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Scurry: A Race-To-Finish Scavenger Hunt App

We have a lot of traditions here at Viget, many of which you may have read about - TTT, FLF, Pointless Weekend. There are others, but you have to be an insider for more information on those.

Pointless Weekend is one of our favorite traditions, though. It’s been around over a decade and some pretty fun work has come out of it over the years, like Storyboard, Baby Bookie, and Short Order. At a high level, we take 48 hours to build a tool, experiment, or stunt as a team, across all four of our offices. These projects are entirely separate from our client work and we use them to try out new technologies, explore roles on the team, and stress-test our processes.

The first step for a Pointless Weekend is assembling the teams. We had two teams this year, with a record number of participants. You can read about TrailBuddy, what the other team built, here.

The Scurry team was split between the DC and Durham offices, so all meetings were held via Hangout.

Once we were assembled, we set out to understand the constraints and the goals of our Pointless Project. We went into this weekend with an extra pep in our step, as we were determined to build something for the upcoming Viget 20th anniversary TTT this summer. Here’s what we knew we wanted:

  1. An activity all Vigets could do together, where they could create memories, and share broadly on social
  2. Something that we could use in a spotty network at C Lazy U Ranch in Colorado
  3. A product we can share with others: corporate groups, families and friends, schools, bachelor/ette parties

We landed on a scavenger hunt native app, which we named Scurry (Scavenger + Hurry = Scurry. Brilliant, right?). There are already a few scavenger apps available, so we set out to create something that was

  • Quick and easy to set up hunts
  • Free and intuitive for users
  • A nice combination of trivia and activities
  • Social! We wanted to enable teams to share photos and progress

One of the main reasons we have Pointless Weekends is to test out new technologies and processes. In that vein, we tried out Notion as our central organizing tool - we used it for user journeys, data modeling, and even writing tickets, which we typically use Github for.

We tested out Notion as our primary tool, writing tickets and tracking progress.

When we built the app, we needed to prepare for spotty network service, as internet connectivity isn’t guaranteed at C Lazy U Ranch – where our Viget20 celebration will be. A Progressive Web Application (PWA) didn't make sense for our tech requirements, so we chose the route of creating a native application.

There are a number of options available to build native applications. But, as we were looking to make as much progress as possible in 48-hours, we chose one of our favorite frameworks: React Native. React Native allows developers to build true, cross-platform native applications, using some of our favorite technologies: javascript, the React framework, and a native-specific variant of CSS. We decided on the turn-key solution Expo. Expo has extra tooling allowing for easy development, deployment, and debugging.

This is a snap shot of our app and Expo.

Our frontend developers were able to immediately dive in making screens and styling components, and quickly made the mockups in Whimsical a reality.

On the backend, we used the supported library to connect to the backend datastore, Firebase. Firebase is a hosted solution for data storage, with key features built-in like authentication, realtime updates, and offline support. Our backend developer worked behind the frontend developers hooking those views up to live data.

Both of these tools, Expo and Firebase, were easy to use and allowed us to focus on building a working application quickly, rather than being mired in setup or bespoke solutions to common problems.

Whimsical is one of our favorite tools for building out mockups of an app.

We made impressive progress in our 48-hour sprint, but there’s still some work to do. We have some additional features we hope to add before TTT, which will require additional testing and refining. For now, stay tuned and sign up for our newsletter. We’ll be sure to share when Scurry is ready for the world!



  • News & Culture

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Together We Flourish, Remotely

Like many other companies, Viget is working through the new challenge of suddenly being a fully-distributed company. We don’t know how long it will last or every challenge that will arise because of these unfortunate circumstances, but we know the health and well-being of our people is paramount. As Employee Engagement Manager, I feel inspired by these new challenges, eager to step up, and committed to seeing what good can come of this.

Now more than ever, we want to maintain the culture that has sustained us over the last 20 years – a culture that I think is best captured by our mantra, “do great work and be a great teammate.” As everyone is adjusting to new work environments, schedules, and distractions, I am adjusting my approach to employee engagement, and the People Team is looking for new ways to nurture and protect the culture we treasure.

The backbone of being a great teammate is knowing each other and caring about each other. For years the People Team has focused on making sure people who work at Viget are known, accepted, and cared about. From onboarding to events to weekly and monthly touchpoints, we invest in coworkers knowing each other. On top of that, we have well-appointed offices where people like to be, and friendships unfold over time. Abruptly becoming fully distributed makes it impossible for some of these connections to happen organically, like they would have around the coffee machine and the lunch tables. These microinteractions between colleagues in the same office, the hellos when you get off the elevator or the “what’d you get up to this weekend” chit chat near the seltzer refrigerator, all add up. We realize more than ever how valuable those moments are, and I know I will feel extra grateful for them when we are all back together.

Until that time, we are working to make sure everyone at Viget feels connected, safe, healthy, and most importantly, together, even when we are physically apart. We are keeping up our weekly staff meetings and monthly team lunches, and we just onboarded a new hire last week as thoroughly as ever. There are some other, new ways we’re sparking connections, too.

New ways we're sparking connections:

Connecting IntentionallyWe are making the most of the tools that we’ve been using for years. New Slack channels have spun up, including #exercise, where folks are sharing how they are making do without a gym, and #igotyou, a place where folks can post where they’ve found supplies in stock as grocery stores are being emptied at an alarming pace.
Remote Lunch TablesWe have teammates in three different time zones, on different project teams, and at different stages of life. We’ve created two virtual lunch tables, one at 12PM EST and one at 12PM MST, where folks can join with or without their lunches and with or without their kids, partners, or pets. There are no rules or structure, just an opportunity to chat and see a friendly face as a touchpoint to your day.
Last Weekend This MorningCatching up Monday morning is a great way to kick off your week. Historically, I’ve done this from my desk over coffee as I greet folks coming off the elevator (I usually have the privilege of sitting at our front desk). I now do this from my desk, at home, over coffee as folks pop in or out of our Zoom call. One upshot of the new normal is I can “greet” anyone who shows up, not just people who work from my same office. Again, no structure, just a way to start our week, together.
Munch MadnessYes, you read that right. Most of the sports world is enjoying an intermission. Since our CEO can’t cheer on his beloved Cavaliers and our VP of Design can’t cheer on his Gators, we’ve created something potentially much better. A definitive snack bracket. There is a minimal time commitment and folks with no sports knowledge can participate. The rules are simple: create and submit your bracket, ranking who you believe will win each snack faceoff. Then as we move through the rounds, vote on your favorite snacks. The competition has already sparked tons of conversation and plenty of snack hot takes. Want to start a munch-off of your own? Check out our bracket as a starting point.
Virtual Happy HoursSigning off for the day and shutting down your machine is incredibly important for maintaining a work-life balance. Casually checking in, unwinding, and being able to chat about your day is also important. We have big, beautiful kitchens in each of our offices, along with casual spaces where at the end of any given day you can find a few Vigets catching up before heading home. This is something we don’t want to miss! So we’re setting up weekly happy hours where folks can hop in and say hi to each other face-to-face. We’ve found Zoom to be a great platform so we can see the maximum number of our teammates possible. Like all of our other events, it’s optional. There is also an understanding that your roommate, kid, significant other, or pet might show up on screen (and are welcome!). No one is shamed for multitasking and we encourage our teammates to join as they can. So far we’ve toasted new teammates, played a song or two, and up next we’ll play trivia.

At the end of the day, we are all here for one reason: to do great work. Our award-winning work is made possible by the trust we’ve built within our teams. Staying focused and accountable to ourselves and our clients is what drives our motivation to continue to show up and do our best. In our new working environment, it is crucial that we can both stay connected and productive; a lot of teammates are stepping up to support one another. Here are a few ways we are continuing to foster our “do great work” mantra.

New ways we're fostering great work:

Staying in TouchThe People Team is actively touching base with every employee. Our focus is on their health, productivity, and connection. These 1:1s have given us a baseline for how we can provide the best support for our team, from making sure they're aware of flexible work options to setting them up with the tools they need to be successful. We’ve delivered chairs, monitors, and helped troubleshoot in-home wifi issues. We are committed to making sure every Viget is set up for success.
Sharing is CaringWe’re no stranger to remote teams. We have four offices across the U.S. and a handful of full-time remote folks, and we’ve leaned on our inside experts to share their expertise on remote work. Most recently, ourData & Analytics Director, who has been working remotely full time for five years, gave a presentation on best practices for working from home. His top tips for working from home include:
  • Minimize other windows in remote meetings.
  • Set a schedule and avoid midday chores.
  • Take breaks away from the screen.
  • Plan your workday on your shared calendar.
  • Be mindful of Slack and social media as a distraction.
  • Use timers.
  • Keep your work area separate from where you relax.
  • Pretend that you’re still working from work.
  • Experiment and figure out what works for you.

Our UX Research Director also stepped up to share her expertise to aid in adjusting to our new working conditions. She led a microclass on remote facilitation where she shared best practices and went over tools that support remote collaboration. Some of the tools she highlighted included Miro, Mural, Whimsical, and Jamboard. During the microclass she demonstrated use of Whimsical’s voting feature, which makes it easy for distributed groups to establish discussion topic priorities.

Always PreparedHaving all of our project materials stored in the Cloud in a consistent, predictable way is a cornerstone of our business continuity plan. It is more important than ever for our team to follow the established best practices and ensure that project files are accessible to the full Viget team in the event of unplanned time off. Our VP of Client Services is leading efforts to ensure everyone is aware of and following our established guidelines with tools like Drive, Slack, Github, and Figma. Our priorities are that clients’ needs are met, quality is high, and timelines are honored.

As the pandemic unfolds, our approach to employee engagement will evolve. We have more things in the works to build and maintain connections while distributed, including trivia and game nights, book clubs, virtual movie nights, and community service opportunities, just to name a few. No matter what we’re doing or what tool we’re using to connect, we’ll be in it together: doing great work, being great teammates, and looking forward.



  • News & Culture

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Should you use Userbase for your next static site?

During the winter 2020 Pointless Weekend, we built TrailBuddy (working app coming soon). Our team consisted of four developers, two project managers, two front-end developers, a digital-analyst, a UXer, and a designer. In about 48 hours, we took an idea from Jeremy Field’s head to a (mostly) working app. We broke up the project in two parts:. First, a back-end that crunches trail, weather, and soil data. That data is exposed via a GraphQL API for a web app to consume.

While developers built the API, I built a static front end using Next.js. Famously, static front-ends don’t have a database, or a concept of “users.” A bit of functionality I wanted to add was saving favorite trails. I didn’t want to be hacky about it, I needed some way to add users and a database. I knew it’d be hard for the developers to set this up as part of the API, they had their hands full with all the #soil-soil-soil-soil-soil (a slack channel dedicated solely to figuring out our soil data problem—those were plentiful.) I had been looking for an excuse to use Userbase, and this seemed like as good a time as any.

A textbook Userbase use case

“When would I use it?” The Usebase site lists these reasons:

  • If you want to build a web app without writing any backend code.
  • If you never want to see your users' data.
  • If you're tired of dealing with databases.
  • If you want to radically simplify your GDPR compliance.
  • And if you want to keep things really simple.

This was a perfect fit for my problem. I didn’t want to write any more backend code for this. I didn’t want to see our user’s data, I don’t care to know anyone’s favorite trails.* A nice bonus to not having users in our backend was not having to worry about keeping their data safe. We don’t have their data at all, it’s end-to-end encrypted by Userbase. We can offer a reasonable amount of privacy for free (well for the price of using Userbase: $49 a year.) I am not tired of dealing with databases, but I’d rather not. I don’t think anyone doesn’t want to simplify their GDPR compliance. Finally, given our tight timeline I wanted nothing more than to keep things really simple.

A sign up form that I didn't have to write a back-end for

Using Userbase

Userbase can be tried for free, so I set aside thirty minutes or so to do a quick proof of concept to make sure this would work out for us. I made an account and followed their Quickstart. Userbase is a fundamentally easy tool to use, but their quickstart is everything I’d want out of a quickstart:

  • Written in the most vanilla way possible (just HTML and vanilla JS). This means I can adapt it to my needs, in this case React using Next.js
  • Easy to follow, it does the most barebones tour of the functionality you can expect to get out of the SDK (software development kit.) In other words it is quick and it is a start
  • It has a live demo and code samples you can download and run yourself

It didn’t take long after that to integrate Userbase into our app with more help from their great docs. I debated whether to add code samples of what we did here, and I didn’t because any reader would be better off using the great quickstart and docs Userbase provides—they are that clear, and that good. Depending on your use case you’ll need to adapt the examples to your needs, for us the trickiest things were creating a top level authentication context to manage users in the app, and a custom hook to encapsulate all the logic for setting, updating, and deleting favourite trails in the app. Userbase’s SDK worked seamlessly for us.

A log in form that I didn't have to write a back-end for

Is Userbase for you?

Maybe. I am definitely a fan, so much so that this blog post probably reads like an advert. Userbase saved me a ton of time in this project. It reminded me of “The All Powerful Front End Developer” talk by Chris Coyer. I don’t fully subscribe to all the ideas in that talk, but it is nice to have “serverless” tools like Userbase, and all the new JAMstacky things. There are limits to the Userbase serverless experience in terms of scale, and control. Obviously relying on a third party for something always carries some (probably small) risk—it’s worth noting Usebase includes a note on their pricing page that says “You can host it yourself always under your control, or we can run it for you for a full serverless experience”—Still, I wouldn’t hesitate this to use in future projects.

One of the great things about Viget and Pointless Weekend is the opportunity to try new things. For me that was Next.js and Userbase for Trailbuddy. It doesn’t always work out (in fact this is my first pointless weekend where a risk hasn’t blown up in my face) but it is always fun. Getting to try out Userbase and beginning to think about how we may use it in the future made the weekend worthwhile for me, and it made my job on this project much more enjoyable.

*I will write a future post about privacy conscious analytics in TrailBuddy when I’ve figured that out. I am looking into Fathom Analytics for that.



  • Code
  • Front-end Engineering

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Freaky Logo Friday. Logo Mash-Ups

What would happen if the logos of famous brands suddenly wake up in the bed of another? Thats what the new tumblr blog Logo Mashups explores. It makes us think in the in the connections they share and how they are constantly appealing to our consumer mind through the commons grounds of symbology and typography.




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Join Our New Online Workshops On CSS, Accessibility, Performance, And UX

It has been a month since we launched our first online workshop and, to be honest, we really didn’t know whether people would enjoy them — or if we would enjoy running them. It was an experiment, but one we are so glad we jumped into! I spoke about the experience of taking my workshop online on a recent episode of the Smashing podcast. As a speaker, I had expected it to feel very much like I was presenting into the empty air, with no immediate feedback and expressions to work from.




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Readability Algorithms Should Be Tools, Not Targets

The web is awash with words. They’re everywhere. On websites, in emails, advertisements, tweets, pop-ups, you name it. More people are publishing more copy than at any point in history. That means a lot of information, and a lot of competition. In recent years a slew of ‘readability’ programs have appeared to help us tidy up the things we write. (Grammarly, Readable, and Yoast are just a handful that come to mind.




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Smashing Podcast Episode 15 With Phil Smith: How Can I Build An App In 10 Days?

In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, we’re talking about building apps on a tight timeline. How can you quickly turn around a project to respond to an emerging situation like COVID-19? Drew McLellan talks to Phil Smith to find out. Show Notes CardMedic React Native React Native for Web Expo Apiary Phil’s company amillionmonkeys Phil’s personal blog and Twitter Weekly Update Getting Started With Nuxt Implementing Dark Mode In React Apps Using styled-components How To Succeed In Wireframe Design Mirage JS Deep Dive: Understanding Mirage JS Models And Associations (Part 1) Readability Algorithms Should Be Tools, Not Targets Transcript Drew McLellan: He is director of the full-stack web development studio amillionmonkeys, where he partners with business owners and creative agencies to build digital products that make an impact.




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Meet SmashingConf Live: Our New Interactive Online Conference

In these strange times when everything is connected, it’s too easy to feel lonely and detached. Yes, everybody is just one message away, but there is always something in the way — deadlines to meet, Slack messages to reply, or urgent PRs to review. Connections need time and space to grow, just like learning, and conferences are a great way to find that time and that space. In fact, with SmashingConfs, we’ve always been trying to create such friendly and inclusive spaces.




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Nikon has confirmed that their flagship D6 DSLR will start shipping on May 21st

It feels like forever since Nikon announced their newest flagship DSLR; the Nikon D6. It’s actually only been three months, but that hasn’t stopped some people getting anxious. Recently, customers were being told that the D6 would start shipping right about now, but now Nikon has officially come out to announce that the Nikon D6 […]

The post Nikon has confirmed that their flagship D6 DSLR will start shipping on May 21st appeared first on DIY Photography.




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#COVIDwear: a hilarious photo series showing quarantine fashion of remote workers

With the coronavirus pandemic, many folks switched to working online. Things like teaching, business meetings and other face-to-face activities have been replaced with video calls. Home has become both home and workplace, and admit it: your wardrobe totally reflects this. Creative duo The Workmans shows this “fashion crossover” in their latest photo series #COVIDwear. The […]

The post #COVIDwear: a hilarious photo series showing quarantine fashion of remote workers appeared first on DIY Photography.




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Watch YouTube’s most informed sock puppet teach you how to shoot with manual exposure

For those who’ve never seen TheCrafsMan SteadyCraftin on YouTube, you’re in for a treat – even if you already understand everything contained within this 25-minute video. For those who have, you know exactly what to expect. I’ve been following this rather unconventional channel for a while now. It covers a lot of handy DIY and […]

The post Watch YouTube’s most informed sock puppet teach you how to shoot with manual exposure appeared first on DIY Photography.




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Arthur packets for $G_2$ and perverse sheaves on cubics. (arXiv:2005.02438v2 [math.RT] UPDATED)

This paper begins the project of defining Arthur packets of all unipotent representations for the $p$-adic exceptional group $G_2$. Here we treat the most interesting case by defining and computing Arthur packets with component group $S_3$. We also show that the distributions attached to these packets are stable, subject to a hypothesis. This is done using a self-contained microlocal analysis of simple equivariant perverse sheaves on the moduli space of homogeneous cubics in two variables. In forthcoming work we will treat the remaining unipotent representations and their endoscopic classification and strengthen our result on stability.




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Almost invariant subspaces of the shift operator on vector-valued Hardy spaces. (arXiv:2005.02243v2 [math.FA] UPDATED)

In this article, we characterize nearly invariant subspaces of finite defect for the backward shift operator acting on the vector-valued Hardy space which is a vectorial generalization of a result of Chalendar-Gallardo-Partington (C-G-P). Using this characterization of nearly invariant subspace under the backward shift we completely describe the almost invariant subspaces for the shift and its adjoint acting on the vector valued Hardy space.




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Automorphisms of shift spaces and the Higman--Thomspon groups: the one-sided case. (arXiv:2004.08478v2 [math.GR] UPDATED)

Let $1 le r < n$ be integers. We give a proof that the group $mathop{mathrm{Aut}}({X_{n}^{mathbb{N}}, sigma_{n}})$ of automorphisms of the one-sided shift on $n$ letters embeds naturally as a subgroup $mathcal{h}_{n}$ of the outer automorphism group $mathop{mathrm{Out}}(G_{n,r})$ of the Higman-Thompson group $G_{n,r}$. From this, we can represent the elements of $mathop{mathrm{Aut}}({X_{n}^{mathbb{N}}, sigma_{n}})$ by finite state non-initial transducers admitting a very strong synchronizing condition.

Let $H in mathcal{H}_{n}$ and write $|H|$ for the number of states of the minimal transducer representing $H$. We show that $H$ can be written as a product of at most $|H|$ torsion elements. This result strengthens a similar result of Boyle, Franks and Kitchens, where the decomposition involves more complex torsion elements and also does not support practical extit{a priori} estimates of the length of the resulting product.

We also give new proofs of some known results about $mathop{mathrm{Aut}}({X_{n}^{mathbb{N}}, sigma_{n}})$.




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The Shearlet Transform and Lizorkin Spaces. (arXiv:2003.06642v2 [math.FA] UPDATED)

We prove a continuity result for the shearlet transform when restricted to the space of smooth and rapidly decreasing functions with all vanishing moments. We define the dual shearlet transform, called here the shearlet synthesis operator, and we prove its continuity on the space of smooth and rapidly decreasing functions over $mathbb{R}^2 imesmathbb{R} imesmathbb{R}^ imes$. Then, we use these continuity results to extend the shearlet transform to the space of Lizorkin distributions, and we prove its consistency with the classical definition for test functions.




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Unbounded Kobayashi hyperbolic domains in $mathbb C^n$. (arXiv:1911.05632v2 [math.CV] UPDATED)

We first give a sufficient condition, issued from pluripotential theory, for an unbounded domain in the complex Euclidean space $mathbb C^n$ to be Kobayashi hyperbolic. Then, we construct an example of a rigid pseudoconvex domain in $mathbb C^3$ that is Kobayashi hyperbolic and has a nonempty core. In particular, this domain is not biholomorphic to a bounded domain in $mathbb C^3$ and the mentioned above sufficient condition for Kobayashi hyperbolicity is not necessary.




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On the automorphic sheaves for GSp_4. (arXiv:1901.04447v6 [math.RT] UPDATED)

In this paper we first review the setting for the geometric Langlands functoriality and establish a result for the `backward' functoriality functor. We illustrate this by known examples of the geometric theta-lifting. We then apply the above result to obtain new Hecke eigen-sheaves. The most important application is a construction of the automorphic sheaf for G=GSp_4 attached to a G^L-local system on a curve X such that its standard representation is an irreducible local system of rank 4 on X.




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Continuity properties of the shearlet transform and the shearlet synthesis operator on the Lizorkin type spaces. (arXiv:2005.03505v1 [math.FA])

We develop a distributional framework for the shearlet transform $mathcal{S}_{psi}colonmathcal{S}_0(mathbb{R}^2) omathcal{S}(mathbb{S})$ and the shearlet synthesis operator $mathcal{S}^t_{psi}colonmathcal{S}(mathbb{S}) omathcal{S}_0(mathbb{R}^2)$, where $mathcal{S}_0(mathbb{R}^2)$ is the Lizorkin test function space and $mathcal{S}(mathbb{S})$ is the space of highly localized test functions on the standard shearlet group $mathbb{S}$. These spaces and their duals $mathcal{S}_0^prime (mathbb R^2),, mathcal{S}^prime (mathbb{S})$ are called Lizorkin type spaces of test functions and distributions. We analyze the continuity properties of these transforms when the admissible vector $psi$ belongs to $mathcal{S}_0(mathbb{R}^2)$. Then, we define the shearlet transform and the shearlet synthesis operator of Lizorkin type distributions as transpose mappings of the shearlet synthesis operator and the shearlet transform, respectively. They yield continuous mappings from $mathcal{S}_0^prime (mathbb R^2)$ to $mathcal{S}^prime (mathbb{S})$ and from $mathcal{S}^prime (mathbb S)$ to $mathcal{S}_0^prime (mathbb{R}^2)$. Furthermore, we show the consistency of our definition with the shearlet transform defined by direct evaluation of a distribution on the shearlets. The same can be done for the shearlet synthesis operator. Finally, we give a reconstruction formula for Lizorkin type distributions, from which follows that the action of such generalized functions can be written as an absolutely convergent integral over the standard shearlet group.




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Sharp p-bounds for maximal operators on finite graphs. (arXiv:2005.03146v1 [math.CA])

Let $G=(V,E)$ be a finite graph and $M_G$ be the centered Hardy-Littlewood maximal operator defined there. We found the optimal value $C_{G,p}$ such that the inequality $$Var_{p}(M_{G}f)le C_{G,p}Var_{p}(f)$$ holds for every every $f:V o mathbb{R},$ where $Var_p$ stands for the $p$-variation, when: (i)$G=K_n$ (complete graph) and $pin [frac{ln(4)}{ln(6)},infty)$ or $G=K_4$ and $pin (0,infty)$;(ii) $G=S_n$(star graph) and $1ge pge frac{1}{2}$; $pin (0,frac{1}{2})$ and $nge C(p)<infty$ or $G=S_3$ and $pin (1,infty).$ We also found the optimal value $L_{G,2}$ such that the inequality $$|M_{G}f|_2le L_{G,2}|f|_2$$ holds for every $f:V o mathbb{R}$, when: (i)$G=K_n$ and $nge 3$;(ii)$G=S_n$ and $nge 3.$




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A Quantum Algorithm To Locate Unknown Hashes For Known N-Grams Within A Large Malware Corpus. (arXiv:2005.02911v2 [quant-ph] UPDATED)

Quantum computing has evolved quickly in recent years and is showing significant benefits in a variety of fields. Malware analysis is one of those fields that could also take advantage of quantum computing. The combination of software used to locate the most frequent hashes and $n$-grams between benign and malicious software (KiloGram) and a quantum search algorithm could be beneficial, by loading the table of hashes and $n$-grams into a quantum computer, and thereby speeding up the process of mapping $n$-grams to their hashes. The first phase will be to use KiloGram to find the top-$k$ hashes and $n$-grams for a large malware corpus. From here, the resulting hash table is then loaded into a quantum machine. A quantum search algorithm is then used search among every permutation of the entangled key and value pairs to find the desired hash value. This prevents one from having to re-compute hashes for a set of $n$-grams, which can take on average $O(MN)$ time, whereas the quantum algorithm could take $O(sqrt{N})$ in the number of table lookups to find the desired hash values.




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Recurrent Neural Network Language Models Always Learn English-Like Relative Clause Attachment. (arXiv:2005.00165v3 [cs.CL] UPDATED)

A standard approach to evaluating language models analyzes how models assign probabilities to valid versus invalid syntactic constructions (i.e. is a grammatical sentence more probable than an ungrammatical sentence). Our work uses ambiguous relative clause attachment to extend such evaluations to cases of multiple simultaneous valid interpretations, where stark grammaticality differences are absent. We compare model performance in English and Spanish to show that non-linguistic biases in RNN LMs advantageously overlap with syntactic structure in English but not Spanish. Thus, English models may appear to acquire human-like syntactic preferences, while models trained on Spanish fail to acquire comparable human-like preferences. We conclude by relating these results to broader concerns about the relationship between comprehension (i.e. typical language model use cases) and production (which generates the training data for language models), suggesting that necessary linguistic biases are not present in the training signal at all.




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Optimal Adjacent Vertex-Distinguishing Edge-Colorings of Circulant Graphs. (arXiv:2004.12822v2 [cs.DM] UPDATED)

A k-proper edge-coloring of a graph G is called adjacent vertex-distinguishing if any two adjacent vertices are distinguished by the set of colors appearing in the edges incident to each vertex. The smallest value k for which G admits such coloring is denoted by $chi$'a (G). We prove that $chi$'a (G) = 2R + 1 for most circulant graphs Cn([[1, R]]).




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Numerical study on the effect of geometric approximation error in the numerical solution of PDEs using a high-order curvilinear mesh. (arXiv:1908.09917v2 [math.NA] UPDATED)

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.




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A Shift Selection Strategy for Parallel Shift-Invert Spectrum Slicing in Symmetric Self-Consistent Eigenvalue Computation. (arXiv:1908.06043v2 [math.NA] UPDATED)

The central importance of large scale eigenvalue problems in scientific computation necessitates the development of massively parallel algorithms for their solution. Recent advances in dense numerical linear algebra have enabled the routine treatment of eigenvalue problems with dimensions on the order of hundreds of thousands on the world's largest supercomputers. In cases where dense treatments are not feasible, Krylov subspace methods offer an attractive alternative due to the fact that they do not require storage of the problem matrices. However, demonstration of scalability of either of these classes of eigenvalue algorithms on computing architectures capable of expressing massive parallelism is non-trivial due to communication requirements and serial bottlenecks, respectively. In this work, we introduce the SISLICE method: a parallel shift-invert algorithm for the solution of the symmetric self-consistent field (SCF) eigenvalue problem. The SISLICE method drastically reduces the communication requirement of current parallel shift-invert eigenvalue algorithms through various shift selection and migration techniques based on density of states estimation and k-means clustering, respectively. This work demonstrates the robustness and parallel performance of the SISLICE method on a representative set of SCF eigenvalue problems and outlines research directions which will be explored in future work.




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Establishing the Quantum Supremacy Frontier with a 281 Pflop/s Simulation. (arXiv:1905.00444v2 [quant-ph] UPDATED)

Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers are entering an era in which they can perform computational tasks beyond the capabilities of the most powerful classical computers, thereby achieving "Quantum Supremacy", a major milestone in quantum computing. NISQ Supremacy requires comparison with a state-of-the-art classical simulator. We report HPC simulations of hard random quantum circuits (RQC), which have been recently used as a benchmark for the first experimental demonstration of Quantum Supremacy, sustaining an average performance of 281 Pflop/s (true single precision) on Summit, currently the fastest supercomputer in the World. These simulations were carried out using qFlex, a tensor-network-based classical high-performance simulator of RQCs. Our results show an advantage of many orders of magnitude in energy consumption of NISQ devices over classical supercomputers. In addition, we propose a standard benchmark for NISQ computers based on qFlex.




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Active Intent Disambiguation for Shared Control Robots. (arXiv:2005.03652v1 [cs.RO])

Assistive shared-control robots have the potential to transform the lives of millions of people afflicted with severe motor impairments. The usefulness of shared-control robots typically relies on the underlying autonomy's ability to infer the user's needs and intentions, and the ability to do so unambiguously is often a limiting factor for providing appropriate assistance confidently and accurately. The contributions of this paper are four-fold. First, we introduce the idea of intent disambiguation via control mode selection, and present a mathematical formalism for the same. Second, we develop a control mode selection algorithm which selects the control mode in which the user-initiated motion helps the autonomy to maximally disambiguate user intent. Third, we present a pilot study with eight subjects to evaluate the efficacy of the disambiguation algorithm. Our results suggest that the disambiguation system (a) helps to significantly reduce task effort, as measured by number of button presses, and (b) is of greater utility for more limited control interfaces and more complex tasks. We also observe that (c) subjects demonstrated a wide range of disambiguation request behaviors, with the common thread of concentrating requests early in the execution. As our last contribution, we introduce a novel field-theoretic approach to intent inference inspired by dynamic field theory that works in tandem with the disambiguation scheme.




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On Exposure Bias, Hallucination and Domain Shift in Neural Machine Translation. (arXiv:2005.03642v1 [cs.CL])

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




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Seismic Shot Gather Noise Localization Using a Multi-Scale Feature-Fusion-Based Neural Network. (arXiv:2005.03626v1 [cs.CV])

Deep learning-based models, such as convolutional neural networks, have advanced various segments of computer vision. However, this technology is rarely applied to seismic shot gather noise localization problem. This letter presents an investigation on the effectiveness of a multi-scale feature-fusion-based network for seismic shot-gather noise localization. Herein, we describe the following: (1) the construction of a real-world dataset of seismic noise localization based on 6,500 seismograms; (2) a multi-scale feature-fusion-based detector that uses the MobileNet combined with the Feature Pyramid Net as the backbone; and (3) the Single Shot multi-box detector for box classification/regression. Additionally, we propose the use of the Focal Loss function that improves the detector's prediction accuracy. The proposed detector achieves an AP@0.5 of 78.67\% in our empirical evaluation.




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A Local Spectral Exterior Calculus for the Sphere and Application to the Shallow Water Equations. (arXiv:2005.03598v1 [math.NA])

We introduce $Psimathrm{ec}$, a local spectral exterior calculus for the two-sphere $S^2$. $Psimathrm{ec}$ provides a discretization of Cartan's exterior calculus on $S^2$ formed by spherical differential $r$-form wavelets. These are well localized in space and frequency and provide (Stevenson) frames for the homogeneous Sobolev spaces $dot{H}^{-r+1}( Omega_{ u}^{r} , S^2 )$ of differential $r$-forms. At the same time, they satisfy important properties of the exterior calculus, such as the de Rahm complex and the Hodge-Helmholtz decomposition. Through this, $Psimathrm{ec}$ is tailored towards structure preserving discretizations that can adapt to solutions with varying regularity. The construction of $Psimathrm{ec}$ is based on a novel spherical wavelet frame for $L_2(S^2)$ that we obtain by introducing scalable reproducing kernel frames. These extend scalable frames to weighted sampling expansions and provide an alternative to quadrature rules for the discretization of needlet-like scale-discrete wavelets. We verify the practicality of $Psimathrm{ec}$ for numerical computations using the rotating shallow water equations. Our numerical results demonstrate that a $Psimathrm{ec}$-based discretization of the equations attains accuracy comparable to those of spectral methods while using a representation that is well localized in space and frequency.




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Online Algorithms to Schedule a Proportionate Flexible Flow Shop of Batching Machines. (arXiv:2005.03552v1 [cs.DS])

This paper is the first to consider online algorithms to schedule a proportionate flexible flow shop of batching machines (PFFB). The scheduling model is motivated by manufacturing processes of individualized medicaments, which are used in modern medicine to treat some serious illnesses. We provide two different online algorithms, proving also lower bounds for the offline problem to compute their competitive ratios. The first algorithm is an easy-to-implement, general local scheduling heuristic. It is 2-competitive for PFFBs with an arbitrary number of stages and for several natural scheduling objectives. We also show that for total/average flow time, no deterministic algorithm with better competitive ratio exists. For the special case with two stages and the makespan or total completion time objective, we describe an improved algorithm that achieves the best possible competitive ratio $varphi=frac{1+sqrt{5}}{2}$, the golden ratio. All our results also hold for proportionate (non-flexible) flow shops of batching machines (PFB) for which this is also the first paper to study online algorithms.




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The Danish Gigaword Project. (arXiv:2005.03521v1 [cs.CL])

Danish is a North Germanic/Scandinavian language spoken primarily in Denmark, a country with a tradition of technological and scientific innovation. However, from a technological perspective, the Danish language has received relatively little attention and, as a result, Danish language technology is hard to develop, in part due to a lack of large or broad-coverage Danish corpora. This paper describes the Danish Gigaword project, which aims to construct a freely-available one billion word corpus of Danish text that represents the breadth of the written language.




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An asynchronous distributed and scalable generalized Nash equilibrium seeking algorithm for strongly monotone games. (arXiv:2005.03507v1 [cs.GT])

In this paper, we present three distributed algorithms to solve a class of generalized Nash equilibrium (GNE) seeking problems in strongly monotone games. The first one (SD-GENO) is based on synchronous updates of the agents, while the second and the third (AD-GEED and AD-GENO) represent asynchronous solutions that are robust to communication delays. AD-GENO can be seen as a refinement of AD-GEED, since it only requires node auxiliary variables, enhancing the scalability of the algorithm. Our main contribution is to prove converge to a variational GNE of the game via an operator-theoretic approach. Finally, we apply the algorithms to network Cournot games and show how different activation sequences and delays affect convergence. We also compare the proposed algorithms to the only other in the literature (ADAGNES), and observe that AD-GENO outperforms the alternative.




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Ensuring Fairness under Prior Probability Shifts. (arXiv:2005.03474v1 [cs.LG])

In this paper, we study the problem of fair classification in the presence of prior probability shifts, where the training set distribution differs from the test set. This phenomenon can be observed in the yearly records of several real-world datasets, such as recidivism records and medical expenditure surveys. If unaccounted for, such shifts can cause the predictions of a classifier to become unfair towards specific population subgroups. While the fairness notion called Proportional Equality (PE) accounts for such shifts, a procedure to ensure PE-fairness was unknown.

In this work, we propose a method, called CAPE, which provides a comprehensive solution to the aforementioned problem. CAPE makes novel use of prevalence estimation techniques, sampling and an ensemble of classifiers to ensure fair predictions under prior probability shifts. We introduce a metric, called prevalence difference (PD), which CAPE attempts to minimize in order to ensure PE-fairness. We theoretically establish that this metric exhibits several desirable properties.

We evaluate the efficacy of CAPE via a thorough empirical evaluation on synthetic datasets. We also compare the performance of CAPE with several popular fair classifiers on real-world datasets like COMPAS (criminal risk assessment) and MEPS (medical expenditure panel survey). The results indicate that CAPE ensures PE-fair predictions, while performing well on other performance metrics.




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The Perceptimatic English Benchmark for Speech Perception Models. (arXiv:2005.03418v1 [cs.CL])

We present the Perceptimatic English Benchmark, an open experimental benchmark for evaluating quantitative models of speech perception in English. The benchmark consists of ABX stimuli along with the responses of 91 American English-speaking listeners. The stimuli test discrimination of a large number of English and French phonemic contrasts. They are extracted directly from corpora of read speech, making them appropriate for evaluating statistical acoustic models (such as those used in automatic speech recognition) trained on typical speech data sets. We show that phone discrimination is correlated with several types of models, and give recommendations for researchers seeking easily calculated norms of acoustic distance on experimental stimuli. We show that DeepSpeech, a standard English speech recognizer, is more specialized on English phoneme discrimination than English listeners, and is poorly correlated with their behaviour, even though it yields a low error on the decision task given to humans.




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WSMN: An optimized multipurpose blind watermarking in Shearlet domain using MLP and NSGA-II. (arXiv:2005.03382v1 [cs.CR])

Digital watermarking is a remarkable issue in the field of information security to avoid the misuse of images in multimedia networks. Although access to unauthorized persons can be prevented through cryptography, it cannot be simultaneously used for copyright protection or content authentication with the preservation of image integrity. Hence, this paper presents an optimized multipurpose blind watermarking in Shearlet domain with the help of smart algorithms including MLP and NSGA-II. In this method, four copies of the robust copyright logo are embedded in the approximate coefficients of Shearlet by using an effective quantization technique. Furthermore, an embedded random sequence as a semi-fragile authentication mark is effectively extracted from details by the neural network. Due to performing an effective optimization algorithm for selecting optimum embedding thresholds, and also distinguishing the texture of blocks, the imperceptibility and robustness have been preserved. The experimental results reveal the superiority of the scheme with regard to the quality of watermarked images and robustness against hybrid attacks over other state-of-the-art schemes. The average PSNR and SSIM of the dual watermarked images are 38 dB and 0.95, respectively; Besides, it can effectively extract the copyright logo and locates forgery regions under severe attacks with satisfactory accuracy.




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Crop Aggregating for short utterances speaker verification using raw waveforms. (arXiv:2005.03329v1 [eess.AS])

Most studies on speaker verification systems focus on long-duration utterances, which are composed of sufficient phonetic information. However, the performances of these systems are known to degrade when short-duration utterances are inputted due to the lack of phonetic information as compared to the long utterances. In this paper, we propose a method that compensates for the performance degradation of speaker verification for short utterances, referred to as "crop aggregating". The proposed method adopts an ensemble-based design to improve the stability and accuracy of speaker verification systems. The proposed method segments an input utterance into several short utterances and then aggregates the segment embeddings extracted from the segmented inputs to compose a speaker embedding. Then, this method simultaneously trains the segment embeddings and the aggregated speaker embedding. In addition, we also modified the teacher-student learning method for the proposed method. Experimental results on different input duration using the VoxCeleb1 test set demonstrate that the proposed technique improves speaker verification performance by about 45.37% relatively compared to the baseline system with 1-second test utterance condition.




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Knowledge Enhanced Neural Fashion Trend Forecasting. (arXiv:2005.03297v1 [cs.IR])

Fashion trend forecasting is a crucial task for both academia and industry. Although some efforts have been devoted to tackling this challenging task, they only studied limited fashion elements with highly seasonal or simple patterns, which could hardly reveal the real fashion trends. Towards insightful fashion trend forecasting, this work focuses on investigating fine-grained fashion element trends for specific user groups. We first contribute a large-scale fashion trend dataset (FIT) collected from Instagram with extracted time series fashion element records and user information. Further-more, to effectively model the time series data of fashion elements with rather complex patterns, we propose a Knowledge EnhancedRecurrent Network model (KERN) which takes advantage of the capability of deep recurrent neural networks in modeling time-series data. Moreover, it leverages internal and external knowledge in fashion domain that affects the time-series patterns of fashion element trends. Such incorporation of domain knowledge further enhances the deep learning model in capturing the patterns of specific fashion elements and predicting the future trends. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed KERN model can effectively capture the complicated patterns of objective fashion elements, therefore making preferable fashion trend forecast.




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Mortar-based entropy-stable discontinuous Galerkin methods on non-conforming quadrilateral and hexahedral meshes. (arXiv:2005.03237v1 [math.NA])

High-order entropy-stable discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods for nonlinear conservation laws reproduce a discrete entropy inequality by combining entropy conservative finite volume fluxes with summation-by-parts (SBP) discretization matrices. In the DG context, on tensor product (quadrilateral and hexahedral) elements, SBP matrices are typically constructed by collocating at Lobatto quadrature points. Recent work has extended the construction of entropy-stable DG schemes to collocation at more accurate Gauss quadrature points.

In this work, we extend entropy-stable Gauss collocation schemes to non-conforming meshes. Entropy-stable DG schemes require computing entropy conservative numerical fluxes between volume and surface quadrature nodes. On conforming tensor product meshes where volume and surface nodes are aligned, flux evaluations are required only between "lines" of nodes. However, on non-conforming meshes, volume and surface nodes are no longer aligned, resulting in a larger number of flux evaluations. We reduce this expense by introducing an entropy-stable mortar-based treatment of non-conforming interfaces via a face-local correction term, and provide necessary conditions for high-order accuracy. Numerical experiments in both two and three dimensions confirm the stability and accuracy of this approach.




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Constructing Accurate and Efficient Deep Spiking Neural Networks with Double-threshold and Augmented Schemes. (arXiv:2005.03231v1 [cs.NE])

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are considered as a potential candidate to overcome current challenges such as the high-power consumption encountered by artificial neural networks (ANNs), however there is still a gap between them with respect to the recognition accuracy on practical tasks. A conversion strategy was thus introduced recently to bridge this gap by mapping a trained ANN to an SNN. However, it is still unclear that to what extent this obtained SNN can benefit both the accuracy advantage from ANN and high efficiency from the spike-based paradigm of computation. In this paper, we propose two new conversion methods, namely TerMapping and AugMapping. The TerMapping is a straightforward extension of a typical threshold-balancing method with a double-threshold scheme, while the AugMapping additionally incorporates a new scheme of augmented spike that employs a spike coefficient to carry the number of typical all-or-nothing spikes occurring at a time step. We examine the performance of our methods based on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST and CIFAR10 datasets. The results show that the proposed double-threshold scheme can effectively improve accuracies of the converted SNNs. More importantly, the proposed AugMapping is more advantageous for constructing accurate, fast and efficient deep SNNs as compared to other state-of-the-art approaches. Our study therefore provides new approaches for further integration of advanced techniques in ANNs to improve the performance of SNNs, which could be of great merit to applied developments with spike-based neuromorphic computing.




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Shared Autonomy with Learned Latent Actions. (arXiv:2005.03210v1 [cs.RO])

Assistive robots enable people with disabilities to conduct everyday tasks on their own. However, these tasks can be complex, containing both coarse reaching motions and fine-grained manipulation. For example, when eating, not only does one need to move to the correct food item, but they must also precisely manipulate the food in different ways (e.g., cutting, stabbing, scooping). Shared autonomy methods make robot teleoperation safer and more precise by arbitrating user inputs with robot controls. However, these works have focused mainly on the high-level task of reaching a goal from a discrete set, while largely ignoring manipulation of objects at that goal. Meanwhile, dimensionality reduction techniques for teleoperation map useful high-dimensional robot actions into an intuitive low-dimensional controller, but it is unclear if these methods can achieve the requisite precision for tasks like eating. Our insight is that---by combining intuitive embeddings from learned latent actions with robotic assistance from shared autonomy---we can enable precise assistive manipulation. In this work, we adopt learned latent actions for shared autonomy by proposing a new model structure that changes the meaning of the human's input based on the robot's confidence of the goal. We show convergence bounds on the robot's distance to the most likely goal, and develop a training procedure to learn a controller that is able to move between goals even in the presence of shared autonomy. We evaluate our method in simulations and an eating user study.




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Retired Soccer Star Briana Scurry on Sharing "Her Hell"

For a long time after her injury, soccer great Briana Scurry "hid her hell." Now, she knows that that was not the right thing to do and she wants to teach others to become more open and understanding about concussion.




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How Fast Should My Website Be? [+7 Tips for Speeding Up Your Site]

Did you know that for every second faster your website loads, you increase conversions by 7%? A fast loading website leads to longer dwell sessions, improved engagement, and increased conversions. When people can access information fast, they’re more likely to stay on your page. So now you’re probably wondering, “How fast should my website be?” […]

The post How Fast Should My Website Be? [+7 Tips for Speeding Up Your Site] appeared first on WebFX Blog.




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Energy Department Reports Show Strong Growth of U.S. Wind Power

By Energy.Gov Annual reports analyzing the wind energy industry released today by the Energy Department show continued rapid growth in wind power installations in 2015, demonstrating market resilience and underscoring the vitality of the U.S. wind energy market on a … Continue reading




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Let's Discuss Memoization, or Should I Say Memoisation

“In computing, memoization or memoisation is an optimization technique used primarily to speed up computer programs by storing the results of expensive function calls and returning the cached result when the same inputs occur again” — Wikipedia article on memoization

I've written a two part article in Memoization in JavaScript. The first part explains the concept with basic implementation in JavaScript code. It details a way to apply the technique on function calls. It is generic to handle most JavaScript functions.




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CSS Only, Content Overflow Shadows

See the Code - See it Full Page - See Details

Horizontal and Vertical scrolling with faded out content. **Please note:** I have not cross browser tested this, however this method leverages `background-attachment: local`, currently usable in everything except Android Browser & Opera Mini according to <a href="https://caniuse.com/#feat=background-attachment" target="_blank">caniuse.com</a>, meaning there is great support across devices and many Android devices use Google Chrome for Android rather than the OS browser. **Additional note:** There is a bug when previewing this pen on mobile, due to loading the example within an `iframe`. The shadow rgba values are read as a non transparent, this does not happen when previewing locally not in an iframe :-)

This Pen uses: HTML, SCSS, JavaScript, and




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In Washington's rural pot shops, the effects of the coronavirus scare can be dramatic

The Cannabis Issue During normal times, I-90 Green House is like a destination resort for marijuana lovers.…




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North Idaho Rep. Heather Scott reaps the glory — and the consequences — of being one of Matt Shea's biggest allies

At these gatherings in northeast Washington, the jackboot of tyranny is always said to be descending, the hand of the federal government always inches away from stealing your guns, your land, your freedom to speak or to pray.…



  • News/Local News

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With a new coronavirus sweeping the world, how much should you really worry?

Since late last year, a new coronavirus, now dubbed COVID-19, has been sweeping the globe, sickening more than 114,000 with flu- and cold-like symptoms and killing more than 4,000 so far.…



  • News/Local News

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Should I quarantine because of coronavirus? It depends on who you ask

Agencies, local authorities and national governments do not agree on who should be quarantined or what that should actually look like. Here’s what we do know. By Maya Miller, Caroline Chen and Joshua Kaplan ProPublica People who have been exposed to the coronavirus are being given incomplete or misleading information about whether they should quarantine themselves, exposing major gaps in the public health response to the pandemic and illuminating disagreement among officials about how useful the tactic even is at this point in the disease’s spread.…



  • News/Nation & World

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Sturdy and old-fashioned, Ford v Ferrari is a leisurely paced character study about cool guys and fast cars

There are no legal skirmishes in Ford v Ferrari.…



  • Film/Film News