No salaries for Apr, May; hours flown-based pay for those operating cargo flights: SpiceJet to pilots

Amfi data released on Friday showed SIP inflows fell 3 per cent to Rs 8376.11 in April.

The Franklin Templeton Mutual Fund fiasco seems to have hit the debt mutual fund space very hard. The data released by Association of Mutual Funds in India or Amfi reveals that most debt mutual fund categories have witnessed outflows in the last month.

An individual looking to buy health insurance cover has to make two decisions. The first is whether the entire family needs insurance and the second is about the type of health policy to buy.

Flows into equity MFs drops 8.8% to Rs 6,026 cr in October: AMFI

FDI flows from neighbouring countries will be affected due to new screening rules: Shardul Shroff

Florida packs a lot of heat, and this is not a take on its weather! The beautiful state is home to numerous beaches, and theme parks, and is a place full of...

The country's largest domestic airlines had on Friday announced pay cut ranging between 5 and 25 per cent.

Coal India planned to auction 60% of its 75 million tonnes inventory by May-June following which four subsidiaries planned to offer 46 million tonnes under different e-auction schemes. CIL reduced floor price for bidding from 20-30% above notified price to the notified prices and bulk of the offer was to be for auctions allowing consumers to lift booked quantities over several months.

A Miami, Florida, business owner was sentenced to 24 months in prison today for failing to pay over employment taxes, announced Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Richard E. Zuckerman of the Justice Department’s Tax Division and U.S. Attorney Ariana Fajardo Orshan for the Southern District of Florida.

Document filed on September 19, 2019

• Plea Agreement

Two commercial flooring executives, Robert A. Patrey Jr. and Kenneth R. Smith, pleaded guilty for their role in an antitrust conspiracy to rig bids and fix prices for commercial flooring services and products sold in the United States, the Department of Justice announced. The defendants are cooperating with the Justice Department’s ongoing investigation.

Another Sankey diagram from a waste water treatment plant (WWTP). This one shows concentrations (of organic matter?) in dissolved and adsorbed phases in grams per day. Actual volume streams are not represented.

From the museum of Sankey diagrams comes this beautiful visualization of migration flows between Canadian provinces in the years 1956 to 1961. Sorry but I didn’t note the source… still wanted to share it with you.
[See image gallery at www.sankey-diagrams.com]
Unfortunately, flows are not to scale: compare, for example, the exits from the Atlantic provinces in the period (86,078 people) which should have an arrow similar to the inflow of 85,476 to British Columbia. Or look at the exodus from Ontario provice, which seemingly is larger than the influx to the provice (but in fact is smaller).

A comparison of the different pathways that municipal solid waste (MSW) is going in large metropolitan centres such as Toyko, Paris and Mexico City is presented in the article ‘La recogida de basura en Mega-ciudades: En el marco de la sostenibilidad’ by Fabian Tron. Available in Revista INVI v.25 n.70 12/2010 on Scielo in Spanish.
[See image gallery at www.sankey-diagrams.com]
While the data on waste quantities itself is quite old and dates back to 2005, I found the system how household waste is handled differently in these three cities quite interesting. To get an idea of the “weight” of the different pathways, I decided to do a remake of the three figures as Sankey diagrams. Here is the one for Tokyo.

[See image gallery at www.sankey-diagrams.com]
Flows are in 1000 tonnes (kt) per year. There is an informal sector (Economia Informal) where waste streams are not under control of the municipality. The largest part of non-recyclable household waste goes directly to incineration or “reduction”. The remainder is led to treatment plants and eventually most of it ends up in landfill (Vertedero). Note that smaller flow quantities are over-emphasized and are not to scale (otherwise they would hardly be visible in the diagram).

If you want to see the two other Sankey diagrams, please let me know in the comments.

Chris checks in with Eimear King, the new voice on The Future of Photography and answers a question on photographic travel preparations, including camera time zones and some really nifty Lightroom stuff, so you can focus on the really important things. [sc:podlovebutton] Links: SPONSOR: HoneyBook. Get 50% off with code TOPFLOOR Download the MP3 for … Continue reading "873 The Flowers and the Bees"

The post 873 The Flowers and the Bees appeared first on PHOTOGRAPHY TIPS FROM THE TOP FLOOR.

Chris gets a voicemail from a listener (Brenie) discussing the new show format. And Mark helps Chris encourage more engagement for the alphabet photo challenges. Download the MP3 for this episode Receive TFTTF updates via email Support the show on Patreon or via SEPA

The post 891 Snips from the Top Floor? (Slice) appeared first on PHOTOGRAPHY TIPS FROM THE TOP FLOOR.

Miami Herald: Florida’s lax oversight of nursing homes spills over from one deadly crisis to the next. “Florida’s solution for one potential crisis — the failure of nearly 100 elder-care facilities to comply with the state’s emergency power law, even as hurricane season approaches — is to allow the homes to pack all their residents … Continue reading Miami Herald: Florida’s lax oversight of nursing homes spills over from one deadly crisis to the next

The following sponsored article is from the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, Nicole “Nikki” Fried, Commissioner. In 1521, on his second expedition to the New World, Juan Ponce De Leon brought a small herd of Andalusian horses and cattle to Charlotte Harbor near current day Fort Myers, Florida. These were the first horses and cattle […]

The post Discover Florida: The Florida Cracker Horse Is The Sunshine State’s Legacy appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.

Trainer Ray Handal experienced the highs and lows of horse racing with shippers Kansas Kis and Timely Tradition on closing weekend at Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs, Ark. The duo were the first starters for Handal since March 15, the last day of live racing in New York, when he saddled Timely Tradition for a victory in a […]

The post Handal Says Fantasy Flop Won’t Define Kansas Kis’ Season appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.

The Daily Racing Form reported Thursday that trainer Todd Pletcher is sending strings of horses north to Churchill Downs and Belmont Park next week. Pletcher had pulled many of his horses from Belmont and sent them to Florida in late March as shutdowns and fears surrounding the coronavirus pandemic ramped up. Pletcher told the Form […]

The post Pletcher Sending Horses Back North After Waiting Out COVID-19 In Florida appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.

Lauren and Jonah wrote this case study which shows how to do Mister P in R using Stan. It’s a great case study: it’s not just the code for setting up and fitting the multilevel model, it also discusses the poststratification data, graphical exploration of the inferences, and alternative implementations of the model. Adam Haber […]

Dear Reader, This is the first spring for my husband’s newly planted cactus garden. And apparently the cacti and succulents loved all the rain, because they are BLOOMING! Here’s a picture I recently posted on Facebook. The picture is public, […]

The post [Surnetkids] Flowers appeared first on Newsletters » Surfnetkids.

Saturday's 14-race Florida Derby Day card gets under way at 11:30 a.m. from Gulfstream Park in Hallandale Beach, Fla., and the Grade 1 Derby will feature a full field of 3-year-olds competing for $750,000 and 170 qualifying points for the Kentucky Derby, now scheduled for Sept. 5 (100 points to the winner, 40 to second, […]

The post Triple Crown News Minute Presented By Kentucky Equine Research: Closer Look At Florida Derby Contenders appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.

The Grand Canyon National Park Airport in Tusayan will be added as a free park and ride location for park visitors from Aug. 30 through Sept. 2, 2019, to alleviate some of the holiday traffic. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/overflow-park-and-ride-labor-day.htm

Lowe’s is delivering $1 million worth of flower baskets to isolating moms and grandmothers in senior homes around the US for Mother’s Day.

The post Lowe‘s Sends Mother’s Day Love to Isolated Seniors With $1 Million in Flower Baskets Delivered From Local Growers appeared first on Good News Network.

This easy and tasty recipe can be made in the microwave

These cosy and comforting banana bread recipes are healthy, easy to make and delicious

Much of the water supply in the Pacific Northwest originates in national forests. It sustains the region’s aquatic ecosystems, agriculture, hydroelectric power, and community water supplies.

Mount St. Helens' explosive eruption on May 18, 1980, was a pivotal moment in the field of disturbance ecology.

At last a stable cross browser method of centering a variable width float left dropdown menu.

Two methods to indicate text-overflow. One using CSS3 and the other using a small graphic.

A menu using the float/drop technique using background images with hover change and breadcrumb trail.

Another menu using the float/drop technique using total background images with hover change and breadcrumb trail.

A tutorial to explain how the float.drop menu system works.

Using the no hacks float drop technique to produce a multi-column dropdown menu.

Using CSS3 to produce a circular menu with petals on a flower.

A CSS3 thumbnail gallery with reflow of thumbnail images when viewing large images.

Conservation measures for aquatic species throughout the Pacific Northwest rely heavily on maintaining forested riparian zones. A key rationale for this strategy is that the presence of standing and downed trees next to streams will provide a continuous source of wood, which is an important structural component of aquatic habitat.

This is a state-of-the-science synthesis of the effects of forest harvest activities on peak flows and channel morphology in the Pacific Northwest, with a specific focus on western Oregon and Washington. We develop a database of relevant studies reporting peak flow data across rain-, transient-, and snow-dominated hydrologic zones, and provide a quantitative comparison of changes in peak flow across both a range of flows and forest practices. Increases in peak flows generally diminish with decreasing intensity of percentage of watershed harvested and lengthening recurrence intervals of flow. Watersheds located in the rain dominated zone appear to be less sensitive to peak flow changes than those in the transient snow zone; insufficient data limit interpretations for the snow zone. Where present, peak flow effects on channel morphology should be confined to stream reaches where channel gradients are less than approximately 0.02 and streambeds are composed of gravel and finer material. We provide guidance as to how managers might evaluate the potential risk of peak flow increases based on factors such as presence of roads, watershed drainage efficiency, and specific management treatments employed. The magnitude of effects of forest harvest on peak flows in the Pacific Northwest, as represented by the data reported here, are relatively minor in comparison to other anthropogenic changes to streams and watersheds.

FLORIAN SCHNEIDER, co-founder and keyboardist for the legendary electronic music group KRAFTWERK has passed away, according to ROLLING STONE,  A band statement said that SCHNEIDER … more

MAX MEDIA/DENVER VP/Programming RICK THOMAS has made a move with his morning show on Top 40/Rhythmic KFCO (FLO 107.1) as LARRY ULIBARRI and KATHIE J., the venerable DENVER morning team, exit … more

The team at the UF/ IFAS Extension office show us how to create a pond, and fill it with native aquatic plants, to attract wildlife to our yards.

Florida's foreclosure crisis seems like a never-ending nightmare. Mortgages are caught up in MERS, an electronic database that most homeowners never heard of until the foreclosure crisis. Homeowners in foreclosure are worried that robo signing by lenders' employees may have led to mortgage fraud. The mortgage process itself is under scrutiny by the courts and government regulators who are asking: How could something so simple as a home loan go so terribly wrong?

What do you do if you’re partway through an important project for a client and you get, well… stuck? You simply can’t wring any more good ideas from that brain...

The post Getting Those Creative Juices Flowing Again appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

This Mother’s Day, April Kelley just wants to give her daughter Jessica Kelley a hug. But she can’t. Jessica, 21, works on the COVID-19 floor at Mercy Medical Center in Cedar Rapids. To...

This Mother’s Day, April Kelley just wants to give her daughter Jessica Kelley a hug. But she can’t. Jessica, 21, works on the COVID-19 floor at Mercy Medical Center in Cedar Rapids.

To protect her family and still do her job, Jessica is living full time at the hospital, which has made housing available to staff who need to isolate from their families during the pandemic.

“Just based on the floor I’m on, I don’t want to put my family at risk. It’s not worth it,” she said.

Her mother has an autoimmune disorder, adding another layer to Jessica’s worries. Though she does not interact with patients with the coronavirus directly, she still knows exposure is a risk.

“It wasn’t too hard of a decision, but it’s hard on me sometimes,” she said. “I really miss her.”

Jessica is a telemetry monitor technician. For her eight- to 12-hour shifts, her job is to watch heart monitors of patients in the hospital’s intensive care unit. If any patient starts to have cardiac distress or irregular heart rhythms, she and her fellow technicians are the first ones to notice and can notify the doctors and nurses in the main ward.

“It was her choice to either work at the hospital or come home, which was really difficult for her,” April Kelley said. “She’s only 21, so I was pretty proud of her for choosing to help. I don’t think people realize the sacrifice people are making to be there, working in the hospitals right now.”

Jessica is finishing her junior year as a nursing student at Mount Mercy University in Cedar Rapids. When classes moved online and the dorms closed, she had to figure out what to do. While many of her classmates moved back home with their families, doing so would have meant quitting her job. Right now, she said, that job feels more important than ever. In addition to being a full-time student, she works 32 to 36 hours a week at the hospital.

She spent about a week at home with her mother and brother in Humboldt after the dorms closed, but even then, she stayed in her mother’s finished basement and didn’t interact directly with her.

Her older brother, 26, is staying at home with their mom, and she misses him, too. Jessica said to stay connected, she does FaceTime with her mom, a social worker, almost every day.

“She’s definitely one of my best friends, one of my biggest supporters. She is a single mom, and she’s worked two jobs for the last 12 years,” Jessica said. “She always provides for us, and she’s just wonderful in every single way. She’s very caring, she takes care of everybody, no matter where you are.”

This Mother’s Day, those roles have reversed. Now, Jessica is protecting her mother instead of the other way around.

“She said, ‘Mom, I just can’t come home again, I couldn’t put you in that kind of danger,’” April said. “I’m extremely proud of the young lady she is and how responsible she is, and what she is doing during this time, to make sure other people are safe.”

Jessica’s interest in nursing came from her family. Her grandmother, aunt and cousin are all nurses. She also had an experience as a child that stuck with her and inspired her current career goal of becoming a pediatric intensive care nurse after graduation.

In the second grade, she had encephalitis. At first, she said, doctors didn’t believe she was actually sick. Her mother had to take her to a different hospital to get help.

“They said I was making it up, that my screaming and vomiting was just trying to get attention. They said I was faking it,” she said. “At one point, I really did not know who my mom was, and that’s the scariest part, to have someone tell you that’s not real. That’s just not right, and I don’t want other people, especially children to have to deal with that.”

She became interested in the telemetry job after touring the hospital as a student. She said watching the monitors can be surreal, knowing each line she watches represents a patient she may never meet but whose life she is responsible for.

“You see their heart, but you don’t see them,” she said. “Sometimes you watch them die, but never see them. Other times, you see someone going into a fatal rhythm, and you call the nurses ... and when they finally get that person stabilized, you know they might not have made it if we weren’t there. It’s very rewarding.”

April stressed the need for people to follow public health guidelines on social distancing to stay healthy.

“I know they’re starting to open back up and people are eager to get on with their lives,” she said. “But there are a lot of people putting their lives on the line right now ... and I would hate for Jessica to have to go back and self-isolate again if there was a second wave.”

April’s sad she can’t spend this Mother’s Day with her daughter, but right now, that’s not what is important.

“Remember, there’s going to be another Mother’s Day, she said. “We all just have to take care of our people.”

Comments: (319) 398-8339; alison.gowans@thegazette.com

In a previous blogpost we talked about the Opus codec, which offers very low bitrates. Another codec seeking to achieve even lower bitrates is Codec 2.

Codec 2 is designed for use with speech only, and although the bitrates are impressive the results aren’t as clear as Opus, as you can hear in the following audio examples. However, there is some interesting work being done with Codec 2 in combination with neural network (WaveNets) that is yielding great results.

Layers of a WaveNet neural network.

Background

Codec 2 is an open source codec designed for speech, and aims for compression rates between 700bps and 3200bps (bits per seconds).

The man behind it, David Rowe, is an electronic engineer currently living in South Australia. He started the project in September 2009, with the main aim of improving low-cost radio communication for people living in remote areas of the world. With this in mind, he set out to develop a codec that would significantly reduce file sizes and the bandwidth required when streaming.

Another motivation according to David, was to be free from patented technologies used by closed source codes which he believes “require expensive and awkward licenses and are stifling innovation”. His belief is that this work can be done without requiring the use of patent protected codecs, so all his work is open source.

Potential Applications

Rowe’s perceived applications include VOIP trunking, voice over low bandwidth HF/VHF digital radio, (especially for amateur radio, so as to avoid issues with the use of proprietary codecs), and developing world and remote area communications, including military, police and emergency services.

Why we’re interested here at Auphonic is for its potential for longer podcasts, presentations and audiobooks, allowing for low storage and minimizing the effect of bad network connections.

How it Works

To achieve the lower rates sought, speech has to be reduced into the smallest possible information/data, and this means that the amount of redundant information that is transmitted has to be minimized.

To do this, Codec 2 uses harmonic sinusoidal speech coding. This splits the speech into 10 - 30ms segments, called frames. Each frame is then analysed for the fundamental frequency (or pitch), and the number of harmonics that fit into a 4Khz bandwidth. Further, for each of the harmonics within the 4khz range, the amplitude and phase are recorded.

This information is then coded, and the decoder reconstructs the audio based on this data.

Codec 2 Block diagrams - Encoder (left) And decoder (right)
Figure from Rowtel.

Audio Examples and Comparison with other Codecs

Whilst it all sounds great in theory, how does the reality match up? Let’s have a listen.

Here is a short wav audio file:

Applying Codec 2 (without the WaveNet decoder) at the different rates available, 3200bps, 2400bps,1600bps,1200bps and 700bps, we get:

These examples show significantly reduced file sizes.
Putting that information more meaningfully in terms of how much storage you would need for an hour of audio:

• At 3200bps, 1 hour of audio requires only 1.37MB (this would fit on one old 3½-inch floppy disk!)
• A rate of 2400bps equates to 1.03MB/h
• A rate of 1600bps equates to 0.68MB/h (Or approximately 2 hours of audio on one floppy disk!)
• A rate of 1200bps equates to 0.51MB/h
• A rate of 700bps equates to 0.3MB/h

So great compression, but the result is clearly not natural sounding.

As a comparison here is the same audio as a 8kb/s MP3:

The file size is significantly larger than Codec 2 and the quality is arguably still not useable. You can clearly hear what is sometimes called sizzle - the weird metallic sounds you hear on low quality MP3s.

There is a final codec which is worth comparing, one that that seems to capture the two ideals of usable quality at low bitrates that we want: Opus.
Because of it's convincing low-bitrate performance, Auphonic already offers Opus encoding all the way down to 6 kbps, the lowest bitrate that Opus supports.

Comparing Opus at this 6 kbps rate to the 8kbps MP3 shows a significant improvement - although slightly muffled, it still sounds natural:

Returning to Codec 2, and purely as s a bit of fun, here are some samples of Codec 2 on music! (Note that Codec 2 is not designed for music, it was only ever conceived for use on speech).

I personally couldn’t listen to the MP3 at this rate, so let’s listen to what Codec 2 does!

Codec 2 at different bitrates:

As you can hear, it is not suitable for this application at all!

Codec 2 and WaveNet

As we have heard, despite the impressive bitrates achieved, the end result is not very natural sounding.
However, where it starts to get more interesting is the work done by W. Bastiaan Kleijn from Cornell University Library. He has been using with Codec 2 running at 2400bps on the coding side, but replaced the Codec 2 decoder with a WaveNet deep learning generative model (for more informationsee the paper Wavenet based low rate speech coding).

Here are some samples from the authors:

Comparing to Codec 2 you can hear a significant increase in quality, and if you compare to the original, there is not a significant decrease in quality.

Conclusion

Whilst the (original) Codec 2 project represents very interesting work, it is limited, and the end result is not suited for podcasting. Also as we heard in the audio examples, it can only be used for voice recordings, and not music.

However, Codec 2 in combination with a WaveNet decoder improves the quality a lot and the low bitrate (2400bps) would be extremely interesting for podcasts and audiobooks distribution as well: one hour of audio would require only 1.03MB of storage!

Auphonic will add support for Codec 2 output files when the WaveNet decoder is in a usable form. For now we have just added support for Codec 2 input files.