The recent ICRA (International Conference on Robotics and Automation) research conference hosted another successful PCL tutorial on Friday, May 10. Given the fact that some of the PCL luminaries were present at the event, this was the perfect opportunity to use the day prior to the event and hold a meeting for a generic "PCL roadmap" discussion.
Taken almost as a scene from a Cosa Nostra movie, the group talked about PCL 1.7, interoperability issues regarding the PointCloud2 format, but also the way to push forward agendas using pcl-developers@ as a forum for discussions. Decisions such as "to break" or not a part of the API have always been open for vote in PCL, and as the code base and the community continue to grow, these decisions and discussions around them are going to be increasingly more important.
PCL-ORCS - code sprint success!
Pat Marion, an R&D Engineer at Kitware, has concluded his work on the joint Open Perception - Ocular Robotics code sprint. The goal of the code sprint was to develop a pcl::Grabber driver interface for the RE0x laser sensors and to develop visualization code capable of real-time display of point cloud data streams acquired by the grabber interface.
The pcl::RobotEyeGrabber is a new C++ class that was added to the pcl io module. It implements the pcl::Grabber interface and provides access to point cloud data streams sent over the network by RE0x laser sensors. A point cloud visualization application called RobotEye Viewer was developed using the RobotEyeGrabber and PCLVisualizer. The application uses the RobotEye C++ API to send control messages to the RobotEye laser sensor and displays real-time point cloud streams acquired using the grabber interface.
The Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are sponsoring a new PCL code sprint! The efforts will be focused on developing algorithms for human detection and tracking, out of 2D camera imagery fused with 3D point cloud data (coming from ASUS XtionPRO cameras).
This project requires good C++ programming skills, and knowledge of PCL internals.
It is our pleasure to announce a new code sprint from our host organization, Open Perception, and Spectrolab, a Boeing company. Spectrolab has expressed interest in connection with the potential possibilities that PCL offers, and we will be searching for outstanding candidates to participate in a new code sprint that involves the development of 3D Viewer Software in PCL, as well as an advanced sensor grabber for Spectrolab's SpectroScan3D LIDAR imager.
It includes pure MATLAB code to read and write unorganized point clouds as PCD files and a wrapper function for point cloud visualization that writes the MATLAB data to a temporary file and sets pcl_viewer loose on it. Using files is inelegant and inefficient, but we sidestep the whole problem of trying to create MEX files linked to PCL.
This is a work in progress and things to add are writing binary PCD; reading/writing binary_compressed formatted files; handling organized data.
We are proud to to announce the release of python-pcl Python bindings for PCL.
For a more complete example showing how to combine filtering, plane and cylinder segmentation (the code used to generate the logo above), see this example.


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Am J Hypertens. 2014 Jan;27(1):72-80. doi: 10.1093/ajh/hpt163. Epub 2013 Sep 4.
Blood pressure responses to dietary sodium and potassium interventions and the cold pressor test: the GenSalt replication study in rural North China.
Zhao Q1, Gu D, Chen J, Li J, Cao J, Lu F, Guo D, Wang R, Shen J, Chen J, Chen CS, Mills KT, Schwander K, Rao DC, He J.
In the Genetic Epidemiology Network of Salt Sensitivity (GenSalt) study, we observed that blood pressure (BP) responses to dietary sodium and potassium interventions and the cold pressor test (CPT) varied greatly among individuals. We conducted a replication study to confirm our previous findings among 695 study participants.
The dietary intervention included a 7-day low sodium (51.3 mmol/day), a 7-day high sodium (307.8 mmol/day), and a 7-day high sodium with potassium supplementation (307.8 mmol sodium and 60 mmol potassium/day). BP measurements were obtained during the baseline and each intervention phase. During the CPT, BP was measured before and at 0, 1, 2, and 4 minutes after the participants immersed their right hand in ice water for 1 minute.
Systolic and diastolic BP responses (mean ± SD (range), mm Hg) were 8.1±8.4 (-39.1 to 18.2) and -3.5±5.1 (-25.1 to 11.1) to low sodium, 9.1±8.4 (-13.3 to 33.1) and 4.0±5.4 (-16.0 to 20.7) to high sodium, and -4.6±5.8 (-31.8 to 11.6) and -1.9±4.3 (-16.9 to 14.2) to potassium supplementation, respectively (all P < 0.0001 for comparison with each former phase). The mean maximum systolic and diastolic BP responses to the CPT were 16.5±10.5 (-15.3 to 63.3) and 7.6±6.1 (-8.7 to 39.3), respectively (all P < 0.0001).
Our study indicates that there are large variations in BP responses to dietary sodium and potassium interventions and to the CPT among individuals.
blood pressure; cold pressor test; dietary potassium; hypertension; salt sensitivity; sodium.
Distribution of systolic blood pressure (SBP) (upper panel, a–c) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) (lower panel, d–f) responses to low-salt intervention (left panel), high-salt intervention (middle panel), and potassium supplementation (right panel). Black bars indicate individuals with zero blood pressure (BP) response. BP response to low salt = BP on low-salt diet – BP at baseline; BP response to high salt = BP on high-salt diet – BP on low-salt diet; and BP response to potassium supplementation = BP on high-salt diet with potassium supplementation – BP on high-salt diet.
Am J Hypertens. 2014 Jan;27(1):72-80.
Distribution of systolic blood pressure (SBP) (upper panel, a–d) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) (lower panel, e–h) responses to the cold pressor test (CPT) at 0, 1, 2, and 4 minutes after the end of ice-water immersion. Black bars indicate individuals with zero blood pressure (BP) response. BP response at 0 minutes = BP at 0 minutes – pre-CPT BP; BP response at 1 minute = BP at 1 minute – pre-CPT BP; BP response at 2 minutes = BP at 2 minutes – pre-CPT BP; and BP response at 4 minutes = BP at 4 minutes – pre-CPT BP.


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Oh, UniFi, cool! How is it?
@vringar I love it. It makes a great entry point to enterprise networking without the steep curve of for instance the Cisco systems.
However, it's kind of a pain to have to deal with the cloud key if you move around the servers a lot. I broke my usb power port so I had to get a PoE adapter for it.
If you have a small spare server it might be worth simply setting it up on there. I haven't tried a raspberry pi.
Also, having one point of entry also means you have one point of failure. You MUST keep backups of the unify controller or you will be locked out of your network until you do a factory reset.
TLDR: Simple to use but still enterprise grade hardware. Make backups and be careful with credentials. There's a lot of em.
@ChappIO thank you very much.
I just yesterday got myself an Amazon aws account so we will probably host the controller there.
As for credentials, I will try to keep that in mind for when we migrate to a proper server.
@siljamicke Because it makes noise and I don't have a spare room to put it in haha. Also, my laundry room is right next to the entry point for the Internet connection.
I plan on building a decent server with actual server components and a lot more memory since I am running short pretty often.
After I do this, the server I have now will become a gateway server. (DNS, Proxy, ssh tunnels, jenkins master, etc) and the new server will do the heavy lifting.
Nice work. Looks very cool.
You have Samsung washer. I'm worried about Your gear.
@jamesh haha I'll take a pass on that one.
I feel like this is some kind of 90's sitcom about a hacker who launders money... And clothes.
How will he keep his zany life balanced?!
Hey guys, I am new to these things, I am mostly a software guy trying to get into hardware through raspberry pi. But why do people have a server running in their homes? What kind of applications is it used for?
@troopy712139 I mostly do expriments like datamining but most people use them for backups or NAS.
With a raspberry pi it's fun to play around with media boxes or pi hole. Just to learn new things.
@oscylo lol yeaaaaaaah. That's the most likely thing to catch fire in that room.


Things change weekly at Gilkisons so its always a wise idea to visit the venue a few days before the actual event.
Always start with a plan and check your measurements!
You don't want to get to the venue and find you don't have enough cords.
Forgetting something can be a real pain.


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Little Things: Tricky Kick
I suspect that Tricky Kick wanted to be obscure even by the standards of TurboGrafx-16 games. It presented a deliberately confusing front back in 1990. The title suggests a soccer game, but it isn't. The "family" label suggests a party game, but it allows only one player. And the box art, with its cave-guy and samurai and schoolgirl standing on an eye puzzle, fits nothing so much as the cover of an unclassifiable prog-rock album with a title like Precambrian Odditure.
The Escherian topography of the cover hints at the truth: Tricky Kick is a puzzle game. Its characters advance through stages by booting an enemy, usually a harmless one, around the screen until it collides with an identical foe and vanishes. That's about it. A few creative obstacles and enemy-launching gadgets pop up, but the game remains too limited, both in what you see and what you can do. It never gets even half as interesting as The Adventures of Lolo or Kickle Cubicle, but TurboGrafx-16 owners didn't have much in that category. If they wanted to shove things around a screen with little threat involved, Tricky Kick had them captive.
The best parts of Tricky Kick have nothing to do with the gameplay. Each character gets a cute, short introduction and a unique setting: elven hero Oberon takes on an evil sorceress, schoolgirl Mayumi finds her way to her classmate Biff's party (yes, Biff), a kid named Taro undergoes some haunted-house hazing, the feudal Japanese prince Suzuki schemes his way to rule the nation, and an Ultraman knock-off called Udon punts giant monsters around city streets. Oh, and a caveman known as Gonzo heads out to slay a big meaty mammoth.
Gonzo's intro is my favorite piece of the game by far, due to its delightful vision of Paleolithic life. The matriarch of the family, in the absence of modern diapers, has swaddled her youngest child in her mass of untamed cavewoman hair. Gonzo's eldest son takes after him, one of his daughters takes after her mom, and the remaining kids look like troglodyte versions of Charlie Brown…or Bonk, the bald cave-boy who became the TurboGrafx's only respected mascot. In fact, we might be seeing Bonk's origin right here! And maybe the purple-haired girl grew up to become Flare from The Legendary Axe or the mysterious assassin from The Legendary Axe II! It's another point for the Grand Unified Theory of TurboGrafx games!
Most of all, I like Gonzo's expression. You can see a determined grimace there in his beard, but a quicker glance makes it look like he has the smiling, noseless, innocent face of a Lego figure. I like that duality, even though Gonzo's obviously not supposed to look upbeat. He knows that he faces a harsh task and perhaps a harsher return home. Should he survive his foray, he could come back to find that one of his children was snatched up by a Haast's eagle, that his family was devoured by a sabertoothed tiger, or that his entire tribe was wiped out by an avalanche or some neighboring clan that just invented spears and genocide. But he can't let anyone know that.
Posted by Kid Fenris on 12/12/2014 2 comments:
Labels: Games
Interview: Fester's Quest
Fester's Quest is a curious sight in the landscape of NES games based on movies and TV series. The Addams Family wasn't particularly prominent during the late 1980s, and yet Sunsoft created a game all about it—and not just a predictable action game starring the members of Charles Addams' macabre clan. No, Fester's Quest is all about Uncle Fester fending off an alien invasion and rescuing Gomez, with the rest of the family popping up to provide the pasty hero with potions, whips, and restorative vises.
That alone would mark Fester's Quest as an oddity, but there's more to its reputation. It's one of the toughest NES games around. Tougher than Battletoads. Tougher than Ninja Gaiden. Perhaps even tougher than that Captain Planet game. Fester can take only two hits (four if you uncover secret health boosts), enemies are relentless, and defeat sends Jackie Coogan's finest television role back to the very start of the game. It vexed children of the NES era to no end, and many hate Fester's Quest to this very day. I don't think it's a bad game, though. It feels a lot like the overhead sections of Blaster Master, and it has that sort of hyper-catchy music that Sunsoft always pulled off in their NES games. Plus it gave us this!
A lot about Fester's Quest puzzled me, so I went to the source. Richard Robbins was the game's producer (and pretty much its creator), while Michael Mendheim served as designer as well as the illustrator for the game's cover (and over a dozen other game boxes). Both went on to more popular things: Robbins worked on the Desert Strike series and Crüe Ball, while Mendheim was part of Battle Tanx and the Army Men series. The two of them also crafted the cult classic Mutant League Football. In fact, Mendheim and others revived it this year—check out the website! Before all of this, though, they were the minds behind Fester's Quest.
Fester's Quest has a strange premise for a licensed game. How did Sunsoft decide to combine The Addams Family and an alien invasion? And why make Uncle Fester the hero?
Robbins: I had a dream, literally, for a game called "Uncle Fester's Playhouse." Pee-wee's Playhouse was airing then. We came up with the alien idea as a quest, to save the family.
The Addams Family seems to have been a fairly quiet property in the late 1980s. Why did Sunsoft option it for a game? Did they get it as a package deal with Platoon?
Robbins: I was a huge Addams Family fan. I called Charles Addams' widow Lady Colyton literally at a chateau in France and started a dialog. It took many, many expensive long-distance calls and a sort of romancing to convince this regal lady to let us do a game. Lady Colyton kept talking about a movie deal, which I thought was a bunch of baloney at the time. The Japan folks at Sunsoft were extremely skeptical and gave me a real hard time. They really questioned who would care about this really old weird TV show.
Three Irrelevant Things About The Sega Saturn
The Sega Saturn turns twenty years old today, November 22. That's going by the launch date in Japan and not the sudden and problematic American debut. But no matter where you pinpoint the console's birth, it's a favorite of mine.
The Saturn doesn't get enough credit. The poor thing trailed the Sony PlayStation for nearly its entire life, and Sega never recovered from the damage done there. I had a PlayStation first, and yes, I liked it a little better. But I also bought a Saturn and realized how underrated it was. The Saturn had excellent ports of Capcom and SNK arcade games. The Saturn had weird, cool little titles like Burning Rangers and Sakura Wars and the Panzer Dragoon series. The Saturn let you play import games with ease. The Saturn turned me into a bigger game geek than I had ever been before, and it made me enjoy that.
Plenty of websites took a look at the Saturn this week, and you'll see no shortage of recommendations when it comes to the system's best games. It's easy to find a rundown of just about every notable Saturn release. And I don't know if I could really say anything new if I just went on and on about Darkstalkers or Steamgear Mash or Last Bronx.
So I won't. Instead I'll discuss three things that I remember about the Saturn and its under-appreciated library. Not one of these things really mattered in making the Saturn a magnificent sleeper system, but they were important to me. That's what counts here.
Time of Eve-rors
Animation mistakes are inevitable. They're also amusing. Some fans laughed over a braid whiffing through Elsa's arm during that big musical number in Disney's Frozen. Others got angry about it, and that was doubly hilarious. After all, such mistakes are everywhere, from gleaming cinematic treasures to those dollar-bin knockoff cartoons seemingly composted of nothing but animation mistakes. Mike Toole put up a column and a Tumblr dedicated to anime gaffes, and this feed shows us that you'll find goofs in just about every big-budget animated film.
But hey, those little slip-ups seldom harm the story. A security guard's misshapen arm or a magical schoolgirl's chameleon eyes won't confuse the audience that much. At most, a few kids might wonder why Brawn and Windcharger show up in the background of third-season Transformers episodes even though they died horrifically in the movie. Then their parents can explain that cartoons are not always perfect and shatter one key childhood illusion.
My favorite animation error comes in Yasuhiro Yoshiura's Time of Eve, and it may be the only time that such a mistake altered the entire context of a scene.
Time of Eve, or Eve no Jikan, is a six-part series set in a future where androids can pretty much look human—so much so that they wear legally mandated hologram halos. The TV even runs commercials admonishing citizens not to fall in love with machines. Average teenager Rikuo notices some odd datestamps surrounding his family's house-bot, Sammy, and he and his friend Misaki track the mystery to a café called Time of Eve. Inside, androids discard their halos and act like regular humans, leaving newcomers like Rikuo and Masaki unable to tell just who's a robot and who's a meatform.
Posted by Kid Fenris on 11/15/2014 1 comment:
Labels: Animation
Cry On Over
No video game ever made me cry. Nope, not one. Many games get to me in some way, because I'm a big, sappy, hopeless mark when it comes to full-bore blasts of melodrama. Yet I have a hard time remembering any game, book, movie, song, comic, painting, sculpture, water ballet, or 15th-century Italian woodcut that's brought me to tears. I suspect I'm just not built to sob over fiction and art. That part of me prefers that I just sulk around gobsmacked and despondent.
I don't think I would've wept over Cry On, but I wish I could've found out.
Making us weep was, believe it or not, the goal of Cry On. Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi hoped that the game would make players cry, both in joy and sorrow, and so great was his ambition that he put it right there in the title. Cry On wasn't a weird side project, either. Sakaguchi's Mistwalker studio announced it late in 2005, with publisher AQ Interactive and developer Cavia on board. Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu signed up for the soundtrack, the illustrations came from Drakengard artist Kimihiko Fujisaka, and the budget hovered around $8.5 million.
Cry On promised more than wailing and rending of garments, of course. Described as an action-RPG, it showed a world not that different from a rudimentary Final Fantasy spread of medieval mythic scenery speckled with airships and other machine anachronisms. Here humans live alongside Bogles, glazed golems that transform from small totemic statues to fearsome giants. A particularly intelligent Bogle partners with the game's heroine, a young woman named Sally.
Players were to control Sally, but the Bogle may have been the real star. According to interviews, the little ceramic gremlin would ride on Sally's shoulder as she explores and solves those environmental puzzles that every action game demands somehow. Yet the Bogle would transform into its larger incarnation, changing its general form each time, and it could accessorize itself with rubble and other debris. The Bogle would handle much of the fighting, though Sally does have that knife on her.
Labels: Games, Prototypes
Halloween Moods
I wanted to do this for a good while.
Over the past month, Dinosaur Dracula readers have posted Halloween Mood Tables of all sorts. I liked the idea, but I didn't have that much in the way of Halloween decorations or scary movies. So I improvised with Darkstalkers stuff and Ghosts 'N Goblins, and I stretched the definition of just what a scary movie means (I even used Titanic: The Animated Movie, which is scary in several ways). Here's a less moody version if you want a better look at the accessories!
Happy Halloween, folks! Play Darkstalkers games if you got 'em! And, uh, if you're old enough.
Little Things: Ninja Combat
I remember it with perfect and disquieting clarity: a line from an early 1990s issue of GamePro. A writeup about a new arcade game stated "the all-girl round is imaginative, and it starts with a surprise that we can't reveal here, but watch out! These women are MEAN!"
This evocation of feminine mystery must have lodged deep within my borderline-teenage brain, because it stayed with me long after I forgot even the title of the game it was talking about. I recalled only that it was some side-scrolling brawler, and the arcades of the 1990s practically used those to prop open doors and whack cockroaches. Well over a decade later, I remembered that curious phrase and finally figured out that it described Ninja Combat for the Neo Geo.
The second stage of Ninja Combat leads the player to a group of women menaced by the game's generic ninja. They even call for help with a plaintive sound effect. And you, as the hero, clearly should rescue these women just as you would a kidnapped president.
Then comes the surprise. Once you advance, the terrified hostages reveal themselves to be disguised ninja women and attack you. I'm not sure why the Gamepro blurb connoted this as "mean," but I'll say this much: it would have surprised my younger self. Hostages were a cliche in arcade games even back in 1991, but we were used to freeing them for bonus points, whether it was the children in Moonwalker or the stone-encased citizens of Black Tiger (all of whom were old men for some reason). It's a tradition that lives on today in any arcade light-gun shooter where unfortunate civilians cringe and dash through zombie outbreaks or anti-terrorist firefights. These citizens are inevitably mowed down by unwary younger players, who learn that shooting the innocent costs soldiers or police officers only a chunk of life meter. Or a few weeks of paid leave until the investigation clears them.
Ninja Combat isn't very good. It's the sort of primitive arcade title that gave the Neo Geo a reputation for mediocre games costing $200 and lasting about forty-five minutes. Yet it's not without some invention. Enemy mid-bosses become playable characters once defeated, the cutscenes have some hysterical acting, and the enemy ninja include such novelties as harpy ninja, fan ninja, and burly executioner ninja whose Klansman-like hoods weren't changed to appease North American audiences.
Is there more to Ninja Combat's little joke about captive damsels in arcade brawlers? Is it subtly telling us that the concept of helpless, imperiled women pleading for rescue is an outdated and chauvinistic ideal, and that those who accept it do so to their ninja-swamped misfortune?
Rygarfield Returns
I'm afraid that Rygarfield has not yet emerged as this century's hottest new comic strip. At first I didn't know what the problem might be. It has everything kids like: video games, webcomics based on video games, and ironic Garfield humor. Then I realized what was wrong. Rygarfield had only one panel instead of the multi-panel format used by every good comic that isn't The Far Side!
Now Rygarfield is the complete work that it should have been at the start. It also delivers biting commentary about cats and the marginal secrets of old NES games. It's like Howard and Nester meets Heathcliff!
Posted by Kid Fenris on 9/21/2014 2 comments:
Labels: Comics, Games
Good Box Art: Advance Wars
Remember when I used to write about awful box art? Well, I actually updated the old gallery with an entry on Wing of Alnam. Lots of people discuss bizarre game cover illustrations these days, but as far as I can tell, nobody's taken a crack at this one just yet. Besides, I enjoy pretending that the last ten years haven't happened.
I also want to highlight good box art—the stuff that sells a game better than any panting laudatory quotes or pre-order gadgetry ever could. I'll start, in no way alphabetically, with Intelligent Systems and Nintendo's original Advance Wars.
Advance Wars is a game of jovial strategy, a game where little rounded helicopters and puttering tanks and squat, rifle-toting troops clash in big colorful battlefields. And the cover illustration captures it perfectly. Three young heroes commandeer a tank and rush into battle with such energy that the treads lift off the churned concrete. Andy, an Orange Star officer, mans the controls with a maniacal cartoon grin. It's all a good taste of what's inside Advance Wars.
Yet Advance Wars, like many outwardly cute video games, is rather depressing when you think about it too hard. The most disposable pieces of any Advance army, as Andore Jr. eloquently points out, are the humble soldiers in your basic infantry units, and at least a few of them are guaranteed death every time they rise to attack or defend. Advance Wars may be precious and gleeful, but it's still about wars.
This brings me to my favorite part of the cover. Andy may brim with gusto as he guns that tank toward victory, but his companions don't. Max wears a look of grim caution, while Sami stares numbly before her. Because they know.
Posted by Kid Fenris on 8/23/2014 1 comment:
Darkstalkers Redirection
Sometimes I have to ask myself why I have a set of Darkstalkers novelty head-wings. The answer is complicated.
It's exactly what it looks like: a promotional Darkstalkers Resurrection band that you can wrap around your head like a Burger King crown. The bat-wings imitate the headgear of Morrigan, as she's the focus of the Resurrection art and the main character of the series. Darkstalkers is notable in that respect. Street Fighter and Guilty Gear and Tekken and most other major fighting games deem men their iconic leads, but Darkstalkers has Morrigan. I suspect that's because she usually looks ready to spill out of her demon-lady costume if someone so much as pats her on the back, but hey, small victories.
Capcom gave away these bat-crowns at conventions back in 2012. They had just announced Darkstalkers Resurrection, a collection of the two best games in Capcom's monster-fighter series, and so they put together a large booth for the game. It was a fine time to like Darkstalkers, as I certainly do. Resurrection was a great repackaging of the series, and Capcom strongly implied that they'd make an all-new Darkstalkers if the reissue did well enough.
A little blot of dread grew in me. As excited as I was at the promise of a new Darkstalkers, I suspected that Resurrection wouldn't do so well and that Capcom wouldn't make much Darkstalkers merchandise beyond this little strip of paper that looks vaguely like a crab's maw if you view it from behind. So I resolved to save mine. I made sure I that I got it home in one piece, and I didn't try wearing it at the convention, even though that would've given me a shot at winning a free download of Resurrection (I was content to buy the game twice, once on Xbox Live and again on the PlayStation Network). I would not tarnish so wonderful an artifact with my slovenly nerd-brow.
I was right. Horribly, horribly right. Resurrection didn't sell nearly well enough to begin a new golden age of Darkstalkers, and Street Fighter producer Yoshinori Ono, who for years claimed "Darkstalkers are not dead," is now a shade more taciturn about the subject. Yet Capcom still keeps Darkstalkers alive with artbooks, this poster set, and suggestively posed Morrigan statues that I wouldn't put on my shelf. So the series will survive as long as fans lurk in the wastelands of Resurrection's online lobbies or needlessly remind people that Morrigan is a succubus and not a vampire. They're keeping the faith, and so am I.
Drakengard 3: Four
Drakengard 3 arrived last month. It's a very strange game, abusive and self-mocking and technically graceless. It's a monster that won me over in ways I never expected. It's a lot of things, but it's most clearly a portrait of Zero, a goddess-like Intoner who goes around a twisted medieval Europe and murders her deified sisters with a mixture of vicious abandon and blasé cruelty. I've talked at length about just what Drakengard 3 did to me, and it's time for an addendum about one of the game's more interesting characters. She's not who you might think.
Four is the least threatening among Zero's numerically named sisters, all of whom decided to rule the world and rather rudely didn't invite Zero. We meet them when Zero attacks their city stronghold. One is the rational leader, Two is cheerful, Three is spookily distracted, and Five is hedonistic to no end. Four seems the most reluctant to fight; during an initial free-for-all with Zero, Four pleads for her sister to reconsider such violent rebellion. Later in the game, Four is the second victim in Zero's conveniently numbered murder spree. En route to a mountain fortress, Zero tells her companions that Four is an uptight virgin and that "deep down, she's evil."
If Four's evil, we don't see it in the prime stretch of Drakengard 3. Upon confronting Zero, Four again begs her to stop and proclaims how highly she thinks of the murderous Intoner. So great is Four's faith in her sister that she's even willing to fall for a blatant and deadly ruse. Later, as the game's timeline unravels into chaos and paradoxes, Four reappears as a lunatic, driven mad by the ominous floral entity that birthed all of the Intoners. She's a piteous sacrifice, hiding in poorly concocted innocence and a mess of happy, Zero-centered memories that aren't even real.
For a look into Four's true depths, one must venture beyond the central game. The short stories available on the Drakengard 3 website introduce Four as a teetering stack of neuroses. Traveling with her sisters (minus Zero), Four worries about her sibling Intoners, mends their clothes, tries to keep a borrowed house clean…and then explodes into a room-wrecking fury and seethes with hate for her family. And herself most of all.
[The following article discusses rape and other forms of sexual assault as they are depicted in video games. Please avoid reading further if this subject upsets you.]
Video games seldom take a responsible tone when addressing rape. It's rare to see a title acknowledge sexual assault as anything more than an exploitative dash, a cheap, nasty surprise for a vulnerable and usually female character. It's a brilliant package deal for the careless writer beleaguered with demands for maturity. What better way to paint a villain as instantly loathsome, stoke the player's righteous fury, and elevate your game above the childish superficialities of past eras! After all, trashy films, sleazy anime, and execrable comics with titles like Stormfang Saga do it, so why shouldn't video games?
The latest such attempt is in Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes. It drops the elder of the saga's two Snake operatives into a secret American military compound, from which he must rescue operatives Paz and Chico. Along the way, the player can uncover recordings of the game's villain, Skullface, torturing the prisoners. Both Paz and Chico are raped. Chico is forced to rape Paz. The audio log concludes with Skullface and his surgeon planting two explosive devices in Paz—the second one apparently hidden in her vagina. Should you doubt this, the scene provides the squelching, visceral sounds of a bomb going somewhere it probably shouldn't.
This may be the most horrifying of Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima's uses of rape, but it sure isn't the first. The original Metal Gear Solid strongly implies that Meryl is sexually assaulted during Revolver Ocelot's torture sequence, the second game finds once-laughable nerd Otacon confessing that his stepmother raped him, the third has some disturbing notes about undercover agent Eva, and Metal Gear Solid 4 luridly mixes sexuality and trauma into The Beauty and the Beast Corps. The entire Metal Gear Solid web weaves together grim realities and goofy fourth-wall assaults, and Kojima's infusion of radio-drama rape and vagina disploda is both, entwining the absurd and the horrific.
Kojima is no lone provocateur. Numerous other games trot out rape scenes with all the care of a backhandedly misogynistic romance novel, a torture-porn flick, or the Raveonettes' "Boys Who Rape (Should All Be Destroyed)." You can find it callously applied in Heavy Rain's TV-movie interludes, F.E.A.R. 2's finale, and just about any game where a female character's backstory boils down to "she was raped" and little else.
Is that all video games can do? Do any of them treat the subject with a modicum of respect?
Introducing Rygarfield
You know what's wrong with webcomics? They just don't have broad appeal. Name any webcomic, and you can find a great mass of people who hate it or, worse yet, ignore it.
Fortunately, I have devised a new project to scale magnificent heights in online comedy and profit. It is a webcomic that no one could shun, a webcomic that fuses the Internet's boundless affection for old video games with the proven success of one of the past century's most marketable characters. I call it Rygarfield.
Rygarfield is available for syndication, merchandising, and whatever funding you might care to send me. Feel free to make ROM hacks and memes about Rygarfield, so long as you credit me and pay me royalties. And if anyone points out that Rygarfield is a blatant arrogation of copyrighted material, tell them it's OK under the doctrine of fair use. Just don't tell them to look up what the doctrine of fair use actually means.
Be sure to check back for regular Rygarfield comics about sarcasm, dog abuse, and that weird, unreachable door in the water just above Dorago's lair!
Off-Kilter Instinct
I'd like to talk about Killer Instinct and B. Orchid. Really.
I admire Killer Instinct in a strange historical capacity. It's not the reluctant fondness I have for the considerably trashier BloodStorm. It's more of a distant appreciation for the way the original Killer Instinct summarizes all of the trends that video games toyed with in the mid-1990s. It's a fighting game, of course, and it has plastic-looking computer-rendered graphics, profuse guitar licks, comical violence, preposterous sexism, an announcer squawking excitedly about BLASTER COMBOS, and a lineup of stereotypes exploiting everything from the Predator to Jurassic Park. And all of this came from Nintendo, who by then was sick and tired of Sega pretending to be the more daring game-industry titan.
If you want to experience a good game from 1995, play Chrono Trigger, Panzer Dragoon, or Metal Warriors. If you want to know what games were really like in 1995, play Killer Instinct.
B. Orchid is part of that, of course. Her design is an amalgamation of every unfortunate stereotype inflicted on women by that decade's video games. She gallivants around in a skin-tight suit with "HOT" on the side, moans provocatively during her post-fight footage, and, for a "No Mercy" move, whips open her top and shocks her male opponents into cardiac arrest. Yet there was a time when people were hopeful about B. Orchid.
The above profile comes from a 1994 issue of Nintendo Power. I can sympathize with the writer who had to find good things to say about Orchid, looking as she does like some hideous 1960s Eastern European knockoff of a Barbie doll. In a bout of vague optimism, Nintendo Power suggests that Orchid will change the way female characters are portrayed in video games. In hindsight, the kindest view of Orchid is that she didn't influence such depictions one way or the other, that she was a symptom and not a catalyst.
Little Things: Kid Kool
Some mysteries are compelling not because they're important, but because they're so weirdly insignificant. For one example, consider the king's butler in the awkward and rampantly detested Kid Kool and the Quest for the Seven Wonder Herbs. He's a miniscule oddity in a lousy old NES game, and that makes the enigma itch all the more.
Kid Kool's interminable story sequences introduce only four characters: the ailing king, his butler, the titular Kid Kool, and, in the best endings, a princess. The butler doesn't serve much of a purpose beyond rattling off the details of Kool's herb-gathering mission and announcing the hero's demise. The latter happens a lot in Kid Kool, because Kid Kool despises everyone who plays it.
But it isn't the butler's dialogue that's puzzling. It's his appearance. His haircut, glasses, and snaggletoothed nerd visage clash with the King's Garfield-like appearance and the mundane anime-kid design of Kool and the princess. And why do his shorts clearly say "T YAN"?
It all suggests that the butler is a caricature of someone, possibly this T. Yan individual. But who could that be?
The most obvious explanation would be that the butler is a leftover joke from Kid Kool's original Japanese version, Kakefu-Kun no Jump Tengoku: Speed Tengoku. It was a vehicle for Kenji "Kakefu-kun" Sagara, a popular child actor in Japan during the late 1980s. Vic Tokai's Americanization of the game replaced his Hanshin Tigers baseball cap with a spiky coiffure and changed his name to the less expensive Kid Kool, but the other characters were left alone. One clue crops up in the Japanese credits: the butler's name is listed as "Dirty Echigoya." It also lists the king's name as Nioccory V of Poconioccory and his daughter as Josephine Nioccory, and I have no idea what that might mean.
Yet I think I know who T.Yan is.
The Men, Women, and Weirdos of Bangai-O
Treasure's Bangai-O games are wondrous menageries of destruction. They drop tiny robots into zoomed-out stages and let them wreak havoc with lasers, baseball bats, grenades, and blinding storms of enough missiles to choke an Ichiro Itano dogfight. This brand of adorable chaos is easy enough to find. Bangai-O HD: Missile Fury is still on Xbox Live, and Bangai-O Spirits is pretty cheap among DS games. They're both decent games, and yet they lack one endearing point of the original Bangai-O: nonsense-spouting bosses.
The dialogue is one of the best parts of Bangai-O, odd as that may be for a shooter with no real storyline. Robot-pilot siblings Riki and Mami get advice from a bored housewife and a medium who channels long-dead celebrities, and every stage caps off with some bizarre boss who pilots a rival mecha or sits in a computer core. In localizing the Dreamcast version of Bangai-O, Conspiracy Entertainment intentionally left the text unpolished. It reads like something fresh off a buggy, wheezing translation machine, and it suits Bangai-O perfectly.
Conspiracy even carried the tone over to the boss profiles in the manual. The rest of the booklet is fairly straight-faced about everything, but every boss gets a description rife with absurdity. My favorite is 86, the SF Kosmo Gang leader who communicates entirely through sketches.
The entire set of character profiles can be found here. Bangai-O fans will note that very little of this backstory ever sees mention in the game itself. For example, you'll never learn about the heroic Yomeiri Masuke's hit TV series unless you read the manual.
Several Dreamcast games made their way to modern systems in recent years, but they're limited to Sega offerings like Sonic Adventure and Space Channel 5. I hope that Treasure, now pursuing Steam development, sees fit to reissue Bangai-O in its blithering Dreamcast glory. Perhaps they'll include the manual, so that all who play it can appreciate things in full.
Yes, Riki. It really is.
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Also they have a C/C++ version available from their partners. While I mostly used the JAVA version, with the trial key they provide you can play around with all of the versions available for download.
To better understand what it does let me provide a simple example. Say you join a new project where you find that the architecture documentation is out-of-date or worse yet, missing. Some people say that the best documentation is the source code itself. But reading hundreds or thousands of source code files is usually not an option. What you could do though is get a quick overview of the whole project's structure and design just by opening the compiled result of the project in Structure 101. It doesn't matter whether you have packaged the classes in .jar files or have them in some directory. Just create a new project in Structure 101 and add them to the list. You'll also be asked whether you want the detailed information i.e. if you'll be examining the structure at the function level. Once you open it you're presented with the ability to examine the project in a list of perspectives the more interesting of which you can see below.
Here you can analyze the packages and their dependencies.
See the project at different architectural levels and the level of entanglement on each level.
This is the place where you simulate the changes to the structure and immediately see the consequences without actually modifying any source code.
This perspective helps you understand the dependencies between classes.
I'm still learning it so I won't try to provide a tutorial or anything. If you need some help figuring this out be sure to see the screencasts.


text:
CSTM $18.800 -1.88%
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About Constellium
Constellium's Bowling Green Facility Receives Award for Lowering Carbon Emissions
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November 17, 2020 – Constellium is proud to announce that its Bowling Green, Kentucky facility has been recognized as an "exemplary environmental steward" by the Tennessee Valley Authority ("TVA"). Constellium's Bowling Green plant produces flat rolled aluminium Auto Body Sheet products for the growing automotive market in North America and has a capacity of 100,000 metric tons annually.
The TVA recognizes local businesses that help make the region cleaner and greener, and Constellium Bowling Green received two awards for "Lowest Carbon Emissions" and "Most Improved Carbon Emissions" based on its 2019 power consumption.
Steve Tua, Director of Manufacturing at Bowling Green, said, "We are very proud of these awards, which recognize the continuous improvements our team has made since this plant began production as a greenfield site. This validates our efforts as a company to advance our environmental mission. We want to thank Warren RECC, our utility provider, for helping us be as energy efficient as possible."
Catherine Athenes, Vice President Group Sustainability at Constellium, continued, "These awards are a tribute to Constellium's longstanding efforts to implement sustainability practices in our business. Our Bowling Green plant is an excellent example of our commitment to helping our automotive customers meet their lightweighting and emission reduction targets by producing advanced aluminium solutions in a sustainable way."
Ernie Peterson, TVA General Manager, said, "In an effort to encourage energy efficiency, TVA established annual carbon reduction awards for the top performing companies across the Seven State Valley. We are proud to present this award to Warren RECC's customer, Constellium, for their dedication to energy efficiency and protecting the environment."
Since launching in 2016, the plant has made special efforts to reduce the amount of power it uses each day. Adjustments made to the CALP line, wastewater treatment facility and positive air pressure system managed to significantly reduce the plant's power consumption.
About the TVA
The Tennessee Valley Authority was founded as part of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s and today provides electricity to 10 million people and businesses in parts of seven southeastern states. With an emphasis on carbon-free solutions, power is largely generated by hydroelectric dams, as well as nuclear, solar, wind and biogas programs.
Constellium (NYSE: CSTM) is a global sector leader that develops innovative, value added aluminum products for a broad scope of markets and applications, including aerospace, automotive and packaging. Constellium generated €5.9 billion of revenue in 2019.
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Constellium (NYSE) is a global sector leader that develops innovative, value added aluminium products for a broad scope of markets and applications, including aerospace, automotive and packaging. Constellium generated €4.9 billion of revenue in 2020.
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text:
Papa Deusdedit () a fost Papă al Romei în perioada 19 octombrie 615 - 8 noiembrie 618.

Papa Deusdedit s-a născut la Roma, iar tatăl său a fost preotul Ștefan. Numele său a avut și alte două variante: "Adeodatus" și "Deodatus". Numele consacrat este echivalent cu "Dumnezeu a dat", iar variantele sunt foarte apropiate ca idee și chiar ca sens literal.

Papa Deusdedit a fost ales la o vârstă înaintată, după ce a fost preot timp de patruzeci de ani. S-a distins prin actele sale excepționale de altruism și devotament în august 618, când Roma a fost bântuită de lepra care a apărut în urma unui cutremur catastrofal.

Conform tradiției, Papa Deusdedit ar fi fost primul care a sigilat documentele papale cu un sigiliu specific ("bulla").

Deusdedit
Sfinți în Biserica Catolică
Romani din secolul al VII-lea î.Hr.
Decese în 618

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


The fundamental point I was making, that the future of web development lies with web application frameworks and not in traditional CMS's, relies on two rather finely drawn (I cheerfully admit) lines.
The first is on the difference between implementing a CMS and developing for the web. To implement a CMS you typically need specialized knowledge and skill concerning which modules to employ to achieve the aim. The user group got hung up on this distinction, I suspect because many of the CMS implementors thought I was denigrating what they do. I wasn't. I was simply saying that particular skill set is different from a developer's skill set. It's the difference between a production designer and a graphic artist — the graphic artist creates the images the production designer uses. The one who implements the CMS (I'll call that particular skill set "systems integrator," for lack of a better term) has a specialized knowledge that comes into play as the modules are assembled to make a web site. The developer's skill set creates the modules the systems integrator selects from. In the world of the CMS, both skill sets are required, and they are generally found in different people.
The second line is between a traditional CMS and a framework. This line is becoming even finer, as more CMS's (such as Radiant or Expression Engine) are developed that rest upon published frameworks (such as CodeIgniter or Rails). For my purposes, I'll define the CMS as a collection of software modules that require no (or minimal) coding in anything other than the standard languages of the web (HTML and CSS) to implement. WordPress, for example, requires little or no knowledge of PHP (the language it's written in) in order to be installed and used.
I received a lot of push-back when drawing the first line; it seemed to me a lot of the noise was being generated by the implicit assumption that I was saying the systems integrator skill set was somehow inferior to the developer skill set. This isn't the case at all.
What I was saying was that the systems integrator skill set wasn't interesting to the developer. This isn't saying it's inferior; I could say the same thing about the developer skill set not being interesting to the integrator. It's not interesting, because at root it's not relevant to what they do best. Just as excellent graphic artists can make bad production designers, excellent developers can make bad integrators, and vice versa.
These days it's possible to put together a CMS that adequately meets 80% of most customer's business needs from a free or low-cost CMS, using off-the-shelf modules. If a developer plans on making more than a subsistence living in that market, it can only be by giving up or seriously limiting the amount of time spent doing what a developer does best (if satisfactory extensions are free, there's not a good economic case for getting paid to write them from scratch) and instead turning into a systems integrator. Some developers can do this, some can't, but even those who can do this only succeed by, in effect, ceasing to be a developer.
Therefore the developer has to step out in a different direction. One possibility is to build completely custom coded websites, while another is to develop and sell modules for the systems integrators to use.
If a developer chooses to go the custom-code route, a framework will provide a solid foundation to build off of. Frameworks provide stub code and basic functionality which can easily be extended to cover the precise needs of the site at hand, without incurring the burden of unnecessary code. Built-in or otherwise available framework modules to handle user authentication, for example, form the basis for a more complete user profile system, only requiring the custom features of the user profile required by the community site under development to be written by the developer. The framework does the heavy lifting, while the developer supplies the chrome and the custom business logic, tailored to 100% of the site owner's needs. Instead of off-the-rack, the result is a custom-tailored fit.
This road isn't easy. Off-the-rack suits fit most bodies reasonably well, so the potential market is smaller. But at the same time it's more lucrative, so the two balance. And with a good framework, a creative and knowledgeable developer can provide enough of a value add to make the time and cost more than worth it to the customer. If the "standard" CMS yields 80% of the goal, a good framework under it can often make the other 20% easier to reach.
If the developer chooses to build and sell CMS modules or extensions, the market is tighter. There will be a lot of competition from low- (or no-) cost alternatives exerting downward pressure on the market, still it's possible for a developer to make a living there. But in taking that route, the developer still is using a framework. In this case, the internals of the CMS itself form the framework that is used to build the extension. Sometimes that's explicitly designated as a framework, as with Expression Engine or Joomla, and sometimes it's just a published API, as with WordPress or Drupal. But whether it's officially named that or not, it's still a framework.
So what's the "action list" for you as a developer?
Look at the framework first. Don't (please, just … don't) write your own framework from scratch. There are plenty of Open Source ones out there to contribute to; find one you can live with and while you're learning it, fix some bugs and add some features to make it better. It'll be easier to add the features you want to an existing framework than write an entire framework from scratch around those features.
Decide — Custom Code or CMS extensions. Make this decision on top of the best framework you can find. The framework itself will provide some of the tools you'll be using to build the modules, after all, and no one likes working with inferior tools.
There's you road map. Start your journey.


New Delhi: Union minister Jitendra Singh has sought to play down the "Kashmiri militants are martyrs" remarks of a PDP MLA, terming it as a "stray comment".
Aijaz Ahmed Mir had stoked a controversy when he described Kashmiri terroristsshot dead in encounters with security forces as "martyrs" and "brothers" and also cautioned against glorifying their killings.
"If a stray comment is made by a stray person, it is not to be given any importance. But as far as we are concerned, a terrorist is a terrorist and a terrorist only," Singh told reporters in Jammu in reply to a question seeking his reaction over the remarks.
"Terrorism is to be dealt in the way terrorism is dealt. We have zero tolerance against terrorism and government is clear on this stand and will continue to follow this stand," he said.
The Union minister said such comments amount to disrespecting the nation's security forces.
"By saying anything, terrorist cannot be a martyr and by making such an apologetic statement about terrorists, who engineer terrorist acts, amounts to disrespecting security forces," said Singh.
The PDP MLA's remarks came as an embarrassment for his party as its alliance partner the BJP decried the comments saying these were "absolutely intolerable" and demanded an FIR against him.


This museum in Carberry occupies a former sash and door factory owned and operated by James White. In 1939, White sold the building to J. H. Toby and W. B. McKay who operated a machine shop in it. It became a community museum in 1976 when local citizens, assisted by the Rural Municipality of North Cypress, took over the building.
"Historic building saved, shop becomes museum" by Penny Ham, Brandon Sun, 1 March 1977, page 8.


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text:
KHN Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Thursday, Jan 11 2001
Syphilis Flourishes in African-American Communities
Although syphilis rates in the United States have dropped overall, the disease continues to thrive in "marginalized communities," where residents have little access to health and social services, the Los Angeles Times/Detroit News reports. Half of the nation's 6,700 cases of syphilis are confined to 25 counties, making the disease "one of the most glaring examples of racial disparity in U.S. health care," the Times/Detroit News reports. The rate of syphilis among African Americans is 30 times higher than the rate among whites, and blacks accounted for 75% of all syphilis cases in 1999. One reason for this disparity is that "a disproportionate number of blacks live in poor, isolated communities," the Times/Detroit News reports. In addition, high syphilis rates within a community often "signal" the presence of other problems, such as other STDs, infant mortality and prostitution. But there "is no good medical reason for [syphilis] to endure," since it can be prevented with condom use, is "easily" detected with a blood test and "easily" cured with penicillin when detected early. Dr. Peter Leone, director of STD clinics in Wake County, N.C., said, "If we can't defeat syphilis, it doesn't bode well" for other STDs such as HIV.
Federal Campaign
The racial disparity in syphilis infection rates has caught the attention of federal officials, who have crafted a campaign to fight the disease. The CDC has designed a program targeting the 25 most afflicted counties, most of which are located in the Southeast and Midwest. Last month, Congress allocated $33 million a year to fund the federal syphilis-elimination campaign -- nearly twice the amount previously given to fight the disease. While lawmakers and health officials can expand medical services, increase screening and respond to syphilis outbreaks, they "can only do so much," the Times/Detroit News reports. Health officials are hoping to boost the syphilis-eradication campaign with help from "established community groups," which can "tap into a community's trust" more effectively than government and health officials (Marquis, Los Angeles Times/Detroit News , 1/11).
This is part of the KHN Morning Briefing, a summary of health policy coverage from major news organizations.	Sign up for an email subscription.
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Conservation and Outdoor Recreation Program (COR)
/SHIFT Summit 2021 and First Two Months of my Fellowship
SHIFT Summit 2021 and First Two Months of my
SHIFT Summit 2021 and First Two Months of my Fellowship
Written by: Vanessa Morales
The first two months of my fellowship at National Trails System have been engaging, educational, inspiring, and exciting! I feel so fortunate to work with a group of people who are so knowledgeable and passionate about their work in the outdoors, and not a day goes by where I don't learn something new. Special shoutout to my incredible team and close colleagues: Peter, John, Corita, Susan, fellow fellow Ximena, and Evelyn! It is also worth mentioning the HORALE group within NPS that I came to know during Hispanic Heritage Month.....knowing there is an empowered group of Latine employees in NPS and beyond has been so inspiring!
Coming from a teaching background, transitioning to a new field was intimidating, but there has been an outpouring of encouragement and trust I did not expect in a remote position. I had been so accustomed to going into work and seeing the same people in the same building for so long. Now, I work with people who are dispersed around the country and see them all through Teams. It has certainly been a transition, and I am so glad it has been with the National Trails System.
Fortunately, though, not every experience in my fellowship has been exclusively virtual. Through HAF's support, I was able to attend the SHIFT Conference in Grand Junction, Colorado in late October. In conjunction, I also participated in the Emerging Leaders Program, aimed at building "a diverse coalition of advocates who can champion the health benefits of nature and fight for a more sustainable future for the planet." The people I collaborated with in ELP are so inspiring, as most were people of color passionate about bringing justice to the outdoors and increasing access to nature for all. Thank you to Dr. Morgan Green who led the ELP program and inspired us with his dedication to the program.
At SHIFT, I was able to participate in my very first rafting experience down the Colorado River, hiked 6 miles in the Colorado National Monument where I saw herds Bighorn Sheep, and met countless inspiring professionals working in outdoor recreation. Many of the topics at the conference revolved around JEDI topics in the outdoors. The conference's keynote speaker, Melody Mobley, the USDA Forest Service's first female black forester, was especially inspiring as she shared her raw and compelling story. She discussed her challenges as a Woman of Color openly, inviting us to ask her questions, and even went so far as to giving out her personal number for us to call her to discuss anything with her. Furthermore, some of the ELP participants and I were out at the networking event in town, and Melody chose to sit with us to chat the whole night away. Her story is moving in so many ways, and I cannot wait to watch the documentary "The Starya Project" coming out about her amazing story! It was a privilege to meet, speak with, and learn from her. Thank you for being so accessible and inspiring.
Thank you to the numerous people who I have worked with so far for giving me a chance to step into this world. I am looking forward to my future projects, which will involve uniting the agencies and partners that make up the National Trails System in communications projects, as well as creating a Spanish resource group with different Spanish speakers of the NPS. Until next time!
Agency: National Park Service
Program: Conservation and Outdoor Recreation Program (COR)
Location: Washington Office Region 1
Media Contact Info
For Editors & Reporters:
Contact Robert Fanger at robert@hispanicaccess.org for information and interview contacts.