I would be honored to serve this great county as your next Linn County Auditor. This role serves as the commission of elections and has oversight of all accounting functions, payroll, and oversight of property tax and real estate services. The position naturally requires someone of high integrity and strong work ethic, and it also requires strong leadership and someone willing to be a collaborative partner with the many Linn County residents, vendors, communities and staff who interface with the office.

I spent almost 14 years serving as Linn County Supervisor. I remain committed to helping Linn County be the most collaborative service provider possible. This takes a strong leader with a solid sense of what partnership and customer service mean to the many audiences Linn County serves.

My leadership and collaboration skills were demonstrated as we worked with many local, state and federal government partners to help Linn County successfully manage the devastation of the 2008 Flood, and the national recession that followed. During my tenure at the National Association of Counties, I trained counties and communities throughout the U.S. in post-disaster management. Our success in Linn County happened with collaborative efforts among many people and organizations. I took our “lessons learned” and shared what leadership and collaboration really look like when faced with a crisis.

While working for the National Association of Counties, I worked with the Cybersecurity Advisory Council of the Department of Homeland Security to advise on county-level election issues. Cybersecurity and elections security will be critical issues for all future elections. Engaging voters, helping to restore felons voting rights and making elections easier and more accessible are also key goals I have.

When I considered running for Auditor, Joel Miller had announced he wouldn’t be running again. Then he changed his mind. Two years ago, Mr. Miller changed his party affiliation to run against Supervisor Ben Rogers. Then he changed back to Democrat again, although the Linn County Web page still lists him as no-party. This does not represent the leadership Linn County’s partners need at any time, but especially not now.

These are unique times and there are many challenges ahead. I would be honored to bring my leadership and collaboration to serve Linn County. I ask for your vote in the June 2 primary for Linn County Auditor. Please request your absentee ballot, vote your ballot, and protect yourselves and our poll workers.

Linda Langston is a candidate in the Democratic primary for Linn County autidor.

“I pledge my Head to clearer thinking, my Heart to greater loyalty, my Hands to larger service, and my Health to better living, for my club, my community, my country, and my world.” — 4-H pledge

The Johnson County 4-H program is living up to these words, teaming up with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Johnson County to assemble Camp-in-a-Bag kits for the youngest “Littles” enrolled in the BBBS mentoring program.

Big Brothers Big Sisters creates one-on-one opportunities between adult volunteer mentors and at-risk youths ages 6 to 18. Known as “Bigs” and “Littles,” they meet for at least six hours a month for 18 months. But those in-person outings to movies, museums, restaurants, recreational activities and new adventures, as well as monthly events and school-based programs organized by the agency, are on hold during the COVID-19 pandemic.

So the kits became an outreach outlet.

“I was thinking about ways that we would be able to connect with our Littles, to let them know that we’re thinking about them,” said Dina Bishara, program specialist for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Johnson County. “And also in a very small way, to try to fill that gap that so many kids are experiencing right now. They’re used to the structure and activity of school and extracurricular activities and playing with friends.”

The bags contain more than six hours of STEAM — science, technology, engineering, arts and math — activities, from the pieces needed for building gliders and balloon flyers, to conducting scientific experiments, planting seeds, choosing healthy snacks and writing down their thoughts.

Those activities also reflect the other contributing partners: Johnson County Master Gardeners, Johnson County Extension and Outreach’s Pick a Better Snack program, O’Brien Family McDonalds and Forever Green Garden Center.

“(We wanted to) just give them something really fun and also educational and engaging, to help them spend time with their siblings, if they have them, and get their parents involved, if possible — and just really keep them connected to that learning and the fun, but also to Big Brothers Big Sisters,” Bishara said. “Camp-in-a-Bag helps us structure things in an intentional and thoughtful way.”

Partnering with 4-H, known for its summer camps, fairs and educational programs, “was a really great way to make sure that the activities we were including were really robust, so it was not going to be a hodgepodge, throw-some-things-in-a-bag,” Bishara added. “We really needed to be deliberate about it, to have the directions nicely laid out.”

The first wave is being distributed to 20 elementary-age children, and officials are hoping to expand the project.

“Funding is always a question,” Bishara said. “We would love to expand to 20 or 40 for more. ... We’d sure like to be able to target the kits to a little older kids, who have different interests.”

Bishara and Kate Yoder, who works with 4-H out of the Iowa State University Extension office in Johnson County, are eager to continue their collaborative efforts.

“It really great,” Yoder said. “When you work together, things comes together and amazing things happen. I’m excited to see what the future holds — what partnerships we can build on and grow.”

Comments: (319) 368-8508; diana.nollen@thegazette.com

• What: Big Brothers Big Sisters Camp-in-a-Bag kit contributions

• Contact: Email Dina Bishara at dina@bbbsjc.org

GoCopy is the simplest way for copywriters and designers to collaborate better on Adobe InDesign content. Get your copy free!

Taking your first steps in programming is like picking up a foreign language. At first, the syntax makes no sense, the vocabulary is unfamiliar, and everything looks and sounds unintelligible. If you’re anything like me when I started, fluency feels impossible. I promise it isn’t. When I began coding, the learning curve hit me — hard. I spent ten months teaching myself the basics while trying to stave off feelings of self-doubt that I now recognize as imposter syndrome.

We propose protocols to resolve the tension between anonymity and accountability in a peer-to-peer manner. Law enforcement can adopt this approach to solve crimes involving cryptocurrency and anonymization techniques. We illustrate how the protocols could apply to Monero rings and CoinJoin transactions in Bitcoin.

In this work, we consider a group of robots working together to manipulate a rigid object to track a desired trajectory in $SE(3)$. The robots have no explicit communication network among them, and they do no know the mass or friction properties of the object, or where they are attached to the object. However, we assume they share data from a common IMU placed arbitrarily on the object. To solve this problem, we propose a decentralized adaptive control scheme wherein each agent maintains and adapts its own estimate of the object parameters in order to track a reference trajectory. We present an analysis of the controller's behavior, and show that all closed-loop signals remain bounded, and that the system trajectory will almost always (except for initial conditions on a set of measure zero) converge to the desired trajectory. We study the proposed controller's performance using numerical simulations of a manipulation task in 3D, and with hardware experiments which demonstrate our algorithm on a planar manipulation task. These studies, taken together, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller even in the presence of numerous unmodelled effects, such as discretization errors and complex frictional interactions.

Drink Local For the majority of regional craft breweries, most revenue comes from two avenues: direct-to-consumer sales out of a tasting room and selling beer to local bars and restaurants.…

Described herein are systems and methods for enabling a collaborative remote desktop environment. The system includes a computing device and a first application instance that has an application state associated therewith. The first application instance includes, or is associated with, a current state component and application data/data files. The system further includes an application launcher that is used to instantiate a second application instance operating either on the same or on a different computing device. The second application instance similarly has an application state associated therewith and is associated with the application launcher. Upon receiving a request from the second user to interact with the first application instance, the application state and the application data/data files are communicated to the application launcher, and the application launcher instantiates the second application instance so that its state is substantially identical to that of the first application instance.

An application framework including different application programming interfaces (APIs) is described which performs a variety of mobile device functions in response to API calls from applications. For example, in response to relatively simple API calls made by applications the application framework manages the complex tasks associated with invitations and matchmaking. By way of example, the details of complex transactions such as establishing peer-to-peer connections between mobile devices may be transparent to the application developer, thereby simplifying the application design process. The application framework may include an application daemon for communicating with a first set of services and an applications services module for communicating with a separate set of services. The application framework may also include a cache for caching data for each of the services based on different cache management policies driven by each of the services. The cache may be updated by push notification cache updates sent from each of the services.

The present invention relates to an apparatus for mixing and controlling the temperature of laboratory vessel contents with an accommodating device in detachable connection with an exchangeable block for accommodating and controlling the temperature of laboratory vessels and with a drive by which the accommodating device can be set in a mixing motion, and with a temperature control device with a heat source or sink in heat-conducting connection with the exchangeable block at least through in each case at least one adjoining contact face firstly on the accommodating device and secondly on the exchangeable block, which is characterized in that the detachable connection is maintained by a spring element which, by virtue of its spring force, horizontally clamps together a first undercut between the accommodating device and the exchangeable block in at least one first direction.

In an approach, a method of spotting music for a motion picture comprises: receiving music editor (MXE) cue related data defining a plurality of cues each having a start timecode value and an end timecode value; based on the MXE data, creating and storing an MXE timecode path, a composer (CMP) timecode path, and a cue sheet timecode path; copying one or more of the MXE cue related data to CMP cues in the CMP timecode path in a CMP spotting dataset; receiving one or more changes to the CMP cues without also modifying the MXE cue related data; applying an editing lock to the CMP cues; auto-populating the CMP cues to cue sheet cues in the cue sheet timecode path; receiving one or more changes to the cue sheet cues without also modifying the CMP cues; finalizing and distributing a cue sheet based on the cue sheet cues; wherein the method is performed by one or more special-purpose computing devices.

A computerized-social network provides a community of users with features and tools facilitating an immersive, collaborative environment where users can learn a language or help others learn a language. One user (user A) can view another user's (user B) Web page or document and make suggestions or comments for selected content on that Web page. These suggestions are linked specifically to the selected content. User B can review the suggestions, and accept or reject the suggestions by user A and others.

Systems and methods for managing a collaborative environment are provided. A plurality of sheets is stored in a collaboration system. The collaboration system tracks user interactions with the plurality of sheets and generates a collaboration graph based on the interactions. The collaboration graph is analyzed to determine similarities between the sheets and/or the users. One or more visualizations are generated based on the collaboration graph and the determined similarities. In some embodiments, the collaboration system is able to provide project management information even for dynamic workflows that are not explicitly defined.

The invention relates to a method and apparatus for the delaboration of ammunition, in particular shells having a housing with a tubular housing portion made of steel and open at one end, a cone made of ductile metal and fitted into the tubular housing portion, the cone having a base with a tubular rim, and an explosive charge contained between the housing and the cone. The method comprises a) inserting an extraction tool through the open end into the tubular housing portion for extracting the cone, b) axially compressing the tubular rim of the cone between the extraction tool and the explosive charge, c) deforming a portion of the tubular rim into a form fit with the extraction tool, d) withdrawing the extraction tool from the housing portion, and e) at least partially withdrawing the cone from the housing portion together with the extraction tool.

Described herein are methods and systems for generating shared collaborative maps for planting or harvesting operations. A method of generating a collaborative shared map between machines includes generating a first map for a first machine based on a first set of data and generating a second map for a second machine based on a second set of data. The method further includes generating at least one shared collaborative map for at least one of the first and second machines based on the first and second maps.

A spring-based mechanism for saving labor of a bicycle rider is disclosed and in one embodiment includes an axle operatively connected to a chain wheel and a first set of bearings via a gear assembly; a housing for mounting a shaft therein wherein the first set of bearings is provided at one end of the shaft; a second set of bearings provided at the other end of the shaft; a spring in the housing and having one end attached to one end of the shaft and the other end attached to the other end of the housing; and a clutch provided externally of the other end of the housing, the clutch being operatively connected to the second set of bearings and including a lock lever. The mechanism can store elastic force by counterclockwise pedaling and release the stored energy by disengaging a clutch from the mechanism when riding uphill.

An apparatus consisting of hierarchically elaborated antenna modules is calibrated by steps. Although the AWV can be calculated mathematically based on the required phase shift values of each antenna element for a beam direction to compensate for signal delay. However, in practice, due to hardware implementation imperfection, coupling in signal path for each antenna element within hardware, inaccuracies of implementations, physical misalignment, the mathematically generated AWV does not necessarily provide alignment between transmit beam and receive beam. This subset is sufficient is all practical operation. The subset of AWVs are typically called codebook and the receiver beam points to different direction by using a AWV within the codebook.

A process writes phase shift error correction values into a phased-array antenna to normalize a range of manufacturing variances. An axial ratio is determined for an antenna weight vector (AWV) by making multiple measurements with the horn of a test antenna mechanically rotating from 0 to 180 degree or with dual polarization test antenna. For calibration of the whole array, each subarray is treated in the same fashion as equivalent to an antenna element in the subarray calibration. The subarray is electronically rotated as a whole (all elements rotated by the same phase shift value) from 0 to 360 degree during the full array calibration. Due to small power variation among AWVs, calibration solely by REV results fail to consistently converge to resolution. Accordingly, the apparatus measures and compares axial ratios. During final fabrication, the apparatus programs an AWV with best axial ratio into each non-transitory array element.

Compositions and methods useful for point of care testing for hemophilia by measuring coagulation factor levels are provided.

Dream Records' We Are Leo collaborate with Elizabeth Grace on single

'The Scotts' has helped the ex-boyfriend of Kylie Jenner in joining an elite club of stars who have landed multiple No. 1 entrances, including Mariah Carey, Drake and Justin Bieber.

Function Loops has announced the launch of its Production Contest 2020 with prizes including a collaboration with 22Bullets, premium bundles, and much more. Edvin from Function Loops: “We decided to create this production challenge, to find out who is the best producer in our community! Completely free to enter. The grand winner will get a […]

The post Win a collaboration with 22 Bullets in Function Loops’ music production contest appeared first on rekkerd.org.

PepsiCo India had volunteered to support the scale up of India's COVID-19 testing capacity through support provided to FIND.

With about a million products available on its website, Tolexo is among the largest B2B ecommerce sites in the country, serving 2.5 lakh businesses.

Prada, who has been the creative force behind one of luxury's most successful brands for 30 years, said the new partnership did not signal an eventual succession.

In the early 1800’s, American painter Edward Hicks began painting “Peaceable Kingdom," a series of 62 paintings inspired by a verse in the book of Isaiah. The verse says, “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them.” In Traverse City, two different art galleries are bringing that concept to the art world.

As business professionals, educators, and others around the globe rely on web conferencing solutions like Zoom to communicate under current conditions, post houses, broadcasters, and video rights holders are either acquainting themselves with cloud video editing solutions like the popular Blackbird platform, or moving once-peripheral distributed production workflows to the center of their operations.

Sometimes you need to experiment to grow as an artist. What better place to try out new design ideas than the Drawing Vector Graphics Laboratory? Every Wednesday, Von Glitschka introduces a new method, tool, or resource to stretch your creative muscle and explore a new artistic style. Each lesson pulls back the curtain on Von's design process—the good, the bad, and the ugly—to give beginners the self-confidence they need to start drawing and provide experts an inside look at a fellow professional's workflow.

Note: Because this is an ongoing series, viewers will not receive a certificate of completion.

NPR's Michel Martin talks with Jane Oates, a former assistant secretary of labor for employment and training, about navigating the changes in the American workforce.

NPR's Michel Martin talks with Jane Oates, a former assistant secretary of labor for employment and training, about navigating the changes in the American workforce.

Domestic workers are losing jobs they rely on to the pandemic, and the jobs they’ve kept could jeopardize their health. We hear how workers are using lessons from past disasters to advocate for their communities. Then, in a story from Uncuffed , an ex-marine in prison faces his own mortality. Plus, we’re bringing Bay Area author readings to you in a new series called "New Arrivals."

Karen and Bradley play and discuss Richard Fontana's Linux Collaboration Summit 2012 talk, The Decline of the GPL, and What To Do About It.

Show Notes:

Segment 0 (00:36)

Karen mentioned a legal summit where Richard and Karen spoke; the same event where the organizers said having Bradley speak would be the same as having the caterers speak.

Segment 1 (04:46)

Fontana's slides for this talk are available on Fontana's website.

Note that this talk is a longer version of Ricahrd Fontana's FOSDEM 2012 talk, The (possible) decline of the GPL, and what to do about it from the FOSDEM 2012 Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom.

Segment 2 (57:24)

Bradley and Karen discuss Fontana's talk.

Send feedback and comments on the cast to <oggcast@faif.us>. You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and by following Conservancy on on Twitter and and FaiF on Twitter.

Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch of danlynch.org. Theme music written and performed by Mike Tarantino with Charlie Paxson on drums.

The content of this audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The Secret Ingredient is “Prison Labor on Farms.” You might not expect where prison-produced food may show up! Listen back as agriculture farmer and former inmate Jahi Ellis guides the conversation on food production in prison along with Raj Patel, Tom Philpott and Rebecca McInroy.

Hay medidas buenas y no tan buenas, pero el punto de fondo es que todos pongan para superar el Covid19

Jon Talton | No single source can explain the big decline in union membership. Rebuilding organized labor, and worker bargaining power and rights, will be a hard battle.

Dave Matthews Band announced it's rescheduling its entire summer concert slate — including the annual Labor Day weekend bash the band's hosted at the Gorge Amphitheatre for years — due to COVID-19.

A report released by the Labor Department on Thursday showed U.S. labor productivity pulled back by much less than expected in the first quarter. The Labor Department said labor productivity slumped by 2.5 percent in the first quarter after jumping by 1.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2019. Economists had expected productivity to plunge by 5.5 percent.

Widely respected Labor MP Mike Kelly is retiring, which means a by-election in his marginal seat of Eden-Monaro is on the cards.

Up to 150 superannuation accounts have been illegally accessed by what the Australian Federal Police says is a sophisticated operation targeting the early release super scheme.

Opposition Leader Rebecca White vows to ditch the Greens as party faithful meet in Burnie for Labor's first Tasmanian gathering since suffering a bruising federal election defeat.

The Landgate deal represents a sizeable change in position by WA Labor, a party that spent years fighting tooth and nail against privatisations but just locked in one of the state's biggest-ever deals with the private sector, writes Jacob Kagi.

Western Australia moves significantly closer to legalising voluntary assisted dying with the State Government's euthanasia bill sailing through the Lower House of Parliament but it still faces a major hurdle.

Opposition Water spokesman Tony Burke has announced Labor would change the way 450 gigalitres of water is recovered, by "restoring the socio-economic definition" for delivering water.

The Labor Party's hold on the city that helped give birth to the modern union movement and the eight-hour working day loosens.

Long-serving Federal Labor MP Mike Kelly ends months of speculation by making the "gut wrenching" decision to resign from Parliament.

Jason Reitman's uneven romantic drama about a depressed woman and an escaped prisoner stretches credibility and feels less than genuine.

Victorian Opposition Leader Michael O'Brien calls on the Office of Public Prosecutions to release its advice not to prosecute Labor figures over the misuse of taxpayer-funded electorate officers during the 2014 election campaign.

Liberal backbencher Dave Sharma and Labor MP Josh Burns join forces with alleged victims to seek Malka Leifer's extradition to Australia to face child sexual abuse charges.