VideoSolo, a professional multimedia software provider, has officially released a new version for their Video Converter Ultimate. The new verison brings lot of changes and will let you convert video/audios quicker and easier.

Rayward Apparel debuts new collection of sun protective clothing, compromising neither comfort nor performance in the process.

Independent analysis of software category rates technology providers across seven product and customer assurance evaluation categories

Boris Groysberg, Harvard Business School professor.

Bob Seelert, chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi and author of "Start with the Answer: And Other Wisdom for Aspiring Leaders."

Stewart Friedman, Wharton School professor and author of "Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life."

Michael Schrage, research fellow at MIT Sloan School's Center for Digital Business and author of "Serious Play."

Shawn Achor, CEO of Aspirant and author of "The Happiness Advantage."

The champion diver explains how visualization and ambitious goal-setting helped him achieve double gold medals in back-to-back Olympic Games and why he now serves as a mentor to younger athletes and a spokesman for LGBT causes.

Elena Botelho, partner at leadership advisory firm ghSmart, talks about the disconnect between the stereotype of the CEO and what research shows actually leads to high performance at that level. She says the image of the charismatic, tall male with a top university degree who’s a strategic visionary and makes great decisions under pressure is a pervasive one. However, research shows that four behaviors more consistently lead to high performance in the corner office: 1) deciding with speed and conviction 2) engaging for impact 3) adapting proactively 4) delivering reliably. Botelho is the co-author of the article “What Sets Successful CEOs Apart” in the May-June 2017 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Pablo Isla, the CEO of Inditex, is No. 1 on Harvard Business Review’s list of “The Best-Performing CEOs in the World 2017.” He opens up about his management style and reflects on his tenure leading the Spanish clothing and accessories giant, whose brands include Zara, Massimo Dutti, and Pull&Bear. Successful fast fashion takes much more than speed, he says. Isla discusses aspects of the company’s business model: source close to headquarters, entrust store managers with product orders, and treat what’s sold in stores and online as one stock. He also forecasts the future of physical stores.

Gerry Anderson, the CEO of DTE Energy, and Robert Quinn and Anjan Thakor, professors at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and the Olin Business School at Washington University, respectively, discuss how an aspirational mission can motivate employees and improve performance. Anderson talks about his own experience. Quinn and Thakor explain their research showing how leaders can foster a sense of purpose that sharpens competitiveness. They wrote the article “Creating a Purpose-Driven Organization” in the July-August 2018 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Marc Effron, president of the Talent Strategy Group, looked at the scientific literature behind high performance at work and identified eight steps we can all take to get an edge. Among those steps is taking care of your body -- sleep, exercise, and nutrition. But the most important is sleep. He offers some practical advice on getting more and better rest, and making time to exercise. Effron is the author of the new book, "8 Steps to High Performance: Focus On What You Can Change (Ignore the Rest)."

Adam Grant, organizational psychologist at The Wharton School, argues that individuals and companies alike can benefit from having rivals. He has studied sports and business rivalries and believes they often add up to more than just zero-sum competition. Grant explains how we can perform and even feel better by taking the risk of treating our rivals more like competitive friends.

Credit risk funds have always been vulnerable to its investments of up to 65% (and more) in the lower-rated instruments. To earn higher returns than the rest of the debt categories, the fund manager buys high-yielding, low credit quality bonds.

The two primary forms of growth of a mutual fund scheme is either the growth of the Net Asset Value (NAV) or if the fund regularly declares dividends.

Your manager dreads review meetings as much as you do, because it is an unpleasant task to pass judgment on another person’s contributions and compensation. Here’s how you can make it work well for everyone and ace your annual appraisal.

Beaten down banking and industrial stocks likely to outperform in near term: Taher Badshah

‘As economic activity resumes, expect a further revival in the market in the coming months’

On June 23rd, 2013, Grand Canyon National Park will host “President Theodore Roosevelt Salutes the National Park Service.” This special program is a living history portrayal of the 26th President of the United States as performed by Joe Wiegand at 8:30pm, Sunday, June 23rd, 2013 at McKee Amphitheater located on the South Rim behind Park Headquarters near Parking Lot A. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/grand-canyon-national-park-presents-living-history-performance-of-president-theodore-roosevelt.htm

Four types of tree shelters were evaluated in southwestern Washington for their effects on seedling microenvironment and performance of two tree species. Shelter types were fine-mesh fabric shelters, solid-walled white shelters with and without vent holes, and solid-walled blue unvented shelters. Summer mean and daily maximum air temperatures were increased by 0.8 degrees C and 3.6 degrees C, respectively, in solid-walled tree shelters. Shelter color and shelter venting did not influence air temperatures. Tree shelters only affected vapor pressure deficit late in the growing season. Midday photosynthetically active radiation within shelters ranged from 54 percent of full sun in fine-mesh fabric shelters to 15 percent of full sun in blue solid-walled shelters. In the first year after planting, height and diameter growth of western redcedar (Thuja plicata Donn ex D. Don) were significantly increased by all shelter types, with blue solid-walled shelters resulting in the greatest height growth. However, in blue solid-walled shelters, photosynthesis and stem diameter growth of Oregon white oak (Quercus garryana Dougl. ex Hook.) seedlings were significantly less than for unsheltered seedlings.

Eliot Smith Dance company is live-streaming a powerful production to mark the 75-year anniversary of Victory in Europe day

Charity ambassador and musician Cormac Neeson said: "The line up is as strong as you could ever hope for in the real world and every artist is born and bred right here in NI."

It even involves some serious dance moves at the end

A study to comparatively examine the effects of sports-related concussions (SRC) on athletes in Major League Soccer (MLS) and the English Premier League (EPL) in terms of incidence, return to play (RTP), performance, and career longevity.

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.

We study a two-stage reneging queue with Poisson arrivals, exponential services, and two levels of exponential reneging behaviors, extending the popular Erlang A model that assumes a constant reneging rate. We derive approximate analytical formulas representing performance measures for the two-stage queue following the Markov chain decomposition approach. Our formulas not only give accurate results spanning the heavy-traffic to the light-traffic regimes, but also provide insight into capacity decisions.

High-performance implementations of graph algorithms are challenging to implement on new parallel hardware such as GPUs, because of three challenges: (1) difficulty of coming up with graph building blocks, (2) load imbalance on parallel hardware, and (3) graph problems having low arithmetic intensity. To address these challenges, GraphBLAS is an innovative, on-going effort by the graph analytics community to propose building blocks based in sparse linear algebra, which will allow graph algorithms to be expressed in a performant, succinct, composable and portable manner. In this paper, we examine the performance challenges of a linear algebra-based approach to building graph frameworks and describe new design principles for overcoming these bottlenecks. Among the new design principles is exploiting input sparsity, which allows users to write graph algorithms without specifying push and pull direction. Exploiting output sparsity allows users to tell the backend which values of the output in a single vectorized computation they do not want computed. Load-balancing is an important feature for balancing work amongst parallel workers. We describe the important load-balancing features for handling graphs with different characteristics. The design principles described in this paper have been implemented in "GraphBLAST", the first open-source linear algebra-based graph framework on GPU targeting high-performance computing. The results show that on a single GPU, GraphBLAST has on average at least an order of magnitude speedup over previous GraphBLAS implementations SuiteSparse and GBTL, comparable performance to the fastest GPU hardwired primitives and shared-memory graph frameworks Ligra and Gunrock, and better performance than any other GPU graph framework, while offering a simpler and more concise programming model.

Event-related potential (ERP) speller can be utilized in device control and communication for locked-in or severely injured patients. However, problems such as inter-subject performance instability and ERP-illiteracy are still unresolved. Therefore, it is necessary to predict classification performance before performing an ERP speller in order to use it efficiently. In this study, we investigated the correlations with ERP speller performance using a resting-state before an ERP speller. In specific, we used spectral power and functional connectivity according to four brain regions and five frequency bands. As a result, the delta power in the frontal region and functional connectivity in the delta, alpha, gamma bands are significantly correlated with the ERP speller performance. Also, we predicted the ERP speller performance using EEG features in the resting-state. These findings may contribute to investigating the ERP-illiteracy and considering the appropriate alternatives for each user.

A classical problem in appointment scheduling, with applications in health care, concerns the determination of the patients' arrival times that minimize a cost function that is a weighted sum of mean waiting times and mean idle times. One aspect of this problem is the sequencing problem, which focuses on ordering the patients. We assess the performance of the smallest-variance-first (SVF) rule, which sequences patients in order of increasing variance of their service durations. While it was known that SVF is not always optimal, it has been widely observed that it performs well in practice and simulation. We provide a theoretical justification for this observation by proving, in various settings, quantitative worst-case bounds on the ratio between the cost incurred by the SVF rule and the minimum attainable cost. We also show that, in great generality, SVF is asymptotically optimal, i.e., the ratio approaches 1 as the number of patients grows large. While evaluating policies by considering an approximation ratio is a standard approach in many algorithmic settings, our results appear to be the first of this type in the appointment scheduling literature.

In this paper, we propose a new nonlinear detector with improved interference suppression in Multi-User Multiple Input, Multiple Output (MU-MIMO) system. The proposed detector is a combination of the following parts: QR decomposition (QRD), low complexity users sorting before QRD, sorting-reduced (SR) K-best method and minimum mean square error (MMSE) pre-processing. Our method outperforms a linear interference rejection combining (IRC, i.e. MMSE naturally) method significantly in both strong interference and additive white noise scenarios with both ideal and real channel estimations. This result has wide application importance for scenarios with strong interference, i.e. when co-located users utilize the internet in stadium, highway, shopping center, etc. Simulation results are presented for the non-line of sight 3D-UMa model of 5G QuaDRiGa 2.0 channel for 16 highly correlated single-antenna users with QAM16 modulation in 64 antennas of Massive MIMO system. The performance was compared with MMSE and other detection approaches.

We study the problem of jointly designing a sparse sensor and actuator schedule for linear dynamical systems while guaranteeing a control/estimation performance that approximates the fully sensed/actuated setting. We further prove a separation principle, showing that the problem can be decomposed into finding sensor and actuator schedules separately. However, it is shown that this problem cannot be efficiently solved or approximated in polynomial, or even quasi-polynomial time for time-invariant sensor/actuator schedules; instead, we develop deterministic polynomial-time algorithms for a time-varying sensor/actuator schedule with guaranteed approximation bounds. Our main result is to provide a polynomial-time joint actuator and sensor schedule that on average selects only a constant number of sensors and actuators at each time step, irrespective of the dimension of the system. The key idea is to sparsify the controllability and observability Gramians while providing approximation guarantees for Hankel singular values. This idea is inspired by recent results in theoretical computer science literature on sparsification.

Making changes to a program to optimize its performance is an unscalable task that relies entirely upon human intuition and experience. In addition, companies operating at large scale are at a stage where no single individual understands the code controlling its systems, and for this reason, making changes to improve performance can become intractably difficult. In this paper, a learning system is introduced that provides AI assistance for finding recommended changes to a program. Specifically, it is shown how the evaluative feedback, delayed-reward performance programming domain can be effectively formulated via the Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) framework. It is then shown that established methods from computational games for using learning to expedite tree-search computation can be adapted to speed up computing recommended program alterations. Estimates of expected utility from MCTS trees built for previous problems are used to learn a sampling policy that remains effective across new problems, thus demonstrating transferability of optimization knowledge. This formulation is applied to the Apache Spark distributed computing environment, and a preliminary result is observed that the time required to build a search tree for finding recommendations is reduced by up to a factor of 10x.

Homomorphic encryption (HE) allows direct computations on encrypted data. Despite numerous research efforts, the practicality of HE schemes remains to be demonstrated. In this regard, the enormous size of ciphertexts involved in HE computations degrades computational efficiency. Near-memory Processing (NMP) and Computing-in-memory (CiM) - paradigms where computation is done within the memory boundaries - represent architectural solutions for reducing latency and energy associated with data transfers in data-intensive applications such as HE. This paper introduces CiM-HE, a Computing-in-memory (CiM) architecture that can support operations for the B/FV scheme, a somewhat homomorphic encryption scheme for general computation. CiM-HE hardware consists of customized peripherals such as sense amplifiers, adders, bit-shifters, and sequencing circuits. The peripherals are based on CMOS technology, and could support computations with memory cells of different technologies. Circuit-level simulations are used to evaluate our CiM-HE framework assuming a 6T-SRAM memory. We compare our CiM-HE implementation against (i) two optimized CPU HE implementations, and (ii) an FPGA-based HE accelerator implementation. When compared to a CPU solution, CiM-HE obtains speedups between 4.6x and 9.1x, and energy savings between 266.4x and 532.8x for homomorphic multiplications (the most expensive HE operation). Also, a set of four end-to-end tasks, i.e., mean, variance, linear regression, and inference are up to 1.1x, 7.7x, 7.1x, and 7.5x faster (and 301.1x, 404.6x, 532.3x, and 532.8x more energy efficient). Compared to CPU-based HE in a previous work, CiM-HE obtain 14.3x speed-up and >2600x energy savings. Finally, our design offers 2.2x speed-up with 88.1x energy savings compared to a state-of-the-art FPGA-based accelerator.

Ask any working musician why they play live, why they lug their equipment to and from bars and restaurants and wine-tasting rooms week after week, and they'll point to the same nebulous thing: It's the connection with an audience.…

While events around the country have been put on hold, Coeur d’Alene’s Summer Theatre is still slated for a show at the end of the month. But it won’t be in the usual format.…

A method, system and computer program product for intelligently responding to hardware failures so as to optimize system performance. An administrative server monitors the utilization of the hardware as well as the software components running on the hardware to assess a context of the software components running on the hardware. Upon detecting a hardware failure, the administrative server analyzes the hardware failure to determine the type of hardware failure and analyzes the properties of the workload running on the failed hardware. The administrative server then responds to the detected hardware failure based on various factors, including the type of the hardware failure, the properties of the workload running on the failed hardware and the context of the software running on the failed hardware. In this manner, by taking into consideration such factors in responding to the detected hardware failure, a more intelligent response is provided that optimizes system performance.

Memory devices adapted to repair single unprogrammable cells during a program operation, and to repair columns containing unprogrammable cells during a subsequent erase operation. Programming of such memory devices includes determining that a single cell is unprogrammable and repairing the single cell, and repairing a column containing the single cell responsive to a subsequent erase operation.

A method and apparatus for including in a processor instructions for performing logical-comparison and branch support operations on packed or unpacked data. In one embodiment, instruction decode logic decodes instructions for an execution unit to operate on packed data elements including logical comparisons. A register file including 128-bit packed data registers stores packed single-precision floating point (SPFP) and packed integer data elements. The logical comparisons may include comparison of SPFP data elements and comparison of integer data elements and setting at least one bit to indicate the results. Based on these comparisons, branch support actions are taken. Such branch support actions may include setting the at least one bit, which in turn may be utilized by a branching unit in response to a branch instruction. Alternatively, the branch support actions may include branching to an indicated target code location.

A method and apparatus for including in a processor instructions for performing logical-comparison and branch support operations on packed or unpacked data. In one embodiment, instruction decode logic decodes instructions for an execution unit to operate on packed data elements including logical comparisons. A register file including 128-bit packed data registers stores packed single-precision floating point (SPFP) and packed integer data elements. The logical comparisons may include comparison of SPFP data elements and comparison of integer data elements and setting at least one bit to indicate the results. Based on these comparisons, branch support actions are taken. Such branch support actions may include setting the at least one bit, which in turn may be utilized by a branching unit in response to a branch instruction. Alternatively, the branch support actions may include branching to an indicated target code location.

A system (200) and a method (100) of operating a computing device to perform memoization are disclosed. The method includes determining whether a result of a function is stored in a cache and, if so, retrieving the result from the cache and, if not, calculating the result and storing it in the cache. The method (100) includes transforming (104) by the computing device at least one selected from the input parameters and the output parameters of the function, the transforming being based on an analysis of the function and its input arguments to establish whether or not there is a possible relationship reflecting redundancy among the input parameters and output parameters of the function. The transforming may include at least one of: use of symmetry, scaling, linear shift, interchanging of variables, inversion, polynomial and/or trigonometric transformations, spectral or logical transformations, fuzzy transformations, and systematic arrangement of parameters.

A method and apparatus for including in a processor instructions for performing logical-comparison and branch support operations on packed or unpacked data. In one embodiment, instruction decode logic decodes instructions for an execution unit to operate on packed data elements including logical comparisons. A register file including 128-bit packed data registers stores packed single-precision floating point (SPFP) and packed integer data elements. The logical comparisons may include comparison of SPFP data elements and comparison of integer data elements and setting at least one bit to indicate the results. Based on these comparisons, branch support actions are taken. Such branch support actions may include setting the at least one bit, which in turn may be utilized by a branching unit in response to a branch instruction. Alternatively, the branch support actions may include branching to an indicated target code location.

The systems and methods described herein may be used to implement a shared dynamic-sized data structure using hardware transactional memory to simplify and/or improve memory management of the data structure. An application (or thread thereof) may indicate (or register) the intended use of an element of the data structure and may initialize the value of the data structure element. Thereafter, another thread or application may use hardware transactions to access the data structure element while confirming that the data structure element is still part of the dynamic data structure and/or that memory allocated to the data structure element has not been freed. Various indicators may be used determine whether memory allocated to the element can be freed.

A High Performance Computing (HPC) node comprises a motherboard, a switch comprising eight or more ports integrated on the motherboard, and at least two processors operable to execute an HPC job, with each processor communicably coupled to the integrated switch and integrated on the motherboard.

This invention relates to extend the benefits of using hypochlorite compounds such as sodium hypochlorite to clean and disinfect articles while reducing or eliminating the side effects of treating an article with a strong oxidant material. The invention relates to a single step process involving mixing of precursor compositions of a suitable hypohalite or hypohalous acid with a solution of a reducing agent. Optionally a buffer may be present in either or both precursor compositions, such that at time of use such active hypohalous acid concentration in the resulting aqueous mixture remains at a sufficient activity level to effect one or more desired benefits against a target substrate for a desired period of time. The oxidant is substantially consumed by reaction with the reducing agent after the time needed for achieving the desired benefit has passed.

A method for configuring an interactive platform for monitoring the performance and the quality of a computer network, the monitoring data being suitable to be displayed on a dynamic page of type webpage in a form of graphic components called “displets”; including providing, on the interactive platform a configuration interface in which are defined, for at least one given user, filtering criteria for displaying displets, the criteria being defined in the form of parameters for configuring the rights of the at least one user.

A handheld electronic device includes a reduced QWERTY keyboard and is enabled with a disambiguation routine that is operable to disambiguate text input. In addition to identifying and outputting representations of language objects that are stored in the memory and that correspond with a text input, the device is able to perform a spell check routine during input of a text entry and to learn and automatically correct mistakes typically made by the particular user.

A method of performance monitoring in a data processing environment is provided. The data processing environment includes multiple systems, each of which has resources. Each resource relates to a resource type, wherein at least one performance parameter is defined for each resource type. The method includes determining a value of the at least one performance parameter for at least one resource, aggregating performance parameter values and related resources of a resource type, creating for at least a part of the resources a next predefined aggregation level which includes all resources relating to the resource type and associating all performance parameter values to this aggregation level, and repeating the creating for at least a part of the resources a next predefined aggregation level until a predefined target aggregation level of the data processing environment has been reached.

A method of tailoring the shape of a plurality of relief printing dots created in a photosensitive printing blank during a platemaking process including the steps of: (a) selectively exposing at least one photocurable layer to a source of actinic radiation to selectively crosslink and cure the at least one photocurable layer; and (b) developing the exposed at least one photocurable layer to reveal the relief image therein, said relief image comprising the plurality of relief printing dots. The source of actinic radiation comprises a source of UV light in the UV-A range and a source of light in the UV-C range. The at least one photocurable layer is simultaneously exposed to the source of UV light in the UV-A range and the source of UV light in the UV-C range to produce printing dots having at least one desired geometric characteristic.

An automatic performance apparatus includes a memory device, an input device, a write device, a switching device, and a write control device. The memory device stores performance information. The input device inputs the performance information. The write device sequentially writes the performance information at predetermined addresses of the memory device on the basis of an operation of the input device. The switching device commands rewriting. In response to a command from the switching device, the write control device returns a write address of the memory device to an immediately preceding start point of a predetermined music composition unit having two or more notes, thereby enabling an easy and accurate edit of the once stored performance information.