Garcia will have to navigate through Woods if he wants to pull off victory
When Sergio Garcia won The Players Championship five years ago, he outlasted a group that included Paul Goydos, Jeff Quinney, Briny Baird, Stephen Ames and Ben Crane.
If Garcia wins his second Players title, he will have to overcome PGA Tour rookie David Lingmerth and a longtime nemesis: Tiger Woods.
Paired in the last group during Saturday's third round for the 21st time in their careers, Garcia and Woods completed 14 holes before play was called for darkness at 7:48 p.m.
Garcia (two birdies and three bogeys) and Woods (one birdie and one bogey) are at 10-under 134 and tied for second with Henrik Stenson, two shots behind Lingmerth.
A spicy subplot to the Garcia-Woods dynamic occurred on the second hole.
Garcia's second shot from the fairway missed right into the trees. In an interview with NBC during the delay, Garcia suggested his swing was impacted by another factor.
"I wouldn't say that [Woods] didn't see that I was ready, but you do have a feel (for) when the other guy is going to hit," Garcia said. "And right as I was in the top of the backswing, I think he must have pulled like a 5-wood or a 3-wood out of the rough and obviously everybody started screaming so that didn't help very much.
"But it was unfortunate because … I might have hit it there if nothing happened. You never know. But if I hit a good shot there and maybe make birdie, it gets the day started in a different way."
Woods and Garcia were 50 yards apart. A split-screen replay showed Woods pulling his club while Garcia was in his set up.
Said Woods afterward to reporters: "Obviously, he doesn't know all the facts. The marshal told me (Garcia) already hit, so I pulled the 5-wood."
Woods added a salvo: "Not real surprising he's complaining about something."
To which Garcia said: "That's fine. At least I'm true to myself. I know what I'm doing, and he can do whatever he wants."
Garcia missed a 9-foot par putt on the hole. Woods missed the fairway left but hit a nine-foot birdie attempt to move into the lead at 11 under.
Woods gave a shot back at the par 3 third hole when his tee shot was well past the pin and he missed a 4-foot par putt.
When play resumed, both players posted par on Nos. 7-8 before Garcia again expressed displeasure with the gallery after his second shot on No. 9. But he regrouped to make his first birdie (20-foot putt) to move to 11 under.
While Henrik Stenson was bogeying No. 11, Garcia went tee to pine straw to bunker before getting up and down to save par. But there was no escape at No. 12. Garcia's second shot found the rough, his third shot a pot bunker and his fourth shot a sprinkler ahead behind the green. He made bogey to fall into a three-way tie for second.
A 5-foot birdie putt on No. 13 propelled Garcia to 11 under, tied for the lead. But he gave the shot back with a bogey on No. 14.
Woods hit only five of 11 fairways but 11 of 14 greens.
"I was very patient today" he said. "I stayed grounded, and it was a day of grinding. ... As hot as it was, the greens were very slippery early on and the rain slowed things up and we could be more aggressive this afternoon."


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So it's happy birthday to The Lion King - 10 years old in London as of this week. A 250-strong pride of former cast members, together with American designer-director Julie Taymor - the creative force most credited with making this screen-to-stage franchise such a roaring success worldwide - whooped it up at the anniversary celebrations on Sunday. And there was no shortage of stars on hand either: that rising young political cub David Cameron was in the house, as was Hollywood grandee James Earl Jones - who voiced King Mufasa in the original Disney film.
Who wouldn't want to bask in the reassuring glow of such a long-running triumph? The statistics tell their own story of galloping satisfaction. In London, The Lion King has grossed over £289m and been seen by more than eight million people. Sure, not every ticket sold can be put down to the show's much-trumpeted virtues as an all-singing, all-dancing feast for the senses. Given that acquiring the films on DVD is practically a birthright now, a trip to the theatre to see how it all looks in the flesh almost counts as an inevitable part of the package.
Yet cynicism falls away in the face of the pulsating, richly imagined spectacle laid before us. Yes, you can pick holes. How many of the songs stay with you - beyond that jaw-dropping opening-number, Circle of Life, which summons a Noah's Ark-load of exotic beasts through the stalls? And isn't the storyline - in which the young prince Simba must learn to stop lounging around and reclaim the throne from his usurping uncle and his hyena henchmen - a bit thin on substance?
Yet watching the show alongside my rapt children, I was struck by how much it succeeds in speaking to the heart rather than the head - without succumbing to manipulation. In theory it should all feel contrived - you've got Elton John and Tim Rice's anthemic pop efforts sharing the same terrain as earthy, soul-stirring African arrangements. The human presence creating the animal magic is openly signalled in the costumes and puppetry. And yet, for all that calculation, the over-riding impression is one of freshness - of potentially incongruous elements flowing together quite naturally.
Assisted at every point by the lithe, energetic contributions of 46 performers, The Lion King's broad brushstrokes deliver nothing less than a sweeping panorama of a continent in dignified motion and a deeply felt celebration of life.

domain: artistic


A secret meeting of former President Obama’s financial backers convened in Washington early this month: Organized by David Jacobson and John Phillips, Obama’s former ambassadors to Canada and Italy, the group interviewed an array of 2020 presidential candidates and debated whether to throw their wealth behind one or two of them.
Obama had no role in the event, but it unfolded in his political shadow: As presidential hopefuls like Senators Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, and Sherrod Brown auditioned before them, the donors wondered aloud whether Obama might signal a preference in the race, according to three people briefed on the meeting, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
David Axelrod, Obama’s former chief strategist, told the group they should expect no such directive. Axelrod confirmed in an interview that he briefed the gathering, recalling: “They asked me about Obama endorsing. I said, ‘I don’t imagine he will.’”
Axelrod said he had been sharing his own perspective, not speaking as an official Obama emissary. But his forecast matches what Obama has told friends and likely presidential candidates in private: that he does not see it as his role to settle the 2020 nomination, and prefers to let the primary unfold as a contest of ideas. Michelle Obama, the former first lady, also has no plans to endorse a candidate, a person familiar with her thinking said.
Even former Vice President Joe Biden does not expect to secure Barack Obama’s backing if he runs, according to allies of Biden’s.
Yet if Obama has all but officially taken a vow of neutrality, he remains the party’s most convincing model for success at the national level, and continues to shape the mindset and strategy of Democratic presidential candidates.
He has counseled more than a dozen declared or likely candidates on what he believes it will take to beat President Trump, holding private talks with leading contenders like Harris, Booker, and Senator Elizabeth Warren; underdogs like Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Ind.; and prominent figures who remain undecided on the race, like Eric Holder, his former attorney general, and Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York.
During these informal conversations, usually at his office in Washington, Obama has offered a combination of supportive advice and sober warnings, cautioning candidates that running for president is a more punishing process than they could ever imagine, according to seven people who have spoken with him directly or were briefed in detail on the meetings.
Obama continues to express frustration that he did not anticipate Trump’s victory, these people said, even after years of clashing with the forces of right-wing populism as president. He has urged candidates to push back on Trump’s bleak and divisive rhetoric about economic change, and to deliver a competing message that can resonate even in Republican-leaning areas, courting rural voters and other communities that tend to distrust Democrats.
Eric Schultz, a senior adviser to Obama, said the former president was encouraged by the “diverse, experienced, and principled” field of candidates taking shape, and said Obama had been “happy to speak privately with candidates seeking his guidance on the best way to lead the country.”
“President Obama counsels candidates to always show up and make their case even in areas or in front of audiences they may not necessarily win; express views and positions that reflect their genuine beliefs; and share a positive vision for the country true to their own personal story,” he said.
Obama has indicated to candidates that he worries about the possibility of a damaging primary fight, and has urged them to avoid attacking each other in bitterly personal terms that could help Trump. He has also hinted that he sees a relatively open space for a more moderate Democrat, given the abundance of hard-charging liberals in the race.
Democrats have kept the meetings almost entirely confidential, out of deference to Obama. Beto O’Rourke, the former Texas Senate candidate, briefly described his session with the former president in an interview with Oprah Winfrey this month, recalling that Obama spoke with disarming candor about the personal strain of running for president. O’Rourke said Obama had not lobbied him to run.
“You asked if he encouraged me to; he did not,” O’Rourke said. “But he was very generous in sharing what his thought process was, leading up to that decision.”
Other candidates have declined to share details of their meetings with Obama, but invoke him reverently on the campaign trail. Booker drew laughter and applause from a crowd in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, last weekend, when he declared: “I miss Obama — and I miss her husband, too!”
The primary will represent something of a test for Obama’s brand of politics, if perhaps not of his influence within the party. He is personally revered by many Democrats, and his achievements like the Affordable Care Act, the Paris climate agreement, and the regulations he imposed on banks and coal companies are seen as sacrosanct by most liberals.
But Obama’s party has also plainly moved leftward on core matters of policy since his term ended, and some factions have grown contemptuous of the consensus-seeking approach Obama took as president. The coming primary campaign may hinge in part on whether Democratic voters favor making gradual improvements to Obama’s legacy or pursuing more disruptive policy changes like enacting single-payer health care.
Obama’s doctrine of nonintervention could represent a setback, though not an unexpected one, to Biden. The former vice president and his political allies have confided to potential supporters that they do not expect Obama to issue an endorsement in the primary, for Biden or anyone else.
But the two men have discussed the race, and allies of Biden hope Obama might speak favorably about Biden’s service as his running mate and vice president, people who have spoken to Biden’s inner circle said.
Bill Russo, a spokesman for Biden, declined to comment.
To some veteran Obama supporters, there is a certain irony to Democrats wishing that Obama would act as an old-school party leader and decree his preferences from on high.
Rufus Gifford, a top Obama fund-raiser who served as ambassador to Denmark, suggested that the diversity of the Democratic candidates was a consequence of Obama’s pathbreaking presidency. He said the 2020 field was a tribute to the former president, even if it left voters and donors struggling to parse their options.
“You look at the number of women, the racial diversity, the diversity of experience, the different levels of public service — I think a lot of that can and should be attributed to the legacy of Barack Obama,” Gifford said.


text:
Learning about Natural Supplements in Depth
Keeping your body in a healthy condition every time should be the key thing that every person is recommended to ensure. Good health is one of the key things that every person should aim at to live a life free from various types of diseases that might even take away your life.
There are however various health tips that different people have come up with to help promote good health to the people. Most of the health tips also help one to lead a life full of the right body fitness that also contributes greatly to promoting a healthy life to a person. To any person who would want to have a physically fit body, here are some of the few health tips that he or she can go for. Most of the health specialists, however, recommend most of the people with various challenges that might be as a result of having excess body weights to go to the gym regularly.
At times, it is important not to go for any kind of a gym blindly but to keenly choose a good gym with various specialists who have the right type of training and a gym that will guarantee you of a good body fitness and a good body health finally. It is very important for every person to undertake the right types of body exercises and physical training which do not have any hark to his or her body both physically or psychologically and more so body exercises that will help live a good and healthy life. There are various body exercises that one can practice regularly and the most common and recommended types of exercises include doing various press ups or even jogging.
Always make sure that despite having various body training exercises you also take the right food on a daily basis. Not any food is a good food especially to someone who is much concerned with his or her health and hence being very important for one to take the right food that has natural supplements. Various modern foods are not recommended as they do not add the value that comes with the foods containing various natural supplements and more to these, they have a lot of side effects to our health.
Natural supplements are however much advantageous that artificial foods because most of the natural supplements can be absorbed by the body more easily than the artificial foods. Most of the artificial foods are derived from foods suited to dogs and other animals and hence making the artificial foods not suitable for human beings.

domain: medical


Emerging Technologies: IoT, Big Data, and CPS with Sensory SystemsView this Special Issue
Research Article | Open Access
Ling-Yun Jiang, Fan He, Yu Wang, Li-Juan Sun, Hai-ping Huang, "Quality-Aware Incentive Mechanism for Mobile Crowd Sensing", Journal of Sensors, vol. 2017, Article ID 5757125, 14 pages, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/5757125
Quality-Aware Incentive Mechanism for Mobile Crowd Sensing
Mobile crowd sensing (MCS) is a novel sensing paradigm which can sense human-centered daily activities and the surrounding environment. The impact of mobility and selfishness of participants on the data reliability cannot be ignored in most mobile crowd sensing systems. To address this issue, we present a universal system model based on the reverse auction framework and formulate the problem as the Multiple Quality Multiple User Selection (MQMUS) problem. The quality-aware incentive mechanism (QAIM) is proposed to meet the quality requirement of data reliability. We demonstrate that the proposed incentive mechanism achieves the properties of computational efficiency, individual rationality, and truthfulness. And meanwhile, we evaluate the performance and validate the theoretical properties of our incentive mechanism through extensive simulation experiments.
A new paradigm of sensing with smartphones has emerged which is usually called people-centric mobile sensing or mobile crowd sensing . Compared with the traditional sensor networks, MCS is an effective way for large-scale data sensing, processing, and gathering without deploying a large number of sensor nodes. MCS has enabled numerous large-scale applications such as urban environment monitoring [2–4], traffic flow surveillance [5–7], healthcare , behavior and relationship discovery [9, 10], indoor localization , 3G/Wi-Fi discovering [12–14], activity monitoring [15, 16], and bus arrival time prediction .
The effect of the aforementioned mobile crowd sensing applications relies heavily on the quantities of participants. However, the ordinary individuals are not willing to share their sensing capabilities unless there are sufficient incentives. Research on incentive mechanism has been widely concerned by investigators, and considerable designed schemes about the incentive mechanism design have been put forward which can be classified into nonmonetary incentives [18–20] and monetary incentives [21–29].
The key of any crowd sensing system is not only the quantities of participants but also the sensing quality offered by participants. However, most of the existing solutions usually assume that each sensing task (e.g., air quality in a certain region) in a sensing cycle could be performed by a single participant. It is intuitive that the quality of sensing project would be higher if each sensing task was performed by multiple participants. One of the main reasons is that the sensed data cannot always be trusted because participants maybe intentionally (e.g., malicious participants) or unintentionally (e.g., making mistakes) offer the data contrary to the truth. Another reason may come from the recruitment system model itself. A typical MCS consists of two roles: the recruiter who publicizes the sensing tasks and the participants who constitute potential sensing capability selected by the recruiter from many candidates. The interaction between the recruiter and the candidates is modeled as a reverse auction in many existing solutions which can be illustrated by Figure 1. The recruiter always selects participants according to the sensing plans of the candidates. However, changes always go beyond plans. The participants may not be able to complete the task according to their schedule for unexpected incidents (e.g., a selected participant cannot go to the specific locations claimed in his sensing plan). These participants may offer some forged data or do nothing. As a result, the tasks could not be completed in time.
In this paper, we address the issue of quality-aware monetary incentive mechanism design. We design a truthful incentive mechanism satisfying the properties of computational efficiency, individual rationality, and truthfulness with low approximation ratio.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we review the related work. In Section 3, we describe the system model and formulate the MQMUS problem. Thereafter, in Section 4 we propose the incentive mechanism, named QAIM, which consists of two phases, winner selection and payment determination, and analyze the properties of QAIM. Section 5 presents the experimental results. Finally, we draw the conclusion and discuss some possible future directions in Section 6.
2. Related Work
There are lots of incentive mechanisms which can be classified into nonmonetary incentives [18–29] and monetary incentives [30–45]. Paying for sensed data in crowd sensing tasks is the most intuitive incentive. Monetary incentive mechanisms are mainly based on two kinds of schemes: Stackelberg game and auction.
Stackelberg game is a game where one leader player has the dominant influence over the other players . Duan et al.  make use of the Stackelberg game to design a threshold revenue model for service providers. The system and the users interact through a two-stage process similar to that of Stackelberg game. The system announces the total reward and the threshold number of required participants. Each participant decides whether to accept the task or not. Yang et al.  also model the proposed platform-centric incentive mechanism as a Stackelberg game, prove that this Stackelberg game has a unique equilibrium, and design an efficient mechanism for computing it. The above two Stackelberg game solutions have theoretical guarantees. However, the premise of this kind of method is that the costs of all users or their probability distributions are assumed to be known, which limits the applicability of Stackelberg game-based mechanisms because participants may keep their costs private in the real world.
An auction-based mechanism is originally the process of buying and selling goods by negotiating the monetary prices . A kind of auction, called reverse auction, is adopted to model the negotiation process in crowd sensing, which is shown in Figure 1. Lee and Hoh  firstly design a reverse auction-based dynamic price incentive mechanism with virtual participation credit with the objective of minimizing and stabilizing the platform cost while maintaining the participation level. Yang et al.  consider two system models for smartphone crowd sensing system: the platform-centric model with the solution based on the Stackelberg game and user-centric model with the solution based on the reverse auction. Feng et al.  formulate the winning bids determination problem and present a truthful auction for location-aware collaborative sensing. Zhang et al.  focus on the user-centric model and study three methods which involve cooperation and competition among the services. Xu et al. [35, 36] investigate truthful incentive mechanisms for time window dependent tasks with the strong requirement of data integrity and propose two incentive mechanisms for the single time window case and the multiple window case, respectively. Subramanian et al.  consider offline and online incentive mechanisms using the same bidding framework with MSensing Auction proposed in . Zhao et al.  investigate the incentive mechanisms in the online setting based on an offline budget feasible mechanism , which provides a starting point for the online mechanism. Jin et al.  pay attention to the quality of the mobile crowd sensing systems and incorporate a metric named QoI (Quality of Information) into the incentive mechanisms. SRC and MRC mechanisms with the criterion of the combinatorial QoI and price are proposed. However, the authors fail to consider the truthfulness of the MRC mechanism. The aforementioned solutions assume that each measurement of sensing task can be represented by a single sensor reading.
Several solutions are proposed to ensure the quality of crowd sensing data. Tanas and Herrera-Joancomartí  achieve the first work, which focuses on how to validate sensing data, but the premise of their work is that there are multiple users to submit multiple sensing readings on each task. Kazemi et al.  assume each worker has a reputation score, and assign enough number of workers to each spatial task such that workers’ aggregate reputation can satisfy the confidence of the task. However, they focus on self-incentivized spatial crowdsourcing, in which people perform the tasks voluntarily without any reward. Zhang et al.  propose a task management framework to match workers to the merged query and sensing tasks efficiently. In their model, each task can be assigned to multiple workers, and each worker can be assigned to at most one task, although each worker may have the preference for multiple tasks. Xu et al.  design the incentive mechanism, which considers the issue of stimulating the biased requesters in the competing crowdsourcing market. Xiong et al.  consider the k-depth coverage as an MCS data collection constraint, but every subtask is assigned to the same value of . Wang et al.  present a detailed quality-aware mobile crowdsourced sensing framework, composed of three MCS components: crowd, crowdsourcer, and crowdsourcing platform. The crowdsourcer is a new role who assesses the posted contributions’ quality. He et al.  propose a recruitment strategy in vehicle-based crowdsourcing through taking full advantage of predictable mobility patterns of vehicles, which bring a new insight to improve the quality of crowd sensing system. However, the behaviors of human are affected by many factors. It is far more difficult to predict the mobility patterns of human beings than those of vehicles.
In this paper, we try to enhance the quality-aware incentive mechanism from two main dimensions: the reputation of participants and the design of task.
3. Problem Statement
Different from most crowd sensing systems, the objective of this paper is designing the truthful incentive mechanism with maximum social efficiency and high sensing quality. To achieve this objective, the recruiter needs to select participants who can match the diverse requirements of the crowd sensing application with minimum social cost. Before demonstrating the rigorous problem definition, we would like to present a motivating example to make the problem better understood.
3.1. A Participant Recruitment Example in Air Quality Monitoring
We take the urban air quality monitoring MCS task as an example. As shown in Figure 2, the MCS recruiter wants to collect the state of the air in three regions (denoted as ). Nine candidates () are interested in performing the task and reporting their sensing plans, which include what they can do with the corresponding bid price. The industrial structures vary greatly in different regions. The regions with more plants, which can discharge waste gas, need more participants to monitor. For example, the recruiter wants 5 participants to monitor region and only 3 to monitor region because there are more chemical plants in region . We use squares to represent the regions, and the number above each square denotes its requirement. To the perspective of the candidates, people may not just stay in a certain region in one sensing cycle and can fulfill multiple sensing tasks in different regions. We use disks to represent the candidates, and the number above each disk denotes its corresponding bid price, and the set of regions below each disk denotes the regions that he can monitor.
In this example, the mobile crowd sensing system has some requirements: () Every subtask should be assigned to enough participants so that their aggregate sensing results can ensure the sensing quality. () Every subtask has different sensing requirement. The different number of participants should be recruited to satisfy different sensing requirements with minimum costs. () Every participant has different ability in terms of the task completion and should be assigned to the different number of subtasks based on his particular ability.
3.2. System Model and Problem Formulation
We present the rigorous definition and formulation of the MQMUS problem. In this problem, the recruiter can divide the task into multiple subtasks with different quality factors and the participants can be assigned to multiple subtasks in one sensing cycle.
Suppose that a crowd sensing task can be divided into disjoint subtasks according to the sensing geographic areas, and each subtask has its sensing quality factor (to simplify, we use the number of participants to represent as shown in the above motivating example). The recruiter publicizes the sensing task and the quality factor as a quality constraint for participants selecting.
Considering candidates, are interested in performing the sensing task. Each candidate submits a sensing plan to the recruiter, in which is the set of subtasks that candidate can perform (the superscript of is only used to represent that can fulfill the subtask ) and is bid price that candidate wants to charge for performing .
We assume that the candidate has a reputation score , which states the probability that the candidate performs a task correctly. The recruiter is responsible for maintaining and updating the reputation score of every candidate. The value of is set to 1 initially and updated by
We utilize a voting mechanism to set the value of . This intuition is based on the idea of the wisdom of crowds  that the majority of the participants are trusted. The recruiter aggregates the different sensing results to get the reliable result at the end of the sensing cycle. The setting way of is inspired by . is set to “−1” in two cases: () the candidate cannot perform the subtask as the claimed sensing plan; () the sensing result of the same subtask is contrary to more than half of participants’ results; otherwise, is “0.” If , will not be selected until the recruiter resets to 1 after a period of time (e.g., 10 sensing cycles).
Assume that the number of candidates is sufficient to fulfill the sensing task with its quality constraints . This assumption is reasonable for mobile crowd sensing systems as made in [31, 33, 35]. The selected participant is placed into the list according to the order. is the ID of the candidate and its subscript denotes that is the selected participant. The recruiter has to calculate the payment for each participant as the incentive. The utility of participant can be calculated by (2), in which is the real cost of the participant and only known by itself. is not less than due to the selfishness and rationality of participants (if the reputation score of is set to a value less than 0 in this sensing cycle, the utility of will be 0 in the next sensing cycle because he will not be selected).
The utility of the recruiter is calculated by (3). is the value to the recruiter when it has collected enough data to satisfy the quality constraints of the sensing task .
The social efficiency of the sensing task (with the quality constraints ) is calculated by (4). Although the real cost is only known by participant , we will prove that claiming a different cost cannot help to increase the utility of participant in our designed mechanisms. So we use when we attempt to maximize social efficiency in the mechanisms designed below. The objective of maximizing the social efficiency is equivalent to the objective of minimizing the social cost.
Given the list of selected participants is the set of the remaining subtasks excluding those subtasks of participants according to their sensing plans. The goal of achieving high quality crowd sensing with minimum social cost can be formulated as (5) and constrained by (6).
We design a truthful incentive mechanism, , to select appropriate participants to satisfy the objective of this paper, and to eliminate the fear of market manipulation (the participants cannot improve their utility by submitting a bid price different from its real cost).
consists of two phases: winner selection algorithm and payment determination algorithm . For a given and a set of bids , the algorithm selects a subset of participants and the algorithm returns the vector for those selected participants.
Our objective is to design the incentive mechanisms satisfying the following four desirable properties to solve problem:(i)Computational Efficiency. A mechanism is computationally efficient if both the winner selection function and payment decision function can be computed in polynomial time.(ii)Individual Rationality. Each participant will have a nonnegative utility upon performing the sensing task.(iii)Truthfulness. A mechanism is truthful if no participant can improve its utility by submitting a bid price different from its real cost, no matter what others submit. In other words, reporting the real cost is a dominant strategy for all participants.(iv)Social Optimization. The objective function is maximizing the social efficiency. We attempt to find optimal solution or approximation algorithm with low approximation ratio when there is no optimal solution computed in polynomial time.
4. Mechanism Design and Analysis
4.1. Mechanism Design
We attempt to find an approximation algorithm following a greedy approach which can be solved in polynomial time because the problem is NP-hard problem. The winner selection algorithm is illustrated in Algorithm 1 and the payment algorithm is illustrated in Algorithm 2.
In Algorithm 1, is the ID of candidates, is the number of selection round, and is the set of remaining subtasks excluding those in the sensing plans of the selected participants before the previous rounds. The effective sensing units of in the round are denoted by which can be calculated by (7), the effective average sensing weight of candidate in the round is denoted by which is calculated in Line () of Algorithm 1.
The main idea of greedy approach is to select candidate with least effective average sensing weight, so of all remaining candidates are sorted in nondecreasing order in Line () of Algorithm 1, and is the ID of the selected participant in the selection round.
The trick of lies in the use of which denotes the number of participants that can be selected in the round. The nondecreasing sorting of implies that (8) is true.
Equation (9) is true; otherwise the first selected participant in the round will be selected in the round.
The calculation method of in Line () of Algorithm 1 implies that cannot be bigger than , so (10) is true which implies the participant is selected in the nondecreasing order of the effective average sensing weight:
Let denote the IDs of the selected participants in the selection round; the set of remaining subtasks would possibly be changed only at the end of the selection round, so (11) is true.
In Algorithm 2, is the ID of candidates with the same role as in , is the number of payment determination round, and is the set of remaining subtasks excluding those in the sensing plans of the selected participants before the previous rounds. The effective sensing units of in the round are denoted by with the same calculation method used in (7). The effective average sensing weight of candidate in the round is denoted by which is calculated in Line () of Algorithm 2.
To compute the payment for each in the winner list , we consider the set of candidates and reselect appropriate participants into the list with the same method used in (the superscript of is used to identify that is not considered as a candidate). Let and denote the selected participant, is the set of remaining subtasks excluding those effective subtasks of participants according to their sensing plans, and (13) is true for the same reason of (12).
4.2. A Walk-Through Example
To better understand the algorithm, we use the example in Figure 2 to illustrate how the works.
With regard to the aforementioned example, the crowd sensing task is divided into 3 subtasks: is set to 3, is set to 4, and is set to 5. There are 9 candidates who want to participate in the task and report their sensing plan: the bid price of is shown above it, and the subtask that can fulfill is given below it in Figure 2. Take , for example, , which can also be represented as , and . The effective sensing units of in the first round are denoted by which is calculated by (7) (i.e., ), and the effective average sensing weight of in the first round is denoted by which is calculated in Line () of Algorithm 1 (i.e., ).
We first assume that all participants are trustworthy and can fulfill the sensing units as they had claimed in their sensing plan.
In the first selection round, . of each candidate in the first round is listed in Table 1. According to , is the first winner and then , and is the third one in the first round. The selected list , , , and .
In the second selection round, , , , , and . of each candidate in the second round is listed in Table 2. According to , is the first and only winner. The selected list and .
In the third selection round, , , , , and . of each candidate in the third round is listed in Table 3. According to , is the first winner and is the second one. The selected list , , and .
In the fourth selection round, , which implies the selected participants () can satisfy the sensing requirements.
If is a malicious participant, he lies in the results of all sensing units; the reputation of is 0 calculated by (1) which means he will not be selected in the next sensing recruitment cycle.
Owning to the limitation of the space and the similarity of the algorithm process, we only give the payment example of the first selected winner which is similar to the payment determination of other participants. is initialized to 0.
In the first payment determination round, , , , , and . of each candidate in the first round is listed in Table 4. According to , is the first winner; then . is the second winner; then . is the third winner; then .
In the second payment determination round, , , , , and . of each candidate in the second round is listed in Table 5. According to , is the first and only winner; then .
In the third payment determination round, , , , , and . of each candidate in the second round is listed in Table 6. According to , is the first and only winner; then .
In the fourth payment round, , so the payment to is .
4.3. Properties of QAIM
In this section, we analyze the properties of theoretically to show that is computationally efficient, individually rational, and truthful. The approximation is also discussed in the end. We use to denote the number of candidates, to denote the number of subtasks, to denote all the sensing units, and to denote the effective sensing units of the selected participants , and for ease of analysis they can be calculated by
(1) Is Computationally Efficient. We analyze and , respectively, where takes in the worst case.
The nested for-loop (Lines ()–()) of will be executed times. The maximal value of is which is less than obviously in the worst case when the effective sensing unit of every candidate has only one subtask. is less than and is far less than obviously, so takes in the worst case.
takes in the worst case because there are similar processes in both (Lines ()–()) and (Lines ()–()), which will be executed times less than .
(2) Is Individually Rational. When considering the set of candidates , let be the replacement of participant which appears in the place in the selected list . Equation (16) is true according to the main idea of winner selection. will not be selected in the place if is considered, so (17) is true.
Equation (19) is true according to the main idea of payment calculation in Line () of .
(3) Is Truthful. According to Myerson’s Theorem , an auction is truthful if and only if the selection rule is monotone and each winner is paid the critical value ; if a participant wins the auction by bidding , he also wins by bidding but loses by bidding .
The monotonicity of the selection rule is obvious: if bids a smaller that means will also be selected according to (12).
Suppose ; (20) is true if is greater than .
Equation (20) shows the fact that will not be selected before the previous participants are selected. But if the previous participants are selected, there is no reason to select because the previous selected participants can satisfy different sensing requirements.
(4) The Approximation Factor to Optimal Solution Is . Let denote the minimal social cost computed by optimal solution, denote the effective sensing units of the selected participants calculated by (15), and denote the social cost of the selected participant .
Because the participant is selected in the nondecreasing order of the effective average sensing weight according to and the average cost of the rest uncovered sensing units is not greater than , (21) is true.
Hence the total cost of can be calculated by
5. Performance Evaluation
5.1. Before the Simulation Setup
Because there is no real data set which is consistent with the proposed system model, we have to mine the ways of human mobility from Gowalla  and Brightkite , which come from the location-based social networking website where users share their locations by checking-in. The details of the data sets are listed in Table 7.
We consider the variation law of user’s mobile preferences because the sensing task is dependent on location in most crowd sensing systems. Observing a user’s visiting history can help discover the user’s abilities to fulfill the subtasks in different locations.
We divide the region into square blocks and let denote the block in which represents horizontal and vertical locations, respectively. Let denote the number of checking-ins of user during the time period in block . If is greater than zero, is called the reachable region of user during the time period .
The reachable regions of user can be viewed as the subtasks in different locations that the user can fulfill. Let denote the number of reachable regions which can be viewed as the number of subtasks that the user can fulfill, which is calculated by
With different partition granularity in different data set, more than 95% of the users’ number of reachable regions is smaller than 1.25% of the number of region blocks; the complementary cumulative distribution of follows the same power-law distribution formulated by (24), which can be seen in Figures 3 and 4, respectively.
The phenomenon of power-law distribution is consistent with our life experience: the activity scope of most people has a limited range in several specific regions in their daily life. The above-mentioned result tells us how to set the number of subtasks that the user can fulfill.
5.2. Performance Evaluation
In order to evaluate , we first introduce two baseline algorithms with the similar ideas of using redundancy.(i) is derived from the K-depth coverage objective solution proposed in . No matter how different the sensing quality factor of each subtask is, is set to the maximal value of these quality factors.(ii) is derived from the idea proposed in . No matter how many subtasks one participant can do, he is only assigned with one subtask at a time. So, the participant is selected in the nondecreasing order of the bid price.
The performance metrics include the social cost, the number of winners, the running time, and the truthfulness, and the importance of reputation score is also checked up.
Simulation parameters are shown in Table 8. Each measurement is averaged over 100 instances.
(1) Impact of . Figures 5–7 show the performance of with different candidates when the number of sensing subtasks is set to 100. As shown in Figures 5 and 6, the social cost and the number of winners of are both less than those of or . The variation does not follow the rule of decreasing with increment of the number of candidates but is within a certain range. The reason is and which are generated randomly.


Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph G. Recto on Thursday, April 5, expressed hopes that the rehabilitation plan of the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) for the Pasig River service would not suffer the same fate of the Department of Transportation’s (DoTr) Metro Rail Transport (MRT).
“I have always said that because the ferry has been sunk by DoTR’s disinterest, other agencies should bail it out. And I am glad that (DBM) Secretary (Benjamin Diokno) has put himself on the captain’s seat,” he said in a statement.
Recto said he was hopeful that under Mr. Diokno, “this maritime MRT – or Manila River Transport – will not suffer the same fate as the DOTR-run Metro Rail Transit.”
Recto reiterated his observation that the cost of reviving Pasig River as “a people-mover is less compared to the expensive land-based solutions like trains and elevated expressways.”
Pasig River, he said, “is a nautical highway that is wider than the widest road.”
“It is toll-free. It is ready to use. It is not beset by right-of-way issues. Unlike roads, its rehabilitation will not cause traffic jams,” Mr. Recto said.
“There is no need to import trains and wait years for their delivery because the boats can be procured locally, from Cavite, Batangas, Bataan, and Cebu, where there is a thriving shipbuilding industry,” Mr. Recto said.
Mr. Diokno on Wednesday, April 4, led officials from 30 government agencies on an inspection tour of the Pasig River ferry, route and stations.
The DBM chief said they are looking at a December 2018 soft opening of a rehabilitated and privatized ferry service, which would have 24 air-conditioned boats that would load and unload 19.8 million passengers annually along 29 newly-refurbished stations from Manila to Marikina.


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Stanley Baker and Sir Michael Caine in the brilliant British war film Zulu
These virtues aren't about arrogance or showing off. (We leave that to rivals such as Germany and France.)
Rather, they have to do with simple, honest things: pluck in the face of overwhelming odds, duty, loyalty, self-sacrifice, sang-froid and – with luck – victory snatched by the underdog from the jaws of defeat.
Zulu tells the amazing true story of the Battle of Rorke’s Drift, the action in January 1879 when a garrison of just 150 British and colonial troops beat off successive attacks by a vastly superior force of 3,000 to 4,000 Zulus.
Had our chaps not held their nerve they would undoubtedly have experienced the fate of their 1,300 comrades massacred the day before at Isandlwana. Instead they held out with just 17 killed – and well over 300 enemy dead. And were rewarded with an unprecedented (for one action) 11 Victoria Crosses.
The defence of Rorke's Drift as imagined by Alphonse de Neuville
But that was then. Now apparently we are supposed to find this episode shaming.
Or so reckons a pop star by the name of Lily Allen, who applauded a campaign by fellow Social Justice Warriors to have a cheery message commemorating the event whitewashed from history.
The message was put up this week on a billboard at Dollis Hill Tube station by a London Underground worker who happened to be an Army reservist from a military family.
“The Battle of Rorke’s Drift is quite an important day in British military history so I put it up there. I never meant to offend anyone,” he said. Headlined “On this day in history” his message sketched out the details of the action without passing any moral judgment.
The defence of Rorke's Drift as imagined by Lady Butler
These virtues aren't about arrogance or showing off. We leave that to rivals such as the Germans or the French
Even so, complaints were made by the usual suspects and – as is the way of modern officialdom – Transport for London swiftly caved in, apologised for the sign and scrubbed the message.
This prompted a jubilant campaigner to crow on a video: “That [noticeboard] is supposed to be for uplifting comments, not for celebrating colonialism, so I'm glad you're wiping it off.”
Lily Allen shared the clip with the message “too right” – and later used her Twitter account to engage with people who disagreed. She said she found celebrating Britain's colonial past “disgusting” and mocked one critic as someone who based his history on having “watched Zulu once”.
Before we go into why Allen is so disgusted, let's first concede the tiny area where she’s right. Judged by modern values the Anglo-Zulu Wars are probably not the finest hour of British history.
Essentially they were a land grab by the British, whose administrator Sir Henry Bartle Frere pretty much started the war by exaggerating the Zulu threat.
The real John Chard and as portrayed by Stanley Baker in Zulu (1964)
Nor was Britain’s conduct of the campaign very impressive. The defeat at Isandlwana – which pitched trained men with rifles against natives with spears – was one of the most humiliating in our history.
And this was probably the real reason why so many VCs were given for Rorke’s Drift: as a way of distracting the British public from what an awful cock-up the war had been.
That said, you’d need a heart of stone, the imagination of a goldfish and the patriotism of a Corbynista not to feel moved and inspired by what those 150 men did that day.
They weren't even top-class troops: they were wounded, reserves and passed over officers, supposedly destined never to achieve greatness.
Lieutenant John Chard (Stanley Baker in the film) was a Royal Engineers officer who’d done nothing more exciting in his career than constructing naval fortifications in Bermuda and Malta.
Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead (Michael Caine) had been described by his commanding officer as “hopeless”.
The Battle of Isandlwana – told in the film Zulu Dawn, the prequel to Zulu
Yet they stood and fought, knowing almost for certain that they would end up being disembowelled by the assegais of their vastly more numerous opposition.
At one point they discussed whether to make a run for it – as various small units which could have stayed ignominiously did – but decided against because that would have meant abandoning their wounded.
The film painted a stirring picture of courage and fortitude as the many Welsh soldiers stiffened their sinews with a rousing chorus of Men Of Harlech.
However, Private Alfred Hook – the VC-winning, hard-drinking reprobate accurately shown in the movie defending the wounded in the hospital – was in fact a clean-living teetotaller. But most of the film is pretty accurate.
Michael Caine as Gonville Bromhead, the second-in-command at Rorke's Drift
Lily Allen – who once wrote the excruciating couplet “You’re just so racist/You can’t tie my laces" – would probably be appalled by the political incorrectness.
But let’s not forget that the black cast of that 1964 Zulu film were mostly descendants of the original Zulu warriors who’d fought at Isandlwana and Rorke’s Drift. And they were proud of their involvement, not ashamed.
Most people in Britain would surely agree that Rorke’s Drift deserves to live on in our collective memory.
It’s a shame that attention-seeking Lefties such as Allen get taken seriously by organisations such as Transport for London.
They’re a shrill and annoying minority.
But they're not representative of our country – nor of the values that have made us great.

domain: history


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So if you are looking for on the web unusual games to perform, or if you should be in to the classics – you should be in a position to find them and play them on line! Knowledge activities for the kiddies are in abundance on the Internet – nevertheless, it’s strongly encouraged that before enabling your young ones to enjoy free online activities, you ought to be examining the legitimacy of the website! It is a concept to download the activities your self, which means that your children can properly perform them offline later!
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domain: hobby


text: MARTELLO DIES. Vince Martello, 23, who started for Florida State's basketball team for 53 games from 1982 to 1984, died in Pensacola from sarcoma, a cancer that infects the bladder and prostate glands. It was first diagnosed on Aug. 30 of 1985. Martello is survived by his wife, Teressa, and daughter, Katrina, 4. Martello was FSU's No. 2 scorer in his senior year, averaging 13.8 points and 4.5 rebounds.

domain: news


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Neighborhood: Broadwater, 33711 - St Pete/gulfport
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All listing information is deemed reliable but not guaranteed and should be independently verified through personal inspection by appropriate professionals. Listings displayed on this website may be subject to prior sale or removal from sale. Availability of any listing should always be independently verified. Listing information is provided by My Florida Regional MLS DBA Stellar MLS for consumer personal, non-commercial use, solely to identify potential properties for potential purchase. All other use is strictly prohibited and may violate relevant federal and state law. Updated: 27th February, 2021 8:07 PM

domain: geography


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Isolated from school and society, I was attracted to the idea of the commune; people sharing a common life. I imagined making food together and living together.
At the recent Northwest Permaculture Convergence, one person said, "With 100% self sufficiency, it is not sustainable unless we can work with others". Immersed in community is a practical way of life. When you have a group deciding on things, you could multiple views and can adapt yours based on others and influence other peoples views. The framework of consensus makes all of this possible. The individual is treasured but we try to be humble for a second and consider what is best for the group. From the food program, to the garden program, to the Trust and Communications Committee to the soirées, and to the educational events. I am sure I will return to this community someday, and it will have forever come with me,
changing me for the better.
I've had fun, learned more about permaculture and community and met so many inspiring individuals. Thank you Songaia! I am sure we will meet again.

domain: agronomy


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Ten years after being made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, OBE, rock legend Eric Clapton has become a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, CBE. He received the honor from Queen Elizabeth II's daughter, Princess Anne, during a ceremony at Buckingham Palace on November 3. Clapton told reporters, "As a kid I would not have been able to accept this. I was very immature about the way I looked at that. I was against the establishment. Now that I have grown up, I really think it is an important thing to be able to set example of some kind."
Detroit rapper Eminem's new album, Encore, is expected to be one of the year's best sellers, with nearly four million copies reportedly pre-ordered. Piracy concerns led Interscope Records to announce an early release of the collection. Originally slated for a November 16 issue, Encore will now hit stores on November 12.
Britney Spears' much-anticipated Greatest Hits CD was released on November 9. In addition to hits like "Oops?I Did It Again," "I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman" and "?Baby One More Time" are three new or previously unreleased tracks. They include Britney's version of Bobby Brown's 1988 hit "My Prerogative," "(I've Just Begun) To Have My Fun" and "Do Somethin'," which previously was only available on the European release of her DVD, In The Zone.
On November 9, Universal Records released Elton John's 43rd album, Peachtree Road. It's described as "an intimate, country-tinged" collection. That same day, his four DVD set, Dream Ticket: Elton John Across Four Decades, will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy stores and BestBuy.com. It features three full-length concerts from Madison Square Garden, London's Royal Opera House and the Great Amphitheater in Ephesus, Turkey. The fourth DVD contains archival performance footage, interviews, a costume gallery, and more. In other news, billboard.com reports that Elton has signed a deal with ABC to star in a sitcom based on the legend's 30 years of experiences in the entertainment industry. Elton will play the role of a rock legend tangled up in humorous situations with the people around him. The show's creator says it's possible some of other famous people will make guest appearances. A pilot episode is expected to be filmed in 2005. Elton and his lyricist Bernie Taupin have already written a tune called "Him and Us," which will be used as the show's theme song.
R&B singer Brandy has split with Atlantic Records, the label she's been signed to her entire career. Combined sales of her four albums for Atlantic exceed 8 million copies. Brandy's latest CD, "Afrodisiac," sold only 361,000 copies. No reason was given for the split, but the singer is reportedly talking with several labels about creating her own imprint for future releases.
Career retrospectives from two Country superstars hit record stores November 9. Toby Keith's Greatest Hits 2 features three new tracks, including a duet with his 17-year-old daughter Krystal. They recorded a new version of James Taylor and Carly Simon's 1974 Top 5 hit, "Mockingbird," which will be released as the album's next single. Toby says, "Krystal and I used to sing 'Mockingbird' at home all the time. Krystal is an incredible singer, and it is just as good as it gets to work with her. She did a great job on the song and I am so proud of her." The collection also contains two live tracks. And, Shania Twain also added some new cuts to her first Greatest Hits CD. They include country and pop versions of her current hit "Party For Two" (pop version recorded with Sugar Ray's Mark McGrath and country version with newcomer Billy Currington), the honky-tonk track "I Ain't No Quitter" and the ballad "Don't," which she wrote for the film An Unfinished Life. The movie opens December 24 and stars Robert Redford, Morgan Freeman and Jennifer Lopez.
On November 9, American Idol first-season finalist Tamyra Gray made her Broadway debut in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Bombay Dreams. She'll play the leading role of Priya in the limited engagement musical, which is scheduled to run for 12 weeks.
The 3rd annual Wildlife Benefit for Walden's Puddle will take place on November 11 in Nashville. This year's lineup includes Vince Gill, Billy Ray Cyrus, Rodney Crowell, Dobie Gray and Collin Raye. The Walden's Puddle Rehabilitation Center, located outside of Nashville in Joelton, Tennessee, provides care and treatment to more than 1,300 orphaned and injured wild animals each year.


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Install this FREE app and start sharing your knowledge with other Club Touareg members, owners and enthusiasts. We are looking forward to seeing you on the forums from your phone!


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Fifty-seven percent of Americans admit to covering their teeth when they laugh. Why? Because they feel self-conscious about their smiles.
Perhaps you’re one of the many people who would beam brighter if you had a straighter smile. If so, you may be weighing your teeth-straightening options, and Invisalign has risen to the top of the list.
Still, you have a lot of questions about the process. Namely, how soon will you see results from Invisalign? Here’s the answer to that and other questions about this teeth-straightening treatment.
How Does Invisalign Work?
You probably have a general idea as to what Invisalign is. If you choose to straighten your teeth this way, you will wear clear plastic aligners that shift your teeth into the proper position.
But that’s a very broad view of how Invisalign actually works. It begins with a visit to your dentist or orthodontist, who will scan your teeth to ensure aligners fit and will move your teeth into place over time. Some scanners can give you a preview of the latter—you’ll get to see how your teeth will look at the end of the process.
Next, your aligners will be made, and you’ll check back in with the dentist to try them on for the first time. You won’t come in every time you swap out your aligners for a new set. But, the first time, they will want to ensure that the aligners fit Invisalign standards.
After that, you’ll visit your orthodontist or dentist every six to eight weeks to pick up new aligners. Each set will expand upon the progress of the previous, slowly shifting your teeth toward their final, straightened destinations.
In the end, you’ll have the straight teeth you’ve wanted without having to wear traditional metal braces. But when can you expect to get that picture-perfect smile?
When Will I See Results From Invisalign?
There’s no one answer to this question. Every smile is different, and every patient’s Invisalign results will come on their own timelines.
In general, though, many patients will notice that their teeth have moved in the few weeks after they get their first set of aligners. Some have said they can see a change after 14 days.
Others will have to wait a bit longer to pinpoint little encouraging changes. Still, you should be able to tell a difference within weeks. If it has been months and your teeth don’t look any different, you should call your dentist or orthodontist for an appointment to get your aligners double-checked.
It’s not just about initial results and changes, though. You also want to know when you can expect to see the final results from your Invisalign retainers.
Again, this depends on what your aligners are meant to be fixing. So, if you have slight crookedness to your teeth, it’ll be faster to fix that than, say, a more involved orthodontic issue. But some previous patients have finished the Invisalign process with perfectly straight smiles after a mere six months, although most need 12 months to complete their straightened smile.
Is There Anything I Can Do to Get Invisalign Results Sooner?
So many people opt for Invisalign retainers because they’re much more flexible than braces. If you get the latter, you won’t be able to eat certain sticky or crunchy foods, as they can damage the metal brackets and wires.
You don’t have to change your diet with Invisalign since you can slide them on and off of your teeth. But this flexibility comes with a caveat—you have to be responsible about wearing your retainers as much as you possibly can.
Invisalign experts suggest that you wear the retainers for 20 to 22 hours each day. Teenagers’ Invisalign will come with indicator strips to ensure they wear them enough.
And, of course, you can and should take them off while you eat and drink, but you’ll have to put them in as soon as you can afterward. Make sure to brush your teeth before slipping the aligners back into position.
Diligently wearing your Invisalign retainers for the recommended amount of time will ensure you get your results as quickly as possible. Slacking off can stall your results or reverse your progress, so make sure you’re committed to wearing the aligners before you sign up for such a treatment.
Am I a Candidate For Invisalign?
Now that you know the answer to your question, you may be sold on Invisalign. But before you get your heart set on this teeth-straightening treatment, you’ll have to ensure you’re a candidate for it.
Invisalign is adept at fixing the following issues:
- Open bites
- Crowded teeth
- Gaps between teeth
- Crooked teeth
Invisalign can also work for patients who have a combination of permanent and baby teeth, too. Of course, your best bet is to speak to an expert—your dentist or orthodontist—to ensure you’re a candidate for the Invisalign process.
I’m Ready to Try Invisalign
You now know the answer to your question regarding results from Invisalign. And you know the type of cases it can treat, as well as the ways you can improve or even hasten your results.
With all of this information in mind, you’ve made a decision—you’re ready to try Invisalign. All there’s left to do is call your dentist or orthodontist and get started. Soon enough, you won’t be scared to show your smile when you laugh; instead, you’ll be beaming because you’re proud of your straightened, sparkling smile.
And don’t forget to check back with Digital Trends Report the next time you need advice or news on the latest healthcare treatments.


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Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ITERAMS (Integrated mineral technologies for more sustainable raw material supply)
Berichtszeitraum: 2018-12-01 bis 2020-11-30
Mining has been and is still a significant user of land space and water. One of the major environmental issues in processing the ore to concentrates is the waste stream, which can reach over 90% of the total mass. The ITERAMS project targeted significantly reducing water consumption by circulating process waters and reducing the amount of tailings waste through valorisation of the mineral matrix. Water circulation reduces water consumption at mine sites and the need to dispose of large quantities of wastewater in surrounding areas. To achieve this, the project focused on the complete isolation of process waters from the adjacent water systems. This required development of new methods for optimizing and controlling water qualities at each process step. As a bonus, it also facilitates the recovery of additional valuable constituents. The closure of water cycles inevitably increases the process disturbance, temperature and instability and results in a dynamic situation. The completely closed water cycles can be realized only if the tailings can be filtered and stacked dry.
The geopolymer technology has long been recognized as providing the potential for immobilization of hazardous components in the structure and thus providing a safe method for utilizing mine tailings in value added applications. The use of geopolymers as water- and oxygen-tight covers on the deposited tailings, as hardening mine fill or as sellable products was demonstrated in the project.
ITERAMS brings substantial advancements in water management for closing the water cycle in mines. This advancement refers to progress on individual technologies (DAF, ion exchange, filtration, among others) but also in a smart and efficient combinations of the technologies. The different validation mine sites in the project confirmed that there is no “one ITERAMS solution” for closing the water cycle, consisting of a certain pattern of technologies that are interconnected in one approved set, but rather ITERAMS is offering a solution portfolio, which has been tested and validated in small scale. This solution portfolio should be adapted to the specific requirements of a mine site and its operating mode. Sensors are an essential element in a well-managed water circulation system. In ITERAMS, new sensors for measuring ion concentration in water streams have developed, based on Ion-Selective Electrodes (ISE). Conceptually, a water treatment protocol has been developed, to guide interested users towards a promising and effective water treatment design, for a mine site.
Further, ITERAMS achieved a better understanding of conditions that are suitable for creating geopolymers from tailings obtained from ore processing and was able to successfully create these geopolymers and validate
the models and concepts in relevant tests. It was no surprise to see that the initial properties of tailings vary tremendously from mine to mine, and that a “one fits all” approach and recipe for obtaining geopolymers is out of the question.
Not the least, a sustainability assessment for mine sites has been developed and successfully applied, that is at the same time able to capture the various sustainability effects of a mine operation, on-site and to local
communities, as well as through the supply chain and life cycle, for environmental, social, and economic impacts. For validation sites with very different conditions, a complete sustainability model has been created. The approach includes a procedure of how to understand and evaluate a social license (SLO) to operate for a mine site, and aspects affecting this SLO.
With ITERAMS results, it is thus possible to sort the ore, to close the water cycle in a mine site, to produce, depending especially on geological conditions, geopolymers from residues of the treatment of the circulated water, to assess the sustainability of the operations, and to guide and steer the operation of the mine towards sustainability.
The project will maintain Europe at the forefront in the fields of efficient water circulation and sustainable tailings utilization. The project developed new holistic water and waste concepts and systems, which result in higher technical, economic and environmental performance in raw materials production. The developed ITERAMS water and waste efficient concepts were jointly validated by industrial and research partners at their mine sites. The ITERAMS vision is that our new knowledge and technologies will enable (i) significantly more efficient water recycling at the mining sites in Europe and globally, (ii) valorisation of the solid waste residues will bring cost savings and added income streams for especially small mines and (iii) minimisation of the overall environmental footprint to improve the mining industry´s performance and as a consequence the image. We also anticipate that ITERAMS solutions will influence on the total lifecycle of the mining operation, as they provide input to project planning and operational phases as well as to the closure and rehabilitation.

domain: chemistry


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Robbie Williams once went without sleep for 144 hours during a six-day drink and drugs bender - and the star now believes he was "close" to death.
The 49-year-old singer thought downing drink and taking drugs was his "superpower" in the 90s, but has since realised it could've been his "fast-track to death".
Recalling a huge session in 1996, he told The Sun newspaper: "I thought I could snort the most, take the most pills, drink the most and I thought that was a superpower at the time.
"I didn’t know that was my fast-track to death. You feel like you’re indestructible, I didn’t feel I was going to die. It’s only subsequently I realise I was close.
"I stayed awake for six days. I was with somebody with deals to the dealers and it was a six-day bender, and it went very quickly."
Robbie has told how he threw up "black bile" after taking "absolutely anything" he could in "all quantities" before performing at an MTV Awards with Take That.
He said: "There was a time with Take That before our first MTV awards in Brussels when I went on, shall we say, a very long celebrity weekend.
"And I just went absolutely mental, taking absolutely any- thing I could in all quantities, and then before the live show I was spewing my guts out with this black bile. It just filled the bathroom floor.
"A doctor injected me with something, then I went and did the show. It made me scared.
"I did the show and then went back out again and carried on like nothing had happened."
But when he returned to London, Robbie - who is gearing up to release a four-part Netflix documentary about his life on November 8, titled ‘Robbie Williams’ - had a realisation that he was an addict.
He added: "The next day we flew to London and I was walking around Chelsea Harbour and it hit me, ‘Oh s***, I’m an alcoholic, I’m an addict’.
"Because I’d been close to death but had carried on regardless, abasing my better judgment, so by the time it came to the end of Take That I was doing fully-blown alcoholism and desolate times."
Robbie recently admitted making his new documentary was a "trauma watch" and like witnessing a "crash you were involved in".
He told The Times newspaper: "It was like watching a crash you were involved in, but in slow-mo.
"(Making the documentary) was like enduring your mental illness at a very, very slow pace, over a very, very long time. It’s a niche thing to experience, you know. There aren’t many support groups for it.
"When they asked me to make the documentary, I came up with a jingle for it: ‘Trauma watch!, Trauma watch!, Have a trauma watch!. I was in Take That then I left Take That, Then I did drugs and I got real fat’."
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FORSYTH COUNTY, N.C. -- A Duke Energy spokesperson says all of their customer will have their power restored by Tuesday night and many will have it even earlier an that.
FOX8 crews saw multiple energy teams working in northwest Winston-Salem on Monday.
Forsyth County was the hardest hit area with outages across the Piedmont Triad.
More than 20,000 customers in Forsyth County did not have power when crews began working on Monday Morning.
By around 5 p.m. only 7,500 were still in the dark.
Saul Juarez Armengol was happy to see workers near his home on Speas Road Monday afternoon.
“We are just glad they are here and glad they are working pretty fast,” Armengol said.
He and 10 other family members crammed into another home Sunday night. His house didn’t have power for more than a day.
“We had to use flashlights to grab a couple things,” Armengol said. “It was probably almost as cold as it is outside.”
Duke Energy will halt their efforts overnight, with only emergency crews working. The teams will be back out when the sun rises Tuesday morning.
Around 1,600 Duke Energy crew members have been working in the Piedmont Triad since the freeze over the weekend.