text:
\section{Introduction}

Non-parametric methods \cite{DBLP:conf/aaai/GuWCL18, zhang-etal-2018-guiding, bapna-firat-2019-non, DBLP:journals/corr/abs-2010-00710, zheng-etal-2021-adaptive} have recently been successfully applied to neural machine translation (NMT).
These approaches complement advanced NMT models \cite{DBLP:conf/nips/SutskeverVL14, DBLP:journals/corr/BahdanauCB14, DBLP:conf/nips/VaswaniSPUJGKP17, DBLP:journals/corr/abs-1803-05567} with external memory to alleviate the performance degradation when translating out-of-domain sentences, rare words~\cite{DBLP:conf/aclnmt/KoehnK17}, etc.
Among them, $k$NN-MT~\cite{DBLP:journals/corr/abs-2010-00710} is a simple yet effective non-parametric method using nearest neighbor retrieval.
More specifically, $k$NN-MT equips a pre-trained NMT model with a $k$NN classifier over a provided datastore of cached context representations and corresponding target tokens to improve translation accuracy without retraining.
This promising ability to access any provided datastore or external knowledge during inference makes it expressive, adaptable, and interpretable.

Despite the potential benefits, $k$NN-MT requires large-scale in-domain parallel corpora to achieve domain adaptation.
However, in practice, it is not realistic to collect large amounts of high-quality parallel data in every domain we are interested in.
Since monolingual in-domain data is usually abundant and easy to obtain, it is essential to explore the capability of $k$NN-MT on unsupervised domain adaptation scenario that utilizes large amounts of monolingual in-domain data.
One straightforward and effective solution for unsupervised domain adaptation is to build in-domain synthetic parallel data via back-translation of monolingual target sentences \cite{sennrich-etal-2016-improving, DBLP:journals/corr/abs-1803-00353, dou-etal-2019-unsupervised,wei-etal-2020-iterative}.
Although this approach has proven superior effectiveness in exploiting monolingual data, applying it in $k$NN-MT requires an additional reverse model and brings the extra cost of generating back-translation, making the adaptation of $k$NN-MT more complicated and time-consuming in practice.

In this paper, we propose a novel \textbf{U}nsupervised \textbf{D}omain \textbf{A}daptation framework based on $k$NN-MT (UDA-$k$NN).
The UDA-$k$NN aims at directly leveraging the monolingual target-side data to generate the corresponding datastore, and encouraging it to play a similar role with the real bilingual in-domain data, through the carefully designed architecture and loss function.
Specifically, we introduce an autoencoder task based on target language to enable datastore construction with monolingual data.
Then we incorporate lightweight adapters into the encoder part of pre-trained NMT model to make the decoder's representation in autoencoder task close to the corresponding representation in translation task.
In this way, the adapter module implicitly learns the semantic mapping from the target language to source language in feature space to construct an effective in-domain datastore, while saving the extra cost of generating synthetic data via back-translation.

We evaluate the proposed approach on multi-domain datasets, including IT, Medical, Koran and Law domains.
Experimental results show that when using target-side monolingual data, our proposed approach obtains $4.9$ BLEU improvements on average and even achieves similar performance compared with back-translation.

\section{Background}
In this section, we give a brief introduction to the domain adaptation of $k$NN-MT. In general, the process includes two steps: creating an in-domain datastore and decoding with retrieval on it.

\paragraph{In-domain Datastore Creation.}
Given a pre-trained general domain NMT model and an in-domain parallel corpus, $k$NN-MT utilizes the model to forward pass the corpus to create a datastore.
Formally, for each bilingual sentence pair in the corpus $(x, y) \in (\mathcal{X}, \mathcal{Y})$, the NMT model will generate a context representation $h(x, y_{<t})$ for each target-side token $y_t$.
Then, the datastore is constructed by collecting the representations and corresponding tokens as keys and values respectively:
\begin{equation}
(\mathcal{K}, \mathcal{V}) = \bigcup_{(x, y) \in (\mathcal{X}, \mathcal{Y})} \{(h(x, y_{<t}), y_t), \forall y_t \in y \}.
\label{equ:datastore}
\end{equation}
\paragraph{Decoding with Retrieval.}
On each decoding step $t$, the NMT model first generates a representation $h(x, \hat{y}_{<t})$ for current translation context, which consists of source-side $x$ and generated target-side tokens $\hat{y}_{<t}$.
Then, the representation is used to query the in-domain datastore for $k$ nearest neighbors, which can be denoted as $N = \{(h_i, v_i), i \in \{1, 2, ..., k\} \}$.
These neighbors are utilized to form a distribution over the vocab:
\begin{align}
p_{\textrm{kNN}}(y_t & |x, \hat{y}_{<t}) \propto \label{equ:knn_prob} \\
&\sum_{(h_i, v_i)} \mathbb{1}_{y_t = v_i} \exp (\frac{-d(h_i, h(x, \hat{y}_{<t}))}{T}), \nonumber
\end{align}
where $T$ is the temperature and $d(\cdot, \cdot)$ indicates the squared euclidean distance.
The final probability to predict next token $y_{t}$ is an interpolation of two distributions with a hyper-parameter $\lambda$:
\begin{equation}
\label{equ:prob_ip}
\begin{split}
p(y_t|x, \hat{y}_{<t}) &= \lambda \ p_{\textrm{kNN}}(y_t|x, \hat{y}_{<t}) \\
& + (1-\lambda) \ p_{\textrm{NMT}} (y_t|x, \hat{y}_{<t}),
\end{split}
\end{equation}
where $p_{\textrm{NMT}}$ indicates the general domain NMT prediction and $p_{\textrm{kNN}}$ represents the in-domain retrieval based prediction.

\begin{figure}[t]
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width=0.49\textwidth]{pic/model.pdf}
    \vspace{-10pt}
    \caption{An overview of the proposed method.}
    \label{fig:model}

\end{figure}

\section{Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with $k$NN-MT}

Although \citet{DBLP:journals/corr/abs-2010-00710} has shown the capability of $k$NN-MT on domain adaptation, the datastore creation heavily relies on high-quality in-domain parallel data, which cannot be always satisfied in practice.
As in-domain monolingual data is usually abundant and easy to obtain, it is essential to extend the capability of $k$NN-MT on unsupervised domain adaptation that merely uses large amounts of in-domain target sentences.
In this paper, we design a novel non-parametric \textbf{U}nsupervised \textbf{D}omain \textbf{A}daptation framework based on $k$NN-MT (UDA-$k$NN) to fully leverage in-domain target-side monolingual data.

The overview framework of UDA-$k$NN is illustrated in Figure \ref{fig:model}.
The UDA-$k$NN starts with the autoencoder task based on target language $y$, where the target-side is simply copied to the source-side to generate pair $(y, y)$.
Based on that, the UDA-$k$NN aims to make the decoder's representation in autoencoder task close to the ideal representation in translation task.
In this way, we can directly leverage autoencoder structure and in-domain target sentences to construct the corresponding datastore for $k$-nearest-neighbor retrieval, which is similar to that from real in-domain bilingual data.
Next, we will introduce the architecture and training objective of our proposed method in detail.

\paragraph{Architecture.} We insert lightweight adapter layers~\cite{DBLP:conf/icml/HoulsbyGJMLGAG19,DBLP:conf/nips/GuoZXWCC20,DBLP:journals/taslp/GuoZXCC21} into the source embedding layer and each encoder layer of the pre-trained NMT model to perform the autoencoder task, by which we only increase a few parameters for our method.
Specifically, we simply construct the adapter layer with layer normalization as well as two feed-forward networks with non-linearity between them:
\begin{equation}
\label{equ:enc_adapter_forward}
Z = W_1 \cdot (\textrm{LN}(H)), \\
H_{\textsc{o}} = H + W_2 \cdot (\textrm{ReLU}(Z)),
\end{equation}
where $H$ and $H_{\textsc{o}}$ are the input and output hidden states of the adapter layer respectively, $\textrm{LN}$ indicates layer normalization, $W_1$ and $W_2$ are the parameters of the feed-forward networks.

\paragraph{Training.}
The UDA-$k$NN is designed to leverage monolingual target-side data to generate the corresponding datastore, which plays a similar role with real in-domain bilingual data.
We achieve this by leveraging out-of-domain bilingual data $(\mathcal{X}, \mathcal{Y})$.
More specifically, given a bilingual sentence pair in the corpus $(x, y) \in (\mathcal{X}, \mathcal{Y})$, the original NMT model generates decoder representation $h_{(x;\ y_{<t})}$ for each target token $y_t$.
Meanwhile, with the target-copied pair $(y, y)$, the NMT model with adapters generates another representation for each $y_t$, which can be denoted as $h'_{(y;\ y_{<t})}$.
We take the end-to-end paradigm to directly optimize the adapter layers by minimizing the squared euclidean distance of the two sets of decoder representations:
\begin{equation}
\theta^* = \min_{\theta} \sum_{(x,\ y) \in (\mathcal{X}, \mathcal{Y})} \sum_{t}||h'_{(y;\ y_{<t})} - h_{(x;\ y_{<t})}||^2,
\label{equ:objective}
\end{equation}
where $\theta$ is the parameters of all adapter layers.
Note that we keep original parameters in the pre-trained NMT model fixed during training to avoid the performance degradation of the NMT model in the inference stage.

\paragraph{Prediction.}
For unsupervised domain adaptation, given the domain-specific target-side monolingual data, we first copy the target sentences to the source side to generate synthetic bilingual pairs.
Then the pre-trained NMT model with adapter layers forward passes these pairs to create an in-domain datastore.
When translating in-domain sentences, we utilize the original NMT model and $k$NN retrieval on the in-domain datastore to perform online domain adaptation as \Cref{equ:prob_ip}.

\section{Experiments}

\subsection{Setup}
\paragraph{Datasets and Evaluation Metric.}
We use the same multi-domain dataset as ~\citet{aharoni-goldberg-2020-unsupervised} to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed model and consider domains including \textbf{IT}, \textbf{Medical}, \textbf{Koran}, and \textbf{Law} in our experiments.
We extract target-side data in the training sets to perform unsupervised domain adaptation while keeping the dev and test sets unchanged.
Besides, WMT'19 News data\footnote{\url{http://www.statmt.org/wmt19/translation-task.html}} is used for training the adapters in our method as well as the reverse translation model for back-translation.
The sentence statistics of all datasets are illustrated in \cref{table:dataset}.
The Moses toolkit\footnote{\url{https://github.com/moses-smt/mosesdecoder}} is used to tokenize the sentences and we split the words into subword units \citep{sennrich-etal-2016-neural} with the codes provided by the pre-trained model \citep{ng-etal-2019-facebook}.
We use SacreBLEU\footnote{\url{https://github.com/mjpost/sacrebleu}} to measure all results with case-sensitive detokenized BLEU~\citep{papineni-etal-2002-bleu}.

\begin{table}[htb] \small
\centering
\resizebox{0.48\textwidth}{!}{%
\begin{tabular}{l|ccccc}
\toprule
\multicolumn{1}{l|}{Dataset} & WMT19'News & IT    & Medical & Koran & Laws    \\ \midrule
Train                     &$37,079,168$ & $222,927$ & $248,009$   & $17,982$ & $467,309$ \\
Dev            &$10,000$ & $2000$& $2000$   & $2000$ & $2000$ \\
Test            &  -       & $2000$ & $2000$   & $2000$ & $2000$ \\ \bottomrule
\end{tabular}%
}
\vspace{-5pt}
\caption{Statistics of dataset in different domains.}
\label{table:dataset}
\vspace{-5pt}
\end{table}

\paragraph{Methods.}
We compare our proposed approach with several baselines:
\begin{itemize}[leftmargin=*]
    \setlength{\itemsep}{0pt}
    \setlength{\parskip}{0pt}
    \item \textbf{Basic NMT}: A general domain model is directly used to evaluate on in-domain test sets.
    \item \textbf{Empty-$k$NN}: The source-side of synthetic bilingual data is always set to \textit{<EOS>} token.

    \item \textbf{Copy-$k$NN}: Each target sentence is copied to source-side to produce synthetic bilingual data. This is a special case of our method without model training.

    \item \textbf{BT-$k$NN}: A reverse translation model is applied to produce synthetic bilingual data, which are used to generate in-domain datastore.
    \item \textbf{Parallel-$k$NN}: Ground-truth parallel data is used to generate the in-domain datastore, which can be regarded as the upper bound of the $k$NN retrieval based methods.
\end{itemize}

\paragraph{Implementation Details.}

We use the WMT'19 German-English News translation task winner model \citep{ng-etal-2019-facebook} as our general domain model.
For introduced adapters, the hidden size is set to $1024$, with only about $6\%$ parameters of the original model.
Adam \citep{DBLP:journals/corr/KingmaB14} is used to update the parameters in adapters.
During training, we collect about $40000$ tokens for each batch and schedule the learning rate with the inverse square root decay scheme, in which the warm-up step is set as $4000$, and the maximum learning rate is set as 7e-4.
Faiss\footnote{\url{https://github.com/facebookresearch/faiss}} is used to build the in-domain datastore to carry out fast nearest neighbor search. We utilize faiss to learn $4096$ cluster centroids for each domain, and search $32$ clusters for each target token in decoding.
When inference, we retrieve $16$ nearest neighbors in the datastore.
We set the hyper-parameter $T$ as $4$ for IT, Medical, Law, and $40$ for Koran.
The $\lambda$ is tuned on the in-domain dev sets for different methods.

\subsection{Main Results}

The adaptation performance of different methods are listed in \Cref{table:main}.
Obviously, our method can significantly improve the translation accuracy on in-domain test sets compared to basic NMT, while Empty-$k$NN and Copy-$k$NN can't.
It demonstrates the efficiency of our proposed method to create an in-domain datastore by leveraging only monolingual data.
Besides, we can observe that our method achieves comparable performance over BT-$k$NN,
but completely avoids the reverse model and extra time cost to generate synthetic data, making the adaptation much faster and simpler.

\begin{table}[tb]
\centering \small
\setlength\tabcolsep{3pt}
\begin{tabular}{@{}l|ccccc}
\toprule
Model     & IT    & Medical & Law   & Koran & Avg.   \\ \midrule
Basic NMT  & $38.35$ & $39.99$   & $45.48$ & $16.26$ & $35.02$                        \\ \midrule
Empty-$k$NN & $38.06$   & $40.01$     & $45.62$   & $16.44$   & $35.03$                          \\
Copy-$k$NN  & $38.96$ & $40.86$   & $46.00$ & $17.06$ & $35.72$                  \\
BT-$k$NN    & $41.35$ & $47.02$   & $52.91$ & $19.58$ & $40.23$                          \\
UDA-$k$NN      & $41.57$ & $46.64$   & $52.02$ & $19.42$ & $39.91$                        \\ \midrule
Parallel-$k$NN &
  \multicolumn{1}{c}{$45.96$} &
  \multicolumn{1}{c}{$54.16$} &
  \multicolumn{1}{c}{$61.31$} &
  \multicolumn{1}{c}{$20.30$} &
  \multicolumn{1}{c}{$45.43$} \\ \bottomrule
\end{tabular}%
\vspace{-5pt}
\caption{The BLEU scores [\%] of different methods evaluated on four domains.}
\label{table:main}
\vspace{-5pt}
\end{table}

\subsection{Analysis}

In this section, we would like to further explore the reasons behind the success of our approach.

\paragraph{Similarity Measurement.}
We measure the cosine similarity and squared euclidean distances between the synthetic representations generated by our method and ideals generated using ground-truth parallel data.
As shown in \Cref{table:similarity}, we also list the results of BT-$k$NN and Copy-$k$NN.
We can observe that even without the source language information, our UDA-$k$NN can generate the representations that are close enough to the ideals as BT-$k$NN, leading to the efficient in-domain retrieval for $k$NN-MT.
It also verifies the effectiveness of the adapter layers on directly learning the semantic mapping from target language to source language in feature space.

\begin{table}[htb]
\centering \small
\setlength\tabcolsep{3pt}
\begin{tabular}{@{}lcccc@{}}
\toprule
\multicolumn{5}{c}{Cosine Similarity ($\uparrow$)}                               \\ \midrule
\multicolumn{1}{l|}{Method}   & IT    & Medical & Law  & Koran   \\ \midrule
\multicolumn{1}{l|}{Copy-$k$NN} & $0.74$  & $0.77$    & $0.77$ & $0.65$  \\
\multicolumn{1}{l|}{BT-$k$NN}   & $0.85$  & $0.86$   & $0.92$  & $0.81$  \\
\multicolumn{1}{l|}{UDA-$k$NN}     & $0.87$  & $0.87$    & $0.91$ & $0.84$ \\ \midrule
\multicolumn{5}{c}{Squared Euclidean Distance ($\downarrow$)}                   \\ \midrule
\multicolumn{1}{l|}{Method}   & IT    & Medical & Law  & Koran   \\ \midrule
\multicolumn{1}{l|}{Copy-$k$NN} & $85.93$ & $79.03$   & $77.97$ & $145.93$ \\
\multicolumn{1}{l|}{BT-$k$NN}   & $47.00$ & $42.30$   & $25.47$ & $78.77$  \\
\multicolumn{1}{l|}{UDA-$k$NN}     & $46.10$ & $45.83$   & $31.36$ & $68.56$ \\ \bottomrule
\end{tabular}%
\vspace{-5pt}
\caption{ Cosine similarity / squared euclidean distance between the ground-truth representations and that generated by different methods.}
\label{table:similarity}
\vspace{-5pt}
\end{table}

\paragraph{Visualization.}

\begin{figure*}[t]
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width=0.95\textwidth]{pic/visualization.pdf}
    \vspace{-5pt}
    \caption{The t-SNE visualization \citep{vanDerMaaten2008} of the representation distributions for label \textit{profile}, \textit{network}, \textit{software} in the datastores, which are created by different methods.}
    \label{fig:visualization}
    \vspace{-8pt}
\end{figure*}

We also collect and visualize the representations with the same target tokens in different datastores to give intuitive insights of the impact of adapters.
Specifically, we select three common words in IT domain and show the results in \Cref{fig:visualization}.
We can see that the representations generated with Copy-$k$NN tend to gather in small areas, which results in retrieval collapse when meeting diverse translation contexts.
While with the adapters, the distribution of the same label in the datastore can be closer to that generated with bilingual pairs, improving the retrieval efficiency.

\paragraph{Effect of Adapter Position.}

In our proposed method, we only insert adapters into the encoder side as we would like to modify the encoding function of $y$.
It aims to encode the $y$ into the same feature space as the semantically identical $x$.
We also compare our choice to the common practice \citep{ bapna-firat-2019-simple, DBLP:conf/nips/GuoZXWCC20}, where the adapters are inserted into both encoder and decoder sides.
The results are shown in \Cref{table:effect}.
We can observe that the adapters in the decoder side can only play a very limited role, which also demonstrates the motivation of our approach.

\begin{table}[htb]
\centering \small
\setlength\tabcolsep{3pt}
\begin{tabular}{@{}l|ccccc@{}}
\toprule
Adapter             & IT    & Medical & Law & Koran   & Avg   \\ \midrule
Encoder          & $41.57$ & $46.64$   & $52.02$ & $19.42$ & $39.91$ \\
Encoder + Decoder & $41.73$ & $46.75$   & $52.15$ & $19.31$ & $39.99$ \\ \bottomrule
\end{tabular}%
\vspace{-5pt}
\caption{The BLEU scores [\%] of inserting adapters into encoder / encoder and decoder sides of our method.}
\label{table:effect}
\end{table}

\paragraph{Comparison with Fine-tuning Strategy.}
We compare our method with BT-FT, where the back-translation data is used for fine-tuning the full NMT model.
The fine-tuning method easily causes catastrophic forgetting problem \citep{thompson-etal-2019-overcoming} and results in performance degradation, especially when the data contains noise, as the results shown in \Cref{table:FT}.

\begin{table}[htb]
\centering \small
\setlength\tabcolsep{3pt}
\begin{tabular}{@{}l|ccccc@{}}
\toprule
Method             & IT    & Medical & Law & Koran   & Avg   \\ \midrule
Basic NMT  & $38.35$ & $39.99$   & $45.48$ & $16.26$ & $35.02$                        \\ \midrule
UDA-$k$NN          & $41.57$ & $46.64$   & $52.02$ & $19.42$ & $39.91$ \\
BT-$k$NN    & $41.35$ & $47.02$   & $52.91$ & $19.58$ & $40.23$    \\
BT-FT              & $39.72$ & $46.44$   & $51.06$ & $17.45$ & $38.67$ \\ \bottomrule
\end{tabular}%
\vspace{-5pt}
\caption{The BLEU scores [\%] of the non-parametric methods and fine-tuning method.}
\label{table:FT}
\end{table}

\section{Conclusion}

In this paper, we present UDA-$k$NN, a simple yet effective framework that directly utilizes monolingual data to construct in-domain datastore for unsupervised domain adaptation of $k$NN-MT.
Experimental results verify that our method obtains significant improvement with target-side monolingual data.
Our approach also achieves comparable performance with the BT-based method, while saving the extra cost of generating back-translation.

\section{Acknowledgments}
We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.
This work is supported by National Science Foundation of China (No. U1836221, 61772261), National Key R\&D Program of China (No. 2019QY1806) and Alibaba Group through Alibaba Innovative Research Program.
We appreciate Weizhi Wang, Hao-Ran Wei, Yichao Du for the fruitful discussions.
The work was done when the first author was an intern at Alibaba Group.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


Gregory Gibbs grew up in Shepparton and can recall being captivated by the night sky around the age of seven, when he was taken to the outskirts of town to see Halley's Comet. Gregory Gibbs has been fascinated with the night sky ever since, and began photographing it seriously in 2010. Currently residing near Holbrook, Gibbs enjoys observing and taking pictures of objects in space like planets, star forming nebula regions, distant galaxies and even the Sun, but his passion is astrophotography and he is well-known for field of landscape astrophotography.
Gibbs uses nothing more than a standard tripod and camera to capture wide field images of the night sky in relation to the landscape. He has travelled extensively throughout the region to seek out new and interesting locations, well away from the effects of bright city lights, which enables Gibbs to capture the full beauty of a star filled sky. Waiting out bad weather or for a bright full moon to shoot a location can be really frustrating and very cold night temperatures are normal working conditions. But when the weather does cooperate and Gibbs' patience pays off, he gets the photographs planned for. Gibbs hopes that through his hobby of capturing the beauty of the night sky he can inspire people to get away from artificial lights and simply look up. Halley's Comet will return to our skies in 2061. Keep an eye out for the 82 year old man standing next to a camera on a tripod with a huge smile on his face.
- Active member of the Astronomical Society of Albury Wodonga.
If anyone is interested in the night sky or wants to learn more about how to photograph it, come along to a meeting. The society meets the first Wednesday of each month, 7pm at Charles Sturt University's Thurgoona Campus. The meeting is held in room 114 Learning and Teaching Hub, AKA building 754 with access from Car Park 2.


text:
4 emotionally intelligent skills that are overrated
Emotional intelligence is a trait that has been touted as crucial to the future of work, but it's not always a good thing.
[Photo: Oladimeji Odunsi/Unsplash]
By Anisa Purbasari Horton 4 minute Read
Emotional intelligence, or EQ, is a skill that's going to make you thrive in the future of work, and VCs look for it in founders when they decide whether or not to invest in a company. But EQ encompasses a wide range of attributes.
It's obvious why certain EQ habits–like being a good listener, having empathy, and managing stress are important to workplace success. But there are also EQ skills that have, well, probably gotten more hype than they should have. That's not to say that they're terrible to have, but as set out below, they're not always necessary or appropriate in every circumstance.
1. High self-esteem
Having high-self-esteem used to be all the rage. The problem is, sometimes too much self-esteem can inflate your ego, and it becomes harder for you to come to terms with how others really see you–particularly when it comes to your flaws and not-so-flattering parts, writes Melissa Dahl, editor of New York Magazine's Science of Us.
Rather than focusing on increasing your self-esteem, Dahl argues that everyone should strive for "self-clarity." This means seeing yourself and situations through a non-emotional lens, and acknowledging your imperfections that others see in you. If this doesn't come naturally, Dahl suggests thinking of a time when you felt low in self-confidence. Let yourself feel the feelings, but then step back and think, has this happened to others? You might realize that your flaws are not so embarrassing and are easier to accept after all.
Related: The "self-esteem" movement is over, here's what's taking its place
2. Positive thinking
In a world driven by fear and negative headlines, optimism can seem like an attractive attribute. It's easy to see why. When you know how to turn obstacles into opportunities, and focus on what went well rather than what went terribly, the inevitable challenges of life can seem less daunting to face.
It's a great thing to be an optimist, but there is a time when too much of it isn't a good thing. For example when you're overly optimistic about achieving a goal, you're less likely to work hard toward it, making you less likely to achieve it. As Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic previously wrote for Fast Company, "those who skew more pessimistic about reaching their goals may be more likely to achieve them, not least because their self-doubt pushes them to work harder to reach them. When you really want something, you're better off thinking that you won't get it than assuming you will."
When you undertake challenging tasks, thinking about what could go wrong can help you avoid it. Of course, that doesn't mean that you constantly dwell on the worst-case scenarios, as Stephanie Vozza previously wrote for Fast Company. But by having a plan of what you'll do if it does happen, you'll probably end up mitigating the risk and it better.
Related: How being pessimistic can help you succeed
3. Mindfulness
Mindfulness is sometimes treated as the be-all and end-all solution to the stresses of modern life. But just as too much technology is bad for you, too much mindfulness isn't so great either, psychologists Dr Robert Biswas-Diener and Dr. Todd B. Kashdan previously wrote for Fast Company. The authors noted, "Mindfulness is the act of focusing attention and observing the present moment without a lot of mental dialogue and interpretation." But your brain isn't always wired to focus all the time. When you give it space to wander and drift, that's when you're letting your thoughts incubate, and when you're more likely to come up with a solution to the problem that's been bugging you all day.
That doesn't mean you should give up on the practice altogether. Rather, Biswas-Diener and Kashdan wrote, "Mindfulness and mindlessness should coexist. You benefit from the lightning-strike of creativity, but then you want to be able to analyze the potential and drawbacks of your spontaneous ideas." So next time you meditate and focus on your surroundings, allow a few minutes where you let your thoughts wander freely, without forcing yourself to "go back to the breath."
Related: This is why meditation isn't working for you
4. Willpower
There's a misconception that productive people have strong willpower, discipline, and self-control. But as Lydia Dishman previously reported for Fast Company, research from Duke University indicates that the more you exercise self-control, "the bigger the drain on brain structures that support recall and, consequently, productivity."
Think about New Year's resolutions. People resolve to lose weight and eat healthy, but rely too much on their willpower, and inevitably fail. If they designed their environment differently however, they don't need to rely so much on willpower. Brian Wansink, author of Slim By Design: Mindless Eating Solutions, argues that putting out the fruit bowl and hiding the chocolate bars does more to someone's eating behavior than discipline ever will. When it comes to changing habits, Wansink says that what works are "behavioral tools people can use to change what they select without knowing it's good or bad for them."
"We have far less control over our own behavior than we like to think," social scientist Joseph Grenny previously told Fast Company. So don't rely on it when you're trying to change a habit; instead, focus on creating systems in your life that set you up for success, whether it's a support system or you motivate yourself with small rewards. You'll probably find that you'll get much further.
Anisa is a freelance writer and editor who covers the intersection of work and life, personal development, money, and entrepreneurship. Previously, she was the assistant editor for Fast Company's Work Life section and the co-host of Secrets Of The Most Productive people podcast.
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That night, in a poker game, Rolfe sits in and deliberately drops the torn king card, sarcastically saying, "My good luck piece.Souvenir of the biggest pot I ever sat in on." Kane and Romano react, but Foster does not, because only he knows that the man pretending to be Harris, isn't.
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As he's released, the proud Rolfe, a Bronze Star- and Purple Heart-winning soldier accustomed to hardship, sees that he's lost his job, he's broke and everything he's worked for since he got out of prison is ruined.But Foster's plan suddenly is skewed when his daughter Helen (Coleen Gray) arrives unexpectedly.She meets Rolfe while registering for a bungalow and takes a liking to him.Part of his plan involves making an innocent patsy out of the floral truck driver and ex-con Joe Rolfe (John Payne), a look-alike getaway truck that the police will pursue instead of Mr. Each wearing a mask so none can identify each other, he and his gang arrive in a look-alike floral truck as Rolfe, unaware, drives away.Big's truck, to buy time to successfully escape the country. Big and his gang subdue the armored car guards in four minutes, grab bags containing
As he's released, the proud Rolfe, a Bronze Star- and Purple Heart-winning soldier accustomed to hardship, sees that he's lost his job, he's broke and everything he's worked for since he got out of prison is ruined.But Foster's plan suddenly is skewed when his daughter Helen (Coleen Gray) arrives unexpectedly.She meets Rolfe while registering for a bungalow and takes a liking to him.Part of his plan involves making an innocent patsy out of the floral truck driver and ex-con Joe Rolfe (John Payne), a look-alike getaway truck that the police will pursue instead of Mr. Each wearing a mask so none can identify each other, he and his gang arrive in a look-alike floral truck as Rolfe, unaware, drives away.Big's truck, to buy time to successfully escape the country. Big and his gang subdue the armored car guards in four minutes, grab bags containing $1.2 million and flee, knowing that his distinctive getaway truck will be mistaken for Rolfe's. Big gives each gang member a torn king playing card. We'll cut up the money when I think it's had time enough to cool off.One is an armored car routinely picking up bags containing lots of money from a bank.
As he's released, the proud Rolfe, a Bronze Star- and Purple Heart-winning soldier accustomed to hardship, sees that he's lost his job, he's broke and everything he's worked for since he got out of prison is ruined.
But Foster's plan suddenly is skewed when his daughter Helen (Coleen Gray) arrives unexpectedly.
She meets Rolfe while registering for a bungalow and takes a liking to him.
Part of his plan involves making an innocent patsy out of the floral truck driver and ex-con Joe Rolfe (John Payne), a look-alike getaway truck that the police will pursue instead of Mr. Each wearing a mask so none can identify each other, he and his gang arrive in a look-alike floral truck as Rolfe, unaware, drives away.
Big's truck, to buy time to successfully escape the country. Big and his gang subdue the armored car guards in four minutes, grab bags containing $1.2 million and flee, knowing that his distinctive getaway truck will be mistaken for Rolfe's. Big gives each gang member a torn king playing card. We'll cut up the money when I think it's had time enough to cool off.
One is an armored car routinely picking up bags containing lots of money from a bank.
.2 million and flee, knowing that his distinctive getaway truck will be mistaken for Rolfe's. Big gives each gang member a torn king playing card. We'll cut up the money when I think it's had time enough to cool off.One is an armored car routinely picking up bags containing lots of money from a bank.
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Horizon Updates
Selected Bios
Academy Publishes Notes from Meeting with Regulators on MPRA
To date, a number of multiemployer pension plans in critical and declining status have submitted applications to the Department of Treasury and Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation to suspend benefits or partition liabilities under the Multiemployer Pension Reform Act of 2014 (MPRA). So far, only one application to suspend benefits has been approved, but several have been rejected by the regulators or withdrawn by the plan sponsor.
The Multiemployer Plans Subcommittee of the American Academy of Actuaries has published notes from a February 2017 meeting with federal regulators to discuss lessons learned from the suspension and partition applications that had been reviewed up to that point. These notes are a valuable resource for multiemployer plan sponsors and practitioners, especially those for plans considering applying for a suspension or partition under MPRA.
From the Winter 2017 edition of the Enrolled Actuaries Report:
Academy Liaises With Federal Agencies on MPRA Applications
The Multiemployer Plans Subcommittee met in February with members of the U.S. Department of Treasury, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation and the Department of Labor. The discussion focused on applications by multiemployer pension plans in critical and declining status to suspend benefits or partition liabilities, as permitted under the Multiemployer Pension Reform Act of 2014 (MPRA).
The subcommittee released notes from the meeting, highlighting discussions about actuarial assumptions, plan sponsor considerations, review process, and the possibility of informal consultation prior to a MPRA application for suspension of benefits or partition.
The discussion in this exchange was intended to provide plan sponsors and actuaries with insights about the MPRA application review process with a goal to help plan sponsors make decisions about applying and to increase the acceptance rate for those who do apply.
Treasury Approves First Application to Suspend Benefits
On December 16, 2016, the Department of the Treasury approved the application by the Iron Workers Local 17 Pension Fund to suspend benefits under the Multiemployer Pension Reform Act of 2014 ("MPRA"). This application is the first to be approved by Treasury, following denials of four other applications.
Now that the application has been approved by Treasury, the suspension must now proceed to a vote by participants and beneficiaries. The vote will be administered by Treasury.
The Iron Workers Local 17 Pension Fund first submitted its application to suspend benefits on December 23, 2015. It withdrew the original application and resubmitted a revised application on July 29, 2016. Treasury has posted the approval letter to the Fund on its webpage for MPRA applications.
Please contact your Horizon Actuarial consultant for more information on how this decision may affect your pension fund.
Kline Releases Composite Plan Proposal for Multiemployer Pension Plans
On September 9, 2016, Representative John Kline (R-MN), Chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee published a discussion draft of the Multiemployer Pension Modernization Act of 2016, a proposal to "modernize multiemployer pensions and strengthen retirement security." The draft bill outlines a new "composite plan" design for multiemployer defined benefit pension plans.
The composite plan design was originally included as part of the Solutions Not Bailouts proposals developed by the National Coordinating Committee for Multiemployer Plans ("NCCMP") Retirement Security Review Commission. This hybrid design combines aspects of traditional defined benefit and defined contribution plan designs – intending to spread investment risks between plan participants and sponsors, while still providing lifetime retirement income to plan participants.
The following points highlight some of the key aspects of the composite plan proposal, as outlined in the discussion draft. These points are not intended to be a comprehensive summary of the proposal, which may change in the coming weeks and months. Please contact your Horizon Actuarial consultant for more information.
General Highlights
Optional plan design. There is no requirement for the trustees of a multiemployer plan to adopt the composite plan design; it is purely optional. In fact, there are restrictions on which plans may adopt the composite plan feature. For example, plans currently in critical status or plans projected to be in critical status in the following 5 years are not eligible.
Two plan components. If the composite plan feature is added to an existing multiemployer plan, there will be two components to the plan: the "composite plan" and the "legacy plan." When benefit accruals cease under the legacy plan (past service), they begin under the composite plan (future service). Separate funding rules and contribution requirements apply to the two different components.
Composite Plan Highlights
No unfunded liability. By definition, the composite plan has no unfunded liability. As a result, there is no employer withdrawal liability associated with the composite plan component. There is also no benefit guaranteed by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation ("PBGC") and no premium requirement.
Annual certification. The composite plan actuary must issue an annual certification of the current and projected funded ratios for the composite plan. If the projected funded ratio in 15 years is less than 120%, the trustees of the composite plan must adopt a "realignment program." The certification is due 120 days into the plan year.
Realignment program. The realignment program consists of reasonable measures designed to return the projected funded ratio to at least 120% in 15 years (other tests may apply). The measures consist of proposed increases to employer contribution rates and reductions in participant benefits and are prioritized into three tiers:
First tier measures includes proposed contribution rate increases, reductions in the rate of future benefit accruals, and the reduction or elimination of "adjustable" or other ancillary benefits. Future benefit accruals cannot be reduced below the equivalent of 1% of contributions. As under current law, adjustable benefits include early retirement benefits and other subsidies not already in pay status.
Second tier measures include reductions in accrued benefits not already in pay status, as well as reductions to non-core benefits in pay status. For this purpose, "core" benefits include accrued benefits payable at normal retirement age. "Non-core" benefits include early retirement benefits, subsidies, and post-retirement increases.
Third tier measures include further reductions to the rate of future accruals (below the equivalent of 1% of contributions if needed) and reductions in core benefits already in pay status. Any reductions to in-pay core benefits must be distributed equitably, considering the same criteria as for suspensions of benefits for plans in critical and declining status. Trustees should incorporate third tier measures into the realignment program only after all reasonable measures in the first two tiers have been exhausted.
Restrictions on benefit increases. The composite plan design imposes restrictions on plan amendments that increase benefits. For example, for an amendment that increases plan liabilities by no more than 3%, the resulting projected funded ratio must be at least 120%. If the amendment increases plan liabilities by more than 3%, the resulting projected funded ratio must be at least 140%. Additional restrictions apply to restoring core benefits that were previously reduced under a realignment program.
Legacy Plan Highlights
Existing rules still apply. The legacy plan remains a defined benefit plan, and in general, existing rules continue to apply. For example, the legacy plan actuary will still issue annual certifications as to whether the legacy plan is in endangered or critical status. Withdrawal liability and PBGC premiums still apply, as well. However, legacy plan withdrawal liability will be eliminated once certain full-funding thresholds are met.
Transition contributions. Contributions to the legacy plan must be sufficient to cover the cost of benefit accruals (if any) and allocable administrative expenses, as well as to pay down the unfunded liability over time. The initial unfunded liability must be paid down over 25 years, and any subsequent changes in the unfunded liability must be paid down over 15 years. These contributions continue until the legacy plan liability is fully funded.
Again, these points provide only a high-level summary of the key provisions of the composite plan proposal. As noted above, the proposed legislation is a "discussion draft" and subject to change. Please contact your Horizon Actuarial consultant for more information.
Contact a Horizon Actuarial consultant.
contactus@horizonactuarial.com
Press Release (4.29.2015): "Time to Modernize Multiemployer Pension System" http://edworkforce.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=398799
Press Release (9.9.2016): "Kline Releases Discussion Draft to Modernize Multiemployer Pensions"
http://edworkforce.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=400989
Discussion Draft: "Multiemployer Pension Modernization Act of 2016" http://edworkforce.house.gov/uploadedfiles/composite_a_xml.pdf
Questions and Answers: "A Discussion Draft to Modernize Multiemployer Pensions" http://edworkforce.house.gov/uploadedfiles/basic_q_and_as_on_a_discussion_draft.pdf
Press Release (9.14.2016): "Modernizing Multiemployer Pensions" http://edworkforce.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=401019
Horizon Responds to PBGC Proposed Rule on Mergers and Transfers
On June 6, 2016, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation ("PBGC") published a proposed rule regarding mergers and transfers involving multiemployer pension plans. On July 28, 2016, Horizon Actuarial Services, LLC submitted a comment letter in response to the proposed rule. Horizon's comment letter can be found at regulations.gov as well as on our website here.
Horizon's comment letter covers four topics. One, it discusses additional guidance that may be needed from PBGC with respect to applications for facilitated mergers. Two, it recommends changes to the applicable solvency requirements for mergers and transfers. Three, it proposes that PBGC use its authority to approve certain mergers and transfers that would result in increased solvency for the plans involved and reduced expected losses to PBGC. Four, it encourages PBGC to work with the Department of the Treasury to issue guidance regarding mergers following a suspension of benefits.
Other organizations submitting comments on the proposed rule, which can also be found at regulations.gov, include:
The American Academy of Actuaries
The Association of Food and Dairy Retailers, Wholesalers and Distributors (prepared by Venable, LLP)
First Actuarial Consulting, Inc.
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters
The Kroger Co.
The National Coordinating Committee of Multiemployer Plans ("NCCMP")
Segal Consulting
The US Chamber of Commerce
PBGC Proposes Rule on Mergers and Transfers
On June 6, 2016, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation ("PBGC") published a proposed rule regarding mergers and transfers involving multiemployer pension plans. The proposed rule can be found on the Federal Register.
The proposed rule provides guidance for requesting a facilitated merger under the Multiemployer Pension Reform Act of 2014 ("MPRA"), including a request for financial assistance from PBGC. The proposed rule also updates the existing regulation regarding mergers and transfers between multiemployer plans under section 4321 of ERISA.
Comments on the proposed rule may be submitted via www.regulations.gov or at reg.comments@pbgc.gov. Comments must be submitted within 60 days of the publication of the proposed rule, in other words, no later than August 5, 2016.
Update: On July 28, 2016, Horizon Actuarial Services, LLC submitted a comment on the proposed rule. More information can be found here.
Treasury Decision on Central States Suspension Application
On Friday, May 6, 2016, the Department of Treasury ("Treasury") issued a decision rejecting the application to suspend benefits submitted by the Central States, Southeast, and Southwest Areas Pension Fund ("Central States").
The Central States application, comments on the application, and the Treasury decision can all be found on the Treasury website, at www.treasury.gov/mpra. Applications for suspensions of benefits submitted by other plans can also be found on the website.
The following summary of the Treasury decision on Central States is intended for general informational use only. It does not represent legal, tax, or other professional advice. Please contact your Horizon Actuarial consultant for more information.
Under the Multiemployer Pension Reform Act of 2014 ("MPRA"), a plan is in "critical and declining" status if it is projected to go insolvent (in other words, run out of money) in the next 15 to 20 years. Plans in critical and declining status may submit an application to Treasury to suspend benefits. A benefit suspension is either a temporary or permanent reduction in benefits payable to plan participants and beneficiaries. While certain classes of participants are protected due to age or disability, suspensions may apply to benefits that were previously protected, including accrued benefits and benefits already in payment status.
MPRA requires that the proposed suspensions be sufficient to enable the plan to avoid insolvency. The suspensions must also not materially exceed the level needed to avoid insolvency, and they must be distributed equitably across the participant population.
Treasury released proposed and temporary regulations on MPRA benefit suspensions in June 2015. At that time, Treasury announced it had appointed Ken Feinberg to be Special Master responsible for overseeing the implementation of MPRA. In early 2016, Treasury issued a few sets of final regulations, with the latest regulations coming on April 26 and May 5.
Central States was the first such plan to submit an application, which it did on September 25, 2016. In conjunction with its application, Central States launched a special "Rescue Plan" website, www.cspensionrescue.com, which describes the proposed suspensions and provides updates on the process.
Under MPRA, Treasury had 225 days to review the application and render a decision. As noted above, Treasury issued its decision on May 6, 2016 after reviewing both the Central States application and nearly 3,000 comments on the application submitted by interested parties. This was the first decision from Treasury on an application to suspend benefits under MPRA.
Treasury Decision
As of the date of this post, we are aware of two letters from Treasury regarding its decision on the Central States application. The first letter is from Special Master Feinberg to Central States, detailing the reasons for the rejection. The second letter is from Secretary Jacob Lew to Congressional leaders reporting the decision and outlining issues that emerged during the review process.
The Feinberg decision letter to Central States listed four factors contributing to its rejection of the application, as described below. Trustees of plans in critical and declining status considering a suspension of benefits should consider these factors when preparing their applications.
The first two factors in the decision letter were actuarial assumptions that Treasury determined to be not reasonable, and as a result would cause Central States to fail to demonstrate that the proposed suspensions are sufficient to avoid insolvency. The third and fourth factors related to the design and notice requirements, respectively, of the proposed suspensions.
Investment return assumption. Treasury stated that the investment return assumption used by Central States was not reasonable. Both in this letter and in its final regulations, Treasury noted that it expects the investment return assumption to consider timing of plan cash flows and to give appropriate weight to near-term expected returns, which are generally expected to be lower than over the long term. In its decision letter, Treasury referenced the 2015 Survey of Capital Market Assumptions published by Horizon Actuarial.
Entry age assumption. Treasury stated that the assumption used by Central States in projecting new active participants in future years was not reasonable. The assumption included a single hire age for all new active participants, which Treasury determined did not adequately reflect recent demographic experience.
Equitable distribution of suspensions. Treasury stated the suspensions proposed by Central States were not equitably distributed, because different levels of suspensions applied to participants currently or formerly employed by United Parcel Service, Inc. (UPS) depending on whether the participant is covered under a separate company plan sponsored by UPS. It is important to note that this issue applies to a special rule under MPRA, which is believed to apply only to Central States.
Understandable notices. Under MPRA, a plan that applies to suspend benefits must send notices to participants describing the proposed suspensions and their impact on each individual's benefits. MPRA requires that the notices must be written so as to be understood by the average plan participant. In its decision letter, Treasury stated that the notices sent by Central States did not meet this requirement, citing overly technical and wordy language.
It should be noted that Central States has posted an update regarding the Treasury decision on its Rescue Plan website.
The letter from Secretary Lew reported to Congress the decision to reject the Central States application. The letter stated that without congressional action, the Central States Pension Fund will likely become insolvent within 10 years and that the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) multiemployer program may also be insolvent by that time.
The letter to Congress also outlined issues that emerged during Treasury's review of the Central States application. For example, Treasury noted that some commenters suggested that smaller benefit reductions should be allowed before committing to deeper cuts, which is not permitted under MPRA. Treasury also called into question the provision under MPRA that imposes maximum benefit suspensions on Central States "orphan" participants as well as the requirement that Treasury override a vote by participants rejecting a proposed suspension if the plan is deemed to be "systemically important."
Treasury Publishes Final Regulations on MPRA
On April 28, 2016, the Department of Treasury ("Treasury") released final regulations on the implementation of certain aspects of the Multiemployer Pension Reform Act of 2014 ("MPRA"), specifically the application process for a proposed suspension of benefits by plans in critical and declining status.
The final regulations and a summary of the key provisions can be found on the Federal Register, and they replace the temporary regulations published in June of 2015. The revenue procedure accompanying the final regulations, Rev. Proc 2016-27, updates the procedures set forth in Rev. Proc 2015-34.
Treasury also published two sets of regulations related to the suspension of benefits under a special rule believed to apply only to the Central States, Southeast, and Southwest Areas Pension Fund. The first set of regulations was published on the Federal Register on February 11, 2016, and the second was published on May 5, 2016.
PBGC and IRS Issue Guidance on MPRA
On June 17, 2015, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) issued guidance on the Multiemployer Pension Reform Act of 2014 (MPRA), which was signed into law last December.
The IRS's guidance comes in the form of a revenue procedure regarding the application and approval process for benefit suspensions under MPRA. The IRS has posted the revenue procedure on its website. The revenue procedure was issued in conjunction with temporary and proposed regulations providing guidance on benefit suspensions.
The PBGC's guidance comes in the form of an interim final regulation on the partition rules under MPRA. The PBGC has posted a press release regarding the regulation on its website, which includes a link to the regulation itself. The regulation provides guidance on the process of applying for a partition, including information required from the plan sponsor as part of the application.
Multiemployer Pension Reform Act of 2014
On December 16, 2014, President Obama signed the Multiemployer Pension Reform Act of 2014 into law. The Act was introduced by Representatives John Kline (R-MN) and George Miller (D-CA) on December 10 as part of the omnibus government funding bill, which Congress passed on December 13.
The following is a high-level summary of the key components of the Act.
This summary is intended for general informational use only. It does not represent legal, tax, or other professional advice. Please contact your Horizon Actuarial consultant for more information on how the Act may affect your multiemployer pension fund.
1. PPA modifications and repeal of sunset.
The Act makes permanent the funding rules affecting multiemployer pension plans under the Pension Protection Act of 2006 ("PPA"). Certain provisions of the PPA had been scheduled to sunset on December 31, 2014.
The Act also modifies certain provisions of the PPA, effective beginning in 2015. For example, a plan approaching critical status may elect to enter critical status early, thus bypassing endangered status. The ambiguity regarding emergence from critical status when Internal Revenue Code section 431(d) amortization extensions apply (the so-called "revolving door") is eliminated. A plan will remain in the "green zone" if it would have otherwise entered endangered status, but requires no corrective action under a funding improvement plan. The Act includes other technical corrections and modifications, as well, including the elimination of the reorganization rules.
Additionally, the Act extends guarantees by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation ("PBGC") to pre-retirement survivor annuities. It also expands required disclosures for multiemployer pension plans under section 101(k) of ERISA.
2. Mergers and partitions.
The Act gives the PBGC new authority to facilitate plan mergers and grant partitions, to the extent that doing so would strengthen the position of the PBGC's multiemployer program. The new rules apply only to situations involving plans that are in critical status and approaching insolvency.
3. PBGC premiums.
The Act increases PBGC flat rate premiums for multiemployer pension plans to $26 per covered participant and beneficiary, effective in 2015. The flat rate premium for future years will be automatically increased with inflation. For reference, the flat rate premium was $12 per covered participant and beneficiary in 2014, and it was scheduled to increase to $13 in 2015.
4. Benefit suspensions for deeply troubled plans.
The Act gives trustees of a multiemployer pension plan that is in critical status and approaching insolvency (in "critical and declining status") the authority to suspend benefits that were previously protected under law, if doing so would enable the plan to avoid insolvency. The Act defines the suspension of benefits as the temporary or permanent reduction of any current or future payment owed by the plan to any participant or beneficiary. The trustees must determine annually that the benefit suspensions remain necessary to avoid insolvency, after all other reasonable measures to avoid insolvency have been taken.
There are several limitations on the benefit suspensions. For example, suspensions cannot reduce benefits below 110% of the levels guaranteed by the PBGC (a monthly benefit of up to $35.75 per year of service). Retirees who are age 80 or older at the time the suspensions go into effect are protected, as are disabled retirees. (Retirees age 75 to 79 are partially protected.) The suspensions must not materially exceed the level needed to avoid insolvency, and they must be spread equitably across the participant population. Trustees of large plans (with at least 10,000 participants) must also designate a retired plan participant to advocate for the interests of retired and deferred vested participants through the suspension process.
The suspensions are subject to approval by the Secretary of Treasury and ratification by a vote of plan participants and beneficiaries. If the suspensions are rejected by the participant vote, and the plan represents more than $1 billion in potential financial assistance payments from the PBGC (a "systemically important" plan), the Secretary of Treasury has the authority to override the vote and implement the suspensions. The Secretary of Treasury will act in consultation with the PBGC and Secretary of Labor, and it will issue regulations within 180 days of the enactment of the Act.
There are certain disclosure requirements that must precede any benefit suspensions. For example, before the plan can submit its application for approval to the Secretary of Treasury, it must send a detailed notice to interested parties, including an "individualized estimate" of the effect of the proposed suspensions on each participant or beneficiary. In addition, the plan's application to the Secretary of Treasury will be posted online for public inspection and comment.
5. Changes to withdrawal liability rules.
The Act also changes certain rules for determining employer withdrawal liability. For example, certain contribution increases required under a funding improvement plan or rehabilitation plan (for plans in endangered status or critical status, respectively) are disregarded for purposes of allocating unfunded vested benefits to participating employers and when calculating an employer's statutory payment schedule. Employer surcharges (for plans in critical status only) are also disregarded.
Additionally, the effect of any benefit suspensions (as described above) are disregarded for purposes of determining withdrawal liability, for a period of ten years following the effective date of the suspensions.
Lastly, for plans that engage in a partition (as described above), for the first ten years following the partition, withdrawal liability will be determined with respect to both the original plan that was partitioned as well as the new plan that was created by the partition. After ten years, withdrawal liability will be determined with respect to the original plan only.
Cary Franklin Featured in Bloomberg Panel on Multiemployer Plans
On May 2, 2013, Bloomberg Government and the Quality Construction Alliance hosted a discussion on the state of private sector pension plans in the U.S., with a special focus on multiemployer defined benefit pension plans.
* Josh Gotbaum: Director of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC)
* Randy DeFrehn: Executive Director of the National Coordinating Committee for Multiemployer Plans (NCCMP)
* Cary Franklin: Actuary and Managing Consultant of Horizon Actuarial Services, LLC
* Earl Pomeroy: Former U.S. Representative and Attorney at Alston & Bird, LLP
* Norm Stein: Professor at Drexel Law School and Former Counsel to the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP)
Mr. Gotbaum was the first speaker, discussing the importance of defined benefit plans and issues facing the PBGC. Following Mr. Gotbaum was a panel discussion including Mr. DeFrehn, Mr. Franklin, Mr. Pomeroy, and Mr. Stein. The panel's discussion focused on issues facing multiemployer defined benefit pension plans and the NCCMP's recent report – Solutions Not Bailouts – which offers a set of proposals to preserve the current multiemployer pension system, remediate the minority of deeply troubled plans, and offer innovative ideas for the future.
The video can be streamed from the C-SPAN website via the link below.
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/event/218127
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In Memory of Brian Dailey


We all want our 3D visualisations to be as real as possible. A basic premise seems to be that they adhere to the laws of physics. No small feat! Or is it?
We decided to give it a go during a two-day programming contest. Our team's idea was to develop a web-based game where the user cycles around and has to avoid crashing into cars. To create the game, we needed a physics engine.
As could be expected, 48 hours later we found out we had been overly ambitious. There really was no game experience to speak of. However, we did manage to create a 3D world with basic physics. Hopefully, our experiences will give you some insight into using physics in 3D.
Physijs runs all the physics simulation in a web worker. The worker makes sure that it does not interfere with the renderloop. To set up Physijs you need to point it to its web worker and the ammo script that it requires. The next step is to create a Physijs.Scene and call the simulate function of that scene in your update function.
After having done the basic setup, we needed to add physics objects. To do this we needed to create Physijs meshes instead of the default Three.Meshes. There are a couple of Physijs meshes but the most useful, lightweight meshes are Physijs.BoxMesh, which uses the bounding box as physics object, and Physijs.SphereMesh, which uses the bounding sphere.
For our little game prototype we used Physijs.BoxMesh for the cars, the surfaces and the bicycle. For the buildings we used the Physisjs.ConcaveMesh, because multiple buildings needed to be grouped together in chunks and this would cause collisions otherwise. We must note Physisjs.ConcaveMesh is a very costly physics object to have in your simulation, but luckily the performance turned out to be reasonable.
In our final demo we managed to get cars moving as physics objects, following the roads that we had extracted from the government database TOP10NL (in Dutch). Moving the bicycle proved to be harder, because it is not a physics object. When we integrated the bike into the physics we ran into errors concerning the web worker that simulates the physics. The main difference between the bike and the cars is that the bike should have used the 'applyCentralImpulse' function which unfortunately could not be found in the simulation and the cars used 'setLinearVelocity', which did work. During the final hour of our hackathon we still weren't able to get the bike working. The result is the hilarious demo in which you can see cars mindlessly drive around, crash into each other and then bounce out of the 'world' again.
As you can see in the movie the cars behave a bit strangely when tipped over. This is because the Physijs.BoxMesh allows cars to slide on their front as the physics mesh is flat at that location. Also note that not all roads match up perfectly, because of inaccuracies in the data set. Even though the demo mainly looks funny in this state, it does show correct car/house, car/car, and car/surface interaction as far as physics is concerned. It just requires more tweaking to make the cars behave in a more realistic way. Given an extra day or two, we surely would've succeeded in making a mind-blowing game!
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Imagine a television that wraps around in a cone or that you can stretch across a wall. That's the idea with FLEx Lighting, a new technology that uses LEDs arranged on a roll that can be used for a display in any size or shape. The sheet is less than a half millimeter thick, bends like a thin piece of plastic, and yet has all the qualities for current LED technology: low power, low cost, and long-lasting.
So in future we would be having such Televisions which can be folded and can be easily transported from one place to another. Its a great technology that will help the customers to see the high quality images in just a half millimeter thick T.V.
But it would be interesting to know its price in market and also I ponder how it will be kept on the tables or can it be Hanged to walls like the photos.
LED's are playing a vital role in our daily life now a days and its important to note that LED's have almost replaced bulbs and other light emitting materials that uses a huge amount of electricity.Thanks to LED's and also there producers.
Lets wait and watch when this new technology will entertain us with its brand new facilities and ease of keeping it at a place.
Meet The Transparent Solar Cell!
New Technology Converts Ink Into Sound!
Coming soon: Rajinikanth phones, tablets!


Do you want to see who you will be working with? Please check this page again for updated information about our models.
In the meantime, you can come visit our office to meet with us personally. You can use the address information found on our contact us page. You can also call us at 404-944-9723 for other inquiries.


text:
Delaware vs UNCG (Mar 10, 2019)
Composite box score
2019 Southern Conference Softball
Delaware at UNCG
Mar 10, 2019 at Greensboro, N.C. (UNCG SB Stadium)
Delaware 5 (7-11)
Player ab r h rbi bb so po a lob
Garber cf 3 0 0 0 1 2 1 0 0
Kisamore 3b 4 2 2 0 0 0 0 1 0
Glanden 1b 4 2 2 2 0 0 8 0 1
Steinmetz c 3 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0
Mendoza 2b 3 0 0 1 0 1 3 3 0
Bessel ss 3 0 0 0 0 2 1 3 0
Coyne dh 2 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 0
Gallardo dh 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0
Davis lf 3 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0
O'Donald rf 2 0 0 0 0 2 2 0 3
de Jesus ph 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Marsh p 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0
Totals 29 5 4 3 1 10 18 9 4
UNCG 6 (12-9)
Makenna Matthijs cf 4 1 1 0 0 0 2 0 0
Katie Stettler lf 4 1 1 0 0 0 3 0 0
Stephanie Bryden p 4 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 2
Marisa Sholtes 1b 3 1 1 0 0 0 3 0 0
Gabi Howard 3b 1 1 0 0 2 0 0 1 0
Hannah Kincer dh 2 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0
Delaney Cumbie c 2 1 2 5 1 0 11 0 0
Kamryn Graves rf 3 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 4
Melanie Darges 2b 3 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0
Monica Pepe ss 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0
Totals 26 6 7 6 4 1 21 3 6
Score by Innings                  R  H  E
Delaware............ 300 020 0 -  5  4  2
UNCG................ 201 030 X -  6  7  4
E - Kisamore(6); Mendoza(1); Sholtes(2); Howard 2(7); Pepe(1). LOB - DELAWARE 4; UNCG 6. 2B - Glanden(5); Sholtes(7). HR - Glanden(3); Cumbie(3). SB - Kisamore(8). CS - Graves(1).
Delaware ip h r er bb so wp bk hbp ibb ab bf fo go
Marsh L,1-4 6.0 7 6 6 4 1 1 0 0 0 26 30 7 9
UNCG ip h r er bb so wp bk hbp ibb ab bf fo go
Stephanie Bryden W,8-5 7.0 4 5 2 1 10 0 0 0 0 29 30 8 3
Win - Bryden (8-5). Loss - Marsh (1-4). Save - None. WP - Marsh(3).
Umpires -
Start: 3:52 pm Time: 1:44 Attendance: 133
Weather: cloudy; high 50s
Delaware at UNCG - Composite Box Score
Delaware ab r h rbi 2b 3b hr bb sb cs hp sh sf so ibb kl gdp po a e
Garber cf 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 1 0 1 0 0
Kisamore 3b 4 2 2 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1
Glanden 1b 4 2 2 2 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 8 0 0
Steinmetz c 3 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0
Mendoza 2b 3 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 3 3 1
Bessel ss 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 1 3 0
Coyne dh 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 1 0 0 0 0
Gallardo dh 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
Davis lf 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0
O'Donald rf 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 1 0 2 0 0
de Jesus ph 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Marsh p 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0
Totals 29 5 4 3 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 10 0 3 0 18 9 2
UNCG ab r h rbi 2b 3b hr bb sb cs hp sh sf so ibb kl gdp po a e
Matthijs cf 4 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0
Stettler lf 4 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 0 0
Bryden p 4 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0
Sholtes 1b 3 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 0 1
Howard 3b 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 2
Kincer dh 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Cumbie c 2 1 2 5 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 11 0 0
Graves rf 3 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Darges 2b 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0
Pepe ss 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1
Totals 26 6 7 6 1 0 1 4 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 21 3 4
Delaware starters: 2/cf Garber; 14/3b Kisamore; 7/1b Glanden; 12/c Steinmetz; 0/2b Mendoza; 19/ss Bessel; 16/dh Coyne; 32/lf Davis; 26/rf O'Donald; 3/p Marsh;
UNCG starters: 11/cf Matthijs; 6/lf Stettler; 3/p Bryden; 22/1b Sholtes; 35/3b Howard; 7/dh Kincer; 2/c Cumbie; 4/rf Graves; 17/2b Darges; 10/ss Pepe;
Delaware 1st - Garber struck out swinging. Kisamore singled, bunt. Glanden doubled to left center; Kisamore advanced to third. Steinmetz reached on a fielding error by 1b; Glanden advanced to third; Kisamore scored, unearned. Mendoza reached on a throwing error by ss, RBI, advanced to second; Steinmetz advanced to third; Glanden scored, unearned. Bessel reached on a fielding error by 3b. Coyne struck out swinging. Davis reached on a fielding error by 3b; Bessel advanced to second; Mendoza advanced to third; Steinmetz scored, unearned. O'Donald struck out swinging. 3 runs, 2 hits, 4 errors, 3 LOB.
UNCG 1st - Matthijs singled to center field. Stettler singled up the middle; Matthijs advanced to second. Bryden singled through the left side, RBI; Stettler advanced to second; Matthijs scored. Sholtes flied out to lf. Howard walked; Bryden advanced to second; Stettler advanced to third. Kincer popped up to 2b. Cumbie walked, RBI; Howard advanced to second; Bryden advanced to third; Stettler scored. Graves flied out to rf. 2 runs, 3 hits, 0 errors, 3 LOB.
Delaware 2nd - Garber out at first p to 2b, bunt. Kisamore flied out to lf. Glanden flied out to cf. 0 runs, 0 hits, 0 errors, 0 LOB.
UNCG 2nd - Darges struck out swinging. Matthijs reached on a fielding error by 3b. Stettler reached on a fielder's choice; Matthijs out at second ss to 2b. Bryden flied out to lf. 0 runs, 0 hits, 1 error, 1 LOB.
Delaware 3rd - Steinmetz fouled out to c. Mendoza grounded out to 3b. Bessel struck out swinging. 0 runs, 0 hits, 0 errors, 0 LOB.
UNCG 3rd - Sholtes grounded out to 2b. Howard walked. Howard advanced to second on a wild pitch. Kincer grounded out to ss; Howard advanced to third. Cumbie singled to left field, RBI; Howard scored. Graves flied out to cf. 1 run, 1 hit, 0 errors, 1 LOB.
Delaware 4th - Coyne struck out looking. Davis flied out to lf. O'Donald struck out looking. 0 runs, 0 hits, 0 errors, 0 LOB.
UNCG 4th - Darges grounded out to 1b unassisted. Matthijs grounded out to p. Stettler grounded out to 2b. 0 runs, 0 hits, 0 errors, 0 LOB.
Delaware 5th - Garber struck out looking. Kisamore singled to center field. Kisamore stole second. Glanden homered to right field, 2 RBI; Kisamore scored. Steinmetz fouled out to 1b. Mendoza struck out swinging. 2 runs, 2 hits, 0 errors, 0 LOB.
UNCG 5th - Bryden grounded out to 3b. Sholtes doubled to left field. Howard grounded out to 2b; Sholtes advanced to third. Kincer walked. Pepe to ss for Kincer. Kincer to dh for Pepe. Cumbie homered to left field, 3 RBI; Pepe scored; Sholtes scored. Graves singled to left field. Graves out at second c to ss, caught stealing. 3 runs, 3 hits, 0 errors, 0 LOB.
Delaware 6th - Bessel struck out swinging. Gallardo to dh for Coyne. Gallardo struck out swinging. Davis flied out to cf. 0 runs, 0 hits, 0 errors, 0 LOB.
UNCG 6th - Darges grounded out to ss. Matthijs fouled out to rf. Stettler reached on a fielding error by 2b. Bryden popped up to 2b. 0 runs, 0 hits, 1 error, 1 LOB.
Delaware 7th - de Jesus pinch hit for O'Donald. de Jesus grounded out to ss. Garber walked. Kisamore popped up to ss. Glanden flied out to lf. 0 runs, 0 hits, 0 errors, 1 LOB.
Plate appearance breakdown
Delaware at UNCG - Plate Appearance Breakdown
batting plate appearances vs vs rbi with adv with lead bases runner rnrs rnrs 2out gnd fly
Delaware tpa ab h bb hp sh sf ci left right ops rnrs ops 2outs off% full on3rd adv lob rbi out out
Garber cf 4 3 0 1 0 0 0 0 0-0 0-3 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-3 0-0 0-0 0 0 0 1 0
Kisamore 3b 4 4 2 0 0 0 0 0 0-0 2-4 0-0 0-1 0-1 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 0 0 0 0 2
Glanden 1b 4 4 2 0 0 0 0 0 0-0 2-4 1-1 2-3 2-3 0-2 0-0 0-0 0-0 0 1 0 0 2
Steinmetz c 3 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0-0 0-3 0-1 0-1 1-1 0-0 0-1 0-0 0-1 0 0 0 0 2
Mendoza 2b 3 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0-0 0-3 0-1 0-1 1-1 0-1 0-0 0-0 1-1 0 0 0 1 0
Bessel ss 3 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0-0 0-3 0-1 0-1 0-1 0-1 0-1 0-0 0-1 0 0 0 0 0
Coyne dh 2 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0-0 0-2 0-1 0-1 0-1 0-0 0-1 0-1 0-1 0 0 0 0 0
Gallardo dh 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0-0 0-1 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 0 0 0 0 0
Davis lf 3 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0-0 0-3 0-1 0-1 1-1 0-2 0-0 0-1 0-0 0 0 0 0 2
O'Donald rf 2 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0-0 0-2 0-1 0-1 0-1 0-2 0-0 0-1 0-0 0 3 0 0 0
de Jesus ph 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0-0 0-1 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-1 0-0 0-0 0 0 0 1 0
Marsh p 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 0 0 0 0 0
Totals...... 30 29 4 1 0 0 0 0 0-0 4-29 1-7 2-10 5-10 0-8 0-7 0-3 1-4 0 4 0 3 8
pitching batters faced vs vs with with lead gnd fly
Delaware bf ab h bb hp sh sf ci 2b 3b hr wp bk kl left right rnrs 2out off% out out np
Marsh 30 26 7 4 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1-3 6-23 4-13 3-9 1-6 9 7 106
UNCG tpa ab h bb hp sh sf ci left right ops rnrs ops 2outs off% full on3rd adv lob rbi out out
Matthijs cf 4 4 1 0 0 0 0 0 0-0 1-4 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 1-1 0-0 0-0 0 0 0 1 1
Stettler lf 4 4 1 0 0 0 0 0 0-0 1-4 0-0 1-2 1-2 0-2 0-0 0-0 0-0 0 0 0 2 0
Bryden p 4 4 1 0 0 0 0 0 0-0 1-4 1-1 1-3 1-3 0-2 0-1 0-0 0-0 0 2 0 1 2
Sholtes 1b 3 3 1 0 0 0 0 0 0-0 1-3 0-1 0-1 0-1 0-0 0-1 0-0 0-0 0 0 0 1 1
Howard 3b 3 1 0 2 0 0 0 0 0-0 0-1 0-1 0-1 2-2 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 1 0 0 1 0
Kincer dh 3 2 0 1 0 0 0 0 0-0 0-2 0-2 0-2 1-2 0-0 0-0 0-1 0-1 1 0 0 1 1
Cumbie c 3 2 2 1 0 0 0 0 0-0 2-2 2-2 2-2 3-3 2-2 0-0 0-0 0-0 0 0 5 0 0
Graves rf 3 3 1 0 0 0 0 0 0-0 1-3 0-1 0-2 0-2 1-3 0-0 0-1 0-0 0 4 0 0 2
Darges 2b 3 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0-0 0-3 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-3 0-0 0-0 0 0 0 2 0
Pepe ss 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 0-0 0 0 0 0 0
UNCG bf ab h bb hp sh sf ci 2b 3b hr wp bk kl left right rnrs 2out off% out out np
Bryden 30 29 4 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 3 2-13 2-16 2-10 0-8 0-7 3 8 104
UNCG 6, Delaware 5 (Mar 10, 2019 at Greensboro, N.C.)
Delaware............ 300 020 0 -  5  4  2      (7-11)
UNCG................ 201 030 X -  6  7  4      (12-9)
Pitchers: Delaware - Marsh and Steinmetz. UNCG - Stephanie Bryden and Delaney Cumbie.
Win-Stephanie Bryden(8-5)  Loss-Marsh(1-4)  T-1:44  A-133
HR DELAWARE - Glanden (3).
HR UNCG - Delaney Cumbie (3).


text:
Oconee County Experienced A Decline In Driving Under The Influence Arrests As Alcohol Law Changed
Issue On Watkinsville Agenda
Oconee County has been experiencing a decrease in arrests for driving under the influence going back to 2008, when the Board of Commissioners approved the sale of beer and wine in county restaurants.
Oconee County also compared favorably with neighboring counties in terms of the number of DUI cases in the court system in the last five years.
In January, the county changed the 2008 ordinance to allow for the sale of liquor by the drink in county restaurants, and the city of Watkinsville is likely to follow suit tomorrow night.
The data on DUI arrests provide a benchmark against which future data can be compared to determine the impact, if any, of this year's changes in the county's alcohol ordinances.
Data From Sheriff Office
Oconee County Chief Deputy Sheriff Lee Weems provided me with the data on DUI arrests, which he said were compiled by DeeDee Schaefer, administrator in the Oconee County Sheriff's Office.
The data, according to Weems, were checked against bookings in the county jail and reflect arrests regardless of agency making the arrest.
It was not possible to go back further in time because of limitations of the records available, according to Weems, but the data show a high of 218 arrests in 2008.
This coincides with the Georgia State Patrol conducting "Rolling Thunder" checkpoints after University of Georgia football games, Weems said.
Since 2008, arrests have been relatively constant, excepting for an increase in 2012 and the decline in 2014 to the lowest level in the seven years for which data are available.
No Violations On Sales
Weems also reported in early January that all 17 retailers spot checked by the Oconee County Sheriff's Office and state regulators had passed a compliance check.
The check consists of a person 19 or 20 years old attempting to purchase alcohol using a legitimate identification.
The first check is whether the retailer checks for an ID, and the second check is whether the retailer sells the alcohol.
All retailers passed, Weems said.
The county began the year with 18 outlets having licenses for the retail sale of beer and/or wine, nine restaurants with licenses for the sale of beer and/or wine by the drink, and one recreational club alcohol license.
Comparison Data
Weems also provided me with data from six neighboring counties to Oconee County for the period 2010 to 2014. All allow the sale of alcohol, though the rules differ in the six counties.
These data come from the respective courts in those jurisdictions handing DUI cases and were provided to Weems by the Georgia State Patrol in Athens.
In the chart below, the data have been standardized to reflect the differing population sizes of the seven counties.
Oconee County has a much lower incidence of DUI cases per 1,000 population than does neighboring Clarke County, which is highly urbanized, and neighboring Oglethorpe County, which is largely rural.
Oconee County is roughly comparable to Walton, Barrow, and Jackson counties and lower than Morgan County in terms of DUI cases.
The count for Oconee County from the Georgia State Patrol of 528 cases from 2010 to 2014 was 36 cases higher than the count DeeDee Schaefer provided.
Data on DUI cases have been found to be differentially reported around the state.
Watkinsville Council
The Watkinsville Mayor and Council tomorrow night will give second reading to an ordinance that would allow for the sale of liquor by the drink in city restaurants. The meeting starts at 7 p.m. in City Hall.
Council gave first reading to the ordinance last month, but only after amending a draft ordinance to set the ratio of food to alcohol at to 75/25. The draft ordinance prepared by the city attorney set that ratio at 60/40.
The action makes the ordinance under consideration consistent with the ordinance adopted by the Board of Commissioners in January. That ordinance affects only the unincorporated parts of the county.
In a referendum last month Watkinsville voters authorized the Council to pass an ordinance allowing for the issuance of licenses to sell liquor by the drink in city restaurants.
At present, Watkinsville has three restaurants. None of the county's other three cities, Bishop, Bogart and North High Shoals, has any restaurants.
Oconee County Experienced A Decline In Driving Und...


This past weekend I uttered an odd sentence: I've read some exciting news from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis!
For the first time, it turns out, the US government has studied the contribution of arts and culture to the county's economy. The results are in, and in 2011 (the most recent year for which statistics are available), arts and culture contributed $504 billion to GDP. To put that in perspective, 3.2% of the total US economy was attributed to arts and culture, which is even more than the travel and tourism industry that represented 2.8% of the US economy.
In his book "Outliers", Malcolm Gladwell speaks of "The 10,000 Hour Rule", which I understand is based largely on the work of Dr. K. Anders Ericsson. I certainly can't explain The 10,000 Hour Rule as well as Mr. Gladwell, but I'll try to summarize this rule by saying it states that any person who becomes quite proficient at a complex task must first dedicate about 10,000 hours to intense practice of that task. Mr. Gladwell uses examples of top tier athletes, performers, and even Bill Gates as a computer programmer to demonstrate his rule, showing where individuals cross this 10,000 hour threshold early in life, the proficiency attained by these individuals provides them with a significant advantage over their peers and competitors.
The other day, my wife Shannon and I took a short flight to Stuart, Florida. Martin County maintains a great airport in Stuart, and each person working at the airport seems to be friendlier than the last.
Shannon brought along her new camera for the trip, and took hundreds of pictures throughout the day. The Florida Everglades and the Atlantic coast of Florida are absolutely beautiful from above, and Shannon is a wonderful photographer.
Upon getting home, we reviewed the many pictures taken during the day. Some of the pictures were absolutely spectacular, but amongst the great pictures were also some that were not quite as good, such as those that had wing-strut in the way, or those that caught the sun's glare through the windshield.
It's absoltely wonderful that with digital cameras, an amateur photographer such as Shannon can take hundreds of pictures, without being hindered by the cost of both film and development, so that she can feel free to experiment. The result is that amongst the photographs that were not the best were some gems.
I've noticed that the creation of a business plan can seem like an overwhelming task for those of us that were not business majors. Sometimes it seems as though business plans are only developed under duress when they're needed as a business seeks funding, however, taking the time to put together a business plan can be a useful task for a business in any position.
While there's no "secret formula" to creating a business plan, I suggest that the first step be to determine for whose consumption you're developing the plan. Identifying who will be reading the plan, and for what purpose, will answer questions relating to what should be included, and how information should be presented.
If, for example, you're putting together a plan to present in hopes of obtaining funding from a bank or investor, you should consider including an executive summary, and definitions of terms that may be unique to your industry. On the other hand, if you are developing a business plan solely for use within your company, summaries and definitions may not be as important.
Marketing arts and entertainment businesses poses unique challenges and opportunities. For example, our world has tremendous wealth, but that wealth is not very evenly distributed, leading to challenges in identifying customers for non-essential goods and services. Some entertainment businesses have found success in maximizing distribution in order to find success, and as I'm writing this blog in October, it's probably a good time of the year to use baseball as an example.
Looking at your typical major league baseball game, it's clear that admission, hot dogs and beer do not cover the cost of the teams' operations such as a huge stadium and players' salary. Here is some quick math using the San Francisco Giants as an example: According to ESPN, the team's 2013 home attendance was 3,326,796. Reportedly, the Giants' average ticket price this year was $27.21, meaning that revenue from the sale of home tickets was $90,522,119.16. That's a lot of money, for sure, but the team had expenditures this year, too, not the least of which was player payroll at $136,042,112, thus ticket revenue fell short of covering payroll by $45,489,992.84. If we only look at the above figures, it would certainly appear as though this team is not a very successful entertainment business, but to the contrary, baseball is successful in the United States, in part, because they've expanded their distribution – first through radio, and then television. Baseball has found a way to sell their product to a lot of people, for a small amount of money each.
This past weekend, some friends of mine introduced me to the Funky Buddha Brewery in Oakland Park, FL. Those of you that know me probably are not surprised that I was enjoying a beer on a Sunday afternoon (I do come from Canada, after all), but the surprise of the afternoon came from Oakland Park, itself.
Oakland Park, Florida does not have the best of reputations. It's one of those neighborhoods that one would make an effort to drive around rather than through. So, when I arrived at my destination this past weekend to find a vibrant, busy, and not at all scary part of town, I was more than a little surprised. It turns out that the City of Oakland Park has made a commitment to community redevelopment in a unique way by creating the Oakland Park Culinary Arts District.
This is a wonderful example of successful niche marketing. Let's face it, there are countless examples of cities promoting community redevelopment, but few are bold enough as to do so by focusing on such a narrow pursuit as "culinary arts". Oakland Park has done it right in that they've apparently devoted considerable resources towards investing in the arts. It's a smart investment for a community – just ask almost any Miami Beach tourism business during Art Basel how much they appreciate their local government's investment in the arts.
As with many old adages, "you can't manage what you don't measure" holds true throughout time. Certainly, management is more than mere analysis of metrics, but managing without an objective way to answer the question "how are we doing?" is needlessly difficult, at best.
Every business is different; however, if you keep the following three metrics on the top of your list, you'll have a good foundation for management by measurement.
Margin is defined as Gross Profit, expressed as a percentage of Income. If, for instance, you have $1000 in sales, and the cost to your business for these sales was $750, your business's margin is 25%.
Monitoring your margin allows you to make informed business decisions about many important aspects of your business, including expenses. In addition, planning and maintaining margin allows you to measure your business much more effectively through periods of both high and low sales.
One of the many lessons we can learn from music is that a composition can be greater than the sum of its notes. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony; three Gs followed by an E flat. Taken separately, these four notes are completely unremarkable. Their durations, part of this symphony's "short, short, short, long" motif, are even more routine, and seemingly more useful as morse code for the letter V than as an opening to a grand composition. These four simple notes, however, are instantly recognizable, and convey far more than almost any other combination of four notes.
So, Craig, how does the opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony relate to me?
I've come to realize that for me, impatience comes with experience. That may sound like a strange statement, so please allow me to explain before passing judgment.
I've always strived to be honest and ethical in business. "You're only as good as your word" is more than just nice-sounding phrase to me; it's how I endeavor to do business. I like to think that for this reason, over the years my clients, business partners, colleagues, and friends have placed a great deal of trust in me. I'm truly grateful for having been the recipient of such trust, and I work every day to ensure that this trust has not been misplaced.
First thing's first: I'm not a proponent of stealing someone's goods or services just because they're sold for a price that seems unreasonable, or via methods that aren't agreed with. I no more support the theft of music via file-sharing services based on the idea that "$14.99 is too much to spend on an album" than I support the idea of stealing a Ferrari 458 Spider because "$260,000 is too much to spend on a car".
Theft is theft, and it's wrong.
That being said, there were certainly some important lessons learned when music file-sharing became popular. The most important lesson, and one that seemed to be lost to most of the established music industry at the time, is that the industry's customers were generally dissatisfied with the prices they were being asked to pay, and the methods of purchase they were being asked to follow. Most people are good, and probably disagree with theft, so the fact that so many consumers became frustrated with what the music industry to the extent that they resorted to theft should have been a wake-up call to the music industry.
As with any business, the start of a creative business is often associated with risk. This risk may be as simple as the decision for musician to move out of his or her parents' basement in a small town to make a go of it in "the big city", or as complicated as a theatre company deciding to open up their own theatre. In both of these examples, the uncertainly of "am I good enough to make it", or "will anyone actually buy a ticket to our productions" can be quite stressful. Complicating the decision to start these businesses is the likely fact that stressed-out musicians and theatre companies are often not the best musicians and theatre companies (insert your own "why The Beatles broke up" theory here).


Under the provisions of temporary layoff, what happens if an employer has less than twenty hours per week of work for a WMS employee to perform?
If an employer has less than twenty hours per week of work for a WMS employee to perform during a period of temporary layoff, the employer must notify the WMS employee that he/she is being furloughed. The employer may then offer the available work hours to the WMS employee as an acting appointment under the provisions of WAC 357-58-265.


Welcome to #FearlessWomen! Today, we're featuring an excerpt from Sherrilyn Kenyon's upcoming Deadman's Cross novel, Death Doesn't Bargain, available on May 8th.
Kalder Dupree has never known a day of mercy. Born to the cruelest of mer-races, he sacrificed himself for his crew and is in Vine's hands. He expects no mercy or rescue. Yet Cameron Jack is determined to set Kalder free. As a Hellchaser, it's her calling, and she cannot allow even a not-so-innocent to be tortured for an act of kindness that spared her damnation.
Hi there! I'm trying to submit a pic of my pre-order receipt for the pin (super cool, by the way), but the image won't load. Is there a way I can email it directly?
We're sorry you're having trouble with the form! If you'll email us your receipt plus the info required in the form, we'll enter you manually. The email address is webmaster@tor-forge.com.
Don't forget to mention the cover artist. Stephen Youll is amazing.


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