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Entercom/Boston Radiothon Raises Funds To 'Feed New England'

ENTERCOM's BOSTON cluster aired a special "Feed NEW ENGLAND Radiothon" on TUESDAY (5/5), raising funding to provide 156,684 meals for people in need through GREATER BOSTON FOOD … more




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Former Bad Company Vocalist Brian Howe Passes

BRIAN ANTHONY HOWE, former lead singer of the legendary rock band BAD COMPANY has passed away, according to TMZ.  HOWE, who replaced PAUL RODGERS as the vocalist for BAD COMPANY, died … more




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WDRV/Chicago's Sherman & Tingle Raise $15,000 For Coronavirus Response Fund For Nurses

HUBBARD RADIO Classic Rock WDRV (97.1 THE DRIVE)/CHICAGO's morning guys SHERMAN & TINGLE partnered with the AMERICAN NURSES FOUNDATION to present “Healthcare Heroes," a … more




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Court Reverses $9.4 Million Judgement In Quincy Jones - Michael Jackson Estate Case

The CALIFORNIA COURT OF APPEALS has reversed a $9.4 million court judgement in favor of music producer QUINCY JONES. JONES and the estate of MICHAEL JACKSON had been battling over royalties … more




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Exponential Infection Increases Are Deadly Serious

Listen in as I use two calculators to track the difference in numbers of infections over a short period of time, depending on how many people each infected individual infects on average.

-- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com




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Updated cholesterol guidelines offer more personalized risk assessment, additional treatment options for people at the highest risk

Statement Highlights: High cholesterol, at any age, can increase a person’s lifetime risk for heart disease and stroke. A healthy lifestyle is the first step in prevention and treatment to lower that risk. The 2018 guidelines recommend more detailed risk assessments to help health care providers better determine a person’s individualized risk and treatment options. In some cases, a coronary artery calcium score can help determine a person’s need for cholesterol-lowering treatment, if their risk status is uncertain or if the treatment decision isn't clear.




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As COVID-19 cases increase, preventing a second heart attack or stroke is vital

DALLAS, March 20, 2020 — As hospitals, health professionals and healthcare systems, governments and leaders work to reduce community spread of the coronavirus in the U.S. and protect the most vulnerable individuals, the American Heart Association offers...




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Made In Québec, Créateurs de richesses

Portraits of entrepreneurs Quebecois, for whom the question of profit goes after those working conditions, personal development and improvement of the environment. How to do more with less? Enrich themselves ... but differently. --------------------------------------------- Des portraits d'entrepreneurs québecois, pour qui la question du profit passe après celles des conditions de travail, de l’épanouissement personnel et de l’amélioration de l’environnement. Comment faire mieux avec moins ? S’enrichir… mais différemment.




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Bathhouses in Budapest

Daily Photo – Bathhouses in Budapest There are different old Turkish baths all over Budapest. This particular one had about seven different pools, and this was the most ornate. I’m not 100% sure, but I think the roof can partially retract too. I can imagine that a century earlier it would have probably been the […]




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WordPress Theme Releases for 3/11

Attitude is a simple, clean, and responsive retina-ready theme. Catch Everest is a simple, clean, and responsive theme. Liberus is an ideal business related theme that is relatively simple and would suit any blog or website. Stitch is an elegant, modern theme with optional fixed header.




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WordPress Plugin Releases for 3/13

New plugins Easy Media Gallery is designed to display portfolios and various media types including gallery sets, single images, google maps, video, audio, and links with ease and elegance. ytlink provides a preview image for embedded YouTube videos. Updated plugins BackWPup allows you to backup your WordPress database, files, and more. Genericon’d enables easy use of the Genericons icon font set from within WordPress. Icons can be inserted using either HTML or a shortcode. Keyring provides a very hookable, completely customizable framework for connecting your WordPress site to an external service. WP All Import makes it easy to import any XML or CSV file into your WordPress site.




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WordPress Theme Releases for 3/15

Ease is a simple red and white theme. Nomad is an attractive professional, business or blog theme with an unusual, very narrow orientation and design. Sensitive is fully responsive theme using Twitter Bootstrap and a Metro-styled accent. Visual is a dark minimalist theme for displaying photos and images.




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WordPress Plugin Releases for 3/17

New plugins Barc Chat provides a simple yet feature rich chat room for your whole community to interact in real-time directly on your site. Get Directions is a flexible and responsive map plugin. Namaste! LMS is a learning management system for WordPress. Pinterest Verify Meta Tag simply inserts the Pinterest meta tag verification code to the correct section of your site. Updated plugins BackWPup allows you to backup your WordPress database, files, and more. Ooyala Video allows you to easily embed videos from the Ooyala Video Platform.




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WordPress Theme Releases for 3/19

Cazuela is a neutral colored theme. Ilisa is a clean and minimal theme that can be easily used as a personal portfolio or a business website. Partition has a light, lively, colorful, yet professional and classic appearance.




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WordPress Plugin Releases for 3/21

New plugins Google Adsense Dashboard for WP will display your Google Adsense earnings and related reports inside your Dashboard. Google Analytics Dashboard for WP will display Google Analytics data and statistics inside your Dashboard. Updated plugins Ad Code Manager allows you to manage your ad codes through the WordPress admin in a safe and easy way. BFT Autoresponder allows scheduling of automated autoresponder messages and managing a mailing list. CampTix Event Ticketing is an easy to use and flexible event ticketing plugin.




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WordPress Theme Releases for 3/23

Memori Jingga is a responsive, clean, and simple theme. Rockers is a responsive theme with a clean design. Satu is an elegant single-column responsive theme.




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WordPress Plugin Releases for 3/25

New plugins Easy Watermark automatically adds watermark to images when they are uploaded. Internet Defense League Cat Signal automatically loads either the modal or the banner Cat Signal when there is an active campaign from the Internet Defense League. Updated plugins BFT Autoresponder allows scheduling of automated autoresponder messages and managing a mailing list. Google Analytics Dashboard for WP will display Google Analytics data and statistics inside your Dashboard. WordPress MU Domain Mapping allows users of a WordPress MU site or WordPress 3.0 network to map their blog/site to another domain.




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WordPress Theme Releases for 3/28

AirTime is a subtle and simple theme. FirmaSite is a responsive theme with BuddyPress and bbPress support. Stark Lite is a minimalist and simple theme.




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WordPress Plugin Releases for 3/30

New plugins GC Message Box allows you to highlight your key message(s) in smart ways within articles and blog posts. Simple Social Icons allows you to insert social icons in any widget area. Stick It allows you to stick the navigation menu in any theme to the top of browser window. Updated plugins Jetpack allows you to supercharge your WordPress site with powerful features previously only available to WordPress.com users. Nav Menu Images enables uploading of images for nav menu items on the menu edit screen.




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This Family Uses Chalk Art To Go On Adventures During The Lockdown

Quarantine might have trapped us inside the shells of our houses; however, some people are finding ways to escape the...




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Vinton-Shellsburg senior golfers join coronavirus fight in New Jersey as nurses

Carli Lang and Lillie Lamont loaded up Lang’s Chevy Impala and pulled away as their families waved goodbye, shrinking in the rearview mirror. The Vinton-Shellsburg seniors weren’t...





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How to Sell Online Courses with Sensei LMS

Any business can increase revenue with online courses. No physical contact required! Here are the 4 tools you’ll need to get started fast & generate sales!

The post How to Sell Online Courses with Sensei LMS appeared first on WooCommerce.




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Men and elderly lag in taking Test Iowa coronavirus assessment

Nearly 327,000 Iowans have taken an assessment to see if they are eligible to be checked for COVID-19 under the Test Iowa Initiative. Another free drive-though site for those who have taken the...




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Coronavirus closes the Iowa Writers’ House — for now

IOWA CITY — Once upon a time, there was a house in a city that loved literature. It was a quaint, two-story home in the heart of the historic district with brick stairs, pale yellow siding, a...




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Men and elderly lag in taking Test Iowa coronavirus assessment

Nearly 327,000 Iowans have taken an assessment to see if they are eligible to be checked for COVID-19 under the Test Iowa Initiative.

Another free drive-though site for those who have taken the assessment and been scheduled for an appointment opened Thursday in Cedar Rapids — the fourth site in the state so far.

About 1 on 46 Iowans have been tested so far, health officials said.

State data release Thursday for the first time reveals big gaps in who has — and who has not — taken the assessment at TestIowa.om:

• Less than 35 percent of those who have been assessed for tests are men. Yet men are more apt to die from the disease than women. Of the 231 Iowa deaths so far, 51 percent are of men.

• Only 2 percent of those who have been assessed for testing are age 80 or over. But 46 percent of the Iowa deaths from the virus reported so far are in that age group.

• There are gaps in the rates at which urban and rural residents are completing the assessment. Nearly 9 percent of Linn County residents have been assessed, but only about 7.6 percent of Allamakee County residents have. Yet when looking at the rate of known infection per capita, Allamakee is far worse.




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Coronavirus closes the Iowa Writers’ House — for now

IOWA CITY — Once upon a time, there was a house in a city that loved literature.

It was a quaint, two-story home in the heart of the historic district with brick stairs, pale yellow siding, a hipped red roof and a rich history: Its original owner was Emma J. Harvat, who in 1922 became the nation’s first female mayor for a city of more than 10,000.

Nearly a century later, in 2014, Andrea Wilson was working in advertising in Florida and pined for a more “altruistic purpose” for her life. So she planned a return to Iowa, where she grew up in Columbus Junction.

But this time Wilson would live in Iowa City, known for — among other things — pioneering academic creative writing pursuits at the University of Iowa’s famed Writers’ Workshop.

Wilson wanted to write and found the idea of the historic Harvat house so charming she bought it “sight unseen” from down in Miami, aiming to run it as a bed-and-breakfast. But when she arrived, Wilson discovered a need in her new community she aimed to fill. It had a surprising dearth of literary resources for those outside the university.

“There wasn’t any place for the public to take a class or meet other writers or really be part of a writing community where people could just express their humanity through words,” she said. “It became my passion project — to try to create that for this community. I thought if anywhere should have a place like that, it would be America’s only UNESCO City of Literature at the time.”

So in March 2015, Wilson debuted Iowa City’s first community-based literary center for writers — or those aspiring. She had hoped to open a communal writing space closer to downtown but didn’t have the funding. So she gave her home a third identity: the Iowa Writers’ House.

She continued to live there and maintain her bed-and-breakfast business, which funded the writing endeavor and kept its cozy corridors bustling with interesting characters.

Famed visiting writers included Leslie Jamison, American novelist and essayist with works on the New York Times bestseller list; Hope Edelman, whose six non-fiction books have published in 17 countries and translated in 11 languages; Alison Bechdel, an American cartoonist and MacArthur fellow; and Piedad Bonnett Velez, Colombian poet, playwright and novelist of international acclaim.

And over the years, the Iowa Writers’ House connected, served and motivated thousands with its workshops, seminars, readings and summer camps. It offered editing services, founded a Bicultural Iowa Writers’ Fellowship, and — among other things — inspired a growing network of friends and creatives to value their own stories and the stories of others.

“I said yes to everything anyone ever asked of me,” Wilson said. “We gave tours. I received visiting scholars. We hosted dinners for visiting poets and writers for the university. And a lot of that was all volunteer. We never had a steady funding stream like most literary centers do.”

So when the coronavirus in March reached Iowa City, later shuttering storefronts, canceling events, curtailing travel plans and crippling the economy, the Iowa Writers’ House momentum stopped, too.

“Once COVID hit, because all of our programming is live and people come to the house, we had to cancel it,” Wilson said.

She dropped most of the organization’s spring season. She lost all her projected bed-and-breakfast business. And in a message posted to the Iowa Writers’ House website last month, Wilson announced her hard but unavoidable news.

“As the situation pushes on, and with no programming in the foreseeable future, we must make drastic changes,” she wrote. “Organizations must weather the storm or adapt, and in the case of this little organization with a big heart, evolution is the only option.”

And so after five years of intimate conversations, communal meals, singing, laughing, crying and lots and lots of writing and reading — all done in the shadow of Harvat — the organization is leaving the historic space and “taking a break to assess our mission and consider our best options for the future.”

Wilson said she plans to focus on her own writing. And the Bicultural Iowa Writers’ Fellowship program will continue — allowing for the release later this year of a third volume of “We the Interwoven: An Anthology of Bicultural Iowa,” including six new authors with multilingual stories of living in Iowa.

News of the goodbye — at least for now — has been met with an outpouring of support and testimonials of the impact the Iowa Writers’ House has had,

“I grew up without a writing community, and it was a very lonely experience,” Erin Casey wrote to Wilson after learning of its pause.

Casey — on the Iowa Writers’ House team and director of The Writers’ Rooms, an offshoot of the house — said her involvement in the project shaped not only her career but her personal growth.

“You, and the Iowa Writers’ House, helped me become a stronger person who felt deserving of companionship, respect, and love,” she wrote. “Watching the house grow, the workshops fill, and the stories come in about how much the IWH touched people’s lives added to the joy. I finally found a place to call home.”

Casey said that while the future is unknown, its legacy is not.

“The IWH will live on in the hearts of the people you touched,” she wrote. “Writers have found friends, support, guidance …”

Although the project isn’t getting a fairy-tale ending, Wilson said the story isn’t over.

“The organization is leaving the space. I’m leaving the space. We’re going on an organizational break so we can determine what a sustainable future might be,” she said. “But it’s really the end of a chapter. And we don’t know what the next chapter will be.”

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com




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Australia’s global talent visa for individuals and businesses

In late 2019 the Australian Government launched the Global Talent – Independent program which offers a streamlined, priority visa pathway for highly skilled and talented individuals to work and live permanently in Australia. There are two streams. The first is the Global Talent Independent Program (GTI) and the second is the Global Talent Employer Sponsored (GTES). […]

The post Australia’s global talent visa for individuals and businesses appeared first on Visa Australia - Immigration Lawyers & Registered Migration Agents.




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20 Free Old Paper Textures with Creases, Folds and Stains

Old paper textures are one of my most commonly used design resources, as you may have noticed from my tutorials! I have always just downloaded whatever third-party assets I could find, so I thought it was about time I made a collection of my own old paper textures to keep handy in my digital toolbox. […]

The post 20 Free Old Paper Textures with Creases, Folds and Stains appeared first on Spoon Graphics.




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How to secure a website and be foolproof against surprises

The internet is an excellent resource for all kinds of information. However, with all of its advantages, there are also some things that you need to pay attention too. Knowing how to secure a website is a must, and anyone with an online identity needs to pay attention to this. As the internet can also […]




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How to Add Native Keyword Aliases to Babel

Those of you who follow this blog know that not every blog post is an endorsement of a technique but simply a tutorial how to accomplish something. Sometimes the technique described is probably not something you should do. This is one of those blog posts. The Babel parser is an essential tool in the web […]

The post How to Add Native Keyword Aliases to Babel appeared first on David Walsh Blog.




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6 Causes of Pixelated Text in Photoshop and Their Fixes

You’re working on some text in Photoshop for your photo. Things are going along great…until you realize that your text is horribly pixelated! Why? You may have even created this exact type of file before and not had this problem. Why is the text pixelated now? There are a few things that can cause pixelated text in Photoshop. The good Continue Reading

The post 6 Causes of Pixelated Text in Photoshop and Their Fixes appeared first on Photodoto.




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How to – Create a Pair of Reading Glasses Icon

In today’s tutorial, we’re going to take a quick look behind the process of creating a pair of reading glasses icon, and see how we can take some simple shapes and turn them into a finished usable product. So, assuming you already have the software running, let’s jump straight into it! Tutorial Details: Reading Glasses […]

The post How to – Create a Pair of Reading Glasses Icon appeared first on Vectips.




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Top 10 Best Courses on Domestika (in English)

For those professionals looking to share not only their projects but to connect with other creatives, learn from them, and even find employment in the creative field, a new option entering the English market is Domestika. With its expansive forums and thousands of projects being shared by creatives from all over the world, Domestika is an amazing resource to explore. One of their biggest features is their online courses to help you learn new skills and with that in mind, we wanted to shine a spotlight on the 10 Best English Courses on Domestika so you can jump right in and get started! So, if you’re ready, let’s get started! Bundle 3 Courses & Save 30% (Ends May 6) Domestika are offering a further 30% off if you bundle 3 courses. » Click here to start bundling.    Top 10 Best English Courses on Domestika Logo Design: From Concept to Presentation with Sagi Haviv – $19 Transforming your creative ideas into personal projects – $15 Creativity Face to Face: A Playful Collage Journey – $12 Digital Painting for Characters: Color and Light – $14 Creation of an Original Logo from Scratch – $14 The Art of Record Covers: Illustration Meets […]




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Disney Princesses Comic Book Style

What happens when you mash-up Disney princesses with Marvel Super Heros, artist cartooncookie did an excellent job creating this mix: Marvel x Disney Princesses: a celebration of the X-Men joining...



  • Design Roud-up

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"In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses..."

“In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. This kind of art is not theoretical or illustrative of theories; it is intuitive, it is involved with all types of mental processes and it is purposeless. It is usually free from the dependence on the skill of the artist as a craftsman.”

- Artist Sol Lewitt on conceptual art.




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Shim uses node.js to test sites on multiple browsers

Shim was developed within the Boston Globe’s media lab as a way to study how Web sites look on various devices and browsers. A laptop intercepts all wifi traffic – this is redirected to a custom node.js server – which inserts a javascript, or “shim,” at the head of each web page that is visited. Read the rest...




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Roses and Rabbit

Andrew Rickmann posted a photo:

The Rose house with a Sophie Ryder rabbit.




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DHS: Secret Service has 11 Current Virus Cases

According to the DHS document, along with the 11 active cases there are 23 members of the Secret Service who have recovered from COVID-19 and an additional 60 employees who are self-quarantining. No details have been provided about which members of the Secret Service are infected or if any have recently been on detail with the president or vice president.




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The Canon EOS R5 release gets closer as it passes Bluetooth certification

We’re a big step closer to a Canon EOS R5 release announcement now, as Nokishita Tweets that it has passed its Bluetooth certification. The belief is that the EOS R5 was originally scheduled to ship in July, and Canon Rumors reports that they’ve been told that’ll still happen. With lockdowns still in effect in much […]

The post The Canon EOS R5 release gets closer as it passes Bluetooth certification appeared first on DIY Photography.




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Photography Life makes all their paid premium courses free

Photography Life has just contributed to the selection of online courses that you can take for free. While their premim courses are normally paid $150 per course, you can now access them free of charge. The founders have released them on YouTube, available for everyone to watch. The Photography Life team came to the decision […]

The post Photography Life makes all their paid premium courses free appeared first on DIY Photography.




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Output feedback stochastic MPC with packet losses. (arXiv:2004.02591v2 [math.OC] UPDATED)

The paper considers constrained linear systems with stochastic additive disturbances and noisy measurements transmitted over a lossy communication channel. We propose a model predictive control (MPC) law that minimizes a discounted cost subject to a discounted expectation constraint. Sensor data is assumed to be lost with known probability, and data losses are accounted for by expressing the predicted control policy as an affine function of future observations, which results in a convex optimal control problem. An online constraint-tightening technique ensures recursive feasibility of the online optimization and satisfaction of the expectation constraint without bounds on the distributions of the noise and disturbance inputs. The cost evaluated along trajectories of the closed loop system is shown to be bounded by the optimal predicted cost. A numerical example is given to illustrate these results.




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Stationary Gaussian Free Fields Coupled with Stochastic Log-Gases via Multiple SLEs. (arXiv:2001.03079v3 [math.PR] UPDATED)

Miller and Sheffield introduced a notion of an imaginary surface as an equivalence class of pairs of simply connected proper subdomains of $mathbb{C}$ and Gaussian free fields (GFFs) on them under conformal equivalence. They considered the situation in which the conformal transformations are given by a chordal Schramm--Loewner evolution (SLE). In the present paper, we construct processes of GFF on $mathbb{H}$ (the upper half-plane) and $mathbb{O}$ (the first orthant of $mathbb{C}$) by coupling zero-boundary GFFs on these domains with stochastic log-gases defined on parts of boundaries of the domains, $mathbb{R}$ and $mathbb{R}_+$, called the Dyson model and the Bru--Wishart process, respectively, using multiple SLEs evolving in time. We prove that the obtained processes of GFF are stationary. The stationarity defines an equivalence relation between GFFs, and the pairs of time-evolutionary domains and stationary processes of GFF will be regarded as generalizations of the imaginary surfaces studied by Miller and Sheffield.




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Infinite dimensional affine processes. (arXiv:1907.10337v3 [math.PR] UPDATED)

The goal of this article is to investigate infinite dimensional affine diffusion processes on the canonical state space. This includes a derivation of the corresponding system of Riccati differential equations and an existence proof for such processes, which has been missing in the literature so far. For the existence proof, we will regard affine processes as solutions to infinite dimensional stochastic differential equations with values in Hilbert spaces. This requires a suitable version of the Yamada-Watanabe theorem, which we will provide in this paper. Several examples of infinite dimensional affine processes accompany our results.




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Solid hulls and cores of classes of weighted entire functions defined in terms of associated weight functions. (arXiv:2005.03167v1 [math.FA])

In the spirit of very recent articles by J. Bonet, W. Lusky and J. Taskinen we are studying the so-called solid hulls and cores of spaces of weighted entire functions when the weights are given in terms of associated weight functions coming from weight sequences. These sequences are required to satisfy certain (standard) growth and regularity properties which are frequently arising and used in the theory of ultradifferentiable and ultraholomorphic function classes (where also the associated weight function plays a prominent role). Thanks to this additional information we are able to see which growth behavior the so-called "Lusky-numbers", arising in the representations of the solid hulls and cores, have to satisfy resp. if such numbers can exist.




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Functional convex order for the scaled McKean-Vlasov processes. (arXiv:2005.03154v1 [math.PR])

We establish the functional convex order results for two scaled McKean-Vlasov processes $X=(X_{t})_{tin[0, T]}$ and $Y=(Y_{t})_{tin[0, T]}$ defined by

[egin{cases} dX_{t}=(alpha X_{t}+eta)dt+sigma(t, X_{t}, mu_{t})dB_{t}, quad X_{0}in L^{p}(mathbb{P}),\ dY_{t}=(alpha Y_{t},+eta)dt+ heta(t, Y_{t}, u_{t})dB_{t}, quad Y_{0}in L^{p}(mathbb{P}). end{cases}] If we make the convexity and monotony assumption (only) on $sigma$ and if $sigmaleq heta$ with respect to the partial matrix order, the convex order for the initial random variable $X_0 leq Y_0$ can be propagated to the whole path of process $X$ and $Y$. That is, if we consider a convex functional $F$ with polynomial growth defined on the path space, we have $mathbb{E}F(X)leqmathbb{E}F(Y)$; for a convex functional $G$ defined on the product space involving the path space and its marginal distribution space, we have $mathbb{E},Gig(X, (mu_t)_{tin[0, T]}ig)leq mathbb{E},Gig(Y, ( u_t)_{tin[0, T]}ig)$ under appropriate conditions. The symmetric setting is also valid, that is, if $ heta leq sigma$ and $Y_0 leq X_0$ with respect to the convex order, then $mathbb{E},F(Y) leq mathbb{E},F(X)$ and $mathbb{E},Gig(Y, ( u_t)_{tin[0, T]}ig)leq mathbb{E},G(X, (mu_t)_{tin[0, T]})$. The proof is based on several forward and backward dynamic programming and the convergence of the Euler scheme of the McKean-Vlasov equation.




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A Note on Approximations of Fixed Points for Nonexpansive Mappings in Norm-attainable Classes. (arXiv:2005.03069v1 [math.FA])

Let $H$ be an infinite dimensional, reflexive, separable Hilbert space and $NA(H)$ the class of all norm-attainble operators on $H.$ In this note, we study an implicit scheme for a canonical representation of nonexpansive contractions in norm-attainable classes.




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Deformation classes in generalized K"ahler geometry. (arXiv:2005.03062v1 [math.DG])

We introduce natural deformation classes of generalized K"ahler structures using the Courant symmetry group. We show that these yield natural extensions of the notions of K"ahler class and K"ahler cone to generalized K"ahler geometry. Lastly we show that the generalized K"ahler-Ricci flow preserves this generalized K"ahler cone, and the underlying real Poisson tensor.




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Keeping out the Masses: Understanding the Popularity and Implications of Internet Paywalls. (arXiv:1903.01406v4 [cs.CY] UPDATED)

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.




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Machine learning topological phases in real space. (arXiv:1901.01963v4 [cond-mat.mes-hall] UPDATED)

We develop a supervised machine learning algorithm that is able to learn topological phases for finite condensed matter systems from bulk data in real lattice space. The algorithm employs diagonalization in real space together with any supervised learning algorithm to learn topological phases through an eigenvector ensembling procedure. We combine our algorithm with decision trees and random forests to successfully recover topological phase diagrams of Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) models from bulk lattice data in real space and show how the Shannon information entropy of ensembles of lattice eigenvectors can be used to retrieve a signal detailing how topological information is distributed in the bulk. The discovery of Shannon information entropy signals associated with topological phase transitions from the analysis of data from several thousand SSH systems illustrates how model explainability in machine learning can advance the research of exotic quantum materials with properties that may power future technological applications such as qubit engineering for quantum computing.