text:
Talk:OMAP3530 VPU
- 1 Startup procedure
- 2 Logbook
- 2.1 2009.06.18
- 2.2 2009.09.01
- 2.3 2009.11.09
- 2.4 2009.12.17
- 2.5 2010.06.22
- 2.6 2010.08.14
- 2.7 2010.08.17
- 2.8 2010.08.19
- 2.9 2010.09.01
- 2.10 2010.09.06
- 2.11 2010.09.08
- 2.12 2010.09.11
- 2.13 2010.09.12
- 2.14 2010.09.13
- 2.15 2010.09.14
- 2.16 2010.09.17
- 2.17 2010.09.18
- 2.18 2010.09.19
- 2.19 2010.09.20
- 2.20 2010.09.21
- 2.21 2010.09.22
- 2.22 2010.09.24
- 2.23 2010.09.25
- 2.24 2010.09.26
- 2.25 2010.09.27
- 2.26 2010.09.28
- 2.27 2010.09.29
- 2.28 2010.10.01
- 2.29 2010.10.03
- 2.30 2010.10.10
- 2.31 2010.11.22
- 2.32 2011.08.13
Startup procedure
This is the startup procedure for the video recorder
- Check that camera works OK using a laptop with guvcview
- Check all connections, see e.g. Image:FlightMockup-001.jpg
- Connect USB console cable to laptop and the Tobi Console port
- Establish connection between laptop and Tobi (assume /dev/ttyUSB0):
$ kermit -l /dev/ttyUSB0 kermit> set flow-control none kermit> set carrier-watch off kermit> set speed 115200 kermit> connect
- Switch on the recorder and wait for login prompt to appear on the console
- Login
- cd video
- Execute the wifioff.sh script to switch off WiFi and BT
- Execute the camon.sh script to override false USB power protection
- Start the capture.sh <cycles>script to start recording
- 1 cycle = 5 minutes
- Keep in mind the shortened recording time due to device I/O errors
- When capturing has started it is safe to disconnect TTY cable
- When rocket is recovered re-establish connection
- If script is still running (i.e. there is no prompt on TTY) it is safe to use CTRL+C
echo 0 > /sys/class/gpio/gpio164/value echo 0 > /sys/class/gpio/gpio16/value
echo 1 > /sys/bus/usb/devices/1-1/bConfigurationValue
To be updated
At last, received the Gumstix Overo Fire. IRL smaller than I expected even though I knew the size. Weight 6g confirmed.
The power connector on the Summit board is very non-standard, see PJ1-022-SMT. I say it is non standard because I couldn't find a single electronics supplier that has this particular size in their series. Do there really expect people to buy that god damn wall plug? I will just mount two wires directly on the board.
Finally created an alternate power connector for the summit board, see http://twitpic.com/oxe4d
Powered up the Gumstix following the instructions on the website. Ångstrom boots up all right. The first boot took a long time because it had to configure god knows how many GNOME games and other stupid things – it took several minutes. The second boot was much, much faster, less than a minute.
No power manager installed.
WiFi and BT seemed alive but of course there was no connection and I don't know how they are configured. I tried to scan for BT devices from my Mac and there was something. I didn't want to connect since I didn't know if it was the Gumstix or maybe something fishy from one of my neighbors. I'll have to find some docs about these. Btw. a quick scan on the website didn't really turn anything up. I hope this doesn't mean that the Gumstix is just another not very well documented thing.
e-CAM32_OMAP_GSTIX - Camera Solution for GumStix's Overo Series:
- http://www.e-consystems.com/omapovero.asp
- http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/ECon-eCAM32-OMAP-Gstix/
With V4L2 drivers. Amazing!
e-con Systems expect to release a 5MPix camera module soon, see blog post. This blog post also suggests that capturing and encoding 720p @ 30fps is possible on the OMAP.
- Had a quick half-day session with my Gumstix Overo.
- Did not find any USB mini-A to mini-B cable in regular computer shop.
- Gumstix Overo is still alive and the boot messages scroll through the tty; however, I did not get any image on the DVI monitor! I tried two different monitors, there is simply no signal. I was wondering if I have damaged the DVI output or something else.
- I decided that I will but a Tobi expansion board, which has Ethernet interface, and also one of these new small breakout boards.
- Ordered a Gumstix Tobi and a Pinto-TH board. Also included a USB mini-A to mini-B cable and an wall plug into the package since I was missing them.
- Package from Gumstix has arrived. They put two USB mini-A to mini-B cables in the package :)
- Decided that we will try to get the Gumstix Overo ready for an amateur rocket flight on 2010.10.03
- Functional scope TBD but it is highly unlikely that we can have live video feed or anything like that.
- Decided that the scope of the rocket flight will be recording video
- Still pending whether we can get the gumstix up and running in time
- Set up the Gumstix Overo + Tobi on a workbench. Thsi will be a permanent setup for now.
- Some issues that need to be resolved ASAP
- Ethernet on Tobi does not work (could be due to old image on NAND)
- Boots from flash but then loads OS from NAND!
Tried with newly flashed image on new µSD card. No luck but noticed an error message right at the beginning of boot:
Texas Instruments X-Loader 1.4.2 (Mar 27 2009 - 08:51:34)
Reading boot sector
Loading u-boot.bin from mmc
U-Boot 2010.06 (Sep 09 2010 - 13:32:51)
OMAP3530-GP ES3.1, CPU-OPP2, L3-165MHz, Max CPU Clock 600 mHz
Gumstix Overo board + LPDDR/NAND
I2C: ready
DRAM: 128 MiB
NAND: 256 MiB
In: serial
Out: serial
Err: serial
Board revision: 0
Tranceiver detected on mmc2
Die ID #6b2400040000000004032d460c005010
Net: smc911x-0
Hit any key to stop autoboot: 0
Unknown command 'mmcinit' - try 'help'
Booting from nand ...
NAND read: device 0 offset 0x280000, size 0x400000
4194304 bytes read: OK
## Booting kernel from Legacy Image at 82000000 ...
Image Name: Angstrom/2.6.29-rcfinal+r0+git90
Image Type: ARM Linux Kernel Image (uncompressed)
Data Size: 2723228 Bytes = 2.6 MiB
Load Address: 80008000
Entry Point: 80008000
Verifying Checksum ... OK
Loading Kernel Image ... OK
Starting kernel ...
A Google search lead to this discussion suggesting to "clearing the environment in nand" with:
nand erase 240000 20000
I assumed this had to be done right after stopping the autoboot timer, and indeed it worked. After doing that it booted from µSD card!
Tobi network works fine using the new image.
- Prepared and tested two new microSD cards with desktop and console image from 2010.09.09.
- Console image does not start Tobi Ethernet
- Recorded boot video: TBD
- Had a few kernel panics:
- First while executing opkg update
- Second time while trying to run a Gstreamer pipeline
- After kernel panic neither graphics nor Ethernet worked.
- Disconnecting all power and cables brought back graphics and Ethernet; however, mouse and keyboard were no longer working!
- After this the functionality was random (monitor, keyboard, mouse). Maybe the contents on the SD card got bad during the crashes? Or maybe the image is just unstable?
- Other possibility is that the Overo Fire is running way too hot and things shut down. I have to measure the temperature.
Found out why I was getting the kernel panic and broken, graphics, Ethernet, keyboard and mouse, see photo. I really need to get some of those tiny screws.
- Trying http://www.gumstix.net/Setup-and-Programming/view/Overo-Setup-and-Programming/Installing-additional-sw-packages/111.html
- Errors during opkg update:
- pkg_parse_from_stream_nomalloc: Excessively long line at 1. Corrupt file? (many of these)
- pkg_parse_from_stream_nomalloc: Missing new line character at end of file! (many of these too)
- opkg_download: Failed to download http://www.gumstix.net/feeds/unstable/ipk/glibc/armv7a/debug/Packages.gz, wget returned 1.
- Errors during "opkg upgrade":
- update-alternatives: Error: cannot register alternative readprofile to /sbin/readprofile since it is already registered to /usr/sbin/readprofile
- Thanks to this I found how I can see which packages are available: http://www.gumstix.net/feeds/unstable/ipk/glibc/armv7a/
I think the upgrade broke system! After next reboot I had these messages at the end of boot screen:
Starting advanced power management daemon: No APM support in kernel (failed.) Starting ntpd: done Starting Samba: smbd nmbd. Starting syslogd/klogd: done * Starting Avahi mDNS/DNS-SD Daemon: avahi-daemon [ ok ] Starting Bluetooth subsystem: Initialization timed out. Starting Network connection manager daemon: NetworkManager. Starting PVR Usage: insmod filename [args] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): wlan0: link is not ready net eth0: SMSC911x/921x identified at 0xd08c8000, IRQ: 336 WARNING: Could not open '/lib/modules/2.6.34/kernel/drivers/gpu/pvr/pvrsrvkm.ko': No such file or directory FATAL: Could not open '/lib/modules/2.6.34/kernel/drivers/gpu/pvr/omaplfb.ko': No such file or directory WARNING: Could not open '/lib/modules/2.6.34/kernel/drivers/gpu/pvr/pvrsrvkm.ko': No such file or directory FATAL: Could not open '/lib/modules/2.6.34/kernel/drivers/gpu/pvr/bufferclass_ti.ko': No such file or directory mknod: missing operand after `0' Try `mknod --help' for more information. chmod: cannot access `/dev/pvrsrvkm': No such file or directory cups: started scheduler. Starting GPE display manager: gpe-dm .-------. | | .-. | | |-----.-----.-----.| | .----..-----.-----. | | | __ | ---'| '--.| .-'| | | | | | | | |--- || --'| | | ' | | | | '---'---'--'--'--. |-----------' '-----'-'-'-' -' | '---' The Angstrom Distribution overo ttyS2 Angstrom 2010.7-test-20100824 overo ttyS2
Also note the version string! I should be Angstrom 2010.7-test-20100909 overo ttyS2
After making a new flash and initializing it I made the mistake selecting a different Enlightenment settings and now it take the desktop long time to come up after the onsole login appears :(
- Connected the Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000. Showed up as /dev/video0 and I could start cheese, but no luck capturing – Cheese said it has captured and LED on camera was ON for a while but image area was blank.
- Can get image up with Gstreamer pipeline.
- Using xvimagesink CPU load is below 50%
- jpegenc blows CPU up (not accelerated?)
- CPU is running a bit hot during capture but it is no more than 5-6 deg above what it was before.
- Since I had to create a new microSD, I decided to give the Gnome R11 image a try. → TBD Boots OK but neither bluetooth nor Tobi Ethernet works.
- Changed display resolution to 1280x1024 → TBD
- Been looking at these TI DMAI stuff... I doubt I can make video encoding work using this within the next two weeks (also need time for testing and mechanical work)
- Alternatives:
- Capture and save raw video
- Capture and save MJPG video
- Capture and save JPG images at lower rates
Capture and save raw video
This is very easy using a Gstreamer pipeline, e.g.
gst-launch -e v4l2src ! video/x-raw-yuv,format=\(fourcc\)YUY2,width=640,height=480,framerate=5/1 ! multifilesink location=img%05d.yuv
but it requires very high bandwidth. I have a Class 6 microSD, but what is the maximum rate we can achieve on the Gumstix Overo?
- 160x120: 38400 byte/frame
- 320x240: 153600 bytes/frame
- 640x480: 614400 bytes/frame
- 800x600: 960000 bytes/frame
- 1600x1200: 3840000 bytes/frame
- YV12 and YU12 (I420):
- 640x480: 460800 bytes/frame
- 1600x1200: 2880000 bytes/frame
- RGB3 and BGR3:
- 640x480: 921600 bytes/frame
- 1600x1200: 5760000 bytes/frame
→ Measure disk I/O throughput
Capture MJPG video
I don't know how to do it with Gstreamer. I tried the image/jpeg caps as in Pixel formats but can not play the resulting file in anything.
→ Can we find a working pipeline for capturing JP from camera?
Capturing using the guvcview CLI results in a file playable by VLC and mplayer. Unfortunately, the GUI can not be turned off!
→ Can we make guvcview work without having X11?
Capture and save JPG images
Using a Gstreamer pipeline with image/jpg and multifilesink generates unreadable files.
Uvccapture captures JPG from camera and saves to file. Unfortunately, it can not use dynamic filenames or capture with higher frame rate than 1 fps. The good news is that uvccapture is very simple and easy to modify.
JPG image sizes (Logitech QuickCam Vision Pro 9000):
- 320x240: 7297 bytes/frame
- 640x480: 18583 bytes/frame
- 800x456: 35504 bytes/frame
- 800x600: 25698 bytes/frame
- 960x720: 36242 bytes/frame
- 1280x720: 61092 bytes/frame
- 1600x904: 107942 bytes/frame
- 1600x1000: 109873 bytes/frame
- 1600x1200: 124891 bytes/frame
→ Try to modify uvccapture to capture JPG at higher resolutions and at higher frame rates
→ Try to build uvccapture on Gumstix Overo
- Forked uvccapture: http://github.com/csete/uvccapture
- Modified uvccapture to allow capturing JPG at high resolutions
- Modified uvccapture to support sequential file names (img001.jpg, img002.jpg, ...) and to allow specifying the number of images to capture.
- Tried to let uvccapture run in free-running mode, i.e. no delay, but the max framerate I can accomplish is around 15fps, while guvcview gets 30 fps without problems.
- Wanted to try luvcview as well, but it has some weird dependencies...
- Can capture MJPG using gstreamer, provided that I put the stream in a container:
- gst-launch v4l2src ! image/jpeg,... ! avimux ! filesink → works
- gst-launch v4l2src ! image/jpeg,... ! matroskamux ! filesink → can not play resulting file (could be bad jpeg data from camera)
- gst-launch v4l2src ! image/jpeg,... ! jpegdec ! xvimagesink → dies after a while (certain number of frames)
- Did some more testing with jpeg/avi and it seems to be a good option, provided that it will also work on the Gumstix Overo Fire. I have tried it on an old desktop and the MBP where it ran without any noticable CPU load.
- Tried to capture MJPG using the Gstreamer pipelines on the Gumstix Overo Fire. Got good video up to about 800x456 at 30 fps. Above this resolution video becomes bad. See test videos here: http://files.oz9aec.net/video/Gumstix/2010.09.20-mjpg/
- I had to remove keyboard and mouse from USB
- I was using the (presumably slow) 2 GB microSD so performance may be better with the Class 6 microSD I got last week. Did not have time to try this.
- The bad performance could also be due to USB bottleneck
- GST-DSP v0.8.0 has been announced!
- Prepared an 8 GB class 6 microSD card using 201009191347 image. Works okay but OpenGL demos don't run.
- Tried capturing MJPG using the Class 6 microSD card. Results were practically the same as with the slower microSD card, i.e. capture only possible up about 800x456 at 30 fps (or 640x480). See recorded test videos here: http://files.oz9aec.net/video/Gumstix/2010.09.21-mjpg/
- Tried to investigate whether bottleneck is at the USB end or the microSD interface:
- Camera+USB can sustain 1280x720 at 30 fps using a desktop PC ⇒ USB hub is OK
- Camera capturing 800x600 at 10 fps then upsampled to 30 fps using videorate is OK ⇒ microSD card can sustain the data rate
- Camera capturing 800x600 at 30 fps then downsampled to 10 fps is not OK ⇒ Bottleneck is at the USB interface!
- Note: The videorate element in Gstreamer can be used to convert between two different frame rates by either duplicating or deleting frames from the incoming stream.
- Discussed the situation with ERU, given that we can not get higher than 640x480 / 800x456. Options are to go on and use the Gumstix Overo Fire at this resolution or to switch to another off the shelf HD camcorder. We decided to continue since even with this limitation it is a step towards the long term goal of an open source real time video streaming platform.
- Measured power consumption of Gumstix Overo Fire mounted on the Summit expansion board:
- 250 mA during startup.
- 350-400 mA after WiFi gets turned on.
- Still need to measure power consumption of the camera, but it seems that the 850 mA LiPo battery should be sufficient.
- Ordered battery, charger and some other parts for integration from Electrokit
- Package from Electrokit has arrived. There was a small mistake in the package in that instead of 0.75 and 1 mm DC plugs I received microphone plugs! Important but not critical! Everything else looks OK.
- Added new photos to Picasa photo album
- I have weighed the various parts, see below. It looks like camera, batteries and electronics can stay within 120 grams! Not bad.
- Forgot to measure the Pinto-TH :(
|Gumstix Overo Fire
|6 g
|28 g
|Camera with wire and connector
|76 g
|Camera without wire and connector
|35 g
|USB hub (just in case)
|49 g
|1 Ah LiPo battery
|21 g
|LiPo battery charger (just in case)
|8 g
|5V 1A switching regulator
|4 g
|Gumstix antenna (just in case)
|7 g
- Succeeded disabling WiFi and Bluetooth using the tip from this email thread
# disable wifi echo 0 > /sys/class/gpio/gpio16/value # disable bluetooth echo 0 > /sys/class/gpio/gpio164/value
- Disabling bluletooth does not reduce the power consumption.
- Disabling WiFi reduced the power consumption from 400 mA to 210 mA! Cool!
- Acquired some bits and pieces for creating the frame. Decided to go with a two stage frame held together with plastic screws and bolts.
- Got some plastic material that I intend to use for the base plates, unfortunately, it feels quite hard to work with.
- Mounted power supply unit a board, see photo.
- Learned that I do not have to worry about the mechanical mounting of the video recorder inside the rocket because ERU and Jan has made an acryllic plate mounted vertically that will support the video recorder as well. Glad for this.
- Tried different buffer modes for the file sink to see if it would help on the "jumps". During a 1 minute video:
- 0 - full buffering: 6 small jumps and 1 big jump ← stick to this one
- 1 - line buffering: 2 small jumps and 3 big jumps
- 2 - unbuffered: 5 small jumps and 5 large jumps. Quite useless video.
- Created scripts for disabling BT+WiFi and to start recording.
- Found out that I can not use the Summit board!!! For some reason the USB OTG can not properly configure the hub/devices connected to it. Tried USB host as well but with bad video (just like when using USB host on Tobi)
⇒ We have to use the Tobi board which is bigger and 11 grams heavier. The Tobi wouldn't have fit on a 9.5 cm plate so it is very fortunate that ERU and Jan decided to make the vertical plate!
- Tested the video recorder (using Tobi) for a 30 minute duration – looked OK but didn't watch the whole video yet.
- In the afternoon we worked on the mechanical parts. Drilled wholes for camera, Tobi board and the batteries (see photo). Will continue (and hopefully finish) this on Wednesday.
- Had to rework the power supply unit because one of the damned JST connectors got damaged.
- Tested the setup using the new power supply with the Tobi board ⇒ Passed
- Made an USB cabling mockup; however, I had great difficulties getting the camera to work when connected directly to the USB OTG port (power was bypassed directly to PSU). The USB driver claimed there was insufficient power.
- The solution was to force the device to be activated despite of the error message as suggested here
echo 1 > /sys/bus/usb/devices/1-1/bConfigurationValue
- This will have to be executed after start. It works also if the camera has been plugged in before power-on (TBC)
- Confirmed that forcing camera initialization also works if camera has been connected before power on.
- Finished USB and power cabling and rand a few short duration tests
- Confirmed procedure after video capture has been started:
- Start capture
- Disconnect console cable
- After recovery, reconnect console cable and establish connection
- If capture still running (i.e. no prompt), sen CTRL+C
- First long duration tests using the flight setup:
- Capturing stops at random due to device I/O error from camera
- Confirmed that it is not due to the switching 5V regulator
- Problem appears to be the "hacked" USB data interface
- Changed to capture 5 minute chunks in a loop
- Broken recordings can still be played using mplayer
- Gumstix Overo Fire, Tobi and batteries mounted on the internal frame of the rocket (photo to be added)
- Flight computer finished and tested (video to be added)
- So far weather forecasts have been quite bad :(
No more access to device until Sunday, Oct 3 (launch day)
- Still go for launch
- We had a great day at the Rocket Festival organized by Danish Space Challenge.
- There were 5 rockets built by student and one DSC rocket (ours).
- Launch was fine but engine cut off early. Rocket didn't get higher than 500-600 meters.
- Parachute deployed but rocket got deparated from parachute and crash landed.
- The Gumstix Overo Fire and Tobi boards look extremely well with no visible damage. So did the Logitech Webcam Pro 9000
- Sadly, the microSD card fell out and got lost either during the crash or the recovery.
- Videos from the event:
- Photos to be added
- Took the Gumstix Overo Fire and Tobi boards from each other and could inspect the damage to the connectors:
- Using the summit board, the Gumstix Overo fire could boot without any problems, so it seems only to be the connectors on the Tobi board.
Caught an interesting discussion on the Gumstix mailing list regarding video flickering:
The queue element really seems to help smooth out the stream, not sure why, but it works well. We are capturing frames from two cameras @ 10fps each and merging them into one D1 PAL frame. The cameras are outputting full image data (no compression), so just getting the images in at that rate uses about 15-20% CPU. With the h264 compression and software cropping and saving to RAM disk, total CPU is 44-50%.
It seems in your case you may be using a (UVC?) camera with a direct MJPEG interface. So you can dump the frames straight into an MJPEG container and it should work, as you are seeing. However, I would suggest you try adjusting the compression parameters; it seems you are dropping some of the data. It took some pretty careful driver tuning to get our camera working on the gumstix (even though it works great at 60 fps on a netbook), especially adjusting the parameters of the underlying camera. You should try to lower the frame rate to see if it is still dropping out. I actually set our driver to throw out any incomplete frames; I think part of the weakness is the musb driver. You might try the host port (or maybe that is worse...).
Resuming work on this project :-) Ordered new Gumstix stuff:
- One Gumstix Overo Water COM to have a COM without the WiFi and BT.
- One Tobi board to replace the damaged one.
- One Summit board to replace the one I have, which I think is broken.
- One Caspa VL camera board - yay!


text:
Cabin Fever 2 - Spring Fever
Release Date: 22 February 2010 | Certificate: Suitable for 18 years and over
£4.49 includes FREE UK Postage (other delivery options available)
Shipping Destinations for this item
UK - Shipping Included
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You Save: £8.50
Following on from the first film, Cabin Fever 2 sees a high school prom face a deadly threat: a flesh-eating virus that spreads via a popular brand of bottled water.
More Detail
Region 2
Sound: Dolby Digital
Production Year: 2009
Main Language: English
Release Date: 22 February 2010
Certificate: 18 - Suitable for 18 years and over. Not for sale to persons under age 18, by placing an order for this product you are declaring that you are 18 years or over.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Nervous investors — and their financial advisors — watched closely on Monday for signs of where the markets are headed now that the Federal Reserve has spoken and U.S. government bond yields have headed to their highest levels in almost two years.
On Monday, Treasuries extended their selloff, with the benchmark 10-year note yield reaching as high as 2.667% by midafternoon, and stocks dropped across the board.
Economists, meanwhile, are trying to figure out just where the Fed is headed — for example, Bank of America-Merrill Lynch's Global Economics Research team said Thursday that it didn't expect the Fed to begin tapering the pace of its quantitative easing program until early 2014. But by Friday, the team changed its mind and released a new Fed call: "We now expect the Fed to announce tapering in December with the first rate hike to begin in summer 2015."
(Find out how to manage the turmoil: Register for AdvisorOne's premiere advisorcentric Virtual ETF Summit, which starts July 23, and features Rick Ferri, Ron Delegge, Skip Schweiss.)
Advisors Fielding Client Calls
What has all this tapering talk and market madness done to financial advisors? It has left them fielding frantic requests from clients to tell them why the markets are gyrating wildly and what they're doing to protect their portfolios.
"I never heard of the word 'taper' when I was studying economics in graduate school," wrote Benjamin Hein, president and chief investment officer with PRS Investment Advisory, in a June 14 bond market update for the firm's clients. "However, 'tapering' has become a buzzword of late with speculation regarding when and how the U.S. Federal Reserve will start reducing its purchases of fixed income securities, thus leading to potentially higher interest rates."
Hein's advice to fixed income investors is to take a second look at their portfolios and review with their financial advisors "whether some tweaking might be in order." He believes that investors who have been piling into fixed-income funds over the past year will get a big wake-up call with their June statements, and he says the best way to play bonds these days is with diversified fixed-income portfolios that aren't composed solely of high-quality securities.
"Of course, there is no guarantee that a diversified fixed-income portfolio will outperform a U.S. Treasury portfolio in a given month, but we believe that, particularly in today's low-interest rate environment, it is prudent to have exposure to a wide range of fixed-income and income-producing investments along with alternative investments to complement a pure fixed-income portfolio," Hein writes.
In a comment describing "Why Bonds Still Make Sense," New York-based independent investment advisory Gerstein Fisher reminds investors that the purpose of bonds in an investment portfolio is not to generate high returns — "the past 30 years notwithstanding" — but to dampen total portfolio volatility by balancing out riskier holdings such as equities.
"If you fear a rise in interest rates, one way to reduce your exposure to this risk would be to shorten the maturity or duration of your bond holdings from 10 years to five years or less," Gerstein Fisher recommends, pointing out that shorter-duration bonds are less volatile. Alternatively, some investors may want to hold more cash, the firm says.
As for the stock market, Nuveen Asset Management chief equity strategist Bob Doll writes that U.S. equities declined last week as the S&P 500 ended down 2.09% and suffered its first back-to-back one-day declines of more than 1% since last November.
However, in his weekly investment comment, "The Fed Unintentionally Lays an Egg," a bullish Doll asserts that a decrease in the Fed's quantitative easing is not an economic hurdle.
"A diminished QE3 program should be expected, given slower growth of the federal budget deficit and the decrease in issuance of Treasury debt," he writes. "Many have focused on the end of the great monetary experiment rather than the Fed's message about its policy being data dependent. Potential outcomes may be either: 1) the economy will stabilize and allow investors to gain confidence in corporate earnings, or 2) soft and choppy data will persist, and QE will be extended."
Investors Also Cautious on Equities, ETFs
While Doll remains bullish over a cyclical horizon, current conditions leave him cautious in the near term.
"The equity market has benefited from decent economic growth, moderating tail risk, depressed interest rates and low bond volatility," he writes. "We maintain our positive views on equities cyclically, as bond yields remain well below nominal GDP growth, and profit growth should continue to be moderately positive. We expect overvalued, defensive sectors and bond proxies to bear the brunt of the position squaring. Conversely, we believe cyclical sectors are undervalued and earnings expectations are acceptable."
Alec Young, global equity strategist with S&P Capital IQ, is not so bullish on the emerging markets.
Young's international investment outlook on Monday notes that EM equities are nearing bear market territory, down 16.3% from their January 3 highs and 13.9% year to date, with widespread damage in emerging Asia, Latin America and emerging Europe, the Middle East and Africa suffering declines as high as 20%.
"We believe fears of receding central bank monetary policy accommodation are clearly the primary driver as EM volatility really accelerated right after Fed Chairman Bernanke's May 22 press conference when QE tapering talk first started," Young writes. "While we acknowledge that oversold EM assets are overdue for a counter-trend bounce, we believe the open-ended nature of the Fed tapering overhang will continue to limit rallies and fuel continued EM underperformance over the coming months."
Many exchange traded funds also have taken a beating – though some ETFs still offer a safe haven.
ETFtrends.com web editor John Spence reported on Monday in "Treasury ETFs Continue Sell-Off as 10-Year Yield Climbs Above 2.6%" that the iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond Fund (NYSEArca: TLT) traded lower again Monday after last week's 5% sell-off when yields on the 10-year note broke through 2.6% for the first time since 2011.
"TLT and other Treasury bond ETFs have fallen sharply since the Federal Reserve said it could start pulling back on monetary stimulus if the economy improves," Spence wrote.
Meanwhile, ETFtrends.com editor and owner Tom Lydon made an argument in favor of dividend ETFs in the face of market volatility.
"Treasury yields have spiked recently but solid dividend ETFs are still paying out more, which brings the focus back to dividend-yielding stocks, Lydon wrote in "Why Dividend ETFs Can Still Work," published on Sunday. "Investors should look for dividend exchange traded funds that have potential for growth and the possibility to raise dividend payouts."
Steve Doster, a certified financial planner with Doster Financial Planning in San Diego, said that he was hustling to get a client report done for a meeting on Monday afternoon because his clients are concerned about interest rates rising and their bond funds going down.
His job right now is to calm client fears.
"I'm a believer of the passive investment philosophy, so I continue to remind clients about the long-term horizon," Doster wrote in an email. "And rising rates are a good thing for their long-term retirement plan even if there may be some short-term losses in their bond allocations."
For direct insights on the role of ETFs in client portfolios from multiple experts—including Rick Ferri, Ron Delegge, Skip Schweiss and more—we invite you to register for AdvisorOne's premiere advisorcentric Virtual ETF Summit, which starts July 23 (and get multiple hours of CFP Board CE).


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text:
Difference between revisions of "explain xkcd:Community portal/Technical"
(→We need more maintainers)
(→We need more maintainers)
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|Line 269:
::We do however strongly advise against installing a wiki in /wiki. Because you do '''not''' want to create /wiki/$1 style paths while your script path makes scripts look like /wiki/index.php.
::We do however strongly advise against installing a wiki in /wiki. Because you do '''not''' want to create /wiki/$1 style paths while your script path makes scripts look like /wiki/index.php.
::In this case my plan would be to move /wiki to /w then come up with some other short url pattern like /e/$1, some other path, or maybe /$1.
::In this case my plan would be to move /wiki to /w then come up with some other short url pattern like /e/$1, some other path, or maybe /$1.
== Sort by numbers in categories ==
== Sort by numbers in categories ==
Revision as of 07:09, 23 March 2013
Welcome to the Community Portal. This set of pages is used to discuss how Explain xkcd works, and is divided into five sections. Please use the table below to find the most appropriate section to post in, or post in the miscellaneous section. You can view all community portal sections at once here.
|Community portal sections
Proposals (post)
Coordination (post)
Admin requests (post)
Miscellaneous (post)
- 1 Changelog
- 2 Sitenotice dismissal
- 3 Comments
- 4 Robots.txt
- 5 Gadgets?
- 6 Wordpress Import
- 7 Automation
- 8 Outage
- 9 References
- 10 Mainpage category issues
- 11 Caching issues
- 12 Creating new comics
- 13 short URLs
- 14 Scaled Images
- 15 Caching issue with pages
- 16 Math extension
- 17 External Link
- 18 Spam template add noindex
- 19 Change "Discussion" to "Talk"
- 20 New comic template:
- 21 xkcd icon
- 22 We need more maintainers
- 23 Sort by numbers in categories
- 24 Resize
- 25 Incidental Ads
- 26 /wiki/
- 27 Newbie questions: Comic dates, previous-and-next-comic buttons
- 28 Error message
I created this page. --Philosopher Let us reason together. 08:40, 1 August 2012 (EDT)
I've also created Explain XKCD:Sandbox. --Philosopher Let us reason together. 08:40, 1 August 2012 (EDT)
I've changed MediaWiki:Helppage to point here. If we decide to have a local users manual or help desk, it should probably be changed. The default target was "Help:Contents". This also changes where the "Help" link in the sidebar points, so right now we have two different sidebar links pointing to the same place. --Philosopher Let us reason together. 10:30, 1 August 2012 (EDT)
- Update: I changed it to point to Help:Contents at mediawiki.org. The community portal is already linked from the sidebar, it was redundant to have two links there pointing to the same page. --Waldir (talk) 11:41, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
I created MediaWiki:Common.css and MediaWiki:Common.js. This is one of the "did I break it"-type changes, so let me know if you notice anything strange. The new pages are made up of excerpts from their Wikipedia counterparts - I copied what I thought was potentially useful and left the rest. --Philosopher Let us reason together. 22:32, 2 August 2012 (EDT) Moved from Explain XKCD:Community Portal. --Philosopher Let us reason together. 00:08, 4 August 2012 (EDT)
Sitenotice dismissal
There should be a way to dismiss the MediaWiki:Sitenotice after you've read it. I know it can be done, but don't know how, does anyone else? --Philosopher Let us reason together. 00:23, 4 August 2012 (EDT)
- What do you think about this extension? Dismissable Site Notice --Jeff (talk) 03:37, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
- Yes! That's probably what I'm looking for. --Philosopher Let us reason together. 01:41, 12 August 2012 (UTC)
You might consider Extension:Comments. It acts basically like the comment system on the blog, so you could keep everything (article, comments) in one place. It's more conducive to casual conversation than the discussion page. --Cyanfish (talk) 14:07, 2 August 2012 (EDT)
- That's nice, but a simpler approach could be just to transclude the talk page in the subject page itself, as is done in the Wikipedia Signpost (see here for an example). --Waldir (talk) 16:15, 3 August 2012 (EDT)
Discussion above moved from User talk:Jeff. --Philosopher Let us reason together. 00:26, 4 August 2012 (EDT)
- Neither do I, to be honest. I just created {{Comic discussion}} to make things a little smoother, but from my experience, there will *always* be newcomers forgetting to sign, commenters confused about the best markup for indentation/replies, comments placed at the top rather than at the bottom, new comic description pages created without that template, etc. A proper commenting solution might be the best option for this. I just mentioned the transclusion option to let people know it was a possibility. Also, in the long run we need to make sure the wiki doesn't start looking like Wikia (blergh) if we start adding too many custom extensions. But a comment extension seems to be essential if we don't want to alienate the blog's community. --Waldir (talk) 17:06, 6 August 2012 (UTC)
Following post moved from Explain XKCD:Community portal/Proposals#Comments --Waldir (talk) 17:11, 6 August 2012 (UTC)
I'd like to suggest we add comments capabilities to the comics pages, since the discussion pages don't lend themselves to the kind of dialogue experienced on the blog. There appear to be several extensions that allow this, but I'm fairly new to the wikimedia stuff so I'm not sure how it would work, exactly.
One extension available is Extension:WordPress Comments, which appears to enable the style of comments we are used to. Any thoughts? --DanB (talk) 15:10, 6 August 2012 (UTC)
- We should definitely give it a try :) --Waldir (talk) 19:46, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
- That said, its demo looks rather simple. Extension:Comments seems to be a little more powerful (supporting replies, user pictures, voting, and maybe more). The only advantage of the Wordpress one is that it would integrate with Wordpress so extra accounts don't need to be created, but I assume most people who used to comment on the blog didn't have accounts anyway... --Waldir (talk) 19:58, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
- Tried Extension:Comments - but the download page for it does not exist. Anyone have any ideas why that is? Looks like an extension I'd like to try, but I can't download it! --Jeff (talk) 01:47, 14 August 2012 (UTC)
- That said, its demo looks rather simple. Extension:Comments seems to be a little more powerful (supporting replies, user pictures, voting, and maybe more). The only advantage of the Wordpress one is that it would integrate with Wordpress so extra accounts don't need to be created, but I assume most people who used to comment on the blog didn't have accounts anyway... --Waldir (talk) 19:58, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
I'm not sure how to set it up, but if you could edit the robots.txt file to exclude the contents of Category:Noindexed pages? I've created a Sandbox for people to test the unfamiliar features in, and you're probably not going to want that indexed by the search engines. --Philosopher Let us reason together. 08:47, 1 August 2012 (EDT)
- Apparently you can edit it through MediaWiki:Robots.txt, but I'm not experienced enough to know what will happen if you block a url that runs through a .php page. (Perhaps nothing? Perhaps it blocks everything?) Is there any chance of moving the wiki to use /wiki/articlename urls like Wikipedia does rather than the current /wiki/index.php?title=articlename ? --Philosopher Let us reason together. 10:43, 1 August 2012 (EDT)
For URL rewritung, have a look at mediawiki.org: Short URL or for Apache. --SlashMe (talk) 15:49, 1 August 2012 (EDT)
Moved from User talk:Jeff. --Philosopher Let us reason together. 00:27, 4 August 2012 (EDT)
Can we enable MediaWikiWiki:Extension:Gadgets? I'd really like to bring over wikipedia:Wikipedia:Popups and wikipedia:Wikipedia:HotCat as gadgets. --Philosopher Let us reason together. 22:45, 2 August 2012 (EDT)
- sounds good. I'll do it later this weekend when I get back to my computer to get to the FTP access. --Jeff (talk) 00:31, 3 August 2012 (EDT)
- That'd be great! While you're at it, MediaWikiWiki:Extension:Inputbox is something we may want for the future, though we don't need it now. --Philosopher Let us reason together. 21:29, 3 August 2012 (EDT)
Moved from User talk:Jeff. --Philosopher Let us reason together. 00:38, 4 August 2012 (EDT)
- ✓ Done --Jeff (talk) 03:16, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
- For the record, what was installed was the Gadgets extension (which makes sense since Philosopher said the InputBox is not needed ATM). I had already brought the HotCat gadget, which should now be visible in the users' preferences for enabling. It was also necessary to create MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition and the description for HotCat so it could appear in the preferences page. However, it doesn't seem to be working... If someone can figure out what's wrong, we can fix it. One can test the script separately from the gadget system (so we can make sure it's not a gadget problem) by installing it as a user script, as I did in User:Waldir/common.js --Waldir (talk) 11:02, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
- Nevermind, the guys from the #mediawiki IRC channel helped me figure out what was wrong :) it should be working now and available to all users via the gadgets tab of the preferences page. --Waldir (talk) 11:41, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
- You rule Waldir. The InputBox extension is enabled as well for good measure. --Jeff (talk) 13:01, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
- Awesome :D I assume Philosopher will have a few ideas for that (namely the {{Community portal}} template. --Waldir (talk) 16:28, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
- Yeah, that's where I found out about it, at least. I may not find time to implement it right away - I'm busy in RL at the moment. In the mean time, I've imported Popups from en.wikipedia. I haven't edited out the references to Wikipedia in it b/c I'm not quite sure which of them will break things or what to replace them with. --Philosopher Let us reason together. 04:23, 11 August 2012 (UTC)
- Awesome :D I assume Philosopher will have a few ideas for that (namely the {{Community portal}} template. --Waldir (talk) 16:28, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
- You rule Waldir. The InputBox extension is enabled as well for good measure. --Jeff (talk) 13:01, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
- Nevermind, the guys from the #mediawiki IRC channel helped me figure out what was wrong :) it should be working now and available to all users via the gadgets tab of the preferences page. --Waldir (talk) 11:41, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
- For the record, what was installed was the Gadgets extension (which makes sense since Philosopher said the InputBox is not needed ATM). I had already brought the HotCat gadget, which should now be visible in the users' preferences for enabling. It was also necessary to create MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition and the description for HotCat so it could appear in the preferences page. However, it doesn't seem to be working... If someone can figure out what's wrong, we can fix it. One can test the script separately from the gadget system (so we can make sure it's not a gadget problem) by installing it as a user script, as I did in User:Waldir/common.js --Waldir (talk) 11:02, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
- ✓ Done --Jeff (talk) 03:16, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
Wordpress Import
Moved from explain xkcd:Community portal/Admin requests#Wordpress Import
Anyone have any idea on how to import all of my posts from Wordpress into pages in the wiki? I can do it manually obviously, but I'd love to do it programatically. --Jeff (talk) 15:10, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
- I also realize that I won't be importing ALL the posts, just the ones that don't already have pages in the wiki already created. --Jeff (talk) 15:25, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
- SlashMe said (here): When we agree on a page layout, I can do this automatically. He's speaking about importing and creating pages for all comics programmatically. I don't know if he includes the explanations from your blog posts, though...
- Also, do you think it could be a good idea to import, in the comic discussions here, the comments existing in the wordpress blog for comics prior to the wiki conversion? They obviously wouldn't be associated with wiki accounts, but we could get a copy of them here (with the dates, names, and also the +/- comment appreciation maybe...). Perhaps this could be considered once the idea of wordpress comments on wiki pages (as suggested here by DanB) is already settled.
- Cos (talk) 15:44, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
- I don't think I can import blog posts completely automatically, but maybe write something to make it easier. I'll have to look what is possible, but I'd say the least I'll need is an account for Wordpress.
- Importing comments is similar: No promises, but probably difficult if not impossible. I'll have to see the comment system in the wiki. --SlashMe (talk) 17:06, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
- Importing all previous blog comments would be awesome. We could try a test installation of wordpress and a few test pages here on the wiki (it's easy to delete them if we screw up anything). In any case, I expect some manual tweaking to be needed if we want to convert the comments already posted on-wiki into comments of the wordpress plugin. It's definitely a challenge, but after all, we're xkcd readers, by definition we enjoy a good puzzle :) (and many of us are perfectionists who won't settle for a less-than-perfect solution :D). I say let's hack the heck outta that extension! --Waldir (talk) 19:48, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
- Sorry to the perfectionists, but regarding a less-than-perfect solution, could we include a link to the blog comments as a temporary stopgap? I've been using 1004:_Batman to try my hand at adding a comic, and I added a subtle link to the blog comments below the discussion box/transmutation. I'm thinking that link could be added programatically because we know how the blog structure is with year/month/date foldering. --DanB (talk) 17:11, 8 August 2012 (UTC)
- Yes, it can be automatically generated by the {{comic}} template. User:TheHYPO should be able do do it. --Waldir (talk) 18:42, 8 August 2012 (UTC)
moved from Explain XKCD:Community portal/Proposals#Automation
This wiki lacks automation, every time a comic comes out it needs to be submitted manually. A really simple way to do this is utilize xkcd's own JSON feed. http://xkcd.com/json.html If you download the latest comic json feed and edit it in notepad, you find all sorts of useful data like a complete transcript of the comic. --Jtorba (talk) 14:28, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
moved from Explain XKCD:Community portal/Miscellaneous
Just experienced the following navigating the site...
Internal Server Error The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact the server administrator, [email protected] and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error. More information about this error may be available in the server error log. Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Very strange, and not able to repro it, so it seems to have been transient. Just noting it here in case it happens again. I assume this is a hosting company hiccup.
BTW, while researching the above, I noticed that the explainxkcd.com domain registration expires in 3 days (August 10)... hopefully the bill has been paid; I'd hate for this site to go down; Grace Period and Redemption are a PITA... -- IronyChef (talk) 14:44, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
- over the past week, I've gotten a few of those Internal Server Errors at random. TheHYPO (talk) 15:05, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
moved from Explain XKCD:Community portal/Proposals#References
Can we install the "references" plugin so that we can use "ref" tags and add "references" sections to certain comics? I grant that it won't be as useful as on wikipedia, as most references are generally just wikilinks to wikipedia anyway, but I think it could be helpful. In editing the Black Hat article, I wanted to cite references to specific comics. I had to write them into the text because references aren't installed. If References do get installed, I'd like to also suggest a template for {{cite comic}} to create a quick and easy uniform reference to comics by number (or perhaps by name at the user's option?) TheHYPO (talk) 15:56, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
- Do you have a link for the References plugin? I searched quickly on MediaWiki's site and didn't see anything. --Jeff (talk) 16:56, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
- Cite extension
- It defaults (I believe) to citing in a 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 style; there's SOMETHING That lets you change it to the more familiar wikipedia 'a' 'b' 'c' style, which is easier to read, imo. TheHYPO (talk) 19:15, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
- qv the existing {{xkcd}} and {{explain}} templates, which generate links to a specific xkcd comic, or the corresponding explanation here, respectively; to wit, {{xkcd|29}} and {{explain|29}} produce xkcd 29 and xkcd 29, the latter could also be used this way: xkcd 29: Hitler. Either could also become the first comic in which Black Hat appears or Black Hat's first appearance. -- IronyChef (talk) 06:10, 9 August 2012 (UTC)
- Do you have a link for the References plugin? I searched quickly on MediaWiki's site and didn't see anything. --Jeff (talk) 16:56, 7 August 2012 (UTC)
Mainpage category issues
Waldir already did some repairs to the {{comic}} template to keep it from sorting the Main Page into categories when the template is transcluded on the main page, but I see that other manual categorizations are still being transcluded (eg: the main page is currently categorized into category:Comics featuring Cueball. Is there a way to include the article without including its categories at all? TheHYPO (talk) 21:33, 8 August 2012 (UTC)
- That doesn't seem to be related to the {{comic}} template. Apparently the categories added manually to the comic page are getting to the main page. We can, for now, wrap them in noinclude tags. Maybe later we should create a {{category}} template that does that automatically. --Waldir (talk) 23:40, 8 August 2012 (UTC)
Caching issues
I seem to be seeing some caching issues with images. I can't be sure if this will still be in effect by the time anyone reads this, but at the time of writing, File:United Shapes.png, for example, is still displaying as an older revision (even though it correctly states the filesize and resolution of the current version). Viewing the "full sized image" (http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/images/f/fc/United_Shapes.png) still displays that older revision, as well. However, if you add a question mark to the end of the full sized URL (http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/images/f/fc/United_Shapes.png?), the image is correctly purged and displays the correct image (although only with that URL, not on the file page nor where the image is transcluded). In other words, there's a caching issue.
I used to edit on some Wikia sites where they also had this issue, and it drove all the editors up the wall (particularly since it ended up affecting a good portion of images when updated, sometimes for as long as several hours). It was frankly quite frustrating when Wikia refused to do anything about that problem (part of the reason I don't edit there anymore). Is there any chance someone could look into this issue? I'm not sure what entirely causes it. Omega Talk • Contribs 01:58, 9 August 2012 (UTC)
- Aaaaand the image is updated (so the above example won't work anymore). The images definitely seem to be updating, but it's rather slow: at least a few minutes... Omega Talk • Contribs 02:00, 9 August 2012 (UTC)
Related issue?
Don't know if this is related, but I'm noticing that thumbnails are displaying as red X's on alot of images - especially where I've noticed that editors have corrected the image title to lowercase in an article. One example is File:t-shirts and T-shirts - the thumbnails for the image history on the image page itself are Xs for me, as is the actualy comic on its comic page, which was at a reduced size. This isn't the only comic doing this. Hitler is as well, for example. TheHYPO (talk) 14:01, 13 August 2012 (UTC)
Creating new comics
I'm a big fan of List of all comics which I think is a great page and resource. Problem is, at least for me, the "create" button isn't working like it should. It's not preloading the {{create}} template as a starting template. If someone has time to take a look at that issue, I think it's a great idea. Is there any way that the preload could also somehow be passed the comic number, image name and comic name so the user doesn't have to reenter those? We should look into this. TheHYPO (talk) 21:15, 15 August 2012 (UTC)
- Ditto. There are a few refinements that I think could be made, though.
- It's huge, taking a lot of time to load (tables tend to do that, I suppose) so perhaps breaking it into groups, even if it's on the same page (that is, separate tables for each hundred or fraction thereof) Breaking each into sections would allow a TOC for rapid navigation, too.
- While it might be innocuous, the (create) link isn't needed for anything that isn't redlinked, so maybe an #ifexist, for when the pages do get created, the create no longer appears.
- Just thotz. Otherwise, it's a really useful page, both for visitors, and gnomes. -- IronyChef (talk) 01:58, 16 August 2012 (UTC)
short URLs
Hi, you should try to enable short URLs, which remove the ugly index.php from every URL. It makes navigation more intuitive and "wiki-style". It's actually quite easy to do: [1]
(Oh, and by the way, would you add WikiEditor? It's so beautiful :) [2])
Scaled Images
Some of the larger comics are being scaled down to 800px wide. But MediaWiki apparently wants a discrete image rather than scaling what's been uploaded. Is there a plan to fix this? I hope I posted to the right section lcarsos (talk) 21:39, 16 August 2012 (UTC)
- Can you provide an article as an example, because I'm not sure what you mean here. What I have noticed lately, and maybe this is the same thing you're talking about is that any scaled image is not displaying and I'm not sure what the error is.
For Example:
- The image links to [3], which gives a 404. Maybe this is related to #short URLs? --188.8.131.52 06:49, 17 August 2012 (UTC)
- I'll start building a list here of them as I go through. Feel free to strike out the ones that fix themselves or get fixed.
- 1040: Lakes and Oceans
- 1071: Exoplanets
- 1080: Visual Field
- File:online_communities_2.png
- File:online_communities_small.png
- Basically, anything that's been scaled down, whether automatically by the wiki software (usually on File pages), or by people putting in widths into the comic template on comic pages so the images aren't obnoxiously large.
- lcarsos (talk) 21:24, 17 August 2012 (UTC)
- Here is a mediawiki discussion on this same (appraently) issue. And this is a mediawiki bug report thread that has at least one link to a patch. Perhaps someone in management can attempt to impliment some of the proposed solutions? TheHYPO (talk) 15:06, 21 August 2012 (UTC)
Caching issue with pages
I'm noticing that aside from the image scaling issue (that I really hope someone is working on), I'm noticing that pages appear to be caching - I edited the latest article but my edits don't immediately show on the main page where that article is transcluded (as of this writing, I still see dead links on the mainpage to "Comics featuring Beret Guy" "Comics featuring Ponytail" because I forgot to add "Category:" to the wiki tag, even though I've already fixed the error in the article. TheHYPO (talk) 16:38, 24 August 2012 (UTC)
Math extension
Extension:Math for mathematical formulas in "Transcript" sections (see 385 or 870). --valepert (talk) 04:41, 27 August 2012 (UTC)
External Link
The little image that is usually there to indicate an external link is not appear on some pages:
+ Home Page
+ Community Portal
+ Etc
Probably a permissions issue. --grep:talk:applaud:smite
Spam template add noindex
Can the spam template be modified to also tag the pages as Category:Noindexed pages so that passing search engine robots don't think we're promoting those sites? I haven't leveled up enough in wiki-knowledge to be smart enough to do that on my own. lcarsos (talk) 21:38, 3 September 2012 (UTC)
- Apologies if this is already implemented, but just add <includeonly>__NOINDEX__</includeonly> to the template page. That's assuming the robots.txt for this website is set up to accept instructions from the wiki, of course. --Philosopher Let us reason together. 07:55, 6 October 2012 (UTC)
Change "Discussion" to "Talk"
It seems we've borrowed a number of templates and other settings that refer to "T" or "talk" for what is still called "Discussion" here. I suggest it is changed to "Talk" now, rather than change the references back to "D" and "discussion". Mark Hurd (talk) 11:44, 5 October 2012 (UTC)
New comic template:
this guy has indicated that he has "added some interesting features to my toolbar, including adding a page template as a button" - it would be great to Add the {{create}} template code as a quick clickable button to insert when creating a new page for new comics... Can anyone with admin access to the site code add such a button?? TheHYPO (talk) 20:49, 5 November 2012 (UTC)
xkcd icon
Can anyone see the icon next to xkcd.com links? I just see a blank space. --Waldir (talk) 15:19, 20 November 2012 (UTC)
- I cannot, and as far as I know, no one else can. I suspect that this is related to the image resizing bug that we are also dealing with. But, as no one is working on that, there will not be a fix for this either in the near (or indeed the foreseeable) future. lcarsos_a (talk) 15:50, 20 November 2012 (UTC)
- Actually, it wasn't related to the image scaling problem. It turns out the direct link at MediaWiki:Common.css was outdated. I just fixed that :) --Waldir (talk) 03:13, 22 November 2012 (UTC)
We need more maintainers
- I'm moving a thread that Davidy22 started on my talk page. The gist is, we need more people with server-side access (especially mediawiki-savvy ones) so we can properly deal with several issues that have been plaguing the wiki for a while now, most notably spam, but also the image scaling problem, a possible extension for proper comments, clean urls, etc. Below is the original thread, please comment. --Waldir (talk) 17:56, 25 November 2012 (UTC)
Could you set the permissions so that all anon users have to pass a captcha to edit? The spam has gotten obscene, and they've stopped posting links, so our current detection mechanisms aren't working anymore. Davidy22(talk) 08:21, 25 November 2012 (UTC)
- I would love to have the ability to tweak the wiki more thoroughly, but currently Jeff's the only one with server access. To be honest, I am not terribly familiar with server-side mediawiki management, so I haven't asked Jeff for access, but it's clear we can't be dependent on a single person to do all the mediawiki config (and Jeff probably knows even less about mediawiki than I do). Are you by any chance acquainted with server-side mediawiki maintenance? I think we could present a good case for having someone else with access to a dev/prototype instance of this wiki on Jeff's server so we could at least experiment and tell him exactly what needs to be done. Thoughts? --Waldir (talk) 17:40, 25 November 2012 (UTC)
- I agree that we need more people that are empowered to actively fight spam. I think that we ought to promote Davidy22 to administrator also, so that he can delete pages and block spammers/vandals as he notices them rather than letting them pile up until yourself, IronyChef, or myself notice that there's work that needs done.
- What I think we should do is break out rights into more groups than simply administrator and bureaucrat. I think that's too big of a jump, and that there should be some gradiation. I think we should add a moderator (mark pages as patrolled and rollback ability (as much as it's a sledgehammer when you really only need a ball-peen hammer)) position.
- I think we also need a spam fighter position, but that might not be possible to implement. It should be a position that allows the person to delete pages with 1 or 2 edits (page creation, marked as spam, maybe as high as 3 or 4 for the bots that repeat edit certain pages) and block users with 1 or 2 edits. The real problem there is how to grant those super-powerful abilities without allowing them to lose their mind and go crazy and destroy the wiki. Of course, if we don't catch it early enough there's going to be those IPs that manage to get to six edits, and those will have to be squashed by a full admin. We will also need a way of tagging those spam accounts so when a full admin passes by they will also know to ban the IP address after a spam fighter has deleted all the pages it created.
- Finally, we also need a more active bureaucrat so that we don't have to bug Jeff to promote admin's as well as future moderators and/or spam fighters, and recognize bot accounts as bot accounts. We also should find someone knowledgeable to help Jeff (and maybe he has little helpers) to maintain the actual server. I've done some PHP work, but I've never touched anything deep inside a wiki (I like Ruby and Rails much more). This is my first time gaining admin status on a wiki, so I have no idea what the extra dials and levers do/mean. I look up on the MediaWiki manual and Wikipedia help pages things that I think should be possible, and often times pages exist in places about doing these things, but I'm nowhere near being called knowledgeable. After I finish up some IRL work I'm currently tied up in, I intend to set up a VM webserver on my computers and run a mediawiki install so I can learn how to work (and not break) things without putting explain xkcd in jeopardy.
- From what I know, a moderator user group is possible, but not the spam fighter one. Then again, too many hierarchical levels may be too much for such a small body of regulars. Implementing the moderator group is easy, mw:Manual:User rights has the details (the "ninja" example and the "list of permissions" section should be enough for putting together the configuration commands to be added to the wiki's LocalSettings.php).
- As for bureaucrats, I think it makes sense but it seems to me that Jeff only takes longer to perform changes that affect the server, as they understandably may take longer or be more complex (or break the wiki!). Bureaucrats' only difference from admins is that they can promote/demote other users, and this Jeff has been doing without delay, so perhaps there isn't a need for more bureaucrats at the moment. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
- We do need more sysadmins (people with access to the server), though, for sure. This is a little tricky as none of us is comfortable enough to confidently make server changes in a mediawiki install. Jeff, how about putting the wiki in source control and giving two or three people access to it, so that any wrongdoings can be easily reverted? You could setup a git repository in the server and we could fork it locally to our machines, make tests and push the commits to the server repo whenever they're ready. --Waldir (talk) 17:20, 5 December 2012 (UTC)
- This is good stuff. I'm down with promoting more admins for spam fighting. If they screw stuff up we can demote them if necessary. I really haven't found a spam fighting extension that I think will be the best possible solution. I'll keep looking as it may be a combination of things. Server access is much more complicated as it is not even my server and it is shared hosting. I think that would be best to be accessed just by me. --Jeff (talk) 19:10, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
- Regarding the server, I understand -- your position seems reasonable. In any case, I've been looking for extensions that may help taking some workload out of server actions and make more stuff configurable via the wiki itself. I'll report back if I find something usable.
- On another note, how do you feel about promoting more bureaucrats? I suggest Lcarsos who's been consistently active for the past few months. --Waldir (talk) 12:47, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
Personally I'd kind of like to go and make some changes myself. Come up with a nice short url pattern and set it up. Upgrade the wiki. etc... Dantman (talk) 02:44, 23 March 2013 (UTC)
- The shorter URL is being looked into, although Mediawiki strongly advises against it. As for upgrades to the wiki, monetary donations towards Jeff so he can buy better bit for the server would be appreciated. Davidy²²[talk] 03:06, 23 March 2013 (UTC)
- MediaWiki does not advise against it. Half the code currently running short URLs in core was written by me. Same for the new standard for rewrite rules in the new guides. And the tool to automatically generate the config needed to apply short urls to a wiki. Short URLs are not advised against.
- We do however strongly advise against installing a wiki in
/wiki. Because you do not want to create
/wiki/$1style paths while your script path makes scripts look like
- In this case my plan would be to move
/wthen come up with some other short url pattern like
/e/$1, some other path, or maybe
- And upgrading the version of MediaWiki so that it doesn't have security holes doesn't require server replacement. Dantman (talk) 07:09, 23 March 2013 (UTC)
Sort by numbers in categories
I noticed that in Category:Comics all comics are sorted correctly by numbers; but not in any subcategory. (I didn't really get the explanation of how it works on the comics page.) How to fix this? -- St.nerol (talk) 10:40, 22 December 2012 (UTC)
- The comics template uses a template called num4 that turns the number in the comic number field into a four-digit number. That's then passed as a parameter to the category link, and the comics category page sorts articles by those four-digit numbers instead of their actual names. If we wanted to do the same for other categories, we would have to type them all out as [[Category:Politics|0200]], or whatever the comic number is. I would rather wait for mediawiki to come out with an in-built feature to solve this. Davidy22[talk] 11:28, 22 December 2012 (UTC)
- Is there a reason that the template applies that directly to Category:Comics and not as a default sortkey via DEFAULTSORT? – Philosopher Let us reason together. 12:10, 1 January 2013 (UTC)
I haven't been here (to edit) for a while, but have we still not addressed the bug that doesn't allow image resizing? I know most of us don't have access to that kind of lower-level coding on the site, but I think it's a bit of a notable issue that we can't display comics smaller than their actual size. TheHYPO (talk) 14:24, 21 January 2013 (UTC)
- Take it up with User:Jeff, but I suspect that adding your voice to the already insistent roaring that images are broken isn't going to inspire much change. lcarsos_a (talk) 18:08, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
Incidental Ads
as ive noticed i think you should check if someone has embeded some of your links with ads really annoying please fix
--TheWeatherMan (talk) 14:00, 23 January 2013 (UTC)TheWeatherMan
- Do you have any specific examples of this? By the way, using punctuation, capitalization, spell check, and complete sentences are more likely to get someone to help you. lcarsos_a (talk) 18:10, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
- There is known malware (both adware and viruses) that makes Wikipedia look like it has ads. This wiki uses the same wiki software, so perhaps that malware affects our site too? – Philosopher Let us reason together. 05:42, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
Now that explainxkcd redirects straight to the wiki, could we take the /wiki/ out of the url? I'd also like the wiki's edit log to be purged to clean out the history and forget about past spam, but that's probably wishing for too much. Davidy22[talk] 04:06, 28 January 2013 (UTC)
- But seriously, could the /wiki/ go? It'll screw with the spammers for a day or two, at the very least. Davidy22[talk] 11:37, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
Just created the my first page, 220: Philosophy, but I could use a little guidance. How do I find the date that an xkcd comic was originally posted, and how do I rig up the previous-comic and next-comic arrows on a page? (Actually, I've noticed several pages that should have the arrows but don't.) Ekedolphin (talk) 11:19, 28 January 2013 (UTC)
- Those arrows will automagically insert themselves when you make the adjacent comic explanations. There *is* a little backstage magic that needs to be taken care of, but we can do that for you. Davidy22[talk] 11:40, 28 January 2013 (UTC)
- OK. How about the dates? Ekedolphin (talk) 11:41, 28 January 2013 (UTC)
- The comic template checks for the existence of the numerical redirect for the comic before and the comic after. If it finds the page to exist it will display the next/previous button as appropriate. So, by creating the redirects listed on the List of all comics (third column, only worry about the number and title links) future pages will automatically get the links created. Redirect pages look like
#REDIRECT [[####: Comic Title]]and that's it (here is a link to the redirect page with redirect disabled so you can look at the source to see what I'm talking about). That's all that needs to exist on the number and title redirects. If you feel up to creating them yourself, feel free, otherwise someone else goes through occasionally and mass adds all the missing redirects. lcarsos_a (talk) 17:55, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
Error message
I've been getting this error message a lot the last cup'o days. When trying to access a page; when trying to save changes on a page. Any ideas on why? I'm getting it on both chrome and firefox.
- Database error
- A database query syntax error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database query was:
- (SQL query hidden) from within function "Revision::insertOn". Database returned error "1142: INSERT command denied to user ::'dbo423085716'@'188.8.131.52' for :table 'text' (db423085716.db.1and1.com)".


text:
Sending a LinkedIn invitation and getting a $70 million account was all in a day's work for one Morgan Stanley financial advisor—not all in the same day, mind you, but in the sense of day-in day-out use of social media that the firm actively encourages.
"It was an advisor in our New York City area who serves the small business owner segment," says Lauren Boyman, head of digital strategy for Morgan Stanley Wealth Management.
Boyman told ThinkAdvisor in an interview on Monday that this advisor "is very systematic about how he uses LinkedIn," participating in group discussions targeted to CFOs or CEOs of small businesses.
Through disciplined activity in this market—Boyman says there are nearly 2 million small business owners using LinkedIn—the advisor "gets himself known as a knowledge leader within the small business space…After he has a roster of people he knows and has established a name for himself, he invites them for more personal interaction."
While the large account, from a technology consulting and services company, may be an outlier in terms of size, Boyman (left) says Morgan Stanley advisors enrolled in the firm's social media program are seeing positive results.
"For those advisors who are using social and doing so on a daily basis—meaning it's actually part of their practice, something they have absorbed—40% have gotten a new client," she says, adding that a failure to be consistent will yield no better results than trying to diet by going to the gym once a month.
"It has to be part of their business development and marketing efforts on a regular basis," she says.
(Wirehouse advisors aren't the only advisors who are increasingly using social media for business building. See these recent ThinkAdvisor articles:
Where to Find Wealthy Clients on Social Media
RIAs' Top Compliance Goal: Social Media Policies
4 Tools for Fund Managers, and All Advisors, to Use Social Media Effectively)
Boyman says some 4,000 Morgan Stanley advisors—about 25% of the advisor force—are enrolled in the firm's social media program, which fully rolled out a little over a year ago, after a yearlong pilot program.
She says about 75% of these advisors have only a LinkedIn account and about 25% both a LinkedIn and Twitter account. The firm is currently working on a pilot program for Facebook, which Boyman calls "tricky," citing worries over a crossover between personal and professional usage.
Morgan Stanley provides its advisors with compliance-friendly, pre-approved content, so that advisors needn't spend lots of time finding relevant material, and it archives all communications and tracks audience engagement—for example seeing what information audiences are sharing and surveying advisors to see what kind of business they're bringing in.
In a new initiative, the firm just added a whole slew of new content that goes beyond the market and investment strategy focused material they were using exclusively until a week or two ago.
The new content, provided by American Express Publishing, includes material on golf, travel and leisure, food and wine. While it's too early to make meaningful comparisons as to which content area is most effective, Boyman says that so far at least the lifestyle-oriented content—on subjects such as the five new wine regions with lots of potential or state-of-the-art golf equipment—is being shared as much as their most popular finance-oriented articles.
While there are a wide variety of business development activities an advisor could take, Boyman says the firm especially esteems social media because of the ease of tracking and wide potential reach.
"Other kinds of marketing activities are harder to measure and intangible," Boyman says. "Something like a seminar or event is more tangible to measure but harder to put together and organize. Coaching little league or [participation in] charitable activities—that's harder to measure."
In contrast, social media, she says, is not only easier to measure, but is an especially efficient and productive use of an advisor's time, she says.
"With other ways you reach one or two people or pay a lot of money and not get anywhere. Social allows you to reach thousands of people with one click."
Still, many advisors have been slow to adopt, something the Morgan Stanley exec says is inherent in a large group. The firm's website program, for example, has been around for 15 years now, but is still short of 100% participation, despite the ubiquity of websites in the U.S.
"To get 16,000 to 18,000 advisors to do anything is not easy. There are a few approvals they have to get. They have to get training and have profiles approved," she says.
But Boyman is confident that advisors will embrace social media.
"We're growing steadily and have been for a while. At some point it'll reach a steady state plateau—by focusing on engagement and giving them different kinds of content."
Coming up next? The firm is working out how to allow assistants to help out with the advisor's social presence.
Presently, "others can do advance searches or look for groups that are relevant," Boyman says. "But we're working on a technological solution to allow someone in more of a support role to help out [actively by overcoming] IT and security concerns" involving passwords and the like. Boyman expects a solution later this year.
Check out these related ThinkAdvisor articles:
- Where to Find Wealthy Clients on Social Media
- RIAs' Top Compliance Goal: Social Media Policies
- 4 Tools for Fund Managers, and All Advisors, to Use Social Media Effectively
- Advisors 'Haven't Fully Committed' to Social Media, SEI Expert Says
- Go Social, Stay Compliant: 3 Tips for Advisors
- Raymond James Gives Advisors Access to New Social Media Platform


text:
In managing long-term disability income for high-net-worth clients, or even for advisors themselves, there are several challenges to ultimately seeing benefits paid, according to Evan Schwartz, founding partner of Quadrino Schwartz, a New York-based law firm that handles a variety of insurance claims for national clients.
One of those challenges is the policies themselves. Advisors and clients need to understand their policies and exactly what they cover, Schwartz said. "They need to know and understand what their policies say: how disability is defined, what are the limits on their coverage and when they would occur, does it provide for total and partial or residual benefits?"
Having residual coverage becomes especially important, Schwartz stressed, because "the vast majority of claims that I see aren't from someone who had an accident and immediately became disabled. More often it's an injury or sickness that progresses, where someone is limited in their ability to work and ultimately makes a decision that they're unable to continue working at all." Professionals who continue to work in a limited capacity and don't have a residual provision in their policy can hurt their ability to claim benefits to replace the income they lost as they slowed down. "If you're actually doing some of the responsibilities of your occupation, it becomes harder to make the argument that you can't do it," he said.
(Check out Top 10 Cheapest States for LTC Costs in 2013 on ThinkAdvisor.)
As an example, Schwartz described a dentist with a condition that makes it difficult to hold instruments and see patients. "If you have to work fewer hours and working fewer hours means you might have to lay people off or you won't be able to generate the income you were earning before and you're losing your patient base, your practice will be ultimately unsellable," he said. "If you don't have residual benefits at the time you stop working, the company may say, 'You don't meet the definition of total disability. You may only go in once or twice a week or it may have taken you longer to work on a patient, but you could still do it, so we don't think you're totally disabled. You're partially disabled, but you don't have a rider for that.' Then you stop working entirely because your practice isn't generating revenue anymore and they say, 'Well, you were never totally disabled and now you have no occupation to be disabled from.'"
Continuing to work in a limited capacity is bad for professionals in several ways, Schwartz said. First of all, "they're doing nothing to improve their own health," but they're also adding stress and potentially hurting their claim.
Instead of working as long as they can before they're forced to stop working, he suggested high-income professionals turn to a lawyer as soon as they anticipate a claim might be in their future "If you think you might have the need to access your disability policies, get to a lawyer who understand how this process works as soon as possible so you don't do one of the things that will wind up potentially ruining your ability to successfully submit and collect on one of these policies."
Also making it harder to claim long-term disability benefits is the fact that insurers are less litigious these days. Disability insurers are more likely to scrutinize a claim immediately, Schwartz said, than they were when he started handling disability claims back in the mid-90s. Back then, a lot of companies oversold policies and went out of business when "claims started coming in in droves," according to Schwartz.
Many went out of business or were taken over by reinsurers, and "the whole market shrank until five or six years ago. Now all these companies are taking a very, very, very careful look at claims at the time of filing. Back in my early years, they would just terminate claims when they were losing money, then try to buy somebody out during litigations."
Insurers are also less interested in litigation "in part because they don't want their reputation impugned by having a lot of lawsuits and being bad-mouthed on the Web," Schwartz said. That, and it's simply a lot cheaper to scrutinize a claim and deal with problems at claim time. "If somebody has an opportunity to resolve a claim early, then they've paid less to their lawyer, which means their net's going to be higher. Now the insurance company can offer less money knowing the person's not into their lawyer for a ton of money, and they didn't spend money defending the case."
A less litigious environment means it's more difficult for a claimant to get benefits, though. "They're going to put an insured who's filing a claim through his paces," Schwartz said. "The vast majority of people who don't have a severe accident or horrible sickness are going to encounter frustration and barriers during the claims process and, in this day and age, are probably going to need a lawyer to assist them."
It can be hard for claimants to establish their occupational duties and how their medical condition prevents them from doing those duties, information insurers are looking for to determine the validity of a claim. Complicated financial issues can also affect how benefits are paid, Schwartz said.
A typical claim lasts about four months, Schwarz said, but the complexity of the claim has a significant impact. "Business owners who have more complicated financial reporting have much more difficulty than a W-2 employee whose tax return shows their earnings. If you own a business and you've got K-1 earnings, deductions, employees, maybe your spouse works in the business–you create a lot of questions for the insurer when evaluating the financial side of things. Then there's the question of how complicated your medical condition is."
Schwartz recalled a client who was a high-level Wall Street worker with extensive group and individual coverage. "He came in and said, 'I left my job about four months ago.'" The client hadn't seen a doctor and wasn't sure if he was technically disabled, but quit working because he was unsatisfied with his performance. By asking a lot of questions, Schwartz suspected the client's disability might have been psychiatric in nature, such as depression or anxiety. "I told him, 'Look, I'm a really good lawyer and I can do a lot of amazing things, but without medical support I can't help you. If I don't have a doctor supporting your claim, it's dead on arrival." A forensic psychiatrist examined the client and was able to opine that he likely suffered major depression and anxiety at the time he stopped working, and could backdate his total disability. The client subsequently won his claim.
In securing coverage in the first place, Schwartz suggested that consumers or advisors find a "broker who understands the long-term disability market and their particular profession. It's helpful to have a broker who understands that particular profession and the products that are available to people in their profession."
It's also important to find an independent broker. "What might be a good product for one company, they have others that aren't as good as what other companies sell. Better to have a broker rather than an agent," Schwartz said.
Schwartz recommended high-income professionals secure individual coverage before adding any group coverage through their employers, not just because the features are frequently better, even with the higher cost, but because they can avoid the income underwriting component on group policies. "If you got hired by a law firm and you got covered based on a certain percentage of your income, that policy will prevent you from buying individual coverage because they'll factor that [group coverage] in to determine how much you qualify for. In group coverage, the underwriting is a lot more simplified, so you'll want to have your individual disability policies first and then get your group coverage."
Another drawback to group coverage is that it is frequently not guaranteed renewable or non-cancellable, Schwartz said. As long as professionals pay their premiums, individual policies can't be cancelled or changed the way group policies can.
For business owners like independent advisors and other firm leaders, they should look beyond individual coverage at policies like key man insurance, disability buyout coverage and business overhead expense coverage. Those types of products will help high-income professionals "given statistics that you are more likely to be disabled during your lifetime from your job than you are to die before" you reach your life expectancy.
Even if advisors and high-income professionals don't become disabled themselves, if they have partners who leave due to disability, those products can help smooth the transition. "The concept that one of your partners is going to get sick and be unable to work and that it's going to trigger some sort of buyout, to have that type of coverage available to both the partner and the entity itself will help financially deal with the loss of a key person. When that person's not there generating revenue, the business overhead expense policy will help cover the expenses of the practice."
– Check out these related stories on ThinkAdvisor:
Want to learn more about how you can use social media to grow your business? We invite you to a free ThinkAdvisor webcast on Oct. 1 featuring social media experts Amy McIlwain, Clara Shih and Hardeep Walia.


text: Wednesday, August 22, 2012 Top Concerns of ACOs: Reducing Clinical Variation, Cost of Care Among hospitals that currently are participating in an accountable care organization (ACO), the top 3 challenges they encounter are reducing clinical care variation, reducing the cost of care, and developing and maintaining a common culture among the various ACO partners, says a new issue brief by the Commonwealth Fund. Increasing the size of the covered patient population, developing an information system infrastructure, and accessing capital to invest in the ACO model are the top concerns of hospitals preparing to participate in an ACO. As of summer 2012, 154 groups are participating in ACO initiatives sponsored by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Thirty-two organizations have signed contracts to become Pioneer ACOs, 116 organizations have enrolled in the CMS Shared Savings Program, and 6 have joined the Physician Group Practice Transition demonstration program. In all, more than 2.4 million Medicare beneficiaries are receiving care from providers participating in these initiatives. Numerous other organizations have contracts with private payers that include many of the key features of the ACO model. A recent report identified 221 ACOs in 45 states as of May 2012. This number includes both CMS and private sector ACOs. Nineteen percent of hospitals participating or preparing to participate in an ACO report using predictive tools to identify patients at high risk of poor health outcomes or high resource use, compared with 9% of those not exploring the ACO model. Further, 28.4% of those participating or preparing to participate in an ACO report managing high-volume, high-cost patients using experienced case managers, compared with 19.5% of those not exploring the ACO model. Only 50% of hospitals currently participating in an ACO track performance data; the other half plans to do so within the next 3 years. All hospitals—regardless of whether they are participating in ACOs, in planning phases, or not considering the model—expect an average 11% decrease in the percent of their revenue coming from fee-for-service payments in the next 3 years. Check out what your peers are saying about physical therapy and ACOs on APTA's collaborative care models communities discussion forum. Visit the collaborative care webpage for information and resources on ACOs, bundled payment models, and patient-centered medical homes.