Here's a video segment on the fog machine Kit that we use. A transcription of the video is available after the jump.

Today marks the 75th anniversary of the Allied victory in Europe during World War 2

HUBBARD RADIO Classic Rock WDRV (97.1 THE DRIVE)/CHICAGO's morning guys SHERMAN & TINGLE partnered with the AMERICAN NURSES FOUNDATION to present “Healthcare Heroes," a … more

We join The Nature Conservancy as they search for eastern indigo snakes released at the Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines Preserve.

Statement Highlights: New developments in identifying and treating the increased risk of premature heart disease in children and teens with certain medical conditions associated with increased cardiovascular risk are discussed in a scientific statement from the American Heart Association. Obesity and severe obesity are now considered significant risk factors for an increased risk of cardiovascular disease in children and teens.

Research Highlights: Hypertensive pregnancy disorders, especially preeclampsia – may increase the risk of psychological development disorders and behavioral and emotional disorders in children. This is the first study to show that preeclampsia...

Chinese-Australian students have come under increasing scrutiny, raising debate about the role of culture, coaching colleges and notions of childhood in an increasingly competitive school environment. Are Chinese parents too pushy, their focus too narrow and the children too obedient? Or are there lessons to be learnt from Chinese students to ensure everyone shares in the success?

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.

CEDAR FALLS — Like many high school seniors across the country, Norwalk’s Bowen Born is unsure when he’ll be able to get on campus at the University of Northern Iowa and begin...

At the turn of the 20th century, a vaccine had been developed for smallpox, a virus that killed millions in the 1800s. Those who survived the disease were often left badly scarred or blind. The...

As death rates from COVID-19 rise, the state is beginning to open back up. And with that the expectation is that Iowans get back to work. Iowans who don’t go back to work will lose...

DES MOINES — More than 20 days after Iowa signed a $26 million contract with a Utah company to expand testing in the state, the machines the firm supplied to run the samples still have not...

IRENE ELIZABETH SCHINDLER
Marengo


Irene Elizabeth Schindler, 90, of Marengo, passed away Wednesday, May 6, 2020, at the Rose Haven Nursing Home in Marengo. Funeral services will be held at 2:30 p.m. Saturday, May 9, at St. John's Lutheran Church in Marengo, with Pastor Andrew Gray officiating. Burial will be in the Marengo Cemetery in Marengo. A memorial fund has been established. Kloster Funeral Home, Marengo, is assisting the family with arrangements.
Irene is survived by three nephews, Kevin (Pam) Dye of Cedar Rapids, John (Andi) Schindler of Marion and Bill Schindler of Cedar Rapids; two nieces, Deanne (Todd) Mumm of Parnell and Vera Dye of Williamsburg; a cousin, Will Klotz of Gibson; many great, and great, great-nieces and -nephews; and a sister-in-law, W. Irene Schindler of Marengo.
She was preceded in death by her parents; three brothers, Delmar, Calvin and Milver Schindler; and a sister, Shirley Dye.
Irene was born Jan. 10, 1930, in Marengo, the daughter of Charles and Katie (Klotz) Schindler. She graduated from Marengo High School in 1952. Irene worked at Collins Radio in Cedar Rapids from September 1952, until she retired in 1989 on the circuit board assembly line. She was a lifelong member of St. John's Lutheran Church and was a part of the quilting group. Irene enjoyed watching pro wrestling, going bowling, gardening baking, and was an Iowa Hawkeyes fan. She loved spending time with family and friends.
Online condolences may be left at www.klosterfuneralhome.com.

Note: This post is adapted from my original viral Twitter thread. Ffrom November 2003 through July 2005, I worked in the prepaid cell phone and phone card industry. Most of my work was in BFE meth towns and urban ghettoes. I learned things about the poor in America you won’t want to believe… But this […]

I was happy to read Joe Coffey’s article in Sunday’s paper (“The birth of news in Linn County”) about the history of newspapers in Linn County. But I was disappointed that Mr. Coffey did not include mention of the Metro Libraries’ historical newspaper databases. All of the papers mentioned and pictured in his article (and many more!) are available in scanned, full-text, searchable versions, through the websites of the Cedar Rapids and Marion Public Libraries. There is no charge to browse or search these delightful old editions, and in fact, you don’t even need a library card.

I encourage anyone with an interest in local history, or just with a little time on your hands, to look at some of these old newspapers. It’s a delightful adventure to read about lives in other times.

Jo Pearson

Marion

Republican voters in the Iowa 2nd District have a pretty simple choice on June 2.

On the one hand, there’s my opponent, Mariannette Miller-Meeks. She’s the establishment darling, and she’s got plenty of experience campaigning! This is now her fourth time running for Congress (She lost the first three times).

The problem with Miller-Meeks is that, like too many career politicians, she will say or do anything to get elected. Miller-Meeks claims to be pro-life, but here’s what she told a 2018 League of Women Voters candidate forum:

“I am pro-choice, but it’s a very sensitive issue. … Ultimately as a doctor and a health care provider, I think these are decisions that are best left to providers, to doctors, and to patients.”

After that video clip surfaced, I called on Miller-Meeks to either endorse the heartbeat bill — a bill that would ban abortion after the moment a baby’s heartbeat could be detected — or drop out of the race. She has no plans to do either, but in the meantime she’s going to continue to run ads telling you how pro-life she is!

Voters have another option on June 2. I’m Bobby Schilling. I’m a Catholic, pro-life, pro-family, pro-free market, former union member, Trump-supporting Republican. I own a few pizza restaurants in the Quad Cities area. And my wife, Christie, and I have — count ‘em — ten kids!

I served as a member of Congress after winning my race in 2010. I know how Congress works. And I know how to stand up for conservative principles even when liberals, RINOS and fake news journalists are trying to get you to vote the wrong way.

We need someone who can be tough in the face of political pressure and remain firm in their convictions. We need a fighter who is willing to work with President Donald Trump to make America great again, even if it means upsetting the establishment in Washington. Unfortunately, my opponent has shown herself to be very wishy-washy. We don’t know how she’ll vote. We just know she wants to be there. We can absolutely do better than that.

I want to go to Congress to fight for America — and fight for Iowa families. That’s why I’m in this. I hope you’ll consider voting for me on June 2.

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

As death rates from COVID-19 rise, the state is beginning to open back up. And with that the expectation is that Iowans get back to work. Iowans who don’t go back to work will lose unemployment benefits, leaving thousands of workers forced to expose themselves and their families to a potentially deadly virus, which experts say could have a second wave in the fall.

The rush to reopen the state has left many questions about the health and safety of Iowans unanswered. Among those questions, “Who will watch the children?” is especially crucial.

Schools are closed for the rest of the year. The future of summer camps is uncertain. Half of the child care centers in America currently are closed. Using elderly parents for child care can be risky since grandparents are in the age bracket with the highest risk for death and complications from COVID-19.

This leaves families, mothers especially, at risk of losing their jobs and unemployment benefits.

Nationwide, women still carry the heavy burden of child care, despite the fact that most families are dual income homes. Two-thirds of minimum wage workers in America are women which puts them at risk for unemployment and illness because of exposure to the virus.

Already, the child care gap for women contributes to the wage gap. Women earn 80 cents to the male dollar. And the inequality is compounded when segmented by race.

Congress has tried to pass a paid leave policy, but those attempts have failed. And Iowa’s governor has so far not commented on the looming child care crisis as she declares victory over the virus and opens up the state.

Before the pandemic, a quarter of Iowa families lived in a child care desert, and child care in the state does not even come close to meeting the national definition of affordable. Experts estimated that the Iowa economy loses more than $1 billion each year because of a lack of child care. And with the reality of the pandemic sinking in, it will only get worse.

The Department of Human Services received $31.9 million in aid from the federal CARES Act that was dispersed to child care centers to help care for the children of essential workers. But as more people go back to work, that aid will be spent very quickly. Leaving the children of everyone else without answers to this fundamental question. If Reynolds wants to open up the state, her team needs to formulate a comprehensive plan that addresses the lack of child care and offers paid leave and works to reopen child care centers.

But rushing to open an economy when there is no child care is an attack not just on families but specifically mothers.

(319) 398-8262; editorial@thegazette.com

I talked about Disabling search engine on search pages in a previous post using the meta tag. Today lets go over the web bots Cached copy of your site. If you are working on builder your blog, or have a temporary site up, use the following code: <meta name="robots" content="noarchive"> This will tell any bot […]

The post Disable caching of your site or post appeared first on WPCult.

At the turn of the 20th century, a vaccine had been developed for smallpox, a virus that killed millions in the 1800s. Those who survived the disease were often left badly scarred or blind.

The vaccine’s protection, though, lasted only five years and had to be renewed. And people forgot to do that, leading to occasional epidemics, including a serious outbreak on the Meskwaki Settlement near Tama.

In February 1901, three dozen Iowa communities reported smallpox outbreaks. When Des Moines reported 200 smallpox cases in late February, the mayor closed the schools and prohibited public gatherings. Still, no one died. That would not be the case at the Meskwaki Settlement.

On Oct. 22, 1901, an area resident told Dr. Benjamin Thompson of Tama, “I believe the Indians have the smallpox.”

Thompson went to the nearby Meskwaki Settlement, home to 309 people, to investigate.

He learned that an Indian from the Winnebago tribe had visited the settlement Sept. 23. He had become ill, but no doctor was called and he continued meeting with tribe members.

Two weeks later, the Meskwaki were becoming ill.

Thompson went back to the settlement with Dr. George Carpenter of Toledo. The first wickiup they visited had four active smallpox cases and three people recovering from the virus. Two Meskwaki who’d lived there had died.

The doctors found another five cases and were told of two other deaths.

The doctors that night reported to a joint meeting of the boards of health in Tama, Toledo and Montour.

William Malin, the Interior Department’s Indian agent for the settlement, insisted there was no problem. But after another medical visit to the settlement, the three cities quarantined themselves.

By Nov. 2, 70 Meskwaki had smallpox, and nine members of the tribe had died. Two weeks later, the totals had risen to 90 Meskwaki with smallpox and 35 deaths.

To complicate matters, the Meskwaki declined offers to go to the hospital, they refused smallpox vaccinations and they refused to stay on the settlement. If they became sick, they would hide from the doctors.

The Tama Herald reported, “It looks as though the disease must run its course through the tribe, carrying off the aged and the infirm and weakening the constitution of those who may survive.”

The Iowa governor appealed to Interior Secretary Ethan Hitchcock for authority to enforce the quarantine among the Meskwaki. Hitchcock complied, giving the state the authority to “take any necessary action.”

National Guard hospital tents and cots were shipped to the settlement. The Meskwaki were vaccinated, and they acquiesced to the quarantine.

The local towns began raising money for medicines and provisions not covered by the federal government.

Meanwhile, Congress appropriated $50,000 — more than $1 million in today’s dollars — to eradicate smallpox on the settlement. The bill gave the Interior Department the authority to quarantine the village and, if necessary, burn Meskwaki wickiups and clothing to halt the contagion.

The state of Iowa chipped in another $7,000 to burn the clothing, blankets, wickiups and other property belonging to the Tama tribe and to provide replacements for the Meskwaki.

The money paid for disinfectants — formaldehyde gas and corrosive sublimate fluid — to bathe tribal members and their dogs. Members of the tribe were forced to move to a camping ground while their village was decontaminated.

Malin, the Indian agent, reported to the Interior Department it took seven days to clean and renovate “the Indian camp.”

“During this process, a large number of the wickiups, where the disease had been prevalent, also large quantities of clothing, bedding and other infected property, were committed to the flames and new goods of similar character supplied,” he reported.

“Twenty-four new board houses, built of good lumber, and some 2,700 square yards of very heavy duck for tents, to those who preferred tents to houses, were given in lien of the wickiups destroyed. ... The Indians emerged from the trying ordeal through which they had passed and came out into the world again, after having been confined to the limited area of their camping grounds ... with a higher and better conception of the white man’s civilization.”

That assessment aside, the Meskwaki Settlement survived and grew. It now covers 8,000 acres and is home to 800 of the tribe’s 1,300 members.

It wasn’t until 1980 that smallpox was declared eradicated worldwide.

l Comments: d.fannonlangton@gmail.com

DES MOINES — More than 20 days after Iowa signed a $26 million contract with a Utah company to expand testing in the state, the machines the firm supplied to run the samples still have not passed muster.

A time frame for completing the validation process for the Test Iowa lab machines is unknown, as the process can vary by machine, University of Iowa officials said Friday.

The validation process is undertaken to determine if the machines are processing tests accurately. To this point, the lab has processed the Test Iowa results using machines the State Hygienic Lab already had, officials told The Gazette.

Running side-by-side testing is part of the validation process. The lab then compares whether the machines yield the same results when the sample is run, officials said Friday. The side-by-side testing means the Test Iowa samples are being run at least twice to compare results.

The state does not break out how many of the 331,186 Iowans who by Friday have completed the coronavirus assessment at TestIowa.com have actually been tested. Test Iowa was initiated last month to ramp up testing of essential workers and Iowans showing COVID-19 symptoms. The state’s fourth drive-though location where people with appointments can be tested opened Thursday at the Kirkwood Continuing Education Training Center in Cedar Rapids.

On Friday, Iowa posted a fourth straight day of double-digit deaths from coronavirus, with the latest 12 deaths reported by the state Department of Public Health bringing the statewide toll to 243 since COVID-19 was first confirmed March 8 in Iowa.

State health officials reported another 398 Iowans tested positive for the respiratory ailment, bringing that count to 11,457 of the 70,261 residents who have been tested — a positive rate of more than 16 percent.

One in 44 Iowans has been tested for COVID-19, with 58,804 posting negative results, according to state data. A total of 4,685 people have recovered from the disease.

During a Thursday media briefing, Gov. Kim Reynolds told reporters a backlog of test results that occurred due to validation of Test Iowa equipment had been “caught up,” but some Iowans who participated in drive-through sites set up around the state indicated they still were awaiting results.

Reynolds spokesman Pat Garrett confirmed Thursday that “a very small percentage” of coronavirus test samples collected under the Test Iowa program could not be processed because they were “potentially damaged,” resulting in incomplete results.

There were 407 Iowans who were hospitalized (with 34 admitted in the past 24 hours) for coronavirus-related illnesses and symptoms with 164 being treated in intensive care units and 109 requiring ventilators to assist their breathing.

Health officials said the 12 deaths reported Friday were: three in Woodbury County, two in Linn County and one each in Black Hawk, Dallas, Dubuque, Jasper, Louisa, Muscatine and Scott counties. No other information about the COVID-19 victims was available from state data.

According to officials, 51 percent of the Iowans who have died from coronavirus have been male — the same percentage that tested positive.

Iowans over the age of 80 represent 46 percent of the COVID-19 victims, followed by 41 percent between 61 and 80.

Of those who have tested positive, state data indicates about 42 percent are age 18 to 40; 37 percent are 41 to 60; 14 percent are 61 to 80 and 5 percent are 81 or older.

Counties with the highest number of positive test results are Polk (2,150), Woodbury (1,532), Black Hawk (1,463) and Linn (813).

Earlier this week, state officials revamped the data available to the public at coronavirus.iowa.gov, with the new format no longer listing the age range of Iowans who died from coronavirus and providing information using a different timeline than before.

The governor did not hold a daily media briefing Friday due to scheduling conflicts created by Vice President Mike Pence’s trip to Iowa. Garrett said Reynolds would resume her COVID-19 briefings next week.

John McGlothlen and Zack Kucharski of The Gazette contributed to this report.

Stories are everywhere. When they don’t exist we make up the narrative — we join the dots. We make cognitive leaps and fill in the bits of a story that are implied or missing. The same goes for websites. We make quick judgements based on a glimpse. Then we delve deeper. The narrative unfolds, or we create one as we browse.

Mark Bernstein penned Beyond Usability and Design: The Narrative Web for A List Apart in 2001. He wrote, ‘the reader’s journey through our site is a narrative experience’. I agreed wholeheartedly: Websites are narrative spaces where stories can be enacted, or emerge.

Henry Jenkins, Director of Comparative Media Studies, and Professor of Literature at MIT, wrote Game Design as Narrative Architecture. He suggested we think of game designers, ‘less as storytellers than as narrative architects’. I agree, and I think web designers are narrative architects, too. (Along with all the multitude of other roles we assume.) Much of what Henry Jenkins wrote applies to modern web design. In particular, he describes two kinds of narratives in game design that are relevant to us:

Enacted narratives are those where:

[…] the story itself may be structured around the character’s movement through space and the features of the environment may retard or accelerate that plot trajectory.

Sites like Amazon, New Adventures, or your portfolio are enacted narrative spaces: Shops or service brochures that want the audience to move through the site towards a specific set of actions like buying something or initiating contact.

Emergent narratives are those where:

[…] spaces are designed to be rich with narrative potential, enabling the story-constructing activity of players.

Sites like Flickr, Twitter, or Dribbble are emergent narrative spaces: Web applications that encourage their audience use the tools at their disposal to tell their own story. The audience defines how they want to use the narrative space, often with surprising results.

We often build both kinds of narrative spaces. Right now, my friends and I at Analog are working on Mapalong, a new maps-based app that’s just launched into private beta. At its heart Mapalong is about telling our stories. It’s one big map with a set of tools to view the world, add places, share them, and see the places others share. The aim is to help people tell their stories. We want to use three ideas to help you do that: Space (recording places, and annotating them), data (importing stuff we create elsewhere), and time (plotting our journeys, and recording all the places, people, and memories along the way). We know that people will find novel uses for the tools in Mapalong. In fact, we want them to because it will help us refine and build better tools. We work in an agile way because that’s the only way to design an emerging narrative space. Without realising it we’ve become architects of a narrative space, and you probably are, too.

Many projects like shops or brochure sites have fixed costs and objectives. They want to guide the audience to a specific set of actions. The site needs to be an enacted narrative space. Ideally, designers would observe behaviour and iterate. Failing that, a healthy dose of empathy can serve. Every site seeks to teach, educate, or inform. So, a bit of knowledge about people’s learning styles can be useful. I once did a course in one to one and small group training with the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. It introduced me to Peter Honey and Alan Mumford’s model which describes four different learning styles that are useful for us to know. I paraphrase:

1. Activists like learning as they go; getting stuck in and working it out. They enjoy the here and now, and are happy to be dominated by immediate experiences. They are open-minded, not sceptical, and this tends to make them enthusiastic about anything new.
2. Reflectors like being guided with time to take it all in and perhaps return later. They like to stand back to ponder experiences and observe them from many different perspectives. They collect data, both first hand and from others, and prefer to think about it thoroughly before coming to a conclusion.
3. Theorists to understand and make logical sense of things before they leap in. They think problems through in a vertical, step-by-step logical way. They assimilate disparate facts into coherent theories.
4. Pragmatists like practical applications of ideas, experiments, and results. They like trying out ideas, theories and techniques to see if they work in practice. They positively search out new ideas and take the first opportunity to experiment with applications.

Usually people share two or more of these qualities. The weight of each can vary depending on the context. So how might learning styles manifest themselves in web browsing behaviour?

• Activists like to explore, learn as they go, and wander the site working it out. They need good in-context navigation to keep exploring. For example, signposts to related information are optimal for activists. They can just keep going, and going, and exploring until sated.
• Reflectors are patient and thoughtful. They like to ponder, read, reflect, then decide. Guided tours to orientate them in emergent sites can be a great help. Saving shopping baskets for later, and remembering sessions in enacted sites can also help them.
• Theorists want logic. Documentation. An understanding of what the site is, and what they might get from it. Clear, detailed information helps a theorist, whatever the space they’re in.
• Pragmatists get stuck in like activists, but evaluate quickly, and test their assumptions. They are quick, and can be helped by uncluttered concise information, and contextual, logical tools.

An understanding of interactive narrative types and a bit of knowledge about learning styles can be useful concepts for us to bear in mind. I also think they warrant inclusion as part of an articulate designer’s language of web design. If Henry Jenkins is right about games designers, I think he could also be right about web designers: we are narrative architects, designing spaces where stories are told.

—∞—

Parkdale. Toronto, Canada 2019 Follow me @benhuang.photography

Ginza. Tokyo, Japan 2012 Follow me @benhuang.photography

Minamisoma, Japan 2014 Follow me @benhuang.photography

Ginza. Tokyo, Japan 2012 Follow me @benhuang.photography

Seagate. Rikuzentakata, Japan 2019 Follow me @benhuang.photography

Yonge Street. Toronto, Canada 2020 Follow me @benhuang.photography

Ikebukuro. Tokyo, Japan 2012 Follow me @benhuang.photography

Minamisoma, Japan 2014 Follow me @benhuang.photography

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...

Facebook Software Engineer and HipHop for PHP team member Jason Evans provides details on Facebook’s move to a new high-performance PHP virtual machine. Described by Evans is ”a new PHP execution engine based on the HipHop language runtime that we call the HipHop Virtual Machine (hhvm).” He sees it as replacement for the HipHop PHP Read the rest...

By Jessica Corbett Common Dreams “This is a wake-up call,” says one Australian marine biologist. “Given sea temperatures usually increase as we get towards March, this is probably conservative.” Delivering yet another “wake-up call” after recent studies have shown that … Continue reading →

By Jessica Corbett Common Dreams “This is a wake-up call,” says one Australian marine biologist. “Given sea temperatures usually increase as we get towards March, this is probably conservative.” Delivering yet another “wake-up call” after recent studies have shown that … Continue reading →

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.

It’s A Living Mural for X-Games China & Innersect

Tel Aviv University Press Release Smoking parents misperceive where and when their kids are exposed to cigarette smoke, Tel Aviv University researchers say Four out of 10 children in the US are exposed to secondhand smoke, according to the American … Continue reading →

This work has been motivated by recent papers that quantify the density of values of generic quadratic forms and other polynomials at integer points, in particular ones that use Rogers' second moment estimates. In this paper we establish such results in a very general framework. Namely, given any subhomogeneous function (a notion to be defined) $f: mathbb{R}^n o mathbb{R}$, we derive a necessary and sufficient condition on the approximating function $psi$ for guaranteeing that a generic element $fcirc g$ in the $G$-orbit of $f$ is $psi$-approximable; that is, $|fcirc g(mathbf{v})| le psi(|mathbf{v}|)$ for infinitely many $mathbf{v} in mathbb{Z}^n$. We also deduce a sufficient condition in the case of uniform approximation. Here, $G$ can be any closed subgroup of $operatorname{ASL}_n(mathbb{R})$ satisfying certain axioms that allow for the use of Rogers-type estimates.

In a multitype branching process, it is assumed that immigrants arrive according to a nonhomogeneous Poisson or a generalized Polya process (both processes are formulated as a nonhomogeneous birth process with an appropriate choice of transition intensities). We show that the renormalized numbers of objects of the various types alive at time $t$ for supercritical, critical, and subcritical cases jointly converge in distribution under those two different arrival processes. Furthermore, some transient moment analysis when there are only two types of particles is provided. AMS 2000 subject classifications: Primary 60J80, 60J85; secondary 60K10, 60K25, 90B15.

In this paper we study removable singularities for regular $(1,1/2)$-Lipschitz solutions of the heat equation in time varying domains. We introduce an associated Lipschitz caloric capacity and we study its metric and geometric properties and the connection with the $L^2$ boundedness of the singular integral whose kernel is given by the gradient of the fundamental solution of the heat equation.

In 1978, Dwight Duffus---editor-in-chief of the journal "Order" from 2010 to 2018 and chair of the Mathematics Department at Emory University from 1991 to 2005---wrote that "it is not obvious that $P$ is connected and $P^P$ isomorphic to $Q^Q$ implies that $Q$ is connected," where $P$ and $Q$ are finite non-empty posets. We show that, indeed, under these hypotheses $Q$ is connected and $Pcong Q$.

Differential machine learning (ML) extends supervised learning, with models trained on examples of not only inputs and labels, but also differentials of labels to inputs.

Differential ML is applicable in all situations where high quality first order derivatives wrt training inputs are available. In the context of financial Derivatives risk management, pathwise differentials are efficiently computed with automatic adjoint differentiation (AAD). Differential ML, combined with AAD, provides extremely effective pricing and risk approximations. We can produce fast pricing analytics in models too complex for closed form solutions, extract the risk factors of complex transactions and trading books, and effectively compute risk management metrics like reports across a large number of scenarios, backtesting and simulation of hedge strategies, or capital regulations.

The article focuses on differential deep learning (DL), arguably the strongest application. Standard DL trains neural networks (NN) on punctual examples, whereas differential DL teaches them the shape of the target function, resulting in vastly improved performance, illustrated with a number of numerical examples, both idealized and real world. In the online appendices, we apply differential learning to other ML models, like classic regression or principal component analysis (PCA), with equally remarkable results.

This paper is meant to be read in conjunction with its companion GitHub repo https://github.com/differential-machine-learning, where we posted a TensorFlow implementation, tested on Google Colab, along with examples from the article and additional ones. We also posted appendices covering many practical implementation details not covered in the paper, mathematical proofs, application to ML models besides neural networks and extensions necessary for a reliable implementation in production.

The connection between visual input and tactile sensing is critical for object manipulation tasks such as grasping and pushing. In this work, we introduce the challenging task of estimating a set of tactile physical properties from visual information. We aim to build a model that learns the complex mapping between visual information and tactile physical properties. We construct a first of its kind image-tactile dataset with over 400 multiview image sequences and the corresponding tactile properties. A total of fifteen tactile physical properties across categories including friction, compliance, adhesion, texture, and thermal conductance are measured and then estimated by our models. We develop a cross-modal framework comprised of an adversarial objective and a novel visuo-tactile joint classification loss. Additionally, we develop a neural architecture search framework capable of selecting optimal combinations of viewing angles for estimating a given physical property.

Recent single image unsupervised representation learning techniques show remarkable success on a variety of tasks. The basic principle in these works is instance discrimination: learning to differentiate between two augmented versions of the same image and a large batch of unrelated images. Networks learn to ignore the augmentation noise and extract semantically meaningful representations. Prior work uses artificial data augmentation techniques such as cropping, and color jitter which can only affect the image in superficial ways and are not aligned with how objects actually change e.g. occlusion, deformation, viewpoint change. In this paper, we argue that videos offer this natural augmentation for free. Videos can provide entirely new views of objects, show deformation, and even connect semantically similar but visually distinct concepts. We propose Video Noise Contrastive Estimation, a method for using unlabeled video to learn strong, transferable single image representations. We demonstrate improvements over recent unsupervised single image techniques, as well as over fully supervised ImageNet pretraining, across a variety of temporal and non-temporal tasks. Code and the Random Related Video Views dataset are available at https://www.github.com/danielgordon10/vince

Deep neural networks have exhibited promising performance in image super-resolution (SR). Most SR models follow a hierarchical architecture that contains both the cell-level design of computational blocks and the network-level design of the positions of upsampling blocks. However, designing SR models heavily relies on human expertise and is very labor-intensive. More critically, these SR models often contain a huge number of parameters and may not meet the requirements of computation resources in real-world applications. To address the above issues, we propose a Hierarchical Neural Architecture Search (HNAS) method to automatically design promising architectures with different requirements of computation cost. To this end, we design a hierarchical SR search space and propose a hierarchical controller for architecture search. Such a hierarchical controller is able to simultaneously find promising cell-level blocks and network-level positions of upsampling layers. Moreover, to design compact architectures with promising performance, we build a joint reward by considering both the performance and computation cost to guide the search process. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing methods.

We develop a supervised machine learning algorithm that is able to learn topological phases for finite condensed matter systems from bulk data in real lattice space. The algorithm employs diagonalization in real space together with any supervised learning algorithm to learn topological phases through an eigenvector ensembling procedure. We combine our algorithm with decision trees and random forests to successfully recover topological phase diagrams of Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) models from bulk lattice data in real space and show how the Shannon information entropy of ensembles of lattice eigenvectors can be used to retrieve a signal detailing how topological information is distributed in the bulk. The discovery of Shannon information entropy signals associated with topological phase transitions from the analysis of data from several thousand SSH systems illustrates how model explainability in machine learning can advance the research of exotic quantum materials with properties that may power future technological applications such as qubit engineering for quantum computing.

This work deals with the efficient numerical solution of the time-fractional heat equation discretized on non-uniform temporal meshes. Non-uniform grids are essential to capture the singularities of "typical" solutions of time-fractional problems. We propose an efficient space-time multigrid method based on the waveform relaxation technique, which accounts for the nonlocal character of the fractional differential operator. To maintain an optimal complexity, which can be obtained for the case of uniform grids, we approximate the coefficient matrix corresponding to the temporal discretization by its hierarchical matrix (${cal H}$-matrix) representation. In particular, the proposed method has a computational cost of ${cal O}(k N M log(M))$, where $M$ is the number of time steps, $N$ is the number of spatial grid points, and $k$ is a parameter which controls the accuracy of the ${cal H}$-matrix approximation. The efficiency and the good convergence of the algorithm, which can be theoretically justified by a semi-algebraic mode analysis, are demonstrated through numerical experiments in both one- and two-dimensional spaces.

The standard training algorithm in neural machine translation (NMT) suffers from exposure bias, and alternative algorithms have been proposed to mitigate this. However, the practical impact of exposure bias is under debate. In this paper, we link exposure bias to another well-known problem in NMT, namely the tendency to generate hallucinations under domain shift. In experiments on three datasets with multiple test domains, we show that exposure bias is partially to blame for hallucinations, and that training with Minimum Risk Training, which avoids exposure bias, can mitigate this. Our analysis explains why exposure bias is more problematic under domain shift, and also links exposure bias to the beam search problem, i.e. performance deterioration with increasing beam size. Our results provide a new justification for methods that reduce exposure bias: even if they do not increase performance on in-domain test sets, they can increase model robustness to domain shift.

Passive optical networks (PON) can play a vital role in data centres and access fog solutions by providing scalable, cost and energy efficient architectures. This paper proposes a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model to optimize the placement of virtual machines (VMs) over an energy efficient WDM-TDM AWGR PON based data centre architecture. In this optimization, the use of VMs and their requirements affect the optimum number of servers utilized in the data centre when minimizing the power consumption and enabling more efficient utilization of servers is considered. Two power consumption minimization objectives were examined for up to 20 VMs with different computing and networking requirements. The results indicate that considering the minimization of the processing and networking power consumption in the allocation of VMs in the WDM-TDM AWGR PON can reduce the networking power consumption by up to 70% compared to the minimization of the processing power consumption.