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A Gentle Introduction to Quantum Computing Algorithms with Applications to Universal Prediction. (arXiv:2005.03137v1 [quant-ph])

In this technical report we give an elementary introduction to Quantum Computing for non-physicists. In this introduction we describe in detail some of the foundational Quantum Algorithms including: the Deutsch-Jozsa Algorithm, Shor's Algorithm, Grocer Search, and Quantum Counting Algorithm and briefly the Harrow-Lloyd Algorithm. Additionally we give an introduction to Solomonoff Induction, a theoretically optimal method for prediction. We then attempt to use Quantum computing to find better algorithms for the approximation of Solomonoff Induction. This is done by using techniques from other Quantum computing algorithms to achieve a speedup in computing the speed prior, which is an approximation of Solomonoff's prior, a key part of Solomonoff Induction. The major limiting factors are that the probabilities being computed are often so small that without a sufficient (often large) amount of trials, the error may be larger than the result. If a substantial speedup in the computation of an approximation of Solomonoff Induction can be achieved through quantum computing, then this can be applied to the field of intelligent agents as a key part of an approximation of the agent AIXI.




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Evaluation, Tuning and Interpretation of Neural Networks for Meteorological Applications. (arXiv:2005.03126v1 [physics.ao-ph])

Neural networks have opened up many new opportunities to utilize remotely sensed images in meteorology. Common applications include image classification, e.g., to determine whether an image contains a tropical cyclone, and image translation, e.g., to emulate radar imagery for satellites that only have passive channels. However, there are yet many open questions regarding the use of neural networks in meteorology, such as best practices for evaluation, tuning and interpretation. This article highlights several strategies and practical considerations for neural network development that have not yet received much attention in the meteorological community, such as the concept of effective receptive fields, underutilized meteorological performance measures, and methods for NN interpretation, such as synthetic experiments and layer-wise relevance propagation. We also consider the process of neural network interpretation as a whole, recognizing it as an iterative scientist-driven discovery process, and breaking it down into individual steps that researchers can take. Finally, while most work on neural network interpretation in meteorology has so far focused on networks for image classification tasks, we expand the focus to also include networks for image translation.




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Unsupervised Multimodal Neural Machine Translation with Pseudo Visual Pivoting. (arXiv:2005.03119v1 [cs.CL])

Unsupervised machine translation (MT) has recently achieved impressive results with monolingual corpora only. However, it is still challenging to associate source-target sentences in the latent space. As people speak different languages biologically share similar visual systems, the potential of achieving better alignment through visual content is promising yet under-explored in unsupervised multimodal MT (MMT). In this paper, we investigate how to utilize visual content for disambiguation and promoting latent space alignment in unsupervised MMT. Our model employs multimodal back-translation and features pseudo visual pivoting in which we learn a shared multilingual visual-semantic embedding space and incorporate visually-pivoted captioning as additional weak supervision. The experimental results on the widely used Multi30K dataset show that the proposed model significantly improves over the state-of-the-art methods and generalizes well when the images are not available at the testing time.




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Strong replica symmetry in high-dimensional optimal Bayesian inference. (arXiv:2005.03115v1 [math.PR])

We consider generic optimal Bayesian inference, namely, models of signal reconstruction where the posterior distribution and all hyperparameters are known. Under a standard assumption on the concentration of the free energy, we show how replica symmetry in the strong sense of concentration of all multioverlaps can be established as a consequence of the Franz-de Sanctis identities; the identities themselves in the current setting are obtained via a novel perturbation of the prior distribution of the signal. Concentration of multioverlaps means that asymptotically the posterior distribution has a particularly simple structure encoded by a random probability measure (or, in the case of binary signal, a non-random probability measure). We believe that such strong control of the model should be key in the study of inference problems with underlying sparse graphical structure (error correcting codes, block models, etc) and, in particular, in the derivation of replica symmetric formulas for the free energy and mutual information in this context.




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Constrained de Bruijn Codes: Properties, Enumeration, Constructions, and Applications. (arXiv:2005.03102v1 [cs.IT])

The de Bruijn graph, its sequences, and their various generalizations, have found many applications in information theory, including many new ones in the last decade. In this paper, motivated by a coding problem for emerging memory technologies, a set of sequences which generalize sequences in the de Bruijn graph are defined. These sequences can be also defined and viewed as constrained sequences. Hence, they will be called constrained de Bruijn sequences and a set of such sequences will be called a constrained de Bruijn code. Several properties and alternative definitions for such codes are examined and they are analyzed as generalized sequences in the de Bruijn graph (and its generalization) and as constrained sequences. Various enumeration techniques are used to compute the total number of sequences for any given set of parameters. A construction method of such codes from the theory of shift-register sequences is proposed. Finally, we show how these constrained de Bruijn sequences and codes can be applied in constructions of codes for correcting synchronization errors in the $ell$-symbol read channel and in the racetrack memory channel. For this purpose, these codes are superior in their size on previously known codes.




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Scale-Equalizing Pyramid Convolution for Object Detection. (arXiv:2005.03101v1 [cs.CV])

Feature pyramid has been an efficient method to extract features at different scales. Development over this method mainly focuses on aggregating contextual information at different levels while seldom touching the inter-level correlation in the feature pyramid. Early computer vision methods extracted scale-invariant features by locating the feature extrema in both spatial and scale dimension. Inspired by this, a convolution across the pyramid level is proposed in this study, which is termed pyramid convolution and is a modified 3-D convolution. Stacked pyramid convolutions directly extract 3-D (scale and spatial) features and outperforms other meticulously designed feature fusion modules. Based on the viewpoint of 3-D convolution, an integrated batch normalization that collects statistics from the whole feature pyramid is naturally inserted after the pyramid convolution. Furthermore, we also show that the naive pyramid convolution, together with the design of RetinaNet head, actually best applies for extracting features from a Gaussian pyramid, whose properties can hardly be satisfied by a feature pyramid. In order to alleviate this discrepancy, we build a scale-equalizing pyramid convolution (SEPC) that aligns the shared pyramid convolution kernel only at high-level feature maps. Being computationally efficient and compatible with the head design of most single-stage object detectors, the SEPC module brings significant performance improvement ($>4$AP increase on MS-COCO2017 dataset) in state-of-the-art one-stage object detectors, and a light version of SEPC also has $sim3.5$AP gain with only around 7% inference time increase. The pyramid convolution also functions well as a stand-alone module in two-stage object detectors and is able to improve the performance by $sim2$AP. The source code can be found at https://github.com/jshilong/SEPC.




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Optimal Location of Cellular Base Station via Convex Optimization. (arXiv:2005.03099v1 [cs.IT])

An optimal base station (BS) location depends on the traffic (user) distribution, propagation pathloss and many system parameters, which renders its analytical study difficult so that numerical algorithms are widely used instead. In this paper, the problem is studied analytically. First, it is formulated as a convex optimization problem to minimize the total BS transmit power subject to quality-of-service (QoS) constraints, which also account for fairness among users. Due to its convex nature, Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions are used to characterize a globally-optimum location as a convex combination of user locations, where convex weights depend on user parameters, pathloss exponent and overall geometry of the problem. Based on this characterization, a number of closed-form solutions are obtained. In particular, the optimum BS location is the mean of user locations in the case of free-space propagation and identical user parameters. If the user set is symmetric (as defined in the paper), the optimal BS location is independent of pathloss exponent, which is not the case in general. The analytical results show the impact of propagation conditions as well as system and user parameters on optimal BS location and can be used to develop design guidelines.




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Inference with Choice Functions Made Practical. (arXiv:2005.03098v1 [cs.AI])

We study how to infer new choices from previous choices in a conservative manner. To make such inferences, we use the theory of choice functions: a unifying mathematical framework for conservative decision making that allows one to impose axioms directly on the represented decisions. We here adopt the coherence axioms of De Bock and De Cooman (2019). We show how to naturally extend any given choice assessment to such a coherent choice function, whenever possible, and use this natural extension to make new choices. We present a practical algorithm to compute this natural extension and provide several methods that can be used to improve its scalability.




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Heterogeneous Facility Location Games. (arXiv:2005.03095v1 [cs.GT])

We study heterogeneous $k$-facility location games. In this model there are $k$ facilities where each facility serves a different purpose. Thus, the preferences of the agents over the facilities can vary arbitrarily. Our goal is to design strategy proof mechanisms that place the facilities in a way to maximize the minimum utility among the agents. For $k=1$, if the agents' locations are known, we prove that the mechanism that places the facility on an optimal location is strategy proof. For $k geq 2$, we prove that there is no optimal strategy proof mechanism, deterministic or randomized, even when $k=2$ there are only two agents with known locations, and the facilities have to be placed on a line segment. We derive inapproximability bounds for deterministic and randomized strategy proof mechanisms. Finally, we focus on the line segment and provide strategy proof mechanisms that achieve constant approximation. All of our mechanisms are simple and communication efficient. As a byproduct we show that some of our mechanisms can be used to achieve constant factor approximations for other objectives as the social welfare and the happiness.




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Robust Trajectory and Transmit Power Optimization for Secure UAV-Enabled Cognitive Radio Networks. (arXiv:2005.03091v1 [cs.IT])

Cognitive radio is a promising technology to improve spectral efficiency. However, the secure performance of a secondary network achieved by using physical layer security techniques is limited by its transmit power and channel fading. In order to tackle this issue, a cognitive unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication network is studied by exploiting the high flexibility of a UAV and the possibility of establishing line-of-sight links. The average secrecy rate of the secondary network is maximized by robustly optimizing the UAV's trajectory and transmit power. Our problem formulation takes into account two practical inaccurate location estimation cases, namely, the worst case and the outage-constrained case. In order to solve those challenging non-convex problems, an iterative algorithm based on $mathcal{S}$-Procedure is proposed for the worst case while an iterative algorithm based on Bernstein-type inequalities is proposed for the outage-constrained case. The proposed algorithms can obtain effective suboptimal solutions of the corresponding problems. Our simulation results demonstrate that the algorithm under the outage-constrained case can achieve a higher average secrecy rate with a low computational complexity compared to that of the algorithm under the worst case. Moreover, the proposed schemes can improve the secure communication performance significantly compared to other benchmark schemes.




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A Multifactorial Optimization Paradigm for Linkage Tree Genetic Algorithm. (arXiv:2005.03090v1 [cs.NE])

Linkage Tree Genetic Algorithm (LTGA) is an effective Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) to solve complex problems using the linkage information between problem variables. LTGA performs well in various kinds of single-task optimization and yields promising results in comparison with the canonical genetic algorithm. However, LTGA is an unsuitable method for dealing with multi-task optimization problems. On the other hand, Multifactorial Optimization (MFO) can simultaneously solve independent optimization problems, which are encoded in a unified representation to take advantage of the process of knowledge transfer. In this paper, we introduce Multifactorial Linkage Tree Genetic Algorithm (MF-LTGA) by combining the main features of both LTGA and MFO. MF-LTGA is able to tackle multiple optimization tasks at the same time, each task learns the dependency between problem variables from the shared representation. This knowledge serves to determine the high-quality partial solutions for supporting other tasks in exploring the search space. Moreover, MF-LTGA speeds up convergence because of knowledge transfer of relevant problems. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm on two benchmark problems: Clustered Shortest-Path Tree Problem and Deceptive Trap Function. In comparison to LTGA and existing methods, MF-LTGA outperforms in quality of the solution or in computation time.




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Diagnosing the Environment Bias in Vision-and-Language Navigation. (arXiv:2005.03086v1 [cs.CL])

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires an agent to follow natural-language instructions, explore the given environments, and reach the desired target locations. These step-by-step navigational instructions are crucial when the agent is navigating new environments about which it has no prior knowledge. Most recent works that study VLN observe a significant performance drop when tested on unseen environments (i.e., environments not used in training), indicating that the neural agent models are highly biased towards training environments. Although this issue is considered as one of the major challenges in VLN research, it is still under-studied and needs a clearer explanation. In this work, we design novel diagnosis experiments via environment re-splitting and feature replacement, looking into possible reasons for this environment bias. We observe that neither the language nor the underlying navigational graph, but the low-level visual appearance conveyed by ResNet features directly affects the agent model and contributes to this environment bias in results. According to this observation, we explore several kinds of semantic representations that contain less low-level visual information, hence the agent learned with these features could be better generalized to unseen testing environments. Without modifying the baseline agent model and its training method, our explored semantic features significantly decrease the performance gaps between seen and unseen on multiple datasets (i.e. R2R, R4R, and CVDN) and achieve competitive unseen results to previous state-of-the-art models. Our code and features are available at: https://github.com/zhangybzbo/EnvBiasVLN




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Line Artefact Quantification in Lung Ultrasound Images of COVID-19 Patients via Non-Convex Regularisation. (arXiv:2005.03080v1 [eess.IV])

In this paper, we present a novel method for line artefacts quantification in lung ultrasound (LUS) images of COVID-19 patients. We formulate this as a non-convex regularisation problem involving a sparsity-enforcing, Cauchy-based penalty function, and the inverse Radon transform. We employ a simple local maxima detection technique in the Radon transform domain, associated with known clinical definitions of line artefacts. Despite being non-convex, the proposed method has guaranteed convergence via a proximal splitting algorithm and accurately identifies both horizontal and vertical line artefacts in LUS images. In order to reduce the number of false and missed detection, our method includes a two-stage validation mechanism, which is performed in both Radon and image domains. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method in comparison to the current state-of-the-art B-line identification method and show a considerable performance gain with 87% correctly detected B-lines in LUS images of nine COVID-19 patients. In addition, owing to its fast convergence, which takes around 12 seconds for a given frame, our proposed method is readily applicable for processing LUS image sequences.




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AVAC: A Machine Learning based Adaptive RRAM Variability-Aware Controller for Edge Devices. (arXiv:2005.03077v1 [eess.SY])

Recently, the Edge Computing paradigm has gained significant popularity both in industry and academia. Researchers now increasingly target to improve performance and reduce energy consumption of such devices. Some recent efforts focus on using emerging RRAM technologies for improving energy efficiency, thanks to their no leakage property and high integration density. As the complexity and dynamism of applications supported by such devices escalate, it has become difficult to maintain ideal performance by static RRAM controllers. Machine Learning provides a promising solution for this, and hence, this work focuses on extending such controllers to allow dynamic parameter updates. In this work we propose an Adaptive RRAM Variability-Aware Controller, AVAC, which periodically updates Wait Buffer and batch sizes using on-the-fly learning models and gradient ascent. AVAC allows Edge devices to adapt to different applications and their stages, to improve computation performance and reduce energy consumption. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed model can provide up to 29% increase in performance and 19% decrease in energy, compared to static controllers, using traces of real-life healthcare applications on a Raspberry-Pi based Edge deployment.




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Guided Policy Search Model-based Reinforcement Learning for Urban Autonomous Driving. (arXiv:2005.03076v1 [cs.RO])

In this paper, we continue our prior work on using imitation learning (IL) and model free reinforcement learning (RL) to learn driving policies for autonomous driving in urban scenarios, by introducing a model based RL method to drive the autonomous vehicle in the Carla urban driving simulator. Although IL and model free RL methods have been proved to be capable of solving lots of challenging tasks, including playing video games, robots, and, in our prior work, urban driving, the low sample efficiency of such methods greatly limits their applications on actual autonomous driving. In this work, we developed a model based RL algorithm of guided policy search (GPS) for urban driving tasks. The algorithm iteratively learns a parameterized dynamic model to approximate the complex and interactive driving task, and optimizes the driving policy under the nonlinear approximate dynamic model. As a model based RL approach, when applied in urban autonomous driving, the GPS has the advantages of higher sample efficiency, better interpretability, and greater stability. We provide extensive experiments validating the effectiveness of the proposed method to learn robust driving policy for urban driving in Carla. We also compare the proposed method with other policy search and model free RL baselines, showing 100x better sample efficiency of the GPS based RL method, and also that the GPS based method can learn policies for harder tasks that the baseline methods can hardly learn.




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Two-Grid Deflated Krylov Methods for Linear Equations. (arXiv:2005.03070v1 [math.NA])

An approach is given for solving large linear systems that combines Krylov methods with use of two different grid levels. Eigenvectors are computed on the coarse grid and used to deflate eigenvalues on the fine grid. GMRES-type methods are first used on both the coarse and fine grids. Then another approach is given that has a restarted BiCGStab (or IDR) method on the fine grid. While BiCGStab is generally considered to be a non-restarted method, it works well in this context with deflating and restarting. Tests show this new approach can be very efficient for difficult linear equations problems.




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Weakly-Supervised Neural Response Selection from an Ensemble of Task-Specialised Dialogue Agents. (arXiv:2005.03066v1 [cs.CL])

Dialogue engines that incorporate different types of agents to converse with humans are popular.

However, conversations are dynamic in the sense that a selected response will change the conversation on-the-fly, influencing the subsequent utterances in the conversation, which makes the response selection a challenging problem.

We model the problem of selecting the best response from a set of responses generated by a heterogeneous set of dialogue agents by taking into account the conversational history, and propose a emph{Neural Response Selection} method.

The proposed method is trained to predict a coherent set of responses within a single conversation, considering its own predictions via a curriculum training mechanism.

Our experimental results show that the proposed method can accurately select the most appropriate responses, thereby significantly improving the user experience in dialogue systems.




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Learning, transferring, and recommending performance knowledge with Monte Carlo tree search and neural networks. (arXiv:2005.03063v1 [cs.LG])

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.




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Overview of Surgical Simulation. (arXiv:2005.03011v1 [cs.HC])

Motivated by the current demand of clinical governance, surgical simulation is now a well-established modality for basic skills training and assessment. The practical deployment of the technique is a multi-disciplinary venture encompassing areas in engineering, medicine and psychology. This paper provides an overview of the key topics involved in surgical simulation and associated technical challenges. The paper discusses the clinical motivation for surgical simulation, the use of virtual environments for surgical training, model acquisition and simplification, deformable models, collision detection, tissue property measurement, haptic rendering and image synthesis. Additional topics include surgical skill training and assessment metrics as well as challenges facing the incorporation of surgical simulation into medical education curricula.




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Evaluating text coherence based on the graph of the consistency of phrases to identify symptoms of schizophrenia. (arXiv:2005.03008v1 [cs.CL])

Different state-of-the-art methods of the detection of schizophrenia symptoms based on the estimation of text coherence have been analyzed. The analysis of a text at the level of phrases has been suggested. The method based on the graph of the consistency of phrases has been proposed to evaluate the semantic coherence and the cohesion of a text. The semantic coherence, cohesion, and other linguistic features (lexical diversity, lexical density) have been taken into account to form feature vectors for the training of a model-classifier. The training of the classifier has been performed on the set of English-language interviews. According to the retrieved results, the impact of each feature on the output of the model has been analyzed. The results obtained can indicate that the proposed method based on the graph of the consistency of phrases may be used in the different tasks of the detection of mental illness.




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Computing-in-Memory for Performance and Energy Efficient Homomorphic Encryption. (arXiv:2005.03002v1 [cs.CR])

Homomorphic encryption (HE) allows direct computations on encrypted data. Despite numerous research efforts, the practicality of HE schemes remains to be demonstrated. In this regard, the enormous size of ciphertexts involved in HE computations degrades computational efficiency. Near-memory Processing (NMP) and Computing-in-memory (CiM) - paradigms where computation is done within the memory boundaries - represent architectural solutions for reducing latency and energy associated with data transfers in data-intensive applications such as HE. This paper introduces CiM-HE, a Computing-in-memory (CiM) architecture that can support operations for the B/FV scheme, a somewhat homomorphic encryption scheme for general computation. CiM-HE hardware consists of customized peripherals such as sense amplifiers, adders, bit-shifters, and sequencing circuits. The peripherals are based on CMOS technology, and could support computations with memory cells of different technologies. Circuit-level simulations are used to evaluate our CiM-HE framework assuming a 6T-SRAM memory. We compare our CiM-HE implementation against (i) two optimized CPU HE implementations, and (ii) an FPGA-based HE accelerator implementation. When compared to a CPU solution, CiM-HE obtains speedups between 4.6x and 9.1x, and energy savings between 266.4x and 532.8x for homomorphic multiplications (the most expensive HE operation). Also, a set of four end-to-end tasks, i.e., mean, variance, linear regression, and inference are up to 1.1x, 7.7x, 7.1x, and 7.5x faster (and 301.1x, 404.6x, 532.3x, and 532.8x more energy efficient). Compared to CPU-based HE in a previous work, CiM-HE obtain 14.3x speed-up and >2600x energy savings. Finally, our design offers 2.2x speed-up with 88.1x energy savings compared to a state-of-the-art FPGA-based accelerator.




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Football High: Helmets Do Not Prevent Concussions

Despite the improvements in helmet technology, helmets may prevent skull fractures, but they do not prevent concussions.




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Football High: Keeping Up with the Joneses

Competition is steep in games like football. The desire to win often trumps safety.




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Retired Soccer Star Briana Scurry on Sharing "Her Hell"

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.




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Retired Soccer Star Briana Scurry on What a Concussion Feels Like

After she was hit, retired soccer star Briana Scurry felt off balance, sensitive to light and sound,and felt intense pain in her head and neck.




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Retired Soccer Star Briana Scurry: Message to People Struggling After Concussions

If you don't feel right after a concussion, talk to your parents, your coach, your doctor ... get a second, third, fourth opinion ... Do not accept that you will not get better.




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Retired Soccer Star Briana Scurry on Girls Soccer and Concussion Protocols

One out of two girls will sustain a concussion playing soccer, but most will recover and return to play with ease. Nevertheless, awareness and education are key to keeping players safe.




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Retired Soccer Star Briana Scurry on "Being Me Again"

"The Briana Scurry who could tune out 90,000 people during the World Cup and focus on a single ball and know I could keep it out of the goal ... that is who I want to be again."




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Retired Soccer Star Briana Scurry on Her Post-Concussion Depression

Was her depression physiological from the hit to her head or because her professional soccer career was over?




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Why Retired Soccer Star Briana Scurry Is Speaking Out About Concussion

As someone who had a phenomenal career in professional soccer and that had a career-ending head injury, Briana Scurry knows she can help other female — and male — athletes.




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This Concussion Is More Serious Than You Thought

Bob Duncan talks about what happened to his son when he returned to college and to his midterm exams only 24 hours after his concussion.




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Looking at the Risk of Concussion in Sports Head On

Are sports organizations like FIFA taking concussions in sports seriously enough?




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Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) in Amateur Athletes

A new study suggests that vulnerability to CTE is not limited to professional athletes.




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Despite risks, many in small town continue to support youth football

Despite multiple concussions, a high school freshman continues to play football. Will family tradition outweigh the risks?




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Teen athletes sandbag concussion tests to stay in the game

What happens when the drive to play outweighs the potential risk of injury? Some high school athletes are finding ways around the precautions coaching and medical staff take to ensure their safety.




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5 Best Practices for Breadcrumb Navigation 

Breadcrumbs are a subtle element of a website that helps improve usability and navigation. They’re a utility that often receives little acknowledgment; however, breadcrumbs can have a large impact and provide a plethora of benefits, such as lowering bounce rate, increasing conversions, and improving user satisfaction.   Imagine you’re in a regular grocery store, except […]

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How Personalized Landing Pages Can Make Your Site More Profitable

Personalization is one of the most effective marketing techniques to connect with customers online. While the exact methods are different for every business, adding personalized elements to landing pages is a proven method of driving conversions on your site. But why is it so successful? The simple answer is that personalization shows customers that you […]

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Is Your Website a Failure? 3 Reasons Sites Fail (And How to Save Yours)

Traffic isn’t great, online sales are even worse, and let’s not talk about the lack of phone calls. Everyone, including you, is wondering the same thing — is your website a failure? Not yet, and not if you have anything to say about it. While a failing website can seem like a problem without a […]

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What is a Favicon? [+4 Tips for Creating an Impactful Favicon]

When you bookmark pages on the web, it’s challenging to remember the name of the page. As you dive back into your bookmarks to find it, you see a small icon next to the page. You recognize the icon and realize it’s the website you viewed prior. This icon, known as a favicon, is small, […]

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Pay Attention to These Web Design Trends for 2020 [7+ Trends]

If you’re not already thinking about 2020 web design, the time is now. Already, web design trends for 2020 have started to emerge, and if you want to stay on-trend and engage site visitors, it’s crucial to pay attention. But what is the future of web design in 2020? Will everything change? Well — not […]

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5 Lead Generation Website Design Best Practices

Are you looking to generate more leads and revenue with your website? If so, it’s time to consider web design for lead generation to help you create a website that caters to your audience and encourages them to become leads for your business.  On this page, we’ll provide you with five lead generation website design […]

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Category Page Design Examples: 6 Category Page Inspirations

Dozens of people find your business when looking for a type of product but aren’t sure which product fits their needs best. With a well-designed and organized category page, you’ll help people browse products easier and find what they want. To help you get inspired, let’s take a look at some excellent category page design […]

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5 Simple Tips for How to Update Content on Your Website

Subscribe to our YouTube channel for the latest in digital marketing! Transcript: Your website isn’t set in stone, so you shouldn’t treat it like it is.  Technology and the internet change quickly, and often. You should update your website regularly to keep up with the times. Having an up-to-date and optimized site creates a great […]

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Going Beyond Sales: 7 Types of Website Conversions to Optimize for on Your Website

If you’re looking to grow your business online, it’s time to start setting up different types of website conversions to help your company succeed. Whether you’re looking to earn more email subscribers or sell more products, you can set conversion goals that grow your business. On this page, we’ll discuss what a conversion goal is, […]

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What is Website Conversion? [+5 Ways to Improve Conversions]

When you’re trying to grow your business online, you must monitor vital metrics to ensure your business is growing. One important metric is your website’s conversions. Conversions help you determine if you’re driving success with your digital marketing campaigns. So, what is website conversion? How can you improve your website conversion rate? Keep reading to […]

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Need a Website? 6 Reasons to Have a Website for Your Business

Did you know that over 70% of people will research a company on the web before deciding to buy or visit, yet 46% of small businesses in the U.S. don’t have a website? If you don’t have a site, people can’t research your company and determine if you’re a good fit for their needs. If […]

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5 Magnificent Examples of Websites That Convert Visitors into Customers

Need some inspiration to build a high converting website? Websites that convert persuade visitors to become customers. These websites drive more revenue, so if you want to increase your site’s revenue, use these examples of websites that convert as inspiration! We’ll go over what makes for the best converting websites and five examples of websites […]

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Solar Surges: Renewable Energy Jobs Topped 8 Million in 2015

By Andrea Germanos Common Dreams On the heels of clean fuel milestones in Germany and Portugal , a new report finds that the renewable energy industry employed over 8.1 million people worldwide in 2015. According to the International Renewable Energy … Continue reading




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Closure of Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant

By Lauren McCauley Common Dreams In landmark agreement, California’s last remaining nuclear plant will be replaced by greenhouse-gas-free energy sources A plan to shutter the last remaining nuclear power plant in California and replace it with renewable energy is being … Continue reading




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Future Bioeconomy Supported by More Than One Billion Tons of Biomass Potential

By The Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy Within 25 years, the United States could produce enough biomass to support a bioeconomy, including renewable aquatic and terrestrial biomass resources that could be used for energy and to develop products … Continue reading