There will be Purple Hearts awarded to troops injured during the Jan. 8 Iranian missile barrage on the al-Asad airbase in Iraq, a defense official told Military Times.

By Harriet Gross Courtesy of Aeon What’s not to like about gardening? It’s a great way to get outdoors, away from everyday routines, and to exercise your creativity. It’s good for your health, whatever your age, and gardeners tend to be … Continue reading →

Since the introduction of Node.js by Ryan Dahl at the European JSConf on 8 November 2009, it has seen wide usage across the tech industry. Companies such as Netflix, Uber, and LinkedIn give credibility to the claim that Node.js can withstand a high amount of traffic and concurrency. Armed with basic knowledge, beginner and intermediate developers of Node.js struggle with many things: “It’s just a runtime!” “It has event loops!

We study the geometry and topology of exotic Springer fibers for orbits corresponding to one-row bipartitions from an explicit, combinatorial point of view. This includes a detailed analysis of the structure of the irreducible components and their intersections as well as the construction of an explicit affine paving. Moreover, we compute the ring structure of cohomology by constructing a CW-complex homotopy equivalent to the exotic Springer fiber. This homotopy equivalent space admits an action of the type C Weyl group inducing Kato's original exotic Springer representation on cohomology. Our results are described in terms of the diagrammatics of the one-boundary Temperley-Lieb algebra (also known as the blob algebra). This provides a first step in generalizing the geometric versions of Khovanov's arc algebra to the exotic setting.

In this article, we prove that if $R$ is a finitely generated ring over $mathbb{Z}$ of dimension $d, dgeq2, frac{1}{d!}in R$, then any unimodular row over $R[X]$ of length $d+1$ can be mapped to a factorial row by elementary transformations.

An element in a ring $R$ is called clear if it is the sum of unit-regular element and unit. An associative ring is clear if every its element is clear. In this paper we defined clear rings and extended many results to wider class. Finally, we proved that a commutative B'ezout domain is an elementary divisor ring if and only if every full matrix order 2 over it is nontrivial clear.

In this paper, we give a criterion of the Gorenstein property of the Ehrhart ring of the stable set polytope of an h-perfect graph: the Ehrhart ring of the stable set polytope of an h-perfect graph $G$ is Gorenstein if and only if (1) sizes of maximal cliques are constant (say $n$) and (2) (a) $n=1$, (b) $n=2$ and there is no odd cycle without chord and length at least 7 or (c) $ngeq 3$ and there is no odd cycle without chord and length at least 5.

Given a standard graded polynomial ring over a commutative Noetherian ring $A$, we prove that the cohomological dimension and the height of the ideals defining any of its Veronese subrings are equal. This result is due to Ogus when $A$ is a field of characteristic zero, and follows from a result of Peskine and Szpiro when $A$ is a field of positive characteristic; our result applies, for example, when $A$ is the ring of integers.

Hearing is often believed to be more sensitive than touch. This assertion is based on a comparison of sensitivities to weak stimuli. The respective stimuli, however, are not easily comparable since hearing is gauged using acoustic pressure and touch using skin displacement. We show that under reasonable assumptions the auditory and tactile detection thresholds can be reconciled on a level playing field. The results indicate that the capacity of touch and hearing to detect weak stimuli varies according to the size of a sensed object as well as to the frequency of its oscillations. In particular, touch is found to be more effective than hearing at detecting small and slow objects.

A k-proper edge-coloring of a graph G is called adjacent vertex-distinguishing if any two adjacent vertices are distinguished by the set of colors appearing in the edges incident to each vertex. The smallest value k for which G admits such coloring is denoted by $chi$'a (G). We prove that $chi$'a (G) = 2R + 1 for most circulant graphs Cn([[1, R]]).

Event-related desynchronization and synchronization (ERD/S) and movement-related cortical potential (MRCP) play an important role in brain-computer interfaces (BCI) for lower limb rehabilitation, particularly in standing and sitting. However, little is known about the differences in the cortical activation between standing and sitting, especially how the brain's intention modulates the pre-movement sensorimotor rhythm as they do for switching movements. In this study, we aim to investigate the decoding of continuous EEG rhythms during action observation (AO), motor imagery (MI), and motor execution (ME) for standing and sitting. We developed a behavioral task in which participants were instructed to perform both AO and MI/ME in regard to the actions of sit-to-stand and stand-to-sit. Our results demonstrated that the ERD was prominent during AO, whereas ERS was typical during MI at the alpha band across the sensorimotor area. A combination of the filter bank common spatial pattern (FBCSP) and support vector machine (SVM) for classification was used for both offline and pseudo-online analyses. The offline analysis indicated the classification of AO and MI providing the highest mean accuracy at 82.73$pm$2.38\% in stand-to-sit transition. By applying the pseudo-online analysis, we demonstrated the higher performance of decoding neural intentions from the MI paradigm in comparison to the ME paradigm. These observations led us to the promising aspect of using our developed tasks based on the integration of both AO and MI to build future exoskeleton-based rehabilitation systems.

Existing deep learning methods for image deblurring typically train models using pairs of sharp images and their blurred counterparts. However, synthetically blurring images do not necessarily model the genuine blurring process in real-world scenarios with sufficient accuracy. To address this problem, we propose a new method which combines two GAN models, i.e., a learning-to-Blur GAN (BGAN) and learning-to-DeBlur GAN (DBGAN), in order to learn a better model for image deblurring by primarily learning how to blur images. The first model, BGAN, learns how to blur sharp images with unpaired sharp and blurry image sets, and then guides the second model, DBGAN, to learn how to correctly deblur such images. In order to reduce the discrepancy between real blur and synthesized blur, a relativistic blur loss is leveraged. As an additional contribution, this paper also introduces a Real-World Blurred Image (RWBI) dataset including diverse blurry images. Our experiments show that the proposed method achieves consistently superior quantitative performance as well as higher perceptual quality on both the newly proposed dataset and the public GOPRO dataset.

Recursed is a 2D puzzle platform video game featuring treasure chests that, when jumped into, instantiate a room that can later be exited (similar to function calls), optionally generating a jar that returns back to that room (similar to continuations). We prove that Recursed is RE-complete and thus undecidable (not recursive) by a reduction from the Post Correspondence Problem. Our reduction is "practical": the reduction from PCP results in fully playable levels that abide by all constraints governing levels (including the 15x20 room size) designed for the main game. Our reduction is also "efficient": a Turing machine can be simulated by a Recursed level whose size is linear in the encoding size of the Turing machine and whose solution length is polynomial in the running time of the Turing machine.

It has recently been shown that word embeddings encode social biases, with a harmful impact on downstream tasks. However, to this point there has been no similar work done in the field of graph embeddings. We present the first study on social bias in knowledge graph embeddings, and propose a new metric suitable for measuring such bias. We conduct experiments on Wikidata and Freebase, and show that, as with word embeddings, harmful social biases related to professions are encoded in the embeddings with respect to gender, religion, ethnicity and nationality. For example, graph embeddings encode the information that men are more likely to be bankers, and women more likely to be homekeepers. As graph embeddings become increasingly utilized, we suggest that it is important the existence of such biases are understood and steps taken to mitigate their impact.

We give an efficient algorithm for robustly clustering of a mixture of two arbitrary Gaussians, a central open problem in the theory of computationally efficient robust estimation, assuming only that the the means of the component Gaussians are well-separated or their covariances are well-separated. Our algorithm and analysis extend naturally to robustly clustering mixtures of well-separated strongly logconcave distributions. The mean separation required is close to the smallest possible to guarantee that most of the measure of each component can be separated by some hyperplane (for covariances, it is the same condition in the second degree polynomial kernel). We also show that for Gaussian mixtures, separation in total variation distance suffices to achieve robust clustering. Our main tools are a new identifiability criterion based on isotropic position and the Fisher discriminant, and a corresponding Sum-of-Squares convex programming relaxation, of fixed degree.

Recent beyond worst-case optimal join algorithms Minesweeper and its generalization Tetris have brought the theory of indexing and join processing together by developing a geometric framework for joins. These algorithms take as input an index $mathcal{B}$, referred to as a box cover, that stores output gaps that can be inferred from traditional indexes, such as B+ trees or tries, on the input relations. The performances of these algorithms highly depend on the certificate of $mathcal{B}$, which is the smallest subset of gaps in $mathcal{B}$ whose union covers all of the gaps in the output space of a query $Q$. We study how to generate box covers that contain small size certificates to guarantee efficient runtimes for these algorithms. First, given a query $Q$ over a set of relations of size $N$ and a fixed set of domain orderings for the attributes, we give a $ ilde{O}(N)$-time algorithm called GAMB which generates a box cover for $Q$ that is guaranteed to contain the smallest size certificate across any box cover for $Q$. Second, we show that finding a domain ordering to minimize the box cover size and certificate is NP-hard through a reduction from the 2 consecutive block minimization problem on boolean matrices. Our third contribution is a $ ilde{O}(N)$-time approximation algorithm called ADORA to compute domain orderings, under which one can compute a box cover of size $ ilde{O}(K^r)$, where $K$ is the minimum box cover for $Q$ under any domain ordering and $r$ is the maximum arity of any relation. This guarantees certificates of size $ ilde{O}(K^r)$. We combine ADORA and GAMB with Tetris to form a new algorithm we call TetrisReordered, which provides several new beyond worst-case bounds. On infinite families of queries, TetrisReordered's runtimes are unboundedly better than the bounds stated in prior work.

We argue that "Question Answering with Knowledge Base" and "Question Answering over Linked Data" are currently two instances of the same problem, despite one explicitly declares to deal with Linked Data. We point out the lack of existing methods to evaluate question answering on datasets which exploit external links to the rest of the cloud or share common schema. To this end, we propose the creation of new evaluation settings to leverage the advantages of the Semantic Web to achieve AI-complete question answering.

Predicate constraints of general-purpose knowledge bases (KBs) like Wikidata, DBpedia and Freebase are often limited to subproperty, domain and range constraints. In this demo we showcase CounQER, a system that illustrates the alignment of counting predicates, like staffSize, and enumerating predicates, like workInstitution^{-1} . In the demonstration session, attendees can inspect these alignments, and will learn about the importance of these alignments for KB question answering and curation. CounQER is available at https://counqer.mpi-inf.mpg.de/spo.

In this paper, we study the problem of fair classification in the presence of prior probability shifts, where the training set distribution differs from the test set. This phenomenon can be observed in the yearly records of several real-world datasets, such as recidivism records and medical expenditure surveys. If unaccounted for, such shifts can cause the predictions of a classifier to become unfair towards specific population subgroups. While the fairness notion called Proportional Equality (PE) accounts for such shifts, a procedure to ensure PE-fairness was unknown.

In this work, we propose a method, called CAPE, which provides a comprehensive solution to the aforementioned problem. CAPE makes novel use of prevalence estimation techniques, sampling and an ensemble of classifiers to ensure fair predictions under prior probability shifts. We introduce a metric, called prevalence difference (PD), which CAPE attempts to minimize in order to ensure PE-fairness. We theoretically establish that this metric exhibits several desirable properties.

We evaluate the efficacy of CAPE via a thorough empirical evaluation on synthetic datasets. We also compare the performance of CAPE with several popular fair classifiers on real-world datasets like COMPAS (criminal risk assessment) and MEPS (medical expenditure panel survey). The results indicate that CAPE ensures PE-fair predictions, while performing well on other performance metrics.

This paper provides a method for the simultaneous topology optimization of parts and their corresponding joint locations in an assembly. Therein, the joint locations are not discrete and predefined, but continuously movable. The underlying coupling equations allow for connecting dissimilar meshes and avoid the need for remeshing when joint locations change. The presented method models the force transfer at a joint location not only by using single spring elements but accounts for the size and type of the joints. When considering riveted or bolted joints, the local part geometry at the joint location consists of holes that are surrounded by material. For spot welds, the joint locations are filled with material and may be smaller than for bolts. The presented method incorporates these material and clearance zones into the simultaneously running topology optimization of the parts. Furthermore, failure of joints may be taken into account at the optimization stage, yielding assemblies connected in a fail-safe manner.

Cassava a major food crop in many parts of Africa, has majorly been affected by Cassava Brown Streak Disease (CBSD). The disease affects tuberous roots and presents symptoms that include a yellow/brown, dry, corky necrosis within the starch-bearing tissues. Cassava breeders currently depend on visual inspection to score necrosis in roots based on a qualitative score which is quite subjective. In this paper we present an approach to automate root necrosis scoring using deep convolutional neural networks with semantic segmentation. Our experiments show that the UNet model performs this task with high accuracy achieving a mean Intersection over Union (IoU) of 0.90 on the test set. This method provides a means to use a quantitative measure for necrosis scoring on root cross-sections. This is done by segmentation and classifying the necrotized and non-necrotized pixels of cassava root cross-sections without any additional feature engineering.

In this paper we analyze a continuous version of the maximal covering location problem, in which the facilities are required to be interconnected by means of a graph structure in which two facilities are allowed to be linked if a given distance is not exceed. We provide a mathematical programming framework for the problem and different resolution strategies. First, we propose a Mixed Integer Non Linear Programming formulation, and derive properties of the problem that allow us to project the continuous variables out avoiding the nonlinear constraints, resulting in an equivalent pure integer programming formulation. Since the number of constraints in the integer programming formulation is large and the constraints are, in general, difficult to handle, we propose two branch-&-cut approaches that avoid the complete enumeration of the constraints resulting in more efficient procedures. We report the results of an extensive battery of computational experiments comparing the performance of the different approaches.

Making changes to a program to optimize its performance is an unscalable task that relies entirely upon human intuition and experience. In addition, companies operating at large scale are at a stage where no single individual understands the code controlling its systems, and for this reason, making changes to improve performance can become intractably difficult. In this paper, a learning system is introduced that provides AI assistance for finding recommended changes to a program. Specifically, it is shown how the evaluative feedback, delayed-reward performance programming domain can be effectively formulated via the Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) framework. It is then shown that established methods from computational games for using learning to expedite tree-search computation can be adapted to speed up computing recommended program alterations. Estimates of expected utility from MCTS trees built for previous problems are used to learn a sampling policy that remains effective across new problems, thus demonstrating transferability of optimization knowledge. This formulation is applied to the Apache Spark distributed computing environment, and a preliminary result is observed that the time required to build a search tree for finding recommendations is reduced by up to a factor of 10x.

For a long time after her injury, soccer great Briana Scurry "hid her hell." Now, she knows that that was not the right thing to do and she wants to teach others to become more open and understanding about concussion.

Node.js 14 is available now. We wanted to get more context and details about the state of Node, and why developers should care about Node.js 14. We talked with Bethany Griggs, Node.js Technical Steering Committee member and Open-source Engineer at IBM, to find out more. 

Bethany has been a Node Core Collaborator for over two years. She contributes to the open-source Node.js runtime and is a member of the Node.js Release Working Group where she is involved with auditing commits for the long-term support (LTS) release lines and the creation of releases. 

The apps and devices you use are conducting surveillance with your every move Sure, you lock your home, and you probably don't share your deepest secrets with random strangers.…

We could blame the enormous — and justifiable — success of the Lego flicks for the existence of Playmobil: The Movie, but that would be unfair to all the shameless knockoffs and cinematic coattail riders.…

March is obviously going to be the busiest month for any purveyor of traditional Irish music, and with St. Patrick's Day right around the corner, Spokane's Floating Crowbar has multiple gigs crowding the week's calendar.…

Thirty years into his distinguished career as one of the world's great guitar players, Joe Bonamassa is still finding new ways to showcase his skills, explore new sounds and stretch his artistic horizons.…

You'll be forgiven if, during the daily deluge of COVID-19-related updates, you didn't notice that some seriously great musicians recently booked shows in and around Spokane for later in the year.…

Tours are on hold.…

Pardon the interruption for a little fanboy boosterism, but one of my favorite all-time bands surprise-dropped a brand new album on Bandcamp today, and damned if I'm not going to tell you to go listen to it. The band is X, pioneering Los Angeles legends who helped establish the West Coast punk scene in the late '70s and early '80s with a sound that was rooted in American rock's roots.…

The Spokane Comedy Club might be quiet right now, but there are still laughs to be had on Zoom, and not just from watching your co-workers try to navigate the online meeting platform. Saturday night, and again next Saturday, the comedy club is hosting Comedians Doing Comedy: A Virtual Comedy Show.…

We've known that Hamilton was going to be part of the 2020-21 STCU Best of Broadway season for a while, but now we finally know the exact dates, as well as the rest of the featured shows for the season. Granted, the whole world has changed since WestCoast Entertainment announced Hamilton was coming to town back when they announced their 2019-20 season — a season that's been roiled, along with the rest of our lives, by the coronavirus pandemic.…

Two more residents who were staying at the Spokane Veterans Home have died of complications related to COVID-19, according to the Washington State Department of Veterans Affairs. There have now been five residents of the home who have died following their diagnosis of COVID-19.…

A coalition of immigrant-focused organizations has created the Spokane Relief Fund for Undocumented Immigrants, in order to help families who are unable to access federal aid during the coronavirus shutdowns. The partners sponsoring the work include the Spokane Immigrant Rights Coalition (SIRC), the Hispanic Business and Professional Association, Latinos en Spokane, Mujeres in Action and Raiz.…

Weeks after being raped at a wedding — an experience already wrapped in feelings of self-blame and fear — the 18-year-old Eastern Washington University student realized something else was wrong.…

The '20s issue The '20s are back, baby.…

A process has been developed for preparing 2-methoxymethyl-1,4-benzenediamine (IV-a), other compounds of formula (IV), and the salts thereof, all of which may be used as primary intermediates in compositions for dyeing keratin fibers.

The present invention relates to a process for preparing a compound of formula wherein: R2 is cycloalkyl or alkyl, each of which may be optionally substituted; Y is —CONR3R4, —CN or CO2R5; R3, R4 and R5 are each independently H or alkyl; n is 1 to 6; wherein said process comprising the steps of: (i) treating a compound of formula (IV), where R1 is alkyl, with a compound of formula (V) and forming a compound of formula (IIIb); (ii) treating said compound of formula (IIIb) with a compound of formula (I1) to form a compound of formula (I).

A process for preparing alkylated p-phenylenediamine having the steps of reacting aniline and nitrobenzene in presence of a complex base catalyst to obtain 4-aminodiphenylamine intermediates, hydrogenating the 4-aminodiphenylamine intermediates to 4-aminodiphenylamine in presence of a hydrogenation catalyst, and reductively alkylating the 4-aminodiphenylamine to alkylated p-phenylenediamine.

The invention relates to a method for preparing ring-halogenated N,N-dialkylbenzylamines and intermediates obtainable therefrom for preparing agrochemicals and pharmaceutically active ingredients.

Systems and methods for generating a tuple of structured data files are described herein. In one example, a method includes detecting an expression that describes a structure of a structured image using a constructor. The method can also include using an inference-rule based search strategy to identify a hierarchical arrangement of bounding boxes in the structured image that match the expression. Furthermore, the method can include generating a first tuple of structured data files based on the identified hierarchical arrangement of bounding boxes in the structured image.

The current application is directed to monitoring subsystems, and monitoring methods incorporated within the monitoring subsystems, that monitor operation of devices and systems in order to identify normal states and to quickly determine when a device or system transitions from a normal state to an abnormal state. The methods and monitoring components to which the current application is directed employ self-organizing maps and moving-average self-organizing maps to both characterize normal system behavior and to identify transitions to abnormal system behaviors.

Embodiments of the invention provide systems and methods for analyzing sequential data. The sequential data can comprise a sequence of data points arranged in a particular order and thus representing a sequence. A number of such sequences can be analyzed, for example, to identify patterns or commonalities within the sequences or portions of sequences represented by the data. According to one embodiment, a method of identifying patterns in sequences of data points can comprise reading a set of sequential data. The sequential data can comprises a plurality of sequences and each of the plurality of sequences can represent an ordered sequence of tokens. A dotplot representing matches between each sequence of the plurality sequences can be generated. One or more patterns within the sequential data can then be identified based on the dotplot.

In embodiments of the present invention improved capabilities are described for a computer program product embodied in a computer readable medium that, when executing on one or more computers, helps determine an unknown user's preferences through the use of internet based social interactive graphical representations on a computer facility by performing the steps of (1) ascertaining preferences of a plurality of users who are part of an internet based social interactive construct, wherein the plurality of users become a plurality of known users; (2) determining the internet based social interactive graphical representation for the plurality of known users; and (3) inferring the preferences of an unknown user present in the internet based social interactive graphical representation of the plurality of known users based on the interrelationships between the unknown user and the plurality of known users within the graphical representation.

Provided herein are processes for preparing estolides and estolide base oils from fatty acid reactants utilizing catalysts. Further provided herein are processes for preparing carboxylic esters from at least one carboxylic acid reactant and at least one olefin.