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PALS Mane Event fundraiser set for June 20
Hoosier Times | Saturday, May 10, 2014 5:00 pm
The PALS Mane Event, an annual fundraiser for People and Animal Learning Services Inc. will take place at 6 p.m. June 20 in Indiana University's Alumni Hall. PALS is a nonprofit organization that provides therapeutic equine activities for individuals with disabilities and at-risk youth.
The Derby-themed evening will begin with beer and wine tasting courtesy of Bloomington Brewing Co., Chateau Thomas Winery, Cutters Brewing Co., Flat 12 Bierwerks, Oliver Winery, Manolo's Wines, Sun King Brewing Co. and Vanguard Wines. There will be live music, a silent auction, dinner and a live auction hosted by auctioneer Jimmie Dean Coffey — with items such as jewelry, artwork and vacation packages to a variety of destinations. Drink selections at dinner will be provided by Oliver Winery and Bloomington Brewing Co. Derby attire is encouraged.
Tickets are $65 per person, and guests must be 21 years old with a valid ID to attend. All proceeds from the event support PALS riders, programs and horses. For event information, go to , email or call 812-336-2798, ext. 18.
PALS offers new program for veterans
Special to the H-T | Tuesday, May 13, 2014 3:10 am
PALS (People and Animal Learning Services) is proud to offer a new program designed especially for Indiana's veterans. The new initiative, incorporating both philosophies and techniques central to the organization's mission, aids our most deserving community members by providing support and assistance with the healing of physical or emotional wounds including injuries and accidents suffered on duty, PTSD, stress, depression and much more.
As veteran riding programs continue to grow across the country, PALS is right at the forefront of the movement dedicated to helping veterans transition from active duty to civilian life. The unique approach to each participant not only addresses a veteran's individual needs but provides an opportunity for camaraderie to form with others participating in the program.
Veterans have the opportunity to learn and practice everything from grooming to riding during their sessions, with the goal of forming a unique drill team. In addition to the riding program, participants will have the opportunity to meet and interact with other local veterans participating in a BBQ honoring their participation.
To provide the program, PALS has partnered with the well-known Wounded Warrior Project, which provides veterans and service members who have incurred a physical or mental injury, illness, or wound, co-incident to their military service on or after Sept. 11, 2001, and their families with a variety of services. In conjunction with WWP, PALS will have the opportunity to offer 10 free sessions to alumni of the WWP.To learn more about the WWP, visit woundedwarriorproject.org.
Interested in getting involved? This new program requires a great deal of support from the community to be successful. PALS is recruiting volunteers with a passion for serving the veterans who've served our community and country (no horse experience necessary). BBQ experts and local organizations serving veterans are encouraged to get involved as well. Everyone interested, please contact PALS head instructor Cindy at or 812-336-2798, ext. 14, for more details or check out the website .
Horse-riding demos part of PALS free "Fun Show"
By Dann Denny 331-4350 | firstname.lastname@example.com | Posted: Thursday, September 26, 2013 2:17pm
There will be horse-riding demonstrations by 40 to 50 riders at the 13th Annual People and Animal Learning Services free "Fun Show" from 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Oct. 12 at its new facility at 7644 W. Elwren Road.
"Last year we had 400 guests, but this year we hope to have even more because we have a better facility," said Fern Bonchek, PALS' executive director. "We're very excited about this year's event."
Groups of riders will participate at 10 a.m., 12:15 p.m., 2:30 p.m., and 4 p.m., demonstrating such things as dressage, walking, trotting and obstacle courses. Each group will have an honorary judge from the community, who will give the riders participation ribbons and trophies, plus some positive feedback after their demonstrations.
"The event has two purposes," Bonchek said. "First, it gives people an opportunity to come see what we do here. Second, it gives our riders an opportunity to demonstrate their skills in front of family and friends and be proud of what they've accomplished during the year."
During the day there will be door prizes and kids' activities such as a horseshoe throwing competition and horse-themed face painting. From 11 a.m.-3 p.m. the Big Cheese Food Truck will serve a variety of cheese sandwiches, soups and beverages.
There also will be a PALS's Volunteer of the Year Award given to two volunteers as well as a Rider of the Year award.
The event's sponsors are Dr. Sterling Doster, Ken Nunn Law Office, IU Health Southern Indiana Physicians, Crowder's Healthcare Pharmacy, Bloom Magazine, The Trojan Horse, WFIU, Awards Center, Crane Federal Credit Union, Stokes & Housel CPA's, Utilities District of Western Indiana REMC, Commercial Service of Bloomington, and Hoosier Energy R.E.C., BloomingtonOnline.NET
Since its inception in 2000, PALS has provided individualized therapeutic equine programs designed by professionals to develop and restore functional skills, enhance well-being and improve quality of life. PALS has provided more than 17,600 therapeutic horseback riding lessons, various educational programs, and camp opportunities for people with disabilities.
On August 23rd PALS was featured in a spotlight article in the Herald Times.
Click Here to read the article entitled: "Therapeutic Riding Program PALS Celebrates New Forever Home in Bloomington"
Looking to become part of a growing organization serving our community? PALS is currently searching for professionals to join our team! With over a decade of service, PALS continues to provide high quality therapeutic equine programs to individuals with disabilities, impairments, and chronic illness in Monroe and surrounding counties. Please click the link below to learn more about available opportunities.
Click here for more information.


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As the weather gets warmer, it's nearly impossible to ignore the barrage of reminders that it's time to break out the ol' swimsuit that has been gathering dust for the past year. For some of us, this is exciting. For others, it's something we dread. As much as I love swimming, I've found myself in the latter category over the past few years. More

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AUTO RACING PACKAGE: Auto Racing Glance |
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text: USG to Conduct Special Elections for Three Positions St. Thomas Newsroom February 17, 2012 Undergraduate Student Government is planning special elections for the positions of freshman class president, junior class president, and elections and credentials chair. Election packets are available on the USG website and in the Campus Life office, Room 325, Anderson Student Center. Packets are due back by 8 a.m. Thursday, Feb. 23, in the USG office, Room, 314, Anderson Student Center. Candidates will give two-minute speeches to the Undergraduate Student Government General Council at 6 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 26, in the Koch Commons Fireside Room, with the special elections immediately following. For more information about the elections email Mike Orth.


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Sensors 2014, 14(2), 2259-2279; doi:10.3390/s140202259
Published: 29 January 2014
: This paper addresses the problem of three-dimensional speaker orientation estimation in a smart-room environment equipped with microphone arrays. A Bayesian approach is proposed to jointly track the location and orientation of an active speaker. The main motivation is that the knowledge of the speaker orientation may yield an increased localization performance and vice versa. Assuming that the sound produced by the speaker is originated from his mouth, the center of the head is deduced based on the estimated head orientation. Moreover, the elevation angle of the head of the speaker can be partly inferred from the fast vertical movements of the computed mouth location. In order to test the performance of the proposed algorithm, a new multimodal dataset has been recorded for this purpose, where the corresponding 3D orientation angles are acquired by an inertial measurement unit (IMU) provided by accelerometers, magnetometers and gyroscopes in the three-axes. The proposed joint algorithm outperforms a two-step approach in terms of localization and orientation angle precision assessing the superiority of the joint approach.1. Introduction
In recent years, significant research efforts have been focused on developing human-computer interfaces in intelligent environments that aim to support human tasks and activities. The knowledge of the position and the orientation of the speakers present in a room constitutes valuable information allowing for better understanding of user activities and human interactions in those environments, such as the analysis of group dynamics or behaviors, deciding which is the active speaker among all present or determining who is talking to whom. In general, it can be expected that the knowledge about the orientation of human speakers would permit the improvement of speech technologies that are commonly deployed in smart-rooms. For instance, an enhanced microphone network management strategy for microphone selection can be developed based on both speaker position and orientation cues.
Very few methods have been proposed to solve the problem of speaker localization and speaker orientation estimation from acoustic signals. They differ mainly in how they approach the problem and can be coarsely classified in to two groups. The first group assumes the task of localization and orientation estimation as two separate and independent problems, working as a two-step algorithm: first locate the speaker, and then, the head orientation is estimated [1–6]. The main advantage of this approach is the simplicity and processing speed. However, the main drawback of this method is that the head orientation estimation process is highly dependent on the speaker tracking accuracy. This kind of approach does not take advantage of the fact that speaker orientation information could be used to improve the speaker localization precision.
The second group of approaches [7,8] considers the localization and the estimation of the orientation of the speaker as a joint process, which aims at improving the performance of the localization by proper weighting of the cross-correlation between microphone pairs, depending on their relative angle with the speaker, thus minimizing the degrading effects of the head orientation in the localization algorithm [9].
No previous work has been found that tackles the task of three-dimensional (3D) speaker orientation estimation with microphone arrays. This can be attributed to the fact that most smart environments have the microphones placed in nearly the same plane in order to maximize the localization performance in the xy coordinates, making it very difficult to estimate the head elevation angle, due to the low microphone placement diversity in the z-axis. Another possible cause may be the lack of acoustic databases with annotated speaker orientation and not even 3D orientation labels.
In this paper, a Bayesian approach is proposed to jointly track the location and orientation of a speaker. The main motivation is that the knowledge of the speaker orientation may yield to an increased localization performance and vice versa. The position and orientation of the speaker are estimated in the 3D space by means of a joint particle filter (PF) with coupled dynamic and observation models. Furthermore, the part from the vertical angle of the speaker's head can be inferred by the algorithm solely from the acoustic cues. In order to test the performance of the proposed algorithm, a new multimodal dataset has been purposely recorded, where the corresponding 3D orientation angles are acquired by an inertial measurement unit (IMU) provided by accelerometers, magnetometers and gyroscopes in the three axes. The position of the center of the head of the speaker is automatically provided by a video particle filter tracker from multiple cameras. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is assessed by means of a new proposed set of metrics derived from the multiple person tracking task [10] in Section 6.2 over the cited database, showing an increased performance for the joint PF approach in relation to the two two-step algorithms that first estimate the position and then the orientation of the speaker.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, the head rotation representation is described. Section 3 introduces the speaker localization and orientation estimation algorithms as a two-step approach. Section 4 presents an alternative two-step algorithm employing a PF at each step. Section 5 describes the joint PF. Sections 6 and 7 show the experiments and results. Finally, Section 8 gives the conclusions.
2. Head Rotation Representation
The parametrization of the head rotation in this work is based on the decomposition into Euler angles (ϕ, θ, ψ) with the x−y−z convention of the rotation matrix of the head into the room's frame of reference, where (ϕ, θ, ψ) denote the three basic rotations, one for every axis. By the x − y − z convention, the following rotations are chosen:
Rotate by angle ψ about the head z-axis
Rotate by angle θ about the head y-axis
Rotate by angle ϕ about the head x-axis
The rotation matrix, R(ϕ, θ, ψ), is given by:
where:The Euler angles (ϕ, θ, ψ) are also known as the roll, tilt and pan; or roll, pitch and yaw angles of the head. In this work, it seems not feasible to estimate the roll of the head with acoustic signals. Therefore, only the pan and tilt will be considered. Thus, the rotation of the head will be parametrized as R(θ, ψ) = R(0, θ, ψ) = Rz(ψ)Ry(θ). Nevertheless, the knowledge of the horizontal and vertical head angles, in addition to the head location, gives a good representation of the speaker in the 3D space. In order to estimate what the speaker may be referring to, the direction vector of his head in the 3D space can be computed from the rotation matrix as follows:
3. Two-Step Speaker Localization-Orientation Algorithm
The two-step algorithm to estimate the location and the orientation of speakers is based on the work presented in [11]. First, the position of the speaker is estimated by the steered response power-phase transform (SRP-PHAT) algorithm and the time difference of arrival (or time delay of arrival) (TDOA) for each microphone pair with respect to the detected position is computed. In the second step, the energy of the cross-correlation nearby the estimated time delay is used as the fundamental characteristic from where to derive the speaker orientation.
3.1. Acoustic Source Localization
3.1.1. GCC-PHAT Algorithm
In a multi-microphone environment, one of the observable clues with positional information more commonly used in acoustic localization algorithms is the time difference of arrival of the signal between microphone pairs. Consider a smart-room provided with a set of M microphones from which we choose N microphone pairs. Let x denote a ℝ3 position in space. Then, the time difference of arrival, τp,i,j, of an hypothetical acoustic source located at p between two microphones, i, j, with positions mi and mj is:
where c is the speed of sound in air.The cross-correlation function is well-known as a measure of the similarity between signals for any given time displacement, and ideally, it should exhibit a prominent peak in correspondence to the delay between the pair of signals [12]. A commonly used weighting function in acoustic event localization is the phase transform (PHAT), also known in the literature as cross-power-spectrum phase technique [13], which is usually considered useful in reverberant conditions. It can be expressed in terms of the inverse Fourier transform of the estimated cross-power spectrum (Gij(f)) with the following equation:
In practice, the frequency range used to compute Rij(τ) can be reduced to the speech-band to increase the accuracy [14], employing the rectangular band-pass filter, U(f1, f2), with a unitary value for frequencies f1 ≤ |f| ≤ f2, and zero otherwise.The estimation of the TDOA for each microphone pair is computed as follows:
3.1.2. SRP-PHAT Algorithm
The contributions of each microphone pair can be combined to derive a single estimation of the source position. However, in the general case, the availability of multiple TDOA estimations leads to a minimization of an over-determined and non-linear error function. A very efficient approach is the SRP-PHAT or global coherence field introduced in [14]. The SRP-PHAT algorithm performs very robustly in reverberant environments, due to the PHAT weighting, and actually, it has turned out to be one of the most successful state-of-the-art approaches to microphone array sound localization.
The basic operation of the SRP-PHAT algorithms consists of exploring the three-dimensional (3D) space, searching for the maximum of the global contribution of the PHAT-weighted generalized cross-correlations (GCC-PHAT) from all the microphone pairs. The 3D room space is quantized into a set of positions with a typical separation of 5–10 cm. The theoretical TDOA, τp,i,j, from each exploration position to each microphone pair are precomputed and stored.
The set of GCC-PHAT functions are combined to create a spatial likelihood function (SLF) F(p), which gives a score for each position, p, in space by means of the following equation:
The estimated acoustic source location is the position of the quantized space that maximizes the contribution of the GCC-PHAT of all microphone pairs:
where is the set of microphone pairs. Then, the TDOA for each microphone pair, τp̂,i,j, is estimated using the obtained location.3.2. Orientational Features
The orientational cues used in this work are based on GCC-PHAT averaged peak (GCC-PHAT-A), described in [11]. It consists on computing the energy of the cross-correlation nearby the estimated time delay by the following equation:
where τp̂,ij is the delay in samples and w(k) is a window with length L = 2Δ + 1. Different window types and lengths can be used in w(k) with satisfactory performance, as addressed in [11].Basically, the GCC-PHAT-A measure reduces to the sum of the energy of the band-filtered PHAT-weighted cross-correlation around the estimated TDOA, and essentially, it measures the proportion of the signal between frequencies f1 and f2 that contributes to the main peak in the localization. It is also important to note that this measure is commensurable across all microphone pairs independent of microphone gains, due to the PHAT weighting and, therefore, constitutes a valuable orientational feature.
3.2.2. Orientation Angle Estimation
In order to estimate the orientation of a speaker based on the GCC-PHAT-based orientational measures, a simple vectorial method is employed, similar to that described in [8]. The technique first needs the position of the active person to be known beforehand or estimated by means of the SRP-PHAT or any other source localization method. Then, the vectors, vij, from the speaker to the center of each microphone pair are computed, adjusting their magnitude |vij| to the orientational measure of the microphone pair, ρij. The orientational measures consists in the min-max-normalization scaled GCC-PHAT-A values, which fit in the range [−γ, (1 − γ)].
where ρmin and ρmax are the minimum and maximum value of the set of ρij. Min-max normalization retains the original distribution of values, except for a scaling factor and transforms all values into the desired range [15]. The min-max normalization models the fact that the microphone pairs with the lowest orientational cue value are probably behind the speaker, and by giving those pairs a negative value, its resulting vector would help point to the correct direction. In our experiments, we obtained good results with γ = 0.3.The sum of the vectors formed by all the orientational measures of each microphone pair is considered the estimated head direction, vsum, as follows:
The estimated head orientation angle, ψ̂, is computed as the angle of the projection of vsum in the xy-plane with the x-axis.
4. Two-Step Particle Filter Tracking
In this section, a two-step approach to estimate the location and orientation of the speaker is proposed, employing a particle filter in each stage, which is introduced here to enable a fair comparison with the joint particle filter approach.
4.1. Particle Filter Tracking
The concept of tracking can be defined as the recursive estimation of the hidden state of a target based on the partial observations at every time instant. Assuming that the evolution of the state sequence is defined by a Markov process of first order, the dynamics of the state can be described by the transition equation:
where fk is a possibly non-linear function of the previous state, xk−1, and an independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) process noise, vk−1. At every time instant, k, the observation of the state, xk, is defined by the observation equation: where, again, hk is, in general, a non-linear function of the state and an i.i.d. measurement noise sequence, nk.Tracking aims to estimate xk based on the set of all available measurements z1:k = {zi, i = 1,…, k} up to time k. One solution is to use the Bayesian approach to reconstruct the probability density function (pdf) of xk given all the data, z1:k, up to time k, or in a compact notation, p(xk∣z1:k). The pdf, p(xk∣z1:k), is known as the posterior density and contains all statistical information gathered by the measurements up to time k. The posterior density may be obtained recursively by means of the Bayesian approach based on two fundamental iteration steps, namely, prediction and update.
In the prediction step, the prior pdf, p(xk∣z1:k−1), is obtained making use of the transition pdf, p(xk∣xk−1), which is derived from transition Equation (15):
In the update stage, the new measurement, zk, is used to update the prior pdf via the Bayes' rule and obtain the required posterior density of the current state:
where the denominator: is a normalizing constant, which depends on the pdf, p(zk∣xk), defined by observation Equation (16).Particle filters (PF) [16] approximate the Bayesian filter approach by representing the probability distribution recursively with a finite set of samples, known as particles, that are updated according to their measured likelihood for a given dynamical and observational model. Applications of PF to acoustic localization can be found in [17–19] with a comprehensive research in [20].
Let denote a set of Ns random samples of the state with associate weights normalized such that . Then, the posterior density, p(xk∣z1:k), can be approximated as:
Considering that the samples, are drawn from a sampling distribution, called importance density, and taking some widely accepted assumptions [16], the weights can be computed recursively by the following expression:
In the literature regarding other domains, some techniques aim at constructing efficient importance density functions through Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods [21] or exploiting independence among variables in the state space using Rao-Blackwellized particle filters [22]. Although there is a large number of methods to compute the associated particle weights, one approach that is the most largely accepted, in part for its convenience, is to choose the importance density to be the prior:
reducing the weight recursion to:A common problem with the PF is the degeneracy phenomenon, where, after a few iterations, all the weight concentrates in just one particle, and the rest of the particles have almost zero contribution to the approximation of the posterior. A measure of the degeneracy of the PF is the effective sample size introduced in [23] and [24], defined as:
where and a small is a symptom of severe degeneracy. Although this problem could be tackled by using a very large Ns, a common approach, whenever a significant degeneracy is observed, is to make use of particle resampling techniques, which consist of discarding the particles with lower weight and proportionally replicating those with a higher one, while still representing the posterior density.The best estimation of the state at time k, x̂k, is derived based on the discrete approximation of Equation (20). The most common solution is the Monte Carlo approximation of the expectation:
The design parameters of the PF are the state model, the dynamical model and the observational model, which are defined in the following sections.
4.2. Location Tracking
4.2.1. State and Dynamical Models
A common approach is to characterize the human movement dynamics as a Langevin process [25], since it is reasonably simple and has been proven to work well in practical applications [19,25]. In this case, the state variable, xk, is defined as:
where pk = [xk yk zk]T denotes the position and ṗk = [ẋk ẏk żk]T denotes the velocity of the target. The addition of the velocity component in the state variable aims to improve the representation of the movement dynamics.For the sake of simplicity, consider the Langevin process in the x-coordinate as follows:
where nx ∼ (0, 1) is a normally distributed random variable, T is the time step unit between consecutive updates of the state vector and the two constants are defined as: where υ denotes the steady-state root mean square velocity and β is the rate constant. The motion model in the x and y coordinates is assumed to be independent and identically distributed, which yields to identical model parameters in both coordinates. The random variable, nz, for the z-axis is set to have a normal distribution with a very low variance, . Equations (27) and (28) can be rewritten following the form of transition Equation (15): with vk−1 characterized as a zero-mean Gaussian noise variable with covariance matrix Qk−1:4.2.2. Observational Model
The particle filter approach requires the definition of the likelihood function, in order to update the weight of every particle. In this case, the observation, zk, is not limited to the estimated source location [19], and the full SRP-PHAT SLF generated by Equation (9) or a modification thereof can be employed [26]. Other works [17] construct the likelihood function employing solely the TDOA estimations.
In this work, the localization likelihood is derived from a spatial likelihood function F(p) obtained by the SRP-PHAT algorithm with the PHAT-weighted cross-correlation smoothed by the convolution with a triangular window, Ω(τ), of five samples:
Given the iterative nature of the PF, this smoothed SLF enables a faster convergence of the particles to its global maximum, while avoiding being trapped around local maxima. Since the position that maximizes F(p) determines the most probable location of the sound source, the localization observation likelihood function is constructed from the estimated position of the speaker's mouth, tk, and the SLF: where zk,loc denotes the observation of the localization.The likelihood function, F(p), is usually precomputed for a discrete set of space positions for every audio frame in order to gain speed in the evaluation of p(zk,loc∣xk) in the case of a PF with a large number of particles, at the expense of localization precision. In this work, the quantization step is set to 5 cm.
4.3. Orientation Tracking
4.3.1. State and Dynamical Models
The state vector of the particle filter used to estimate the orientation consists only of the pan angle and the dynamical model as follows:
where is a normally distributed random variable.The state head direction vector in 3D space dk(ψk) = [cos(ψk) sin(ψk) 0]T.
4.3.2. Observational Model
The orientation likelihood is obtained from the GCC-PHAT averaged peak features described in Section 3.2. A vector, vn, is created from the estimated speaker's position, pk, to the center of each microphone pair, adjusting their magnitude |vn| to the normalized orientational measure of the microphone pair as defined in Section 3.2.2. The orientation observation is formed by the resulting vector, vsum, of the vectorial sum of vn. The orientation likelihood function is then defined as the scalar product of the state head direction vector and the normalized resulting vector as follows:
where 〈·,·〉 denotes the inner product, zk,ori is the observation of the orientation and C is a constant to control the width of the observation probability function.The scalar product of the two unitary vectors is scaled into the range [0, 1] to better resemble a likelihood function. The exponent, n|vsum|, is used as a confidence factor for the orientational observation, with the constant, n, set empirically to four. The magnitude of the observation vector, |vsum|, models the likelihood function, where a very small value of the vector length yields to the constant likelihood function independent of the state. On the other hand, higher values of the observation vector magnitude will narrow the likelihood function to observation angles close to the state angle.
5. Joint Localization-Orientation Particle Filter Tracker
In this work, a particle filter approach is proposed to jointly track the location and orientation of a speaker. The main motivation is that the knowledge of the speaker orientation may yield to an increased localization performance and vice versa. The position and orientation of the speaker are estimated in the 3D space by means of a joint particle filter with coupled dynamic and observation models. The proposed system makes the assumption that the voice of a speaker is produced around the mouth, and the knowledge about the orientation yields to a better estimate of the head position. On the other hand, in this work, it is proposed to assume that the person movement is dependent on his orientation and vice versa. Next sections describe the proposed state and coupled dynamic and observation models.
5.1. State Model
The state of the particles is composed by the position of the center of the speaker's head pk = [xk yk zk]T, the velocity of the speaker ṗk = [ẋk ẏk żk]T and the tilt and pan of his head.
The estimated head rotation at any time is defined by:The estimation of the position of the speaker's mouth tk is determined at every instant by the state vector, and it is synthesized from the head center position and the rotation angles as follows:
where it has been assumed that the mouth lies at r distance from the head center with an inclination angle of α. A preliminary radius of r = 15 cm and an inclination of α = 45 degrees have been set experimentally.The state head direction vector in the 3D space, dk(θk, ψk), is computed, rotating the head direction vector in the head coordinate reference to the 3D space reference:
5.2. Dynamical Model
Similarly to Section 4.2.1, a Langevin process is chosen to characterize the speaker movement dynamics. Usually, the motion model in the x and y coordinates is assumed to be independent and identically distributed, which yields to identical model parameters in both coordinates. However, in this work, it is assumed that the movement in the x and y coordinates is dependent on the pan orientation angle of the person. It is expected as a more probable event that the speaker moves to his forward direction than to his sideways or backward directions. This is modeled as a Rayleigh distribution probability in the speaker's forward direction and a normal distribution in his sideways direction. The Rayleigh distribution, (0,1), is scaled and centered in order to have a zero mean expectation and unity variance. The variance of the distributions determined by the σ factor is also different for the forward and sideways directions.
The random variable, nx, from Equation (28) for the x and y coordinates are obtained by the rotation of nforward and nsideway by the pan angle ψk:
The random variable, nz, for the z-axis is set to have a normal distribution with a very low variance, .In this work, the horizontal orientation angle of the speaker is assumed to be dependent on his velocity. It is expected that the faster the person moves, the more probable it is that the person is looking to his moving direction. This is modeled by predicting the next state head direction as the weighted sum of the current state head direction vector in the xy plane and the normalized moving direction vector plus a normally distributed random variable, nd, where the weight factor, αψ, depends on the person's velocity and the maximum expected velocity, υmax, as follows:
dx, dy and dz being the x, y and z components of dk−1.Finally, the next state yaw orientation is the angle formed by the y and x components of the head direction:
The pitch orientation angle recursion equation, assuming independence with other state variables, is defined as:
where αθ is a forgetting factor accomplishing |αθ| ≤ 1 and is a normally distributed random variable. The pitch, θk, determines the height of the mouth of the speaker in relation to the head center position. The variables, αθ, nθ and nz, are adjusted, so that short-term vertical head movements are inferred by θk, whereas long-term smooth head height changes are incorporated into the state head height, due to the forgetting factor.5.3. Observational Model
The observation likelihood, p(zk∣xk), is composed from the localization, zk,loc, from Equation (35) and orientation zk,ori from Equation (38) feature observations as follows:
where it is assumed that these observations are conditionally independent, given the current state, xk.6. Experiments
6.1. Experimental Setup and Database Description
The joint PF tracker performance will be compared with the two two-step algorithms introduced in Sections 3.2.2. and 4 in the task of estimating the position and orientation of the speaker's head. Since the two-step approaches are only able to estimate the horizontal orientation angle, the pitch and roll hypothesis are set to 0 for all time frames. The comparison with the two-step PF approach assesses that the performance increase obtained by the joint method is due to the joint dynamic and observation models and not the filtering itself.
The performance of the proposed head orientation estimation algorithm was evaluated using a purposely recorded database collected in the smart-room at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. It is a meeting room equipped with several multimodal sensors, such as microphone arrays, table-top microphones and fixed or pan-tilt-zoom video cameras. The room dimensions are 3, 966×5, 245×4,000 mm, which correspond to the x, y and z coordinates, respectively, and its measured reverberation time is approximately 400 ms. A schematic figure of the room setup can be observed in Figure 2.
The database is composed of one single person dataset involving the recording of multi-microphone audio, multi-camera video and IMU data for seven people moving freely in a smart room speaking most of the time and another multi-person dataset consisting in the recording of a group discussion with four participants. Only the simple person dataset will be considered in this work, since it is oriented toward the person tracking task, while the multi-person dataset is oriented toward the group analysis task. A sample of the database is shown in Figure 3.
The ground truth provided by the database consists in the annotations of the center of the head and the Euler rotation angles of every participant. The center of the head was obtained automatically by means of a multi-camera video PF tracker and the Euler orientation angles are acquired by an inertial measurement unit (IMU) provided by accelerometers, magnetometers and gyroscopes in the three axes.
6.2. Metrics
The metrics proposed in [10] for acoustic and audiovisual person-tracking are considered for evaluation and comparison purposes. These metrics have been used in international evaluation contests [27] and have been adopted by several research projects, such as the European Computers in the Human Interaction Loop (CHIL) [28] or the U.S. VACE [29] thus, they allow an objective and fair comparison with other acoustic tracking methods and with methods from other modalities.
In [10], two metrics are defined for an acoustic and audiovisual person-tracking task. Multiple object tracking precision (MOTP), which shows the trackers ability to estimate precise object positions, whereas multiple object tracking accuracy (MOTA) expresses the performance for estimating the correct number of objects and keeping to consistent trajectories. Additionally, the acoustic multiple object tracking accuracy (A-MOTA) score is defined for the acoustic tracking task, evaluated only for the active speaker at each time instant, k. A new metric is proposed in this work, multiple head orientation tracking precision (MHOTP), which determines the performance for estimating the head orientation of multiple persons.
6.2.1. Multiple Object Tracking Accuracy (MOTA) (%)
This is the accuracy of the tracker when it comes to keeping correct correspondences over time, estimating the number of people, recovering tracks, etc., the tracker, false positives, misses and mismatches, over all frames, divided by the total number of ground truth points.
where msk, fpk and mmk denote, respectively, the number of misses, false positives and mismatches, and gk is the number of ground truth objects at time instant k. A distance threshold of 1 m is used to associate a track with the ground truth. Distances above this threshold will be treated as either false positives or mismatches. A more detailed description of this metric can be found in [10].6.2.2. Multiple Object Tracking Precision (MOTP) (mm)
This is the precision of the tracker when it comes to determining the exact position of a tracked person in the room.
where ck is the number of correspondence matches found for time frame k and di,k is the distance between the ground truth position and its corresponding hypothesis.6.2.3. Multiple Head Orientation Tracking Precision (MHOTP) (degrees)
This is the precision of the tracker when it comes to determining the exact orientation of a tracked person in the room. It is the Euclidean angle error for matched ground truth-hypothesis pairs over all frames, averaged by the total number of matches made. It shows the ability of the tracker to estimate the correct orientation and is independent of its tracking accuracy. The Euclidean angle is computed as the angle between the estimated head direction vector, d̂(θ̂, ψ̂), and the ground truth vector, d(θ, ψ). The multiple head orientation tracking precision can be also detailed by three sub-metrics, which account for the angle error in every axis.
where ϕi,k, θi,k and ψi,k are the ground truth Euler angles for the target, i, at the time instant, k, and ϕ̂i,k, θ̂i,k and ψ̂i,k are the estimated Euler angles for the corresponding hypothesis.7. Results
Experiments were conducted over the cited database to compare the performance of the joint PF tracker and the two two-step approaches. A tight relationship between the tracking accuracy (MOTA) and precision (MOTP and MHOTP) has been observed in the three algorithms, since it is possible to output a localization and orientation hypothesis only when the confidence of the algorithm is above a threshold and achieve a high precision at the expense of tracking accuracy, and vice versa. In order to ensure a fair comparison between the three algorithms, the peak value of the SLF is selected as the confidence for all methods, where a sweep threshold parameter is used to obtain the curve of all possible accuracy and precision results.
Figure 4a shows the position tracking error in relation to the tracking accuracy for the three methods. The two-step PF approach is slightly better than the two-step algorithm. However, the proposed joint PF approach obtains a notable performance increase in the localization precision with respect to the two-step PF approach, that ranges from 7% to 24% error reduction depending on the A-MOTA working point. This increased localization precision is due to the fact that the database position annotations correspond with the head center position (this is a general fact for almost all tracking databases), whereas the acoustic localization algorithm detects the position of the mouth of the speaker. The proposed joint algorithm takes advantage of the knowledge of the mouth position and head orientation to estimate the center of the head, thus obtaining better localization results. Two A-MOTA working points have been selected to show numerical values, which can be observed in Tables 1 and 2.
The overall precision of the estimation of 3D direction of the head in relation to the tracking accuracy is shown in Figure 4b for all methods. The joint PF approach exhibits an overall reduction of 1.4 degrees in the 3D angle estimation error with respect to the two-step approaches, which have a very similar performance. The 3D angle error can be split in the horizontal and vertical angle error, which are shown in Figure 5, respectively. The proposed joint method has a horizontal angle error reduction of 8.2% to 9.1%, depending on the selected confidence threshold in comparison to both two-step approaches, which, again, have a very similar angle error. Interestingly, the results obtained for the vertical angle, which are similar to the localization results, have better precision when only high confidence SLF values are employed. This can be explained by the fact that the proposed method estimates the elevation angle from the small term height changes produced by the acoustic localization algorithm and that high confidence SLF values provide a more accurate acoustic source position.
8. Conclusions
A PF approach for joint head position and 3D orientation estimation has been presented in this article. Experiments conducted over the purposely recorded database with Euler angles and head center annotations for seven different people in a smart room showed an increased performance for the joint PF approach in relation to two two-step algorithms that first estimate the position and then the orientation of the speaker. Both two-step approaches have a very similar angle estimation error, with a small increase in the localization precision (MOTP) for the two-step PF. The proposed joint algorithm outperforms both two-step algorithms in terms of localization precision and orientation angle precision (MHOTP), assessing the superiority of the joint approach. Furthermore, by means of the definition of a joint dynamical model, part of the the elevation angle of the head is inferred by the algorithm. Future work will be devoted to extending the joint PF to track multiple speakers and to study the fusion with video approaches with a focus on 3D orientation estimation.
This work has been partially funded by the Spanish project SARAI (TEC2010-21040-C02-01).
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
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Table 1. Tracking performance joint and two-step approaches for an A-MOTA working point of 10%. PF, particle filter. |
System | MOTP | MHOTP | MHOTPψ | MHOTPθ |
2-Step | 133.94 mm | 17.76° | 11.27° | 10.63° |
2-Step PF | 125.58 mm | 17.84° | 11.53° | 10.53° |
Joint PF | 95.30 mm | 16.06° | 10.38° | 9.39° |
Table 2. Tracking performance joint and two-step approaches for an A-MOTA working point of 75%. |
System | MOTP | MHOTP | MHOTPψ | MHOTPθ |
2-Step | 140.86 mm | 28.04° | 22.64° | 11.54° |
2-Step PF | 136.62 mm | 26.25° | 21.01° | 11.58° |
Joint PF | 122.67 mm | 25.08° | 19.60° | 11.30° |
© 2014 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).


text:
I have written a basic web service using RealDWG(.NET) that can update a DWG-file from one version to another with an option to update an existing block attribute. No other content in the DWG file should be changed/corrupted/deleted in a way so it cannot be edited just as before my little service executed and saved the file. The service seems to work fine when using some sample files I have received. I've done a visual comparison using DWG TrueView 2013 and to my eye it looks the same. Does anyone know of a tool that could compare and list if something was changed or excluded from the original drawing?
Even though the resulting file looks ok I've noticed a couple of things that makes me wonder if I've missed something:
I have no idea what program(s) were actually used to create the drawings I have tested but the service have to handle files produced with several different AutoCAD products (including different versions).
Being new to RealDWG and most things related to AutoCAD any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated.
If theAecxxx files are being loaded, then the objects that they own/implement will be updated to the version of your RealDWG and cannot be changed back to an older version even if you save the file back to an older version dwg. That's fine if they were already the current version, but from what you are saying, that would not be fine if they were an older version to start with.
Another thing that could affect file size is if the drawing was saved in Acad with partial save enabled. This would cause the drawing to have extra data in it from the partial saves. When your RealDWG app saves it, that will be a full save and will remove the partial save data since it is no longer needed. That woudl cause the dwg file to shrink.
The requirements changed so it is now OK that the file is only saved in the latest format meaning that there should not be a problem with using the Aecxxx files that comes with RealDWG 2013.
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I have my old complete set of OEM headlights, tail lights and 2 grilles. They aren't in great condition because they have been on the truck for 118,6XX miles. The headlight set has both headlights, both corner lights, and both turn signals and ALL have bulbs. Both the tail lights are in great condition and have all the bulbs. The chrome grille is missing a few snaps and has rock chips and paint overspray on it. The black grille is bran new but the driver side corner light attachment point is broken off (shown in pics). Both grilles do NOT have the Sombrero. This can be fixed with opoxy. I'm not looking to make ANY profit off this stuff and it's just sitting here taking up space. So it's all free, all I ask is that you pay for shipping. I am located in 95667 and the size and approximate weight of the boxes is listed below. I would prefer that you figure out the shipping information. I would like the head and tail lights to be sold as a complete set.
Thank you
Just the Headlights, no blinkers or corners... (box:7lbs, 20"X13"X12")
Black grille (note the broken peice)... (box:10lbs, 68"X10"X16")
Remember, EVERYTHING is FREE!!! You just pay shipping.


text:
Kevin Morby – "Still Life…" Released
New album by Kevin Morby released. Produced by Rob Barbato here with Drew Fischer at the controls.
More info hereNew album by Kevin Morby released. Produced by Rob Barbato here with Drew Fischer at the controls.
More info hereRecent studio happenings:
NIC HESSLER / CATWALK (Captured Tracks) – Recording some drums and mixing to tape by Drew Fischer
GIRLPOOL – Rob Barbato and Drew Fischer recorded their new single
CRAFT SPELLS (Captured Tracks) – Part Time Punks live session with Be Hussey before their show at The Echo
JESSICA PRATT (Drag City) – Here doing some "pre-mastering" to 1/4″ tape with Drew.
THE MARCH VIOLETS – Part Time Punks live session of this classic band on their first US tour in something like 20 years, with Be Hussey at the helm
PEAKING LIGHTS (Domino) – Remix session by Aaron Coyne and Drew Fischer
COLD SHOWERS – Here recording their latest record with Rob and Drew at the helm
VULKANO – Recorded and Mixed a single Produced by Aaron Coyes (Peaking Lights) and engineered by Drew
Check out 'Breakdown,' the new single from Peaking Lights from their upcoming album COSMIC LOGIC (Weird World / Domino). Mixed here by Matt Thornley (DFA Records/LCD Soundsystem).
Hear the single and watch it animateApril here means retooling and renewing…
We are happy to announce two new studio partners!
Rob Barbato (Composer/Producer/Musician) and Drew Fischer (Recording/Mixing engineer) have collaborated on many projects together and have decided to join up with company. With them comes (no surprise here) a stack of gear, a stack of projects, and a stack of know-how. Please give them a warm welcome.
PEAKING LIGHTS (Domino) just finished mixing their record to tape with Matt Thornley at the helm.
DUCKTAILS (Domino) aka Matt Mondanile in the house cutting tracks for his new record with Drew Fischer and Be Hussey.
KEVIN MORBY (Woodsist) recording his new record here between tour dates.
BIG SEARCH currently recording a new record here.
UNITED GHOSTS tracked a stack and mixed their new EP with Drew Fischer.
GUIDES 3-song 7″ is back from the presses and is creamy white and available on July 1.
CUT CHEMIST (A Stable Sound) and MIA DOI TODD drop in for some design work.
Remember to stay hydrated.
Kim Deal and Morgan Nagler (Whispertown) release a new limited 7″ as part of the Kim Deal Solo Series. Be Hussey mixed the B-side with Kim here and recorded some other stuff after transferring her 1/2″ 8-track to 2″ 24-track. All analog, of course. All Wave.
Click Here to Listen and Buy 7″


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Results for recess
Migrant Workers and The Grapes of Wrath Revisited
Originally Posted: 09/24/2011 - 4:14pm | Type: Blog -
When John Steinbeck's classic novel The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939, it caused a sensation. It won the Pulitzer Prize and was the best-selling novel of the year. Wh ...
Beyond Camelot: Britain's Un-American Austerity Program
Originally Posted: 07/14/2011 - 7:34am | Type: Blog -
Our British cousins have come up with an economic policy that could not be more different from what we Americans have been doing for decades. I rather like it.
 Our Briti ...
Wall Street, Repent!
Originally Posted: 07/14/2011 - 7:34am | Type: Blog -
We are all familiar with the famous pop culture image of a street evangelist holding up a sign reading, "Repent, for the end is near!" But repentance is actually a fundamental religious theme, and ...
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Originally Posted: 07/14/2011 - 7:18am | Type: Blog -
Do you find yourself adding more to your to-do list, even though you already feel overwhelmed?

Are your weekends just as jam-packed as your workdays?
 ...


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Young's Literal Translation (YLT) | New International Version (NIV) |
21 `The woman, when she may bear, hath sorrow, because her hour did come, and when she may bear the child, no more doth she remember the anguish, because of the joy that a man was born to the world. | 21 A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world. |
Young's Literal Translation is in the public domain. (Young's Literal Translation - The Bible Online) | Scripture quoted by permission. Quotations designated (NIV) are from THE HOLY BIBLE: NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica. All rights reserved worldwide. (New International Version Bible Online) |


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missing persons - Page 4
Abducted Child In Gold Hummer Just Misunderstanding [UPDATE]
Ouachita Parish Sheriff deputies are saying that the BOLO about a gold Hummer with a child tied and gagged in the back seat was just a big misunderstanding.
Another Arrest in Keiosha Felix Case
Authorities in Baton Rouge report that Ronald Wilkerson has been arrested on a warrant and was held for Duson Police. Ronald is the brother of Leon Wilkerson who was arrested two weeks ago and charged with second-degree kidnapping and simple rape in Keiosha Felix's disappearance.
Keiosha Felix Volunteers Establish Headquarters
From our sister-station NewsTalk 965 KPEL:
DUSON, La. (KPEL) — Friends, family, and volunteers assisting in the search for missing Duson teen Keioshia Felixhave set up a headquarters from which to base their organization.
The Find Keioshia Felix Now Facebook page says Pastor Toby Ryder with the Dus
Volunteers Establish Headquarters For Missing Teen Keiosha Felix
Friends, family, and volunteers assisting in the search for missing Duson teen Keiosha Felix have set up a headquarters from which to base their organization.
Keep Calm and Find Mickey Shunick
Please don't forget about Mickey Shunick, the UL student who went missing one month ago today. Her friends and family haven't forgotten her and neither should we. Please share this video message wherever and wheneve
Mickey Shunick Update: Command Center To Be Relocated To Blackham
Mickey Video Surfaces; Command Center To Be Relocated To Blackham; Police Seek White Truck
Mickey Shunick Captured on Video, White Pickup of Interest
Lafayette Police Department
Detectives were able to identify a bicyclist believed to be Mickey Shunick traveling on Versailles Blvd and Saint Landry Street. At approximately 1:47 am the bicyclist is captured on Versailles Blvd traveling towards St. John Street.
10 Ways You Can Help In The Search For Mickey Shunick
Many people express feelings of helplessness; this list will give you an idea of how you CAN help.
Mickey Shunick Still Missing, Police Set Up Tip Line: 337-291-8633
Family asks residents to search their property and neighborhoods for any clues, and those with surveillance cameras are asked to review the footage.
Lafayette Girl Missing; Family Asks For Your Help
A 14 year-old Lafayette girl has been missing since Thursday, and her family is asking for your help.
Madison Claire Bourque, a student at Lafayette High School, went missing some time in the early morning hours of April 12th.


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Tickets are $75.00.
There will be food, drinks, and fun items for sale (shoes from Jeffrey, jewelry from Stella & Dot, make-up, silent auction items, and a moving talk by domestic violence victim who was helped by AVLF's Safe Families Office.
Proceeds from the ticket sales, and a percentage of items purchased that evening will benefit the Foundation's Domestic Violence Project.
Join Kat Schuller on Third Tuesdays at Victory Sandwich Bar in Decatur for Gayborhood Networking!
Time: 6:30-7:30
When: Third Tuesdays
Where: Victory Sandwich Bar
340 Church Street, Decatur, GA
Please join Matt Lee for Perimeter Gayborhood Networking every third Wednesday at 5:30pm.
When: Third Wednesdays
Time: 5:30 pm
Where: McCormick & Schmick's, 600 Ashwood Parkway
Contact: Matthew Lee (email@example.com)
Join Chad Slieper and Stephen Scriber for Buckhead Gaybhorhood Networking every Third Wednesday at Brio!
Time: 6:30 pm
Where: Brio, 2964 Peachtree Road NW
Contact: Chad Slieper (email@example.com; 404-667-1519) and Stephen Scriber (firstname.lastname@example.com; 770-490-9553)
We are excited to announce that on February 19, 2015 the Stonewall Bar Association will be hosting an Attorney Mentoring Program Mentor/Mentee Mixer at STK Atlanta.
The event will last from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., with passed hor d'oeuvres and a complimentary drink ticket.
We encourage you to stay after the mixer for dinner as well. STK has graciously offered attendees 20% off their meal that evening. Reservations may be made in advance by visiting: www.stkhouse.com.
We look forward to seeing you on the 19th at STK!
Contact Jessica MacAllister at firstname.lastname@example.com with any questions about this event, how to be a mentor or how to get a mentor.
Join Misty Peterson and John Kraus for Gayborhood Networking every fourth Thursday!
Where: Apres Diem, 931 Monroe Drive
Contact: Co-Chairs: Misty Peterson (firstname.lastname@example.com; 404-781-7815) and John Kraus (email@example.com; 404-323-4444)


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Today's landscape of design and technology is impressive, to say the least. 2015 will be a hallmark year as more companies adopt the cloud allowing creatives and technologies to rally together resulting in innovative experiences … Read the full article
It's almost time to party like its 2015, but first, let's look back at the greatest hits from 2014. We've learned so much: From bettering your UX to designing a great culture. Here's a reading … Read the full article
Everyone is talking about storytelling: We talk about storytelling. You talk about storytelling. Storytelling gets people excited, it's relatable, and it's a successful marketing strategy across the board. We recently published a post explaining why … Read the full article
In a recent interview, Eric Ries said that design is the new basis of competition. I couldn't agree more. Design is more than just how that something looks, more than how something functions. Design has … Read the full article
In a time when dev teams are moving (or have already moved) towards an Agile software development methodology, why aren't more design teams moving towards a Lean UX design process? Innumerable new products come onto … Read the full article
"Normalcy is overrated. If you tap into your natural creativity, you have a chance to be extraordinary." —@kelleybros Those opposed to normalcy often come off as weird. If you're designing today's web, that's a good … Read the full article


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World English Bible (WEB) | New International Version (NIV) |
6 He doesn't preserve the life of the wicked, But gives to the afflicted their right. | 6 He does not keep the wicked alive but gives the afflicted their rights. |
The World English Bible is in the public domain. (The World English Bible Online) | Scripture quoted by permission. Quotations designated (NIV) are from THE HOLY BIBLE: NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica. All rights reserved worldwide. (New International Version Bible Online) |


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Seth Hanslik of Uhrichsville took first place in the Senior Division of the 2013 Pokemon City Championship in Vienna, West Virginia recently.
In addition to the title and trophy, Hanslik earned championship points toward a potential invitation to compete at the 2014 Pokemon World Championships in Washington D.C.
For more information, visit www.pokemon.com/play.
Your privacy is important, read our privacy policy.


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Hello Everyone,I'm Christian and I'm a graphic designer.I just joined this forum and wanted to say HELLO to all of ya..:)
Welcome, Christian!
Tell us more about yourself - What sort of work do you do, and what are you hoping to get from your involvement at Typophile?
The Resident Pariah welcomes you, as well. Come for the typography, stay for the bonhomie…
@Christian: Where did you study?


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I just vomited on a lot of clowns.
Leonard: It'd actually be nice to not hear Sheldon complain about my cooking all day.
Sheldon: Yo ... uh, excuse me, but every year you prepare a terrible meal and every year I criticize it. Do our traditions mean nothing to you?
Raj: That's horrible. Why would you push a cow over? They're sacred.
Penny: Oh, stop it. I've seen you eat, like, a million hamburgers.
Raj: Hey, an animal can be both sacred and delicious.
- Permalink: Hey, an animal can be both sacred and delicious.
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Arnold Schwarzenegger was supposed to be the education governor of California. Since becoming the Golden State's chief executive, the former Hollywood action star has vowed to bring the same kind of leadership and muscle to education reform as he once brought to the big screen. Daniel Weintraub, in an excellent article in the current issue of Education Next, however, shows Schwarzenegger has been a dismal failure.
The reason:?? The Terminator has been tamed by California's powerful teachers unions. Weintraub, a columnist for the Sacramento Bee, demonstrates that the massive California Teachers Association (CTA) and the feisty California Federation of Teachers (CFA) have successfully blocked almost every major Schwarzenegger initiative. The governor has been reduced to playing defense. He has vetoed countless bills sent to him by the teachers unions' allies in the Democrat-controlled legislature. Thus, Schwarzenegger has succeeded in protecting California's effective system of standards, testing, and accountability from being eroded. But he has failed to go on the political offensive, forging the broad-based consensus necessary for overhauling the state's public schools.
Weintraub concedes that Schwarzenegger's heart is in the right place. He has good ideas. Schwarzenegger knows what needs to be done to bring about meaningful reform--devolve greater power and authority to local school districts; provide much more flexibility in state education spending; make teaching a true profession by giving teachers more pay and training, while holding them accountable for classroom performance; grant principals the ability...
A post from guest blogger and Fordham board member Diane Ravitch. Visit her blog, Bridging Differences, at blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences.
Dear Mike,
It is absurd of Dean Millot to call you a "McCarthyite" for pointing out that Bill Ayers was a terrorist. He was a terrorist. He says so. He doesn't deny it. His actions, which he proudly acknowledges, confirm it.
McCarthy was known for making false charges. Yours were not false. McCarthy was known for saying that someone was guilty if he associated with another person who was clearly guilty. But Ayers was not a terorrist by association with terrorist. He was a terrorist; he planted bombs. Maybe he killed people, maybe he didn't. I don't know, but one thing certain about bombs is that they have the power to kill people.
And it is not true that no one was killed by Weathermen bombs. First of all, I have never heard until Dean Millot wrote it that the Weathermen warned people before they bombed something. That is a new one on me. I lived through that era and can't recall any reports of advance warnings. Second, three Weathermen--including Ayers's girlfriend Diana Oughton--were killed when one of their own bombs exploded as they were building it in a luxurious townhouse in Greenwich Village. By the way, they were packing the bombs with nails, presumably to maim people, not buildings, and to create terror wherever they would be exploded. Also, a researcher was killed...
Now that Sol Stern has completely ruffled the feathers of the "whatever works" crowd, he's turned his sights to one of the most visible leaders of the "what works" movement, Institute for Educational Sciences director Russ Whitehurst. In a new City Journal Online piece, Stern critiques the recent Reading First evaluation and (joining Fordham's Amber Winkler, among others) points out its fatal flaw: the likelihood that the study's "control schools" were implementing many of the same programs as the study's "treatment group":
One reading scientist willing to speak on the record about these concerns is University of Illinois professor Timothy Shanahan, former president of the 85,000-member International Reading Association (the world's largest professional organization of reading teachers and scholars) and a recent inductee into the Reading Hall of Fame. Shanahan told me that he asked IES officials about the study design and was told that it was too late to change it.
Stern, reading the Washington tea leaves and sensing Congressional Democrats' eagerness to kill off the program, wants IES (i.e., Whitehurst) to admit the evaluation's limitations:
IES officials should at least point out that influential people in Washington are drawing unwarranted conclusions from a study that many reputable reading scientists find deeply flawed. It would be a stunning display of irresponsibility to remain silent after their study has contributed to so much public misunderstanding.
As I...
Clearly blogging is having a dumbing-down effect on my punditry. Though it is silly ("unwise"? "counter-productive"? "cynical"?) to expect 100 percent of students to attain proficiency and for proficiency to still mean something, as our friends in South Carolina recently discovered.
Corey Bower seems to think so. He points to this passage from this New York Times piece about some affluent suburban public schools that are adopting a "global studies" curriculum:
Michael J. Petrilli, a vice president of the conservative-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute, cautioned that American schools were already giving short shrift to American history and government and could not afford to layer global studies on top of already stretched curriculum.
"In some of these trendy schools, there is an ethos that we are all citizens of the world, and that's all that matters," he said. "Students need to be taught to be American citizens first."
To be fair to Corey, the reporter's paraphrasing of my views wasn't entirely accurate. By all means schools should be teaching students about the rest of the world; that's why Fordham reviewed the states' world history standards, for example. But it appears that the school profiled in the article is finding time for "global studies" by trimming American history and civics. Given that schools are already narrowing history out of the curriculum, I found this disturbing. And it's hardly "reactionary" or "anti-world" to believe that American students should be taught about American history and citizenship--before being taught how to be "citizens of the world." Or if it is reactionary, and I don't know it, then I've suddenly gotten a lot more conservative in just the past few weeks. No doubt I'm spending...
Dean Millot at Edbizbuzz seems to think so.
I'm tempted to leave it at that, because, as Millot himself implies, this debate is pulling us further and further away from education policy and more and more into the realm of the bizarre. But it's not every day that I'm likened to one of the most despicable characters of the 20th century so, alas, let me respond.
Millot argues that the term "terrorist" is "hyperbolic" because the Weather Underground did not practice "the deliberate indiscriminate use of force against innocents to strike fear in the general public." Instead, they "just" blew up government buildings, taking care not to injure anyone.
This strikes me as semantic jujitsu (the Weathermen did use violence to forward their political aims), but I'm certainly happy to concede that what Al Qaeda perpetrates, for example, is much, much, much worse.
Still, were the Weathermen's actions defensible? Hardly. Sometimes we at the Fordham Institute are considered "bomb throwers"--but only figuratively. We tend to disagree strongly with the teachers unions, but it would be morally reprehensible for us to call on school reformers to bomb their headquarters, even in the middle of the night when no one could be hurt. That's not how democracies are supposed to work.
Furthermore, Millot argues that Ayers was a "fugitive from justice," but since all charges were dropped because of "prosecutorial misconduct," he is presumed...
Nothing is more emblematic of the rampant intellectual incoherence and moral equivalence of our age than the current debate about whether Bill Ayers is a "terrorist." Dean Millot at Edbizbuzz calls Mike a "McCarthyite"--one of the most vicious slanders in the political lexicon--for stating the obvious: Ayers is an unrepentant terrorist who shouldn't be part of the American Educational Research Association's leadership team. Leaving aside the AERA issue (and I don't think any respectable group should have a person who committed and championed violence to pursue political goals as a member, never mind as one of its leaders), how can Ayers's actions as part of the radical Weather Underground not be categorized as terrorism?
''I don't regret setting bombs,'' Ayers told the New York Times in an interview published (of all days) on September 11, 2001. ''I feel we didn't do enough.'' Well, he and the Weathermen did plenty: They launched a series of bombings against New York City Police Headquarters, the Capitol building, and the Pentagon during the early 1970s. Their goal was to bring violent Marxist revolution and the Vietnam War to the streets of America--or as they frequently called it, "Amerika," to connote its supposedly fascist underpinnings.
In 1970, Ayers summed up the Weatherman philosophy as: ''Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at.'' Ayers now says his comments were a "joke" meant to stimulate discussion on...
Washington Post reporter Daniel de Vise writes today that high schools are scaling back "honors" courses as they boost their AP and IB offerings. Some suspect that Post reporter Jay Mathews's Challenge Index, which ranks high schools based on their participation in AP and IB, is pressuring schools to abandon honors classes for the more rigorous college-prep programs.
Whatever the reasons, critics are probably right that the mid-level rigor of an honors course was a good fit for lots of kids who now will have to either languish in unchallenging lower-level classes or strain themselves in AP or IB. Still, one could argue that the trend is encouraging. First, more college-prep classes mean higher expectations and ultimately, one hopes, higher all-around achievement.
Second, it's great to see schools embodying two simple but overlooked concepts that gave the world unprecedented gains in productivity and prosperity in the last couple centuries: division of labor and comparative advantage. The folks at AP and the folks at IB focus all their time and energy on making rigorous, comprehensive, well-balanced tests and curricula. By employing their services and products, teachers can focus their time and energy on teaching. Maybe critics are right that there is some kind of perverse rankings-grubbing going on in some of these schools, but one suspects that in most cases, school leaders simply appreciate the convenience and pedagogical value of AP and IB and are consequently wanting to use them more and more....
Yesterday's Sunday Times (UK) featured a piece on New York City's student pay-for-performance plan, spearheaded by Harvard economist Roland Fryer. The article also explores more generally the latest efforts to solve the crises facing America's black community, contrasting two main approaches with some expressive terminology:
The education initiative has pushed Fryer to the forefront of a national debate that has previously owed more to emotional political bias than scientific rigour. On Fryer's left is the black "ghettocracy", the angry old guard of black liberation. Led by rabble-rousing preachers such as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jack-son, it tends to blame everything on racism or white malice. On his right is the "Afristocracy", the conservative black elite led by Bill Cosby, one of America's most popular comedians, who has repeatedly taken black youths to task for being stupid, ill-mannered slackers. "They think they're hip," Cosby once said. "They can't read, they can't write, they are laughing and giggling and they're going nowhere."
The education initiative has pushed Fryer to the forefront of a national debate that has previously owed more to emotional political bias than scientific rigour. On Fryer's left is the black "ghettocracy", the angry old guard of black liberation. Led by rabble-rousing preachers such as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jack-son, it tends to blame everything on racism or white malice.
On his right is the "Afristocracy", the conservative black elite led by Bill Cosby, one of America's most popular comedians, who has repeatedly taken black youths to task for being stupid, ill-mannered slackers. "They think they're hip," Cosby once said. "They can't read, they can't write, they are laughing and giggling and they're going nowhere."
Interesting, as always, to see how we're viewed by our cousins across the pond.
Photo by Fran Collin from The American.
Video games supposedly made America's youth lazy and fat; maybe video games can make them active and lean.


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Athletissima 08 - Ivan Ukhov drunk. Sad but true -- winning Olympic gold hasn't allowed high jumper Ivan Ukhov to live down his most Internet-orious moment: a drunken appearance at a meet in Switzerland four years ago. Old video of that competition just resurfaced, and it spiked immediately, showing the Russian comically flopping underneath the bar (after apparently stumbling out of one). His manager claimed that Ukhov "had a fight with his girlfriend and was also upset at failing to qualify for the Olympics," and the national coach called him a disgrace. But surely all is forgiven now, and we're assuming Ukhov had a staggeringly good gold-medal celebration.
who voted for this video:


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At Red Hills Animal Hospital we understand the value of the Human-Animal bond and how important your furry family members are to you. Because of that, we strive to provide the best healthcare possible for your pets. We will take the time necessary to give them the individual attention that they need and deserve. We will also make sure that we answer your questions while we do it.
Our Doctors and staff take pride in providing thorough, compassionate, friendly, and up-to-date care for all of your pets medical and surgical needs. We are a progressive practice.
Red Hills Animal Hospital has been in business for over 13 years, and our three Doctors have over 40 years of combined veterinary knowledge and expertise. Our primary mission is to improve your life by helping your pet to be as healthy, happy, and comfortable as possible.


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Wednesday, September 08
Coors Field
Attendance: 28,271
Denver, CO (Sports Network) - Troy Tulowitzki hit two homers and drove in four runs, leading the surging Colorado Rockies in a 9-2 rout of the struggling Cincinnati Reds in the third of four games at Coors Field.
Tulowitzki notched his second career multi-homer game and first since June 23, 2009 for the Rockies, who have won six straight to remain within 4 1/2 games of the first-place Padres, who beat the Dodgers. Seth Smith also homered, while Jonathan Herrera and Eric Young, Jr. each had a two-run single in the win, Colorado's ninth straight at home over Cincinnati.
"We're doing everything well right now," Smith said. "Baseball is hard to put everything together -- pitching, defense and baserunning. We seem to be doing all three well right now."
Carlos Gonzalez extended his hitting streak to 16 games with a 1-for-3 effort at the plate. Aaron Cook (6-8) earned the win, allowing one run, six hits and a walk in five-plus innings before leaving with a non-displaced fracture in his right leg after being hit with a line drive.
Joey Votto had three hits and drove in a run for the Reds, who have lost four straight and five of six, but still lead St. Louis by six games in the NL Central after the Cardinals lost to Milwaukee. Bronson Arroyo (14-10) lost his third straight start after giving up seven runs on eight hits in 4 1/3 frames.
"We had another chance to pick up a game, but on the bright side we didn't lose any ground, either, and there's one less game on the schedule," said Reds manager Dusty Baker. "That's not going to continue. We feel fortunate that that's happened, but we've got to win."
Votto's RBI single in the first put the Reds ahead early, but the Rockies' lineup woke up and took a substantial lead.
Smith singled with one down in the second and moved to third on Miguel Olivo's double. Herrera followed with a two-run single to right for a 2-1 lead.
Dexter Fowler began the third with a base hit, and Gonzalez worked a walk to get to Tulowitzki, whose blast to left put Colorado ahead, 5-1. Tulowitzki added a leadoff shot in the fifth to extend the lead, and the Rockies added three more runs in the inning on Smith's solo homer and Young's two-run single for a eight-run advantage.
Cincinnati drew one closer on Paul Janish's RBI single in the seventh, and the Reds later loaded the bases with one out in the inning. Chris Valaika, however, grounded into an inning-ending double play.
Colorado cruised the rest of the way.
Mike Reilly
Bill Miller
Chad Fairchild
Eric Cooper


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Posted: Thu, 07/07/2011 - 11:44am
Updated: Mon, 01/05/2015 - 1:23pm
In conjunction with the State Board of Education initiative to offer more flexibility to schools, the Indiana Department of Education has streamlined the procedure for accrediting schools and has transformed to a real-time accreditation system that is annually reported based on PL 221 category placements and compliance with IDOE Legal Standards. For more information regarding accreditation and more, please follow the links below.
Accreditation Information
- Lookup Individual Schools and their Accreditation Status and Data
- Accreditation Types
- Accreditation Legal Standards
Instructional Time/180 Day Requirement
- Instructional Time Requirement and the 180-Day School Year
- Indiana Code Instructional Time Statute
- FAQ Instructional Time 2014-2015
Performance Qualified High Schools and Districts
- Indiana Code 20-24.2-1-3
- Performance Qualified FAQ
- Examples of DOE-CL Calendar Entries for Qualified Schools
School Improvement Plan Documents
- Legal Standards Submissions/SIP and Evaluation Plan
- Optional School Improvement Plan Outline
- School Improvement Plan Requirements, Statutory & State Board
- Exclusive Rep Signature Page/Sign Once for District
- Exclusive Rep Signature Page/Sign for Each Building