By David Suzuki The David Suzuki Foundation Seeing terms like “post-truth” and “alternative facts” gain traction in the news convinces me that politicians, media workers and readers could benefit from a refresher course in how science helps us understand the … Continue reading →

Mirage JS is helping simplify modern front-end development by providing the ability for front-end engineers to craft applications without relying on an actual back-end service. In this article, I’ll be taking a framework-agnostic approach to show you Mirage JS models and associations. If you haven’t heard of Mirage JS, you can read my previous article in which I introduce it and also integrate it with the progressive framework Vue.js.

Event-related desynchronization and synchronization (ERD/S) and movement-related cortical potential (MRCP) play an important role in brain-computer interfaces (BCI) for lower limb rehabilitation, particularly in standing and sitting. However, little is known about the differences in the cortical activation between standing and sitting, especially how the brain's intention modulates the pre-movement sensorimotor rhythm as they do for switching movements. In this study, we aim to investigate the decoding of continuous EEG rhythms during action observation (AO), motor imagery (MI), and motor execution (ME) for standing and sitting. We developed a behavioral task in which participants were instructed to perform both AO and MI/ME in regard to the actions of sit-to-stand and stand-to-sit. Our results demonstrated that the ERD was prominent during AO, whereas ERS was typical during MI at the alpha band across the sensorimotor area. A combination of the filter bank common spatial pattern (FBCSP) and support vector machine (SVM) for classification was used for both offline and pseudo-online analyses. The offline analysis indicated the classification of AO and MI providing the highest mean accuracy at 82.73$pm$2.38\% in stand-to-sit transition. By applying the pseudo-online analysis, we demonstrated the higher performance of decoding neural intentions from the MI paradigm in comparison to the ME paradigm. These observations led us to the promising aspect of using our developed tasks based on the integration of both AO and MI to build future exoskeleton-based rehabilitation systems.

Funding the production of quality online content is a pressing problem for content producers. The most common funding method, online advertising, is rife with well-known performance and privacy harms, and an intractable subject-agent conflict: many users do not want to see advertisements, depriving the site of needed funding.

Because of these negative aspects of advertisement-based funding, paywalls are an increasingly popular alternative for websites. This shift to a "pay-for-access" web is one that has potentially huge implications for the web and society. Instead of a system where information (nominally) flows freely, paywalls create a web where high quality information is available to fewer and fewer people, leaving the rest of the web users with less information, that might be also less accurate and of lower quality. Despite the potential significance of a move from an "advertising-but-open" web to a "paywalled" web, we find this issue understudied.

This work addresses this gap in our understanding by measuring how widely paywalls have been adopted, what kinds of sites use paywalls, and the distribution of policies enforced by paywalls. A partial list of our findings include that (i) paywall use is accelerating (2x more paywalls every 6 months), (ii) paywall adoption differs by country (e.g. 18.75% in US, 12.69% in Australia), (iii) paywalls change how users interact with sites (e.g. higher bounce rates, less incoming links), (iv) the median cost of an annual paywall access is $108 per site, and (v) paywalls are in general trivial to circumvent.

Finally, we present the design of a novel, automated system for detecting whether a site uses a paywall, through the combination of runtime browser instrumentation and repeated programmatic interactions with the site. We intend this classifier to augment future, longitudinal measurements of paywall use and behavior.

We develop a Learning Direct Optimization (LiDO) method for the refinement of a latent variable model that describes input image x. Our goal is to explain a single image x with an interpretable 3D computer graphics model having scene graph latent variables z (such as object appearance, camera position). Given a current estimate of z we can render a prediction of the image g(z), which can be compared to the image x. The standard way to proceed is then to measure the error E(x, g(z)) between the two, and use an optimizer to minimize the error. However, it is unknown which error measure E would be most effective for simultaneously addressing issues such as misaligned objects, occlusions, textures, etc. In contrast, the LiDO approach trains a Prediction Network to predict an update directly to correct z, rather than minimizing the error with respect to z. Experiments show that our LiDO method converges rapidly as it does not need to perform a search on the error landscape, produces better solutions than error-based competitors, and is able to handle the mismatch between the data and the fitted scene model. We apply LiDO to a realistic synthetic dataset, and show that the method also transfers to work well with real images.

Despite recent progress on computer vision and natural language processing, developing video understanding intelligence is still hard to achieve due to the intrinsic difficulty of story in video. Moreover, there is not a theoretical metric for evaluating the degree of video understanding. In this paper, we propose a novel video question answering (Video QA) task, DramaQA, for a comprehensive understanding of the video story. The DramaQA focused on two perspectives: 1) hierarchical QAs as an evaluation metric based on the cognitive developmental stages of human intelligence. 2) character-centered video annotations to model local coherence of the story. Our dataset is built upon the TV drama "Another Miss Oh" and it contains 16,191 QA pairs from 23,928 various length video clips, with each QA pair belonging to one of four difficulty levels. We provide 217,308 annotated images with rich character-centered annotations, including visual bounding boxes, behaviors, and emotions of main characters, and coreference resolved scripts. Additionally, we provide analyses of the dataset as well as Dual Matching Multistream model which effectively learns character-centered representations of video to answer questions about the video. We are planning to release our dataset and model publicly for research purposes and expect that our work will provide a new perspective on video story understanding research.

Provided is a zinc-plated steel sheet for hot pressing having outstanding surface characteristics, comprising: a steel foundation plate comprising a metal surface diffusion layer of which the Gibbs free energy reduction per mole of oxygen during oxidation is less than that of Cr; an aluminum-rich layer containing at least 30 wt. % of aluminum formed on the surface diffusion layer, and a zinc plating layer formed on the aluminum-rich layer. In this way, a metal having a low affinity for oxygen is coated to an effective thickness prior to annealing and thus the creation of annealing oxides at the surface of the steel sheet is suppressed and a uniform zinc plating layer is formed, and alloying of the zinc plating layer is promoted during press-processing heat treatment. Cracking in the steel foundation plate during hot press molding is prevented.

Disclosed herein is an adapter for use with ordinary lawn and leaf bags and a method for manufacture of such adapter. The adapter has a cavity that has four sides and four corners, and a lower portion consisting of four flaps. The use of a frame, side and/or corner fasteners create an adapter where the flaps lie inside the bag and the cavity remains outside the bag to create a large surface area for filling the bag and also prevents the mouth of the bag from closing due to wind or other forces.

A no-till apparatus for application of herbicide and fertilizer, soil preparation, and seeding of a cover crop in a standing crop has inter-row assemblies configured to pass along inter-row areas between adjacent row lines of standing crop plants. Each assembly includes a fertilizer applicator, a no-till soil preparation element, a cover crop seed applicator, and a post-seeding element.

An apparatus is provided for dispensing a roll of sheet material in severable portions therefrom. The apparatus comprises a housing having a rim portion longitudinally offset from a base portion by a sidewall portion extending therebetween. The base and sidewall portions define a compartment for holding the roll of sheet material, and the sidewall portion includes a longitudinally extended dispensing slot formed therethrough communicating with the compartment. The sidewall portion forms about the dispensing slot at least one tapered edge. A lid is detachably coupled to the rim portion of the housing to enclose the compartment, and includes a bottom surface portion. A pivot structure is formed on at least one of the base and bottom surface portions to pivotally engage an axial end of the roll of sheet material for angular displacement thereon.

The “Microcosm Terrestrial and Aquatic Landscape Habitat” is a Main Basin Pond 4 surrounded on three sides by artificial rock, “Miniature Mountains” 3 a, 3 b, 3 c or Natural Looking Imitation Rocks. The fourth, front side has no “Miniature Mountains” or Natural Looking Imitation Rocks to enclose the Main Basin Pond. Instead, here I adhere on a Pane of Glass 2 a to the imitation rock surface using Silicon Sealant 2 b or other sealants 2 c: A pond-aquarium hybrid! The “Miniature Mountains” are higher than the water level in the Main Basin Pond. On the top or sides of the “Miniature Mountains” is an Upper Pool 5. Water in the Main Basin Pond is circulated up to the Upper Pool using a Submersible; Electric, Aquatic, Pump 8. From the Upper Pool, the Water then flows down a Water Course to the Waterfalls and back to the Main Basin Pond to oxygenate the water.

A heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) write apparatus is described. The HAMR write apparatus is coupled with a laser that provides energy. The HAMR writer has a media-facing surface (MFS) and a laser-facing surface. The HAMR write apparatus includes a free-standing reflector and at least one waveguide. The free-standing reflector resides on the laser-facing surface and has a concave reflective surface oriented to receive the energy from the laser. The waveguide(s) are optically coupled with the free-standing reflector and direct energy from the laser toward the MFS.

The oil protests at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation drew national attention. On Reveal, we team up with Inside Energy to go behind the scenes and meet the young people who started the fight. This upcoming hour looks at how those protests put at-risk teens on a healthier path and how other Native tribes are grappling with energy projects on their sovereign land.

Head over to revealnews.org for more of our reporting.

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Jasilyn Charger was one of the first people to set up camp at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in April 2016. Along with youth from neighboring tribes, the then-19-year-old helped raise awareness about construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline by staging a 2,000-mile run from North Dakota to Washington. By the time the group returned to Standing Rock, the camp population had swelled into the thousands. One year later, she reflects on the protests and how the movement has changed the course of her life.

'Amid struggles, trials, or even times of great happiness and prosperity, how can we learn to keep Christ at the center of our lives? Why is it so important that we do so?'

Thursday on Political Rewind , a metric that gives fresh perspective on how to view Gov. Brian Kemp’s decision to reopen the state: the number of new people infected by each person infected by COVID-19. That number went down during shelter-in-place orders in Georgia. How do the experts expect this rate to change now that restrictions have been partially lifted?

What is a recession? How can it impact you? What can be done to make economic downturns more manageable? Join Jason Schenker as he describes an economy in recession, how recessions impact various industries, personal and business strategies to counter recession risks, and the drivers that bring an economy out of recession. He covers how recessions impact jobs, industries, and financial markets. He discusses consumer spending, real estate, stocks, interest rates, business strategy, and investments. Jason also shares what he considers to be the number one rule for workers to keep in mind.

'Amid struggles, trials, or even times of great happiness and prosperity, how can we learn to keep Christ at the center of our lives? Why is it so important that we do so?'

As gratifying as applied research is, to set out to answer a specific research question, it’s not always the best way to come up with new ideas, discover new things, and develop understanding. For these things you need basic research or just a curiosity about the world and how it works. As Dr. Art Markman...

Rachel Yang and Seif Chirchi of Joule, and Heliotrope Architects were the Seattle area's two other food industry ties that have made it to the finalist stage of the 2020 James Beard awards.

An AI knows how you dance and Canada’s newest and youngest astronaut

In honour of International Women's Day, we revisit Eleanor Wachtel's 2012 conversation with the celebrated British writer.

Graziers have turned to the help of a landscape ecologist to battle severe drought in rain-starved areas of far western New South Wales.

A 79-year-old "miracle man" blows kisses to the medical team at Dubbo Base Hospital and fights back tears as he heads home after making a full recovery from coronavirus.

Rugby Australia chairman Cameron Clyne, who Michael Chieka said he had "no relationship" with after the Wallabies' World Cup exit, will stand down.

The closure of an historic brothel has provided another nail in the coffin for one of Australia's most famous red-light districts, which has operated illegally for more than a century.

A court has heard the most senior Australian Anglican clergyman to be charged with child sexual abuse used his power and influence to dissuade his alleged victim from disclosing the abuse.

Farmers Stephen Black and Melissa Portingale were so desperate for water they put a rare ooshie up for sale. That's when the trouble started.

If you've been avoiding your local library because you are yet to return that dog-eared book by your bedside, the ACT Government has good news for you.

A far-right activist who restrained a teenager after he egged Senator Fraser Anning is wanted by police on charges of disturbing a place of religious worship.

Most general aviation (GA) airports are minimally staffed and rarely employ environmental specialists, and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) can be overwhelming to work through for those not familiar with the requirements. The TRB Airport Cooperative Research Program's ACRP Research Report 211: Guidance for Using the Interactive Tool for Understanding NEPA at General Aviation Airports , and the accompanying interactive tool that was developed, will help airport staff from GA airports understan...

The Genetics Society of America (GSA) is pleased to announce the 2020 recipients of its annual awards for distinguished service in the field of genetics. The awardees were nominated and selected by their colleagues and will be recognized with presentations at The Allied Genetics Conference (TAGC), held April 22-26, 2020, in the metro Washington, DC area.