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Computing Topic Type News
Flying an experimental supersonic aircraft requires rock-solid flight software
Ronald K. Hess
David I. Bass
John B. Baca
software NASA control systems aircraft
Most people can tolerate the occasional computer crashes that plague modern life. Not so the pilot of a jet fighter streaking through the sky at a notch above the speed of sound. A single software glitch could send the aircraft spiraling out of control, possibly killing the pilot. It's our job to make sure that doesn't happen.
Writing and testing software for the onboard computers that translate a jet pilot's commands into actions is hard enough at the best of times, but when an experimental technique for controlling a supersonic aircraft is thrown into the mix, the job gets really tough--and interesting. That's the task faced by our teams at Boeing Co. and NASA as a modified F/A-18 strike fighter tests out a new way of using its wings.
This research program--dubbed the active aeroelastic wing (AAW) project--breaks with decades of aircraft tradition. Normally, to roll left and right, airplanes use control surfaces, such as ailerons and flaps, which are attached to the leading and trailing edges of relatively rigid wings. The control surfaces are angled up and down to alter the amount of lift on the wings, rolling the aircraft one way or the other.
A modified F/A-18 jet maneuvers over the Mojave Desert in California during flight tests for the Active Aeroelastic Wing project. The project could lead the way to more fuel-efficient and agile planes.
Photo: NASA
But the AAW is flexible enough to be twisted on demand in flight--and it could herald nothing less than a revolution in aviation. The twisting can be used to control the plane's roll, reducing and, we hope, ultimately eliminating, the need for ailerons and flaps and their associated hardware. The result: thinner, lighter airplane wings.
The benefits would be immense. For example, knocking 10 percent off the weight of a jumbo jet's wing would result in annual fuel cost savings of about US $1 400 000 per plane. And while it may be some time before this technology percolates into civil aviation, the military is already interested in the other advantages heralded by the AAW. Increased fuel efficiency, for instance, means the ability to carry more weapons for longer distances. As a bonus, AAW-equipped planes would be more maneuverable, able to execute sharper turns at higher speeds. Although current combat planes are already near the physiological limit of human pilots' ability to withstand turns, future remotely piloted or robotic planes would be able to fully exploit this new agility.
Building on research in the 1980s and early 1990s by NASA and the U.S. Air Force, the AAW project began in 1996 as a joint effort. Its participants are NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, Calif.; the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio; and the Boeing Phantom Works divisions in St. Louis and Huntington Beach, Calif. The first flight tests of the AAW-equipped F/A-18 took place from November 2002 to April 2003.
But the idea of using a flexible wing to control a plane is not new: in fact, it's exactly as old as flight itself. Just over a century ago, the Wright brothers twisted the wood-and-cloth wings of their first plane to adjust its course. Twisting the wings in different directions on either side of the pilot increased lift on one wing and decreased it on the other, causing the plane to roll.
As airplanes flew faster and higher, however, engineers moved to stiffer wings and relied on ailerons to bank or roll planes to the left or right.
Ironically enough, an overly flexible wing was a serious problem during the initial development of the F/A-18 strike fighter in the 1970s and 1980s. At high speeds, deflecting an aileron up or down would twist the wing the other way--negating roll torque from the ailerons. The result was a sluggishly rolling aircraft, not desirable when you are upside down and close to the ground, say. In the extreme, the twisting wing could roll the plane in exactly the opposite direction of the one the pilot intended. The problem was solved by building new reinforced wings and adjusting the flight control software to compensate for the small amount of twisting that still occurred.
When the AAW project started, engineers realized that the F/A-18's teething problem could save a lot of the time and effort normally required to develop a test bed for experimental flights. By replacing a few wing panels, they could return the plane's wings to their prototype flexibility.
Next, the project needed to come up with a way of twisting the wing in flight. Another stroke of luck came to the rescue. The leading-edge flap of an F/A-18's wing is split in two; this allows the wings to be folded up, important for conserving deck space on aircraft carriers. Normally, both halves of this flap are moved as one by a single actuator, but the project added a second actuator that lets us control each half separately. Differentially deflecting the two halves when the F/A-18 is flying at high speed creates aerodynamic pressures that force the wing to twist. By varying the flap deflections, we can control the amount and direction of twisting, and so roll the plane [see picture, " "].Pitching and yawing the plane still require rudders and elevators.
Although the wing twists through only a few degrees, this slight variability should be more than enough to affect the handling of the aircraft and demonstrate whether an idea straight out of the Wright brothers' playbook could become part of the 21st-century aircraft engineer's toolbox. Future AAW wings should be able to twist themselves, without the need for the external flaps used in our experimental program.
But for this rosy future to come to pass, we have to prove the wing can be used to control the F/A-18. The initial flight tests last year, known as Phase 1, did not use the wing to control the aircraft. Rather, we put hundreds of strain gauges onto the wings to monitor their behavior. During a series of 50 flights, we twisted the new wings back and forth in small increments while maneuvering the plane at altitudes from 1500 to 7500 meters and at speeds from Mach 0.85 to Mach 1.30.
This limited twisting wasn't yet enough to cause the aircraft to roll one way or the other. Instead, the objective was to generate the physical data needed to develop the software that would allow the F/A-18 to use its flexing wings to maneuver safely in the air, even when flying faster than the speed of sound.
The idea of using a flexible wing to control a plane is not new: in fact, it's exactly as old as flight itself. Just over a century ago, the Wright brothers twisted the wood-and-cloth wings of their first plane to adjust its course.
The first "live" tests, with the AAW wings actually controlling the F/A-18's flight, are scheduled to begin this month as part of the Phase 2 flight tests at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center (the home of the storied series of X-planes, from Chuck Yeager's supersonic X-1 to today's unmanned hypersonic X-43A.) Before the tests can happen, though, we need to have enough confidence in the reliability of our computerized flight control system that we can let pilots climb into the cockpit without making us--or them--flinch.
The system that will control the wings is based on a commercial off-the-shelf processor: a Motorola 68040 central processing unit. (Macintosh users may remember this chip was used to power Apple's early 1990s line of Quadra computers.) As in the F/A-18's original setup, four processors are used in parallel to provide quadruple redundancy. The 68040 CPUs are installed in the F/A-18's flight control computer alongside the original processors; should any problems with the new system manifest themselves in flight, the test pilot can flick a switch and return control to this tried-and-true system.
The original flight control processors are also responsible for providing the interface to the aircraft's command and control systems, passing inputs to the research processors and sending their outputs to the various servos that operate the rudders, flaps, and so on [see diagram, " Fly-by-Wire"]. But the biggest difference between the F/A-18's system and a consumer-grade computer system is in the software.
The flight software has to keep track of the plane's speed, altitude, and attitude while monitoring the pilot's controls for commands. Based on a set of rules known as control laws, the software must then translate any commands from the pilot into movements of the aircraft's various control surfaces, such as the rudders or, most significantly, the flaps that flex the AAWs. And this all has to happen fast enough that the plane responds instantly to the pilot and reliably enough that he can bet his life it will work all the time, every time.
Despite its complex and critical job, the flight software is compact, consisting of only about 13 000 lines of source code written in the Ada language. When compiled, the code fits into approximately 160 kilobytes. Compare this with the millions of lines of code that compile into tens of megabytes for a modern Web browser or word processor.
Flight Software is fundamentally different from the type of software most of us encounter on the desktop, or even the software that runs such enterprise-class applications as banking databases, and not just in size. For one thing, flight software must operate in real time. We're all used to the spinning hourglasses and watches that appear regularly on our computer screens; they're telling us that the print preview or new spreadsheet we just asked for is on its way but that the computer doesn't know quite when (if ever) it will appear.
The problem goes beyond the vagaries of office software. It is fundamental to many of the operating systems used in general-purpose computers--they have no way to guarantee how long a given task will take. Of course, most of the time this unreliability isn't a problem. If your media player has to drop a few frames of a movie because the video couldn't be processed fast enough, or if it takes 150 milliseconds to select an e-mail when it normally takes 10, you're not going to notice. The worst-case scenario, when the computer completely hangs, is usually just a blip in the workday and cured by a quick reboot.
We don't have that luxury. We have to guarantee that when the flight computer starts calculating how far an elevator should move in response to a command by the pilot, the job will be finished quickly enough so that the computer has enough time to calculate where all the other control surfaces should be and still appear to be responding instantly to the pilot's wishes. This is mission-critical, real-time operation.
To pull this off, first we established an absolute limit on the amount of processor time a task can use. A task might be calculating a rudder position or checking the pilot's control stick for movement. A hardware timer interrupts the flight computer every 6.25 ms, forcing it to move on to the next task on its to-do list. Eventually the computer reaches the bottom of the list and starts at the top again. Each task is given a fixed number of the 6.25-ms slots on the to-do list. The same task might be given several slots on the list--but no more, firmly constraining the processor time of even the busiest task and ensuring that every task gets a turn.
A critical task that has to respond very quickly to changing external events has an even stricter schedule--it must be completed in the first 2.2 ms of its time slot. This is because the original F/A-18 flight computers are waiting impatiently for commands to pass on to the plane's rudders, flaps, and other flight systems, and if no new command is received after 2.2 ms, the last command will be repeated. For example, if a rudder is told to turn, the original flight computers will continue to send turn commands until told to do otherwise.
While it's okay for a rudder to keep turning a few milliseconds longer than it should every now and then because of a task's occasionally missing its deadline, as a rule we have to ensure that every task can be completed in the time allotted. Otherwise, the task will fall further and further behind the rest of the system, introducing an ever-growing lag in response time that can spell disaster.
Clearly, a task that uses a very complex algorithm to work out what it's supposed to be doing will simply exhaust its share of processor time before it comes up with a result. To keep that from happening, we created what is called a gain schedule, a simplification technique that replaces complex algorithms with simple linear calculations based on empirical data.
This is where all the Phase 1 flight testing paid off. We took the data from the strain gauges and other monitoring instruments onboard the F/A-18 and used it to update the plane's original aerodynamics and structural loads databases created for the F/A-18 when it was first developed.
These databases gave us the information we needed to create the control laws that form the basis of the aircraft's flight software. The laws are designed to allow maximum agility without overstressing the airframe. They dictate what positions control surfaces should be in to make the F/A-18 execute a given maneuver--a gentle roll, say, or a sharp dive--taking into account the plane's current speed and orientation.
In other words, the plane's response to the pilot's pulling the control stick to the right is one thing when it's in the middle of a high-speed climb and another when it's coming in for a landing. These laws also embody the rules for how the plane should handle problems in flight, such as a stuck control surface or a malfunctioning air-data sensor.
The laws that are produced by analyzing the databases are cumbersome. They use complex nonlinear formulas to determine the best positions of the plane's control surfaces in response to pilot commands covering the whole range of conditions that the plane could experience in flight. There's no way we could squeeze these formulas into the flight computer and still have the software work in real time.
So, with the results of the complex analysis as a guide, we used Austin, Texas-based National Instruments Corp.'s MATRIXx control design and simulation software to chop the range of possible flight conditions into different regions. For example, one region might cover level flight, while another covers a banking turn. Within each region, a different easy-to-compute linear approximation can be trusted to adequately determine the aircraft's behavior. The look-up table of regions and their corresponding linear approximations is the gain schedule, and it forms the heart of the plane's control software.
In flight, then, the computer's to-do list looks something like this: inputs are gathered from the pilot's controls and flight instruments, such as the air-data sensor, which collects information used to work out the plane's altitude and air speed. Next, the flight instrument information is used to find which region of the gain schedule is applicable and to select the corresponding linear approximation. The resulting linear calculation then quickly computes where the plane's control surfaces should be based on the inputs from the pilot [see diagram, " The Mind of the Machine"].
Of course, knowing that the software can run fast enough to keep up with the aircraft is pointless if it isn't doing the right thing. It is the effort we put in to make sure it does what it should that marks another huge difference between flight software and your average piece of desktop software. People have grown accustomed to consumer and business software shipping with missing features and an armada of bugs, often because of insufficient testing by vendors. That's not an option for us.
Making sure the software does the right thing begins with the very first draft of the flight software. The mathematical description of the gain schedule--the parameters describing the various regions of flight and the equations that form the corresponding linear approximations--was automatically converted by the MATRIXx software into Ada source code to eliminate the possibility of errors being introduced "in translation."
We loaded the preliminary software into a flight simulator, which let our test pilots try it out to see if it behaved as an F/A-18 should and gave us a chance to make adjustments. Then we started systematic testing.
We Do have one major advantage. Unlike most software developers, who have to accommodate the bewildering array of hardware and software that might be used in combination with their program, we have complete control over the hardware our flight software will run on. This allows us to duplicate exactly the environment our software will experience in flight, using a specialized test bench on the ground. If we can get it to work on the bench, we can be confident it will work in the air.
The test bench lets us plug in the actual flight computers we'll be using in the F/A-18. It can simulate all the inputs the software will experience during flight, including control stick movements and airspeed information. The bench accepts outputs from the flight computers that would normally drive actuators and feeds them into simulated versions of their associated control surfaces, including a special simulator we built to accommodate the new actuator for the outboard leading-edge flap. The simulators are based on the updated databases from the Phase 1 flight tests.
We didn't attempt to test the flight software all in one piece. In that situation, when problems arise, trying to pinpoint the error in the software is almost impossible. Instead, with testing already in mind, we created the flight software as a collection of about 450 independent modules. Each module was responsible for performing one or more simple functions, such as checking the position of the pilot's control stick or computing what position an elevator should be in [see picture, " Through the paces"].
A special debugging mode built into the flight computers allowed us to test individual modules one at a time by systematically supplying a range of inputs. After the individual modules checked out, we tested larger and larger combinations of modules until the entire system passed muster.
At this stage, we called for a second round of flight simulation with our test pilots, this time using a sophisticated simulator at Boeing's St. Louis division, the hardware-in-the-loop simulator (HILS). The HILS used an actual F/A-18 cockpit that was connected to the new flight control computers. Most important, the HILS confirmed that pilots could switch between the experimental flight system and the original flight computer processors without any loss of control during the transition.
In mid-July, the AAW software entered the final phase of testing at NASA's Dryden facility. The previous testing assumed that the plane was operating normally, but the Dryden testing (which also uses the HILS simulator) focused on making sure the software could cope when things go wrong: malfunctioning actuators, failed instrumentation, or damaged hardware, for example.
The ultimate test of the software, though, will come this month when one of our test pilots takes the F/A-18 up and puts the active aeroelastic wing through its paces. Although the flight will be closely monitored from the ground, the pilot and plane will be out on their own.
While we will have to await the results of the experimental program before deciding where the AAW project goes next, an obvious follow-up step would be to design wings that can twist in flight without flaps, so we can start reaping the weight benefits of the aeroelastic approach. Ultimately, it may be possible to design so-called morphing wings, wings that at the flick of a switch would be able to transform themselves into almost any form while the plane is in the air--for example, long slender shapes for fuel-efficient cruising or narrow delta shapes for combat maneuverability [see illustration, " The shape of things to come"]. With that accomplishment, the familiar paraphernalia of airplanes--rudders, elevators, flaps, and ailerons--would take their place alongside exhibits like the Wright Flyer in aerospace museums.
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Computing Topic Type Feature
The Future of Deep Learning Is Photonic
Computing with light could slash the energy needs of neural networks
Ryan Hamerly
This computer rendering depicts the pattern on a photonic chip that the author and his colleagues have devised for performing neural-network calculations using light.
Alexander Sludds
DarkBlue1
Think of the many tasks to which computers are being applied that in the not-so-distant past required human intuition. Computers routinely identify objects in images, transcribe speech, translate between languages, diagnose medical conditions, play complex games, and drive cars.
The technique that has empowered these stunning developments is called deep learning, a term that refers to mathematical models known as artificial neural networks. Deep learning is a subfield of machine learning, a branch of computer science based on fitting complex models to data.
While machine learning has been around a long time, deep learning has taken on a life of its own lately. The reason for that has mostly to do with the increasing amounts of computing power that have become widely available—along with the burgeoning quantities of data that can be easily harvested and used to train neural networks.
The amount of computing power at people's fingertips started growing in leaps and bounds at the turn of the millennium, when graphical processing units (GPUs) began to be harnessed for nongraphical calculations, a trend that has become increasingly pervasive over the past decade. But the computing demands of deep learning have been rising even faster. This dynamic has spurred engineers to develop electronic hardware accelerators specifically targeted to deep learning, Google's Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) being a prime example.
Here, I will describe a very different approach to this problem—using optical processors to carry out neural-network calculations with photons instead of electrons. To understand how optics can serve here, you need to know a little bit about how computers currently carry out neural-network calculations. So bear with me as I outline what goes on under the hood.
Almost invariably, artificial neurons are constructed using special software running on digital electronic computers of some sort. That software provides a given neuron with multiple inputs and one output. The state of each neuron depends on the weighted sum of its inputs, to which a nonlinear function, called an activation function, is applied. The result, the output of this neuron, then becomes an input for various other neurons.
Reducing the energy needs of neural networks might require computing with light
For computational efficiency, these neurons are grouped into layers, with neurons connected only to neurons in adjacent layers. The benefit of arranging things that way, as opposed to allowing connections between any two neurons, is that it allows certain mathematical tricks of linear algebra to be used to speed the calculations.
While they are not the whole story, these linear-algebra calculations are the most computationally demanding part of deep learning, particularly as the size of the network grows. This is true for both training (the process of determining what weights to apply to the inputs for each neuron) and for inference (when the neural network is providing the desired results).
What are these mysterious linear-algebra calculations? They aren't so complicated really. They involve operations on matrices, which are just rectangular arrays of numbers—spreadsheets if you will, minus the descriptive column headers you might find in a typical Excel file.
This is great news because modern computer hardware has been very well optimized for matrix operations, which were the bread and butter of high-performance computing long before deep learning became popular. The relevant matrix calculations for deep learning boil down to a large number of multiply-and-accumulate operations, whereby pairs of numbers are multiplied together and their products are added up.
Multiplying With Light
Two beams whose electric fields are proportional to the numbers to be multiplied, x and y, impinge on a beam splitter (blue square). The beams leaving the beam splitter shine on photodetectors (ovals), which provide electrical signals proportional to these electric fields squared. Inverting one photodetector signal and adding it to the other then results in a signal proportional to the product of the two inputs. David Schneider
Over the years, deep learning has required an ever-growing number of these multiply-and-accumulate operations. Consider LeNet, a pioneering deep neural network, designed to do image classification. In 1998 it was shown to outperform other machine techniques for recognizing handwritten letters and numerals. But by 2012 AlexNet, a neural network that crunched through about 1,600 times as many multiply-and-accumulate operations as LeNet, was able to recognize thousands of different types of objects in images.
Advancing from LeNet's initial success to AlexNet required almost 11 doublings of computing performance. During the 14 years that took, Moore's law provided much of that increase. The challenge has been to keep this trend going now that Moore's law is running out of steam. The usual solution is simply to throw more computing resources—along with time, money, and energy—at the problem.
As a result, training today's large neural networks often has a significant environmental footprint. One 2019 study found, for example, that training a certain deep neural network for natural-language processing produced five times the CO2 emissions typically associated with driving an automobile over its lifetime.
Improvements in digital electronic computers allowed deep learning to blossom, to be sure. But that doesn't mean that the only way to carry out neural-network calculations is with such machines. Decades ago, when digital computers were still relatively primitive, some engineers tackled difficult calculations using analog computers instead. As digital electronics improved, those analog computers fell by the wayside. But it may be time to pursue that strategy once again, in particular when the analog computations can be done optically.
It has long been known that optical fibers can support much higher data rates than electrical wires. That's why all long-haul communication lines went optical, starting in the late 1970s. Since then, optical data links have replaced copper wires for shorter and shorter spans, all the way down to rack-to-rack communication in data centers. Optical data communication is faster and uses less power. Optical computing promises the same advantages.
But there is a big difference between communicating data and computing with it. And this is where analog optical approaches hit a roadblock. Conventional computers are based on transistors, which are highly nonlinear circuit elements—meaning that their outputs aren't just proportional to their inputs, at least when used for computing. Nonlinearity is what lets transistors switch on and off, allowing them to be fashioned into logic gates. This switching is easy to accomplish with electronics, for which nonlinearities are a dime a dozen. But photons follow Maxwell's equations, which are annoyingly linear, meaning that the output of an optical device is typically proportional to its inputs.
The trick is to use the linearity of optical devices to do the one thing that deep learning relies on most: linear algebra.
To illustrate how that can be done, I'll describe here a photonic device that, when coupled to some simple analog electronics, can multiply two matrices together. Such multiplication combines the rows of one matrix with the columns of the other. More precisely, it multiplies pairs of numbers from these rows and columns and adds their products together—the multiply-and-accumulate operations I described earlier. My MIT colleagues and I published a paper about how this could be done in 2019. We're working now to build such an optical matrix multiplier.
Optical data communication is faster and uses less power. Optical computing promises the same advantages.
The basic computing unit in this device is an optical element called a beam splitter. Although its makeup is in fact more complicated, you can think of it as a half-silvered mirror set at a 45-degree angle. If you send a beam of light into it from the side, the beam splitter will allow half that light to pass straight through it, while the other half is reflected from the angled mirror, causing it to bounce off at 90 degrees from the incoming beam.
Now shine a second beam of light, perpendicular to the first, into this beam splitter so that it impinges on the other side of the angled mirror. Half of this second beam will similarly be transmitted and half reflected at 90 degrees. The two output beams will combine with the two outputs from the first beam. So this beam splitter has two inputs and two outputs.
To use this device for matrix multiplication, you generate two light beams with electric-field intensities that are proportional to the two numbers you want to multiply. Let's call these field intensities x and y. Shine those two beams into the beam splitter, which will combine these two beams. This particular beam splitter does that in a way that will produce two outputs whose electric fields have values of (x + y)/√2 and (x − y)/√2.
In addition to the beam splitter, this analog multiplier requires two simple electronic components—photodetectors—to measure the two output beams. They don't measure the electric field intensity of those beams, though. They measure the power of a beam, which is proportional to the square of its electric-field intensity.
Why is that relation important? To understand that requires some algebra—but nothing beyond what you learned in high school. Recall that when you square ( x + y)/√2 you get (x2 + 2xy + y2)/2. And when you square (x − y)/√2, you get (x2 − 2xy + y2)/2. Subtracting the latter from the former gives 2xy.
Pause now to contemplate the significance of this simple bit of math. It means that if you encode a number as a beam of light of a certain intensity and another number as a beam of another intensity, send them through such a beam splitter, measure the two outputs with photodetectors, and negate one of the resulting electrical signals before summing them together, you will have a signal proportional to the product of your two numbers.
Simulations of the integrated Mach-Zehnder interferometer found in Lightmatter's neural-network accelerator show three different conditions whereby light traveling in the two branches of the interferometer undergoes different relative phase shifts (0 degrees in a, 45 degrees in b, and 90 degrees in c). Lightmatter
My description has made it sound as though each of these light beams must be held steady. In fact, you can briefly pulse the light in the two input beams and measure the output pulse. Better yet, you can feed the output signal into a capacitor, which will then accumulate charge for as long as the pulse lasts. Then you can pulse the inputs again for the same duration, this time encoding two new numbers to be multiplied together. Their product adds some more charge to the capacitor. You can repeat this process as many times as you like, each time carrying out another multiply-and-accumulate operation.
Using pulsed light in this way allows you to perform many such operations in rapid-fire sequence. The most energy-intensive part of all this is reading the voltage on that capacitor, which requires an analog-to-digital converter. But you don't have to do that after each pulse—you can wait until the end of a sequence of, say, N pulses. That means that the device can perform N multiply-and-accumulate operations using the same amount of energy to read the answer whether N is small or large. Here, N corresponds to the number of neurons per layer in your neural network, which can easily number in the thousands. So this strategy uses very little energy.
Sometimes you can save energy on the input side of things, too. That's because the same value is often used as an input to multiple neurons. Rather than that number being converted into light multiple times—consuming energy each time—it can be transformed just once, and the light beam that is created can be split into many channels. In this way, the energy cost of input conversion is amortized over many operations.
Splitting one beam into many channels requires nothing more complicated than a lens, but lenses can be tricky to put onto a chip. So the device we are developing to perform neural-network calculations optically may well end up being a hybrid that combines highly integrated photonic chips with separate optical elements.
I've outlined here the strategy my colleagues and I have been pursuing, but there are other ways to skin an optical cat. Another promising scheme is based on something called a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, which combines two beam splitters and two fully reflecting mirrors. It, too, can be used to carry out matrix multiplication optically. Two MIT-based startups, Lightmatter and Lightelligence, are developing optical neural-network accelerators based on this approach. Lightmatter has already built a prototype that uses an optical chip it has fabricated. And the company expects to begin selling an optical accelerator board that uses that chip later this year.
Another startup using optics for computing is Optalysis, which hopes to revive a rather old concept. One of the first uses of optical computing back in the 1960s was for the processing of synthetic-aperture radar data. A key part of the challenge was to apply to the measured data a mathematical operation called the Fourier transform. Digital computers of the time struggled with such things. Even now, applying the Fourier transform to large amounts of data can be computationally intensive. But a Fourier transform can be carried out optically with nothing more complicated than a lens, which for some years was how engineers processed synthetic-aperture data. Optalysis hopes to bring this approach up to date and apply it more widely.
Theoretically, photonics has the potential to accelerate deep learning by several orders of magnitude.
There is also a company called Luminous, spun out of Princeton University, which is working to create spiking neural networks based on something it calls a laser neuron. Spiking neural networks more closely mimic how biological neural networks work and, like our own brains, are able to compute using very little energy. Luminous's hardware is still in the early phase of development, but the promise of combining two energy-saving approaches—spiking and optics—is quite exciting.
There are, of course, still many technical challenges to be overcome. One is to improve the accuracy and dynamic range of the analog optical calculations, which are nowhere near as good as what can be achieved with digital electronics. That's because these optical processors suffer from various sources of noise and because the digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital converters used to get the data in and out are of limited accuracy. Indeed, it's difficult to imagine an optical neural network operating with more than 8 to 10 bits of precision. While 8-bit electronic deep-learning hardware exists (the Google TPU is a good example), this industry demands higher precision, especially for neural-network training.
There is also the difficulty integrating optical components onto a chip. Because those components are tens of micrometers in size, they can't be packed nearly as tightly as transistors, so the required chip area adds up quickly. A 2017 demonstration of this approach by MIT researchers involved a chip that was 1.5 millimeters on a side. Even the biggest chips are no larger than several square centimeters, which places limits on the sizes of matrices that can be processed in parallel this way.
There are many additional questions on the computer-architecture side that photonics researchers tend to sweep under the rug. What's clear though is that, at least theoretically, photonics has the potential to accelerate deep learning by several orders of magnitude.
Based on the technology that's currently available for the various components (optical modulators, detectors, amplifiers, analog-to-digital converters), it's reasonable to think that the energy efficiency of neural-network calculations could be made 1,000 times better than today's electronic processors. Making more aggressive assumptions about emerging optical technology, that factor might be as large as a million. And because electronic processors are power-limited, these improvements in energy efficiency will likely translate into corresponding improvements in speed.
Many of the concepts in analog optical computing are decades old. Some even predate silicon computers. Schemes for optical matrix multiplication, and even for optical neural networks, were first demonstrated in the 1970s. But this approach didn't catch on. Will this time be different? Possibly, for three reasons.
First, deep learning is genuinely useful now, not just an academic curiosity. Second, we can't rely on Moore's Law alone to continue improving electronics. And finally, we have a new technology that was not available to earlier generations: integrated photonics. These factors suggest that optical neural networks will arrive for real this time—and the future of such computations may indeed be photonic.
Deep Learning's Diminishing Returns - IEEE Spectrum ›
How Deep Learning Works ›


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Retailers Try to Keep Up With Atlanta's Dynamic Consumer Population
Posted on January 9, 2017 by John Nelson in Georgia, Market Reports, Retail, Southeast, Southeast Market Reports
To understand the state of retail in Atlanta in 2005, you first looked at where and what developers were building, then to where retailers were locating and lastly to how consumers were shopping. Simply put, if a developer built it and a retailer occupied it, the consumer was sure to shop there, but that's no longer the case. To understand the state of retail in Atlanta today, you need to start with the Atlanta consumer.
From 2000 to 2010, the Atlanta Regional Commission reports metro Atlanta added over 1 million residents with an additional 2.5 million people projected to be added between 2015 and 2040. Further, according to a study by the University of Georgia, half the state's population growth is concentrated in just three Atlanta metro counties — Fulton, Gwinnett and Forsyth. A big driver for the growth is jobs, especially those in high-paying sectors like information, professional services, science and technology. EMSI reports that two of the counties making up Atlanta's metropolitan area, Forsyth and Coweta, are in the top eight of large counties for skilled job growth. Additionally, Forbes claims Atlanta is now growing its business service sector faster than New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.
Jonathan Dubovsky, The Shopping Center Group
Another important population driver is education, and according to Niche rankings, Fulton, Gwinnett and Forsyth counties are in the top five county school districts in metro Atlanta. Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett counties make up nearly 60 percent of metro Atlanta's population.
These uber-performing, higher density markets will continue to experience robust residential growth, higher barriers to entry, lower vacancy, higher rents for retail (eclipsing $50 per square foot in some places), stronger retailer demand, easier sources of financing and increased private investment. Typically, there is also a strong correlation between population density and higher retail sales. As land costs continue to increase, the need for more residential projects will further fuel the vertical mixed-use trend.
Completed projects such as Avalon in Alpharetta and Ponce City Market in Atlanta's Old Fourth Ward district have been much-heralded highlights of the integrated residential/consumer experiential development movement, with additional large format developments such as Halcyon and Colony Square in Fulton County, The Battery Atlanta in Cobb County and the GM Assembly in DeKalb County about to come on line. While most new projects will not be of the same size and scope, many will attempt to recreate similar experiences.
Who's Your Daddy?
While Millennials tend to get all the media attention and the 10 to 29 age group makes up the largest segment of the population at 28.2 percent, we cannot ignore the fact that the 45 to 65 age group makes up the second largest segment at 25 percent. From 2000 to 2010, that segment grew by 5 percent while the 10 to 29 age group actually shrunk by 1.5 percent of the overall population.
While the trend for younger residents is to move closer into town, 60 percent of all residents aged 10 to 29 still live outside the city. We'll also see a more diverse residential population as non-whites and Hispanics made up 91 percent of all new residents from 2000 to 2010. Per capita income is highest in Fulton, Forsyth and Fayette counties, although this is less relevant as it is easier to merchandise around income — whether a retailer or landlord — than a lack of population density.
Although population density is the leading stimulant for the creation of additional retail gross leasable area (GLA), age, race and income are equally relevant drivers. An aging population looks for convenient bricks and mortar retail, services, medical facilities and entertainment.
Grocery categories including traditional (Kroger and Publix), specialty (Whole Foods/365, Sprouts Farmers Market and Trader Joe's) and promotional (Walmart, Aldi and Lidl) will continue to be a weekly destination of choice and an important catalyst for new development. Fueled by an aging population and up to 30 million new Affordable Care Act patients, medical uses will also continue to be woven into the retail fabric to include uses such as urgent care, family practices, dentists, physical therapy and chiropractors.
Millennials will continue to look for convenient retail in a blended brick and mortar/online format, but will demand a unique dining, shopping or entertainment experience. If bricks and mortar cannot provide this in a fluid and flexible format, this consumer group will continue to increase their tendency to shop online.
These uses include chef-driven concepts like Superica, Barcelona, JCT Kitchen, The Optimist, BeetleCat, Heirloom BBQ and Breadwinner, as well as unique fashion brands like Factory Girls and lululemon athletica. Millennials are also looking for multi-format entertainment venues like Movie Tavern, Slingshot, Main Event, Escape Room and Sky Diving, as well as specialty fitness concepts like Orange Theory, Flywheel, CrossFit and Pure Barre, all with a seamless integration with social media.
The challenge for retailers and developers will be in staying ahead of a constantly evolving Millennial consumer base by turning merchandise quicker, using technology to reach the consumer more effectively and changing menu items with frequency, all in an environment that provides a sense of fun and theater.
Regardless of age, race or income, there is a strong desire for a sense of community, familiarity, comfort, sense of belonging and prideful support. Local communities who have successfully accomplished this include Roswell, Vinings and Woodstock. In fact, if you have been to downtown Roswell on a Saturday night recently, you have seen a vibrant, walkable community that transcends age, race and income. Communities such as Sandy Springs, Suwanee, and certainly the developments along the Beltline are also creating similar experiences for their local and visiting consumers.
Bricks and mortar retail is alive and well in Atlanta. Provided supply and demand fundamentals are in balance, bricks and mortar will continue to thrive as long as retailers and landlords are creative and nimble and offer consumers what they are looking for.
— By Jonathan Dubovsky, Partner, The Shopping Center Group. This article originally appeared in the October 2016 issue of Southeast Real Estate Business.
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Mid Ulster District Council has appointed consultants to move proposals for a public realm in Maghera to the next stage.
RPS will now be responsible for producing the economic appraisal and design concepts for the proposed £2.5M investment which would see new paving, lighting, planting and street furniture installed in Maghera town centre.
The public realm works, which emerged as part of wide-ranging Maghera Development Framework, are likely to extend the length of Main Street, taking in parts of Coleraine Road, Station Road, Meeting House Avenue, Tirkane Road, Church Street, Glen Road, Hall Street, Bank Square and St Lurach's Road.
"Completing the economic appraisal and producing initial design concepts are crucial elements for this project if we are to secure funding from the Department for Communities and ensure we can move from design to a reality on the ground.
A period of public consultation will also take place later this year before the economic appraisal is submitted for assessment in the autumn of this year.


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Miguel de Icaza: They Have Done A Very Good Job With Gnome 3 [Exclusive]
By Swapnil Bhartiya February 13, 2012 1697 views
Miguel de Icaza is one of those celebrated figures of the Free Software/Open Source world who created technologies that changed the course of history. Miguel created the most popular desktop environment in the UNIX-like operating systems — Gnome along with Federico Mena. Gnome was started due to KDE which relied on Qt widget toolkit which used a non-free license at that time. Icaza, along with Nat Friedman founded Ximian (Helix Code) in 1999 to develop GNOME's infrastructure and applications, and in 2003 it was purchased by Novell. He then started Mono project for the .NET implementation on the Linux platform. After Novell's acquisition by Attachmate, Miguel started his own company called Xamarin which focuses on the mobile space. I met Miguel during FOSDEM and he agreed for a quick interview. I had many more questions, but we did not have that much time. Here is an interview with an extremely pleasant, friendly and nice man…
Swapnil: Miguel you started Gnome. Now we have Gnome Shell 3 which offers a completely new approach. What is your opinion about Gnome 3, about the mega open source project that you started??
Miguel: I think they have done a very good job with Gnome 3. Gnome 3 was an effort to figure out how they can substantially improve the desktop. One interesting thing they did with the shell was that they made it possible for end user to script the desktop in a very easy way with JavaScript extension.
I think the most important thing for me was to see a graphic designer going from an idea about how he can enhance the desktop and implement it without having to convince a programmer to do it for him.
At the Gnome summit they were discussing UI design changes for new class of gadget. What was interesting that designers, for the first time, were able to implement changes without convincing a developer. It was very interesting to watch these designers tweak the desktop themselves, they are not really hacker or programmer; they are designers but are now able to actually improve the usability without having to go after someone, file bugs or wait for six month. So that's a great step in that direction.
Swapnil: You have formed your own company Xamarin. How does that affect the Mono project? Have the goals of Mono changed now?
Miguel: The goals of the Mono projects are the same, you should not confuse Mono project with the fact that I have started a company. Those are two different things. I also participate in other efforts, I do a lot of different things 🙂
What we wanted to do with Mono was to bring a better development environment to Linux users, to bring the best of the breed tools. We realized that Mono addressed those problems, C# and .NET addresses those problems. The reason was it was an evolution of some best practices from the Java world so it was basically an enhancement of that. They[Microsoft] have been evolving the framework in a very tasteful way for many years so that's what it basically is. So on top of that what we basically did was we took the core and build extensions so that you can build native Linux applications and that's how it started. That was the original goal — to improve the developers experience on Linux.
Over time the Linux on the desktop did not quite materialize the way it was expected. It did not take over the world by storm. A lot of focus shifted to the Linux on the servers, that how do we bring .NET to the Linux servers. So a lot of efforts were spent in this direction…all that stuff goes in server programming.
Couple of years ago with the iPhone revolution we brought Mono to the iPhone for one of our customers, Unity. They are very focused in the gaming space. We created an equivalent of what we did with Linux — Mono plus native bindings to native libraries. We did the same thing with the iPhone and we did the same think with the Android as well. So, there is a whole history of Mono as being used as a developer technology in all these places.
Swapnil: There has always been a concern around Mono, that it may be attacked by Microsoft. How and why do you think Mono is safe?
Miguel: Microsoft has given a patent grant for people to use it. These are very specific patent grants — there is community promise, there is Apache license and they also made those patents available in FRAND.
So, it has a very good patent protection. It is interesting because for many years Mono people were saying that Microsoft is going to sue us and Mono was a pariah of the Linux world. You have to remember that Microsoft made these three patent pledges but Java, which was the poster child of open source development, they did not make those pledges. And now they are suing Google.
So it is a little bit ironic because Microsoft platform actually have more patent grants than anything Java ever did. It's a little bit sad that all that FUD that was spread around Mono — it turned out that it wasn't Mono that wasn't safe, it was Java that wasn't safe.
I think the desktop Java doesn't have those promises because of the LGPL license but it means that Java is not as free as people would like it to be.
Swapnil: One of the ambitious and promising Mono projects was Moonlight. What is the future of Moonlight?
Miguel: We are somewhere between Silverlight 2-3 support . The reality is that Microsoft has abandoned Silverlight and at this point they are not going to continue developing it and they are not going to continue to push it. So the point of having an open source implementation of silverlight is greatly diminished.
Swapnil: Why could Moonlight never get to run services like Netflix? As you stated about does that also mean there is no possibility of Netflix' support via Moonlight on the Linux platform?
Miguel: We could never get Netflix to work on Moonlight because there is a whole stack or features that are not public — like the DRM system, the keys, etc. I heard from a third party that even if you could implement the DRM system they won't give you the keys so it doesn't matter.
Effectively Silverlight is a technology that doesn't seem like getting a lot of push and I think that the world has switched to HTML 5 so it does not make any sense in continue working on Moonlight or to invest in developing Moonlight. There are more important problems to solve in Linux desktop and there are interesting people working on those problem, in particular Jonathan Blandford at Red Hat and teams at openSUSE are doing a great job.
The point is Moonlight is not that important anymore, just because Microsoft is not pushing it anymore, you don't see a lot of adoption of it. It's very rare to see a site that requires it so its better to use those resources in lot of other areas.
Swapnil: How is your company affecting the development of the Mono project?
Miguel: You should not make a mistake by confusing Mono with my company. Mono is an open source projects and we certainly contribute a lot to it but there is a bunch of other companies which contribute to it as well. Just because my company works in the mobile space doesn't mean you should blend the two. One thing is mono, the project and other thing is my company. These are separate.
Swapnil: That makes me think where is the leadership of Mono now?
Miguel: The leadership of Mono is still with me. I wear two hats and that's perfectly fine to wear two hats. So we continue to push Mono for where it is worth, and organize the community but that is separate from my work on the mobile space.
Swapnil: Why should a developer pick Mono over other technologies? What advantages does it have?
Swapnil: Looking at Google-Oracle court battle over Java, do you think the critics of Mono will change their opinion? Will there be wider adoption of Mono?
Swapnil: What is your opinion about SOPA and PIPA?
Miguel: Well, I think they defeated it so that's good. Isn't it?
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Aerospace, Energy and Rail/Transportation industries tend to order versions of the multi-post and vertical assembly cell products to enhance manufacturing procedures. Rail industries like this product for its assembly features. In each case these lifts can be customized for specific product applications or, as in rail, a standard version can often be used across multiple organizations.


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Risk – If one has to jump a stream and knows how wide it is, he will not jump. If he doesn't know how wide it is, he'll jump and six times out of ten he'll make it.
If your life is free of failures, you're not taking enough risks.
Most successful people are people who take risks – calculated risks – but nevertheless, risks.
Remember the turtle – he never makes any progress until he sticks his neck out.


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New Study Calls the Reliability of Brain Scan Research Into Question
Three million analyses point to a problem with fMRI brain activity studies
Erin Blakemore
fMRI changed the way researchers look at the human brain. NIH Image Gallery (Flickr/Creative Commons)
When functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was introduced in the late 1990s, it drew raves for its ability to show brain activity—and concerns that it might be the modern equivalent of phrenology. Now, that debate could spring to life again with revelations that the popular imaging technology could have been flawed for years. As Kate Lunau writes for Motherboard, new research suggests that software used to analyze fMRI results could invalidate up to 40,000 brain activity studies.
Science never operates in a vacuum—reproducing results over and over again is central to research. But a new paper published in the journal PNAS calls the reproducibility of fMRI studies into question, Lunau writes. The analysis examined resting-state fMRI data from 499 healthy people. Researchers split the people into groups and used three statistical packages commonly used to analyze fMRI data to conduct three million comparisons.
Since the data used were of people whose brains were not particularly active, so they should not have shown any significant trends of neural activity. Researchers expected to find false positives—that is, results showing that people's brains were not at rest—about five percent of the time. But that's where the expected results broke down: Rather than showing a five percent chance of finding a false positive, the analysis revealed a 70 percent chance.
A bug in one of the software programs used to analyze fMRIs seems to have been at least partly to blame. When the researchers reported their findings to software manufacturers, writes Lunau, they responded with their own analyses and, in one case, code changes. But the study calls into question decades of research that relies on fMRI studies that used the flawed code.
"It is not feasible to redo 40,000 fMRI studies, and lamentable archiving and data-sharing practices mean most could not be reanalyzed either," the team writes.
The study has caused a stir among scientists who rely on fMRI. But how bad is the problem? Not as bad as you might think, says Discover's "Neuroskeptic." The commentator points out that the problem only applies to one statistical package and that up to 70 percent of studies containing at least one false positive does not mean that 70 percent of studies are, in fact, invalid or false. Further, writes Neuroskeptic, the problem only affects a small percentage of brain studies—those that deal with brain activation.
Regardless, the study is likely to play into a bigger debate in the field of science and the brain: reproducibility. Since a gigantic international effort called the ability of psychology studies to be reproduced last year, the debate about how to make research more reliable and reproducible has heated up. (The study in question was controversial and continues to be debated, especially among the psychology community.) In May, the journal Science published the results of a study of 1,500 researchers on reproducibility. Over 70 percent reported they had tried and failed to reproduce others' research, and more than 60 percent listed selective reporting and pressure to publish as reasons studies that are not reproducible are published. More than half of the respondents (52 percent) called reproducibility "a significant crisis" in science—unsurprising, given that scientists have trouble agreeing what the word even means.
Don't despair, though: As Monya Baker writes for Slate, recent reproducibility kerfuffles are likely good for science and spur additional visibility and funding for more reliable results. "Taken together," writes Baker, attempts to make work more reproducible "...could stop researchers from blithely following up on work that cannot be reproduced or charging down paths others have charted as dead ends." Studies like the one that calls fMRI brain activation results into question are sobering, but even as they potentially unseat years of research, they may push science into a more reliable future.
Erin Blakemore | | READ MORE
Erin Blakemore is a Boulder, Colorado-based journalist. Her work has appeared in publications like The Washington Post, TIME, mental_floss, Popular Science and JSTOR Daily. Learn more at erinblakemore.com.
Brain Medicine New Research Psychology


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*Updated 2018
Emma Watson on feminism, Leonardo Dicaprio on climate change, and Angelina Jolie on humanitarian rights. Celebrities are taking over our screens for the cause. Going back to Jane Fonda protesting the Vietnam War, and alternately Elvis advocating for conscription, we have allowed celebrities to influence not only our story telling, but also our political and social views.
Have we mindlessly prioritized the message of celebrities over that of professors, experts, victims or activists? Or, is it possible that celebrity activists are the perfect vehicle to effect the change that we need?
The following are three positive, and three negative positions on celebrity activists.
Taking the Stage (The Pros)
A Wide and Captive Audience
Conversations are being instigated by celebrities every day, even indirectly. There are tens of celebrities on Twitter, not to mention Instagram, with tens of millions of followers, some of whom even have more than 100 million followers. #MeToo first surfaced a decade ago at the keyboard of activist Taran Burke, but with one tweet from Alyssa Milano, a worldwide movement was launched. Burke has said that after watching her movement grow in slow waves over the years, seeing it grow en masse "has been pretty amazing." Simply being famous provides a wider platform for celebrities to get a message across. When Michelle Obama took to Twitter to raise awareness for kidnapped Nigerian girls, the world paid attention. The minute Kim Kardashian took up the cause for prison reform, she was able to meet with President Trump at the White House. And after Taylor Swift broke her long-held silence on politics, voter registration spiked by 65,000 new registered voters in the first 24 hours.
Using Old Tactics to Change The World
When a celebrity gives their endorsement to a product, they generate brand recognition and provide a sense of familiarity and trust, which equals sales. In fact, just one celebrity endorsement can boost sales of a product by 4% almost immediately, according to Marketwatch, as cited by Forbes. So, if celebrity endorsement can boost product sales, why not use the same model to boost social responsibility? The UN has been using Goodwill Ambassadors as representatives for decades. Becoming a UN Goodwill Ambassador means going through a vetting system that requires having a sizeable number of followers as well as producing the right kind of image. To represent a charity means living your life in accordance with their message, which some celebrities embrace and embody willingly. In these cases, celebrity activists can do a world of good.
Celebrities Are People Too
In terms of mental illness, abuse and poverty, no one is immune, not even celebrities. But unlike the 1 in 10 Americans suffering from depression, celebrities have a platform to shed light. Members of the British Royal Family have openly discussed depression and therapy, peeling back the stigma surrounding mental health and celebrity, showing the world that everyone is susceptible. Jim Carrey speaks frankly about being homeless as a young teen. He is explicitly a part of the conversation surrounding the charities to which he contributes fighting at risk youth and homelessness. And he is only one example of celebrities inspired by their pasts. Everyone has a story, yet some of us are given a larger stage than others on which to express it. Celebrity activists should be commended for embracing such a stage.
All That Shimmers Is Not Gold (The Cons)
Where Have All the Experts Gone?
By giving our time and educating ourselves through celebrity activism, we discount experts who have given unwavering dedication to the cause. Sixty-six percent of people surveyed in a recent poll could not link a celebrity with their sponsored charity. These numbers suggest that celebrity is not enough to sell an idea, and yet you're more likely to hear about climate change from Matt Damon or Leonardo DiCaprio than professional environmentalist Al Gore or actual climate scientists. In many cases, the celebrity name will stick while the cause won't, leaving actual experts desperate for an audience.
When Your Audience is Focused on Image Over Education
Supporting celebrity activists contributes to the culture of failure and promotes what is called Slacktivism. This relatively new term, Slackstivism, describes people who consider themselves online activists but are actually more concerned with appearing to join the right cause but, in actuality, doing as little as possible to make a difference. When activism is a trend, misinformation runs rampant. The culture of failure puts so much pressure on succeeding that we forget how to sit back and educate ourselves, and to take the time to decide what we believe in and, more importantly, how to act on these beliefs.
100% Exposure with 0% Accountability
When a politician endorses a candidate, or a doctor endorses a program, there must be accountability. However, in the world of celebrity, staying relevant is a constant battle. This means that celebrities often need to reinvent themselves, which can affect the cause(s) they are supporting.
When the City of New York made Taylor Swift its Global Welcome Ambassador, officials were connecting to and counting on her "wholesome" image. Strategically timed with the release of her single "Welcome to New York," Swift's image at that time was perfect for New York's tourism board. However, by the time Swift's next album dropped, her previously wholesome image had dramatically changed. Or, take Beyonce. In 2011, she joined Michelle Obama's "Let's Move" campaign to combat child obesity. However, just one year later, she sent mixed messages to America's youth when becoming the face of Pepsi and promoting sugary soft-drink consumption. In such cases, the image as an entertainer comes before their cause, adding a layer of hypocrisy to some celebrity activists.
The Bottom Line: The old adage goes: There is no such thing as bad publicity. There are many voices trying to be heard on the stage of social reform. Is this a case of leave it to the experts, or does every voice count in the push for social reform?
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Starting from science and ending nowhere…
Disney has banned the junk food promotion for kids on its networks
June 6, 2012 April 28, 2016 saypeople	0 Comments children, Disney, health, human, medical, science
The Walt Disney Co. has banned the promotion of junk foods on all of its networks including television channels such as Disney XD and children's program on ABC network, Disney-owned websites and radio stations.
From now these networks will not publish candy, sugar cereal or fast food promos, so that the children must not get attraction. Any cereal with more than 10 grams of sugar per serving and a full meal with more than 600 calories will not be promoted.
First Lady Michelle Obama called it a "game changer" and is hopeful that the other entertainment industry will also get the message.
[hana-code-insert name='StumbleUpon' /][hana-code-insert name='Reddit' /]"Just a few years ago if you had told me or any other mom or dad in America that our kids wouldn't see a single ad for junk food while they watched their favorite cartoons on a major TV network, we wouldn't have believed you," said Obama, who has headed a campaign to curb child obesity.
Although the company will face an initial loss after banning the products but CEO Bob Iger is hopeful that the companies will eventually produce new products meeting the standards.
"There seems to be limited taste for government regulation," Said Aviva Must, chairwoman of the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine at Tufts School of Medicine, who has studied childhood obesity for decades. "So I think a large company like Disney taking a stand and putting in a policy with teeth is a good step."
"The emotional connection kids have to our characters and stories gives us a unique opportunity to continue to inspire and encourage them to lead healthier lives," Iger said.
The Better Business Bureau and 16 major food companies including Burger King Worldwide Holdings Inc., Coca-Cola Co. and Mars Inc. have also undertook to promote only better-for-you foods for children by 2014.
Source: BusinessWeek
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Zainab Salbi – Founder of Women for Women International and Author of Between Two Worlds: Escape from Tyranny: Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam – 100
By Kami Guildner Callings Courage Empowerment Episodes Feminine Leadership Leadership Non-Profit Passion Purpose Success Voice Women WomenCEO
Today I'm excited to share with you my 100th episode of Extraordinary Women Radio! And I'm extremely honored to feature Zainab Salbi, the founder of Women for Women International for this milestone episode!
At the age of 23, Zainab Salbi founded Women for Women International, a grassroots humanitarian and development organization dedicated to serving women survivors of wars by offering support, tools, and access to life-changing skills to move from crisis and poverty to stability and economic self-sufficiency.
Under her leadership as the organization's CEO (1993-2011), the organization grew from helping 30 women upon its inception to more than 500,000 women in 8 conflict areas. It also distributed more than $100 million in direct aid and micro credit loans that impacted more than 1.7 million family members.
Today Zainab shares her story of how she founded Women for Women International. She also shares her deeply personal story of growing up in the shadows of Saddam Hussein, a secret she kept hidden for many years. We talk about the power of facing our fears, and Zainab shares the catalyst moment when she brought her own truth forward in telling this story.
There is so much wisdom in this interview, as Zainab shares her firsthand knowledge around the vital role of women in war, and how women are naturally called to make a difference in this world.
This is a powerful episode my friends. You won't want to miss it.
Zainab is also the host and creator of several TV shows including #MeToo, Now What? on PBS (2018), The Zainab Salbi Project, original series on Huffington Post (2016), The Nidaa Show with TLC Arabic where she started with the historic first interview of Oprah Winfrey in the Arab world, and a new original series with Yahoo News! Through Her Eyes with Zainab Salbi.
Zainab is the author of several books including the national bestseller Between Two Worlds: Escape from Tyranny: Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam, If You Knew Me You Would Care, and her latest Freedom is an Inside Job.
Zainab has been featured on Oprah's Super Soul Sunday several times and her global awards list is lengthy:
One of the 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People, Watkins (2019)
One of the 100 Most Powerful Arabs, Gulf Business (2019)
One of the 100 Leading Global Thinkers, Foreign Policy Magazine (2016)
One of 25 Women Changing The World, People Magazine (2016)
One of the 100 Most Creative People in Business for being a voice of change in the Middle East, Fast Company (2016)
One of the World's 100 Most Powerful Arab Women, Arabian Business (2016)
One of the Most Influential Women on Social Media, Wear Your Voice (2015)
One of the 100 Most Powerful Arab Women, Arabian Business (2015)
Honorary doctoral degree from York University (2014)
One of the Most Influential Women on Twitter, Fortune Magazine (2014)
Austin College Posey Leadership Award (2011)[1]
David Rockefeller Bridging Leadership Award (2010)
World Economic Forum's Young Global Leader (2007)
Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize, on behalf of Women for Women International (2005)[2]
Forbes Magazine Trailblazer Award (2005)
Harper's Bazaar 21st Century Heroines nominee (2003)
Harper's Bazaar 21st Century Heroine (nominated by President Bill Clinton)[3]
Time magazine Innovator of the Month for her pioneering work as philanthropist
Honored by President Clinton at a White House ceremony for her humanitarian work (1995)
To learn more about Zainab Salbi, you can follow her on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. To learn more about Women For Women International, visit their Website or follow them on Facebook or Twitter.
Zainab Salbi Show Notes
https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/media.blubrry.com/extraordinarywomenradio/content.blubrry.com/extraordinarywomenradio/100_Zainab_Salbi.mp3


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NASA delays spacewalk due to threat of space debris
The International Space Station | Image: NASA
Early this morning, NASA postponed a spacewalk scheduled to occur outside the International Space Station today, after getting word of a possible safety threat from some nearby space debris. It's unclear where the debris is coming from, but the delay comes about two weeks after Russia blew up one of its own satellites in orbit, creating thousands of dangerous fragments that threatened the space station.
NASA astronauts Kayla Barron and Thomas Marshburn were all set to don spacesuits and leave the confines of the ISS this morning at around 7:10AM ET, in order to replace an antenna on the outside of the station. It would have been the fifth spacewalk for Marshburn and the first for Barron.
NASA says that it didn't have enough time to…
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text:
Le canton de Roubaix-2 est une circonscription électorale française du département du Nord créée par le décret du . Il tient lieu de circonscription d'élection des conseillers départementaux et entre en vigueur lors des élections départementales de 2015.

Histoire
Un nouveau découpage territorial du département du Nord entre en vigueur à l'occasion des premières élections départementales suivant le décret du . Les conseillers départementaux sont, à compter de ces élections, élus au scrutin majoritaire binominal mixte. Les électeurs de chaque canton élisent au Conseil départemental, nouvelle appellation du Conseil général, deux membres de sexe différent, qui se présentent en binôme de candidats. Les conseillers départementaux sont élus pour  au scrutin binominal majoritaire à deux tours, l'accès au second tour nécessitant 12,5 % des inscrits au . En outre la totalité des conseillers départementaux est renouvelée. Ce nouveau mode de scrutin nécessite un redécoupage des cantons dont le nombre est divisé par deux avec arrondi à l'unité impaire supérieure si ce nombre n'est pas entier impair, assorti de conditions de seuils minimaux. Dans le Nord, le nombre de cantons passe ainsi de 79 à 41.

Le canton de Roubaix-2 est formé de deux communes issues des anciens cantons de Lannoy () et de Villeneuve-d'Ascq-Sud () et d'une fraction de la commune de Roubaix. Il est entièrement inclus dans l'arrondissement de Lille. Le bureau centralisateur est situé à Roubaix.

Représentation

Résultats détaillés

Élections de mars 2015

À l'issue du  des élections départementales de 2015, deux binômes sont en ballottage : Roger Ackermann et Marie-Chantal Blain (FN, 43,23 %) et Henri Gadaut et Catherine Osson (PS, 28,06 %). Le taux de participation est de 38,88 % ( sur ) contre 46,81 % au niveau départemental et 50,17 % au niveau national.

Au second tour, Henri Gadaut et Catherine Osson (PS) sont élus avec 52,72 % des suffrages exprimés et un taux de participation de 41,69 % ( pour  et ).

Catherine Osson a été élue députée La République en marche ! de la 8 circonscription du Nord en juin 2017.

Spray Fahem a quitté  le  PS.

Élections de juin 2021

Le premier tour des élections départementales de 2021 est marqué par un très faible taux de participation (33,26 % au niveau national). Dans le canton de Roubaix-2, ce taux de participation est de 20,47 % ( sur ) contre 30,39 % au niveau départemental. À l'issue de ce premier tour, deux binômes sont en ballottage : Marie-Chantal Blain et Philippe Lambilliotte (RN, 30,22 %) et Benjamin Caillièret et Soraya Fahem (DVG, 21,59 %).

Le second tour des élections est marqué une nouvelle fois par une abstention massive équivalente au premier tour. Les taux de participation sont de 34,36 % au niveau national, 31,01 % dans le département et 22,27 % dans le canton de Roubaix-2. Benjamin Caillièret et Soraya Fahem (DVG) sont élus avec 61,37 % des suffrages exprimés ( pour  et ).

Composition

Le canton de Roubaix-2 comprend :
 Deux communes entières ;
 La partie de la commune de Roubaix non incluse dans le canton de Roubaix-1.

Démographie

Notes et références

Notes

Références

Voir aussi

Articles connexes
 Nord
 Arrondissements du Nord
 Liste des cantons du Nord
 Liste des communes du Nord
 Liste des conseillers départementaux du Nord

Roubaix-2

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
« October 2010 | Main | December 2010 »
Events for Weekend and Week Ahead
Thursday, 12/2
Cafe Science: Egyptian Gold - 7:00 p.m. Join Dr. James Phillips at the Hopleaaf Bar, 5148 N. Clark Street, in Andersonville as he discusses the role that gold has played in Egyptian history and culture, past and present. Free. Pre-registration not required.
Friday, 12/3
ESCONI Christmas Party - 5:30 pm at Greek Islands Restaurant West, 300 East 22nd Street, Lombard, IL
ESCONI General Meeting, 8:00 pm at College of Dupage, K Building, Jim Holstein from the Field Museum of Natural History speak to us about Techniques of Mineral Classification.
Saturday, 12/4
Create a Gem Tree - 1 pm to 3 pm at Lizzadro Museum of Lapidary Art. 9 yrs. to adult. $20 per person, museum members $15. Lapidaries Bill and Lois Zima of the DesPlaines Valley Geological Society teach how to create a small tree using gemstones and wire. All materials included. Reservations required: (630) 833-1616.
Tuesday, 12/7
Meet the Mammoths - Fullersburg Woods Forest Preserve, 3609 Spring Road, Oak Brook, IL 60523, 4-5 pm, Age 4-6. Meet a Mammoth, and learn about other giant creatures that lived during the Ice Age through a story, activity and craft. Free. To register call (630) 850-8110. For ages 7-12, this event will take place on Tuesday, December 14, 4-5 pm.
Posted on November 30, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
RSVP for Holiday Party
ESCONI ANNUAL HOLIDAY PARTY
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 3rd, 2010
Greek Islands Restaurant
300 E. 22nd St.
Lombard IL 60148
www.greekislands.net
PLEASE NOTE: The Holiday party will be a Dutch Treat . . . that is, we will be ordering off the menu and you will pay your own check. Be prepared to pay with CASH!
The restaurant serves all kinds of food, including hamburgers, spaghetti and vegetarian dishes.
We will continue our tradition of a Secret Santa gift exchange. This grab bag is optional. If you do want to participate, please make sure that your gift is earth science related, has a value of $15.00 and is labeled "male" or "female" if it is a gender specific gift.
If you would like to attend the Holiday Party, please RSVP by December 1st to Rob Sula (630) 236-9695 e-mail: sulasaurus@comcast.net.
After the party, ESCONI is honored to have guest speaker Jim Holstein from The Field Museum of Natural History speak to us about Techniques of Mineral Classification. The lecture will be held at The College of DuPage in the K Building at 8:00 pm.
So even if you can't attend the Holiday Party, please join us for our General Meeting and an exciting presentation.
Dinosaur Fossil in Cathedral
Via Gather:
If you thought religious relics were the only places ancient whispers could be heard in Renaissance-era Italian churches, University of Milan paleontologist Andrea Tintori has some Earth-shaking news for you.
That's because Tintori has discovered fossilized remains that are posited as a dinosaur skull from an unknown species, but in a surprising spot. No, not among the hills or rocky outcroppings of Italy. But near the altar, in slabs supporting the balustrade, of the Cathedral of St. Ambrose in Vigevano, a town approximately 20 miles from cosmopolitan cousin Milan. One wonders how many paleontology aficionados will now flock to Vigevano.
Royal Society Science Book of the Year Prize
Via The Guardian:
In Life Ascending, Lane painstakingly brings his readers up to speed on the latest scientific insights into 10 great evolutionary "inventions", among them the origin of life itself, DNA, photosynthesis, complex cells and sight – all wildly implausible events, on the face of it, but not in the least surprising to a modern biologist. (ed.: or geologist or paleobiologist...)
Wikipedia list of shortlist and winners by year.
Naked Dinosaurs No More
I'm tired of seeing naked dinosaurs...It's about time books, documentaries and movies caught up with the latest fossil discoveries and depicted more feathered, bristly dinosaurs, says Brian Switek...
Illustration: Mark Witton/Creative Commons
My Grandson the Rock
Via NPR:
Rocks aren't alive. Life is.
So think of them as separate. Rocks over here; life over there.
Then along come Robert Hazen and his colleagues with their study, "Mineral Evolution," published in the American Mineralogist and all of a sudden categories shatter. I'm amazed. I hadn't thought of this, even remotely.
Here's what they found:
First Native American?
Via PhysOrg:
The first Native American to arrive in Europe may have been a woman brought to Iceland by the Vikings more than 1,000 years ago, a study by Spanish and Icelandic researchers suggests.
The findings boost widely-accepted theories, based on Icelandic medieval texts and a reputed Viking settlement in Newfoundland in Canada, that the Vikings reached the American continent several centuries before Christopher Columbus travelled to the "New World."
Mine Shaft Found at Seaman Mineral Museum Site
Via Pasty.com:
The A.E. Seaman Mineral Museum is in the process of building at a new site on the Michigan Tech campus and during the ground breaking, a flooded mine shaft, believed to be on the Maab's Brothers lode, was unearthed. The last production of this mine shaft was in 1892 and at that time only produced a few tons of copper.
Hunter Finds Plesiosaur
Via Daily Mail:
A hunter has uncovered what is believed to be a fossil of a carnivorous marine dinosaur that lived 75 million years ago, officials have said.
David Bradt, who was hunting elk, stumbled on the largely intact fossilised remains of a plesiosaur in Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, in Montana, U.S.
Cretaceous Oxygen Levels
Via geology.com:
Gas bubbles trapped in amber show an oxygen-rich Cretaceous atmosphere
Republished from a information release posted by USGS in June, 2009.
Photo: "Amber - the fossilized resin of conifer trees - provides a unique means of protecting intricate samples of the past. This mosquito, lying trapped for 45 million years in a piece of amber, is almost perfectly preserved. USGS image."
In addition: amber in India's Cambay area has new information too.
How To Be A Paleontologist
Interesting article from the Washington Post today:
... The first step for a budding paleontologist is deciding where to put in his or her shovel. According to Norell, one of the most acclaimed dinosaur-hunters in the field today, young paleontologists face a dilemma. The most reliable place to look for dinosaurs is where other people - either paleontologists or astute farmers and miners - have already found them. But the way to make a name in the field is by digging in places where no one has dug before...
Food Grass Age Determined with Geology Study
Via Examiner:
...According to a popular hypothesis, grasses such as maize, sugar cane, millet and sorghum got their evolutionary start as a result of a steep drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels during the Oligocene epoch, more than 23 million years ago. A new study overturns that hypothesis, presenting the first geological evidence that the ancestors of these and other C4 grasses emerged millions of years earlier than previously established.
The findings are published in the journal Geology...
Day in the Life of a Geologist
Via NYTimes - Notes from the Field: Nigel Pitman writes about the life of a geologist:
Bob Stallard is the geologist on the expedition, and I'm just going to go ahead and say it: He looks an awful lot like Eric Clapton. Like Clapton, Bob has been doing great work for decades and is highly regarded in his field. But where Clapton tends toward songs like "Hellhound on My Trail," Bob's songbook runs more along the lines of, say, "Quartz Pebbles Probably Dating to a Miocene Deposition Event on My Trail."
Geo Club Helps College and Community
via Sacramento News:
Members of Sacramento State's Geology Club will auction off a variety of rocks, fossils and minerals Friday to raise $8,000 for the geology department...
"Us rock nerds really geek out," said senior geology major Michael Sekigahama, the club's vice president...
Funds will help subsidize fees for geology field courses that range from $75 to $150, and students' field trip fees...
To give back to the community, funds will provide resources for geology studies in local elementary schools. Funds will be used to buy materials to create rock boxes for the schools.
The rock boxes will contain 15 to 20 igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary rocks, such as granite, sandstone, slate, quartz and feldspar, Evans said.
Tyler Keillor's Paleoart Exhibit
Tyler Keillor's Paleoart exhibit will open on Saturday 11/20 at the Lake County Discovery Museum in Wauconda 10 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. The exhibit demonstrates how he blends art and science to bring prehistoric creatures to life.
Tyler writes to ESCONI, "One of the items on display is a plaque I sculpted at my art booth during the ESCONI Fossilfest 2000."
The exhibition features Keillor's reconstructions of various dinosaurs and prehistoric beasts, including predatory dinosaurs Rugops and Herrerasaurus, ancient fish Tiktaalik, giant prehistoric snake Sanajeh, and winged reptile Ramphorynchus. Text panels and captions written by Keillor shed light on his inspiration and process.
The exhibit also includes a state-of-the-art hologram of Herrerasaurus, created by Zebra Imaging. The hologram is based on a 3-D laser scan of a model made by Keillor, and features the dinosaur's skull in skeletal form, as well as fleshed out.
Paleo Meeting Room Change
1038A in the Technology Education Center (TEC). Map of COD campus.
The Mineralogical Society of Southern Africa
This article, authored by Dr. Duncan Miller, appeared in the South African Lapidary Magazine in July 2010. At one time there was an exchange bulletin arrangement between ESCONI and the Federation of Southern African Gem and Mineralogical Societies (FOSAGAMS). Now the connection is tenuous, consisting of a small number of common members, pictured below. See if you can identify them.
The Mineralogical Society of Southern Africa was founded in 1962 and is 48 years old this year. In 2005 the name was changed informally to the Cape Town Gem and Mineral Club, for ease of identification and advertising. Since its inception in 1966, we have been a member club of the Federation of South African Gem and Mineral Societies (FOSAGAMS). For the past few years the membership has hovered around 100, some of these memberships being whole families.
For many years we have enjoyed the luxury of having our own club house, situated in Goede Hoop Street, Bothasig. This boasts a large meeting room, with displays of minerals and legally registered fossils; a kitchen; an office for committee meetings; a general lapidary workshop; a specialised faceting workshop; a jewellery workshop; a small but well stocked library; a rock store; a covered stoep; and ladies' and men's loos of course. There is ample off-street parking in our fenced and grassy grounds.
Our regular monthly meetings are held on the second Saturday of each month, except in January. The main meeting, starting at 14h00 usually is preceded by an hour's swap session, with the library open for loans and returns of books and magazines. The meetings themselves can be very varied, with talks from guest speakers, slide shows of field trips, practical craft demonstrations, etc., and usually end with an auction of a selection of mineral specimens for club funds. Cold drinks, tea and cake are available for purchase from the kitchen. After the meeting braai fires are lit, and all members are welcome to stay for a sociable bring-your-own braai.
The mineral displays are also very varied. Some cases contain a miscellany of minerals from all over the world, but mainly Southern Africa, while others are devoted to specific localities that have been visited by the club in the past. The fossil display is an historic collection of Cretaceous fossils from Algoa Bay, donated to the club by Henry Schramm, one of our long-standing senior members. This fossil collection has been registered formally with the South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA). In South Africa, collection of fossils without a permit from SAHRA is illegal, and we discourage our members from breaking the law.
The committee room is the location of the mysterious monthly meetings of the Executive Committee (EXCO), whose edited deliberations (leaving out the plans for the full-scale annexing of Namibia) appear in the monthly club newsletter Mineral Chatter. At eight information-packed pages this is more of a monthly magazine than a newsletter, and is the main vehicle for communicating forthcoming activities within the club. We established a functional club website in 2010 (www.ctminsoc.co.za).
The general lapidary workshop is well equipped with a range of diamond saws, from a trim saw to a huge 24 inch slab saw, four double grinders for cabochon making, various sanding machines, three flat lapping machines, and a sphere making machine. Regular introductory classes are run for those wanting to learn how to use these machines. The faceting workshop is equipped with a trim saw and three Lee faceting machines, with accessories. Faceting classes are run when there is sufficient demand and those who have completed a course are entitled to use the faceting machines. A very modest daily fee is charged for the use of these workshops, simply to replace consumables and pay for replacement parts when necessary.
The jewellery workshop is equipped with an electric roller, gas lines, and torches at six work stations. It is used only for teaching silver smithing and usually several courses, for beginners and more advanced jewellers, are run each year. Intermittently we also run gemmology courses, both for gem cutters and for jewellers.
The library houses an extensive collection of books on lapidary, jewellery making, gemmology, geology, and palaeontology. The club subscribes to The Mineralogical Record. The magazines and the books are available for loan for a period of one month at a time. The library also houses the geological and gemmological book collection of the late Fr Tony Garman, as well as a geological book collection donated by former club member Tom Molyneux. These items are for reference in the library only.
The rock store is a treasure trove of material donated or collected over the years. This is mostly lapidary material, as the mineral specimens are depleted regularly for the monthly auctions. Club members can purchase lapidary material on intermittent sales aimed at reducing the holdings of the store. As everyone knows, rocks multiply in the dark, so this appears to be an unattainable goal.
The covered stoep comes into its own on the club's Open Day, which is held on the first Saturday of each month (except January, when all rocks are still hung-over from the festive season and don't want to see the light). On Open Day about twenty trader members set out their diverse wares, from hand-made jewellery to cut stones and fine mineral specimens. The club is open to the public on these days, and a light lunch is on sale.
The real highlights of club activities are the field trips. These are arranged regularly, some of them just half day trips to local geological outcrops and others major excursions lasting up to two weeks. There are not many mineral collecting localities near to Cape Town, but the club organises an approximately annual trip to an active quarry near Vanrhynsdorp to collect quartz and adularia feldspar crystals. This is a closed locality, and by arrangement with the mine may only be visited through the Cape Town Gem and Mineral Club. The various pegmatites of Namaqualand are also a favoured target for club field trips. Several of our members have a particular interest in the various rocks making up the Cape Granite Suite (CGS). Our having visited many of the outcrops over the past few years, there are now plans to start a formal collection of polished examples of representative rocks of the CGS. This will necessitate a fresh round of Sunday outings, to outcrops mostly conveniently situated along the scenic west coast.
The Cape Town Gem and Mineral Club is vibrant, and we look forward to a long and sustainable future.
Saturday, 11/20:
Lizzadro Museum of Lapidary Art - Lapidary Activity Day. Learn how gemstone jewelry is made and the types of lapidary art with members of the West Suburban Lapidary Club. 10 a.m. to 4 p.m
Opening of Tyler Keillor's Paleoart exhibit at the Lake County Discovery Museum in Wauconda 10 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. ... learn how he blends art and science to bring prehistoric creatures to life. Tyler writes to ESCONI, "One of the items on display is a plaque I sculpted at my art booth during the ESCONI Fossilfest 2000."
Hope you can make it! Please spread the word to whoever may be interested.
ESCONI Paleontology Study Group Meeting. 7:30 p.m. College of Dupage,
NOTE: 1038A in the Technology Education Center. It is on the first
floor. John Catalini will talk about Nautiloids. NOTE: We will not be photographing Mazon specimens in this meeting.
Citizen Scientists
Crowdsourcing science looks like fun.... The Network for Citizen Scientists.
Oldest Fossil Shrimp
... Rodney Feldmann and Carrie Schweitzer (both Kent State University) report on the oldest fossil shrimp known to date. The creature in stone is as much as 360 million years old and was found in Oklahoma. Even the muscles of the fossil are preserved. The study will be published soon in Journal of Crustacean Biology... more
Photo Credit: Rodney Feldmann/NOAA