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Je suis heureux d'annoncer la disponibilité de mon nouvel album intitulé Ça recommence. Il est disponible sur toutes les plateforme de musique en ligne.
Pour plus de détails, voir mon site dédié à l'album.
Je suis heureux d'annoncer la disponibilité de mon nouvel album intitulé Ça recommence. Il est disponible sur toutes les plateforme de musique en ligne.
Pour plus de détails, voir mon site dédié à l'album.
I love plants. I'm not quite sure why, but over the recent years, it's been a growing love affair; pun intended.
I'm lucky to have room on my rooftop to grow lots of veggies in the summer. I've been building up capacity and I'm now up to 7 irrigated containers. I even managed to grow corn that was 9+ feet tall during my first summer! I'm now engaged in a ruthless battle with our beloved squirrels over domination of the garden's bounty.
However, each year as our Montréal winter drew closer, I watched, powerless, as my once strong crops wrinkled away. This got me interested in finding out what my options were when it came to growing veggies indoors, and that lead me to hydroponics.
There is a sustainable development aspect to all of this which I find quite interesting. Growing most of the food we need locally seems like something we will have to do as a society pretty soon. I've been a big fan of Lufa Farms, who have been pioneers in that area, ever since they started. There are similar initiatives in most major cities. This technology is even being put in containers that are then shipped to the arctic to grow fresh food in the most arid climate on the planet!
This post isn't an exact step-by-step guide. There is lots to know and learn, and great resources already exist online. Here, I'm going to take you through my journey and point you to relevant resources along the way.
Post contents
Let's start with the basics: what's hydroponics? Very simply, it's a technique for growing plants without soil, by using water enriched with a nutrient solution. This technique has been around for a very long time. No need to do a hydro garden to grow veggies inside; I could have simply decided to grow veggies in pots filled with soil. But isn't doing it the way NASA is growing food in space way cooler?? There are also advantages in terms of efficiency, like increased growth rate and less water usage.
There are different types of hydroponics systems, but the basic idea is always the same. The type of system I built is a nutrient film technique (NFT) system. The diagram below shows the major elements involved.
The water reservoir is filled with water, enriched with nutrients and pH corrected. The water is then pumped into the system, where plants are placed in net cups. The water flows through the system, bringing nutrients to the roots of the plants, until it reaches the end and gets recycled back in the reservoir. An air stone is placed in the reservoir to pump air in the water to make sure it stays oxygenated (not shown on the diagram but required).
I first considered buying a pre-built small system like the ones from Aerogarden, but ended up not going for those because I was afraid the yields would be low and I would be locked in their proprietary seed system.
Then I took steps towards building a deep water culture system like the one described in this video. What made me reconsider that choice was thinking about the logistics of actually running the system. This is a pretty crucial point to consider depending on where you'd place your garden. Since the water needs to be changed every 1 to 2 weeks, the reservoir has to be either close or transported to a drain, emptied and filled up again. Depending on the size of the system, the reservoir can be quite heavy when filled with water. Living in a condo with mostly wooden floors, I considered the required water operations too complicated and risky. I imagined having the container on a shelf with wheels and rolling it to my bathroom to change the water, but that seemed like it would be too complicated.
I then found a guide to building an NFT system with PVC pipes that seemed better adapted for my situation. Having the water reservoir separate from the system where the plants grow would make changing the water much easier as I would be able to simply carry it, leaving the plants where they are.
Inspiration for my system. Image taken from this post.
I got all the required parts from my local hardware store and online stores. I also dropped by a specialized hydroponics store and got some things from them, but I could have gotten them online.
Here are most of the parts that I ended up using:
Hydroponics grow medium and nutrients
Seed starting
The first step is to cut the PVC pipe into sections with a saw and then drill holes at the right spots. You can use the net cups as guides and draw around them with a marker so you know where to drill.
I had a small piece of unused pipe that I used to make sure the size of the whole saw matched the net cups correctly. The size was good but since I was using a round pipe, the sides of the net cups were exposed. I used aluminum foil to block off the light. I've seen some people use square fence posts instead of this type of pipe I used; more on that later.
Then I put a drain in the PVC cap by drilling a hole using a smaller hole saw then for the net cups:
The next step was to drill all the net cup holes. Drilling with the hole saw makes a pretty huge mess. You'll get little pieces of plastic everywhere. I highly recommend using a file to finish the job cleanly and then properly cleaning the inside of the pipes so that there isn't any plastic piece left inside. That will prevent any piece from making its way into your water pump later on.
At this point I could assemble the whole thing by dry fitting the different pieces to make sure it was all good:
Then came the time to glue the different pieces together so that no water leaked out. Watched some more Youtube and got going with the glue.
Moved the system in my bathroom and put it in the bathtub so I could test it out with some water flowing through it. It seemed to be doing OK, which was somewhat of a surprise. Next step was a live-fire exercise: running the system with water pumped from the reservoir and having it drain back out.
Unfortunately, two problems became very apparent. First, I had leaks in my PVC joints. Second, the pump was too powerful for the capacity of the drain that I had put. This meant the pump was emptying the entire reservoir in the system and would eventually cause the water to overflow as well as burn out the pump once the reservoir emptied out. Even setting the pump to its lowest capacity was too much.
For the leaks, it was a bit tricky. My normal job is working in computer science, where mistakes can often by fixed by undoing with a simple ctrl+z. Things aren't as simple when gluing plastic pipes together. One option was to saw off the joints and redo them, which would reduce the size of the system and wasn't ideal at all. The second option, which I ended up doing, was to apply self-fusing silicon tape around the joints. But putting a generous quantity over the problematic joints, it took care of all the leaks!
For the overflow problem, the ideal solution would have been to put in a bigger drain, but again, since the PVC cap was glued on, I would have had to saw it off, put a new one, install a bigger drain, which I didn't have… So the fix was to put a second drain right next to the first one as I did have that part.
At this point the system was good to go. But I was a bit scared that something unforeseen could go wrong and water would leak out. Since I'm on the top floor of a condo building, you can understand that it is not an acceptable scenario. I needed a contingency plan.
I thought of how I could put some kind of containment system in place. I was inspired by small kid's swimming pools, and decided to build a custom basin into which I could place the whole hydro system. If something were to break and all the water leaked out, it would be completely contained within the basin. The reservoir only contains 14L of water, which is not a huge quantity.
Went back to the hardware store to get some wood, metal shelves supports, tie wraps and a tarp.
Et voilà. Water shields up!
The final step was to hang the light fixture. Because I was placing the garden at the top of a staircase where I didn't care too much about the look of it, I simply screwed some hooks in the beams in the ceiling and hung the lamp using adjustable ropes with ratchets.
A little preparation needs to go in the water. I've used tap water for the garden, even though there are recommendations online on using distilled water, or water that went through reverse osmosis. The reason is that tap water contains more chemicals and minerals (ie: chlorine) that you might not want in your garden. However, as I understood it, the important thing you need to do when using tap water is to let is standing, exposed to the sun's UV rays, for about 24 hours. This allows the chlorine put in the water by the municipality to break down. For that purpose, I bought 2 identical buckets so that I could have the system running with the first bucket as the reservoir while the second one is filled with the replacement water. The buckets take turns being the reservoir.
Then you need to add nutrients. Some people optimize the type of nutrient based on what growth stage their plants are in. So one type when they're simply growing and creating roots, and another when they're producing fruit. I'm not that sophisticated yet and I'm using a simple 2-3-2 solution from my local hydro store. I also started putting in Calimagic solution as well after about 6 weeks in an attempt to help out my tomato plants that didn't look too happy. Simply follow the instructions on the bottle in terms of quantity.
The final step is to control the pH, with a pH up/down solution and your pH meter. I try to aim for a pH of about 6, based on the many guides online. The pH up/down solution is pretty concentrated, so I use pipette for greater control.
I haven't paid too much attention to the PPM readings up to now so I can't report much on that front, except that I'm getting OK-ish results without paying attention to it :)
Because the plants will be growing without soil, we need to start them from seeds into a growing medium. The most popular one is rock wool cubes (yellow cubes below). The cubes are created from rock and sand and are similar to mineral insulation used in houses. Because of their popularity, I started with them. However as I read more on the subject, some argued that they were not very eco-friendly, so I decided to try alternatives. I'm now using rapid rooter starter plugs (brown cylinders), that are made from compost.
Whichever medium you use, the idea is the same: hold water, air and our seeds. You need to start them in a little green house. This video explains how it's done. I've found that using a heating mat helped a lot so I recommend getting one.
My very first batch was 2 tomatoes, 2 peppers and 3 lettuce. Once our little veggies are big enough, we can put the rock wool cube in a net cup and fill it with clay pebbles so they are held in place. You also want to prevent as much light as possible from getting into the system, which the pebbles also help to do. If light gets in, you increase the chances of having algae grow in the system.
With all our baby plants in net cups placed in the system with aluminum foil covering any remaining openings, the system was complete. I drilled holes in the reservoir's cover to allow the different pipes though and we were good to go.
This is a video of the system in action:
My day job is doing machine learning and data science, so it was natural to think about how I could collect as much data as possible on the garden to track and automate things. One of the longer-term goal is to try correlating environmental conditions and whatever actions I'm taking with plant growth and yield. In terms of actions, everyone suggests keeping a journal, which I'm doing. But for metrics on the water, air and light, having something automated is much better.
To monitor the environment, I put together a small monitoring rig with a Raspberry Pi. I'm not going to go into too many details on this, but since this was my first experience with a Pi, it's not too complicated. I ordered a Pi, breadboard and a few sensors. The first ones I hooked up were the following:
A small Python server runs on the Pi and exposes an API with the readings from the sensors. The script is available on Github. The server also pulls weather information from the Open Weather Map API so I can track what's going on outside. I have a MacMini that runs Prometheus, a time series database, that collects and saves the time series data, and I setup Grafana to have a nice dashboard.
This is the result:
Some fun patterns:
I also got a TP-Link HS110 smart plug with energy monitoring in order to track how much power I'm using. I also wanted to be able to programmatically turn the power off and on. I didn't want to get into setting up a Pi-controlled relay, and there is an open source 3rd party library that can be used to control the HS110 so I went with that. As you can see from the screenshot, the light used a daily average of 1,39kWh, and the electricity cost in Québec is 0,0877$/kWh, meaning the cost of running the lamp was 3,66$ for the last month. Acceptable price for hopefully yummy tomatoes!
I configured the HS110 to turn on the light from 6:00AM to 11:30PM. Plants need to sleep too.
Below is a slideshow showing the progression of the growth.
Up to now, I've eaten two lettuces, but there are 3 that are about ready for consumption.
The tomato and pepper plants took longer to establish themselves and for a while, their leaves were in what seemed a pretty bad shape. I realized I had mis calibrated my pH meter and was about 30% off from the desired acidity level. After fixing that, the leaves improved and flowers appeared in all 4 plants. There are now many baby tomatoes growing.
Since the garden is indoors, bees can't help when it comes to pollination. Tomato plants can simply be shaken since their flowers have both the male and female parts. Another way to do this is to have a fan blowing on the garden to constantly move the plants, simulating the wind. Pepper plants, however, need to be pollinated by hand. After doing some research, I've tried doing it with a queue tip. I think I have just succeeded as I'm seeing tiny tiny green balls in some pepper flowers.
One big lesson is to make sure your pH meter is properly calibrated. I hadn't done it properly and was about 30% off in terms of what the water's acidity needed to be at. That caused the leaves of fruit plants to wrinkle on themselves and not produce any flowers.
I've gotten away with changing the water about every 10-12 days. As the tomato and pepper plants have gotten bigger, they've started drinking much more water, which causes the reservoir to empty out. With less water in, the acidity goes up because the ratio of water to nutrient changes. So I need to do a quick check up every two days and fix the acidity with the pH+/- solutions. With bigger tomato plants, I also now have to top up the water once between every change. One big reason to change the water completely is to prevent algae from forming in the system. I'm being as careful as I can to prevent light from hitting the water (algae needs light to grow), so I haven't had any problems up to now.
Another realization is that the system might be too small for tomato plants. As they are growing bigger, their root system also grows. After my last water change, the system started to leak because roots got into the drain and partially blocked it, causing the water level to rise too much in the system and leak through the net cup holes. This was the first real test for the emergency basin and everything worked great. I'll have to monitor that closely and potentially remove the tomato plants, which would mean I can't grow fruit plants in this 4′ PVC system.
Finally, the next garden I build will probably not use round pipes, but instead square fence posts, like in this project. The big reason is you can't install drains on a round surface, and the net cups are harder to put in place. That's why I had to put the drains in the end caps of the pipes, and I have to use aluminum foil around the cups. When changing the water, it's hard to remove all water from the system because the drain is about 1 cm from the bottom, so I have to tilt the whole thing. Having a drain at the bottom would make it much easier.
I've bought an ultrasonic distance sensor for the Pi and have been planning to install on the inside of the water reservoir cover. This would allow monitoring of the water level in the reservoir, allowing me to programmatically stop the pump if required. This could happen if the plants drink all the water or if there is a leak. It would even be possible to differentiate between the two based on the rate of change. Taking an automated action in case of a leak would be a great second contingency system. Adding extra sensors to track how the water is doing would also be great, like a pH sensor, so I don't have to do it myself every other day. Professional sensor systems exist but they're pretty expensive.
I also have a webcam ready and I'm planning to start taking pictures every few minutes to create a time-lapse video showing how things are changing over time. I've done that for seeds and it's pretty fun to watch. The second thing I'd like to do with the images is to automatically track the growth of plants by doing some image analysis.
Having both extra sensors and the video feed that I can analyze automatically is really what unlocks optimizing the garden conditions to maximize yield.
I took a pretty complicated route to get to where I am. If you're interested in trying out a hydro garden, a 100-200$ hydroponic kit will certainly do the job. You could even go the soil route by only getting a lamp.
Happy hydro gardening!
Last week, I published two posts that relate to a very interesting and socioeconomically relevant machine learning topic: human augmentation through artificial intelligence. There have been many examples that made their way in the mainstream media where we've seen AI push the limits of what was possible, especially since deep learning really took off. One of the big recent examples is of course, AlphaGo.
But human augmentation isn't about what AI can do by itself. Rather, it's about how AI can be used to assist a human so that he or she can be much more efficient at performing a given task. It can be to make humans faster at it, or allow them to produce work of higher quality. It's about using AI as a tool, just like any one of the hundreds of tools we all use in our everyday life.
The first post was a guest post on KDNuggets (with a companion notebook) on MLDB, showing how deep and transfer learning can be used to quickly train a model to classify if the car in a picture is a Tesla, a BMW or an Audi. It lays some of the technical foundation used in the second post.
The second post is about DeepTeach, the interactive Deep Image Classifier Builder. DeepTeach is an MLDB plugin, that is open source, and implements a human augmentation workflow allowing a user to quickly build an image classifier from unlabelled data within minutes.
As the post explains, the plugin uses a series of machine learning techniques, like deep, transfer and active learning. But what's the most interesting about it is the workflow it implements, allowing a user to go from thousands of unlabelled images to a working binary image classifier in a minute. The same workflow could be implemented to deal with any type of data, like sound or text, and it concretely shows how AI can be used to make humans more productive.
The video below shows a demo of the plugin in action:
I've been playing with the macOS Sierra Golden Master for a few days and ran into the new storage optimization app that is now included in macOS. It prompted me that I was running low on disk space, and displayed the following dialog. The first item on the list was a bit shocking:
How could Chrome be using 21GB of my precious SSD space?!
I quickly looked at the configuration for Chrome's cache, which was fine. Then I jumped on Google and found the problem. Chrome had not been deleting previous versions of itself after automatic updates. I had versions 14.0.835.202, with a creation date of September 29th 2011, all the way to 53.0.2785.116, which was a couple of days old. That's a lot of Chrome!
Turns out this is a known issue, but getting a fix out, or at the very least prompting the user about a problem, has been dragging along for years. The root of this sneaky bug is bad permissions on one file, that's preventing the updater to work correctly.
Silent errors make for great user experience!
I'm happily walking away from this with an extra 21GB in my pocket! And now I ask you: is your Chrome bigger than mine?
UPDATE: To be fair to the Chrome devs, I should point out that, according to the bug report linked above, the permissions problem is caused by 3rd party plugin installers that run as root and modify the Chrome application bundle. They mention DivX as the probable culprit, which makes sense since I had Chrome versions dating back to 2011. This leaves the question of how Chrome should deal with the situation. I think anything from a warning to a privilege elevation prompt would be much better than a silent failure.
More comments:
I recently gave a talk at PyCon Canada 2015 in Toronto about the Epic NHL goal celebration hack with a hue light show and real-time machine learning blog post.
In a hurry? Go straight to the graphs.
The dataset and notebook detailing how this was done are available in the companion repository.
Two weeks ago was Back To The Future Day. October 21st, 2015 is the day Marty and Doc Brown travel to at the beginning of the second movie. The future is now the past. There were worldwide celebrations and jokes, from the Queensland police deploying a hoverboard unit, Universal Pictures releasing a Jaws 19 trailer and even Health Canada issuing an official recall notice of DeLorean DMC-12 because of a flux capacitor defect that could prevent the car from traveling through time.
I love the trilogy and as many people probably did that week, I rewatched the movies. I also wondered if there was any fun BTTF data science project I could do. While watching the climactic sequence at the end of the third movie, I realized that as the steam locomotive pushes the DeLorean down the tracks, we get many data points as to the speed of the DeLorean. Marty is essentially reciting a dataset, all the way from 1885.
That made me ask the 1.21 Giga Watts question: Do they really make it to 88 miles per hour before they run out of tracks?
For those not familiar with the movies, Marty and Doc are trapped in the old West without any gas to power the gasoline engine of the DeLorean, their time-machine. That means they can't drive it to 88 miles per hour, the speed required to activate the flux capacitor, and travel back to 1985. The plan they come up with is to commandeer a steam locomotive and use it to push the DeLorean to the required speed.
Doc spells out the plan to make it back to the future:
Tomorrow night, Sunday, we'll load the DeLorean on to the tracks here on the spur right by the old abandoned silver mine. The switch track is where the spur runs off the main line 3 miles into Clayton… Shonash Ravine. The train leaves the station at 8:00 Monday morning. We'll stop it here, uncouple the cars from the tender, throw the switchtrack, and hijack – borrow the locomotive and use it to push the time machine. According to my calculations we'll hit 88 miles per hour just before we hit the edge of the ravine, at which point we'll instantaneously arrive in 1985 and coast safely across the completed bridge.
If you think of it, it's a shame Doc didn't equip the DeLorean with Tesla electric motors when he visited 2015. That would have made things easier considering the DeLorean was equipped with a working Mr. Fusion generator in 1885.
To assemble the dataset, I simply watched the train sequence and took down each time Marty said the speed, or that we saw it on the speedometer, along with the time in the movie. The tiny dataset is available in the companion repository.
Also, Doc tells us twice in the movie that they have 3 miles of tracks before they hit the ravine. Finally, like Jack Bauer would say, we assume events occur in real-time. This is a critical assumption because I'll base the distance calculations off this. So if they were to go at a steady 25 miles per hour for one hour in the movie, that would mean that they traveled 25 miles during that period.
For simplicity, I assumed a linear progression between each actual data point, meaning we're assuming a uniform acceleration between data points. The following graph shows the sequence of events as they occur in the movie.
The x-axis represents the number of minutes since the beginning of the train sequence and the y-axis is their speed. The landmarks along the tracks have been labeled in red at the bottom. Finally, the period for which each of Doc's 3 presto logs burnt have been marked as horizontal lines.
We can see that the whole sequence lasts about 7 minutes and they successfully reach 88 miles per hour just before reaching the ravine, exactly as Doc predicted.
But did they?
The question we have is about the actual distance it takes them to get to that critical velocity. Since we know at what speed they were going and for how long, we can essentially integrate the time vs speed graph above to get the distance they really traveled.
Doing this gives us the distance vs speed graph that we can use to determine if they really reached 88 miles per hour before having traveled 3 miles. In other words, does the blue speed line get to the green future line before reaching the red ravine line ?
Great Scott! They actually run out of tracks just shy of 70 miles per hour. This means the ravine is actually rightly renamed Eastwood Ravine because Marty does end up at the bottom of it!
Here is another way to look at it:
Looking at their acceleration over time sheds some light as to why they got in trouble. Remember we're assuming a uniform acceleration, meaning that between each actual data point, we assume a linear speed progression between each pair of points.
The following graph shows the acceleration:
The very narrow spikes are when the speedometer is shown on screen and you see the speed go up by 1 mph within 2 seconds. The wider and lower periods are the result of the speedometer not being shown for a while and the speed not having gone up that much in the meantime.
My expectation would have been that as the yellow and especially red logs catch fire, we get a higher and higher acceleration. In reality, acceleration correlates with dramatic moments in the story and with when the speedometer is shown on screen. It's a movie; I know.
Let's give Doc a hand and figure out the acceleration his presto logs would have needed to provide in order to make this work. By assuming that we can only influence the acceleration from the point where the green presto log catches fire, we can determine the acceleration we need to get to the right speed in time and derive the following modified distance vs speed graph:
This allows us to plot the new speed curve on the initial graph that showed the sequence of events.
In this scenario, Marty safely goes back to the future after 2 minutes and 8 seconds, a mere 39 seconds after the green log caught fire.
Unfortunately, since Clara came on board exactly when the green log caught fire, she most probably would have made the jump with the locomotive. In the movie, it took her 1 minute and 51 seconds to get to the locomotive's whistle, so she would not have had time to call for help. Doc, who had to put the presto logs in the firebox while the train was moving, would have had to rush to the DeLorean but it's possible he would have made it.
We're forced to conclude that Doc's calculations were off and Marty couldn't have made it back to the future. The fact that he did may mean that we are currently in a "time paradox, the results of which could cause a chain reaction that would unravel the very fabric of the space-time continuum and destroy the entire universe."
But in any case, time travel can be a risky business. As a word of advice: maybe where you're going, you don't need roads… but where you came from, always make sure you had enough tracks.
More comments are available on:
The 2015 Canadian federal election is in its final stretch and college and I thought it would be a great opportunity to collect some data and do some machine learning. Citizen data science in action!
We looked at the press releases of non-regional Canadian federal political parties using Datacratic's Machine Learning Database (MLDB). The image below is a map with 620 dots each representing one English-language press release, colored by each party's official color. The closer two dots are, the more similar the text of the press releases they represent. The white text labels were placed by hand to give a sense of what the various groupings mean.
A lot of interesting insights about each party's communication strategy can be derived from the visualization.
Check out the complete blog post for more details as well as an interactive version of the graph.
See media coverage of this blog post.
In Montréal this time of year, the city literally stops and everyone starts talking, thinking and dreaming about a single thing: the Stanley Cup Playoffs. Even most of those who don't normally care the least bit about hockey transform into die hard fans of the Montréal Canadiens, or the Habs like we also call them.
Below is a Youtube clip of the epic goal celebration hack in action. In a single sentence, I trained a machine learning model to detect in real-time that a goal was just scored by the Habs based on the live audio feed of a game and to trigger a light show using Philips hues in my living room.
The rest of this post explains each step that was involved in putting this together. A full architecture diagram is available if you want to follow along.
The original goal (no pun intended) of this hack was to program a celebratory light show using Philips hue lights and play the Habs' goal song when they scored a goal. Everything would be triggered using a big Griffin PowerMate USB button that would need to be pushed by whoever was the closest to it when the goal occurred.
That is already pretty cool, but can we take it one step further? Wouldn't it be better if the celebratory sequence could be triggered automatically?
As far as I could find, there is no API or website available online that can give me reliable notifications within a second or two that a goal was scored. So how can we do it very quickly?
Imagine you watch a hockey game blindfolded, I bet you would have no problem knowing when goals are scored because a goal sounds a lot different that anything else in a game. There is of course the goal horn, if the home team scores, but also the commentator who usually yells a very intense and passionate "GOOOAAAALLLLL!!!!!". By hooking up into the audio feed of the game and processing it in real-time using a machine learning model trained to detect when a goal occurs, we could trigger the lights and music automatically, allowing all the spectators to dance and do celebratory chest-bumps without having to worry about pushing a button.
The first step is to take a look at what a goal sound looks like. The Habs' website has a listing of all previous games with ~4 minutes video highlights of each game. I extracted the audio from a particular highlight and used librosa, a library for audio and music analysis, to do some simple signal processing. If you've never played with sounds before, you can head over to Wikipedia to read about what a spectrogram is. You can also simply think of it as taking the waveform of an audio file and creating a simple heat map over time and audio frequencies (Hz). Low-pitched sounds are at the lower end of the y-axis and high-pitched sounds are on the upper end, while the color represents the intensity of the sound.
We're going to be using the mel power spectrogram (MPS), which is like a spectrogram with additional transformations applied on top of it.
You can use the code below to display the MPS of a sound file.
This is what the MPS of a 4 minutes highlight of a game looks like:
Now let's take a look at an 8 seconds clip from that highlight, specifically when a goal occurred.
As you can see, there are very distinctive patterns when the commentator yells (the 4 big wavy lines), and when the goal horn goes off in the amphitheater (many straight lines). Being able to see the patterns with the naked eye is very encouraging in terms of being able to train a model to detect it.
There are tons of different audio features we could derive from the waveform to use as features for our classifier. However, I always try to start simple to create a working baseline and improve from there. So I decided to simply vectorize the MPS, which was created by using 2 second clips with frequencies up to 8KHz with 128 Mel bands at a sampling rate of 22.5KHz. The MPS have a shape of 128×87, which results in a feature vector of 11,136 elements when vectorized.
If you're not familiar with machine learning, think of it as building algorithms that can learn from data. The type of ML task we need to do for this project is binary classification, which means making the difference between two classes of things:
Put another way, we need to train a model that can give us the probability that the Canadiens scored a goal given the last 2 seconds of audio.
A model learns to perform a task through training, which is looking at past examples of those two classes and figuring out what are the statistical regularities in the data that allow it to separate the classes. However, it is easy for a computer to learn things by heart. The goal of machine learning is producing models that are able to generalize what they learn to data they have never seen, to new examples. What this means for us is that we'll be using past games to train the model but what we obviously want to do are predictions for future games in real-time as they are aired on TV.
As with any machine learning project, there is a time when you will feel like a monkey, and that is usually when you're either building, importing or cleaning a dataset. For this project, this took the form of recording the audio from multiple 4 minute highlights of games and noting the time in the clip when a goal was scored by the Habs or the opposing team.
Obviously, we'll be using the Canadiens' goals as positive examples for our classifier, since that is what we are trying to detect.
Now what about negative examples? If you think about it, the very worst thing that could happen to this system is for it to get false positives (falsely thinking there is a goal). Imagine we are playing against the Toronto Maple Leafs and they score a goal and the light show starts. Not only did we just get scored and are bummed out, but on top of that the algorithm is trolling us about it by playing our own goal song! (This is naturally a fictitious example because the Leafs are obviously not making the playoffs once again this year) To make sure that doesn't happen, we'll be using all the opposing team's goals as explicit negatives. The hope is that the model will be able to distinguish between goals for and against because the commentator is much more enthusiastic for Canadiens' goals.
To illustrate this, compare the MSP of the Habs' goal above with the example below of a goal against the Habs. The commentator's scream is much shorter and the goal horn of the opponent's team amphitheater is at very different frequencies than the one at the Bell Center. The goal horn only goes off when the home team scores so the MSP below is taken from a game not played in Montréal.
In addition to the opposing team's goals, we'll use 50 randomly selected segments from each highlight that are far enough from an actual goal as negatives, so that the model is exposed to what the uneventful portions of a game sound like.
False negatives (missing an actual goal) are still bad, but we prefer them over false positives. We'll talk about how we can deal with them later on.
Note that I did not do any alignment of the sound files, meaning the commentator yelling does not start at exactly the same time in every clip. The dataset ended up consisting of 10 games, with 34 goals by the Habs and 17 goals against them. The randomly selected negative clips added another 500 examples.
As I mentioned earlier, the goal was to start simple. To that effect, the first models I tried were a simple logistic regression and an SVM with an rbf kernel over the raw vectorized MPS.
I was a bit surprised that this trivial approach yielded usable results. The logistic regression got an AUC of 0.97 and an F1 score of 0.63, while the SVM got an AUC of 0.98 and an F1 score of 0.71. Those results were obtained by holding out 20% of the training data to test on.
At this point I ran a few complete game broadcasts through the system and each time the model detected a goal, I wrote out the 2 seconds corresponding sound file to disk. A bunch were false positives that corresponded to commercials. The model had never seen commercials before because they are not included in game highlights. I added those false positives to the negative examples, retrained and the problem went away.
However the AUC/F1 score were not an accurate estimation of the performance I could expect because I was not necessarily planning to use a single prediction as the trigger for the light show. Since I'm scoring many times per second, I could try decision rules that would look at the last n predictions to make a decision.
I ran a 10-fold cross-validation, holding out an entire game from the training set, and actually stepping through the held out game's highlight as if it was the real-time audio stream of a live game. That way I could test out multi-prediction decision rules.
I tried two decision rules:
For each combination of decision rule, hyper-parameters and classifier, there were 4 metrics I was looking at:
SVMs ended up being able to get more true positives but did a worst job on false positives. What I ended up using was a logistic regression with the second decision rule. To trigger a goal, there needs to be 5 positives votes out of the last 20 and votes are cast if the probability of a goal is over 90%. The cross-validation results for that rule were 23 Habs goals detected, 11 not detected, 2 opposing team goals falsely detected and no other false positives.
Looking at the Habs' 2014-15 season statistics, they scored an average of 2.61 goals per game and got scored 2.24 times. This means I can loosely expect the algorithm to not detect 1 Habs goal per game (0.84 to be more precise) and to go off for a goal by the opposing team once every 4 games.
Note that the trained model only works for the specific TV station and commentator I trained on. I trained on regular season games aired on TVA Sports because they are airing the playoffs. I tried testing on a few games aired on another station and basically detected no goals at all. This means performance is likely to go down if the commentator catches a cold.
Now that we're able to do a reasonable job at identifying goals, it was time to create a light show that rivals those crazy Christmas ones we've all seen. This has 2 components: playing the Habs' goal song and flashing the lights to the music.
The goal song I play is not the current one in use at the Bell Center, but the one that they used in the 2000s. It is called "Le Goal Song" by the Montréal band L'Oreille Cassée. To the best of my knowledge, the song is not available for sale and is only available on Youtube.
Philips hues are smart LED multicolor lights that can be controlled using an iPhone app. The app talks to the hue bridge that is connected to your wifi network and the bridge talks to the lights over the ZigBee Light Link protocol. In my living room, I have the 3 starter-kit hue lights, a light-strip under my kitchen island and a Bloom pointing at the wall behind my TV. Hues are not specifically meant for light shows; I usually use them to create an interesting atmosphere in my living room.
I realized the lights can be controller using a REST API that runs on the bridge. Using the very effective phue library, we can interface with the hue bridge API from python. At that point, it was simply a question of programming a sequence of color and intensity calls that would roughly go along with the goal song I wanted to play.
Below is an example of using phue to make each light cycle through the colors blue, white and red 10 times.
I deployed this up as a simple REST API using bottle. This way, the celebratory light show is decoupled from the trigger. The lights can be triggered easily by calling the /goal endpoint.
My classifier was trained on audio clips offline. To make this whole thing come together, the missing piece was the real-time scoring of a live audio feed.
I'm running all of this on OSX and to get the live audio into my python program, I needed two components: Soundflower and pyaudio. Soundflower acts as a virtual audio device and allows audio to be passed between applications, while pyaudio is a library that can be used to play an record audio in python.
The way things need to be configured is the system audio is first set to the Soundflower virtual audio device. At that point, no sound will be heard because nothing is being sent to the output device. In python, you can then configure pyaudio to capture audio coming into the virtual audio device, process it, and then resend it out to the normal output device. In my case, that is the HDMI output going to the TV.
As you can see from the code snippet below, you start listening to the stream by giving pyaudio a callback function that will be called each time the captured frames buffer is full. In the callback, I add the frames to a ring buffer that keeps 2 seconds worth of audio, because that is the size of the training examples I used to train the model. The callback gets called many times per second. Each time, I take the contents of the ring buffer and score it using the classifier. When a goal is detected by the model, this triggers a REST call to the /goal endpoint of the light show API.
My TV subscription allows me to stream the hockey games on a computer in HD. I hooked up a Mac Mini to my TV and that Mac will be responsible for running all the components of the system:
Since the algorithm is not perfect, I also hooked up the Griffin USB button that I mentioned at the very beginning of the post. It can be used to either start or stop the light show in case we get a false negative or false positive respectively. It was very easy to do this because a push of the button simply calls the /goal endpoint of the API that can decide what it should do with the trigger.
After two playoff games against the Ottawa Senators, the model successfully detected 75% of the goals (missing 1 per game) and got no false positives. This is in line with the expected performance, and the USB button was there to save the day when the detection did not work.
This was done in a relatively short amount of time and represents the simplest approach at each step. To make this work better, there are a number of things that could be done. For instance, aligning the audio files of the positive examples, trying different example length, trying more powerful classifiers like a convolutional neural net, doing simple image analysis of the video feed to try to determine on which side of the ice we are, etc.
In the mean-time, enjoy the playoffs and Go Habs Go!
In the media
Je suis heureux d'annoncer la disponibitlié immédiate de mon dernier album intitulé "Une dernière chance". Cet album fut réalisé sur une période de plusieurs années, parsemées de plusieurs longues pauses.
Il est disponible gratuitement sur Soundcloud, Spotify, et également sur iTunes. Plus de détails sur ma page de musique.
I just published a new post on the Datacratic blog: The Too Good To Be True Filter.
At Datacratic, one of the product we offer our customers is our real-time bidding (RTB) optimisation that can plug directly into any RTBKit installation. We're always hard at work to improve our optimisation capabilities so clients can identify valuable impressions for their advertisers. Every bid request is priced independently and real-time feedback is given to the machine learning models. They adjust immediately to changing conditions and learn about data they had not been exposed to during their initial training. This blog post covers a strange click pattern we started noticing as we were exploring optimized campaign data, and a simple way we can use to protect our clients from it. Read more…


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A week before he arrived, I was so wound up with anticipation and excitement I could hardly fall asleep at night. It had been just over three months since I saw him last and I was practically bursting at the seams of my sanity waiting for him to get here.
In my mind, I imagined a certain scenario would play out the second I saw him exiting the airport terminal, you know, the type of scenario that involved a dramatic and embarrassing public display of affection (maybe I watch too many chick flicks). Instead our reaction was true and natural, tight hugs and beaming smiles were exchanged and it felt incredibly normal to have him right by my side again.
I took the week off from work and loosely planned each day out, leaving an uncharacteristic amount of room for spontaneity.
We hiked Dragon's Back and wandered through Sai Kung and Stanley Market.
Visited The Peak and "took the road less traveled" when we discovered a fork in the path (see the stairs?) The stairs lead us up the side of the mountain and to Victoria Peak Garden.
We stumbled upon the most stunning view Hong Kong has to offer and follow a narrow path called "The Governor's Walk" without having a clue where it would lead us. The garden was simply magical and the mystery of not knowing where we were was thrilling (we later found out Victoria Peak Garden was the summer home of the Governor or Hong Kong).
In honor of my birthday, we celebrated with an Italian dinner, champagne, chocolate cake, a fabulous rooftop bar and late night cigars (after a few puffs I opted out of the cigar). I was in such good company and enjoyed the extra twelve hours added onto my birthday. Thanks to the time difference I received happy birthday wishes well into the 12th (which was fine by me being the celebraholic I am).
Breakfast, bloody marys and a boat trip followed the next day.
Kevin jumped in despite my advice not to and I expect he'll come down with some strange illness soon.
For the last leg of the trip, we flew two hours north to Shanghai to give Kevin a taste of the mainland.
Took on the role of tourists and strolled through YuYuan Garden.
Scored Formula One tickets (thanks Dow) and got a full education in the subculture of race car driving. Afterwards, we made the most of a rainy afternoon in Shanghai by dodging in and out of crowded shopping malls and thoroughly enjoying one another's company.
Had an unforgettable night out on the town that consisted of amazing views, classy drinks, The Waldorf and a jazz club called JZ.
We all left the airport flying in difference directions.
As my plane landed in Hong Kong, I felt a surprising sense of relief to be back. I realized in that moment, while feeling a sad and empty emotional hangover from the goodness of the week, that Hong Kong has become my home. And it was so good to share my home with someone I love.

subset: commoncrawl


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Last night was a significant milestone in the '08 Election process. The winners of the Iowa caucuses were Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama. I could easily link to numerous articles on this. I particularly am interested in Thabiti's response (he has an interesting take on the decline of African-American Theology and the election). A wonderful statement of summation was provided by Dr. Mohler: The rhetoric of the race -- and the rhetoric of many evangelicals -- is disturbing. This race is important and necessarily so. We are talking about the next President of the United States, after all. But evangelicals have invested far too much hope in the political process. No government can make people good, transform humanity, or eliminate sin. The political sphere is important, but never ultimate. Jesus Christ is Lord -- and He will be Lord regardless of who sits in the Oval Office. If you are interested in following this story closely a great place for updates is Justin Taylor's blog.
John Piper encourages us to Pray Global Prayers. He also points us to Operation World to assist in our prayers. (It would be helpful if OW had an RSS Feed so we could add it to our Google Reader's).
When Nikki and I bought our last car (a state-of-the-art 1993 Grand Prix) I could not help but notice that the world is populated with many similar cars. Was it that people suddenly decided to buy '93 Grand Prix's en masse? I doubt it. Maybe my eyes were more aware of the red beasts. I say all of that to ask a question...is it just me or are we seeing a massive resurgence of John Newton stuff? Within the last couple days there have been new posts on Newton. Founders points us to Newton on zeal blended with humility. Of First Importance quotes Newton as saying We cannot think too highly of Christ.
Stephen Moore has a very interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal. He is concerned that because of video games his sons are turning into Teenage Zombies. It might sound a little strong but more says, "I am persuaded that video games are the new crack cocaine". While I would not go that far, I have found that many of our teenagers are so obsessed with video games that they have little time to go deep theologically. Some barely crack the cover of their Bibles "b/c they hate reading". Yet these same students read hours of e-mails, text messages and television screens. Some might say we should find a way to "get the gospel" in all these things. Maybe we should come up with some cool Christian video games. My solution--would be to man up and be parents. Unplug your television, pry the control out of the hand of your 5 year old, and go play catch. Then, of course, come back and have a riveting game of Madden together. (HT: Tim Ellsworth)
Brian Thornton has asks, what is central in looking for a church home? Is it good worship music? Fun events? A relevant youth ministry? A nursery without cockroaches and broken glass? A hip pastor? Good solid expositional preaching? Friendly people?
Said at Southern has a wonderful roundup on evangelism. I have yet to check out all of the articles but I am awaiting the time to do so.
And finally Borrowed Light is honored to be part of the SBCVoices. It is an excellent resource that puts together all of the blogs from folks that are part of the SBC.


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We've introduced you to Levi Maestro on Dime before, and in this brand new episode of Maestro Knows, he gives us one of the coolest off-court looks into what goes into the mind of Chris Bosh. As you would think, Bosh is into crazy art. While we knew that, we didn't know he was such a big sneakerhead. As for his game on the football field? Check the video out to see.
What do you think?
Follow Sean on Twitter at @SEANesweeney.
Follow Dime on Twitter at @DimeMag.
Become a fan of Dime Magazine on Facebook HERE.


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So what are the elk you ask? Well, they are- elk! Elk were once native to Pennsylvania, but they were overhunted in the 19th century, and they all died out across the state. In the early 20th century, 50 elk were shipped from the west to re-establish a herd in Pennsylvania.
When I was younger, the herd was still relatively small, but more recently the PA Game Commission has taken great strides to improve the numbers, and now there are more than 700 elk living in this little town called Benezette.
This was my first time to go since they built a new visitor's center, and I will say that I now offically like to go see the elk. The visitor's center was great, and it made me happy to see that it was a green building. While there we watched a 4D movie (which was awesome!), perused the gift shop, explored the discovery room, and rode a horse drawn wagon.
While at the visitor's center, we did not see any elk! But we saw many on the ride home. This was my favorite:


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We spent the end of last week reading books about Mother's Day!
Here's a quick look at the students' sweet drawings of their mothers.
(I had to resist the urge to post all 26 drawings!)
We wrote about our mothers!
We designed cards for our mothers!
We learned songs to sing to our mothers!
And we even made bracelets as gifts!
I hope you have a beautiful Mother's Day!


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As there is no way I can continue with the pulka, I have decided to pursue on foot. I have selected the most necessary things and made up one bag that I will carry on my back. I gave up the tent (5kg), and one camera with the 500mm tele-zoom (6kg) plus many other items and clothes.I regret to have to give up the tele-zoom for I wont be able to take animals photographies, but weight matters now. I estimate my bag being around 20kg, still.
I was very fortunate to meet Arvis, a young farmer in Maskale, few km before Kaleti. He agreed to keep my stuff.
I will tell you more about this man and how he greatly helped me.


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When I enter the channel I get user mode "Voice"
I was just wondering if there was a way (in Icechat) to automatically join as user mode "Halfop".
I think that it may be somthing to do with the auto perform function, but I am unsure what the commands are....
anyone know how to do this??


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LONDON, UK 13 MAY, 2014 – 3CX, developer of the award-winning Windows VoIP PBX 3CX Phone System announces that Optodev, the producer of high quality ophthalmic lenses based in the Philippines, has successfully deployed 3CX phone System.
Optodev has noticed an immediate improvement in the ease of communication with 3CX Phone System, particularly when its employees are working away from the office. Using 3CXPhone for Android and iPhone, Optodev's employees can now make and receive office calls from anywhere in the world, enabling them to keep up-to-date on daily operations. As 3CX supports the use of Cisco 7940,7941, 7960 and 7961 phones, the company has been able to retain its existing Cisco phones, making the move to 3CX very cost-effective and the deployment of the phone system even quicker.
Alexander Galanido, IT Supervisor Optodev, said:
"We are extremely pleased with 3CX Phone System, which since its installation has performed very well. The phone system is extremely user friendly and we are now able to manage our whole phone system internally without any difficulties, enabling our staff to easily keep in touch."
Read the complete case study to find out how Optodev was able to modernise its phone system & retain its existing hardware with 3CX Phone System
About Keysys Inc (www.keysys.com)
Keysys Inc defines its product expertise in the areas of network security, content security, messaging, environmental monitoring and surveillance, hardware and peripherals. Since 1997, Keysys has continuously developed its product portfolio by teaming up with multi-level IT providers and providing solutions to meet the corporate needs of its customers. Keysys is committed to being a reliable provider of IT Systems and products for the benefit of its customers and the community.


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|Ed and Lou
Parkinson's at 63 has disrupted my weight watcher's dance of roller coaster dieting. I have risen to my upper crest at 124 kilograms. And, despite a serious case of camera embarrassment, feel a futility in abstinence. Too much of my daily grace comes from consumption. Despite a Paleo prejudice, I covet carbohydrates.
Physical movement has become so untenable, a zombie shuffle, leaning forward as if to bite the neck of some hapless imaginary victim. When once pilgrimage was my magic solvent, when walking was both a passion and a solution, I now vegetate in the stagnent confines of online exploration. Brave steps out of the house to take the trash to the corner, or to wobble to the nearest vending machine, leaves me panting. Pain follows like a loving lap dog, a merciless reminder of better times.
It's hard to feel loveable when your magic mirror no longer answers the question 'Who is the fairest of them all?' Get real. In the age of Selfies, a positive self image is essential. With or without the big gut, get that mojo working.


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We had our first three
When/ Where?
26th - 28th July 2018
Daily timetable @
Thursday Evening - No activities!
Friday Evening - No activities!
Saturday Evening - BBQ, Certificate and
The Team - Who are we?
This project is being led by Ayo Olajide, a church worker at ELT Baptist Church.
ELT have twenty years' experience of running local community projects, including working with Tower Hamlets Council, The Jack Petchey Foundation, local housing associations, Comic Relief and BBC Children in Need. The staff at ELT meet all requirements for working with children.
The main coach for this camp is an ex-NBA player - Zack Jones - who has many years' experience running similar camps; he also currently works as a basketball coach and High School principal in the USA. Zack has run similar camps in Germany and around the world for the last fifteen years. Other coaches come with diverse experiences of playing and coaching both internationally and nationally.
The team are all committed Christians and want to share their love of basketball as well as the truths of the gospel that impact their lives both on and off the court.
What to bring/ Wear?
Water and lunch each day
Come in your basketball kit, ready to play
Money for a tuck shop in the evening
Travel card if you want to catch the tube to our evening base rather than walk (20mins)
End, London E3 4TU
To Register and book
Follow the link below
Contact/ Enquiries
Address: ELT Community Center, Burdett Road, Mile
£25 – this includes a camp T-Shirt as well as snacks and prizes and food each evening.
To pay online or in person at your bank use the following BACS:
ELT Baptist Church
CAF Bank Ltd,
Account No: 00009889
Sort Code 40-52-40.
Reference: 'ELBC initial of child.surname'
To pay by cheque:
Make the cheque payable to 'ELT Baptist Church' and send it (or bring it person) to the church office - ELBC ELT Baptist Church Burdett Rd, London E3 4TU


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The much awaited trailer. http://www.alluc.com/stream/Star+Wars+trailer+2015
The teaser trailer is here.
I dream that JJ Abrams will re-write bits of the prequels.
EG: There will be a reference to Jar-Jar Binks, who it turns out was *actually* banished from his fierce tribe of amphibian warriors for being *too* fierce. "Remember, don't end up like Jar-Jar" and the screen will wobble back to reveal the *true* Jar-Jar, a gnarly amphibian warrior with enormous legs like some kind of oversized frog, who then snarls and ninja-jumps towards the camera and then off scene to snarling and screaming. And his ears? Compact little amphibian ears that can retract away under a layer of skin when swimming. In other words, the Gunguns were a warrior race, and Jar Jar the worst of them all. A few brief scenes like this and we'll get the message. The Clone Wars happened, but the 'history' we've received has been corrupted. What I'm saying…
View original post 18 more words


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TiPb nation, rev up your ZOMGS and get ready for SQUEEE -- the Apple Online Store is down world wide.
Now before you get too excited, this is not for the White iPhone 4. That's been delayed until later this year. Unfortunately, this time it's probably not for any iOS devices. If the rumors are true, what we'll see today are 12-proc Mac Pro, updated iMac, 27" LED displays, and maybe -- just maybe -- the MagicPad multitouch trackpad for the Mac.
Give us your best guesses in the comments and we'll find out just as soon as the store comes back up.


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Welcome to Healing Hands Life Center
Because You Deserve It!
An unforgettable experience designed to relieve muscle tension, reduce stress, relieve pain & migraines, and promote deep relaxation. Our professionally trained and licensed massage therapists utilize a wide variety of healing modalities: classic Swedish, neuromuscular, deep tissue, hot stone therapy*, and pre-natal massage*, to insure optimal therapeutic benefits and we will customize your massage based on your specific needs.
*an additional charge will be added for these services


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2015 Dodge Challenger SRT bows with a 6.2-liter V8 Hellcat engine, boasts 600+ horsepower
Chrysler's newly (re)anointed performance brand Dodge has dropped a bomb on the American muscle car segment and it comes in the form of the 2015 Challenger SRT. Dodge has taken the reigns as the in-house tire slayer division again now that SRT is no longer a standalone brand and it comes correct with the highly-anticipated 6.2-liter supercharged Hellcat V8 engine. Dodge didn't disclose how much horsepower this new supercharged V8 will produce but said it's north of 600 ponies. While numbers aren't solid, the Hellcat engine is promised to be Chrysler's most powerful V8 engine ever built. This puts the 2015 Challenger SRT in the same neighborhood as its super car sibling, the Viper, but does so minus two cylinders. The 2014 SRT Viper relies on an 8.4-liter V10 engine that is rated at 640 horsepower but don't be surprised if the Challenger SRT creeps close to that.
This new supercharged Hellcat V8 engine also catapults the Challenger SRT into Mustang GT500 and Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 territory. At 661 and 580 horsepower, respectively, the 2015 Challenger SRT is expected to split the difference between its new competition. The 6.4-liter V8 engine that's currently available will live on for 2015 but sees a boost in output, rising from 470 hp to 485 while torque numbers climb from 470 lb-ft to 475 lb-ft. As for transmission options, a six-speed manual or a new eight-speed automatic transmission will be offered. The eight-speed auto is even offered on the Hellcat engine and can handle 30 percent more torque than any other eight-speed that Chrysler offers.
Also: The Class of 2015 -- New Vehicles Ready to Roll
With great power comes great responsibility and Dodge knows that. This is why every 2015 Challenger SRT with a Hellcat V8 under the hood comes with a red and black key fob. The red key fob allows the Hellcat to reach its full potential while the black key fob limits power to 500 horsepower. To engage this so-called "safe mode," you need to enter a four-digit PIN and then put the car in Valet Mode. This will limit the engine from turning more than 4000 rpm while disabling launch control, the paddle shifting function on automatic models, and Drive Mode selections. Besides that, this function ensures that no matter how hard the valet or teenager tries, stability control stays on.
Stopping the most powerful V8 engine ever produced by Chrysler Group takes the biggest brakes ever used by Chrysler Group and these come in the form of 15.4-inch Brembos up front. These can also be added on the regular Challenger SRT Track Package, too. All Challenger SRT models roll along on 20-inch forged wheels and are wrapped in 245/45ZR20 rubber while the Hellcat calls for 275/40ZR20 Pirelli P Zero Nero four-season tires. One last interesting feature on the 2015 Dodge Challenger SRT equipped with the Hellcat V8 engine comes in the form of the air intake seen in the driver's side headlight. This was done to help with aerodynamics (the speedometer does go up to 200 mph, for what it's worth) and enable more air to get to the engine.
Dodge hasn't announced pricing for the 2015 Challenger lineup yet but we expect the SRT Hellcat model to sit somewhere near $55,000. Production is set to kick off later this year.
More Dodge news...
Future plans for Dodge includes more focus, less models
The 2014 Dodge Challenger SRT has the heart of an enthusiast, guts of a Grand Tourer
2014 Dodge Challenger R/T shaker unveiled
Popular at KBB.com


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Federal Reserve Study: College Degrees for Minorities No Guarantee of Raising Income
The results are striking.
Campus Reform reports.
Fed study: degrees didn't protect blacks, Latinos from downturn
As the 2016 presidential contenders eagerly vie for the youth vote with promises to expand and further subsidize higher education, a new study claims that a degree is no guarantee of financial stability, at least for African-Americans and Latinos.
The report released this month by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis poses the question, "Why didn't higher education protect Hispanic and black wealth?" in response to the finding that college graduates in those communities experienced far greater economic declines during the recent recession than did those without a college degree.
Among Hispanics, the median net worth of college graduates fell 71.9 percent between 2007 and 2013, while non-grads lost 41.2 percent over the same period. For blacks, the figures are 59.7 percent and 37.3 percent, respectively.
Black and Latino graduates also fared worse than their white and Asian counterparts during the recession, with the median net worth of white grads falling 16 percent and that of Asian grads actually rising by 5.1 percent.
The unusual findings prompted the authors to examine the same trends over a longer time period, co-author Bill Emmons told NPR last week; when they extended their analysis back to 1992, the results were even more striking.
Fed study: degrees didn't protect blacks, Latinos from downturn (Campus Reform)


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Helena Gunnare
Helena grew up in the north of Sweden where the winters are cold and the days are short. Except during the summer when there's daylight 24/7. Today she lives in southern Sweden and enjoys travelling the world whenever she can. She's a photographer and has recently started to discover all the amazing things that her home country offers. She enjoys walking in the forests with her camera and can endure -20 just to get that special photograph. She loves getting lost and exploring cities by foot.
Helena is the editor of travel blog Oh darling, let's be adventurers – where she writes about her passion for traveling and showcases her photography.


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Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology
Volume 2011, Article ID 707985, 11 pages
Experimental Model of Zymosan-Induced Arthritis in the Rat Temporomandibular Joint: Role of Nitric Oxide and Neutrophils
1Faculty of Dentistry, Federal University of Ceará, Sobral Campus, Avenida Comandante Maurocélio Rocha Pontes, 100 Derby, 62042-280 Sobral, CE, Brazil
2Faculty of Medicine of Sobral , Federal University of Ceará, Sobral Campus, Avenida Comandante Maurocélio Rocha Pontes, 100 Derby, 62042-280 Sobral, CE, Brazil
3Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Faculty of Medicine, Federal University of Ceará, Rua Coronel Nunes Valente, 1315 Rodolfo Teófilo, 60430-270 Fortaleza, CE, Brazil
4Department of Morphology, Faculty of Medicine, Federal University of Ceará, Rua Delmiro de Farias, Porangabussu, 60440-261 Fortaleza, CE, Brazil
Received 15 September 2010; Revised 2 December 2010; Accepted 9 December 2010
Academic Editor: Oreste Gualillo
Copyright © 2011 Hellíada Vasconcelos Chaves et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Aims. To establish a new model of zymosan-induced temporomandibular joint (TMJ) arthritis in the rat and to investigate the role of nitric oxide. Methods. Inflammation was induced by an intra-articular injection of zymosan into the left TMJ. Mechanical hypernociception, cell influx, vascular permeability, myeloperoxidase activity, nitrite levels, and histological changes were measured in TMJ lavages or tissues at selected time points. These parameters were also evaluated after treatment with the nitric oxide synthase (NOS) inhibitors L-NAME or 1400 W. Results. Zymosan-induced TMJ arthritis caused a time-dependent leucocyte migration, plasma extravasation, mechanical hypernociception, and neutrophil accumulation between 4 and 24 h. TMJ immunohistochemical analyses showed increased inducible NOS expression. Treatment with L-NAME or 1400 W inhibited these parameters. Conclusion. Zymosan-induced TMJ arthritis is a reproducible model that may be used to assess both the mechanisms underlying TMJ inflammation and the potential tools for therapies. Nitric oxide may participate in the inflammatory temporomandibular dysfunction mechanisms.


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Assistant Professor
Department of Medicine
Kristen Knutson is a biomedical anthropologist whose research focuses on the association between sleep and such cardiometabolic disease risks as hypertension, diabetes, or obesity. As a biomedical anthropologist, she considers human health to be more than simply a manifestation of underlying physiology. Her research focuses on how social factors, cultural practices, and complex behavior interact with sleep to impact cardiometabolic disease. In addition to examining the role sleep plays in disease risk, she is interested in identifying physiologic and/or social factors that predict impaired or insufficient sleep and in determining whether sleep may mediate health disparities.
She is widely published on the subject of sleep duration and quality, and is the recipient of numerous awards for her work, including first prize in the 2007 Hospes Sueños Award (in collaboration with the Spanish Sleep Society), two Sleep Research Society Trainee Merit-Based Travel Awards (2004, 2006), the 2004 Human Biology Society E. E. Hunt Student Prize, and the Initiatives for Women Award, University at Albany, State University of New York, in 2000.
Knutson holds a PhD in biomedical anthropology from the University at Albany, SUNY (2004), and a BA in English literature from McGill University (1992).
Knutson joined the University of Chicago faculty in 2010.


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Sheldon Historic Locations
The following historic locations are located in Sheldon, North Dakota. Please select a historic place in Sheldon to view detailed information including address information, historical signifiance, and much more.
North Dakota Historic Places
|Mizpah Lodge Building
260 Front St.
Sheldon, ND
Meeting Hall, Specialty Store, Business
North Dakota Historic Places


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America fiends to be a live-and-let-live kinda place. You believe what you want. I'll believe what I want.
Just don't knock on my door Saturday before 10 am with a Watchtower and a shit-eating grin.
Scientology and Transcendental Meditation have made BILLIONS smacking us up side of the head for decades with our own goofy, good-natured tolerance.
They carjack lives in nauseating ways, all the while hiding behind the skirts of "religious freedom."
This lets spirituality peddlers make absurd claims for their goods. But some skeptic or critic objects, they're intolerant.
And unfortunately, some good-naturedly tolerant Americans believe them. They criticize us for being bullies because they don't know our—or our abusive group's—history.
Tolerance doesn't mean accepting abuse, fraud, criminality.
No church, cult, or nation has my green light to cause harm. No matter what their beliefs.
Transcendental Meditation isn't a religion. It's a multi-BILLION-dollar corporation pushing a pricey line. Scientology the same.
I'm not required to tolerate their ads.
Thank God, I'm not required any more to tolerate their abuse.


text:
Logon Screen 2.31
Logon Screen is a small and simple program that will help you change your Windows 7 logon screen background with a push of a button. One point that makes this application different from other Logon Screen changers applications is the ability to integrate with the Windows 7 context menu.
2.31.exe file was thoroughly tested by our system on Sep 9, 2010 by the three antivirus programs and passed. Is absolutely clean, enjoy!
This archive is 100% safe to download and install.
Have a look at the full Logon Screen 2.31 antivirus scan reports.
(1.31MB, Extension: EXE)
Download alternate to Logon Screen solution
Look at the free or trial alternatives and similar apps to Logon Screen software by the tags. It's possible also to find substitutes for the most popular titles in the Operating System Utils category.
| Logon Studio | Logon Screen Changer | Logon Changer | Login Screen | Change Logon Screen |
History updates (Complete changelogs since the listing on this site)
2.31 [08-29-10]
Useful independent reviews and opinions of the users
Predicted future versions and notices:
The doDownload.com constantly monitors the update of all programs, including information from the Logon Screen 2.31 changelog file, however sometimes it can happen that data are not complete or are outdated.We assume that author continue's to develop 2.32 version with further advanced features, and soon you will be informed. Equally important 3.0 upgrades of the program we will continue to monitor. Full Logon Screen description has been compared with the overall software database and our algorithm has found the following applications (are showed below).


text:
Today's See You Next Tuesday is a particularly sad one for me to write, because it's about a group of people whom I loved and trusted and believed in, but who have begun to disappoint me with increasing frequency. That's right, writers of Cougar Town, I'm looking at you.
I have long stuck up for, defended, and promoted Cougar Town as an underrated sitcom. (Not least because it lends some social legitimacy to my own version of "Big Carl" — Target boxed Pinot Noir drunk from the spigot. Tastes like classy!)
And what's not to love? The cast is talented, there are tons of Scrubs cameos (Bill Lawrence created both shows) the writers are witty, sharp, and obsessed with wine. Courtney Cox has proven that she's capable of carrying an insular group-of-friends sitcom at any age on her tiny, lovable shoulders. Indeed, Cougar Town is all the best parts of Friends with a slightly meaner, more caustic writing streak, set against a slightly more realistic backdrop. (I say "more realistic" because it's not twenty-somethings living in giant, unaffordable New York apartments, and because these grown-ups cater most of their social events around drinking like real people, whereas no one on Friends ever drank, ever. But I say slightly because, like Friends, the group hangs out in the mornings before work [who does that??], no one ever seems to actually go to work anyway, and while everyone is constantly drinking from giant wine glasses, no one ever seems to actually get drunk, unlike real people.) But the cast is really wonderful, and Courtney Cox is the eternally lovable glue that holds them all together.
And that's just the problem. Cox's Jules Cobb is so likable and so adorable, but the writers keep putting her in emotionally devastating situations and expecting her to make light of it. For the first two seasons, the oft-mentioned joke was how often Bobby Cobb, Jules' ex-husband and inexplicable continued member of the cul de sac crew, had remorselessly cheated on her, largely with the knowledge of their neighbors and son. This is played off as a recurring gag, and Jules is expected to shrug her shoulders, wag her finger at him, ("Now, Bobby!"), and ultimately accept that her unemployed, boat-living bum of a cheating ex-husband has an intense bromance with her neighbor and constantly occupies her couch.
And that's just background. Then Jules started dating Grayson, cul de sac resident and reformed man-whore. Grayson wants kids, though, and first, Jules is forced to compromise to the idea of having a second child -- a child who would have been 19 years younger than her first kid, and birthed in her 40s -- when she really didn't want to. When Jules and Grayson got engaged in a thoughtful and romantic way, it seemed that Jules was finally getting a well-deserved karmic stroke of good luck. But good luck is apparently bad television, because then the writers introduced my most hated story-line ever: Grayson's illegitimate daughter with a ditzy one-night stand.
Maybe this was meant to avoid a storyline where Jules and Grayson conceive a September-of-their-lives infant and the inevitable viewer backlash? Maybe this was to avoid the tastelessness of a fake-pregnant Courtney Cox? Maybe the writers are watching Mad Men and realized fat-suited actresses make cheap and tacky plot points?
Anyway, Grayson has this illegitimate daughter (they did a paternity test so there's no backing out of this one) named "Tampa" and her mildly-retarded but large-breasted mother is suddenly around all the time. And, instead of being allowed to have a normal, confused, angry, bitter, pissed-off-but-trying-to-be-supportive reaction to this bit of life-changing news, everyone admonishes Jules for not being nicer to her fiance's baby momma. Grayson defends Tampa's mom, and everyone takes his side about how harmless and okay she is.
Then, THEN, in a moment that made me write this post and almost write a letter to the Cougar Town writers if I knew their addresses or thought anyone would read it or people still wrote letters anymore, Jules' son Travis makes out with Grayson's baby momma and then Grayson and Travis discuss how hot of a kisser she is and then everyone is mad at Jules for not wanting to listen to her fiance and her son discuss making out with the same woman who is also the mother of her fiance's child. WHAT IS WRONG WITH EVERYONE? WHY ARE YOU ALL THE WORST, LEAST EMOTIONALLY-REASONABLE PEOPLE EVER?
Writers, I know you want some quality babymamadrama, but why can't you give Jules a break, or at least use some of the drama as a window into character growth or emotional complexity and not just a vulgar plot vehicle. It's bad enough that Jules has to hang with her cheating ex-husband every day, its bad enough that you made her arrange a romantic date for him to take another woman (Scrub's Sarah Chalke!) on, it's bad enough that her fiance's man-whore past has caught up to him, but asking Jules to stay stoic and glib throughout the crashing blows is too much. It's okay for the characters on Cougar Town to sometimes be hilariously bad people (a la Seinfeld), but Jules has put up with so much, can't you just let someone say, "hey, this situation might be a little difficult for Jules right now guys so let's fill up Big Carl and have a Jules day?"
Cougar Town, your jokes, quips, group gimmicks, and pop culture nods are as on-point as ever. Even another terrible "let's pile on Jules" episode (where Travis wants to date Jules' personal assistant and best friend 10 years his senior and everyone admonishes Jules for disapproving and "getting in the way of love"), there was this amazing re-enactment of the The Perfect Storm on Bobby's boat during a hurricane. That scene was a total riot, right down to Ellie's sad exit line after poorly aiming a bucket of water: "I'm just an okay storm, I'm not a perfect storm."
But the driving plot of the show feels like really terrible, messy fan-fiction that everyone wishes they could just back out of. There was enough borderline soap-opera going on in this show with the twisted relationships, but it was never the main focus and it always managed to make for a few solid, self-aware punch lines. But now lovable Jules IS the punch line, and the other characters are rapidly descending into despicable, self-centered shallowness. And that, my friends, should be territory reserved strictly for Ellie.
I love you Cougar Town, I really do, and I will keep watching you. But please, get back to what you're good at: slut jokes, wine, and penny can.
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text: This is likely going to end up being a warranty issue, but I thought I would ask if anyone else had encountered this issue. Last night, I plugged my Surface RT into it's charger, and noticed the light did not come on. I tried re-seating the connector, no joy. Tried a spare charger - still no joy. I checked the battery system tray, and it still showed as being on battery - even stranger, it showed 100% battery despite having being turned on all day, and been used for Skype chats quite a bit in the evening. Upon restarting the device, it now won't boot - I get the Surface splash screen for a moment, then the white circle with the low battery icon .. then it powers itself back off. Won't charge - nothing. Given neither of my chargers are working, it seems to be a battery or charger circuit failure. Anyone encountered this before? -- RC


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Why are there double train tracks on railroad bridges? Hey there! Recently, a question has been bugging me, I'm sure a lot of...
Sabtu, 02 Maret 2013
Kamis, 01 Maret 2012
Dimensions, Aren't They Fun?
Diposting oleh bedjo bedjan di 08.56
Dimensions, Aren't They Fun? Howdy readers! Fission here to tell you the reality of the many dimensions. Please bare in mind the...
Langganan: Postingan (Atom)


text:
Rang de love – Episode 2
Hey guys. Meet me sona. Yesterday I told one part of my story. Today i will start with introduction of the story. Mt story contains only few characters. But they will play major role. So i will start now.
The story starts with coming of one police van. Police is saying to his sub-ordinate that in Kolkata there is full traffic so take care of it. That police will stops near one house. The officer will get down & knocks the door. One person will open the door.
Police: R u sanskaar?
Person: …………..
Police: I am asking u only. R u sanskaar?
He comes forward & says yes I am sanskaar. Police holds his collar & takes him to station & pushes him in cell. That night full he will be in station.
Constable: Good morning sir.
Police: Good morning. Did he say anything?
Cons: No sir.
Then police takes stick & goes to him & asks hey where r ur friends?
Sans: I don't know.
Police holds his collar & asks again where they are?
Sans: I dnt know.
Police gets angry on him & gives him a tight slap.
Police: I know that u know it. They r ur best friends right.
Sans: I don't know.
He again beats him hard & says u dnt know them ha. Dnt tell me lies. Then he leaves him & goes. Sans is in pool of blood. Then he starts saying his story.
Yes for every normal there will be one story. Sometimes they also have crime stories. Behind every crime story there will be one girl.
Then they will show one beautiful girls swinging in a swinging bed. She is so beautiful in white sleeveless laced short dress. She was smiling beautifully.
Then scene shifts to one colony in Kolkata. In this colony one day in C block house all media people will be present there. There one incident has takes place. One girl is attempted to rape. All are talking about it. Police will have doubt on one person & also they will get proof of cool drikn glass where they mixed sleeping tablets.
Then one new character will be introduced. He is sailesh. He will take photos in any situation.
Another character sriketh if he says truth also no body will believe him. Because he will talk only nonsense.
They says to us that they are going to banglore & leaves from there.
Then scene shifts to one Atm center where one lady is going in. She makes her child to sit on bike. Then two persons will close mouth of security guard & one new character will enter in & asks what the name of the girl is?
He says her to turn back & see. When she sees those 2 persons are keeping knife to that girl. She gets afraid.
He says draw money then your baby will be fine. She follows him & gives him money.
He is subhash. He is the main person in the gang. The three will escape from their nicely.
Then sans will be seen by cooking. Those three are his friends. Our sans only knows where they are.
Sans likes cooking. He took diploma in cooking. Oil less chicken is his speciality. He wants to go to Singapore & to join in job in star cruise as a cook. He is trying for visa.
His mother will be seen. She is a nurse. Only he & his mother will be there. Ravikanth will be in another place. He is sans father & he hates his father. Because he left them & staying with another woman.
Mom: What r u doing beta?
Sans: Chicken wings fry mom.
Mom: Again for ur friends ha. How many times did i told u not to talk with them. I don't like them at all. Colony people are giving complaints on them. They are idiots. Please leave them.
She leaves. He thinks that after her only they will take care of him. He goes to them by taking those wings & some beer. He will go to one secret place where they will stay after robbery.
They will take that wings & will give him his share in robbery.
Thats it guys. Swara already met him yesterday. There story will also start soon. Please comment.


text:
Author: hidaka_yuushi
Length: Chaptered
Genre: Angst
Rating: PG-13
I thought my love was enough… to love you, to defend you, to wait for you…But now I realized that it isn't anymore… and it's not enough for me to even love me… that's why I've found myself someone who can love me enough… and he is.
Please, forget me and forgive me
If forgetting and forgiving are always that easy to do
Chapter 6
The restaurant held one of the fondest memories that Yoochun ever had. Well, two if you counted the happy past time he usually spent with his parents during weekend to have a reward for being a good boy throughout the week… That was ages ago… when this restaurant was still nothing but a modest small restaurant.
But the memory that prompted him to buy this restaurant in the first place was the image of Junsu's delighted face… in this very same restaurant, that evening… when he tried to be as suave as possible and maintain his cool aura while fumbling throughout his speech.
That was the day where they officially became a couple.
That was the only reason why Yoochun bought this restaurant as the first investment he made when he finally earned enough money.
Although he knew that he might never get Junsu back, at least he could still retain his memory of him as much as possible…
20 years ago… after he found out that Junsu had simply vanished from the surface of the earth, his first thought was that Junsu was sulking… after all it was common for your boyfriend to be mad at you for always drinking and sleeping around…
But not once the thought of Junsu leaving him permanently ever crossed his mind.
Not after 2 months later when he was forced to face the fact that he had really lost Junsu.
And even after that, his mind still rejected the possibility of Junsu leaving him forever… He couldn't live without him, and he was sure that Junsu was the same.
(and now when he thought back about it, only a bitter smile formed on his lips… How foolish he was when he was young…)
He thought… he believed that Junsu was only mad at him for being such a useless person… He had absolute faith that after he had changed for the better, Junsu would come back again to him… sooner or later…
Sooner or later…
Which turned out to be never.
But he didn't know that before. So he worked his ass off… applying for many jobs and got a good employment. Undertook many projects and stayed for many overtime periods…
In 3 years, he had changed from a nearly homeless person to a mid-level manager.
And he still believed that Junsu would come back to him soon.
Until the fated wedding invitation came and ripped out the dreams he had based his life on.
He nearly quitted his job then. Nearly decided to just go back to his old lifestyle… club-hopping… mindless flirting… even more mindless fucking… anything to drown his problems and misery…
(Which he realized that his whole life actually was, starting from the day he let Junsu out from his life)
But… he made a promise… to keep waiting for Junsu… to watch over him even from far… And he realized that as much as he wanted to just waste his life away to temporarily forget the bleakness, he had a promise to keep.
So he went back to continue… living in a monotony, living in his work, living so he could catch a glimpse of Junsu in the meetings, the dinner party, the parents-teacher meetings…
And he forced to tell himself that it was enough.
And after 17 years, he had lied to himself so much that it was enough for him to actually believe it.
And now this young man offered him something he never even dared to dream of.
"Wh…" He cleared his throat to force the stuck words out. "What are you saying, young man?" His voice came out harsher than he intended it to be, judging from the flinch on Jung Sang Ho's face. But Yoochun didn't really care whether he hurt the youth's feeling or not. This man had just uttered a sentence that might change his life forever. He gave Yoochun a dangerous thing…
A hope, a dream, to get something more from Junsu, to wish to get something more from Junsu.
"You can't joke on this kind of thing!" Another unintended snap.
"I'm not joking!" The young man showed an impressive amount of guts and bravery… courtesy of both of his fathers' characters this time.
"Yoochun-sshi…" Sang Ho softened his words again. "Please, listen to what I have to say… I'm serious about what I said before and it's not only my suggestion. It's my sister and brother's as well…
"And he leaned forward to plant a fix stare on the now shell-shocked older man. "And it was my father's wish too…"
"Please take care of my Junsu-appa… " He sat back down and started to fiddle with his hands.
"Junsu-appa… although he tries to deny it, to hide it, but we all know that he's dying inside… After Yunho-appa…died, he's like someone who lost his reason to live…"
"he practically gave my whole life back!...."
"Well, your father is his life…" Yoochun said drily, earning an equally dry smile from the young man.
"He was… and maybe he is… But now Yunho-appa had passed away, Junsu-appa needs to find a new reason to live! I know that, you know that, even Yunho-appa knew that! He's practically wasting his life away like this!"
Yoochun bit back a sarcastic laugh that had threatened to escape his lips. "And you think that I can give him that back? Don't you know that he's the one who left me in the first place? He hates me for betraying him before."
"He hated you before," Sang Ho's voice was certain and definite. "He's doesn't anymore. And don't you realize that he has started to open his heart for you again?" It was heartening really, to see the son of your 'so called rival' had more conviction that you could rekindle the long lost relationship with your ex boyfriend.
But Yoochun had stopped dreaming and hoping long ago.
"Listen, kid," now his tone was downright demeaning. "Your appa doesn't want to have anything to do with me… and I know a lost cause when I see it…"
"Then why don't you stop waiting for him?!"
That question set Yoochun aback. Why didn't he? Was it because of a mere simple promise? Really? After 15 years? What kind of promise worth 15 years of commitment?
But Yoochun knew that he just couldn't start to move on… not due to lack of trying from his side. He tried his best, his hardest to just move on from Junsu. He tried to accept the offer from the men and women who threw themselves shamelessly on to his bed, tried to have a relationship with some decent ones…
But he just couldn't move on. Those short relationships and one night stands turned out to be just that… short relationships and one night stands, nothing more.
Seeing Yoochun fall into silence gave Sang Ho more fuel to continue. "Please… I, we, have seen that now you and Junsu-appa had started back some kind of friendship… an awkward and uneasy one… but it was there nonetheless… It's just… both of you are too scared to let it grow further… "
The much older man wanted to laugh at his predicament. At 42 years old, he was not getting a lecture on his love life from a mere 18 year old?
But he wanted to believe… so much…
His life had been so empty, so meaningless, so redundant…
If only… what this kid said was the truth…
Could he start dreaming again? Start believing that it was finally his turn to begin to live again?
"I'm listening…"
~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:A/N I feel that I should update before my last paper... I scared I will have no time after that... too busy partying around! hahaha... And I will be flying to Turkey and Egypt on the 6th until around 15th... and I don't know whether I will have time (and internet connection) to update the story... so I will try to update as much as possible^^ hehehe
Also, I wanted to chase after Junsu in the airport tomorrow... even finished my studying today! But apparently our duck butt decided to fly off today T_T... haizh... next year I'm going to chase after them for sure! hahaha
so yeah, please do enjoy the chapter! and don't forget to comment! Thanks a lot!


text:
Everyone tells you that the first few weeks are difficult. When I was pregnant, all my friends with children told me variations of "it's so much easier when they're on the inside." I knew that for me it would be true enough: I had an "easy," happy pregnancy, but I was anxious about le Petit's arrival. Before he was born I kept telling him to be patient with his mom, that I had no idea what I was doing and would surely be a klutz at first. I promised I'd apply myself and learn fast.
However anxious I'd been, the first six weeks were even more difficult than I'd imagined. I need sleep, I need predictability, or so I thought: I improvised, we made it. On le Petit's two-month birthday I still felt more or less the same way I did when I finished the Paris Marathon: exhausted, amazed that I'd survived, and wondering if I'd just signed up to do the stupidest thing I'd ever attempted in my life.
But somewhere along the way le Petit started smiling. And talking to us. He addresses us with such earnest "arreughs" that we can't help but pay attention.
I'll also admit that after a month and a half of being taken care of by my husband, my mother-in-law, and my husband's aunt, I was dreading my husband's return to work full time. I didn't know how well I'd do on my own all day with le Petit. Indeed, the first days were stressful, tiring, but slowly I learned the tricks I needed to make it work.
And then one day last week it all clicked into place. I went to the hopital for a postnatal meeting and ended up as the only mother who showed up, so I had a private consultation with the children's nurse. She gave me some breastfeeding advice, then reassured me that in general I was doing just fine. And it suddenly occurred to me that she was right.
After the meeting, le Petit and I went on our near-daily walk along the Seine. It was a beautifully sunny day, and Paris was bathed in a kind of golden sunlight particular to September. Le Petit was hungry so we stopped in a park. We sat on a bench along the river, where le Petit stared up happily at the trees and I watched the barges go by. He finished nursing and I sat him on my lap and leaned over him and held him close.
The stress and fatigue of the last two months evaporated, at least for that moment, and all that was left was joy. The joy of being his mother. The joy of sharing a perfect autumn day with him for the very first time.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Posted by Parisienne Mais Presque at 11:44 AM
Labels: Le Petit
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text:
Dr. Plante's compassion and devotion to patient care is well known and has been recognized with the Patient's Choice Award and Compassionate Doctor Recognition Award.
Reading, MA (PRWEB) May 21, 2014
The Fertility Centers of New England is proud to announce that Beth Plante, M.D. has joined the practice as their newest Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility Specialist. Dr. Plante is board-certified in Obstetrics and Gynecology in Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility.
Dr. Plante joins the Fertility Centers of New England from the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and Tufts University School of Medicine, where she served as a clinical assistant professor in their combined program in Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility. She has been the winner of numerous teaching and clinical awards, including the Berlex Best Teaching Resident Award, Patient's Choice Award, and Compassionate Doctor Recognition Award.
"Dr. Plante's compassion and devotion to patient care is well known in the Providence and Boston communities and surrounding region," said Fertility Centers of New England President and CEO Joseph A. Hill, M.D. "Dr. Plante shares our vision and commitment to helping people build healthy families one successful pregnancy at a time by making infertility care more accessible and more affordable without compromising the personalized and compassionate care patients deserve."
Bringing extensive experience to her new position, Dr. Plante's clinical and research interests include infertility, IVF treatment and polycystic ovarian syndrome. She is available for appointments throughout Massachusetts in our Boston, Danvers, Dedham, Reading and Westborough locations.
In addition to accepting all insurance plans, the Fertility Centers of New England has been named a Center of Excellence for IVF treatment by both OptumHealth and Aetna Healthcare. The Fertility Centers of New England offers patients without infertility insurance coverage free initial consultations and access to their IVF Assist program. This program for self pay patients is the most comprehensive and affordable option for IVF available.
"We are so confident in our IVF pregnancy success rates," said Fertility Centers of New England Chief Operating Officer, Brian E. Miller, Ph.D., "should pregnancy not occur after two attempts, we will provide the third cycle free."
About Fertility Centers of New England
The Fertility Centers of New England is an international leader in the evaluation, diagnosis, and treatment of infertility. We combine advanced reproductive technologies with a comforting, supportive environment to give patients the personal care they deserve. The Fertility Centers of New England has ten convenient locations for treatment and cycle monitoring throughout New England. We accept all insurance plans and offer a range of options for self-pay patients, including donor oocyte cycles. Patients interested in obtaining additional information about the Fertility Centers of New England may call our center at 877-877-9901 or visit us at http://www.bostonfertilitycenter.com/.
Media inquiries: Please contact Brian E. Miller, Ph.D. at millerb(at)fertilitycenter(dot)com or 781-942-7000 Ext. 631.