U.S. Senate

Buckley

Certification ensures laundering processes effectively remove pathogens from health care textiles

Oil On The Brain: Petroleum's Long, Strange Trip To Your Tank is a smart, surprisingly funny account of the oil industry — the people, economies, and pipelines that bring us petroleum, brilliantly illuminating a world we encounter every day.

Americans buy ten thousand gallons of gasoline a second, without giving it much of a thought. Where does all this gas come from?

Author Lisa Margonelli’s desire to learn took her on a one-hundred thousand mile journey from her local gas station to oil fields half a world away.

In search of the truth behind the myths, she wriggled her way into some of the most off-limits places on earth: the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the New York Mercantile Exchange’s crude oil market, oil fields from Venezuela, to Texas, to Chad, and even an Iranian oil platform where the United States fought a forgotten one-day battle.

In a story by turns surreal and alarming, Margonelli meets lonely workers on a Texas drilling rig, an oil analyst who almost gave birth on the NYMEX trading floor, Chadian villagers who are said to wander the oil fields in the guise of lions, a Nigerian warlord who changed the world price of oil with a single cell phone call, and Shanghai bureaucrats who dream of creating a new Detroit.

Deftly piecing together the mammoth economy of oil, Margonelli finds a series of stark warning signs for American drivers. Rave reviews for Oil On The Brain include:

“If you drive a car, you must read this book.” —Mary Roach, author of Stiff

“By giving voice to the people who are the links in the global oil chain, Margonelli invites us to leapfrog all the rhetoric, dry statistics, and dire pronouncements about oil in order to truly understand it.” —Fast Company

“Hugely enjoyable, compulsively readable, and brilliantly reported.” —Po Bronson, author of What Should I Do with My Life?

The PBS Newshour conducted an extensive interview with the author, which can be found here.

Transport Geographies: Mobilities, Flows And Spaces brings together a formidable range of expert insight to introduce the key ideas, concepts and themes of transport geography.

Using an issues-based, qualitative approach, the contributors feature a wide range of case-study material.

This work explores the relationship between transport geography and wider geographical concerns, as well as connections to other areas of study -- economics, engineering, environmental studies, political science, psychology, spatial planning, sociology and transport studies.

The book highlights the role of transport geography in globalization, and its interplay with economic, social and environmental geographies at a range of spatial scales. It reviews contemporary policy and the role transport geographers can play in policy debates.

Both empirically informed and theoretically robust, this compelling text shows the significance of transport in terms of the needs and demands of future travel.

Growing south from the plaza where the city of Los Angeles was founded as a tiny pueblo in 1781, the area now known as downtown L.A. was first developed in the late 1800s as a residential neighborhood, complete with churches and schools.

As the population surged at the turn of the 20th century, the downtown area was transformed into a busy business and entertainment center of shops, banks, hotels, and theaters.

The explosion of the postcard craze in the early 1900s coincided with this period of downtown's tremendous growth toward a formidable metropolis.

Early Downtown Los Angeles is a collection of vintage postcard images offers a glimpse into the changing city through the 1940s. Transportation is afforded its own chapter.

It includes rarely seen images of La Grande Station, the passenger terminal constructed by the Santa Fe Railroad in 1893. Santa Fe and Southern Pacific's competitive rail pricing fueled the real estate boom and unprecedented population growth throughout the region in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Early interior images of Union Station, Angels Flight, and other rail lines are of particular topical interest.

What a gorgeous embroidery! I would love to learn and have begun collecting just a few things. I really need to just do it!

These are gorgeous! I love crochet too--these are beautiful.

Vice President Stephen Lapierre represents developer Verdad Real Estate in acquisition of properties for two Popeyes restaurants

GIS has mostly been behind more popular buzzwords like machine learning and deep learning. GIS has always been around us in the background being used in government, business, medicine, real estate, transport, manufacturing etc.

The former U.S. Senate majority leader and U.S. envoy to Northern Ireland and the Middle East describes his approach to resolving disputes and fostering bipartisan compromise.

Dan McGinn, senior editor at Harvard Business Review, talks about what businesspeople can learn from how top performers and athletes prepare for their big moments. In business, a big sales meeting, presentation, or interview can be pivotal to success. The same goes for pep talks that motivate employees. McGinn talks about both the research and practical applications of mental preparation and motivation. He’s the author of the book, "Psyched Up: How the Science of Mental Preparation Can Help You Succeed." His article, “The Science of Pep Talks,” is in the July-August 2017 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Dodge Roll's Dave Crooks reveals how the studio has polished its bullet hell dungeon crawler Enter the Dungeon and revised its design to create spin-off dungeon climber Exit the Dungeon. ...

With Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service, Esri's development time has improved by 20%-50%

Gregg Ramsdell, 61, of Columbus, entered a guilty plea to one count of false statements and one count of violation of the Stolen Valor Act.

The Department of Justice today filed a Statement of Interest in a Georgia federal court to help ensure that uniformed service members serving their country away from home, their family members absent with them, and American citizens living overseas have the opportunity to participate fully in Georgia’s 2020 federal elections. The Statement of Interest is part of the Department of Justice’s continued efforts to enforce the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA).

Stephens, George May 20, 1953 - Apr 30, 2020 George L. Stephens, 66, Palmetto, Fl., died April 30, 2020. George was born and raised .....

Grand Canyon National Park and Yuntaishan Geopark from the Henan province of China renewed their five-year Sister Park Agreement on Tuesday, May 23, 2017 https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/sister-park-agreement.htm

First Forest Service researcher to receive honor.

The 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens produced a massive landslide and consequent pyroclastic currents, deposits of which blocked the outlet to Spirit Lake. Without an outlet, the lake began to rise, threatening a breaching of the blockage and release of a massive volume of water. To mitigate the hazard posed by the rising lake and provide an outlet, in 1984–1985 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers bored a 2.6-km (8,500-ft) long tunnel through a bedrock ridge on the western edge of the lake.

The proposal by GEOBROADCAST SOLUTIONS to allow FM boosters to transmit geotargeted programming like ads and news separate from the primary station's programming has gained the support of … more

Georgia State’s website represents its colleges and schools, centers of creativity and discovery, and provides visitors an opportunity to discover how Georgia State has a major impact on Atlanta, the nation and the world. Why it’s in the Showcase: This...

Research Highlights: A robot was used to treat brain aneurysms for the first time. The robotic system could eventually allow remote surgery, enabling surgeons to treat strokes from afar. Embargoed until 11:15 a.m. Pacific Time / 2:15 p.m. Eastern ...

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...

INDEPENDENCE
Georgia Lauridsen Gray, 89, died Thursday, May 7, 2020. White Funeral Home, Independence.

Missing Berlin’s gorgeous buildings again. ???? (at Berlin, Germany)

NATGEO KIDS Branding Redesign Proposal

abduzeedoMay 04, 2020

We introduce the conormal fan of a matroid M, which is a Lagrangian analog of the Bergman fan of M. We use the conormal fan to give a Lagrangian interpretation of the Chern-Schwartz-MacPherson cycle of M. This allows us to express the h-vector of the broken circuit complex of M in terms of the intersection theory of the conormal fan of M. We also develop general tools for tropical Hodge theory to prove that the conormal fan satisfies Poincar'e duality, the hard Lefschetz theorem, and the Hodge-Riemann relations. The Lagrangian interpretation of the Chern-Schwartz-MacPherson cycle of M, when combined with the Hodge-Riemann relations for the conormal fan of M, implies Brylawski's and Dawson's conjectures that the h-vectors of the broken circuit complex and the independence complex of M are log-concave sequences.

High dimensional expanders is a vibrant emerging field of study. Nevertheless, the only known construction of bounded degree high dimensional expanders is based on Ramanujan complexes, whereas one dimensional bounded degree expanders are abundant.

In this work, we construct new families of bounded degree high dimensional expanders obeying the local spectral expansion property. This property has a number of important consequences, including geometric overlapping, fast mixing of high dimensional random walks, agreement testing and agreement expansion. Our construction also yields new families of expander graphs which are close to the Ramanujan bound, i.e., their spectral gap is close to optimal.

The construction is quite elementary and it is presented in a self contained manner; This is in contrary to the highly involved previously known construction of the Ramanujan complexes. The construction is also very symmetric (such symmetry properties are not known for Ramanujan complexes) ; The symmetry of the construction could be used, for example, in order to obtain good symmetric LDPC codes that were previously based on Ramanujan graphs.

The main tool that we use for is the theory of coset geometries. Coset geometries arose as a tool for studying finite simple groups. Here, we show that coset geometries arise in a very natural manner for groups of elementary matrices over any finitely generated algebra over a commutative unital ring. In other words, we show that such groups act simply transitively on the top dimensional face of a pure, partite, clique complex.

Positive geometries encode the physics of scattering amplitudes in flat space-time and the wavefunction of the universe in cosmology for a large class of models. Their unique canonical forms, providing such quantum mechanical observables, are characterised by having only logarithmic singularities along all the boundaries of the positive geometry. However, physical observables have logarithmic singularities just for a subset of theories. Thus, it becomes crucial to understand whether a similar paradigm can underlie their structure in more general cases. In this paper we start a systematic investigation of a geometric-combinatorial characterisation of differential forms with non-logarithmic singularities, focusing on projective polytopes and related meromorphic forms with multiple poles. We introduce the notions of covariant forms and covariant pairings. Covariant forms have poles only along the boundaries of the given polytope; moreover, their leading Laurent coefficients along any of the boundaries are still covariant forms on the specific boundary. Whereas meromorphic forms in covariant pairing with a polytope are associated to a specific (signed) triangulation, in which poles on spurious boundaries do not cancel completely, but their order is lowered. These meromorphic forms can be fully characterised if the polytope they are associated to is viewed as the restriction of a higher dimensional one onto a hyperplane. The canonical form of the latter can be mapped into a covariant form or a form in covariant pairing via a covariant restriction. We show how the geometry of the higher dimensional polytope determines the structure of these differential forms. Finally, we discuss how these notions are related to Jeffrey-Kirwan residues and cosmological polytopes.

We observe that the DeTurck Laplacian flow of G2-structures introduced by Bryant and Xu as a gauge fixing of the Laplacian flow can be regarded as a flow of G2-structures (not necessarily closed) which fits in the general framework introduced by Hamilton in [4].

We introduce natural deformation classes of generalized K"ahler structures using the Courant symmetry group. We show that these yield natural extensions of the notions of K"ahler class and K"ahler cone to generalized K"ahler geometry. Lastly we show that the generalized K"ahler-Ricci flow preserves this generalized K"ahler cone, and the underlying real Poisson tensor.

When time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs) are solved numerically in a domain with curved boundary or on a curved surface, mesh error and geometric approximation error caused by the inaccurate location of vertices and other interior grid points, respectively, could be the main source of the inaccuracy and instability of the numerical solutions of PDEs. The role of these geometric errors in deteriorating the stability and particularly the conservation properties are largely unknown, which seems to necessitate very fine meshes especially to remove geometric approximation error. This paper aims to investigate the effect of geometric approximation error by using a high-order mesh with negligible geometric approximation error, even for high order polynomial of order p. To achieve this goal, the high-order mesh generator from CAD geometry called NekMesh is adapted for surface mesh generation in comparison to traditional meshes with non-negligible geometric approximation error. Two types of numerical tests are considered. Firstly, the accuracy of differential operators is compared for various p on a curved element of the sphere. Secondly, by applying the method of moving frames, four different time-dependent PDEs on the sphere are numerically solved to investigate the impact of geometric approximation error on the accuracy and conservation properties of high-order numerical schemes for PDEs on the sphere.

Domain of mathematical logic in computers is dominated by automated theorem provers (ATP) and interactive theorem provers (ITP). Both of these are hard to access by AI from the human-imitation approach: ATPs often use human-unfriendly logical foundations while ITPs are meant for formalizing existing proofs rather than problem solving. We aim to create a simple human-friendly logical system for mathematical problem solving. We picked the case study of Euclidean geometry as it can be easily visualized, has simple logic, and yet potentially offers many high-school problems of various difficulty levels. To make the environment user friendly, we abandoned strict logic required by ITPs, allowing to infer topological facts from pictures. We present our system for Euclidean geometry, together with a graphical application GeoLogic, similar to GeoGebra, which allows users to interactively study and prove properties about the geometrical setup.

Deep learning-based object detection and instance segmentation have achieved unprecedented progress. In this paper, we propose Complete-IoU (CIoU) loss and Cluster-NMS for enhancing geometric factors in both bounding box regression and Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS), leading to notable gains of average precision (AP) and average recall (AR), without the sacrifice of inference efficiency. In particular, we consider three geometric factors, i.e., overlap area, normalized central point distance and aspect ratio, which are crucial for measuring bounding box regression in object detection and instance segmentation. The three geometric factors are then incorporated into CIoU loss for better distinguishing difficult regression cases. The training of deep models using CIoU loss results in consistent AP and AR improvements in comparison to widely adopted $ell_n$-norm loss and IoU-based loss. Furthermore, we propose Cluster-NMS, where NMS during inference is done by implicitly clustering detected boxes and usually requires less iterations. Cluster-NMS is very efficient due to its pure GPU implementation, , and geometric factors can be incorporated to improve both AP and AR. In the experiments, CIoU loss and Cluster-NMS have been applied to state-of-the-art instance segmentation (e.g., YOLACT), and object detection (e.g., YOLO v3, SSD and Faster R-CNN) models. Taking YOLACT on MS COCO as an example, our method achieves performance gains as +1.7 AP and +6.2 AR$_{100}$ for object detection, and +0.9 AP and +3.5 AR$_{100}$ for instance segmentation, with 27.1 FPS on one NVIDIA GTX 1080Ti GPU. All the source code and trained models are available at https://github.com/Zzh-tju/CIoU

This paper proposes a faceted information exploration model that supports coarse-grained and fine-grained focusing of geographic maps by offering a graphical representation of data attributes within interactive widgets. The proposed approach enables (i) a multi-category projection of long-lasting geographic maps, based on the proposal of efficient facets for data exploration in sparse and noisy datasets, and (ii) an interactive representation of the search context based on widgets that support data visualization, faceted exploration, category-based information hiding and transparency of results at the same time. The integration of our model with a semantic representation of geographical knowledge supports the exploration of information retrieved from heterogeneous data sources, such as Public Open Data and OpenStreetMap. We evaluated our model with users in the OnToMap collaborative Web GIS. The experimental results show that, when working on geographic maps populated with multiple data categories, it outperforms simple category-based map projection and traditional faceted search tools, such as checkboxes, in both user performance and experience.

A Non-terrestrial Network (NTN) comprising Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites can enable connectivity to underserved areas, thus complementing existing telecom networks. The high-speed satellite motion poses several challenges at the physical layer such as large Doppler frequency shifts. In this paper, an analytical framework is developed for statistical characterization of Doppler shift in an NTN where LEO satellites provide communication services to terrestrial users. Using tools from stochastic geometry, the users within a cell are grouped into disjoint clusters to limit the differential Doppler across users. Under some simplifying assumptions, the cumulative distribution function (CDF) and the probability density function are derived for the Doppler shift magnitude at a random user within a cluster. The CDFs are also provided for the minimum and the maximum Doppler shift magnitude within a cluster. Leveraging the analytical results, the interplay between key system parameters such as the cluster size and satellite altitude is examined. Numerical results validate the insights obtained from the analysis.

[IMAGE-1] Harrison Ford has gone full Grizzly Adams and Buck the canine hero is fully CGI, 100-percent digital, not a scrap of real fur or dog farts about him. There is so much about this new umpteenth film version of Jack London's classic novel The Call of the Wild that is ready-made for meme-iriffic snarking.…

An independently functioning or centrally controlled wall light switch is configured to operate in normal mode and a Jewish holiday mode wherein the state of the light is fixed, regardless of the user's physical manipulation of the light switch. The control system automatically activates holiday mode by combining a geographically determined Jewish religious clock executed by software and hardware that utilizes the current time, date and geographical location of the apparatus in accordance with the Jewish definition of time and laws for calculating numerous religiously significant shifting daily points in time. The control system further incorporates several energy saving and preference modes by utilizing a particular day's calculated religious points in time in conjunction with holiday behavior patterns common to most Jewish families to provide the user with a greatly simplified means of programming an automatically adjusting on/off light timer and dimming overlay functionality during holiday mode.

An additive manufacturing method for forming nearly monolithic SRF niobium cavities and end group components of arbitrary shape with features such as optimized wall thickness and integral stiffeners, greatly reducing the cost and technical variability of conventional cavity construction. The additive manufacturing method for forming an SRF cavity, includes atomizing niobium to form a niobium powder, feeding the niobium powder into an electron beam melter under a vacuum, melting the niobium powder under a vacuum in the electron beam melter to form an SRF cavity; and polishing the inside surface of the SRF cavity.

Systems and methods are disclosed for evaluating cardiovascular treatment options for a patient. One method includes creating a three-dimensional model representing a portion of the patient's heart based on patient-specific data regarding a geometry of the patient's heart or vasculature; and for a plurality of treatment options for the patient's heart or vasculature, modifying at least one of the three-dimensional model and a reduced order model based on the three-dimensional model. The method also includes determining, for each of the plurality of treatment options, a value of a blood flow characteristic, by solving at least one of the modified three-dimensional model and the modified reduced order model; and identifying one of the plurality of treatment options that solves a function of at least one of: the determined blood flow characteristics of the patient's heart or vasculature, and one or more costs of each of the plurality of treatment options.

An injection molding system is disclosed that utilizes a melt channel wherein at least a portion of the melt channel has a noncircular cross-section for balancing shear in a melt stream of moldable material that flows therethrough. The noncircular cross-section of the melt channel portion may be, for e.g., capsule-shaped, extended egg-shaped, oval, teardrop-shaped, or peanut-shaped. A flow splitter is also disclosed that is positioned offset from a central axis of an upstream melt channel to protrude between inlets of respective downstream melt channels, where the upstream melt channel splits into the downstream melt channels, to thereby create a narrower inlet into one of the downstream melt channels and a wider inlet into the other of the downstream melt channels.

A location aware user interface on a wireless handset is described. The location aware user interface comprises a location module configured to transmit a location message to a remote server via a network. The remote server is configured to determine whether the wireless handset is within a geofence. The user interface further comprises a display module configured to display at least one content item associated with the geofence. The user interface also comprises an input module configured to receive a user-created content item and transmit the received user-created content item to the remote server. The remote server is configured to associate the content item with the geofence in which the wireless handset is located.

In general, the subject matter described in this specification can be embodied in methods, systems, and program products for identifying proximity of a mobile computing device to another mobile computing device. A computing system determines that a set of mobile computing devices are geographically proximate to a first mobile computing device based on identifying that each of the mobile computing devices received a first type of signal from an emitting device for which the first mobile computing device also received the first type of signal. The computing system determines a subset of the mobile computing devices that share a physical space with the first mobile computing device based on identifying that each of the mobile computing devices emitted a second type of signal that was detected by the first mobile computing device, or detected the second type of signal that was emitted by the first mobile computing device.

A vertical geometry light emitting diode is disclosed that is capable of emitting light in the red, green, blue, violet and ultraviolet portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. The light emitting diode includes a conductive silicon carbide substrate, an InGaN quantum well, a conductive buffer layer between the substrate and the quantum well, a respective undoped gallium nitride layer on each surface of the quantum well, and ohmic contacts in a vertical geometry orientation.

A geotextile container has a bag section, a cover section and a stuffing space. The bag section has a bag cloth, a bag non-woven fabric and a trapezoidal longitudinal section. The cover section is integrally connected with the bag section and has a cover cloth and a cover non-woven fabric. The stuffing space is formed inside the bag section and has a first margin portion. A longitudinal section of the stuffing space is trapezoidal. The first margin portion is formed at a side of a bottom of the stuffing space. The first margin portion can be immediately unfolded and contain filling materials once the geotextile container is projected into the sea.

A turbomachine blade or vane is made of composite material including fiber reinforcement obtained by three-dimensional weaving of yarns and densified by a matrix. The blade or vane includes a first portion constituting at least an airfoil exhibiting two faces each connecting a leading edge to a trailing edge, the first portion forming a single part with at least one second portion present only on one of the faces of the airfoil, the second portion constituting a portion of at least one of the following elements: a flowpath delimiting outer portion of an inner platform, an inner portion of an inner platform, a flowpath delimiting inner portion of an outer platform, and an outer portion of an outer platform, the portions of the fiber reinforcement corresponding to the first and the second portions of the blade being at least partially mutually imbricated, with yarns of the first portion of the fiber reinforcement penetrating into the second portion of the fiber reinforcement.

An X-ray arrangement is suitable to record absorption, phase contrast, and dark field images of an object. The visibility of low absorbing specimens is improved and required radiation dose is reduced. The assembly includes an X-ray source; two or more gratings; a position-sensitive detector with spatially modulated detection sensitivity; a recorder for recording the images; an evaluator for evaluating the intensities for each pixel to identify the characteristic of the object for each individual pixel as an absorption and/or a differential phase contrast and/or an x-ray scattering dominated pixel. Images are collected by rotating from 0 to n or 2n either the sample or the assembly. The gratings are produced with planar geometry. The X-rays pass through the gratings parallel to the substrate. The grating structures extend along the X-ray path which determines the phase shift. The attenuation of the X-rays caused by the grating structures is no longer given by the thickness, but by the length of the grating structures.