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Definition of a Capital Campaign
A church capital campaign is a carefully choreographed series of events that encourages an ongoing offering for a given period of time above and beyond the current giving of tithes and offerings. A proper capital campaign is biblical in precedent, spiritual in nature, and produces both spiritual and financial fruit.
What a Capital Campaign Is
Many churches have the misconception of what a proper capital campaign is and what it is not. A capital campaign is a process that is designed to help raise money for large capital projects such as construction, renovation, the purchase of expensive items such as vans, organs, stained glass, or playgrounds, or for debt retirement. A properly run capital campaign will effectively raise money from within (and potentially outside) the congregation through giving that is above and beyond the current tithes and offerings. Most importantly, a capital campaign is at least as much about spiritual growth as it is about raising money.
What a Capital Campaign Is Not
What a capital stewardship program is not, is a high-pressure sales pitch used to fleece the sheep of their money. In fact, the focus of the campaign really is not on money per se, it's on communicating a biblical need exists and how God meets that need through the proper stewardship of the time, talents, and treasures He provides through His people.
The Three Pillars of a Capital Stewardship Campaign
A capital campaign should not be based solely on an emotional appeal, but should be a balance of three foundational elements. When God created man He gave him his mind, emotions, and spirit. To maximize its spiritual and financial success, the campaign must successfully address each of these three facets of man in proper proportion. Therefore, the three pillars of a successful capital campaign are intellectual information, emotional excitement, and spiritual truth.
Pillar #1: The Mind
The people who are asked to give to the church's campaign must intellectually understand and agree with the biblical need that is being met as a result of the campaign. Facts and figures on what the church needs to do, why it needs to be done, and how much it will cost must be provided. Additionally, the campaign must also clearly communicate how the members are expected to participate. This information should satisfy the rational mind by removing as many intellectual impediments as possible. Successfully addressing the issues of the mind leaves it free to act in concert with the emotions and spirit. Much of the information that is required for this part of the capital campaign will be supplied by the information from a needs and feasibility study.
Pillar #2: The Emotions
While the focus of a capital campaign should not be an emotional appeal alone, the emotions do need to be brought into balance with the mind and spirit. Generally speaking, emotions are easily stirred up and swayed, sometimes reversing with little cause. For this reason, emotion must be balanced with the other two elements, as emotion alone will not endure for the long haul of a capital campaign.
A strictly emotional appeal may produce a quick flurry of money and commitments but will soon fade away, just as fireworks quickly flame out after a spectacular start. Those people who are quickly and easily swayed by an emotional appeal to give will, with equal ease and speed, become emotionally attached to other things such as a new car or boat, a new boyfriend or girlfriend, a new house, or other affections. And when the heart settles on another object of affection, it generally takes the wallet with it. For this and other reasons, the campaign must address all three sides of man over a period of several weeks in order to develop a commitment that will stand the test of time.
Pillar #3: The Spirit
The final pillar of the stewardship campaign is spiritual. Like a three-legged stool, all three legs are needed for it to work properly. Of the three equal pillars, this one is perhaps a little more equal than the others. Ultimately, a stewardship program is not really about money, it's about helping people make an appropriate faith response to meet a need, as God has equipped them. (See 2 Corinthians 9:8) There are more than 2,000 verses that deal with money and possessions, so there is no lack of material with which to educate and exhort your members.
As the church moves through the various phases of the capital campaign, the people will be called to make a faith response. The Scriptures tell us that, "Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God." Everything needed to teach someone about stewardship comes straight from Scripture. The church's challenge is to both proclaim it and model it in a way that is understood and applicable to the lives of the people in the congregation. The ultimate goal for the campaign is for people to prayerfully consider how the Spirit of God moves them to participate in giving and then to cheerfully give in accordance with His prompting.
Capital Campaign Phases
A capital campaign is comprised of 5 phases, not all of which are readily visible to the public. The two initial phases of the campaign involve recruiting, selecting, organizing, training a capital campaign committee, and doing the background work to prepare for the public phases of the campaign. The next phase is the public phase, the one that the church body most visibly notices and what most people think of when talking about a capital campaign.
It is during this public phase that the church capital campaign committee provides information, builds excitement, and provides the spiritual equipping to help bring people to an understanding of the need to build and how they will participate in the campaign to meet that need. A campaign is usually capped off with a Commitment Sunday or banquet to collect the pledge commitments and to celebrate what God has done, and will do, in the church. Finally, there is a short administrative phase and then the long-haul of the ongoing collection of pledge contributions, accounting, follow up, and new member assimilation into the campaign.
Five Capital Campaign Phases
As described above, a capital campaign is typically broken down into several phases. The time to complete each phase is dependent on the size and organization of the church.
- Planning & Recruiting 3 weeks – 6 months
- Equipping & Preparation 5 – 10 weeks
- Public Phase 5 – 8 weeks
- Receiving Commitments 1 to 3 weeks
- Collection & Follow-up 3 years (Typically)
The phases can go as quickly as the church can move or take as long (within reason) as it must. The 2nd phase will take at least 5 weeks for a very small campaign and 10 or more weeks for medium to larger churches. A longer period of time is usually less stressful and more effective than trying to cram it all into a few weeks. A longer preparation phase also gives the church more time for the critical task of donor development.
Once the church moves into the public phase, events need to stay on a more rigid timeline. This phase of the campaign is a carefully choreographed time that is intended to maximize the effectiveness of your preparation. For most campaigns, recruiting, preparing, and equipping the stewardship committee should start at least 4-6 months or more before the church wishes to be in front of the congregation with the public phase. Doing so will make the whole process much easier, less stressful, and generally improve the overall quality of the campaign.
What You Should Expect from a Capital Campaign
Most churches should expect to experience most or all of the following in a professionally run campaign:
- Spiritual growth and increased faith.
- A pledge commitment of 1 to 3 times the current annual income in tithes and offerings.
- A greater understanding of God's perfect plan of providence and stewardship with a corresponding dependency on His Word.
- An increase in normal tithes and offerings of 10-15 percent. (This may dwindle over time if stewardship principles are not taught on a regular basis).
- A greater sense of unity and purposefulness in the congregation.
It must be noted that a primary presumption of a capital campaign is that the church has a good idea of what it wants to build, why it needs to build, and what it can afford. If the church cannot definitively answer these questions, it is premature to run a capital campaign. The "what", "why" and "how much" of the building program are critical requirements for the intellectual and spiritual components of your campaign. Trying to run a campaign without these critical components is like trying to run your car with missing spark plugs.
The Financial Benefits of a Church Capital Campaign
Over the past several decades, thousands of churches have executed professionally facilitated capital campaigns. Historically speaking, churches have typically raised between 1 and 3 times their current tithe and offering income over three years through a purposeful and professionally facilitated capital stewardship campaign. This is in contrast to fundraising which provides more modest revenue to the church from the sale of goods or services.
Ignoring for the moment the tremendous spiritual benefits that result from a capital stewardship campaign, there are at least six ways a church building program will financially benefit from a capital campaign.
- Some churches may use a capital campaign to begin a savings program in order to pay cash and avoid debt.
- Some churches, in order to expand the scope of the building project, may opt to augment their borrowing capacity with additional funds from a capital campaign.
- Some churches, without the necessary cash to begin a building program, may use a capital campaign to help raise the necessary cash to cover up-front expenses and/or necessary cash buffer prior to securing a construction loan.
- Some churches will choose to use a capital stewardship campaign to pay off the debt as quickly as possible.
- A capital campaign provides a fund from which a portion of the higher mortgage payments may be paid until the congregation and giving grow to meet the payment.
- A capital campaign may be required by the lender in order to qualify for a loan.
Capital Campaigns and Debt Reduction
Let's consider again our example church from the previous chapter which had $500,000 per year income and look at what happens when the entire proceeds from a capital campaign is applied to debt reduction.
Debt Reduction Example
In that example, it was determined that conventional lending guidelines would indicate that a maximum safe debt for the example church might be $1,500,000. Given historical precedent from other capital stewardship programs, it would not be unreasonable to expect this church to raise between $500,000 and $1,500,000 over the next three years in a professionally facilitated capital stewardship campaign. If we took a conservative viewpoint and said the church raised only 1.5 times its current income (which is more typical in the post 2008 economy), at the end of three years the church could retire as much as $750,000 of the $1,500,000 debt by applying 100% of the proceeds from the campaign to reducing principal. During this same time period, the church will have reduced its principal balance by at least another $127,703 through its regular monthly loan payments, leaving an unpaid balance of $571,101 after only 3 years. (This assumes on time mortgage payments and additional annual payments from the capital campaign applied against the principle of $250,000.)
Speed of Debt Retirement through a Capital Campaign
As shown by this example, the combination of regular payments plus the proceeds from the capital campaign has enabled the church to retire just over one-half of the debt by the end of the three-year campaign. Of course, if the church raises more money in its campaign, then the remaining debt is reduced correspondingly.
It seems reasonable, therefore, to expect that if the church can retire half of its debt in three years, it should certainly be able to retire the remaining half over the next four years. In fact, if the church were to continue with its regular payments and then run a second campaign with similar results to the first, it would easily pay off the loan balance in 6 years and have some seed money for the next building program already in the bank.
Being optimistic, I believe the church will grow numerically and financially over the period of paying off the debt. This is supported by a study of churches that showed 80 percent experienced growth after completing the building program. Increased attendance should translate into increased offerings which should allow the church to retire its debt even more quickly.
Being practical, I also realize that many churches will elect to augment their building budget with some of the proceeds from the campaign or use some of the campaign income to help service debt, either of which would leave less of the proceeds for debt reduction. This notwithstanding, the principle is still a valid one.
The church in our example executed a second stewardship campaign that was a non-stop continuation of its first campaign. That campaign paid off the remaining debt and put money back into a building fund account for future renovation or building programs. Hopefully your church will be considering its next expansion plans before the end of seven years, which is certainly a very good reason for becoming debt free as quickly as possible!
Becoming debt free in seven years or less begins with the concepts discussed earlier about knowing what is needed and what can be afforded. The church needs to do this before getting too far into a building program, and then put a plan into place to make it happen. Part of the financial plan for any building program should include a plan to retire the debt in a timely fashion.
Benefits of Hiring a Consultant
Many churches elect not to hire outside help for a capital campaign. For the vast majority of churches, this decision is often to their financial loss. Conventional wisdom and anecdotal evidence indicated that churches that use a professional campaign consultant/coach raise, on average, twice as much as churches that self-deliver their campaign. While there are exceptions to every rule, my personal experience confirms that churches inexperienced in capital fundraising which do not use outside consultant typically raise about 50 percent less in their fundraising than those who do get professional assistance.
Do-It-Yourself Capital Campaign Failure
In 2010 I had an opportunity to put this to the test. A church that had been in discussions with me about a capital campaign elected to do it themselves. My initial fact-finding indicated the church could likely raise $1,000,000, and the church only needed $900,000 to make the numbers work for their project. About 8 months later the church called me. Their campaign had not performed as they expected, raising just over $470,000, and they wanted to know if I could help them meet their goal.
The Power of Using a Church Capital Campaign Consultant
I had never had the opportunity to do a "do-over" campaign for a church, but was confident we could improve their results. Long story short, we ran a "second wind" campaign and raised the total to just over $800,000. While not quite double, and perhaps not as good as they could have gotten doing it the right way the first time, I believe this fairly represents the difference between well intentioned and well qualified campaign leadership.
As this demonstrates, it is to the church's advantage to hire a capital campaign consultant to assist with the fundraising. Any increase in the cost of the campaign due to hiring a consultant is certainly offset many times by the increased giving that results from this assistance.
When Should the Church Run a Capital Campaign?
With few exceptions, the answer to this question is generally "as soon as possible." In the post-2008 economy, a capital campaign may be required by the lender, or may be required to provide the necessary cash on hand and cash flow to qualify for a loan. The money raised before construction can either be used to reduce the amount of money the church needs to borrow or to increase the scope of the building program. How this money is utilized depends on the church's interpretation of financial stewardship, and of course, the church's unique situation.
Finances are the biggest limiting factor in most building programs. If planning to build in three years or less, now would be the appropriate time to start becoming financially prepared. As it is written in Ecclesiastes 3:1, "To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven." The scriptures also direct us to consider the ant who, "Prepares her food in the summer and gathers her provision in the harvest." (Proverbs 6:8)
The bottom line is that the church needs to be financially prepared when the season of building comes upon it. Too many churches struggle, or even fail for a time, because of lack of timely preparation. There are several reasons to execute a stewardship program well in advance of building.
- A building program and capital campaign are both complicated and time-consuming events, and both deserve undivided attention.
- By starting sooner rather than later, the church will have more money with which to build.
- The increased giving to the building fund may be factored into the loan calculations, potentially increasing the amount of financing the bank may offer.
- A demonstrated pattern of giving to a building fund improves how lenders rate the risk in lending to the church. This can potentially improve the loan rate and terms.
- A capital campaign creates a sense of excitement and unity.
Another consideration for the timing of a campaign has to do with the time of the year. There are times in the year when, in the typical church, a campaign is more effective than others. The church should take care to organize the campaign around holidays, vacation times and other church events that might compete for the time and attention of the staff and/or members.
Retiring Debt Is More Expensive Than Avoiding It!
An important point to note is that a dollar given in advance of the building program is more valuable than a dollar given to reduce debt. For every dollar of debt that the church assumes in a building program, it will cost significantly more than a dollar to retire it. For example, at a 6.5% interest rate, every dollar of debt will cost $1.25 to retire if the loan is paid off in 7 years. If the church takes 20 years to retire its debt, every dollar borrowed will end up costing the church $1.79 to retire.
Questions to Ask When Preparing for a Capital Campaign
Two important questions that need to be asked of the membership as it prepares for a capital campaign are these: (1) Who gives to the church building fund in a capital campaign, and, (2) Who pays the mortgage every month? The bottom-line answer to both these questions is that the congregation does.
If the congregation has the option of giving a dollar now to avoid debt, or giving as much as $1.79 to pay off a dollar's worth of debt, which would they rather do? It comes down to paying a dollar today or as much as two dollars later.
Would your members rather contribute $1 now to avoid having to borrow it, or pay $1.79 later to retire $1 worth of debt?
This logic, however, does not apply if the church is electing to use the capital stewardship funds to extend the scope of the building program instead of retiring debt. In this case, the capital campaign merely permits a larger project to be built than would otherwise be possible but does little or nothing with regard to retiring the debt more quickly.
Definition of Fundraising
Not to be confused with a capital stewardship campaign, which is a purposeful long-term offering, fundraising is a shorter-term program (or series of programs) in which money is given in exchange for goods or services provided with the profits going to the church. Fundraising events come in a variety of different shapes and sizes from candy bars, bake sales and chicken dinners, to car washes and rent-a-youth.
Benefits of Fundraisers
Fundraisers are a good way to keep financial needs fresh in people's minds. It also gives the church a way to encourage members to approach people outside the church to ask them to help with the building program. Through fundraisers, the congregation and community are given multiple opportunities to contribute financially to the building fund. Don't think, however, that this type of fundraising will replace a capital stewardship program.
Capital Campaigns vs. Fundraisers
The most effective way of raising money for the building program is through the determined, sacrificial, weekly giving by the congregation through a purposeful capital stewardship program. Fundraisers can raise money for the building program; however, fundraisers will not be the primary source of funding a new church. After all, it takes a lot of candy bars or spaghetti dinners to pay for a church.
Fundraisers are great ways to raise money for various aspects of the building program including new furniture, sound systems, stained glass windows, new audio/visual equipment, or things that the church may need to purchase that may not be in the building budget. And it goes without saying that the church always has the option to apply the proceeds from the fundraiser to the building cost with the goal of either reducing the amount of money the church needs to borrow in a construction loan or retiring debt more quickly.
In summary, a capital campaign is the most effective way of raising money and reducing the amount of money the church needs to borrow, and/or helping pay the loan off as quickly as possible. Fundraising is no substitute for a capital campaign, but is a complementary strategy that, when used in conjunction with a capital stewardship campaign, will enable the church to raise the most money possible for this important work.
(This article is excerpted from Chapter 7 – Capital Campaigns & Fundraising, Preparing to Build, by Stephen A. Anderson)
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Colorado is thirsty, and Mobile Canning, which has made it possible for more than a dozen smaller Colorado breweries to package and sell beer to liquor stores over the past year, is planning to help quench that thirst this spring when it doubles in size.
The Longmont company, which takes its beer-canning line on the road to breweries that don't have enough space or money to buy their own machinery, plans to add a second line and a second truck to haul it, says Mobile Canning co-owner Pat Hartman.
See also: - Broomfield's Big Choice Brewing will start canning in March - Renegade Brewing will can two more of its beers - Crabtree Brewing rolls out tallboys: no cans, no canning line, no problem
Like the original line, the new one will be built by Wild Goose Engineering, a Boulder manufacturer that has also seen its business grow over the past two years. The addition will allow Mobile Canning to double its canning runs, or work at two breweries at once.
"This means we'll be able to do anywhere from 100 to 900 cases a day, and it means there will be a lot more good, quality beers that we can get into cans," says Hartman, adding that the four-person company will be hiring two more employees soon.
Mobile Canning has fourteen confirmed clients, including Crabtree Brewing in Greeley, Boulder Beer Company, Broomfield's Big Choice Brewing, which plans to can its first beer, Disconnected Red, this March, and Denver's Renegade Brewing.
Mobile Canning was at Renegade today to can the brewery's inaugural run of 5:00 Afternoon Ale, one of two beers that Renegade began canning this month. 5:00 will be packaged in sixteen-ounce cans while Elevation Triple IPA is in twelve-ounce cans. Renegade first hired Mobile Canning last year to package its Ryeteous Rye IPA.
The company, founded in 2011 by Hartman and Ron Popma, has also started an "affiliate program" for entrepreneurs in other states who want to do the same thing. So far four affiliates -- in Virginia, Ohio, Michigan and upstate New York -- have signed on. To participate, they buy a canning line from Wild Goose, pay a fee to Mobile Canning and receive operations training and education.
"A lot of guys had been calling from other states saying they loved what we were doing and that they thought it was something that could work in their area," Hartman says, adding that the partnership with Wild Goose makes the deal even better.
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Blog post • Mar 19, 2018 19:50 +0630
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Which perks of Skillcapes can be used when displayed on the cape hanger?
Each Skillcape has certain benefits, and we will detail the perks of Skillcapes that can be used while displayed on the cape hanger.
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MRV#1 was on a warm day in August. The teams had to unscramble a ticket that led them to Viera Regional Park. After a not so fast pre-meeting, the teams chose a teammate to get them a starting position. The Game was golf. the longest drive starts first. Problem was, it was a wiffle golf ball and a plastic golf club.
After some impressive and not so impressive drives…the teams were off and running.
Clue one: Viera's #1
-Now I'll admit, it was suppose to hold them up a little, but all 11 teams went to VHS. And sadly it took some teams an hour to realize it was refering to Uno's of Viera.
Clue four: This Place ramps you down, and it's near by bridge takes you to a place where Douglas Skyhawks may have once flown.
-getting to this clue was a little difficult for the last 4 teams, as the area it was located in was closed around 630pm. so we improvised. Almost all the teams figured this out in a few minutes, and it led them to the Pineda Boat ramp where they had to fish the next clue out of the river in four parts.
Clue Ten: From the top of this eastern twin, you can see the home of the hawks
-the tunnel east of campus was the eastern twin. and what waited for the teams there was a maze built for four. Four kids were taped back-to-back, and had to navigate thru to get the next clue.
Final Clue: What fruit benefits Viera High?
– Actually, the pinapple foutain at the avenues, donates all the money tossed into it, to Brevard County Schools. So technically, It does. This was was finish line. Green team figured this out in about 10 seconds, and finished the race first, an hour before the next team. In the end, Cow print won by a mere 40 points cementing their names at the top of the Wisdom Trophy. And for a historical note, the first ever, last place team was Rasta. (Winners of the Gilded Shoe of Slow)
MRV#2: The Sequel began at noon on February 19th. The teams solved a coded message directing them back to the eastern twin from game one. A quick meeting with the parent drivers and we got into the pre-meeting talk. This game added a "Best Dressed" point bonus at the starting line. The teams were very surprised that they were the judges in this contest for an extra 150 points.
Next was our traditional game for starting position. This game also surprised the teams. A "sweet 16" Rock-Paper-scissors tourney for one player from each team.
The Theme was a little confusing for the teams to figure out. Sequels. Movie sequels, specifically. Each clue was a poster of a movie sequel. Lord of the Rings2, Star Wars2, Toy Story2..and so on. It took a couple clues, but they finally got it.
You had to look close, but there is a Starbucks logo in the moon. This lead the teams to the Rockledge Starbucks where they had to pick the 1 right poster of 3 starwars posters hanging in a window.
Teams had to find the letters hidden in the characters and subtract 2. The clue read "dres4les", which lead most teams to the Ross parking lot in Viera.
The clue reads "the key maker is where the mountain resides", referring to where Mount Viera reside now. A treasure box at this location held the final clue. " La linea de meta es 2251-117" roughly translates to the "finishline is at 2251-117". The number just happens to be the address of the Finish Line at the Avenues.
The Race went 10 hours (2 more hours than I planned for) and we held the finishing ceremony at the Pineapple fountain once again. Cow print continued its dominance for a second game, followed closely by Scooby doo and the Teacher team.
MRV#3 Spies Like Us
Mrv3 was held on Saturday August 27th under threat of Hurricane Irene. The Game had been in question, but Irene turned north and spared us a direct hit. The teams clue to the starting line was a picture of a high school senior. They were told to find his parking spot for instructions. The picture was my highschool senior picture, the parking sport was my spot and the starting line was finally, Viera High.
The theme for game three was "Spies like us." Whether that was actually a spy theme or a secert agent theme, i don't think we every decided. But none-the-less we threw a few curve balls at the teams right from the starting line. First thing we did was kidnap a team member and unknown to the most of the players until the end, we turned them into double agents.( They worked behind the backs of their team to complete a task that was the exact opposite of the rules we told the teams). Then we set the teams loose in the order in which they finished the registration Challenge.
Clue 1: It was a QR code for an address. But the code was different for every other group.
Clue 2: Was a partially completed ariel view of the Drivers ed course at VHS. This lead them to the first of 6 challenges. A "ropes" challenge where the entire team had to cross a rope bridge built by our ROTC instructor.
Clue 5: "You've got
someone following you, I'm pretty sure you've seen them too. I'm going to
divert you to a secret location in hopes of them losing your trail…
My friend, Henley
Ashwood, has been in Ventana on a Solitary assignment. He worked out of what
the locals called "the Club House." He would enter through the Iron Gate that
faced the Village. The password was the slovak word for "Faith". Find him 600
feet south of the password and turn left. He will help from there."
All the Bolded words were road names the crossed the road they were on if they went south. This lead them to another challege area.
Finish Line Clue:
North south east west
If you go north, you go over it
If you got south you repeat it
If you look east you see double it
If you go west you fall off of it
This lead the kids almost back to the starting line, and the wester twin (tunnel overpass, west of the school) finally got it's turn in the game. The cow print team was hot on the trail of the finish line and was even spotted within a half mile (@ the eastern twin) 20 minutes before the first team finished. Their 3-peat hopes were dashed to pieces. Teacher team (silver) finished first and cow print managed topull a 3rd place after driving 8 miles out of the way.
MRV#4: Cowboys vs. Aliens
This game took place on March 3rd, 2012, and yes it was loosely based on the movie of the same name. The players were all cowboys/cowgirls and they were chasing a group of aliens around trying to recover gold from them. This version of the game utilized FACEBOOK as the primary method of communications, negating the need a "phone bank" of staffers to answer questions/give hints. (Worked beautifully, BTW!)
The race began at noon in a western field in the highlands of viera. (clue zero being a Highlander quote)
Clue one: A craft crash landed nearby. It was shaped like a flying wedge and is invisible to the naked eye. The beings were craving food from a nearby building, but several employees fought them off. They require a portable fuel source to aid their injured comrades
– So the portable fuel source, being a "Mobile" fuel source…and craving food and the "wedge", led the teams to a parking lot behind Viera Pizza(being located at a Mobile Station) where the fist challenge was waiting.
Clue 4: A few years ago the locals said another ship crashed near a road in the area. The government tried to cover up the incident by disguising the crater. We believe you might find the aliens trying to recover the gold from that location. Mr. Anderson once claimed it was a mere half mile north of his establishment.
– The teams found this one with no help at all. I guess Mr. Anderson was quickly tracked down to Anderson Elementary and the park a half mile the the north.
Clue 7: Looking for a large gold deposit, the Aliens landed north of a secure location on the island of their birthright.
– This one tripped up all 10 teams. Took a few teams 3 hours to find it and do the challenge waiting for them there. Birthright= heritage & Secure location= gate house on the north side of Heritage Isle
Clue 9: OK, this one was based on the fact my daughter was appearing in a production of ANNIE. The lyrics to "Your never fully dressed without a smile" were bosted as part of a radio broadcast the aliens were streaming. Two words in the lyrics were altered to direct the team to Bromley Road near Lexus of Melbourne.
The Finish: Team KISS took a sprint to the end in the last 3 clues to take first place. They also were one of the few teams to ever complete one of my scavenger lists (which were all Gold based, for the movie theme). They did every item. and won by the slimmest margin in our games history.
MRV#5: World Traveler
This Game was rescheduled twice due to money issues. The production of this game cost us nearly $3000, almost all of which was obtained thru fund-raising. (a first for MRV) The game finally took place on December 1st, 2012, and, to much celebration, was held at the Walt Disney World Resort. The theme of World Traveler had the teams moving throughout the parks, resorts, and assorted destination areas; arriving, by the end of the day, at the House of Mouse, with roughly 3 hours to spare. We changed the tempo of the game once again, by setting specific times for the teams to arrive at the clues. This really allowed the game to be managed by many fewer people than you would think it would take to run a game of this size. We used FACEBOOK once again to communicate, which worked even better in this format than the last.
Clue Zero: The tour bus picked us up at VHS at 7am and dropped us off at downtown Disney at 8:20am. Game began as they stepped off the bus.
– I had wanted the game to begin at 9am, but with having to drive 45 students and staffers to Orlando, we had to buffer the start time so the remainder of the game would fall into place.
Clue One: Here there be sea monsters….but not at Cypress gardens. (9-920)
– Most Floridians know that Cypress Gardens was sold to and turned into Lego Land. And the Lego Store at DTD has a sea monster out in front. It was also the scene of one of several EXTRA POINT areas. A mason jar was filled with assorted legos, guessing correct, or within 5 or 10, netted you between 200-500 points.
Clue Four: I see London, I see France….but you cannot enter from here.(1130-1155)
– Several teams found the area behind the Boardwalk hotel&resort where you can see both London and France in the World showcase of EPCOT. And there was an entrance to EPCOT, the teams knew they could not enter. (teams the made it to this clue on time recieved a map of the Magic Kingdom, the next stop.)
Clue Seven: Between the worlds of fright and thundering speed, suspends the path that you might need. I'll hint and huck of places far, though you cannot get there in a car. (230-245)
– Every team found this clue, staffed by Mr. E and his son. The suspension bridge on Tom Sawyer's Island sits between the Haunted Mansion and Big Thunder Mountian Railroad….and you must use a boat to get there.
Clue Nine: A major topic of debate as a world traveler – only civilized people have it at half-past 3, because by 4, it is much too late. (345-415)
– This clue was harder than i thought. Only civilized people have tea at 3:30. And the rabbit from Alice in Wonderland was very late.
Clue Eleven: You've been ordered to sail east my boy! Find your riches in the wilds of Florida (500-530)
– This one confused alot of the teams. Most teams did not think to leave Magic Kingdom to find their riches at Ft. wilderness. In fact, No team made it to this clue in time for points. (though several were very close)
Final Clue: Back and Forth, north and south, all day and all night. I'll climb above and wait a while and take in all the sights. A General craft is where i am, you better hurry up. The end is near for most of you, I'm tired of this stuff. (6pm)
– The ferry boat on the seven seas lagoon, sails north and south all day and night, but only the boat named General Joe Potter had me on board. 5 teams found me in time and recieved finishing points. and this ended the game.
We had several strategies employed by the teams, including blowing off the first 4 or 5 checkpoints to focus on scavenger items; Slow-and-steady progression (hard fought decoding of the clues); teaming up with another team (which has actually happened before); and lastly the "Just going with it" method. The scheme of limited time at the clue locations, kept the game moving and no one was ever out of the race. The scavenger items were huge as far as the points earned, but we threw a few challenge points in there to benefit the teams that hit most of the checkpoints. For example…at the first clue location, White team guessed the "LEGO-in-the-jar" to within 4 pieces and earned a bonus 300 points. And the yellow team was the only team to figure out that CLUE 6 was refering to the Swiss Family Robinson Tree House and earned and burned 300 extra points for their challenge (climbing the tree 3 times, back to back).
In the end, the first ever Parent Team took home the Wisdom Trophy in a close win over Blue team. Their strategy of Scavenger Items paid off big for them as they got several high value items (including the Mr. E picture for 1000pts) and managed to be one of the five teams to get points for finishing. (Also recieving finishing points were Purple, Green, Pink, and Orange) After the game the teams got 4 more hours to enjoy the Magic Kingdom before we headed home. All in all, it was my impression that the teams had a blast, and were just a little past exhausted by the end. The last Disney bus of the day we took together as a group, was very loud at 10:30pm….but the Bus ride home at 11:05 was much more subdued.
MRV#6: March of the Dead
This game was literally though of, planned, and developed in the six days that followed the finish at the General Joe Potter. We hadn't been planning a 6th game, but this one almost created itself.
MRV6: March of the dead, started pre-noon on a fridged day in the library of Viera High School on March 2nd, 2013. We had sealed up the building like we were in a post-apocalyptic situation and began to draw names for the starting order. Unknown to all but one team (White team, who were actually actors portraying a team) the minute we closed the doors to start the game, Zombies had swarmed the whole facility. We rigged the starting game so that White team would start first, and as soon as they "Started," zombies were pounding on all the other doors and windows. I told the teams to forget the starting order and run for it! As they emerged into the school's courtyard, they were greeted with a scene of chaos. White team had been taken down by a pack of zombies, and there were 30 roaming zombies immediately on the attack. The teams had to avoid the zombies, pick up their team pack out in the yard, and make it back to their cars.
Clue 1:
Clue 4:
Clue 8:
The Game ended with Purple team (who had come in dead last in game 5) killing the competition, pretty much the whole night. The scavenger items were plentiful from all the teams, but Purple team had really pulled away at the end. The temperature had dipped into the 40's and the teams (and myself) spent most of the finish waiting in our cars with the heat running.
I have decided to "rest the game" since most of my players are graduating. But who knows what next year will bring.
MRV#7: World Traveler 2
I must have been crazy…..but at least nobody died. The idea of one last game for 2014 seniors was entirely their idea, but I took it in stride that, even though I had moved my whole family 500 miles north of the MRV battlefield, we could still pull this off.
Coming soon…


text:
Pipe Insulation
Controlling heat loss in a piping system is essential to maximize thermal efficiency. The proper selection of materials during design will ensure the system operates within specifications with minimum heat loss to the environment. Insulation also provides for a more temperate work environment while also protecting workers from hot piping.
This module takes 30 minutes to complete. At the end of this module, you must obtain an 80% or higher on the Test Your Knowledge for it to be marked as complete. You have unlimited attempts and the highest attempt is recorded.


text:
In Flanders Fields those rows—Auschwitz ditch graves—
Gulag mounds below snow—lost souls heaved in caves—
MRSA steals a child—one too many pills—
A bullet rips through flesh—hypothermic chill—
The end? Such spearing grief—the bare seat and bed—
The memories that haunt—the future, all dread?
There is one hope for all—everlasting spring—
The balm from Death's cruel sting—the eternal King.
From Roman nails and wood—from limestone-sculpt tomb—
The Holy One rose up—to open spring bloom—
Death forever vanquished—past the sky's blue sea—
He holds the key to life—for eternity—


text:
Insights from Inside Neural Networks
52 Pages Posted: 19 Aug 2018 Last revised: 14 Nov 2018
Date Written: November 14, 2018
We provide a tutorial that illuminates the aspects which need to be considered when fitting neural network regression models to claims frequency data in insurance. We discuss feature pre-processing, choice of loss function, choice of neural network architecture, class imbalance problem, as well as over-fitting. This discussion is based on a publicly available real car insurance data set.
Keywords: Neural Networks, Architecture, Over-Fitting, Loss Function, Dropout, Regularization, LASSO, Ridge, Gradient Descent, Class Imbalance, Car Insurance, Claims Frequency, Poisson Regression Model, Machine Learning, Deep Learning
JEL Classification: G22, C10, C13, C14, C67
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation


text:
TORONTO, ONTARIO--(Marketwired - June 22, 2015) - Plateau Uranium Inc. (formerly Macusani Yellowcake Inc.) ("Plateau Uranium" or the "Company") (TSX VENTURE:PLU)(FRANKFURT:QG1) announced that it has filed today on SEDAR a technical report to support the new resource estimates for its uranium properties located on the Macusani Plateau in the Puno District of southeastern Peru disclosed in the Company's press release of May 6, 2015.
Details regarding the new resource estimates can be found in the Company's press release of May 6, 2015 and the technical report, both of which have been filed and are available for viewing and download on the Company's profile at www.sedar.com.
About Plateau Uranium
Plateau Uranium Inc. is a Canadian uranium exploration and development company focused on its properties on the Macusani Plateau in southeastern Peru. The Company controls all reported uranium resources known in Peru and mineral concessions that cover over 100,000 hectares (1,000 km2) situated near significant infrastructure. Plateau Uranium is listed on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol 'PLU' and the Frankfurt Exchange under the symbol 'QG1'. The Company has 40,362,086 shares outstanding. For more information please visit www.plateauuranium.com.
Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.
Contact Information:


text:
The Six Nations rugby season is here again and the RBS Six Nations Rugby tournament sees teams from Wales, England, Ireland, Scotland, France & Italy competing for the prize of being crowned Six Nations champions.
Join us at the Rhiwderin Inn for all of Wales games in this year's Six Nations.
The 2017 Fixtures are:
Round Four:
Friday 10th March:
Wales v Ireland (8pm)
Saturday 11th March:
Italy v France (2.30pm)
England v Scotland (4pm)
Round Five:
Saturday 18th March:
Scotland v Italy (12.30pm)
France v Wales (2.45pm)
Ireland v England (5pm)


text:
As more businesses realize excellent customer service can be a competitive advantage, few are truly succeeding in creating a customer focus culture where the customer is the most important part of the business. Better Business organized an exciting program for a prestigious mall and launched the Service Culture Program in which participants took part in activities which inspired, engaged and educated them on the importance of a customer centric service culture.
To mark the launch of this new program, the slogan 'Happy Employee… Happy Customer' was developed and all employees engaged in an interactive discussion on how to reach happiness at work so that it reflects on customers. The program focused on the impact of the employee in building a customer culture as a key issue for those who want to maintain a competitive advantage and lead the market.


text:
We are committed to helping you make your move to Spain as easy as possible and helping you to enjoy that dream lifestyle in the sun.
Finding your dream
Browse through our properties to see a whole range of villas and apartments around on Spain's sunny Costa Blanca. If you don't see something straight away, please contact us and we'll actively search on your behalf for the perfect apartment or villa for you in the Benidorm area.
We'll also add you to our mailing list to make sure that you're amongst the very first to receive details of new properties and price reductions.
The Best Prices
In the current economic climate, we have some great offers on forced sales and bank repossessions. Sign up for our newsletter to be amongst the first to receive details of these.
Financing your purchase
We have some great connections with local Spanish banks putting you on the fast track for a safe and secure mortgage for your new property(subject to status).
Buy to Let
We can advise you on the best properties, help arrange a buy to let mortgage and even advertise your property on our BBS Rentals website.
The paperwork
We will introduce you to a reliable local Gestor/Agent who specialises in the area. He will guide you through the requirements of Spanish property purchase process and ensure that everything is completed without problems.
Enjoying life
Once the keys are handed over, we carry on working with you to help you enjoy your life in your new Spanish property. We can provide information on schools, healthcare, residential requirements, insurances and local tradesmen to ensure that everything is looked after for your new home.


text:
Compatibility updates:
- Publisher is EE5 compatible, but it does not currently support the Fluid field (it's in the works).
Ticket: Nested Bloqs variables not parsed in closing tag after first bloq.
|Add-on / Version
|Bloqs 4.0.9
|EE Version
Jarod ClarkNov 07, 2018
Description: I have a setup where I'm using nested Bloqs. I'm trying to do a conditional in the close section for a bloq and the variable is only parsed for the first instance of that bloq type.
Here's an example of my code:

{if container == 1}
{/if}
{if container == 1}
{/if}
As you can see, I have a {container} variable that I'm trying to run a conditional on in the closing tag. The first time this bloq is displayed, everything works fine (and it outputs 1 in this case). The second time I have a bloq of that same type on the page, it's not parsed and just outputs {container}.
The variable and conditional are properly parsed in the main part of the tag, it's just whatever is in the {close:section} part that isn't parsed.
BoldMinded (Brian)Nov 08, 2018
What is "container"? Is it a block variable or something else? Another custom field?
BoldMinded (Brian)Nov 08, 2018
Is container an atom?
Jarod ClarkNov 10, 2018
Sorry for the delay.
"container" is an atom (a field defined in the bloq type). In this case, it's a toggle field.
BoldMinded (Brian)Nov 10, 2018
Thanks, I'll try to replicate it soon and see what the issue is.
BoldMinded (Brian)Nov 10, 2018
I was not able to replicate this. Here is my section code, which I added a Toggle field too, then added a section > row, section > row to the Bloqs field.
Have you tried a similar conditional with another atom type? E.g. checking if a field value == some text instead of using a Toggle field? What other ways have you tried to debug this?

container: {container}

{if container}Yep{/if}

BoldMinded (Brian)Nov 10, 2018
Jarod ClarkNov 11, 2018
I just set up another test page with only 3 top level bloqs, no nesting. It seems it's the last bloq that isn't being parsed.
Jarod ClarkNov 11, 2018
And actually, in looking at this a bit closer, in my debug code where I'm outputting the bloqs variables in the close tag, it's actually outputting the variables from the NEXT bloq, not the current one.
So if you look at that bloqs-frontend image I linked in the previous comment, it should be outputting 1 - white, then 0 - light, then 1 - dark based on the values I have in the bloqs. However, it's only outputting from the 2nd and 3rd bloqs, and then outputting no parsed values for the last iteration.
Hopefully that helps with tracking this down.
Jarod ClarkNov 11, 2018
Comment has been marked private.
BoldMinded (Brian)Nov 11, 2018
Ok, I can see conditionals not parsing correctly, but it appears to only be the Toggle fields, as in its not correctly evaluating "0" as false and "1" as true. The field values are strings, not integers.
Given the following code where container is a Toggle and theme is a dropdown, the theme field conditional appears to be working, just not the Toggle field.

theme: {theme} {if theme == "light"}bright{/if}{if theme == "medium"}dull{/if}{if theme == "dark"}boring{/if}
container: {container} {if container}Yep{/if}
close container: {container}

{if container}Yep{/if}

BoldMinded (Brian)Nov 11, 2018
BoldMinded (Brian)Nov 11, 2018
Comment has been marked private.
BoldMinded (Brian)Nov 12, 2018
I think this has something to do with the internal parser. If I explicitly set the toggle field value to false if it has the string value of "0" then the template renders correctly.
Try making this code change:
protected function _parseConditionals($tagdata, TagOutputBlockContext $context)
// Compile conditional vars
$cond = [];
$cond = array_merge($cond, $this->getContextVariables($context));
$block = $context->getCurrentBlock();
// Map column names to their values in the DB
foreach ($block->atoms as $atom) {
// Add this conditional…
if ($atom->value === '0') {
$atom->value = false;
$cond[$atom->definition->shortname] = $atom->value;
$tagdata = $this->EE->functions->prep_conditionals($tagdata, $cond);
return $tagdata;
My latest template code with results:

theme: {theme} {if theme == "light"}bright{/if}{if theme == "medium"}dull{/if}{if theme == "dark"}boring{/if}
container: {container} {if container}Yep{if:else}Nope{/if}
close container: {container}

{if container}Yep{if:else}Nope{/if}

BoldMinded (Brian)Nov 12, 2018
Note, this is when the field is not set to nestable. When I make it nestable I do see the issue of the conditional inside the close tag showing the incorrect value.
BoldMinded (Brian)Nov 12, 2018
Comment has been marked private.
Jarod ClarkNov 12, 2018
I installed that build you provided and this does appear to be working properly now.
Here's output from a test template I set up this morning which was showing incorrect info before I updated:
Start Section
Container: 1
Theme: white
Start Close Section
Container: 1
Theme: white
End Close Section
End Section
Start Section
Container: 0
Theme: light
Start Close Section
Container: 0
Theme: light
End Close Section
End Section
Start Section
Container: 1
Theme: dark
Start Close Section
Container: 1
Theme: dark
End Close Section
End Section
BoldMinded (Brian)Nov 12, 2018
Comment has been marked private.
Jarod ClarkNov 12, 2018
Just uploaded that latest build, and it all looks to be working fine still.
BoldMinded (Brian)Nov 12, 2018
Sweeeet. Thanks for checking. I'll go ahead and close this ticket.
Thanks for pointing out this bug btw, seems its been like this for months and no one has caught it :(
BoldMinded (Brian)Nov 13, 2018
Jarod, I took another look at the conditional parsing, specifically the {if container} conditional, and found that it was working as intended. You'll need to change them to {if container == '0'} or {if container == '1'} in order for it to work. I found this in EE's core, which I should follow, otherwise some other field that actually contains the value "0" that is not a boolean will not evaluate correctly in the conditional.
* Cast to EE boolean
private function bool($value)
// We do *not* follow the string 0 php casting rule.
// {if field} should be true if the user entered
// something. Doesn't matter what it is.
if ($value === '0')
return TRUE;
return (bool) $value;


text:
Right now the status bar on my iPhone 5 reads "No service". This time it's for real; and it's permanent.
I was an early adopter. Now, I'm an early dropper. Or whatever the opposite of "adopter" is. But I'm weary of iPhones, iPads and all manner of things that claim to make my life better. Because they don't.
This isn't the first time I've written about my growing disinterest in iThings.[1] What began as a desire to avoid being distracted and constantly tethered to the phone has given way to a deeper mistrust of technologies that follow us around. It has taken me a while to come to a fuller recognition of what irritates me about these devices. Certainly their invasiveness, distractibility, and expense remain problematic. But what concerns me more is that iPhones - and by "iPhones" I mean any manner of smartphone - have a pernicious and viral quality about them. Not only do they make it easier and more addictive to check out of the real world, but their ubiquity and "social" hooks make them efficient at spreading cultural expectations about the nature of work and availability to one another. In other words, when everyone has a smartphone, then smartphones become a vector for the warped idea that work is a 24/7 proposition. It becomes nearly impossible to opt-out. No other man-made tool has been so efficient at generating and maintaining a meme like this, one that guarantees its own survival.
Not only do smartphones spread expectations about availability and always-on work, they also disseminate ideas about human imperfection and the desirability of eliminating it. No longer is there an excuse for being lost. Everyone has a GPS in their pocket. No longer is there an excuse for a missed appointment or a forgotten phone number. Never mind that whole regions of the brain are likely falling into disuse atrophy.
But our imperfections are not necessarily "bugs" in the system; perhaps they are "features" (to borrow from programming parlance.) What if the chance of forgetting is what drives us to remember? What if getting lost gives us the confidence to take chances? Whether a bug or feature, demanding perfection of ourselves or others runs counter to Buddha-nature. Accepting that which is, without a desire to make it otherwise, is where happiness is found.
alanduncan.me "Goodbye iPhone". In February, 2014 I first wrote about my intent to ditch the iPhone. But I discovered that I had several more months of indentured servitude before I could cancel my contract without incurring an early cancelation fee. ↩


text:
Brendel and Bethge show empirically that state-of-the-art deep neural networks on ImageNet rely to a large extent on local features, without any notion of interaction between them. To this end, they propose a bag-of-local-features model by applying a ResNet-like architecture on small patches of ImageNet images. The predictions of these local features are then averaged and a linear classifier is trained on top. Due to the locality, this model allows to inspect which areas in an image contribute to the model's decision, as shown in Figure 1. Furthermore, these local features are sufficient for good performance on ImageNet. Finally, they show, on scrambled ImageNet images, that regular deep neural networks also rely heavily on local features, without any notion of spatial interaction between them.
Figure 1: Illustration of the heap maps obtained using BagNets, the bag-of-local-features model proposed in the paper. Here, different sizes for the local patches are used.
Also find this summary at [davidstutz.de](https://davidstutz.de/category/reading/).
Ilyas et al. present a follow-up work to their paper on the trade-off between accuracy and robustness. Specifically, given a feature $f(x)$ computed from input $x$, the feature is considered predictive if
$\mathbb{E}_{(x,y) \sim \mathcal{D}}[y f(x)] \geq \rho$;
similarly, a predictive feature is robust if
$\mathbb{E}_{(x,y) \sim \mathcal{D}}\left[\inf_{\delta \in \Delta(x)} yf(x + \delta)\right] \geq \gamma$.
This means, a feature is considered robust if the worst-case correlation with the label exceeds some threshold $\gamma$; here the worst-case is considered within a pre-defined set of allowed perturbations $\Delta(x)$ relative to the input $x$. Obviously, there also exist predictive features, which are however not robust according to the above definition. In the paper, Ilyas et al. present two simple algorithms for obtaining adapted datasets which contain only robust or only non-robust features. The main idea of these algorithms is that an adversarially trained model only utilizes robust features, while a standard model utilizes both robust and non-robust features. Based on these datasets, they show that non-robust, predictive features are sufficient to obtain high accuracy; similarly training a normal model on a robust dataset also leads to reasonable accuracy but also increases robustness. Experiments were done on Cifar10. These observations are supported by a theoretical toy dataset consisting of two overlapping Gaussians; I refer to the paper for details.
Also find this summary at [davidstutz.de](https://davidstutz.de/category/reading/).
## General stuff about face recognition
Face recognition has 4 main tasks:
* **Face detection**: Given an image, draw a rectangle around every face
* **Face alignment**: Transform a face to be in a canonical pose
* **Face representation**: Find a representation of a face which is suitable for follow-up tasks (small size, computationally cheap to compare, invariant to irrelevant changes)
* **Face verification**: Images of two faces are given. Decide if it is the same person or not.
The face verification task is sometimes (more simply) a face classification task (given a face, decide which of a fixed set of people it is).
Datasets being used are:
* **LFW** (Labeled Faces in the Wild): 97.35% accuracy; 13 323 web photos of 5 749 celebrities
* **YTF** (YouTube Faces): 3425 YouTube videos of 1 595 subjects
* **SFC** (Social Face Classification): 4.4 million labeled faces from 4030 people, each 800 to 1200 faces
* **USF** (Human-ID database): 3D scans of faces
## Ideas in this paper
This paper deals with face alignment and face representation.
**Face Alignment**
They made an average face with the USF dataset. Then, for each new face, they apply the following procedure:
* Find 6 points in a face (2 eyes, 1 nose tip, 2 corners of the lip, 1 middle point of the bottom lip)
* Crop according to those
* Find 67 points in the face / apply them to a normalized 3D model of a face
* Transform (=align) face to a normalized position
Train a neural network on 152x152 images of faces to classify 4030 celebrities. Remove the softmax output layer and use the output of the second-last layer as the transformed representation.
The network is:
* C1 (convolution): 32 filters of size $11 \times 11 \times 3$ (RGB-channels) (returns $142\times 142$ "images")
* M2 (max pooling): $3 \times 3$, stride of 2 (returns $71\times 71$ "images")
* C3 (convolution): 16 filters of size $9 \times 9 \times 16$ (returns $63\times 63$ "images")
* L4 (locally connected): $16\times9\times9\times16$ (returns $55\times 55$ "images")
* L5 (locally connected): $16\times7\times7\times16$ (returns $25\times 25$ "images")
* L6 (locally connected): $16\times5\times5\times16$ (returns $21\times 21$ "images")
* F7 (fully connected): ReLU, 4096 units
* F8 (fully connected): softmax layer with 4030 output neurons
The training was done with:
* Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD)
* Momentum of 0.9
* Performance scheduling (LR starting at 0.01, ending at 0.0001)
* Weight initialization: $w \sim \mathcal{N}(\mu=0, \sigma=0.01)$, $b = 0.5$
* ~15 epochs ($\approx$ 3 days) of training
## Evaluation results
* **Quality**:
* 97.35% accuracy (or mean accuracy?) with an Ensemble of DNNs for LFW
* 91.4% accuracy with a single network on YTF
* **Speed**: DeepFace runs in 0.33 seconds per image (I'm not sure which size). This includes image decoding, face detection and alignment, **the** feed forward network (why only one? wasn't this the best performing Ensemble?) and final classification output
## See also
* Andrew Ng: [C4W4L03 Siamese Network](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jfw8MuKwpI)
The main contribution of this paper is introducing a new transformation that the authors call Batch Normalization (BN). The need for BN comes from the fact that during the training of deep neural networks (DNNs) the distribution of each layer's input change. This phenomenon is called internal covariate shift (ICS).
#### What is BN?
Normalize each (scalar) feature independently with respect to the mean and variance of the mini batch. Scale and shift the normalized values with two new parameters (per activation) that will be learned. The BN consists of making normalization part of the model architecture.
#### What do we gain?
According to the author, the use of BN provides a great speed up in the training of DNNs. In particular, the gains are greater when it is combined with higher learning rates. In addition, BN works as a regularizer for the model which allows to use less dropout or less L2 normalization. Furthermore, since the distribution of the inputs is normalized, it also allows to use sigmoids as activation functions without the saturation problem.
#### What follows?
This seems to be specially promising for training recurrent neural networks (RNNs). The vanishing and exploding gradient problems \cite{journals/tnn/BengioSF94} have their origin in the iteration of transformation that scale up or down the activations in certain directions (eigenvectors). It seems that this regularization would be specially useful in this context since this would allow the gradient to flow more easily. When we unroll the RNNs, we usually have ultra deep networks.
#### Like
* Simple idea that seems to improve training.
* Makes training faster.
* Simple to implement. Probably.
* You can be less careful with initialization.
#### Dislike
* Does not work with stochastic gradient descent (minibatch size = 1).
* This could reduce the parallelism of the algorithm since now all the examples in a mini batch are tied.
* Results on ensemble of networks for ImageNet makes it harder to evaluate the relevance of BN by itself. (Although they do mention the performance of a single model).
This paper is a top-down (i.e. requires person detection separately) pose estimation method with a focus on improving high-resolution representations (features) to make keypoint detection easier.
During the training stage, this method utilizes annotated bounding boxes of person class to extract ground truth images and keypoints. The data augmentations include random rotation, random scale, flipping, and [half body augmentations](http://presentations.cocodataset.org/ECCV18/COCO18-Keypoints-Megvii.pdf) (feeding upper or lower part of the body separately). Heatmap learning is performed in a typical for this task approach of applying L2 loss between predicted keypoint locations and ground truth locations (generated by applying 2D Gaussian with std = 1).
During the inference stage, pre-trained object detector is used to provide bounding boxes. The final heatmap is obtained by averaging heatmaps obtained from the original and flipped images. The pixel location of the keypoint is determined by $argmax$ heatmap value with a quarter offset in the direction to the second-highest heatmap value.
While the pipeline described in this paper is a common practice for pose estimation methods, this method can achieve better results by proposing a network design to extract better representations. This is done through having several parallel sub-networks of different resolutions (next one is half the size of the previous one) while repeatedly fusing branches between each other:
The fusion process varies depending on the scale of the sub-network and its location in relation to others:
Disclaimer: I am an author
# Intro
Experience replay (ER) and generative replay (GEN) are two effective continual learning strategies. In the former, samples from a stored memory are replayed to the continual learner to reduce forgetting. In the latter, old data is compressed with a generative model and generated data is replayed to the continual learner. Both of these strategies assume a random sampling of the memories. But learning a new task doesn't cause **equal** interference (forgetting) on the previous tasks!
In this work, we propose a controlled sampling of the replays. Specifically, we retrieve the samples which are most interfered, i.e. whose prediction will be most negatively impacted by the foreseen parameters update. The method is called Maximally Interfered Retrieval (MIR).
## Cartoon for explanation
Learning about dogs and horses might cause more interference on lions and zebras than on cars and oranges. Thus, replaying lions and zebras would be a more efficient strategy.
# Method
1) incoming data: $(X_t,Y_t)$
2) foreseen parameter update: $\theta^v= \theta-\alpha\nabla\mathcal{L}(f_\theta(X_t),Y_t)$
### applied to ER (ER-MIR)
3) Search for the top-$k$ values $x$ in the stored memories using the criterion $$s_{MI}(x) = \mathcal{L}(f_{\theta^v}(x),y) -\mathcal{L}(f_{\theta}(x),y)$$
### or applied to GEN (GEN-MIR)
\underset{Z}{\max} \, \mathcal{L}\big(f_{\theta^v}(g_\gamma(Z)),Y^*\big) -\mathcal{L}\big(f_{\theta}(g_\gamma(Z)),Y^*\big)
\text{s.t.} \quad ||z_i-z_j||_2^2 > \epsilon \forall z_i,z_j \in Z \,\text{with} \, z_i\neq z_j
i.e. search in the latent space of a generative model $g_\gamma$ for samples that are the most forgotten given the foreseen update.
4) Then add theses memories to incoming data $X_t$ and train $f_\theta$
# Results
### qualitative
Whilst learning 8s and 9s (first row), GEN-MIR mainly retrieves 3s and 4s (bottom two rows) which are similar to 8s and 9s respectively.
### quantitative
GEN-MIR was tested on MNIST SPLIT and Permuted MNIST, outperforming the baselines in both cases.
ER-MIR was tested on MNIST SPLIT, Permuted MNIST and Split CIFAR-10, outperforming the baselines in all cases.
# Other stuff
### (for avid readers)
We propose a hybrid method (AE-MIR) in which the generative model is replaced with an autoencoder to facilitate the compression of harder dataset like e.g. CIFAR-10.
This paper builds upon the previous work in gradient-based meta-learning methods.
The objective of meta-learning is to find meta-parameters ($\theta$) which can be "adapted" to yield "task-specific" ($\phi$) parameters.
Thus, $\theta$ and $\phi$ lie in the same hyperspace.
A meta-learning problem deals with several tasks, where each task is specified by its respective training and test datasets.
At the inference time of gradient-based meta-learning methods, before the start of each task, one needs to perform some gradient-descent (GD) steps initialized from the meta-parameters to obtain these task-specific parameters.
The objective of meta-learning is to find $\theta$, such that GD on each task's training data yields parameters that generalize well on its test data.
Thus, the objective function of meta-learning is the average loss on the training dataset of each task ($\mathcal{L}_{i}(\phi)$), where the parameters of that task ($\phi$) are obtained by performing GD initialized from the meta-parameters ($\theta$).
F(\theta) = \frac{1}{M}\sum_{i=1}^{M} \mathcal{L}_i(\phi)
In order to backpropagate the gradients for this task-specific loss function back to the meta-parameters, one needs to backpropagate through task-specific loss function ($\mathcal{L}_{i}$) and the GD steps (or any other optimization algorithm that was used), which were performed to yield $\phi$.
As GD is a series of steps, a whole sequence of changes done on $\theta$ need to be considered for backpropagation.
Thus, the past approaches have focused on RNN + BPTT or Truncated BPTT.
However, the author shows that with the use of the proximal term in the task-specific optimization (also called inner optimization), one can obtain the gradients without having to consider the entire trajectory of the parameters.
The authors call these implicit gradients.
The idea is to constrain the $\phi$ to lie closer to $\theta$ with the help of proximal term which is similar to L2-regularization penalty term.
Due to this constraint, one obtains an implicit equation of $\phi$ in terms of $\theta$ as
\phi = \theta - \frac{1}{\lambda}\nabla\mathcal{L}_i(\phi)
This is then differentiated to obtain the implicit gradients as
\frac{d\phi}{d\theta} = \big( \mathbf{I} + \frac{1}{\lambda}\nabla^{2} \mathcal{L}_i(\phi) \big)^{-1}
and the contribution of gradients from $\mathcal{L}_i$ is thus,
\big( \mathbf{I} + \frac{1}{\lambda}\nabla^{2} \mathcal{L}_i(\phi) \big)^{-1} \nabla \mathcal{L}_i(\phi)
The hessian in the above gradients are memory expensive computations, which become infeasible in deep neural networks.
Thus, the authors approximate the above term by minimizing the quadratic formulation using conjugate gradient method which only requires Hessian-vector products (cheaply available via reverse backpropagation).
\min_{\mathbf{w}} \mathbf{w}^\intercal \big( I + \frac{1}{\lambda}\nabla^{2} \mathcal{L}_i(\phi) \big) \mathbf{w} - \mathbf{w}^\intercal \nabla \mathcal{L}_i(\phi)
Thus, the paper introduces computationally cheap and constant memory gradient computation for meta-learning.
Adversarial examples and defenses to prevent them are often presented as a case of inherent model fragility, where the model is making a clear and identifiable mistake, by misclassifying a label humans would classify correctly. But, another frame on the adversarial examples research is that they're a way of imposing a certain kind of prior requirement on our models: that they be sensitive to certain scales of perturbation to their inputs. One reason to want to do this is because you believe the model might reasonably need to interact with such perturbed inputs in future. But, another is that smoothness of model outputs, in the sense of an output that doesn't change sharply in the immediate vicinity of an example, can be a useful inductive bias that improves generalization. In images, this is often not the case, as training on adversarial examples empirically worsens performance on normal examples. In text, however, it seems like you can get more benefit out of training on adversarial examples, and this paper proposes a specific way of doing that.
An interesting up-front distinction is the one between generating adversarial examples in embeddings vs raw text. Raw text is generally harder: it's unclear how to permute sentences in ways that leave them grammatically and meaningfully unchanged, and thus mean that the same label is the "correct" one as before, without human input. So the paper instead works in embedding space: adding a delta vectors of adversarial noise to the learned word embeddings used in a text model. One salient downside of generating adversarial examples to train on is that doing so is generally costly: it requires calculating the gradients with respect to the input to calculate the direction of the delta vector, which requires another backwards pass through the network, in addition to the ones needed to calculate the parameter gradients to update those. It happens to be the case that once you've calculated gradients w.r.t inputs, doing so for parameters is basically done for you for free, so one possible solution to this problem is to do a step of parameter gradient calculation/model training every time you take a step of perturbation generation. However, if you're generating your adversarial examples via multi-step Projected Gradient Descent, doing a step of model training at each of the K steps in multi-step PGD means that by the time you finish all K steps and are ready to train on the example, your perturbation vector is out of sync with with your model parameters, and so isn't optimally adversarial. To fix this, the authors propose actually training on the adversarial example generated by each step in the multi-step generation process, not just the example produced at the end. So, instead of training your model on perturbations of a given size, you train them on every perturbation up to and including that size. This also solves the problem of your perturbation being out of sync with your parameters, since you "apply" your perturbation in training at the same step where you calculate it.
The authors sole purpose in this was to make models that generalize better, and they show reasonably convincing evidence that this method works slightly better than competing alternatives on language modeling tasks. More saliently, in my view, they come up with a straightforward and clever solution to a problem, which could potentially be used in other domains.
Lecuyer et al. propose a defense against adversarial examples based on differential privacy. Their main insight is that a differential private algorithm is also robust to slight perturbations. In practice, this amounts to injecting noise in some layer (or on the image directly) and using Monte Carlo estimation for computing the expected prediction. The approach is compared to adversarial training against the Carlini+Wagner attack.
Also find this summary at [davidstutz.de](https://davidstutz.de/category/reading/).
Munoz-Gonzalez et al. propose a multi-class data poisening attack against deep neural networks based on back-gradient optimization. They consider the common poisening formulation stated as follows:
$ \max_{D_c} \min_w \mathcal{L}(D_c \cup D_{tr}, w)$
where $D_c$ denotes a set of poisened training samples and $D_{tr}$ the corresponding clea dataset. Here, the loss $\mathcal{L}$ used for training is minimized as the inner optimization problem. As result, as long as learning itself does not have closed-form solutions, e.g., for deep neural networks, the problem is computationally infeasible. To resolve this problem, the authors propose using back-gradient optimization. Then, the gradient with respect to the outer optimization problem can be computed while only computing a limited number of iterations to solve the inner problem, see the paper for detail. In experiments, on spam/malware detection and digit classification, the approach is shown to increase test error of the trained model with only few training examples poisened.
Also find this summary at [davidstutz.de](https://davidstutz.de/category/reading/).


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Highgrove Beef Suet
200grms Beef Suet, great for dumplings!
Price £1.69
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Product Information
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Tour Magnifique
Short Film (Full Length) – 1982 Sport Documentary
This NFU documentary gets in the saddle to follow the professional riders in the world's southernmost road cycling race. Held in October 1981, the Tour of Southland went from lowland towns like Lumsden to the spectacular trans-Southern Alps road to Milford. Chopper shots and pre-GoPro camera mounts follow riders through Fiordland National Park rainforest. As cyclists rest aching muscles, an unusually philosophical narrator wonders "but is it worth it?". Date stamps include cigarette sponsorship and a Cortina support fleet. The film screened in cinemas alongside Smash Palace.
But is it worth it? Day after day after day?– The narration wonders at the pain and the gain of the sport
For requests to re-use this title, contact Archives New Zealand


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Find out more about this product
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Item Number 726690426200 (726690426200)


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Fabulous All Inclusive Ibiza Holiday
7 Nights in a Gorgeous 4* Hotel in a Great Location incl. Return Flights
Hotel Palladium Hotel Palmyra
Departure airport Dublin
airline Ryanair
meals All Inclusive
Sometimes when it comes to booking a holiday you have to all out. I've found the perfect thing to have you feeling rested and relaxed in no time at all, a fabulous all inclusive Ibiza holiday on Expedia. Book yourself something to look forward to today! :)
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The great thing about this hotel is that you get it in an all inclusive package so you don't have to worry about the extra costs of getting food sorted out. However, when you feel like getting out of the hotel there are tonnes of options for great places to eat.
This sun-soaked offer really is hard to pass up so get clicking the links and have an amazing time! :)
- Fabulous All Inclusive Ibiza Holiday: 7 Nights in a Gorgeous 4* Hotel in a Great Location incl. Return Flights for just €494pp
- Travel period: 19/04/2018 – 26/04/2018
- Length of stay: 7 Nights
- Airport of departure: Dublin
- Destination: Ibiza
- Airline: Ryanair
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Boat trip to CAPRI
A boat tour off the Faraglioni rocks. A private trip excursion around the Lighthouse of Punta Carena. A guided walking tour through the alleyways near the famous Piazzetta and the Augustus Gardens. Because Capri is an unmissable holiday in the Gulf of Naples. An unforgettable moment made of a mixure of history and leisure. Ideal for a cultural stay during the day, that turns into fun for the fantastic night life: memorable clubs, cocktails at sunset, dinner by the sea and other relaxing time. In Capri you can taste la "dolce vita"
Tour program Capri
The most exclusive boat excursion in the Gulf of Naples, an unforgettable holiday on an island where it's possible to admire nature and worldliness. For centuries Capri has enchanted tourists from all over the world with the beauty of its crystalline sea, the splendor of a pristine landscape, its cliff and the variety of caves that you can only explore thanks to a private boat.
Once you get off the blue pearl of the Mediterranean, our captain will lead you to discover the most fascinating places of this land, such as the Marina Grande, the Blue Grotto, the Natural Arch, the Faraglioni, Marina Piccola, the Punta di Punta Carena, the Green Cave and much more.
To visit whole area, the tour also includes a stop on the island.
In addition, during the boat tour, there are several stops between the natural coves for swimming, snorkeling and to fully enjoy moments of absolute relaxation and fun.
Duration of the excursion: 7/8 hours
The following services will also be offered in the price:
- Snack on board
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- Beach towels
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- Fuel and Taxes
- Insurance for passengers
All boats are also equipped with:
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Auxvasse Man Accused in Five Incidents
MEXICO - Today authorities in Mexico and Columbia are accusing an Auxvasse man of inappropriately touching women in three separate incidents.
It started yesterday at the Mexico Walmart when police say 44 year-old Lorne Beers touched the outside of a woman's clothing and made inappropriate comments while she was shopping. The woman reported the incident at 11:40 a.m.
About thirty minutes later, a similar incident happened at the Boone Hospital Center, involving an employee. Police say Beers then chased another hospital worker while she was walking to her car.
After Beers left the hospital, police say he was involved in two separate hit and run incidents. He was arrested shortly after the second crash and is now being treated at University Hospital.
Police say they currently have no mug shot of Beers because he went to University Hospital before the booking process.
Press Release-Reported Sexual Assault Mexico Press Release - Columbia Sexual Misconduct Report


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04 May TOXICS AND CARPETS ARE IN THE TITLE
FRETWORK is dedicated to the concept of looking to find and follow good science whenever we things do not quite look right. We think Science, Technology, Understanding and Reasoned Thinking (STUART) is the best antidote to some of the things we read.
We write in the hope that STUART can offer some insight.
Recently we were given a copy of:
"Toxics in Carpets in the European Union"
Report Prepared by: Jessica Onyshko, Dr Rob Hewlett
Report Approved by: Paul Ashford, Peter Scholes
Date: March 2018
The report describes the problems of the toxic contents of carpets in a life cycle consideration with an end objective of the circular economy impacts. At first read it seems quite comprehensive but a small amount of thought could lead to quite a different conclusion. Probably the best assessment would seem to be "It's a bit more complicated than that"(*).
The report does seem to treat carpet as, well, "carpet". Carpet of course is normally used as a floor covering and there are some floorcoverings used as a carpet that are not made by carpet manufacturing techniques. We should also take into account the fact that good quality carpets with high wear and other quality performance are often (normally some would say?) used with an underlay. These underlays are out of sight so are made with non-woven technology and use cheap and often waste fibres. Some carpets are made with an underlay type of backing – often called a secondary backing. These secondary backings are textile (nonwoven) based or may be chemical or polymer based backings. Non-woven floor covering has a backing to hold it together and provide performance in wear.
When considering both carpets and floorcoverings in general it should be remembered that they provide aesthetic and comfort properties and that includes sound reduction properties that are highly desirable to most people.
The concept of durability and wear characteristics is extremely important for carpets and this will determine where they are suitable for use and directly affect cost. It is also a very clear and crucial fact that carpets are used in public places where they must be assessed as part of the overall fire risk assessment. But this also must recognise that there are no EU standards for the ignition or burning behaviour of carpets for the household or, as it is better known, Domestic market. The lack of market for flame retardants in domestic carpets and floorcovering is a simple fact.
Carpets, in construction terms, consist of a face or pile (upper) side that may be required to be tested as part of a risk assessment for use in the Public or Contract market. The problem is that applying flame retardants has serious implications for wear and appearance and it would be highly unusual to appear on the face of the carpet. At its simplest level, the fire safety assessment for high risk areas such as protected exit routes in public buildings does not allow for the use of carpets.
A generalisation could be that public buildings use the types of carpets that have the best wear performance and are more likely to be produced with a fire safety assessment based performance. This is not made clear in the report as it seems to be directed towards working on the basis that if it could be in a carpet it will be in all carpets.
When we look at the specifics of some chemicals used in carpets we can say that e.g. bitumen is more likely to be found in domestic floorcoverings and carpet tiles and PVC would be best suited to a water resistant backing in carpets for (say) bathrooms. Putting such consideration together with the undescribed issues as to which flame retardants may be used and when we seem to have a growing level of generalisation. Chlorphosphates may be used in PU foam but as PU foam backed carpets will not produce the highest level of wear properties we can ask if they will appear in the contract sector in Public buildings. The use of brominated flame retardants (BFRs) is again questionable. They are expensive and carpets represent a large mass so they would be applied at relatively high level and cost in the ground structure of a carpet. The only use I ever found was in the aerospace sector where cost could be equated with weight and weight could be linked to aircraft fuel costs.
Carpets as a product do have recycling issues but that is described by their use of short length and very coarse textile fibres that are held firmly in a backing matrix to provide wear and other performance characteristics. This is not the best material for recycling. The carpet industry is aware of this issue. Carpets are not the only product on the market to face these types of problem. Whether this report helps provide a solution to the problem is not clear.
However, to conflate the possible presence of certain chemicals with end of life problems without defining the circumstances of their use is hardly helpful. The Public/Contract sector already has good levels of EU regulated control covering the life cycle through architectural design to procurement and fire safety assessment and including the end of life considerations. Are they asking for more or just trying to create some basis for criticising REACH for taking too long to achieve their ends – which is becoming increasingly common and strident in equal measure.
Perhaps we should consider who this report is intended to help? The carpet industry is well aware of the problems. Specifiers and purchasers would gain little insight into their problems. Much of the discussion on what may be present follows an almost cut and paste approach set in the context of carpets. Shall we say some of the comments seem well rehearsed? Perhaps there is more sense in the opportunity to mention Toxics and Carpets in the same title as that always helps with internet searches? It does rather seem like another example of science, technology and understanding put into disarray.
*With due deference to "I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that" by Ben Goldacre.


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As co-founder in 2001 of Make Your Point , Francesca has developed and facilitated training programs in effective communication and international negotiations for a variety of government agencies within Australia and overseas. She has a Bachelor (Hons) degree from the Australian National University, the Certificate IV in training and assessment and holds the Australian Institute of Company Directors diploma. She speaks German, Indonesian and some Russian. Francesca is adjunct associate professor at the University of Canberra and also a full member of the Professional Historians Association (NSW & ACT), the Australian Society of Authors and the Canberra Society of Editors. From 2007 to 2012 Francesca was manager, then general manager, research at the National Centre for Vocational and Education Research (NCVER). She is a former Australian diplomat, who served in Jakarta, Moscow and Berlin, as well as private secretary to the Minister for Foreign Affairs. She also worked as a senior official in the then Australian Agency for International Development. From 2002 to 2004 she was executive director of Adult Learning Australia.
I comment on tertiary education on LinkedIn


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That moon right?
I think I'm currently at month ten of living in the suburbs. Give or take.
Through a variety of circumstances I've recently had the opportunity to think about this decision more. I switched onto a new project at work and when people find out that my commute is 90 minutes long ... each way... the natural next question is "so when are you moving closer?". I answer "never" so fast that it probably surprises people. The thing is, yes I love where I live right now. But nothing in life is permanent. If things change and I want to live in Boston again, I can and I will. But right now, I don't.
I don't have to remind myself often of why I moved. More often what happens is that I am reminded by other things why I did. That might be confusing, but essentially think of it this way. When I'm having a hard day I don't have to remind myself of the virtues of my decisions. It is more the virtues that remind me.
For example, last night I was driving home from the work and saw a moonrise / sunset so amazing that I swore about it. Multiple times. I could not pull over fast enough to capture it. And then when I got home, I couldn't change fast enough to get out for a quick walk. I'm not a messy person but there is literally a pile of discarded clothes in the front hall from evenings just like this.
There are things that I do miss about living in the North End. But when I made a quick list, 60% were food related and 20% were yoga classes. That last 20%? Just general exploration and socializing. There is something rather lovely about taking casual multi-hour strolls and not picking anything up.
But instead of long city walks, I take long sea glass walks. And I take weekend morning bagel trips with my brother. And I see the ocean every day - twice. And I can grow 6 varieties of tomatoes without getting labeled a fire hazard.


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SHELTON, Wash. (2/23/15)--Peninsula Community FCU, Shelton, Wash., helped member Bryan Shorten rebuild his custom tiling business in the wake of the Great Recession.
Shorten's business was thriving, but work dried up in 2008. Eventually, he declared bankruptcy
He found work installing tile, work in which he knew he excelled, so he restarted his business. However, but he worried that his post-bankruptcy credit would keep him from securing success, the Northwest Credit Union Association reported (Anthem Feb. 20)
As Shorten dipped his toe back into the small business waters, he attended a money management class offered by Peninsula CU and Kitsap Community Resources. It focused on how to understand and build credit.
He opened an account at Peninsula. Branch Manager Jenny Soule helped him open both a personal and a business account. Soule said that Peninsula pulls credit reports whenever new members join the credit union.
"His credit was not as bad as he thought," she said. She helped Shorten get a better rate on a truck loan, and also helped him get a share secured loan, a low-interest loan secured by his own savings, in order to build his credit.
Taken together, these steps amounted to a practical plan to help Bryan revive his credit. For Bryan, it was more than just practical, it was emotional. "It helped me believe that maybe there is a reason to work on my credit," he said. "I thought, maybe I can be successful again."
These days, Bryan is busier than ever. "Last year was absolutely insane," Bryan said. "I grossed three times more than ever before."
Shorten's tile business is booked months out, has another full-time employee and creates work for subcontractors.
After moving his accounts to Peninsula, he was surprised at the sort of relationships he was able to build with the staff. "They treated me like one of their biggest [members]," he said, "way bigger than I was."