Franklin Madison Advisors to specialize in providing financial planning for Generations X & Y and developing strategies that help people get ahead in life financially.

The book is helpful to middle and upper middle income U.S. persons and households, and is especially helpful to self-employed persons.

The K Street Group has announced that is it prepared to assist its house of worship clients with a phased in re-opening of their facilities, once the COVid pandemic restrictions are relaxed.

Daniel O. Hands of Oakbrook, Illinois, is honored by the International Association of Who's Who as one of Illinois Top Attorneys in Estate Planning Asset Protection for his extensive achievements within the field of Law.

CPI Consulting CEO for over 30 years reveals success strategies for "Planning the Life You Desire ~ Living the Life You Deserve: Creating & Achieving Goals That Matter Most"

Douglas Boneparth, Bone Fide Wealth President, joined Yahoo Finance's Jen Rogers, Myles Udland, Dan Roberts, and Melody Hahm to discuss the best approach to retirement planning during the coronavirus pandemic.

Everyone is calling for smart growth...but what exactly is it?

In The Smart Growth Manual (New York: McGraw-Hill Professional, 2009), two leading city planners provide a thorough answer. From the expanse of the metropolis to the detail of the window box, they address the pressing challenges of urban development with easy-to-follow advice and broad array of best practices.

With their landmark book Suburban Nation, Andres Duany and Jeff Speck "set forth more clearly than anyone has done in our time the elements of good town planning" (The New Yorker).

In this long-awaited companion volume, the authors have organized the latest contributions of new urbanism, green design, and healthy communities into a comprehensive handbook, fully illustrated with the built work of the nation's leading practitioners.

This work also features a valuable Smart Growth Directory, with contact information for national, regional and state organizations.

Lieutenant Governor-Elect Gavin Newsom, writing as Mayor of San Francisco, touted The Smart Growth Manual as "an indispensable guide to city planning. This kind of progressive development is the only way to full restore our economic strength and create new jobs, new industries, and a renewed ability to compete in the first rank of world economies."

An extensive interview with the authors is featured on the American Society of Landscape Architects "The Dirt" blog.

The conventional wisdom says that we need strict planning to build walkable neighborhoods around transit stations - even though these neighborhoods are like the streetcar suburbs that were common in America before anyone heard of city planning.

In reality, many of our greatest successes in urban design have occurred when we treated the issues as political questions - not as technical problems that the planners should solve for us.

According to Unplanning: Livable Cities And Political Choices (Berkeley, Calif.: Preservation Institute, 2010), the anti-freeway movement of the 1960s and 1970s and the anti-sprawl movement of recent decades were both political movements, and citizen-activists often had to work against projects that planners proposed and approved.

This book uses an intriguing thought experiment to show that, in order to build livable cities, we should go further than the anti-freeway and anti-sprawl movements by putting direct political limits on urban growth.

Political choices about how we want to live can transform our cities more effectively than planning.

At the new year, many people resolve to make changes. Attorney Paul Black recommends adding a few estate planning items to your new year's resolution list.

Announces Marshall Heitzman to Lead New Program Efforts

Monika Hamori, professor at IE Business School in Madrid and author of the HBR article "Job-Hopping to the Top and Other Career Fallacies."

Marc Freedman, founder and CEO of Civic Ventures and author of "The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife."

First Encounter Assault Recon proved a breakthrough moment for game AI. So let's revisit what made it so special and explore how it works in detail. ...

Developer Chris Crawford bemoans the industry's short-sighted outlook, and suggests it might be better to plant oaks than short-lived weeds. ...

Developer Chris Crawford bemoans the industry's short-sighted outlook, and suggests it might be better to plant oaks than short-lived weeds. ...

While the current estate tax exemption is higher than most people will qualify for at $11.4 million, estate planning is an important process for everyone. Critical decisions such as who will be the legal guardian of your children, how your… Read More

The post Making Technology Work for You: 5 Tips for Proactive Digital Estate Planning appeared first on Anders CPAs.

The end of the year is fast approaching whether we are ready or not! There are several tax savings strategies that you can utilize to reduce the taxes you will be paying for the 2019 tax year.
Bunch Itemized Deductions… Read More

The post 2019 Year-End Tax Planning Strategies appeared first on Anders CPAs.

Good news came for taxpayers with large estates when the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) was passed. The TCJA doubled the estate and gift tax lifetime exemption, from $5.49 million per taxpayer to $11.18 million per taxpayer. For 2019,… Read More

The post How Portability Can be a Valuable Estate Planning Tax Strategy appeared first on Anders CPAs.

Virus could hit the way Indian revenue authorities tax their individual, foreign income.

Businessman Sentenced to a Year in Prison for Stealing Employer’s Trade Secrets While Planning New Job in China

Due to the hard work of firefighters and the successful plan they implemented, the Galahad Fire has been contained to the point where no direct threats remain to park resources. The fire is not out, but the chances of it crossing existing containment lines have been greatly reduced. The fire is estimated to be 3,102 acres and 30% contained. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/hard-work-and-good-planning-pay-off-on-the-galahad-fire.htm

National Park Service (NPS) and U.S. Forest Service (USFS) fire managers, working together as the North Zone Interagency Fire Management Program, anticipate initiating prescribed fire treatment during the fall and winter months as weather and fuel moisture conditions allow. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/north-zone-fall-2014-rx.htm

National Park Service (NPS) and U.S. Forest Service (USFS) fire managers, working together as the North Zone Interagency Fire Management Program, anticipate initiating a prescribed fire treatment this fall as weather and fuel moisture conditions allow near the boundary line between the North Kaibab Ranger District of the Kaibab NF and the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/fall-prescribed.htm

Warm, dry weather conditions have led to additional growth on the Ikes Fire, which is now approximately 1,535 acres and 20% contained. Smoke settled into the Grand Canyon overnight as temperatures cooled but smoke may begin to lift as temperatures warm up throughout the day. https://www.nps.gov/grca/learn/news/ikes-fire-spreads-crews-secure-planning-area-20190815.htm

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

In recent years, the Forest Service and the public have placed increasing priority on making sure that management of public lands takes into account the needs of nearby communities, regional residents, national residents, and even members of the public who may not currently visit public lands.

This report chronicles a large-scale effort to map place values across the Pacific Northwest Region (Washington and Oregon) of the U.S. Forest Service.

A recurrent theme in the development of U.S. forest policies has been the assertion of strong positive relations among communities, economies, and natural resource management. Now as a new round of federal land management planning is getting underway, questions are being raised about the strength of that assertion and how to view communities following a decade of reduced federal harvests. This report examines these questions considering the 433 communities in six Bureau of Land Management districts in western Oregon. It discusses the ways that forest-based communities have been considered in the context of federal forest management planning, and it summarizes information on socioeconomic conditions and trends for communities in western Oregon.

Public land managers are confronted with an ever-growing and diversifying set of demands for providing recreation opportunities. Coupled with a variety of trends (devolution of governance and decisionmaking, population growth, technological innovation, shifts in public values, economic restructuring) and reduced organizational capacity, these demands represent a significant and complex challenge to public land management. One way of dealing with this situation is to use a framework to assist in working through this complexity. A framework, for the purpose of this report, is a process using a set of steps, based on sound science, that assists managers in framing a particular problem, working through it, and arriving at a set of defendable decisions. Several such frameworks exist for providing recreation opportunities on public lands. These include the Recreation Opportunity Spectrum, Limits of Acceptable Change, Visitor Experience and Resource Protection, Visitor Impact Management, and Benefits-Based Management. The report traces the development of each of these frameworks, describes the fundamental premises and concepts used within them, and provides an assessment of the experience with their use. Each of the frameworks has been used with varying success, depending on the organization's will, its technical capacity, the extent to which the process is inclusive of varying value systems, how open and deliberative the process is, the extent to which the organization is concerned with effectiveness, and the extent to which issues are confronted at the systems level.

This report reviews the growing literature on the concept of agency-citizen interactions after large wildfires. Because large wildfires have historically occurred at irregular intervals, research from related fields has been reviewed where appropriate. This issue is particularly salient in the West where excess fuel conditions indicate that the large wildfires occurring in many states are expected to continue to be a major problem for forest managers in the coming years. This review focuses on five major themes that emerge from prior research: contextual considerations, barriers and obstacles, uncertainty and perceptions of risk, communication and outreach, and bringing communities together. It offers ideas on how forest managers can interact with stakeholders for planning and restoration activities after a large wildfire. Management implications are included.

Sustaining farm and forest land has been an important goal in the United States because of the role these lands play in the livelihoods of rural residents while also providing desired open space benefits. However, land use policies to protect rural lands often involve a tension between balancing public interests regarding economic and open space goals with the private interests and property rights of farm and forest land owners.

National forest managers are charged with tackling the effects of climate change on the natural resources under their care. The Forest Service National Roadmap for Responding to Climate Change and the Climate Change Performance Scorecard require managers to make significant progress in addressing climate change by 2015. To help land managers meet this challenge, Forest Service scientists conducted three case studies on national forests and adjacent national parks and documented a wide range of scientific issues and solutions. They summarized the scientific foundation for climate change adaptation and made the information accessible to land managers by creating a climate change adaptation guidebook and web portal. Case study teams discovered that collaboration among scientists and land managers is crucial to adaptation planning, as are management plans targeted to the particular ecosystem conditions and management priorities of each region.

Robots operating in household environments must find objects on shelves, under tables, and in cupboards. Previous work often formulate the object search problem as a POMDP (Partially Observable Markov Decision Process), yet constrain the search space in 2D. We propose a new approach that enables the robot to efficiently search for objects in 3D, taking occlusions into account. We model the problem as an object-oriented POMDP, where the robot receives a volumetric observation from a viewing frustum and must produce a policy to efficiently search for objects. To address the challenge of large state and observation spaces, we first propose a per-voxel observation model which drastically reduces the observation size necessary for planning. Then, we present a novel octree-based belief representation which captures beliefs at different resolutions and supports efficient exact belief update. Finally, we design an online multi-resolution planning algorithm that leverages the resolution layers in the octree structure as levels of abstractions to the original POMDP problem. Our evaluation in a simulated 3D domain shows that, as the problem scales, our approach significantly outperforms baselines without resolution hierarchy by 25%-35% in cumulative reward. We demonstrate the practicality of our approach on a torso-actuated mobile robot searching for objects in areas of a cluttered lab environment where objects appear on surfaces at different heights.

Uncertain dynamic obstacles, such as pedestrians or vehicles, pose a major challenge for optimal robot navigation with safety guarantees. Previous work on motion planning has followed two main strategies to provide a safe bound on an obstacle's space: a polyhedron, such as a cuboid, or a nonlinear differentiable surface, such as an ellipsoid. The former approach relies on disjunctive programming, which has a relatively high computational cost that grows exponentially with the number of obstacles. The latter approach needs to be linearized locally to find a tractable evaluation of the chance constraints, which dramatically reduces the remaining free space and leads to over-conservative trajectories or even unfeasibility. In this work, we present a hybrid approach that eludes the pitfalls of both strategies while maintaining the original safety guarantees. The key idea consists in obtaining a safe differentiable approximation for the disjunctive chance constraints bounding the obstacles. The resulting nonlinear optimization problem is free of chance constraint linearization and disjunctive programming, and therefore, it can be efficiently solved to meet fast real-time requirements with multiple obstacles. We validate our approach through mathematical proof, simulation and real experiments with an aerial robot using nonlinear model predictive control to avoid pedestrians.

The paper develops a robotic manipulation system to treat the pressing needs for handling a large number of test tubes in clinical examination and replace or reduce human labor. It presents the technical details of the system, which separates and arranges test tubes in racks with the help of 3D vision and artificial intelligence (AI) reasoning/planning. The developed system only requires a person to put a rack with mixed and non-arranged tubes in front of a robot. The robot autonomously performs recognition, reasoning, planning, manipulation, etc., and returns a rack with separated and arranged tubes. The system is simple-to-use, and there are no requests for expert knowledge in robotics. We expect such a system to play an important role in helping managing public health and hope similar systems could be extended to other clinical manipulation like handling mixers and pipettes in the future.

We analyze the computational complexity of motion planning through local "input/output" gadgets with separate entrances and exits, and a subset of allowed traversals from entrances to exits, each of which changes the state of the gadget and thereby the allowed traversals. We study such gadgets in the 0-, 1-, and 2-player settings, in particular extending past motion-planning-through-gadgets work to 0-player games for the first time, by considering "branchless" connections between gadgets that route every gadget's exit to a unique gadget's entrance. Our complexity results include containment in L, NL, P, NP, and PSPACE; as well as hardness for NL, P, NP, and PSPACE. We apply these results to show PSPACE-completeness for certain mechanics in Factorio, [the Sequence], and a restricted version of Trainyard, improving prior results. This work strengthens prior results on switching graphs and reachability switching games.

A navigation system having a central device which uses a link shape compression unit to compress information of altitude changes of a road link obtained from a three-dimensional road map, and calculates a geometry parameter based on variation of energy of a vehicle travelling on the road link. An on-board terminal device estimates the vehicle's average travelling pattern by using a travel-pattern-estimation unit based on the geometry parameter calculated by the central device, a link-travelling time estimated from statistically-stored traffic information, and a link length. The on-board terminal device further calculates fuel consumption of the vehicle travelling on each road link based on the estimated travelling pattern and parameters of the vehicle by using a fuel-consumption calculation unit, and then, searches a fuel-efficient route by using the fuel consumption as a link cost. The on-board terminal device has a vehicle-type selector for selecting a type of the vehicle.

A method and apparatus for determining a trajectory for a vehicle are disclosed, wherein, the method includes: identifying a starting position (p0) and a desired terminal position (P) for the vehicle; linearly approximating dynamics of the vehicle; and using the starting position (p0), desired terminal position (P), and linear approximation, determining the trajectory for the vehicle. The linear approximation can be constrained by requirements (e.g., specifications) that: (i) an acceleration applied to the vehicle at a point on the trajectory is relatively large when the acceleration acts in a direction that is substantially perpendicular to the velocity of the vehicle; and (ii) an acceleration applied to the vehicle at a point on the trajectory is relatively small when the acceleration acts in a direction that is substantially parallel to the velocity of the vehicle. The vehicle may have a curvature limit.

A method, system and computer readable media for route re-planning including generating enemy force movement predictions to be used during mission planning. During a mission, enemy force movements can be compared to the predictions. By using enemy force movement predictions for an initial comparison, the enemy force movements may only need to be compared to the own force mission plan if the enemy forces deviate from the predictions. When enemy force movement deviates from the predictions, new enemy force movement predictions can be generated. The new enemy force movement predictions can then be compared to the own force mission plan to determine if a route re-plan is needed. The route can be re-planned to determine a route that reduces or eliminates the chance of a lethal encounter with an enemy or threat.

A planning and guiding method and excavation guiding device correctly implant an artificial tooth root at a predetermined site, perform various excavation processes on a cortical bone section and a spongy bone section by stage-based guidance, and guide eccentric excavation of the cortical bone section and concentric excavation of the spongy bone section according to a bone pattern, such that the artificial tooth root thus implanted is not only positioned at a planned ideal site but also manifests appropriate initial stability.

The South Coast Development Team at Savills has successfully sold Southbrook Rise, the former council offices in Southampton, with planning permission for 60 flats.

Eastern Michigan University released information regarding its planning process for the Fall 2020 semester.

How has the city of San Francisco changed in the last decade, and what will it look like in the future? Host Ethan Elkind sits down with retiring San Francisco Planning Director John Rahaim.

Your Legal Rights Host Jeffrey Hayden welcomes Janet Brewer and Alicia Gamez, specialists in estate planning, wills, trusts and probate law. We consider new tax laws' effects on planning and special issues to do with international assets and family minors. Questions for Janet and Alicia? Please call toll-free 866-798-8255.

Hey, guys. Struck me this morning that it's a good idea for MeFites in town to know where everyone is, what potential needs folks have, and how to help if things get much worse. I'm setting this one as a proposed meetup in Austin in the hopes of getting emails out to folks in town, but right now I have no intention of meeting in-person--just organizing folks in town so that we can set up a network we can use to help one another and familiarize ourselves with anyone who's local on the site. Anyway, here's a space. Thoughts?

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST: More than 50 million children here in the U.S. will be out of school for the remainder of the academic year due to the coronavirus. In Europe, however, a different story. This coming Monday, France is set to join a small number of European countries attempting a partial reopening of schools. This week, French president Emmanuel Macron visited a primary school northwest of Paris that has remained open for the children of essential health workers. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: (Speaking French). PRESIDENT EMMANUEL MACRON: (Speaking French). UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: (Speaking French). MACRON: (Speaking French). KELLY: That little girl there telling the president her mother works as a nurse in a coronavirus unit. Well, Macron's education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, was there at the school as well. He is overseeing the reopening of schools next week, and he joins us via Skype now from Paris. Bonjour.

IBM Planning Analytics for Microsoft Excel 2.0.48 32-bit Microsoft Windows Multilingual

IBM Planning Analytics 2.0.9 Microsoft Windows Multilingual

IBM Planning Analytics for Microsoft Excel 2.0.48 64-bit Microsoft Windows Multilingual

Bina Venkataraman, author of The Optimist’s Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age, studies the art of looking ahead for solutions during dangerous times. It's a skill she honed while working on the Ebola Task Force for former U.S. president Barack Obama.