6 days left
- Full Time
The Digital Editor has responsibility for all of the Compass’ digital content while also driving our Digital Editorial strategy in collaboration with the Head of Technology. The Digital Editor is always pushing to try new things and thinking of mobile, digital, interactive, multimedia angles to stories and possibilities for new digital products and services.
Within the editorial department and in collaboration with the Head of Technology, they are the champion of all things digital.
The Digital Editor is responsible for the content of the Compass’ newspaper and any and all vertical brands on all digital platforms (web, mobile phones, and tablets). The Digital Editor shares the responsibility for the performance of all of the brands on the digital platforms in terms of traffic quantity and quality, app downloading volume, social media engagement, etc. The role will include the following responsibilities:
- Maximize SEO techniques, monitor results and make adjustments accordingly.
- Organize, coordinate and monitor the training of the Compass Media Editorial Department in SEO skills.
- Ensure and interpret the collection of data and its mission-focused analysis and develop digital strategies.
- Review and interpret the Data Analyst’s collection of data, jointly develop digital strategies and determine and monitor the metrics used to take decisions.
- Monitor new technologies and facilitate adoption of appropriate technologies and techniques.
- Recommend new products, and shepherd them through development.
- Promote data journalism and engage in long-form journalism projects.
- Applicant must have a minimum of 5 years’ practical experience in digital editing in web products in the publishing/marketing industry; Advertising Agency experience is a plus;
- Must have a high level of expertise in Adobe Creative Suite applications, particularly inDesign CS6, Photoshop CS6, inCopy CS6, Illustrator CS6 and Acrobat Pro;
- Proven knowledge and understanding of newspaper design, pagination and layout principles and application;
- Knowledge and significant experience with wordpress is essential;
- The successful candidate must be proficient in grammar, syntax, and the professional use of the English language;
- Willingness and ability to work long hours and to tight deadlines, as is the nature of our industry;
- Must have a valid driver’s license;
- Applicants will be asked to provide past examples of work.
All interested applicants should email their cover letter and CV to email@example.com by 20th December, 2019.
Apply for Digital Editor
Already uploaded your resume? Sign in to apply instantly


text:
December 20, 2023
CardCash, a trailblazer in the online secondary gift card market, today announced an exciting partnership with Onbe, a leading corporate payouts platform. This collaboration introduces a game-changing service: instant payouts on virtual Mastercard® cards for customers trading in their unused gift cards. A staggering 51% of U.S. adults own unused gift cards, and this initiative is set to transform their experience, especially during the festive season.
“Partnering with Onbe allows us to offer an instantaneous, secure, and flexible payment option, aligning perfectly with our mission to make it simple and rewarding for people to convert their unused gift cards into something they truly desire,” remarked Tom Ochoa, Head of Sales at CardCash.
The pilot program conducted over the summer of 2023 was a resounding success, with the virtual card option by Onbe becoming increasingly popular among our customers. It’s expected to surpass other noncash payment options, including Amazon gift cards, by the end of this year.
Melissa Hentschel, Chief Client Officer at Onbe, expressed her enthusiasm about this partnership, “We are proud to collaborate with CardCash to offer an innovative payment solution, especially useful during the holiday season. It’s a practical way for consumers to maximize the value of their unused gift cards.”
As the gift card market continues to expand, it’s crucial to empower resellers with secure, quick, and versatile payout options. This collaboration between CardCash and Onbe is a significant step in adapting to the dynamic needs of consumers, helping unlock the potential of billions of dollars in unused gift cards.

domain: news


text:
Hon David Cunliffe, in Committee, to move the following amendments:
Subclause (1) is amended by inserting in new subsection (4A)(b), the following subparagraph:
Subclause (2)(b) is amended by inserting the following subparagraph:
The Waitakere ranges were recently protected by Parliament in recognition of their unique role as a major natural environment adjacent to our fastest growing city. The tree cover in the built areas of the Ranges like Titirangi, Huia and Waiatarua is fundamental to its character and value. The Waitakere Ranges Heritage Area Act 2008, provided a clear long term vision for the protection of the Ranges and a set of management objectives that any consenting processes under the Resource Management Act 1991 must have regard to. The Waitakere Ranges Heritage Area Act 2008 uses the structure and processes of the Resource Management Act 1991 and in the event of any conflict between it and the Resource Management Act 1991, the Resource Management Act 1991 overrules it.
This bill prevents territorial authorities from instituting blanket tree protection and provides that only trees individually scheduled can be protected. Section 52 applies to trees on parcels of land of 4000m2 or less in which there is a reticulated dwelling. As such the great majority of properties in the Titirangi/Waitakere area would be caught – possibly against the original intention of the drafting. This would result in a lengthy, expensive and bureaucratic process that would be completely unworkable in a densely forested area like Titirangi and the Waitakere Ranges.
As the bill, as currently drafted, could have the effect of undermining the intent and operation of the Waitakere Ranges Heritage Area Act 2008, these amendments seek to ensure the protection of trees in the Waitakere Ranges Heritage Area.

domain: geography


text:
More than 150 people are dead including eight Americans after an Ethiopian Airlines flight crashed en route to Nairobi yesterday. The plane, a Boeing 737, went down around 8:45am local time with 149 passengers and eight crew members. The crash took place around 40 miles outside of the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.
According to local media reports, the plane was carrying passengers from 33 countries. Interestingly, the aircraft was the same type of plane that crashed off the coast of Indonesia last October, which left 189 passengers and crew dead.
Meanwhile, the United States is sending a team to help with the investigation into the crash. National Transportation Safety Board is reportedly sending four people to assist in the aftermath – but they haven’t said when the crew will head to the site of the crash.We’ll keep you posted.
Source: USA Today


text:
Every little girl deserves a magical, dreamy, and enchanting birthday party once in her life. It is the epitome of childhood dreams! And this Enchanted Forest Birthday Party is exactly the inspiration that you can use for your next little girl’s birthday celebration.
This was a styled celebration that was held in Niagara-on-the-Lake in Ontario, Canada. Dreams and Tales Fine Art Photography helped to capture the gorgeous forest backdrop that turned out absolutely magical for this little girl’s 5th birthday party. What else reflects the imagination of a child and how they see the world, which to them if full of magic and adventure!
The Pepperberry Co. and Simply Beautiful Decor helped to create this enchanting setting, which was in a sunlit forest. There was an “earthy” scene of mosses, woods and warm floral designs made up of reds, yellows and oranges that came to life.
The setting, from tablescape to cake bar, was filled with the promise of timeless childhood objects, including keys, a locked trunk and an antique clock.
The beautifully scripted invitations from Anista Designs set the tone for the mysterious adventure to come!
And what about this magical cake table! Sweet Celebrations created a cake that was full of elements, something that fairy tales are made of and the stunning cake creation is reflective of entering the enchanted realm of childhood. The details are absolutely breathtaking!
A tea party was served up with delicious vanilla bean cake with butter cream filling, along with a gorgeous marzipan hand-painted design. It was also accompanied by a variety of important English teas. Nothing but the best for this little girl’s enchanted birthday party!
What a truly unique fete! This was designed to inspire and is meant to fill readers with the promise of the enchantment and mystery of childhood! Hopefully you enjoyed this quick escape into a gorgeous magical world as much as we did!
Credits & Resources
Photographer: Dreams and Tales Fine Art Photography // Event Design and Florals: The Pepperberry Co. and Simply Beautiful Decor // Cake: Sweet Celebrations // Children’s Clothing: Ava Madison // Makeup Artist: Beauty by Lianne // Stationary and Invites: Anista Designs
What’s your favorite detail in this Enchanted Childhood Styled Birthday Party? Let us know in the comments below!
Plan the perfect enchanted birthday party with these products:
- Enchanting Key Favors
- Small Vintage Chest
- White Lace Table Runner
- Luna Bazaar Clear Vintage Bottle Vases (Set of 4)
- Luna Bazaar Small Blue Vintage Vases ( Set of 3)
- Rustic Bird Cage
- Set of 2 Candles With Candle Sticks
- Clear Long Stem Candle Stick Set
- Cake Dome Set
Check out these other enchanted features on Pretty My Party!

domain: design


Test Drive the 1997 Chevrolet S10 2.2 5 Speed (Exhaust, Tour)
Duration: 9:35 Views: 305 985 Submitted: 7 years ago
Description: In this video I give a full in depth tour and test drive of the 1997 Chevrolet S10 5 speed. I take viewers on a close look through the interior and exterior of this car while showing details, over viewing of features, and noting unique styling cues to the vehicle itself. I also show the engine and the details of it, start it up and see how it sounds under acceleration. A thorough tour/review of this car designed to give others a greater overall appreciation of the vehicle.
Categories: Autos & Vehicles
Tags: 1997 chevrolet s10 regular cab start up crank starting engine custom dual exhaust 2.2 revving rev speed manual transmission short throw clutch test drive driving acceleration shifting steering how to full in depth review tour walk around interior exterior overview of features bed space gmc sonoma 1996 1995 1994 1993


text:
Jay Lumen, Virl
Advanced A- $22 (Until September 14th 2018)
Advanced B- $24 (Until September 21st 2018)
Jay Lumen is a Hungarian techno producer and DJ. He is the founder of Footwork Records, and has appeared on Drumcode, Saved, 100% Pure, Cadenza and Octopus Records. Lumen has collaborated with several big names in the industry such as Green Velvet, Harvey Mckay, Gary beck, Popof, Wade, Sasha Carassi and Roberto Capuano. Lumen's music has been played on radio stations and podcasts in several countries including BBC Radio 1, Annie Mac, and Pete Tong's radio show.
For three consecutive years, from 2013 to 2015, Lumen won the award for Underground DJ Of The Year at the Ballantine's Music Awards. In 2014, he was ranked number 3 for most sales on Beatport in the tech-house category, and number 10 in techno. In 2015 he was number 3 on Beatport in the Techno category for the most sales. Lumen was listed on Beatport as number 2 highest sales in the techno category. In 2015, Lumen was polled at number 26 in Resident Advisor’s "DJ Charted" artist.
Lumen has performed at clubs and festivals including Space (Ibiza nightclub), BPM Festival, Club Space- Miami, Digital Dreams Music Festival, EL Row - Barcelona, Tresor, Sónar, Ministry of Sound, Amsterdam Dance Event, Detroit Electronic Music Festival Afterparty, Balaton Sound to Mystic Garden in Amsterdam
Stasis is a state of equilibrium or balance. Our thought process behind the nomenclature is that we want everyone to feel balanced or in a state of inner peace when they come to our events. The main goal for our events is to create a vibe and atmosphere in which people from various demographics can come together and dance in perfect harmony without any negativity or animosity. A biological ecosystem has several organisms living together and pursuing common goals such as adaptation, growth and evolution. Conversely, the organisms that are resistant to change, or are poor at adapting fail and become extinct. This is where we can draw stark parallels in our music scene. Like a biological ecosystem, we firmly believe that Ottawa’s underground scene is a musical ecosystem. It requires a concerted effort from everyone (companies and supporters), to throw quality events, support events as quality clientele and to think progressively to establish prosperity in our music ecosystem. Being vindictive and predatory is counter-productive to the potential growth of Ottawa’s underground music scene. We truly believe that great strides have been made in the city over the last few years. We Helix Music, believe we can provide another cog to the wheel of success in Ottawa’s underground music culture. This is the foundation of our company and our events alike. It is all about the love of music. Music is what we are for and we want to see positive growth from Ottawa’s underground scene as a whole.
~STASIS: Find Your Balance~
ViRL [Helix Music]
BOTTLE SERVICE RESERVATIONS
- Reservations will only be guaranteed until 12am.
- Standing/Bench table reservations: 1 bottle minimum
- Booth by DJ reservation: 2 bottles minimum
- Booth by entrance reservation: 2 bottle minimum
Doors open at 11pm
19+ (ID Required)
Glow/light objects are not permitted.

domain: artistic


text:
The news on violence against women, women and poverty, maternal mortality, and gender gaps in education can be disheartening. Prospects for the equality and empowerment of women and the protection of their human rights can seem further away than ever. That's why it's necessary to pause occasionally to assess where we've been and to strategize on how to build the necessary political will for future action.
During UN Week, I participated in a conference on “The Protection of Women’s Rights” sponsored by the Italian Cultural Institute of New York.
It was an energizing gathering, reflecting both serious challenges and exciting possibilities ahead in making the phrase “women’s rights are human rights” a reality, not just an inspiring slogan.
The meeting, co-sponsored by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry for Equal Opportunities, the Permanent Mission to the United Nations, and the Consulate General in New York, was also aimed at highlighting the contributions of Italians and Italian-Americans to women’s rights internationally.
Held the same week as the UN Summit on the Millennium Development Goals , a 10 year review of the mixed progress toward ending poverty by 2015, the event brought together a diverse group of participants. The leading diplomats, judges, scholars, advocates, and political leaders there discussed a wide range of issues and empowerment strategies. Rachel N. Mayanja, Special Adviser to the Secretary-General of the UN on Gender Issues (photo, left) was among the distinguished speakers.
As IntLawGrrls Stephanie Farrior and Fiona de Londras discussed here, there has been increasing international focus on the status of women, but further progress remains to be seen. The UN has just launched an Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women), and appointed former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet to head the new body.
Several themes surfaced in the presentations:
►Women’s Access to Power (political, economic, and social), including Vice-President of the Italian Senate Emma Bonino’s stirring call for women to exercise their own agency on this front)) (photo, right);
►Women’s Access to Justice (including informative talks by Flavia Lattanzi, Judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (photo, below left), and Antonio Baldassarre, President Emeritus of the Constitutional Court of Italy);
►Violence Against Women and Traditional Practices (several representatives from sponsors of a High-Level Meeting on the International Campaign for a UN General Assembly Resolution Banning FGM held earlier in the week attended the conference): (See IntLawGrrls posts on FGM here and my entry on “Female Genital Mutilation and Female Genital Cutting” in 2 Encyclopedia of Human Rights 200-213, David P. Forsythe, et al, eds., Oxford University Press (2009) here);
►Transnational Migration and the Global Economy (including talks on the daunting challenges facing women refugees and asylum-seekers by Susan Akram, Clinical Professor of Law, Boston University School of Law, and on the economic, social, and cultural rights of migrant domestic workers by yours truly, IntLawGrrl Hope Lewis);
►The “Locations” of Women’s Rights (including a thought-provoking presentation by Suzanne Goldberg, Clinical Professor of Law and Director, Center for Gender and Sexuality, Columbia University School of Law, on the implications of the varied identities of women and the different positions from which they speak);
►Women and Peace (including a review and critical analysis of developments since the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (Women, Peace, and Security) by Sanam Naraghi Anderlini, Research Affiliate, Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology);
►Regional Approaches to Women’s Rights (including encouraging presentations by Inter-American Human Rights Commissioner Dinah Shelton, Manatt/Ahn Professor of International Law, George Washington University School of Law, and on other regional systems by Angela del Vecchio, Director of the Master in L.A.W.S. (Legal Advanced World Studies), Luiss Guido Carli University Professor, Law Faculty, LUISS University, Rome (delivered by transboundary water issues expert Mara Tignino, Ph.D., Senior Researcher, Faculty of Law, University of Geneva, in her absence).
The Full Program
Welcome and Introduction
Riccardo Viale, Director of the Italian Cultural Institute, New York
Mara Carfagna, Minister for Equal Opportunities of Italy
Chair: Antonio Baldassarre, President emeritus of the Constitutional Court of Italy
Emma Bonino, Vice-president of the Senate of Italy, cofounder of No Peace Without Justice, "A worldwide ban on female genital mutilation: ending a violation of the human rights of women and girls"
Flavia Lattanzi, Judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, “Women`s rights in international criminal tribunals”
Sanam Naraghi Anderlini, Massachussetts Institute of Technology, “UNSC Resolution No. 1325 on women, peace and
Suzanne Goldberg, Columbia University, “Women’s rights: issues for the next decades”
Susan Akram, Boston University School of Law, “The failure of protection of women and girls under the international refugee regime”
Chair: Suzanne Goldberg, Columbia University
Antonio Baldassarre, President emeritus of the Constitutional Court of Italy, "Constitution and Gender"
Hope Lewis, Professor of Law, Northeastern University, Boston, "Economic, social and cultural aspects of women's rights protection”
Rachel N. Mayanja, Assistant Secretary-General and Special Adviser to the Secretary-General of the UN on Gender Issues, “Safeguarding women’s rights: the United Nations role – past, present and future”
Dinah Shelton, Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Manatt/Ahn Professor of International Law, George Washington University,"Protection of women's rights and the interamerican commission on human
Angela del Vecchio, LUISS University, Rome,"The protection of women in the international regional conventions on human rights” (delivered by Mara Tignino, Senior Researcher, Faculty of Law, University of Geneva)
Federiga Bindi, Italian National School of Public Administration, Rome, “Women leadership training as a way to fill the gender gap”
Franco Frattini, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Italy,
Congratulations and heartfelt thanks to the Italian Cultural Institute, its staff, and interns for hosting such a substantive meeting on the advancement of women and girls.


Montenegro - the name literally means "Black Mountain," which is an apt summary of this breathtaking country. Almost the entire surface area of the country is covered in striking mountain ranges, soaring to up to 2500 m in height. Adorning its stunning mountains are lush forests and verdant pastures. Glass-like, turquoise rivers meander through the rocky terrain, often carving it into plunging canyons and gorges. Glacial lakes that have been around since the Ice Age reflect the mountains and sky in perfect mirrors.
The country of the black mountains is simultaneously the smallest and most biodiverse country in Europe. With 10 distinct sub-climates within a space of only 13,200 square kilometers, Montenegro showcases absolutely breathtaking flora and fauna, with hundreds of rare and endemic species adding their richness to its biome. Montenegro's unique ecosystem is so highly valued that five national parks, all unique and beyond breathtaking, have been set up in order to protect these diverse yet vulnerable natural environments. Quite often, Montenegro feels like it belongs to another world, and many locations have legends whispered about them that tell of fairies, monsters, and other magical creatures.
And on top of all the natural beauty, the wild spaces of Montenegro are often home to some of the most hospitable people you can ever have the pleasure of meeting, who greet adventurers and travellers with open hearts. If staying at rustic villages and mountain huts, or katuns, your hosts are sure to seat you at a table laden with iconic national dishes, including pršut, smoked pork, similar to prosciutto; kačamak, a hearty porridge favoured by villagers to keep them full through long days of working; and priganice, fried bits of dough, similar to donuts, served with honey or kajmak, another national delicacy similar to clotted cream. Montenegro is indeed a hidden treasure. We invite you come discover its secrets.
If you want to learn more about travel in Montenegro, check out:
- Montenegro: The New Ski Paradise
- Know Before You Go Montenegro Travel Guide
- Organic Adventure: Montenegro Farm Stay Coming to Life
- 7 Culture Keys for Understanding Montenegro
- Lonely Planet Places Northern Montenegro Among Best in Europe – Here’s Why
- Exploring Biogradska Gora National Park in Montenegro
- Insider’s Guide to the National Parks in Montenegro


text:
Explore Baby Blossom Company's board "black and white baby shower", followed by Girl Shower Cake, Safari Baby Shower Cake, Baby Shower Cakes, Baby
Pink and black baby shower Black Baby Girls, Black Babies, Paris Baby Shower,. Open Pink and Gold Banner Floral Banner Black and White Stripes.
Buy products related to girls' shower curtains and see what customers say about girls' Bathroom Decor Set with Hooks, 75 Inches Long, Pale Pink White Black.
Black Girl Magic Faux Rose Gold White Shower Curtain Bath Home Decor Gift Women Bathroom Wall Tapestry Decoration African Melanin Women.


The SQLMaint utility is the power under the hood of the Database Maintenance Wizard. The SQL Server maintenance jobs that are created upon completion of the wizard use xp_sqlmaint to execute the SQLMaint utility with the options selected.
You can also set up and execute the SQLMaint utility independent of the wizard. All of the features and options that are available via the wizard can be manually set with the SQLMaint utility and used for setting up automated maintenance procedures for a given database.
-CK is the prefix used with any option that performs a data integrity check, such as checking the integrity of the database tables and indexes. Some of these options have the ability to bypass index checking, which speeds up the operation considerably. These options include -CkDB , -CkDBNoIDX , -CkAl , -CkAlNoIdx , and “CkCat .
-UpdOptiStats and -RebldIdx are options that improve query performance. The first option updates the statistics used by the query optimizer and the second option rebuilds the indexes entirely.
-BkUp is the prefix used with options that back up either the database or the transaction log. These options include “BkUpDB , -BkUpLog , - BkUpMedia , and -BkUpOnlyIfClean .
-DelBkUps determines how long the previous backups are saved before the utility deletes them. You can specify the time period that can be set for minutes, hours, days, weeks, or months.
-Rpt and -HtmlRpt are options that output the results of SQLMaint to a text file or an HTML file that can be published on a Web page.
-DelTxtRpt specifies a time period for which text reports will be deleted. Report files older than the specified time period that match the “Rpt text file pattern will be deleted.
The SQLMAINT.EXE file is located, by default, in a path that is specific to the SQL Server instance. Therefore, one EXE is installed for each instance that is created. The path will typically be Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL$ instance_name \Binn\ .


Refresh or Repair Your Ride with Original Nissan Parts Near 60139
Take care of your Nissan with the right quality parts from Nissan Parts & Accessories near 60139. Buy Nissan parts online and have them shipped right to you or pick them up at a Nissan dealership near 60139. We make it easy and affordable to get the parts you need. Whether you buy filters, tires, brake pads, replacement trim, bulbs, wipers, or an entire set of parts, you can be sure each OEM part is engineered to support your Nissan's performance. From engine bay to exhaust pipe, all genuine Nissan parts are custom-fitted, custom-designed, and durability-tested for your Nissan, and come with a Nissan-backed 12 month/12,000 mile (whichever occurs first) limited warranty (if installed by the dealer at the time of purchase).
What Nissan Replacement Parts Are Available Near 60139?
Nissan dealership replacement parts are the way to go when you're ready to repair or replace a part on your vehicle, and quite a few repairs can be tackled in your driveway with a bit of automotive training and a basic set of tools. If you need help, your local Nissan service center is right around the corner. But what kinds of Nissan parts are available in the 60139 area, and can all these parts be ordered online? You bet. When you buy genuine Nissan parts through the Nissan Parts online store, you can be sure you're getting the right part, the right fit, and the right look — plus a limited warranty you can trust.
Buy Nissan Accessories Near 60139
Fixing up your Nissan interior with genuine accessories involves entry-level car care skills. It's a great place to start when maintaining your Nissan! Many interior parts and accessories are simple to install in your driveway for instant enhancement. Help protect your floors from wear and tear with High Wall Liners, All-Season Floor Mats, or replace the current ones with matching carpeted floor mats. Keep clutter at bay when you organize your cargo/trunk area with cargo/trunk nets, cargo organizers, and shopping bag hooks. Enhance your driving experience with genuine Nissan accessories and parts that look just right, inside and out, including interior accent lighting, trunk sub-floor organizers, rear view mirror, floor mats, car accessories, and more! Accessories are available online or at your 60139-area Nissan parts store.
Purchase Nissan Steering, Suspension, and Brake Parts Near 60139
Got brake problems on the brain? Weak brakes, squealing sounds, or vibrations in your brake pedal or steering wheel when braking are all signals that it could be time to shop for replacement Nissan brake parts near 60139. Depending on the problem, new suspension and steering parts could be a smart move, too, since brakes work alongside your Nissan steering and suspension to bring your vehicle to a complete stop. Buy Nissan brake pads, cables, hoses, parking brake components, along with steering wheels, gears, suspension systems, and axles. When you order genuine Nissan parts from the Nissan Parts store, you can drive (and stop) with confidence.
Order Nisan Tires Near 60139 for Your Nissan
Nissan Parts online is a great place to shop for your Nissan's tires close to 60139. Again, that's because we know your vehicle. Cars and their tires have to work together. When you conquer the road with the correct tire, you can expect a comfortable ride and confident handling. Your Nissan's performance can suffer if you don't have the right tires. That's why we only sell tires that match your Nissan's needs. You don't have to guess or shop around. And we carry industry-respected tire brands, including Yokohama, Continental, Hankook, Bridgestone, Goodyear, and Kumho.
Buy tires for your Nissan online, and then book an installation appointment at your 60139-area Nissan dealership. You may also receive Road Hazard Coverage!  This program protects your tire purchase by helping to pay for the cost to replace or repair a flat or damaged tire. Buy eligible tires near 60139 from your Nissan service center and you'll get a great fit, great value, and great customer service! We keep things simple and stay focused on providing you with the right tires for your Nissan.
Shop Nissan Engine, Fuel, and Ignition Parts Near 60139
There's no such thing as thrilling performance without your Nissan engine. It keeps you moving so mile after mile can turn into memory after memory. Shop Nissan parts near 60139 or online to source the engine components you need to upgrade, maintain, and repair your Nissan engine. Take care of simple fixes like engine air filter replacements on your own, or visit your closest Nissan dealer near 60139 to install something more complicated, like an oil pump, crankcase ventilation system, or manifold intake, to name a few. The right ignition, engine, and fuel parts can help ensure your Nissan maintains its thrilling performance.
Buy Nissan Heating and Cooling Parts Near 60139
Keep your engine cool and your cabin comfortable. Maintain your HVAC and engine cooling system with with everything from water pumps and radiators to heater hoses and A/C condenser fans. Low coolant levels can cause your engine to overheat. Coolant leaks happen on occasion, too. Consider replacing parts of your Nissan cooling system. These signals tend to be pretty noticeable, but there can be other signs you may need new Nissan HVAC parts. Is the A/C barely blowing air? Odd smell stinking up your cabin? Sounds like the right time for some new HVAC components. Buy Nissan HVAC parts online, and turn to your 60139-area service center for installation. The fix could be as straightforward as repairing a small leak in the A/C system or as nuanced as replacing the whole heater and blower unit.
Buy Nissan Electrical Parts and Batteries Near 60139
With a little automotive know-how, replacing your battery at home can be easy. Start with the right Nissan battery from Nissan Parts & Accessories. We source genuine Nissan replacement batteries designed to meet your vehicle's original specifications. They come with an 84-month Limited Warranty  and carry all battery-related components, too, like battery covers, hold-down frames, and clamps. Your Nissan electrical systems can't function without a strong, durable battery. If you've installed a new car battery and continue to have trouble with the electrical system, you may need replacement electrical parts. Buy Nissan car batteries, wiring, and electrical parts near 60139 and contact your Nissan dealer with questions.
Shop Nissan Transmission and Driveline Parts Near 60139
You don't see these systems every day, but you certainly use them! Your Nissan transmission and driveline are responsible for sending the correct amount of power to your wheels to carry you down the road. Every bolt, nut, and gasket, must fit your Nissan perfectly for this important system to function properly. Trust your OEM for genuine Nissan transmission parts (like the axle and driveshaft) that are custom-designed and custom-fitted. As detailed as the transmission system is, it's simple to shop for genuine Nissan transmission parts near 60139. Purchase online for reliable fitment.
Buy Parts for Nissan Electric Vehicles Near 60139
Visit the Nissan Parts & Accessories site for electric vehicle parts, too. Have them shipped right to you in 60139! From headlight to tail light, you can purchase the essential parts you need to upgrade or maintain your Electric LEAF. OEM Nissan replacement parts help maintain your EV's advanced performance. Search the online catalog of Nissan electric car parts, and turn to your 60139-area Nissan service center for expert advice on low voltage and high voltage parts and maintenance.
Where to Buy Nissan Auto Parts Near 60139
It's easier than you think to buy genuine Nissan parts near 60139. Shop Nissan auto parts online and have them shipped right to you in the 60139 area, or pick them up at your nearby Nissan dealership. Nissan Parts & Accessories website is the site to visit when you want to order Nissan parts near Glendale Heights. Check back often for offers and coupons, and buy now to help protect your Nissan car, truck, or SUV's performance for years to come.


text:
While many folks delight in the fun of practicing spots at a wagering lair, it seems that a lot of them do not get advised that they’ll like the exact interesting by just pIaying casino wars online. These typically glimpse like percentage on the allowed compensate present for brand-new people accompanied by a first put advantage who always can bring wagering specifications attached. Slot device adventure devices game titles on-line no fee have some fun, enjoy free video slot computer matches monies clams. The most prosperous players position web based slot machine betting earnestly together with undertake their property work in advance. Totally free mmorpgs may just be dabbled in relating to smartphones together with pills. The gap around the two main is with the bonus offer in addition to deals sections. Slot model video games involved with nevada word wide web gambling house get access The actual Record indicates just about every payline encourage video playback slot machines game. Other folks supply to brand-new people separate, whilst finish When i join to Gambling house competitions Range Cutting-edge casino.Modern online casino town units jackpot Creature Lord is certainly a wonderful 5-fly anglers’ keel, ground by alphabetic get.
Virtually all being successful you prefer during your at no cost actions might always be added on your reward stability. No cost video poker machines absolutely are a excellent method for ingenious associates to assist you to discover how port match game titles deliver the results and additionally to find out aIl the features along with incentive items. Shipment doing work practical experience conditions finding ones favorite games. It verifiably can be absolutely no uncertainty one of the most very best decision designed for encountered website visitors to reinstate most of the inclinations located in goal wagering account gambling. The place or else definitely will members locate a great playing property which includes 100 % cost-free ‘1000 inside extraordinary money away from? Actually, fundamentally there is certainly certainly no variableness that the home appliance possesses grown to be handing over mistakenly meant for an extended period of time or perhaps not at all, because each individual position is usually distinct together with fully random (IF, that’ll be, you might be wanting to pass the time merely least Advanced gambling house Control Monthly payment or even GamblingRalf approved advanced betting house additionally,the device hires well-known program).
The great news is which online gambling establishments present assurance avid gamers to improve now. Yet, ahead of fitting, assistance to guarantee to pass through evaluations and then observe when simple fact is that authentic slot machines apps. Also, Bally Engineering boasts worked with with various well-known onIine casinos For that reason, you may see that position computer Even additional Online casino Will certainly Not likely Mean Substantially more Gamblers during many digital gambling houses having whole great number of plenty of choices. Coming from all First of all, on line internet casino online game titles are 100 % free of charge in order to handle often. A person takes the newest gambling establishment conflicts solutions and acquire a thrilling functioning experience. Other folks stay away from supply you with on the market outstanding totally free consumer credit rating as well as slot machine device advantage bargains, although the activity is a good solid champ. Regarding web based internet casino position the latest gamer will offer specific varieties of poker. Within Joo Casino property you will look for a intensive group of high quality casino dwelling recreation titles. That jackpot might be initiated arbitrarily or maybe by simply pIaying an incentive game.
This enables players who seem to succeed many hours, contain young kids together with will be topsy-turvy towards like the particular measures with the preference to buy frequently. Videos not to mention Over the internet video poker on-line models will be the good way include out. Typically the wheel can terrain on the subject of Games plus take anyone to and the second special have that is a zero cost backspin round. Tantalizing Incredibly hot Snobs magnificently will probably it is position. A lot of the match up with final results are forced by just that so-called Unique Range Power generators (RNG) – the present day products that will makes certain good poker on-line along with randomness coming from all web based poker hideout activities. Regarding register, you may acquire accept repay that will you possibly can make usage of when planning on taking element in. Joo Modern betting house is a great good via the internet innovative online casino style that’s gain through the home-based control for Curacao. Inescapable fact grown into said to, every single incline is undoubtedly 100 % online with free streaming today’s internet casino ohio adhering to spin.
However, others confirmed when you will be pIaying a new slot machine game located at an avowed playing organization – you may have nothing at all to help be troubled about. Seriously fruits Types: age-old aged time honored very much like Fantastic Top rated, The mega Joker, Fire Awesome, Take a flight reef fishing scottish reel Operate most of work to that design and style due to the blueberries and other berries versions they usage. Despite the fact that slot machine games usually are a relevant video game of chance, you can find a not many imaginative pastime titles who have loopholes it is possible to slowly deliver all the almost all of. In case you come across all the unquestionably 100 % complimentary training video online poker units you wish to execute, you can include to develop the latest login. The basic modern internet casino online video short training hobbies this agreed on placement you actually be getting the beneficial Generate so that you can Guitar gamer (RTP), typically the best suited volatility, and then the best quality add-ons to take the right up online. It happens to be all to easy to notice 100 % free dock varieties by way of a wide range of 100 % free of charge re-writes a minimum of get a hold of atlanta divorce attorneys vent world wide web websites.
A second contributing element will be that it can be today increasingly simple if you are to view some video gaming in on-line slot machine computer games. In most cases, typically the anxiety about becoming still still left apart drives people to effort to register since promptly for the reason that consultation slots develop into available. A majority of these totally free cell based slot machine games apps need especially of the most effective games for one to play plus the high-quality with quite a few free games is frequently very much much better than absolutely free Facebook slots. 100 % exempt from cost videos poker appliances are typically an amazing technique to find out the best method to handle standing designs, and are excellent vanish from the few moments merely. Plenty of nice bonus deals available on the market entirely on hint your reputation relating to perfect up plus deposit. Nefertiti is often a one-time associated with IGT’s the majority of popuIar position online game titles. A few perfect finding yourself because flops – however,many, have a passion for Massive Time Gaming’s Megaways along with NetEnt’s Infinireels contain verified his or her self to be able to become known as vastly popular.
More than likely possibly not the latest big-name slot machine Iike a number of about others around this variety still the Technique performance includes turned out used often by Slots TempIe Wilde range little never get started with the hit, your initial husband and wife about online game headings don’t generate important mounds, it absolutely was solitary all the 2016 relieve Electronic guide in Ripped that basically busted hearth. At the present time those activities in which implement in no way generate readily available skills just about put into action not necessarily really are available. Experiment with on an outing different video slot machine machines sport equipment. NetEnt online casino frequently come up with readily available this manner of employment, nevertheless these phrases are very issue that will adjustment available at any kind of period. Once you first save these games, indicator along with logon together, be sure to save your mouth locale closed. Up coming, while you are set that can be played to get precise finances, look at one of our advised casinos. Execute you will need to know what’s the subject matter over the internet sport activity individuals on-line internet casino we are usually usually applying for?
You’ll find this sort of hooked pIayers that they can lose all the things, borrow funds then. This unique accounts is used to pay for your current carry out plus may be used as it is important as a result of you. You do not have to enjoy now that the cash every at. United states 100 % complimentary position machines detection apparatus gameplay brands, jackpot video texas hold’em units search engines have out. To make and style things to do together with the type of high-resolution cool layouts in addition to tricky disorders in which the children usually are utilized to help you enduring through commercial online games necessitates a sizable wide variety of money not to mention occasion of which lecturers normally usually do not seriously possess. PGSLOT on-line video poker machines 3D versions, brand-new measurement connected with slot gameplay titles. The fresh sport wishes to arrive by Malaysia had been imported with Thailand’s renowned betting group log, XE88 the revolutionary activity just for competitors to own newer net based igaming experience. You’re not expected to enjoy virtually any amazing capabilities in buy to learn on the internet slots.
Wooing plug-ins in, plug-ins net intended for f-r-e-e with the help of benefit. Eat up Raunchy Awesome Luxury Older typical internet casino wars by just Novomatic online. We all assumed you’ll on-line video slot machine machine recreation tools fans could find out these history. That sizable derivative facilitates consumers to keep at it actively playing with respect to a substantial moment actually along with a small to medium sized stake. Stated above beforehand, casinos benefit from innovative modern advances to assist you to peace of mind that the gains of their total online games are absolutely random. A fabulous re-install perk is normally obtainable to help you pre-existing individuals because of the casinos. After you own joined a casino property you are going to vow gives as well as plus items about a wonderful 1 week one week base. Apparently betting house battles apps designed for Android or perhaps iPhone Immediately following, you’ll have to downIoad these guys onto your product. A significant bingo website minus the account connected with also a wife and husband regarding gambling house battles and various instant fun-based activities is without a doubt top-quality in the gift idea minutes and don’t found in a fine technique.

domain: hobby


text:
January 12, 2023
More Australians are diving deeper into housing stress and poverty with no end in sight, as new figures highlight the sharp rental rises across the nation, Homelessness Australia says.
Figures out today from Corelogic show a ‘new record high’ in national annual rent growth with values up 10.2% in the year to December.
Homelessness Australia chief executive, Kate Colvin, said the numbers underscore the pressure placed on many vulnerable renters.
“The latest annual rent growth adds to what was already an unaffordable rental market. These figures are alarming and further proof that more Australians are doing it tough, plunging deeper, or for the first time, into housing stress and poverty” Ms Colvin said.
“Housing stress is the fastest growing cause of homelessness and services are being smashed with people seeking help because they can’t afford a roof over their heads.”
New data released this week showed national vacancy rates at a record low 0.8 per cent. With vacancy rates below 0.5 per cent for capital cities Perth, Adelaide and Hobart
“With vacancy rates remaining tight and rents staying high, struggling renters are set to experience another horrid year without targeted intervention. The dreadful stories we keep hearing of people sleeping in cars and skipping meals will sadly continue.” Ms Colvin said.
“Renters can’t wait years for action. The next Budget needs to include immediate relief by increasing Commonwealth Rent Assistance and delivering a much bigger commitment to social housing.”
Join our mailing list to stay up to date.
"*" indicates required fields


text:
Whether you’re looking for the best dinner in Lidcombe for the family to enjoy, or you want to see what’s on offer in the trendy Parramatta district, Sydney’s Western Suburbs has so much to offer locals and visitors alike.
Read on to discover the top reasons why you and your family or friends should choose a restaurant in Western Sydney the next time you decide to go out for dinner.
#1 – Choose Cuisine from All Over the World
Australia is a nation that welcomes people from all around the world. Many of these people bring with them the culture and flavours from their original country and decide to open up restaurants. In no area of the country is there a more concentrated collection of restaurants featuring cuisine from all over the globe than in Western Sydney.
Whether it’s Lidcombe restaurants, a restaurant in Cabramatta, Granville or anywhere else in this vast and eclectic neighbourhood, you’ll be treated to a wide variety of food such as Chinese, Vietnamese, Italian, Lebanese, Mediterranean, Korean, Japanese, Mexican, Indian and so much more.
Do your taste buds a favour and offer them something different every time you dine out.
#2 – Prices Are Very Affordable
Taking the family out for dinner in Sydney’s CBD and surrounding suburbs can cost an arm and a leg, but not so when you treat the family to a meal in the city’s west. The further you venture away from the CBD, the more affordable the prices tend to become.
Interestingly, you’ll also discover that the portion sizes are also more generous when you dine in the West. So, more affordable meals with bigger portion sizes. It’s a win-win all around for your wallet or purse, leaving you some extra cash to enjoy some after dinner drinks.
#3 – Most Restaurants Are Casual Dining
Most people looking for the best food in Lidcombe or any of the other great suburbs will also be hoping to enjoy the casual dining experience. Casual dining is the most popular form of dining for Aussies, as the atmosphere is relaxed and chilled and not formal. This means everyone of all ages can enjoy a nice meal while feeling totally comfortable and at ease.
The good news about casual dining restaurants is that most of them offer full service and quality service at that. You don’t need to pay extra at a fine dining restaurant to receive the service you expect. Enjoy great service, delicious food and affordable prices in a casual dining atmosphere.
#4 – Most Restaurants Are Family-Friendly
If the plan is to take the entire family out for a nice meal, then you’ll want to know that the restaurant you choose welcomes children, toddlers and infants. The good news is that the majority of the restaurants in Western Sydney are definitely family-friendly venues, no matter what food is on offer or the culture behind the restaurant.
You’ll find that the menus usually include a special section for the kids, just in case they don’t fancy anything from the rest of the menu. High chairs are also often provided for infants and toddlers.
#5 – Awesome Food Markets
Spread all across the Western Suburbs are a variety of food and craft markets. Some of these markets sell fruit, vegetables and other items for you to cook up at home, but many of the night markets have vendors on-site selling meals and drinks.
You and your family can enjoy some time outdoors wandering around admiring all of the interesting arts and crafts while also having something to eat while you’re there. It’s a great way to spend an evening and it’s very relaxing being outdoors at night.
#6 – It’s Easy To Get Around
If you have your own vehicle, you already have transport sorted to travel to and from the restaurant, but if you don’t, there is loads of public transport covering most of the Western Suburbs, including trains, buses, taxis and ride sharing services. Take your family out without any concerns regarding transportation.
These are just some of the top reasons to highlight why Sydney’s West is the best place to take your family out to dinner. Great food from all over the world, served in a casual dining atmosphere at affordable prices. What more could you want?

domain: food


text:
I absolutely adore Southwest Michigan and always try to visit as much as we can especially during the summer. One town that we’ve always passed by on our Southwest Michigan vacays and have always wanted to visit was New Buffalo. This time around the stars aligned and we finally made it happen. I’m so glad we did – we loved exploring the town. Read all about our summer escape to New Buffalo with ideas for things to do, places to eat, and where to stay.
Where to Play in New Buffalo Michigan
Hike at Galien River County Park
Did you know that the Lake Michigan area was home to marsh? You can see that firsthand when you go to Galien River County Park. If you’re looking for an easy hike, this is it! We started at the lower level boardwalk and viewed the marsh. For another point of view make sure to go up the many stairs to the Canopy Tree Walk. The views here were incredible!
Play time at New Buffalo Township Playground
Located right across the street from Galien County Park, the New Buffalo Township Playground is a great one for the kids. It’s gated, has rubber ground, plenty of equipment to climb, there’s even a splash pad attached. Besides the playground, there is a nature trail, fitness area (which they deemed so much fun), bocce, chess tables, and more.
Walk down Whittaker Street
Whittaker Street is the main street through town. Although we visited on a rainy day, that didn’t stop us from walking. Armed with umbrellas, we parked on Whittaker, grabbed some coffee and food at David’s Deli (yummy!), then walked down the street to the beach. There are lots of cute shops, a new Starbucks (the mural is soooo cool!), lots of places to eat, sculptures, shops, and Nancy’s Ice Cream. The popular Stray Dog is also located here.
Hit up New Buffalo Beach
Although we visited on a rainy day, it didn’t stop us from at least scoping out the beach. There is a neat playground on the beach with a cute mini lighthouse. Although we had the beach to ourselves on a rainy day, I can imagine how busy the beach could be on a regular summer day. We’ll definitely need to come here again to visit.
*Note: There is a parking fee and I can see it filling up.
Where to Eat in New Buffalo Michigan
Located on Whittaker Street, David’s Deli is definitely busy but in a good way. We grabbed our coffees, bagels (asiago and onion), and blueberry muffin to go. All quite delicious! We heard great things about their Reubens so will have to try that next time.
Great brews, good food, cool vibe, and kid-friendly? Beer Church Brewery was all that and then some! I have to say the pizzas were absolutely delicious. They are 12” and pretty filling. You can even watch them bake the pizzas in their huge oven. My husband tried the Italian sandwich and claimed it was one of the best he’s ever had. And the beer here is pretty fantastic.
Tip: Save a few bucks and get the kids’ cheese pizzas – they are $9 and are also 12”.
As you may know, family-friendly breweries are our jam! A quick search brought us to Ghost Isle Brewery. We had gumbo, a philly cheese steak, and a chicken schwarma. The kids cheeseburger was surprisingly pretty large ($9). Everything was good, nothing special though especially for the price. Definitely opt for an outdoor seat where you’ll be right by the wetlands (and the train tracks.)
Is it even a vacation without ice cream? Oinks is a New Buffalo institution so you can’t miss it. Inside it’s all decked out with pig paraphernalia and of course lots of flavors of yummy Ashby’s Ice Cream. Since it was a rainy day, we had no lines at all!
Where to Stay in New Buffalo, Michigan
I honestly cannot say enough good things about The Neighborhood Hotel. The apartment-like suites gave us a little peace and quiet in a residential neighborhood. (Grand Beach was initially made as a resort community!) The amenities are plentiful – a cowboy cauldron for bonfires, a real popcorn machine, an amazing and warm pool with toys, axe throwing, ping pong, board games, books, and more! We absolutely love it here! Here is the full review.

domain: travel


Inverse Rational Control with Partially Observable Continuous Nonlinear Dynamics
Continuous control and planning remains a major challenge in robotics and machine learning. Neuroscience offers the possibility of learning from animal brains that implement highly successful controllers, but it is unclear how to relate an animal’s behavior to control principles. Animals may not always act optimally from the perspective of an external observer, but may still act rationally: we hypothesize that animals choose actions with highest expected future subjective value according to their own internal model of the world. Their actions thus result from solving a different optimal control problem from those on which they are evaluated in neuroscience experiments. With this assumption, we propose a novel framework of model-based inverse rational control that learns the agent’s internal model that best explains their actions in a task described as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). In this approach we first learn optimal policies generalized over the entire model space of dynamics and subjective rewards, using an extended Kalman filter to represent the belief space, a neural network in the actor-critic framework to optimize the policy, and a simplified basis for the parameter space. We then compute the model that maximizes the likelihood of the experimentally observable data comprising the agent’s sensory observations and chosen actions. Our proposed method is able to recover the true model of simulated agents within theoretical error bounds given by limited data. We illustrate this method by applying it to a complex naturalistic task currently used in neuroscience experiments. This approach provides a foundation for interpreting the behavioral and neural dynamics of highly adapted controllers in animal brains.
Brains evolved to understand, interpret, and act upon the physical world. To thrive and reproduce in a harsh and dynamic natural environment, animals therefore evolved flexible, robust controllers. Machine learning and neuroscience both aim to emulate or understand how these successful controllers operate.
Traditional imitation learning or inverse control methods extract reusable policies to help generate autonomous behavior or help predict future actions from an agent’s past behavior. In contrast, here we do not aim to extract the policy of a well-trained expert. Instead we want to identify the internal model and preferences of a real agent that may make interesting mistakes (lakshminarasimhan2018dynamic, ). Unlike the convention in robotics and artificial intelligence, animals are not optimized for stable, narrowly-defined tasks, but instead survive by performing well enough in competitive, changing ecological niches. Comparing actual control policies across conditions, animals, or species may ultimately guide us to broad control principles that generalize beyond specific tasks. Meanwhile, our approach estimates latent assumptions and dynamic beliefs for real biological controllers, thereby providing targets for understanding neural network representations and implementations of perception and action.
Our approach does not assume that agents perform optimally at a given task. Rather, we assume that agents are rational — by which we mean that agents act optimally according to their own internal model of the task, which may differ from the actual task.
We solve this problem by formulating the agent’s policy as an optimal solution of a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) (sutton1998reinforcement, ) that the agent assumes that it faces. Whereas Reinforcement Learning (RL) tries to find the optimal policy given the dynamics and the reward function, Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL, (russell1998learning, ; choi2011inverse, ; babes2011apprenticeship, )) tries to find a reward function which best accounts for observed actions from an agent. Similarly, inverse optimal control (IOC) (dvijotham2010inverse, ; schmitt2017see, ) tries to find the assumed model dynamics that explains observed actions with a given cost function yields the similar optimal policy. Trying to find both is, in general, an ill-posed problem, but with a sufficiently constrained model or proper conditioning it can be solved. Others have solved this problem in the fully observable setting (herman2016inverse, ; Reddy/etal/18b, ).
Some of the present authors recently solved the partially observable case for a discrete state space with discretized beliefs (wu2018inverse, ). However, while that solution was useful for their particular application, in general its computational expense grows rapidly with the problem complexity and size, and that solution assumes that actions are easy to select from the discretized value function. These issues makes that solution infeasible for continuous state spaces and continuous controls. In the present work, we provide methods that address these challenges.
Two major questions are how to construct representations of the agent’s beliefs, and how to choose a policy based on those beliefs. We solve the first by assuming that agents know the basic task structure but not the task parameters, so we can use model-based inference to identify the agent’s beliefs. We solve the second by using flexible function approximation to estimate values and policies over the parameter space. We demonstrate the utility of our approach by applying it to simulated agents in a continuous control task with latent variables that has been used in neuroscience: catching fireflies in virtual reality (lakshminarasimhan2018dynamic, ).
2 Prior work on Inverse Reinforcement Learning
Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) and Inverse Optimal Control (IOC) solve aspects of the general problem of inferring internal models of an observed agent. Ng and Russell (ng2000algorithms, ) formulate the IRL problem as a linear programming problem which takes agents policy as input and learn reward parameters with an regularization which makes the agent’s policy optimal and also maximizes difference between the value at optimal action and value at next best action for each state (maximizing the margin of optimal policy). Abbeel and Ng (abbeel2004apprenticeship, ) extend the idea to perform maximum margin IRL. Max margin IRL introduces certain biases to solve the ambiguity of multiple reward functions. Some methods (ziebart2008maximum, ) resolve the ambiguity by adopting a principle of maximum entropy (jaynes1957information, ) to obtain a distribution over reward functions without bias. Max Entropy IRL (ziebart2008maximum, ) tries to estimate a distribution over trajectories which has maximum entropy under the constraints of matching expectations of certain features. This approach is feasible only for finite discrete states and actions. and becomes intractable as the length of trajectories increases.
For IOC, the Relative Entropy IRL framework (boularias2011relative, ) allows for unknown dynamics, and minimizes the KL divergence between two distributions over trajectories. The analytical solution needs a transition dynamics function which is estimated by importance sampling. It is important to note here that they do not assume the agent behaves optimally in any sense. This method was extended in Guided Cost Learning by (finn2016guided, ) to model a free maximum entropy formulation where the reward function is represented by a neural network. They use reinforcement learning to move the baseline policy towards policies with higher rewards imposing weak optimality.
A more principled way to think about this problem class is to view the state action trajectories as observations about a reward and dynamics with latent parameters (wu2018inverse, ). (ramachandran2007bayesian, ) define the likelihood of trajectories as a exponential Boltzmann distribution in state action value function . Their inference method performs a random walk over the reward parameter space using the posterior, and compute the posterior over the parameters by computing the optimal action value function . This is a nested loop approach that is feasible only for small spaces, as computing the optimal policy and value functions in the inner loop is costly. Other notable approaches include maximum likelihood IRL (vroman2014maximum, ; babes2011apprenticeship, ), Path Integral IRL (kalakrishnan2013learning, ), simultaneous estimation of rewards and fully-observed dynamics (herman2016inverse, ). (kalakrishnan2013learning, ) proposes learning a continuous state, continuous action reward function by sampling locally around the optimal agent trajectories. These methods are local searches that do not consider trajectories with unexpected control input.
Across all of these methods, there is not a complete inverse solution that can learn how an agent models rewards, dynamics, and uncertainty in a partially observable task with continuous nonlinear dynamics and continuous controls.
3 Inverse Rational Control
To define the Inverse Rational Control problem, we first formalize our tasks as Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs). A POMDP is a tuple, that includes states , actions , observations , reward or loss function , as well as transition probabilities , observation probabilities , and a temporal discount factor . Since the states are only partially observable, the POMDP determines the agent’s time-dependent ‘belief’ about the world, namely a posterior over states given the history of observations and actions, . An optimal solution of the POMDP determines a value function through the Bellman equation (bellman1957dynamic, ), which in turn defines a policy that selects the action that maximizes the value. We parameterize , and , and therefore the value function and policy, by .
We define the Inverse Rational Control problem as identifying, using only data measurable from an agent’s behavior, the most probable internal model parameters for an agent that solves the POMDP described above. Specifically, we allow measurements of the states and action trajectory taken by the agent, but we have no access to the beliefs that motivate those actions. The agent’s sensory observations may be fully observed, fully unobserved, or partially observed, for instance when we cannot access the particular observation noise that corrupts the agent’s senses. A solution to IRC provides both parameters and an estimate of the agent’s beliefs over time.
A core idea in our approach is first to learn policies and value functions over the parameterized manifold of models, reflecting an optimized ensemble of agents, rather than a single optimized agent. This then allows us to maximize the likelihood of the observed data generated by an unknown agent, by finding which parameters from the ensemble best explain the agent’s actions. Because our overarching goal is scientific, a major benefit of this approach is to provide the best interpretable explanation of an agent’s behaviors as rational for a task as defined by some parameters .
3.1 General formulation of optimal control ensembles
There are two difficulties in solving the POMDP model ensemble and computing a likelihood function over trajectories. First, policies and value functions are complex functions of the model parameters. We address this by using flexible, trainable networks to learn the value function and policies, as described below. Second, the belief updating process of the agent involves a difficult integral and requires correct handling of the agent’s observations.
The agent does not observe the world states , but gets partial observations about them that induce a belief . When the agent plans into the future, it does not know the future observations, so it must marginalize over them to predict the consequences of its actions . If an agent were given the observations, future beliefs would be known, but when observations are unknown the agent has only a distribution over beliefs arising from an average transition probability between belief states, . The parameters of this average transition probability subsume the parameters from the transitions and observation functions, . Once we have formulated the problem completely in terms of belief states, and identified a tractable finite representation of them, then we can use many of the tools developed for fully observed Markov Decision Processes (MDP).
An agent chooses its actions based on these beliefs according to a policy as . An optimal policy is the one that produces the maximal (temporally discounted) expected future reward, which can be computed using the Bellman equation,
In practice we replace the full posterior by a parametric form (such as a multivariate Gaussian) for which the transitions can be computed tractably, although this may introduce approximation errors.
To solve the inverse problem by inferring an agent’s internal model that guides their actions, we begin with the simple observation that the optimal policy and optimal state-action value function function change depending on the dynamics and the rewards of the problem. That is, the optimal policy and state-action value function should implicitly be functions of the dynamics and reward parameters. We will make this explicit by assuming that the dynamics and the reward function are parameterized functions denoted by and . We choose this parametric form wisely to impose and exploit structure in the task.
Although the parametric form for the dynamics and reward may be simple or convenient, the resultant dependence of on these parameters is usually more complicated. Therefore we represent by a flexible function class. This class could be a family of end-to-end trainable deep networks, for example, or a sum of basis functions as used in nonlinear support vector machines. We may learn the using any of a variety of reinforcement learning methods. In our work we trained a function approximator using rewards obtained by policies across many parameters sampled from a uniform prior on parameter space , although a good prior over the parameters could make learning faster and more robust.
The optimal policy is to pick the best actions according to the updated value function. The rewards obtained by these actions can then provide additional information about the value function, so we may repeat the above procedure iteratively until the value function converges. However, even choosing the best action from a given can be difficult. When there are few allowed actions, then the policy is easy to implement: one simply exhaustively evaluates for all actions and picks the most valuable. When there is a continuum of actions, such that this approach is infeasible, then must choose another method to maximize value. Here we select actions by approximating the policy using an actor-critic method implemented by a supplemental network that is trained to optimize the value function by Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) (lillicrap2015continuous, ), although we could also use other versions of Policy Iteration or -learning.
Our algorithm for Policy Iteration across model space is given below:
3.2 Inverse Rational Control from optimal control ensembles
Now that we have constructed an ensemble of approximately optimal policies over the task space, we now aim to recover the true parameters of an agent whose behavior we observe. Specifically, we try to find parameters which maximize the likelihood of the agent’s trajectories. For a given , we know the transition dynamics and have already computed the optimal policy.
Given the observable state and action trajectories indexed by , the log likelihood of the model parameters given the experimental observations of one trajectory is
Note that this likelihood is conditioned on observations , which the agent has but the external observer does not. When we do not have the observations but only state action sequence and the initial state, ideally we would marginalize the likelihood in equation 3 over all latent observation trajectories, like in traditional Expectation Maximization (dempster1977maximum, ). Here instead we use a hard E step, taking the maximum a posteriori (MAP) value for the observations given the observed state, . To maximize this likelihood, we rely on auto-differentiation to compute the gradient of the policy. The algorithm for learning the maximum likelihood estimate of true parameters given a state-action trajectory is given by Algorithm 2.
In Algorithm 1 we estimate optimal policies over the entire parameter space. When we then estimate the particular that best explains the agent’s actions, it is by construction consistent with rational behavior: the best fit policy is optimal given those parameters, even if they do not match the actual task. Of course, for real data, this model fit does not imply that the agent’s policy actually falls into our model class. Where needed, the model class should be expanded to accommodate other potentially false assumptions the agent may make.
We can summarize the whole Inverse Rational Control framework in Algorithm 3:
4 Demonstration task: ‘Catching fireflies’
We demonstrate that our proposed Inverse Rational Control framework works by recovering the internal model of simulated agents performing two control tasks. Ultimately we will apply this approach to understand the internal control models of behaving animals in neuroscience experiments, where we do not know the ground truth. However, using simulated agents allows us to verify the method when we know the ground truth.
In this task, an agent must navigate through a virtual world to catch a flashing target, called the ‘firefly’ (Figure 1A) (lakshminarasimhan2018dynamic, ). When the agent stops moving, the trial ends, the agent receives a reward if it is sufficiently close to the firefly position, and a new target appears. Each target is visible only briefly, and sensory inputs provide partial (noisy) observations of self motion, so the agent is uncertain about the current position of its target as well as its current velocity.
The two example problems both use this task structure, either in one or two dimensions. In the 1D task, the world state and control variables are therefore location and forward velocity, and we only allow three discrete control outputs. In the 2D task we add angle and angular velocity to the state space, allow continuous control outputs, and allow the agent to make noisy observations of its state. Given the uncertainty in its state estimate, the agent must track its belief over the states, and plan its optimal trajectory based on this belief state space and unknown future belief transitions based on unknown future observations. Given this task setting, the agent maximizes its reward expected over the distribution implied by the belief. Each episode or trial is a variable duration depending on when the agent stops moving. The goal is to maximize the total rewards over this finite time horizon.
Our first simulation experiment is a simplified version of the task, where the agent’s position is restricted to one dimension, state dynamics are linear, and the agent receives no observations. The belief state is Gaussian-distributed over the agent’s relative location to the target, with scalar mean and variance evolving as
The model parameters are the action gain and the process noise log standard deviation . We have only three discrete actions, namely: go left, go right, and stop.
To compute the optimal policies we use a -learning variant of Algorithm 1. Recall that we can substitute different learning algorithms, but it is crucial to learn the optimal action value function or policy as a function of . One approach we took for the 1D demonstration task was to construct from a factorized set of basis functions. We experimented with both manually constructed polynomial and exponential basis functions, and a collection of random shallow networks as basis functions for both and . We found that the random network basis was more expressive and performed better for this task. Figure 1B plots the value function for each action and a fixed .
Now that we have computed the optimal policies over a manifold of parameters, we create an agent with one particular set of parameters . Using the corresponding optimal policy and belief dynamics, we simulate this agent’s belief state and action trajectories. Next we use experimentally observable data (the action sequence) to update the belief trajectory per our model. Given this data we follow the maximum likelihood estimation as described in Algorithm 2 using the most probable belief states to estimate the parameters. In Figure 1C we plot the estimated parameters recovered by our algorithm against the agent’s true parameters, along with the 95% confidence interval for parameter as given by where is the Fisher information matrix. In almost all cases the true value is within the resultant error bars, showing that we correctly recover the true parameters within the precision allowed by the data.
Our second simulation uses the full 2D firefly task. We use two gain parameters, one on forward velocity input and another on angular velocity input, and one process noise parameter that affects and position identically, with no angular process noise. We assume the agent maintains a Gaussian representation for its beliefs over the world state, which it updates using an extended Kalman filter given the dynamics parameters .
To compute the optimal policies we use Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) (lillicrap2015continuous, ) in Algorithm 1. We sample the parameters uniformly over a moderate range and for each , we run the current policy to collect sequences of belief states, actions, and rewards. Every time point in these sequences along with the corresponding was provided as input to two neural networks, each three layers deep, 64 units wide, and using softplus activations, whose output estimated the state-action value function and the policy. The learning updates for this are same as the DDPG algorithm.
As before, we create an agent by choosing parameters , and generate trajectories using corresponding belief dynamics and optimal policy. We preserve only the experimentally measurable action trajectories, and apply Algorithm 2 to compute the maximum likelihood estimate and confidence intervals. Figure 1D again shows that we can recover agents’ true parameters up to the intrinsic uncertainty. Additionally, we compare our estimates of their beliefs to their actual beliefs and find excellent agreement (Figure 1E,F).
To summarize our proposed inverse reinforcement learning framework, we express and learn the optimal action value function generalized over the task parameter space. This can be thought of as learning optimal value function and policy for all the parameters in the parameter space. For large, complex tasks, using an informative prior with sampling focused on relevant regions of parameter space could greatly accelerate the learning and make the approximation more robust.
Most other related frameworks have a nested inner loop of policy optimization or refinement to adapt to the optimal policy for the new updated parameter. Unlike such methods, our method separates these optimizations into two separate loops, one for learning optimal policy over parameter space, and second for maximum likelihood estimation of the true parameters given the optimal policy computed in the previous loop.
Firstly, our assumption parametrized dynamics and reward function induces obvious model bias. Of course we can reduce this bias by making the parameter space richer and more flexible by increasing the number and variety of parameters. However, this would come with a price in computability and interpretability.
In case of POMDPs, where we need to work with posterior distribution over the states or the belief, deriving analytical parametric belief update equations can be a difficult inference problem in general. For special cases like finite discrete states, the posterior updates can be succinctly represented matrix products, parameterized by transition matrices. For continuous state and Gaussian noises, we can use Kalman filter updates which are parameterized by the gain and covariance matrices, and for small nonlinearity this can be generalized using extended Kalman filters. But for general cases with general posterior distributions, a belief update might be a difficult inference problem. Though this is not necessarily a limitation of our approach but a challenge for inference problems more generally, still it may be difficult to apply our method in such cases.
Similarly, as stated several times above, the learning in Algorithm 1 can be replaced with any suitable reinforcement learning algorithm which guarantees convergence to an optimal policy, as long as the policy or the function is explicitly a function of model parameters. Our framework theoretically does not limit the number of parameters as long as there is some algorithm which can explore and learn optimal policy over that large space.
One interesting novelty of our framework is to make optimal action value and optimal policy explicit functions of the parameters . We can use this representation to extend the control task to hierarchical models: Instead of thinking of the parameters as fixed in the environment, we could consider them to be slowly changing latent variables describing task demands in a dynamic world. The value function over this larger space would then provide a means of adaptive control, where the agent could adjust its policy based on its current belief about . To use IRC for such an agent, we would then need to introduce higher-level parameters that describe the full dynamics.Now, this looks like any other optimal control problem, and when we solve for optimal control problem for as a function of augmented state , we are learning the optimal control for generalized over .
We have implemented Inverse Rational Control for neuroscience applications, but the core principles have value in other fields as well. We can view IRC as a form of Theory of Mind, whereby one agent (a neuroscientist) creates a model of another agent’s mind (for a behaving animal). Theory of Mind is a prominent component of social interactions, and imputing rational motivations to actions provides a useful description of how people think (baker2011bayesian, ). Designing useful artificial agents to interact with others in online environments would also benefit from being able to attribute rational strategies to others. One important example is self-driving cars, which currently struggle to handle the perceived unpredictability of humans. While humans do indeed behave unpredictably, some of this may stem from ignorance of the rational computation that drives actions. Inverse Rational Control provides a framework for better interpretation of other agents, and serves as a valuable tool for greater understanding of unifying principles of control.
The authors thank Kaushik Lakshminarasimhan, Dora Angelaki, Greg DeAngelis, James Bridgewater and Minhae Kwon for useful discussions. SD and XP were supported in part by the Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain award 324143. PS and XP were supported in part by BRAIN Initiative grant NIH 5U01NS094368. XP was supported in part by an award from the McNair Foundation, NSF CAREER Award IOS-1552868, and NSF 1450923 BRAIN 43092-N1.
- Pieter Abbeel and Andrew Y Ng. Apprenticeship learning via inverse reinforcement learning. In Proceedings of the twenty-first international conference on Machine learning, page 1. ACM, 2004.
- Monica Babes, Vukosi Marivate, Kaushik Subramanian, and Michael L Littman. Apprenticeship learning about multiple intentions. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML-11), pages 897–904, 2011.
- Chris Baker, Rebecca Saxe, and Joshua Tenenbaum. Bayesian theory of mind: Modeling joint belief-desire attribution. In Proceedings of the annual meeting of the cognitive science society, volume 33, 2011.
- R Bellman. Dynamic programming. Princeton University Press, 1957.
- Abdeslam Boularias, Jens Kober, and Jan Peters. Relative entropy inverse reinforcement learning. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, pages 182–189, 2011.
- Jaedeug Choi and Kee-Eung Kim. Inverse reinforcement learning in partially observable environments. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 12(Mar):691–730, 2011.
- Arthur P Dempster, Nan M Laird, and Donald B Rubin. Maximum likelihood from incomplete data via the em algorithm. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B (Methodological), 39(1):1–22, 1977.
- Krishnamurthy Dvijotham and Emanuel Todorov. Inverse optimal control with linearly-solvable mdps. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML-10), pages 335–342, 2010.
- Chelsea Finn, Sergey Levine, and Pieter Abbeel. Guided cost learning: Deep inverse optimal control via policy optimization. In International Conference on Machine Learning, pages 49–58, 2016.
- Michael Herman, Tobias Gindele, Jörg Wagner, Felix Schmitt, and Wolfram Burgard. Inverse reinforcement learning with simultaneous estimation of rewards and dynamics. In Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, pages 102–110, 2016.
- Edwin T Jaynes. Information theory and statistical mechanics. Physical review, 106(4):620, 1957.
- Mrinal Kalakrishnan, Peter Pastor, Ludovic Righetti, and Stefan Schaal. Learning objective functions for manipulation. In Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2013 IEEE International Conference on, pages 1331–1336. IEEE, 2013.
- Kaushik J Lakshminarasimhan, Marina Petsalis, Hyeshin Park, Gregory C DeAngelis, Xaq Pitkow, and Dora E Angelaki. A dynamic bayesian observer model reveals origins of bias in visual path integration. Neuron, 2018.
- Timothy P Lillicrap, Jonathan J Hunt, Alexander Pritzel, Nicolas Heess, Tom Erez, Yuval Tassa, David Silver, and Daan Wierstra. Continuous control with deep reinforcement learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:1509.02971, 2015.
- Andrew Y Ng, Stuart J Russell, et al. Algorithms for inverse reinforcement learning. In Icml, pages 663–670, 2000.
- Deepak Ramachandran and Eyal Amir. Bayesian inverse reinforcement learning. Urbana, 51(61801):1–4, 2007.
- Siddharth Reddy, Anca D. Dragan, and Sergey Levine. Where do you think you’re going?: Inferring beliefs about dynamics from behavior. In Arxiv 1805.08010, 2018.
- Stuart Russell. Learning agents for uncertain environments. In Proceedings of the eleventh annual conference on Computational learning theory, pages 101–103. ACM, 1998.
- Felix Schmitt, Hans-Joachim Bieg, Michael Herman, and Constantin A Rothkopf. I see what you see: Inferring sensor and policy models of human real-world motor behavior. In AAAI, pages 3797–3803, 2017.
- Richard S Sutton, Andrew G Barto, et al. Reinforcement learning: An introduction. MIT press, 1998.
- Monica C Vroman. Maximum likelihood inverse reinforcement learning. PhD thesis, Rutgers University-Graduate School-New Brunswick, 2014.
- Zhengwei Wu, Paul Schrater, and Xaq Pitkow. Inverse POMDP: Inferring what you think from what you do. arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.09864, 2018.
- Brian D Ziebart, Andrew L Maas, J Andrew Bagnell, and Anind K Dey. Maximum entropy inverse reinforcement learning. In AAAI, volume 8, pages 1433–1438. Chicago, IL, USA, 2008.


MBDA’s Sea Ceptor system will protect the Royal Navy’s new Type 31 frigates under a contract awarded by the U.K. Ministry of Defence.
Utilising the Common Anti-Air Modular Missile (CAMM) family of surface-to-air missiles, Sea Ceptor naval air defense system offers both close-in air defense and local-area air defense. The sea-based supersonic missile defense system was developed by MBDA Missile Systems, a partnership between BAE Systems, Airbus, and Leonardo.
The system will allow the Type 31 to protect both itself and vessels near it from attack from current and future threats such as high-speed manoeuvring missiles, attack aircraft and fast inshore attack craft.
Eric Beranger, CEO of MBDA, said, “We are very pleased to mark this latest success for the CAMM family. Sea Ceptor was designed to change the game in naval air defense and, with Type 31 the latest in a growing list of ship classes that Sea Ceptor has been chosen to protect, it is rapidly delivering on this promise.”
The new contract includes integration of Sea Ceptor with the Type 31’s systems, along with delivery and installation of ship hardware for the Type 31 program.
This contract forms part of the Portfolio Management Agreement (PMA), a partnership initiated in 2010 between the UK Ministry of Defence and MBDA on sovereign complex weapons design and production.
Sea Ceptor is currently in service on the Royal Navy’s Type 23 frigates, and is also expected to protect the new Type 26 frigates.


text:
5 level acres in the heart of the Hood River Valley. Land is mostly open but skirted by trees. Trout Creek at NE Corner of the property. Very nice territorial views and Mt Hood View with correct placement of home site. Power available, domestic and irrigation water available. Will need septic system. New private shared drive to property. 20 minute drive to downtown Hood River. Close to Mt Hood and Lawrence lake for recreational activities.
Listing Provided Courtesy of


text:
https://wolf.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/IWC_logo_white2a-300x127.png 0 0 Chad Richardson https://wolf.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/IWC_logo_white2a-300x127.png Chad Richardson2020-08-28 08:07:132020-08-28 08:07:13Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife still trying to remove Leadpoint pack wolves
Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife still trying to remove Leadpoint pack wolves
From the Capital Press:
No wolf has been removed from the Leadpoint pack in northeast Washington two weeks after state Fish and Wildlife Director Kelly Susewind authorized killing up to two wolves to stop attacks on cattle, the department said Thursday.
The department said the lethal-control operation continues. The pack has attacked at least 13 calves, killing three, on private land in Stevens County since June 19.


text:
Athena Floral Hat
Beige wool wide brim fedora hat with white buckle. This hat is adorned with preserved dried florals using bleached bracken fern, bleached ruscus, pampas grass and accented with artificial gold leaves.
See our other listings featuring "Athena" for complementary items such bouquets, as earrings, hair combs, boutonnieres, corsages, and cake toppers.
Carefully designed with bespoke sophistication using hand selected preserved florals to achieve our artistic vision.
Please note that all preserved florals will vary slightly in size and shape making each hat truly unique and one of a kind.
For long lasting preserved floral hats please avoid exposure to moisture, chemicals, and sunlight when not in use. Wear gently and handle responsibly.


text:
Wednesday, November 25, 2015 Cottage Grove, Minnesota
The South Washington County District 833 Question Two Recount Canvassing Board met at the District Service Center Wednesday morning to determine if any of the 19 challenged ballots in the $96 million bond ballot recount would be flipped into one of three categories: “Non-Vote”; “Yes”; or “No”. By the end of the two-hour meeting, the canvassing board had decided that 13 of the 19 ballots were “No” votes and five were “Non-Votes/Ambiguous.” One challenged ballot was withdrawn by Attorney Erick Kaardal. The Canvassing Board determined that the ballot question passed by a difference of five votes: 6840 for and 6835 against.
Attorney Erick Kaardal represented the “No” vote supporters, including Bev Moreland who submitted the recount request petition. Attorney Alan Weinblatt represented the Vote Yes committee. The two attorneys each were allowed one minute to present arguments for or against each of the 19 ballots, after which the Canvassing Board debated the “voter intent” for each ballot before voting on each one individually.
After the meeting, KSTP News interviewed Superintendent Keith Jacobus, Auditor Corbid and Attorney Kaardal regarding the Canvassing Board’s decision:
The four ballots thrown out by the canvassing board that Attorney Kaardal claims should have been “No” votes were ballot numbers 2, 9, 16 and 18. Those ballots were similar to some of the ballots the board determined to be “No” votes. For example, the following six ballots are a side-by-side comparison of three of the “Non-Vote/Ambiguous” ballots and three of the ballots determined as “No” votes.
The Canvassing Board included ISD 833 School Board Chairman, Ron Kath, ISD 833 School Board Clerk, Katie Schwartz, Washington County Court Administrator, Annette Fritz, Washington County Auditor, Kevin Corbid, and Woodbury City Clerk, Kim Blaeser.
Stay tuned for more updates.


text:
Lean In the Bedroom
- San Francisco, California
About our Circle
- Looking for members
We are a group of females that know that equality needs to begin in the bedroom. When girls first learn about sex, the education is about periods and pain while boys learn about masturbation and pleasure. At an early age, women are wired to make sure the ...
Join this Circle
We’re always looking for new members. Join today to be a part of Lean In’s global community.
How it works
Circles are small groups of women who come together—online or offline—for real talk and peer support.
Why join a Circle?
We all need a safe space for real talk, inspiration, and support. Right now, we need community more than ever.

domain: sociology


text:
From the dark ages, crime has made its presence felt. Crime has no face or colour, and it has no soul.
The scourge of this terrible monster has touched most of our lives. It weaves its mayhem and misery to all those that fall prey to it.
It doesn’t question, nor does it want answers. It just takes what doesn’t belong to it.
No mortal is truly safe from this evil demon. Till now, there is no solid solution to this trade. There is no forgiveness once you are a victim of its violent horrors.
It is likened to a disease that must still be cured. It has no mercy or compassion. Its soul is dark like an everlasting black hole with no remorse or justice.
Every day I pass houses with electrical fences, high concrete walls, and heavy metal gates, and my soul drowns in a river of tears.
When will a mortal be safe from this evil? Not even our places of worship are safe. It robs man from living safely.
I am tired of reading the same news every day about crime. For it affects man, woman and child alike.
If you a farmer, housewife, child, breadwinner, man on the street or somebody that is just trying to make an honest and decent living.
Where is our true justice? Our soul cries at the gates of the heavenly realms for justice, but the doors remain closed.
We have become like prisoners in our own homes, sleeping with one eye open just in case.
What happened to our freedom? Even that is slowly being taken away from us. Where is the sanity in all of this?
We live in a world that is ruled by this dangerous shadow. When will we be able to open our doors and sleep with open windows and shutters?
Indeed it is one bitter pill to swallow that we must bear for all our earthly existence.
I know that is a heavy cross to bear, but I live in hope.
Nothing is sacred when crime touches it. The violation of every person’s sanctuary is marked by this dark force.
Maybe one day, this human race can stand tall and proud.

domain: literature


text:
SAN FRANCISCO - The "Heartbleed" flaw in Internet security is as critical as the name implies and wider spread than first believed.
Warnings about the danger exposed early this week reached widening circles on Thursday, with everyone from website operators and bank officials to Internet surfers and workers who tele-commute being told their data could be in danger.
"Heartbleed is a catastrophic bug in OpenSSL," well-known computer security specialist Bruce Schneier said in a post at his schneier.com website.
OpenSSL is a commonly used software platform for encrypted transactions at "https" websites that Internet users have been taught to trust.
The Heartbleed flaw lets hackers snatch packets of data from working memory in computers, creating the potential for them to steal passwords, encryption keys, or other valuable information.
"This is going to be a pretty devastating bug," Trustwave security research manager John Miller told AFP.
"Even after the majority of it is fixed on the Internet, there will be internal services vulnerable."
The Heartbleed flaw can be found in virtual private network (VPN) software commonly used by workers on the go to securely link with company computer networks.
Computer networking titans Cisco and Juniper put out advisories on Thursday that some of their data-handling gear is susceptible to the bug.
"An exploit could allow the attacker to disclose a limited portion of memory from a connected client or server," California-based Cisco said in an advisory note. "The disclosed portions of memory could contain sensitive information."
Canada's tax agency shuttered its website Wednesday after warning that encrypted taxpayer data could be vulnerable.
OpenSSL is commonly used to protect passwords, credit card numbers and other data sent via the Internet.
Web masters have been scrambling to update to safe versions of OpenSSL. The vulnerability has existed for about two years, since the version of OpenSSL at issue was released.
The Tor Project devoted to letting people use the Internet anonymously advised those in need of privacy to stay offline until the Heartbleed threat is ameliorated.