text:
\section{Introduction}

Recent years have seen a great improvement in text-independent speaker verification. The speaker verification system extracts speaker characteristic information from a given utterance and then verify the speaker ID. In the state-of-the-art methods of speaker verification, i-vector \cite{i-vector} is used to represent speaker characteristics, and probabilistic linear discriminant analysis (PLDA) \cite{plda0,plda1,plda2} is used as a verifier. While this system performs well on long utterances, the performance degrades drastically when only short utterances are available \cite{kanagasundaram2011vector}. The main cause of this problem is the biased phonetic distribution of short utterances, which makes the estimated speaker features become statistically unreliable. However, in many real world scenarios, users may be reluctant to provide several-minute-long utterances.

Significant efforts have been made to remedy the performance degradation in short utterance speaker verification. In \cite{kanagasundaram2014improving}\cite{7953206}\cite{duration}, the variance of i-vectors for short utterances are modeled and used for i-vector normalization. \cite{kenny2013plda} and \cite{lin2017fast} proposed to utilize duration information in PLDA model. \cite{yamamoto2015denoising} uses phonetic information to reconstruct reliable i-vectors.

\iffalse
\begin{figure}[t]
	\centering
	\includegraphics[scale=0.6]{ogan.jpg}
	\caption{Generative Adversarial Networks.}
	\label{fig:GAN}
\end{figure}
\fi
In the past years, deep learning has become very popular in the speaker verification field. Many approaches use deep neural networks to process i-vectors. For example,  \cite{villalba2017tied} proposed a variational autoencoder as a back-end for i-vector based speaker recognition, \cite{mahto2017vector} used denoising autoencoders to compensate for noisy speech. However, a large amount of data is required for training deep neural networks \cite{e2e}, while the amount of data available for speaker verification are usually very small. This has been one of the biggest obstacles for building an end-to-end speaker verification system using deep learning. Hence, it may be better to improve the i-vector and PLDA framework by using deep learning.
Recently, a novel structure called generative adversarial network (GAN) \cite{goodfellow2014generative} has become extremely popular. GAN can learn a mapping from random noise to target domain, by playing a zero-sum game with two networks, a generator $G$ and a discriminator $D$: $G$ tries to generate ``real'' samples which can fool $D$, while $D$ tries to determine whether a given sample is from real data distribution or from $G$.

This paper describes an i-vector transformation method using conditional GAN for improving i-vector based short utterance speaker verification. The method uses GAN to estimate a generative model which can generate a reliable i-vector from an unreliable i-vector, in which we assume an i-vector from a long utterance is reliable, and an i-vector from a short utterance is unreliable. Specifically, we used the conditional version of GAN, where both the generator and the discriminator have an i-vector from a short utterance as the conditional input. The generator $G$ tries to generate a reliable i-vector from an unreliable one, and the discriminator $D$ tries to decide whether a given reliable i-vector is a real one extracted from a long utterance or a fake one generated by $G$. In order to stabilize GAN training, numerical difference (cosine distance) between generated i-vectors and target reliable i-vectors are used in the training stage. Moreover, inspired by \cite{mahto2017vector}, we tried to improve the speaker discriminative ability of generated i-vectors by adding an extra speaker label predicting task to $G$. This multi-task learning framework can better guide the training of GAN. In the testing stage, $G$ is used to generate reliable i-vectors from those extracted from short utterances, and then the generated i-vectors would be used in PLDA scoring.

This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 briefly introduces related works of our methods. Section 3 presents the proposed GAN-based structure for i-vector restoration. Section 4 describes experimental evaluations for speaker verification in two NIST SRE tasks. Section 5 summarizes this paper.

\section{Related Works}

\subsection{I-vector and PLDA}
I-vector and PLDA have been widely used in the state-of-the-art systems for text-independent speaker verification.
The i-vector approach aims to extract a fixed and low dimension representation from a given utterance based on a factor analysis model. As described in \cite{i-vector}, an utterance is projected onto a low-dimensional total variability space which contains both channel- and speaker-dependent information, as an i-vector. Given an utterance, the channel- and speaker-dependent GMM supervector $M$ can be written as:
\begin{equation}
M = m + Tw,
\label{eq-2}
\end{equation}
where $m$ is the speaker- and channel-independent supervector taken from the universal background model (UBM), $T$ is the total variability matrix (TVM) and $w$ is the i-vector.

Probability linear discriminant analysis (PLDA) \cite{plda2} is applied as a generative model for i-vectors, which can be written as follows,
\begin{equation}
w = \bar{w} + Ux + Vy + \epsilon
\label{eq-1}
\end{equation}
where $\bar{w}$ is the global mean of i-vectors, $U$ and $V$ are an eigenvoice and an eigenchannel matrix respectively, $x$ and $y$ are speaker- and channel-factors, and $\epsilon$ is residual noise.

Given two i-vectors, the log-likelihood ratio of the same-speaker and different-speaker hypotheses is computed by the PLDA model as the measure of their similarity.

\subsection{Generative Adversarial Networks Family}

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) were introduced in \cite{goodfellow2014generative} to estimate a generative model by an adversarial process, in which a generator G tries to generate a sample using a random noise vector $z$ and a discriminator D tries to compute the probability that a given sample is from real data $y$ rather than generated by G. Training of GAN is equivalent to optimizing the following min-max function,
\begin{equation}
\begin{aligned}
\min\limits_G \max\limits_D V_{\textnormal {GAN}}(D, G) =&\ E_{y}[\log D(y)] \\
                            &+ E_{z}[\log (1-D(G(z)))].

\label{eq1}
\end{aligned}
\end{equation}
\begin{figure}[t]
  \centering
  \includegraphics[scale=0.5]{gan.jpg}
  \caption{Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks.}
  \label{fig:conditional GAN}
\end{figure}
As our target is about transformation, we used GAN's conditional version (CGAN) \cite{mirza2014conditional} in our approach. The adversarial training procedure is almost the same as the original GAN, and the only difference is both the generator and the discriminator have a conditional input $x$, as in Figure 1. The min-max function is:
\begin{equation}
\begin{aligned}
\min\limits_G \max\limits_D V_{\textnormal {CGAN}}(D, G)=\  & E_{x,y}[\log D(y|x)]\\
           &+ E_{x,z}[\log (1-D(G(z|x)))].
\label{eq2}
\end{aligned}
\end{equation}
There have already been several successful applications of CGAN in similar tasks. \cite{isola2017image} uses it to convert image styles. \cite{pascual2017segan} applies it to enhance speech. Inspired by their success, we apply CGAN in i-vector space to improve the performance of i-vector based short utterance speaker verification.

\section{Proposed Method}
\begin{figure}[t]
  \centering
  \includegraphics[scale=0.4]{general.jpg}
  \caption{Framework of our method.}
  \label{fig:general framework}
\end{figure}
Figure 2 shows the framework of our proposed method. At first, acoustic features (MFCC) are extracted from a short utterance, then an unreliable i-vector is extracted from them. Next, an i-vector transformation function is applied to the unreliable i-vector, and finally the transformed i-vector is fed into the PLDA model.

\subsection{GAN for i-vector Transformation}
Our target is to estimate a transformation function which can restore a reliable i-vector (extracted from a long utterance), from a short-utterance i-vector. We use a CGAN-based structure to estimate this function. Overall architecture of the proposed GAN is the one shown in Figure 1, where the conditional input $x$ is an i-vector extracted from a short utterance, the real sample $y$ is an i-vector from a long utterance. In the training stage, $G$ is optimized to generate a reliable i-vector using the one extracted from a short utterance, and $D$ is optimized to determine whether the given reliable i-vector is fake (generated by $G$) or real (extracted from a long utterance). In testing, $G$ is used as the transformation function for an i-vector extracted from a short utterance in the testing set.

In order to prevent several problems such as unstable gradient and model collapse in GAN training, we use a special GAN structure Wasserstein GAN (WGAN) \cite{arjovsky2017wasserstein}. Denoting $x$ as an unreliable i-vector, $y$ as a reliable i-vector and $z$ as random noise, the min-max function is represented as:
\begin{equation}
\begin{aligned}
\min\limits_G \max\limits_D V_{\textnormal {WCGAN}}(D, G) =\ &E_{x,y}D(y|x) \\
& - E_{x,z}D(G(z|x)),

\label{eq3}
\end{aligned}
\end{equation}
Then the objective function related to GAN for $G$ is
\begin{equation}
\min \textnormal {G}= - E_{x,z}D(G(z|x)),
\label{eq4}
\end{equation}
and for $D$, objective function is
\begin{equation}
\max \textnormal{D} = E_{x,y}D(y|x) - E_{x,z}D\left(G\left(z|x\right)\right).
\label{eq5}
\end{equation}
Regarding the training data for GAN, i-vectors extracted from short and long utterances are required. While only long utterances are present in the training dataset, we obtained short utterances by segmenting a long utterance into short utterances. I-vectors are extracted from both long and short utterances using the same extractor. Through this process we can obtain an i-vector pair consisting two i-vectors from the same speaker and session, but one is from a short utterance and the other is from a long utterance. The i-vector pairs are utilized in the next section.

\subsection{Speaker Verification-oriented Objective Functions}
To better guide the training of GAN for our task and make the best use of the training data, two additional learning tasks are added to the GAN framework.

\subsubsection{Numerical difference}
The most straight-forward approach to measure the performance of transformation is computing the numerical difference between the generated i-vector and the target. We compute this objective function using i-vector pairs mentioned above. In many other similar tasks, mean squared error (MSE) is used to measure such a numerical difference. However, for i-vectors, we believe cosine distance is more suitable. The objective function related to this task can be written as:
\begin{equation}
\min \textnormal {COS} = \frac{1}{m}  \sum_{i=1}^{m} \left[\frac{1}{n_i} \sum_{j=1}^{n_i}\left(1 - \frac{G(z|x_{ij}) \cdot y_i}{\|G(z|x_{ij})\|\ \|y_i\|} \right)\right],
\label{eq6}
\end{equation}
where $m$ is the number of long utterances in the training set, $y_i$ refers to the i-vector extracted from the $i$-th long utterance in the training set, $n_i$ is the number of short utterances extracted from the $i$-th long utterance, $x_{ij}$ means the i-vector extracted from the $j$-th segment of the $i$-th long utterance and $z$ is random noise.
\begin{figure}[t]
  \centering
  \includegraphics[scale=0.45]{g1.jpg}
  \caption{Training of the generator network $G$ and its application in the testing stage.}
  \label{fig:modified G}
\end{figure}
\subsubsection{Speaker discrimination}
The training objectives explained above only compensate the variance brought by the biased phonetic distribution of short utterances, and the speaker labels provided by the training set are not used yet.
Clearly, improving the speaker discriminative ability of generated i-vectors can enlarge the inter-speaker differences among i-vectors, which would improve the verification performance in the PLDA scoring stage. As shown in Figure 3, in the training stage, a supplementary section, $G_{\textnormal{sup}}$, is concatenated after the generator $G$, which takes the generated i-vector as an input and predicts its speaker label. We minimize cross entropy between the prediction result and the ground truth:
\begin{equation}
\min \textnormal{CE} = \frac{1}{m}\sum_{i=1}^{m} \left[\frac{1}{n_i} \sum_{j=1}^{n_i} l_{ij}^k \left(\log o_{ij}^k\right)\right],
\label{eq7}
\end{equation}
where $l_{ij}^k$ is the empirical probability observed in the ground truth that the target i-vector belongs to the $k$-th class, and $o_{ij}^k$ is the predicted probability that the generated i-vector belongs to the $k$-th class. In summary, for training $G$, our goal is to minimize
\begin{equation}
a\ \textnormal{G} + b\ \textnormal{COS} + c\ \textnormal{CE},
\label{eq8}
\end{equation}
where $a$, $b$, $c$ are weight parameters for these three targets, respectively.

After training, as shown in Figure 3, only $G$ is used to generate a reliable i-vector, which is fed into a PLDA model for the next scoring step.

\section{Evaluation}

\subsection{Experimental setup}
We evaluated the performance of our method in the speaker verification tasks of the NIST SRE 2008 \cite{sre08}. We used the ``short2-10sec" and ``10sec-10sec" conditions as our trial sets, where each session is an excerpt of telephone speech, and ``short2" refers to five-minute-long speech while ``10sec" means that the active voice part in the sample is about 10 seconds. There are three sub-conditions in the trail sets: Condition 6 covers all the speech segments, Condition 7 involves only those spoken in English, and Condition 8 only has those spoken in English by native U.S. English speakers \cite{sre08}.
 Performance measures for the evaluation were the equal error rate (EER) and the minimum detection cost function (minDCF) of NIST SRE 2008 \cite{sre08} on the trails calculated with DETware provided by NIST \cite{det}.

We compared our method, which is named as ``D-WCGAN'' (Discriminative WCGAN) in the experiments with a baseline i-vector and PLDA system that does not apply any short-utterance compensation techniques. To demonstrate the contribution of GAN to the performance improvement, we made an extra system, which shared almost the same structure with the proposed GAN but did not contain a discriminator and did not use GAN-related objective function. This system is named as ``Single G'' in the following part.

\subsubsection{Baseline system}
The baseline system is the i-vector and PLDA system shown in Section 2. In this system, the input speech segment was first converted to a time series of 60 dimensional feature vectors of Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (20 dimensional features followed by their first and second derivatives) extracted from a frame of 20ms long and 10ms shift. An i-vector of 400 dimensions was then extracted from the acoustic features using a Gaussian mixture model with 2048 mixture components as a universal background model (UBM) and a total variability matrix (TVM). Length normalization was applied to i-vectors as a preprocessing step before being sent to the PLDA model. Kaldi speech recognition toolkit \cite{kaldi} was used to run these steps.

The UBM, the TVM, and PLDA models were all gender-dependent and trained with SRE08's development data, which contains the NIST SRE2004-2006 data, Switchboard, and Fisher corpus. This dataset as a whole consistes 34,925 utterances from 7,275 male speakers.
\subsubsection{Proposed GAN}
The training data of GAN is a subset of SRE08's development set mentioned above and SRE08's training set, which contains 1,986 male speakers in total. To make the short and long utterance pairs mentioned in Section 4, we used a sliding window of 20s long and 10s shift to cut one long utterance into short utterances. The UBM, TVM for extracting i-vectors are the same as the one used in the baseline system. Finally, we got 331,675 i-vector pairs for GAN training.
The activation function of hidden layers in the proposed GAN, if not specified, is a leaky ReLU \cite{lrelu} with an alpha value set to 0.3. As mentioned above, $G$ generates an i-vector and $G_{\textnormal{sup}}$ predicts its speaker label. The input layer of $G$ contains 450 nodes to accept the 400-dimension i-vectors and random noise vectors of 50 dimensions, followed by three hidden layers with 512 nodes. $G$'s output layer has 400 nodes, which holds the generated i-vector. The activation function for the output layer of $G$ is tanh. $G_{\textnormal{sup}}$ has one hidden layer, which contains 1,986 nodes. Output layer of $G_{\textnormal{sup}}$ also have 1,986 nodes and the activation function of each node is softmax.The random noise vectors were sampled from a Gaussian distribution with zero mean and standard deviation $0.5$. $D$ has four hidden layers and its input layer has 800 nodes, which accepts two concatenated i-vectors. Output layer of $D$ has only one node with a linear activation function. As we used the WGAN structure, weight clipping is done on $D$, where the clipping range is $-0.01$ to $0.01$.

We used the Tensorflow library \cite{tensorflow} for our neural networks implementation. The networks were optimized using RMSProp \cite{rmsprop} with a mini-batch of 64 samples. The learning rate was set to $0.0001$. For G training, we set the value of $a$, $b$, $c$ as 4, 7, 1, respectively.

In the testing phase, for the ``short2-10sec" condition, an i-vector extracted from an utterance in the testing set are transformed by $G$, then PLDA scoring is done on the i-vector extracted from the enrollment set and the transformed i-vectors. At last, score-wise fusion is done between the baseline system and the proposed method. For the ``10sec-10sec" case, almost all the steps are the same as the former one, but the i-vectors from both the enrollment and the testing set are transformed by $G$. The i-vector extractor and PLDA model are the same as those used in the baseline system.

\begin{table}[t]
\caption{The speaker verification results in terms of EER (\%) on all the three conditions of the SRE08 ``short2-10sec" male trail list.}
  \label{tab:example}
\centering
\begin{tabular}{l@{} r r r r}
\toprule
\multicolumn{1}{c}{}&
\multicolumn{4}{c}{\textbf{EER (\%)}} \\
\cmidrule{2-5}
\multicolumn{1}{c}{\textbf{System}} &
\multicolumn{1}{c}{\textbf{Cond. 6}} &
\multicolumn{1}{c}{\textbf{Cond. 7}}  &
\multicolumn{1}{c}{\textbf{Cond. 8}} &
\multicolumn{1}{c}{\textbf{Average}}
\\
\midrule
a) Baseline   & 7.28 & 6.15 & 6.06 & 6.50 \\
b) Single G   & 10.04 & 8.85 & 8.33 & 9.07 \\
c) a + b      & 7.28 & 5.77 & 6.06 & 6.37 \\
d) D-WCGAN    & 9.45 & 8.08 & 8.33 & 8.62 \\
e) a + d      & \textbf{6.89} & \textbf{5.77} & \textbf{5.30} & \textbf{5.99} \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{table}

\begin{table}[t]
\caption{The speaker verification results in terms of EER (\%) on all the three conditions of the SRE08 ``10sec-10sec" male trail list.}
  \label{tab:example}
\centering
\begin{tabular}{l@{} r r r r}
\toprule
\multicolumn{1}{c}{}&
\multicolumn{4}{c}{\textbf{EER (\%)}} \\
\cmidrule{2-5}
\multicolumn{1}{c}{\textbf{System}} &
\multicolumn{1}{c}{\textbf{Cond. 6}} &
\multicolumn{1}{c}{\textbf{Cond. 7}}  &
\multicolumn{1}{c}{\textbf{Cond. 8}} &
\multicolumn{1}{c}{\textbf{Average}}
\\
\midrule
a) Baseline   & 11.97 & 10.32 & 9.60 & 10.63 \\
b) Single G   & 15.32 & 13.89 & 12.00 & 13.77 \\
c) a + b      & 11.16 & 10.71 & 9.60 & 10.49 \\
d) D-WCGAN     & 15.42 & 13.89 & 13.60 & 14.30 \\
e) a + d      & \textbf{10.75} & \textbf{8.73} & \textbf{8.80} & \textbf{9.43} \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{table}

\begin{table}[t]
\caption{The speaker verification results in terms of minDCF on Condition 6 of the SRE08 ``short2-10sec" and ``10sec-10sec" male trail lists.}
  \label{tab:example}
\centering
\begin{tabular}{l@{} r r}
\toprule
\multicolumn{1}{c}{}&
\multicolumn{2}{c}{\textbf{minDCF}} \\
\cmidrule{2-3}
\multicolumn{1}{c}{\textbf{System}} &
\multicolumn{1}{c}{\textbf{short2-10sec}} &
\multicolumn{1}{c}{\textbf{10sec-10sec}}
\\
\midrule
a) Baseline   & \textbf{0.370} & 0.553 \\
b) Single G   & 0.494 & 0.717 \\
c) a + b      & 0.391 & 0.540  \\
d) D-WCGAN    & 0.454 & 0.678 \\
e) a + d      & 0.375 & \textbf{0.522}  \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{table}

\subsection{Results}
 Table 1 shows the EERs of the ``short2-10sec" condition of NIST SRE 2008. The average EER of our proposed method was 5.99\%, and it outperformed that of the baseline i-vector PLDA system, 6.50\%. The reduction of average EER is 7.85\%. Table 2 shows the EERs of ``10sec-10sec" condition of NIST SRE 2008. The average EER of our proposed method was 9.43\%, and it outperformed the 10.63\% of baseline, and the reduction of average EER is 11.29\%. Although our method alone did not outperform the baseline system, it achieved better results when the score-wise fusion was done with the baseline method. We found that the best results was achieved when the score weight ratio of baseline system and our method is 7:3. Table 3 shows the minDCF of the Condition 6 of ``short2-10sec" and ``10sec-10sec" sets. The minDCF of our method is 1.33\% worse than the baseline's in ``short2-10sec", but 5.61\% better in ``10sec-10sec". These results showed that our proposed method can make i-vectors more reliable in most cases. However, in current stage, the amount of training data for the GAN is not enough, even smaller than the amount of PLDA's training data. If we have more training data for the GAN, the performance of the proposed methods may become much better.

Regarding the importance of GAN, our results (b, c in Table 1, 2 and 3) showed that performance became worse, but slightly better than the baseline system in EER, when $D$ was absent. This fact demonstrates the contribution of GAN.

\section{Conclusions}
This paper has proposed a GAN-based speaker feature restoration method for speaker verification using short utterances. The generator is trained to transform an unreliable i-vector extracted from a short utterance to a reliable i-vector which can be extracted from a long utterance. Speaker labels are also used in the training of GAN to improve the speaker discriminative ability of generated i-vectors. The evaluation results on NIST SRE 2008 task show that our proposed method improved the performance, especially when only short utterances are available for enrollment and testing.

Our future work includes collecting more data for GAN training, as well as applying the GAN-based framework to other cases when i-vectors become unreliable, for example, noise exists in utterances. In addition, we plan to make the discriminator network able to determine whether two given i-vectors are from one speaker or not, so that we can use the GAN model as a back-end for the text-independent speaker verification system.

\section{Acknowledgment}
This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI 16H02845 and by JST CREST Grant Number JPMJCR1687, Japan.
\bibliographystyle{IEEEtran}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


text:
Q: A uniqueness of ODE solution problem Assume function $f:\mathbb R \to \mathbb R$ is bounded over the real line, and the bound is M. Prove that there is a unique bounded solution for the differential equation $y'-y = f(x)$. If f is periodic then the bounded solution is periodic.
My attempt:
Using the method of integrating factor, I arrived at:
$$ y(x) = e^x (\int_{x_0}^x e^{-t}f(t)dt +C) \iff \lvert y(x) \rvert \le e^x (\int_{x_0}^x e^{-t} \lvert f(t) \rvert dt +C) \le e^xM (-e^{-x} + e^{-x_0} + C) = M(e^{x}C + e^{x - x_0} - 1)$$
which blows up as $x \to \infty$ unless I restrict my initial condition such that $C = -e^{-x_0}$, but that's impossible since I will get $\lvert y(x) \rvert \le -M$. Did I do anything wrong? Is there a single function satisfying this ODE that satisfies ANY initial conditions but is still bounded?
Please enlighten me.

A: First note that there exists the limit
$$
D=\lim_{x\to+\infty}\int_{x_0}^x e^{-t}f(t)\,dt=\int_{x_0}^{+\infty} e^{-t}f(t)\,dt
$$
exists (show for example that $c_n=\int_{x_0}^n e^{-t}f(t)\,dt$ is a Cauchy sequence). So, your solution is bounded for $x>0$ if and only if $C=-D$.
On the other hand, notice that any solution is bounded for $x<0$.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


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text:
The DeHavilland Blog
Harris Interactive and The Wall Street Journal came out last week with the results of their 8th annual ranking of the world's best and worst corporate reputations based on a survey conducted by Harris. (See here for the article "How Boss' Deeds Buff a Firm's Reputation" in the Journal.)First place went to Microsoft, an unthinkable achievement even five years ago, when the company was known more for its unfair business practices than for its social accomplishments. However, thanks to the philanthropic work of Bill Gates in education, health, and a number of other areas, the firm now boasts the greatest corporate reputation in the world. From the article:
"The involvement of Bill Gates and his wife in their charitable foundation has had a definite impact on Microsoft's reputation," says Enriqueta Lopez Ramos, a survey respondent and retired university professor in San Benito, Texas. "It's hard to separate Bill Gates's image from that of Microsoft; to me, they're one and the same."
While Microsoft and a handful of others (Johnson & Johnson, UPS, etc.) are held in high regard, the corporate world as a rule is not:
The corporate world's overall reputation remains dismal, with new scandals emerging, such as the improper dating of stock-option grants to business executives. About 69% of respondents graded corporate America's reputation as either "not good" or "terrible," just slightly lower than the 71% in 2005.
"At a time when being big is a bad thing, it is important that companies tell the world they care about more than just their stockholders," says Andria Lickfelt, a homemaker in Springdale, Ark., who gave Sears Holdings Corp. high marks for its sponsorship of the television program "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition." Sears "has taken a step up in my mind because every week you see a family's life changed on the show, and Sears is a part of that."
Given the many benefits afforded by a positive corporate reputation, and the fact that the aggregate reputation of businesses is so bad, it's surprising that there's not more of an investment in a hot-button issue like education. According to the US Chamber, businesses contribute $2.5 billion annually in goods and services to public education; compare this with the profit of $39.5billion announced by ExxonMobil for 2006 alone. Granted, it's a record profit, but the fact remains that if businesses wanted to improve their reputations to reap the associated benefits, they have the means to do so.
And, while I've been mum about a company initiative, I'll soon be able to provide evidence as to the warm reception businesses would receive by knocking on the schoolhouse doors. More to come soon on that point – but for now suffice it to say that partnering with education can provide a win for both sides, and based on reported investment levels and the interest recorded in such partnerships by schools, there's certainly room to grow.
posted by Brett Pawlowski at 1:02 PM
In an era of reduced resources and increased expectations, schools are overlooking the most obvious and effective solution to both challenges: enlisting community leaders as true partners in education. That's what I write about.
Name: Brett Pawlowski
Location: Charlotte, North Carolina, United States
Business/Education Partnership Forum
DeHavilland white papers
Intercepts
Kitchen Table Math, the Sequel
Benchmarking and best practices
Low-tech focus in school communications
Setting the wrong standards
The lessons of business - in government
Business principles in practice
Elevating performance in a flat world
Accountable...like Ken Lay?
Community engagement in education

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Colorized photographs give life to these WWI, WWII U.S. troops
Oriana Pawlyk
World War I's Hundred Days Offensive and the Battle of Belleau Wood. World War II's Battle of Midway and D-Day.
These and many other diverse clashes in those two separate conflicts bookended an era that marked the ascension of the U.S. into a global military powerhouse.
The photographic record of those conflicts, however, is overwhelmingly monochromatic. Black-and-white photos can carry considerable power, but older images also can reflect new depth and immediacy — and trigger new emotions — when a full color palette is applied.
In a few weeks, Europe will mark the 70th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day, much like Marines have been paying homage to the Battle of Okinawa since April 1. As such anniversaries approach, it feels like an appropriate time to take a new look at some decades-old images of those wars.
The following photographs, colorized courtesy of artists and hobbyists such as Doug Banks, Royston Leonard, Lori Lang, Benjamin Thomas and Paul Reynolds, capture in vivid detail U.S. service members on the battlefield. Personal mementos family members and troops themselves from all over the world have contributed to the evolution of photograph colorization.
Their photos are also featured among the hundreds of colored photos on the WW1 Colourised Photos and WW2 Colourised Photos Facebook pages.
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Get the military's most comprehensive news and information every morning
View these U.S. service members, volunteers, and armaments in some of the largest conflicts in history.
Editor's note: Photos and photo captions are courtesy of artists' Facebook pages, but may be edited for brevity. Photos featured are from Defense Department and military service pages, National Archives, Library of Congress, newspapers or donated by third parties. Permissions granted by all artists.
Sgt Louis S.Wallace, from Meadville, Miss., prepares two of the many thousands of turkeys on a M1937 Field Range that have arrived from the states.
Photo Credit: Colorized by Paul Reynolds
Private Roy Humphrey of Toledo, Ohio is being given blood plasma by Pfc. Harvey White of Minneapolis, Minnesota after being wounded by shrapnel on August 9, 1943, in Sicily.
Photo Credit: Colorized by Lori Lang
US soldiers, members of Maryland's 117th Trench Mortar Battery, 67th Artillery Brigade, 42nd. Division operating a 58mm French trench mortar. This gun and crew kept up a continuous fire throughout the raid of March 4, 1918 in Badonviller, Muerthe et Modselle, France.
Photo Credit: Colorized by Royston Leonard
U.S. soldiers of Pennsylvania's 28th Infantry Division march along the Champs-Élysées , the Arc de Triomphe in the background, on Aug. 29, 1944, four days after the liberation of Paris.
Soldiers of the 369th (formerly known as the 15th New York National Guard Regiment) who won the Croix de Guerre for gallantry in action, 1919. Seen here returning to the New York Port of Embarkation and were demobilized on February 28, 1919 at Camp Upton at Yaphank, New York, and returned to the New York Army National Guard.
Photo Credit: Colorized by Doug Banks
Battle of Okinawa: US Marines of the 2nd Battalion, 22nd Regiment, land at Green Beach One, Okinawa in the Ryukyu Islands during WWII.
An American soldier at an advanced Allied base, probably in Northern Australia, with his pet kangaroo, September 10, 1942.
Photo Credit: Colorized by Ben Thomas
Lieutenant (later Lieutenant Commander) Walter Lewis Chewning of Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, (February 19, 1914 - February 4, 1990) steps on the burning fuel tank of an F6F-3 Hellcat flown by Ensign (later Lieutenant) Byron Milton Johnson of Potter, Nebraska (May 19, 1920 - February 20, 2005) to effect a successful rescue of the pilot on November 10, 1943.
5th Engineer Special Brigade, rescuing men whose landing craft had been attacked and sunk on Omaha Beach.
American medics of the 103rd and 104th Ambulance Companies give medical attention to wounded German prisoners. These prisoners were taken from second line trenches during the opening attack of the Battle of Saint Mihiel on September 12, 1918.
About Oriana Pawlyk
Lolita C. Baldor, The Associated Press
January 17 at 10:47 PM
15,000 National Guard troops now in DC for inauguration in eerie calm before the feared storm
Howard Altman
David A. Lieb, The Associated Press
US military says troop withdrawal from Somalia is complete
US B-52 conducts 'presence patrol' after Iranian Guard holds missile drill
January 17 at 11:29 AM


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Seventeen volunteers let this worm live inside them to help defeat a dangerous disease
At 2:15 p.m., Roestenberg huddles in a small meeting room with three colleagues. The worms are not drugs, but they need to be released for use just like an experimental drug would be. The scientists check numbers on some documents against data on a computer screen, then they sign a form. The experiment can begin.Twenty minutes later, back in the infection room, the volunteers stretch out their arms so that a little metal cylinder, a few centimeters in diameter, can be taped to their skin. Carefully, an assistant pipettes a few drops of water, containing exactly 20 parasites, into each cylinder. The volunteers are nervous, but they say they are motivated. "I like the fact that the study is related to vaccines, because I've worked in that field before," says one, a young scientist. The woman next to him says she comes from East Africa and knows the disease firsthand. They will also be paid €1000 for their time.Once infected, the volunteers will return to the lab every week so the research team can test their blood for a molecule called CAA, which the worms regurgitate from their stomachs. CAA's presence will indicate that the worms are still alive; in future trials, its absence might mean that a vaccine or drug has worked.Some schistosomiasis scientists agree that the potential benefits justify the minimal risks. "My hope is that it would hugely accelerate identification of worthwhile candidate vaccines," says Alison Elliott of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, who works at a joint Ugandan and U.K. research unit in Entebbe. She is interested in establishing the model there; people in Uganda, a country badly affected by schistosomiasis, might react differently to a vaccine if they were exposed to the worms in childhood, she explains. At a recent stakeholders' meeting, "Ethics and regulatory colleagues were very supportive of taking discussions of the model forward, and community representatives are already keen for the opportunity to volunteer!" Elliott added in an email."It's itching a little bit," one of the Leiden volunteers says 5 minutes into the exposure. After half an hour, when the infested water is removed from the volunteers' forearms, red spots reveal where the parasites have entered their new hosts. Then, close to 4 p.m., the clock stops ticking; the volunteers head home and Roestenberg and her colleagues go out for a coffee. 3 2 By Kai KupferschmidtFeb. 21, 2018 , 4:25 PM At 12:05 p.m. on a Thursday in February, a lab technician takes a six-well plate containing a solitary red snail and places it in a heated water bath under a strong light. The light and warmth signal hundreds of tiny larval parasites to stream out of the mollusk. Now, the clock starts ticking for Meta Roestenberg, an infectious disease physician here at Leiden University Medical Center. She has about 4 hours to launch a unique, controversial experiment in which she will let the parasites burrow into the arms of four healthy volunteers. If she waits too long, the larvae start to die.Roestenberg and her colleagues are infecting people with Schistosoma mansoni, one of five tiny waterborne worm species that cause schistosomiasis, a disease that sickens millions of people in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America and kills thousands each year. There is no schistosomiasis vaccine and only one old, inadequate drug, praziquantel, to treat it. Infecting humans could help speed up the development of new interventions. Roestenberg has designed the experiment to prevent the parasites from reproducing, and she says the risk to volunteers is extremely low.But not low enough, some scientists argue, because there is no guarantee that subjects will get rid of their parasites when the study is over. "I would not volunteer for this study and if I had a son or daughter who wanted to volunteer, I would recommend against it," says Daniel Colley, a schistosomiasis researcher at the University of Georgia in Athens.Sign up for our daily newsletterGet more great content like this delivered right to you!Country *AfghanistanAland IslandsAlbaniaAlgeriaAndorraAngolaAnguillaAntarcticaAntigua and BarbudaArgentinaArmeniaArubaAustraliaAustriaAzerbaijanBahamasBahrainBangladeshBarbadosBelarusBelgiumBelizeBeninBermudaBhutanBolivia, Plurinational State ofBonaire, Sint Eustatius and SabaBosnia and HerzegovinaBotswanaBouvet IslandBrazilBritish Indian Ocean TerritoryBrunei DarussalamBulgariaBurkina FasoBurundiCambodiaCameroonCanadaCape VerdeCayman IslandsCentral African RepublicChadChileChinaChristmas IslandCocos (Keeling) IslandsColombiaComorosCongoCongo, The Democratic Republic of theCook IslandsCosta RicaCote D'IvoireCroatiaCubaCuraçaoCyprusCzech RepublicDenmarkDjiboutiDominicaDominican RepublicEcuadorEgyptEl SalvadorEquatorial GuineaEritreaEstoniaEthiopiaFalkland Islands (Malvinas)Faroe IslandsFijiFinlandFranceFrench GuianaFrench PolynesiaFrench Southern TerritoriesGabonGambiaGeorgiaGermanyGhanaGibraltarGreeceGreenlandGrenadaGuadeloupeGuatemalaGuernseyGuineaGuinea-BissauGuyanaHaitiHeard Island and Mcdonald IslandsHoly See (Vatican City State)HondurasHong KongHungaryIcelandIndiaIndonesiaIran, Islamic Republic ofIraqIrelandIsle of ManIsraelItalyJamaicaJapanJerseyJordanKazakhstanKenyaKiribatiKorea, Democratic People's Republic ofKorea, Republic ofKuwaitKyrgyzstanLao People's Democratic RepublicLatviaLebanonLesothoLiberiaLibyan Arab JamahiriyaLiechtensteinLithuaniaLuxembourgMacaoMacedonia, The Former Yugoslav Republic ofMadagascarMalawiMalaysiaMaldivesMaliMaltaMartiniqueMauritaniaMauritiusMayotteMexicoMoldova, Republic ofMonacoMongoliaMontenegroMontserratMoroccoMozambiqueMyanmarNamibiaNauruNepalNetherlandsNew CaledoniaNew ZealandNicaraguaNigerNigeriaNiueNorfolk IslandNorwayOmanPakistanPalestinianPanamaPapua New GuineaParaguayPeruPhilippinesPitcairnPolandPortugalQatarReunionRomaniaRussian FederationRWANDASaint Barthélemy Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da CunhaSaint Kitts and NevisSaint LuciaSaint Martin (French part)Saint Pierre and MiquelonSaint Vincent and the GrenadinesSamoaSan MarinoSao Tome and PrincipeSaudi ArabiaSenegalSerbiaSeychellesSierra LeoneSingaporeSint Maarten (Dutch part)SlovakiaSloveniaSolomon IslandsSomaliaSouth AfricaSouth Georgia and the South Sandwich IslandsSouth SudanSpainSri LankaSudanSurinameSvalbard and Jan MayenSwazilandSwedenSwitzerlandSyrian Arab RepublicTaiwanTajikistanTanzania, United Republic ofThailandTimor-LesteTogoTokelauTongaTrinidad and TobagoTunisiaTurkeyTurkmenistanTurks and Caicos IslandsTuvaluUgandaUkraineUnited Arab EmiratesUnited KingdomUnited StatesUruguayUzbekistanVanuatuVenezuela, Bolivarian Republic ofVietnamVirgin Islands, BritishWallis and FutunaWestern SaharaYemenZambiaZimbabweI also wish to receive emails from AAAS/Science and Science advertisers, including information on products, services and special offers which may include but are not limited to news, careers information & upcoming events.Required fields are included by an asterisk(*) Worms mature, mate, and lay eggs. Parasites to the people Researchers have long grown Schistosoma mansoni in the lab, using hamsters. Now, they are also infecting humans with the parasitic worms. Larvae emerge from snail. 1 EYE OF SCIENCE/SCIENCE SOURCE 4 Male and female larvae are used to infect hamster. 5 In nature, male and female Schistosoma mansoni worms pair up within the host. Studies in which people are purposely infected with malaria, cholera, and flu are on the rise, but they haven't been done with schistosomiasis, in part because damage from the S. mansoni eggs can be irreversible. The goal of the current study, which began in early 2017, is to find out whether Roestenberg's infection model is safe; if so, she hopes to test a vaccine later this year.At 1:35 p.m., Roestenberg walks to the room where the volunteers will be infected. She opens a transparent plastic container that contains epinephrine, antihistamines, and corticosteroids. "This is the emergency box," she says—in case a subject has a strong allergic reaction. None of the 13 volunteers infected so far has, although one who was infected with 30 larvae developed a strong fever. In another precaution, the volunteers have been tested to rule out risk factors such as HIV infection and pregnancy. In nature, people become infected with both male and female parasites, but Roestenberg uses only males, so there will be no eggs and thus, she says, no symptoms. And when the study ends in 12 weeks, the volunteers will be given praziquantel to cure them.That drug, Colley emphasizes, is "not terribly effective." But Roestenberg says that even if it fails, volunteers needn't worry. "The ethics board asked me: 'If one worm survives even after multiple treatments, what will happen to that person?' And I said: 'They'll probably live to be 100.'" The board gave her its blessing. Colley agrees the risk is low, but still, S. mansoni has an average life span of 5 to 10 years. "That is a long time to have something as ugly as a schistosome living in your blood vessels, putting out excrement and things." At 1:05 p.m., the technician takes the plate out of the bath. The larvae are ready to be harvested. Viewed under a microscope, they move around frantically, like minipropellers. Another technician removes one drop, dilutes it, adds iodine to kill the parasites, and counts them. That allows the researchers to calculate how many are left in the well: 574. They need only 80 today, 20 per volunteer.A snail population in an African lake could shed millions of these larvae into the water on a single day, each equipped with a chemical sensor that lets it home in on humans entering the water. After penetrating the skin, they migrate to the liver, where they mature and mate. Male-female couples stay together and move to blood vessels in the bowel, where they can reside for years, shedding hundreds of eggs a day. Most eggs end up in urine and feces, and if they make their way back into the lake they may infect fresh snails. But some get trapped in the liver, kidneys, or spleen, causing damage and leading to pain, blood loss, malnutrition, and sometimes death.Researchers in this same lab recreated the parasite's life cycle decades ago, with hamsters taking the place of humans. That allowed them to produce and study S. mansoni. Now, Roestenberg wants to bring humans back into the mix. Field trials, especially of vaccines, are hugely expensive and complex, and the risk of failure is considerable. A controlled infection study can act as a gatekeeper, she says: "It gives you an indication whether something can work in humans or not." Male larvae are allowed to burrow into arm ofvolunteer. N. DESAI/SCIENCE Eggs are harvested from liver and used to infect snails. Seventeen volunteers let this worm live inside them to help defeat a dangerous disease read more
Are Anushka Sharma and Virat Kohli planning their first child
By admin | September 5, 2019
Virat Kohli and Anushka Sharma planning their first child?InstagramAnushka Sharma has reportedly been distancing herself from any movie offers, giving rise to speculations that the actress and her hubby Virat Kohli are planning to have their first baby.According to reports, Anushka, who was last seen in Zero that was released in December 2018, has been getting a lot of movie offers, but she refused all of those. As reported, she was offered to play the female lead in Satte Pe Satta remake, but she seemed to be reluctant to accept it as well.Speculations of Anushka planning to have a child got momentum as she reportedly has not signed any film post Zero, which was a flop. However, it may also be the case that Anushka is currently willing to spend some quality time with Virat, or simply wait for the right project to land in her kitty.Earlier, rumours of Anushka being pregnant had made headlines many a times, but all of those had turned out to be false. After similar rumours had started doing the rounds, the NH10 actress had expressed annoyance at it while confirming those to be false."People can keep speculating (about someone being pregnant), and then after four months when they realise that these stories are false, they will feel silly and say, 'Let's go after the other one who got married, let's talk about her now'! This is done to generate news. There is absolutely no truth to it and it's not something that's being planned in the near future," she had told a publication.Virat and the gorgeous actress had tied the knot in 2017 in a private ceremony in Italy. It was one of the most beautiful and talked about celebrity weddings in India. Close Celebrities Who Announced They Were Pregnant In 2018 read more
Fuselage of crashed Indonesia plane believed to be found
Families of passengers of Lion Air flight JT610 stand as they look at the belongings of the passengers at Tanjung Priok port in Jakarta, Indonesia, on 31 October 2018. ReutersIndonesian search and rescue workers believe they have found the fuselage of a Lion Air passenger jet that crashed with 189 people on board, and are also trying to confirm the origin of an underwater "ping" signal, officials said on Wednesday.Ground staff lost touch with flight JT610 of Indonesian budget airline Lion Air 13 minutes after the Boeing 737 MAX 8 took off early on Monday from Jakarta, on its way to the tin-mining town of Pangkal Pinang.There were no survivors.Indonesia's military chief said he believed the plane had been located, and a transport safety official said divers would be sent to confirm the origin of a "ping" signal picked up by a search and rescue team late on Tuesday."We strongly believe that we have found a part of the fuselage," armed forces chief Hadi Tjahjanto told broadcaster TV One.Speaking on board the navy ship KRI Rigel, navy official Colonel Haris Djoko Nugroho told broadcaster TVOne that a 22-metre long object had been found in waters about 32 metres deep, and a sonar was being used to identify it.Divers would also be sent to check, he said.The Rigel has been searching in an area about 5 nautical miles from the site where the aircraft lost contact.The accident is the first to be reported involving the widely sold Boeing 737 MAX, an updated, more fuel-efficient version of the manufacturer's single-aisle jet.The plane's blackboxes, as the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder are known, should help explain why the almost-new jet went down minutes after take-off.Amid media speculation over the airworthiness of the aircraft, the transport minister suspended Lion Air's technical director and several technicians to facilitate the crash investigation.The suspended technicians "issued the recommendations for that flight", the ministry said in a press release. It did not say how many technicians had been suspended.QuestionsAn official of the national transport safety panel has said the plane had technical problems on its previous flight on Sunday, from the city of Denpasar on the resort island of Bali, including an issue over "unreliable airspeed".Privately owned Lion Air, founded in 1999, said the aircraft had been in operation since August and was airworthy. The pilot and co-pilot had 11,000 hours of flying time between them, it said.Lion Air chief executive Edward Sirait has acknowledged reports of technical problems with the aircraft, but said maintenance had been carried out "according to procedure" before it was cleared for flight again.Investigators are looking into why the pilot had asked to return to base shortly after take-off, a request that ground control officials had granted, although the flight crashed soon after.They will also question pilots who flew the same aircraft from Bali to Jakarta on Sunday.For details of search, crash inquiry, please click onThe airline is to meet a team from Boeing on Wednesday to discuss the fate of the plane.Although it is now almost certain that everyone on the plane died, relatives are desperate to find traces of their loved ones. Only body parts and debris have been found. read more
Trump to extend China trade deadline meet Xi soon
Donald TrumpUS president Donald Trump said on Friday there was "a very good chance" the United States would strike a deal with China to end their trade war and that he was inclined to extend his 1 March tariff deadline and meet soon with Chinese president Xi Jinping.US and Chinese negotiators had made progress and will extend this week's round of negotiations by two days through Sunday, Trump told reporters at the White House as he met with his top negotiators and their counterpart, Chinese Vice Premier Liu He."I think that we both feel there's a very good chance a deal will happen," Trump said.Liu agreed there had been "great progress"."From China, we believe that (it) is very likely that it will happen and we hope that ultimately we'll have a deal. And the Chinese side is ready to make our utmost effort," he said at the White House.The Republican president said he probably would meet with Xi in March in Florida to decide on the most important terms of a trade deal.Extending the deadline would put on hold Trump's threatened tariff increase to 25 per cent from 10 per cent on $200 billion of Chinese imports into the United States. That would prevent a further escalation in a trade war that already has disrupted commerce in goods worth hundreds of billions of dollars, slowed global economic growth and roiled markets.Optimism that the two sides will find a way to end the trade war lifted stocks, especially technology shares. The S&P 500 stock index reached its highest closing level since 8 November Oil prices rose to their highest since mid-November, with Brent crude reaching a high of $67.73 a barrel.Currency AgreementTrump and treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin said the two sides had reached an agreement on currency. Trump declined to provide details, but US officials long have expressed concerns that China's yuan is undervalued, giving China a trade advantage and partly offsetting US tariffs.Announcement of a pact aimed at limiting yuan depreciation was putting "the currency cart before the trade horse," but would likely be positive for Asian emerging market currencies, said Alan Ruskin, global head of currency strategy at Deutsche Bank in New York. "How can you agree to avoid excessive Chinese yuan depreciation or volatility if you have not made an agreement on trade that could have huge FX implications?" Ruskin asked in a note to clients.In a letter to Trump read aloud by an aide to Liu at the White House, Xi called on negotiators to work hard to strike a deal that benefits both country.Trump said a deal with China may extend beyond trade to encompass Chinese telecommunications companies Huawei Technologies and ZTE Corp .The Justice Department has accused Huawei of conspiring to violate US sanctions on Iran and of stealing robotic technology from T-Mobile US Inc.Chinese peer ZTE was last year prevented from buying essential components from US firms after pleading guilty to similar charges, crippling its operations.Memorandums No MoreTrump appeared at odds with his top negotiator, US trade representative Robert Lighthizer, on the preliminary terms that his team is outlining in memorandums of understanding for a deal with China. Trump said he did not like MOUs because they are short term, and he wanted a long-term deal."I don't like MOUs because they don't mean anything," Trump said. "Either you are going to make a deal or you're not."Lighthizer responded testily that MOUs were binding, but that he would never use the term again.Reuters reported exclusively on Wednesday that the two sides were drafting the language for six MOUs covering the most difficult issues in the trade talks that would require structural economic change in China.Negotiators have struggled this week to agree on specific language within those memorandums to address tough US demands, according to sources familiar with the talks. The six memorandums include cyber theft, intellectual property rights, services, agriculture and non-tariff barriers to trade, including subsidies.An industry source briefed on the talks said both sides have narrowed differences on intellectual property rights, market access and narrowing a nearly $400 billion US trade deficit with China. But bigger differences remain on changes to China's treatment of state-owned enterprises, subsidies, forced technology transfers and cyber theft of US trade secrets.Lighthizer pushed back when questioned on forced technology transfers, saying the two sides made "a lot of progress" on the issue, but did not elaborate.The United States has said foreign firms in China are often coerced to transfer their technology to Chinese firms if they want to operate there. China denies this.The US Chamber of Commerce on Friday urged the US government to ensure the deal was comprehensive and addressed core issues, rather than one based on more Chinese short-term purchases of goods.China has pledged to increase purchases of agricultural produce, energy, semiconductors and industrial goods to reduce its trade surplus with the United States.China committed to buying an additional 10 million tonnes of US soybeans on Friday, US Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said on Twitter. China bought about 32 million tonnes of US soybeans in 2017.The commitments are a "show of good faith by the Chinese" and "indications of more good news to come," Perdue wrote.China was the top buyer of US soybeans before the trade war, but Beijing's retaliatory tariffs on US soybeans slashed business that had been worth $12 billion annually. read more
Hubert Lawrence | Dacres – Jamaican male athlete of the year
Ingles, Gobert star as Jazz edge Warriors
Klopp keeps door open for possible Liverpool buys


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TRAVEL TO CANADA
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Home/SCHOLARSHIPS/Trent University Scholarships for Undergraduate Students in Canada
Trent University Scholarships for Undergraduate Students in Canada
Are you looking to pursue an undergraduate course program in Canada? You have a great opportunity to apply for the Trent University Scholarships for Undergraduate Students in Canada provided for international students from anywhere in the world. The Trent University scholarship opportunity aims to provide students with the financial support that they need to further their studies in Canada. Study in Canada cannot get much easier in terms of costs than when you have a scholarship that has got you covered. The scholarship allows students who have shown great academic achievements to study at Trent University on a very cheap amount.
Applicants interested in the Trent University Scholarships For Undergraduate Students in Canada, who have also made an impact in the lives of their community and school, shown leadership qualities, and also show promises to become an important contributor of positive impacts in the world. The applicants will be given an opportunity to receive financial aid to continue their studies in Canada no matter which country they are coming from. The Trent University Scholarships will provide students over $25,000 for the category of United World College, International Levy Award, and Trent International Global Citizen Award, as well as $3,000 to $15,000 for those who qualify for the Justin Chiu International Scholarship every year
The Trent University Scholarships application form is accessible online but will only be available after students have obtained admission to study at Quest University. The competition for the Trent University scholarship is very strict and the university will make their selection on a merit basis.
Trent University is located in Peterborough, Ontario in Canada. It is a rare public liberal university with a satellite campus in Oshawa that serves the Regional Municipality of Durham. The university awards thousands of international students with scholarship opportunities when they pursue an undergraduate course program at the university. The scholarships are subject to renewal but will greatly depend on the student's good academic standing in the subsequent years in the school.
You can read more about this Trent University Scholarships for Undergraduate Students in Canada below and also ensure you submit your application early if you will be interested to apply for this award.
Brief Description of the Trent University Scholarships For Undergraduate Students in Canada
Host Institution(s):
Trent University Located in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada
Level/Field(s) of study:
Undergraduate course program for different subjects taught at the university.
Number of Scholarships:
International from anywhere in the world is eligible to apply for the Trent University Scholarships for Undergraduate Students in Canada
Trent University Scholarships for Undergraduate Students in Canada value/inclusions:
The successful applicants will receive a cash benefit divided into the following categories
Amounts between $2,000–$25,000 for Trent international Global Citizens Scholarships and Awards
Amount of $25,000 for Trent International Tuition Levy Scholarship
Amount of $25,000 for United World Colleges (UWC) Scholarship
Amount from $3,000–$15,000 for Justin Chiu International Scholarship;
Eligibility for the Trent University Scholarships For Undergraduate Students in Canada
If applicants wish to be considered for this award, the student must ensure to adhere to the following criteria:
The Trent University Scholarships For Undergraduate Students selection process is very rigorous and more emphasis is placed on candidates who have shown ability to lead, a willingness to contribute, an eagerness to learn, and a passion for excellence.
The renewal policy for this scholarship can be found in the link below.
Applicants must be applying for an undergraduate degree program at Trent University.
The student must be coming from a recognized secondary, college, or transferring from other universities.
Documents Required for Application
Long and short essay
Bursary application form
English language proficiency test scores
Applicants applying for the Trent University Scholarships for Undergraduate Students in Canada should first obtain the Quest Admission Application
The admission application will be submitted along with the scholarship form.
Applicants for the Trent University Scholarships For Undergraduate Students in Canada are also advised to submit along with their application reference letters and a resume or CV to support their scholarship application.
You are also advised to submit early enough and ensure all your documents are accurate. Refer to the school website for more information.
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Giant Freakin Robot > Entertainment
Lost Reboot: This Version Will Be More Mature And Skip Networks
In another case of 'say it ain't so' or 'should they or shouldn't they', talk is once again heating up about a possible reboot of the roller coaster hit TV series Lost. The show, which ran for six seasons in the early 2000s and was co-created by J.J Abrams and Damon Lindelof, has been talked about before in terms of a reboot. Now it seems, in this day and age of the reboot/revision, the chances are now about 50/50 that a Lost reboot happens.
According to this source if it moves forward the plan is for the rebooted version of Lost to be "more mature" and that it would end up on a streaming service, not network TV. What exactly "more mature" means is hard to fathom, as the show definitely wasn't for kids the first time around. Hopefully it means that any Lost reboot will change the ending so that the whole thing actually makes sense.
Lost told the story of a handful of people who survived an airplane crash and landed on a mysterious island. The first two seasons were a riveting watch…and then it started to slowly come off the rails. To its credit, the show did hold interest, albeit waning in the final few seasons, but it did have enough to win multiple Golden Globes, Emmys, and BAFTAs.
Lost made stars of Matthew Fox, Evangeline Lilly, Jorge Garcia, Josh Holloway, Daniel Dae Kim, and Naveen Andrews as well as a few others in the cast. But the divisiveness of the final few seasons, more importantly the last season and its final episode, left many fans unsatisfied and possibly more questions than answers. So, do we need a Lost reboot?
If you ask one of the stars, Henry Ian Cusick, he'd be on board with a Lost reboot, as he told The Independent. "I think a reboot would be really cool. I'd be really excited to see what they did if any of us got asked back. I'd imagine they'd go with the island being the star, but you never know. I guess the obvious way would be Hurley and Benjamin Linus on the island. But yeah, I'd be up for it – it was a cool show and things are getting rebooted all the time."
Another of the series' stars, Nestor Carbonell, excitedly weighed in on the idea of a Lost reboot. "I'd work with Damon [Lindelof], Carlton [Cuse] and that cast any time on any project, and if they found something meaningful to do beyond what they've already created – and it would be meaningful coming from them – then I'd be the first to sign up. Lost was a gift in so many ways – it changed my life, it changed my family's life; my wife has actually written a book that she'll publish next year about the show from her point of view." He also said, "To come back to it in some other incarnation would be another gift."
Other stars, more to the point Evangeline Lilly, spoke about their specific character. "I always thought Kate was obnoxious. Not at the beginning – at the beginning, she was kind of cool. But as the show went on, I thought she became more and more predictable. I felt that my character went from being autonomous – really having her own story, journey and agendas – to chasing two men around the island. That irritated the shit out of me." Seems the chances of bringing back Kate are slim to none.
That Lost series finale left a bad taste in the mouths of many. Fans felt cheated. Many of the actors felt cheated and had to defend the ending. Were they dead? Were they not? What the heck was that island? So many unanswered questions, so again, does Lost need a reboot?
Damon Lindelof talked to ComicBook.com about the possibility of rebooting Lost, "We had such an opportunity to kind of do everything that we wanted to there. This is, again, it's another situation where, for someone who's come in and worked in the Alien-verse and the Star Trek-verse and now the Watchmen-verse, the idea that I created some original IP in Lost that someone else could come in and put their spin on, I would love to see more Lost. I'd love to see what other people would do with it. I just kind of feel like I had my crack at it and it's time for the old man to step aside and let someone else take the reins. That would be cool for there to be more Lost, but, again, I don't think it should be me."
He seems all in, just not as part of a Lost reboot. Lindelof also had this to say to disgruntled fans about the show and it's ambiguous ending, "I guess the takeaway from Lost is that I am unapologetic about the fact I'm fascinated by ambiguity and questions that will never be answered because that's what life is. I'm just really interested in those stories and I understand that there is an experience of frustration and dissatisfaction. But I also think that there is nobility in the exploration and the journey of these ideas."
Another person who may not be on board with a Lost reboot would be former executive producer Carlton Cuse. Back in 2017, he stated that they had no plans of rebooting the series. But in 2019, ABC President Karey Burke dropped a bit of knowledge by saying at the Television Critics Association, "I would like that very much. That is a reboot I would be interested in seeing." Is this the ringing endorsement it needs? The scuttlebutt around the water cooler says that while it hasn't been inked, the idea is moving forward. It will also be a "more mature" version of Lost and most likely would be part of a streaming service.
What say you, Lost fans? Is Lost reboot worthy? Is it something you would want to see? Are there still too many unanswered questions that need to be answered? Tell us your interest level on a possible Lost reboot.
Would you watch a Lost reboot if it had a different ending than the original?
— GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT (@GFRobot) July 9, 2020
Evangeline Lilly Rumored To Return For Amazon's Lord of the Rings
Dominic Monaghan: Mired In Accusations And Controversy Since Lost
Chris Pine On Whether He's Still In Star Trek 4
The Walking Dead Announces The End, Read The Cast's Cancellation Letter


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KEGWORTH Town had their Everards Division One lead cut but it could have been far worse after a dramatic escape against Broomleys.
Chasing 188 for 9 the Coalville side were well on top with just 15 runs needed from the last four overs and seven wickets in hand.
But staring at a first defeat of the season Kegworth's bowlers and fielders stepped up to the mark, forcing Broomleys to panic and inducing four run outs in those overs.
The match came down to the last ball bowled by Mark Ashcroft with two needed to win but Broomleys could only scramble one to ensure a winning draw for the leaders giving them 14 points and 10 more vital points than they looked set to be earning just a few minutes beforehand.
The dramatic finish would not have been a possibility without the brilliant batting of Paul Widdowson who carried his bat for an excellent 104 not out when the rest of the Kegworth batsmen failed.
Widdowson could only watch on from one end as only two of his partners reached double figures, Dominic Reed hitting 13 and Doug Savige providing a stubborn 38 as Kegworth posted 188 for 9.
While Savige (1 for 36 from four overs) and Neil Shipway (0 for 30 from five) were expensive the rest of the bowlers were tight and able to keep the runs down.
Jordan Holmes was wicketless but only went for 21 in nine overs to increase the pressure and allow Ashcroft (2 for 63 off 16) and Chris Trevis (1 for 30 off 11) to pick up wickets.
They built up enough pressure to force Broomleys to fold and fall one short of a tie closing on 187 for 8.


Taphandles LLC needed to consolidate services at its branch locations, potentially incurring thousands in early termination penalty fees. It also needed more bandwidth at its headquarters in Seattle. Caisson turned these two projects into one by negotiating with the service provider for a win-win.
Served as single point of contact for sale and installation of the EoF service upgrade at Seattle location.
Managed the consolidation of services at client's branch locations.
Successfully negotiated for thousands of dollars in early termination penalty fees to be waved.
Ultimately, Caisson got Integra Telecom to wave all early termination fees associated with disconnecting services at the client's branch locations because Integra would be upgrading the client's Ethernet over Fiber (EoF) service at its Seattle location.
For the Seattle upgrade, Caisson boosted the client's Integra service from 30 Mbps to 100 Mbps Ethernet over Fiber (EoF) to meet the client's bandwidth requirements.


text:
Q: Need help locating/clicking a drop down located in table using selenium I am working on a script to locate/click a dropdown and the click any of the item from the selected drop down using selenium and python.
Below is the code and would like your help to make it better if its correct and correct it if its not correct way of doing it.
Code Snippet:
table1 = self.browser.find_element_by_id('user-list-table')
trows = table1.find_elements_by_tag_name('tr')
for trow in trows:
    tcols = trow.find_element_by_tag_name('td')
    for tcol in tcols:
        if tcol ==("//button[@id='dropdownMenu1'][3]"):
            self.browser.find_element_by_xpath(tcol).click()
            self.browser.find_element_by_link("//a[contains(text(),'Edit User')][3]").click()

HTML snippet :

                        Status
                        First Name
                        Last Name
                        Employee ID
                        Patient Load
Permanent | Temporary
                        No. of Tasks
Priority | Total
                        Tasks Per Day (completed)
Week | Month | Quarter
                        User Actions

                        01
                        Tracy
                        Jones
                        1001
                        10 | 5
                        30 | 50
                        45 | 60 | 50

                              <button class="btn btn-default dropdown-toggle" type="button" id="dropdownMenu1" data-toggle="dropdown" aria-expanded="true">
                                User Actions

                              </button>

 Assign Patients

 Todays Availability

 View Profile

 Edit User

 Deactivate User

A: Although I'm not certain I understand the problem you're experience (or trying to solve) well enough to help, I will try.
If I were you, attempting to click specific items from a list, I would just create a list of those items in the first place and then loop through it a single time, clicking as I went.  The code might look something like this.
item_list = driver.find_elements_by_xpath('//button[@id="dropdownMenu1"]') #you can add further specifications as necessary

At the very least, you can nix a couple for loops if you would just first create a list of the items you wanted to check.  See docs.
Does that help at all?  I see that you're already finding elements (rather than just a single element), so I likely don't understand the problem well enough to advise fully.  Consider providing greater clarification about your problem/objective in the comments or editing your questions.  Thanks and best of luck!
EDIT: Although it's implied in my answer, I should be clearer.  I believe that if you're simply trying to reach elements through loops and checks, it likely makes sense to use XPATH.  it is best suited to finding very specific (one-off) elements in an XML document.  Just my tuppence.
SECOND EDIT:
Here is a list of the links you need (I think):
list_of_links = driver.find_elements_by_xpath('//li[@role="presentation"]/a') # len(list) == 99

Then, as said above, you can just loop this one list and .click() each link.
for link in list_of_links:
    link.click()

Let me know if it works.  Best of luck!!


Nipsative questions include an element of both Normative and Ipsative assessment. This means that you are likely to indicate your preference for a behavioural statement on a scale of 1 to 5, but also rank the statement against others in terms of which one describes you most.
These types of assessments are difficult to 'fake', but also use a lot of mental capacity. As such they are not the best for a good candidate experience.
You should answer honestly as possible, and not spend too long pondering about the behavioural statements (questions).
Our Work Personality Questionnaire has been designed by previous SHL and Kenexa test developers. Take the WPQ now and get a FREE expert feedback report.
Nipsative assessments are a combination of both 'ipsative' and 'normative' type assessment. These types of assessments are rare and new in the test publishing industry and are a useful way of identifying reliable norm groups (see glossary for definition of 'norms').
Normative questionnaires simply ask individuals to rate a statement (or question) they are presented with on a scale of 1 to 5 indicating their level of disagreement or agreement. Ipsative type questions require individuals to choose a statement they most agree with and one statement that they most disagree with from a group of 3 or 4 equally desirable statements (for more information see 'Ipsative tests'). A 'nipsative' type assessment combines both of these styles into one and requires the individual to both indicate their level of agreement with each statement, as well as rank the statements in terms of their agreement with them.
The best advice when taking these assessments is to be as honest as possible. If you attempt to distort these questionnaires, the results can appear sporadic with certain consistency and desirability scales (contained within these assessments) giving away your style of response.
See a real example of a normative assessment – take the Work Personality Questionnaire (WPQ) now and get a FREE personalised report.


GRAND RAPIDS, MI - The Grand Rapids School Board passed a resolution to dismiss a tenured teacher for job abandonment after the woman failed to show up for work at her new school.
Mary Thomson, who began her career with the district in December 2010, refused to report to her new assignment teaching ninth grade English Language Arts and reading at Ottawa Hills High School, according to the Sharron Pitts, assistant superintendent for human resources and general counsel.
During the 2015-16 school year, Thomson served as a reading specialist for the district at the Potters House school. The board vote to 8 to 0 to proceed with the charges at its meeting on Monday, Oct. 3.
"Teachers have 20 days to file a claim of appeal with the state tenure commission," according to Brad Banasik, general counsel and director of Labor Relations and Policy for the Michigan Association of School Boards.
"Administrations have a right to place teachers where they deem fit. Districts seeking a dismissal just have to prove their charges without being arbitrary or capricious."
Banasik said abandonment dismissals are highly unusual.
Pitts echoed the rarity, saying there hasn't been a similar charge filed since she's been at the helm.
Thomson had asked to be assigned to a reading specialist position after being notified in June of her new role, but was informed by human resources no reading positions were available, according to information provided to the board.
She made a similar inquiry in August. On Sept. 1, she did not report as required to work with the rest of the teaching staff. Thomson was emailed to see if she planned to come to work.
She responded on Sept. 2 that the assignment had been tentative and she was waiting for a permanent assignment letter. She also reiterated her interest in a reading assignment.
Human resources sent her a permanent assignment letter on Sept. 2 and on Sept. 4, she informed the department that "she had not accepted the ELA (English Language Arts) position or any other position," according to a letter to the school board from Micky Savage, director of Human Resources and Labor Relations.
On Sept. 6, Thomson was notified she was expected to report to Ottawa Hills. When she did not show up, human resources sent her letter on Sept. 8 about seeking to terminate her employment for job abandonment.
The board was told that Thomson has not been in communications with human resources since early September. The teachers union was not involved in the case.
Thomson, who has received effective ratings on her recent evaluations, did not respond to calls to comment on her dismissal or whether she intended to appeal.


text:
Q: LCD driver program in Verilog for Altera DE2 board I need to display the characters and numbers on a 2x16 LCD on the Altera DE2 board using a Verilog program. Any advice?

A: This should get you started!
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.arch.fpga/msg/f4ef5805dbafbcc9

A: This project will probably get you 90% of the way... http://opencores.org/project,wb_lcd


text:
Global shares mixed as markets await US Fed rate decision
A man pases by an electronic stock board of a securities firm in Tokyo, Wednesday, July 31, 2019. Asian shares were mostly lower Wednesday as investors looked cautiously ahead to a key policy update from the U.S. Federal Reserve later in the day. (AP Photo/Koji Sasahara)
LONDON (AP) — European stock markets traded in fairly narrow ranges Wednesday as investors looked ahead to an anticipated U.S. Federal Reserve rate cut later in the day.
Markets have generally recovered their poise a day after being spooked by comments from President Donald Trump, who accused Beijing of trying to stall in trade talks through the 2020 presidential election in hopes of being able to negotiate with a more malleable Democrat. He said that if re-elected, he would get "much tougher" with Beijing.
Now the focus is very much on the Fed, which is expected to cut its main interest rate for the first time in more than a decade from the current range of 2.25-2.50%.
"With markets pricing a 79% chance of a 25-basis point cut, there is still an outside chance of a dramatic 50-basis point shift today," said Joshua Mahony, senior market analyst at IG.
In Europe, France's CAC 40 was up 0.1% at 5,518 while Germany's DAX edged up 0.2% to 12,176. The FTSE 100 of leading British shares, which has outperformed its European counterparts this week, was 0.7% lower at 7,595.
Wall Street was poised for modest gains at the bell with Dow futures and the broader S&P 500 futures both up 0.3%.
Earlier in Asia, Japan's benchmark Nikkei 225 fell 0.9% to 21,521.53. Australia's S&P/ASX 200 lost 0.5% to 6,812.60. South Korea's Kospi dropped 0.7% to 2,024.55. Hong Kong's Hang Seng dropped 1.3% to 27,777.75, while the Shanghai Composite shed 0.7% to 2,932.51.
ENERGY: Benchmark crude oil added 40 cents to $58.45 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange while Brent crude, the international standard, gained 43 cents to $65.06 a barrel.
CURRENCIES: The euro was flat at $1.1146 while the dollar was steady at 108.56 yen.
by DARLENE SUPERVILLE, Associated Press / Jan 19, 2020
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — President Donald Trump is expected to discuss new U.S. trade agreements with its North American neighbors and with China during an appearance Sunday at a convention of American farmers.
When Trump spoke to the American Farm Bureau Federation's convention last year, he urged farmers to continue supporting him even as they suffered financially in the fallout from his trade war with China and a partial shutdown of the federal government.
Billionaire Bloomberg is granted financial disclosure delay
by BRIAN SLODYSKO, Associated Press / Jan 17, 2020
WASHINGTON (AP) — Billionaire Michael Bloomberg won't have to publicly disclose his finances until late March, well after voters in more than a dozen states take to the polls on Super Tuesday.
Presidential candidates are required to reveal their investments, businesses and streams of income. Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor, is the only Democrat seeking the White House who has yet to file paperwork to publicly disclose his.
Des Moines 16-year-old accidentally shoots himself in the groin
Sun dogs appear on a frigid January day


text:
Q: Loop over XML and store attributes in a struct I query a device and it returns an XML output with the number of alerts.
I want to store each alert as a struct and store all the alerts in a slice.
I have looked through a number of answers for a similar problem but I am having a hard time finding how to parse the attributes of each msg tag and put the attributes into the struct.
Example Code: https://play.golang.org/p/XZMONjRc5q1

A: I have made corrections to your example code on the playground.

*

*Your XML example was not well-formed; the first <msg> element was missing a closing tag, so there would've been parse errors.

*Your outer element is not named "xml version". Your outer element is the <alarmlist>, which contains zero or more elements named <msg>.

*Values contained by <msg> are not elements. They are attributes and must be tagged appropriately.

I imagine this is not the only XML document your code will need to handle in the long run, so I recommend you read the godoc very carefully to understand the tag syntax. Look for introductions to XML on the nets if you're having trouble with some of the terminology.

A: I had to add the attr to the vbcAlert struct.


FANUC Series 18i Model A (18i-MA 18i-TA) or 18 Model B (18i-MB 18i-TB) / 180i (210i-MA 210i-TA) (Open CNC Computer) are series of Ultra-Compact, Ultra-Thin CNC integrated LCD and network features, for versatile machine tools including lathe, machining center, compound machine with milling and turning ability, gear finishing machine and so on. Integrated FANUC 18i CNC with LCD Display (7.2", 8.4", 9.5", 10.4", 12.1", 15.0" LCD), including all the small pcb (Fanuc graphic card, Fanuc Axes Servo card, Fanuc CPU Pentium Card, From module, Dram Module and also the Inverter of the LCD) Reduction of Cable by Ultra-high-speed Serial Data Transfer.
Fanuc 18i PERIODIC Maintenance Spare parts : FANS, BATTERIES, BACKLIGHT, LCD.
The FANUC 18i CNC has been steadily reduced in size using surface–mount and custom LSI technologies for electronic components. The FANUC 18i-A 18i-B CNC also is designed to be protected from external noise. However, it is difficult to measure the level and frequency of noise quantitatively, and noise has many uncertain factors. It is important to prevent both noise from being generated and generated noise from being introduced into the CNC. This precaution improves the stability of the CNC machine tool system. The CNC component units are often installed close to the parts generating noise in the power magnetics cabinet. Possible noise sources into the CNC are capacitive coupling, electromagnetic induction, and ground loops. When designing the power magnetics cabinet, guard against noise in the machine as described in the following section.
Part programs, offset data, and system parameters are stored in CMOS memory in the control unit. The power to the CMOS memory is backed up by a lithium battery mounted on the front panel of the control unit. The above data is not lost even when the main battery goes dead. The backup battery is mounted on the control unit at shipping. This battery can maintain the contents of memory for about a year. When the voltage of the battery becomes low, alarm message "BAT" blinks on the display and the battery alarm signal is output to the PMC. Fanuc 18i . When this alarm is displayed, replace the battery as soon as possible. In general, the battery can be replaced within two or three weeks, however, this depends on the system configuration. If the voltage of the battery becomes any lower, memory can no longer be backed up. Turning on the power to the Fanuc 18i control unit in this state causes system alarm 910 (SRAM parity alarm) to occur because the contents of memory are lost. Clear the entire memory and reenter data after replacing the battery.


text:
HomeNewsArchivesWAPA Moves Ahead Without Blessing of PSC
WAPA Moves Ahead Without Blessing of PSC
Sept. 2, 2004 – The V.I. Water and Power Authority is requesting bids from independent power producers whether the Public Services Commission likes it or not.
On Aug. 12 the PSC ordered WAPA not to send out the requests. (See "PSC to WAPA: Don't Send Out RFP without Approval").
Thursday WAPA held a press conference announcing that it had sent out the requests Wednesday.
Alberto Bruno-Vega, executive director for WAPA, also announced at the meeting that WAPA had filed with the commission a Petition for Reconsideration of its order.
Bruno-Vega said, "We are moving forward, the order is null and void." He said the order did not follow due process. WAPA officials were not allowed to present their case before the PSC before the order was made. He also accused the PSC of trying to micromanage WAPA.
The driving force behind WAPA's efforts to get alternative energy sources, according to Bruno-Vega, is the need for the authority to diversify, get away from total dependence on imported oil and to keep the rates residents pay for power in check. He said the price of oil has dropped from its peak, but is still higher than it has historically been. He also cited the volatility of the oil market as problems in the oil-producing countries continue.
The responses are due in to WAPA by Nov. 5.
Before WAPA awards a bid, it will go to the PSC ask for it to approve the terms and conditions of the contract.
Bruno-Vega said, "The PSC has a very important role to play in due time, a judgment role. But in reality, at this time the PSC members are just a bunch of political hacks that really have no knowledge of the workings of WAPA. Their sole purpose seems to be to deflect any actions by WAPA which might cause government house to be placed in an unpopular light. They would be better advised to keep their noses out of things they know nothing about but we know that's not going to happen. Another problem is that the Government is the biggest deadbeat on our accounts receivable books. If I had my way, WAPA would be allowed to cut them off for non-payment just the same as any other customer."
The contract would be for 15 years with a five-year renewal option. The contractor would have to have its facility built and providing power by June 30 of 2009.
Bruno-Vega said it is possible that a provider will be able to be up and running before that date.
The criteria to be used by WAPA in evaluating the proposals include:
· The greatest cost benefit to rate payers
· Risk of cost increases to rate payers
· Respondent's experience in developing and operating similar projects
· Creditworthiness
· Improvement to WAPA's reliability
· Guaranteed availability and capacity
· Minimum amount that WAPA has to purchase in a time period
· Technology risk
· Supplier diversity
· Impact on the environment
· Ability to meet operational dates
Requests for proposals were sent to Caribbean Energy Resources Corp., Caribbean Waste Technologies, Florida Power and Light, Renaissance Group, Energy Management Inc., West Indies Power and Sea Solar Power International.
Requests were also advertised in local news media including The Source (See Legal Advertisement ).
The PSC has 30 days in which to reply to the Petition to Reconsider. Bruno-Vega said if the PSC did not reconsider its order, there would be no choice for WAPA but to take the PSC to court. He said the order was simply one government body trying to usurp the power of another government body.
Valencio Jackson, chairman of the PSC, said he would reserve comment until after he had a chance to read the petition.
To make sure only serious proposals are received WAPA is requiring a nonrefundable check of $20,000 to accompany each one.
Bruno-Vega said preparing the request for proposals and then reviewing those received would be a very expensive task for WAPA.
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Court Case Initiated to Save V.I. Endangered Species


Last Monday, I presented my solutions to the Natas server-side security war games at NSLUG. Afterwards, I spent some time to clean up my code, and I've now published it to CPAN as Hack::Natas, which comes with modules and scripts to solve level 15 and 16 in an automated way, plus walkthroughs for all the levels up to 17 written in Markdown (those are almost the same as my blog posts, so you're not missing out by looking at only one or the other).
I wanted to move a large number of files from one directory to another, but the target directory already had many of the filenames already used. This is a common enough problem -- digital cameras use DSC#, video downloaders often append numbers to get a unique filename, and so on. In both those examples, the sequence restarts if you empty the program's work directory. So, you'll end up with DSC0001.jpg every time you empty your camera's memory card. If you're trying to move such files into a single directory, you'll get conflicts every time.
Instead of manually renaming the files before transferring them, I wrote a simple script to give each file a unique name in the destination directory.
In Tips & tricks from my 4 months at Pythian, I showed how to give a symlink a new target atomically. I wasn't aware of any module to encapsulate that, so I quickly put together File::Symlink::Atomic.
and you get a drop-in replacement for CORE::symlink. It creates a temporary symlink (using File::Temp to get a unique pathname) pointing to your new target, then moves it into place with a rename call. On POSIX systems, the rename system call guarantees atomicity.
I put it on PrePAN to get some advice. I have no clue what that'll do on any non-POSIX systems that have symlinks (if the OS doesn't do symlinks, I can't help you). Is a rename call universally atomic? If not, how can I detect those platforms, and provide that atomic guarantee some other way?
I didn't get any feedback, so I chose to simply release the module. It's now on CPAN. Enjoy!
In the past month, a number of people have asked about the theme for this blog. I was particularly flattered that someone even asked where I bought it.
It is just a customized version of Joey Robinson's Minimalist theme. My aim was to keep the same design principles - fast-loading, minimalism, readability - but update it to have a more modern look. One major goal was to have a truly great font via [ccie]@font-face[/ccie] on modern browsers, so I used the Junction font from The League of Movable Type. They're an awesome group of free font designers - you should check out their other fonts too!
The new theme is called, unsurprisingly, "Hashbang" - and is now available on Github. Enjoy!
http://p.hashbang.ca now runs WWW::Hashbang::Pastebin, a simple pastebin written with Dancer and DBIx::Class that does nothing but store your text and show it back to you. The only feature beyond that is if you append a +, you'll get line numbering (no syntax highlighting). You can use an anchor to jump to any line (click the line number), and the number for that line will be highlighted.
Or, use the Perl client, which provides a command-line tool to do the same thing (and also fetch paste content, given an ID).
Perl programmers are probably all aware of the utf8 pragma, which turns on UTF-8 in your source code. This is actually a stumbling block for new programmers, who might think that utf8 makes your filehandles use UTF-8 by default, or automagically turns incoming data into UTF-8, and ensures outgoing data is all UTF-8 as well. Sadly, that's not the case.
Last night, someone posed a problem in #perl-help. They wanted to have syntax highlighting in their shell for Perl code. I immediately suggested that they use Pygments - I knew about it because I'd used it before, and I had experimented with the command line tool. But I was surprised there wasn't already a Perl solution.