Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks is an amazing engineer and blogger. He’s not only creative but has always had the drive to put his thoughts to work, no matter how large. He also has a good eye for the little things that can make CSS-Tricks or your site special. One of those little things is his […]

The post How to Create a CSS-Tricks Custom Scrollbar appeared first on David Walsh Blog.

In this Chalkboard Text Vector tutorial, I’ll show you how to create a chalkboard vector effect with some gradients, a bristle brush, and some freebies from Vector Mill! This chalkboard text vector effect tutorial is relatively simple and can be applied to many other Illustrator projects. Use this effect for logo creation, back to school backgrounds, […]

The post 20 Minute Tut! Create Your Own Customized Chalkboard Text Vector appeared first on Vectips.

The end of this month kicks off the busy summer travel season, which causes many designers to get behind on your design work. But it doesn't have to be that way. Instead, you can use stock graphics to speed up your design work this summer, so you can still enjoy those much-needed getaways and outdoor time. And right now, we have two iStock promo codes that can save you some change...

The post iStock Promo Codes – May 2020 appeared first on Vectips.

By Hannah Hickey UWNEWS While winter sea ice in the Arctic is declining so dramatically that ships can now navigate those waters without any icebreaker escort, the scene in the Southern Hemisphere is very different. Sea ice area around Antarctica … Continue reading →

By David Suzuki with contributions from Senior Editor Ian Hanington David Suzuki Foundation In 2012, North Carolina’s Coastal Resources Commission warned that sea levels there could rise by a metre over the next century. The warning was based in part … Continue reading →

Creative interactions call for creative measures - numerous extensions reduce, minimize or dilute the frustration of the customers and resolve issues quickly without the customer support team need....

Have you chosen Mac for its reliable system? They really have a lot of advantages and are of the best quality. Mac users don’t face serious problems with hard drives often. But the reality is such...

Instagram Stories are an integral part of the platform. Though Instagram copied Snapchat’s concept a few years ago, over 500 million accounts use the Stories feature on a daily basis. Some users...

We imagine the what-ifs as a worst case scenario, our worst nightmare happening to us, our life falling apart. But here’s another way of looking at it.

Customer service as we know it has changed. Today’s customers won’t necessarily call a contact center when they need help. […]

The post Best WordPress Live Chat Plugins for Better Customer Support appeared first on WPHacks.

While most known for automotive, Michigan has a rich history in design. As a designer myself, I wanted to learn more about Michigan’s design roots. Not knowing what to expect, I found Michigan is home to many historic designers, several innovative design-forward companies, and top design schools. Automotive is a source of Michigan pride, but […]

The post History of Design in Michigan appeared first on Psychology of Web Design | 3.7 Blog.

David Wolf
Oranges and Stones, , 2012
Website - DavidWolfPhotographs.com

David Wolf is a devoted film photographer, making both color and black and white prints by hand in the traditional darkroom. His work has been exhibited internationally at such venues as Aperture, The Griffin Museum of Photography, the Photographic Center Northwest, the Lishui International Photography Festival in China, and the Salon de la Photo during Paris Photo. David’s photographs have been acquired by a variety of private and institutional collections, including the Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris; the Prentice and Paul Sack Photographic Trust of the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; and the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA. He recently won top honors in both the International Photography Awards and the Grand Prix de la Decouverte, International Fine Art Photography Competition. His work has appeared in such publications as Harper’s, aCurator, and Fraction Magazine. A Boston native and Brown University graduate, David now calls San Francisco home, where his work is represented by Corden|Potts Gallery.

Do you want to add an Amazon affiliate store with WordPress? Amazon is the world’s largest online store that helps thousands of merchants to sell products online across the world. They have an official affiliate system that allows affiliate marketers like you to recommend Amazon products to your website’s audience and earn an affiliate commission. […]

The post How to Create an Amazon Affiliate Store (Step by Step) appeared first on IsItWP - Free WordPress Theme Detector.

If a new user registers at a WordPress site the new user and the administrator receive notification mails: User: From: […]

Even though I’m an extrovert, I have a feeling the future favors the introvert. Beth Comstock was at the CreativeLive studios in Seattle and I could not help but snag her for a quick moment to pick her brain on one of the most popular topics on my channel — navigating an extroverted world as an introvert. As a self-described introvert, Beth knows what it’s like to find elevate your strengths and have the courage to defend your creative ideas. Beth was named one of the most powerful women in business. After leaving a 27 year career at GE as their Chief Marketing Officer and Vice Chair, she decided to got a completely different direction to focus on new areas such as writing, art, exploration, and discovery. In this episode, Beth shares her advice to embrace your nature, and bring those strengths to any client, team, or situation. Enjoy! If you dig the show, please give a shout out to Beth on social and let her know. ???? FOLLOW BETH: twitter | instagram | website Listen to the Podcast  Subscribe   This podcast is brought to you by CreativeLive. CreativeLive is the world’s largest hub for online creative education in […]

The post The Introvert Advantage with Beth Comstock appeared first on Chase Jarvis Photography.

When it was time to think about the cover – the whole design package – for my NEW BOOK, Creative Calling, I knew I wanted it to be something different. After all…see if you follow me here… it’s just wrong to make a book about creativity with just any old trend, cliche book cover.  Instead, the package needed to embody the ideas within. So when we approached this design challenge of a hard bound book – it had to be meaningful, beautiful, AND stand out in a sea of other books on the shelf.  No small task… And consider this:  you know that this isn’t just a nice story about the book cover.  This is a metaphor for any creative challenge.  Like every episode of podcast is full of practical advice….this is the real life story of ups and downs on this process…on how we struggled to overcame the challenge front of us… with costs, design options, time, publisher feedback, and other real-life constraints.  In short of EVERY CREATIVE PROCESS.  I’ve included 2 live-recorded phone calls with the designers on the project, Lou and Vasco, so you get their take on the creation process, challenges, the concepts behind what we set out to […]

The post A [big] new challenge—the story behind the Creative Calling book cover appeared first on Chase Jarvis Photography.

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.

We show weak-strong uniqueness and stability results for the motion of a two or three dimensional fluid governed by the Navier-Stokes equation interacting with a flexible, elastic plate of Koiter type. The plate is situated at the top of the fluid and as such determines the variable part of a time changing domain (that is hence a part of the solution) containing the fluid. The uniqueness result is a consequence of a stability estimate where the difference of two solutions is estimated by the distance of the initial values and outer forces. For that we introduce a methodology that overcomes the problem that the two (variable in time) domains of the fluid velocities and pressures are not the same. The estimate holds under the assumption that one of the two weak solutions possesses some additional higher regularity. The additional regularity is exclusively requested for the velocity of one of the solutions resembling the celebrated Ladyzhenskaya-Prodi-Serrin conditions in the framework of variable domains.

This paper deals with an optimal control problem associated to the Kuramoto model describing the dynamical behavior of a network of coupled oscillators. Our aim is to design a suitable control function allowing us to steer the system to a synchronized configuration in which all the oscillators are aligned on the same phase. This control is computed via the minimization of a given cost functional associated with the dynamics considered. For this minimization, we propose a novel approach based on the combination of a standard Gradient Descent (GD) methodology with the recently-developed Random Batch Method (RBM) for the efficient numerical approximation of collective dynamics. Our simulations show that the employment of RBM improves the performances of the GD algorithm, reducing the computational complexity of the minimization process and allowing for a more efficient control calculation.

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.

We introduce primal and dual stochastic gradient oracle methods for decentralized convex optimization problems. Both for primal and dual oracles the proposed methods are optimal in terms of the number of communication steps. However, for all classes of the objective, the optimality in terms of the number of oracle calls per node in the class of methods with optimal number of communication steps takes place only up to a logarithmic factor and the notion of smoothness. By using mini-batching technique we show that all proposed methods with stochastic oracle can be additionally parallelized at each node.

We consider the stochastic 2-dimensional Cahn-Hilliard equation which is driven by the derivative in space of a space-time white noise. We use two different approaches to study this equation. First we prove that there exists a unique solution $Y$ to the shifted equation (see (1.4) below), then $X:=Y+{Z}$ is the unique solution to stochastic Cahn-Hilliard equaiton, where ${Z}$ is the corresponding O-U process. Moreover, we use Dirichlet form approach in cite{Albeverio:1991hk} to construct the probabilistically weak solution the the original equation (1.1) below. By clarifying the precise relation between the solutions obtained by the Dirichlet forms aprroach and $X$, we can also get the restricted Markov uniquness of the generator and the uniqueness of martingale solutions to the equation (1.1).

The article is devoted to the expansion of iterated Stratonovich stochastic integrals of arbitrary multiplicity $k$ $(kinmathbb{N})$ based on the generalized iterated Fourier series. The case of Fourier-Legendre series as well as the case of trigonotemric Fourier series are considered in details. The obtained expansion provides a possibility to represent the iterated Stratonovich stochastic integral in the form of iterated series of products of standard Gaussian random variables. Convergence in the mean of degree $2n$ $(nin mathbb{N})$ of the expansion is proved. Some modifications of the mentioned expansion were derived for the case $k=2$. One of them is based of multiple trigonomentric Fourier series converging almost everywhere in the square $[t, T]^2$. The results of the article can be applied to the numerical solution of Ito stochastic differential equations.

We present a method for optimal path planning of human walking paths in mountainous terrain, using a control theoretic formulation and a Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation. Previous models for human navigation were entirely deterministic, assuming perfect knowledge of the ambient elevation data and human walking velocity as a function of local slope of the terrain. Our model includes a stochastic component which can account for uncertainty in the problem, and thus includes a Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation with viscosity. We discuss the model in the presence and absence of stochastic effects, and suggest numerical methods for simulating the model. We discuss two different notions of an optimal path when there is uncertainty in the problem. Finally, we compare the optimal paths suggested by the model at different levels of uncertainty, and observe that as the size of the uncertainty tends to zero (and thus the viscosity in the equation tends to zero), the optimal path tends toward the deterministic optimal path.

We investigate the quantum twistor bundle constructed as a $U(1)$-quotient of the quantum instanton bundle of Bonechi, Ciccoli and Tarlini. It is an example of a locally trivial noncommutative bundle fulfilling conditions of the framework recently proposed by Brzezi'nski and Szyma'nski. In particular, we give a detailed description of the corresponding $C^*$-algebra of 'continuous functions' on its noncommutative total space. Furthermore, we analyse a different construction of a quantum instanton bundle due to Landi, Pagani and Reina, find a basis of its polynomial algebra and discover an intriguing and unexpected feature of its enveloping $C^*$-algebra.

We study SLE$_{kappa}$ theory with elements of Quasi-Sure Stochastic Analysis through Aggregation. Specifically, we show how the latter can be used to construct the SLE$_{kappa}$ traces quasi-surely (i.e. simultaneously for a family of probability measures with certain properties) for $kappa in mathcal{K}cap mathbb{R}_+ setminus ([0, epsilon) cup {8})$, for any $epsilon>0$ with $mathcal{K} subset mathbb{R}_{+}$ a nontrivial compact interval, i.e. for all $kappa$ that are not in a neighborhood of zero and are different from $8$. As a by-product of the analysis, we show in this language a version of the continuity in $kappa$ of the SLE$_{kappa}$ traces for all $kappa$ in compact intervals as above.

There are $n ge 2$ stacks, each filled with $d$ items, and one empty stack. Every stack has capacity $d > 0$. A robot arm, in one stack operation (step), may pop one item from the top of a non-empty stack and subsequently push it onto a stack not at capacity. In a {em labeled} problem, all $nd$ items are distinguishable and are initially randomly scattered in the $n$ stacks. The items must be rearranged using pop-and-pushs so that in the end, the $k^{ m th}$ stack holds items $(k-1)d +1, ldots, kd$, in that order, from the top to the bottom for all $1 le k le n$. In an {em unlabeled} problem, the $nd$ items are of $n$ types of $d$ each. The goal is to rearrange items so that items of type $k$ are located in the $k^{ m th}$ stack for all $1 le k le n$. In carrying out the rearrangement, a natural question is to find the least number of required pop-and-pushes.

Our main contributions are: (1) an algorithm for restoring the order of $n^2$ items stored in an $n imes n$ table using only $2n$ column and row permutations, and its generalization, and (2) an algorithm with a guaranteed upper bound of $O(nd)$ steps for solving both versions of the stack rearrangement problem when $d le lceil cn ceil$ for arbitrary fixed positive number $c$. In terms of the required number of steps, the labeled and unlabeled version have lower bounds $Omega(nd + nd{frac{log d}{log n}})$ and $Omega(nd)$, respectively.

Histopathology is a reflection of the molecular changes and provides prognostic phenotypes representing the disease progression. In this study, we introduced feature scores generated from hematoxylin and eosin histology images based on deep learning (DL) models developed for prostate pathology. We demonstrated that these feature scores were significantly prognostic for time to event endpoints (biochemical recurrence and cancer-specific survival) and had simultaneously molecular biologic associations to relevant genomic alterations and molecular subtypes using already trained DL models that were not previously exposed to the datasets of the current study. Further, we discussed the potential of such feature scores to improve the current tumor grading system and the challenges that are associated with tumor heterogeneity and the development of prognostic models from histology images. Our findings uncover the potential of feature scores from histology images as digital biomarkers in precision medicine and as an expanding utility for digital pathology.

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.

Diagnosis of high impedance fault (HIF) is a challenge for nowadays distribution network protections. The fault current of a HIF is much lower than that of a normal load, and fault feature is significantly affected by fault scenarios. A detection and feeder identification algorithm for HIFs is proposed in this paper, based on the high-resolution and synchronous waveform data. In the algorithm, an interval slope is defined to describe the waveform distortions, which guarantees a uniform feature description under various HIF nonlinearities and noise interferences. For three typical types of network neutrals, i.e.,isolated neutral, resonant neutral, and low-resistor-earthed neutral, differences of the distorted components between the zero-sequence currents of healthy and faulty feeders are mathematically deduced, respectively. As a result, the proposed criterion, which is based on the distortion relationships between zero-sequence currents of feeders and the zero-sequence voltage at the substation, is theoretically supported. 28 HIFs grounded to various materials are tested in a 10kV distribution networkwith three neutral types, and are utilized to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

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.

XSS is a security vulnerability that permits injecting malicious code into the client side of a web application. In the simplest situations, XSS vulnerabilities arise when a web application includes the user input in the web output without due sanitization. Such simple XSS vulnerabilities can be detected fairly reliably with blackbox scanners, which inject malicious payload into sensitive parts of HTTP requests and look for the reflected values in the web output.

Contemporary blackbox scanners are not effective against stored XSS vulnerabilities, where the malicious payload in an HTTP response originates from the database storage of the web application, rather than from the associated HTTP request. Similarly, many blackbox scanners do not systematically handle context-sensitive XSS vulnerabilities, where the user input is included in the web output after a transformation that prevents the scanner from recognizing the original value, but does not sanitize the value sufficiently. Among the combination of two basic data sources (stored vs reflected) and two basic vulnerability patterns (context sensitive vs not so), only one is therefore tested systematically by state-of-the-art blackbox scanners.

Our work focuses on systematic coverage of the three remaining combinations. We present a graybox mechanism that extends a general purpose database to cooperate with our XSS scanner, reporting and injecting the test inputs at the boundary between the database and the web application. Furthermore, we design a mechanism for identifying the injected inputs in the web output even after encoding by the web application, and check whether the encoding sanitizes the injected inputs correctly in the respective browser context. We evaluate our approach on eight mature and technologically diverse web applications, discovering previously unknown and exploitable XSS flaws in each of those applications.

A method for encoding information in DNA sequences is described. The method is based on the precision-resolution framework, and is aimed to work in conjunction with a recently suggested terminator-free template independent DNA synthesis method. The suggested method optimizes the amount of information bits per synthesis time unit, namely, the writing rate. Additionally, the encoding scheme studied here takes into account the existence of multiple copies of the DNA sequence, which are independently distorted. Finally, quantizers for various run-length distributions are designed.

A Non-terrestrial Network (NTN) comprising Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites can enable connectivity to underserved areas, thus complementing existing telecom networks. The high-speed satellite motion poses several challenges at the physical layer such as large Doppler frequency shifts. In this paper, an analytical framework is developed for statistical characterization of Doppler shift in an NTN where LEO satellites provide communication services to terrestrial users. Using tools from stochastic geometry, the users within a cell are grouped into disjoint clusters to limit the differential Doppler across users. Under some simplifying assumptions, the cumulative distribution function (CDF) and the probability density function are derived for the Doppler shift magnitude at a random user within a cluster. The CDFs are also provided for the minimum and the maximum Doppler shift magnitude within a cluster. Leveraging the analytical results, the interplay between key system parameters such as the cluster size and satellite altitude is examined. Numerical results validate the insights obtained from the analysis.

By using dissipativity approach, we establish the stability condition for the feedback connection of a deterministic dynamical system $Sigma$ and a stochastic memoryless map $Psi$. After that, we extend the result to the class of large scale systems in which: $Sigma$ consists of many sub-systems; and $Psi$ consists of many "stochastic actuators" and "probability controllers" that control the actuator's output events. We will demonstrate the proposed approach by showing the design procedures to globally stabilize the manufacturing systems while locally balance the stock levels in any production process.

We propose some new mixed finite element methods for the time dependent stochastic Stokes equations with multiplicative noise, which use the Helmholtz decomposition of the driving multiplicative noise. It is known [16] that the pressure solution has a low regularity, which manifests in sub-optimal convergence rates for well-known inf-sup stable mixed finite element methods in numerical simulations, see [10]. We show that eliminating this gradient part from the noise in the numerical scheme leads to optimally convergent mixed finite element methods, and that this conceptual idea may be used to retool numerical methods that are well-known in the deterministic setting, including pressure stabilization methods, so that their optimal convergence properties can still be maintained in the stochastic setting. Computational experiments are also provided to validate the theoretical results and to illustrate the conceptional usefulness of the proposed numerical approach.

With the growing reliance on the ubiquitous availability of IT systems and services, these systems become more global, scaled, and complex to operate. To maintain business viability, IT service providers must put in place reliable and cost efficient operations support. Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) is a promising technology for alleviating operational complexity of IT systems and services. AIOps platforms utilize big data, machine learning and other advanced analytics technologies to enhance IT operations with proactive actionable dynamic insight.

In this paper we share our experience applying the AIOps approach to a production cloud object storage service to get actionable insights into system's behavior and health. We describe a real-life production cloud scale service and its operational data, present the AIOps platform we have created, and show how it has helped us resolving operational pain points.

The decisions coaches make on the sidelines about returning a concussed player to the game or not can be a "game changer" for that athlete's life.

For many competitive high school football players like Garrett Harper, the intensity of this contact sport has its price.

The issues of sports-related concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy were intensified when the brain of a deceased 21-year-old football player was examined.

Need some inspiration to build a high converting website? Websites that convert persuade visitors to become customers. These websites drive more revenue, so if you want to increase your site’s revenue, use these examples of websites that convert as inspiration! We’ll go over what makes for the best converting websites and five examples of websites […]

The post 5 Magnificent Examples of Websites That Convert Visitors into Customers appeared first on WebFX Blog.

The Cannabis Issue People have been enjoying cannabis for recreational purposes for centuries, including in the United States since the early 1900s. That means weed was in America a good 50 years or so before the invention of rock 'n' roll.…

There's one thing the Innovia Foundation can never say: That it hadn't been told.…

You shouldn't find yourself rewatching some sitcom for the thousandth time or sitting through a vacuous Hollywood blockbuster just because you're stoned and stuck inside during the age of social distancing.…

Monty Spears didn't know it at the time, but the last time he'd see his father would be through the window at the Life Care Center of Lewiston.…

[IMAGE-1] Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story begins as its central marriage is coming to an end. Our two protagonists are fiercely independent, articulate, opinionated creative types: Charlie (Adam Driver) is the director of an avant-garde theater troupe in New York City; Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) is an actress and one of his primary collaborators.…

[IMAGE-1] I honestly don't know how people like Bryan Stevenson keep up the fight. Just Mercy is the true origin story of a literal social justice warrior, a Harvard-educated lawyer who, in the late 1980s, launched the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, to take on the neediest, most desperate cases.…

PROPHET OF DOOM…

[IMAGE-1] Part of being a music lover is also being a snob, and even though my mind has opened considerably as I've aged, I still remember all the genres I just couldn't give any time to when I was growing up. Southern rock was definitely verboten for much of my life.…

Here are a few ways to keep yourself entertained, and maybe even educate yourself a bit, while you're stuck at home:…