text:
If you are experiencing issues such as freezing, crashing, or slow performance while playing the game Tales of Symphonia, there are several potential solutions that you can try to resolve these problems.
1. System Requirements
- Check if your computer meets the minimum system requirements for the game. Ensure that your operating system is up to date and meets the necessary specifications.
2. Graphics Settings
- Adjust the graphics settings in the game options menu. Lowering certain settings such as resolution or disabling advanced graphical features may help improve performance.
- If you have a dedicated graphics card installed on your computer, make sure that it is up to date with the latest drivers from the manufacturer's website.
3. Hardware Limitations
- If your computer does not meet the recommended system requirements for Tales of Symphonia, it may struggle to run smoothly.
- In this case, consider upgrading your hardware components such as RAM or graphics card to improve overall performance.
4. Background Processes
Certain background processes can consume system resources and interfere with gameplay:
- determine what processes are running in- background – using Task Manager (Windows) or Activity Monitor (Mac).
- Ideally terfering with gameplay-To avoid applications any non-essential applications while playing Tales of Symphonia.
- Tales of Symphonia system requirements
- Tales of Symphonia fps fix
- Puzzles for Clef fps fix
- Ys IX: Monstrum Nox keeps freezing,crashing,running slow
- Lunacy: Saint Rhodes fps fix
- Decapolice fps fix
- Tales of Symphonia release date
- Madden NFL 24 keeps freezing,crashing,running slow
- HellSweeper VR keeps freezing,crashing,running slow
- 30XX fps fix


text:
Happy June from the Department of Distance Learning. As the first mini session is progressing, there have been some questions about weighting grades in Blackboard. Since most of you weight by category, there is a three step process:
- Set up categories (and remove duplicates).
Manage > Categories
- Set up category weights in your weighted grade column.
Weighted Column > Edit Column Information
- Assign a category to all items that will be graded.
Manage > Column Organization
In addition to the steps above, here are a few items that frequently cause problems:
- Items must be "included in Grade Center calculations" in the item settings.
- An item must include "possible points" to affect the calculation.
- When selecting "Yes" for Calculate as Running total, make sure to assign a Zero for items not attempted or students will not be penalized for not attempting the assignment (excused absence).
The following short video might be helpful in setting up Grade Weighting (start at 1:35 if you weight by category, rather than by individual items). Weighting Grades in Blackboard 9.1 (4:53)
Please see the following document for a list of known issues in Blackboard and solutions or work arounds:

source: openbmb/Ultra-FineWeb


text:
This fascinating documentary presents the details of Eric's life, who was perhaps best known as an athlete in the 1924 Olympics, as depicted in the Academy Award-winning film, Chariots of Fire. His story is told by David McCasland, author of Eric Liddell: Pure Gold, Eric's daughter Patricia, and Rev. John Keddie, consultant on Chariots of Fire, along with fellow prisoners form the internment camp in China.
Growing up, Eric was a gifted athlete, excelling in rugby and later in track. He entered the 1924 Olympics in Paris and was favored to win the 100-meter race. But when he learned that he would have to race on Sunday, he refused. Instead, he competed in other races and still brought home gold for Scotland.
Now a national hero, Eric announced his intentions to go to China as a missionary. There he taught Chemistry and oversaw the school's sports programs, sharing his faith at sporting events. He later married, then left teaching to become an evangelist By 1941, China was becoming more unstable and Japan was increasing its control. Concerned for his family's safety, he sent them off to Canada while he remained in China. It wasn't long until the Japanese began moving people into internment camps. There, Eric became friend and mentor to 300 children, many of whom were separated from their missionary parents. Fellow prisoners observed as he rose early each day to read and pray. He continued living out his faith in the camp and was admired and respected by all. In 1944, however, he began showing signs of a possible brain tumor and died the following year.
Eric Liddell was a humble man with a simple and personal faith whose life's purpose was to glorify God. His life and legacy continue to impact people's lives around the world.
Studio: Christian History Institutue
Time: 100 minutes
Eric Liddell: Champion of Conviction (DVD):
- Item Price: $12.95
- Listed On: March 14, 2012

source: HuggingFaceFW/fineweb-edu


text:
The Banishing Charm is a spell used to send an object away from the caster. The spell with the opposite effect is the Summoning Charm.
 Effects and Limitations
The Banishing Charm is a fairly difficult spell to cast and is not taught until students' fourth year at Hogwarts. The class has to read three extra books in preparation for lessons on the Summoning Charm which they learnt first.
Assuming the spell works in a similar way to the Summing Charm, it requires the caster to concentrate on the object as well as to speak the incantation. If the witch or wizard isn't concentrating enough the spell wont work and objects either wont move at all or will give up partway through.
It takes practice for the spell to send the object in the direction that the user wants it to go.
 Uses in the books
 Fourth Book
Harry Potter was taught the Banishing Charm in Charms Class by Professor Flitwick. They were taught using cushions rather than trying to banish objects around them, as solid objects flying around was something of a safety hazard. Unfortunately Neville Longbottom's aim was so bad that he kept hitting Flitwick with the banishing spells and sent him flying around the classroom, rather than the cushions. Hermione Granger and Harry Potter were both able to cast the spell properly however, and send the cushions into the box they were meant to be aiming at. Ron Weasley was less accurate and knocked Parvati Patil's hat off with one cushion, sent another into a chandelier and yet another out of the window.
 Additional Canon
In the video game Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban the incantation for the Banishing Charm is "Depulso".


Vertical elliptic operator for efficient wave propagation in TTI media
Umair bin Waheed, Tariq Ali Alkhalifah
Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review
3 Scopus citations
Elliptic wave extrapolation operators require significantly less computational cost than the ones for transversely isotropic (TI) media. However, it does not provide accurate wavefield representation or imaging for the prevalent TI media. We propose a new vertical elliptically anisotropic (VEA) wave equation by decomposing the acoustic TI pseudo-differential wave equation. The decomposition results in a vertical elliptic differential equation and a scalar operator. The new VEA-like wave equation shares the same dispersion relation as that of the original acoustic TI wave equation. Therefore, the kinematic contents are correctly matched to the original equation. Moreover, the proposed decomposition yields better amplitude properties than the isotropic decomposition without increasing the computational load. Therefore, it exhibits better cost versus accuracy tradeoff compared to the isotropic or the tilted elliptic decompositions. We demonstrate with numerical examples that the proposed methodology is numerically stable for complex models and is free from shear-wave artifacts.
Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)3560-3564
Number of pages5
JournalSEG Technical Program Expanded Abstracts 2015
StatePublished - Aug 19 2015
Dive into the research topics of 'Vertical elliptic operator for efficient wave propagation in TTI media'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.
Cite this


6.71. Cleaning Up
From now on, when reentering the chroot environment after exiting, use the following modified chroot command:
chroot "$LFS" /usr/bin/env -i \
 HOME=/root TERM="$TERM" PS1='\u:\w\$ ' \
 PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin \
 /bin/bash --login
The reason for this is that the programs in /tools are no longer needed. Since they are no longer needed you can delete the /tools directory if so desired.
[Note]
Note
Removing /tools will also remove the temporary copies of Tcl, Expect, and DejaGNU which were used for running the toolchain tests. If you need these programs later on, they will need to be recompiled and re-installed. The BLFS book has instructions for this (see _URL_
If the virtual kernel file systems have been unmounted, either manually or through a reboot, ensure that the virtual kernel file systems are mounted when reentering the chroot. This process was explained in Section 6.2.2, "Mounting and Populating /dev" and Section 6.2.3, "Mounting Virtual Kernel File Systems".


Using threads with collections, Part 2
New design issues arise when making collections larger
The collection model provides an abstraction for grouping related objects, which proves useful when writing programs. As the size of a collection grows, however, manipulating it in its entirety can become unwieldy. At this point it becomes desirable to support subsets. But the ability to subset a collection imposes new restrictions on the design of the collection classes themselves.
This column is a continuation of the discussion I started in the March Java In Depth column. In that first part I discussed building a class that implements the collection abstraction called SynchroList. In this column I'll update that class so that I can subset the collection. Then we'll go through the issues that arise when multiple threads use a subsetted collection. Finally, I'll show you an applet I wrote that helps demonstrate what is going on inside the collection when multiple threads are accessing it.
Collections that support subsets
The class that I created in part 1 of this series is called a SynchroList, and it is an ordered collection. Being ordered means that the objects within the collection have some notion of order associated with them. For example, words may be sorted into alphabetical order, numbers into numerical order, and so on. In the case of my class, the ordering is determined by a helper class called a Comparator. This ordering is similar to the way in which collections are set up in the 1.2 release of Java.
Once a collection is ordered, a user of the collection can specify a subset of elements in terms of example objects. While this may be confusing at first, it turns out to be a pretty simple concept.
Consider a collection of words (which for the purpose of this example will consist of an arbitrary number of characters and letters, tokens, not necessarily English words) that are ordered alphabetically using the convention that letters that appear earlier in the alphabet are considered to have a value less than letters that appear later in the alphabet. Within the collection, you may wish to select all tokens that start with the letter a. You make your selections from the list by comparing all of the tokens in the list with the tokens "a" and "b." If the list element is greater than or equal to the first token, that element is included in the subset as long as it is also less than the second token. The tokens selected become the subset. That subset can be expressed as ("a," "b"]. The difference between the ( symbol and the ] symbol is that a parenthesis implies greater than or equal to, while the bracket implies less than. The set is said to be inclusive of "a" and exclusive of "b."
To implement subsets in the SynchroList class I changed the inner class LinkEnumerator. Why? The original LinkEnumerator (for a review, see the original source in part 1 of this series) had only the null constructor. This set an internal index variable named current to point to the head of the sorted list of Link objects. In the new version of this class we add two constructors for returning subsets of the list. Further, we've added a pointer to the last object to be returned, named last, that tells the class when it has reached the end of the list. The original constructor was modified as follows:

LinkEnumerator( ) { current = head; last = null }
Next we've added two additional constructors to return subsets of the list. The first returns the subset from and object referenced by the variable from to the end of the collection. This constructor is shown next:
LinkEnumerator(Object from) {
 last = null;
 for (current = head; current != null; current = current.next()) {
 if (cmp.lessThan(from, current.getData()))
 break;
 }
}
The code above simply walks through the list, using the Comparator object to compare objects, until the testing method lessThan fails or reaches the end of the list. The second constructor is shown below:
LinkEnumerator(Object from, Object to) {
 last = null;
 if (cmp.greaterThan(from, to)) {
 Object tmp = from;
 from = to;
 to = tmp;
 }
 for (current = head; current != null; current = current.next()) {
 if (cmp.lessThan(from, current.getData()))
 break;
 }
 for (last = current; last != null; last = last.next()) {
 if (! cmp.greaterThan(to, last.getData()))
 break;
 }
}
As in the previous code sample, the constructor is pretty straightforward, however, it does add two important elements. First, it checks to see that object from and object to are ordered from lower-valued object to higher-valued object. Next, it finds the first element exactly the same way the previous constructor did. Finally, it locates the first object that is larger than the to object and sets the variable last to reference it.
The method nextElement is modified to check to see if the enumeration has reached the object referenced by last and, if it has, it stops returning elements. I should note here that I made the somewhat arbitrary decision at the beginning of the design process that the range returned would be inclusive of the lower element and exclusive of the upper element. You may want to check to see how you would go about changing the code to be inclusive of both elements, upper and lower, or exclusive of those elements. If you choose to investigate different versions, be aware that there are at least two valid solutions.
After modifying the LinkEnumerator class, additional methods are added to the SynchroList class to return a subsetted enumeration. These methods are part of the SynchroList class and are shown next.
public synchronized Enumeration elements() {
 return new LinkEnumerator();
}
public synchronized Enumeration elements(Object fr) {
 return new LinkEnumerator(fr);
}
public synchronized Enumeration elements(Object fr, Object to) {
 return new LinkEnumerator(fr, to);
}
The important point to note in the methods above is that these methods are synchronized. This synchronization is unavoidably necessary as the list must be stable when you are constructing an enumeration. However, as I'll show in the next session, once constructed you can still provide unsynchronized access to the list. I have included a working example of the SynchroList with subset enumerations in the Resources section.
Adding threads to the picture
Let us take a minute to review where we started and where we have arrived. I started with the assertion that a collection that was thread aware would be a useful tool to have in the toolbox, and described where the Java 1.0 collections Vector and Hashtable fell short of this capability. So far what we've accomplished is to create an ordered collection that can be subsetted, but we haven't yet addressed the aspects relating to threads.
I prefer to differentiate between threadsafe collections and thread hot collections in the following way:
 - A threadsafe collection is one that works correctly when accessed by multiple threads
 - A thread hot collection is one that works correctly and efficiently when accessed by multiple threads
To build a thread hot collection, it is necessary to be able to update the collection with one thread while it is being enumerated by another thread. Further, updates to one region shouldn't be blocked by enumerating another region if the regions don't overlap.
To achieve this objective, the SynchroList class has to keep state concerning the LinkEnumeration classes that have been created. This is where this class begins to differ most significantly from collection classes that you may have already used.
An enumeration of the collection held by a SynchroList class is a series of Link objects whose next and prev pointers identify the next and previous links in the chain. To guarantee consistency of this chain of links, it is required that the SynchroList class not change the previous or next pointers while an enumeration is outstanding. This piece of state, whether or not a Link object is participating in an enumeration, can be maintained in several ways. I chose to implement it with a bit set.
The reason I chose a bit set is because the information required was boolean, that is one bit, and in Java the java.util.BitSet class can be used relatively efficiently to create a dynamically sized array of bits. What I didn't realize was that the BitSet class was missing a couple of key methods that I would need to make my design work. Further, like many classes in the core Java packages, the java.util.BitSet class was declared final so I could not easily extend it to add the methods I needed. The saving grace was that the source to the class is included with the JDK so I could create a modified version of the class that met my needs. I proceeded to create a modified class, called a ChuckBitSet, and added two methods to the standard class:
 - isZero -- This method returns true if the set currently contains no "one" bits.
 - lastBit -- This method returns the index of the last (bit with the highest index) one-bit set (the extent of the bit set).
Perhaps, with luck, these might make it into the Sun version of BitSet some day.


text:
Plant Health for One Health
The intersection of plant, human, animal, and ecological health
Webinar 4 brings together scientists working at the intersection of environmental, human, and animal health. In this session, the experts will examine plant health and agriculture from a "One Health" approach. This collaborative, multisectoral, and transdisciplinary perspective recognizes the health of people, animals, plants, and their environments as all closely connected. In this approach, both agricultural practices and plant health outcomes are determined by, and contribute to, ecological, animal, and human health.

source: m-a-p/FineFineWeb


text:
Evaluation of Grouting Performance Using Electrical Resistivity Tomography
This study proposes a tomography-based method for evaluating grouting performance after injection. Tomography is a convenient approach for solving the boundary measurement inverse problem of capturing discrete pixels and synthesizing these pixels into a unified image. Four arrays of eight electrodes are installed into large triaxial cell specimens to simulate in-situ crosshole resistivity testing. Sand is used as a base material and a wet cement mixture is grouted into the specimens. Electromagnetic waves are used as a means of accumulating the physical properties of the specimens. Each measured electrical resistivity is considered as a discrete signal. The electrical resistivity distribution is calculated and optimized through an iterative modified least-squares inversion based on a forward solution of Coulomb and Gauss's law equations. Results show that the electrical properties of an injected grout material and its location and size can be effectively estimated from a series of resistance measurements.
Seung-Seok Lee, Joon Hyun Lee, Ik Keun Park, Sung-Jin Song, Man Yong Choi
N. D. Thanh et al., "Evaluation of Grouting Performance Using Electrical Resistivity Tomography", Key Engineering Materials, Vols. 321-323, pp. _PHONE_, 2006


text:
Surface detection of contamination: Principles, applications and recent developments
This paper presents the basic principles of luminescence spectroscopy used to detect trace organic substances on surfaces and some examples of application related to surface luminescence detection. These applications include the analysis of a synthetic fuel sample spotted on filter paper, the study of the adsorption process of a tumorigenic fossil-fuel material into mouse skin, the quantification of various coal liquids by sensitized fluorescence measurements, and the detection of potentially hazardous polyaromatic hydrocarbons by a sensitive surface detection technique, room temperature phosphorescence.
Journal of Environmental Sciences
Volume / Issue
Start / End Page
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)


text:
A productive parcel of predominantly arable land
Land at Northolm Farm, Eye Green, Peterborough
The land at Northolm Farm extends to about 364.75 acres (147.61 hectares) of predominantly Grades 2 and 3 arable land. The land is located to the north east of Eye Green which is a village located a short distance to the north east of Peterborough. The land benefits from multiple points of access directly off the Crowland Road and Nipcut Road, both of which give excellent access on to the A47.
The land is found predominantly within a ring fence, there is however a small off-lying parcel of fallow land located to the west of the Crowland Road. The main parcel of land is well serviced with internal tracks that have recently been upgraded.
The Soil Survey of England and Wales records the soils, as being predominantly of the Shabbington and Downholland 1 series.
The Shabbington soils are described as deep fine loamy and fine loamy over sandy soils variably affected by groundwater. Some are slowly permeable seasonally waterlogged fine loamy over clayey soils and suitable for the growing of winter cereals and grassland. The Downholland 1 soils are described as deep stoneless humose clayey soils, calcareous in places. Some are peat soils and deep humose calcareous silty soils, which are suitable for the growing of cereals, sugar beet, potatoes and field vegetables in the Fens.
Investment in the soils has been undertaken in the previous 12 months to improve soil structure through tillage of the soil. Back cropping has included, sugar beet, maize, winter wheat and wider variety of combinable crops under previous tenancy.
The selling agents understand that part of the farm is under drained. Drainage plans are available on request.
The land is subject to drainage rates payable to the North Level District Internal Drainage Board.
The selling agents are not aware of any services connected to the land.
Tenure, Possession & Holdover
The freehold is offered for sale subject to a Farm Business Tenancy agreement terminating 10th October 2022. A period of holdover may be required by the outgoing tenant to harvest late crops, with a long stop date of 30th November 2022.
Method of Sale
The freehold of the property is available as a whole by private treaty. Offers for part of the land may be considered. All prospective purchasers are encouraged to register their interest with the selling agents.
Subsidies and Grants
The land is registered to receive payments under the Basic Payment Scheme. 145.47 entitlements are included in the tenancy and will be available with the sale. The current tenant has made a claim for the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) in 2022, entitlements will be transferred on completion of the sale. The ingoing purchaser will indemnify the vendor and existing tenant against any non-compliance from the date of completion.
In the event that any part of the sale is subject to VAT this will be payable by the purchaser in addition to the purchase price. It is the selling agents understanding that the holding is not opted for VAT.
The land will be subject to a non-agricultural, forestry or equine development overage set at 30% of any uplift in value as the result of the grant of any planning consent, for a period of 50 years from the date of completion of the sale.
National Grid Pipeline
There is a gas pipeline that runs under the property. Part of this pipeline has been identified as being too shallow by the National Grid. The area affected has not been cropped and is fenced off with cultivations not permitted in this area. The National Grid are compensating the tenant for loss of crop and are working on longer term solutions.
Wayleaves, Easements and Rights of Way
The property is sold subject to and with the benefit of all wayleaves, easements and rights of way whether public or private whether mentioned or not.
Sporting & Timber Rights
All sporting and timber rights shall be included in the sale in so far as they are owned.
The vendors except all mines and minerals from the sale, with surface searching and underground working powers only.
The vendor and vendor's agents will do their best to specify the ownership of boundaries, hedges, fences and ditches but will not be bound to determine these.
A productive parcel of predominantly arable land with good internal tracksHenry King


text:
Definition of tableware
n. - Ware, or articles collectively, for table use. 2
The word "tableware" uses 9 letters: A A B E E L R T W.
No direct anagrams for tableware found in this word list.
Words formed by adding one letter before or after tableware (in bold), or to aabeelrtw in any order:
s - tablewares
All words formed from tableware by changing one letter
Browse words starting with tableware by next letter


text:
Science Fair Project Encyclopedia
Gold-plating is a term relating to European Union law, used particularly in the UK.
Gold-plating refers to the practise of national bodies exceeding the terms of European Community directives when implementing them into national law. In the United Kingdom business lobbyists argue that the government and its agencies often tag additional measures on to the back of European Directives which place UK business at a competitive disadvantage in relation to other EU states where directives are implemented more literally.
In Italy, gold-plating has often been used a device to pass through controversial measures and ensuring a lower degree of parliamentary scrutiny, particularly in periods of weak governments.
EU governments committed themselves to a deregulation agenda at the Lisbon Summit in 2000, and as a consequence the European Commission has supported more maximum harmonisation measures in recent years, which effectively prohibit gold-plating.
The contents of this article is licensed from _URL_ under the GNU Free Documentation License. Click here to see the transparent copy and copyright details


text:
Computer Graphics Forum
Volume 11, Issue 3 (1992)
Roni Yagel and Arie KaufmanAbstract:
We present an efficient three-phase algorithm for volume viewing that is based on exploiting coherency between rays in parallel projection. The algorithm starts by building a raytemplate and determining a special plane for projection - the base-plane. Parallel rays are cast into the volume from within the projected region of the volume on the base-plane, by repeating the sequence of steps specified in the ray-template. We carefully choose the type of line to be employed and the way the template is being placed on the base-plane in order to assure uniform sampling of the volume by the discrete rays. We conclude by describing an optimized software implementation of our algorithm and reporting its performance.


text:
Random Student Name is a tool for randomly selecting students from your class. It will select in an unbiased fashion and without repetition until all members have been selected.
Typically Random Student Name is used for deciding 'who will answer the next question', or for dividing your class into random pairs or teams for group work.
At the beginning of the school year teachers can set their class list (up to 32 students). Random student name is easy to edit when students need to be added or taken from your class list. It is also easy to temporarily omit a student from the list in the case of students which may be absent on a particular day.
This is one of many creative interactive activities available from John Short's wonderful website:
A 60 second timer with a difference!
A sure-fire way of getting your students' attention in 10 seconds.
If I had to recommend just one book about classroom management, it would be "Tools for Teaching" by Fred Jones. Fred Jones has observed teachers (good and bad) in classrooms for over 30 years and through observation and experiment has distilled the essence of good classroom management into this book. I highly recommend it. Failing that, Fred has put summaries of his classroom management strategies on his website at


text:
If you order an AP Calculus AB or BC Exam for a student and they indicate after the November 13 ordering deadline that they would like to switch to the other type of AP Calculus Exam, you may switch the student's AP Calculus Exam in AP Registration and Ordering by March 12, 2021, (11:59 p.m. ET) without incurring a late order fee.
The student must be enrolled in two class sections: the one they were originally enrolled in and the one for the exam they would like to switch to.
- For example: A student enrolled in AP Calculus BC decides they would like to instead take the AP Calculus AB Exam. The student should enroll in the class section for AP Calculus AB while still being enrolled in the class section for AP Calculus BC.
When the student has enrolled in the second class section, click the Why can't this be changed? tooltip next to the Order Exam? field for the class section corresponding to the exam the student isn't taking.
Select the checkbox to switch the exam.
When you've completed switching the student's exam, submit the change to your exam order. See How do I submit a change to my initial order?


How gpfdist is used in the DIA servers for data loading?
posted Sep 14, 2012, 6:06 AM by Sachchida Ojha
gpfdist
gpfdist is Greenplum's parallel file distribution server utility software. It is used with read-only external tables for fast, parallel data loading of text files into a Greenplum data warehouse.
gpfdist can be considered as a networking protocol, much like the http protocol. Running gpfdist is similar to running a HTTP server. It exposes the target file via TCP/IP to a local file directory containing the files. The target files are usually delimited files or CSV files, although it can also read tar and gziped files. In the case of tar and gzip files, the PATH must contain the location of the tar and gzip utilities.
For data uploading into a Greenplum database or data warehouse, you generate the flat files from an operational database or transactional database, using export, COPY, dump, or user-written software, depending on your business requirements. This process can be automated to run periodically.
How to install gpfdist
gpfdist is installed on each DIA server by default. If it is not already installed, there are two ways you can install it:
1. copy gpfdist from another source to the DIA server, and put the location of the file into the PATH environment variable.
2. download and install the Greenplum loaders package. Select the loaders package that is appropriate to your DCA database version.
For example, if your DCA Greenplum database is of version 4.0.5.0, you will want to download and install the Greenplum loaders package: Greenplum-loaders-4.0.50.0-build-8-RHEL5-x86_64.bin.
For EMC customers, the Greenplum loaders packages are available for download at the EMC Powerlink web site. (go to _URL_ and click the Greenplum link.)
Running gpfdist on a DIA server
gpfdist runs in a client-server model. The DIA server acts as the server, while the master server of the DCA is the client. You start the gpfdist process on a DIA server, by indicating the directory where you drop your source files. Optionally, you may also designate the TCP port number to be used.
A simple startup of the gpfdist server is the following command syntax:
gpfdist –d <file_files_directory> –p <port_number> –l <log_file> &
For example,
# gpfdist -d /etl-data -p 8887 -l gpfdist_8887.log &
[1] 28519
# Serving HTTP on port 8887, directory /home/gpadmin/etl-log
In the above example, gpfdist server is set up to run, anticipating data loading from flat files stored in a file directory /etl-data. Port 8887 is opened and listening for data requests, and a log file is created in /home/gpadmin called etl-log.
For each DIA server, you can run multiple instances of gpfdist, under different TCP ports and directories.
Running gpfdist clients
To initiate the data extraction process, we use the DCA Master Server as the client. We connect to gpfdist through the external tables. These tables can be created
using the psql command.
For example:
# psql -d gpdb
gpdb=#
gpdb=# create external table ext_load_performance (like
performance_table)
gpdb=# location ('gpfdist://etl3:8887/performance_test.dat')
gpdb=# format 'text' (delimiter '|')
gpdb=# segment reject limit 20 rows;
In the above example, we create an external table. This table has all the attributes of a table called 'performance_table' (using the like performance_table clause), and makes uses of flat files stored in the host 'etl3', using port 8887. The flat file name is expected to be 'performance_test.dat'.
Combining this statement with the statement started in the gpfdist server, we expect the file to be in the directory '/etl-data'. Both client and server will be communicating using TCP port 8887. Of course, the process itself will not initiate any process, or do any data loading. It has simply defined a connection between the client and the server.
To start the data loading process, you issue a command that requests data from the external table – ext_load_performance. This will trigger the input data to be read into the external table. For example:
gpdb=# insert into performance_table select * from
ext_load_performance;
INSERT 0 _PHONE_
When this command is run, each segment server will connect to gpfdist simultaneously. The gpfdist utility will divide the flat file in chunks, and distribute the work among the segment servers. Taking advantage of the 'share nothing' architecture, Greenplum database is able to make use of the parallelism given to the data loading operations, achieving 2TB/hour data loading performance.
Comments


Basic+ Word of the Day: dark
dark (noun, adjective) LISTEN
Glow in the dark clothes
The dark is when there is no light—for example, at night.
 - When I was little, I was scared of the dark.
If something is dark, it means that there isn't a lot of light there.
 - The room was dark because the curtains were closed.
If a color is dark, it means that it is closer to black than white.
 - The sea was dark blue.
 - My hair is dark, but my sister's is blond.
Did you know?
If something is glow in the dark, it means that you can see it in the dark. Glow in the dark things are usually very bright colors like yellow, orange and green. In the picture at the top of this page you can see a man wearing glow in the dark clothes!
In pop culture
At some restaurants you can eat your food in the dark. People do this because it's fun and you can taste the food better. In this video, two women are trying it for the first time, but one of them is scared of the dark! Would you like to try it too?
There are other meanings of dark.
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Word of the Day is released Monday through Friday.
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text:
2D games using Silverlight - Collision detection implementation
This article shows how to implement collision detection in a Microsoft Silverlight game application. This is the second article in a series which will show how to create a complete working game (a clone of the classic Arkanoid game).
The first article in this series 2D games using Silverlight - implementing the game loop introduced the possibility of writing 2D games using Silverlight, an approach that has benefits when targeting all of the platforms: Windows Phone 7, Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 and Internet browsers. The original article covered the creation of the game skeleton for a simple Arkanoid clone called JailBreaker, and included the games loop and the game controllable loop.
This article extends the game skeleton by adding collision detection.
Collision detection implementation strategy
There are numerous strategies and algorithms for collision detection: broad detection phase, narrow detection phase, how to use dot production to estimate distance, etc. However it does not make sense to re-invent the wheel: for more complicated games there are open source physics engines, and for simple games like this there are often platform APIs that can be used to help with collision detection. For this example we use the collision detection functionality built into the platform, along with a good understanding of the simple collision detection required for this game.
Considering the game environment:
- There are few components with complex non-predictable movement - essentially just the club and ball. All other elements either stand still or fall in predictable manner - they do not collide. As a result we only need to consider a single object, the ball, for determining whether a collision has occurred.
- We only need to consider collisions in three directions along the active object movement: forward, forward diagonal up, forward diagonal down. This limitation allows us to minimize number of tests required
Collision detection in the platform:
- There is a helper class VisualTreeHelper in the platform that allows hit test on the component tree (all visible components in Silverlight application form a component tree hierarchy)
- There is a support for object animation based on StoryBoard that is suitable for steady moving objects
- the game movement is based on screen refresh rate, which is not constant across devices. To make object speed the same on different devices/conditions we need to measure the refresh rate before calculation the object next position
- During object movement, the object perception will be conducted on the next the object position because we are going to make the calculations in a hook to the screen refresh loop.
New module in the project PhysicalBody
The new class PhysicalBody is attached to a UI element statically created in XAML. It handles the element:
- position update
- object collision assessment
- checking the class container extends to keep the element position inside the container
Also it accepts gameOver and hitScores() method delegates from the class container
The position update is a simple increment of the current position based on the current body speed. Note that the body speed defines the body direction according to the coordinate system: positive value is from left to right by X axis, and from top to bottom in Y axis and negative value is in the opposite direction.
Object collision assessment
This is the crucial part of the article. The collision detection is implemented in one function and follows the strategy we have declared above in the preceding sections.
Let us examine the code:
private void assessCollision()
// get bounding box and offset the box in movement direction on one step
Canvas canvas = (Canvas)body.Parent;
// (1) for converting screen-to-control coordinates
var transform = canvas.TransformToVisual(Application.Current.RootVisual); // for converting screen-to-control coordinates
var origin = transform.Transform(new Point(Canvas.GetLeft(body) + velocityX, Canvas.GetTop(body) + velocityY));
var boundingBox = new Rect(origin, new Size(body.ActualWidth, body.ActualHeight));
// (2) check whether there are element exist on the body's way
// in three directions : forward, forward-diagonal-up and forward-diagonal-down
// (3) use VisualTreeHelper helper class to walk through elements hierarchy tree
// (4) filter out all objects except Shapes
if (isCollided(VisualTreeHelper.FindElementsInHostCoordinates(new Point(boundingBox.Right, boundingBox.Bottom), (Canvas)body.Parent)) ||
isCollided(VisualTreeHelper.FindElementsInHostCoordinates(new Point(boundingBox.Right, boundingBox.Y), (Canvas)body.Parent)) ||
isCollided(VisualTreeHelper.FindElementsInHostCoordinates(new Point(boundingBox.X, boundingBox.Bottom), (Canvas)body.Parent)))
for more details please check the source code
Given approach shows how easy to implement collision detection in Silverlight game project if use only the platform means. Working example is available in source code that can be build and run on Windows Phone 7.X device. Also since Windows platform does not allow side-loading installation binaries, just for reference the same code has been deployed to a web site and can run embedded into a browser.


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Measure the longitudinal strain at two points along the path of the pipe. The flow direction will be from highest to lowest strain.
How to Determine Flow Direction in a Pipe?
Determining the flow direction in a pipe is an important step in any piping system. Knowing the direction of flow can help engineers and technicians troubleshoot any problems, plan maintenance or repairs, and ensure that the system is functioning properly. Here is a guide on how to determine the flow direction in a pipe.
The first step to determining the flow direction in a pipe is to identify the type of pipe you are dealing with. Pipes can be categorized as either high-pressure pipes or low-pressure pipes. Low-pressure pipes typically have a smooth interior surface and are more likely to have a uniform flow. High-pressure pipes usually have a rougher interior surface and a more turbulent flow.
Once you have identified the type of pipe, you can use several methods to determine the flow direction. The first method is to use a flow meter. This device measures the velocity of the flow in the pipe, and the direction of the flow is indicated by the arrows on the meter. Another method is to use a pressure gauge. This device measures the pressure differential throughout the pipe, and the direction of the flow can be determined by the pressure gradient.
The third method is to use a visual inspection. This involves looking inside the pipe


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I'm using multiple instances of the Behavior script. Some of the instances have delays on a Mouth Open trigger and others have delays on a Mouth Closed trigger. Each instance enables or disables an image object.
The mouth open triggers all work correctly, enabling image objects with delays.
The mouth closed triggers only work with delays correctly disabling image objects the first time they are triggered. On subsequent triggering, there is no delay and all of the objects are disabled immediately.
It's the same out-of-the-box script as the mouth open triggers. What could be causing the loss of delay?


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by Msgr. Ildebrando Jesus Aliño Leyson
This coming 21 October 2012, Pope Benedict XVI will enlist the name of another Filipino in the roster or Canon of the Saints of the Church. The baptismal name of this second Filipino to become a saint is "Pedro". He may have taken his name from the saint of the day when he was born, like for example, from Saint Peter the Apostle on June 29.
His surname is variedly spelled in the manuscripts of his Spanish companions and contemporaries as "Calonsor", "Calongsor", "Calansor" and "Calangsor". The present version of the surname is "Calungsod", with the accent falling on the "u" – "Calúngsod".
The surname is of Visayan origin. It comes from the Visayan word "lúngsod" which means "town" or "citizenry". The affix "Ca-" forms a noun which means "one's co-[noun]". Therefore, "Calungsod" means "one's townmate" or "one's fellow town citizen". While today the Visayans normally use the word "katagilúngsod" (the "Ca-" is substituted with "ka-" plus the affix "tagi-" functioning as an indicative of a place of origin) to refer to one's townmate, the surname remains to be "Calungsod". The Spaniards may have written the surname according to how they could pronounce it, that is, perhaps with some difficulty in enunciating the "ng" and the terminal "d" – Calonsor – or it may have been actually the old version of the surname. Even today, when "lungsod" is inflected, the terminal "d" is alternated with an "r"; for example, "kalungsóran" (towns); "lungsoránon" (town citizen[s]). The same is true with other Visayan words that end in "d", like for instance: "búkid" (mountain) > "kabukíran" (mountains); "tubúd" (spring) > "tuburán" (source, springs, having source or spring); "tíkad" (cultivate) > "tikáron" (will cultivate; will be cultivated).
Ignacio Francisco Alcina, S.J., a Spanish missionary who lived and wrote in the Visayas from _PHONE_, that is, during the time of Pedro Calungsod, spelled the word "lungsod" as "longsor" to refer to a "populated place" or "población". Alcina was very familiar with the Visayan language because he lived in the Visayas for thirty-six years and did learn and speak the Visayan language, the words of which, he said, were easy to pronounce. He was well aware of the common occurrence of the union of the consonants "n" and "g" in many Visayan words. However, he complained that the Visayan natives somehow confused in their writing and pronunciation the letters "o" and "u" as well as the letters "l", "r" and "d".
Hence, "Calungsod" became "Calongsor". And as it was further heard and pronounced by different persons of different tongues, ears and years, it became "Calonsor" and even "Calangsor" or "Calansor". The confusion between the "o" and the "u" in the Visayan pronunciation is true even today. One can hear the surname "Calungsod" pronounced also as "Calungsud" or "Calongsod" or something halfway between these two ways of pronouncing it.
"Pedro" is a rather common Christian name. It is no wonder then that there had been, and still there are, other Visayans named "Pedro Calungsod". There was a Pedro Calungsod who was baptized in the town of Ginatilan in Cebu on 23 May 1909. Much earlier, there was a Pedro Calungsod who was baptized in the town of Hinunangan in Leyte in 1854. There was also a Pedro Calungsod, Sr., who was born in the same town of Hinunangan in 1909. His son is Pedro Calungsod, Jr. In Molo, Iloilo City in Panay, there was only a Petrona Calonsod [sic] who was baptized on 30 June 1894, but one of her nephews was named Pedro Calunsod [sic] Cadunay. Andres Calungsod, who was baptized in Ginatilan on 17 October 1894 begot a son named Peter Calungsod who in turn begot Peter Calungsod II.
"Pedro Calungsod" may be a rather common name. But what makes this name very special today is how that boy from the Visayas of the 1600s gave it great honor. It has become like a royal robe too splendid to wear!


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Evaluate the transfusion patterns associated with preoperative autologous blood donation (PABD) during posterior lumbar spinal surgery.Summary of Background Data.
There is a paucity of evidence in the literature examining the utility of PABD in elective adult lumbar spinal surgery.Methods.
Medical records of 541 patients treated for spinal stenosis between January 1997 and February 2000 were reviewed. Patients were divided into donors (PABD; n = 413) and nondonors (non PABD [NPABD]; n = 128).Results.
Average preoperative hemoglobin (Hb) in the NPABD group was 0.62 units more than in the PABD group (95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.30–0.94). For PABD patients, there was a negative correlation (−0.3) between preoperative Hb and number of units donated. PABD patients who donated 1 and 2 units of blood were, respectively, 7.5 and 9 times more likely to be transfused within the first 24 hours than NPABD patients. NPABD patients were 25 times more likely to need a transfusion of allogeneic blood than PABD patients who donated at least 2 units of blood. Autologous donation was an independent predictor of perioperative blood loss (P < 0.05). Patients who donated at least 2 units of blood lost approximately 1.3 units of Hb more than NPABD patients. The odds of wastage for a PABD patient who had a decompression with noninstrumented fusion were 8.64 times that of a PABD patient who had a decompression with instrumented fusion.Conclusion.
Autologous blood donation induced preoperative anemia and resulted in a lower transfusion threshold than allogeneic blood usage. In addition, we found that autologous donation significantly increased blood loss in the preoperative period as measured by Hb lost. Usage of autologous blood was significantly more efficient in patients who underwent instrumented fusion than in patients with less complex surgery.


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Lucy Cranwell in group portrait of Auckland Museum staff.
August 7 1907|
Henderson, Auckland, New Zealand
June 8, 2000 (aged 92)|
Tucson, Arizona, USA
|Residence||New Zealand, US|
|Alma mater||University of Auckland|
|Known for||Palynology, Flora of New Zealand|
|Institutions||Auckland Museum, University of Arizona|
Lucy May Cranwell (7 August 1907 – 8 June 2000) was a New Zealand botanist responsible for groundbreaking work in palynology. Cranwell was appointed curator of botany at Auckland Museum in 1929, when she was 21 years old. As well as her work on ancient pollen samples she was responsible for encouraging a love of botany in a generation of Auckland children.
Early life and education
Cranwell was born in Auckland, New Zealand in 1907. She grew up in Henderson under the strong influence of her conservation-minded and artistic mother. It has been suggested that Cranwell inherited the unpredictable aspects of her fearless and adventuresome spirit from her mother's Cornish roots. Her father was a trained nurseryman who had planted an extensive orchard in the family property. She attended Henderson public school and then Epsom Girls Grammar School. She entered the University of Auckland in 1925 where she undertook an initial BA degree that was a mixture of English and Botany, followed by a masters in Botany with a thesis on the epiphytes of the Waitakere Ranges. She graduated in 1929.
During her university studies she developed a love of tramping and gained a reputation as the strongest, fastest walker in the University Field Club. Her love of the New Zealand wilderness stood her in good stead for the many botany field trips she began to embark on, most often with fellow botany student and friend Lucy Beatrice Moore, to various remote and inaccessible parts of the country.
In April 1929, a few weeks after graduating, the director of the Auckland Museum, Dr Gilbert Edward Archey, offered Cranwell the inaugural Botany Curator position. The museum was due to open in its new, much larger, war memorial building in November of that year and its halls were in need of filling with displays.
"Everything had to be done on a shoestring, alas, and there was no artist to help make the cases look seductive for man, woman, or child. People did not seem to take notice, however. Dr Archey had stressed that we were to consider ourselves the servants of the public; we were to welcome enquiries of all kinds," wrote Cranwell of those first few months in the job.
As well as finding botanical specimens for display she also set about organising the Cheeseman herbarium of about 10,000 specimens. During her 14 years as botany curator she Introduced "botany trots" for children to places like Rangitoto Island in the Hauraki Gulf, wrote weekly short articles for children about plants for the Auckland Star newspaper, and collected over 4000 plants for the herbarium during her 14 years as the botanist.
Cranwell's field work was among the first and certainly the most extensive undertaken by a woman scientist in New Zealand. These included trips into the pristine, ancient podocarp forests of the King Country looking for root parasites, various trips to Te Moehau peak on the tip of the Coromandel peninsula where she documented the unique alpine flora found there, and several visits to Maungapohatu in Te Urewera. She also undertook a study of marine algae of New Zealand's northern islands (a green and a red algae are named after her), surveys of Auckland Harbour and its west coast between Muriwai and Piha, as well as several trips to take fossil pollen samples from South Island bogs.
Field trips in the 1920s and 1930s were tough assignments. Cranwell and her botanical companion Lucy Moore often slept out in the open in canvas sleeping bags, occasionally waking up covered in frost. Her field experience led her to be a conservationist recognising early that possums and wallabies represented a serious threat to the biodiversity of New Zealand forests.
During a trip to Europe, which included attending the International Botanical Congress in Amsterdam in 1935, she was invited by Professor Lennart von Post of Stockholm to learn his method of fossil pollen analysis . With knowledge of this new field study, palynology, Cranwell opened up a whole new field of botany in New Zealand. Her work analysing pollen taken from the sediment in bogs revealed the past botanical assemblages in New Zealand and aided an understanding of New Zealand's past as part of the supercontinent of Gondawana.
She was made a Fellow of the Linnaean Society (London) in November 1937, "in recognition of botanical research work done both in New Zealand and Sweden and because of efforts she has made to stimulate interest in botany through her position at the Auckland Museum." In the same year she won New Zealand's premier conservation award, the Loder Cup. She was awarded the Hector Medal from the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1954, the first woman ever to receive this honour.
War effort and marriage
Cranwell's war effort during WWII was to research to and prepare a booklet for downed allied airmen called "Food is Where You Find It: A Guide to Emergency Foods of the Western Pacific". It detailed, with illustrations, what fish and foods the downed pilots with could eat. The booklet proved extremely popular and five facsimile impressions followed the initial print run of 5000 copies.
Cranwell married Captain (later Major) Samuel Watson Smith (1897–1993) of the 13th US Airforce, a lawyer and later eminent researcher in archaeology, in 1943 and moved to the United States in 1944. They had one son, Benjamin Watson Smith. After working at Harvard University Cranwell became a Research Affiliate in palynology at the University of Arizona, Tucson. She earned international recognition for her work in this field, particularly on Gondwanan plant microfossils.
- Obituary in the Yearbook of the Academy Council of the Royal Society of New Zealand 2000
- Obituary by Ewen Cameron in the New Zealand Journal of Botany _URL_ dead link]
- University of Arizona obituary _URL_
- "Food is where you find it : a guide to emergency foods of the Western Pacific". Auckland War Memorial Museum. Retrieved 2015-11-16.
- IPNI. Cranwell.
- Information on an exhibit held at the Auckland Museum about Lucy Cranwell
- Lucy Cranwell - Pioneering young curator, adventurous and outstanding by Ewen K. Cameron, Auckland War Memorial Museum.


The Mario's Super Picross wiki last edited by do_pe on 03/27/14 01:32AM View full history
Mario no Super Picross is the Super Famicom sequel to the Game Boy title Mario's Picross. This game builds on the pixel-chiseling puzzle gameplay introduced by its predecessor with more puzzles that are larger and even more challenging and new rules courtesy of the "Wario's Picross" mode. Originally a Japan-only title when it was released in 1995, Mario no Super Picross was released in PAL territories via the Wii Virtual Console for 900 Wii points in September of 2007.
The basic puzzle solving mechanics and gameplay have carried over from Nintendo's first Picross title. The puzzles involve a square grid of cells where the player must determine which cells should be colored in (or in the case of this game chiseled away) and which should be left blank. Numbers along the top and left side of the grid indicate the number and size of unbroken lines of filled in cells there are in the given row or column that are separated by at least one blank cell. For instance, if a row has the numbers "2 5 4", that means that there are from left to right, a group of two colored in cells, a group of five colored in cells, and a group of four colored in cells, with all other cells being left blank and at least one blank cell between each group. Players are given the ability to mark cells with an "X" that should be left blank.
In "Mario's Picross" mode, each puzzle must be completed within a 30 minute time limit. Mistakes penalize the player by reducing the remaining time. The first mistake will remove one minute and the amount of penalized time doubles for each additional mistake. If the timer reaches 0:00, the game is over and the player must restart the puzzle. The player is given the option of receiving a hint at the start of each puzzle. This hint reveals the solution for a randomly selected row and column. At any point during the puzzle the player can also elect to give up five minutes of time to receive another hint.
"Wario's Picross" mode alters the gameplay in several ways. The time limit of Mario's mode is removed, and the timer now simply counts up and tracks how long the player takes to complete the puzzle. There are also no hints available in this mode. The biggest change though is that there is no direct penalty for making a mistake, but those mistakes are not indicated to the player which presents a unique challenge.
Mario no Picross offers a total of 300 different puzzles of varying sizes and difficulties distributed almost equally between the two modes. Puzzles are grouped together in levels. Completing puzzles unlocks higher levels with larger and more difficult puzzles. Whenever a puzzle is completed, it becomes a color image, animates, and the title of the puzzle is revealed. Puzzles come in sizes of 5x5, 10x10, 15x15, 20x20, and 20x25. The game can track progress on two separate save game files and also allows the player to save at any point during a puzzle and resume at a later time from the same point. The fastest puzzle completion times are tracked for each puzzle.
Nintendo Power Picross
The same basic gameplay engine from Mario no Picross was used in Nintendo's Picross NP series that was distributed via their Satellaview system in Japan. A total of eight volumes of puzzles were released in the Nintendo Power branded series. These games included many puzzles that when solved revealed images of characters from various Nintendo franchises including The Legend of Zelda and Star Fox.
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In the realm of commercial water heating, advanced technology is instrumental in achieving optimal performance and energy efficiency. Shenling's commercial heat pump water heaters are at the forefront of technological innovation, offering cutting-edge features for superior performance. In this article, we will explore the advanced technology integrated into Shenling commercial heat pump water heaters and how it ensures optimal performance in diverse commercial applications.
Inverter Technology: Maximizing Energy Efficiency and Performance:
Shenling commercial heat pump water heaters utilize inverter technology, which plays a vital role in maximizing energy efficiency and performance. Traditional water heaters operate at a fixed speed, resulting in energy waste during low-demand periods. In contrast, Shenling's inverter-driven compressors adjust their speed based on hot water demand, ensuring precise temperature control and minimizing energy consumption. This dynamic operation allows businesses to achieve significant energy savings while enjoying consistent and efficient hot water supply.
Smart Controls and Intelligent Operation for Precise Temperature Regulation:
Shenling commercial heat pump water heaters feature smart controls and intelligent operation, enabling precise temperature regulation and user-friendly management. With advanced control systems, businesses can set and maintain the desired water temperature with ease. Additionally, remote monitoring capabilities provide real-time insights into energy usage and system performance, empowering businesses to optimize their water heating operations and troubleshoot any issues promptly.
Enhanced Performance and Convenience for Commercial Applications:
Shenling commercial heat pump water heaters offer enhanced performance and convenience for various commercial applications. These water heaters provide fast heat recovery, ensuring a continuous supply of hot water even during peak demand periods. Whether it's a hotel accommodating multiple guests or a restaurant with high-volume dishwashing requirements, Shenling commercial heat pump water heaters deliver reliable performance, minimizing downtime and maximizing operational efficiency.
Shenling commercial heat pump water heaters incorporate cutting-edge technology to deliver optimal performance and energy efficiency in commercial water heating. With features such as inverter technology, smart controls, and intelligent operation, these water heaters offer businesses precise temperature regulation, remote monitoring capabilities, and enhanced convenience. By choosing Shenling as your commercial heat pump water heater provider, you can leverage advanced technology to achieve superior performance, reduce energy consumption, and streamline your water heating operations.


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5. Test Excavation at Site 25SF50 Scotts Bluff National
Griffin, Kristin L.
Archeological test excavations were conducted during June
and July of 1988 at Scotts Bluff National Monument in northwestern Nebraska.
Site 25SF50 is
located in an arroyo-cut valley at the base of the bluff. It was
discovered during a 1975 archeological survey of the Monument conducted by
the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The report of these investigations
described the site as having a "well-defined living surface...in a context
suitable for settlement and subsistence studies" (Kay 1975:48). At the
time of its discovery, the site was rapidly eroding and its expedient
salvage was recommended. In 1987, Scotts Bluff National Monument proposed,
under Development and Study Package 127, to sponsor archeological testing.
The 1988 test excavations confirmed the presence of intact deposits,
including hearth and midden features. Analysis of chipped stone and faunal
and macrofloral remains produced evidence that a primarya activity at the
site was the processing of bison kills. Radiocarbon dates indicate the
site was used sporadically between A.D. 1022 and 1635.
Due to the sensitive nature
of this subject this report is
available to professional
archeologists only. If you
order this manuscript we may
contact you for verification of


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A sunny spring and a dry summer have hastened the first grape harvest this year. According to the estimates of Moselle winegrowers, it will begin around September 5. This is about three weeks earlier than usual.
The dry climate is ideal for grape varieties that produce quality red wine. There will be a lot of it in 2022 in Luxembourg. Prospects for white wines are not so obvious yet, experts say.
The heat helps the grapes reach ideal ripeness. But the vineyards have already experienced its negative effects. When the temperature in the Grand Duchy approached 40 degrees Celcius, many berries were simply burned by the hot sun. And thus became unfit for wine.
If the heat does not subside by the beginning of September, the grape harvest will have to be conducted early in the morning, before 11 o'clock. After that, the grapes will become too hot.
In 2021, due to the cold spring and varied weather in the summer, the grape harvest came late and was not so voluminous. From it the vineyards were able to produce about 100,000 hectoliters of wine. Now the vineyards of the country hope to seriously surpass last year's numbers.
It won't be easy to do, however. Right now the Grand Duchy is extremely short on grape pickers.


The Lesser Key of Solomon
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 (Redirected from Lemegeton)
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The Lesser Key of Solomon, also known as the Clavicula Salomonis Regis[note 1] or Lemegeton, is an anonymous grimoire (or spell book) focused on demonology. It was compiled in the mid-seventeenth century, mostly from materials a couple of centuries older.[1][2] It is divided into five books, the Ars Goetia, the Ars Theurgia-Goetia, the Ars Paulina, the Ars Almandel, and the Ars Notoria.[1][3]
Ars Goetia[edit]
The most obvious source for the Ars Goetia is Johann Weyer's Pseudomonarchia Daemonum in his De praestigiis daemonum. Weyer does not cite, and is unaware of, any other books in the Lemegeton, indicating that the Lemegeton was derived from his work, not the other way around.[1][4] The order of the spirits was changed between the two, four additional spirits were added to the later work, and one spirit (Pruflas) was omitted. The omission of Pruflas, a mistake that also occurs in an edition of Pseudomonarchia Daemonum cited Reginald Scot's The Discoverie of Witchcraft, indicates that the Ars Goetia could not have been compiled before 1570. Indeed, it appears that the Ars Goetia is more dependent upon Scot's translation of Weyer than Weyer's work in itself. Additionally, some material was used from Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy and the Heptameron by pseudo-Pietro d'Abano[note 2][1][5] and from the Magical Calender.[6]
Weyer's Officium Spirituum, which may be related to a 1583 manuscript titled "The Office of Spirits",[7] appears to have ultimately be an elaboration on a fifteenth century manuscript titled Le Livre des Esperitz (of which 30 of its 47 spirits are nearly identical to spirits in the Ars Goetia).[2][5]
In a slightly later copy made by Dr. Thomas Rudd, this portion was labelled "Liber Malorum Spirituum seu Goetia," and the seals and demons were paired with those of the seventy-two angels of the Shemhamphorasch,[3] who were intended to protect the conjurer and control the demons he summoned.[8] The angelic names and seals were derived from a manuscript by Blaise de Vigenère, whose papers were also used by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers in his works for the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.[5] Rudd may have derived his copy of Liber Malorum Spirituum from now a lost work by Johannes Trithemius,[5] who taught Agrippa, who in turn taught Weyer.
This portion of the work was later translated by S.L. MacGregor Mathers and published by Aleister Crowley under the title The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the King." Crowley added some additional invocations previously unrelated to the original work, as well as essays describing the rituals as psychological exploration instead of demon summoning.[9]
The Seventy-Two Demons[edit]
 1. King Bael
 2. Duke Agares
 3. Prince Vassago
 4. Marquis Samigina
 5. President Marbas
 6. Duke Valefor
 7. Marquis Amon
 8. Duke Barbatos
 9. King Paimon
 10. President Buer
 11. Duke Gusion
 12. Prince Sitri
 13. King Beleth
 14. Marquis Leraje
 15. Duke Eligos
 16. Duke Zepar
 17. Count/President Botis
 18. Duke Bathin
 19. Duke Sallos
 20. King Purson
 21. Count/President Marax
 22. Count/Prince Ipos
 23. Duke Aim
 24. Marquis Naberius
 25. Count/President Glasya-Labolas
 26. Duke Buné
 27. Marquis/Count Ronové
 28. Duke Berith
 29. Duke Astaroth
 30. Marquis Forneus
 31. President Foras
 32. King Asmoday
 33. Prince/President Gäap
 34. Count Furfur
 35. Marquis Marchosias
 36. Prince Stolas
 37. Marquis Phenex
 38. Count Halphas
 39. President Malphas
 40. Count Räum
 41. Duke Focalor
 42. Duke Vepar
 43. Marquis Sabnock
 44. Marquis Shax
 45. King/Count Viné
 46. Count Bifrons
 47. Duke Vual
 48. President Haagenti
 49. Duke Crocell
 50. Knight Furcas
 51. King Balam
 52. Duke Alloces
 53. President Caim
 54. Duke/Count Murmur
 55. Prince Orobas
 56. Duke Gremory
 57. President Ose
 58. President Amy
 59. Marquis Orias
 60. Duke Vapula
 61. King/President Zagan
 62. President Valac
 63. Marquis Andras
 64. Duke Haures
 65. Marquis Andrealphus
 66. Marquis Cimeies
 67. Duke Amdusias
 68. King Belial
 69. Marquis Decarabia
 70. Prince Seere
 71. Duke Dantalion
 72. Count Andromalius
Ars Theurgia Goetia[edit]
The Ars Theurgia Goetia mostly derives from Trithemius's Steganographia, though the seals and order for the spirits are different due to corrupted transmission via manuscript.[10][5] Rituals not found in Steganographia were added, in some ways conflicting with similar rituals found in the Ars Goetia and Ars Paulina. Most of the spirits summoned are tied to points on a compass, four Emperors tied to the cardinal points, sixteen Dukes tied to cardinal points, inter-cardinal points, additional directions between those. There are an additional eleven Wandering Princes, totaling thirty one spirit leaders who each rule several to a few dozen spirits.[11]
Ars Paulina[edit]
Derived from book two of Trithemius's Steganographia and from portions of the Heptameron, but purportedly delivered by Paul the Apostle instead of (as claimed by Trithemius) Raziel. Elements from The Magical Calendar, astrological seals by Robert Turner's 1656 translation of Paracelsus's Archidoxes of Magic, and repeated mentions of guns and the year 1641 indicate that this portion was written in the later half of the seventeenth century.[12][13] Traditions of Paul communicating with heavenly powers are almost as old as Christianity itself, as seen in some interpretations of 2 Corinthians 12:2-4 and the apocryphal Apocalypse of Paul. The Ars Paulina is in turn divided into two books of its own, the first detailing twenty four angels aligned with the twenty four hours of the day, the second (derived more from the Heptameron) detailing the three hundred sixty spirits of the degrees of the zodiac.[14]
Ars Almandel[edit]
Mentioned by Trithemius and Weyer, the latter of whom claimed an Arabic origin for the work. A fifteenth century copy is attested to by Robert Turner, and Hebrew copies were discovered in the twentieth century. The Ars Almandel instructs the magician on how to create a wax tablet with specific designs intended to contact angels via scrying.[15][16]
Ars Notoria[edit]
Editions and Translations[edit]
 - Arthur Edward Waite, The Book of Black Magic and of Pacts, (1898). Later republished as "The Secret Tradition in Goetia," includes large portions of the Lemegeton, particularly the Goetia.[9]
 - Shah, Idries, The Secret Lore of Magic, (1970). Contains portions of Ars Almandel and split sections the Ars Goetia, missing large portions of the the rituals involved.[9]
 - Peterson, Joseph H. The Lesser Key of Solomon: Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis (2001), ISBN 978-1-57863-220-6. Considered "the definitive version"[21] and "the standard edition."[22]
 4. ^ a b The Book of Ceremonial Magic, part I, chapter III, section 2: "The Lesser Key of Solomon"; Arthur Edward Waite; London,


public void run() {
 // perform logic
 }
});
Future<?> future = executorService.submit(runnable);
// ... some additional logic ...
future.get();
What the Runnable is an operation that you would like to wrap in a span. What should be the name of that span? How can you pass it to the Tracer so that the span name is set?
To answer those issues we've introduced two approaches
 - a @SpanName annotation for an explicit class that implements Runnable or Callable
 - toString() method resolution of an anonymous instance of either of those interfaces
Most likely in the future releases @SpanName or its modification will be used more heavily to provide explicit names of spans.
Anyways examples could look like those in the documentation. Example for @SpanName annotated class:
@SpanName("calculateTax")
class TaxCountingRunnable implements Runnable {
 @Override public void run() {
 // perform logic
 }
}
and an anonymous instance:
new TraceRunnable(tracer, spanNamer, new Runnable() {
 @Override public void run() {
 // perform logic
 }
 @Override public String toString() {
 return "calculateTax";
 }
});
Both will have the same span name. Remember that both Runnables should be wrapped in a TraceRunnable instance.
Customization of span propagation
It's pretty obvious that there's a lot of companies that have already created some form of distributed tracing instrumentation. In Spring Cloud Sleuth we're expecting the tracing headers to be containing certain names like X-B3-TraceId for the trace id containing headers or X-B3-SpanId for the span related one.
One of the first issues that we've created was related to support configurable header names but actually we've developed it quite late. Anyways with RC1 it's possible to customize Sleuth in such a way that it's compatible with your system's nomenclature. Let's define two terms before we go any further - Injector and Extractor.
Injectors
In Spring Cloud Sleuth an Injector is actually a functional interface called SpanInjector. It has the following method:
void inject(Span span, T carrier);
Its purpose is to take whatever is necessary from a span and inject it to the carrier. Let's assume that in your system you don't set the headers for trace id with the name X-B3-TraceId but you call it correlationId and mySpanId for X-B3-SpanId. Then you would have to override the behavior of Sleuth by registering a custom implementation of the SpanInjector. Let's look at the following snippets from the documentation:
class CustomHttpServletResponseSpanInjector implements SpanInjector<HttpServletResponse> {
 @Override
 public void inject(Span span, HttpServletResponse carrier) {
 carrier.addHeader("correlationId", Span.idToHex(span.getTraceId()));
 carrier.addHeader("mySpanId", Span.idToHex(span.getSpanId()));
 // inject the rest of Span values to the header
 }
}
Note that this approach will work with Zipkin only if your values that you're passing are Zipkin-compatible. That means that the IDs are 64bit numbers.
Also you may wonder why do we convert values using Span.idToHex. We've decided that we want the values of ids in the logs and in the message headers to be the very same values as the one that you can later see in Zipkin. That way you can just copy the value and put it into Zipkin to debug your system.
Once you have the SpanInjector you have to register it as a bean with @Primary annotation as presented below:
@Bean
@Primary
SpanInjector<HttpServletResponse> customHttpServletResponseSpanInjector() {
 return new CustomHttpServletResponseSpanInjector();
}
Extractors
In Spring Cloud Sleuth an Extractor is actually a functional interface called SpanExtractor. It has the following method:
Span joinTrace(T carrier);
Its purpose is to create a Span from the provided carrier. Let's have the same assumption as with the SpanInjector and let's consider a case where traceId header is named correlationId and spanId header is mySpanId. Then we customize the Spring context by providing our own implementation of the SpanExtractor:
class CustomHttpServletRequestSpanExtractor implements SpanExtractor<HttpServletRequest> {
 @Override
 public Span joinTrace(HttpServletRequest carrier) {
 long traceId = Span.hexToId(carrier.getHeader("correlationId"));
 long spanId = Span.hexToId(carrier.getHeader("mySpanId"));
 // extract all necessary headers
 Span.SpanBuilder builder = Span.builder().traceId(traceId).spanId(spanId);
 // build rest of the Span
 return builder.build();
 }
}
Again note that we're considering that the values are Zipkin compatible (64bit values for ids). Also note that we've assumed that the ids are sent in a hexadecimal form like they are presented in the Zipkin UI. That's why we used the Span.hexToId method to convert it back to long again.
Summary
In this very short post you could see two quite big features available in the RC1 release. You can check Spring Cloud Sleuth documentation for more information about the integrations and configurations of Sleuth. Actually you can check all the things that have changed in the RC1 release by checking the closed issues and merged PRs.
In case of any questions do not hesitate to ping us on the Gitter channel or file an issue on Github.
I'm pleased to announce that JSON Assert version 0.2.1 got released! The following features have been added
Breaking changes
I've changed the groupId and packages of the library so you have to do the migration of both.
GroupId
Was:
com.blogspot.toomuchcoding
Is:
com.toomuchcoding.jsonassert
Package
Was:
com.blogspot.toomuchcoding.jsonassert
Is:
com.toomuchcoding.jsonassert
BTW
I've created a new page on the website OSS. You can check out which OSS projects I've created or have contributed sth there. If you don't care - just ignore it ;)


text:
Ground Based Augmentation System (GBAS)
The Ground Based Augmentation System (GBAS) is a satellite-based precision landing system for aircraft. At Braunschweig-Wolfsburg airport, DLR operates its own GBAS station to research precision approach procedures based on satellite navigation data.
Data Link Station
DLR operates an efficient air-ground data link for analysing air-ground integration, remote control of aircraft and for assisting flight tests. The distinctive landmark of this data link station is a 30-metre-high antenna tower.
Multilateration System (MLAT)
The multilateration system (MLAT) at Braunschweig-Wolfsburg airport offers unique sensor technology that enables the highly accurate surveillance of arriving and departing objects as well as ground objects. It allows new procedures and technology to be researched under realistic conditions.
TRADEF is a platform consisting of hardware and software to accommodates the development, testing and validation of tracker software. Typical parts of the TRADEF facility are data inspection/manipulation tools (asterix, madrec), simulation environment for generation of realistic traffic, testbed for running tracker software and evaluation environment for tracker output.


text:
Qlucore helps reduce plants' dependancy on fungicides
25 February 2014Tweet
Scientists at the Institution of Plant Protection Biology within the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences have been researching how to reduce the dependence on chemical fungicides in farming, assisted by Qlucore Omics Explorer.
The scientists used Qlucore Omics Explorer to aid their research which focused on understanding plant defence mechanisms and so produce plants that are more resistant to disease, which will lessen pesticide use, and ultimately benefit the environment.
The research is focused on how plants defend themselves against oomycetes and fungi. Oomycetes, also known as 'water moulds', are a group of several hundred organisms that include some of the most devastating plant pathogens. The team of 16 at the Institution of Plant Protection Biology have been studying biochemical components of plant defense and the interactions with pathogens and trying to identify resistance factors that can be used in future breeding for disease resistance crops, and in developing methods for induced resistance by applying non-toxic inducing agents in order to reduce the dependence on chemical fungicides.
In the past, one of the major problems facing the scientists was how to handle the increasingly vast amounts of data that was being produced from their research.
'Seeing structures in the data and finding meaningful biology in them has been a problem,' commented Dr Erik Alexandersson, Assistant professor at SLU Alnarp, Institution of Plant Protection Biology.
'We have used Qlucore both for gene expression and quantitative proteomics data,' continued Dr Erik Alexandersson. 'Some of the sampling is done in the field in order to obtain molecular data in a realistic setting as it would be out in the farm avoiding laboratory artifacts. We see clear differences in the mechanisms at play in these two settings. Qlucore has turned out to be very powerful in handling noisy data and quickly assessing underlying structures not relevant to the research question. We were recently able to "save" a noisy dataset by taking the set-up time into account and use the function "eliminate factor" in Qlucore.'
By the active use of Visualisation techniques important structures and patterns can be identified quickly, with the user getting instant feedback. Qlucore Omics Explorer allows 3D modelling and the ability to change parameters quickly and easily which can make the whole process of analysis more efficient.


Sometimes, we need to print a report on a printed blank paper. Such as invoice, bill, credential, etc. With common reporting tools, we need to measure every data area with a ruler, and design the report according to the sizes. In a practical case, it may need to debug the report for many times. Therefore, it will be very complicated and frustrated. Moreover, if the paper format changes, developers have to design the report again. Preformatted paper printing is also called locating printing, which means to print desired content at a specific position on paper precisely. This function is widely used in report print. RAQ Report adopts base image depicting to realize the preformatted paper printing. With RAQ Report, developers can scan needed paper into an image, and set it as the background picture of the report. Next, drag the gridlines of the report to match the picture. Then, the report will be printed on the preformatted paper precisely. For specifi operations, please refer to


text:
Het dorp Rincon, Te Rincon, Rincón: Rinon (Papamientu)
Meaning of Rincón, Spanish for corner/nook, may refer to:
A "Rincon" is also a place where you can have activities, such as a restaurant ("ex: the corner of the good food") or a shop ("the corner of hot sales"). It means as well a remote settlement, a group of houses. A Rincon can be built inland or by the sea.
Is Rincon protected from the pirate attacks?
1/Rincon is sheltered in the North by the Brandaris (240 m) and Seru Mangel (144,6 m), in the West by Seru Dos Pos (125,6 m) and Montagne (143 m), and, in the South by Seru Largu (133 m). Rincon is almost invisible from the sea and far less exposed than Palu di Lechi.
2/ Rincon is protected by a very shallow sand bank on the east side of Bonaire, right in front of the town.
3/ Even inland, sheltered and protected, the Rincon has been raided several times, cf Laurens Prins in 1665.
Rincon Village is the oldest village on Bonaire. Additionally, it is the oldest in continual existence within the Netherlands Antilles and Aruba.
In 1527, the Spaniards came back from Hispaniola to Bonaire and then founded the first settlement on Bonaire: Rincon. On their return they brought Indians and various types of livestock along. Rincon's location was chosen because it is in a fertile valley and has an always blowing trade wind and it was out of the eye of passing (pirate)ships and beyond the reach of their raids. In 1636 the West India Company, which has long been established on Curacao, decided to Bonaire add to their possessions. The Dutch exploited Bonaire mainly for its salt and paint timber. Brasil Wood (Palu di Brasil) was used as red pigment for paint. When the Dutch saw that they needed more labor, they imported slaves from Africa, who then had to settle in Rincon. The slaves worked on plantations in the area of Rincon and on salt pans on the opposite side of the island. Because the walk from Rincon to the salt pans took about 10 hours the slaves build themselves small huts to sleep in. The slaves worked the salt pans and stayed in their huts during the week, on saterday they were allowed to go back to their homes in Rincon. In 1850, these shacks were replaced by stone houses. These stone houses are still standing along the salt pans. After the abolition of slavery on July 1st of 1863, the former slaves stayed in Rincon, they maintained their culture and to this date many of the current residents of Rincon are descendants of the slaves.
1 Altamira Unjo – Panorama Rincon
2 Cadushy Distillery & Heritage Center
3 Polar Bar (closed)
4 Catholic Church
5 Rose Inn
6 Kos Bon So Grill restaurant
7 Excellent Supermarket
8 Community Centre – Centro di Bario
9 Gas Station
10 Lourdes Grotto – Replica of Lourdes Cave
11 Mangazina di Rei – Culture Park
12 Protestant Church
13 Direction Playa Grandi
14 Direction Dos Pos
16 Plantation Onima
17 Watapana school
18 San Luis Bertran school
19 Windmill Park
20 Traditional cottage – Kas Krioyo (closed)
21 Kanta Orchidia
22 Soccer Stadium
23 Kununu's (farming grounds) West
24 Kunuku's (farming grounds) East
25 Statue of Julio Abraham
26 Memorial stone founding of Rincon
27 Posada Para Mira
28 Market Square
29 Tropicana Bar
30 Orange bar
©2012 Olivier Douvry/GlobeDivers


text:
Comparison of cluster measures
Clustering algorithms can be described as unsu-pervised learning algorithms in machine learning process. They assign class labels to data objects based on the relationship between data items without any pre-defined class label. This gives rise to an inherent uncertainty in the clustering process. As such clustering validity measures are needed to verify the clusters from different clustering algorithms. In this paper we compare various cluster validity measures proposed in the literature. We use the 'usage frequency' of these measures as a distinguishing attribute to classify them. We also provide the results of our experimentation to validate our classification.
International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Pattern Recognition 2009, AIPR 2009
Anyanwu, M., Shiva, S., & Lin, D. (2009). Comparison of cluster measures. International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Pattern Recognition 2009, AIPR 2009, 348-355. Retrieved from _URL_


2
I imported my image with three bands (RGB) with 100*100 tiles using raster2pgsql into the DB. Now, I need to export those tiles separately. I used the following code but it produces a table
 select st_aspng(st_reclass(rast,1,'0-100:0-100','8BUI',0)) from myraster.test where rid=1;
So I need some help to improve this code or even revise it to a suitable form.
0
I found the solution to this question:
Using gdalwarp and PG was worked:
gdalwarp -t_srs EPSG:4326 -tr 100 100 -of PNG -r bilinear PG:"host=localhost port=5432 dbname='postgis' user='***' password='***' schema='chp01' table='raster_table' mode='1'" rast_name.png
mode - option is used to know the expected arrangement of the raster table. There are 2 possible values
mode=1 - ONE_RASTER_PER_ROW mode. In this case, a raster table is considered as a bunch of different raster files. This mode is intended for raster tables storing different raster files. It's the default mode if you don't provide this field in connection string.
mode=2 - ONE_RASTER_PER_TABLE mode. In this case, a raster table is considered as a unique raster file, even if the table has more than one row. This mode is intended for reading tiled rasters from database.
In my case since I imported the image in different tiles, number 1 can provide suitable result
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text:
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...and consequently are referred to as such or as leucocratic. The mafic minerals include olivine, pyroxenes, amphiboles, and biotites, all of which are dark in colour. Mafic minerals are said to be melanocratic. These terms can be applied to the rocks, depending on the relative proportion of each type of mineral present. In this regard, the term colour index, which refers to the total...
What made you want to look up "melanocratic rock"? Please share what surprised you most...


text:
These famous birds have such inspirational stories that some people say God has performed miracles through them. Here are are some of the most famous miracle birds in history:
Alex was an African grey parrot who participated in pioneering research studies about the intelligence of birds. Animal psychologist Irene Pepperberg worked with Alex in the United States from 1977 to his death in 2007 in a wide variety of university studies. During those studies, Alex demonstrated intelligence far beyond what human beings had previously realized birds were capable of, miraculously revealing the extent to which birds can think and feel.
Among Alex's many abilities were: thinking critically, using language creatively, solving problems, recognizing and describing items, adding numbers, and expressing a wide range of emotions in context during conversations with people.
2. Cher Ami
This homing pigeon became a hero during World War I when she flew through a barrage of bullets and successfully delivered a message that saved the lives of 194 people. During the Battle of Argonne in France in October 1918, a battalion of soldiers from the U.S. Army's 77th Infantry Division got trapped without ammunition on a hill behind enemy lines. Their fellow Allied troops didn't know where they were, so they were firing on their own soldiers without realizing it. Desperate to get word of their location to the Allies, the trapped battalion sent out two different pigeons with notes in canisters attached to their legs, but both were shot down by German soldiers.
They then sent Cher Ami to deliver a note that read: "We are along the road parallel to 276.4. Our own artillery is dropping a barrage directly on us. For heaven's sake, stop it!" Miraculously, Cher Ami delivered the note and made it back to the battalion, even though she had been shot multiple times (including through the chest) and blinded in one eye. Allied troops then rescued all 194 of the surviving trapped soldiers, and medics worked on Cher Ami to save her life.
Cher Ami had faithfully delivered other important messages earlier during World War I, as well. She received numerous awards for her heroic war service.
Snowball -- a white cockatoo with a plume of yellow feathers on his head -- has a miraculous ability to dance. Unlike most other birds, Snowball can recognize different musical beats and accurately synchronize his movements in time to them.
This USA bird's dance moves made him a sensation on the Internet and attracted the attention of scientists from The Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California and Harvard University, who studied Snowball and concluded that he does truly dance to music. Snowball is the first animal whom scientific researchers have declared to be capable of real dancing.
4. G.I. Joe
G.I. Joe was an heroic War War II pigeon. While working for the United States Army Pigeon Service in Italy during October 1943, G.I. Joe delivered a crucial message to Allied troops not to bomb a village they were scheduled to bomb -- Calvi Vecchia -- because Allied forces on the ground had already captured the village. Miraculously, just before the bombing was set to begin, G.I. Joe got the message through in time. So the bombing was called off, saving the lives of an estimated 1,000 people in Calvi Vecchia.
5. Old Abe
Old Abe was a bald eagle who became a hero for miraculously helping Union troops during the U.S. Civil War. A female bird who was nonetheless named in honor of then-U.S. president Abraham Lincoln, Old Abe showed remarkable courage while accompanying troops in many battles. She served as an inspirational mascot for Union troops, improving their morale and seeming to cheer them on by spreading her wings out and screaming out loud, fierce calls when they moved into action. Although Confederate troops often tried to capture or kill Old Abe, she remained safely with Union troops and survived the entire war.
After the war, Old Abe went to live in a place of honor inside the U.S. Capitol building. She helped save the U.S. Capitol from destruction in 1881 by using her piercing call to alert people to a fire that had broken out in the building's basement; people then successfully stopped the fire.
6. The Cliff Swallows of San Juan Capistrano
Every year since the Mission San Juan Capistrano in California, USA opened in 1776, huge flocks of American cliff swallow birds have followed a miraculous migration route. They travel about 6,000 miles from Argentina (where they spend the winter) to the mission, arriving on the same day in the spring (March 19th) and departing for Argentina on the same day in the fall (October 23rd).
The swallows build nests out of mud in various places (such as eaves) of the mission's buildings and hatch their babies there. Their presence has inspired many mission visitors over the centuries as an example of faithfulness and hope at work every year.


text:
Storage and use
The volume of surface water used in the Northern Territory (NT) each year is roughly 50,000 megalitres.
You need a licence to take or use surface water. Read how to apply for a surface water extraction licence.
Surface water uses are divided into the following:
- 75% urban
- 12% irrigation
- 6% pastoral
- 5% rural
- 2% mining or other.
Storage of surface water
Surface water is stored in dams, farm dams, excavated tanks, turkey nests or steel tanks.
Large surface water storages are used for water supply, recreation or flood control.
The three major dams in the NT are Darwin River Dam, Manton Dam and Mary Anne Dam.
There are only two major water supply systems that use surface water in the NT.
These are Darwin's water supply from the Darwin River Dam and Katherine's water supply from the Donkey Camp weir on the Katherine River.
Last updated: 17 March 2016
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text:
When I first heard of touchdown PCR, I thought of a landing aircraft, which, as it turns out is not a bad way to think about it.
But despite it's amenability to analogies and dreadful puns (see title), touch-down PCR (TD-PCR), a very useful technique for improving PCR amplification specificity, is trickier that it might seem at first. So in this article I'll provide a primer on touchdown PCR (TD-PCR) and some tips and references for perfecting it.
So let's start with…
What is touchdown PCR?
TD-PCR is a modification of PCR in which the initial annealing temperature is higher than the optimal Tm of the primers and is gradually reduced over subsequent cycles until the Tm temperature or "touchdown temperature" is reached, much like the touchdown of an airplane.
A gradual lowering of temperature to a more permissive annealing temperature during the course of cycling favors amplification of the desired amplicon.
Why does TD-PCR work better?
Optimal annealing temperature is a requirement in PCR. This is normally determined based on the melting temperature (Tm) of the primer-template pair. But, primer Tm is affected variously by the individual buffer components, even primer and template concentrations so any calculated primer Tm value is only an approximation (1). Therefore, it is often difficult to find the right annealing temperature for a given primer/template combination.
To-low annealing temperatures, can lead to primer-dimer formation and non-specific products while too-high temperatures reduce yield due to poor primer annealing.
By using temperatures higher than the calculated Tm in the initial cycles, TD-PCR favours only accumulation of amplicons whose primer-template complementarity is the highest. The stepwise transition to a lower temperature during subsequent cycle guards against lower yields by making use of the desired amplicons in the reaction that now outcompetes any non-specific products or primer-dimers if present.
What are TD-PCR cycling conditions?
The protocol published in Nature Protocols (2) works very well and is a good reference to start off with TD-PCR.
The suggested cycling program has two phases. The first phase of touchdown programming uses a Tm that is approximately 10°C above the calculated Tm. The temperature is reduced by 1°C every successive cycle until the calculated Tm range is reached. This is done for a total of 10-15 cycles.
Phase 2 follows generic PCR amplification of up to 20-25 cycles using the final annealing temperature reached in the touchdown phase.
The cycles and temperature drop during touchdown phase can be adjusted from 1-3 cycles per 1-3°C drop in temperature if non-specific products are still observed or if the yield is low.
General Tips for TD-PCR:
- Keeping all reactions cold until thermal cycling starts is crucial to avoiding non-specific priming even with TD-PCR.
- A hot start setup is preferred. Since the main aim of TD-PCR is to eliminate non-specific interactions during the initial cycles, it is important to use a hot-start set up.
- TD-PCR can address problems with monoplex reactions better than multiplex reactions.
- Total number of PCR cycles, including the touchdown phase should be kept low (below 35). Too many cycles will lead to appearance of non-specific bands in the gel.
- An extra 1 min denaturation cycle at 96°C or 97°C may be extremely useful for difficult templates.
- Roux KH. Genome Research. 1995. 4: S185-194.
- Korbie DJ and Mattick JS. Nature Protocols. 2008. 3(9). 1452 – 1456.