text:
\section{Introduction}
\label{sec:intro}
The modern speech processing system has a voracious appetite for data. The general trend in automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems today has been to create algorithms that can make use of increasingly larger datasets. These efforts have undoubtedly yielded impressive results. The ability to learn effectively from large datasets has directly corresponded with recognition accuracy.
Far from being unique to speech recognition, ASR's counterpart, speech synthesis has also followed a similar trend. The original Blizzard challenge dataset \cite{black2005blizzard} consisted of a one-hour corpus. The most recent version \cite{blizzard2020} uses corpora several times larger.

While this trend of ever larger datasets has led to great advances in speech processing abilities, it has also ignored the needs of several end-users. Large sized corpora are simply not available for a large variety of tasks. The most common use case with this constraint is speech recognition when dealing with non-mainstream languages. Igbo, for instance, is spoken by 47 million speakers but no large corpus exists, and creating a several thousand hour Igbo corpus for ASR will be prohibitively expensive. Arguably, older techniques like Hidden Markov Models \cite{rabiner1986introduction} would still be applicable when dealing with smaller corpora. However, it is important that we do not exclude poorly resourced languages from enjoying the advances of modern speech processing technologies.

In this paper, we will therefore pursue a goal directly \emph{opposite} the general trend of papers today. We will attempt to reduce the amount of data required to build a viable speech recognizer while still using modern neural network based ASR techniques. We attempt this using speech synthesis techniques \cite{zen2009statistical} as a form of data augmentation. The reasoning behind this decision is that synthesizers typically require orders of magnitude less data than recognizers do. After all, statistical parametric speech synthesizers have even been built on as little as 30 minutes of speech data \cite{black2015random}. Speech synthesizers also offer a means of data augmentation that is less naive compared to standard augmentation techniques. For instance, a common form of data augmentation is to speed up or slow down existing speech. While this technique might improve accuracy, it does not reflect the true way that humans speed up or slow down their speech. A synthesis-based augmentation technique, on the other hand, is more likely to reflect rate changes more accurately. We therefore believe that synthesis-based augmentation should yield even better results.

We will investigate three different forms of speech synthesis and their performance when used as a means of data augmentation for ASR. The first is the classic statistical parametric speech synthesis \cite{zen2009statistical}. The second is the popular neural synthesizer, Tacotron2 \cite{shen2018natural}. The third is the adversarial synthesizer, WGANSing \cite{chandna2019wgansing}. We report our experiences with all three synthesizers.

\section{Prior Work}
\label{sec:prior}
Low-resource ASR and TTS have a rich and varied history. Technically, any ASR paper from 10 years ago or earlier can be considered a viable approach for low-resource ASR. However, the closest related work to ours is the paper from Rosenberg et al \cite{rosenberg2019speech}. The authors describe an approach where the Tacotron speech synthesizer is used to augment real speech with the goal of increasing lexical and acoustic diversity. The major difference between Rosenberg et al. and our work is in the quantity of data used. Keeping in mind our goal of using the least amount of data possible, we use substantially smaller subsets of the Librispeech corpus \cite{panayotov2015librispeech}. Because we restricted ourselves to using as little data as possible, we also had to resort to synthesizers beyond Tacotron that Rosenberg et al. use.

Another closely related work is LRSpeech by Xu et al \cite{xu2020lrspeech}. The authors target low-resource scenarios like we do but use a high-resource language to bootstrap ASR and TTS systems for the low-resource language. We, on the other hand, assume that no corpus is available apart from that of the low-resource language. We see our approach as complementary to that of Xu et al., and hope our approach is an interesting alternative.

\section{Experiments}
\subsection{Speech recognizer}
Our speech recognition models are trained using the BBN speech recognition system, Sage \cite{hsiao2016sage}. Sage is an extension of the popular Kaldi speech recognition toolkit \cite{povey2011kaldi}. Our ASR systems are multilingual initialized \cite{ma2017multilingual} hybrid TDNN-F models \cite{povey2018tdnnf}, trained for one epoch of lattice-free MMI (LF-MMI) and two epochs of sMBR. For language modeling, we train word-level trigram models. All our experiments in this paper will focus on the acoustic model since text data is typically easier to obtain than labeled audio. We use 100 hours of Librispeech transcripts for language model data in all cases, and vary the amount of audio data as required by the experiment.

\subsection{Statistical Parametric synthesis}
For our experiments using statistical parametric speech synthesis, we use the Clustergen synthesizer \cite{black2006Clustergen}. Clustergen uses the Festival system \cite{black1998festival} to convert text into a sequence of phonemes, and uses random forests to predict mel-frequency cepstral co-efficients that correspond to the phonemes.

While Clustergen generally produces good quality speech, we use it differently from its original intent. Clustergen is heavily optimized towards a single speaker corpus. However, most ASR corpora are multi-speaker, and only possess a few minutes of speech for each speaker. It is impossible to build a synthesis model for each speaker with such little data. We therefore attempted to build average models for groups of speakers. We identified similar speakers by clustering i-vectors \cite{dehak2010front}. We pretended that all the speech from a particular cluster was from the same speaker, and built a Clustergen model for it. These average models did not produce high quality synthesis but resulted in some interesting findings anyway. They pointed out several flaws in Mel Cepstral Distortion (MCD), the objective metric we were using to assess synthesis quality. We discuss these flaws in section \ref{sec:Discussion}.

\begin{table}[th]
  \caption{ASR performance when using synthetic speech as additional training data}
  \label{tab:real-plus-synth}
  \centering
  \begin{tabular}{ l r }
    \toprule
    \textbf{Training data} & \textbf{WER} \\
    \midrule
    20h real & 12.7  \\
    20h real + 20h synth & 12.6 \\
    20h real + 20h synth (MCD $<$ 5) & 12.7 \\
    20h real + 20h synth (MCD $<$ 6) & 12.7 \\
    20h real + 60h synth & 13.0 \\
    20h real + 80h synth & 12.8 \\
    \midrule
    40h real & 12.0  \\
    40h real + 60h synth & 13.0 \\
    \midrule
    80h real & 11.4  \\
    80h real + 20h synth & 11.5 \\
    \bottomrule
  \end{tabular}
\end{table}

\begin{table}[th]
  \caption{ASR performance when training on either purely real or purely synthetic speech}
  \label{tab:real-vs-synth}
  \centering
  \begin{tabular}{ l r }
    \toprule
    \textbf{Training data} & \textbf{WER} \\
    \midrule
    80h real & 11.4  \\
    80h synth, unclustered, 50 voices & 36.2 \\
    80h synth, clustered, 5 voices & 47.1 \\
    \bottomrule
  \end{tabular}
\end{table}

Table~\ref{tab:real-plus-synth} shows the results of using Clustergen as a data augmentation system. Here, Clustergen was trained on the specified amount of real speech and then used to synthesize the specified amount of synthetic speech. The `MCD $<$ 5' and `MCD $<$ 6' rows correspond to experiments where we left out synthetic voices that had MCD scores higher than the number.

Table~\ref{tab:real-vs-synth} shows the results of an experiment where we trained on either purely real speech or purely synthetic speech. The results in the second row were generated by building a separate Clustergen model for each speaker no matter how little the available data. The third row in the table is the result of clustering similar speakers using i-vectors. The results in both tables indicate that Clustergen's speech quality was not sufficient to be useful as a data augmentation method.

For neural TTS and adversarial TTS, we used Clustergen as a baseline. Since ASR training is computationally expensive, we did not train the ASR system whenever any synthesizer performed worse than the parametric synthesizer.

\subsection{Neural TTS}
Tacotron2 \cite{shen2018natural} is a purely neural speech synthesizer that consists of a recurrent sequence-to-sequence neural network that takes as input character embeddings and predicts mel spectrograms. We use Waveglow \cite{prenger2019waveglow} as a vocoder to convert the mel spectrograms to raw speech. Tacotron2 has been shown to produce excellent quality speech in the past, but our primary reason for choosing this synthesizer and waveglow was because there was open-source code available.

We were successful in producing high quality synthesis from Tacotron2 by training on the 24 hour LJ Speech dataset \cite{ljspeech17}, but had difficulty achieving similar results on any 1 hour CMU Arctic dataset \cite{kominek2004cmu}. Despite our best efforts, the best Tacotron2 could do on the one-hour corpus was babble in a voice that strongly resembled the original speaker. This test is important because CMU Arctic is still larger and cleaner than any single voice we had for our ASR datasets. We therefore had to rule out any possibility of training a Tacotron2 model exclusive for each voice in an ASR corpus. (Building an exclusive model for each voice in an ASR corpus would have been terribly expensive computationally anyway).

To overcome this difficulty, we extended Tacotron2 to support multi-speaker training by incorporating speaker embeddings as input in addition to the character embeddings. We experimented with both one-hot embedddings as well as i-vectors. One-hot embeddings gave us marginally better results than i-vectors but neither could match up to even the quality of Clustergen. Nor was there an easy way of quantifying the difference in quality between the i-vectors and one-hot embeddings. Since the quality of synthesis on our corpus was significantly worse than using classical parametric synthesis, we did not attempt our augmentation experiments.

\subsection{Adversarial TTS}
In addition to the classical parametric and neural speech synthesizers, we also tested an adversarial synthesizer based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Adversarial learning is a new machine learning technique that has had tremendous success in generating high-dimensional data. These techniques are still in the nascent stages for speech synthesis, but nevertheless show great promise because of the success they have had in related fields such as image generation.

The toolkit we used for our experiments was actually a GAN-based singing synthesizer called WGANSing \cite{chandna2019wgansing}. We chose WGANSing because it was the only open-source toolkit we could find capable of open-vocabulary speech synthesis. The architecture of this system is the same as DCGANs \cite{blaauw2019data} and is trained using the Wasserstein GAN algorithm.

WGANSing takes as input a block of frame-wise linguistic features and singer identity features, and outputs vocoder features that correspond to the block. The most problematic for us among the input features were the precise phone durations and the pitch contours required. These features make sense for synthesizing singing, but are very difficult to generate for regular speech. We were therefore forced to modify the toolkit to avoid conditioning on these troublesome features. However, the resulting synthesis quality without these features was poor compared to the other synthesizers discussed in this paper. We suspect that this sub-par performance is caused by the low amounts of training data we use. Low-resources are a requirement for our task. Unfortunately, this requirement might also be the Achilles heel of adversarial ML.

\section{Discussion}\label{sec:Discussion}
One major setback we faced in our series of experiments is the failure of Mel Cepstral Distortion (MCD) as a metric. In standard speech synthesis experiments, MCD has issues but is generally reliable. For instance, a rule of thumb is that an MCD reduction of 0.12 is equivalent to doubling the amount of training data \cite{kominek2008synthesizer}. Unfortunately, intuitive rules and beliefs such as these only ended up being true for the standard speech synthesis training scenario of clean, single-speaker data. When training on noisy, multi-speaker data, not only was MCD a poor reflection of quality, but it was also extremely misleading. In informal tests, we found several instances where the metric indicated high MCD but the synthesized speech was understandable. We also found several examples where the synthesized speech was unintelligible but the measured MCD was low. Clearly, single-speaker objective metrics do not extrapolate well to multi-speaker training scenarios.

Another major pain point for us was the gordian knot that was Tacotron2. We faced tremendous engineering and research challenges in getting sensible performance from this synthesizer. The engineering challenges were primarily related to the amount of compute required (at least the implementation we used required this). Both Tacotron2 and Waveglow could only be run on the fastest GPUs we had available, and then still took between days to weeks to converge. While we managed to overcome these through a lot of work, the research challenges proved more insurmountable. We were able to successfully replicate the default experiments in the open-source Tacotron2 toolkit, but we had little success when running the codebase on our own smaller dataset. The inscrutable nature of modern neural networks also made it difficult to extend the system to support multiple speakers. Despite being experts in speech synthesis and neural networks, progress was extremely difficult. We hope that future work by us and others relieves researchers of this burden, and makes it easier to achieve positive results.

\section{Conclusion}
The results of our experiments have mostly been disappointing. It appears that modern speech synthesis has not yet advanced to be of sufficient use in training low-resource speech recognizers. Nevertheless we still believe that as speech synthesizers increase in quality, this approach will eventually become viable. We also hope that our experiments point to interesting future directions with a higher potential for success. For instance, every synthesizer we explored in our paper has been heavily tuned for the human ear. It is highly likely that new synthesizers will need to be designed and built with the explicit goal of acting as sources of augmented data.

\section{Acknowledgement}
We thank Sean Colbath, Ilana Heintz, and Ron Coleman for all their support in this endeavor.

\vfill\pagebreak

\bibliographystyle{IEEEbib}
{\footnotesize

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


Combining inspiration from historic homes in the area and years of experience SB Design owner Beth McGehee commissioned Native Tile to create decorative tile for almost every room in this ocean front new construction home. Having worked with Beth on previous projects Native Tile was enthusiastic about creating all of the custom details that would make this project special. The owners were involved in the process and together we selected a color palette and patterns that satisfied their tastes and were consistent with a historically inspired Mediterranean Style home.


text:
Q: Manipulating Redux output I'm working on a React application to render content of a WordPress website using the WordPress Rest API, Redux and Thunk.
The WordPress API returns posts without detailed information about the category (name, slug, etc). All I'm getting is the id. I'm currently calling an additional action/function to get the detailed category information (output). Below an example of how I'm currently fetching my posts.
// Actions.js

import axios from 'axios'

export const fetchPosts = (page = 1) => {
  return {
    type: "FETCH_POSTS",
    payload: axios.get(`${REST_URL}/wp/v2/posts?per_page=14&page=${page}`)
  }
}

|
// PostsReducer.js
const initialState = {
  posts: [],
  fetching: false,
  fetched: false,
  error: null
}

export default function reducer(state=initialState, action) {
  switch (action.type) {
    case "FETCH_POSTS": {
      return {
        ...state,
        fetching: true
      }
    }
    case "FETCH_POSTS_REJECTED": {
      return {
        ...state,
        fetching: false,
        error: action.payload
      }
    }
    case "FETCH_POSTS_FULFILLED": {
      return {
        ...state,
        fetching: false,
        fetched: true,
        posts: action.payload
      }
    }
  }

  return state
}

And this is how I'm fetching category information:
export const fetchCategory = (id) => {
  return {
    type: "FETCH_CATEGORY",
    payload: axios.get(`${REST_URL}/wp/v2/categories/${id}`)
  }
}

Is there a way to combine my fetchPosts() action with the fetchCategory() action, so it populates the post.categories, returned from fetchPosts() with the more detailed fetchCategory() information?

A: If you're referring for ajax calls chaining you can use this example to understand how thunk can work for you:
function loadSomeThings() {
    return dispatch => {
        fetchFirstThingAsync.then(data => { // first API call
            dispatch({ type: 'FIRST_THING_SUCESS', data }); // you can dispatch this action if you want to let reducers take care of the first API call
            return fetchSecondThingAsync(data), // another API call with the data received from the first call that returns a promise
        })
        .then(data => {
             dispatch({ type: 'SECOND_THING_SUCESS', data }); // the reducers will handle this one as its the object they are waiting for
        });
    };
}

Basically when we call loadSomeThings we dispatch an new action as a function (fetchFirstThingAsync) as our first ajax call, redux-thunk will catch that before any reducer does as function are not the plain object that reducers can handle, thunk will invoke this function with dispatcher as an argument (along getState and some more args), we wait it out with .then and then we can dispatch a plain object that reducers can handle + returning another promise (fetchSecondThingAsync) that's your second ajax call, we wait it out with .then and again dispatching a plain object that reducers can handle.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Friday, Sep 4, 2020
99 Gang Social continues Adelaide's foray into clubstraunts SA COVID hospitalisations rise, two more deaths but cases drop Libs to field new candidate against exiled MP Adelaide's north dominates new home builds as renovators look east Modern function centre plan for historic Rymill House
Victoria's record virus toll
Victoria has reported an Australian-record 59 coronavirus deaths, although only nine of the fatalities are new.
Photo: AAP/Daniel Pockett
Throughout this week, Victoria's daily toll has included earlier aged care deaths as the sector reconciles data with the state and federal governments, with the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services saying 50 of Friday's reported deaths were at aged care fatalities from July and August.
The state toll soared past 600 to 650 and the national figure to 737, with Friday's figure surpassing the previous Australian record of 41 deaths on August 31.
Victoria also had 81 new cases, a significant drop from Thursday's spike of 113.
The fall in case numbers is encouraging news, two days from the announcement of the much-anticipated "roadmap" out of lockdown.
Premier Daniel Andrews will announce separate pathways for how and when Melbourne and regional Victoria will come out of respective stage four and three lockdowns.
There is no confirmation yet that any restrictions will be eased on September 13, and Andrews is not deviating from his pre-set timeline for unveiling the state government's strategy.
"The time to announce what things look like in the weeks and months ahead is not today," he told reporters on Thursday.
Andrews reiterated the "roadmap" could not be released as it was not finished yet and needed contemporary data from the next few days.
"There is an enormous amount of modelling going on at the moment," he said.
"Literally thousands of scenarios are run through various computers and processes, and that does take some time."
The premier also dismissed a leaked document indicating Melbourne's 8pm-5am curfew could be extended by a further fortnight as out of date.
Meanwhile, Victoria Police has defended the arrest of a pregnant Ballarat woman for allegedly inciting a planned anti-lockdown protest in the regional city on Saturday.
Police are determined to stop a "Freedom Day" protest planned at locations in inner Melbourne, including at the Shrine of Remembrance, on the same day.
Stephanie Richards Tuesday, January 18
Tom Richardson Tuesday, January 18
Andrew Spence Tuesday, January 18

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Men's health concerns change as they grow old. According to statistics, over 60% of men in their 40s or older are undergoing prostate problems. But even though the first prostate symptoms might be considered not dangerous, but rather just a little causing bothers, anticipating care might be more than effective.
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text:
Published: 08:38 March 16, 2018
Home EU INSTITUTIONS EU reacts to Russian law on 'undesirable organisations'
EU reacts to Russian law on 'undesirable organisations'
PHOTO BY: Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0
Anti-corruption protest in Nizhny Novgorod, 26 March 2017.
Russia's decision to list the European Platform for Democratic Elections and the International Election Study Centre as "undesirable organisations" further reduces the space for civil society and restricts the exercise of fundamental freedoms in Russia, just ahead of the March 18 presidential elections. So said a statement issued by the spokesperson of the European Union's Foreign Affairs and Security Policy/European Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations.
Maja Kocijancic also said: "These organisations support or conduct citizens' election observation in the Eastern Partnership countries, the Russian Federation and the European Union. Such independent observation is a necessary element for free, transparent and credible elections."
He stressed that their listing means all their activities and information material are from now on banned in Russia. "These restrictions should be removed and the Russian authorities need to ensure that civil society organisations are able to contribute fully to Russia's development."
credible elections
European Platform for Democratic Elections
free elections
fundamental freedoms
International Election Study Centre
undesirable organisations


text:
Conservatives 'will not suspend whip' from MP arrested on suspicion of rape
The allegations relate to four separate alleged incidents in London, police say
By Ewan Somerville
Updated August 2, 2020 2:31 pm
A Union flag flies at the Houses of Parliament (Photo: Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty)
The Conservative Party has defended its decision not to suspend the whip from an MP arrested on suspicion of rape.
The former Government minister, who has not been named, was taken into custody early on Saturday and later released on bail after being questioned at an east London police station.
The allegations relate to four separate incidents alleged to have taken place in Westminster, Lambeth and Hackney between July 2019 and January 2020, the Met Police said.
A female ex-parliamentary employee in her twenties made the allegations, according to The Sunday Times.
Police launch probe
She alleges that the MP assaulted her, forced her to have sex and left her so traumatised that she had to go to hospital, the paper reports.
The Metropolitan Police said it had launched an investigation into the allegations.
File photo: four incidents are alleged to have taken place in London (Photo: pixabay)
"On Friday, 31 July, the Metropolitan Police Service received allegations relating to four separate incidents involving allegations of sexual offences and assault," the force said in a statement.
"These offences are alleged to have occurred at addresses in Westminster, Lambeth and Hackney between July 2019 and January 2020.
"A man in his 50s was arrested on Saturday 1 August on suspicion of rape. He has been released on bail to return on a date in mid-August."
Woman 'spoke to chief whip'
A Conservative Party spokesman said: "We take all allegations of this nature extremely seriously. As this matter is now in the hands of the police it would be inappropriate to comment further."
The MP will not have the Conservative whip suspended during the investigation. When the whip is suspended, an MP is no longer part of the parliamentary party.
The whips' office confirmed: "These are serious allegations and it is right that they are investigated fully. The whip has not been suspended. This decision will be reviewed once the police investigation has been concluded."
But Labour's shadow safeguarding minister Jess Phillips called the decision "shocking", insisting the whip should be removed.
Speaking to Times Radio, the Labour MP said: "It is very difficult to comment on the case itself because it is quite rightly in front of the criminal justice system.
"But what I would say in this matter is in any organisation – especially one like Members of Parliament who every day work with vulnerable people, young activists, members of staff – in any other organisation, were this police investigation to be going on, somebody would be suspended while the investigation was taking place."
"I find it shocking this morning in the news that the Conservative Party has decided not to withdraw the whip in this case," she added.
Charlie Elphicke's guilty verdict shows that no matter how powerful your abuser, they can be held accountable for their actions
According to The Sunday Times, a fellow Conservative MP first raised the woman's allegation with Mark Spencer, the chief whip, and Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the House of Commons, after speaking to the alleged victim a month ago.
However, no action was taken by the chief whip, reports say.
The PA news agency understands Mr Spencer advised her to make a formal complaint to the authorities who would be able to investigate the claims.
A spokesman for Mr Spencer said: "The chief whip takes all allegations of harassment and abuse extremely seriously and has strongly encouraged anybody who has approached him to contact the appropriate authorities, including parliament's independent complaints and grievance scheme."
The Conservatives were already facing scrutiny over Theresa May's decision to reinstate the whip for Charlie Elphicke in 2018 to bolster support for a key Commons Brexit vote.
Ex-MP Elphicke was convicted of three counts of sexual assault against two women on Thursday, prompting his wife to leave him.
Michael Fallon, then the defence secretary, and Damian Green, then Ms May's de factor deputy Prime Minister, were among those accused of sexual misconduct at the height of the #MeToo movement, though neither faced charges.


text:
Thank You Nigel!
An enormous thank you to Nigel Cowie who advised he was standing down as President of the Club at the AAC AGM which was held on August 25.
Nigel has dedicated many years of personal time and effort to the Club, having joined the Committee in 2008 where he began his tenure as Lodge Supervisor and was instrumental in the Lodge renovation project. Nigel was then elected Chairman in 2012 and has held that role ever since. Nigel is also a representative on the AAC National Council, and he will continue this role going forward.
Nigel, from the Committee and Club Members, we would like to thank you for your commitment to the Club, your leadership as president and of course the support of Fiona and the rest of the family. We look forward to seeing you and the family at the Lodge for many years to come.


text:
A Historic Agreement to Combat Climate Change
On December 12, nearly 200 countries came together in Paris to announce the most ambitious global agreement ever to combat climate change. Watch a message from President Obama on this historic achievement.
Environment Justice
Why The Crash of 2016 Will Happen…
The Big Picture RT
The next big financial crisis is already on its way.
Trump Predicts Crash of 2016
By raising interest rates have the feds set us up for a new financial crisis? Here to discuss the Fed's interest rate hike – the likelihood of an economic crash in 2016 – and what's really going on in our economy – is Marshall Auerback – Research Fellow – the Levy Institute and Director of Economists for Peace and Security.
Former World Bank Chief Economist on Climate: "I Hope Historians Will See This as a Turning Point"
In 2006, Lord Nicholas Stern, the prominent British climate economist and former chief economist of the World Bank, published a pioneering report, "The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change." We speak to Lord Stern about where we stand almost a decade after he published the nearly 700-page report and what he would like to see come out of COP21. "I hope historians will see this as a turning point, that the world got together to change direction to say we are now moving together towards the low-carbon economy, that this is the great story of the future," Stern says. "This is the way that we can get secure growth. This is the way we can get clean growth."
At COP21, U.S. Allows Mention of Climate Reparations — Only If It Doesn't Have to Pay Them
The United States will allow the words "loss and damage" in the Paris accords only if it is agreed that the U.S. is not liable for paying for it. "Loss and damage" refers to compensation for countries already suffering from the impacts of climate change caused by more industrialized nations. We discuss the role of the U.S., China and other major countries at COP21 on this issue and on REDD, a mechanism meant to stem deforestation in countries such as Indonesia. "REDD is labeled as a solution to the climate crisis," says Ruth Nyambura, Kenyan political ecologist, part of the African Ecofeminist Collective. "But it has given polluting countries in the developed world, and corporations, the ability to say, 'I will continue to pollute as long as I pay for forest rehabilitation in the Global South.'"
Sacrifice | George Monbiot
The joints of meat that do more damage than a long-haul flight
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 23rd December 2015
The figures were so astounding that I refused to believe them. I found them buried in a footnote, and assumed at first that they must have been a misprint. So I checked the source, wrote to the person who first published them(1), and followed the citations. To my amazement, they appear to stand up.
A kilogramme of beef protein reared on a British hill farm can generate the equivalent of 643 kg of carbon dioxide. A kilogramme of lamb protein produced in the same place can generate 749 kg. One kilo of protein from either source, in other words, causes more greenhouse gas emissions than a passenger flying from London to New York(2).
This is the worst case, and the figure comes from a farm whose soils have a high carbon content. But the numbers uncovered by a wider study are hardly reassuring: you could exchange your flight to New York for an average of 3kg of lamb protein from hill farms in England and Wales(3). You'd have to eat 300kg of soy protein to create the same impact.
In choosing our Christmas dinner – or making any other choice – we appear to take informed and rational decisions. But what looks and feels right is sometimes anything but. In this case, the very features we have been led to see as virtuous – animals wandering freely across the mountains, tended by horny-handed shepherds, no concrete and steel monstrosities or any of the other ugliness of modern intensive farming – generate astonishing impacts.
…(read more).
Food-Matters
Robert Stavins | Thanks to Paris, we have a foundation for meaningful climate progress
Laurent Fabius has brought the gavel down on a successful deal. Reuters/Stephane Mahe
Robert Stavins
Professor of Business and Government, Harvard University
Robert N. Stavins receives funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Enel Foundation.
The Conversation is funded by Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Knight Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Alfred P Sloan Foundation, Rita Allen Foundation and the Simons Foundation. Our global publishing platform is funded by Commonwealth Bank of Australia.
The Paris Agreement is a truly landmark climate accord, and checks all the boxes in my five-point scorecard for a potentially effective deal. It provides a broad foundation for meaningful progress on climate change, and represents a dramatic departure from the Kyoto Protocol and the past 20 years of climate negotiations.
In Paris, representatives of 195 countries (plus the European Union) adopted a new hybrid international climate policy architecture that includes: bottom-up elements in the form of "Intended Nationally Determined Contributions" (INDCs), which are national targets and actions that arise from national policies; and top-down elements for oversight, guidance, and coordination. Now, all countries will be involved in taking actions to reduce emissions.
Remarkably, 186 of the 196 parties to the agreement submitted INDCs by the end of the Paris talks, representing some 96% of global emissions. This broad scope of participation under the new agreement is a necessary condition for meaningful action – but, of course, it is not a sufficient condition.
Also required is adequate ambition of the individual contributions. But this is only the first step with this new approach. The INDCs will be assessed and revised every five years, with their collective ambition ratcheted up over time.
That said, even this initial set of contributions could cut anticipated temperature increases this century to about 3.5℃ – more than the frequently discussed aspiration of limiting temperature increases to 2℃ (or now, under the Paris deal, potentially to 1.5℃), but much less than the 5-6℃ increase that would be expected without this action. (An amendment to the Montreal Protocol to address hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) is likely to shave off a further 0.5℃ of warming.)
The problem has not been solved, and it will not be for years to come, but the new approach brought about by the Paris Agreement can be a key step toward reducing the threat of global climate change.
The new climate agreement, despite being pathbreaking and the result of what The New York Times rightly described as "an extraordinary effort at international diplomacy", is only a foundation for moving forward. But it is a sufficiently broad and sensible foundation to make increased ambition over time feasible for the first time.


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Can We Predict Treatment Success in tVNS?
Predicting Treatment Success
Transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (tVNS) has recently emerged as a promising treatment for depression and an effective mood enhancer, showing benefits over similar treatments including traditional vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) which is invasive and costly.
tVNS targets the auricular branch of the vagus nerve and works by applying a small electrical stimulation to the outer ear. The new non-invasive method has been shown to be effective in multiple clinical trials, but the technology could benefit from further optimisation of the treatment protocol. In particular, a clearer understanding of the changes in brain structures that could predict treatment success.
Previous studies have reliably demonstrated the involvement of the insula as well as the thalamus and hippocampus. However, there is still room to further ascertain the relationship between brain region activation/deactivation by tVNS and treatment for depression.
The Crucial Link
The identification of the link between stimulation of brain regions via tVNS and the subsequent clinical outcomes has been critical to ensuring treatment efficacy. In a recent study, researchers revealed that anterior insula fMRI activity could serve as a reliable predictor of tVNS treatment success in participants with depression. [1]
A total of 38 participants were involved in the study, 17 of whom received tVNS that lasted 30 minutes per session twice a day, 5 days a week for 4 weeks and the remaining 21 participants received a sham treatment.
Consistent with previous results, tVNS treatment produced a more pronounced effect size on the outcome measure (Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale). More importantly, the fMRI scans provided vital clues to decipher the mechanism of neuromodulation.
Clinical Outcomes
This research showed that tVNS significantly reduced the symptoms of depression when compared to the sham treatment. This could be attributed to its neuro-modulating effect of vital brain connections known as the default mode network (DMN) that regulates mood and emotion. Patients who received tVNS scored significantly lower on the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale compared to those who received the sham treatment.
Fig. 1. The graph shows a significant decrease in the HAM-D scores in the tVNS treatment group. Such a reduction was more pronounced compared to the sham group.
Mapping the Emotional Brain
fMRI imaging study of the participants revealed that more activation of the left anterior insula was detected in the tVNS group compared to the sham treatment group. The insula is a key brain region that regulates emotions and saliency processing and has been implicated in the pathology of depression.
Caption: Activation map showing the brain region after tVNS stimulation. The region highlighted in yellow shows the left insula.
The results of fMRI were further corroborated by another earlier German study that confirmed an increased activation in the insula after tVNS stimulation. The researchers also found a simultaneous increase in MRI signal in the precentral gyrus (both sides), the right thalamus and the right anterior cingulate cortex. [2]
These results are highly encouraging as they clearly demonstrated the role of the insula in modulating mood and depression that could also function as an early predictor of treatment success of tVNS.
The Predictor of Treatment Success
When both the behavioural outcomes (HAM-D scores) and the fMRI brain scans were examined together, the results strongly suggest that the beneficial effect of tVNS was achieved via the modulation of the left anterior insula activity.
More importantly, such an association between insula activation and clinical improvement was evident even during the first treatment session. Such a unique characteristic implied that insula activation could predict the outcome (successful or failure) of tVNS treatment.
This emerging evidence provides further support to the use of tVNS as a non-invasive mood enhancer and also an effective alternative clinical treatment for depression. This new data could pave the way for greater understanding and insight in the most effective use of tVNS therapy.
1: Fang J, Egorova N, Rong P, et al. Early cortical biomarkers of longitudinal transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation treatment success in depression. NeuroImage Clin 2017;14:105–11. doi:10.1016/j.nicl.2016.12.016
2: Kraus T, Hösl K, Kiess O, et al. BOLD fMRI deactivation of limbic and temporal brain structures and mood enhancing effect by transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation. J Neural Transm 2007;114:1485–93. doi:10.1007/s00702-007-0755-z


text:
Sandovalina is a municipality in the state of São Paulo in Brazil. The population is 4,354 (2020 est.) in an area of 456 km². The elevation is 424 m.

References

Municipalities in São Paulo (state)

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
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Steven Druker is a public interest attorney who founded the Alliance for Bio-Integrity and, as its executive director, initiated a lawsuit that forced the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to divulge its files on genetically engineered (GE) foods. This revealed that politically influenced administrators had covered up the extensive warnings of their own scientists about the abnormal risks, misrepresented the facts, and then allowed these novel products onto the market without requiring the testing that's mandated by federal food safety law.
He is a prominent commentator on the risks and regulatory issues of GE foods and has served on the food safety panels at conferences conducted by the National Research Council and the Food and Drug Administration and has been a featured speaker at symposia at the British House of Commons and the National Congress of Brazil and at press conferences sponsored by the Brazilian Medical Association, the Swedish Consumers Association, and the Green Party members of the European Parliament.
In 2017, he received a Luxembourg Peace Prize for outstanding work on behalf of the environment.
He has been invited to speak at many universities (including Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, and the University of Copenhagen) and has met with government officials world-wide, including the UK's Environmental Minister, Canada's Health Minister, and the heads of food safety for the UK, France, Ireland, and Australia.
His articles on genetically engineered food have appeared in several respected publications, including The Congressional Quarterly Researcher, The Parliament Magazine (a Brussels-based periodical), and The Financial Times.
His influential book, Altered Genes, Twisted Truth: How the Venture to Genetically Engineer Our Food Has Subverted Science, Corrupted Government, and Systematically Deceived the Public, was released in March 2015 with a foreword by Jane Goodall hailing it as "without doubt one of the most important books of the last 50 years." Among the other scientists who have praised it are David Schubert, a professor and laboratory director at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, who has called it "incisive, insightful, and truly outstanding"; and Joseph Cummins, Professor Emeritus of Genetics at the University of Western Ontario, who extolled it as "a landmark" that "should be required reading in every university biology course."
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text:
Robin Hennessy (born 28 February 1948) is an Irish sailor. He competed in the Dragon event at the 1972 Summer Olympics.

References

External links

1948 births
Living people
Irish male sailors (sport)
Olympic sailors of Ireland
Sailors at the 1972 Summer Olympics – Dragon
Place of birth missing (living people)


text:
Woolworth Building
From 1913 to 1930, this was the tallest building in the world.
Walking Men 99
Church of St. Peter
St. Peter's is the oldest Catholic parish in New York (though not the oldest surviving Catholic church building), and the church's founders faced some very familiar-sounding discrimination in establishing their parish back in 1785. The first American-born saint, Elizabeth Seton (whose family's former land we've walked across), converted to Catholicism at St. Peter's in the early 19th century, and, almost 200 years later, Father Mychal Judge was laid before the altar here after being killed by debris from the collapse of the South Tower of the World Trade Center.
9/11 memorial #56
This is a replacement for the World Trade Center cross, which stood here outside St. Peter's for almost five years.
St. Paul's churchyard
There are about 800 headstones here at St. Paul's, Manhattan's only surviving pre-Revolutionary church building.
More St. Paul's
Things looked a little different here in the aftermath of 9/11.
9/11 memorial memorial #1
Bell of Hope
The south arcade
This section of the Municipal Building is lined with Guastavino tiles.
The central arch
Automobiles once plied the pavement of this passageway through the Municipal Building. (And apparently a rare few still do.)
New York County Courthouse
This building is home to the civil branch of the Supreme Court of the State of New York, which, confusingly, is not the supreme court of the State of New York.
The city clerk's office is home to the recently renovated Manhattan Marriage Bureau — congrats to the newlyweds!
And just across the street…
The cycle of Authority
This statue and its counterpart (Authority and Justice, respectively), currently located beside the New York County Courthouse, are the two statues we earlier learned were relocated from the Surrogate's Courthouse during construction in the 1960s.
Portal of the dead
Confucius Plaza
The legendary wisdom of this ancient Chinese philosopher is probably best known to Americans as the inspiration for an endless line of sophomoric "Confucius say" jokes. My personal favorite is one my grandfather used to always tell: "Confucius say, woman who cooks chicken and peas in same pot very unsanitary." (It only works when spoken.)
Writing in the NY Times, and referencing the City Beautiful movement, Christopher Gray says that "No project ever realized this concept of the entire city as an integrated work of art more successfully than the plaza of the Manhattan Bridge". He goes on to bemoan the deterioration of the plaza over the years, likening it to the sack of Rome. While much of the larger plaza has been lost at this point — notably the two parks that once stood at its corners — the monumental arch and colonnade have, thankfully, since been restored to a state befitting such grand architecture.
Spirit of Industry
The inspiration for this sculpture, like so many others in Manhattan, was Audrey Munson. Her tremendous success as an artists' model led to a brief film career, including a starring role in Inspiration, in which she became the first woman to appear fully nude in a non-pornographic American film. She also penned around 20 articles pondering the fleeting nature of human beauty and questioning its sometimes troubling role in our society. After reaching the heights of fame and celebrity, she eventually succumbed to mental illness, spending the last 65 years of her life in a psychiatric hospital.
Moishe's Bake Shop
Closed for Passover, of course
Ottendorfer Library
Another remnant of Little Germany, the Ottendorfer Library was built in 1884 as the second branch of the grass-roots New York Free Circulating Library (whose origins purportedly lie in a sewing class teacher lending books to her students to keep them from reading cheap, sensational story papers), and it became part of the New York Public Library when the two systems merged in 1901.
German Dispensary
Located next door to the library, this dispensary, built to serve the needs of those who couldn't afford regular medical care, was another gift of the Ottendorfers.
This oddly named apartment building honors William M. Evarts, a 19th-century senator from New York whose home once stood on this site. Before his election to the Senate, Evarts successfully defended Andrew Johnson during his impeachment trial — which, according to the NY Times, seemed like a lost cause for the president until Evarts started speaking — and thus "saved the Nation from the shame of a National act of injustice". He also served as secretary of state and attorney general, and as senior counsel for Henry Ward Beecher in the civil trial of the scandalous Beecher-Tilton affair. According again to the Times, his role in that trial, "more than any of his other public doings, fixed him in the eye of the multitude, which, of course, was hugely interested in every detail of that deplorable affair." Some things never change.
The aged enclosure of Stuyvesant Square
This cast-iron fence was built around Stuyvesant Square in the 1840s, beginning the much-delayed transformation of this space into a legitimate public park.
Second Avenue residences
Opened in 1976, the tram was intended for temporary operation until subway access to Roosevelt Island could be constructed. Its popularity, however, has kept it running as a permanent mode of transportation to the island, alongside the subway station that was eventually built in 1989.
Day & Meyer, Murray & Young
Portovault storage for some of New York's most valuable objects
Muck house
The looooong-awaited Second Avenue subway is under construction, and it shows. This is a muck house, where underground rock and debris are loaded onto trucks for removal.
Second Avenue blasting
Take a listen!
A well-illuminated block
Brick waterfall
Mobile gantry cranes
Construction of the Second Avenue subway takes on many forms.
Day 827: Back at Green-Wood Cemetery


text:
Olga Ivanova may refer to:

 Olga Yakovlevna Ivanova (born 1945), Russian diplomat and ambassador
 Olga Ivanova (athlete) (born 1979), Russian shot putter
 Olga Ivanova (politician) (born 1984), Estonian politician
 Olga Ivanova (rower), Russian gold medal winner at the 1971 European Rowing Championships
 Olga Ivanova (taekwondo) (born 1993), Russian taekwondo practitioner
 Olga Ivanova (tennis) (born 1977), Russian tennis player


text:
Research Specialist Senior
The Repair Lab at the University of Virginia seeks a research specialist to contribute to the Environmental Justice Policy Clinic (EJPC) housed under the auspices of the Lab. The EJPC synthesizes research on environmental issues affecting communities in the mid-Atlantic region, working with emerging citizen-led groups to develop interventions to improve local outcomes. The EJPC consolidates legal, policy, and environmental resources for addressing environmental problems, and to promote community-centered, equitable and democratic approaches to policymaking at all levels. The research specialist will work closely with Repair Lab members, especially the Lab's practitioner(s)-in-residence, providing expertise specifically in environmental sciences, climate change, geospatial analysis, and policy making processes and outcomes to projects related to environmental justice that answer policy-relevant questions.
The research specialist will be responsible for synthesizing research on political landscapes and environmental science issues affecting communities in the mid-Atlantic region. The research specialist will review, evaluate, analyze, and synthesize environmental sciences research, data collection, environmental policies, and decision-making related to compliance with regulations. The specialist will have administrative duties regarding the operation of the EJPC. The specialist will collaborate with the Lab's practitioner(s)-in-residence, provide deliverables on time, organize meetings with stakeholders, and keep engagement active and bi-directional. The specialist will develop project leadership experience and gain extensive practice working with large environmental and administrative datasets.
The research specialist must have experience conducting research in any area of the environmental sciences, with a preference for work connected to climate change, a working understanding of policy making at multiple levels, and experience working with citizen-led groups. The specialist must be able to program to enable novel environmental data analysis across time and space. We seek individuals with highly independent project and data management capacity and strong written and oral communication skills.
In collaboration with senior research faculty, Research Specialist Senior employees participate as skilled individual contributors and/or lead researchers on one or more research projects. They serve as experts in their research field. They may be responsible for administrative, financial, staff supervision, and planning aspects of projects, where funding allows.
Investigate, evaluate, and synthesize environmental sciences data collection, research, regulatory compliance-related decision-making related to Repair Lab projects.
Conduct research in areas of expertise, programming, writing, presenting, and sharing results and for inclusion in larger projects.
Write and collaborate with other team members on policy memos, environmental sciences research, and reports.
Collaborate with practitioners, researchers, students, and other experts on long-range plans for projects and programs. Administer programs these programs.
Work with students and lead some project work groups.
In addition to the above job responsibilities, other duties may be assigned.
Education: Master's or terminal degree
Experience: Five years of specialized experience.
For additional information about the position, please contact Sally Pusede at sep6a@virginia.edu .
This position is a year long, restricted position and is dependent upon project need, availability of funding and performance. Start date and schedule are flexible. Anticipated Hiring Range: $65,000 - $75,000 commensurate with education and experience.
This is an Exempt level, benefited position. For more information on the benefits at UVA, visit hr.virginia.edu/benefits.
Review will begin January 23 and will remain open until filled.
This position is Hybrid and located in Charlottesville, VA.
Please apply through Workday, and search for R0043822. Internal applicants must apply through their UVA Workday profile by searching 'Find Jobs.' Complete an application online with the following documents:
Resume or CV
Contact information for three professional references
Upload all materials into the resume submission field, multiple documents can be submitted into this one field. Alternatively, merge all documents into one PDF for submission. Applications that do not contain all required documents will not receive full consideration.
References will be completed via UVA's standardized process Skill Survey. A total of five references will be requested via SkillSurvey during the final phase of the interview process.
For questions about the application process, please contact Jon Freeman, Academic Recruiter, at jf2sw@virginia.edu.
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GunForce
| Genre: Action | Licensed
Published by: Irem, 1992
Famicom Title: Gunforce: Battle Fire Engulfed Terror Island
A group of ruthless radicals are plotting to destroy the Earth and all its inhabitants. There's only one squad that has the ability to stop these terrorists--the GunForce, a highly trained, supremely disciplined corps of grizzled war veterans. With members from all over the world, the GunForce is a diverse mix of characters, each with a specialized area of expertise. As a member of this elite squad, it's up to you to work your way through five challenging stages of brutal firefights, ambush attacks, and recon missions. Each level is unique in design and purpose, and your battle skills will be pushed to their limits as you take on the craftiest terrorists the world has ever seen. The fate of the planet is in the hands of the GunForce. Can you lead them to victory?
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Florissantia is an extinct monotypic genus of planthopper in the dictyopharid subfamily Dictyopharinae.  The single species, Florissantia elegans, was described by Samuel Hubbard Scudder (1890) from fossils found in the Florissant Formation of Colorado.

History and classification
At the time of description, both the holotype and paratype of F. elegans were deposited in the paleoentomology collections at Princeton University, with Samuel Scudder's type description of the genus and species being published in a United States Geological Survey of the Territories 1890 monograph.  Scudder named the monotypic genus Florissantia after the type locality of Florissant, but did not elaborate on the etymology of the species name elegans.

At the time of description Scudder placed the genus into "subfamily Cixiida" of the "family Fulgorina".  The family was later elevated to Superfamily treatment as Fulgoroidea encompassing all planthoppers, with subfamily "Cixiida" being elevated to the family status as Cixiidae.  The familial placement of Florissantia was not reevaluated until Emeljanov (1983) who moved it to the family Dictyopharidae. This placement was further refined by Swedo (2008) who included Florissantia in the subfamily Dictyopharinae, but noted that tribal placement was unclear due to the characters visible in the fossils.

Distribution and paleoecology
When described, the genus Florissantia was known from two separate fossils preserved as impressions in fine shales of the Florissant formation in Colorado. The formation is composed of successive lake deposits resulting from a volcanic debris flow damming a valley.  When Florissantia was described, the Florissant Formation was considered to be Miocene in age, based on the flora and fauna preserved.  Successive research and fossil descriptions moved the age older and by 1985 the formation had been reassigned to an Oligocene age.  Further refinement of the formation's age using radiometric dating of sanidine crystals has resulted in an age of  placing the formation in the Priabonian stage of the Late Eocene.

The Florissant paleoforest surrounding the lake has been described as similar to modern southeastern North America, with a number of taxa represented that are now found in the subtropics to tropics and confined to the old world. MacGinitie (1953) suggested a warm temperate climate based on the modern biogeographic relatives of the biota found in the formation.  Modern estimates of the paleoelevation range between , notably higher than the original estimates by MacGinitie of . Estimates of the mean annual temperature for the Florissant Formation have been derived from climate leaf analysis multivariate program (CLAMP) analysis and modern forest equivalencies of the paleoflora. The results of the various methods have gaven a mean annual temperature rage between approximately , while the bioclimatic analysis for suggests mean annual precipitation amounts of .

Description
Florissantia elegans adults are  long by  at the base of the abdomen, with hemelytra almost the same length as the body at . The hemelytra about 3 times as long as wide, with a rounded pterostigma positioned near the middle of the apical half.  The wing veins are connected by a series of cross veins positioned near the pterostigma. The legs have longitudinal pale and dark striping, with dark colored spines on the  tibia. Overall the coloration is of a dark tone, with light markings on the abdominal region while the thorax has a punctate texture that changes to a reticulate texture on the scutellum.

References

Florissant Formation
†
Extinct Hemiptera
Eocene insects
Fossil taxa described in 1890
Taxa named by Samuel Hubbard Scudder


The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/1477-7819-10-185) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
RT, YY, TY, YM, KA, RT and HM treated the two patients as a team and reviewed the literature. RT drafted the manuscript, and YY, TY, YM, KA, RT and HM also helped to draft the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
Granulosa cell tumors (GCTs) of the ovary account for 2 to 5 of ovarian malignancies. We present two patients with malignant ovarian adult GCT. In one patient, a combination of bleomycin, etoposide, and cisplatin was effective after initial surgery for malignant GCT. In the other, an aromatase inhibitor was effective for recurrent malignant GCT. We also review the literature for further management of this tumor. Because GCT of the ovary is rare, it will be necessary to elucidate the clinical phenotype and establish treatment protocols by accumulating and analyzing more patients.


text:
Nominations deadline is Monday 5th April at midnight
The Worcestershire Health and Social Care Awards 2021, to recognise the talent and dedication of those heroes who work in the industry.
Run by Newsquest's Worcestershire titles, including the Worcester News, Malvern Gazette and Evesham Journal, the aim of the awards is to champion those teams and individuals that have gone above and beyond the call of duty to care for people during the Covid pandemic.
There are 12 categories and nominations are open now at worcesternews.co.uk. Finalists will be chosen by a panel of experts and the winners will be announced at a virtual awards ceremony broadcast live on our website and social media channels in April.
The awards are supported by MPs Robin Walker (Worcester), Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire) and Nigel Huddleston (Mid Worcestershire).
Worcestershire Health and Care NHS Trust has backed the awards by becoming a partner, and we are calling out to other organisations to sponsor the awards to show their appreciation for the county's health and care workers.
Michael Purton, the editor of the Worcester News, Malvern Gazette and Evesham Journal, said: "The people who work in the health and social care industry have always been an inspiration, not just during the pandemic, and these awards are our way of thanking them for their incredible dedication and skill.
"I would urge all of our readers to nominate an individual or team, to show them how much you appreciate everything they do.
"We will aim to profile every nominee in our newspapers and on our websites, to recognise their amazing work."
MP Harriett Baldwin said: "This is a wonderful chance for readers to nominate all those very many health and care workers who have been going above and beyond every day. I am sure everyone will know someone who has delivered exceptional care during this very challenging time."
MP Nigel Huddleston added: "I am immensely proud of our health service and all those who have worked tirelessly in this pandemic. I'm delighted that the 2021 Worcestershire Health & Social Care Awards will allow us the opportunity to award some of the health and care workers who truly deserve recognition.
"The awards also shed a light on the real stories and challenges that these workers have faced every day in what has been an immensely tough year, and is an important moment to celebrate the work of these unsung heroes."
The 12 award categories are:
•The Health Care Team Award
We want to hear about teams working together to deliver improved patient care. They can be from any sector but must demonstrate impact, very strong team working, strong communication, and the ability to work across organisational boundaries.
•The Care Hero Award
This award recognises that all our care workers in Worcestershire are heroes. Care workers make a difference to people's lives every day and this award celebrates that. Do you know a care worker who has worked hard to enable someone to live an independent, safe and fulfilled life? Have they helped to change someone's life for the better? It is these everyday stories about how our care workers make a difference (big or small) that the judges want to hear.
•The Care Home Worker Award
This award recognises the contribution of an individual home care worker who strives to improve the delivery of care in the care home sector through developing ways to enhance nursing care. This person must demonstrate outstanding levels of commitment to care and put the person being cared for at the heart of what they do.
•The Care Trainer Award
This award is for outstanding work in care training. The judges want to hear about how the training adapted to meet the needs of service, about the quality of service given and the effectiveness of new training.
•The Health Care Employer Award
This award goes to the health care employer who can demonstrate strong commitment to employees without diminishing the care they provide. The winner will have a strong and loyal workforce, who feel valued and recognised for the contributions they make.
•Domiciliary Care Worker Award
This award is about celebrating the important work that the third sector and community teams do in health and care. Are you, or do you know someone who is; doing something new, something bold or different? Something new to you, new to the sector or a new way of tackling an age-old problem? Or do you know someone who just does what they do really, well?
•The Good Nurse Award
We are looking for a health care professional who demonstrates an innovative and caring approach to their work. This person must demonstrate outstanding levels of commitment to patient care and put the patient at the heart of what they do. Entrants can be from any health care profession, and can work anywhere, from community care to surgical theatres.
•Adolescent and Child Health Care Award
This award is open to an organisation, department and or individual carer/nurse/doctor/charity who specialises in the care and treatment of children and adolescents within Worcestershire. This can range from specialist paediatrics, mental health, social, emotional or behavioural support, along with those who offer assessments and intervention.
•The Dementia Carer Award
This award recognises the contribution of an individual care worker who strives to improve the delivery of care for those suffering with dementia. This person must demonstrate outstanding levels of commitment to care and put the person being cared for at the heart of what they do.
•The Palliative/ End of Life Care Award
An award for an individual or team that recognises how choices made by the person being cared for and their family is central to the service and care that is delivered. This involves reflecting fully on what is important to the person at the end of their life. The judges will be looking for a carer or team who demonstrate what it takes to support clients and their families with care as well as psychological, social and spiritual support.
•The Mental Health Award
This award is open to a department or individual carer/nurse/doctor who specialises in the care and treatment of mental health in Worcestershire. Good mental health is now recognized as a vital component to good overall health and we would like to hear how the care and support in this sector has improved the lives of the individual and their families.
•GP Practice of the Year Award
We are looking for a GP practice in Worcestershire that stands out for the level of care they provide. Have you received great service? Has a doctor or practice nurse gone above or beyond the call of duty, or has the receptionist always greeted you with a smile and a friendly word? This award recognises the contribution of everyone in the GP practice in providing a good service to patients, where staff have gone the extra mile when treating you or someone you know.
CLICK ON AN AWARD CATEGORY
TO NOMINATE:-
The Health Care Team Award
The Care Hero Award
The Care Home Worker Award
The Care Trainer Award
The Health Care Employer Award
Domiciliary Care Worker Award
The Good Nurse Award
Adolescent and Child Health Care Award
The Dementia Carer Award
The Palliative/ End of Life Care Award
The Mental Health Award
GP Practice of the Year Award
Please note: All nominations are accepted in good faith, and on the basis that both the nominee and the person making the nomination consents to the publication by the awards organiser of all information provided in print, online and on social media.
If you'd like to sponsor the awards or one of the individual categories, email michael.purton@newsquest.co.uk
Worcestershire Health _ Social Care Awards 2021 Sponsor Pack.pdf
Headline Sponsor:
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text:
Q: Input and Output Voltage of a Full bridge rectifier I know If we provide a sinusoidal AC Voltage across the Inputs of a full bridge rectifier we get a fluctuating DC Voltage (more or less) with the peaks of source AC Voltage. But what would be the peak voltage after smoothing the Output DC with Capacitors if we hypotactically provide 220VAC RMS?

A:
Figure 1. Relationship between sinusoidal peak, RMS and average (after rectification) values. Image source: Learn About Electronics.
The peak voltage of a sinusoidal voltage waveform is \$ \sqrt 2 V_{RMS} \$. Conversely \$ V_{RMS} = \frac 1 {\sqrt 2} V_{peak} \$.
The RMS voltage can be considered that DC voltage which will give the same heating affect as the AC being considered. Since the power in a resistive load is given by \$ P = \frac {V^2} R \$ the RMS value is not the same as the average value.
Without smoothing capacitors the fullwave rectified DC will have the same RMS value as the AC waveform (ignoring losses in the rectifier).

Figure 2. Smoothing capacitor ripple. Image source: Electronics Notes.
The smoothing capacitor charges up on each peak of the rectified AC and supplies power to the circuit when the voltage falls away. See the linked article for how to size the smoothing capacitor.


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7 Days Private Tour Of Beijing, Xian, Shanghai By Bullet Train
Day 1: Beijing Arrival
Stop At: Beijing, Beijing
Upon you arrival in Beijing, our driver will meet you at airport/train station by holding a welcome board with your name and then transfer to your hotel.Free and easy on your own(no guide service).
Accommodation included: overnight in Beijing
Day 2: Beijing
Stop At: Ming Tombs (Ming Shishan Ling), Ming Shisan Ling Area, Changling Town, Changping District, Beijing 102213 China
Ming Tomb(Dingling) is one of the most visited Ming Tombs in Beijing. It is the only officially excavated one among the 13 Ming Tombs.
Stop At: The Great Wall at Badaling, Badaling, Yanqing District, Beijing 102112 China
Badaling Great Wall is the most famous and the best-preserved section of the Chinese Ming Dynasty Great Wall. The mountain slope is very steep and the roads are tortuous, which makes it an important military stronghold in ancient time. The wall is like a strong dragon winding its way along the mountain ranges. The hiking time on the Great Wall is about 2 hours. If hiking is too much for you, cable car is available and optional (cost on your own)
Today you will have 45 minutes to pay a short visit to the Jade Carving Factory.The jade carving is very famous special local product, it was not only the excellent skill on carving, but also mixes many Chinese traditional cultures in the jade carving.
Meals included:
• Lunch
Stop At: Tiananmen Square (Tiananmen Guangchang), West Changan Street, Dongcheng District, Beijing 100006 China
Tiananmen Square is the heart and symbol of Beijing and the largest city square in the world. The spacious square has been used for many public celebrations, ceremonies, and demonstrations for over a hundred years.
Stop At: Forbidden City-The Palace Museum, No.4 Jingshanqian Street, Dongcheng District, Beijing 100009 China
Forbidden City is one of the largest and most completely preserved palace complex built of wood. It functioned as the imperial palace in the Ming and Qing Dynasties (1368-1912). 24 emperors of the two dynasties once lived here.
Stop At: Temple of Heaven, Tiantan Road, Dongcheng District, Beijing 100050 China
Temple of Heaven located at southern part of Beijing, it serviced as a complex of sacrificial building where emperors of Ming and Qing Dynasties prayed for peace and harvest.
Stop At: Hutong Tour, No.9, Zhonglou, Dongcheng District No.9, Zhonglou, Dongcheng District, 100009, Beijing, Beijing 100009 China
Visit the Beijing local folk residence: Hutong Alley. There is opportunity for you to take a rickshaw to explore Hutong to see daily life of native Beijing people. Following the local expert guide, you will find another face of the city that totally different from what you see in major streets.
Today you will also pay a visit to Chinese Herb Medicine Market.
Day 4: Beijing - Xi'an by High Speed Train
Stop At: Beijing West Railway Station, No.118, Lian Hua Chi East Rd Fengtai District, Beijing 100036 China
Pickup by driver in your hotel at about 05:30 and then take the bullet train G89 (06:53-11:24) or similar train to Xian. Met by Xian guide and driver at Railway Station.
Stop At: Xi'an City Wall (Chengqiang), Zhongxin District, Xi'an 710001 China
Xian Ancient City Wall is the most completely preserved and largest city wall in China. It was built for military defense in the Ming Dynasty, about 650 years ago. You can optionally ride a bike on the city wall.
Stop At: Drum Tower Square, Beiyuanmen Snacks Street, Xi'an 710000 China
Come to Bell Tower & Drum Tower Square to have an outer look of the Bell Tower and the Drum Tower. At last, go to visit Muslim Quarter, the most famous food street in Xian.
Stop At: Muslim Quarter, West of Bell Drum Towers Square , Beilin District, Xi'an 710000 China
Muslim Quarter located at the center of Xi'an city. It is a place combining shopping malls, typical local food restaurants, and entertainment places and a must-see spot for tourists with unique historical atmosphere and diver culture. You can optionally try some snacks here
Accommodation included: Overnight in Xi'an
Day 5: Xi'an
Stop At: The Museum of Qin Terra-cotta Warriors and Horses, Qinling North Road, Lintong District, Xi'an 710600 China
Terracotta Warriors and Horses Museum. Known as "the Eighth Wonder of the World", the museum shows a surprisingly high level in sculpture. It is located 30 km east of Xi'an City and the original site was discovered by four local farmers while drilling a well in 1974. Now it has turned into one of the most important attractions in China and the top site in Xi'an. The museum includes Pit 1 (the largest), Pit 2, Pit 3, and the exhibition hall of the chariots and horses.
Stop At: Big Wild Goose Pagoda (Dayanta), Enci Temple The southern part of Yata Road, Yanta District, Xi'an 710061 China
Big Wild Goose Pagoda , a sacred place for worshiping Buddha. The pagoda was originally built to preserve sutras and figures of Buddha that Xuanzang brought back to China from India in the Tang Dynasty. Now there is a big Garden around Big Wild Goose Pagoda where people can have a nice walk.
Day 6: Xi'an - Shanghai by High Speed Train
Stop At: Xi'an, Xi'an, Shaanxi
The driver will meet you in hotel lobby at about 07:20 and escort you to train station to take the bullet train G362(08:49-14:45) or similar train to Shanghai.
Stop At: Shanghai South Railway Station, Shanghai South Railway Station, Shanghai
Upon your arrive at Shanghai South Train Station, our local tour guide will pick you up on time, then start the tour in Shanghai.
Stop At: The Bund, The Bund, Shanghai
The Bund is one of the most famous landmarks in Shanghai. Standing on the bank of Huangpu River, the 26 various buildings of different architectural styles including Gothic, Baroque, Romanesque, Classicism and the Renaissance are a symbol of Shanghai's past.
Stop At: Huangpu River, Headstreams from Dianshan Lake, Zhujiajiao Town, Qingpu District, Shanghai 201700 China
In the evening, take a relaxing Huangpu River night cruise to enjoy the spectacular scenery on the bank. Huangpu River separates Shanghai into two parts, Pudong and Puxi. Cruising on the river will give you an unparalleled view of the city's skyline and an unforgettable traveling experience.
After the cruise, you will be escorted back to hotel.
Accommodation included: Overnight in Shanghai
Day 7: Shanghai Departure
Stop At: Jade Buddha Temple, 170 An Yuan Road, Shanghai China
Our local tour guide will pick you up from the hotel lobby and then start the one day tour with the hundreds-year-old Jade Buddha Temple. The temple was built to keep two jade Buddha statues which had been brought from Burma by a monk named Huigen.
Stop At: Shanghai Museum (Shanghai Bowuguan), No.201 Renmin Avenue, Shanghai China
Then move on to visit Shanghai Museum at People's Square. Established in 1952, the Shanghai Museum has a collection of more than 120,00 rare cultural pieces from the Old Stone Age to modern times. Shanghai Museum closed on each Monday.
Stop At: Yuyuan Garden, Fuxing Road, Siming District, Xiamen 361002 China
Yuyuan Garden is a famous classical garden which was originally built for Pan's parents as a place for them to enjoy a tranquil and happy time in their old age. Nearby is Yuyuan Market a bustling marketplace set in an old Chinese neighborhood with traditional architecture and shops selling everything from local snacks to various souvenirs.
Stop At: Shanghai, Shanghai
After the tour finished, our guide and driver will escort you to the airport or train station for departure.
Starts Beijing
Ends Beijing
Leaving from Beijing
Beijing is the capital of the People's Republic of China, is one of the oldest and largest cities in the world. Famous for one of the largest engineering works known as the Wall of China.