This poll says the more water you drink, the happier you feel—and those who feel they “don't drink enough water” more commonly reported feeling unhappy.

The post Americans Who Drink This Much Water a Day Were More Likely to Report Feeling ‘Very Happy’ appeared first on Good News Network.

The Irish people are repaying a debt of gratitude to Native Americans suffering from COVID-19, 170 years after a tribe helped Ireland during the Great Famine.

The post Irish People Are Repaying Debt of Gratitude to Suffering Native Americans 170 Years After Potato Famine appeared first on Good News Network.

Portugal is aiming to leap out of their COVID-19 lockdown by launching a series of clean energy projects that could generate 5.5 billion Euro in investment.

The post Portugal Preparing Several Billion-dollar Clean Energy Projects for Post-Coronavirus Future appeared first on Good News Network.

NextGen Cup, led by Starbucks and McDonald’s, launched a pilot program to create a green alternative to the 250 billion discard paper coffee cups.

The post Starbucks and McDonald’s Aim to Replace 250 Billion Paper Coffee Cups with Recyclable Alternatives appeared first on Good News Network.

The Labor Department’s survey taken in April is expected to show record job losses for the U.S. WSJ explains the context behind the numbers. Photo: Justine Lane/EPA/SHUTTERSTOCK

AMP has been forced to defend its plans for executive pay after frustrated shareholders moved to block the company’s 2019 renumeration report. The Finance Giant’s report has been voted down by a 67 percent majority at the company’s annual general meeting. The report stated the AMP’s Chief executive officer had been paid approximately four million dollars in 2019, despite the bank recording a four year net loss of 2.5 billion dollars in February.

A method of replacing menu link text with rollover png images that works in IE6 and also degrades well when images are of and/or CSS is off.

A responsive layout with animated repositioning of elements. For all the latest browsers.

A tutorial to replace the default controls on a Vimeo video with a Play / Pause button, and make responsive.

This research is a preliminary step for an upcoming project.... more

This report highlights key findings from the most recent (2001-2005) data collected by the Forest Inventory and Analysis Program across all forest land in California.

This report highlights key findings from the most recent (2001-2005) data collected by the Pacific Northwest Forest Inventory and Analysis (PNW-FIA) Program across all ownerships in Oregon.

Forest managers are seeking practical guidance on how to adapt their current practices and, if necessary, their management goals, in response to climate change. Science-management collaboration was initiated on national forests in eastern Washington where resource managers showed a keen interest in science-based options for adapting to climate change at a 2-day workshop. Scientists and managers reviewed current climate change science and identified resources vulnerable to expected climate change. Vulnerabilities related to vegetation and habitat management included potential reductions in forest biodiversity and low forest resilience to changing disturbance regimes. The vulnerabilities related to aquatic and infrastructure resources included changing water quality and quantity, the risk to roads and other facilities from changes to hydrologic regimes, and the potential loss of at-risk aquatic species and habitats. Managers then worked in facilitated groups to identify adaptations that could be implemented through management and planning to reduce the vulnerability of key resources to climate change. The identified adaptations were grouped under two major headings: Increasing Ecological Resiliency to Climate Change, and Increasing Social and Economic Resiliency to Climate Change. The information generated from the science-management collaborative represents an initial and important step in identifying and prioritizing tangible steps to address climate change in forest management. Next would be the development of detailed implementation strategies that address the identified management adaptations..

This report highlights key findings from the most recent (2004–2008) data collected by the Forest Inventory and Analysis program across all ownerships in southeast and south-central Alaska. We present basic resource information such as forest area, ownership, volume, biomass, carbon sequestration, growth, and mortality; structure and function topics such as vegetation and lichen diversity and forest age distribution; disturbance topics such as insects and diseases, yellow-cedar decline, fire, and invasive plants; and information about the forest products industry in Alaska, the potential of young growth for timber supply, biofuels, and nontimber forest products. The appendixes describe inventory methods and design in detail and provide summary tables of data and statistical error for the forest characteristics sampled.

The Forest Inventory and Analysis program collected, analyzed, and summarized field data on 44 forested field plots for the 10 largest atoll groups in the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI): Ailinglaplap, Arno, Jaluit, Kwajalein, Likiep, Majuro, Maloelap, Mili, Rongelap, and Wotje.

The U.S. Forest Service's Pacific Northwest Research Station today released a new report that outlines a climate adaptation strategy for yellow-cedar in Alaska.

This report highlights key findings from a comprehensive vegetation survey of all forested land across the state of Oregon. A total of 5,180 forested field plots in Oregon were visited by Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) crews over a 10-year period from 2001 to 2010. Oregon has 30 million acres of forest, covering nearly half the state. The structure and composition of Oregon’s forests differ considerably across the state, particularly east versus west of the Cascade Range. Western Oregon forests are dominated by higher productivity classes (85 to 224 cubic feet per acre annual growth) and are composed of Douglas-fir and western hemlock, while forests in the east typically exhibit lower productivity (0 to 84 cubic feet per acre annual growth) and are composed of ponderosa pine, western juniper, and lodgepole pine. The Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management administer the majority of forested land in Oregon; these public forests managed by federal agencies tend to have older, larger trees. Private owners, both corporate and noncorporate, own nearly half of the forested land in western Oregon, particularly in areas of high productivity. Understory vegetation in Oregon forests is more abundant in younger, moist forests. Non-native species are present in many of Oregon’s forests, most notably cheatgrass in the east and Himalayan blackberry in the west. This report includes estimates of forest growth, removals, and mortality for ownership groups across the state. The FIA program will continue to revisit and remeasure all the field plots over 10 years to report on changes in Oregon’s forest resources.

This is a state-of-the-science synthesis of the effects of forest harvest activities on peak flows and channel morphology in the Pacific Northwest, with a specific focus on western Oregon and Washington. We develop a database of relevant studies reporting peak flow data across rain-, transient-, and snow-dominated hydrologic zones, and provide a quantitative comparison of changes in peak flow across both a range of flows and forest practices. Increases in peak flows generally diminish with decreasing intensity of percentage of watershed harvested and lengthening recurrence intervals of flow. Watersheds located in the rain dominated zone appear to be less sensitive to peak flow changes than those in the transient snow zone; insufficient data limit interpretations for the snow zone. Where present, peak flow effects on channel morphology should be confined to stream reaches where channel gradients are less than approximately 0.02 and streambeds are composed of gravel and finer material. We provide guidance as to how managers might evaluate the potential risk of peak flow increases based on factors such as presence of roads, watershed drainage efficiency, and specific management treatments employed. The magnitude of effects of forest harvest on peak flows in the Pacific Northwest, as represented by the data reported here, are relatively minor in comparison to other anthropogenic changes to streams and watersheds.

The proposed takeover deal of the Magpies is now understood to be in the hands of the Premier League.

Sunderland's move to write off £20.5m loan as an exceptional operating expense will have a big impact, according to a football finance expert

ALL ACCESS has compiled some of the best in the business for our MORNING SHOW PREP section. What's there for you to check out? ROSS BRITTAIN: Veteran morning man ROSS BRITTAIN shares some … more

EDISON RESEARCH and NPR released the findings in its 2020 Smart Audio Report on smart speaker and voice-controlled device usage THURSDAY (4/30)  in a webinar hosted by EDISON's TOM … more

ON TIME TRAFFIC NETWORK's COMMANDER CHUCK JOHNSON is now heard on NORTH MISSISSIPPI RADIO GROUP's stations, Classic Hits WOWW-A-W249BN (97.7 GUESS FM), Country WEBL (95.3 THE REBEL), … more

EDISON RESEARCH will present data from its annual "Moms & Media Report" in a webinar on THURSDAY (5/7) at 2p (ET). The presentation will be given by VP MELISSA DECESARE and will … more

CUMULUS Country KSKS (93.7 KISS COUNTRY)/FRESNO PD and overnight host STEVE PLESHE is reportedly departing the station after three years on FRIDAY, MAY 8th. He's leaving for an … more

EDISON RESEARCH's "THE RESEARCH MOMS" have released their annual "Moms and Media" study with data from the INFINITE DIAL study and additional results from an online … more

WARNER MUSIC GROUP has released its second-quarter financial results for the period ended MARCH 31, 2020. “We had a tough comparison with an especially strong Q2 in 2019, so I’m … more

MUSIC BUSINESS WORLDWIDE and the HOLLYWOOD REPORTER are both carrying reports on rumors that SAUDI ARABIA's PUBLIC INVESTMENT FUND is making an offer to buy WARNER MUSIC GROUP. The fund … more

Concussion is a common childhood injury that may lead to long-term physical, behavioral, and neurocognitive effects, affecting learning and school performance. There is increasing concern about the potential for repeat concussions among professional and high school athletes, with specific attention focused on understanding how sustaining a concussion alters future concussion risk. Addressing repeat concussion risk among youth has substantial implications for clinical practice in terms of managing exposure — particularly regarding youth sports participation — and long-term health and development.

Film on Class of 2021 high school basketball players dried up in mid-March when the high school season ended, with most state tournaments (Iowa’s excluded) canceled. If you’re a college...

At the same time Vice President Mike Pence was in Iowa on Friday to discuss the nation’s food supply security, U.S. Rep. Dave Loebsack called on the administration to take more measures to...

11 a.m. Iowa sees 214 more positive tests for coronavirus The Iowa Department of Public Health on Saturday reported nine more deaths from COVID-19, for a total of 252 since March 8. An additional 214...

At the same time Vice President Mike Pence was in Iowa on Friday to discuss the nation’s food supply security, U.S. Rep. Dave Loebsack called on the administration to take more measures to protect workers in food processing plants.

Loebsack also questioned the decisions to reopen the economy being made by the Trump administration and Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds.

“I don’t think we’re ready for that yet, quite honestly,” the Iowa City Democrat said.

“Ready” will be when adequate protections are in place for the people processing America’s food, Loebsack said.

Workers are showing up on the job, but “they fear for their families, they fear for themselves, they fear for everybody,” Loebsack said. “They don’t know if they’re going to catch this thing or not. But they’re there.”

Of particular concern are workers in food processing, such as those in meatpacking plants in Iowa where more than 1,600 cases of COVID-19 have been reported.

“I really believe that we should not open the plants if we do not ensure worker safety,” Loebsack said.

He called for President Donald Trump to use the Defense Production Act, which the president invoked to keep meatpacking plants open, to ensure an adequate supply of personal protective equipment for packing plant workers.

If Pence and the president are concerned about the nation’s food supply, then they need to “keep those workers safe and, therefore, keep those processing plants running” to avoid meat shortages at the grocery store, Loebsack said.

“We can’t have those plants running if workers are not protected. It’s that simple,” he said. “It’s not just the workers, it’s the families, it’s the community at large.”

With unemployment at 14.7 percent — probably higher, Loebsack said, Congress should extend federal coronavirus-related unemployment benefits of $600 a week beyond their current July end date.

He’s also pleased that the last relief package fixed a Small Business Administration Economic Injury Disaster Loan program to allow farmers to apply for assistance.

Comments: (319) 398-8375; james.lynch@thegazette.com

11 a.m. Iowa sees 214 more positive tests for coronavirus

The Iowa Department of Public Health on Saturday reported nine more deaths from COVID-19, for a total of 252 since March 8.

An additional 214 people tested positive for the virus, bringing the state’s total to 11,671.

A total of 71,476 Iowans have been tested for COVID-19, the department reported.

With Saturday’s new figures from the Department of Public Health, these are the top 10 counties in terms of total cases:

• Polk — 2194

• Woodbury — 1554

• Black Hawk — 1477

• Linn — 819

• Marshall — 702

• Dallas — 660

• Johnson — 549

• Muscatine — 471

• Tama — 327

• Louisa — 282.

By Lauren McCauley Common Dreams At this rate, plastics production will account for 20 percent of total oil consumption and 15 percent of the global annual carbon budget by 2050. The weight of plastic waste clogging the world’s oceans threatens … Continue reading →

“

What is deceptive, especially in the West, is our assumption that repetitive and mindless jobs are dehumanizing. On the other hand, the jobs that require us to use the abilities that are uniquely human, we assume to be humanizing. This is not necessarily true. The determining factor is not so much the nature of our jobs, but for whom they serve.

‘Burnout’ is a result of consuming yourself for something other than yourself. You could be burnt out for an abstract concept, ideal, or even nothing (predicament). You end up burning yourself as fuel for something or someone else. This is what feels dehumanizing. In repetitive physical jobs, you could burn out your body for something other than yourself. In creative jobs, you could burn out your soul. Either way, it would be dehumanizing. Completely mindless jobs and incessantly mindful jobs could both be harmful to us.

By Jessica Corbett Common Dreams Far-reaching global assessment details how humanity is undermining the very foundations of the natural world     On the heels of an Earth Day that featured calls for radical action to address the current “age … Continue reading →

By The EPA The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today launched a new online portal that will provide local leaders in the nation’s 40,000 communities with information and tools to increase resilience to climate change. Using a self-guided format, the … Continue reading →

By Jessica Corbett Common Dreams Far-reaching global assessment details how humanity is undermining the very foundations of the natural world     On the heels of an Earth Day that featured calls for radical action to address the current “age … Continue reading →

Researchers sometimes ask participants which of two alternative designs they prefer. The data from these studies comprise opinions that have little predictive value. In contrast, multivariate A/B testing involves target users doing real tasks. The data from these studies comprise behavioural observations that predict real-world behaviour.

U.S. Rep. Ken Buck, who is also the chairman of the Colorado Republican Party, was captured ordering a local party official to report false election results in a primary race for a state Senate seat in a leaked audio recording released earlier this week.

We introduce an infinite-dimensional $p$-adic affine group and construct its irreducible unitary representation. Our approach follows the one used by Vershik, Gelfand and Graev for the diffeomorphism group, but with modifications made necessary by the fact that the group does not act on the phase space. However it is possible to define its action on some classes of functions.

The Gabriel-Roiter measure is used to give an alternative proof of the finiteness of the representation dimension for Artin algebras, a result established by Iyama in 2002. The concept of Gabriel-Roiter measure can be extended to abelian length categories and every such category has multiple Gabriel-Roiter measures. Using this notion, we prove the following broader statement: given any object $X$ and any Gabriel-Roiter measure $mu$ in an abelian length category $mathcal{A}$, there exists an object $X'$ which depends on $X$ and $mu$, such that $Gamma = operatorname{End}_{mathcal{A}}(X oplus X')$ has finite global dimension. Analogously to Iyama's original results, our construction yields quasihereditary rings and fits into the theory of rejective chains.

Bernstein, Frenkel, and Khovanov have constructed a categorification of tensor products of the standard representation of $mathfrak{sl}_2$, where they use singular blocks of category $mathcal{O}$ for $mathfrak{sl}_n$ and translation functors. Here we construct a positive characteristic analogue using blocks of representations of $mathfrak{sl}_n$ over a field $ extbf{k}$ of characteristic $p$ with zero Frobenius character, and singular Harish-Chandra character. We show that the aforementioned categorification admits a Koszul graded lift, which is equivalent to a geometric categorification constructed by Cautis, Kamnitzer, and Licata using coherent sheaves on cotangent bundles to Grassmanians. In particular, the latter admits an abelian refinement. With respect to this abelian refinement, the stratified Mukai flop induces a perverse equivalence on the derived categories for complementary Grassmanians. This is part of a larger project to give a combinatorial approach to Lusztig's conjectures for representations of Lie algebras in positive characteristic.

We prove that there are no irreducible representations of $B_n$ of dimension $n+1$ for $ngeq 10.$

Position encoding (PE), an essential part of self-attention networks (SANs), is used to preserve the word order information for natural language processing tasks, generating fixed position indices for input sequences. However, in cross-lingual scenarios, e.g. machine translation, the PEs of source and target sentences are modeled independently. Due to word order divergences in different languages, modeling the cross-lingual positional relationships might help SANs tackle this problem. In this paper, we augment SANs with emph{cross-lingual position representations} to model the bilingually aware latent structure for the input sentence. Specifically, we utilize bracketing transduction grammar (BTG)-based reordering information to encourage SANs to learn bilingual diagonal alignments. Experimental results on WMT'14 English$Rightarrow$German, WAT'17 Japanese$Rightarrow$English, and WMT'17 Chinese$Leftrightarrow$English translation tasks demonstrate that our approach significantly and consistently improves translation quality over strong baselines. Extensive analyses confirm that the performance gains come from the cross-lingual information.

Representation learning is a critical ingredient for natural language processing systems. Recent Transformer language models like BERT learn powerful textual representations, but these models are targeted towards token- and sentence-level training objectives and do not leverage information on inter-document relatedness, which limits their document-level representation power. For applications on scientific documents, such as classification and recommendation, the embeddings power strong performance on end tasks. We propose SPECTER, a new method to generate document-level embedding of scientific documents based on pretraining a Transformer language model on a powerful signal of document-level relatedness: the citation graph. Unlike existing pretrained language models, SPECTER can be easily applied to downstream applications without task-specific fine-tuning. Additionally, to encourage further research on document-level models, we introduce SciDocs, a new evaluation benchmark consisting of seven document-level tasks ranging from citation prediction, to document classification and recommendation. We show that SPECTER outperforms a variety of competitive baselines on the benchmark.

Recent single image unsupervised representation learning techniques show remarkable success on a variety of tasks. The basic principle in these works is instance discrimination: learning to differentiate between two augmented versions of the same image and a large batch of unrelated images. Networks learn to ignore the augmentation noise and extract semantically meaningful representations. Prior work uses artificial data augmentation techniques such as cropping, and color jitter which can only affect the image in superficial ways and are not aligned with how objects actually change e.g. occlusion, deformation, viewpoint change. In this paper, we argue that videos offer this natural augmentation for free. Videos can provide entirely new views of objects, show deformation, and even connect semantically similar but visually distinct concepts. We propose Video Noise Contrastive Estimation, a method for using unlabeled video to learn strong, transferable single image representations. We demonstrate improvements over recent unsupervised single image techniques, as well as over fully supervised ImageNet pretraining, across a variety of temporal and non-temporal tasks. Code and the Random Related Video Views dataset are available at https://www.github.com/danielgordon10/vince

In ASPIC-style structured argumentation an argument can rebut another argument by attacking its conclusion. Two ways of formalizing rebuttal have been proposed: In restricted rebuttal, the attacked conclusion must have been arrived at with a defeasible rule, whereas in unrestricted rebuttal, it may have been arrived at with a strict rule, as long as at least one of the antecedents of this strict rule was already defeasible. One systematic way of choosing between various possible definitions of a framework for structured argumentation is to study what rationality postulates are satisfied by which definition, for example whether the closure postulate holds, i.e. whether the accepted conclusions are closed under strict rules. While having some benefits, the proposal to use unrestricted rebuttal faces the problem that the closure postulate only holds for the grounded semantics but fails when other argumentation semantics are applied, whereas with restricted rebuttal the closure postulate always holds. In this paper we propose that ASPIC-style argumentation can benefit from keeping track not only of the attack relation between arguments, but also the relation of deductive joint support that holds between a set of arguments and an argument that was constructed from that set using a strict rule. By taking this deductive joint support relation into account while determining the extensions, the closure postulate holds with unrestricted rebuttal under all admissibility-based semantics. We define the semantics of deductive joint support through the flattening method.

We present a sound and complete method for the verification of qualitative liveness properties of replicated systems under stochastic scheduling. These are systems consisting of a finite-state program, executed by an unknown number of indistinguishable agents, where the next agent to make a move is determined by the result of a random experiment. We show that if a property of such a system holds, then there is always a witness in the shape of a Presburger stage graph: a finite graph whose nodes are Presburger-definable sets of configurations. Due to the high complexity of the verification problem (non-elementary), we introduce an incomplete procedure for the construction of Presburger stage graphs, and implement it on top of an SMT solver. The procedure makes extensive use of the theory of well-quasi-orders, and of the structural theory of Petri nets and vector addition systems. We apply our results to a set of benchmarks, in particular to a large collection of population protocols, a model of distributed computation extensively studied by the distributed computing community.