If bushes fall, get rid of them. Reduce them up and use the items for firewood. This can be utilized in your house, however in the event you don't wish to use it, then sell or give it away. Just remember to get rid of the stump as well. A stump is solely useless wooden, which attracts termites. Before you resolve to rid your own home of pests you should take into account the ethical implications. For example, when you have a mouse problem you might have considered trying a way that just removes them, however does not kill them. Nowadays most exterminators offer this to their clients, but it might be somewhat costlier.
Put screens in your windows. Cool summer season breezes are good, however the bugs and bugs that can are available are not so pleasant. While it may be true that you just simply use the air conditioning most of the time, do not forget that it could break down and energy does exit. Be ready. Add pest management chores to your weekly routine. It's easy to overlook the simple things that may help keep pests out of your home. Most of them may be done in only a few minutes weekly and might make a giant difference. Make them a part of your chore routine weekly, and you will be better off for it.
Laundry detergent is a great tool for preventing ants from entering your house. They strongly dislike the scent of the chemical substances used in detergent. Use this by putting the detergent in a spry bottle and utilizing all of it lengthy the entrances to your doorways and any other place ants might enter. Search for doable entry factors round your home. Bugs and animals may be very creative in the case of breaking into your home. In case you have noticed a brand new problem, it's attainable that they discovered a new manner in. Have a look around the outdoors and interior dwelling and seal any possibly entryways for pests.
These steps will power rodents to search for different accommodations.
Never step on a cockroach to kill it. While you step on it, it might probably release its egg sac. The eggs can then be transferred from the bottom of your footwear all through the carpets and rugs in your home. The eggs survive in your carpet till they are able to hatch, leaving you with a a lot larger roach drawback. Verify to see that your whole food is hermetic and sealed efficiently. If meals just isn't sealed properly, it should give off an odor, which is able to entice a variety of insects. This could result in an infestation, which might price you a variety of time and money in the long term.
Nearly each season makes way for brand new household pests that may have an effect on your loved ones's everyday activities. Common pests can vary from simple ants, to issues extra sinister like rats and mice. The next article will provide help to take issues into your personal fingers and explain how you can carry out your personal forms of pest management! To scale back mosquitoes and the West Nile Virus they carry, change the water in your birdbath utterly every three days. It is essential to do the identical for any standing water, be it a bucket, kiddie pool or different water trap. Don't let water pool on your exterior both to make sure no mosquitoes breed there.
Because they are so expert at hiding, it is laborious to get rid of mattress bugs. Prior to taking extermination efforts, make sure you seal obvious holes. Then, they are going to have no the place to hide or come again in from. In case your pest drawback is noisy crickets, then your reply is as easy as duct tape. Cut off a strip and lay it with the adhesive side dealing with up. Place in on the ground or floor near where you hear the crickets. It will entice them, and they'll get caught on it.
Go for rock or stone when landscaping your yard as an alternative of straw or wood chips. Natural materials is the proper habitat for many pests. If you want to keep them out of your property, both your home and yard needs to be as inhospitable to pests as potential. Pests won't ever make it into your house if they cannot get previous your yard. Do not underestimate the power bugs need to completely invade your private home! Though they arrive out at evening to feed in your kitchen or drink in the toilet, they dwell contained in the partitions, in heating vents and below floor boards. Whenever you tackle your pest control drawback, ensure that to hit each inch of the dwelling.
If you can't do that, be certain that to rinse all the pieces that goes into the bins. Examine your property for moist areas within the structure if in case you have carpenter ants.
Don't assume that pests are fully gone just because you have not seen any. In case your exterminator desires to come back again for a follow-up, you need to comply with their advice. There's a good likelihood that there's nonetheless a small population in your home that might have come from eggs, so take heed to the skilled and stick to the follow-up appointment. If you're battling an ant drawback in your house, make sure you aren't feeding your unwanted visitors! Be very diligent about placing away any food after you eat it and keep your counter tops and flooring clean. Take out your trash commonly and if you have pets, do not go away their food out overnight.
As you've got just read, thousands and thousands of people each year are affected by common family pests. Having an unwanted pest in your house can hinder your potential to function on the entire. Use the guidelines from this text to help you deal with any family pests and achieve control of the scenario. Mosquito infestations in your yard may be extremely problematic, particularly within the late summer. To forestall mosquitoes from infesting your yard and using it for breeding, make certain you have no stagnant pools of water in your yard. Change the water in chicken baths every week and keep away from water build-up in sand boxes and other containers.
If trees fall, get rid of them. Reduce them up and use the pieces for firewood. This can be used in your home, but for those who do not need to use it, then sell or give it away. Just keep in mind to do away with the stump as effectively. A stump is solely useless wood, which attracts termites. Earlier than you decide to rid your private home of pests you must consider the moral implications. For example, when you've got a mouse problem it's your decision a technique that just removes them, however does not kill them. These days most exterminators supply this to their customers, but it could be considerably costlier.
If you happen to consider you have mattress bugs, you may assist management the population by washing your garments. However, it's a must to be careful when doing so. Put your entire clothes right into a plastic bag. Seal it as much as take it to the laundry room. Wash it all within the hottest water attainable and then dry it on excessive heat. Remember that it is very arduous to eradicate bed bugs by yourself, so name around and see if a company will do a free inspection for you.
If your own home is being overran with pests, go around your home and search for cracks. Should you discover any cracks, seal them using a silicone based caulk. This may assist hold pests out of your house. For those who can see daylight underneath your doors, either add a weatherproofing strip or decrease your door. Examine exterminator prices. There are different factors that go into totally different estimates, so find out what they're. You need to guantee that the individual you rent can eliminate these pests for good. Nonetheless, generally that will cost a bit of extra. Do your research earlier than hiring someone.
Check all your exterior doorways totally. You need to make it possible for no daylight is shining by means of the bottom of them all. Some doorways to pay special attention to are your front door and your exterior garage door. In the event you see daylight, try adjusting the peak of their thresholds and presumably adding some climate striping to them. Retailer flour, cereals, sugar, and other dry items in sealed plastic, glass, or metal containers. This prevents invasions of pantry moths, weevils, ants, and even mice in your kitchen. Do not rely on cardboard or different flimsy packaging to keep pests out. Mice can chew by them, and insects can penetrate tiny openings.
Hopefully we've offered you with some helpful hints, tips, and tricks that will make it easier to exterminate your private home. You'll be saving cash and getting rid of any bugs that may have been inhabiting your house. Everyone knows that they're probably the most undesirable of undesirable guests. If you wish to have a pest-free life-style, the following tips and tips ought to get you on your way. It is vital to use them as instructed to ensure the perfect results. As soon as you've got started utilizing your new-found knowledge, you must find the pests disappearing proper before your eyes, so to speak.
Ensure you try the plumbing in your home. You could uncover that a pipe is leaking water. This kind of moist wood is adored by termites and attracts them in for a meal.


text:
Naupacte (, Nàfpaktos), coneguda també pel seu nom històric de Lepant (del venecià Lepanto) és una ciutat de Grècia situada a la unitat perifèrica d'Etòlia-Acarnània, a la costa nord de l'estret que separa el golf de Patres del golf de Corint. Té una població d'uns vint mil habitants i fins a 1977 fou seu d'un bisbat de l'església catòlica.

Per la seva situació, ha estat de gran rellevància estratègica al llarg de tota la història pel control que ofereix del golf de Corint: a l'antiguitat fou una estació naval atenesa molt important durant la Guerra del Peloponès, posteriorment fou un emplaçament clau en les guerres entre otomans i venecians i el 1571 fou el lloc on s'esdevengué la Batalla de Lepant, on la Lliga Santa derrotà l'Imperi Otomà i frenà el seu avanç cap a Europa. Pràcticament no es conserven restes de la ciutat antiga, però sí que es conserven les fortificacions venecianes.

Història

Edat antiga
Segons el mite fundacional, la ciutat derivaria el seu nom d'un heraclida anomenat Naupacte: es deia que els heraclides, capitanejats per Naupacte, construïren allà la flota amb què entraren al Peloponnès, i durant aquell període fundaren la ciutat, que prengué el nom del seu fundador. En realitat, el nom de Naupacte significa 'amarrador': és un compost de  naus, 'vaixell' i el verb  pḗgnymi, 'amarrar'. En efecte, constituïa el millor punt d'ancoratge de la costa nord del golf de Corint, i era el port d'Amfissa, la capital de la Lòcrida Ozòlia, i.

Després de les Guerres Mèdiques va caure en mans dels atenesos, que hi van establir els messenis expel·lits del seu país pels espartans al final de la tercera guerra messènica el 455 aC. Durant la guerra del Peloponès fou quarter general de la flota atenesa a la zona de la Grècia occidental: la flota atenesa, dirigida per l'almirall Formió, va derrotar els lacedemonis a Naupacte el 429 aC. Posteriorment, els messenis de Naupacte van patir els saquejos per part dels etolis de la zona, i van convèncer el general atenès Demòstenes d'atacar l'interior d'Etòlia; Demòstenes va sortir de Naupacte amb una força considerable, però ja a l'interior d'Etòlia fou derrotat a Egícion. Llavors, els etolis, aliats amb els espartans d'Euríloc, van atacar Naupacte, que Demòstenes va poder defensar amb ajut dels acarnanis. Després d'aquest conflicte els etolis no van participar més en la guerra, si bé alguns mercenaris va combatre pels atenesos a Sicília.

Després de la Batalla d'Egospòtamos, els messenis foren marxats, i els locris recuperaren la ciutat (404 aC). Amb els messenis exiliats de Naupacte, Zacint i el Peloponnès, Dionís el Vell de Siracusa fundà la ciutat de Tíndaris. Poc més tard, Naupacte caigué sota la influència dels aqueus, que en foren expulsats per Epaminondes de Tebes. El 338 aC la va ocupar Filip II de Macedònia, que la va cedir a la Lliga Etòlia. Per aquest motiu, de vegades també fou considerada una ciutat d'Etòlia, en comptes de la Lòcrida.

A final del , la Lliga Etòlia es va enemistar amb Filip V de Macedònia, i fou gràcies a l'estrateg Agelau de Naupacte que els dos oponents feren la pau i el 191 aC defensaren plegats la ciutat de l'atac dels romans durant dos mesos. Després de la Batalla de Pidna el , la ciutat passà a mans de la República Romana, juntament amb Macedònia i Etòlia.

La ciutat tenia un temple dedicat a Posidó, un dedicat a Artemisa, una cova sagrada d'Afrodita i un temple dedicat a Asclepi, en ruïnes ja en temps de Pausànias.

Història moderna
Fou destruïda per un terratrèmol en temps de Justinià I (553) i reconstruïda més tard; altre cop destruïda per un terratrèmol al , fou altre cop reconstruïda. Durant el domini de l'Imperi Romà d'Orient, l'antic nom de  (Nàupaktos) esdevengué  (Épaktos), que més tard donà lloc al nom italià de la ciutat, Lepanto.

Lepant fou una possessió catalana dins el Ducat d'Atenes de 1361 fins a 1377, quan passà a la família dels Spata. Pau Bua Spata la va cedir el 1407 a la República de Venècia a canvi de 1500 ducats. Una versió que podria ser certa diu que la ciutat fou presa per sorpresa pels venecians, i el seu senyor la va haver de cedir sota amenaça d'acabar amb el cap tallat. Els venecians nomenaren un capitano o rettore dependent del governador de Corfú, i la varen mantenir durant 92 anys. La van fortificar, i van resistir un setge dels otomans el 1477 que va durar quatre mesos; però finalment, el 1499, fou conquerida per Baiazet II, i fou la capital del sandjak d'Aynabahti o İnebahtı, que és com s'anomena la ciutat en turc.

El 7 d'octubre de 1571 fou escenari de l'anomenada batalla de Lepant, contesa que enfrontà l'Imperi Otomà amb la Lliga Santa, una unió formada pels Estats Pontificis, la República de Venècia i la monarquia hispànica. El 1678 els venecians la van reconquerir, però la van haver de retornar als otomans en virtut del tractat de Karlowitz de 1699. El 12 de març de 1829 s'incorporà a la Primera República Hel·lènica, que el 1832 esdevengué el nou Regne de Grècia. A partir d'aquest moment, i seguint la política d'hel·lenització de la toponímia de l'estat grec, la ciutat adoptà oficialment el nom clàssic de Naupacte ().

Referències

Ciutats de Lòcrida
Municipis de Grècia
Unitat perifèrica d'Etòlia-Acarnània

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


Fianna Fáil Housing Spokesperson Darragh O'Brien has stated additional steps are needed to address the rapidly worsening delays in An Bord Pleanála.
PQ Data received by Deputy O'Brien has confirmed that the completion rate for reaching a final decision on a planning application within the 18 week statutory time frame has fallen from 79% in 2016 to 64% in 2017 to 38% of cases currently up to the end of October 2018.
Deputy O'Brien stated, "Under the Planning and Development Act 2000, An Bord Pleanála has a statutory objective to determine planning appeals within 18 weeks. However we are witnessing rapidly escalating delays with the legal timeframe completion rate collapsing by over half over the past two years. This is despite government promises on additional resources being enough to meet the increased workload on the organisation.
"Last week, I raised this issue in the Dáil with the Minister as the mounting delays are becoming more and more evident. I have been contacted by several builders about undue delays that are frustrating their plans to put bricks and mortar in the ground. These lengthening delays are hiking up costs for builders and preventing badly needed homes from being delivered. This, in the midst of a national housing crisis, is unacceptable.
"There are a number of quick measures that the Minister should take to address delays. He should quickly move to expand the number of board members and reduce the quorum for decisions on smaller developments in order to expedite decision making. Additional staff and resources should also be rolled out quickly in order to ensure An Bord Pleanála is fully equipped to undertake its role in addressing the housing crisis," concluded O'Brien.


Ryan McArdle, David Rivers, and Steve Collins of the Southeastern Investment Sales Team facilitated the sale of Golden Eagle Village, a 64,050 SF Publix anchored shopping center located in Clermont, FL (suburb of Orlando). The center was 88% occupied at the time of the sale with Domino's, Great Clips and others as co-tenants. The Southeastern Investment Sales Team worked with the Buyer and the Seller to facilitate the transaction.
Contact a member of the Southeastern Investment Sales Team with any acquisition/disposition opportunities.


We are so excited to introduce this month's Odacité Kind of Girl, Remy Morimoto Park. She is an NYC based full-time recipe developer, health & wellness writer and founder of @Veggiekins - what started as an Instagram food log to help heal an eating disorder, now manifested into an extraordinary wellness blog that showcases food, movement, energy and self-care.
Specialized in vegan and gluten-free recipes, Remy focuses on whole food plant based ingredients with a deep love for edible flowers and the healing properties of plants. Outside of the kitchen, she is a certified yoga and meditation teacher, mindfulness coach and holistic nutrition coach with an approach to not only to have a healthy body, but also a healthy mind and spirit.
Q: What inspired you to create Veggiekins?
I originally created an Instagram account, with no intention of sharing anything publicly. It was actually an accountability log I used to hold myself accountable and check in with the therapist I was working with at the time. I was working to heal an eating disorder, and it was my way of logging my food but it ended up becoming a really enjoyable and fun process. It helped me to learn to love food, look forward to cooking, and making nourishing food for myself. From there it grew and my photography background really helped to elevate my content. Since then I've incorporated more of myself, and wellness as it manifests itself in my life--food, movement, energy, self care etc.
Q: How do you balance being an entrepreneur, recipe developer, photographer and wellness writer?
In the last year I really struggled with taking on too much. I still do that (and probably will always struggle with this) but I've practiced saying no, and reminding myself that although in the moment, saying no might not be the most comfortable thing, holding more space for things that I need is never something I regret. While I may not be working on as many projects as I was this time last year, I'm able to invest any additional time and energy I have into upgrading the quality of the content.
Q: Let's talk skin… we are dying to know what your approach to skincare is?
My approach to skincare is to stick to only non-toxic and vegan skincare items. Skin is our largest organ, and absorbs what we put on it, so I'm always mindful about ingredients. I also believe that what you put into your body is just as important. Our skin is usually a reflection of what's going on inside our bodies, and we can feed our glow by eating good food! Lots of plants, healthy fats and hydration are key for me. When I target a skin issue, I try to attack it holistically.
Q: What are your everyday skincare rituals that are non-negotiable?
Hydration, movement and gua sha. Although drinking water and movement aren't necessarily 2 things you would consider "skincare", they are 2 very essential components in my personal skincare routine. They really help to get my blood flowing and circulation going, which is what gives my face a healthy glow. Gua sha in the morning further helps with this, and there has not yet been a day where I've missed gua sha in the morning. It's like my cup of coffee!
Q: Can you share your favorite Odacité products and why?
My absolute favorite products are the Serum Concentrates. I talk about the Bl+C Pimples Serum Concentrate and the Pa+G Hyperpigmentation Serum Concentrate endlessly because when I first tried the products out, it was the first time I had actually seen a noticeable change in my skin. I like the combo of both because they target my two primary skin concerns. It's the only product I've ever purchased multiples of, as back up in case I run out!
I naturally tend to wake up around 4:30-5AM on a regular basis--I wish I could wake up later, but my body clock works without fail!
Greens greens greens! Usually tempeh too, and colourful produce.
A balance between strong and mobile. I love boxing, and strength training, but always come back to my yoga practice too. I recently tried EMS workout training (electric muscle stimulation) which helps to maximize and intensify movements you do, while condensing down the length of the workout. That was really fun, and a very tech forward approach to fitness that I really enjoyed.
Looking back to Eastern healing practices from simple things like incorporating more miso, and Japanese sea veggies into my diet from my childhood, to an Ayurvedic approach to eating, and acupuncture.
By the sea + in the sunshine, but while here in NYC, a hot bath will do.
Turn the phone off, and create without the mindset that it is something to be shared--without the pressure, I usually come up with my most creative ideas.
To be at peace, and in love with the entirety of who you are. Confidence and self love make for beautiful energy.


text:
Q: Fetching currently performing queries from the Knex.js pool I'm trying to fetch currently running queries by inspecting to tarn-based pool. Previously with node-pool, I could inspect _inUseObjects, however, if I try to inspect pendingCreates, I have a number of PendingOperation objects with promises.
Is it even possible to inspect connections to get the queries?

A: I don't think it is possible to monitor which connections are in use directly from pool, because when connection is taken out of pool, pool forgets it.
You could use global knex events to track started / completed queries https://knexjs.org/#Interfaces-Events
Something like this:
knex.on('query', querySpec => {
  console.log(`Query ${querySpec.__knexUid} started`);
});

knex.on('query-response', (res, querySpec) => {
  console.log(`Query ${querySpec.__knexUid} ended`);
});

knex.on('query-error', (err, querySpec) => {
  console.log(`Query ${querySpec.__knexUid} failed`);
});

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


To create the brand new Grand Prix 5000 tyre the German brand have completely overhauled the ever popular GP4000 II. They claim a 12% reduction in rolling resistance and a 20% increase in puncture protection – sounds pretty good! The GP 5000 also marks the brand's entry into the road tubeless market as there are both clincher and tubeless versions available for this model.
So…where`s the actual review of the tyre ???!
Don't trust in the marketing bla bla.
Trust in your own experiences!
The one stat you conveniently forgot is the GP5000 is 50% more expensive than the GP4000 it replaces. I'm sure sheep will be lining up to buy it though, convinced it will make them go faster.
Your presenting skills remind me of Jeremy Clarkson on Top Gear. Great work, keep it up.
When will continental make these tyres with skinwall. I want that.
I've watched the vid several times now and that just because it reminds me so much too the old Top Gear vids during the Clarkson, Hammond and May era. I'm so impressed by your presenting skills … awesome!
I was really sad about the fact that Matt had left GCN because I really liked his personality. But I have to admit: you are great. I love your attitude and skills. I hope you'll stay as long as possible at GCN.
So, can we get a video on how to mount/unmount a Conti. without cutting three tubes in the process?
This video has a top gear feel to it.
Ollie is a great in the tec and fun too! Sure I will try GP 5000 after seen this video.
Had no prob with this vid. Looks like he was just presenting technical facts. It was cool to see how they're made. I've been running Conti's exclusively for years now, after having tried other brands, and have been very pleased with their performace all around. Between Gatorskin, 4 Season, and Grand Prix I've been pretty well covered.
Can you give some advice about teaming up tyres with rims – how do you measure the rim widths, how do you know which tyres sizes will be safe. Just for your info, I've just fitted some 105 brake (28mm compatible) callipers, but had too many stones caught between the very, very small clearance. Today it stopped me dead in my tracks. I have Continental 4000s ii which I gather run big for their nominal dimensions. Wiggle told me that Vittoria run closer to 28 – will they work better? Etc. etc.
Time to straighten that helmet on the noggin Ollie….
Now all you have to replace is those stupid ugly Zipp wheels.
Ollie reminds me of a young Jeremy Clarkson.
100% you wont feel the 12% rolling resistance decrease and the nail in the road will still go through the 20% puncture resistance increase and 15% contact doesn't help 98% of the time.
I don't love Treks but I love that bike!
This is proper Richard Hammond this one!
So its only for perfect asphalt and this is a perfect asphalt for me. What should i pick for city ride but for a bad contitiin and a little bumpy road?
People who got their hands on say they measure closer to stated size, while 4k measures wider. That explains why they are lighter.
And the lower rolling resistance with added puncture protection? Well, the materials are the same, so you have less rubber and more vectran. You know what that sounds like? Conti Force 24mm with gp5k written on it. They roll better than 4k's.


text:
Q: Efficient Outputs for GeoServer Vector Data We have a mapping application at http://explorer.geowessex.com which uses OpenLayers and GeoServer for delivering the data. The data is potentially endless and we have very little control on what goes in. The data is served from an Oracle Database and published to GeoServer and also (in instances where it is necessary) cached off in GeoWebCache. The problem is trying to work out the correct image format to deliver the 256x256 tiles for these vector layers. We recently switched to PNG8 as this delivers tiles four times smaller than PNGs with what we thought was very little impact. Sadly we recently spotted that if we set the option Transparent to True in our GetMap request we lose any translucency that there should be on the layer, and since we are tiling layers over the top of each other, we need that option!
Here are two examples;
With 'transparent' set to false we can see the pink lines underneath the pink polygon looking thing, but the background is not transparent, so when put on a map it covers all the mapping behind it. Not good.
http://wms.geowessex.com/geoserver/wms?LAYERS=dev%3AALL_STYLE_TEST_TABLE4720,gis:ROUTE&CACHE=false&TRANSPARENT=false&FORMAT=image%2Fpng8&EXCEPTIONS=application%2Fvnd.ogc.se_xml&SERVICE=WMS&VERSION=1.1.1&REQUEST=GetMap&STYLES=&SRS=EPSG%3A900913&BBOX=-264166.03050625,6594375.6422375,-254382.0908875,6604159.5818563&WIDTH=256&HEIGHT=256&format_options=antialias:none
With 'transparent' set to True we cannot see the pink under the pink polygon looking thing, but the background is transparent, so when put on the map you can see other layers. Better, but still not good.
http://wms.geowessex.com/geoserver/wms?LAYERS=gis:ROUTE,dev%3AALL_STYLE_TEST_TABLE4720&CACHE=false&TRANSPARENT=true&FORMAT=image%2Fpng8&EXCEPTIONS=application%2Fvnd.ogc.se_xml&SERVICE=WMS&VERSION=1.1.1&REQUEST=GetMap&STYLES=&SRS=EPSG%3A900913&BBOX=-264166.03050625,6594375.6422375,-254382.0908875,6604159.5818563&WIDTH=256&HEIGHT=256&format_options=antialias:none
Of course, one way to solve this problem is to switch all vector data to PNGs, which work perfectly, like this
http://wms.geowessex.com/geoserver/wms?LAYERS=gis:ROUTE,dev%3AALL_STYLE_TEST_TABLE4720&CACHE=false&TRANSPARENT=true&FORMAT=image%2Fpng&EXCEPTIONS=application%2Fvnd.ogc.se_xml&SERVICE=WMS&VERSION=1.1.1&REQUEST=GetMap&STYLES=&SRS=EPSG%3A900913&BBOX=-264166.03050625,6594375.6422375,-254382.0908875,6604159.5818563&WIDTH=256&HEIGHT=256&format_options=antialias:none
But as you will see if you look at the size of the response, this tile on it's own is 256.6KB, where as the PNG8s were 64.4KB. There is every possibility that someone might actually want 10 layers turned on at once, with each layer maybe needing about 30 tiles each depending on the users screen size you can see the amount of data that needs to be sent starts hitting many, many Megabytes a time and over the course of one session the user might have clocked a total download running into hundreds of megabytes. This is really bad and we cannot find a solution that both provides smallish tiles sizes and the ability to be transparent and translucent at the same time. Does anyone have any ideas on this? What do other mapping systems use? FYI I have looked at the all purpose GeoServer bible 'GeoServer on Steroids' as well as a number of other similar PDFs to very little avail. None seem to hit the same problem we do and I can't work out what we are doing differently! Also FYI we will be switching our OS Basemaps/Aerial Photography and other Raster datasets to JPEG soon which will save a lot of bandwidth/frustration, but we can't do the same with vectors.

A: Support for translucency in PNG8 has been added in 2.2.x:
http://geo-solutions.blogspot.it/2012/05/developers-corner-geoserver-stunning.html


text:
Wyoming Mining Rescue Teams Dominate at National Competition
(Associated Press, August 15) – Industries work hard to prevent emergencies, but if a major accident were to happen nearby, Sweetwater County has the best mine rescue teams in the nation ready to respond.
Local teams ruled at national competition in Kentucky late last month, perhaps signaling a return to the local tradition of countrywide dominance.
Genesis Blue team members returned home with national championship trophies in field competition, while Ciner Blue edged them out by 2.5 points to earn overall champion honors and a large traveling trophy.
Eight local teams — two from each trona mine — traveled to Lexington, Kentucky, for the Metal and Non-Metal 2018 National Mine Rescue Contest. Forty-two teams from 16 states challenged one other in three major categories including field, first aid and technician team. Sweetwater County teams placed first in two of the three categories and earned top finishes in every division.
It's been 10 years since a local team earned the national field championship. Prior to that, though, Sweetwater County won every national field contest from 1996-2008. Overall champion is a fairly new award, first presented in 2002, with local teams winning the contest in 2008 and 2010.
Cindy Phillips, a local mine rescue fan and supporter, traveled to Kentucky for this year's event. She was impressed with the results.
"They did amazing," she said of Sweetwater County teams. "I am extremely proud of them."
Phillips is treasurer of the Southwest Wyoming Mutual Aid Association, and helps train team members and organize local mine rescue contests. She attends nearly every event, and her trademark is a bucket of licorice for participants.
"For Genesis Blue to win field is huge," Phillips said of the national event.
The team will forever be listed as champion in contest books, and she said when members show up at future competitions, the other teams will say, "Oh, no. Genesis Blue is here."
Mine rescue, though, is much more than a rivalry. A proficient team can mean the difference between life and death when disaster strikes.
Being successful as a mine rescue team takes a great deal of time, dedication and sacrifice, Phillips said.
The commitment of local teams is evident by the results of Kentucky's contest. Victory doesn't come easy, however.
Here's a look at the four-day national competition, including the perspective of two top teams: Ciner Blue and Genesis Blue.
GOING INTO IT
Ciner Blue captain Kael Brady said his team has been experiencing a rebuilding year, so expectations weren't all that high going into nationals.
Three veterans had retired from the team, replaced by brand-new guys. Those remaining on the team had switched to different jobs. The new members' first contest was in Rock Springs in June, which was also Brady's first go as captain.
"Everyone underestimated us, since we were a new team," Brady said.
Rather than let that intimidate them, they used it for motivation.
"We knew that we had the potential, but weren't sure it would all work out. We trained hard and studied and did all we could," he said.
The new guys also caught on quick, which helped.
At first, the Genesis Alkali teams weren't even sure that they would be able to compete. The long wall move was scheduled to happen at about the same time, requiring all hands. Management worked out schedules, however, so both teams were able to go to nationals, according to Ben Harcourt, the mine safety coordinator at Genesis Alkali.
DAY ONE: WRITTEN TEST
Every event begins with a written test. Each participant has one hour total to finish and can test in up to two of the three disciplines. Doing well requires a great deal of study, and the outcome often affects who is going to win, Phillips said. Even those who do great in field won't do well in the end if they didn't succeed in the written test, she said.
DAYS TWO-FOUR: TEAM ISOLATION/LOCKUP
Teams draw for position in each discipline. Those waiting their turn, usually starting at 6 a.m., have to be in "lockup" until it's time to compete. They are secluded in a room and not allowed to have any electronic devices including phones, computers, smart watches or even music.
Genesis Blue drew 40 out of 42 teams for the first field problem on Tuesday, so they were in lockup almost the entire day. People in isolation must have an escort to go to the restroom. Those waiting occupy themselves with activities such as poker, corn hole or naps, Dan Romero of Genesis Blue said. A rescue cart can be used as a makeshift hammock and CPR Annie sometimes functions as a pillow.
DAYS TWO-THREE: FIELD COMPETITION
Field competition requires team members to solve a problem involving a mine accident while being timed and observed by judges. Hypothetical challenges may feature a mine fire or explosion, resulting in trapped and potentially injured miners.
The first day of field in Kentucky was very difficult, according to competitors and observers alike. Ciner Blue captain Kael Brady said a lot of the teams weren't able to finish the problem and some who did had major problems along the way.
The Genesis Blue team took their time and focused on how to rescue the victims and ventilate the mine scenario to the best of their ability, Harcourt said. They knew they were facing some very tough teams, including a few professional teams whose only job is mine rescue.
Organizers can be tricky about how they put things on the field, and one mistake can cost many points, Romero said. There are so many rules and regulations, he added. Two of the veterans on Genesis Blue practically have the rule book memorized, which helps.
Judges give deductions based on mistakes.
As teams explore the mock mine, they must mark what they find on a map. Once completed, that map is compared to one made by organizers, and the two must match. Judges are very strict about this. A team can be deducted for an item found, such as a lamp, marked just a few feet from where it actually was.
Teams must also work to control ventilation; for example, clearing pockets of gas by controlling air flow. Ventilation was another aspect of field that was extremely challenging at nationals this year, Romero said. He said the fact that Genesis Blue didn't make ventilation mistakes helped in their victory. Going above and beyond what is required at the beginning also seems to make the judges relax a bit, he said.
Brady and his Ciner Blue teammates were hearing other teams talk after the field contest about how they did and problems they had.
He then told his team, "I think we've got a shot, but don't get your hopes up."
After all, he said, the difference between placing fourth and not placing at all can be just a couple points.
DAY FOUR: FIRST AID & TECHNICIAN TEAM
– Three members of each team are chosen for the first-aid competition, which consists of two stations. In the first, contenders are given a scenario describing a victim's injury and how it happened. They have 30 minutes to stabilize the patient and get them transported. The second station features a two-person CPR dummy as well as rescue breathing.
Competition was very tight in this event, Brady said. His team placed third.
– Teams select two individuals to compete in the technician team division. Contest organizers put faulty equipment, called "bugs," in a self-contained breathing apparatus, either a Drager BG-4 or a Biomarine Biopak 240. Drager BG-4 provides up to four hours of breathable air in toxic environments such as those that could be encountered in a mine rescue operation.
In the Drager BG-4 version of technician team competition, a two-member team must find, bench and fix the "bugs." Benching means running a series of tests to make sure the apparatus is ready for use. One person fixes the BG-4 and the other fixes the gas meter.
The team that completes the task successfully in the fastest time wins.
Genesis Teal's tech national champions, Kelly Hermansen and Paul Nelson, won the Mutual Aid contest in Rock Springs in June and had been studying in their free time and working hard together to prepare for nationals, Harcourt said. There were a couple difficult problems in the tech contest, and the two had no idea where they might place.
Ciner Blue members didn't think they had a chance in team tech, so Brady said their second-place finish was a big surprise.
DAY FOUR: THE BANQUET
Brady had been told that the best banquets are the ones where you don't expect to win anything. It was a great banquet for his Ciner Blue team.
They were surprised and happy to place in the top six in each division, but weren't really even thinking about the all-around competition, Brady said. When organizers were getting ready to announce the overall champion, someone told them, "You might want to record this; you're the only team that won a trophy in all three events."
They chose a teammate to document the proclamation and, sure enough, they were named overall champions.
Ciner Blue team members were also surprised to be named national champions in the field contest. After the Doe Run Maroon team was pronounced as taking second place, Romero said his team thought that they had missed finishing in the top six.
When Genesis Blue and Teal were named winners of both the tech and field problem division, respectively, team members were in awe and speechless with emotion and surprise, Harcourt said.
For at least one member of Genesis Blue, success as a team translates into confidence in life. Romero said he trusts all of his teammates and appreciates their professionalism.
"I would feel absolutely confident going with the guys on my team to respond to an emergency and rescue survivors," he said.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
\section{Introduction}
Reverberation, resulting in from multiple reflections from the rooms facets and objects, degrade the speech quality, and in severe cases, the speech intelligibility, especially for hearing impaired people. The success rate of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems may also significantly deteriorate in reverberant conditions, especially in cases of mismatch between the training and test phases.
Reverberation is the result of convolving an anechoic speech utterance by a long acoustic path. The output signal suffers from overlap- and self-masking effects that may deteriorate the speech quality~\cite{nabvelek1989reverberant}. These are often manifested as ``blurring'' effects on the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) images.
A plethora of methods for speech dereverberation using both single- and multi-microphone exists~\cite{naylor2010speech}.

The REVERB challenge~\cite{reverberation_challenge} was a large community-wide endeavor to put together a common dataset for testing dereverberation algorithms and for evaluating many algorithms on a common ground.
The challenge addresses both ASR and speech enhancement using 1, 2 or 8 microphones. In this paper, we focus on single-microphone speech enhancement solutions.

In STFT domain, reverberation can be modeled as a per frequency convolution along frames. In~\cite{WPE}, the signal is dereverberated by estimating the inverse filter that minimizes the weighted linear prediction error (WPE). A different approach directly estimates the reverberant filter, using recursive expectation-maximization algorithm (REM), that is then used to construct a Kalman filter. This method can be both applied in the single- and multi-microphone cases~\cite{KEM}.

Other methods in the challenge used a convolution in the amplitude of the STFT domain and then applied nonnegative
matrix factor deconvolution (NMFD)~\cite{NMF2}.

Spectral domain processing can be also utilized by using the statistical model of the reverberant tail (see Polack's model~\cite{polack1993playing}). A method that takes into account the direct-to-reverberant ratio (DRR) was presented in~\cite{habets2009late}. A modified version of this approach, proposed by Cauchi et al.~\cite{Cauchi} proved to be very efficient in the single-microphone case.
Two additional methods used spectral enhancement procedure, using spectral analysis tools other than the STFT. Gonzalez et al.~\cite{Gonzalez} used a zero-phase transformation, which can distinguish between a periodic and a non-periodic components of the speech signal. Wisdom et al.~\cite{Wisdom} proposed a short-time fan-chirp transform (STFChT) that is coherent with speech signals over a longer analysis window.
Deep learning methods were employed by Xiao et al.~\cite{Xiao} to find a nonlinear mapping between the reverberant and clean spectrum.

Following the successes of learning-based methods, Han et al.~\cite{wang15} applied a DNN to map noisy and reverberant spectrograms to clean spectrograms. Then, at a post-processing stage, an iterative phase reconstruction was employed to reconstruct the time-domain signal. Williamson et al.~\cite{wang17} used  deep learning techniques to directly estimate the complex ideal ratio mask (cIRM).
Weninger et al.~\cite{LSTM} used bi-directional long short-term memory (bi-LSTM) recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to preserve the speech continuity.

Despite the success of fully connected (FC) and LSTM networks, they do not fully utilize the spectral structure of the speech. In the speech spectrogram, there are clear time-frequency patterns that can be exploited. By dividing the spectrum into time frames, these patterns are not preserved.

Another type of network is known as the convolutional neural network (CNN), which is based on a sliding-window process in order to enhance the current time frame. In CNN, each pixel in the target image is computed using only a small number of context pixels from the original image, followed by a FC layer that ignores any existing time-frequency structure~\cite{CNN}.

In scenery images, CNN is usually used for classification tasks. For segmentation tasks, which necessitates an estimate the entire picture, a  fully convolutional network (FCN)~\cite{FCN} is most commonly used.

In this study, we apply FCN architecture to the speech dereverberation task. We show that this approach, which preserves global temporal and spectral information along with local information, significantly outperforms competing methods, as demonstrated on both real data and (most of) the simulated data in REVERB challenge.

\section{Problem formulation}

Reverberant speech can be modeled as
\begin{equation}
z(t) = \{x*h\}(t)\label{reverb_model}
\end{equation}
where $x$ is the clean speech that is convolved by $h$, the room impulse response (RIR) that creates the reverberation. In REVERB challenge, a low-level stationary noise is added to $z(t)$, but it is neglected in our derivations. We would like to retrieve $x(t)$ from $z(t)$ by a nonlinear function that is implemented by a neural network:
\begin{equation}
x(t) \approx f(z(t))\label{non-linear_func}.
\end{equation}
Following~\cite{log_spec} we use the log-spectrum as an effective feature vector. Let $Z(n,k)$ denote the log-absolute value of the STFT of $z(t)$ in the $n$-th time-frame and the $k$-th frequency bin. Let $L$ denote the frame-length of the transform, hence, due to symmetry, the indexes of the log-spectrum are $k=0,...,L/2$. Similarly, $X(n,k)$ denote the log-spectrum of the clean speech.
Fig.~\ref{subfig:noisy} and Fig.~\ref{subfig:clean} depict an example of a reverberant and a clean log-spectrogram, respectively. Comparing the two figures, the reverberant spectrograms is much more ``smeared" than the clean spectrogram, as a direct consequence of the convolution with the long RIR.

\section{A U-Net based network architectures}
Following the speech enhancement method in~\cite{noise_gan}, the time-frequency (T-F) representation, the spectrogram,  can be treated as an image.  Consequentially, the enhancement task becomes  an image-to-image transformation.
Treating the reverberant speech as an image has two major advantages. First, speech spectrograms exhibit typical
patterns (e.g. pitch continuity, harmonic structure, and formants). An image processing methodology can take advantage of these structures to apply relevant enhancement procedure. Second, this representation allows us to use highly successful image transformation methods such as the fully convolutional network (FCN).

In this section, we present three variants of the proposed algorithm, all based on a U-Net architecture, namely the U-Net image-2-image architecture with two filter shapes, and U-net on conjunction with generative adversarial network (GAN).

\subsection{U-Net Image-2-Image Architecture}
\label{sec:Unet}

In this study we propose an FCN as the basic architecture.
In this network the image is downsampled and upsampled again, which causes a rapid increase in the receptive field that serves to propagate global information in both time and frequency axes. The receptive field of a neuron is the number of pixels from input image that are used for computing the neuron value.
In FCN the image is downsampled until a bottleneck of $1 \times 1$, causing each pixel in the target to be influenced by the entire input image.

\begin{figure*}[htbp]
\centering
\begin{subfigure}[b]{0.3\linewidth}
	\centering
   \includegraphics[width=.90\linewidth]{updated_results_figures/generated_noisy_3.jpg}
  \caption{Noisy and Reverberant log STFT}
  \label{subfig:noisy}
  \end{subfigure}
\begin{subfigure}[b]{0.3\linewidth}
	\centering
    \includegraphics[width=.90\linewidth]{updated_results_figures/generated_clean_3.jpg}
  \caption{Clean log STFT}
  \label{subfig:clean}
 \end{subfigure}
\begin{subfigure}[b]{0.3\linewidth}
	\centering
   \includegraphics[width=0.90\linewidth]{updated_results_figures/generated_cleaned_unet_unsym3.jpg}
  \caption{U-Net with asymmetric filters result}
  \label{subfig:unet_unsym}
\end{subfigure}

\centering
\begin{subfigure}[b]{0.3\linewidth}
	\centering
   \includegraphics[width=.90\linewidth]{updated_results_figures/generated_cleaned_unet_sym3.jpg}
  \caption{U-Net with symmetric filters result}
  \label{subfig:unet_sym}
\end{subfigure}
\begin{subfigure}[b]{0.3\linewidth}
	\centering
   \includegraphics[width=.90\linewidth]{updated_results_figures/generated_cleaned_combined_1000_unsym3.jpg}
  \caption{U-Net + GAN result}
  \label{subfig:unet_gan}
\end{subfigure}
\caption{One example of reverberant and clean log-spectrograms, and results applied by all methods.}
\label{fig:example}
\end{figure*}

An encoder-decoder network is a very common method for image-to-image translation. In this type of network, each layer downsamples its input (usually with a stride of 2) to the next layer until there is a bottleneck. In the subsequent layer, the input goes through the reverse process where each layer upsamples its input until it returns to the original shape. Thus, the network input is a high resolution image that is squeezed to a very low resolution image (a bottleneck). Conversely, the expanding path does the opposite, i.e., it increases the image resolution until it is resized to the original dimensions. Unfortunately, this network tends to loose essential low level information during the downsampling procedure. In order to improve the encoder-decoder structure, the ``U-Net" architecture \cite{u-net}, along with its symmetric squeezing and expanding paths (like a ``U" shape), capitalizes on the fact that input and output images should have the same structure. We can thus circumvent the bottleneck and also transmit the shared information without downsampling. Therefore, the U-net connects between mirrored layers in the encoder and decoder stacks that transmit the information without going through a bottleneck. In other words, the skip connections directly concatenate feature maps from layer $i$ in the encoder to layer $N-i$ in the decoder, where $N$ is number of layers.

Following \cite{noise_gan}, our network details are as follows.
Let $\textrm{CBL}_{l,s}$ denote a Convolution-BatchNorm-Leaky-ReLU layer with slope=0.2, where $l$ is number of filters and $s \times s$ is the filter size. $\textrm{CL}_{l,s}$ and $\textrm{CBR}_{l,s}$ have the same architecture but without BatchNorm, or with a non-leaky ReLU, respectively. With same notation, let $\textrm{DCDR}_{l,s}$ denote the DeConvolution-BatchNorm-Dropout-ReLU with dropout of 50\%, and let $\textrm{DCR}_{l,s}$ denote the DeConvolution-BatchNorm-ReLU. $\textrm{DCT}_{l,s}$ denote DeConvolution-tanh.
The U-Net squeezing path is given by:\\
$\textrm{CL}_{64,5} \rightarrow \textrm{CBL}_{128,5} \rightarrow \textrm{CBL}_{256,5} \rightarrow \textrm{CBL}_{512,5} \rightarrow \textrm{CBL}_{512,5} \rightarrow \textrm{CBL}_{512,5} \rightarrow \textrm{CBL}_{512,5} \rightarrow \textrm{CBR}_{512,5}$\\
and the U-Net expanding path is:\\
$\textrm{DCDR}_{512,5} \rightarrow \textrm{DCDR}_{512,5} \rightarrow \textrm{DCDR}_{512,5} \rightarrow \textrm{DCR}_{512,5} \rightarrow \textrm{DCR}_{256,5} \rightarrow \textrm{DCR}_{128,5} \rightarrow \textrm{DCR}_{64,5} \rightarrow \textrm{DCT}_{64,5}$.\\

The U-net architecture which combines direct and skip connections is illustrated in Fig. \ref {fig:unet}. The input is normalized to the range [{-}1,1] before processing.
At the end of the network, tanh is applied in order to confine the output $\hat{X}(n,k)$ to the range [{-}1,1], same as the input.

\begin{figure}[htbp]
\centerline{\includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{unet.jpg}}
\caption{U-Net for speech dereverberation architecture.}
\label{fig:unet}
\end{figure}

U-Net filters are usually symmetric ($5 \times 5$ in our implementation), but this is not necessarily the optimal choice. In regular images, using symmetric filters makes sense because there is no difference between the $x$ and $y$ axes. Nevertheless, our images are actually spectrograms, with one axis representing the time domain, and the other the frequency domain. To mitigate the reverberation effects, it may be better to use higher-dimension in the frequency-domain than in the time-domain, to capture important spectral patterns of the speech. The pitch structure occupies several frequency bands, so a filter must be at least longer than the fundamental pitch frequency. Accordingly, we investigated the use of asymmetric filters of size  $10 \times 5$ pixels, 10 for the frequency domain, and 5 for the time domain. In most cases, as we demonstrate in the experimental section, these filters exhibit better performance measures than the symmetric filters. Examples for the log-spectrograms of the enhanced speech by U-Net and asymmetric U-Net are shown in Fig.~\ref{subfig:unet_sym} and Fig.~\ref{subfig:unet_unsym}, respectively.

To train the network we used a training dataset that consisted of T-F images of the clean speech $X_t(n,k)$ and the corresponding noisy and reverberant signal $Z_t(n,k)$, to generate the enhanced speech $\hat{X}_t(n,k)$, whereas $t=0,...,T-1$ represents the $t$-th example and $T$ is the number of training data examples.
Following~\cite{noise_gan} and~\cite{u-net}, we trained the U-Net with the Adam optimizer for 10 epochs, with a batch size of a single image. The cost we minimize is the mean square error (MSE). The loss function we minimize at the training is thus:
\begin{equation}
L_{\textrm{MSE}} = \sum_{t} \|X_t-\hat{X}_t\|^2 \label{L2}
\end{equation}
where $t$ goes over all the images of the training data. Although in~\cite{pix2pix} the loss function used was $L_1$ norm, here $L_2$ was found to yield better results.

\begin{table*}[h!]
\centering
\setlength{\belowcaptionskip}{.1cm}

\caption{Results of simulated data for far microphones.}
\label{table:sim_far}
\begin{tabular}{|l|ccc|ccc|ccc|ccc|}
\hline
 & \multicolumn{3}{c|}{CD} & \multicolumn{3}{c|}{LLR} & \multicolumn{3}{c|}{FWSegSNR} & \multicolumn{3}{c|}{SRMR} \\  Room
 &  1 &  2 & { 3} &  1 &  2 & { 3} & 1 &  2 & 3 &  1 &  2 &  3 \\   \hline
{reverberant speech} & 2.67 & 5.21 & {4.96} & 0.38 & 0.75 & {0.84} & 6.68 & 1.04 & {0.24} & 4.58 & 2.97 & 2.73 \\
{Cauchi et al. \cite{Cauchi}} & 2.67 & 4.65 & {4.44} & 0.42 & 0.77 & {0.82} & 8.93 & 3.50 & {2.75} & 4.75 & 3.88 & 3.86 \\
{Gonzalez et al. \cite{Gonzalez}} & 3.59 & 5.03 & {5.15} & 0.31 & 0.54 & {0.65} & 5.72 & 2.74 & {1.64} & \textbf{5.98} & 4.20 & 3.86 \\
{Wisdom et al. \cite{Wisdom}} & 2.83 & 4.53 &{4.49} & 0.37 & 0.79 &{0.79} & 8.86 & 5.01 & 3.75 & 5.30 & 3.93 & 3.63 \\
{Xiao et al. \cite{Xiao}} & \textbf{1.92} & \textbf{3.17} & {2.99} & 0.41 & 0.61 & {0.58} & 9.12 & 6.31 & {5.97} & 5.67 & \textbf{5.80} & \textbf{5.03} \\
{U-Net} & 2.06 & 3.41 & {3.05} & \textbf{0.26} & 0.63 & {0.58} & 11.80 & 8.60 & {8.65} & 4.98 & 5.44 & 4.79 \\
{asymmetric U-Net} & 2.09 & 3.24 & {2.96} & \textbf{0.26} & \textbf{0.57} & {\textbf{0.55}} & 11.96 & 8.90 & {9.02} & 4.83 & 5.32 & 4.65 \\
{asymmetric U-Net + GAN} & 2.05 & 3.19 & {\textbf{2.92}} & \textbf{0.26} & \textbf{0.57} & {0.56} & \textbf{12.08} & \textbf{9.00} & {\textbf{9.05}} & 4.76 & 5.27 & 4.71 \\ \hline
\end{tabular}%
\end{table*}

\begin{table*}[h!]
\centering
\caption{Results of simulated data for near microphones.}
\label{table:sim_near}
\begin{tabular}{|l|ccc|ccc|ccc|ccc|}
\hline
 & \multicolumn{3}{c|}{CD} & \multicolumn{3}{c|}{LLR} & \multicolumn{3}{c|}{FWSegSNR} & \multicolumn{3}{c|}{SRMR} \\   Room
 &  1 &  2 &  3 &  1 &  2 &  3 &  1 &  2 &  3 &  1 &  2 &  3 \\  \hline
{reverberant speech} & 1.99 & 4.63 & {4.38} & 0.35 & 0.49 & {0.65} & 8.12 & 3.35 & {2.27} & 4.50 & 3.74 & 3.57 \\
{Cauchi et al. \cite{Cauchi}} & 2.02 & 3.82 & {3.67} & 0.36 & 0.51 & {0.64} & 10.29 & 6.19 & {4.89} & 4.65 & 4.32 & 4.27 \\
{Gonzalez et al. \cite{Gonzalez}} & 3.24 & 4.53 & {4.76} & 0.26 & \textbf{0.34} & {0.50} & 7.13 & 5.13 & {3.96} & \textbf{6.05} & 5.45 & 5.01 \\
{Wisdom et al. \cite{Wisdom}} & 2.29 & 3.64 & {3.65} & 0.31 & 0.54 & {0.60} & 10.07 & 8.24 & {6.51} & 5.18 & 4.70 & 4.56 \\
{Xiao et al. \cite{Xiao}} & \textbf{1.58} & 2.65 & {2.68} & 0.37 & 0.50 & {0.52} & 9.79 & 7.27 & {6.83} & 5.74 & \textbf{6.49} & \textbf{5.86} \\
{U-Net} & 1.73 & 2.71 & {2.61} & \textbf{0.19} & 0.44 & {\textbf{0.45}} & \textbf{13.33} & 10.71 & {10.18} & 4.73 & 5.35 & 5.05 \\
{asymmetric U-Net} & 1.79 & \textbf{2.63} & {2.54} & 0.20 & 0.42 & {\textbf{0.45}} & 13.32 & 10.83 & {\textbf{10.45}} & 4.48 & 5.07 & 4.90 \\
{asymmetric U-Net + GAN} & 1.75 & 2.58 & {\textbf{2.53}} & 0.20 & 0.41 & {\textbf{0.45}} & 13.32 & \textbf{10.87} & {10.40} & 4.51 & 5.09 & 4.94 \\ \hline
\end{tabular}%
\end{table*}

\begin{table}[t]
\centering
\caption{SRMR Results of real data for far and near microphones.}
\label{table:real}
\begin{tabular}{|l|c|c|}
\hline                                                     method            &  far    &  near   \\ \hline
{reverberant speech}  & 3.19          & 3.17          \\
{Cauchi et al. \cite{Cauchi}}       & 4.76          & 4.87          \\
{Gonzalez et al. \cite{Gonzalez}}     & 4.62          & 4.78          \\
{Wisdom et al. \cite{Wisdom}}       & 4.82          & 4.96          \\
{Xiao et al. \cite{Xiao}}         & 4.42          & 4.29          \\
{U-Net}               & 5.54          & 5.45          \\
{asymmetric U-Net} & \textbf{5.68}   & \textbf{5.47} \\
{asymmetric U-Net + GAN}              & 5.52          & 5.34          \\ \hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}

\subsection{GAN Training Strategy}
Minimizing the MSE between the enhanced and the clean speech is not always aligned with the human judgment. For that reason, generative adversarial networks (GAN)~\cite{GAN} have been successfully applied to several image processing tasks. The pix2pix conditional GAN (cGAN)~\cite{pix2pix} that presents a way to perform image translations (such as B\&W to color images) using GAN, was found specifically attractive. This method was used by~\cite{noise_gan} for a noisy speech enhancement task, but it has never been applied to a reverberation task. Our cGAN was composed of two components: a \emph{generator} (G) that enhances the spectrogram (the network described in Sec.~\ref{sec:Unet}), and a \emph{discriminator} (D) that was trained to distinguish between the result of G and a clean spectrogram. The discriminator receives two images. The first is the output of G or a clean image, and the second is the noisy spectrogram used as a condition. During training, the goal of G was to improve itself, such that D would not be able to distinguish between the output of G  and the clean spectrogram. The objective is the same as in~\cite{noise_gan} and~\cite{pix2pix}:
\begin{equation}
\begin{aligned}
L_{\textrm{GAN}} (G,D) &=  \sum_t (\log D(Z_t,X_t) + \log (1- D(Z_t,G(Z_t)))\label{gan_loss}
\end{aligned}
\end{equation}
such that $Z_t$, $X_t$ and $\hat{X}_t=G(Z_t)$ are the $t$-th example of the reverberant, clean and enhanced log-spectrum images respectively.
To improve the results, the MSE loss was added to the GAN loss as a regularization term that ensures that the enhanced speech is close to the clean speech.
Accordingly, the final GAN score was expressed as
\begin{equation}
L (G,D) = L_{\textrm{GAN}} (G,D) +\lambda L_{\textrm{MSE} } (G)\label{full_loss}
\end{equation}
where $\lambda$ is the weight of the direct MSE loss.
The GAN network was initialized with the U-Net weights, and then was trained for a couple of more epochs.
We have found empirically the $\lambda=1000$ yields good results. An example of GAN based dereverberation is depicted in Fig.~\ref{subfig:unet_gan}. Both U-Net and GAN architectures are based on~\cite{noise_gan} implementation.

\section{Experimental results}

We implemented the three methods described above: U-Net, asymmetric U-Net, and GAN initialized with asymmetric U-Net. We calculated all measurements on the test dataset by the REVERB challenge published script, so the comparison to other methods would be fair.
\subsection{Dataset}
Our data were based on the REVERB challenge \cite{reverberation_challenge}. The data were divided into a training set and an evaluation test set, such that the former only included simulated data, whereas the latter also included real recordings. The simulated data were taken from the WSJCAM0 corpus \cite{WSJCAMO}, in which each utterance was convolved randomly with room impulse responses (RIRs) from different rooms and a noise was added at an SNR of 20dB. The simulated test dataset was generated from three different room sizes (small, medium and large) with a reverberation time ($T_{60}$) of approximately 0.25s, 0.5s and 0.7s, respectively, and from two microphone placements relative to the speaker (200cm and 50cm). The real recordings were taken from the MC-WSJ-AV corpus \cite{MC-WSJ-AV}, which contains recordings from a noisy and reverberant meeting room, with $T_{60}$ of approximately 0.7s, and microphone distance of 250cm and 100cm from the speaker. The training data were generated from 24 ``rooms" that were simulated from suitable RIRs with reverberation times changed from 0.2s to 0.8s. The rooms and conditions were different for the evaluation set and the training set.

\subsection{Pre-Processing} The input to the network was the log-spectral image of the noisy and reverberant speech. STFT was computed using frame length of 512, with a Hamming window size of 32ms and an overlap of 0.75\%. The signal was sampled at 16kHz. Only the STFT magnitude was considered and for the reconstruction of the time-domain signal we used the noisy phase.
Only 256 frequency bins were taken into account owing to symmetry, and ignoring the high frequency bin in order to use an exact power of two that allows a simpler network.
The data were divided into groups of 256 time bins each, so each group formed a $256 \times 256$ image.

\subsection{Results}
We compared our approach to the methods that competed in the REVERB challenge in the category ``single channel utterance based". In this category, enhancement is required to be solely dependent on the specific utterance (and the training data), without using the other utterances with same conditions (e.g. same room). Each utterance was thus separately enhanced. The results of the simulated test data for far and near microphones are described in Table~\ref{table:sim_far} and Table~\ref{table:sim_near}, respectively. It is evident that for the far microphone (where reverberation conditions are harsher), U-Net with asymmetric filters exhibits better LLR and FWSegSNR objective measures than the other methods. Even for the CD objective measure, this method was the best in room 3. The best performance improvement was achieved for the FWSegSNR objective measure, regardless of the room type. For the near microphone, the regular U-Net and asymmetric U-net outperformed the other methods in most of the rooms for the CD, LLR and FWSegSNR objective measure, whereas the differences between the regular and asymmetric U-Net were negligible. In addition, for the CD objective, the differences between the best result and U-Net were very small, for both the far and near microphones. However, in terms of SRMR our method performed less well. In spite of the failure on the SRMR in the simulated data, the results for real recordings confirmed the success of the asymmetric U-Net method as compared to the others (Table~\ref{table:real}). The GAN
had increased its FWSegSNR score, along with its CD in room 3, with almost no injure in other measurements.
A subjective evaluation campaign was not carried out. The interested reader may check a few examples in our website:\\ \texttt{\justify www.eng.biu.ac.il/gannot/speech-enhancement}.

\section{Conclusion}

In this study we presented a deep learning approach for enhancing noisy and reverberant speech based on image-to-image processing of the log-spectrogram of the reverberant
speech signal. Working directly on the image representation enabled us to explicitly model typical time-frequency patterns. We obtained significant improvements on both real and simulated data compared to previously suggested approaches.

\section{Acknowledgment}

The authors would like to thank Daniel Michelsanti and Zheng-Hua Tan for sharing their GAN code.

\balance

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


text:
Venezuela crisis: Brazil to send army to safeguard border
Image source, Reuters
Soldiers are to police the border which has been strained by an influx of Venezuelan migrants
Brazil says it is sending its army to the Venezuelan border to "guarantee law and order" amid an influx of migrants fleeing the crisis-hit country.
President Michel Temer said in a televised address on Tuesday that Venezuela's "tragic" situation threatened peace across South America.
Millions of Venezuelans have fled their country due to hyperinflation, and food and medicine shortages.
Brazil's move follows recent border clashes between locals and Venezuelans.
Following those clashes, President Temer sent a small contingent of troops to the border town of Pacaraima, where the unrest happened.
Venezuela crisis: A country in freefall
The families split by Venezuela's crisis
On Tuesday, he signed a decree which will deploy soldiers for two weeks along the border and federal roads of its northern state of Roraima.
"The problem of Venezuela is no longer one of internal politics. It is a threat to the harmony of the whole continent," Mr Temer said.
In addition to ensuring the security of Brazilians, the soldiers' role is also to look after the Venezuelan migrants' safety, the president stated.
Meanwhile, neighbouring Peru has declared a 60-day health emergency in two provinces on its northern border, after health authorities expressed concerns of the spread of diseases from migrants.
What is happening in Venezuela?
Venezuela is in its fourth year of an economic crisis, brought on by a crash in oil prices in 2014.
Four in five Venezuelans live in poverty, and people queue for hours to buy food while others are dying from a lack of medicine.
This was compounded by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro's decision in August to issue a new currency to manage the country's runaway inflation - a move that caused widespread confusion.
Venezuelan bolivar - what can it buy you?
'My baby would have died if I had stayed'
Some 2.3 million citizens have fled the country since 2014, sparking the worst migration crisis in Latin American history, according to the United Nations.
Media caption,
Venezuelans are fleeing political instability and hyper inflation
Regional tensions have been stoked, as neighbouring countries struggle to accommodate the exodus of Venezuelans.
The UN's migration agency said last week Venezuela is heading for the same refugee "crisis moment" seen in the Mediterranean in 2015.
What are neighbouring countries doing?
There are more than a million Venezuelans in Colombia, more than half a million in Ecuador, more than 400,000 in Peru and some 60,000 in Brazil.
Brazil has not said how many of its armed forces will be sent to police the border this week.
One minister told journalists that troops were already in place, while another warned Brazil "needs to discipline" the influx of migrants.
This month, Peru began tightening its border by requiring passports instead of national ID cards from Venezuelan migrants.
The first day the new rule was instituted, Peru reported a more than 50% drop in the number of migrants. But hundreds more without passports entered the country by seeking asylum.
Similar regulations were introduced in Ecuador, only to be overturned by a court ruling.
Brazil's northern state of Roraima has also had its attempt to close the border with Venezuela thrown out by a judge.
Violence erupted in Pacaraima last week when local residents attacked makeshift camps housing Venezuelan migrants. The camps were burned down and the occupants temporarily fled back across the border.
Despite the violence, the number of Venezuelans crossing daily into Brazil has continued to rise.
Foreign ministers from Ecuador, Colombia and possibly Peru and Brazil are expected to meet and discuss Venezuelan migration in Ecuador next week, after top immigration officials met at an earlier summit in Colombia's capital Bogotá.
Where is Venezuela in all this?
Many are blaming Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his socialist government for the dire state the nation is in and the exodus of its citizens.
He blames "imperialists" - the US and Europe - for waging "economic war" against Venezuela and imposing sanctions on many members of his government.
"This is the largest exodus Latin America has experienced" - UNHCR's Chiara Cardoletti
The head of Venezuela's constituent assembly suggested the country's escalating migration crisis was being staged to make the government look bad.
"Doesn't it strike you as suspicious there are photos of [these people] walking along the roadside in Peru, walking along the roadside in Ecuador, walking along the roadside in Colombia," said Diosdado Cabello, according to local media.
"It's as if it was: 'Lights, camera, action!' It's a campaign against our country," Mr Cabello said last week.
On Tuesday, Venezuelan state media reported 89 citizens had been repatriated from Peru after being exploited there.
Critics however called the move a publicity stunt.
Venezuelans request asylum in Peru
Venezuela nears 'Mediterranean crisis point'
'Largest exodus Latin America has seen'
'We never thought it would come to this'
Venezuelans rush to Peru to beat deadline
Why millions of people have fled Venezuela
What's behind Venezuela's political crisis?
Venezuelans flee to Brazil despite attacks
Confusion over Venezuela's economic plan
Why mums-to-be are fleeing Venezuela
Venezuela country profile
The bridge of desperation - BBC News
Refugees and asylum seekers


The rackmount EP4000 EUROPOWER power amp from Behringer delivers up to 2 x 2,000W at 2 ohms, 2 x 1400W at 4 ohms, and 4,000W at 4 ohms in bridge mode.
The rackmount EP4000 EUROPOWER power amp from Behringer delivers up to 2 x 2,000W at 2 ohms, 2 x 1400W at 4 ohms, and 4,000W at 4 ohms in bridge mode. Its Precise Power, Signal, and Clip LEDs let you monitor performance, and its XLR and 1/4″ TRS jacks allow for compatibility with any source. Selectable low-frequency filters let you remove distracting infra-sound frequencies, and its independent DC and thermal overload protection on each channel automatically protects your amp and speakers without stopping the show. The Behringer EUROPOWER's professional speaker connectors and "touch-proof" binding posts support most speaker wiring systems.
Order now and get this great power amp to go.


Chelsea (Melissa Claire Egan) is hot on Chloe's (Elizabeth Hendrickson) trail on The Young and the Restless. While she's playing detective, Victor (Eric Braeden) tries to keep one step ahead of her.
Hilary (Mishael Morgan) schemes with Juliet (Laur Allen) after she gets fired from her new job at B&S.
Ashley (Eileen Davidson) is determined to find out what her mysterious mother Dina (Marla Adams) is really up to.
Catch the Y&R promo below!


text:
The Art Institute of New York City was a for-profit college in New York City.  The school was one of a number of Art Institutes, a franchise of for-profit art colleges with many branches in North America, owned and operated by Education Management Corporation.  Founded in 1980 as The New York Restaurant School, and renamed in 2001, it was accredited by the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools.

The Art Institute of New York City officially closed in 2017.

References

External links

New York City
Educational institutions established in 1980
Private universities and colleges in New York City
Universities and colleges in Manhattan
1980 establishments in New York City
Educational institutions disestablished in 2017


text:
Randolph Louis White
This is a featured article. Learn more about Charlottesville's 250th Anniversary in cvillepedia.
Randolph Louis White was the founder of The Tribune.[1] He died on October 28, 1991.[1]
2 Military Career
3 Return to Virginia
4 The Tribune
He was born on October 2, 1896 in Bridgewater.[1] He attended high school in Columbus, Ohio. White worked as a machinist until 1919 and then joined the U.S. Army.[1]
White was part of the Ninth Calvary Regiment and trained at Camp Sherman.[1] He was then moved to the Philippines where he served as a clerk and worked for the judge advocate.[1] He was eventually promoted to sergeant.[1] He voluntarily discharged from the army in 1928 and returned to working as a machinist.[1]
Return to Virginia
White returned to Virginia in 1931 and became employed as a janitor at the University of Virginia Hospital.[1] In 1949 he was given the opportunity to start training in inhalation therapy at Children's Hospital in Washington.[1] He completed his studies at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and returned to UVA as supervisor to the oxygen therapy department.[1] White worked at the hospital for 33 years.[1] He was the first black Southerner to be accepted into the American Association of Inhalation Therapists.[1]
White founded The Tribune in 1954. It was the Charlottesville-Albemarle's premier African-American newspaper.[1] White said that the best story he ever ran was about Martin Luther King's funeral in Atlanta.[1]
White loved music, especially jazz.[1] His wife was a registered nurse.[1] White's heritage included Black, Cherokee and German.[1]
↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17 Web. Yesteryears: Randolph White, Davis Maurer, The Daily Progress, 29 July 2012, retrieved 30 July 2012.
Retrieved from "https://cvillepedia.org/index.php?title=Randolph_Louis_White&oldid=28789"
Charlottesville 250th Anniversary


For years Safetec has been manufacturing top quality first-aid, infection control and compliance products for over twenty-five years. Located in Buffalo, New York, our products are American made and are compliant with OSHA and EPA regulations. Recently, Safetec has also acquired their GMP or Good Manufacturing Practices certification after being audited by UL.
Two different regulations were made as a guide for the rules that need to be followed when working with hazardous materials to ensure that biological and infectious substances are appropriately handled and shipped safely. As part Title 49, the Department of Transport (DOT CFR49), was made to issue some requirements that shippers of these materials need to follow. Section 137 goes explicitly into details about the different packaging methods in regards to various modes of transportation, the different specifications and the responsibilities of the shippers. UN3373 Category B packaging regulations were also made to individually handle biological and infectious substances, which goes together with the CFR 49 requirements. This packaging needs to include the container to hold the material, a material that is wrapped around the container in case of spills, and an outer packaging container for it to be transported in.


It might be cold outside, like sub zero temps cold, but things are heating up for dinner with Pineapple Pad Thai!
I cannot get enough citrus and tropical fruits right now. We're talking eating 1/2 a pineapple, or 8 clementines in a day. Not to mention mango and grapefruit but pineapple and Cuties are always in the house lately. I was out running errands and got hungry and even stopped to pick up a 5lb back of clementines to satisfy my cravings. I always like fruit but eating and craving it a lot more with the pregnancy.
When a craving for Pad Thai hit one night I decided I had to add pineapple, but not just fresh pineapple I decided to go for the sweet grilled/roasted taste and add a little something extra with sweet chili sauce. I may have even eaten all of it while prepping other veggies for the Pad Thai and had to make more. Oops!
I will say my Pad Thai is not like a traditional Pad Thai and I like to use peanut butter but you could also sub almond butter if you need to. Pretty much a version of the sauce I use in my Spaghetti Squash Pad Thai, a favorite and most viewed recipe, cleaned up a little.
Seriously the combo was love at first bite. When my husband was on board and loved it too I knew I had a winner! Trust me he is the one that keeps what I post balanced and in control so you don't see some very odd, in my families opinion, combos. So I just share these on Instagram Stories from time to time but really there aren't too many and they aren't that crazy if you ask me.
So good I had to make it again, and again, and share it with you! I also decided to whip it up this time with Banza noodles (they're chickpea based and gluten free) instead of rice noodles for added protein. You can use either I've been doing both depending on my mood, what we have, and what my body needs.
Perfect for Meatless Monday or when you're craving Pad Thai or comfort food as it's simple to make and healthier than take-out. Speaking of Meatless Monday I hope you link up with Deborah and I and share what's been happening in your kitchen and one or more of the recipes linked up below inspires you.
Simple Pad Thai with caramelized sweet chili pineapple will have your taste buds dancing. Cleaned up and option to use protein noodles. Vegan and gluten free friendly.
Start a large pot of water, brining to a boil, to cook your noodles.
Cut pineapple into slices about 1/2" thick and remove skin.
Heat a cast iron pan over medium high with just enough coconut oil to coat the bottom of the pan.
Brush pineapple slices with 2 tablespoons of sweet chili sauce (reserving the rest for the Pad Thai sauce) and place in hot cast iron pan. Cook for 1-2 minutes until they brown and look caramelized.
Brush tops with sweet chili sauce if you haven't already and flip slices cooking for an additional 1-2 minutes.
Remove pineapple pan from heat and set aside while you prepare the rest of the dish. Once cooled chop into bite size pieces, reserving one slice to cut into wedges for garnish if desired, working around the core and discarding if desired. The core is soft and you can eat it if you want to chop that up as well.
When your pot of water is boiling add noodles, you will want to time it so your noodles are done when sauce is ready so if less than 5 minutes cook time wait and start when you start cooking the veggies. Cooking noodles according to package instructions for the noodles used.
In a large skillet, or rinse out your large cast iron pan. Heat sesame oil over medium to medium high heat.
Add in garlic and ginger, sauté for 30 seconds. Making sure the heat isn't too high you burn it.
Add in red peppers, carrots, and beat sprouts, cook for 2-3 minutes.
Stir in peanut butter, aminos, water, chili sauce, and palm sugar.
Once mixture comes together add cooked and drained noodles and toss to coat.
Plate and top with cilantro, peanuts, pineapple and lime wedges.
Serve with additional sweet chili sauce and aminos for topping as desired.
Here too! Thank you, and we're trying hard to stay warm.
It's been a long time since I've made or I guess even eaten pad thai! This looks yummy!
I can't wait to try this Pad Thai recipe. It looks absolutely delicious.
I loooooove the taste of cooked pineapple in stir frys!
Cooked pineapple, well pineapple in general, is so delicious! It adds the perfect pinch of sweetness.


For discussion of Microsoft Intune (formerly Windows Intune).
Welcome to the Microsoft Intune group!
Windows Intune - App deployment features announced!
Deploy EAP-TLS Certificate Based Authentication Wireless with Intune?
Intune AAD and on-prem Exchange?


I got a call from Anthony today – he was just checking on how I was doing on my to-do list. It made my day to see him taking his role seriously. We caught up on each others work but then he shared some sad news. Our friend Tommy Bennett passed away last month. I met Tommy through my Year of Giving project and he and Anthony were close as well.
To learn more about Tommy, you can visit the vendor profile that Mariko Hewer did for Street Sense about a month before his death. You can also check out Day 155 of my Year of Giving when I first met Tommy.
It saddens me a great deal to learn of his passing. Tommy was a great guy. He would be the first to tell you that he had some hiccups along the road, but as long as I knew him he was an exemplary individual – warm hearted and walking the straight and narrow.
The Street Sense newspaper will have a special section of their paper that comes out tomorrow that pays tribute to Tommy.
Tommy and me enjoying some shade near the corner of 13th and G in DC.


Sue that came out amazing!
Fantastic! So detailed..I don't think I'd have the patience to even attempt it!
precioso...no se como lo hicistes pero precioso.
Wow. You did a fabulous job on this!
love this! its so clean!!


text:
Home News World News Brian Hitchen killed by a car near Benidorm
Brian Hitchen killed by a car near Benidorm
3 December 2013 @ 10:04
Brian Hitchen CBE
BRIAN HITCHEN, former editor of the Daily Star and the Sunday Express, and his wife Nelly were both killed by a car when crossing the road in Altea, near Benidorm.
Mrs Hitchen, 80, died at the scene while Mr Hitchen was rushed to hospital in Alicante, where he was placed in a medically induced coma, but also later passed away.
Brian Hitchen, 77, was editor of the Daily Star between 1987 and 1994, when he became editor in chief of the Sunday Express. He then went on to set up his own media company.
The couple owned a property in Alicante, where they would spend several months a year, they were due to travel back today to their home in Hove, East Sussex.
Tributes have been pouring in from his ex colleagues, including Hugh Whittow, the Daily Express editor who said: "Brian was one of my very best friends and I am deeply, deeply saddened by this tragic news. He was talented, funny, generous, full of mischief and everyone loved him."
Brian Hitchen
sunday express
Previous articleStrict legislation against demonstrating or insulting the state
Next articleMaddocks' View On Life


text:
Q: C# save directory permissions I've been trying to find a way to store permissions on a directory. I am currently using SetACL to help. If I could change ownership on directories/registry without it that would be preferred, but that's a different story. An example is this:
Check current owner and permissions for that owner. Change to permissions and owner on button click > change it back to the original when another button is clicked.
To save the question of why, my team does technical support. We remote into a computer, perform our t/s and leave. We need to be able to change permissions then revert it back the way it was.
Any help is appreciated.

A: If you use the System.Management and System.Management.Instrumentation namespaces, you can use the Directory.GetAccessControl method to get who has access to a folder.  You can then use the AddAccessRule and SetAccessControl methods to actually apply your new permissions.   When you are done, you could remove your new permissions.  Here is an article that walks you through how to change permissions on a folder:
http://www.redmondpie.com/applying-permissions-on-any-windows-folder-using-c/
The basic code this author uses is as follows:
DirectoryInfo myDirectoryInfo = new DirectoryInfo(yourFolderHere);

// Get a DirectorySecurity object that represents the
// current security settings.
DirectorySecurity myDirectorySecurity = myDirectoryInfo.GetAccessControl();

// Builds a new user string for who we want to give permissions to
string User = System.Environment.UserDomainName + "\\" + yourUserName;

// Creates the permissions to apply
myDirectorySecurity.AddAccessRule(new FileSystemAccessRule(User,
                                  FileSystemRights.FullControl, AccessControlType.Allow));

// Set the new access settings.
myDirectoryInfo.SetAccessControl(myDirectorySecurity);

// Showing a Success Message
MessageBox.Show("Permissions Altered Successfully");
}

As for setting the owner, here is a good SO article on how to do so:
C# - How to use DirectorySecurity.SetOwner() ? I'm having troubles
However, if you wanted to set the owner to be someone else (since I would assume you don't need to assign ownership permissions to a user when they already have access to assign ownership permissions), this above method won't work I don't believe.  I have found documentation on how to set the owner to be someone other than yourself.  Here is the link:
http://blog.salamandersoft.co.uk/index.php/2009/10/setting-the-owner-of-files-and-directories-in-c/


ROY KEANE HAS revealed that he's been approached to appear on reality TV shows Celebrity Big Brother and I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here and admitted he could be open to the idea in the future.
In a wide-ranging interview with ShortList magazine, the current Republic of Ireland and Aston Villa assistant coach was asked if he'd ever consider an acting career.
When asked for his views on former-team-mates Gary Neville and Paul Scholes' recent transitions to TV punditry, Keane didn't hold back.
"Certain papers write stories about Gary winning everyone over, and he's writing for these same newspapers, y'know?
Keane did reveal TV and film play an important role in him unwinding after a stressful day but that his last movie experience wasn't too enjoyable.
Email "Roy Keane: 'I've had the Celebrity Big Brother offers and the jungle stuff'".
Feedback on "Roy Keane: 'I've had the Celebrity Big Brother offers and the jungle stuff'".


text:
ROBERT MOTHERWELL "BASQUE SUITE #2" , 1971
Robert Motherwell (1915-1991), alongside Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning, made up the quartet of abstract painters that radically defined Modern painting in America and established New York City as the new center of the art world.
Motherwell was the unofficial spokesman of the New York School, writing, editing a journal, and lecturing on behalf of the movement, his fellow artists, and the merits of abstraction.
While Motherwell's contribution to the art historical canon as a painter is undisputed, his role as a printmaker is arguably as important. Motherwell is one of the most experimental and courageous printmakers of the 20th century. He was always searching for new techniques to express or expand his ideas and aesthetic.
"Basque Suite", is a series of 10 iconic screenprints. The group features Motherwell's signature ink black gestural forms complemented by dense stretches of monochromatic color and breaks of negative space.
This print is a paradigm of Motherwell's oeuvre: aggressive black forms creating a confidant abstract arrangement, softened by decorative shades of green and tangerine.
The complete set of "Basque Suite" can be found in many museum's permanent collections including the Tate.
Questions about this artwork? Contact us or call +1.416.704.1720
"Basque Suite #2, Untitled B"
Screenprint on J.B. Green paper
Initialed and numbered in pencil by the artist
From an edition of 150
41"H 28.25"W (sheet)
Minor wear to frame.
Published by Marlborough Graphics, Inc. London.