If you prefer to owner-manage your property, give us a call and we'll help you secure a quality tenant. As a landlord you are about to become the biggest creditor of a complete stranger. Please don't implement the application process lightly.
Advertise your property on LettingWorx and Property24 websites ensuring maximum exposure. We will then forward prospective candidates details to you to book viewings.
Thoroughly evaluate each tenant application which must include previous landlord information, current employment reference, proof of income, bank statements, personal and professional references, and authority to run credit checks. We will obtain references, verify employment and income, and interview the applicant asking pertinent questions to ascertain the suitability and credibility of the potential tenant.
If required, secure the lease with PayProp Capital's Deposit Guarantee which is underwritten by RMB (a comprehsive insurance package for landlords with affordable premiums paid for by the Tenant).
Draw up and obtain signed lease, which is compliant with all current legislation (note: any lease not compliant with required legislation can be invalidated).
Collect deposit and first month's rent and pay over to you (NB the deposit is required to be in individual interest bearing a/c, not in your own account).
And we don't cut you loose as soon as the first month's rent is paid! We are available for advice all year long.
What is considered the responsibility of the Landlord for repairs and maintenance?


Had a busy weekend what with the holiday so reading got put on hold pretty drastically. Hard to read when the whole family is home and I can't necessarily be my hermit self. So I must set my book aside and come out of my "cave" and socialize.
Very nice teaser! This one has to go on my wishlist. My teasers this week are from The Gathering by Kelley Armstrong and Hard Bitten by Chloe Neill. Happy reading!
Hilarious, sounds like a really fun book.
I so want to read this book! Teaser makes me want to read it more!
Great teaser!! I really want to read this book. Thanks for stopping by my blog.
OK, I wasn't even that interested in this book, but now....lol. That was one great teaser Jessica!
Ooooh interesting teaser. I have this one on my wishlist - looks good.
I have been so out of the book reading loop and I am so happy to be back! Thanks for the great teaser, I have requested it from my library already! Cannot wait to read it!
This one looks really good. How are you liking it?
Thanks for stopping by my Teaser Tuesday as well!


text:
\section{Introduction}
In recent years, remarkable breakthroughs have been achieved in machine learning technology, as typified by deep neural networks. Such technologies are expected to be used for decision-making in medical fields. In decision-making, it is essential to recognize why decisions are made. Although complex machine learning models such as deep learning and ensemble models can achieve high accuracy, they are more difficult to interpret than simple models such as linear models.
SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanation)~\cite{lundberg2017unified} is a method for interpreting the results of machine learning by computing the contribution of each feature.
SHAP enables us to illustrate nonlinear relationships between features and the outcome.
SHAP is also highly compatible with linear models and the derivative of the SHAP value corresponds to the regression coefficient of the linear model.

An interaction effect occurs when the impact of one feature depends on another feature.
Even if each variable has little or no effect on the outcome, its combination can have an unexpectedly large impact on the outcome.
For example, potassium supplements and ACE inhibitors are safe alone; however, their combined use can cause hyperkalemia by drug interaction.

Understanding interactions is important for understanding machine learning models; however, naive SHAP analyses can only evaluate which features are important and cannot evaluate the effects of the main effect and interactions separately.

In this paper, we introduce the Shapley-Taylor index, proposed by Sundararajan et al., as a method for interpreting machine learning models. The index can separate the SHAP value into the effects of single features and the interactions.
The method is applied to the cancer cohort data of Kyushu University Hospital (N=29,080) to analyze what combination of factors contributes to the risk of colon cancer.

\section{Background}

\subsection{Shapley Additive Explanation}

\textit{SHapley Additive exPlanation} (SHAP)~\cite{lundberg2017unified} is a method for interpreting the results of machine learning by computing the contribution of each feature and represents the outcome of patient-$j$: $f(x^{(j)})$ as the sum of each features-$i$'s contribution $\phi_i(x_i^{(j)})$.
\begin{equation}
f(x^{(j)})=\phi_0+\sum_{i=1}^{K} \phi_i(x_i^{(j)})
\end{equation}

\begin{equation}
\phi_0=\frac{1}{N} \sum_{j=1}^{N} f(x^{(j)})
\end{equation}
\begin{equation}
\phi_i(x_i^{(j)})=\Phi(x_i^{(j)}) - \frac{1}{N} \sum_{k=1}^{N} \Phi({x_i}^{(k)})
\label{phi}
\end{equation}
, where $N$ is the number of patients and $\Phi(x_i)$ is the Shapley value for $x_i$.

The Shapley value is a fair profit allocation among many stakeholders depending on their contribution~\cite{roth1988shapley} and was derived from the name of the economist who introduced it. The Shapley value is defined as follows:
\begin{multline}
\Phi(x_i) \\ =\sum_{S \subseteq \{1,\cdots,K\} \setminus \{i\}} \frac{|S|!(K-|S|-1)!}{K!}[f_{x}(S\cup\{i\})-f_{x}(S)]
\label{SHAPdef}
\end{multline}
, where $K$ is the number of stakeholders or features.
The meaning of the bracket part of Eq.~(\ref{SHAPdef}) is that the contribution of entity-$i$ can be defined as a marginal contribution, i.e. the difference between the profit obtained by group-$S$ members only: $f_{x}(S)$ and that of both entity-$i$ and the group members: $f_{x}(S\cup\{i\})$.

The Shapley values can be calculated as long as the function value is defined even if the calculation method is a black box,
The Shapley value is the only profit allocation method that satisfies the following four properties: efficiency, symmetry, linearity, and null player.

The computation time of naive SHAP calculations increases exponentially with the number of features $K$; however, Lundberg et al. proposed a polynomial-time algorithm for decision trees and ensemble trees model~\cite{lundberg2020local}.
This algorithm is integrated into major ensemble tree frameworks like XGBoost~\cite{chen2016xgboost} and LightGBM~\cite{ke2017lightgbm}.
Several studies have applied machine learning algorithms for medical data analysis and interpreted by SHAP~\cite{lundberg2020local,moncada2021explainable,inoguchi2021association}

Notara et al. proposed using the variance (L2-norm) of the SHAP value for measuring variable importance~\cite{nohara2022shap}.
The ranking result sorted by the absolute value of the beta coefficients $\beta_i$ in the generalized linear regression model is exactly the same as that of this definition.

In order to understand what the SHAP value means, we suppose the three-variable function $F(x,y,z)$ is expressed as the following equation.
\begin{equation}
F(x,y,z)=f_x(x)+f_y(y)+f_z(z)+g_{xy}(x,y)+g_{xz}(x,z)
\label{3value}
\end{equation}
, where $f(x)$ is the main effect term for the feature $x$ and $g(x,y)$ is the interaction term of features $x$ and $y$.

The respective contributions of each feature $x$, $y$, and $z$ in this function are as follows:
$$\phi(x)=f_x(x)+\frac{g_{xy}(x,y)+g_{xz}(x,z)}{2}$$
$$\phi(y)=f_y(y)+\frac{g_{xy}(x,y)}{2}$$
$$\phi(z)=f_z(z)+\frac{g_{xz}(x,z)}{2}$$
$$F(x,y,z)=\phi(x)+\phi(y)+\phi(z)$$
In other words, the SHAP value of the feature evaluates the sum of the main effect term of the feature and the interactions between the feature and others.
Therefore, we can evaluate which features are important; however, we cannot distinguish whether the main effect term is affecting the outcome or interactions are affecting the outcome.

\subsection{Shapley-Taylor index}
The Shapley-Taylor index is an extended version of the Shapley value~\cite{sundararajan2020shapley} and decomposes the SHAP value $\Phi(x_i) $ into the main term $\Phi(x_i,x_i)$ and interaction terms $\Phi(x_i,x_j)$ as the following equation:
$$\Phi(x_i)=\Phi(x_i,x_i)+\frac{1}{2}\sum_{j\neq i}\Phi(x_i,x_j)$$
An interaction effect terms $\Phi(x_i,x_j)$ is defined as follows:
\begin{multline}
\Phi(x_i,x_j) \\ = \sum_{S\subseteq\{1,\cdots,K\}/\{i,j\}} \frac{2\cdot|S|!(K-|S|-1)!}{K!} [f_x(S\cup\{i,j\}) \\ - f_x(S\cup\{i\})-f_x(S\cup\{j\})+f_x(S)]
\end{multline}
A main effect terms $\Phi(x_i,x_i)$ is defined using the interaction terms $\Phi(x_i,x_j)$ and the Shapley values $\Phi(x_i)$.
$$\Phi(x_i,x_i)=\ \Phi(x_i)-\frac{1}{2}\sum_{j\neq i}\Phi(x_i,x_j)$$
Using the Shapley-Taylor index, the three-variable function $F(x,y,z)$ in Eq.~\ref{3value} is evaluated as $\Phi_{x,x}=f(x)$, $\Phi_{x,y}=g(x,y)$ and $\Phi_{x,z}=g(x,z)$.
The Shapley-Taylor index enables to evaluate the effect of the main effect term and the interaction terms separately.

The Shapley interaction value~\cite{lundberg2020local} is similar to the Shapley-Taylor index; however, the Shapley interaction value cannot separate interactions clearly, i.e $\Phi_{x,x} \neq f(x)$, $\Phi_{x,y} \neq g(x,y)$ and $\Phi_{x,z} \neq g(x,z)$.

\section{Experiments}
We introduce a method for interpreting machine learning models by separating the effects of single features on outcomes from the interactions among features.
The method is applied to the cancer cohort data of Kyushu University Hospital (N=29,080) to analyze what combination of factors contributes to the risk of colon cancer.

\subsection{Study subjects}
We obtained data from the electronic medical record (EMR) system at Kyushu University Hospital (Japan) for 311,391 patients between January 1st, 2008 and December 31th, 2017.
This practical care information included age, sex, height, weight, smoking status, diagnoses [International Classification of Disease version 10 (ICD-10) codes], laboratory test results, and details of prescription medications.
Eligible patients were 20 to 69 years old (n = 203,104) and had recorded serum bilirubin levels (n = 108,014).
In addition, the patients, who had a history of admission and were followed up for over 1 year, were included in the analysis to increase the accuracy of their information (n = 41,415).
Patients were excluded if they had a previous history of cancers or had ICD-10 codes corresponding to liver cirrhosis or hemolytic anemia or had other hepatobiliary diseases with abnormal liver enzyme levels.
Cancer cases diagnosed within 1 year from recruitment into the study were excluded to minimize potential reverse causality.
In addition, patients with serum bilirubin levels over 2.0 mg/dL were excluded because those patients may have had unidentified pathological  conditions affecting serum bilirubin levels, although some of them had hereditary hyperbilirubinemia, such as Gilbert's syndrome.
Finally, a total of 29,080 subjects (12,946 men and 16,134 women) were eligible for inclusion in the analysis~\cite{inoguchi2021association}.
Table~\ref{baseline} shows the baseline characteristics of the study subjects. The median age was 52 years old, and the median follow-up time was 4.7 years.
There were 315 colon (173 men, 142 women) cases in this study.

\begin{table}[t]
\caption{Baseline characteristics of the study subjects. Data was expressed as median (IQR) or mean (SD). The number (No.) was expressed as absolute value and \%.}
\label{baseline}
\vskip 0.15in
\begin{center}
\begin{small}
\begin{sc}
\begin{tabular}{c|ccc}
\toprule
 & Total & Men & Women \\
\midrule
No & 29,080 & 12,946 & 16,134 \\ \hline
Follow-up & 4.7 & 4.6 & 4.8 \\
{}[years] & (2.4-7.9) & (2.3-7.7) & (2.5-8.0) \\ \hline
Age & 52 & 55 & 49 \\
 & (37-62) & (42-63) & (34-60) \\ \hline
BMI[kg/m2] & 23.0 (4.2) & 23.7 (3.8) & 22.4 (4.3) \\ \hline
BIL & 0.65 & 0.70 & 0.60 \\
{}[mg/dL] & (0.50-0.82) & (0.54-0.90) & (0.50-0.80) \\ \hline
Smoking & 8301 (32\%) & 6021 (52\%) & 2280 (16\%) \\ \hline
Diabetes & 5120 (18\%) & 2958 (23\%) & 2162 (13\%) \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{sc}
\end{small}
\end{center}
\vskip -0.1in
\end{table}

\subsection{Analysis Method}
A survival time analysis using the Cox proportional hazards model was conducted with the seven baseline characteristics as features and the development of colon cancer as the outcome.
In general, logistic regression is often applied as the baseline hazard function in the Cox proportional hazards model; however, the Gradient Boosting Decision Tree (GBDT), a typical machine learning model method, was applied in this analysis.
The baseline hazard function generated by the GBDT is analyzed by SHAP to determine what combination of baseline characteristics contributes to the development of colon cancer.

\section{Results}
\subsection{Results by existing method}
To validate the predictive accuracy of the predictor, we drew a time-dependent ROC of the prediction model and found the 10-year average of its cross-validation AUC was 0.661.
Figure~\ref{shap_summary} shows SHapley Additive exPlanation (SHAP) summary plots for colon cancer.
In the plot, features are sorted by their importance and stacked vertically.
Each row plot is a summary of the SHAP dependence plot of each feature $X_i$.
Each dot represents a patient's SHAP value $\phi(x_i^{(j)})$ plotted horizontally.
Each dot is colored by the value of the feature, from low (blue) to high (red).  Black dots represent missing values.
If red points are plotted at the lower side and blue dots are plotted at the higher side, then the risk becomes higher as the value increases.
Since a SHAP summary plot shows the importance of feature values and an abstract of the SHAP dependence plot, it is useful for overviewing the SHAP analysis.

\begin{figure}[ht]
\vskip 0.2in
\begin{center}
\centerline{\includegraphics[width=\columnwidth]{shap_summary.png}}
\caption{SHAP summary plots for colon cancer risk}
\label{shap_summary}
\end{center}
\vskip -0.2in
\end{figure}

\begin{figure}[ht]
\vskip 0.2in
\begin{center}
\centerline{\includegraphics[width=\columnwidth]{sdp_all.png}}
\caption{SHAP dependence plots for colon cancer risk against serum bilirubin levels. SHAP values are shown on the y-axis.}
\label{sdp_all}
\end{center}
\vskip -0.2in
\end{figure}

Figure~\ref{sdp_all} is a SHAP dependence plots for colon cancer risk against serum bilirubin levels and shows the SHAP value decreases significantly when bilirubin is larger than 1.2 mg/dl.
This indicates that bilirubin 1.2 mg/dl is the threshold for decreasing the risk of developing colon cancer.
One of the possible causes is as follows.
Cancer-associated infections, smoking, obesity, diabetes, ionizing and ultraviolet radiation, and air pollution are established risk factors for cancer development.
All of these factors are likely to be associated with increased reactive oxygen species (ROS) production in humans.
Increased ROS production has been hypothesized to damage DNA, proteins, and lipids, and thus initiate or promote cancer development.
Since bilirubin is a strong endogenous antioxidant, higher serum bilirubin levels reduce the cancer risk through decreasing of ROS production~\cite{inoguchi2021association}.

In the SHAP Dependence Plot in Figure~\ref{shap_summary}, SHAP values are distributed widely for the same bilirubin value (e.g., SHAP values are distributed widely from -0.4 to -0.2 when bilirubin is 1.2).
This is caused by an interaction between bilirubin and other features.

\subsection{Results by our method}
The Shapley-Taylor Index was used to extract main effects and interactions separately and their importance are evaluated using the standard deviation of the SHAP value~\cite{nohara2022shap}.
Table~\ref{importance_top10} shows the 10 most important features for developing colon cancer.

If we focus only on the main effect of features,  the important features are age, bilirubin, triglycerides, BMI, and smoking history, in descending order.
This result is consistent with the ranking of the existing method in Figure~\ref{shap_summary}.

\begin{table}[t]
\caption{Importance of main and interaction effect terms for colon cancer}
\label{importance_top10}
\vskip 0.15in
\begin{center}
\begin{small}
\begin{sc}
\begin{tabular}{lcccc}
\toprule
rank & Feature1 & Feature2 & importance \\
\midrule
1 & age & age & 0.763 \\
2 & bilirubin & bilirubin & 0.115 \\
3 & TG & TG & 0.097 \\
4 & TG & age & 0.083 \\
5 & BMI & BMI & 0.074 \\
6 & BMI & age & 0.064 \\
7 & smoking & smoking & 0.061 \\
8 & sex & sex & 0.054 \\
9 & bilirubin & age & 0.044 \\
10 & DM & DM & 0.033 \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
\end{sc}
\end{small}
\end{center}
\vskip -0.1in
\end{table}

Figure~\ref{sdp_single} is a SHAP dependence plot for colon cancer risk evaluating the main effect of serum bilirubin levels and shows the SHAP value decreases significantly when bilirubin is larger than 1.2 mg/dl.
This shape is very similar to SHAP Dependence Plot in Figure~\ref{sdp_all}; however, SHAP values are not distributed widely for the same bilirubin value (e.g., all SHAP values are almost -0.3 when bilirubin is 1.2).
This is caused by eliminating the interaction between bilirubin and other features from the SHAP value of bilirubin.

\begin{figure}[ht]
\vskip 0.2in
\begin{center}
\centerline{\includegraphics[width=\columnwidth]{sdp_single.png}}
\caption{SHAP dependence plots for colon cancer risk evaluating main effect of serum bilirubin levels.}
\label{sdp_single}
\end{center}
\vskip -0.2in
\end{figure}

Figure~\ref{sdp_age} shows the SHAP dependence plots evaluating the interaction effect of serum bilirubin levels and ages.
In the group of 20s, we found the interaction effect rises significantly when bilirubin exceeds 1.2 mg/dl, while those in their 50s and 60s show a slight decrease in the interaction value when bilirubin exceeds 1.2 mg/dl.

\begin{figure}[ht]
\vskip 0.2in
\begin{center}
\centerline{\includegraphics[width=\columnwidth]{sdp_age.png}}
\caption{SHAP dependence plots for colon cancer risk evaluating interaction effect of serum bilirubin levels and ages.}
\label{sdp_age}
\end{center}
\vskip -0.2in
\end{figure}

Figure~\ref{sdp_age_sum} shows the SHAP dependence plots evaluating the main and interaction effects of serum bilirubin levels and ages.
For the 20s, when bilirubin exceeds 1.2 mg/dl, the decrease in the main effect of bilirubin cancels out the increase in the interaction effect, and the sum of their SHAP values does not change significantly.
On the other hand, for the 30s and older, the decrease in the main effect of bilirubin outweighed the increase in the interaction effect, and the sum of their SHAP values decreased when bilirubin exceeds 1.2 mg/dl.
Since the interaction effect is getting smaller with older age, high bilirubin levels decrease the risk of colon cancer, especially for the elderly.
This is because there is much room for risk reduction for the elderly since their risk is larger than that of the young generation. Therefore, high bilirubin levels effectively work for prevention of the cancer, especially for the elderly.

\begin{figure}[ht]
\vskip 0.2in
\begin{center}
\centerline{\includegraphics[width=\columnwidth]{sdp_age_sum.png}}
\caption{SHAP dependence plots for colon cancer risk evaluating main and interaction effects of serum bilirubin levels and ages}
\label{sdp_age_sum}
\end{center}
\vskip -0.2in
\end{figure}

\section{Conclusion}
In this paper, we introduced the Shapley-Taylor index as a method for interpreting machine learning models.
The index separates the SHAP value into the effects of single features and the interactions.
The method is applied to the cancer cohort data of Kyushu University Hospital (N=29,080) to analyze what combination of factors contributes to the risk of colon cancer.
We found high bilirubin levels effectively work for prevention of the colon cancer, especially for the elderly.

\section*{Acknowledgments}
This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP20K11938.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


text:
Top three games for Chinese online gaming
|In Online Gaming in China
By the end of 2014 there were around 245million online gamers in China. Chinese gamers spent $8.7 billion on PC-based online games in 2013 (source: VentureBeat), and this figure is expected to rise to $23.4 billion by 2018 (source: Research and Market). Online gaming in China is clearly a very enticing marketplace.
A look at the top three games played online will give you an idea of just how successful this format can be, and also show you what is most popular within the marketplace. The success of these games demonstrates the power and viability of Chinese online gaming. Can you see your game in the marketplace?
Chinese online gaming: Crossfire (Tencent, SmileGate)
The top online game in China last year accounted for almost an eighth of the total online gaming revenue, bringing in $967 million from its micro-transactions system (source: Forbes). Crossfire is very popular amongst young gamers, and is very heavily based upon one of the biggest online games of its type – Counter-Strike – which sees players take on the role of soldiers battling to fulfil certain objectives.
Crossfire benefits heavily from the fact that it does not require a particularly fast internet connection to play; vitally important for online gaming in China considering the country's relatively poor internet speeds.
Crossfire is free-to-play, and makes its money by offering paid-for upgrades within the game.
League of Legends (Tencent, Riot Games)
Tencent also publishes the second most popular game in China, in a joint venture with US developer Riot Games. Their collaboration is one of only a few partnerships happening in China that brings American games to the country (source: Riot Games). League of Legends pitches teams of users against each other in highly strategic battles.
League of Legends adopts a more traditional system of micro-transactions, in that the vast majority of its paid-for upgrades allow players to unlock content quicker. Users are not inhibited if they do not want to pay, which is likely one of the reasons why league of Legends continues to be so popular (source: IGN).
2013 revenues: US$624 million
Dungeon Fighter Online (Nexon)
DFO is based upon popular side-scrolling fighting games such as the classic Street fighter, with fast-paced action. Players progress through a series of rooms, each increasing in difficulty, filled with enemies who they must defeat in order to progress to the next room. Slaying monsters rewards them with equipment, in-game currency, new equipment, and materials with which they can craft new items, allowing them to improve and upgrade their character.
In-game tokens can be purchased with real money, which can then be spent on upgrades to improve your character. You also need tokens in order to respawn if your character is killed, otherwise you have to wait (source: IGN).
Many of the most popular Chinese online gaming titles are free to play, but use the micro-transaction system to generate huge amounts of revenue. By offering players an enthralling experience, with the chance to earn rewards, they are attracting legions of Chinese gamers with large pools of disposable income.
Is your game ready for the Chinese online goldmine?
(Image source: "Games Smartphone Displays Internet Gaming And Entertainment" | www.freedigitalphotos.net)
How to break into the Chinese gaming market as a Western brand
Online Game Marketing for Western Games in China
What do players need and expect from Chinese online gaming?
Top 6 companies in Chinese online gaming

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Sam, Sam, Mythological ManDavid Jones
Vol. 7 No. 8 · 2 May 1985
Sam, Sam, Mythological Man
Motel Chronicles and Hawk Moon
by Sam Shepard.
Faber, 188 pp., £3.95, February 1985, 0 571 13458 0Show More
by Wim Wenders and Sam Shepard.
Ecco, 509 pp., £12.95, January 1985, 0 88001 077 0Show More
The British media finally caught up with the existence of Sam Shepard some eighteen months ago. He had, after all, just been nominated for an Oscar for his performance as Chuck Yeager in the film about the first American astronauts, The Right Stuff. And news of his romance with Jessica Lange, whom he was then partnering in Country, had just broken. Arthur Miller's marriage to Marilyn Monroe had caught the headlines in the past, but to get the girl and join the top league of male box-office stars at the same time was a new story. There was much dissection of Shepard's life-style, the subtleties of his sexual attractiveness, his resemblance to Gary Cooper: but only the occasional small paragraph to indicate that the man under discussion was America's most innovative young dramatist since the late Sixties, had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1978 and certainly hadn't said goodbye to writing yet.
I would like to think Shepard had some control over the two photographs that made the covers of the Colour Supplements at that time. One showed him down on the ranch, in full cowboy gear, with one of his favourite horses. The other showed him in silver spaceman suit, bubble helmet at the ready, about to enact Chuck Yeager. An ironic delight in role-playing is central to Shepard (the fact that the son of a wartime pilot was playing one of America's most famous flyers was given an extra dimension by the fact that Shepard refuses ever to fly himself), but so also is the attempt to harness two main impulses of the American character: nostalgia for the straight old days of the West, and pride in a computerised space-age future.
Shepard has always been an elusive man, with an elusive talent. In Motel Chronicles he tells us that his family have named their eldest son Sam through seven generations. But the mothers have always nicknamed the sons, 'so as not to confuse them with the fathers when hearing their names called in the open air while working side by side in the waist-high wheat'. 'The sons came to believe their names were the nicknames they heard floating across these fields,' Shepard continues, 'and answered to these names building ideas of who they were around the sound never dreaming their real legal name was lying in wait for them written on some paper in Chicago and that name would be the name they'd prefix with "Mr" and that name would be the name they'd die with.' It's one of the strengths of Motel Chronicles that a passage as simple as this can share the resonances of some of the major themes in Shepard's plays: a mythic view of 'family' as perhaps the only continuity possible amid the insecurities of modern America; a preoccupation with the father/son relationship (crucial to Paris, Texas and to his latest play Fool for Love); a romantic belief in the virtues of isolated, rural America as opposed to the city deviousness of, say, Chicago; and a fascination with the precariousness of identity and the importance of names, the name given or the name acquired.
Names are important in the theatre. You can gauge a dramatist's certainty from the rightness of his characters' names, the inevitability of his titles. Shepard has written over forty plays in little over twenty years and there's hardly a dud title among them. Geography of a Horse Dreamer, The Tooth of Crime, Suicide in b Flat, Icarus's Mother, Cowboy Mouth, Forensic and the Navigators: they all arouse expectation without explaining or revealing. The fairground barkers of the old Midwest would have appreciated the technique. Shepard even got to work on his own name. Junked the family name of Rogers and took his second name of Shepard in its place. Samuel Rogers became Sam Shepard.
It's important to understand that what Shepard was renaming was his own existence. He wasn't coming up with a fancy nom de plume. Seven years after his first theatrical success in New York in 1964, he was still claiming to be an accidental, if not totally reluctant dramatist. 'I don't want to be a playwright,' he said in 1971. 'I want to be a rock and roll star ... I got into writing plays because I had nothing else to do. So I started writing to keep from going off the deep end.' Clearly there's an element of bravado in that statement, but it's also true that Shepard has adopted a resolutely non-literary stance throughout his career, a stance which I believe has helped him to achieve the startling immediacy of his best dramatic work. Life comes before Art for Shepard. Writing is usually an inadequate substitute for the event it describes.
It's a point of view that Shepard expressed in callow, aggressive, unpunctuated form in his younger days when he claimed that rock music had made 'movies theatre books painting and art go out the window none of it stands a chance against the Who the Stones and Old Yardbirds Creedence Traffic the Velvet Underground Janis and Jimi ...' Much more penetratingly, in 1980 at a playwrights' workshop in Marin County, he said: 'There is the tendency to trade in experience itself for language, which never really captures it and ultimately cheats the experience. We are always referring our experience to something else as in "this reminds me of ..." There's a sense of hardly ever living in the present, and this kind of nostalgia comes through in the writing.' Here Shepard is touching on the central alertness without which good plays cannot be written.
Although Hawk Moon was not published in the USA till 1981, much of its writing seems to date from the brasher, more belligerent tone of the early Seventies. Described as 'a book of short stories, poems and monologues', there's something scrappy and inconsequential, lightweight, about the collection. There are breathless, unpunctuated prose-poems and cute little seven or eight-liners in free verse in the style of Richard Brautigan. (A Californian professor once plucked a volume of Brautigan out of my hand and hurled it to the ground claiming it was causing the Death of Literacy on the American Campus.) The stories are stronger, but with a maximum length of four pages they are often too tersely anecdotal to gather real momentum. The best are sharp, macabre histories of urban fear and violence. In 'Seven is a number in magic', a bunch of 12-year-old bike-riding Hispanic kids cut off the ear of a nurse they ambush and treat it like a bullfighting trophy. 'Montana' describes a man with a murdered woman in a 23rd Street hotel room in New York. He plasters the body with dollar bills, plays rock music, dresses in full cowboy gear, incinerates the corpse in the shower and goes out to hail a Yellow Checker cab, saying: 'Montana, please.'
What becomes increasingly clear is that Shepard is ill at ease in his own voice (where the poems come from) and not too certain of his role as detached narrator either. The atmosphere is ostentatiously anti-cultural, sometimes gratuitously distasteful; the tone is strident, tough, out to shock. It's like Rimbaud on the rampage, without much trace of the literary talent. Six or seven times, however, he really hits his stride and it's usually when he's dealing with the parts of America he loves; or finds fluency and poise in the monologue of an assumed personality. 'Illinois', for example, celebrates the state where he was born; 'Back in the 1970s' is an account of the hippy invasion of the Canadian backwoods; and 'Claw Cloud' a surrealistic fantasy about a Midwestern farmer plucked off his tractor and whirled out to sea by a tornado. Other fine pieces are 'Voices from the Dead: Cowboy', about a rodeo rider bucked to death by a steer; 'Rhythm', which starts out by describing the standard progression of rock-and-roll chords and turns into a dazzling catalogue of the visual and aural rhythms that can be experienced everywhere in the world outside music, ending with the laconic question, 'And you call yourself a drummer?'; and, most strikingly, 'The Curse of the Raven's Black Feather'.
Here Shepard combines his love of rock music (the piece is an extended musing around the talent of Keith Richard), his preoccupation with the Travelling Man (the narrator is driving north to Canada, and later seems to cover most of the freeways of America), and his superstitious belief in the interventions of Fate (the driver hits a black raven, killing it, and then follows the voice of the raven's feather instructing him to deliver it to the town of Noir in Louisiana, if he is to avoid its curse). It's an example of personal myth-making, with the raven transmuting at various points in the tale into Keith Richard, into the idea of death, into the dark centre of creativity. It's appropriate to the whole collection that the Rolling Stones should be Shepard's heroes:
Keith and Mick. Like brothers. Like evil sisters in disguise. A two-headed beast. The opposite of Paul and John. The dark and the light. I've always been pulled toward darkness. Toward black. Toward death. Toward the South. Good. Now I'm heading the right direction. Away from the quaint North. Away from lobsters and white churches and Civil War graveyards and cracker barrel bazaars. Toward the swamps, the Bayou, the Cajuns, the cotton mouth, the Mardi Gras, the crocodile.
The story exemplifies the imaginative gift which has made Shepard uniquely successful in his attempts to grasp the sensation of the American experience in single play after single play. For Shepard the two Americas exist simultaneously: the mechanised world of motor-car, radio culture, rootlessness and nuclear threat; and the ancient, often mythical world of the Frontier, the Wild West, the prairies, Indian spells and superstitions.
To move from Hawk Moon to Motel Chronicles is to breathe a different air. 'The tallest sky he'd ever seen. The sense of being deep below Heaven. The distance. The clear sight of Time standing still.' I discovered this book on the shelves of the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, just after it had been published there. I travelled on with it through Seattle and Vancouver and back to Los Angeles. I read it carefully, six or seven pages at a time, fearful that its astonishing clarity would not be sustained. When I finished it, I felt, as I still feel, that it gives a more perceptive insight into the nature of being American than any book I know apart from William Carlos Williams's In the American Grain. A special sort of American, of course. Nothing to do with the traditions of the Eastern seaboard or the Deep South. Born in Illinois, but into an Air Force family, Shepard has been travelling from the start. He was brought up in rural Southern California. Spent time in New York, but didn't take to it. Came to England in 1971 and stayed an amazing three years, racing a greyhound at White City, sitting taciturn in the corner of the Royal Court's Sloane Square pub. He's never written about England, but the most popular – and perhaps the best – of his earlier plays, The Tooth of Crime, was written and given its premiere here. Back to America and a ranch and horses; but still travelling, first as the chronicler of Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975, then as surprise film-star in Days of Heaven, Resurrection, Frances and others. The entries in Motel Chronicles are dated from Texas, Utah, Nevada, Wyoming, California, New Mexico. Frontier territory aching with space, but empty of history. Written in motels, the book celebrates a nomadic, rootless, perpetually mobile way of life. It's a continuation of the America Thom Gunn discovered:
At worst, one is in motion; and at best,
Reaching no absolute in which to rest,
One is always nearer by not keeping still.
Motel Chronicles is part-journal, part-autobiography, part-scrapbook. Memories of childhood; meetings with his father (now living hermit-like on the edge of the desert); the strange rituals of rising before dawn to embark on a day's filming. Shepard treats his past as he treats American history in his plays: it's only important if it can live alongside the present. Nudging towards the condition of fable or myth, it must be as vivid as the moment-by-moment rhythm of the play or the life it is summoned to join. Out of this impulse comes the astounding speech in Fool for love where Eddie remembers his father walking him miles across town and out into the country to find the father's other secret family and see for the first time the kid half-sister he is to love for the rest of his life. In Motel Chronicles we are told that the newly-born Shepard wanted to leave the delivery room and walk out into the frozen wastes of Lake Michigan – but the window ledge was too high! The child remembers a circle of floodlit plaster dinosaurs stranded in the prairie spaces of Dakota. Fact hovers continually on the edge of creative fiction. The past is tailored; humorously, vulnerably, to answer the needs of the adult man.
Shepard the playwright was always precociously certain. But in this book Shepard the man has become wiser, more centred. In Hawk Moon you feel a continual effort to seem 'mean' (a favourite Shepard word, in the sense of tough, laconic, taking no shit). That effort now has different dimensions:
Tonight I'm pushing everyone away. I'm camped out by my favourite window and no amount of harmonica playing, rattle of dishes, laughter of voices from other rooms deep in this house can draw me out. The fading light is what I really crave. Cars with their headlights just coming on. Owls testing the fields. This mean streak slowly fades as the real black night rolls in.
I always get weird around Indian Summer. My whole organism feels tricked. Just as the body starts to fall in love with flying golden Poplar leaves. The smell of burning Madrone. The wild lure of Fall gets cut to the bone by Indian Summer.
The people around Shepard are recorded in a series of fiercely affectionate portraits (none more striking than the long, controlled, devastating account of an English friend who suffers a brain haemorrhage). And there is a continual evocation of the untamed open spaces of America with which Shepard identifies – Californian upland, the deserts of Texas and New Mexico, the prairies of the Midwest:
I was deep into eighty acres of sprouting new pasture and my head wouldn't stop ... I was wondering how far to go. Exactly the same question I'd had before when swimming out in the ocean. What's the point where it becomes dangerous to go any further? And I recognised that the point of wondering comes when you think you've gone too far.
Travis, the central figure of Paris, Texas strides across the landscapes of Big Bend and Fort Stockton, Texas, as a man who has gone too far, but arrived nowhere. In the wake of a wrecked and violent marriage, he has taken to the road, a disconnected derelict. Not simply rootless, he spends the first quarter of the story as a man without memory, or even language, nursing some dark inner wound. With great delicacy Shepard charts his return to human warmth and commitment through his relationship with the young son he left behind five years before. With his resolve to find the boy's mother Travis implicitly acknowledges the pointlessness of continually walking towards the horizon and the justice of his brother's reaction when he finds him travelling the road: 'Would you mind telling me where you're headed? What's out there? There's nothing out there.' Wim Wenders, the film's German director, was credited with bringing a detached European curiosity to the discovery of a new, exotic side of America. His achievement was, rather, to realise with great visual flair the landscape and fractured personalities of Shepard's individual American vision. Only at the end of the film did an uncharacteristic sentimentality and verbosity intrude to mute the final impact.
The handsomely produced Paris, Texas is a detailed commemoration of the movie. Or is it an embalming? I doubt whether the book can have much resonance for anyone who has not previously seen the film; and even for those who have seen it, though it can work as a memory aid, there is something profoundly unsatisfactory about transmuting a film into a series of stills, however numerous, large and lavish in their colour reproduction. Movies move: stills are fixed, frozen, dead. You would need the temperament of a butterfly-collector to enjoy these pinned-down moments, though there is a haunting quality about some of the close-ups of Harry Dean Stanton's face as Travis, and about those high, desolate Texan skies. The use of a double-page spread for all the frames also fractures some of the images irredeemably. The most valuable section of the book is the script itself. A pity its printing is small and spidery, and French, German and English versions run down each page in narrow, competitive columns. I would have thought a running counterpoint between dialogue and visuals (text and freeze-frames are firmly segregated) would have made for a much more stimulating book. The admission that the text is a description of the finished film, 'not the screenplay as it was written by Sam Shepard before the film went into shooting', makes one very curious as to whether some of the film's final portentousness may be the responsibility of Wenders rather than Shepard.
Like William Carlos Williams, Shepard came and took a hard look at Europe, then turned his back on it. He remains resolutely a Redskin. His achievement has been to avoid the naivety and macho sentimentality of Kerouac and the Beat boys, his predecessors on the road. Ironically, too, his interest in those who live near the edge, people who travel with the minimum of emotional and historical baggage, aligns him with the best of Existentialism, even though he has come at it by quite a different route, learning it from life and the folklore of the Frontier, rather than in the lecture-halls of the Sorbonne. The dependence on the present moment can seem culturally shallow, but it's a valid response to the America Shepard takes as his theme. And it's a crucial stance for the dramatist: from it come the coiled energy, the explosive resonance, and the sheer high spirits that have made his last three plays, Buried Child, True West and Fool for Love, some of the most exhilarating dramatic work of recent years. They all achieve what Shepard has described as the crucial element in theatre: 'writing that leaps off the page and is alive IN THE AIR'.
David Jones is an Associate Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company and a freelance film and television director. His recent work includes the film version of Harold Pinter's Betrayal, Shakespeare's Pericles for BBC Television, and the Haymarket Theatre revival of Old Times.
Vol. 7 No. 10 · 6 June 1985
SIR: One small point about David Jones's excellent review of Sam Shepard's work (LRB, 2 May) – Hawk Moon was not published in the US in 1981, as stated, but by Black Sparrow Press in 1973.


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Found 3 collections related to Walsh, Frank P.
Maloney, William Joseph Marie Alois, 1881-
Maloney collection of Irish historical papers, 1857-1965 [bulk 1913-1922]
Manuscripts and Archives Division | MssCol 1854
4.51 linear feet (11 boxes, 2 volumes, 4 oversize folders)
William J. Maloney was a neurologist and a member of the Irish independence movement in the United States. The Maloney Collection of Irish Historical Papers contains material relating to the history of Ireland from the beginning of the Fenian... more
William J. Maloney was a neurologist and a member of the Irish independence movement in the United States. The Maloney Collection of Irish Historical Papers contains material relating to the history of Ireland from the beginning of the Fenian movement to the proclamation of the Irish Republic. The collection includes papers by and about Sir Roger Casement, 1882-1965, reflecting his activities in the United States as a spokesman for Irish independence, and in Germany as a fundraiser for the Irish Volunteers and organizer of the Irish Brigade; papers of Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, 1898-1937, relating to the history of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood and the Fenian Brotherhood; papers of Joseph McGarrity, 1911-1937, relating to the Irish Republican Movement in the United States; papers of Patrick McCartan, 1914-1949, including reports on conditions in Ireland after the Easter Rising in 1916 and copies of reports as envoy of the Provisional Government of Ireland to the Soviet Union; letters to David James O'Donoghue, 1888-1905, regarding his writing; records of the Joint Committee on the Immigration Act of 1924; correspondence of the Friends of Irish Freedom, 1919-1922, relative to the Irish bond certificate campaign; papers of William J. Maloney relating to Sir Roger Casement, the Irish Volunteer movement, and Irish-American relations. The collection also includes numerous pamphlets, booklets, periodicals and press releases. less
Walsh, Frank P.
Frank P. Walsh papers, 1896-1939 [bulk 1920-1939]
168 linear feet (151 boxes, 94 v.)
Francis Patrick Walsh (1864-1939), an American lawyer and political reformer, was one of the chief architects of the legislative struggle against industrial exploitation of children and an advocate of Irish and anti-imperialist causes. He also... more
Francis Patrick Walsh (1864-1939), an American lawyer and political reformer, was one of the chief architects of the legislative struggle against industrial exploitation of children and an advocate of Irish and anti-imperialist causes. He also fought for civil liberties and was a labor partisan and staunch New Dealer. Collection consists of correspondence, 1907-1939, with professional and political colleagues, friends, family, and others. There also are correspondence and papers, 1915-1939, concerning Irish affairs, the Committee on Industrial Relations, Louise Bryant, the Democratic National Committee, National Progressive League for F.D.R., the 1929 strike of textile workers in Passaic, N.J., the Spanish Civil War, and the Tom Mooney case. The rest of the collection consists of papers relating to Walsh's legal practice; some photographs of Walsh, his family, Eamon De Valera and others; a few posters dealing with Tom Mooney; and clippings, periodicals, newsletters, bulletins and other printed material about civil liberties, the Democratic Party, the Spanish Civil War, the National Woman's Party, child labor, the labor movement, and World War I and the Paris Peace Conference. less
Mooney, Thomas J., 1882-1942
Thomas J. Mooney papers, 1916-1924
.5 linear feet (1 box)
Thomas Joseph Mooney (1882-1942) was an American labor leader. Mooney's conviction with Warren K. Billings for exploding a bomb during a San Francisco preparedness day in 1916 caused worldwide controversy. Mooney's sentence was commuted to life... more
Thomas Joseph Mooney (1882-1942) was an American labor leader. Mooney's conviction with Warren K. Billings for exploding a bomb during a San Francisco preparedness day in 1916 caused worldwide controversy. Mooney's sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 1918. Collection consists of letters, telegrams, depositions, and various records (some photocopies) used as exhibits in the trial of Mooney and later used in efforts to release him. Also, press clippings regarding his conviction and imprisonment, 1916-1924, mostly from San Francisco newspapers with some from New York and Washington, D.C.; several labor journals and copies of Tom Mooney's Monthly, 1920, a digest of articles written about Mooney in American newspapers. Also, correspondence with Frank P. Walsh, Mooney's lawyer, and other materials. less
Indicates that portions of this collection have been
digitized and are available online.


There are more national parks in South America than countries in the world, and in the case of countries like Venezuela for example, national parks, reserves and protected areas cover over a fifth of the territory.
But this is hardly surprising on a continent as varied and large as South America, and yet many of the parks go unnoticed by tourists. While Galapagos and Torres del Paine are familiar names to anyone who has traveled to South America, there are countless other parks that are decidedly worth of a lengthy visit.
Most people spending their holidays in Colombia end up visiting Cartagena at some point – it is the most popular destination in the country, after all. Cartagena is a city with several faces, and two of them are overrun with travelers most of the year. The resort areas with high rise hotels along Bocagrande strip, where beach bums and luxury travelers alike come to enjoy the sun and the ocean. But history buffs are attracted to the colonial walled city, which flourished after the 16th century.
Cartagena was founded by Spanish conquistadors on the site of a small indigenous village, and the growing town rose to fame, was targeted by pirates and then became one of the first sanctuaries of freed African slaves in the Americas. Here's a traveler's guide to historical Cartagena that will give you a taste of the wonders of this city.
Bookworm travelers rarely leave on a trip without bringing either a few beloved paperbacks with them, or, more recently, an e-reader full of interesting new books. But there are other ways as well for a literature geek to indulge in their passion for the written word while they are traveling.
We live in a world where pollution is an increasingly serious problem, and at the same time traveling in one's free time is also far more widespread then in the past thanks to the development of new technologies that allow people to go from one place to another quicker and more safely.
Childhood love for castles, forts and all the accessories that come with it is rarely completely overcome, and as a grown up traveler, anyone can indulge in their secret (or not so secret) love for castles in several destinations where castles are considered to be a very serious business.


Joe is National co-leader of the Blake's Arbitration group. He regularly advises on domestic and international arbitrations as counsel and is available for appointment as arbitrator. He is a member of the ICC Canadian Arbitration Committee, the American Arbitration Association's International Centre for Dispute Resolution (ICDR) Panel of Arbitrators and the Domestic and International Arbitration Panels of the British Columbia International Commercial Arbitration Centre (BCICAC).


ALLERGEN WARNING: Made in a facility that processes peanuts and tree nuts.
Stir well after opening, ingredients tend to settle after shipping.
Our Fresh Ground Process gives our nut butters their unique taste and texture, and allows us to preserve the integrity of all the wonderful ingredients. Our dry roasted sunflower seeds are blended with cold pressed sunflower oil, which is high in Omega 3's and 6's. Our organic, non-GMO honey can help with allergies, is good for gastrointestinal health, and is low on the glycemic index. You won't experience a sugar crash on a spoonful of Sunflower Butter Bliss. We also use a hint of sea-salt, keeping this product as simple as possible. The end result is a tasty treat that is great for the body and good for the soul.
Nutrition Facts Serv. Size 2 Tbsp (32g), Servings About 11, Amount Per Serving: Calories 200, Calories from Fat 160, Total Fat 17g (27% DV), Sat. Fat 2g (9% DV), Trans Fat 0g, Sodium 170mg (6% DV), Total Carbohydrate 8g (3% DV), Dietary Fiber 2g (9% DV), Sugars 4g, Protein 4g, Vitamin A (0% DV), Vitamin C (0% DV) Calcium (0% DV), Iron (4% DV).
Ingredients Roasted sunflower seeds, sunflower seed oil, organic raw honey, sea salt.


The sport of gymnastics has many layers and levels of participation and like many activities your son or daughter may participate in; they can do so as a hobby or you can pursue it to the fullest reaches it can provide. At Chalky Mountain we aim to provide gymnastics instruction that provides a foundation for whatever pursuit you wish. Our simple mission is to teach through the sport of gymnastics "a happy and healthy youth lifestyle".
Gymnastics professionals continually preach the overall benefits of a gymnastics education that far outweigh those of other "traditional sports"! At any level of gymnastics participation, full body preparation and development occur. Because of this gymnastics is the sport for all sports.
Gymnastics also correlates well with educational growth. Figuring out a process, problem solving, constant persistence to achieve success, dealing with failure and confidence in oneself are key attributes to the overall education process and gymnastics development can provide, strengthen and enhance these in students. You wont find any other sports related activity that provides a solid foundation in both gross motor and cognitive development in preschool aged students!
So what is the difference between competitive and instructional gymnastics?
In short the difference between a competitive program and an instructional program is intensity, time and money.
A competitive program pushes development by spending greater amounts of time per day per week practicing. Because of the greater amounts of time spent in the gym, a competitive program develops gymnastics skills faster but comes a greater expense. A competitive program also develops gymnastics skills for competition readiness to achieve success as a competitor in the designated level. There are multiple levels with increasing difficulty with every advancement. Competitive gymnasts typically work out as little as 4 hrs. a week and as many as 22-30 hrs. a week.
An instructional program aims to develop the same foundations and skill development at a slower pace. The intensity is greatly decreased as is the expense. Because there is a much smaller practice window, skill and concept development will be slower and happen over a greater span of time. Development typically happens at the child's own pace, where expectations meet their desired level of participation and not the other way around. An instructional gymnast will work out an hour to and hour and a half one time a week. An instructional program typically is the beginning point on the road to becoming a competitive gymnast.
How then is Chalky Mountains Gymnastics program designed?
What Chalky Mountain provides is an instructional approach designated by a level structure. We've established levels to help foster a passion for the sport while providing structure and appropriate development and intensity levels. Our programs are age based and skill based providing avenues that address each student's individual needs and or readiness. Our programs allow for the rate of development that is right for each student and that it happens on their timetable not ours.
We use progress reports regularly to update parents. Our progress reports help establish goals, recognize achievement, and encourage development.
We engage, encourage, educate, and entertain our gymnasts daily to give each and every one an enjoyable and beneficial experience. Our program is built to provide the wonderful aspects of gymnastics to any participant.
As for the competitive side, Chalky Mountain has always had a good relationship with Liberty Gymnastics Academy. Their mission is to foster the competitive gymnast and offers a variety of competitive programs. "Positive Progress Though Simple Discipline" is their goal! Our two programs marry well and together we foster the love of gymnastics and what this sport can do for us.


Many OEMs are still omitting dedicated Facebook apps, but the Facebook Messenger app is available off the Google Play store.
We assume no responsibility for accuracy of price information provided by merchants. Store ratings and product reviews are written and submitted by online shoppers to assist you as you shop. We take no responsibility for the content of ratings and reviews submitted by users.Messenger also supports sending of photos, searched images and voice messages.Facebook's custom mobile smileys are also available, as well as the new 'stickers' featuring massive smileys and cute kittys.Another app that is included by some OEMs and not others is Twitter.The ever popular, 140 character social media site has a dedicated app for reading and sending tweets available from the Play Store, should you not have it.Replacing your existing home launcher with a dedicated Facebook launcher.Facebook Home brings Facebook messaging right to the heart of your device.Among the many features are a paid version to remove ads, downloadable language packs and themes; think your i Phone is cool, look I can make my Android look the same.Emoji are available, and custom smileys to use instead of the native offering. Of the more interesting features are the ability to schedule texts so that you don't forget something important, or so that you don't have to wake up at 4am to send THAT text, and the ability to customise notifications.Its inclusion in a list of best messaging apps might seem a little strange, given that it is at heart a social media site.Then again, what is social media for if not for communicating with your nearest and dearest, and in Twitters case, everyone else as well.


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Blues Highways
Colin James
Label: True North Records
Review Date: October 4, 2016
Six-time Juno Award-winning singer/guitarist/songwriter Colin James will release his 18th album, Blue Highways, on October 14 via True North Records, distributed in the U.S. by E1 Entertainment.
Blue Highways was co-produced by Colin and Dave Meszaros (Wake Owl, Old Man Canyon) and recorded at The Warehouse Studios in Vancouver. The new album pays tribute to some of Colin's long-time blues idols, including Howlin' Wolf, Jimmy Reed, Freddie King, Jr. Wells, Buddy Guy, Peter Green, Robert Johnson and William Bell to name a few.
In the spring of 2015, Colin wrapped up his "Hearts on Fire" album tour. After a couple of months of straight touring, Colin was loving playing with the band and really happy with the sound they had created on stage. What better time to make an album? Especially the album Colin had been itching to make for years - a collection of some of his favorite blues tracks. In less than a week, Colin and his touring band went into The Warehouse Studios in Vancouver, and in just two days, Blue Highways was born.
The lead single, "Going Down," inspired by the great Freddie King, features Colin James (vocal/lead guitar), backed by Geoff Hicks (drums), Steve Pelletier (bass), Jesse O'Brien (piano) and Craig Northey (rhythm guitar).
Already inducted into the Canadian Music Industry Hall of Fame, Colin James has been named as an inductee into the 2016 Western Canadian Music Hall of Fame. In addition to this honor, Colin will be headlining the Western Canadian Music Awards Show on October 13.
Colin James Hits The Open Road
Colin James, Blues Highways


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Adel S. Elmaghraby
Prof. Dr. Adel S. Elmaghraby
Director of Industrial Research and Innovation at University of Louisville
Professor Adel S. Elmaghraby is the Director of Industrial Research and Innovation and Winnia Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Speed School of Engineering – University of Louisville. He has also held appointments at the Software Engineering Institute – Carnegie-Mellon University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He advised over 60 master's graduates and 25 doctoral graduates. His research contributions and consulting spans the areas of Intelligent Multimedia Systems, Neural Networks, PDCS, Visualization, AI, and Simulation. His research applications include Smart Cities, Data Analytics, Medical Imaging, Bioinformatics, and Computer-Aided Diagnostics. He is a well-published author, a public speaker, member of editorial boards, and technical reviewer. He was recognized for his achievements by several professional organizations including a Golden Core Membership Award by the IEEE Computer Society at the 50th anniversary celebration. Dr. Elmaghraby continued collaborations, mentoring, and scientific contributions have resulted in research funding, international collaboration, and published articles in many prestigious journals such as IEEE-TMI, Medical Physics, Journal of Neuroscience Methods, and Protein Engineering. He is the former President and lifetime member of the Association of Egyptian American Scholars.
The AI Journey: A Vision into the Future Guided from the Past
The future is Artificial Intelligence (AI) according to all predictions and that has created a frenzy of investments in products, academic programs, and political agendas. The recent advances in AI have given us more confidence on its adoption in many fields, and those will be discussed in the context of its perceived value to industry, health and society. Examples of its revolutionary impact on those areas will be discussed in addition to its effect on employment and the educational system. The rise in research and interest in areas such as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and others who discuss the dangers of AI and its effects on security and privacy.
The future promises of AI are bright and shiny, but we need to relate it to the past. Humanity has aspired to automation since the ancient Geeks and the Pharos. Early understanding of machine intelligence and formulation of ideas and coining the Artificial Intelligence have emerged in the 1950s, successes and failures have been the drivers of funding and research cycles. So, understanding the past should help us filter our expectations and better predict the future.
www.linkedin.com/in/adelelmaghraby/


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Tourism, Heritage and Culture
Constituency Office
Hon. Tammy Scott-Wallace, MLA
Hon. TAMMY SCOTT-WALLACE
Kyle Bolt
This week, the provincial, federal and municipal governments announced $15.4 million in funding for the Hampton Regional Multipurpose Facility.
"Improving the community and recreation infrastructure will promote an active and healthy lifestyle for the residents of Hampton and the entire region," said Environment and Climate Change Minister Gary Crossman, who is also minister responsible for the Regional Development Corporation. "The Town of Hampton and surrounding communities have been pursuing this investment for a number of years, so it is great to see it become a reality with today's announcement."
The 6,003 sq. metre (66,700 sq. ft.) facility will be built on a 1.2 hectare (30-acre) parcel of land owned by the town in the William Bell Drive Business Park. It will house an ice surface, changing rooms, washrooms, bleachers, walking track, one large community room space, leisure services offices, as well a lounge and canteen. The provision of an elevator will make the facility wheelchair accessible.
"Recreation facilities are at the heart of Canadian communities," said Saint John-Rothesay MP Wayne Long. "The new multipurpose facility in Hampton will be a wonderful space for people to connect and enjoy the activities they love. Canada's infrastructure plan invests in thousands of projects, creates jobs across the country, and builds cleaner, more inclusive communities."
Long spoke for federal Infrastructure and Communities Minister Catherine McKenna.
The federal government is investing more than $6.2 million towards the project through the Community, Culture and Recreation Infrastructure Stream of the Investing in Canada Infrastructure Program. The provincial government, through the Regional Development Corporation, is providing more than $3.9 million while the Town of Hampton and several local service districts are contributing more than $5.3 million.
"What an amazing day for recreation in the Greater Hampton Region. Through collaboration, communication and co-operation, the Town of Hampton and our neighbouring local service districts have successfully worked together to develop the Hampton Regional Multipurpose Facility," said Mayor Robert Doucet. "With today's announcement, we look forward to breaking ground, thanks in large part to our funding partnership with our federal and provincial counterparts. When this much-anticipated facility opens, its operations will include representation from the local service districts and the Town of Hampton, making this a truly regional recreation facility."
In 2016, the surrounding Local Service District's of Upham, Hampton, Norton and a portion of Springfield voted to financially support this project through property tax contributions.
The existing arena is 44 years old, has reached the end of its useful life and cannot meet the growing demand for recreation and sports programming. Once completed, the new space will serve an estimated 1,400 users per week.
Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal Ceremony - Sussex-Fundy-St. Martins
Ringing in Lunar New Year with the Chinese Cultural Association of NB
Remembering Viola Léger
Constituency Office Address and Hours
77 Wheeler Road, Four Corners, NB
E4G 2W5
9 am - 2 pm Tuesday to Thursday
Tammy.Scott-Wallace@gnb.ca
ֿPlease fill out the form:
Your message will be sent to my email and the constituency office.
© 2023 by the office of Hon. Tammy Scott-Wallace, MLA. All rights reserved.


"Wonnie is a brave girl who came out at just thirteen years old. She found support in her parents and taught herself to live life to its fullest. Wonnie belongs to a friendly LGBT community in Philadelphia. She produces Come Out!, a podcast that has become a platform for gay-lesbian-trans teens. Her love life is also at its peak, and Rebecca, Wonnie's girlfriend, wants to get married. Funny, romantic and honest, this novel follows a day in the life of Wonnie"-- Page  of cover.


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El cormo es una forma de organización del cuerpo de las plantas vasculares. Es una estructura diferenciada en tejidos que están organizados en dos órganos: raíz y vástago. El vástago normalmente puede diferenciarse en tallo y hojas. Cada órgano posee una función distinta: la raíz tiene la función de absorber agua y sales, el vástago tiene la función de fotosintetizar. Si el vástago está diferenciado en tallo y hojas, el tallo tiene la función de sostén. Un sistema de haces vasculares vincula a la raíz y el vástago, llevando el agua y las sales al vástago a través del xilema, y llevando los productos de la fotosíntesis a las raíces a través del floema.

Términos botánicos

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


People joke about being addicted to their cell phones, but recent research suggests it's no laughing matter. A recent study found people were more likely to give in to cravings to use social media than they were to give in to satisfy other desires. That little blue bird may seem harmless enough, but are we on the verge of becoming a nation of insatiable Twitter junkies? Learn more about your brain—on Twitter.


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Geography - Malta Geography - Mexico Geography - South and Central America Geography - South East Asia Geography - Thailand Geography - Uruguay
PV Inverter Intelligence Service (1)
Solar Intelligence Service - North America (1)
Exemption of bifacial cell technology from Section 201 measures to accelerate switch from mono to bifacial cell lines outside of China and drive demand in the United States
Jessica Jin | Edurne Zoco, PhD | Camron Barati | Maria Chea | June 17, 2019
On 13 June 2019, United States Federal trade authorities ruled that bifacial solar modules will be exempt from Section 201 tariffs, as outlined in a notice from the Office of the United States Trade Representative. The ruling will dramatically increase demand for bifacial solar modules in the United States due to the opportunity of avoiding tariff rates of 15% to 25% through February 2022, in addition to the benefits of higher efficiencies and energy yields associated with such products. IHS Markit expects that demand for bifacial modules in the United States will be primarily served by manufacturing lines across Southeast Asia, as products shipped from China will still face antidumping and Section 301 tariffs that will make them less competitive.
Solar Capacity in Central America to Surge, as Tenders Put Region on the Photovoltaic Map
Josefin Berg | September 11, 2014
Set to install an impressive 1.5 gigawatts (GW) of photovoltaic (PV) capacity within a six-year period through 2018, Central America is attracting attention from PV developers from around the world, according to a new report from IHS Technology (NYSE: IHS).
TBEA SunOasis Set to Overtake First Solar as World's Largest Solar EPC Company in 2014
Josefin Berg | May 15, 2014
U.S.-based First Solar delivered on expectations in 2013 to become the leading Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) company in the global photovoltaic (PV) industry, even though it is likely to be surpassed in 2014 by Chinese EPC TBEA SunOasis, according to a new report from IHS Technology.
US to Dodge Solar Shortage This Year Even Amid New Antidumping Fines on Chinese Module Suppliers
A long-running battle in the global photovoltaic (PV) market between the United States and China over antidumping and subsidy charges could expand into higher solar costs, with wide-ranging ramifications for the U.S. if punitive tariffs are levied on Taiwanese cells.


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Dalitdiva
TRANSMEDIA ARTIST/THEORIST/FUTURIST
Thenmozhi Soundararajan is a transmedia artist who believes story is the most important unit of social change. Through her work she explores the possibilities of liberation while also experimenting in the ways stories change over platforms, languages, borders, and dreams
Growing up Dalit-American, Thenmozhi was driven to tell the stories of marginalized communities. Upon graduating from UC Berkeley, she founded the international media training organization Third World Majority, and spearheaded digital storytelling seminars in the U.S., France, Tunisia, Venezuela, Brazil, South Africa, and India - in total over 300 communities around the world. In 2003, she was featured in Utne Reader as one of the "Top Visionaries Under 30", and profiled in The Source as one of the "Top Ten Political Forces in Hip Hop". She was also in residence at the MIT Center for Reflective Community Practice, writing about future narratives. That research inspired her transition to becoming a transmedia creator and her training at the USC School of Cinematic Arts.
Thenmozhi's work has been recognized by Producers Guild of America Diversity Program, Magnum Foundation, Soros Photography Project, Lincoln Center, Women in the World Summit, Daily Beast, Elle India, Producers Guild of America Diversity Program, The Museum of Contemporary Art, The Annenberg Innovation Center, Slamdance, MIT Center for New Media Studies, The Sorbonne, The Hague, V-Day, The National Center for the Humanities, The National Science Foundation, The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Utne Reader, The National Center for the Humanities, The National Science Foundation, and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. She is currently an inaugural Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellow.
All TRANSMEDIA ARTIST/THEORIST/FUTURIST


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phrases, sayings, proverbs and idioms at
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Home | Search | Phrase Dictionary | A nod is as good as a wink
The meaning and origin of the expression: A nod is as good as a wink
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A nod is as good as a wink
What's the meaning of the phrase 'A nod is as good as a wink'?
'A nod is as good as a wink' expresses the idea that, to a person who is ready to understand or undertake something, any subtle signalling of it is sufficient. The context is usually of some undertaking that is borderline illegal or of sexual innuendo.
What's the origin of the phrase 'A nod is as good as a wink'?
This proverbial saying sounds as if it might be quite modern but it is in fact a 16th century phrase originating in England. The longer version of the phrase is 'a nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse'. It might seem that this is just an elaboration of the shorter version, but it appears that the 'blind horse' version was in fact the original. The earliest examples of the proverb in print all give the fuller version, for example, in the Letters of the English lawyer and writer Joseph Ritson, February 1793:
A nod, you know, is as good as a wink to a blind horse.
It seems intuitive to interpret the longer version as meaning 'neither a nod nor a wink has any purpose, both being equally pointless'. Nevertheless, the context of the early uses has it being used with the same apparent meaning as the short version, that is, 'you may nod or wink - I will take your meaning either way'.
During the 19th century the expression began to be shortened and the blind horse was left at home. Citations from that period use the form 'a nod is as good as a wink etc.', which clearly indicates that the later usage was simply a shorthand way of writing the original.
More recently, the expression has gained currency in the form of "a nod is as good as a wink to a blind bat", which Eric Idle used in his 'Nudge, nudge' sketch in Monty Python's Flying Circus. The character Idle played was a nonsense-talking fool who came out with a string of meaningless innuendos. The choice of bat was knowing, as bats are generally regarded as blind and so calling the creature a blind bat emphasized the ridiculousness of the character's gabble... and, before anyone writes in, I know that bats aren't really blind.
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"Welcome to Groundhog Day," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote Monday in a caustic response to Justice Stephen Breyer's dissent. In the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in Glossip v. Gross which reaffirmed states' right to execute prisoners by lethal injection, Scalia bemoaned what he called a familiar scene in which petitioners "sentenced to die for crimes they committed" appeal to the cruel and unusual punishment clause of the Eighth Amendment. Not only is the scene familiar, so are many of the arguments. Large portions of Breyer's dissent and Scalia's response centered on the classical debate over the effectiveness of the death penalty as a deterrent. One long forgotten argument against deterrence theory and capital punishment is buried in the newspaper of the Norfolk Prison Colony (now called the Massachusetts Correctional Institute). The 1949 debate response was written by a 25-year-old prisoner named Malcolm Little, who had already adopted the surname: X.
"The Abolishment of Capitol Punishment," as it appeared in the January 1950 edition of the prison paper The Colony.
Norfolk was considered a model prison community, with buildings arranged like a college campus, a community center, dormitories around a quadrangle, and a well-stocked library. It harkened to an era of penal reform that focused on rehabilitation and education. Malcolm X, who was serving a sentence of 8-to-10 years for breaking and entering and larceny, outlined his reasons for requesting a transfer to the prison : "My sole purpose for wanting to go to Norfolk was the educational facilities that aren't in these other institutions . . . There are many things that I would like to learn that would be of use to me when I regain my freedom." One of the opportunities that he took advantage of at Norfolk was its debate team, which frequently debated – and defeated – teams from the Ivy League, from the 1930s to the 1970s.
The debates took place several times a month, and were typically held at the prison's assembly hall with music provided by the Colony's orchestra. Teams were judged by a three-person rotating panel of academics, lawyers, and other professionals. Audiences sometimes swelled with hundreds of spectators and prisoners.
Malcolm X's final point gestures to the arguments made by Justice Breyer in his dissent about the arbitrary and discriminatory nature of death sentence convictions. Breyer cites several studies documenting race, gender, and geography as crucial factors in capital sentencing. Malcolm X did not make an explicit argument about race, but statistics since 1976 bear out the role that it has played in the death penalty. Although African Americans represent 12 percent of the population, nearly 35 percent of those executed since the reinstatement of capital punishment in Gregg v. Georgia have been black. A 2003 study in Maryland found its death row population to be 67 percent black despite a statewide population of only 28 percent. In every single capital case the victims were white. (Maryland did away with capital punishment last January.) What Malcolm X pointed out in 1949, was that deterrence theory relied on a flawless justice system, which simply did not – and does not – exist.
While the Supreme Court's decision in Glossip v. Gross again put the burden back on the shoulders of death row prisoners, asking that they provide more "humane" alternatives to the lethal injections substances such as midazolam, Justice Breyer's dissent opened a larger debate about the constitutionality of capital punishment under the Eighth Amendment. Malcolm X's critique of capital punishment penned as a young inmate long before he became an international advocate for racial justice, reminds us of the rich history of death penalty abolitionism. And the circumstances of the debate should recall something else we have forsaken, if not forgotten: the possibilities of a penal system that emphasizes reform and education over punishment and retribution.
Garrett Felber is a PhD student at the University of Michigan finishing a dissertation on the Nation of Islam. He is the co-author of The Portable Malcolm X Reader (Penguin, 2013).


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Tales from the Cincinnati Bearcats Locker Room
by Michael Perry (Author) and Nick Lachey (Introduction author)
Tales from the Cincinnati Bearcats Locker Room covers 10 coaching eras, from former National Football League standout John Socko? Wiethe (1946-52) to Mick Cronin, the Cincinnati native who returned to his alma mater in 2006 and resurrected the program. Former Cincinnati Enquirer sports editor Michael Perry, a former UC basketball beat reporter, interviewed more than 85 former players, coaches, recruits, and basketball staff members to deliver a comprehensive look… (more)
Tales from the Cincinnati Bearcats Locker Room covers 10 coaching eras, from former National Football League standout John Socko? Wiethe (1946-52) to Mick Cronin, the Cincinnati native who returned to his alma mater in 2006 and resurrected the program. Former Cincinnati Enquirer sports editor Michael Perry, a former UC basketball beat reporter, interviewed more than 85 former players, coaches, recruits, and basketball staff members to deliver a comprehensive look inside the Bearcat basketball program.
The book takes readers into locker rooms, practices, and game huddles as it recounts memorable moments and unforgettable games, including the Bearcats? record-setting seven-overtime victory over Bradley in 1981; UC's controversial 24-11 loss to Kentucky in 1983; and that fateful day, March 9, 2000, when National Player of the Year Kenyon Martin lay crumpled on the basketball court in Memphis, Tennessee.
Fans will also read about Hall of Famer Jack Twyman registering for classes at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh in 1951 before deciding to attend Cincinnati; former coach Ed Badger hitchhiking in the snow to see a recruit in Pennsylvania; and Tony Yates finding a first-team All-Metro Conference player in a former marching band member in Macon, Mississippi. This reissue, which also provides insight into the Bob Huggins era, makes for a rollicking trip down memory lane, and, for those who did not start following the team until more recently, a fun history lesson.
Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Sports Publishing imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in sportsbooks about baseball, pro football, college football, pro and college basketball, hockey, or soccer, we have a book about your sport or your team.
Whether you are a New York Yankees fan or hail from Red Sox nation; whether you are a die-hard Green Bay Packers or Dallas Cowboys fan; whether you root for the Kentucky Wildcats, Louisville Cardinals, UCLA Bruins, or Kansas Jayhawks; whether you route for the Boston Bruins, Toronto Maple Leafs, Montreal Canadiens, or Los Angeles Kings; we have a book for you. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to publishing books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked by other publishers and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
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Publisher: Sports Publishing (October 14, 2014)
Collection: Tales from the Team
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Honda Sidelines Fred Savage for John Cena in Move to Toughen its Image
Originally Posted On
The WWE star replaces 'Wonder Years' actor as the voiceover of Honda's ads, which are getting a makeover in bid to boost truck and SUV sales
Honda is leaving the "Wonder Years" for the wrestling ring. WWE star and actor John Cena is replacing Fred Savage as the new voice of the brand in a major marketing pivot aimed at giving its ads a more rugged tone.
The switch—which begins today with a new ad from longtime Honda agency RPA—comes as the automaker tries to boost its SUV and pickup truck sales. Trucks, vans and SUVs will account for 76% of U.S. auto sales this year, according to consultancy AlixPartners. But Honda's sales are still about 50% cars and 50% trucks/SUVs, according to Ed Beadle, Honda's assistant VP for integrated marketing. "We would like to keep those sedan buyers but grow that proportion of SUVs," he says.
Savage—forever linked to the TV show "Wonder Years" that ended its run in 1993—had been voicing Honda's ads since 2014. He was seen as an unconventional pick with a boyish persona and higher-pitched voice that stood out in an industry that often deploys more grizzled, leading men types for voice-overs. Ford uses Bryan Cranston, for instance, while Mercedes-Benz has Jon Hamm.
But Savage fit the off-beat tone Honda had used for years with ads that often veered away from the sheet-metal-heavy approach of other auto marketing. In 2016, for instance, Honda ran a Super Bowl ad featuring a flock of sheep singing Queen's "Somebody to Love," followed by a spot plugging its Ridgeline truck with stop-motion art. Its 2017 Big Game ad for the CR-V featured younger versions of nine A-list celebrities springing from the pages of their high-school yearbooks.
The new ad takes pains to portray Honda in a more masculine light, with a heavy emphasis on demonstrating the mud-splattering off-road capability of the 2021 Passport and Pilot SUVs and the redesigned Ridgeline pickup. "Don't let the attention to detail lead you to believe that a Honda is a delicate machine," Cena says in the ad, before exhaling, "you'd be wrong."
"We are definitely going more product-focused now," Beadle says. "The schtick is probably not going to be a recurring thing," he adds, referring to the old creative approach.
As for the voice-over switch, "Fred was great but Fred reflected a key word—and that key word was nice," he says. The brand wanted a "sound that had more gravitas to it and more room to grow, and if you look at John Cena's work, that guy does such a breadth of work, from family films to the tough guy image … he's a car guy," he adds, alluding to his role in the next installment of the "Fast & Furious" film franchise.
Honda did not release financial terms of its deal with Cena. It covers voiceover work only, but Beadle says the brand will "leave open the door to possibilities." He will voice all Honda ads, including for its passenger cars.
Honda is even toughening up the mnemonic that begins its ads. For years it had used a two-beat doorbell sound matching the two-syllable Honda name. The new ad starts with the thump-thump of a drum. "It just starts it off with a rough-and-tough feel," Beadle says.
Ruggedness race
With the changes, Honda risks blending in with other car ads and losing a bit of its family-friendly charm. Honda has long been associated with the "suburban lifestyle" and "known for its innovations in engines, high quality, low cost of ownership and an extremely loyal customer base," says Maryann Keller, an auto analyst and principal at Maryann Keller & Associates LLC.
But "American consumers have moved away from standard sedans, tipping the market toward pickup trucks and SUVs where Honda lacks in the most profitable segment, which are also their most rugged models," she says. "Honda has to demonstrate that its SUVs can go off road, carry lots of passengers and camping gear."
"There seems to be something of a performance/ruggedness race more relevant to today's consumer, just as quality, lower cost to ownership consumer demands [were key] in the 1980s, 90s and 2000s," Keller adds.
Beadle says Honda is not veering from its brand DNA. He points to Cena's reputation as a down-to-earth celeb as a trait that fits nicely with Honda's ethos. The actor is very active with the Make-A-Wish nonprofit. He is also a gamer, which aligns with Honda's emphasis on esports marketing.
Honda is also trying to differentiate itself by spotlighting its range of products. The campaign includes shots of Honda motorcycles, dirtbikes, its Talon all-terrain vehicle and a Honda-branded generator—products not all of its competitors offer. "We are authentic in that space, our motorcycles are loved," Beadle says.
Of course, Honda's future prospects will depend on raising its game in the pickup truck and SUV market, including for the Rideline. Honda recorded 23,112 sales of the mid-size pickup through the year's first three quarters, down 2.2 percent compared with the same period last year, according to Automotive News. The 2021 redesign includes styling meant to give it a tougher look.
"The midsize truck market in which Ridgeline competes is hot, hot, hot, right now," Autotrader analyst Michelle Krebs stated in an email interview. "In contrast to owners of full-size pickups who use their trucks largely for work activities, owners use their midsize trucks for outdoor recreational activities so going more rugged makes sense."
But she added that Ridgeline "has been a niche player in the midsize truck market, which is dominated by Toyota Tacoma. Meantime, Honda relies heavily, maybe too heavily, on just three models—Accord, Civic and CR-V—for the bulk of its sales. Spreading the risk to more vehicles and those with more profit margin like Ridgeline is a smart thing to do."
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Q: Weird youtube logo today Anyone else see the youtube logo like this today?

It suddenly became some weird blue thing. Is it just me?

A: Not only you, with me too or with everyone on earth who using YouTube. As A.J.Ruckman said it's suppoting Global Warming .
Here is the channel.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


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Q: Error inflating class com.google.android.material.button.MaterialButton В чем может быть проблема? Кнопка реализована как MaterialButton. Все нужные библиотеки и стили подключены.
<com.google.android.material.button.MaterialButton
            android:id="@+id/Find"
            style="@style/Widget.MaterialComponents.Button.OutlinedButton"            android:layout_width="match_parent"
            android:layout_height="wrap_content"
            android:text="Find"
            android:textSize="12dp"
            android:onClick="Find"/>

gradle
 compile group: 'com.google.android.material', name: 'material', version: '1.1.0-alpha05'

    compile group: 'com.android.support', name: 'design', version: '28.0.0'

    compile group: 'com.android.support', name: 'appcompat-v7', version: '28.0.0'

Стили
<style name="Widget.MaterialComponents.Button" parent="Widget.AppCompat.Button">
        <item name="enforceMaterialTheme">true</item>
        <item name="enforceTextAppearance">true</item>
        <item name="android:textAppearance">?attr/textAppearanceButton</item>
        <item name="android:textColor">@color/mtrl_btn_text_color_selector</item>
        <item name="android:paddingLeft">@dimen/mtrl_btn_padding_left</item>
        <item name="android:paddingRight">@dimen/mtrl_btn_padding_right</item>
        <item name="android:paddingTop">@dimen/mtrl_btn_padding_top</item>
        <item name="android:paddingBottom">@dimen/mtrl_btn_padding_bottom</item>
        <item name="android:insetLeft">0dp</item>
        <item name="android:insetRight">0dp</item>
        <item name="android:insetTop">@dimen/mtrl_btn_inset</item>
        <item name="android:insetBottom">@dimen/mtrl_btn_inset</item>
        <item name="android:stateListAnimator" tools:ignore="NewApi">@animator/mtrl_btn_state_list_anim</item>
        <item name="cornerRadius">@null</item>
        <item name="elevation">@dimen/mtrl_btn_elevation</item>
        <item name="iconPadding">@dimen/mtrl_btn_icon_padding</item>
        <item name="iconTint">@color/mtrl_btn_text_color_selector</item>
        <item name="rippleColor">@color/mtrl_btn_ripple_color</item>
        <item name="backgroundTint">@color/mtrl_btn_bg_color_selector</item>
        <item name="shapeAppearance">?attr/shapeAppearanceSmallComponent</item>
    </style>
<style name="Widget.MaterialComponents.Button.OutlinedButton" parent="Widget.MaterialComponents.Button.TextButton">
        <item name="android:paddingLeft">@dimen/mtrl_btn_padding_left</item>
        <item name="android:paddingRight">@dimen/mtrl_btn_padding_right</item>
        <item name="strokeColor">@color/mtrl_btn_stroke_color_selector</item>
        <item name="strokeWidth">@dimen/mtrl_btn_stroke_size</item>
    </style>

A: Проверьте, наследуется ли основная тема вашего приложения от Theme.MaterialComponents, и если нет то попробуйте унаследоваться.