How to Gain Weight After Radiation Therapy – 9 Tips

Cancer therapy can be an extremely physical and emotional time for the patient. In patients with cancer of the head and neck for instance, the immune system is often not functioning properly. The immune system does not destroy cancer cells. Causes of the failure of the immune system include severe malnutrition. To exacerbate the problem, radiation can severely effect the taste buds and saliva glands. The loss of appetite, difficulties in swallowing, no taste buds and the inability to dissolve food will result in a tremendous amount of weight loss.

To gain weight after radiation therapy it takes patience and focus. Some cancer patients have gone days without a meal because they simply did not think to eat. No hunger pains or cravings for food means the brain doesn’t doesn’t let us know to do so. It has to be a conscious thought to sit down and eat a meal.

There are a number of things to do and eat that can help the patient to gain weight. Some are obvious but need to be mentioned none the less.

1. It is important to eat and maintain good nutrition despite changes in taste. Prepare foods that appeal to you. Try and focus on foods from the food pyramid to help with a well balance diet.

2. Use a powdered or liquid diet supplement. Available on the market also include weight gain supplements in a gel tab form, with all the nutrition needed, enhance appetite and slow down metabolism to better absorb nutrition and calories. Even if you’re not very hungry, it’s important to keep your protein and calorie intake high. A weight gain supplement in gel tab form might be the answer. Doctors have found that patients who eat well can better deal with having cancer and with the side effects of treatment.

3. Eat five or six small meals during the day rather than three large ones. Eat when you are hungry, even if it is not mealtime. Moisten food with gravies and sauces to make eating easier. Try changing the consistency of foods by adding fluids and using sauces and gravies to make them softer.

4. Change your diet and try new recipes. If you enjoy people around while eating, try to have meals with family or friends. It may be helpful to have the radio or television on while you eat. Use low lighting, soft music, brightly colored table settings, or whatever helps you feel good while eating.

5. Keep easy meals in the freezer to use when you feel hungry. If other people offer to cook for you, let them. Don’t be afraid about telling them what you can eat. Keep healthy snacks for nibbling if you get the urge.

6. If you live alone, you might want to look into “Meals on Wheels” to bring food to you. Ask your doctor or local social service agencies about “Meals on Wheels.” This service is available in most cities and towns.

7. Add butter or margarine to your meals. Mix canned cream soups with milk or half-and-half instead of water. Drinking milkshakes between meals may help keep caloric intake high. Add cream sauce or melted cheese to your vegetables. Some people find they can drink large amounts of liquids even when they don’t feel like eating solid foods. If this is the case, take advantage of each glassful by making drinks enriched with powdered milk, yogurt or honey. A weight gain supplement in gel tab form may be a lot easier to manage. It can also help in making you hungry so you want to eat.

8. If the foods you like no longer taste good, try new foods and use different methods of food preparation.

9. Avoid spices and coarse foods such as raw vegetables, dry crackers or nuts. Remember that acidic foods and liquids can cause mouth and throat irritation. As you start to heal from the radiation you may be able to slowly add these types of foods to your diet.

In conclusion, be patient and focused on the task at hand. It is a task. Weigh yourself often to keep track of your progress. If you are doing what is suggested and you still are not gaining weight, ask your physician or dietitian for help.

Source by Robert L Jackson


How we derailed the Earth’s climate in just 160 years

The Conversation

Source: The Conversation

The exploitation of fossil fuels emits CO₂, the main cause of global warming. Zbynek Burival/Unsplash, CC BY

Climate change might be the most urgent issue of our day, both politically and in terms of life on Earth. There is mounting awareness that the global climate is a matter for public action.

Climate, greenhouse gases and CO2

The main engine of Earth’s climate is the sun. Our star delivers an average surface power of 342 W/m2 per year (roughly that of a hairdryer for each square meter of the planet). Earth absorbs about 70% of this and reflects the rest. If this were the only climate mechanism, the average temperature would be -15°C (below the freezing point of water, 0°C). Life would likely be impossible. Fortunately, some of the absorbed energy is re-emitted as infrared radiation, which, unlike visible light, interacts with the greenhouse gases (GHGs) present in the atmosphere to radiate heat back toward Earth’s surface. This greenhouse effect currently maintains our average temperature around 15°C.

The primary GHGs are water vapour and the much-debated CO2. Carbon dioxide contributes up to 30% of the total greenhouse effect, water vapour provides about 70%. CO2, though, has overall warming power that water vapour doesn’t. Water vapour in the atmosphere has a very short residence time (from hours to days) and its concentration can increase only if temperature increases. CO2 lingers in the atmosphere for 100 years and its concentration is not solely controlled by temperature. CO2 is thus able to trigger warming: if CO2 concentration increases, the average temperature, regardless of its own trend, will increase.

Carbon sinks

It is thus crucial to understand how atmospheric CO2 is regulated. Over geologic timescales (100,000+ years), volcanic gasses are the primary source of CO2, averaging 0.4 billion of tons of CO2 per year (0.4 GtCO2/y). But CO2 doesn’t just endlessly accumulate in the atmosphere. It fluxes in and out thanks to other environmental processes, and is stored in reservoirs known as carbon sinks.

The ocean, for one, contains 50 times more carbon than the atmosphere. However, CO2dissolved in the ocean can easily be released toward the atmosphere, while only geological sinks keep CO2 away from the atmosphere on geological timescales.

The first geological sink is sedimentary organic matter. Living organisms contain organic carbon built from atmospheric CO2 through photosynthesis, and dead organisms are often sent to the bottom of the ocean, lakes, and swamps. Immense amounts of organic carbon thus accumulate over time in marine and continental sediments, some of which are eventually transformed into fossil fuels (oil, gas and coal).

Depending on the estimates, these two sinks combined contain 50,000 to 100,000 timesmore carbon than the present atmosphere.

The Earth’s atmosphere over time

The amount of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere has varied widely. Decades of research allow us to draw the main lines of the history beginning after the Earth was fully formed 4.4 billion years ago.

Earth’s early atmosphere was extremely rich in CO2 (up to 10,000 times modern levels), while oxygen (O2) was scarce. During the Archean (3.8 to 2.5 billion years ago), life first flourished, the first continents built up. Weathering started pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere. The development of photosynthesis contributed to decrease atmospheric CO2, while elevating O2 levels during the Great Oxygenation Event, about 2.3 billion years ago. CO2 concentration fell to “only” 20 to 100 times the preindustrial level, never to return to the concentration of Earth’s earliest eons.

Two billion years later, the carbon cycle changed. Toward the late Devonian-early Carboniferous (approximately 350 million years ago), CO2 concentration was around 1,000 ppm. Mammals didn’t exist. Vascular plants able to synthesise lignin appeared during the Devonian and spread. Lignin is a molecule resistant to microbial degradation that allowed massive organic carbon stocks to build up as coal over millions of years. Combined with the weathering of the Hercynian range (the vestiges of which can be found in France’s Massif Central or the Appalachians in the United States), organic carbon burial pulled atmospheric CO2 down to levels similar to (or lower than) today’s and generated a major glacial era between 320 and 280 million years ago.

By the end of the Jurassic (145 million years ago), however, the pendulum had swung. Dinosaurs ruled the Earth, mammals evolved, tectonic activity increased and Pangea (the last super-continent) ripped apart. CO2 increased, to 500 to 2,000 ppm, and remained at high levels, maintaining a warm greenhouse climate for 100 million years.

From 55 million years, Earth cooled as CO2 decreased, notably following the Himalayan uplift and a subsequent increase in weathering and organic carbon sedimentation. Evolution continues with Hominids appearing 7 million years ago. At 2.6 million years, Earth entered a new state characterised by an alternation of glacial and interglacial periods at a regular pace led by Earth’s orbital parameters and amplified by the shorter-term carbon cycle. CO2reached its preindustrial level 11,500 years ago as Earth entered the latest interglacial stage.

A new story: the Industrial Revolution

Until the 19th century, the story of atmospheric carbon and Earth’s climate was a story of geology, biology and evolution. That story changed sharply following the Industrial Revolution, when modern humans (Homo sapiens), who probably appeared 300,000 years ago, began extracting and burning fossil fuels on a massive scale.

By 1950, the addition of CO2 to the atmosphere through fossil-fuel combustion was already proven, via the carbon isotopic signature of CO2 molecules (known as the “Suess” effect). By the late 1970’s, climate scientists observed a rapid drift toward warmer overall temperatures. The IPCC, created in 1988, showed in 2012 that the average temperature had increased by 0.9°C since 1901. That change might seem modest compared to the last deglaciation, when average temperature increased by about 6°C in 7,000 years, but it’s at least 10 times faster.

The average temperature continues to climb, and natural parameters such as solar activity or volcanism can’t explain such a fast warming. The cause is unambiguously human addition of GHGs to the atmosphere, and high-income countries emit the most CO2 per inhabitant.

How will our story end?

Industrial societies burnt about 25% of Earth’s fossil fuels within 160 years and abruptly inverted a natural flux storing carbon away from the atmosphere. This new human-generated flux is instead adding 28 Gt of CO₂ per year, 50 times more than volcanoes. Natural geological sequestration cannot compensate and atmospheric CO2 keeps rising.

We thank Morgan Fahey for her invaluable help with the English text.

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3rd to 8th grade TCAP math score by category in Tennessee

Change Indicator

Data Provided By
Note: Non-consecutive years appear adjacent in the trend line
because one or more years have been deselected.

Definitions: Data represent the percentage of 3rd to 8th grade students who achieved Proficient or Advanced TCAP score in math during a school year. The Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program (TCAP) is the standardized testing program used in public schools in Tennessee for 3rd to 8th grade students.

Footnotes: NA = Not Available. TCAP scores for the number of valid tests less than 10 are not available. County-level data do not include state special schools. Due to the suspension of testing in grade 3-8 no accountability determinations were made for the 2015-16 school year.


Mozambique: Preparation for elections

Extracted from: "Mozambique" IN Compendium of Elections in Southern Africa (2002), edited by Tom Lodge, Denis Kadima and David Pottie, EISA, 197-200.

The General Peace Agreement (GPA) stipulated that the demobilization of forces should be completed by mid-April 1993 and that the multiparty elections be held not later than October that year. However, owing to the comprehensive scope of the peacekeeping operation and the large number of countries and institutions involved with it, the timetable envisaged by the negotiators soon proved to be totally unrealistic. Onumoz managed to establish its presence in Mozambique only in April 1993 and its military component reached full strength in September that year, 11 months after the commencement of the ceasefire. The reason for the large UN military force was the requirement that they would replace the Zimbabwean and Malawian troops guarding the Beira and Nacala corridors. Renamo did not trust the foreign African troops, the Zimbabweans in particular, and delayed the entire peace process by demanding that at least 65 per cent of the UN soldiers be deployed before it would begin to cooperate.

Another major cause for the delay in implementing the GPA was the lack of cooperation between the government and Renamo, arising from their hostility towards each other and, consequently, their mistrust of each other. Both parties were therefore reluctant to disarm and disband their armies - their main sources of leverage and power - and tended to resist the UN monitors' efforts to press them to comply with the GPA.

A fundamental reason for Renamo's recalcitrance was its lack of wealth and limited access to resources, while Frelimo controlled the state's resources, including some of the aid donated from abroad. As a result, Renamo faced formidable problems in transforming itself into a political party capable of competing with Frelimo in the forthcoming elections. An immediate practical problem, for example, was to find enough trusted and suitably qualified persons to represent Renamo in the numerous commissions brought about by the peace process and for them to afford taking up residence in Maputo. Although Renamo eventually received donor funds - ultimately amounting to about US $ 18 million - it did not happen before the party had withdrawn from the transitional structures for about three months, from March to June 1993.

The tendency within Frelimo's ranks was to regard the UN presence as an infringement of the government's sovereignty and diplomatic efforts to create a climate of trust were perceived as pandering to the rebels' whims. The government nevertheless yielded to some of Renamo's demands by allowing its opponent to appoint up to three "advisers" in the offices of the provincial governors, who were government appointees. As happened in Angola, the government feared losing control of internal security. It caused uproar among all of its opponents because of the creation of a special unit - allegedly troops converted into policemen - to quell riots and uprisings, thereby compelling Onumoz to acquire some 1 000 additional staff for its civilian police unit (Civpol) to monitor the Mozambican police force. There was also a stalemate of several months on the matter of the composition of the National Electoral Commission (CNE) between Frelimo, on the one hand, and Renamo and smaller parties, on the other.

When, by October 1993, a year after the signing of the GPA, very little progress had been made with both demilitarization and preparations for elections UN Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali visited Mozambique to intervene personally. The real possibility of not only Onumoz being withdrawn, but also the donor funds, proved to be a lever in the Secretary-General's hands to extract a series of compromises from President Chissano and Renamo President Dhlakama. As a result, an almost immediate start was made with the various steps to demilitarize and to hold elections. It was agreed that the demobilization of the existing armies and militias would be completed in May 1994, that the new national army (FADM) would be fully operational by September 1994 and that voter registration would close in June 1994 for the elections to take place in October 1994.

The 21-member National Electoral Commission (CNE), chaired by Professor Brazão Mazula - an educationist and at present vice-chancellor of Mozambique's Eduardo Mondlane University - was appointed in January 1994 following promulgation of the new electoral act in the previous month. Mazula had no political affiliation and was appointed after agreement between Frelimo and Renamo. There were two vice-chairman, one nominated by Frelimo and one by Renamo. Altogether 10 NEC members were nominated by Frelimo, seven by Renamo and three by the other political parties.

The Mozambican-staffed Technical Secretariat for Electoral Administration (STAE) - the CNE's executive organ - began to function in February. Both the CNE and the STAE were supported by the Electoral Process Monitoring Group, operating under the auspices of Onumoz and representing the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and donor countries. The Group provided specialist staff and other resources, with the donor countries eventually funding the electoral process to the tune of US $ 60 million.

The election dates, announced in April, were to be 27-28 October 1994. However, the training of some 8 000 staff, grouped into 1 600 five-person teams, and other preparations, delayed the scheduled beginning of voter registration by about three months. Starting on 1 June, the rate of registration was only 260 000 persons in the first week, but it gathered momentum to reach the maximum of 700 000 in the seventh week. When registration closed on 2 September almost 6,2 million prospective voters or 81 per cent of the estimated 7,9 million eligible voters had been registered.

The electoral identity cards (incorporating a photograph), issued to the voters by the registration teams, effectively provided adult Mozambicans with proof of identity for the first time in their lives. Helicopters played a crucial role to help ferry the registration staff to the more remote parts of the country where they also had to be supplied with food, water and camping equipment - a procedure that was to be repeated during the elections. The UN civilian police unit (Civpol) provided the necessary security to the registration teams in areas controlled by either the government or Renamo. Fortunately for the electoral process, the security situation improved as the demobilization of troops and militias progressed.

A massive civic education campaign to persuade Mozambicans to register as voters and to vote in the elections started in May 1994. It was conceived and undertaken by the civic education department of the CNE-STAE - actively assisted by the UNDP and the Electoral Monitoring Group - which also coordinated and guided the work done in this field by the dozens of NGOs and religious groups. With about 1 600 trained voter education agents (most of them Mozambicans) interacting with an adult population who had never voted in a democratic election and most of them illiterate, this project turned into the largest and most concentrated act of mass communication in Mozambican history. It involved the country's entire media sector and related institutions, which conveyed the same, essentially simple, but carefully conceived, messages to the public in Portuguese and the indigenous languages. The emphasis was on audio and visual communication, through radio, television, street theatre and information centres, with printed material mainly used to support the audio-visual methods.

South Africa's first non-racial democratic election in April 1994 and President Nelson Mandela's visit to Mozambique (in July), facilitated the task of the Mozambican electoral educators as it provided a concrete example of what can be achieved through elections. Moreover, South Africa's government of national unity stimulated public debate on the feasibility of such a system for Mozambique, especially in view of the post-election débâcle in Angola. Interesting though, whereas in Angola the government seemed amenable to the concept of powersharing with Unita rejecting it, in Mozambique Renamo pushed the idea while the government was dead against it.

Although demilitarization, like the preparations for the elections, had been running behind schedule, by mid-August more than 80 per cent of all soldiers were either present at the 49 assembly points or had been demobilized. At this stage the old Mozambican army (FAM) and the Renamo army were formally disbanded and the new national army (FAMA) was inaugurated. The process was to continue until the end of 1994, when a total of almost 92 000 soldiers - 71 000 from FAM and 21 000 from Renamo had been demobilized. This total did not include the 12 000 soldiers - about 8 500 from FAM and 3 500 from Renamo - who had joined the new army. However, the humanitarian assistance to former soldiers was to continue until the end of 1996.

An important innovation to accelerate demobilization and to ensure that, at the time of the elections, relatively few soldiers were available to resume the civil war - should any one of the contending parties wished to do so - was the Reintegration Support Scheme (RSS) introduced by Onumoz and financially backed by the observer governments. It entailed cash payments to ex-soldiers over a period of 18 months after demobilization, over and above the three months severance pay provided by the Mozambican government. In addition, the former soldiers and their families received food rations, clothing, tool kits and seed as part of the humanitarian assistance programme. A total of US $ 95 million was spent on this scheme or more than $ 1 000 per discharged soldier, compared with less than $ 100 per person in the case of the some 4,5 million returning refugees and internally displaced persons who had to be resettled during the peacekeeping period.

In early September, following the registration of voters, the CNE assigned legislative seats by province - based on the number of voters in each province - and the parties went ahead to compile their lists of candidates on a provincial basis. Fourteen parties, including Frelimo and Renamo, were accredited by the CNE to contest the legislative election, while the nominations of 12 candidates were accepted for the presidential election.

There were attempts by the minor parties to form alliances, because the electoral threshold of five per cent of the total valid votes cast was rather high. Eventually two alliances contested the legislative elections: the Democratic Union (UD), comprising three parties and led by Antiono Palange, and the Patriotic Alliance (AP), comprising two parties and led by Dr Maximo Dias. Besides Joaquim Chissano and Afonso Dhlakama, the best known presidential candidates and party leaders were Palange and Dias of the aforementioned alliances, along with Wehia Ripua of the Democratic Party (PADEMO), Domingos Arouca of the United Front (FUMO) and Carlos dos Reis of the National Union (UNAMO), a breakaway faction of Renamo.

Yet by now it was evident that there were only two heavyweights - Frelimo and Renamo - and all the rest were minor contestants. The minor parties were not represented at the negotiations in Rome and the CNE was the sole structure in the transitional process that included representatives of the smaller or unarmed parties, because international concern was focused on pacifying the two armed belligerents. However, in view of the financial grants made to Renamo - which never stopped demanding more money - Onumoz eventually disbursed a sum of US $ 50 000 to each of the smaller registered parties to defray their election expenses. Further grants would only be made if proper accounting of expenditures was submitted to Onumoz.

All the presidential candidates and parties had to start their election campaigns on the same day (22 September), as stipulated by the Electoral Act. To be sure, the campaigns conducted by Frelimo and Renamo overshadowed those of the minor parties. All the parties campaigned in Maputo and the larger towns, though Chissano and Dhlakama concentrated their efforts in northern Mozambique, presumably because each one thought he and his party could rely on majority support in the other parts of the country - southern Mozambique, in the case of Chissano and Frelimo, and central Mozambique as far as Dhlakama and Renamo were concerned. The political gatherings were generally peaceful, yet there were numerous instances of intolerance and intimidation displayed by party supporters on all sides.

Observers of the campaigns were of the opinion that, by and large, the media gave good coverage of all the parties and candidates in the run-up to the historic elections. However, having acquired the services of a Brazilian public relations firm, President Chissano and Frelimo's campaign machine was the most sophisticated and best organized and, for this reason, they received the most publicity. Comment by the state-owned electronic media and most of the newspapers tended to favour the government, despite a striving for impartiality. The faxed news-sheet Imparcial Fax was biased towards Renamo, which relied on its leader's fiery rhetoric to spread its message.


Joseph M Castellano

Joseph M Castellano, PhD

  • ASSISTANT PROFESSOR | Neuroscience

Research Topics:

Aging, Alzheimer's Disease, Blood-Brain Barrier, Epigenetics, Extracellular Matrix, Hippocampus, Immunology, Memory, Microglia, Neuro-degeneration/protection, Neuroscience, Synaptic Plasticity, Transgenic Mice

As a graduate student, Dr. Castellano studied how the strongest genetic risk factor for Alzheimer's disease influences metabolism of the pathogenic peptide amyloid beta from brain interstitial fluid. In David Holtzman’s group, he used in vivo microdialysis to show in behaving mice that clearance of this peptide is impeded by the presence of APOE4, whereas clearance in the context of more inert or protective forms is faster. As he transititoned into postdoctoral training, Dr. Castellano became fascinated by the possibility that brain function may be, in part, shaped by the immune system and by unexplored activities present within circulation. In postdoctoral work with Tony Wyss-Coray, Dr. Castellano sought to identify and characterize factors in the periphery that reverse features of brain aging, finding that systemic treatment with umbilical cord plasma revitalizes hippocampal function in aged mice. The Castellano laboratory now focuses on characterizing the activity of proteins, including TIMP2, and their action in mediating long-range effects on circuits in the brain in the context of Alzheimer's disease and other disorders.

PhD, Washington University in St. Louis

Postdoctoral Fellowship, Stanford University


Academic writing using quotes correctly

However, you should make your sources clear at the academic writing using quotes correctly of the essay. Some or all of these approaches may be used: If you and your best friend could have a free limo for 24 hours, where would you go and what would you do?

Daily journal writing has helped Black's students at St. The key verbs here, justify, outline, evaluate, diagnose need to be looked at carefully because they indicate the approach you are expected to take when you prepare and write the essay.

Education with Integrity

One useful method is the half-page system which leaves space for annotation and possible alteration to the sequencing of points. Line references How to show references to quotations from plays and poetry. Two ways are to put a single or double quote at either the beginning or the end of the literal: Decide the task to be undertaken 2.

In planning, you try to foresee what you want your final text to look like, using the following points: Using Sources Correctly There are three main ways to uses sources in your research paper.

When a quotation is indented, the use of quotation marks is not necessary, and the page number is included outside the ending punctuation. I think of the people in that band and what happened to them.

If you choose not to eat well, exercise, deal with stress, and avoid getting drunk, then your grades will go down Kanar Fricke is the source.

Write My Paper For Me!

You may be surprised to hear that revising should take as much time as drafting! No comma is necessary to introduce the quoted phrase. The other ones are like no-op operations.

Education with Integrity

List — List your ideas as they occur. Informative — the result of research, and predominantly the presentation of fact.

Include a table of any diagrams or illustrations used in the main text. Do not italicise quotes or place them in bold lettering.

Throughout the year, illustrations are replaced by words, and those who began with a word or two are now writing a page. Do I use a comma or a colon to introduce a quotation? Next, re-write it in an easily understandable form. News Essay Writing Some assignments, and most examination answers, will be required to be presented in the form of an essay.

All reports should have an introduction, main body, divided into sections, a conclusion and, sometimes, recommendations. You need to make each quote a part of your essay by introducing it beforehand and commenting on it afterward. Your grammar sentence structure, use of vocabulary… should be considered carefully, as should punctuation.

Summarising, paraphrasing & quoting

She stated, "Students often had difficulty using APA style," but she did not offer an explanation Jones,p. When a quotation is indented, the use of quotation marks is not necessary, and the page number is included outside the ending punctuation.

Welcome to the Purdue OWL

Titles How to show the titles of articles, journals, newspapers, magazines, films, and books in essays. In other words, in what order will your information or comments come in the essay? Each paragraph should contain a controlling idea, or topic sentence which links and anticipates.

What are block quotations and how are they handled? Imagine a friend of yours is considering whether to take steroids. She has students write about a favorite "Christmas past," about vacation plans for the "Christmas present," and about a "Christmas future.

How do I punctuate shorter quotations? Make the report as easy and interesting to read as possible. Indented original article by David Fricke appearing in Rolling Stone: Please follow any specific guidelines given in your assignment brief.

He was originally an industrial designer, then went on to lecture on literary studies at Manchester University and the Open University. Make final evaluation Preparation Careful thought and preparation is the key to presenting successful reports.Essay Writing.

Academic writing

The main secrets of our good reputation are trustful relationships with customers and talented academic writers who always create first-chop papers from scratch. Practice using the official IELTS writing answer sheet before your test. Learn how the examiner uses the paper to record your band score and what extra information is contained on it.

For the most complete information, check your campus library or writing center for the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 8th ed. Learn to write like a professional (or a professor).

resources for academic writing, journalism, creative fiction, and copy writing. Jun 17,  · How to Write Articles. In this Article: Article Summary Forming Your Idea Researching Your Idea Outlining Your Idea Writing Your Article Finalizing Your Work Community Q&A There are a multitude of different types of articles, including news stories, features, profiles, instructional articles, and so .

Academic writing using quotes correctly
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Hotels Bogor

Bogor is a city on the island of Java in the West Java province of Indonesia. The city is located 60 kilometres (37 mi) south of the Indonesian capital Jakarta. Bogor is the 6th largest city of the Jakarta metropolitan region and the 14th nationwide, with a population having passed 1 million, it is an important economic, scientific, cultural and tourist centre, as well as a mountain resort.

Population of 949.066 living on an area of 118,5 km2, the central part of Bogor is one of the world's most densely populated areas. The city has a presidential palace and a botanical garden one of the oldest and largest in the world. It bears the nickname "the Rain City" because of frequent rain showers. It nearly always rains even during the dry season.


Sep 10, 2016

Raising the Bar

I have a reputation of paying attention to detail. I’m not sure when it started. I think I have always thought about this stuff. I have already blogged about tiny details that bother me.

Some things are a matter of preference, like how text is rendered. I like mine rendered a certain way, especially when hinting is concerned. The things that aren’t a matter of preference are, for example, typos, grammar mistakes, weird formatting, etc. Those things tend to stand out to me.

I see those problems all the time at work. They stand out the most on the website. I’ve always noticed these problems, but lately I’ve started to actually point them out so they can get fixed. Something I tend to forget is that things that seem obvious to me are not always obvious to others. People tend to be focused on their actual tasks, anyway. For the longest time I just waited for things to get fixed, but it rarely happened. I’ve started to dedicate a part of my time at work to navigate through things and make sure things look good. If I see problems, I assume users will too.

We use a marketing platform at work, and it’s also where we also host our website. It uses a WYSIWYG editor. The bad thing about WYSIWYG HTML editors is that people use them. Those editors tend to produce horrible HTML; like this:

WYSIWYG editors also produce inline styling. This is really difficult to maintain. If you decide to change the CSS for the site, you won’t be updating several elements that use inline styling, and you’re left with inconsistencies. Those build up.

One of the problems is that the people editing the website usually aren’t technical, so they use a WYSIWYG editor. It’s probably the most productive way to produce content, but quality tends to take a hit. Developers produce the best code, but their time isn’t well-spent putting content up on a website. So, who’s responsible for raising the bar?

I decided to start fixing stuff myself. It was inefficient for me to find a problem, let someone else know about it, and have them fix it. This is especially the case when problems are as trivial as a typo or a missing space. Others can use the time that they saved to work on stuff that no one else can. I also don’t have to wait for these things to get fixed.

Who should be responsible for raising the bar? I’m not sure how other companies do this. Is it a part of the culture? Does a single person take responsibility? I think it would be best to make something like this a part of company culture. I guess it conflicts a little bit with the whole startup culture of MVPs, shipping constantly, moving fast and breaking things, etc?

When I was running a business, I made sure that whatever the user saw and experienced was high quality. I had no idea how to make a good landing page. I had never head of the term “landing page” either. At one point I was redesigning the thing every couple of weeks, and that went on for a few months. Eventually I got it to a point where I thought it looked really good. In my experience, people don’t really tell you if your site looks bad. Maybe you’ll hear something if it looks good. I got lucky enough to get some nice feedback. As an 18-year-old with absolutely no design confidence, that felt pretty good!

Personal Improvement

Raising the bar is important to me especially outside of work. That’s probably where it matters the most. I’ve been focusing on personal improvement since I started college. I decided to do that early on, and I’ve kept it going.

I think people tend to accept too many of their flaws. A few flaws I can think of are not being smart enough, not having the patience, or not having the time.

You don’t find the time. You make the time.

You can get smarter. You can become more patient. You can change yourself. If you have flaws, you can work on improving them. I think it’s a good habit to make sure you’re constantly improving yourself.

Keep raising the bar.


Home / India / NASA sees the crash location of the Israeli spacecraft on the moon

NASA sees the crash location of the Israeli spacecraft on the moon

NASA & # 39; s orbiting orbiting orbiting spacecraft has seen the impact of the Israeli Beresheet spacecraft on an area of the moon called "Sea of Serenity" where it crashed on April 11.

SpaceIL, a non-profit organization, attempted to land its spacecraft on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in the ancient volcanic field at the edge of the moon on April 11.

After a smooth first descent, Beresheet made a hard landing on the surface.

As soon as NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) runway landed on April 22, LRO pictured the Beresheet impact site, NASA said in a statement on Wednesday.

LRO took the image of the impact site 90 km above the surface.

"The cameras created a dark spot about 10 meters wide, indicating the point of impact. The dark tone suggests a surface roughened by the hard landing, which is less reflective than a clean, smooth surface", according to the American space agency.

LRO could not determine whether Beresheet formed a surface crater when it hit.

Another possibility is that Beresheet formed a small line instead of a crater, given the low angle of incidence, the light mass and the low speed.

"There are many indications that we are actually looking at a man-made crater rather than a meteoroid-induced crater. This is an important consideration because the moon, without atmosphere, is constantly being bombarded by space rocks that leave craters," NASA said.

na / pg

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard employees and is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)

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January 16, 2019

PSALMS 6-8

Focus Verse: Psalm 8:4

Psalm 6 is the first penitent Psalm.  King David is seeking God’s forgiveness and deliverance from the consequences of his sin.

Psalm 7 opens with King David in obvious distress over his enemies pursuit and petitions the Lord to protect him from his enemies.

Psalm 8 is where the focus verse of the day is taken:

what is mankind that you are mindful of them,

In this Psalm we find King David asking God why do you care for mankind in the way that you do? Why?

Although the reading for todays journey is relatively short it gives us a glimpse of God’s interest in our lives.  In Psalm 6, King David is seeking God’s forgiveness and deliverance from sin.  Why doesn’t God tell King David, you chose to sin and the wages of sin is death, farewell!  Psalm 7 reveals King David being pursued by his enemies, seeking rescue from God.  King David admits he may be responsible for his pursuers anger toward him, but God still delivers him.

Have you considered the question posed in Psalm 8:4? Take a few moments to pray, meditate, and reflect on your life and ask yourself this very simple, yet very difficult question: God why do you care for me so much?


Home Security Page 2
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32. Which of the following is true regarding no-reflow after coronary intervention?

A. Results from microvascular thrombus formation obstructing forward coronary blood flow

B. Can be reduced by thrombus aspiration

C. Is more likely if a patient presents late after symptom onset for coronary intervention

D. Can potentially be lessened using glycoprotein IIb/IIIa inhibitors

E. All of the above


Germantown's secret history as a utopian colony for freed slaves

On a grassy median at the corner of Summer Avenue and Sycamore View Road stands a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it historical marker. It’s inaccurate (its dates are wrong) and ill-placed (it’s miles from the Germantown site it describes). Its inscription is vague and belies its true significance.

The sign describes a “colony whose aims were the enforcement of cooperative living and other advanced sociological experiments.” That ‘advanced sociological experiment’ was, more accurately, an attempt to end the institution of slavery while saving the South’s economy through education, communal living and sexual revolution.

The Nashoba Community was the brainchild of arguably the most interesting woman in early American history. Frances Wright was an unusually tall and “manish” woman, described as “precocious” and always with her signature top hat. She was also the country’s first female playwright, an advocate of workers’ rights and the rights of women and people of color, the first female editor of a national journal, and the first woman to formally lecture to men. Wright was the hero the first suffragettes dreamt about.

Born in Scotland in 1795, Wright was wealthy, well-educated and progressive. She first traveled to the U.S. with her sister in 1819 to tour the northeast. Once home, she published “Views of Society and Manners in America” and garnered the attention of many prominent people, including Thomas Jefferson and Revolutionary War hero, General Marquis de Lafayette. In 1824, Wright returned to tour the southern U.S. with Lafayette.

Historic marker located at Summer Avenue and Sycamore View Road inaccurately reflects the dates of the experimental venture.

While she’d seen the inequity of slavery in the North, in the South she observed firsthand the full brutality of the institution. She wrote, “The sight of slavery is revolting everywhere. But to inhale the impure breath of its pestilence in the free winds of America is odious beyond all that imagination can conceive.”

Within a year, she’d move to America, gain citizenship and publish “A Plan for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery in the United States Without Danger of Loss to the Citizens of the South”. The treatise was a how-to for the abolishment of slavery that was more appealing to slave owners than most of its contemporaries because, simply put, the slave owners still stood to make money.

“Slavery is an economic system first, racism then comes to justify that system,” said Wayne Dowdy, local historian and the chief archivist for the Memphis Public Library’s history collections. “The biggest hang-up in the early days with abolitionists wanting to free slaves is slave owners saying, ‘We want our money back. We actually want more money, we want to profit.’”

Economics is an issue of profit but also of labor. Freemen were in direct competition for jobs with white workers and whites feared they might incite enslaved workers to run or revolt. In response, Tennessee passed a law requiring free persons of color to petition local governments for permission to stay. The prevailing wisdom of the day held that the best solution was to emancipate then relocate the newly-freed outside of the South.

There was also an argument against a sudden emancipation for the sake of the enslaved themselves. It would be cruel, they reasoned, to free people without any education or support in the transition to citizenship. What good was freedom with no resources for success?

Wright’s vision held a solution for all three core concerns. First, she proposed slave owners be compensated for their “loss.” Slaves would be purchased then large farms would be built in each state where they would work towards emancipation in an indentured servant model to offset the cost of their purchase.

As they worked, they would be educated on skills necessary to prepare them for life in free society. Children would also be educated and families kept together to establish stable home-lives. When their debt was paid, the freemen would be relocated to Haiti and the western U.S. and their labor replaced by poor white workers “depressed by the slave industry” and willing to work for low wages.

To promote racial harmony, the farms themselves would be cooperative, with all persons treated and working equitably. Emancipation would serve as motivation rather than barbaric corporal punishment.
Frances Wright, c. 1825, the year she founded the Nashoba Community.Wright had an innovative plan, but also critical to her success was the relatively liberal lean of the early 1800s.

“The interesting thing about it for me is that there’s no opposition to it,” marvels Dowdy. “In fact, it’s by and large celebrated. Thomas Jefferson before he died was aware of her ideas and had her to Monticello. The mayor of Memphis, Marcus Winchester, was just as supportive.”

The 1820s and ‘30s were a transitional period where whites could participate in the institution of slavery while still remaining critical and calling for an alternative. Generations had been raised within the system and no one was sure how to end it without crippling the South’s economy, but there was at least desire to do so. Morally and economically, slavery was not the future the South’s leaders envisioned.

“By the end of the 1850s, it’s ‘Oh, no, it’s a social good. We’re doing the right thing.’ This notion that slavery is wrong disappears from the South,” said Dowdy. “The South is slavery. Period. That’s our culture, that’s our heritage, and we’re clinging to it.”

But Wright was in a sweet spot, a time that encouraged debate and experimentation. In the winter of 1825, her utopia was the hot new theory for social change, but it remained untested.

To prove her case, Wright looked to Tennessee where abolitionist sentiments were strong and a tract of land spanning the Wolf River she described as, “2000 acres of good and pleasant woodland, traversed by a good and lovely stream.”

In this dense, virgin hardwood forest, the Nashoba Community set its roots.

Wright recruited a group of white supporters willing to relocate, received donations for startup costs and traveled to Nashville where she purchased the first eight slaves.

Together, the inhabitants set about clearing the land, beginning with 15 acres around present-day Riverdale Road and Poplar Avenue in northwest Germantown. Basic structures like homes, barns, storage and a small store were constructed. They planted staple crops, primarily cotton, for profit and food crops to sustain themselves.

They made plans for a school and additional housing and amenities for 150 slaves working towards emancipation. Wright reasoned that it would take five years for each individual to work off the cost of their purchase and relocation, an amount equal to $6,000. Plus six percent interest.

Wright’s dream was short-lived.

“Frances Wright was a philosopher, not a farmer,” Dowdy said.

Her grand plan failed to account for the backbreaking work necessary to clear the land, let alone plant and harvest. None of the leadership had experience in large-scale farming, and they wrongly assumed that the slaves would have knowledge of plantation life. This was not the case as the majority of Tennessee’s rural slaves lived on small farms.

Articles and documents detailing the life of Frances Wright and the Nashoba Community, part of a larger collection available at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library's Memphis and Shelby County Room.

Wright also showed her ignorance of human behavior and the psychology of slavery and assumed, with emancipation on the line, the enslaved would work harder and in full cooperation with white residents. She was baffled when they were willful or distrustful.

In a final critical misstep, Wright underestimated the heinous strength of Southern summers and the diseases they brought. Just over a year after launching the project, exhausted and sick with malaria, she was forced to retreat to Ohio before returning to Europe.

Without its visionary leader, Nashoba began to crumble in earnest. The caretakers entrusted with the commune’s management began to invite more white members, some of whom had their own agendas and shifted focus away from equity and emancipation. They stop educating the enslaved adults, claiming they weren’t as capable of learning as the children. There were even reports of corporal punishment.

Not only were ideals being compromised, by the end of 1827, profits were also abysmal. That year the farm produced less than $250 worth of goods.

Reeling from mismanagement, Nashoba was then rocked by a moral scandal when one of the trustees, James Richardson, published part of a diary detailing life on the commune. In one entry, a man attempted to rape a woman. She complained to the trustees and the man was reminded that community rules state all relations must be “the unconstrained and unrestrained choice of both parties.”

In another entry, Richardson announces that he and Mamselle Josephine, a woman of color, were in a relationship and moving in together.

Extramarital sex, interracial relationships, radical consent, and women with bodily autonomy? Surely, Nashoba was beyond all reason and dignity!

A sketch drawn by a visitor to the Nashoba Community shows the cooperative at its height, still largely undeveloped but with a few houses, storage buildings and a small store.

Wright immediately returned to the U.S. and defended the diary by publishing a lengthy letter outlining Nashoba’s principles, including the belief that racial harmony is best achieved through interracial relationships.

Reports often cite the diary as the lynchpin in Nashoba’s demise, and for sure, supporters distanced themselves and donations disappeared. But Dowdy has a different take. He believes that the model was flawed to begin with. The Scottish aristocrat, however well-meaning, was blinded by a glamorized view of the South and couldn’t see past King Cotton and the grand plantation houses to a more practical business model.

“If they had understood better the non-Uncle Tom’s Cabin, non-popular culture of the South and understood the economics of it better, they might have come up with a more viable alternative,” he said. “But the only economic reality anyone paid attention to was the cotton economy.”

Nashoba had plenty of alternatives. The timber on the land was incredibly valuable and could have been sold to local sawmills to fund the project. Nashoba could have built its own sawmill. Shoemaking, blacksmithing and other light industrial jobs were in demand and less risky than farming. Even a smaller farm would have been a safer starting point.

While a scandal makes for an interesting story, ultimately, utopia was lost to ignorance, mismanagement and lack of profit.

“If it was economically viable, she wouldn’t have lost support,” Dowdy said. “There would have been powerful forces, if they were making money off of this thing, that would have crushed [Richardson].”

By 1830, the grand social experiment was over. The white residents went their separate ways while Wright and the now-30 slaves sailed to Haiti where she left them in the care of the Haitian president with the stipulation that once any remaining debt was worked off, they would be freed and given land to start their new lives. Wright moved to Ohio and continued to fight for social change until her death in 1852.

In the years following Nashoba, opinions on slavery hardened, the grand experiments stopped, and the country erupted in war to decide the question of emancipation. The Nashoba lands went to Wright’s estranged daughter and her heirs before languishing in litigation over back taxes. Eventually, its timber was stripped and it was sold to develop new subdivisions as the City of Germantown expanded.

Today, the only thing that remains of the Nashoba Community is the foundation of the main house, a newer home resting atop it, and an ill-placed, inaccurate sign.

Wright was of her time as much as she was ahead of it, and 190 years later, some are her core principles are still worth preservation and continued work. Resources and support to balance inequities that still exist in our institutions and social fabric, greater social integration and cooperation, radical consent and bodily autonomy—those are ideals worth remembering beyond a misplaced sign.

Read more articles by Cole Bradley.

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As America's guiltiest pleasure comes to an end, all fans are either happy or heartbroken. Throughout this season, Becca has made a lot of interesting decisions regarding the men she kept around. Shockingly enough, the biggest surprise this season to me was the finale. And just like all Bachelorette rejects, I have a lot of questions for Becca.

Since night one, I was a ride or die Blake fan. I never disliked Garrett, but he was never a personal favorite. As the season went on, Becca talked more and more about how life with Garrett would be so easy, and consequentially, I disliked him more and more. Not as a person. But as a partner for Becca.

Both Becca and her family repeatedly said Blake would continue to challenge her every single day of their lives. Becca acknowledged to herself, the camera, her family, and basically the entire country that where Garrett would provide an easy and safe life, Blake would provide a stimulating one.

Becca and Garrett's relationship is an interesting dynamic. Much like the relationship between Becca and Blake, there were no problems on the show. Both relationships remained authentic and drama free. But there was a major difference between the two men. Simply put, Blake was able to get real.

Becca wanted to know what shaped him as a person. He full-on dove into awful, traumatic events that created him. Becca asked how he was doing. He told her about his frustration. Becca asked for honesty. He told her as soon as he knew he was falling in love and as soon as he was in love. He showed Becca happiness, sadness, frustration, joy, envy, fear, and most importantly, love.

Garrett, on the other hand, really struggled with getting serious. A big part of his personality and life is deflecting problems with light-heartedness. With Becca and Garrett, they'll laugh their problems away and they'll be happy. But the question is, for how long?

Becca Kufrin

For the happy couple, everything is still new. But as with everything in life, things become old. We fall into routines and we forget how to find the "new." We lose our curiosity and we lose our passion. We become still and we become idle. Due to the ease of life with Garrett, will their relationship lose its sparkle and become passionless?

Becca was confident in the notion that Blake would strive to challenge her every single day. And being challenged means making mistakes. Because mistakes happen when we step out of that comfort zone and routine. If we're messing up, that means we're trying new things, we are making new things, we are learning, living, pushing ourselves, changing our worlds. We are becoming new things, becoming new people. Being challenged means doing something that matters with our lives. Without challenge, there can be no growth.

Unfortunately, Garrett's lifestyle will not promote Becca to be bold. She will not be pushed. And when we aren't being pushed, we aren't stepping out of our comfort zones. And without stepping out of our comfort zones, nothing great can be accomplished. We continue on a path on mundanity.

Becca obviously loved both contenders, so why did she settle for a life of idleness? Was the happiness she felt with Garrett so amazing it overshadowed a future full of self-betterment and growth? She had the opportunity to remain forever curious and passionate about life, but instead, she traded it for a life full of unspoken emotions with Garrett.

While I wish the absolute best to Becca in making this relationship work, this season of the Bachelorette has reaffirmed my goals to never stop challenging myself. To never stop growing. To never stop changing. And after watching Becca navigate this season, I've realized the importance of having someone who pushes me just as hard as I push myself. Challenging yourself can get hard, but having someone next to you willing to challenge you will lead to your greatest self possible.


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July 2019

Digital signal processing
Digital signal processor
Digital signal (signal processing)
Signal processing
of signal transmission were being rapidly developed, as a new type of signal emerged called processing signals. Single-chip digital signal processing was
Audio signal processing
digital approach as the techniques of digital signal processing are much more powerful and efficient than analog domain signal processing. Processing
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is a logic signal or a binary signal, which varies between a low and a high signal level. In digital signal processing, a digital signal is a representation
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digital signal processing, downsampling and decimation are terms associated with the process of resampling in a multi-rate digital signal processing system


“The Only Path to Tomorrow,”
Reader’s Digest, Jan, 1944, 8.

Fascism and communism are not two opposites, but two rival gangs fighting over the same territory . . . both are variants of statism, based on the collectivist principle that man is the rightless slave of the state.

The philosophy of collectivism upholds the existence of a mystic (and unperceivable) social organism, while denying the reality of perceived individuals—a view which implies that man’s senses are not a valid instrument for perceiving reality. Collectivism maintains that an elite endowed with special mystic insight should rule men—which implies the existence of an elite source of knowledge, a fund of revelations inaccessible to logic and transcending the mind. Collectivism denies that men should deal with one another by voluntary means, settling their disputes by a process of rational persuasion; it declares that men should live under the reign of physical force (as wielded by the dictator of the omnipotent state)—a position which jettisons reason as the guide and arbiter of human relationships.

From every aspect, the theory of collectivism points to the same conclusion: collectivism and the advocacy of reason are philosophically antithetical; it is one or the other.

What subjectivism is in the realm of ethics, collectivism is in the realm of politics. Just as the notion that “Anything I do is right because I chose to do it,” is not a moral principle, but a negation of morality—so the notion that “Anything society does is right because society chose to do it,” is not a moral principle, but a negation of moral principles and the banishment of morality from social issues.

As a cultural-intellectual power and a moral ideal, collectivism died in World War II. If we are still rolling in its direction, it is only by the inertia of a void and the momentum of disintegration. A social movement that began with the ponderous, brain-cracking, dialectical constructs of Hegel and Marx, and ends up with a horde of morally unwashed children stamping their foot and shrieking: “I want it now!”—is through.

Collectivism has lost the two crucial weapons that raised it to world power and made all of its victories possible: intellectuality and idealism, or reason and morality. It had to lose them precisely at the height of its success, since its claim to both was a fraud: the full, actual reality of socialist-communist-fascist states has demonstrated the brute irrationality of collectivist systems and the inhumanity of altruism as a moral code.

The advocates of collectivism are motivated not by a desire for men’s happiness, but by hatred for man . . . hatred of the good for being the good; . . . the focus of that hatred, the target of its passionate fury, is the man of ability.


Many people want to become fit, but they think it is too hard to achieve. You should learn all about fitness when you have decided to go ahead with it. This article is full of great tips to help get you started.

Do you find it difficult to devote valuable time to exercise? Split your workout by dividing it into two separate sessions. Don’t increase the duration of your workout, just do it in two portions. Therefore, instead of working out for a one hour burst, split it into two half-hour sessions, one morning and one night. If you do not like to go to the gym two times in a single day, try having one workout in the gym and one outdoors.

Try counting calories to promote fitness. The number of calories you take in every day will determine weather you’re on track to gain or lose weight. Aim to eat enough calories to cover your basal metabolic rate while counteracting extra calories with exercise.

Reduce the chances of being injured by walking with proper posture. Your posture should be upright, and you should bring your shoulders back slightly. Let your elbows fall at a 90-degree angle. Each arm should move forward opposite of the forward foot. Every time you take a step, let your heel touch the ground and then roll forward onto the rest of your foot.

With the help from this article, you should now feel more confident in your ability to become physically fit. This is only a fraction of the excellent information out there. The more you seek out, the better your chances of making significant progress. If you use all the information that you’ve learned, success will surely follow.


IT articles

RSS - What is it and how to use it ?
An article about RSS. What is it? How can you read RSS-feeds? And how can you create XML RSS files in PHP, Delphi or .NET? This small article tries to give an overview.
- Dutch - IT, Webdevelopment
History of OOP
This article, which is written in Dutch, gives an overview of the history of OOP (Object Oriented Programming). The first principles were designed in the sixties. After the language Simula, other languages like Smalltalk, ADA, Prolog, C++, Object Pascal, Java and C# followed.
- Dutch - IT
What is UML ?
The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is one of the most used methodologies to describe a process which can be understood by analysts, developers and clients. This document, which is written in Dutch, gives an overview of UML and shows the different graphical elements which correspond to principles from object oriented programming (OOP).
- Dutch - IT
How to use e-mails and internet safely
This article, which is written in Dutch, explains some a few dangers on the internet and describes how you can prevent your PC from being infected with viruses, worms, hoaxes, ...
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History of the computer
This document, which is written in Dutch, gives an overview of the history of the computer. Everything started long ago with mechanical calculators and only in the forties the first 'computers' were developed. Since the '80s PC's also found their way to the consumer.
- Dutch - IT


On-line Education Programs & Education

Today, on-line training has grow to be more than a cheaper and fewer time-consuming various to classroom or traditional training. The USED and Council for Larger Training Accreditation (CHEA) consider accreditors and acknowledge solely those that meet certain high quality standards. First, we’ve conventional face-to-face studying, during which there are not any on-line parts. Students who perceive these variations and the know-how behind them are higher positioned to choose on-line packages that mirror their profession targets and studying types, giving them the perfect probability of success.online education

In accordance with Dr. Pedersen, many colleges also provide programs that mix on-line and conventional coursework to provide campus-based mostly students with a richer, extra interactive learning expertise. Assessment, if executed in an appealing way, can encourage college students, assist them track their progress, and achieve a sense of accomplishment.

This development displays graduate programs’ tendency to enroll extra working professionals balancing college with career and family tasks. Join with 1000’s of other learners and debate ideas, focus on course materials, and get help mastering concepts.

Some Okay-12 faculty programs create their very own courses, but most contract them from private corporations like K12 , and Connections Academy , a unit of Pearson. Just remember to have the time and self-discipline to complete your program. Several schools have been experimenting with placing high quality audio and video recordings of charismatic professors from prime schools on-line.

If you have to work or take care of your own home and youngsters in the course of the day, you possibly can examine at night. It’s crucial for college kids to contemplate accreditation and state regulations when evaluating on-line degree programs. Courses are sequential and is probably not supplied each semester—an important consideration for students unable to complete the program straight by means of.online educationonline education


Supreme ultimate fist

What is taijiquan?

Taijiquan is an advanced Chinese martial art based on the yin/yang principle. The taijiquan syllabus
teaches a wide variety of powerful, functional skills, along with an in-depth philosophical background.
It encourages a calm, focussed mind and trains a supple, strong, flexible body. A student of taijiquan discovers how to neutralise and incapacitate the opponent without sustaining any injury to oneself.

Taijiquan means...

Taijiquan literally means - "martial art that uses the yin/yang principle in combat".
Taiji is supreme ultimate (yin/yang). Quan is fist (combat/martial art). The name is commonly translated as 'supreme ultimate fist'.

'Tie jee chwan'.

4 styles

There are 4 traditional styles of taijiquan: Chen, Yang, Wu and Hao.

Taijiquan was created in the Wudang Mountain range in Hubei, China. This mountain region is famous for Taoism.
Although baguazhang and xingyiquan are often referred to as 'Wudang', neither of those styles originated in the Wudang Mountain range. Only taijiquan is from Wudang.

Taijiquan is not tai chi for health

When most people say 'tai chi' they mean tai chi for health. Tai chi for health is a simplified, non-martial exercise adapted from taijiquan.
Most modern tai chi classes are teaching an art that an old person could cope with... By definition this cannot conceivably be a martial art.

Yang style has something of the feeling of 'killer energy' about it; it is more martial in appearance.
A spectator can see the applications of the movements when they watch the form.

(Master Xu Shu Song)

Yang style taijiquan

Yang style taijiquan is a fluid, dynamic, exciting kung fu style that involves a wide range of 'counter-intuitive' methods.
The art is thought-provoking and insightful; with lessons about living as well as about fighting. There is nothing macho, aggressive, confrontational or competitive about taijiquan.

Legendary skill

The Yang style of taijiquan was developed by the kung fu legend Yang Lu-chan. Yang Lu-chan's nickname was 'Yang-the-Invincible'.
He is famous for teaching his taijiquan to the Manchu Emperor's elite palace guards.

Taijiquan was designed to be an advanced kung fu method. It cultivates whole-body strength, whole-body movement, fluidity and whole-body power
The muscles do not tense up and the student remains calm and composed. In the melee of combat, the aim is to become 'the eye of the storm'; unflustered and focused.

The combat methods and principles behind taijiquan have been a well-kept secret in China for hundreds (if not thousands) of years.
Even today very few people
understand how to use taijiquan as a martial art. Although the exact origin of taijiquan remains a mystery, it employs insights and principles that are ancient.
New taijiquan students are faced with the challenge of exploring these ancient practices in order to discover how and why the art works.

Internal martial art

Taijiquan is an 'internal martial art'. What does this mean? Internal martial arts are quite different to mainstream martial/fighting arts.
They utilise a much more sophisticated way of moving and defending yourself that doesn't involve punishing yourself physically at the same time.
The internal martial arts require the student to make a mental effort as well as a physical effort. Consequently, these Arts appeal to a different set of people than many other martial arts.

Concrete skills

A common feature in taijiquan classes is the look of surprise on students' faces the first time they get a taste of how effortless taijiquan can be.
The skills are taught on the basis of body mechanics, alignment, spatial awareness, strategy and timing, not some mysterious channelling of qi...
Taijiquan is a physical art, so the skills must also be physical, tangible, real.

Use your head

A clear, sharp mind is cultivated in taijiquan. The faster your mind can move, the faster your hand/body can move. Taijiquan requires both concentration and expansive awareness.
These skills are vital for both combat and everyday life.

Isn't tai chi just slow motion exercise?

No. Some of the training methods are slow, and some are not. Slow motion movement, chilled out exercise or dance cannot be considered tai chi. Authentic tai chi practice follows specific guidelines.
To quote The Tai Chi Classics: "If the opponent's movement is quick, then quickly respond; if his movement is slow, then follow slowly."
Some of the training methods (i.e. form) are slower than normal speed; this is to develop strength, accuracy, balance and control. Combat is fast.

Kung fu is thousands of years old and is a highly developed system of martial art. The student who locates a good kung fu school will find the training thorough and challenging. Kung fu skills, which have been refined over centuries, are not learned easily or quickly. The sincere student, however, through hard work and dedication, will not be disappointed with the results.

(Adam Hsu)

13     authenticity     combat     essence     FORM     internal     jing     neigong     power    principles      quan     syllabus     the Tao     why?     yang

Page created 11 January 1993
Last updated 09 June 2019


Software Development Manager, Web Application

21d - Indeed
Spokeo - Pasadena, CA 91101
Spokeo is a people search engine that both enlightens and empowers our customers. With over 12 billion records and 18 million visitors per month, we reconnect friends, reunite families, prevent fraud, protect families and businesses, and more. Every day our nimble team takes on enormous challenges in data science that push the limits of the cloud and search architecture.

Spokeo is seeking a Software Development Manager focusing on web applications to join us in Pasadena, CA. As an Engineering Manager, your leadership, communication, and full-stack development skills will be exercised as Scrum Master and technical lead of a cross-functional team. You will ensure that the team is self-organizing, efficient, and constantly improving. More broadly, based on interest, you can help define and champion best practices for functional areas such as CSS, JavaScript, Ruby, continuous integration, automation, and general coding standards. The ultimate goal is to bring more value to Spokeo customers through engineering and team excellence.


Nearest Neighbors with Keras and CoreML – Hacker Noon

In this post, we will use Keras to build a cosine-based k-nearest neighbors model (k-NN) on top of an existing deep network. Finally (and optionally) we will convert the model to CoreML for use on iPhone or other iOS devices.

A Jupyter notebook with a complete code example is available here:

The basic problem is this: You have a set of images and you need to find images among them which are similar to a user image. Images, however, cannot easily be compared in their raw form, so you use a neural network to extract features (or representations, codes or encodings) from the images. These features can be compared using cosine similarity. So you want to build a cosine-based k-NN which for any given user image can find the k closest images in the database. It’s easy to build the k-NN using tools like Scikit-learn but for several reasons (detailed below), you want a single model that handles feature extraction and neighbor computation.

The solution is quite simple: Cosine similarity is basically just dot products (on normalized vectors). This means it can be easily expressed in Keras. In fact, it can be just a single dense layer with precomputed weights.

Why not Scikit?

Scikit-learn is a wonderful tool which lets you easily train and use many different Machine Learning models. And it lets you build k-NNs not only using cosine but with several other metrics as well. So, why not take advantage of that? There are several good reasons. Let’s see.

  • Scikit-learn does not support GPUs. By building our k-NN in Keras, we can leverage GPUs for increased inference speed.
  • Scikit-learn does not run on iOS devices. Apple’s tools for converting Machine Learning models to Apple’s CoreML format do support Scikit-learn but only some specific model types and the k-NN is not one of them. The Keras model, however, can be converted to CoreML, making it easy to run your model on an iPhone.
  • Building the k-NN in Scikit-learn (or similar) would introduce another dependency. By building the k-NN with the same tools we use for the neural network, we can avoid introducing more dependencies.
  • Having a single, unified model handling feature extraction and neighbor computation makes for a simpler setup.
  • Finally, it’s a fun little exercise!

The Big Picture

In broad terms, the flow of the system looks like this:

On the left we have the user image. We feed this through a convolutional network which extracts feature. The features are then fed through a dense layer which scores each image in the database by its similarity to the user image. Finally, we have the five most similar images as identified by the k-NN.

The steps we need to carry out are:

  1. Obtain some images making up your image database.
  2. Train or obtain a network for feature extraction.
  3. Extract features for all images in the database.
  4. Build a k-NN using the features extracted in step 3.
  5. Join the feature extraction network and the k-NN for a single, unified model.

Let’s go through each step! And remember, for the complete code example, take a look at the Jupyter notebook.

Build the Image Database

Before we can do anything useful, we need some images. For this example, I will use images from the Caltech 101 dataset which contains images from 101 categories such as airplanes, butterflies, helicopters, pandas, pizzas and more. From the Caltech 101 website:

Pictures of objects belonging to 101 categories. About 40 to 800 images per category. Most categories have about 50 images. Collected in September 2003 by Fei-Fei Li, Marco Andreetto, and Marc ‘Aurelio Ranzato. The size of each image is roughly 300 x 200 pixels.

The Caltech101 dataset contains labeled images but we do not actually use the labels, so feel free to use an unlabeled dataset.

A Neural Network for Feature Extraction

To make things easy we will just use an off-the-shelf convolutional network trained for image classification, namely the ResNet50 network. We are not interested in the actual classification so we throw away the upper layers. This is really easy in Keras:

For real-world problems you could train your own network and use that instead. If you don’t have labeled data you could use a self-supervised approach such as autoencoders. But here, we will just stick with the ResNet50 network.

Extract Features

With our feature extraction network in place, we can now compute a feature vector for every image in our database. We call these our reference vectors. When a user sends us a new query image, we will extract a feature vector from the image (again using the feature extraction network). We call this the query vector. We will then compute cosine similarity between the query vector and each of the reference vectors and eventually pick the k images most similar to the query image. Normally, we would compute those cosine similarities using something like SciKit-learn but we will now see how it can be done in Keras using a dense layer.

How It Works

The math behind this little trick is actually really simple. To understand what is going on and how it works, we need to remind ourselves how the activation of a dense layer is computed and how the cosine is computed. This results in a few insights which are listed right below. We will go through each of them in more detail further down.

  1. We can treat the reference vectors as column vectors and stack them horizontally to obtain a matrix which can be used as the weight matrix in a dense layer.
  2. For the input vector x, the dense layer will compute the dot product x · w for every column vector w in the weight matrix W.
  3. The cosine between two vectors x and w is defined as
    cos(x, w) = x · w / (|x|·|w|). Thus, the dense layer computes the cosine similarity multiplied by the product of the lengths of the two vectors.
  4. A vector can be normalized, that is transformed to a vector of length 1 (a unit vector), without affecting the direction of the vector. Thus, normalizing a vector does not affect the cosine between that vector and any other vector. That is, if w’ is w normalized, cos(x, w) = cos(x, w’).
  5. With w’ being a unit vector, its length is 1 and can consequently be removed from the cosine equation, resulting in cos(x, w’) = x · w’ / |x|. By multiplying by |x| on both sides we get that: x · w’ = |x|· cos(x, w’). Pairing that with insight number 2, we get that the dense layer will compute |x|· cos(x, w’) for the query vector x and every normalized reference vector w’ in the normalized weight matrix W’.
  6. For any particular query vector x, the length |x| is constant. Therefore, for any particular query vector x, it holds that x · w’ ~ cos(x, w’), that is x · w’ is directly proportional to cos(x, w’). Consequently, to find the k most similar images, we can simplify the cosine computation to just x · w’.

Let us now look at each insight in a bit more detail!

1. Stacking Vectors

Having extracted a feature vector for each reference image, we can treat those reference vectors as column vectors and stack them horizontally to make up a matrix. This matrix can be used as the weight matrix of a dense layer in a neural network. This layer has the correct dimensions to take as input a feature vector (computed by the feature extraction network) and output a vector with dimensionality equal to the number of reference images. In our example, W will be of size 2048 by 9144. If you use another network or another dataset, you will, of course, see other dimensions.

2. Dense Layers Compute Dot Products

Let us now remind ourselves how the output or activation of a dense layer in a neural network is computed. With input vector x, weight matrix W, bias vector b and activation function g, the activation can be computed as:

a = g(x · W + b)

If we set the bias to 0 (by simply telling Keras to not use a bias) and use a linear activation we can simplify the activation as:

a = x · W

In other words, the activation of the dense layer (with no bias and a linear activation function) is simply the matrix product between the input vector x and the weight matrix W. Now, let’s remember that our W was made from stacking up reference vectors computed by feeding each image in our database through our feature extraction network. Thus, each element of the vector resulting from the matrix product x · W is actually the dot product between input vector x and a reference vector w. This can be illustrated as below:

As you can see, for each reference vector w, the dense layer computes x · w.

3. Cosine Similarity

As we briefly saw above, the cosine similarity between two vectors x and w is defined as cos(x, w) = x · w / (|x|·|w|). That is, the cosine similarity between two vectors is the dot product divided by the product of the lengths of the vectors. Now, we just saw in the previous section, that the dense layer basically computes a number of dot products, so this should be a hint that we could use the dense layer when computing the cosine similarities. We are not quite there yet, though. If we rewrite the cosine equation by multiplying by |x|·|w| on both sides (and flip the sides), we get the following:

x · w = |x|·|w|· cos(x, w)

Since x · w is exactly what the dense layer computes, we can now see that for the input vector x, a dense layer computes |x|·|w|· cos(x, w) for each column vector w in the weight matrix W.

4. Vector Normalization

We will now briefly change the focus and look for a moment at vector normalization. All we need to remember is that given two vectors, we can change the length of one or both of them without affecting the angle between them and consequently without affecting the cosine. This means we can transform all the vectors w in W to vectors w’ of length 1 (unit vectors) without affecting the cosine. We call this new matrix W’. In the next section we shall see how that makes computing the cosine simpler.

5. Simplifying the Cosine

We will now use the knowledge that our vectors, w’, are all of length 1 to simplify the cosine computation. As we saw above, the cosine definition can be rewritten as:

x · w’ = |x|·|w’|· cos(x, w’)

In contrast to before, we now know that one of the vectors, namely w’, is of length 1. This means multiplying by it has no effect, so we might as well remove it, which gives us:

In other words, if we normalize all the reference vectors, the dense layer will compute |x|· cos(x, w’) for the query vector x and every normalized reference vector w’ in W’.

6. Proportionality

So, our dense layer computes |x|· cos(x, w’). But we set out to compute just cos(x,w’). We might consider simply dividing by |x|. Unfortunately, Keras has no division layer. TensorFlow has one, so we could use that. (This can be done in Keras with a Lambda layer in case you were wondering). But, if we take that approach, we will not be able to easily convert the model to CoreML (because the converter does not support Lambda layers unless you implement their computations in Swift/Objective-C and we do not want that). So we have to do something else, and luckily, the solution is simple: We can skip dividing by |x| entirely. For any given user image, dividing each of the dot products x · w’ by |x| has the effect of normalizing the cosine such that it’s a value between -1 and 1. But it’s the same operation applied to all the reference vector products (since|x| is constant for a given input image), and thus it does not change the ratio between them! Another way to put this is that for any particular query vector x, it holds that:

x · w’ ~ cos(x, w’)

That is x · w’ is directly proportional to cos(x, w’). Remember, we do not care about the actual cosine value. All we need is to find the k vectors in W’ which result in the greatest cosine. That is, we just need to be able to sort by the cosine values. Computing something that is proportional to the cosine for a particular query vector x suffices because this will result in the same order. In other words, computing x · w’ will suffice for our purpose — we are done!

For input vector x and every normalized vector w’ in W’, the dense layer computes |x|·cos(x, w’). Since |x| is constant for the particular input vector, it does not change the proportions.

That’s it for the math — we have seen that if we set the weights to the extracted reference feature vectors, the dense layer computes the dot products between the input feature vector and each of the reference vectors. And we have seen that these dot products are proportional to the cosine similarities if we just make sure to normalize the reference vectors. In short, all we have to do to find the k closest images is implement a dense layer with no bias and set its weights to the normalized feature weights!

There is one final and somewhat interesting note to make about our dense layer: As we have seen, the weights we use are computed by another network, namely the feature extraction network. This is unusual and therefore worth mentioning. Normally you would learn the weights using some variant of gradient descent and back-propagation but here they are computed in advance by another network!

Implementing with Keras

With the math out of the way, we can add the dense layer to the ResNet50 model:

Let’s now normalize the feature weights:

And finally set the weights of the network dense layer:

That’s all there really is to it! In the next section we will start making predictions using our new network.

It is now time to make a few predictions using our network to see that it actually works!

Convert to CoreML

Having assured ourselves that the model works fairly well, we can now finally convert the model to CoreML as shown below.

A k-NN for Classification

You’ve now seen how to use the k-NN approach to search for similar images. Another (maybe even more interesting) application is to use it for image classification. This can be extremely useful because it can help you get away with using relatively few training examples even for problems with many thousand classes. If you think that sounds interesting, go and read my post on how I used an autoencoder and a k-NN to classify photos of over 35,000 different Magic cards!

Good luck and have fun implementing your own k-NN with Keras!

read original article here


Liberation of Animals

We live on the planet where animals are suffering from human cruelty. People think that if they are smarter and stronger, they can hurt and kill animals or use them for their personal benefit. However, do we have the right for such a behavior? There are various viewpoints about it.

Some people can argue that we cannot use animals as food. They are partially right. Animals are living beings, and they want to live and survive on the Earth. It would be ethical to allow them peaceful coexistence with humans. Nevertheless, there are many predators among animals, which can pose danger to people. In that case, we should think – to kill an animal or die from its attack. The majority of people will choose the first option.

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On the other hand, there are many religions, which teach us that the Creator made people for living on this planet, and He made some animals for people to eat. For example, the Bible says, “You shall not eat any abomination. These are the animals you may eat: the ox, the sheep, the goat, the deer, the gazelle, the roebuck, the wild goat, the ibex, the antelope, and the mountain sheep” (OpenBible.Info, 2014). Nowadays, there exist sa number of domestic animals, which people rear for meat. They look after them and feed them; as a result, people get food and money after slaughtering domestic animals. Is it within their right? That is the dilemma.

In his book “Animal Liberation” (1975), the Australian philosopher, Peter Singer, considers, “If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-humans?” (Goodreads Inc., 2014). Moreover, people do not eat other people (of course, if they are not cannibals). So, why do they use animals as food? The point is that beasts are weaker and less smart to protect themselves, though there are many weak people too. It is ridiculous. In spite of that, both opinions have a right to exist.

Ethically, people should respect the liberation of animals. Maybe, if they would not create hostile conditions for birds and beasts, the latter, in turn, would cease to be dangerous for people. They can live in peace with us, not disturbing human life; however, it is only a theory. In the event that a person makes up his/her mind not to eat animals, he/she does it deliberately. It means not only excluding meat from their diet, but also includes some changes in their attitude towards animals. In that case, such man or woman treats animals kindly, helps, and defends them from poachers and other cruel people.

In other case, when a person decides to use animals as food, he/she shall try to eat only those who were not suffering from pain. There are some factories and farms, where slaughtering of animals is very rapid and painless. Even if search of such farmsteads will take a long time, this action will be more ethical in relation to birds and beasts. Unfortunately, most people do not think about animals while eating their meat.

We cannot judge people for eating or not eating animals, because we do not know where the truth is. Some say that meat is good for our health – it contains much iron and other important microelements. Others fight for the liberation of animals. It is difficult to consider who is right and who is not. Every person should make a decision for himself and hold this decision up to the end. In any case, everything begins with us. In addition, if each of us would try to be better and kinder to animals, we would live in the world with less cruelty and suffering, even if it won’t last long.

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