As a firm, we strive to inspire people to be the best they can be, both personally and professionally. To help empower our employees’ overall health and well-being, each year Anders has a Wellness Initiative that focuses on helping improve… Read More

The post How Anders is Focused on a New Decade of Wellness in 2020 appeared first on Anders CPAs.

Working within a tight budget can cause some not-for-profit organizations to neglect their financial reporting. Office managers may be assigned to do the bookkeeping, but don’t have the time or expertise to do the technical accounting. Having accounting and financial… Read More

The post How Not-for-Profits Can Focus on the Mission, Not the Financials appeared first on Anders CPAs.

Enhances the airline's digital transformation strategy and streamlines compliance reporting

Native cloud platform vital to bank's global digital strategy

The share of smartphones priced below Rs 5000, categorized as entry-level, has trailed from 12% in 2017 to 4% in 2019, whereas, for those priced between Rs 5000-Rs 10,000, categorized as basic, it has fallen from 45% to 42%.

Zuckerberg decided to go visit the startup's headquarters after loving his first demo with Oculus' virtual reality headset in Facebook's office.

Any investment decision during this period should be made factoring in the short-term goals of an individual.

Can't be in lockdown forever, have to focus both on lives and livelihoods: Raghuram Rajan

The metal gained about 2% on Thursday on the back of bleak US economic data.

Amazon Fire TV Stick is a content streaming device that plugs into an HDTV and lets customers access Prime Video and other OTT services such as Netflix and Hotstar.

The Securities and Exchange Commission's Investor Advisory Committee will hold a public meeting on May 4, 2020, by remote means.  The meeting will begin at 2 p.m. ET, is open to the public via live webcast, and will be archived…

Keeneland's four auctions on the calendar are tentpoles of the bloodstock industry, but BloodHorse reports that the growing online auction space spurred by social distancing has the company testing out web-based platforms for a year-round marketplace. Over 40 consignors and buyers took part in a recent simulated online auction hosted by Keeneland to test the […]

The post Keeneland Conducts Focus Group Tests For Virtual Auctions appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.

A reassessment of the relationship is due, but now the world must work to fight COVID-19.

The decision to shelve detailed advice from the nation's top disease control experts for reopening communities during the coronavirus pandemic came from the highest levels of the White House, according to internal government e-mails.

A new exhibit is on display at Williams’ historic train depot; and the eye-catching photographs were all taken by Arizona youth.  https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/2009-12-18_photos.htm

In late July 2010, 12 Arizona youth will get a once in a lifetime opportunity to explore Grand Canyon National Park with some of our country’s most enthusiastic outdoor leaders and photography professionals. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/20jul10_news.htm

Grand Canyon National Park staff recently hosted a focus group on accessibility and universal design in wayside exhibits. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/2010-11-29_focus_group.htm

A method of applying :focus to images.

This report examines the growth and development of the tourism industry in Hoonah, Alaska, and its effects on community life and resource use. The report describes the gradual development of tourism in Hoonah and presents resident perceptions of tourism's effect on the natural and social environment. A multisited ethnographic approach was used featuring indepth, open-ended interviews with local residents, tourism providers, business owners, and government officials. Data were analyzed using Ethnograph, a software program used to assist in coding data based on prominent themes. Results indicate that tourism has brought changes to the lives of Hoonah residents, particularly those relying on natural resources for everyday survival. Expansion of nature-based tourism in the area surrounding Hoonah resulted in conflicts between resource users. The growth of the charter fishing fleet led to competition with commercial fishers. Nature tour operators using remote recreation sites experienced conflicts with local hunters and fishers as well as other commercial guides. The development of a cruise ship destination on private land outside of Hoonah led to shifts in use of this historic site by local residents as well as in use of other private lands used for subsistence. Findings may enable Forest Service planners to identify factors involved in the relation between tourism growth and community well-being. It also may assist small southeast Alaska communities in decisionmaking related to tourism development.

As part of the 10-year socioeconomic monitoring of the Northwest Forest Plan, this report evaluates changes in Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) procurement contracting between 1990 and 2002 by asking, (1) How much and what kind of work did the Forest Service and BLM contract during this period, and (2) who received economic benefits from this procurement contracting? Procurement contracting is a particular focus of the socioeconomic monitoring because one expectation of the Northwest Forest Plan was that the Forest Service and BLM would create high-skill, high-wage private sector jobs in public land restoration through contracting to partially offset job losses in timber production, harvesting, and processing. This report finds that, to the contrary, the Forest Service reduced its contracting of land management activities on national forests in the Northwest Forest Plan area from a high of $103 million in 1991 to a low of $33 million in 2002. By contrast, BLM spending was fairly constant at just under $20 million annually. Both the Forest Service and the BLM changed the type of activities that they contracted, shifting from activities associated with intensive forest management such as tree planting in clearcuts to activities associated with ecosystem management. Contractors located near national forests and BLM lands and rural communities captured a similar proportion of contracts in both the earlier and later parts of the study period. However, the significant decline in Forest Service contract spending resulted in considerable decline in the amount of money flowing to rural communities through contracting. Thus, it is unlikely that federal land management contracting created a net increase in jobs to replace jobs lost in mills and logging operations in public lands communities.

An NHL NETWORK documentary on the 50th anniversary of the BOSTON BRUINS' 1970 STANLEY CUP championship is narrated by DROPKICK MURPHYS founder KEN CASEY. "THE 1970 BRUINS: BIG, BAD … more

In an effort to raise money for LOUISIANA musicians who have been devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic, EAGLE ROCK ENTERTAINMENT and filmmaker MICHAEL MURPHY are releasing the new … more

The focus of JACOBS MEDIA President FRED JACOBS' blog is simple and to the point as he writes: "Welcome to BIZARRO WORLD! "If you were a reader of SUPERMAN comics back in the … more

DALLAS, March 24, 2020 — As part of its global response to the growing COVID-19 pandemic, the American Heart Association, the world’s leading voluntary organization focused on heart and brain health and research, is committing  $2.5 million to research...

DALLAS, April 2, 2020 – The American Heart Association — the world’s leading voluntary organization dedicated to a world of longer, healthier lives — announced today more than $14 million in scientific research grants are being awarded to four...

Statements Highlights: Adverse social factors, such as insurance status, food insecurity, lack of funds for medication and others, may lead to worse heart failure outcomes. Caregiving by family and friends of people with heart failure is increasingly...

Thanks to enough people following guidelines on social distancing and avoiding large gatherings, Gov. Kim Reynolds said Thursday the state is able to shift its COVID-19 focus from mitigation...

Immigrants have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19 pandemic. They’re more likely than native-born Americans to be laboring to keep our essential services running, especially in the...

Watch my video on how I’m changing my approach with Thesis to include a lot more Focus. When I launched Thesis 2 in October of 2012, my goal was to create something that could serve as the foundation for any WordPress design. That’s why I spent the next 2 years working on Skins, which are […]

I am a longtime resident of Johnson County, currently in my 25th year of law enforcement. I worked for the Coralville Police Department in the late 1990’s and transferred to the Cedar Rapids Police Department in 1999 where I am a sergeant of the patrol division. I have degrees in criminal justice and organizational leadership and have advanced leadership training from Northwestern University in the School of Police Staff and Command.

Working in the second-largest city in the state has offered me many opportunities to lead. I have taught in the police academy and defensive tactics and as a field training instructor. I was the director of the Eastern Iowa Heroin Initiative, where I founded CRUSH of Iowa (Community Resources United to Stop Heroin). CRUSH is a community-based, grassroots organization helping all those affected by substance abuse disorder.

My passion has been community outreach. Currently I am a member of the Johnson County Human Trafficking Coalition and the Johnson County Prevention Partnership. Through these partnerships I will create a criminal interdiction team to fight the trafficking of humans, weapons and narcotics.

As sheriff, my top three concerns are substance abuse, mental health and human trafficking. I believe in creating long-lasting relationships with the community. I believe in common sense solutions without the haze of political bias. I believe that every citizen has a voice and should be heard. I believe in building a proactive and progressive law enforcement agency that serves with professionalism, compassion and dedication to the citizens. I believe we need to place the community back into community policing.

I am ready to be sheriff of Johnson County. I am a proven leader who is determined to build bridges with the citizens of the county and lead with accountability, trust and transparency. I will fight for all of Johnson County as sheriff because I have done so all of my life. This election is not just about me, it is about us. We, together, will make a positive impact on Johnson County. The status quo is not working. It’s time for change!

I would love to have your vote on June 2. We work better when we work together. People before politics!

Al Fear is a candidate in the Democratic primary for Johnson County sheriff. alfearforsheriff.com

Immigrants have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19 pandemic. They’re more likely than native-born Americans to be laboring to keep our essential services running, especially in the food processing sector that has been ravaged by the pandemic.

And yet immigrants living here illegally — including many food industry workers, their family members and people who have been living here since they were children — do not get the same coronavirus relief that legal citizens do, such as the $1,200 federal payment millions of Americans are receiving.

To remedy the situation, Iowa could coordinate direct cash payments to undocumented immigrants who were left out of the federal program. California announced such a program last month, offering $500 payments to thousands of undocumented Californians.

The public health crisis is tightly bound to the immigration crisis. It has exposed disparities in the workforce and also given rise to protectionists who want to restrict migration.

Iowa’s meat processing industry has been slammed by the virus, with at least one plant in Iowa reporting more than half of its workers have tested positive. Those production lines are heavily populated by immigrants. Well over 1,000 combined cases have been reported at four major packing facilities.

Nationally, 28 percent of agriculture workers and 29 percent of food processing workers are foreign-born, according to the pro-immigration New American Economy Research Fund.

Most immigrant workers have legal status, but many don’t. Some of those who are legal have family members who are undocumented. An influx of cash would help bring some stability to struggling families so they can weather the crisis.

At the same time we are asking essential workers to risk their health to sustain us, the anti-immigration lobby has used the pandemic as an opportunity to ramp up their campaign to cut off the flow of workers across borders. As one recent example, four GOP senators — including Iowa’s Sen. Chuck Grassley — sent a letter this week to the Trump administration, asking for guest worker visas to be suspended until next year.

In the pandemic, the idea of giving people money quickly gained political support. Direct payments are not mucked up by the corporate cronyism that plagues traditional economic development, a la checks to companies and targeted tax breaks. When politicians and bureaucrats pick certain businesses to stimulate, they do a bad job.

As long as the government is doing stimulus, the best avenue is writing checks to individuals. People need to buy stuff and as long as the economy limps on, they can buy stuff with money. Immigrants are people, even if they came here illegally. They are also workers, caretakers and taxpayers.

Direct payments would not be a special kickback or a reward for people living in the country illegally. It would be just like the $1,200 direct deposit I got from the government. It comes with a recognition that they are the same as us, important contributors of our culture and economy who are victims of an unworkable legal system.

If the federal government won’t do it, Iowa should.

adam.sullivan@thegazette.com; (319) 339-3156

Thanks to enough people following guidelines on social distancing and avoiding large gatherings, Gov. Kim Reynolds said Thursday the state is able to shift its COVID-19 focus from mitigation strategies to managing the impact on Iowans.

Even as the state Department of Public Health reported 655 new cases and 12 more deaths, Reynolds said Iowa is successfully dealing with the disease, which has claimed 231 lives in less than two months.

As she continues to allow more businesses to partially reopen, Reynolds said credit goes to Iowans for responding to targeted mitigation efforts to slow the spread of COVID-19 and prevent health care systems from being overwhelmed.

“I’m proud to say that Iowans do what they always do and they responded,” she said during her daily news conference Thursday. “So since we’ve kind of really accomplished what we were trying to do ... now we have shifted our focus from mitigation and resources to managing and containing virus activity as we begin to open Iowa back up.”

That means that beginning Friday, dentists may resume providing services and campgrounds, drive-in movie theaters, tanning facilities and medical spas all may reopen statewide, but with restrictions.

Her latest proclamation also relaxes mitigation strategies in the 22 counties that remain under more strict orders because the virus is more widespread there.

In those 22 counties, beginning Friday, malls and retail stores may reopen provided they operate at no more than 50 percent of capacity and take other steps, and fitness centers may reopen for appointments only.

In a statement, Coralville’s Coral Ridge Mall said it would reopen under those conditions starting at 11 a.m. Saturday. Shoppers there should expect to see hand-sanitizing stations, frequent cleanings and social distancing directions among other precautions.

“As Coral Ridge Mall prepares for this ‘new normal,’ we are thankful for the opportunity to reopen our doors and look forward to welcoming guests back into the shopping center,” senior general manager Monica Nadeau said in a statement.

Representatives of another large mall in the Corridor — Lindale Mall in Cedar Rapids — did not return calls Thursday for comment on its plans.

The governor’s new guidelines are in effect until May 15 unless she changes them. Data about COVID-19 will continue to drive her decisions about reopening the state economy “in a responsible manner,” Reynolds said.

“Just as we can’t stop the virus completely, we also can’t keep businesses closed and our life restricted indefinitely,” she said.

According to the state’s newest version of its COVID-19 dashboard, at coronavirus.iowa.gov, 31 people were admitted to hospitals in the previous 24 hours, bringing the total to 417 with 107 on ventilators and 151 in intensive care.

There have been 66,427 people tested, with 16.6 percent of them testing positive for a total of 11,059. Another 4,266 people are recovering.

Although the number of Iowans dying and becoming infected with COVID-19 continues to increase, Reynolds, who met Wednesday with President Donald Trump and his coronavirus advisers, said she is proud of the state’s efforts.

“We are leading, and we’re leading by example. And we’re going to continue to lead,” she said. “We are in a pandemic. We have a rapidly changing environment. We are reacting and being proactive.”

That includes testing at hot spots, such as meatpacking plants, “so of course, our positive cases are going to increase,” she said.

Iowa’s COVID-19 response may not be perfect, Reynolds said, “but I think we’re doing everything we can to really take care of Iowans in a responsible way (and) also to get the economy up and going so Iowans can get back to work and we can do everything we can to get our life somewhat back to normal.”

Just as it will be up to business owners, churches and others to decide whether they are comfortable partly reopening, Reynolds said it will be up to Iowans to decide whether they want to venture out.

“Iowan to need to make those individual choices themselves,” Reynolds said. “They need to apply personal responsibility, take into account where they’re going, what they’re doing.”

Reynolds also said Trump asked Iowa Director of Public Health Caitlin Pedati to be a member of his coronavirus task force after Pedati briefed the president on Iowa’s efforts to mitigate COVID-19. However, later Thursday, White House officials told Bloomberg News Pedati is not “officially” a member of the task force, but may be consulted. The governor’s office declined to comment.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has announced $78 million for Iowa in reimbursement for costs associated with COVID-19. The funds will cover 75 percent of the eligible cost of personal protective gear and medical supplies and equipment during May and June.

In addition, FEMA has obligated $44 million for similar costs in March and April; $17 million to cover deployment of the National Guard; $4 million to reimburse the state for costs associated with its response; and $4.2 million for the use of up to 20 beds at U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs facilities.

Comments: (319) 398-8375; james.lynch@thegazette.com

As everyone has made the temporary shift to WFH (work from home), many are surrounded by distractions. The 9 ways to focus a wandering mind infographic originally from On Stride Financial in the UK and now published on Headway Capital, offers simple ways to help you refocus.

It’s probably no surprise that the human mind has a tendency to wander. Scientific research has discovered that this trait is almost ubiquitous among humans, and most of us experience it regularly..

Constant mind wandering is a source of frustration for many people. In their study “A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind,” researchers found that that experiencing a regular lack of concentration has a negative impact on overall mood and state of mind. In short, people were less happy when their minds wandered.

Luckily, research into ways of combating this phenomenon is also plentiful. And while we may never be able to eliminate our mind’s propensity for wandering, there are lots of simple techniques that can help improve concentration and focus.

Next time you’re feeling a little distracted, try out some of these techniques and see if you can bring your mind back on task.

A little text-heavy design, but the illustrations help with each section. The comprehensive sources help establish the credibility of the information, and the infographic landing page includes clickable links to all of the source material. Nice touch!

Found on Creative Bloq

Environmental activist and Academy Award®-winning actor Leonardo DiCaprio and Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Fisher Stevens premier their documentary film, Before the Flood, a compelling account of the powerful changes occurring on our planet due to climate change. Before the Flood will … Continue reading →

Representation learning is a critical ingredient for natural language processing systems. Recent Transformer language models like BERT learn powerful textual representations, but these models are targeted towards token- and sentence-level training objectives and do not leverage information on inter-document relatedness, which limits their document-level representation power. For applications on scientific documents, such as classification and recommendation, the embeddings power strong performance on end tasks. We propose SPECTER, a new method to generate document-level embedding of scientific documents based on pretraining a Transformer language model on a powerful signal of document-level relatedness: the citation graph. Unlike existing pretrained language models, SPECTER can be easily applied to downstream applications without task-specific fine-tuning. Additionally, to encourage further research on document-level models, we introduce SciDocs, a new evaluation benchmark consisting of seven document-level tasks ranging from citation prediction, to document classification and recommendation. We show that SPECTER outperforms a variety of competitive baselines on the benchmark.

Previous methods on estimating detailed human depth often require supervised training with `ground truth' depth data. This paper presents a self-supervised method that can be trained on YouTube videos without known depth, which makes training data collection simple and improves the generalization of the learned network. The self-supervised learning is achieved by minimizing a photo-consistency loss, which is evaluated between a video frame and its neighboring frames warped according to the estimated depth and the 3D non-rigid motion of the human body. To solve this non-rigid motion, we first estimate a rough SMPL model at each video frame and compute the non-rigid body motion accordingly, which enables self-supervised learning on estimating the shape details. Experiments demonstrate that our method enjoys better generalization and performs much better on data in the wild.

Inspired by Bitcoin, many different kinds of cryptocurrencies based on blockchain technology have turned up on the market. Due to the special structure of the blockchain, it has been deemed impossible to directly trade between traditional currencies and cryptocurrencies or between different types of cryptocurrencies. Generally, trading between different currencies is conducted through a centralized third-party platform. However, it has the problem of a single point of failure, which is vulnerable to attacks and thus affects the security of the transactions. In this paper, we propose a distributed cryptocurrency trading scheme to solve the problem of centralized exchanges, which can achieve trading between different types of cryptocurrencies. Our scheme is implemented with smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain and deployed on the Ethereum test network. We not only implement transactions between individual users, but also allow transactions between multiple users. The experimental result proves that the cost of our scheme is acceptable.

A coalition of immigrant-focused organizations has created the Spokane Relief Fund for Undocumented Immigrants, in order to help families who are unable to access federal aid during the coronavirus shutdowns. The partners sponsoring the work include the Spokane Immigrant Rights Coalition (SIRC), the Hispanic Business and Professional Association, Latinos en Spokane, Mujeres in Action and Raiz.…

A computer-implemented method for classifying documents for data loss prevention may include 1) identifying training documents for a machine learning classifier configured for data loss prevention, 2) performing a semantic analysis on training documents to identify topics within the set training documents, 3) applying a similarity metric to the topics to identify at least one unrelated topic with a similarity to the other topics within the plurality of topics, as determined by the similarity metric, that falls below a similarity threshold, 4) identifying, based on the semantic analysis, at least one irrelevant training document within the set of training documents in which a predominance of the unrelated topic is above a predominance threshold, and 5) excluding the irrelevant training document from the set of training documents based on the predominance of the unrelated topic within the irrelevant training document. Various other methods, systems, and computer-readable media are also disclosed.

Provided are a method, computer program product, and system for generating a recommendation for transfer of ownership of content. At least one characteristic of a first owner is determined. At least one characteristic of the content is determined. A second owner for the content is determined based on the at least one characteristic of the first owner, and the at least one content characteristic. The recommendation for transfer of ownership is generated, based at least in part on the determination of the second owner.

Disclosed is a resin precursor composition including a bifunctional (meth)acrylate containing a fluorine atom, a bifunctional (meth)acrylate having a fluorene structure, and a photopolymerization initiator, the resin precursor composition in which the formation of precipitates during its storage is suppressed; and a resin obtained from the same. Specifically disclosed is a resin precursor composition that contains a bifunctional fluorine-containing (meth)acrylate (component A); a (meth)acrylate having a fluorene structure (component B); and a photopolymerization initiator (component C), wherein the component B includes a bifunctional (meth)acrylate having a fluorene structure (b-1) and a monofunctional (meth)acrylate having a fluorene structure (b-2) at a molar ratio (b-1):(b-2) of 90:10 to 70:30.

A photocurable material for sealing including (A) an oligomer having a weight average molecular weight of 10,000 to 30,000 and having (meth)acryloyl group(s), (B) a (meth)acrylate monomer, (C) a polythiol compound, and optionally (D) a carbodiimide compound enables the provision of a sealing material that has high compression recovery performance, high tensile strength and excellent flexibility, can have low hardness if required, and therefore has excellent sealing properties including air-tightness performance and water-proof performance and undergoes the formation of little surface tacks and the like.

A system and method may generate unit tests for source code concurrently with API documentation. The system may receive a source code file including several comments sections. Each comments section may include a description of a source code unit such as a class, method, member variable, etc. The description may also correspond to input and output parameters the source code unit. The system and method may parsing the source code file to determine a source code function type corresponding to the unit description and copy the unit description to a unit test stub corresponding to the function type. A developer or another module may then complete the unit test stub to transform each stub into a complete unit test corresponding to the source code unit. Additionally, the system and method may execute the unit test and generate a test result indication for each unit test.

A method of creating a datasheet includes obtaining integrated circuit data from at least one data source, creating a data structure including the integrated circuit data obtained from the at least one data source, and creating a datasheet using data contained in the data structure. The datasheet is created in a human-readable format.