As most of us have spent the past two months in quarantine to flatten the curve of the COVID-19 pandemic, we recognize this unexpected crisis has dramatically changed our lives, country, economy and even our freedoms.

Just as the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the twin towers reframed and reshaped our national approach to security, this pandemic will have long-reaching effects on the way we interact with others at work, play and even how we worship from here on.

Make no mistake, COVID-19 is not finished with us. Even as it subsides in many states, we are being warned that it will resurge in the fall and winter months. Many lives and our economic stability will depend on elected officials’ ability to set aside the politics-as-usual, I-win-you-lose attitude.

These new times call not only for a Congress with a no-nonsense, solution-driven mind-set but members with the right experience and expertise. Among all of the candidates running to succeed Rep. David Loebsack, my life has uniquely prepared me for the challenges ahead to effectively protect us while minimizing the inevitable financial burden and social disruption.

I understand what it means to grow up in a working-class family and to work hard to achieve goals. I grew up as one of eight children of a father who was a U.S. Air Force enlisted man and a mother who had a general education degree. After being badly burned in an accident, I decided I would become a doctor.

I left home at 16 to attend community college, enlisted in the Army, eventually completing nursing school and then medical school. In all, I served 24 years on active duty and in the reserves. That experience taught me a great deal about discipline, organization and service to country.

Peers and former Gov. Terry Branstad have entrusted me in key leadership roles, electing me as president of the Iowa Medical Society and appointing me as director of the Iowa Department of Public Health, respectively.

In 2018, voters in southeast Iowa elected me in a Senate district that tilts Democratic. I believe it was because they see in me what they know to be true of themselves: the tenacity and perseverance to never quit fighting to better themselves and their communities and create a better future for their children and grandchildren.

The next session of Congress will require leaders with the knowledge and toughness to make difficult but necessary decisions based on facts, not emotion or partisanship. That’s why I’m running for Congress.

Mariannette Miller-Meeks is a candidate in the Republican primary for Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District.

I’m Steven the electrician, not the politician. I’m asking for your vote and support in getting there.

• Never held public office in Iowa or Illinois, check my competitors.

• No endorsements so no worries about draining that swamp here.

• Pro-life and Birthright supporter.

• 2nd Amendment and gun rights supporter.

• Legal immigration and revision of laws.

• Supporter of the constitution as written.

• Israel supporter.

• Farm owner and advocate for agriculture and fair trade.

• Check who funded my campaign, I owe no favors or pay backs.

• Still working hard for my family and married 40 years.

• I will budget your money if elected, and no tax increases.

• End of government overreach.

• Proud of our military and their never-ending service.

I’m not the establishment, but your candidate.

Steven Everly is a candidate in the Republican primary for Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District.

When Andrea Wilson approached me five years ago with her idea of creating a space for writers in our community separate from any offered by the University of Iowa, I must admit I was a bit skeptical, if not defensive. Over a long coffee discussion, I shared with her a detailed look at the literary landscape of Iowa City and all of the things my organization, the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature was doing to make those assets more visible and accessible.

• Coronavirus closes the Iowa Writers’ House - for now

Despite this, Andrea mentioned the need for an “on ramp,” a way for people who don’t feel a part of that community to find their path, to access those riches. It was there, I thought to myself. She just hadn’t looked in the right place.

Then she built that ramp in the form of the Iowa Writers’ House. As she and her team defined what that ramp should look like, what role it should play, the Writers’ House evolved from being an idea with promise to a vital part of our literary infrastructure. She showed that people were hungry for further instruction. They desired more and different ways to connect with one another. These were things beyond the scope and mission of the UI and the City of Literature. She had found her niche, and filled it, nicely complementing what was offered by my organization and others.

But those services do not come without cost. Andrea and her team scrambled, using the house as a literary bed-and-breakfast that was used by many visiting writers. They scheduled workshops. They held fundraisers. But that thin margin disappeared with the onset of COVID-19. Unable to hold those workshops, to serve as a bed-and-breakfast, to provide meaningful in-person connections, the Writers’ House was unable to carry on in its current configuration.

We have every hope and expectation that the Iowa Writers’ House and Andrea will continue to be a part of our literary landscape in the future. This will come perhaps in another form, another space. Conversations have been underway for months about the needs of the literary community beyond the UI. Andrea has been a key part of those discussions, and the work that she and her team has done offer vital information about where those conversations need to go. Gaps have been identified, and while they won’t be filled in the same way, they will be filled.

These conversations join those that have been taking place in our community for decades about the need for space and support for writers and artists. As we all have realized over these past few weeks of isolation just how much we miss when we are not able to gather to create and to celebrate those creations, perhaps those conversations will accelerate and gain focus once we reconvene. The newly formed Iowa City Downtown Arts Alliance, of which we are proud to be a part, is an additional voice in that conversation.

In the meantime, we want to thank Andrea, Associate Director Alisha Jeddeloh, and the team at the Iowa Writers’ House, not just for identifying a need, but for taking the rare and valuable step of actually rolling up their sleeves and doing something to meet it.

John Kenyon is executive director of the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature.

Hey there, I’m Ben, and I’m a guest author here at WPZOOM. Today I thought I’d share with you my experience of one of their rather awesome plugins, an addon for Beaver Builder. I know the team at WPZOOM are big fans of Beaver Builder, why not? It’s a great page builder with an excellent feature set; chances are if […]

Many people think the word “disability” means people who require a wheelchair or walker. In reality, however, there is much more to disability than meets the eye. 

Patients with disabilities must receive the same level of lifesaving medical treatment from hospitals during the coronavirus pandemic as able-bodied patients, the Trump administration said.

The internet has given many web companies the chance to rise and meet new audiences. The challenge for these companies is the competition to grow the customer base and build the companies’ credibility. One of the ways to do that is to use social proof as a marketing tool. Many people make decisions regarding a […]

For many of us, git and GitHub play a huge role in our development workflows. Whenever we have a tool that we need to use often, the more fine-tuned we can make that tool, the faster we can get things done. The following are five git commands or helpers that can make your developer life […]

The post 5 Essential git Commands and Utilities appeared first on David Walsh Blog.

Fonts took on a revival in handmade styles this year, from calligraphic, script and handwritten to brush painted and block-printed. Combined with the great visual appeal of hero images and typographic layouts in web design, handwriting fonts are a trend that you can expect to see more of. In this article you’ll find a fresh […]

The post 75+ High Quality Free Fonts: Handwriting, Script & Brush Fonts appeared first on Web Designer Wall.

There is no better time than the end of the year for some fresh inspiration! One of the most popular trends this year, features splitscreen layouts, lots of white space, clean typography and subtle effects. With this playful trend in mind, I’ve created a two-part tutorial to show you how to use flexbox, 3D transforms […]

The post Tutorial: Trendy Splitscreen Layout With CSS3 Animations (Pt. 1) appeared first on Web Designer Wall.

By The European Environment Agency What we throw into the trash bin might end up into the sea. Our understanding is growing on the global issue of marine litter, which has impacts on marine wildlife but also human health and … Continue reading →

Stephen Hawking, a world-renowned scientist who recently passed away, had a brilliant mind that was trapped inside a paralyzed body, and I could not stop thinking about how the opposite is often the case with traumatic brain injury.

We kick things off talking about the Rage Against the Machine reunion. We then discuss the summer touring season and...

The post METAL INJECTION LIVECAST #554 - Rob's Nolita appeared first on Metal Injection.

2019 was the year of the “ethical source” licenses – or ‘open source with a moral clause’ licenses. It was also the year many in the open source movement labeled any attempt at adding moral clauses to open source licenses not only made them not open source licenses, but were a dangerous attack on the […]

The post Value Neutrality and the Ethics of Open Source appeared first on MOR10.

By Jessica Corbett Common Dreams “We face a stark choice [between] radical, disruptive changes to our physical world or radical, disruptive changes to our political and economic systems to avoid those outcomes.” As people across the globe mobilize to demand … Continue reading →

By University of Illinois Extension In an era of increasing energy prices, many Americans insulate and seal up their homes during the winter months. Although this can result in savings on the monthly power bill, sealing the home can concentrate … Continue reading →

By Jessica Corbett Common Dreams “We face a stark choice [between] radical, disruptive changes to our physical world or radical, disruptive changes to our political and economic systems to avoid those outcomes.” As people across the globe mobilize to demand … Continue reading →

By Jessica Corbett Common Dreams “We face a stark choice [between] radical, disruptive changes to our physical world or radical, disruptive changes to our political and economic systems to avoid those outcomes.” As people across the globe mobilize to demand … Continue reading →

Usability tests are unique. We ask people to do real tasks with the system and watch. As the person completes the task, we watch their behaviour and listen to their stream-of-consciousness narrative. But what makes a good usability task scenario?

Receiving service-related disability compensation does not interfere with the funds veterans receive from the GI Bill, explains Adam.

Adam thanks you — his blog viewers and supporters — and encourages you to continue the discussion and awareness raising about TBI and PTSD; the battle does not stop here.

By David Suzuki with contributions from Senior Editor Ian Hanington David Suzuki Foundation By 2002, drivers in London, England, were spending as much as half their commuting time stalled in traffic, contributing to much of the city centre’s dangerous particulate … Continue reading →

Oftentimes, the focus on mobile websites isn’t on adding as much information as possible or even as much detail. It’s all about making the mobile viewing experience as simple and enjoyable as the web designer possibly can. People who use their mobile devices for browsing and research do not have as much time or patience …

Little Details That Matter on a Mobile Website Read More »

It has been a month since we launched our first online workshop and, to be honest, we really didn’t know whether people would enjoy them — or if we would enjoy running them. It was an experiment, but one we are so glad we jumped into! I spoke about the experience of taking my workshop online on a recent episode of the Smashing podcast. As a speaker, I had expected it to feel very much like I was presenting into the empty air, with no immediate feedback and expressions to work from.

The web is awash with words. They’re everywhere. On websites, in emails, advertisements, tweets, pop-ups, you name it. More people are publishing more copy than at any point in history. That means a lot of information, and a lot of competition. In recent years a slew of ‘readability’ programs have appeared to help us tidy up the things we write. (Grammarly, Readable, and Yoast are just a handful that come to mind.

Have you noticed extra-long and weirdly stretched images on your Instagram feed? It looks like some kind of a glitch has appeared, allowing users to post images like this to their followers. Of course, some Instagrammers have made the use of it to draw attention, and if you want to have some fun (or annoy […]

The post Weird glitch lets you post insanely long photos to Instagram appeared first on DIY Photography.

In this paper, for a family of second-order parabolic equation with rapidly oscillating and time-dependent periodic coefficients, we are interested in an approximate two-sphere one-cylinder inequality for these solutions in parabolic periodic homogenization, which implies an approximate quantitative propagation of smallness. The proof relies on the asymptotic behavior of fundamental solutions and the Lagrange interpolation technique.

In this note, we unify and extend various concepts in the area of $G$-complete reducibility, where $G$ is a reductive algebraic group. By results of Serre and Bate--Martin--R"{o}hrle, the usual notion of $G$-complete reducibility can be re-framed as a property of an action of a group on the spherical building of the identity component of $G$. We show that other variations of this notion, such as relative complete reducibility and $sigma$-complete reducibility, can also be viewed as special cases of this building-theoretic definition, and hence a number of results from these areas are special cases of more general properties.

In this work we consider the initial-value problem associated with a coupled system of generalized Korteweg-de Vries equations. We present a relationship between the best constant for a Gagliardo-Nirenberg type inequality and a criterion for the existence of global solutions in the energy space. We prove that such a constant is directly related to the existence problem of solitary-wave solutions with minimal mass, the so called ground state solutions. To guarantee the existence of ground states we use a variational method.

This paper addresses the problem of identifying the graph structure of a dynamical network using measured input/output data. This problem is known as topology identification and has received considerable attention in recent literature. Most existing literature focuses on topology identification for networks with node dynamics modeled by single integrators or single-input single-output (SISO) systems. The goal of the current paper is to identify the topology of a more general class of heterogeneous networks, in which the dynamics of the nodes are modeled by general (possibly distinct) linear systems. Our two main contributions are the following. First, we establish conditions for topological identifiability, i.e., conditions under which the network topology can be uniquely reconstructed from measured data. We also specialize our results to homogeneous networks of SISO systems and we will see that such networks have quite particular identifiability properties. Secondly, we develop a topology identification method that reconstructs the network topology from input/output data. The solution of a generalized Sylvester equation will play an important role in our identification scheme.

We study the regularity of exceptional actions of groups by $C^{1,alpha}$ diffeomorphisms on the circle, i.e. ones which admit exceptional minimal sets, and whose elements have first derivatives that are continuous with concave modulus of continuity $alpha$. Let $G$ be a finitely generated group admitting a $C^{1,alpha}$ action $ ho$ with a free orbit on the circle, and such that the logarithms of derivatives of group elements are uniformly bounded at some point of the circle. We prove that if $G$ has spherical growth bounded by $c n^{d-1}$ and if the function $1/alpha^d$ is integrable near zero, then under some mild technical assumptions on $alpha$, there is a sequence of exceptional $C^{1,alpha}$ actions of $G$ which converge to $ ho$ in the $C^1$ topology. As a consequence for a single diffeomorphism, we obtain that if the function $1/alpha$ is integrable near zero, then there exists a $C^{1,alpha}$ exceptional diffeomorphism of the circle. This corollary accounts for all previously known moduli of continuity for derivatives of exceptional diffeomorphisms. We also obtain a partial converse to our main result. For finitely generated free abelian groups, the existence of an exceptional action, together with some natural hypotheses on the derivatives of group elements, puts integrability restrictions on the modulus $alpha$. These results are related to a long-standing question of D. McDuff concerning the length spectrum of exceptional $C^1$ diffeomorphisms of the circle.

This paper is devoted to the study of the singularity phenomenon of timelike extremal hypersurfaces in Minkowski spacetime $mathbb{R}^{1+3}$. We find that there are two explicit lightlike self-similar solutions to a graph representation of timelike extremal hypersurfaces in Minkowski spacetime $mathbb{R}^{1+3}$, the geometry of them are two spheres. The linear mode unstable of those lightlike self-similar solutions for the radially symmetric membranes equation is given. After that, we show those self-similar solutions of the radially symmetric membranes equation are nonlinearly stable inside a strictly proper subset of the backward lightcone. This means that the dynamical behavior of those two spheres is as attractors. Meanwhile, we overcome the double roots case (the theorem of Poincar'{e} can't be used) in solving the difference equation by construction of a Newton's polygon when we carry out the analysis of spectrum for the linear operator.

The central aim of this paper is to study (regional) fractional Poincar'e type inequalities on unbounded domains satisfying the finite ball condition. Both existence and non existence type results are established depending on various conditions on domains and on the range of $s in (0,1)$. The best constant in both regional fractional and fractional Poincar'e inequality is characterized for strip like domains $(omega imes mathbb{R}^{n-1})$, and the results obtained in this direction are analogous to those of the local case. This settles one of the natural questions raised by K. Yeressian in [ extit{Asymptotic behavior of elliptic nonlocal equations set in cylinders, Asymptot. Anal. 89, (2014), no 1-2}].

We prove that, given a constant $K> 2$ and a bounded linear operator $T$ from a JB$^*$-triple $E$ into a complex Hilbert space $H$, there exists a norm-one functional $psiin E^*$ satisfying $$|T(x)| leq K , |T| , |x|_{psi},$$ for all $xin E$. Applying this result we show that, given $G > 8 (1+2sqrt{3})$ and a bounded bilinear form $V$ on the Cartesian product of two JB$^*$-triples $E$ and $B$, there exist norm-one functionals $varphiin E^{*}$ and $psiin B^{*}$ satisfying $$|V(x,y)| leq G |V| , |x|_{varphi} , |y|_{psi}$$ for all $(x,y)in E imes B$. These results prove a conjecture pursued during almost twenty years.

We derive finite rational formulas for the traces of cycle integrals of certain meromorphic modular forms. Moreover, we prove the modularity of a completion of the generating function of such traces. The theoretical framework for these results is an extension of the Shintani theta lift to meromorphic modular forms of positive even weight.

In this work, we propose a simple modification of the forward-backward splitting method for finding a zero in the sum of two monotone operators. Our method converges under the same assumptions as Tseng's forward-backward-forward method, namely, it does not require cocoercivity of the single-valued operator. Moreover, each iteration only requires one forward evaluation rather than two as is the case for Tseng's method. Variants of the method incorporating a linesearch, relaxation and inertia, or a structured three operator inclusion are also discussed.

In this paper, we are concerned with the numerical solution of one type integro-differential equation by a probability method based on the fundamental martingale of mixed Gaussian processes. As an application, we will try to simulate the estimation of ruin probability with an unknown parameter driven not by the classical L'evy process but by the mixed fractional Brownian motion.

We study a class of fourth order nonlinear parabolic equations which include the thin-film equation and the quantum drift-diffusion model as special cases. We investigate these equations by first developing functional inequalities of the type $ int_Omega u^{2gamma-alpha-eta}Delta u^alphaDelta u^eta dx geq cint_Omega|Delta u^gamma |^2dx $, which seem to be of interest on their own right.

In this review paper, we survey Hardy type inequalities from the point of view of Folland and Stein's homogeneous groups. Particular attention is paid to Hardy type inequalities on stratified groups which give a special class of homogeneous groups. In this environment, the theory of Hardy type inequalities becomes intricately intertwined with the properties of sub-Laplacians and more general subelliptic partial differential equations. Particularly, we discuss the Badiale-Tarantello conjecture and a conjecture on the geometric Hardy inequality in a half-space of the Heisenberg group with a sharp constant.

We study a problem concerning parabolic induction in certain p-adic unitary groups. More precisely, for $E/F$ a quadratic extension of p-adic fields the associated unitary group $G=mathrm{U}(n,n)$ contains a parabolic subgroup $P$ with Levi component $L$ isomorphic to $mathrm{GL}_n(E)$. Let $pi$ be an irreducible supercuspidal representation of $L$ of depth zero. We use Hecke algebra methods to determine when the parabolically induced representation $iota_P^G pi$ is reducible.

In this work, the generalized $N$-component Fokas-Lenells(FL) equations, which have been studied by Guo and Ling (2012 J. Math. Phys. 53 (7) 073506) for $N=2$, are first investigated via Riemann-Hilbert(RH) approach. The main purpose of this is to study the soliton solutions of the coupled Fokas-Lenells(FL) equations for any positive integer $N$, which have more complex linear relationship than the analogues reported before. We first analyze the spectral analysis of the Lax pair associated with a $(N+1) imes (N+1)$ matrix spectral problem for the $N$-component FL equations. Then, a kind of RH problem is successfully formulated. By introducing the special conditions of irregularity and reflectionless case, the $N$-soliton solution formula of the equations are derived through solving the corresponding RH problem. Furthermore, take $N=2,3$ and $4$ for examples, the localized structures and dynamic propagation behavior of their soliton solutions and their interactions are discussed by some graphical analysis.

Let $H$ be a Krull monoid with finite class group $G$ such that every class contains a prime divisor. We consider the system $mathcal L (H)$ of all sets of lengths of $H$ and study when $mathcal L (H)$ contains or is contained in a system $mathcal L (H')$ of a Krull monoid $H'$ with finite class group $G'$, prime divisors in all classes and Davenport constant $mathsf D (G')=mathsf D (G)$. Among others, we show that if $G$ is either cyclic of order $m ge 7$ or an elementary $2$-group of rank $m-1 ge 6$, and $G'$ is any group which is non-isomorphic to $G$ but with Davenport constant $mathsf D (G')=mathsf D (G)$, then the systems $mathcal L (H)$ and $mathcal L (H')$ are incomparable.

In the present paper by the Fourier transform we show that every linear differential equations of $n$-th order has a solution in $L^1(Bbb{R})$ which is infinitely differentiable in $Bbb{R} setminus {0}$. Moreover the Hyers-Ulam stability of such equations on $L^1(Bbb{R})$ is investigated.

In information theory, the so-called log-sum inequality is fundamental and a kind of generalization of the non-nagativity for the relative entropy. In this paper, we show the generalized log-sum inequality for two functions defined for scalars. We also give a new result for commutative matrices. In addition, we demonstrate further results for general non-commutative positive semi-definite matrices.

We study the two-parameter quadratic sieve for a general test function. We prove, under some very general assumptions, that the function considered by Barban and Vehov [BV68] and Graham [Gra78] for this problem is optimal up to the second-order term. We determine that second-order term explicitly.

We show that a random puncturing of a code with good distance is list recoverable beyond the Johnson bound. In particular, this implies that there are Reed-Solomon codes that are list recoverable beyond the Johnson bound. It was previously known that there are Reed-Solomon codes that do not have this property. As an immediate corollary to our main theorem, we obtain better degree bounds on unbalanced expanders that come from Reed-Solomon codes.

Many efforts of research are devoted to semantic role labeling (SRL) which is crucial for natural language understanding. Supervised approaches have achieved impressing performances when large-scale corpora are available for resource-rich languages such as English. While for the low-resource languages with no annotated SRL dataset, it is still challenging to obtain competitive performances. Cross-lingual SRL is one promising way to address the problem, which has achieved great advances with the help of model transferring and annotation projection. In this paper, we propose a novel alternative based on corpus translation, constructing high-quality training datasets for the target languages from the source gold-standard SRL annotations. Experimental results on Universal Proposition Bank show that the translation-based method is highly effective, and the automatic pseudo datasets can improve the target-language SRL performances significantly.

Due to the exponential growth of biomedical literature, event and relation extraction are important tasks in biomedical text mining. Most work only focus on relation extraction, and detect a single entity pair mention on a short span of text, which is not ideal due to long sentences that appear in biomedical contexts. We propose an approach to both relation and event extraction, for simultaneously predicting relationships between all mention pairs in a text. We also perform an empirical study to discuss different network setups for this purpose. The best performing model includes a set of multi-head attentions and convolutions, an adaptation of the transformer architecture, which offers self-attention the ability to strengthen dependencies among related elements, and models the interaction between features extracted by multiple attention heads. Experiment results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state of the art on a set of benchmark biomedical corpora including BioNLP 2009, 2011, 2013 and BioCreative 2017 shared tasks.

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.