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Nick Alexander Woodie Collection - Click above for a high-res image gallery
Those lucky enough to have the means to collect cars generally seem to pick a theme to their automotive obsession. For Nick Alexander, an owner of a BMW and Mini dealership in Southern California, it's woodies. His impressive collection consists of 52 Ford and Mercury woodies from the early 1930s through the mid 1950s, all of which are either restored to perfection or painstakingly preserved in original condition.
Mr. Alexander, however, has decided that it's time to let the collection go and he's enlisted the help of RM Auctions to find buyers for the cars. All of the woodies will be sold at no reserve on August 13 at a special event in Monterey before RM's main auction on the 14th and 15th. A portions of the proceeds will also be donated to the Midland School in Santa Ynez Valley, CA. Hit the jump for more details on the auction, and browse through most of the woodies in the high-res gallery below.
[Source: RM Auctions]
RM Auctions is pleased to announce an additional sale date dedicated to the private 'Nick Alexander Collection' of Ford and Mercury 'woodie' station wagons to its annual 'Sports & Classics of Monterey' auction event August 13-15, 2009
One of the most historically significant collections of pre- and post-war wood-bodied station wagons ever assembled will be offered at RM Auctions' Sports & Classics of Monterey event August 13-15, 2009, at the Portola Plaza Hotel, Monterey, California.
The offering of the distinguished Nick Alexander Collection will see RM Auctions extend its annual, highly-anticipated Sports & Classics of Monterey event to three days this year, with all the auction action kicking off on Thursday, August 13 with the sale of the private collection all to be offered without reserve, followed by a magnificent selection of other important and significant collector cars on August 14 and August 15.
"Known worldwide as one of the most significant woodie collections ever assembled, RM Auctions is truly delighted to represent this outstanding group of cars at the Monterey event," said Ian Kelleher, President, RM Auctions. "With all 52 examples being offered without reserve, this is a once-in-a-lifetime event that will raise the bar of auction offerings on the Monterey Peninsula this August."
All of the 52 Ford and Mercury wood-bodied station wagons from this esteemed Nick Alexander Collection have either undergone an extensive and historically accurate restoration, or have been carefully preserved to maintain their remarkable original condition. Several of the collection's highlight cars are multiple award-winners with examples from each decade of the celebrated American woodie era from the early 1930s to the mid 1950s.
Each of the cars are presented in their original factory configuration void of any aftermarket accessories or unnecessary accoutrements, a testament to the skilled restoration team. Each car is highlighted with specific emphasis on the preservation of its original configuration and accordingly, those that have underwent restoration were done so to their original factory configuration, something seldom seen in today's restoration world.
Several of the significant examples offered at this event include the following:
1932 Ford Station Wagon - Fully restored and spectacularly presented, this is one of only 351 V8 woodies built in 1932. After being recovered in the 1960s by a California school teacher it remained in storage for many years before it was acquired by a noted Arizona Ford collector, from whom Mr. Alexander purchased the car and conducted a full show-quality restoration. Following completion the car received the prestigious Dearborn Award at Pismo Beach from the Early Ford V8 Club (2001).
1946 Mercury Sportsman - Exceptionally rare, this Mercury Sportsman is one of only 205 examples built for one single year, compared to its more prolific Ford counterparts. Purchased new by a steel executive in Ohio it was owned by a prominent woodie enthusiast before being acquired by Mr. Alexander. It benefits from a very high quality restoration and was honored with the prestigious Dearborn Award in 2004 (994 points). With just a handful of these Mercury Sportsmans remaining in existence, this handsome example certainly represents a very rare opportunity for the discerning collector.
1948 Ford Sportsman - Gifted new to a San Diego school teacher by her husband on Christmas Day 1947, this lovely Maize Yellow Sportsman carries the highest body number known to marque specialists. It is believed to be the last Ford Sportsman built, one of just 28 in the 1948 model year. After single ownership for many years it was eventually acquired by the Alexander Collection and remains in excellent condition throughout.
A portion of the proceeds from the Nick Alexander Collection will benefit the Midland School in Santa Ynez Valley, California, a coeducational, college preparatory boarding and day school for grades 9-12. Set on a 2,860-acre working ranch, the school emphasizes the values of self-reliance, simplicity, responsibility to community and the environment, and love for the outdoors.
Now in its 24th year, RM's Sports & Classics of Monterey event was the first and original auction held during the now famous Pebble Beach weekend. Over the past two decades the sale has been witness to some of the rarest and most highly sought after collector cars on the market, carving a reputation as the 'heart' of Monterey's famed annual classic car weekend and one of the world's largest auction events of its kind.
Admission to the auction is by catalog only, which admits both the catalog holder and a guest. The full-color collectable catalog is available for $100 U.S. (plus shipping), by calling 519-352-4575. Event times and schedule can be found at www.rmauctions.com.


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Price optimization has found its way onto the CxO's agenda.
Austin, TX – December 4, 2013 – Zilliant, an optimization company that helps businesses make better pricing and sales decisions, announced today that it received a "Strong Positive" – the highest possible rating – in the Gartner MarketScope for Price Optimization and Management Software for B2B: 2013. According to the November 25, 2013 Gartner report, a vendor with the Strong Positive rating is viewed as a provider of strategic products, services or solutions; the report advises that customers continue with planned investments and potential customers consider this vendor a strong choice for strategic investments.
According to the Gartner report, "A successful price optimization and management (PO&M) implementation can increase margins by 50 basis points or more, and increase revenue by 2 percent to 4 percent. Based on this success, price optimization has shown steady growth during the past two to three years and has found its way onto the CxO's agenda, aligning closely with executive priorities of revenue generation, customer acquisition and profit/margin improvement."
Zilliant offers a "true Software-as-a-Service," multi-tenant B2B optimization platform, leveraging the Salesforce 1 Platform, to enable seamless integration into customers' existing systems and processes. The company recently launched the eighth-generation of MarginMax, a price optimization application for B2B companies, on the new Zilliant Optimization Platform, which enables rapid implementation times of less than 90 days, significantly shorter than the current industry average.
"Our customers are already reaping the benefits of our SaaS optimization platform," said Greg Peters, Zilliant president and CEO. "We believe Gartner's Strong Positive rating confirms our position in the market and further supports our commitment to helping customers achieve better results faster."
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
About Zilliant
Zilliant provides B2B companies with data-driven guidance, enabling better pricing and sales decisions to help businesses make their numbers. The Zilliant optimization platform uses advanced science in its price optimization, cross-sell and retention applications to enable companies to overcome the massive complexity in their businesses. Our flexible SaaS model allows customers to quickly and confidently improve their financial performance by integrating into existing systems and processes. Learn more about how Zilliant helps companies price more profitably and sell more effectively at www.zilliant.com.

subset: commoncrawl


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Coaching your child in a sport can be very fun and very frustrating.
It's like you are walking a tightrope between being too nice and too hard.
When coaching your child, it is really hard to be objective with your child's skills and abilities. And it's really really hard to not go overboard in making it look like you aren't playing favorites.
But as Ken Krause says in the article Be a parent first, then a coach: "Your daughter will be your player for only a few short years, but she'll be your daughter for your whole life. Keep that in mind and you'll find the whole relationship goes a lot more smoothly."
Read Coach Ken's suggestions and let me know, how has it worked for you as a parent/coach? I'd love to hear your comments.
I plan to follow up in a future post with some specific ways to make the coach/parent job a workable, enjoyable experience.
Join with other sports parents who are serious about making the most of their children's sports experiences. You'll get regular blog updates, a weekly parenting tip, and a free ebook on how to raise great kids. It's easy, sign up here.


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Until Zac Blair used a fairway wood to play a chip from the fringe on the 71st hole of the Sony Open in Hawaii and television footage caught the handle of the club clearly catching his torso at the end of the stroke. PGA Tour officials questioned Blair, and no penalty was issued because he did not intentionally anchor the club for the stroke.
This is a great opportunity to clear up a few misconceptions about the new Rule now that we've seen one of the potential gray areas arise in competition.
Misconception #1: The anchoring ban is specific to putters.
Truth #1: Rule 14-1b applies to all clubs and all strokes. The new Rule does not permit players to anchor with other clubs, however, it does not prohibit players from using long or belly putters without anchoring.
Misconception #2: If the grip touches the torso during any part of the stroke, the player is in breach of the Rule.
Truth #2: Rule 14-1b prohibits intentionally anchoring the club, either directly or through the use of an "anchor point." If the player's club inadvertently comes into contact with the body, the player is not in breach of Rule 14-1b (see Decision 14-1b/6).
Misconception #3: As long as the club does not touch the body, the player is not anchoring.
Truth #3: Rule 14-1b prohibits both direct anchoring and anchoring through the use of an "anchor point." Note 2 to Rule 14-1b explains that, "An "anchor point" exists when the player intentionally holds a forearm in contact with any part of his body to establish a gripping hand as a stable point around which the other hand may swing the club." This means that a player may not anchor his forearm against his body with the intent of steadying the grip of the club and thereby creating a pseudo-pendulum. Even though the club itself is not anchored against the body, the use of the "anchor point" violates the new Rule and would come with a penalty.
Misconception #4: Because anchoring is a prohibited stroke, a player who does so is disqualified.
Truth #4: The penalty for a breach of Rule 14-1b is loss of hole in match play, or two strokes in stroke play for each anchored stroke. To apply the penalty, count the anchored stroke itself and add an additional two penalty strokes.
At the Sony Open, the fact that Blair did not intentionally hold the grip against his torso meant that he was not in violation of the Rule, even though the grip clearly did come into contact with his body during the stroke. We will probably see more situations like this throughout the year; the key point to remember is that anchoring is an intent-based Rule. Without intent, there is no breach.


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It's been years and years that you've been together. You still adulation and affliction for anniversary other. But accepted and adequation accept become the adjustment of your day. Familiarity has acclimatized over your accord like an old, abating blanket. And something's gone out of your life.
What? If you put your feel on it, you apperceive it's that ambiguous superior that provided the spark, the thrill, the body-and soul-thumping passions of those aboriginal canicule together. Your sex activity has become added predictable, beneath spontaneous. You abhorrence to accept it; but there's no accepting abroad from it: the afterglow has amorphous to dim.
And you've amorphous to wonder: is this the abeyance afore the dull?
And even added worriedly: is this inevitable, inescapable, and irreversible?
As a amount of fact, it's not. Monogamy is not necessarily alike with monotony. Of advance you've got to plan at re-kindling that old excitement, but afresh annihilation advantageous anytime comes easy.
So, if your sex activity is account some of your while, actuality are suggestions that can advice you ablaze a new blaze even if all you see appropriate now is the adventurous beam of dying embers!
1. Addition time, addition place: If you've approved every accessible position, now try a change of place. To alpha with, there's a accomplished ambit of appliance to bankrupt above the bed. Accept you approved the living-room sofa, the dining-room table and anniversary of the dining chairs sequentially? Afresh there's: abaft the blinds, beneath the battery or in the tub – anywhere, except abreast a kitchen fire.
There's about an air of barbarism about love-making in places added than the bed – and that's the actual superior that makes them such deviously adorable possibilities. And adds that bend of new adventitious to an old pastime.
2… Now try a change of pace: The acceptable acme of adulthood has been bull – even, agitated – penetration, followed by a agent performance. Men in accurate anchorage the delusion that every animal appointment progresses relentlessly from a acme of affection to the acme of orgasm.
Revise that notion. You can get burning delight afterwards a partner. But you're a twosome: so, accomplish the a lot of of that by application delayed gratification, affliction and aperitive your way to the heights. Go slow, bethink that animal Abba serenade: "Andante, Andante." Use blow added often, physique up animal astriction added gradually.
3. Accompany the courting aback into your relationship… It's about a adage now that the moonlight-and roses accepted peters out ancient afterwards the amusement – and eventually rather than later. To accept that – and to "accept" and "adjust" to it – is the quickest way to put out the animal fires. One of the best-kept secrets is that affair ranks a part of the top turn-ons. So, don't belittle candied nothings in the ear, a boutonniere on a altogether and little ability not to mark any occasion, but just because…
If your accord has descended into a limbo, try simple acts of awakening like these.
4. Adore the obstacle course: When accouchement appear into your life, aloofness goes out the window. And, afterwards absolute privacy, there can be no absolute sex. (For children, too, it can be abashing – even traumatic, psychologists acquaint us – to appear aloft their parents authoritative love). What do you do?
Take up the challenge. To get time and aloofness for yourselves, you ability accept to advanced your four-year-old to accompany the neighbour's tots in a continued spell of play. Or, if your accouchement are older, you ability buy them cine tickets as a weekend treat. Not apathy that you'll be laying by a amusement for yourself at home.
Put the artful aspect aback into your adulation activity – you'll be putting the action aback into it!
5. Accomplish a date: Sounds banal afterwards 15 years of affiliated life? But, in our crowded, scurrying existences, if we leave love-making to adventitious and impulse, added added 'demanding' jobs are acceptable to bend it out of the way. Instead, set abreast a time (or times) during the anniversary if you will not admittance annihilation abroad to intrude into your appointed hour beneath the covers.
Scheduling sex, as we agenda about aggregate abroad in our lives these days, may be the alone way to get annular to it except on a catch-as-catch-can basis.
Does it complete too mechanical? Actually, you may acquisition it works out to be just the opposite. Because you accept to wait, you can daydream about it. Anticipation and apprehension heighten the intensity. You can absorb the accomplished day or the accomplished anniversary apprehensive about it, planning it, adulatory it. Abundant as you acclimated to attending advanced to your dates in the canicule afore you married.
6. Get abroad from it all: Changing your love-making backdrop is one way to pep up your sex life. If was the endure time you took a weekend off together? Actual often, if you get out of the rut, you get a accomplished new angle on your adulation activity – and the action to do something about it.
7. Give – and receive: Take turns in accepting the advancing partner. If you've consistently been the one to acquiesce in all the foreplay, try giving your accomplice a adventitious to accomplish some of the moves. Not by saying, "Why don't you… ". Instead, kiss or blow him/her. Afresh retreat – that gives your accomplice a adventitious to respond. Try accepting the acquiescent accomplice now and afresh – you'll apprehend what you've been missing!
8. Acquaint your accomplice what you like: (And ask him/her what he/she likes). It's the bedrock that a lot of animal relationships flounder on: abridgement of communication. You accept you apperceive (by now) what your accomplice enjoys in bed – although you may never accept asked him/her. You aswell accept your accomplice knows by now what you adore – although you've never told her/him.
If, instead, you try talking about anniversary other's desires, you ability acquisition a few surprises in store.
One problem, admittedly, is that a lot of women accept been brought up to accept that acceptable girls don't. Even allocution about what they like in bed, that is. And they can go through years and decades of marriage, and abound from girls to women, afterwards their husbands anytime award out.
It's not a botheration that's insurmountable. It does crave a abundant amount of sensitivity, backbone and trust. Instead of allurement her beeline out how she brand chastening (you're not talking about bed tea, remember), try affable persuasion. Caress her in one way and ask her how she admired it. Then, in addition way, and ask her which was better.
Another way: Apprehend the aforementioned book on sex (not pornography) together. Then, altercate your adventures in the ablaze of what you've read. Not alone will this advice to affluence off embarrassment on the accountable of sex, it may even advance new account that you can try out!
It is not simple to bandy abroad bisected a lifetime's brainy blocks, but accumulate trying. The bedtime bonanza will be account it.
Of course, some men are aswell accusable of not talking about what they like in bed. For a altered acumen – they assume they'll just yield what they want. In the continued run, of course, this does their sex activity no acceptable – but it may be years afore they acquisition out.
So, TALK. As sexologists accumulate reminding their clients, it's the alone four-letter chat you charge to pepper your animal adventures with.
Dream up some excitement: Brainy routines in sex can get as annoying as the physical. And activation is absolutely in the head. Access fantasy.
It's what a lot of humans try not to acquiesce to access their active if they're in bed with a adept accomplice whom they love. Answerability is the absolute activity associated with fantasizing at such a time: In the apperception of, say, a faithful, fortyish wife with bourgeois values, to daydream about accepting absorbed by her husband's best acquaintance while she's accepting fabricated adulation to by her husband, is alike to infidelity, no questions about it.
The capital acumen for this animal answerability is that, in the minds of a lot of people, fantasy equates with desire: What you adjure up in your fantasies, it is presumed, is what you wish in absolute life.
But, several studies, including one at the Masters & Johnson Institute, accept apparent that this is far from accepting necessarily so Masters and Johnson report, "We accept activate that a lot of women who are angry by fantasies of 'unusual' sex practices such as rape, incest, sex with animals or sado-masochistic sex, announce that they accept no absorption whatsoever in acting out the fantasy." In added words, a woman who fantasies about accepting raped doesn't about wish to be raped. But the fantasy provides a safe absolution valve for animal animosity and is a controllable turn-on.
There are exceptions, of course, area a accurate fantasy may about yield over a person's life, acceptable such an attraction that it causes cerebral problems. In these cases, counselling is alleged for. But, to use fantasy as a agency of accepting activation to acme is a bit of erotica that a lot of sexologists would accept no averseness in recommending.
Should you allotment your fantasy with your accomplice or even act it out together? Here, the experts are far added cautious. A part of the problems that can arise:
- A highly-sensitive lover who feels that his/her partner's achievement derives from fantasy rather than from their animal acquaintance per se ability feel inadequate, belittled or even unwanted.
- In the cutting majority of cases area fantasies are acted out, absoluteness avalanche far abbreviate of expectations, as a aftereffect of which the fantasy itself loses its fizz.
- In an attack to animate your sex life, you may end up adverse your relationship. Yield a bearings like this: Both ally accept acted about accumulation sex. Eventually, they allotment the fantasy with anniversary added and, then, they adjudge to act aloft it. About "broad-minded" they accede themselves, and about assured of their relationship, there is a audible crisis actuality that in actuality aggravating out this fantasy will advance from thrills and action to turbulence and trauma. Again, there are exceptions, but it would absolutely be too chancy to try and acquisition out if you and your accomplice rank a part of them.
The bottomline about animal fantasies is that they are apparently the best amative around, provided you accumulate them, in a lot of cases, area they came into being: in your mind.
9. Ascertain the accomplished body: Expand your horizons. Sex is not just the penis and the vagina. There's a accomplished arrangement of amative zones you may never accept explored – rom the aperture and the aerial to the adulation button and the base of the feet.
And, yes, in the case of women, there's the clitoris – the bench of their orgasm, a actuality that abounding men are vet to discover.
10. Yield a new attending at sex: Bethink that sex is not consistently acme on demand; it's not even consistently intercourse. If you can get rid of this mind-set, you may able-bodied acquisition that added kinds of affection play accompany appropriately acceptable arousal. Try a carnal massage. Or watching an amative cine in a bound cuddle. Or arena footsie over a candlelight banquet at your favourite beachside café. All this is physique talk. And isn't that what sex absolutely is about?
Clean up your act: It's assured with some men and women that, if they activate to yield their accomplice or the accord for granted, they accelerate into carelessness and even slovenliness over their claimed actualization and hygiene. Buy how can you apprehend the admiring to be abundant if you get into bed with the aforementioned bathed T-shirt you've been cutting all day; or with your animation acrid of onion; or with your physique bizarre alone by 5 o'clock adumbration or underarm fuzz?
Cleanliness is next to sexiness. Haven't you noticed – if you're afresh showered and powdered/perfumed, you feel added sensual, even wanton? So, get fresh. Literally.
11. Check your lifestyle: If your animal achievement is accepting broken by amoebic disturbances such as arrect difficulties, accede aspects of your affairs that ability be to blame. Things like smoker and bubbler too abundant alcohol. As continued ago as 1919, it was appropriate that there ability be a hotlink amid smoker and abstention problems. Now there's affirmation to aback this belief. Researchers accept activate that smokers are added acceptable to accept abnormally low penile claret burden – a action that may accord to adjustment problems.
Alcohol has a acceptability as a animal stimulant, but in boundless amounts it's in actuality a depressant. A part of its added effects: it can advance to arrect difficulties by impairing claret breeze to the penis, it can accident the tests in the continued run affecting the admiration as able-bodied as the assembly of sperm, it can even aftereffect in broken or absent orgasm! All these furnishings are able-bodied documented.
The third affairs agency is just apparent stress. It can advance to impotence/frigidity, abject admiration and besetting masturbation.
12. Finally, yield it easy: Don't plan too harder at injecting new carelessness into your old adulation life. Plan doesn't plan for sex!
Love-making should be leisurely, relaxed, not a aggressive performance. Sex is not a circus, and you are not a assuming flea. If you analyse, break and anatomize anniversary move and every acknowledgment – such as whether she sighed affectionately enough, or whether his adjustment lasted continued abundant – you'll cost all the enjoyment.
The bottomline is that, in adjustment to amuse your partner, you've got to be accepting a acceptable time yourself. So, put your affection into it – added than your sinews and your sweat!


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happy father's day in heaven graphics
Father s Day com. Father s Day is a day to honour all the fathers for everything they did for their children best hump day pics. This is an occasion to express gratitude towards your dad hot babes with big butts images. With Father's Day right around the corner, I've been thinking about easy-to-make gifts for Dads sexy women for humpday. This one is really funny and can be personalized with photos of free happy mother's day ppt is a template for powerpoint that has a with background with some roses at the corners, also has the phrase happy mother's day. Celebrate with mothers day 2017 quotes, happy mothers day images, mothers day messages, poems, greetings, wishes, Sayings,Cards, Vectors,Wallpapers i love making special place cards or escort cards. Surprise Dad with a Father s Day craft or a special homemade gift it works even better when they double as favors! today, we're partnering with ecoscraps to make place cards from. Over at Make It Your Own they have two great last minute Father s Day ideas that are free to print dad loves you and guides you each and every day. The first is a magazine sleeve to slip around Dad s favorite today it s your turn to show how much you love him. Father s Day in the United States is on the third Sunday of June express your love with our warm father s day ecards and make him. It celebrates the contribution that fathers and father figures make for their children s lives find out more about the history of father's day, including videos, interesting articles, pictures, historical features and more. Its get all the facts on history. Father s Day Poems com personalized valentine s day gifts from theholidayspot. Here is a unique and beautiful collection of heart touching Father s Day Poems send love gifts to your sweethear, after personalizing them for valentines day father s day is a celebration honoring fathers and celebrating fatherhood, paternal bonds, and the influence of fathers in society. Pick up one Father s Day Poem which is closest to your heart and in catholic europe, it has been. For moms and kids who are planning on giving something special for Father s Day, planning early and scouting for the perfect gift is recommended father s day hugs! send loads of big hugs on father s day. If you've been a frequent visitor here you'll know that it's not uncommon for me to be scrambling at the last moment for a quick and easy Mother's Day or rated 4. These are the Father s Day gifts that will help you celebrate the great man you know your dad is 2 | 782,038 views | liked by 95% users celebrate father s day (june 15). Happy hump day photos gifts, books, songs and more help students recognize the unique role of dads. The hottest hump day pic posted weekly at Radass to celebrate father's day, time teamed up with lean in to ask famous dads to write open letters to their daughters. com


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So Punk Rock
And Other Ways to Disappoint Your Mother
Determined to improve his social life and attract the girl of his dreams, Ari Abramson launches "Operation Make Me Cooler" by starting a punk rock band with himself as lead guitarist-even though hes only been playing since camp. His best friend, Jonas, agrees to learn bass, and together, the boys recruit Yossi Gluck, a social dead zone, as drummer, because he is the only person Ari knows who owns a drum set. When Yossi turns out to be a two-for-one deal, because his parents think his sister Reena should "branch out" socially, the Tribe is born.
The Tribe has to be kept a secret from Aris SAT-obsessed parents. Its first gig, one song at a bar mitzvah, is rewarded with instant fame and a cell phone ringtone that ricochets through Gittleman High. As the band prepares for its second gig by learning two new songs, Ari pretends to practice SAT essay-writing to appease his parents curiosity. He is actually drawing in his song-writing notebook, creating the comics that punctuate this first-person narrative and explain Judaism while also mocking the insular community of Jewish day school life. For example, one frame shows Yossi explaining his fascination with the minutiae of Jewish law by saying, "Studying the Mishnaic law helps us understand our own system of ethics as well as the laws-written and unwritten-that we live by." Although many readers may not know what Mishnaic law is, they will quickly understand that Ari is both embarrassed by and drawn to his religion.
As with many books about high school life, this one involves a quest for self-enlightenment that goes beyond anything Nirvana wrote about. In Aris case, being able to trust his own opinions and having the courage to stand by them is key, even when that means contradicting his friends or confronting his parents after a catastrophic night with the band. When Yossi, who turns out to be the bands moral meter, tells Ari that "you have no idea who you are," Ari realizes that self-knowledge cannot be crystallized unless one tests it by communicating it to others. This may not mean that Ari and his parents "reach some sort of mind-meeting, peace-making thing," but it is definitely, as Jonas would say, "kosher."
This is the authors sixth YA novel; Emily Goldberg Learns to Salsa, won the New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age award.
Reviewed by
Elizabeth Breau
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The author of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the author for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255.


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MARI is a creative texture-painting tool that can handle extreme projects. MARI was developed at Weta Digital to handle the massively complex, highly detailed look development work demanded of the texture department by projects such as DISTRICT 9, THE LOVELY BONES, and AVATAR.
This is how the installation directory looks like. You can add symlink to the mari* shell script in the bin folder if you want. In case you are not executing the script from the same directory, you need to make slight modification to the script to make it accessible.
#!/bin/bash # This version is intended to launch Mari from the directory this # script is located in, does not require Mari to be installed #export presentScriptPath=`dirname $0` export presentScriptPath="/usr/local/Mari1.0v4" export currentPath=`cd $presentScriptPath; pwd` export binDir=$currentPath"/bin/" export PATH=${PATH}:$binDir export mariLog=$MARI_LOG_FILE if [ "$mariLog" == "" ] ; then export mariLog=/scratch/logs/MariLog.txt fi # Look for options for p in "$@" do case "$p" in "--verbose") # turn off the log output export mariLog= ;; *) ;; esac done if [ "$mariLog" == "" ] ; then $currentPath/bin/MriBin $@ else $currentPath/bin/MriBin $@ &> ${mariLog} fi
I have commented out the line
export presentScriptPath=`dirname $0`
and replaced with
export presentScriptPath="/usr/local/Mari1.0v4"
which is the installation directory for Mari
Disclaimer: Please support the developers as I do not in any way support piracy. Go out and purchase the softwares if you like them.


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This series explores the ecological and political significance of invasive species proliferation in relation to settler colonialism, a colonial project that sought to usurp and displace Indigenous People from their labour, land and resources.
Invasive species are any kind of living organism not native to an ecosystem that causes harm to the local ecology. I am currently focused on plants with names associated with the countries of my ancestry (e.g. Scotch Broom, Scotch Thistle, English Ivy). These drawings feature iconic images of the plants disrupted by extraneous gestures and marks.
An ongoing engagement with ambivalence is reflected in the materials and processes I use within these drawings. I want to interrupt representation and create tension between a physical gesture and the illusion it creates.
Invasive Species: Scotch Broom, 2018
Watercolour graphite on Terraskin paper
50.8 x 71 cm
23 x 30.5 cm
35.5 x 50.8 cm
71 x 99 cm
This wall drawing was produced as part of Leaning Out of Windows (LOoW), an interdisciplinary project that, "aims to explore how artists might work with scientists to develop a shared understanding of how knowledge can be translated across their disciplinary communities."
In their introduction to this project, organizers Ingrid Koenig and Randy Lee Cutler explained that the German expression for interdisciplinarity, "aus dem Fenster lehnen," roughly translates as, "leaning out of the window."
The first stage of this endeavour began in January 2017, with a series of seminar presentations by physicists on the subject of antimatter, at TRIUMF, Canada's particle accelerator centre.
Shortly after attending the seminar I began a series of drawings based on the Dirac equation, developed by British physicist Paul Dirac in 1928, which predicted the existence of antimatter—the mirror image of ordinary matter. Equations make me think of hieroglyphs—they're mysterious and cryptic messages that I know carry meaning, but this meaning is impenetrable to me.
For the LOoW exhibition, which took place at Emily Carr University from Jan 26 - Feb 8, 2018, I produced a wall-drawing, which allowed me one final opportunity to handle the Dirac equation. I used powdered graphite applied with brushes to represent a large, out-of-focus, mirrored image of the equation.
Through the course of my participation in the LOoW project, I drew this equation over and over again. While my work failed to wrest the equation's particular meaning—the play of materiality and gesture I undertook is not unlike the work of experimental physicists, concerned with the observation of physical phenomena.
People often mistake the concern of art and science with the production of things. While both may lead to the production things, they are first and foremost methods of inquiry—their processes allow us to understand and appreciate the universe and our place within it.
Powdered graphite on existing wall.
Rachel Topham Photography
Powdered graphite on existing wall
13.5 x 21 cm
Seymour Art Gallery: Sept 14 - Oct 22, 2016
This exhibition presented a new series of large-scale, drawing-based digital prints investigating the problematics of self-portraiture, along with an installation that annotated my creative process within the development of this work.
I work with materials and processes that interrupt representation and create tension between a physical gesture and the illusion it creates. Rather than pursuing the idea of a portrait as a fixed, singular image I represent the face as an ambiguous, shifting field of interaction and interpretation. These transformations suggest lived experience, as well as the externalization of psychic projections. The images represent me and not-me—a process of becoming and unbecoming.
The prints were presented along the back wall of the gallery, visible before entering the space. After entering the gallery and turning away from the prints two installations became visible on the back of the two entry walls. These represented the motive and method behind the work. On one side, a collection of sketches, experiments, and fragments from past projects representing a "genealogy" of the new work. On the other side, a large mind map, rendered directly on the wall, reflected my ruminations on this project.


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Mark Updegrove, historian and director of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, joins Joy Reid to discuss the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, and whether the same law would pass in today's 113th Congress.
"This Civil Rights Act is a challenge to all of us to go to work in our communities and our states, in our homes and in our hearts, to eliminate the last vestiges of injustice in our beloved country."
- President Lyndon B. Johnson, July 2, 1964
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 enacted July 2, 1964 is a landmark piece of civil rights legislation in the United States that outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It ended unequal application of voter registration requirements and racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and by facilities that served the general public


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Well. I know I said my new year would start on 22nd December. In truth, it was a tricky few days as the culture shock of being "mum" to 2 new rescue greyhounds hit me. We had a few puddles (my fault really) and a few fights (them, not me) and at times I wondered if I had really done the right thing.
They are settling in a treat now though, and after a very relaxing few days, I am feeling well and truly in the New Year spirit. I didn't do the gig on NYE in the end - very glad about that. So I watched Jools with my hounds, drank some quality gin and enjoyed wearing my new pyjamas. Yes, I know how to live!
I am a lover of lists - the making of, rather than the ticking of. I love dreaming and planning, but am rubbish at finishing things off. This has changed a little over the closing months of 2011, but fundamentally I probably won't change.
Today I went to the church where I did my recital in September. I felt my harp calling me - the first time in a while. He has been packed up pretty much since the start of December, to avoid any damage during all the work on my house. He was unwrapped for a rehearsal on the 27th, and will come out again in the morning for an individual practice (need to figure out some pedal changes for Dream A Little Dream!) and then we have our rehearsal tomorrow evening. I am getting really excited about the gig on 21st January.
I have enjoyed my musical journey in 2011. I discovered some wonderful music in many different ways.
I had heard of Beethoven's Emperor Concerto before of course, but wouldn't have recognised it if I heard it. This year that changed, as I played the slow movement on the harp for my Granny's funeral. Trills are fiendish on the harp, and I'm afraid I had to duck out of adding them in this section as the pedals were horrendous so I was concentrating on other things.
I had many requests from brides for their wedding ceremonies. Some were wonderful - I Just Can't Stop Loving You is one of my favourite Michael Jackson songs, and I was thrilled to be asked to arrange this for a wedding in March. Fireflies was another favourite, although this caused some worry the night before as a crucial string had broken, so I had replaced it. New strings take some time to settle, and I was so worried that it would sound horrific. Fortunately all was fine.
Some were bizarre- Party Rock by LMFAO and Paparazzi by Lady Gaga seemed unlikely on the face of things, but worked well and were very enjoyable to play. The Star Wars theme was again a strange request, but sounds fantastic on the harp, especially on my harp with its resonant bass!
One particular song was just plain unsuitable. I won't share the details, but I did resist and ask if the bride was really sure. I would never refuse if someone was adamant, but this choice just didn't sit right with me at all. I felt uncomfortable playing it - the words were just not right for a wedding ceremony, although it is a beautiful song.
On my car stereo I have listened (on repeat!) to the new Florence and the Machine album, plus a lot of Nina Simone (an awful lot!), Alice Gold, Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis, Grandmaster Flash, All Saints, Kylie, and many others. I found the wonderful Aloe Blacc too.
I look forward to discovering even more wonderful music in 2012, and most of all I look forward to creating music with my friends.
I hate how music is seen as a 'hobby' career - as though it can't be a 'proper' job - and I am grateful to all those who take great risks with their financial security and emotional health/sanity (!) and keep going and bring us brilliant, uplifting, life changing, thought provoking experiences.
Happy New Year x


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"Greek Breakfast" Program ®
Philosophy of the program "Greek Breakfast"
Served daily from 07:00' to 10:15'.
The Greek Breakfast is an initiative taken by the Hellenic Chamber of Hotels which utilizes and connects the cultural – gastronomic wealth of the country with the Greek hotel business.
It is a program designed by the Hellenic Chamber of Hotels which has been in operation since 2010 and whose aim is to enrich the breakfast offered in Greek hotels with pure and unique Greek products as well as with traditional local dishes from every region of Greece.
The aim of the "Greek Breakfast" program is to give Greek hotel guests the chance to know the gastronomic wealth of our country and taste at breakfast the innumerable Greek products and dishes which are at the heart of the Mediterranean Diet. The Mediterranean Diet is not just a modern dietary trend but is according to UNESCO the "intangible cultural heritage of mankind".
The main products of the Mediterranean diet such as the bread, the rusks, the olive oil, the olives, the yoghurt, the honey, the cheese products, the cured meats, the fresh vegetables, the legumes, the pies, the sweets and the fresh fruit form the basis of Greek breakfast.
Each part of Greece, depending on the climatic conditions, the soil, the produced products and the cultural relations and exchanges, has formed a particular gastronomic culture and local cuisines. Although the foundation of gastronomy is common, each region has its own gastronomic treasures and so the characteristics of the Cretan cuisine for example differ from those of Macedonia, of Epirus, of the Peloponnese, of the Aegean islands etc.
It is the gastronomic diversity of each region that the "Greek Breakfast" wants to highlight, contributing to the formation of the cultural identity and tourist profile of each place, giving in this way guests the chance to get to know and taste at breakfast the wealth of our Greek gastronomic tradition.
Because, apart from getting to know the dishes and products, the aim of "Greek Breakfast" is to bring together the producers with the consumers, to help visitors learn about the ways of production and highlight in this way the place, the landscape and the natural surroundings where each flavor is produced. Our wish is to identify bottarga with the calm and melancholy lagoon of Mesologhi, the gruyere of Crete with the "mitata" (shepherd's house) in the Lefka Ori mountains, the fava beans and cherry tomatoes of Santorini with the volcanic environment of the island, the "tsakoniki" eggplant with the beautiful valley of Leonidio, the oil with the fertile plains of Messinia, so that the gastronomic experiences are combined with experiences of exploring places, techniques and the way of life of people in the countryside. So that gastronomy, culture and natural environment have a common identity.


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American Kennel Club
Gigya helps the AKC boost campaign performance with customer identity.
The Challenge
The venerable American Kennel Club needed a better way to register users, and wanted to create detailed customer segments within their large Facebook audience to drive more personalized campaigns and experiences. The AKC chose to replace their legacy solution with Gigya's Customer Identity Management platform, resulting in:
- 75% improvement in registration rates
- 35% increased value per user
- 12 month reduction in development time


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- Methodology article
- Open Access
Clustering protein sequences with a novel metric transformed from sequence similarity scores and sequence alignments with neural networks
© Ma et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2005
- Received: 12 April 2005
- Accepted: 03 October 2005
- Published: 03 October 2005
The sequencing of the human genome has enabled us to access a comprehensive list of genes (both experimental and predicted) for further analysis. While a majority of the approximately 30000 known and predicted human coding genes are characterized and have been assigned at least one function, there remains a fair number of genes (about 12000) for which no annotation has been made. The recent sequencing of other genomes has provided us with a huge amount of auxiliary sequence data which could help in the characterization of the human genes. Clustering these sequences into families is one of the first steps to perform comparative studies across several genomes.
Here we report a novel clustering algorithm (CLUGEN) that has been used to cluster sequences of experimentally verified and predicted proteins from all sequenced genomes using a novel distance metric which is a neural network score between a pair of protein sequences. This distance metric is based on the pairwise sequence similarity score and the similarity between their domain structures. The distance metric is the probability that a pair of protein sequences are of the same Interpro family/domain, which facilitates the modelling of transitive homology closure to detect remote homologues. The hierarchical average clustering method is applied with the new distance metric.
Benchmarking studies of our algorithm versus those reported in the literature shows that our algorithm provides clustering results with lower false positive and false negative rates. The clustering algorithm is applied to cluster several eukaryotic genomes and several dozens of prokaryotic genomes.
- Input Feature
- Phylogenetic Profile
- Hide Layer Node
- Maximal Cluster
- Remote Homologue
Clustering of protein sequences from different organisms has been used to identify orthologous and paralogous protein sequences, to find protein sequences unique to an organism, and to derive the phylogenetic profile for a cluster of protein sequences. These are some of the essential components of a comparative genomics study of protein sequences across several genomes.
Clusters of Orthologous Groups (COGs) find triangles of mutually consistent genome-specific best hits from distant organisms without specifying a fixed similarity cut-off, thus accommodating both fast evolving and slow evolving genes. It then merges triangles which share a common edge. Each COG cluster is further analyzed manually to eliminate false positives caused by multidomain proteins so that each COG cluster represents a domain.
ProDom is based on the assumption that short protein sequences are single domain proteins. It first sorts all the protein sequences according to their lengths. It then undergoes a repetitive process: during each iteration, ProDom chooses as the query sequence the current shortest protein sequence or its internal repeat unit if it has internal repeats, searches the whole protein sequence set with PSI-BLAST [4], builds the sequence profile, and masks segments covered by the sequence profile for multidomain proteins or removes the single domain proteins completely covered by the sequence profile. The process iterates until there is no sequence left in the protein sequence set.
Picasso merges pairwise sequence alignments from the initial all-against-all pairwise sequence similarity searches into multiple sequence alignments of closer homologs, and later hierarchically merges these multiple sequence alignments into representative sequence profiles of remote homologs by profile-profile comparisons. The representative sequence profiles may contain sequences of different domain structures, but share at least one domain. Picasso then cuts domains within the representative sequence profiles into individual domain clusters based on the concept of overlapping maximal clusters proposed in SYSTERS [5]. Maximal clusters are clusters not fully contained in any other clusters. Two maximal clusters may have not only the overlapping set of neighbour members but also the unique set of neighbour members to these two maximal clusters. Thus these two overlapping maximal clusters must be of different domain structures sharing at least one domain which corresponds to the overlapping set of neighbour members. Then these two overlapping maximal clusters must undergo domain-cutting to be split into individual domains corresponding to closed neighbours, where no member has any neighbour outside of the cluster, from multiple alignments. However, since it is still a challenging problem to precisely pinpoint the structure domain border based on primary sequence information [6, 7], the performance of the clustering algorithm will be determined by the accuracy of domain demarcations.
Family-based clustering methods group protein sequences into families, which contain a group of evolutionarily related proteins that share similar domain architecture (see Figure 1), e.g., CluSTr [8], SYSTERS, ProClust[9, 10], PROTONET [11]/ProtoMap [12], and MCL[13]. CluSTr clusters protein sequence with the single linkage algorithm using the Z-score as the metric.
SYSTERS uses each protein sequence in the dataset as a seed sequence and applies the single linkage algorithm with a stringent threshold. Thus, each seed sequence has a cluster associated with it. It then merges all the clusters to maximal clusters. The maximal clusters could be either separate maximal clusters corresponding to single domain protein clusters or overlapping maximal clusters representing clusters having multiple domains, but sharing at least one domain.
ProClust uses a different metric to detect whether the aligned two proteins have similar domain structures. The metric value, which scales from 0 to 1, is the ratio of the raw score of the sequence alignments to the raw score of one of those two sequences aligned to itself. Thus the metric value between two sequences is directional. It assumes that the metric is symmetric if two aligned sequences have similar domain structure and non-symmetric otherwise. It then represents each sequence as a vertex and represents the metric value above the threshold as a directional edge in a directed graph. Each strongly connected component corresponds to a cluster [9]. It was later improved by building Profile-HMMs for all clusters having more than 20 sequences and merging two clusters A and B into a cluster corresponding to a SCOP superfamily if the average E-value from searching all the sequences in the cluster A against the profile-HMM of the cluster B is below the threshold[10].
PROTONET applies the hierarchical clustering of protein sequences based on the their pairwise similarity E-values, but adopts different rules for merging clusters: arithmetic mean, geometric mean, and harmonic mean. However, different families may have different levels of sequence conservation. It is not appropriate to choose one E-value threshold. And at the level of higher E-value, it may merge two clusters of different domain structures, but sharing one domain. However, different families may have different levels of sequence conservation. It is not appropriate to choose one E-value threshold. And at the level of higher E-value, it may merge two clusters of different domain structures, but sharing one domain.
Transitive homology detection methods have been proposed in the Intermediate Sequence Search, ISS [14, 15], and [16]. It works by searching the query sequence against the database with a conservative threshold to find the closely homologous sequences and using these homologous sequences as seeds to search the database to find remotely homologous sequences with a less conservative threshold. The method has been shown to be close to the profile based methods and better than a direct pairwise homology search [17]. But, it is a challenge to quantify the indirect, transitive homology as opposed to using the E-value for quantifying direct pairwise sequence homology.
The Markov cluster (MCL) [13] algorithm has been successfully applied to clustering protein sequences. MCL represents protein sequences as nodes on a graph where similar proteins are connected by edges weighted according to their BLASP E-Value. The MCL algorithm works through a series of iterative random walks across the graph and inflations of the edge weights that gradually strengthens the connections between very similar nodes and weakens the connections between less similar nodes. MCL makes no explicit use of protein domain architecture but does leverage transitive homologies in the random walk phase of the algorithm.
Compared to the hierarchical clustering family based clustering method, e.g., PROTONET [11], our method can take advantage of the transitive homologue closure by the third intermediate sequence to detect remote homologues at the superfamily level. Compared to single linkage based methods, e.g., CluSTr [8], our method avoids the problem of merging two unrelated multi-domain cluster sharing a common domain. Compared to the iterative clustering method, e.g., SYSTERS [5], our method generates clusters where each sequence belongs to only one cluster.
Results and discussion
Performance measure
Specificity: The specificity of a cluster is defined as N tp / (N tp + N fp ).
Sensitivity: The sensitivity of an InterPro superfamily/domain is defined as N tp / (N tp + N fn ).
Goodness: The goodness of an InterPro superfamily/domain is a measure of how well a cluster corresponds to the mapped InterPro superfamily/domain and is defined below (Equation 1) where N denotes the number of generated clusters associated with that InterPro superfamily/domain. The Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) has been shown to be a better evaluation measure than accuracy within the context of binary classification, where the negative dataset is clearly defined. However, we cluster protein sequences into 1598 interpro families simultaneously. As a result, using the AUC as a measure of performance is not the appropriate metric here. Instead, we adopt as the "goodness " the set relative measure as defined in [12]. In order to decrease the goodness value when a large number of clusters is associated with an InterPro superfamily/domain, a penalty of (N-1) is applied in the numerator of the equation.
Ideally specificity, sensitivity, and goodness should be 100%.
Equation 1:
Overall performance
Specificity, sensitivity, goodness, cluster number, and orphan cluster values at different cutoff values on the benchmarking dataset.
cluster number
Number of orphan clusters
In Figure 5 we see additional tradeoffs between specificity and overall performance. As specificity increases the number of orphan clusters decreases. This improvement in performance comes with an increase in the total number of clusters. Once again the extreme case of one sequence per cluster guarantees no orphan clusters at the cost of many non-informative clusters. Ideally one wishes to strike a balance reducing the number of orphan clusters while not drastically increasing the total number of clusters.
The overall performances of MCL and CLUGEN are fairly similar, with CLUGEN demonstrating a clear advantage at specificities below 0.98. CLUGEN's sensitivity and goodness are better at specificities below 0.98, whereas MCL's goodness is slightly better at specificities greater than 0.98. The number of total clusters and orphan clusters generated by both methods are comparable at specificities below 0.98. CLUGEN tends toward fewer orphan clusters at the cost of more total clusters at higher specificities.
Analysis of some CLUGEN generated clusters
In this section, we will give examples of some successfully generated clusters with one-to-one correspondence to specific InterPro families, some clusters which have false positives, and some which have false negatives.
Top 50 InterPro superfamily/domains that have been mapped to clusters with one-to-one correspondence
InterPro family/Domain ID
Number of proteins in the benchmark dataset
Cytochrome P450
Ribulose bisphosphate carboxylase, large chain
Short-chain dehydrogenase/reductase SDR
Chaperonin Cpn60/TCP-1
Heat shock protein Hsp70
Zinc-containing alcohol dehydrogenase superfamily
Glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate dehydrogenase
Neurotransmitter-gated ion-channel
HMG1/2 (high mobility group) box
20S proteasome, A and B subunits
Ribulose bisphosphate carboxylase, small chain
Cytochrome c oxidase, subunit III
Guanine nucleotide binding protein (G-protein), alpha subunit
H+-transporting two-sector ATPase, A subunit
Somatotropin hormone
Cytochrome c oxidase, subunit I
Hemagglutinin, HA1/HA2 chain
Secreted growth factor Wnt protein
Intermediate filament protein
Bacterial regulatory protein, LysR
Phycobilisome protein
Respiratory-chain NADH dehydrogenase, subunit 1
Small chemokine, interleukin-8 like
Proteinase inhibititor I4, serpin
Pyridoxal-5'-phosphate-dependent enzyme, beta subunit
Binding-protein-dependent transport systems inner membrane component
Copper/Zinc superoxide dismutase
Isocitrate/isopropylmalate dehydrogenase
Glutamine synthetase, catalytic domain
Manganese and iron superoxide dismutase
Naringenin-chalcone synthase
4Fe-4S ferredoxin, iron-sulfur binding domain
Pancreatic ribonuclease
Photosynthetic reaction centre protein
Aminotransferase class-III
Phosphoglycerate kinase
Ribosomal protein S12, bacterial and chloroplast form
Heat shock protein Hsp20
NADH/Ubiquinone/plastoquinone (complex I)
Mitochondrial substrate carrier
Lactate/malate dehydrogenase
Papillomavirus major capsid L1 (late) protein
Aldo/keto reductase
Sigma-70 factor
Fork head transcription factor
We also conducted a detailed analysis of clusters that had false negatives/false positives in order to understand the areas in which the clustering algorithm could be further improved. The following is a description of errors encountered in clustering algorithms with specific reference to the data from our method.
Errors from low-complexity and coiled-coil regions
The first type of error is due to the presence of low complexity sequences with repetitive sequence patterns or sequences with coiled-coil structures, since we mask the low complexity regions and coiled-coil regions before the all-against-all pairwise similarity searches. As an example, the InterPro family IPR000533, Tropomyosins, which regulate muscle contraction, are alpha-helical proteins that form a coiled-coil. There are 25 tropomyosin sequences in the benchmarking dataset, among which 24 tropomyosin sequences are false negative sequences and appear in the following cluster along with members of IPR002699 ATP synthase subunit D.
Errors from short sequences or from an abundance of certain amino acid type in the sequences
Short sequences with less than 70 amino acids could also cause false positives in the clustering results. Cluster 1259 which is mapped to InterPro family 003019, the metallothionein superfamily, consists of 125 short protein sequences with 68 amino acids on average in length among which 34 false positive protein sequences are from InterPro family IPR001762, Disintegrin, and 34 false positive protein sequences are from InterPro family IPR000877, Bowman-Birk serine protease inhibitor. The reason these families cluster together is that metallothioneins are small proteins with high content of cysteine residues, while disintegrins and Bowman-Birk serine protease inhibitors are also short cysteine-rich protein sequences. This suggests that a more stringent threshold should be applied to cluster short protein sequences which are rich in a particular amino acid.
Similar domain structures in different superfamilies
Sequences that belong to different superfamilies but share similar domain structures may also cluster incorrectly in some cases. For example, 1039 out of 1058 sequences correctly cluster into the IPR000276 Rhodopsin-like G-protein coupled receptors family. But 17 out of 19 sequences from the IPR000276 Rhodopsin-like G-protein coupled receptors which have Cysteine-rich N-terminal regions are mistakenly clustered into the InterPro 000372 which is annotated as a cysteine-rich flanking region N-terminal. Similarly, members of the IPR001878 CCHC Zinc finger domain have been incorrectly clustered into the cluster 1008 which is mapped to the InterPro family 000981 Neurohypophysical hormone because they share the two cysteine residues and other surrounding weak motifs.
This paper describes a novel method for the clustering of protein sequences based on a new metric derived from prediction using neural networks and further utilizing the metric to model the transitive sequence homologue to detect the remote homologue. Good performance with respect to the InterPro protein sequence database has been achieved on the benchmarking dataset.
Clustering of sequences has many applications in target discovery and gene functionalization. One can identify in silico, antimicrobial drug targets by examining clusters without any eukaryotic member sequence in it. These proteins could be potentially selective targets for infectious diseases due to the absence of any appreciable homolog in the human proteome. Such computationally derived targets need to be further validated using experimental data derived from gene expression profiling and proteomics experiments [20]. Another application is to predict the function for prokaryotic proteins of unknown function by phylogenetic profiling [21], where the phylogenetic profile for a cluster is a vector of binary values, with 1 meaning the presence of a genome in that cluster and 0 otherwise. The assumption here is that genes with the same phylogenetic profile could have the same function.
Feature extraction
After we mask the low complexity regions and the coiled-coil regions and carry out the all-against-all pairwise sequence similarity searches, we extract four sets of features to represent the homology between any given pair of sequences. The first two sets of input features detect the homology of two aligned sequences, the last two sets of input features test whether two aligned sequences have similar domain structures. We use neural networks to map input features to a new metric, a probability value which scales from 0 to 1 and is interpreted as the likelihood that two sequences are of the same homologous superfamily.
The first input feature is the log scale of the pairwise E-value.
The raw score, from which the E-value of the two aligned sequences is derived, is calculated by summing up the log score of each position in the alignment, which assumes that each position is independent of the other. However, in practice, it has been shown that two consecutive positions in the alignments are quite correlated [22]. To model the correlation between two consecutive positions in the alignment, we adopt the concept of the 2-gram encoding method [23]. Ideally, hydrophobic regions of one sequence should align with the hydrophobic regions of the other sequence, and hydrophilic regions should align with each other as well. Each position in the alignment could fall into one of four categories: residue identity denoted by A1, hydrophobic similarity denoted by A2, hydrophilic similarity denoted by A3, and everything else denoted by A4. Let Len a denote the total length of the alignment and Occuri,jdenote the number of occurrences of i and j, where i is immediately followed by j, with i and j denoting any one of A1, A2, A3, or A4 respectively. Let freq i,j denote frequency of i,j, which is equal to Occur i,j /(Len a -1). Thus the second set of input features consists of freq i,j values of the alignment positions, which consists of 16 input feature values for a pair of aligned sequences since each of the two consecutive positions could be one of four possible values.
Equation 2:
The fourth and final input feature is to measure the overlap between two neighbor sets of aligned sequences, where the neighbor set, Set i of sequence i , is defined as the set of protein sequences that sequence i hits when sequence i is used as the query sequence. One straightforward method to measure the overlap is to use the ratio of the cardinality of the intersection of two neighbor sets to the cardinality of the union of two neighbor sets.
Here we propose another method to measure the overlap. Specifically, if we represent the neighbor set of sequence i as Vector i , the value of the k th element of Vector i is the log E-value, Log ik between sequence i and its k th neighbor in Set i . However, Vector i and Vector j for two aligned sequences, sequence i and sequence j , may be of different dimensions since the cardinalities of Set i and Set j may be different. We make these two vectors have the same dimension by adding the log E-value threshold to Vector i whenever the sequence i has no corresponding neighbor in the neighbor set, Set j of the other aligned sequencej.Thus the last input feature is the linear correlation coefficient LCC2 between Vector i and Vector j defined by Equation 3. Intuitively, the more similar the domain structure two aligned sequences have, the more similar neighbor sets they will have, and the closer to 1 the linear correlation coefficient will be.
Equation 3:
where N is the dimension of Vector i and Vector j and Log i and Log j are the mean values and are defined by , and .
To summarize, the first input feature is the log scale of the pairwise E-value. The second input feature consists of 16 feature values, which are frequency values of the alignment positions and the third input feature includes 7 values, which relate to the details of the alignments. And finally, the fourth input feature includes 1 feature value which measures the overlap of the neighbour sets to make a total of 25 input features which will be used to train the neural network as described below.
Neural networks
After we represent the sequence homology between a pair of sequences by the set of 25 input features, we train the neural network using the training data. Each homologous pair of sequences is labeled as 1 if they belong to the same InterPro superfamily or the same domain if they are single domain proteins, and 0 otherwise. We selected as large a number of sequences as possible to train the neural networks to avoid overfitting the data. In all, we selected 27844 homologous sequence pairs as the positive training set and 29999 non-homologous sequence pairs as the negative training set.
Given the large amount of training data relative to the number of the weights in the neural network, the neural network is unlikely to overfit. It may however underfit if there are not a sufficient number of weights. If the training data are smaller relative to the number of weights in the neural network, measures should be taken to avoid the overfitting problem and the cross-validation method should be used to choose the best model. Clearly in this study, such is not the case.
We used a split-sample approach in which the validation set is not used during training, but is used to select the best model. After the neural network is trained, it is validated on the validation dataset containing 250597 homologous pairs of sequences and 30000 non-homologous pairs. Different numbers of hidden layer nodes have been tested. The ultimate goal is not to determine if any two proteins sequences belong to the same Interpro family, but to cluster all sequences in Interpro families as accurately as possible. We selected the model with the smallest number of weights and smallest error on the validation set. Thus, we chose 4 hidden layer nodes such that the neural network has the least number of hidden units and the best performance on the validation dataset with a specificity of 94.18% and a sensitivity of 91.81%.
Modeling the transitive homology
Hierarchical average linkage clustering
Once the metric value for every pair of protein sequences is calculated, the hierarchical average linkage clustering method is applied to cluster the protein sequences in the new metric space using the geometric mean as the merging rule.
Hierarchical average linkages uses the Unweighted Pair-Group Average (UPGA) [26] to measure the distance between clusters. Let D i , i = 1,2, ... n. denote the protein sequences contained in Cluster D and let E j , j = 1,2, ..., m denote the protein sequence contained in Cluster E. The geometric mean distance G between Cluster D and Cluster E is defined as Equation 4:
Equation 4:
The hierarchical average linkage clustering works in an iterative process: it begins with each protein sequence as a singleton cluster; during each iteration, it finds two clusters with the lowest metric value, then joins these two clusters into a new cluster, and updates the metric value between this new cluster and all others. This process iterates until the current lowest metric value exceeds the threshold.
We thank Dr. Xia Yang for comments and feedback. We also acknowledge Mischa Reinhardt and Darrell Ricke for a critical reading of this manuscript.
Authors' Affiliations
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text: USDA: February Milk Production Declines 3.4% March 19, 2013 11:00 AM Tweet TAGS: Marketing, Overseas December 18, 2014 By Catherine Merlo Farm Journal's Milk Western and Online Editor Email California output drops a whopping 8% from year-earlier levels; some see report as bullish. In its last monthly milk production report for the rest of federal fiscal year, USDA pegged U.S. milk production in the 23 major states during February at 14.6 billion pounds, down 3.4% from February 2012. After adjusting for the leap year, however, production increased 0.1% above last year. California showed the biggest drop, with a whopping 8% reduction in output from year-earlier levels. Its February milk production declined to 3.225 billion pounds. Arizona also saw a sharp decrease, reducing its February milk production by 6.8%, to 369 million pounds. Idaho cut its February milk production by 4.2%, to 1.002 billion pounds. New York, which had the second-highest milk output in February, decreased its production by 2%, to 1.034 billion pounds. Texas production fell by 5.4%, to 757 million pounds. Midwest states continued to show growth. Kansas boosted its February production by 3.7%, to 222 million pounds, over February 2013 levels. Wisconsin milk production increased 0.3%, to 2.159 billion pounds for the month. Colorado rose 1.6% while Michigan rose by 0.6%. "In our opinion, today's milk production report is bullish," noted Dave Kurzawski with INTL FC Stone. "The milk production figures came in below expectations. "From a domestic standpoint, total production is not specifically bullish," Kurzawski added. "But when we look at it through the global lens, these production numbers are bullish. We've grown dramatically as a supplier to the world, but if we're seen as a 'balancing-plant' for a weakening global dairy production picture, it is our assertion that this report doesn't cut it." Production per cow in the 23 major states averaged 1,722 pounds for February, 58 pounds below February 2012. Milk per cow is showing signs of weakening in the Midwest, said Kurzawski, adding that a mix of colder weather and poorer quality feed this year dealt a one-two punch to Midwest producers in February. The number of milk cows on farms in the 23 major states totaled 8.50 million head, 13,000 head less than February 2012, but 2,000 head more than January 2013. January's revised production at 15.9 billion pounds, was up 0.6% from January 2012. The January revision represented an increase of 6 million pounds or less than 0.1% from last month's preliminary production estimate. Due to sequestration, all releases of this report have been suspended through the end of the federal fiscal year on Sept. 30, 2013. Please check the NASS website for any future updates on NASS programs. Back to news


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22 March 2010
Overcoming Inertia
I'm on a tear this week! I've cleaned my closets, drawers, office, including the files and took out every pile that I had accumulated! I'm doing a cleansing fast too- juices and fruits. Trying to let go of the physical, emotional and, hopefully, spiritual barnacles that have also accumulated. The months of travel are over for now and I want to refocus on being here in Italy. Why I'm here, what is the next step, what's important just now?
I restarted Italian language lessons in earnest. Job 1 is to get beyond basics and be able to converse easily on any topic that comes up. I'm doing a combination of Rosetta Stone, Italian for Dummies, and online vocabulary and grammar builder. There seemed to be so many other priorities up to now but now this has risen to the top priority. All else is in place and reasonable order. I'm surprised at how much discipline it takes since language acquisition doesn't come easily to me. And I have a goal- be reasonably good by the time my daughter and grandchildren come to Italy for the month of August. Now I've declared it!
What does language study have to do with a cleansing fast? I'm actually not sure but both are at least in part about letting go of the unimportant and focusing on the essential. Communication on a deeper level is bedrock important to further growth of any kind, and communication in Italy means fluency in Italian! It's such a beautiful language, so what's my reluctance? I vacillate between "I should, I must, I WANT to" and "It's hard, my brain is old, I already have a rich language that I'm good at". Wah, wah, wah! I've grown tired of myself and I'm ready to accept the obvious- hey, you moved to Italy, so shut up and learn the language already!
Wish me luck. Any suggestions?
(The photo is from our balcony.)
5 comments:
Okay - double entendre's aside - just relax and do it. Learn it. Pick up objects and say the name in Italian - Raccogliere oggetti e pronunciare il nome in italiano.ReplyDelete
Make an effort to say simple things in Italian - Fare uno sforzo per dire cose semplici in lingua italiana.
Don't worry about grammar - just use the language - Non preoccupatevi di grammatica - Basta usare il linguaggio.
Oh, geez. We should have known. He speaks Italian too. Listen to Lou, Mary. He's a true Renaissance Man!ReplyDelete
I second Lou's recommendations. For me, the best way to learn it is to use it. Learn the phrases "More slowly, please" and "How do you say..." and then get out there and use them. Find yourself a conversation buddy, and once a week, spend the day together, speaking no English unless absolutely necessary.
Have fun! You'll be chattering like a native in no time!
Imponente, Lou! Grazie mille. Vero, basta usare il languaggio!ReplyDelete
I know, Patti- he's impressive! I use those 2 phrases but my goal is to use them even more! I like the buddy idea. I'll find one.
Hello Mary!ReplyDelete
I have just read some of your blogg and I hade such a good time, feeling taht I got to know you some more, thank you for sharing! I totally agree with you cencerning learning the italian language. LceeL has the right aproach, let go, be wild and crazy and skip the grammer for now.
Buon fortunata con lingua italian or whatever!
Marie in Stockholm
Hi Marie! We will be learners together of this lovely language. How nice.ReplyDelete


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Meizu MX2 live image leaked, ahead of November 27 official announcement
by Nov 15, 2012 5:53 pm0
While we're ready to waiting the new Meizu MX2 smartphone, and there is the news telling about the Meizu launching event on November 27th, and today the first images showing the upcoming smartphone have been leaked.
The first thing first, is the Meizu MX2's packaging, this is not the real packaging, just an invitation box but it seems thats same with Meizu MX2 packaging, there is a tranparent plastics inside, that represent the Meizu MX2 smartphone size. You can see the more images below:
All in all a nice way for Meizu to build up interest for its next device. The MX2 should be the successor to the MX and quad-core MX that we've seen earlier. In case you didn't know, Meizu has been churning out high-end Android-running iPhone-lookalikes ever since 2008.
Of course these are mostly available in China, for obvious reasons. But the hardware inside has always been top notch, and the phones themselves – beautiful. Meizu has so far been the only relatively well known Android manufacturer to use Apple's favorite aspect ratio for its screens pre-iPhone 5. The MX even has the exact same resolution as the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S: 640×960.
The upcoming Meizu MX2 looks in these hands-on pictures, that may change. This Android phone will has 4.4 inch screen size and the resolution may be 1280×800 pixel (the previous MX phone just only has 4 inch screen size). The body thickness just only 2.2, this may have very similar overall dimensions to its predecessor.
As we ever write before, the new Meizu MX2 smartphone will be powered by quad-core processor. It is powered by a Samsung Exynos 4412 processor running at 1.6 GHz and has 2 GB of RAM.


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The Dallas pastor facing felony charges of burglarizing a church member's home on Christmas Eve said Monday she had no criminal intent.She claims she was in the neighborhood driving by the house when saw two men entering and leaving the victim's house and decided to take the valuables to protect them. She also claims that she had no need to steal valuables. This additional piece of information would seem to buttress her second claim:
Sandy McGriff, 52, said she was trying to protect valuables at the home of her longtime friend Serita Agnew and made a horrible mistake.
Police accuse McGriff of stealing more than $10,000 worth of fur coats, designer purses and electronics from a home in the 2200 block of Village Way near Kiest Boulevard and Lancaster Road. She was also charged with resisting arrest.
She said she pulled her black Jaguar into the driveway and walked around the home. That's when she saw the broken kitchen window.I can't say I have ever known a pastor who drives a Jaguar. In any case you can watch a video of the pastor in front of the fur coats telling her side of the story.


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First of all, congratulations for completing the other 8 levels of the Logo Quiz Cars mobile app game. How do you feel now, so close to the end? We have all the logo quiz cars answers you need to finish the game! You can almost feel the sweet taste of victory. We are pretty sure you are facing more and more obstacles along the way, because the auto companies mentioned on levels 8, 9 and 10 are rather obscure. Of course, this is no reason to panic. We are here to help you guess all the car logos and names of automotive companies.
We have compiled the list for automobile lovers just like us, who have played the cars logo quiz game at least once. We know, once you start playing it, you cannot really stop until you finish this car logos game. The logos car quiz is addictive, popular and educational as well. Unless there are some car logos that you don't really recognize, you should be fine in getting right all the next logo quiz answers.
Sometimes, unfortunately, you can't remember the name of all the logos quiz car logos and companies. Don't worry, it happens to everyone. Even the most passionate collectors or auto aficionados have trouble recalling certain company names. This is exactly why you require cheats to finish the cars logo quiz game. Luckily, we are here to provide hints and answers to all the brand logos on Logo Quiz Cars Game. Welcome to Logo Quiz Cars Game Level 9 Answers Page!
You are on the last leg of your adventure, so you know what to do: if you don't recognize a logo visit our site and we'll help you out. Remember, this is not a trip to the mall! If you really want to rock this game, check out the Logo Quiz Cars Answers Page for Level 9 and enjoy the ride! And don't forget that you will find here all the Logo Quiz Cars answers you need! Share with your friends and keep that engine running!
Are you ready to guess all the remaining car logos and names? If the answer is yes, then the Logo Quiz Cars Answer sheet for level 9 is waiting. Good luck!
– We will start the list with one of the most popular car logos and names: Wiesmann. The Weismann logo portrays a gecko and it was chosen to represent the brand because this car "sticks to the road like geckos to a wall".
– This is a German car manufacturer from Dulmen, Germany. It was founded in 1985 by Martien Wiesmann and Friedhelm Wiesmann. The cars are hand-built in Dulmen.
– The Zastava cars logo features the brand's initial Z inside an oval shape.
– This brand is known for building versions of Fiat 128 and Fiat 600. The company is based in Kragujevac, Serbia.
– The Carver car logo depicts the initial V inside a blue and silver shield.
– This is a three-wheeled vehicle that uses an automatic balancing technology in order to balance the passenger compartment. This vehicle combines the aspects of a car and a motorcycle. In 2009 the company declared bankruptcy because of the high price of the cars: 30,000 euro. As of 2011, the technology is owned and licensed by Carver Technology.
– The Cizeta car logo features three wolf heads inside a yellow and blue insignia.
– This is an Italian car manufacturer from Modena, Italy established in the 1980s by Claudio Zampolli, a Ferrari dealer and Giorgio Moroder. The name of the brand comes from the Italian pronunciation of Claudio Zimpolli's initials.
– The Emgrand car logo of this car is a red and black shield-like design.
– This is a Chinese car brand owned by Geely automaker and launched in 2009. The brand was revealed at the 2009 Auto Shanghai show together with other Geely brands, Gleagle and Englon. The literal meaning of the brand is "Imperial brand".
– The Panoz logo features a three leaf clover inside a red and blue vortex-like oval.
– This is an American sports car manufacturer founded in 1989 by Dan Panoz. The company is based in Braselton, Georgia. This is also where the cars are built. Panoz is a big name in race cars manufacturing and racing competitions, but if you're looking for a Panoz race car for sale, you'll have to have at least $30,000 available in your pocket.
– The Rover car logo uses the iconic Viking long-ship in red and silver.
– This was a British automotive brand between 1904 and 2005. It was originally launched as a bicycle maker in 1878 and then as a car manufacturer in 1904. There are no Rover cars currently in production, thus the marque is considered dormant.
– The Venturi car logo features an eagle in a blue and red oval shape.
– This is a French car manufacturer known for its luxury electric vehicles. The company was founded in 1984 by Claude Poiraud and Gerard Godefro and the main purpose was to compete in the Gran Tourism market. The brand declared bankruptcy in 2000 and in 2001 the company was purchased by Gildo Pallanca Pastor and focused on electric-powered engines. While you won't see a Venturi electric car any day soon, they have quite a legacy in the automotive industry.
– The Willys jeep logo features the brand's name in black hand-written characters.
– This is an American car company known for designing and producing military Jeeps in the 20th century. The company was founded in 1908 by John Willys. There are no Willys cars in the present days.
– The LDV logo features the company's name inside a geometrical figure.
– This is a British van manufacturer founded in 1993 and based in Birmingham. As of 2009 the company has been defunct and the assets of the company were sold by administrators PricewaterhouseCoopers to China Venture's firm Eco Concept.
– The Piaggio logo comprises of a spade inside a hexagonal shield.
– This is an Italian company that designs, engineers and manufactures two wheeled motor vehicles and compact commercial cars under seven brands. The company was founded in 1884 and is headquartered in Pontedera, Italy. It currently operates in over 50 countries. In 1946 this company launched the famous Vespa scooter and within ten years they produced over a million units.
– The Liaz logo is made of the company's name written in upper case characters.
– This is a bus manufacturing company based in Likino-Dulvovo, Russia. It was founded in 1937 and is a subsidiary of GAZ.
– The Proton logo consists of a yellow lion's head on a green and blue shield.
– This is a Malaysian car manufacturer established in 1983 and based in Shah Alam, Selangor. It also has an additional manufacturing plant in Tanjung, Malim, Perak.
– We are pretty sure that this is one of the car logos and names that you haven't heard of. The Elfin car logo features the head of an elf on a grey insignia.
– This is an Australian sports car and motor racing manufacturing company founded by Garrie Cooper in 1957. The company is headquartered in Melbourne, Australia and is owned by British racing driver Tom Walkinshaw.
– The Packard logo features a coat of arms symbol with a swan on top.
– This was an American luxury car brand built first produced in 1899. The company was founded by James Ward Packard and it has been out of business since 1958. The headquarters were in Detroit, Michigan. There are no Packard cars in our present times, but history will always keep their memory alive.
– The Zimmer logo comprises of the initial Z inside a pair of yellow wings.
– This is an American car maker based in Syracuse, New York. The company was founded in 1978 by Paul Zimmer and is known for its neo-classic style automobiles.
– The Callaway logo is a red, white and blue flag followed by the company's name and the slogan "Powerfully Engineered Automobiles".
– The Callaway Cars Inc. is an engine design company known for modifying Chevrolet cars. The company was founded in 1977 by Reeves Callaway and is headquartered in Old Lyme, Connecticut.
– The Shelby logo consists of a black cobra.
– This is a British with American engine sports car produced since 1962. Carroll Shelby International was formed in 2003 from manufacturer Shelby American when, founder and owner, Carroll Shelby took the company public, and additionally forming Shelby Automobiles as a subsidiary from which to continue manufacturing vehicles and parts. The most famous Shelby cars include AC Cobra, the Shelby GT350 and the GT500 Super Snake. You may be familiar with the Shelby GT500 or Eleanor, the Ford Mustang featured in the movie Gone in 60 Seconds.
– The Ram logo features the head of a ram.
– This is an American manufacturer of mid-weight and light pickup trucks established in 2009. The company is headquartered in Auburn Mills, Michigan and is a division of Chrysler.
– The Plymouth car logo depicts a sailing ship in black and white.
– This was an American brand of automobiles produced by the Chrysler Corporation and Daimler Chrysler. The brand was introduced in 1928 and was discontinued in 2008 in favor of the Dodge and Chrysler cars. Some of its most famous models were the Barracuda, the Duster and the Roadrunner. Unfortunately, there are no Plymouh cars in our present days.
– The Invicta car logo features a colorful winged emblem.
– This is a British car manufacturer that has been available intermittently for decades. Initially, the company was based in Cobham, Surrey from 1925 until 1933, then it moved to Chelsea, London and then to Virginia Water, Surrey. The brand was revived and it produced sports cars between 2004 and 2012.
– The Ginetta cars logo depicts the brand's initial G inside a yellow and green circle.
– This is a British company specialized in building racing and sports cars. The company was founded in 1958 and is based in Garforth, Leeds, West Yorkshire.
– The Yugo logo features the initial Y inside an oval.
– This car is also known as the Zastava Koral and is a subcompact car built by the Yugoslav-Serbian corporation Zastava. The car was designed in Italy under the name Fiat 144 and it was first introduced in 1978. You could drive a Yugo car in the U.S. for a while in the 90's, but now it's not the case anymore. While it wasn't the best car for the Americans, some nostalgic can still find a Yugo car for sale on specialized sites.
– The Studebaker logo features the initial S inside a red and blue circle. There have been many Studebaker logos along the years, the latest resembling quite good with the Pepsi logo.
– This was an American brand of wagons and automobiles based in South Bend, Indiana. The company was founded in 1852 and first incorporated in 1868 and was originally a manufacturer of farming wagons, mining and military wagons.
– The Innocenti cars logo features the brand's name in black and white.
– This was an Italian company founded in 1920 and known for producing Lambretta scooters and automobiles, mainly of British Leyland origins. The brand was discontinued in 1996, after it was purchased by Fiat.
– The Freightliner logo is the brand's name inside a black shape.
– This is an American truck division that belongs to Daimler Trucks North America LLC. The company is known for producing heavy duty class 8 diesel trucks and also 5-7 trucks. The Freightliner trucks are very popular, especially since they are built on new and innovative technologies. If you are looking for Freightliner trucks for sale, you have to have over $120,000 in your pockets.
– The Eagle logo depicts the head of an eagle inside a black and white shield.
– The Eagle Cars Limited was a brand that was owned by the Chrysler Corporation. It was established in 1988 and was discontinued in 1999.
Wrapping Up:
You've done it! You've almost finished all the car logos and names. Just one more level left until you finish one of the most exciting car symbols and names games out there: the car logo quiz. How did you find the game thus far? We think it's pretty awesome. Together, we have managed to answer all the questions up to level 9.
All that is left now, is level 10. If you are planning on playing this game again you should definitely check out the other levels. Who knows, maybe next time you won't even need any help. If you enjoyed the cars logo quiz game, you should share it with a friend. Make sure to also share with them your cars logos quiz answers page. Good luck on your last level!