The National Park Service has selected three companies to provide logistical services in support of administrative river missions along the Colorado River within Grand Canyon National Park. The apparent awardees are Ceiba Adventures, Inc, Colorado River & Trails Expeditions, and Grand Canyon Whitewater, LLC. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/2017-09-08-nps-selects-river-logistics-companies.htm

Lisa Carrico, a 33-year veteran of the National Park Service (NPS), has been selected as Deputy Superintendent of Operations and Science at Grand Canyon National Park. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/lisa-carrico-selected-as-deputy-superintendent.htm

National Park Service Requests Public Input on a Telecommunications Plan at Grand Canyon National Park https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/telecommunications-plan.htm

The National Park Foundation, National Park Service, and the Department of Energy partnered with BMW of North America to donate 100 EV charging stations for locations in and near national parks. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/electric-vehicle-charging-stations.htm

The National Park Service (NPS) is seeking public comment on a proposed Telecommunications Plan and Environmental Assessment from Dec. 2, 2019 until midnight on Jan. 6, 2020. If approved, the plan would provide a framework and guidance for the future construction and operation of telecommunications infrastructure. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/nps-requests-public-input-on-a-telecom-plan-and-ea-at-grca-20191202.htm

A New York company called Veles is selling an all-purpose cleaner made of food waste collected from Manhattan cafeterias, and ditches plastic spray bottles.

The post All-Purpose Cleaner is Made Entirely of Food Waste Collected in NYC—and Ditches Plastic Spray Bottles appeared first on Good News Network.

In addition to EV batteries being reused in 7-11 stores, their minerals can also provide many raw materials needed to run our world.

The post Old Electric Vehicle Batteries Can Be Recycled into New Sources of Energy—Even Used to Power 7-11 Stores appeared first on Good News Network.

Dyper, maker of biodegradable disposable bamboo diapers, now offers a composting service that lets you ship off your baby's diapers in a box for recycling.

The post The World’s First Disposable Diaper Company That Collects The Dirty Ones For Composting appeared first on Good News Network.

Applying the iframe shim fix to the variable width dropdown/flyout menu system. Using expressions to add the iframe and styling.

Using CSS3 'general sibling' selector problems when using :hover in Safari and Chrome

A CSS menu with current page override and graphic/information.

Using CSS3 and SVG to produce 'reflections' for Firefox 4 and 5 (as well as Safari and Chrome).

A CSS only method of producing image reflections on solid background colors.

An alternative to a form select list which can be fully styled.

A CSS conversion of a form select list to a drop list.

Vimeo video select list with external play/pause/rewind controls and fallback for iOS

Plan and lead the strategic development of policies, procedures, standards, practices, and workflows related to circulation, equipment lending, GIL Express, software & hardware management, and electronic resources management. Project, approve, and monit......

Over the past 7 years, a strong collaboration has emerged between the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest ecosystem research group and the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word, an independently funded program for nature writing based in the Department of Philosophy, Oregon State University. The program is called Long-Term Ecological Reflections and it brings together scientists, creative writers, and environmental philosophers to consider new ways to conceptualize and communicate views of long-term ecological change in forests and watersheds and the participation of humans in that change. The program is designed to parallel the Long-Term Ecological Research program, a national science program initiated in 1980 and involving the Andrews Forest. Both programs focus on primary inquiry and have 200-year planning horizons, which have resulted in some uniquely farsighted perspectives and astute ecological observations.

Biomass resources in Alaska are extensive and diverse, comprising millions of acres of standing small-diameter trees, diseased or dead trees, and trees having lowgrade timber.

WASHINGTON, D.C., 1 de abril del 2020 – Después de años de demoras perjudiciales por parte de la FDA, en julio del año pasado un juez federal estableció como fecha límite el 12 de mayo del 2020 para que los fabricantes de cigarrillos electrónicos...

DALLAS, 8 de abril del 2020— Aproximadamente 120 millones de personas en Estados Unidos tienen una o más enfermedades cardiovasculares, las cuales pueden aumentar el riesgo de complicaciones producto del COVID-19. Además, aquellos con hipertensión,...

On January 21st, hundreds of thousands of Americans traveled to Washington D.C. for President Obama's second Inauguration. I was among them to celebrate the event. Here are some of the people I met. These photos follow a set I took at the first Inauguration in 2009 as well as photos I took on the election night in November; I plan to continue attending every Inauguration in the future in order to document the type of people who gather for this event. I call the series "The America We Elected" because I am interested in focusing on the faces of the people in the crowd rather than the main spectacle shown in the media; it is interesting to think about how the faces would be different given a different outcome in the election. For instance, we are looking at radiantly happy people and strangers bonding together with a shared sense of hope, but we can imagine alternate situations where the people I would have encountered might have been angry protestors, or just entirely different demographics of the population. The main thrust of the project is to capture reality as it is and present this little seen aspect to a larger audience. The photos are unmanipulated, spontaneous, and captured on film by a Rolleiflex camera.

Not many of the present readers might know me very well, and that in part, is the reason that I have made the decision to transfer WLTC to more willing and presently capable hands. I am a stranger on my blog and the time has come for me to make sure that this blog, its contents and its knowledge are archived and preserved and maybe rejuvenated at a later time. I delved into blogging tools back in 2004 when I started my Masters degree in CS. I wanted some code to mess around with in my free time and everyone was talking about blogging. I looked into a variety of tools, built a small Linux server for myself at home, and installed a few of the tools that were freely available at that time. I had a heck of a time getting a hold of MT (Moveable Type, the most well-known name) and […]

The Iowa Supreme Court approved a pilot program in the 4th Judicial District — Audubon, Cass, Fremont, Harrison, Mills, Montgomery, Pottawattamie, Page and Shelby counties — to develop...

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.

Jeff Chandler has done a great interview with Dan Milward of Instinct. Check it out here.

The post Weblog Tools Collection: WP-commerce Podcast appeared first on WPCult.

The Iowa Supreme Court approved a pilot program in the 4th Judicial District — Audubon, Cass, Fremont, Harrison, Mills, Montgomery, Pottawattamie, Page and Shelby counties — to develop procedures for the use of electronic search warrants.

Electronic search warrants will reduce the time required to obtain warrants, reduce travel time by law enforcement and make more effective use of judges’ time, according to the order. Paper warrants require law enforcement to fill out application forms and then leave the scene of the potential search and drive to find a judge, either at a courthouse during business hours or their home after hours. If the judge grants the warrant, then the officer has to drive back to the scene to execute it.

The electronic warrants can be submitted to a judge from a squad car computer, which is more efficient for law enforcement and the judges.

The pilot program will be evaluated by the court annually and will continue until further notice.

Fourth Judicial District Chief Judge Jeff Larson, who was on the advisory committee to develop recommendations for the new process, talked about the project, which will start in the next few weeks.

Page County Chief Deputy Charles McCalla, 6th Judicial Associate District Judge Nicholas Scott, Linn County Sheriff Capt. Greg McGivern and Marion police Lt. Scott Elam also provided their thoughts about electronic search warrants.

Q: Iowa courts started going paperless in 2010, so why did it take so long to get a pilot program for electronic search warrants?

A: Larson: It had been discussed at various levels since (the electronic document management system) started. We should take advantage of the electronic process because it will save us money. Most law enforcement agencies are now used to filing electronic citations from their patrol cars and offices. There may have been some pushback a few years ago because some counties or offices didn’t have computer scanners and needed technology. Now, the rural offices have that technology.

Q: As a task force member working on this program, what were the hurdles?

A: Larson: It was just working through the procedural issues to make sure there would be a safeguard throughout the process. When a search warrant is needed, law enforcement has to fill out the search warrant package, including the application with all the pertinent information, and submit it to a magistrate judge, associate or district judge in their judicial district. Then the officer or deputy can just call the judge to alert him/her to the warrant and the judge can ask for any additional information needed. The judge then administers the oath of office over the phone and signs off or denies the warrant. Law enforcement doesn’t have to leave the crime scene and can print off the warrant from their squad car computer.

The process of going to electronic warrants started in 2017, when the lawmakers amended the law to allow those to be submitted electronically, and then in 2018, the state court administrator’s office set up an advisory committee to develop recommendations.

Q: What has been the process to get a search warrant?

A: Larson: Law enforcement would have to leave the scene, fill out paperwork and then, many times, travel miles to go to the courthouse to have the judge sign it or if it’s after hours, go to a judge’s home. The officer may not be in the same county as the courthouse where the judge works or where the judge lives. (It) can take a lot of time. The process is way overdue.

Q: Page County Sheriff’s Chief Deputy Charles McCalla, what do you see as the biggest advantage for filing them electronically?

A: McCalla: The smaller counties have limited manpower, and some of the judges, like in Mills County, may be 60 to 70 miles away if a search warrant is needed after hours. Just traveling across the county can take time, depending where you are. At a minimum, we probably have to drive 30 minutes and up to an hour to get to a judge. This will save us time, money for travel and provide safety because we can stay at the scene to ensure the evidence hasn’t been tampered with.

Q: Is there a recent incident where an electronic search warrant may have helped?

A: McCalla: A few weeks ago, there was a theft report for a stolen chain saw and deputies went to the home and saw guns all over the house and they knew the guy who lived there had been convicted. They didn’t want to tip him off, so they just left the scene and went to get a search warrant. Luckily, the evidence was still there when they came back. They found about 90 guns.

Q: How do you feel about being the “guinea pigs” for the process?

A: McCalla: Happy to be. As law enforcement, we’re natural fixers. We find solutions. And this is an idea time to use the process during the COVID-19 pandemic to keep everyone safe. We won’t have to have any face-to-face contact with the judges.

Q: Is Linn County excited about the program, once it’s tested and used across the state?

A: Scott: I think many of us in the criminal justice system are eagerly awaiting the results of the pilot. They have the potential to make the system more efficient. It is in the interest of the police and the suspect, who is often detained pending a warrant, to get the search warrant application reviewed by a judge as soon as possible. A potential benefit is that officers could also use those more often, which protects citizens from unlawful search and seizures if a judge first reviews the evidence.

A: McGivern: I believe the implementation will be a much faster and efficient process for deputies. Like any new process, there may need to be some revisions that will have to be worked out, but I look forward to it.

A: Elam: We’ve done it this way for a long time, and it can be a bit of a haul for us, depending who’s on call (among the judges) — after hours. It’s nice to see there’s a pilot. The concern would be if something goes wrong in the process. If the internet is down or something else. Now, we have to go from Marion to the Linn County Courthouse. Then we go to the county attorney’s office to get a prosecutor to review the warrant and then find a judge (in courthouse during business hours). That takes some time. If you can type out the application from your car right at the scene, it would help with details on the warrant — describing the structure or property needing be searched. I just hope they work out all the bugs first.

Comments: (319) 398-8318; trish.mehaffey@thegazette.com

I've never thought of myself as a "car person". The last new car I bought (and in fact, now that I think about it, the first new car I ever bought) was the quirky 1998 Ford Contour SVT. Since then we bought a VW station wagon in 2011

In an electric car, the (enormous) battery is a major part of the price. If electric car prices are decreasing, battery costs must be decreasing, because it's not like the cost of fabricating rubber, aluminum, glass, and steel into car shapes can decline that much, right?

On an electric scooter

One of the challenges of coding premium WordPress themes is the unpredictable nature of how they will be used. Compared to coding a custom website, especially one using static HTML documents where you have complete control over the markup, you have to solve problems creatively and ensure flexibility. In these cases, CSS selectors make all […]

The post The Power of CSS Selectors and How to Use Them appeared first on Web Designer Wall.

Isobar’s Rob Larsen suggests that there is often a need to build CSS selectors dynamically when building applications. ”This is typically some existing pattern paired with a loop counter or something pulled from a data attribute,” he writes on his blog. His choice is to create a variable called ”selector” and ”to craft the selector Read the rest...

By Jessica Corbett Common Dreams Analyses show how demand for electric vehicles and rapidly falling renewable energy prices could take down oil and gas industry As an increasing number of nations make plans for banning gas and diesel vehicles within … Continue reading →

U.S. Rep. Ken Buck, who is also the chairman of the Colorado Republican Party, was captured ordering a local party official to report false election results in a primary race for a state Senate seat in a leaked audio recording released earlier this week.

Did you remember how was your life before Freepik and Flaticon. No I can’t remember the dark ages either. To celebrate this golden times, they are giving away once more an incredible package of 210 User Interface Icons in 3 versions: Flat, filled and lineal.  Download This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License …

Cute Collection of 210 User Interface Icons Read More »

Connections between set theoretic Yang-Baxter and reflection equations and quantum integrable systems are investigated. We show that set theoretic $R$-matrices are expressed as twists of known solutions. We then focus on reflection and twisted algebras and we derive the associated defining algebra relations for $R$-matrices being Baxterized solutions of the $A$-type Hecke algebra ${cal H}_N(q=1)$. We show in the case of the reflection algebra that there exists a "boundary" finite sub-algebra for some special choice of "boundary" elements of the $B$-type Hecke algebra ${cal B}_N(q=1, Q)$. We also show the key proposition that the associated double row transfer matrix is essentially expressed in terms of the elements of the $B$-type Hecke algebra. This is one of the fundamental results of this investigation together with the proof of the duality between the boundary finite subalgebra and the $B$-type Hecke algebra. These are universal statements that largely generalize previous relevant findings, and also allow the investigation of the symmetries of the double row transfer matrix.

This is an expanded version of the talk given be the first author at the conference "Topology, Geometry, and Dynamics: Rokhlin - 100". The purpose of this talk was to explain our current results on classification of rational symplectic 4-manifolds equipped with an anti-symplectic involution. Detailed exposition will appear elsewhere.

Large transformer-based language models have been shown to be very effective in many classification tasks. However, their computational complexity prevents their use in applications requiring the classification of a large set of candidates. While previous works have investigated approaches to reduce model size, relatively little attention has been paid to techniques to improve batch throughput during inference. In this paper, we introduce the Cascade Transformer, a simple yet effective technique to adapt transformer-based models into a cascade of rankers. Each ranker is used to prune a subset of candidates in a batch, thus dramatically increasing throughput at inference time. Partial encodings from the transformer model are shared among rerankers, providing further speed-up. When compared to a state-of-the-art transformer model, our approach reduces computation by 37% with almost no impact on accuracy, as measured on two English Question Answering datasets.

The central importance of large scale eigenvalue problems in scientific computation necessitates the development of massively parallel algorithms for their solution. Recent advances in dense numerical linear algebra have enabled the routine treatment of eigenvalue problems with dimensions on the order of hundreds of thousands on the world's largest supercomputers. In cases where dense treatments are not feasible, Krylov subspace methods offer an attractive alternative due to the fact that they do not require storage of the problem matrices. However, demonstration of scalability of either of these classes of eigenvalue algorithms on computing architectures capable of expressing massive parallelism is non-trivial due to communication requirements and serial bottlenecks, respectively. In this work, we introduce the SISLICE method: a parallel shift-invert algorithm for the solution of the symmetric self-consistent field (SCF) eigenvalue problem. The SISLICE method drastically reduces the communication requirement of current parallel shift-invert eigenvalue algorithms through various shift selection and migration techniques based on density of states estimation and k-means clustering, respectively. This work demonstrates the robustness and parallel performance of the SISLICE method on a representative set of SCF eigenvalue problems and outlines research directions which will be explored in future work.

During VR demos we have performed over last few years, many participants (in the absence of any haptic feedback) have commented on their perceived ability to 'feel' differences between simulated molecular objects. The mechanisms for such 'feeling' are not entirely clear: observing from outside VR, one can see that there is nothing physical for participants to 'feel'. Here we outline exploratory user studies designed to evaluate the extent to which participants can distinguish quantitative differences in the flexibility of VR-simulated molecular objects. The results suggest that an individual's capacity to detect differences in molecular flexibility is enhanced when they can interact with and manipulate the molecules, as opposed to merely observing the same interaction. Building on these results, we intend to carry out further studies investigating humans' ability to sense quantitative properties of VR simulations without haptic technology.

Learning-based techniques are increasingly effective at controlling complex systems using data-driven models. However, most work done so far has focused on learning individual tasks or control laws. Hence, it is still a largely unaddressed research question how multiple tasks can be learned efficiently and simultaneously on the same system. In particular, no efficient state space exploration schemes have been designed for multi-task control settings. Using this research gap as our main motivation, we present an algorithm that approximates the smallest data set that needs to be collected in order to achieve high control performance for multiple learning-based control laws. We describe system uncertainty using a probabilistic Gaussian process model, which allows us to quantify the impact of potentially collected data on each learning-based controller. We then determine the optimal measurement locations by solving a stochastic optimization problem approximately. We show that, under reasonable assumptions, the approximate solution converges towards that of the exact problem. Additionally, we provide a numerical illustration of the proposed algorithm.

Chest computed tomography (CT) becomes an effective tool to assist the diagnosis of coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19). Due to the outbreak of COVID-19 worldwide, using the computed-aided diagnosis technique for COVID-19 classification based on CT images could largely alleviate the burden of clinicians. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Feature Selection guided Deep Forest (AFS-DF) for COVID-19 classification based on chest CT images. Specifically, we first extract location-specific features from CT images. Then, in order to capture the high-level representation of these features with the relatively small-scale data, we leverage a deep forest model to learn high-level representation of the features. Moreover, we propose a feature selection method based on the trained deep forest model to reduce the redundancy of features, where the feature selection could be adaptively incorporated with the COVID-19 classification model. We evaluated our proposed AFS-DF on COVID-19 dataset with 1495 patients of COVID-19 and 1027 patients of community acquired pneumonia (CAP). The accuracy (ACC), sensitivity (SEN), specificity (SPE) and AUC achieved by our method are 91.79%, 93.05%, 89.95% and 96.35%, respectively. Experimental results on the COVID-19 dataset suggest that the proposed AFS-DF achieves superior performance in COVID-19 vs. CAP classification, compared with 4 widely used machine learning methods.

Selecting an appropriate model to forecast product demand is critical to the manufacturing industry. However, due to the data complexity, market uncertainty and users' demanding requirements for the model, it is challenging for demand analysts to select a proper model. Although existing model selection methods can reduce the manual burden to some extent, they often fail to present model performance details on individual products and reveal the potential risk of the selected model. This paper presents DFSeer, an interactive visualization system to conduct reliable model selection for demand forecasting based on the products with similar historical demand. It supports model comparison and selection with different levels of details. Besides, it shows the difference in model performance on similar products to reveal the risk of model selection and increase users' confidence in choosing a forecasting model. Two case studies and interviews with domain experts demonstrate the effectiveness and usability of DFSeer.

We consider the problem of protecting and manipulating elections by recounting and changing ballots, respectively. Our setting involves a plurality-based election held across multiple districts, and the problem formulations are based on the model proposed recently by~[Elkind et al, IJCAI 2019]. It turns out that both of the manipulation and protection problems are NP-complete even in fairly simple settings. We study these problems from a parameterized perspective with the goal of establishing a more detailed complexity landscape. The parameters we consider include the number of voters, and the budgets of the attacker and the defender. While we observe fixed-parameter tractability when parameterizing by number of voters, our main contribution is a demonstration of parameterized hardness when working with the budgets of the attacker and the defender.

Coordinating the operation of combined heat and power plants (CHPs) and heat pumps (HPs) at the interface between heat and power systems is essential to achieve a cost-effective and efficient operation of the overall energy system. Indeed, in the current sequential market practice, the heat market has no insight into the impacts of heat dispatch on the electricity market. While preserving this sequential practice, this paper introduces an electricity-aware heat unit commitment model. Coordination is achieved through bid validity constraints, which embed the techno-economic linkage between heat and electricity outputs and costs of CHPs and HPs. This approach constitutes a novel market mechanism for the coordination of heat and power systems, defining heat bids conditionally on electricity market prices. The resulting model is a trilevel optimization problem, which we recast as a mixed-integer linear program using a lexicographic function. We use a realistic case study based on the Danish power and heat system, and show that the proposed model yields a 4.5% reduction in total operating cost of heat and power systems compared to a traditional decoupled unit commitment model, while reducing the financial losses of each CHP and HP due to invalid bids by up-to 20.3 million euros.

Dialogue engines that incorporate different types of agents to converse with humans are popular.

However, conversations are dynamic in the sense that a selected response will change the conversation on-the-fly, influencing the subsequent utterances in the conversation, which makes the response selection a challenging problem.

We model the problem of selecting the best response from a set of responses generated by a heterogeneous set of dialogue agents by taking into account the conversational history, and propose a emph{Neural Response Selection} method.

The proposed method is trained to predict a coherent set of responses within a single conversation, considering its own predictions via a curriculum training mechanism.

Our experimental results show that the proposed method can accurately select the most appropriate responses, thereby significantly improving the user experience in dialogue systems.

I am back in the collecting game. After several months of work and keeping an eye on deals, I am now inching closer toward 100 titles and have built a pretty nice 4K UHD collection. It started with my first DVD…