The Securities and Exchange Commission today issued an order directing the equity exchanges and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) (the participants) to submit a new National Market System plan (NMS plan) with a modernized governance…

Horse Racing Reform, an industry initiative led by The Jockey Club and Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association, announced today the launch of an updated website, horseracingreform.org,designed to better inform and educate the general public, racing fans, and industry personnel on safety, integrity, and welfare matters in horse racing. The mobile-friendly site includes a range of new […]

The post Jockey Club, TOBA’s Horse Racing Reform Launches Improved Website appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.

Grand Canyon National Park Superintendent Steve Martin has announced that an Environmental Assessment (EA) for Supai Camp Improvements is now available for public review and comment. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/environmental-assessment-for-improvements-at-supai-camp-within-grand-canyon-national-park-available-for-public-review-and-comment.htm

Construction on Phase I of the improvements called for in Grand Canyon National Park’s South Rim Visitor Transportation Plan (SRVTP) continues to progress.  https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/news_2009-08-24_phase_i.htm

As the first phase of improvements called for in Grand Canyon National Park's South Rim Visitor Transportation Plan nears completion, the transition to the new South Entrance Road alignment will begin on Tuesday, September 8.  https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/news_2009-09-02_phasei.htm

A Finding of No Significant Impact was signed today for improvements to Supai Camp at Grand Canyon National Park. These improvements will be funded in part through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/news_2009-09-03_supai_fonsi.htm

The National Park Service (NPS) recently awarded the contract for construction of Phase II of the improvements called for in Grand Canyon National Park’s South Rim Visitor Transportation Plan to Fann Contracting, Inc. of Prescott, Arizona.  https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/news_2010-02-08_phase_ii.htm

Construction will begin next week near the Historic Grand Canyon Depot (Depot) to improve the area where Grand Canyon Railway passengers load and unload buses for tours within Grand Canyon National Park. The project was included as part of Grand Canyon’s 2008 South Rim Visitor Transportation Plan which addressed an array of transportation strategies to promote alternative travel modes to the park, reduce congestion, and better integrate connections between parking, transit, wayfinding and trip planning. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/work-to-begin-on-improvements-to-railway-tour-bus-staging-area-near-the-historic-grand-canyon-depot.htm

In order to facilitate the safe and timely completion of pavement preservation work, it will be necessary to temporarily close the North Rim Scenic Drive on two separate occasions. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/21jul10_news.htm

Phase II of the improvements called for in the South Rim Visitor Transportation Plan/Environmental Assessment (Transportation Plan) is now substantially complete; and Mather Point and the Visitor Center plaza areas have reopened for public use. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/2011-01-06_phaseii.htm

On Wednesday, June 15, Grand Canyon National Park will celebrate the completion of two years of improvements to the Mather Point and Grand Canyon Visitor Center area. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/2011-05-26_mather.htm

On Wednesday, June 15, Grand Canyon National celebrated the completion of two years of improvements to the Mather Point and Grand Canyon Visitor Center area, and hundreds showed up to join in the celebration. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/2011-06-21_event.htm

Grand Canyon National Park has begun improvements to Cape Royal Road on the North Rim. Beginning September 3, 2013 Cape Royal Road from Roosevelt Point to Cape Royal Point, at approximately mile 11.5, will be closed for repaving. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/road-improvements-to-temporarily-close-portion-of-cape-royal-road-on-the-north-rim-of-grand-canyon-national-park.htm

Construction will begin as early as January 2, 2018 at the Hermit interchange to resurface and improve the Hermit Road and Village Loop intersection. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/2018-south-rim-roads-improvement.htm

Another phase of the 2018 South Rim roads improvement project will begin the week of February 4, which will include full closures of several Grand Canyon Village intersections. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/february-4-detours.htm

The National Park Service (NPS) announced today that Grand Canyon National Park will modify its entrance fees beginning June 1, 2018 to provide additional funding for infrastructure and maintenance needs that enhance the visitor experience. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/2018-entrance-fee-changes.htm

Another major phase of the South Rim Roads Improvement Project is set to begin Thursday, April 19, when contractors pave Village Loop Drive. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/south-rim-paving.htm

The Arizona Governor’s Office of Highway Safety, along with the DUI Abatement Council, granted Grand Canyon National Park $10,000 to improve highway safety and stop impaired driving. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/grand-canyon-national-park-awarded-state-grant-to-improve-highway-safety-and-stop-impaired-driving.htm

Effectively addressing wildfire risk to communities on large multi-owner landscapes requires an understanding of the biophysical factors that influence risk, such as fuel loads, topography, and weather, and social factors such as the capacity and willingness for communities to engage in fire-mitigation activities.

Statement Highlights: To translate advances in scientific knowledge and innovations in stroke care into improvements in patient outcomes, comprehensive stroke systems of care must be in place to facilitate optimal stroke care delivery. New recommendations support policies that standardize the delivery of stroke care, lower barriers to emergency care for stroke, ensure stroke patients receive care at appropriate hospitals in a timely manner and improve access to secondary prevention and rehabilitation and recovery resources after stroke.

Research Highlights: The PCORnet Blood Pressure Control Laboratory, a new collaborative partnership, analyzed electronic health record data from nearly 1.5 million patients including almost 6 million ambulatory visits with blood pressure measures. ...

As we all know, SEO is a broad-spectrum umbrella term that is used to describe the measures taken to improve your website and help it to rank higher in search engine results for keywords and phrases related to your business. Local SEO is an effective way to optimize a business for the local audience while...

Recent advances in technology have helped both small and large companies to automate their business process to improve productivity. In fact, experts have also emphasized that productivity has stalled over the last couple of years. Numerous large-scale businesses also complained that their productivity was in decline despite implementing innovative workplace guidelines to improve the workflow. […] More

Back in late 2016, we introduced Speech Recognition at Auphonic. This allows our users to create transcripts of their recordings, and more usefully, this means podcasts become searchable.
Now we integrated two more speech recognition engines: Amazon Transcribe and Speechmatics. Whilst integrating these services, we also took the opportunity to develop a complete new Transcription Editor:

Screenshot of our Transcript Editor with word confidence highlighting and the edit bar.
Try out the Transcript Editor Examples yourself!

The new Auphonic Transcript Editor is included directly in our HTML transcript output file, displays word confidence values to instantly see which sections should be checked manually, supports direct audio playback, HTML/PDF/WebVTT export and allows you to share the editor with someone else for further editing.

The new services, Amazon Transcribe and Speechmatics, offer transcription quality improvements compared to our other integrated speech recognition services.
They also return word confidence values, timestamps and some punctuation, which is exported to our output files.

The Auphonic Transcript Editor

With the integration of the two new services offering improved recognition quality and word timestamps alongside confidence scores, we realized that we could leverage these improvements to give our users easy-to-use transcription editing.
Therefore we developed a new, open source transcript editor, which is embedded directly in our HTML output file and has been designed to make checking and editing transcripts as easy as possible.

• Edit the transcription directly in the HTML document.
• Show/hide word confidence, to instantly see which sections should be checked manually (if you use Amazon Transcribe or Speechmatics as speech recognition engine).
• Listen to audio playback of specific words directly in the HTML editor.
• Share the transcript editor with others: as the editor is embedded directly in the HTML file (no external dependencies), you can just send the HTML file to some else to manually check the automatically generated transcription.
• Export the edited transcript to HTML, PDF or WebVTT.
• Completely useable on all mobile devices and desktop browsers.

Examples: Try Out the Transcript Editor

Here are two examples of the new transcript editor, taken from our speech recognition audio examples page:

1. Singletrack Transcript Editor Example

Singletrack speech recognition example from the first 10 minutes of Common Sense 309 by Dan Carlin. Speechmatics was used as speech recognition engine without any keywords or further manual editing.

2. Multitrack Transcript Editor Example

A multitrack automatic speech recognition transcript example from the first 20 minutes of TV Eye on Marvel - Luke Cage S1E1. Amazon Transcribe was used as speech recognition engine without any further manual editing.
As this is a multitrack production, the transcript includes exact speaker names as well (try to edit them!).

Transcript Editing

By clicking the Edit Transcript button, a dashed box appears around the text. This indicates that the text is now freely editable on this page. Your changes can be saved by using one of the export options (see below).
If you make a mistake whilst editing, you can simply use the undo/redo function of the browser to undo or redo your changes.

When working with multitrack productions, another helpful feature is the ability to change all speaker names at once throughout the whole transcript just by editing one speaker. Simply click on an instance of a speaker title and change it to the appropriate name, this name will then appear throughout the whole transcript.

Word Confidence Highlighting

Word confidence values are shown visually in the transcript editor, highlighted in shades of red (see screenshot above). The shade of red is dependent on the actual word confidence value: The darker the red, the lower the confidence value. This means you can instantly see which sections you should check/re-work manually to increase the accuracy.

Once you have edited the highlighted text, it will be set to white again, so it’s easy to see which sections still require editing.
Use the button Add/Remove Highlighting to disable/enable word confidence highlighting.

NOTE: Word confidence values are only available in Amazon Transcribe or Speechmatics, not if you use our other integrated speech recognition services!

Audio Playback

The button Activate/Stop Play-on-click allows you to hear the audio playback of the section you click on (by clicking directly on the word in the transcript editor).
This is helpful in allowing you to check the accuracy of certain words by being able to listen to them directly whilst editing, without having to go back and try to find that section within your audio file.

If you use an External Service in your production to export the resulting audio file, we will automatically use the exported file in the transcript editor.
Otherwise we will use the output file generated by Auphonic. Please note that this file is password protected for the current Auphonic user and will be deleted in 21 days.

If no audio file is available in the transcript editor, or cannot be played because of the password protection, you will see the button Add Audio File to add a new audio file for playback.

Export Formats, Save/Share Transcript Editor

Save/Share Editor

The Save Editor button stores the whole transcript editor with all its current changes into a new HTML file. Use this button to save your changes for further editing or if you want to share your transcript with someone else for manual corrections (as the editor is embedded directly in the HTML file without any external dependencies).

Export HTML / Export PDF / Export WebVTT

Use one of these buttons to export the edited transcript to HTML (for WordPress, Word, etc.), to PDF (via the browser print function) or to WebVTT (so that the edited transcript can be used as subtitles or imported in web audio players of the Podlove Publisher or Podigee).
Every export format is rendered directly in the browser, no server needed.

Amazon Transcribe

The first of the two new services, Amazon Transcribe, offers accurate transcriptions in English and Spanish at low costs, including keywords, word confidence, timestamps, and punctuation.

UPDATE 2019:
Amazon Transcribe offers more languages now - please see Amazon Transcribe Features!

Pricing

The free tier offers 60 minutes of free usage a month for 12 months. After that, it is billed monthly at a rate of $0.0004 per second ($1.44/h).
More information is available at Amazon Transcribe Pricing.

Custom Vocabulary (Keywords) Support

Custom Vocabulary (called Keywords in Auphonic) gives you the ability to expand and customize the speech recognition vocabulary, specific to your case (i.e. product names, domain-specific terminology, or names of individuals).
The same feature is also available in the Google Cloud Speech API.

Timestamps, Word Confidence, and Punctuation

Amazon Transcribe returns a timestamp and confidence value for each word so that you can easily locate the audio in the original recording by searching for the text.
It also adds some punctuation, which is combined with our own punctuation and formatting automatically.

The high-quality (especially in combination with keywords) and low costs of Amazon Transcribe make it attractive, despite only currently supporting two languages.
However, the processing time of Amazon Transcribe is much slower compared to all our other integrated services!

Try it yourself:
Connect your Auphonic account with Amazon Transcribe at our External Services Page.

Speechmatics

Speechmatics offers accurate transcriptions in many languages including word confidence values, timestamps, and punctuation.

Many Languages

Speechmatics’ clear advantage is the sheer number of languages it supports (all major European and some Asiatic languages).
It also has a Global English feature, which supports different English accents during transcription.

Timestamps, Word Confidence, and Punctuation

Like Amazon, Speechmatics creates timestamps, word confidence values, and punctuation.

Pricing

Speechmatics is the most expensive speech recognition service at Auphonic.
Pricing starts at £0.06 per minute of audio and can be purchased in blocks of £10 or £100. This equates to a starting rate of about $4.78/h. Reduced rate of £0.05 per minute ($3.98/h) are available if purchasing £1,000 blocks.
They offer significant discounts for users requiring higher volumes. At this further reduced price point it is a similar cost to the Google Speech API (or lower). If you process a lot of content, you should contact them directly at sales@speechmatics.com and say that you wish to use it with Auphonic.
More information is available at Speechmatics Pricing.

Speechmatics offers high-quality transcripts in many languages. But these features do come at a price, it is the most expensive speech recognition services at Auphonic.

Unfortunately, their existing Custom Dictionary (keywords) feature, which would further improve the results, is not available in the Speechmatics API yet.

Try it yourself:
Connect your Auphonic account with Speechmatics at our External Services Page.

What do you think?

Any feedback about the new speech recognition services, especially about the recognition quality in various languages, is highly appreciated.

We would also like to hear any comments you have on the transcript editor particularly - is there anything missing, or anything that could be implemented better?
Please let us know!

No one can deny that UX (user experience) is the foundation of any website. This is the main reason why many website owners always look for ways to improve it. Some even spend a lot of money on design because of it. So, what is UX design exactly? And what is the difference between user […]

Are you thinking about running a business after getting a degree? This article will help you find the best ways to make your business skills more efficient and useful. The Best Way To Improve Your...

By University of Illinois Extension In an era of increasing energy prices, many Americans insulate and seal up their homes during the winter months. Although this can result in savings on the monthly power bill, sealing the home can concentrate … Continue reading →

Recent advances in deep learning have facilitated the design of speaker verification systems that directly input raw waveforms. For example, RawNet extracts speaker embeddings from raw waveforms, which simplifies the process pipeline and demonstrates competitive performance. In this study, we improve RawNet by scaling feature maps using various methods. The proposed mechanism utilizes a scale vector that adopts a sigmoid non-linear function. It refers to a vector with dimensionality equal to the number of filters in a given feature map. Using a scale vector, we propose to scale the feature map multiplicatively, additively, or both. In addition, we investigate replacing the first convolution layer with the sinc-convolution layer of SincNet. Experiments performed on the VoxCeleb1 evaluation dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods, and the best performing system reduces the equal error rate by half compared to the original RawNet. Expanded evaluation results obtained using the VoxCeleb1-E and VoxCeleb-H protocols marginally outperform existing state-of-the-art systems.

Human visual attention is a complex phenomenon. A computational modeling of this phenomenon must take into account where people look in order to evaluate which are the salient locations (spatial distribution of the fixations), when they look in those locations to understand the temporal development of the exploration (temporal order of the fixations), and how they move from one location to another with respect to the dynamics of the scene and the mechanics of the eyes (dynamics). State-of-the-art models focus on learning saliency maps from human data, a process that only takes into account the spatial component of the phenomenon and ignore its temporal and dynamical counterparts. In this work we focus on the evaluation methodology of models of human visual attention. We underline the limits of the current metrics for saliency prediction and scanpath similarity, and we introduce a statistical measure for the evaluation of the dynamics of the simulated eye movements. While deep learning models achieve astonishing performance in saliency prediction, our analysis shows their limitations in capturing the dynamics of the process. We find that unsupervised gravitational models, despite of their simplicity, outperform all competitors. Finally, exploiting a crowd-sourcing platform, we present a study aimed at evaluating how strongly the scanpaths generated with the unsupervised gravitational models appear plausible to naive and expert human observers.

We investigate sparse matrix bipartitioning -- a problem where we minimize the communication volume in parallel sparse matrix-vector multiplication. We prove, by reduction from graph bisection, that this problem is $mathcal{NP}$-complete in the case where each side of the bipartitioning must contain a linear fraction of the nonzeros.

We present an improved exact branch-and-bound algorithm which finds the minimum communication volume for a given matrix and maximum allowed imbalance. The algorithm is based on a maximum-flow bound and a packing bound, which extend previous matching and packing bounds.

We implemented the algorithm in a new program called MP (Matrix Partitioner), which solved 839 matrices from the SuiteSparse collection to optimality, each within 24 hours of CPU-time. Furthermore, MP solved the difficult problem of the matrix cage6 in about 3 days. The new program is on average more than ten times faster than the previous program MondriaanOpt.

Benchmark results using the set of 839 optimally solved matrices show that combining the medium-grain/iterative refinement methods of the Mondriaan package with the hypergraph bipartitioner of the PaToH package produces sparse matrix bipartitionings on average within 10% of the optimal solution.

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have shown promising results for end-to-end speech recognition, albeit still behind other state-of-the-art methods in performance. In this paper, we study how to bridge this gap and go beyond with a novel CNN-RNN-transducer architecture, which we call ContextNet. ContextNet features a fully convolutional encoder that incorporates global context information into convolution layers by adding squeeze-and-excitation modules. In addition, we propose a simple scaling method that scales the widths of ContextNet that achieves good trade-off between computation and accuracy. We demonstrate that on the widely used LibriSpeech benchmark, ContextNet achieves a word error rate (WER) of 2.1\%/4.6\% without external language model (LM), 1.9\%/4.1\% with LM and 2.9\%/7.0\% with only 10M parameters on the clean/noisy LibriSpeech test sets. This compares to the previous best published system of 2.0\%/4.6\% with LM and 3.9\%/11.3\% with 20M parameters. The superiority of the proposed ContextNet model is also verified on a much larger internal dataset.

When you’re trying to grow your business online, you must monitor vital metrics to ensure your business is growing. One important metric is your website’s conversions. Conversions help you determine if you’re driving success with your digital marketing campaigns. So, what is website conversion? How can you improve your website conversion rate? Keep reading to […]

The post What is Website Conversion? [+5 Ways to Improve Conversions] appeared first on WebFX Blog.

PROPHET OF DOOM…

Disclosed is a process for preparing an aryloxyalkylene amine compound via an aminoethylation reaction comprising: a) reacting an aromatic hydroxyl compound in the presence of a basic catalyst with a 2-oxazolidinone compound of the formula II to form an intermediate reaction product; wherein R3 is selected from the group consisting of hydrogen or lower alkyl having 1 to 6 carbon atoms, R4 is selected from the group consisting of hydrogen, straight or branched chain alkyl having from one to six carbon atoms, phenyl, alkaryl, or arylalkyl; and b) reacting the intermediate product of step a) with a polyalkylene polyamine.

A glass ceramic as cooktop for induction heating having improved colored display capability and heat shielding is provided. The cooktop includes a transparent, dyed glass ceramic plate having high-quartz mixed crystals as a predominant crystal phase. The glass ceramic contains none of the chemical refining agents arsenic oxide and/or antimony oxide and has a transmittance values greater than 0.4% at at least one wavelength in the blue spectrum between 380 and 500 nm, a transmittance >2% at 630 nm, a transmittance of less than 45% at 1600 nm, and a light transmittance of less than 2.5% in the visible spectrum.

According to one embodiment, a glass container may include a body formed from a Type I, Class B glass composition according to ASTM Standard E438-92. The body may have an inner surface, an outer surface and a wall thickness extending between the outer surface and the inner surface. The body may also include a compressively stressed layer extending into the wall thickness from at least one of the outer surface and the inner surface. A lubricous coating may be positioned on at least a portion of the outer surface of the body, wherein the outer surface of the body with the lubricous coating has a coefficient of friction less than or equal to 0.7.

A process for reforming hydrocarbons is presented. The process involves applying process controls over the reaction temperatures to preferentially convert a portion of the hydrocarbon stream to generate an intermediate stream, which will further react with reduced endothermicity. The intermediate stream is then processed at a higher temperature, where a second reforming reactor is operated under substantially isothermal conditions.

Aqueous copolymer dispersions for a variety of uses, including coating compositions or binders for plasters and paints, are disclosed. The aqueous copolymer dispersions may comprise one or more silicon containing compounds, in particular hydrolyzable silane compounds without any additional reactive group.

Systems and methods for static code scheduling are disclosed. A method can include receiving an intermediate representation of source code, building a directed acyclic graph (DAG) for the intermediate representation, and creating chains of dependent instructions from the DAG for cluster formation. The chains are merged into clusters and each node in the DAG is marked with an identifier of a cluster it is part of to generate a marked instruction DAG. Instruction DAG scheduling is then performed using information about the clusters to generate an ordered intermediate representation of the source code.

The present invention provides personal care compositions comprising a carrier and a mixture of essential oil components having specific levels of eucalyptol, terpene materials and auxiliary fragrance materials. The compositions herein gentle to skin and have a fragrance and activity similar if the composition were made using the pure extracted essential oil.

In a computer system that includes multiple nodes and multiple logical partitions, a dynamic partition manager computes current memory affinity and potential memory affinity to help determine whether a reallocation of resources between nodes may improve memory affinity for a logical partition or for the computer system. If so, the reallocation of resources is performed so memory affinity for the logical partition or computer system is improved. Memory affinity is computed relative to the physical layout of the resources according to a hardware domain hierarchy that includes a plurality of primary domains and a plurality of secondary domains.

Described herein are methods and compositions for enhancing pathogen immunity in plants and improving plant growth.

This invention describes the use of S-abscisic acid (S-ABA) and ethylene producing-agents such as ethephon to synergistically improve red color in grapes and to alter the sensory characteristics of wine.

The present invention relates to novel compositions comprising: a fungicide that inhibits mitochondrial respiration at the QoI site (QoI inhibitor), a contact fungicide, a demethylation inhibitor, and pigments, which are highly suitable for controlling unwanted phytopathogenic fungi. Moreover, the fungicidal compositions are able to control mold and fungus infection in grasses and in particular turf grasses.

A method is disclosed for generating a mass spectrum, e.g. for Fourier transform mass spectrometry, having improved resolving power. The method includes steps of acquiring a plurality of mass spectra from a mass spectrometer using image current detection determining the centroids of at least some of the peaks which have a sufficient signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio so that the variation of the centroid of each such peak from the plurality of mass spectra is significantly lower than the full-width at half-maximum, dM, of the peak in the m/z domain; and generating a histogram of the centroids determined from the plurality of acquired mass spectra thereby forming a composite mass spectrum. The resultant composite mass spectrum comprises peaks having full-width at half-maximum, dMC, significantly narrower than the peak width, dM, of the corresponding peaks in the plurality of acquired mass spectra.

A process for improving the hydrogen content of a synthesis gas stream to a synthesis loop, comprising the steps of: (a) removing a purge stream comprising hydrogen and hydrocarbons from a synthesis loop; (b) separating hydrogen from the purge stream; (c) passing the purge stream to a reformer and reacting with steam and oxygen to produce a stream comprising hydrogen and carbon monoxide; (d) subjecting the reformed reaction product stream to a shift reaction to produce a stream comprising carbon dioxide and hydrogen; (e) subjecting the product stream from the shift reaction to separation to separate hydrogen from carbon dioxide; (f) supplying the separated hydrogen to the synthesis loop; and (g) removing the carbon dioxide.

A method is described for improving the uniformity over a predetermined substrate area of a spectral response of photonic devices fabricated in a thin device layer. The method includes (i) establishing an initial device layer thickness map for the predetermined area, (ii) establishing a linewidth map for the predetermined area, and (iii) establishing an etch depth map for the predetermined area. The method further includes, based on the initial device layer thickness map, the linewidth map and the etch depth map, calculating an optimal device layer thickness map and a corresponding thickness correction map for the predetermined substrate area taking into account photonic device design data. Still further, the method includes performing a location specific corrective etch process in accordance with the thickness correction map.

A solution-processed organic electronic structural element has an improved electrode layer. Located between the active organic layer and the electrode layer there is either an interface or an interlayer containing a cesium salt.

A method and system uniquely capable of generating thermal bubbles for improved ultrasound imaging and therapy. Several embodiments of the method and system contemplates the use of unfocused, focused, or defocused acoustic energy at variable spatial and/or temporal energy settings, in the range of about 1 kHz-100 MHz, and at variable tissue depths. The unique ability to customize acoustic energy output and target a particular region of interest makes possible highly accurate and precise thermal bubble formation. In an embodiment, the energy is acoustic energy. In other embodiments, the energy is photon based energy (e.g., IPL, LED, laser, white light, etc.), or other energy forms, such radio frequency electric currents (including monopolar and bipolar radio-frequency current). In an embodiment, the energy is various combinations of acoustic energy, electromagnetic energy and other energy forms or energy absorbers such as cooling.