The accurate assembly of the system matrix is an important step in any code that solves partial differential equations on a mesh. We either explicitly set up a matrix, or we work in a matrix-free environment where we have to be able to quickly return matrix entries upon demand. Either way, the construction can become costly due to non-trivial material parameters entering the equations, multigrid codes requiring cascades of matrices that depend upon each other, or dynamic adaptive mesh refinement that necessitates the recomputation of matrix entries or the whole equation system throughout the solve. We propose that these constructions can be performed concurrently with the multigrid cycles. Initial geometric matrices and low accuracy integrations kickstart the multigrid, while improved assembly data is fed to the solver as and when it becomes available. The time to solution is improved as we eliminate an expensive preparation phase traditionally delaying the actual computation. We eliminate algorithmic latency. Furthermore, we desynchronise the assembly from the solution process. This anarchic increase of the concurrency level improves the scalability. Assembly routines are notoriously memory- and bandwidth-demanding. As we work with iteratively improving operator accuracies, we finally propose the use of a hierarchical, lossy compression scheme such that the memory footprint is brought down aggressively where the system matrix entries carry little information or are not yet available with high accuracy.

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.

MineRL 2019 competition challenged participants to train sample-efficient agents to play Minecraft, by using a dataset of human gameplay and a limit number of steps the environment. We approached this task with behavioural cloning by predicting what actions human players would take, and reached fifth place in the final ranking. Despite being a simple algorithm, we observed the performance of such an approach can vary significantly, based on when the training is stopped. In this paper, we detail our submission to the competition, run further experiments to study how performance varied over training and study how different engineering decisions affected these results.

Any media experience must be fully inclusive and accessible to all users regardless of their ability. With the current trend towards immersive experiences, such as Virtual Reality (VR) and 360-degree video, it becomes key that these environments are adapted to be fully accessible. However, until recently the focus has been mostly on adapting the existing techniques to fit immersive displays, rather than considering new approaches for accessibility designed specifically for these increasingly relevant media experiences. This paper surveys a wide range of 360-degree video players and examines the features they include for dealing with accessibility, such as Subtitles, Audio Description, Sign Language, User Interfaces, and other interaction features, like voice control and support for multi-screen scenarios. These features have been chosen based on guidelines from standardization contributions, like in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the International Communication Union (ITU), and from research contributions for making 360-degree video consumption experiences accessible. The in-depth analysis has been part of a research effort towards the development of a fully inclusive and accessible 360-degree video player. The paper concludes by discussing how the newly developed player has gone above and beyond the existing solutions and guidelines, by providing accessibility features that meet the expectations for a widely used immersive medium, like 360-degree video.

XSS is a security vulnerability that permits injecting malicious code into the client side of a web application. In the simplest situations, XSS vulnerabilities arise when a web application includes the user input in the web output without due sanitization. Such simple XSS vulnerabilities can be detected fairly reliably with blackbox scanners, which inject malicious payload into sensitive parts of HTTP requests and look for the reflected values in the web output.

Contemporary blackbox scanners are not effective against stored XSS vulnerabilities, where the malicious payload in an HTTP response originates from the database storage of the web application, rather than from the associated HTTP request. Similarly, many blackbox scanners do not systematically handle context-sensitive XSS vulnerabilities, where the user input is included in the web output after a transformation that prevents the scanner from recognizing the original value, but does not sanitize the value sufficiently. Among the combination of two basic data sources (stored vs reflected) and two basic vulnerability patterns (context sensitive vs not so), only one is therefore tested systematically by state-of-the-art blackbox scanners.

Our work focuses on systematic coverage of the three remaining combinations. We present a graybox mechanism that extends a general purpose database to cooperate with our XSS scanner, reporting and injecting the test inputs at the boundary between the database and the web application. Furthermore, we design a mechanism for identifying the injected inputs in the web output even after encoding by the web application, and check whether the encoding sanitizes the injected inputs correctly in the respective browser context. We evaluate our approach on eight mature and technologically diverse web applications, discovering previously unknown and exploitable XSS flaws in each of those applications.

We analyze the computational complexity of motion planning through local "input/output" gadgets with separate entrances and exits, and a subset of allowed traversals from entrances to exits, each of which changes the state of the gadget and thereby the allowed traversals. We study such gadgets in the 0-, 1-, and 2-player settings, in particular extending past motion-planning-through-gadgets work to 0-player games for the first time, by considering "branchless" connections between gadgets that route every gadget's exit to a unique gadget's entrance. Our complexity results include containment in L, NL, P, NP, and PSPACE; as well as hardness for NL, P, NP, and PSPACE. We apply these results to show PSPACE-completeness for certain mechanics in Factorio, [the Sequence], and a restricted version of Trainyard, improving prior results. This work strengthens prior results on switching graphs and reachability switching games.

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.

In this paper, we analyze the symbol error rate (SER) performance of the simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) enabled three-node differential decode-and-forward (DDF) relay networks, which adopt the power splitting (PS) protocol at the relay. The use of non-coherent differential modulation eliminates the need for sending training symbols to estimate the instantaneous channel state informations (CSIs) at all network nodes, and therefore improves the power efficiency, as compared with the coherent modulation. However, performance analysis results are not yet available for the state-of-the-art detectors such as the approximate maximum-likelihood detector. Existing works rely on Monte-Carlo simulation to show that there exists an optimal PS ratio that minimizes the overall SER. In this work, we propose a near-optimal detector with linear complexity with respect to the modulation size. We derive an accurate approximate SER expression, based on which the optimal PS ratio can be accurately estimated without requiring any Monte-Carlo simulation.

The increasing ubiquity of low-cost wireless sensors in smart homes and buildings has enabled users to easily deploy systems to remotely monitor and control their environments. However, this raises privacy concerns for third-party occupants, such as a hotel room guest who may be unaware of deployed clandestine sensors. Previous methods focused on specific modalities such as detecting cameras but do not provide a generalizable and comprehensive method to capture arbitrary sensors which may be "spying" on a user. In this work, we seek to determine whether one can walk in a room and detect any wireless sensor monitoring an individual. As such, we propose SnoopDog, a framework to not only detect wireless sensors that are actively monitoring a user, but also classify and localize each device. SnoopDog works by establishing causality between patterns in observable wireless traffic and a trusted sensor in the same space, e.g., an inertial measurement unit (IMU) that captures a user's movement. Once causality is established, SnoopDog performs packet inspection to inform the user about the monitoring device. Finally, SnoopDog localizes the clandestine device in a 2D plane using a novel trial-based localization technique. We evaluated SnoopDog across several devices and various modalities and were able to detect causality 96.6% percent of the time, classify suspicious devices with 100% accuracy, and localize devices to a sufficiently reduced sub-space.

Soccer great Briana Scurry started playing soccer at 12 on an all boys team and in the goal — the "safest" position for a girl ...

Retired soccer star Briana Scurry talks about how frustrating and complicated it is trying to explain what it feels like to have symptoms from a concussion and why bouncing back is not always an option.

Why do some parents and coaches think it's okay to let 9-year-old kids get hit in the head over and over in football practices and games?

Soccer great Briana Scurry writes an open letter to young athletes about her love for soccer and the importance of taking concussions seriously.

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.

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 […]

The post Pay Attention to These Web Design Trends for 2020 [7+ Trends] appeared first on WebFX Blog.

The nail biting. The endless coffee. The sleepless nights. You can’t keep it up, but you need to know: Is my site hacked? Good news, you don’t have to stay up all night, grind down your nails, or consume all the coffee in the building to find out if your website has been hacked. You […]

The post Is My Site Hacked? 6 Ways to Find If Your Site’s Been Hacked appeared first on WebFX Blog.

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 […]

The post What is Website Conversion? [+5 Ways to Improve Conversions] appeared first on WebFX Blog.

Welcome back! In the first part of this series, we looked at a very "low-level" way to interact with a relational database by sending it raw SQL strings and retrieving the results. We created a very simple Express application that we can use as an example and deployed it on Heroku with a Postgres database.

In this part, we're going to examine a few libraries which build on top of that foundation, adding layers of abstraction that let you read and manipulate database data in a more "JavaScript-like" way.

“In computing, memoization or memoisation is an optimization technique used primarily to speed up computer programs by storing the results of expensive function calls and returning the cached result when the same inputs occur again” — Wikipedia article on memoization. 

I've written a two part article in Memoization in JavaScript. The first part explains the concept with basic implementation in JavaScript code. It details a way to apply the technique on function calls. It is generic to handle most JavaScript functions.

See the Code - See it Full Page - See Details

Do you sometimes get lost in what day it is today? This Day Clock shows the progress of the current day and for the week. Click the center clock knot to toggle display. Double click the letter D to activate the debug mode. Also available at github.com/kunukn/dayclock

This Pen uses: HTML, CSS, Vue, and Vue

The Cannabis Issue As we look ahead to sunnier days, few things are as satisfying as a scoop of nice, cold ice cream.…

Summer Camps 2020 Adventure Heights This annual day camp includes field trips to area activities including swimming, hiking, movies and more.…

We've come a long way since the olden days before legalization, when basically the only product on the market was the flower you got from a dealer.…

UPDATE: The Department of Veterans Affairs announced after this article was first published that Spokane Veterans Home residents with COVID-19 would be moved to the Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center.…

[IMAGE-1] I started sobbing from the opening moments of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, and I didn't stop crying for two hours. And then after I left the cinema and ran into a fellow film critic who had also just seen it, I literally could not manage a word of discussion without bursting into tears again.…

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.…

Back in November, we wrote about local singer-songwriter Eliza Johnson's musical project Eliza Catastrophe and her new album You, which she released on pre-loaded MP3 players. One thing we weren't able to mention in our interview — for contractual reasons — is that she had only a couple months prior auditioned for American Idol, and her performance finally aired on the ABC reality competition show Sunday night.…

Welcome to the quarantine.…

While not every musician has taken to the internet to perform live shows during the (almost) nationwide lockdown, it sure seems that way. At least, it does according to my social media feeds, which lean heavily on bands and solo artists.…

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.…

Put pictures of 1975-era Aerosmith and 1995-era Guided By Voices next to each other and you probably wouldn’t think the bands have anything in common.…

And summer takes another hit. Strolling Spokane's Coeur d'Alene Park in Browne's Addition for the Northwest Museum of Art & Culture's annual ArtFest is one of the pleasures of early summer, typically.…

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.…

Here are a few ways to keep yourself entertained, and maybe even educate yourself a bit, while you're stuck at home:…

THE SHOW WILL GO ON…

Another First Friday is here, and you can correctly assume that it will be all online once again. The May 1 Virtual First Friday is from 10 am to midnight.…

ON INLANDER.COM WORLD: Roughly two weeks after Canada's deadliest mass shooting, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau introduced an immediate ban on what he called “military-style assault weapons.”…

Northern Quest Resort & Casino is set to reopen Tuesday, albeit with strict social-distancing and other safety protocols in place, becoming the second regional casino to reopen after closures caused by the coronavirus. Resort officials expect a crowd due to pent-up interest in the community for getting out of the house (not to mention Cinco de Mayo).…

By Johnny Diaz The New York Times Company…

The latest issue of the Inlander is hitting newsstands today. Find it at your local grocery store and hundreds of other locations; use this map to find a pickup point near you.…

This is what it feels like to live during an historic event.…

Drink Local In tumultuous times, one thing remains true: People still want their spirits.…

The chafing.…

While events around the country have been put on hold, Coeur d’Alene’s Summer Theatre is still slated for a show at the end of the month. But it won’t be in the usual format.…

Every spring, audiences in Moscow are typically congregating for the Kino Short Film Festival, an evening of shorts made by the University of Idaho's senior film students. Things being as they are, the Kenworthy Theater won't be open for this year's event, but the U of I will be streaming a virtual version this Friday, May 8, at 6 pm.…

Two beloved Spokane-based entertainers are teaming up this weekend for a good cause.…

As this issue goes to press, our city, our state, our country and our world are coping with the spread of a virus that's deadly to some, and not even noticed by others who have no symptoms but may spread it.…

Miang Goong Miang is the Thai version of lettuce wraps, in this case featuring goong, or shrimp.…

Don't be caught empty-handed (or empty-hearted) this Valentine's Day, coming up Friday, Feb. 14.…

While its main goal is to introduce the humble breakfast taco to more Spokane eaters, owners of the new quick food stop Taco Vado say breakfast burritos have actually been its bestselling menu item since opening about a month ago.…