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I guess a lot of of us will be glad to see the finish of 2016 and try to welcome 2017 with optimism and hope. The contents of this website and our other publications, including Vegetarian Journal, are not intended to offer personal health-related suggestions. I don't care if a magazine is veggie or not – I want good photography, excellent recipes, great layout – pages not too busy with too a lot of recipes crammed in. Also recipes that feature stunning seasonal make. The absence of a capital letter implies that the magazine is not fancy or fussy just about straightforward great food. With a Vegetarian Living magazine subscription,youmake some thing new and yummy each month (or each and every night of the week)! If you can't decide on amongst subscriptions to Vegetarian Times and Yoga Journal, check out Organic Overall health magazine, which covers each healthier foods and fitness.
Some restaurants do cater nicely for vegetarians but unfortunately for a massive number vegetarian implies almost everything on the menu minus the meat! Comparable vegan trends are becoming seen all over the globe, not just Europe and the USA. I am not a vegetarian, but I personal a number of vegetarian cookbooks, if not magazines. As well typically vegetarian cookbooks or recipes concentrate on the wellness aspect and minimize meals to bland salads or light pastas.
Trevelyan discusses his gourmet vegetarian cooking and recipes, Vegetarian friendly restuaruants, and the production of his Epicurean themed cooking show with behind the scene information on production and upcoming shows and wonderful meat-free recipes and wine pairings. I anticipate some fantastic main" dishes from a vegetarian magazine, not just side dishes. Vegfest UK at London Olympia on 10th October and Glasgow SECC on 5th December will be hosting a wellness summit, bringing collectively top dietetic and nutrition specialists to assist well being experts bring their expertise up to date with the information and proof based investigation on vegan diets. My husband is a vegetarian and half my friends are vegetarian so I would be interesting in the dining aspect. Challenging to find sufficient Veggie magazines and information out there so this was a pleasant surprise.
We doubt the folks behind Veganuary, Matthew Glover and Jane Land, the 'start the year vegan' , go vegan, be vegan , remain vegan campaign, could have dreamt of a far better beginning to 2016. Get the most from your veg box with our In Season section, whip up the speedy recipes in our Each day section, understand a lot more about nutrition from our Eat Wise section and savour the very good factors in life with our Indulgence section.
Your activity is to find out why men and women become vegetarian and never overlook to have a appear at a vegetarian cook-book for while major supermarkets are beginning to stock vegetarian ready meals they are still not as plentiful as you may like. This UK publication offers subscriptions to its print magazine in other nations, like the U.S. Housewife?" I would only purchase a magazine that went in the regional/organic/seasonal/fresh ingredient path. If you place these two great and important cutting edge magazines Vegetarian Times and VegeNews on your month-to-month subscription list you will on your way to be totally informed on vegetarianism with relevant articles, travel destinations, goods, restaurants, people and cooking concepts and recipes! Anything strikes me a bit odd about the pairing of vegetarian and luscious even though.…


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Come For The Interview; Stay For The Story – Jonathon Ridgsby for RandomHouse Group, June 21, 2020
We met at Two Medicine Lake, in Glacier National Park, Montana, June the 20th, 2020. Ellen is an elusive writer who travels much and stays out of the public eye when she can.
"Jerry" (her husband of twenty-seven years) "and I decided long ago that he was going to be Fame – I was going to be Fortune," she laughs.
He's fishing today, at a nearby resort. Summer Solstice this year is a warm day, in part because of clear blue skies above. Children are splashing in the water, squealing at the chill, as folks await the next guided boat tour of the lake. The breeze is mild, rippling the water and teasing loose hair.
Ellen is a striking woman, younger-looking than her almost-fifty years would suggest; long blond hair glints red and gold with a hint of silver. Lean and fit, with well-defined muscles in her bare forearms, today she is wearing brand new jeans, their dark blue intense as only brand new denim can be, and a royal blue satin shirt with a white knit vest. And white tennis shoes, achieving a blending contrast between top and bottom. Her face is only lightly lined around eyes and mouth – smile lines, it becomes quickly apparent.
But her most striking feature is her eyes – blue-gray, with a hint of green, and alive with the kind of intensity that this reporter has seen only in martial-arts champions. The kind of look that says the possessor is well-balanced and fully present – mentally, physically, spiritually.
Ellen insists we leave the bench and picnic areas for those who need them. "I'm young and healthy," she says with a raised eyebrow. "And you need to relax." She offers what she calls a 'situpon,' a flat cushion sewn into bright fabric that she says she learned to make while a Girl Guide in Canada.
"I thought you were American."
"All my life," she says cheerfully. "We moved around a lot while we five were growing up" (She has two brothers and two sisters – "And two parents," she adds, radiating satisfaction. "A well balanced family.") "One of the places we lived was a town along the Saint Lawrence River, in Quebec." She pronounces it 'Kay-bec.'
"So tell me about your newest book. It's not the second book of the Guardian's Oath trilogy; what possessed you to write them out of order?"
She laughs heartily, causing passers-by to glance over and smile. Strange smiles, as though they aren't quite sure what they're smiling at, but are pleased nonetheless. "Well, as I'm sure you know, Kindred's Fury is a sequel to Kindred's Creed, which I published in 2018. Rhiadon, the main character in both, is a very strong-willed individual; when she wants a book written, it gets written."
"So you claim that your characters are real people?" And the question comes out somewhat sarcastically.
Ellen doesn't respond to the tone, but says, voice mild, "I would be exceedingly surprised if most writers did not feel their characters were real people on some level. Truth, though, between you and me, in my mind and within their own framework they have to be real." She leans forward, intense eyes boring into mine. "If they're not real to the mind behind the hands that write about them, how could they possibly be real enough to identify with, for a reader? Each and every single one is a person, with different strengths, flaws, voice and worldview; every single one sees their world as having them at the center – just like you and I and every one of the people waiting for the tour boat. Every single one has a different past, even the twins Shawna and Cody – mostly the same experiences growing up but from different perspectives, which changes the experience. Without those unique, real and fully-developed personalities, they become cardboard cutouts of people – surface, no substance – and the story becomes flat and formulaic." Leaning back, she shrugs. "Color me crazy if you will – many people do, and the label hurts them far more than it hurts me – but yes. My characters are real people, they lead real lives, facing real threats with real consequences for their choices, with both triumph and shattering downfall awaiting them, and I am privileged to be their chronicler."
It's understandable why Ellen rarely consents to give interviews. When she speaks with passion, there is a sense of leashed power, of natural forces gathering to do her bidding, should she but give the word.
"So how did all this start? Your writing fame, the Midwestern Wanderer, all of it?"
She chuckles, almost as if to herself, and looks off across the lake, toward the mountain. "I suppose you could say it started when I learned to write. Or maybe when I learned to read. You could also say it started in 1995, when I began developing Shawna, Cody, Jay and Kiana as characters, their backstories, their life's challenges and victories. Or you could say it started in May of 2013 – or September of 2014 – and all would be equally accurate." She turns back to me. "I have a picture, you know, of my older brother Ted here at this lake." She pulls it out of a pocket to display it. It's folded into quarters, but a nice snapshot despite the creases.
"We were out to Kalispell in May 2013, watching a friend run in the Spartan Sprint, and Ted wanted a picture of himself in his shirtsleeves – it was a nice day, maybe a bit windy – with the ice floe floating across the background."
"What's the significance?"
"First, let me ask you – does what you do bring you joy?"
"What does that have to do with anything?"
She purses her lips briefly. "You sound defensive. Does your work bring you joy? Or do you do it because you have to earn a living somehow, even though it's not really what you want?"
Nobody ever gets to do exactly what they want.
"I do. My brother does. In fact, there's an entire network of people in the world who are living their dream, their bliss, without ever worrying about something so mundane as 'making a living.'"
"You're speaking, of course, of WorldVentures. Amazing company."
She smiles again, but there's a rueful look to this expression. "WV is indeed amazing, and I love the company and everyone in it. Wayne and Mike are true visionaries. But WV isn't what I'm referring to when I say a network of people living their dream."
How can it not be?
"Once upon a time, there was a girl named Ellen," she says, with a gleam of mischief in those powerful, wise, intense eyes. "She dreamed of being a writer. She made little books that her mom would bind up with yarn, and in them she wrote little stories. But she grew up, and learned very painfully that writers cannot live without income, and so she had to get a job – a series of jobs, for she was forever finding work, learning how to do it well, then growing bored and moving on. None of her jobs fulfilled the needs of her soul, regardless of how competent she became, or how quickly. Her writing did, but it never prospered. And months became years, years became decades, and by and by she gave the writing up – it was never going to pay, and she had other concerns. The nagging ache at the base of her spirit passed into gentle regret, a wordless longing, that was surely normal. Surely everyone felt it. And then…"
"And then?"
"And then…" She breathes deep. "We walk the road our own choices put us on. And that road takes us exactly where we need to be, even if it's not where we want to go. My road led me, stage by stage, event by event, back to my writing." She nods her head at the surroundings. "This is where I created the idea of the Midwestern Wanderer. This is where I took my writing back up again. The Universe and the Powers That Be were kind enough to offer me a second chance, though I had rejected it the first time it was offered. But putting the work in was hard. The words no longer came effortlessly, and the habit of writing had been lost."
Even in her own simple story, her words make a net to capture attention.
"In September of 2014, I was introduced to the Master Key Master Mind Alliance. And then I rediscovered the inward path back to what I had given up; my writing, my joy, my purpose."
"And you've been tremendously successful! You've released at least one book per year that sells well in spite of the doubters that said your subject matter would never appeal to people. Midwestern Wanderer is known as the authority for travel in the midwest. I've seen some of your African safari pictures, and the ones from the shark dive two years ago that inspire people to check out your other work, which leads them to your books about the Sphere. And your Guardians have fostered a whole new method of thought, where moral justice takes precedence over convenience, and people have started looking inward for answers instead of seeking outward solutions to their problems! God, you could be a high-profile celebrity if you wanted!"
She laughs outright again – surprise and delight. "Seriously? Wow. The ripple effect is astonishing. But none of it would have happened without the MKMMA. Before that, I had dreams, I had wishes and desires. But no plan to get from where I was to where I wanted to be."
"So the MKMMA is a plan?"
Blue-gray-green eyes sparkle. "That, my dear Jonathon, is another tale. And if what you do does not bring you joy, then it is a tale you need to hear – and very likely the reason my agent asked me to do this interview when she knows that I do not grant them. The synchronicity of the Universe is always in operation."

subset: commoncrawl


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A set of sketches of a Grateful Dead poster is worth almost half a million dollars to one eBay seller.
Okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration. The item's actual "buy it now" price on eBay is $417,558.58.
The eight-piece set of sketches by artist Alton Kelly depict the tower of skulls on the poster that was produced for the Grateful Dead's "Memorial" concerts at San Francisco's defunct Carousel Ballroom on May 30-June 1, 1968.
Prospective buyers are allowed to make an offer, but be forewarned that it is going to need to have some zeros on it.
Want a "cheap" version of the poster? Yours for just $347.88 on collectible site Hake's.


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CST:u3v_KKP04 U3V: SM–systém začátečníci - Course Information
u3v_KKP04 U3V: SM–systém začátečníciPan-university studies
Autumn 2019
- Extent and Intensity
- 0/0/0. 0 credit(s). Type of Completion: z (credit).
- Course Enrolment Limitations
- The course is only offered to the students of the study fields the course is directly associated with.
- fields of study / plans the course is directly associated with
- there are 8 fields of study the course is directly associated with, display
- Language of instruction
- Czech
- Enrolment Statistics (Autumn 2019, recent)
- Permalink: https://is.muni.cz/course/cus/autumn2019/u3v_KKP04


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by dee
(laverne,ca usa)
I am 29 years old and will be getting married soon. I have two teenage half-siblings ages 14 and 15 (we share the same father). My dad and stepmother were married for 17 years (actually still technically married) but have been separated for the last four years. The kids live with their mother (my stepmother). I have not seen my stepmother in the last five years and I have only seen my step-siblings just a few times in the last several years (the majority of the time of I was in the military, but I never wrote or contacted them the entire 4 years I was gone). Needless to say I am not close with my half-siblings or my former stepmother.
Comments for Inviting half siblings to your wedding
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Presented here is a budget web design tech for new entrepreneurs. Money making opportunities using Web Design were based on the premise that anyone can learn the basics and develop the coordination to web page design and hyperlinking.
I asked myself how did the average person make an income with a web page without spending a lot?
A web page works 24 hours, 7 days a week and explains anything to the average person; student to webmaster; from startup to payroll.
The cost? $300+ for 36 hours of instruction. That's what the local college charges to learn WordPress for blogging and Web Design.
In comparison, Wealthy Affiliate or WA, with a compliment of services during the introductory starter course level, was free. Wealthy Affiliate represented an opportunity to make money on-line by promoting other people's business. There were no contract obligations after premium upgrade enrollment.
There were close to 4 billion people searching for something or other on-line; information, product and service.
Why does it matter?
A Meta Resource or private enterprise was a capitalist basic, forming a co-operative commonwealth or an ad network. With business psycho-analysis, the marketing plan identified the sell points: ambition, contacts, desires, economy, efficiency, empowerment, exclusiveness, facts, features, incentives, location, package, price, profits, progress, quality, reputation, security, service, style, testimonials and time.
My input seems too public, so Cybersecurity suggested using a different search engine like duckduckgo.com The duck directed the search request to bing, google or yahoo; but not my private confidential address.
"Any business is non-profit while spending money."
This is a testimonial and opinion of Wealthy Affiliate. In summary, based on experience, a new business affiliate web site, like an education could reap a income, knowledge and friendship. Starter accounts were free. There was no contract thus, no obligation. I considered this offer a win-win situation for all concerned with affiliate links inside the blog journal; earning referral commissions; while I studied or did something else . . .
To get the best introductory training to web design click here and connect to Wealthy Affiliate.com. Please visit Wealthy Affiliate and judge for yourself by clicking here !!
End User Beware: The banners or advertising pics were redirect points to affiliate programs. When the end-user decided a purchase from the various affiliate merchants using the hidden hyperlink connection, this concluded with the web page blog \ journal earning a small commission; to continue research on many topics of discussion.
Thumb Nail Picture Market Place
As far as the media was concerned, and as you are aware, robots, computers and web pages work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year; after programming. Get them working to help you potentially bring in another income and you're home free. A web page start-up with technical support, at the basic level, is the next wave in the lazy guy's way to make money. That opportunity is now yours with 2 free web pages for a blog/journal. Click the picture.
Launched in 1995, eBay.com was a California based multi-billion-dollar business with operations in about 30 countries, including Canada. According to Wikipedia sources, the company managed an online auction and shopping website in which ordinary, every day people and businesses, bought and sold a wide variety of goods and services worldwide. Click the picture.
Launched in 2010, AliExpress.com quickly became an online retail service. It was made up of small businesses in Hong Kong, now China, and elsewhere offering products to international online buyers. According to Wikipedia sources, it was owned by Alibaba with affiliation in the USA and Canada. It facilitated small businesses to sell to customers all over the world except mainland China, and one could find almost anything for sale. Sellers were independent, and used it as a host to sell to consumers and other businesses. Click the picture.
Visit this web page for a massive selection of Hellboy, Manga, Star Wars, Superhero comics and other pop culture favorites. This web site says it offers thousands of pop culture products such as apparel, comics, graphic novels, statues, toys and other collectibles. The web site also says they carry a huge variety of popular entertainment products from hundreds of manufacturers including DC Direct, Dark Horse, Disney, Hasbro, McFarlane, Marvel, Master Replicas, Tokyopop. Click the picture.
This calendar web site said they are the world's biggest and best calendar store because they carry thousands of picture desk, wall and engagement calendars, in formats for every interest and occasion. In addition to calendar items, they also have an extensive game, toy, and puzzle collection featuring thousands of products for sale. Click the picture.
Free-eBooks.net was an internet source for free eBook downloads, eBook resources & eBook authors. There were many genres to choose from such as academic, classics, fiction, nonfiction, text books and audio books for adults or children. Any reader could read & download eBooks for free: anytime! Click the picture.
questions: email@example.com


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The New Jersey Senate has reintroduced the "Consumer Protection Act," which would establish a private cause of action which would allow insureds (or their assignees) to allege "bad faith" against their insurance company. Currently, a cause of action for "bad faith" is not grounded in statute, but through the New Jersey Supreme Court's ruling in Rova Farms Resorts Inc. v. Investors Insurance Company.
The proposed legislation provides that in addition to the enforcement authority provided to the Commissioner of Banking and Insurance ("Commissioner"), a claimant may, regardless of any action which has been filed by the Commissioner, file a civil action in court of competent jurisdiction against its insurer for any violation which could be deemed an unfair claims/settlement practice. What constitutes an "unfair practice" is defined in the New Jersey statute, but may only be pursued by the Commissioner. The unfair claims settlement practices are defined in N.J.S.A. 17:29B-4(9) as follows:
Misrepresenting pertinent facts or insurance policy provisions relating to coverage at issue;
Failing to acknowledge and act reasonably and promptly upon communications with respect to claims arising under insurance policies;
Failing to adopt and implement reasonable standards for prompt investigation of claims arising under insurance policies;
Refusing to pay claims without conducting a reasonable investigation based upon all available information;
Failing to affirm or deny coverage of claims within a reasonable time after proof of loss statements have been completed;
Not attempting in good faith to effectuate prompt, fair and equitable settlements of claims in which liability has become reasonably clear;
Compelling insureds to institute litigation to recover amounts due under an insurance policy by offering substantially less than the amounts ultimately covered in actions brought by such insureds;
Attempting to settle a claim for less than the amount of which a reasonable man would have believed he was entitled by reference to written or printed advertising material accompanying or made part of an application;
Attempting to settle claims on the basis of an application that was altered without notice to, or knowledge, or consent to the insured;
Making claims payments to insureds or beneficiaries not accompanied by a statement setting forth the coverage under which the payments are being made;
Making known to insureds or claimant the policy of appealing from arbitration awards in favor of insureds or claimants for the purpose of compelling them to accept settlements or compromises less than the amount awarded in arbitration;
Delaying the investigation or payment of claims by requiring the insured, claimant or physician to submit a preliminary claim report and then requiring the subsequent submission of formal proof of loss forms, both of which submissions contain substantially the same information;
Failing to promptly settle claims where liability has become reasonably clear, under one portion of the insurance policy coverage in order to influence settlements under other portions of the insurance policy coverage;
Failing to promptly provide a reasonable explanation of the basis of the insurance policy in relation to the facts for applicable law for denial of claim or for the offer of a compromised settlement;
Requiring insureds or claimants to institute or prosecute complaints regarding motor vehicle violations in the municipal court as a condition of paying private passenger automobile insurance claims.
Under this bill, if an insured can establish that an insurance company engaged in an unfair practice, they would be entitled to: (1) their monetary damages; (2) attorney fees; and (3) punitive damages if malice or a wanton/willful disregard for the insured's rights are proven by clear and convincing evidence.
A similar version of this bill has previously been introduced. However, it did not clear a committee. The current version is co-sponsored by Senator Nicholas Scutari (Democrat) and Senator Jennifer Beck (Republican).
In light of Super Storm Sandy, there is the possibility that this legislation will gain support by the legislature. At this time, no hearing has been scheduled for this bill at the committee level.


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The curator stands next to a tall glass case filled with a dark liquid and pauses a moment, before flipping a switch to illuminate the creature inside it.
The visitors recoil in shock at its bare flesh, piercing eyes and white teeth.
"I present to you our predecessor: homo sapiens."
Daniel doesn't visit museums much these days.
From: 50-Word Stories


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Friday, October 31, 2014
A View of Macau's Coloane Island
Macao is a peninsula with two islands connected by land fill bridges. Yes, two islands. So you know where this is headed. Taipa is the island north of Macao but Coloane, the southernmost island, really grabbed me. I've never met an island that I didn't love and Coloane is no exception. Check out the green landscape and Maco's highest point, Alto de Coloane. The island offers a striking contrast to bustling, densely populated and developed Macao. What captured me were the ocean views, quiet beaches and salty air. With tiled paths and Portuguese shops,Coloane really reflects Macao's European influences, even though the Portuguese didn't occupy the island until 1864. Coloane's sea caves and heavily forested hills made it a favorite pirate hangout for most of the 19th century. I don't know about the pirates but I'd gladly hole up in Coloane's hills, as long as I have beach access!
Posted by Fly Girl at 9:04 PM 8 comments Links to this post
Labels: Asia, Asian Travel, China, Coloane Island. Islands, Macao
Saturday, October 25, 2014
Traditional Chinese Culture in Macau
I'm still absorbing the whirlwind of sights, sounds and tastes that encompass the allure of Macao. It is unlike anyplace that I've experienced before and I think it will take a little time for me to completely translate my perspective. When I think about what stood out, it's definitely the unusual blend of Chinese and Portuguese cultures. I experienced them separately and together in the special Macanese style, beginning with a stunning Chinese cultural dinner at the Sheraton Macao, Cotai Central. It started with the Qin dynasty warrior pictured above. There were two of them, silently guarding the the dining room.
And why would a room need guarding you ask? I thought the same thing until I walked into this; a spectacle of sumptuous red fabrics, orchids and fine china, complete with a stage.
A six-course feast awaited us, starting with slices of sucking pig, marinated cucumber and wasabi-infused jellyfish, pictured above. The dishes represented traditional Chinese cuisine with touches of Macanese innovation.
Before I could become totally enthralled with the food, the stage throbbed with music, announcing another cultural presentation. These Olympic trained wrestlers demonstrated traditional Chinese acrobatics.
I was excited by the brilliance of the mask changing dancer and thrilled when she revealed her face. As a woman, she represents change in a centuries old tradition of men passing down the dance technique.
The drummers throbbed with drama and energy. You can here a brief clip of their traditional Chinese song below. This extravaganza was just my first introduction to Macao culture so you can imagine the adventures to come. Stay tuned for posts on Macao history, cuisine and landmarks!
Posted by Fly Girl at 8:03 PM 5 comments Links to this post
Labels: Asia, Asian Travel, China, Chinese culture, global cuisine, Macao
Friday, October 10, 2014
Next Stop: Macau
I'm not a huge fan of Las Vegas but I'm excited to be traveling to Macao, Asia's answer to Vegas and the world's largest casino mecca. Perched on the Southeastern coast of China, Macao is a peninsula that offers much more than gambling. I'm most interested in Macao's unusual blend of Chinese and Portuguese cultures. It was a Portuguese colony until 1999, when it was released back to China and became a Special Administrative Region. The Portuguese legacy is everywhere, from the Unesco World Heritage Cite of the Historic Centre of Macao, including the 16th century St. Paul's or Sao Paulo ruins, pictured above, to the egg tarts and golden codfish drenched in coconut milk and saffron, that typify Macanese cuisine. I'll be exploring Macao's cuisine and history as well as the highlights of Sheraton Macao Hotel, Cotai Central, the sponsor of my media trip. Please stay tuned for posts and pix!
Posted by Fly Girl at 8:49 PM 3 comments Links to this post
Labels: Asia, Asian Travel, China, Macao
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The Jewish Community Centers of Greater Boston provides a wide range of programs and services for children, teens and adults with different abilities. Some of the classes include adapted aquatics, social skills groups, activity groups, yoga and much more. The following is a story about the impact our programs have on young participants.
Six-year-old Joshua (not his real name) participates in swimming lessons and the Fun & Games class through the JCC. Both programs are extremely important to him due to his diagnosis of autism.
Fun & Games is a social skills program where the children learn to socialize with each other through play. At first, Joshua was very quiet and required prompting by staff to follow directions. He needed to hold the hand of a staff member in order to participate. Now he is able to set up an activity, such as an obstacle course, and lead the other children in the game. He did this with the most beautiful smile on his face! Joshua's mother said, "For a boy who was less than interested in what other children were doing, he now has an interest in developing friendships and reciprocal play."
The adapted private swim lessons have brought Joshua from a water-loving, non-swimmer to an active swimmer. The JCC's swim instructor understands his specific needs and is able to give directions in a manner that he is able to understand.
His mother said, "His instructor quickly learned what motivates him to strive to perform on his own and continues to challenge Joshua from week to week."
The JCC offers special needs programs for children, teens and adults in the South Area, Metrowest, Newton and throughout Greater Boston.
For more information on special needs services at the JCC, please contact firstname.lastname@example.com.
This post has been contributed by a third party. The opinions, facts and any media content are presented solely by the author, and JewishBoston assumes no responsibility for them. Want to add your voice to the conversation? Publish your own post here.


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Terrific tandems arrive in your home. A chair with ottoman is twice the comfort, support and style. Our chairs with ottomans give you endless decor possibilities for your living room or family gathering space. Try a recliner with ottoman for that kicked-back, custom style. A glider, swivel or rocking chair lends soothing motion to already comfortable designs. Unique combinations include a lounge chair with ottoman or oversized chair and a half -- extra space never hurts! We also have chic, charming leather club chairs with footstool matches.
Has finding that comfortable and stylish seat been difficult? The answer may be the "chair + ottoman" combo. On our site you will view a selection of beautifully lined seats with complementary fabrics, and also see their matching ottomans, a deliberate two-in-one so that comfort question can be answered: sit on them and set your feet atop. Enjoy these great collections.


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Update on Greenway from 12th Lock to Kildare Border by Councillor Roderic O'Gorman
Councillor Roderic O'Gorman of the Green party put forward a question to FIngal County council for an update on the construction of the section of the Royal Canal greenway between the 12th Lock and the Kildare border. Fingal County Council is entirely reliant on the NTA to provide funds for the design and construction of the Royal Canal Greenway between the 12th Lock and the Kildare County boundary. At a meeting with the NTA in January 2017, the NTA agreed to provide a sum of €200,000 for a Consultant to undertake a Preliminary Design for the Greenway, including the section known as the "Deep Sinking" section between Castleknock and Clonsilla Railway Stations. The section shown is from the Irish trails website.http://www.irishtrails.ie/maps/RCW%20-%20Map%202%20M50%20to%20Leixlip.pdf During February the Council drew-up a Consultant's Brief and this was submitted (in early March) to the NTA for approval. Once approved, the Brief will be advertised on eTenders with a view to appointing Consultants. The time estimated to complete the Preliminary Design and Planning Stage is 20 months from commencement. A further 12 months will be required to complete the detailed design and prepare the tender documents. Councillor O'Gorman has said its a significant development. Further coverage on Irishcycle.com is covered on this link http://irishcycle.com/2017/04/05/councillor-calls-on-dublin-city-to-proc…
Photo of 12th Lock from Watersways Ireland. https://irishwaterwayshistory.com/tag/twelfth-lock/
Help us do more for cycling in Dublin by becoming a member!


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PHILADELPHIA -- It might mean nothing. It might mean quite a lot. At the very least, the whole idea of the Eagles' meeting with Johnny Manziel in Indianapolis over the weekend is, like everything else Manziel-related, of interest.
Manziel is a little short for a lightning rod, let alone a quarterback, but the reality is that he and South Carolina defensive end Jadeveon Clowney are the two most intriguing players in the 2014 NFL draft.
Peter King mentioned the Eagles' meeting as almost an afterthought in his MMQB.com piece about Manziel, the Texas A&M quarterback:
"Manziel met with Houston (1), Jacksonville (3), Cleveland (4), Dallas (17), Tampa Bay (7) and Philadelphia coaches and team officials, and very likely Oakland (5), this weekend before flying back to Texas late Sunday afternoon," King wrote.
The numbers in parentheses weren't in King's original text. I added them. They are the draft positions for the teams mentioned. According to King, then, Manziel met with representatives of teams with five of the top seven picks in the draft. The Cowboys at 17 and the Eagles at 22 are jarringly out of place in that company.
That can mean one of two things as far as the Eagles are concerned: Either they believe Manziel could drop far enough on draft day to be an option for them, or they are contemplating a blockbuster deal to move up in the draft to have a shot at him.
The former is more likely, for several reasons. First, Eagles general manager Howie Roseman went out of his way last week to underscore that Nick Foles will be the Eagles' starting quarterback in 2014. Second, in a draft widely heralded as the deepest in years, the Eagles would be giving up valuable lower-round picks to move up for one guy.
Third, it would take a trade partner willing to give up a coveted high pick. The Rams (No. 2) and Falcons (No. 6) are the two top-seven teams that weren't on King's list. That's because they have quarterbacks: Sam Bradford in St. Louis and Matt Ryan in Atlanta.
The Eagles, of course, have Foles. So their meeting with Manziel would give new life to the suspicion that Chip Kelly deep down wants a more mobile quarterback to run his offense.
It is certainly the more entertaining possibility to discuss. Drafting Manziel would unite the most compelling college coach of recent years with perhaps the most compelling college player in one of the most football-centric markets in the NFL.
Either way, though, the Eagles' using valuable combine time to meet with Manziel is worth noting. Roseman has said the Eagles wouldn't rule out a quarterback if one was clearly the best player available when they are on the clock. In that regard, it makes sense to do their homework on Manziel.
Some draft experts have him going first overall to the Texans. Others have him dropping a few slots. It would be surprising for him to drop all the way to No. 22, but ask Geno Smith (second round last year) or even Aaron Rodgers (24th overall in 2005) whether that is possible.
The NFL evaluation process began in earnest with the combine. Manziel was measured at just under 6 feet tall but helped himself by running the 40 in 4.68 seconds. Manziel's hand size -- a major consideration for Kelly in evaluating quarterbacks -- was a very respectable 9-7/8 inches. Manziel didn't participate in the other drills. He will throw at his pro day on March 27.
Only then will teams begin to reach conclusions on Manziel. That includes the Eagles, which is suddenly kind of interesting to think about.


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The Legends Private Residences Launches in ICE District
Luxury condominium project – The Legends Private Residences – offers the opportunity to "Live at Centre Ice"
ICE District Joint Venture is excited to announce the newest addition to ICE District, The Legends Private Residences, Edmonton's most luxurious condominium project. Located in the heart of Canada's largest mixed-use sports and entertainment district, The Legends Private Residences will offer residents the ultimate urban lifestyle, steps away from world-class shopping, dining, retail and entertainment amenities.
The Legends Private Residences will be situated at the southwest corner of 104 Avenue and 102 Street above a new luxury hotel. The 264 condominium units will occupy the 23rd through 54th floors, offering spectacular city views from each design-forward condominium. Residents will enjoy the privileges of sophisticated amenity spaces, refined a la carte hotel services, direct access to Rogers Place and Oilers games, and VIP access to concerts. Many of the hotel's refined services will also be available to residents.
ICE District will offer year-round concerts, sports, arts, and cultural events to residents of The Legends Private Residences in the central public plaza and Winter Garden. The Legends Private Residences will be only steps away from the public plaza and surrounded by all the conveniences of daily living including banking, a Rexall pharmacy, a grocery market, a fitness centre, and access to the LRT and climate-controlled pedway system.
To register for email updates on The Legends Private Residences, as well as an exclusive preview and purchase opportunity, visit LegendsCondos.com.
For more information and updates on ICE District, visit icedistrictproperties.com.
About ICE District
ICE District will be the largest mixed-use sports and entertainment district in Canada and is already projecting an energy and feeling unlike anything Edmonton has seen before. ICE District will deliver a new era of entertainment in the form of epic concerts, heart-stopping NHL and WHL hockey, blockbuster movies, world-class gaming, boutique shopping, trendy dining and more. A humming public plaza with year-round programming will host events from festivals to public skating. All of this, just steps from sophisticated residences and premium office space. Rogers Place is being developed by the Oilers Entertainment Group and the City of Edmonton. ICE District Properties, a mixed-use development surrounding Rogers Place and the Winter Garden, is being developed through a joint venture between Katz Group and WAM Development Group.
For ICE District media inquiries, please contact:
Shauna MacDonald, ICE District Media Relations
E: email@example.com


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Home Join Careers Contact Us About Search
2019 IWLA Essentials of Warehousing Conference
Oct. 1 – 4, 2019
Jacksonville, Fla.
Program Overview & Faculty
Tomorrow's warehouse leaders are already at work in your company. The IWLA Essentials of Warehousing Course ensures they are ready to step up. It gives attendees a broad survey of everything that makes a warehouse succeed:
Attendees learn from top industry experts in each of these fields.
During the session, your warehouse staff will learn from each other by sharing their experiences and knowledge. Moderators will facilitate group discussions and IWLA offers structured networking opportunities. There will be immediate takeaways that your staff can quickly implement.
The experience will give your staff new business connections and set them on a path toward career growth.
Who Should Attend?
Logistics professionals new to the industry or new to their positions. Entry-level trainees, managers, and supervisors involved in sales, operations, transportation, and customer service will benefit from this intensive 3.5-day course.
Program Registration
IWLA Members: $1,499*
Nonmembers: $2,499 - If you are a nonmember and interested in learning more about IWLA membership, please contact Jennifer Rezny at firstname.lastname@example.com or 847.813.0103
Electronic Materials: No charge
Printed Materials: $50 (deadline to register for for printed materials is Friday, Sept. 20.)
Wi-Fi will be available in meeting rooms.
*Register three or more from the same company and all will receive a 20% discount. Call IWLA Headquarters before registering – 847.813.4699
Hyatt Regency Jacksonville
225 E Coastline Dr.
Jacksonville, FL 32202
Room Rate: $154 per night
Room Block is now closed. If you need assistance with booking a room, please contact Liz Whitney (email@example.com) or Grant Stahulak (email@example.com).
Webinar Viewing Requirement
Each attendee is required to view the members-only "Warehouse Contract & Standard Terms & Condition Webinar" which is available on-demand. You will receive a copy of the link to download and view the webinar after you register for the course. The link will be included in the registration confirmation email.
Refund Policy
Registration fees will not be refunded. Substitutions will be accepted.
Cancellation Policy
Programs are subject to cancellation if enrollment is insufficient. In the unlikely event this program is cancelled, registration fees will be refunded. IWLA is not responsible for costs incurred by registrants in the event of program cancellation.
Special Needs
If you have special needs or requirements, please notify Liz Whitney at firstname.lastname@example.com by September 24, 2019 and IWLA will do its best to accommodate you.
©2020 IWLA. All rights reserved.|847.813.4699
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Official game description
Brawlhalla: An eternal battle arena where the greatest warriors in history brawl to prove who's the best that ever was, is, or will be. Every match is an epic test of skill, speed, and strength, and every victory brings additional glory and bragging rights to the winners.
These slugfests are salted with powerful weapons and gadgets. Fighters scramble to grab swords, axes, hammers, blasters, rocket lances and more! Every weapon changes your play style and your options. Gadgets like mines, bombs, and spiked spheres add even more danger into the mix, letting fighters change the course of battle with a well timed-throw or carefully laid trap.
Brawlhalla is a free to play, 2D platform fighting game featuring both online and local singleplayer/ co-op modes.
- Online Ranked 1v1 - A personal test of skill where you match up against a single opponent to claim untold levels of personal glory in Brawlhalla.
- Online Ranked 2v2 - Bolster your ranks with a friend to prove your mettle, wit and teamwork in frenetic 2v2 battles.
- 4 Player Online Free for All - Ranked or casual matches where four fighters enter, but only one can win.
- 8 Player 4v4 & FFA - Because the only thing better than four legends vying for bragging rights is eight legends battling for bragging rights.
- Local Free for All - Up to 4 players can play in free for all mode on one computer - perfect for friendly face-offs.
- Local Custom Teams - Team-up on your local machine, by adding up to 4 bots into the mix for living-room level mayhem.
- Local Single Player - Square off against bots in a three game tournament series. Perfect for warmups or score grinders.
- Alternate Game Modes - Brawlball, Bombsketball and more provide 'casual' 'party game' 'just for fun' alternate game modes with completely different objectives and just as much competition.
Early Access to Open Beta available now for free!
Brawlhalla will always be 100% free to play, with no pay-to-win advantages and no in-game purchases to keep you from the action. In Open Beta there are a few things that we'll be continuing to improve on, and a few things you'll have special access to as a player who joins us in Open Beta.
Here's what you can expect if you get involved with Early Access today
- Immediate access to this fun as hell game!
- Online, custom, ranked, and local play modes.
- Ten stages to fight on with five designated for 1v1 battles.
- 17 Legends to chose from and a free 6 character weekly rotation, unlockable with gold earned through playing the game.
- Unique signature moves, weapon combinations and stats for each character.
- Bugs. Lag. Missing features. Abrupt changes and nerfs (probably to your favorite powers).
- A constant stream of new features, balance tweaks and Legends to make the game better and better.
- Excited Devs active on the forums eagerly listening to what you think!
- Our eternal thanks (you're our favorite).
Development Roadmap
Just Added
- Major Gameplay Improvements / Balance
- Two New Legends
- Gravity Canceling
- Networking Improvements
- Advancement System
Real Soon
- More Legends
- More Maps
- Ongoing Gameplay Improvements
- Additional Gamemode Support
Slightly Less Soon
- Large Team Mode (4v4)
- Clan Support
- Weapon and Legend Skins
- More Maps
- More Legends
- Ongoing Gameplay Improvements
- Full Player Profile and Statistics
- Novelty Items
- Official Crew Battle Support - Teams, clans, crews, guilds and bands of Brawlhallans can challenge one another in crew battles to claim which crew has the most powerful contenders.
- Even More Maps
- Even More Legends
- Ongoing Gameplay Improvements
- Launch!
But all of this will change based on what you tell us! We're always listening to community feedback and value what players are telling us. Throughout Closed Beta the Brawlhalla community helped steer the direction of development multiple times to make Brawlhalla the best it can be.


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Keep your belongings dry on your next adventure
Roll top dry bags are a great solution for keeping a whole host of gear dry no matter where your adventure may be. Heading off for a day at the beach, out on a boat/kayak/paddle board or a hike in the woods you can have faith that the contents will remain dry whatever the conditions may be.
Each bag comes with a padded shoulder strap as standard which can be attached to the d-rings on the bag or stored inside to prevent it getting in the way. Alternatively when the bag is closed you can use the top as a carry handle.
All three bags come with an internal water resistant pocket to act as a secondary barrier against water damage for your valuables.
10ltr – Ideal for smaller items if you are going for a day trip or transporting your Pro Change Jacket. £27.00
30ltr – The ultimate day at the beach bag, fit your wetsuit, luxury towelling change robe, change of clothes and sandwiches all in the one bag (make sure the wetsuit is dry though!). £35.00
60ltr – For those who love an expedition the 60ltr bag is a real work horse. Pack your sleeping bag, tent, supplies and anything else you need inside with space to spare. Or roll up your board bag and pump and you can just fit this inside. £50.00
1. Large water resistant internal pocket: additional protection for your phone and valuables
2. Easy to use dry bag with closure graphic: shows how to create the perfect seal
3. Removable padded shoulder strap: Makes transporting easier
4. D-ring on the base: use for the carry strap or to drip dry if the bag gets wet
5. Reinforced durable base: hard wearing to prevent getting damaged
6. Wide welded seams: creates a stronger bond which is less likely to fail
7. 60ltr can fit Red Paddle Co bag and Pump: For those who want to take it all with them
Let us know what you think...
What others are saying
Totally love these dry bags. My 10lt and 30lt arrived today and can't wait to use them at the weekend paddle.
Well made with the added internal pocket for phone and keys make it my go to bags. Can use the 30lt inside my deck bag to put wet gear in after the inevitable fall off the board and know nothing else will get wet and the 10lt attached to the deck bag for easy access to sandwiches red bottle and sun screen ( hopefully)
Well done Red Paddle Co another must have product


text: In addition to the works cited in producing this web site, we have also aggregated an annotated bibliography of articles relating to social norms from 2004-2007. This bibliography is not intended to be exhaustive, but it should represent a substantial proportion of the work published on social norms. If you have additional research that should be included, contact us. It is divided in two sections (because of length):


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Acting and former high-ranking officials detained on a scandal related to corruption do not plead guilty. All seven detainees will be officially charged today.
Investigation charges the former Mayor of Batumi Giorgi Ermakov, Vice Mayor of Batumi, Deputy ministers of Finance and Education and three high ranking officials of the City Hall.
The case concerns the tender, announced in 2015.
According to the investigation, the former and current high-ranking officials arranged a victory of the Azerbaijani company on the bases of false documents and paid them four million.


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It's shaping up to be a good holiday weekend to go fishing. The big stripers have arrived and are being caught from Island Beach State Park to Sandy Hook by boats using jigs and livelining bunker. Guys on the beach have been treated to a couple of blitzes in Long Branch with fish up to 40 pounds catching them on pencil poppers.
The fluke have also made a strong appearance since opening day, with lots of limits on party boats out of Atlantic Highlands fishing in Raritan Bay. They are also all over the Shark, Navesink, Shrewsbury and Manasquan rivers. Now's the time to go fishing.


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HD Camera is LIVE at Axial Seamount!
The high-definition video camera on the OOI Cabled Array is streaming live, very high resolution views of black smoker and diffusely venting fluids and associated biological communities at the Mushroom hydrothermal edifice within the ASHES hydrothermal field on the western side of the caldera.
The camera is associated with an osmo fluid sampler for follow-on chemical analyses of diffusely flowing fluids and with a novel temperaure (thermistor) array that provides 3D measurements of temperatures in diffusely flowing fluids immediately adjasent to the Mushroom chimney. Exit temperatures in orifices on the Mushroom chimney have been measured at over 260°C - the surrounding seawater is ~2°C. In concert, these instruments are providing characterization of fluid flow and chimney growth evolution, and how fluid chemistry and temperature impact communities of tube worms, palmworms, scaleworms, limpets, and microbes at this site. These data will also allow characterization of how the macrofaunal communities evolve over time in response to changing environmental conditions at this dynamic volcano that includes volcanic and seismic events.
The HD video camera system is composed of a high definition camera and LED lights that are 5 feet apart. It was built by engineers at the University of Washington Applied Physics Lab. The camera is a SubC 1Cam high-definition video camera that includes pan, tilt and zoom capabilites and transmits an uncompressed video stream in real-time to shore at a resolution of 1920×1080 pixels, 60 frames per second, interlaced. The shorthand notation for this mode is 1080i60. LED lights provide ~4800 Lumens each, more than enough to light up the vent. They typically run at 75% and are controllable to any level using serial communications
During the VISIONS'13 UW-RSN OOI Expedition, the SubC 1Cam high-definition video camera assembly was installed at the base of the hydrothermal vent called Mushroom in the ASHES hydrothermal field on the western side of the caldera at Axial Seamount. On August 12th, 2013 the camera was powered up using the Remotely Operated Vehicle ROPOS through 4 km of extension cable installed on the seafloor and the video was streamed in real-time to shore. Onboard the R/V Thompson, the uncompressed video and the compressed stream were archived. During testing of the camera, the zoom, pan, and tilt capabilities were fully tested, as were the lasers. Several hours of video were collected.
The camera was connected to the Primary Infrastructure during the VISIONS '14 UW-RSN OOI Expedition and video were streamed live to shore. The glass component of the camera housing was cleaned during the 2015 UW-OOI Cabled Array operations and maintenance cruise July 4-August 7, again using the ROV ROPOS and R/V Thompson. For several months, the camera has been streaming video live to shore 8 times a day, panning across the entire chimney and zooming in on key areas that allow measurements to be made of chimney growth over time and changes in animal and microbial communities. CAMHDA301 continues to stream live HD video to shore over the dedicated 10 GbE extension cable that connects the HD camera to Primary Node PN3B. It will be turned during the VISIONS'16 expedition July 11-August 15, 2016.


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My husband wen't (begrudgingly) for a semen analysis. He was very embarrassed as this isn't the first time he had to go for one. 7 years ago he was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma and needed 6 months of chemotherapy and 1 month of radiation, so they wanted to test his swimmers and freeze some just in case treatment affected his fertility. He has always said that if he had to go back there he wanted me to go with him to give him a 'hand'. Now that's what I call embarrassing no way was I going in LOL and it was at 7:30 am and what was I going to do with our 2.5 year old? How do you explain that to any potential babysitters?
I had a blood test to test my levels of progesterone. Basically the specialists wanted to confirm that I was in fact ovulating. Well I can't wait until the end of the week to get the results! I still thinks it's hormonal or got something to do with the pelvic pain I have had without my solace since I miscarried 14 months ago.
|War wounds.


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Image Remarks: Abdolmalek Rigi leader of Jondollah terrorist group: On Feb, 23, 2010, on board a plane from Dubai en route to Bishkek to meet a high ranking American offcial in US Manas air base, the flight was intercepted and the fugitive was taken into custody. Clues&Views:- What does US support for terrorists whose best qualifications are showing footage of innocent civilians being decapitated mean? - Is it true that US invaded Afghanistan to fight Al-Qaeda and Taliban in search for Osama Bin Laden?
Tags :IRI , Abdolmalek Rigi , Plane , Arrest , 2010 , Dubai , Bishkek -Section :Person


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Semantic Redundancies in Image-Classification Datasets:
The 10% You Don't Need
Large datasets have been crucial to the success of deep learning models in the recent years, which keep performing better as they are trained with more labelled data. While there have been sustained efforts to make these models more data-efficient, the potential benefit of understanding the data itself, is largely untapped. Specifically, focusing on object recognition tasks, we wonder if for common benchmark datasets we can do better than random subsets of the data and find a subset that can generalize on par with the full dataset when trained on. To our knowledge, this is the first result that can find notable redundancies in CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets (at least 10%). Interestingly, we observe semantic correlations between required and redundant images. We hope that our findings can motivate further research into identifying additional redundancies and exploiting them for more efficient training or data-collection.
1 Introduction
Large datasets have played a central role in the recent success of deep learning. In fact, the performance of AlexNet [Krizhevsky et al., 2012] trained on ImageNet [Deng et al., 2009] in 2012 is often considered as the starting point of the current deep learning era. Undoubtedly, prominent datasets of ImageNet, CIFAR, and CIFAR-100 [Krizhevsky and Hinton, 2009] have had a crucial role in the evolution of deep learning methods since then; with even bigger datasets like OpenImages [Kuznetsova et al., 2018] and Tencent ML-images [Wu et al., 2019] recently emerging. These developments have led to state-of-the-art architectures such as ResNets [He et al., 2016a], DenseNets [Huang et al., 2017], VGG [Simonyan and Zisserman, 2014], AmoebaNets [Huang et al., 2018], and regularization techniques such as Dropout [Srivastava et al., 2014] and Shake-Shake [Gastaldi, 2017]. However, understanding the properties of these datasets themselves has remained relatively untapped. Limited study along this direction includes [Lin et al., 2018], which proposes a modified loss function to deal with the class imbalance inherent in object detection datasets and [Tobin et al., 2017], which studies modifications to simulated data to help models adapt to the real world, and [Carlini et al., 2018] that demonstrates the existence of prototypical examples and verifies that they match human intuition.
This work studies the properties of ImageNet, CIFAR-10 , and CIFAR-100 datasets from the angle of redundancy. We find that at least 10% of ImageNet and CIFAR-10 can be safely removed by a technique as simple as clustering. Particularly, we identify a certain subset of ImageNet and CIFAR-10 whose removal does not affect the test accuracy when the architecture is trained from scratch on the remaining subset. This is striking, as deep learning techniques are believed to be data hungry [Halevy et al., 2009, Sun et al., 2017]. In fact, recently the work by [Vodrahalli et al., 2018] specifically studying the redundancy of these datasets concludes that there is no redundancy. Our work refutes that claim by providing counter examples.
Contributions. This work resolves some recent misconceptions about the absence of notable redundancy in major image classification datasets [Vodrahalli et al., 2018]. We do this by identifying a specific subset, which constitutes above 10% of the training set, and yet its removal causes no drop in the test accuracy. To our knowledge, this is the first time such significant redundancy is shown to exist for these datasets. We emphasize that our contribution is merely to demonstrate the existence of such redundancy, but we do not claim any algorithmic contributions. However, we hope that our findings can motivate further research into identifying additional redundancies and exploiting them for more efficient training or data-collection. Our findings may also be of interest to active learning community, as it provides an upper-bound on the best performance222Suppose we learn about existence of samples in a dataset of size that can achieve the same test performance as a model trained with all samples. Then if our active learner cannot reach the full test performance after selecting samples, we know that there might exist a better active learning algorithm, as the ideal subset of size can achieve full test accuracy..
2 Related Works
There are approaches which try to prioritize different examples to train on as the learning process goes on such as [Fan et al., 2016] and [Katharopoulos and Fleuret, 2018]. Although these techniques involve selecting examples to train on, they do not seek to identify redundant subsets of the data, but rather to sample the full dataset in a way that speeds up convergence.
An early mention of trying to reduce the training dataset size can be seen in [Ohno-Machado et al., 1998]. Their proposed algorithm splits the training dataset into many smaller training sets and iteratively removes these smaller sets until the generalization performance falls below an acceptable threshold. However, the algorithm relies on creating many small sets out of the given training set, rendering it impractical for modern usage.
[Wei et al., 2015] pose the problem of subset selection as a constrained sub-modular maximization problem and use it to propose an active learning algorithm. The proposed techniques are used by [Kaushal et al., 2018] in the context of image recognition tasks. These drawback however, is that when used with deep-neural networks, simple uncertainty based strategies out-perform the mentioned algorithm.
Another example of trying to identify a smaller, more informative set can be seen in [Lapedriza et al., 2013]. Using their own definition of value of a training example, they demonstrate that prioritizing training over examples of high training value can result in improved performance for object detection tasks. The authors suggest that their definition of training value encourages prototypicality and thus results is better learning.
[Carlini et al., 2018] attempt to directly quantify prototypicality with various metrics and verify that all of them agree with human intuition of prototypicality to various extents. In particular, they conclude that with CIFAR-10 , training on nearly-the-most prototypical examples gives the best performance when using 10% of the training data.
Most recently [Vodrahalli et al., 2018] attempts to find redundancies in image recognition datasets by analyzing gradient magnitudes as a measure of importance. They prioritize examples with high gradient magnitude according to a pre-trained classifier. Their method fails to find redundancies in CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets.
Finally, the insights provided by our work may have implications for semi-supervised techniques assessed on notorious image datasets. Currently when evaluated on ImageNet or CIFAR datasets, a fixed-sized subset of the dataset is randomly selected according to uniform distribution, and their labels are removed [Ren et al., 2018, Qiao et al., 2018, Tarvainen and Valpola, 2017, Pu et al., 2016, Sajjadi et al., 2016]. This creates a training set with mix of labeled and unlabeled data to be used for assessing semi-supervised learning methods. However, creating the training set by maintain the most informative fraction of the labeled examples may provide new insights about capabilities of semi-supervised methods.
3 Method
3.1 Motivation
In order to find redundancies, it is crucial to analyze each sample in the context of other samples in the dataset. Unlike previous attempts, we seek to measure redundancy by explicitly looking at a dissimilarity measure between samples. In case of there being near-duplicates in the training data, the approach of [Vodrahalli et al., 2018] will not be able to decide between them if their resulting gradient magnitude is high, whereas a dissimilarity measure can conclude that they are redundant if it evaluates to a low value.
3.2 Algorithm
To find redundancies in datasets, we look at the semantic space of a pre-trained model trained on the full dataset. In our case, the semantic representation comes from the penultimate layer of a neural network. To find groups of points which are close by in the semantic space we use Agglomerative Clustering [Defays, 1977]. Agglomerative Clustering assumes that each point starts out as its own cluster initially, and at each step, the pair of clusters which are closest according to the dissimilarity criterion are joined together. Given two images and , whose latent representations are denoted by vectors and . We denote the dissimilarity between and by using the cosine angle between them as follows:
The dissimilarity between two clusters and , is the maximum dissimilarity between any two of their constituent points:
For Agglomerative Clustering, we process points belonging to each class independently. Since the dissimilarity is a pairwise measure, processing each class separately leads to faster computations. We run the clustering algorithm until there are clusters left, where is the size of the desired subset. We assume that points inside a cluster belong to the same redundant group of images. In each redundant group, we select the image whose representation is closest to the cluster center and discard the rest. Henceforth, we refer to this procedure as semantic space clustering or semantic clustering for brevity.
4 Experiments
We use the ResNet [He et al., 2016a] architecture for all our experiments with the variant described in [He et al., 2016b]. For each dataset, we compare the performance after training on different random subsets to subsets found with semantic clustering. Given a fixed pre-trained model, semantic clustering subsets are deterministic and the only source of stochasticity is due to the random network weight initialization and random mini-batch choices during optimization by SGD.
The semantic space embedding is obtained by pre-training a network on the full dataset. We chose the output after the last average pooling layer as our semantic space representation. All hyperparameters are kept identical during pre-training and also when training with different subset sizes.
As the baseline, we compare against a subset of size uniformly sampled from the full set. Each class is sampled independently to in order to be consistent with the semantic clustering scheme. Note that random sampling scheme adds an additional source of stochasticity compared to clustering. For both either uniform sampling or cluster based subset selection, we report the mean and standard deviation of the test accuracy of the model trained from scratch using the subset.
4.1 Cifar-10 & Cifar-100
We train a 32-layer ResNet for the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 [Krizhevsky and Hinton, 2009] datasets. The semantic representation obtained was a -dimensional vector. For both the datasets, we train for 100,000 steps with a learning rate which is cosine annealed [Loshchilov and Hutter, 2016] from to with a batch size of .
For optimization we use Stochastic Gradient Descent with a momentum of coefficient of . We regularize our weights by penalizing their norm with a factor of . We found that to prevent weights from diverging when training with subsets of all sizes, warming up the learning rate was necessary. We use linear learning rate warm-up for steps from . We verified that warming up the learning rate performs slightly better than using no warm-up when using the full dataset.
In all these experiments, we report average test accuracy across 10 trials.
4.1.1 Cifar-10
We see in the case of the CIFAR-10 dataset in Figure 2 that the same test accuracy can be achieved even after 10% of the training is discarded using semantic clustering. In contrast, training on random subsets of smaller sizes, results in a monotonic drop in performance. Therefore, while we show that at least 10% of the data in the CIFAR-10 dataset is redundant, this redundancy cannot be observed by uniform sampling.
Figure 3 shows examples of images considered redundant with semantic clustering while choosing a subset of 90% size of the full dataset. Each set denotes images the were placed in into the same (redundant) group by semantic clustering. Images in green boxes were retained while the rest were discarded.
Figure 4 shows the number of redundant groups of different sizes for two classes in the CIFAR-10 dataset when seeking a 90% subset. Since a majority of points are retained, most clusters end up containing one element upon termination. Redundant points arise from clustering with two or more elements in them.
4.1.2 Cifar-100
In the case of the CIFAR-100 dataset, our proposed scheme fails to find redundancies, as is shown in Figure 5, while it does slightly better than random subsets. Both proposed and random methods show a monotonic decrease in test accuracy with decreasing subset size.
Figure 6 looks at redundant groups found with semantic clustering to retain 90% of the dataset. As compared to Figure 3, the images within a group show much more semantic variation. Redundant groups in Figure 3 are slight variations of the same object, where as in Figure 6, redundant groups do not contain the same object. We note that in this case the model is not able to be invariant to these semantic changes.
Similar to Figure 4, we plot the number of redundant groups of each size for two classes in CIFAR-100 in Figure 7.
To quantify the semantic variation of CIFAR-100 in relation to CIFAR-10 , we select redundant groups of size two or more, and measure the average dissimilarity(from Equation 1) to the retained sample. We report the average over groups in 3 different classes as well as the entire datasets in Table 1. It is clear that the higher semantic variation in the redundant groups of CIFAR-100 seen in Figure 6 translates to an higher average dissimilarity in Table 1.
|Average Dissimilarity
|All (mean)
|All (mean)
4.2 Choice of semantic representation.
To determine the best choice of semantic representation from a pre-trained model, we run experiments after selecting the semantic representation from 3 different layers in the network. Figure 8 shows the results. Here "Start" denotes the semantic representation after the first Convolution layer is a ResNet, "Middle" denotes the representation after the second residual block, and "End" denotes the output of the last average pooling layer. We see that the "End" layer's semantic representation is able to find the largest redundancy.
4.3 ImageNet
We train a 101-layer ResNet with the ImageNet dataset. It gave us a semantic representation of dimensions. We use a batch size of during training and train for steps with a learning rate cosine annealed from to . Using the strategy from [Goyal et al., 2017], we linearly warm up our learning rate from for 5000 steps to be able to train with large batches. We regularize our weights with penalty with a factor of .
For optimization, we use Stochastic Gradient Descent with a Momentum coefficient of while using the Nesterov momentum update. Since the test set is not publicly available we report the average validation accuracy, measured over trials.
The results of training with subsets of varying sizes of ImageNet dataset are shown in Figure 9. Our proposed scheme is able to successfully show that at least 10% of the data can be removed from the training set without any negative impact on the validation accuracy, whereas training on random subsets always gives a drop with decrease in subset size.
Figure 1 shows different redundant groups found in the ImageNet dataset. It is noteworthy that the semantic change considered redundant is different across each group. Figure 11 highlights the similarities between images of the same redundant group and the variation across different redundant groups.
In each row of Figure 12, we plot two images from a redundant group on the left where the retained image is highlighted in a green box. On the right we display the image closest to each retained image in dissimilarity but excluded from the redundant group. These images were close in semantic space to the corresponding retained images, but were not considered similar enough to be redundant. For example the redundant group in the first row of Figure 12 contains Sedan-like looking red cars. The 2-seater sports car on the right, in spite of looking similar to the cars on the left, was not considered redundant with them.
Figure 10 shows the number of redundant groups of each size when creating a 90% subset. Much akin to Figure 4, a majority of images are not considered redundant and form a group of size 1.
Additional examples of redundancy group on ImageNet is provided in the appendix.
4.4 Implementation Details
We use the open source Tensorflow [Abadi et al., 2016] and tensor2tensor[Vaswani et al., 2018] frameworks to train our models. For clustering, we used the scikit-learn [Pedregosa et al., 2011] library. For the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 experiments we train on a single NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPU. For our ImageNet experiments we perform distributed training on 16 Cloud TPUs.
5 Conclusion
In this work we present a method to find redundant subsets of training data. We explicitly model a dissimilarity metric into our formulation which allows us to find semantically close samples that can be considered redundant. We use an agglomerative clustering algorithm to find redundant groups of images in the semantic space. Through our experiments we are able to show that at least 10% of ImageNet and CIFAR-10 datasets are redundant.
We analyze these redundant groups both qualitatively and quantitatively. Upon visual observation, we see that the semantic change considered redundant varies from cluster to cluster. We show examples of a variety of varying attributes in redundant groups, all of which are redundant from the point of view of training the network.
One particular justification for not needing this variation during training could be that the network learns to be invariant to them because of its shared parameters and seeing similar variations in other parts of the dataset.
In Figure 2 and 9, the accuracy without 5% and 10% of the data is slightly higher than that obtained with the full dataset. This could indicate that redundancies in training datasets hamper the optimization process.
For the CIFAR-100 dataset our proposed scheme fails to find any redundancies. We qualitatively compare the redundant groups in CIFAR-100 (Figure 6) to the ones found in CIFAR-10 (Figure 3) and find that the semantic variation across redundant groups is much larger in the former case. Quantitatively this can be seen in Table 1 which shows points in redundant groups of CIFAR-100 are much more spread out in semantic space as compared to CIFAR-10 .
Although we could not find any redundancies in the CIFAR-100 dataset, there could be a better algorithm that could find them. Moreover, we hope that this work inspires a line of work into finding these redundancies and leveraging them for faster and more efficient training.
6 Acknowledgement
We would like to thank colleagues at Google Research for comments and discussions: Thomas Leung, Yair Movshovitz-Attias, Shraman Ray Chaudhuri, Azade Nazi, Serge Ioffe.
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Appendix A Appendix
Each row is a redundant group of images. The left most image is retained in each row for the 90% subset.


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Happy Saturday, friends! Another lovely day in the Shattering Stigmas event and I've got another amazing blog post to share, yay! In case you missed it, Shattering Stigmas is an event that will take place from October 6th to October 20th here on Drizzle & Hurricane Books.
Three years ago, Shannon @ It Starts at Midnight launched the first Shattering Stigmas, a blogging event dedicated to posts about mental illness to address and challenge the stigmas against it. Through book reviews, discussion posts and lists, Shattering Stigmas has continued conversations around mental illness for the past three years.
This year, for the Shattering Stigmas 4.0, you will be able to find incredible guest posts on blogs from all four hosts of the event: Taylor, Ben, Madalyn, Kitty and Marie.
You can also enter our INTERNATIONAL (Book Depository) giveaway! TWO winners will be able to win the Mental Health book of their choice at the end of this event. Don't forget to ENTER HERE!
Today, I am welcoming the amazing Morgane, writing a fantastic post about her own experience with mental health, her struggles and her journey overall. I hope you'll enjoy her writing as much as I do and as always, feel free to share your thoughts in comments!
Trigger warnings: This post deals with panic attacks and anxiety.
( disclaimer: my 22yo self may have hazy memories, but I'm not sure what day it is so. 😶 )
I don't really have a green thumb when it comes to plants– they all meet a tragic destiny. Never ask me to water your flowers. I master the art of gardening book (space) worms, though! Only, when one already lives on a different planet, and one has the social skills of a mushroom, the art of reading is often seen as a way to disconnect with reality and keep its head in the sand. We bugged me for a while with my tiny-duckling worms. I was infested by stories, surely that wasn't a good thing? With the many demons I've swallowed, I was going to slip in the gaps of reality itself! 😱
It wasn't totally banana to think I wished to slip in the gaps, but not only. Thing is, people think they have the magic solutions to anything, but they forget to ask if that's okay to cast the spell. More spells were cast for me than I wish I could say. I was then left to fix what we broke. It so happens that book worms have a sweet tooth for demons. 😬
In what witchcraft are you in? 😶 Oh, I like speaking in hallucinatory imagery, it makes things weirdly fun and fairy tale-like. You have to keep up!
It's a thing my mom says, that I swallowed demons when I was a kid. It's not the same as swallowing the devil– demons whisper to kids that it's scary to sleep without their ladybug nightlight because monsters hide in the shadows when the devil says it'd be fun to switch the light on / off and mimics the bhooo~ of a ghost.
When demons whisper to kids that sleeping in total darkness is scary, we don't ask them to say goodbye to their ladybug lights, they can keep it, but when it whispers that school is a terrifying place? It's not a good enough excuse to miss class.
I was 8 yo, then. I'm not sure why I was so scared, but I broke my voice screaming on the way to school. I started having psychosomatic reactions ( like pneumonia or chronic heartburn ) and hysterical panic attacks. They are quieter now than then: my lungs forget how they work, I'm disoriented*, feel nauseous, have trouble talking, they are also less frequent, although the aftermaths are the same.
* It's less scary than it sounds. I may have no clue where we are, but my legs do, and they'll walk me home ( even if it's necessary to go through the forest while it's dark. 🙃 they are not that smart. )
My mom was told to kick me in the butt, and that it'd fix it. I was also locked in classrooms, pulled in the stairs or told to stop having tantrums. My mom knew better, though and she sought help. I was diagnosed with extreme school phobia and anticipatory anxiety soon after. It's as surprising as the melting heart of a chocolate-lava cake! 😱
I missed a lot of school days up to high school, but I didn't watch cartoons as everyone else thought. I was taking naps mostly ( read: collapsing in any place ) and did my homework. I also wrote an illustrated book, AND IT'S GOLD, KRAKEN! I did my best to keep up and going to school, but eleven years ago there was less help, it was less known and, in the eyes of many, it was tantrums.
It did not really help my case w/ everyone that I'm smart. I was using « my fragility and small size to manipulate her world. » 🤓 The demons keep whispering that to bug me, and it's been way past 10-years.
You can have a lot of troubles if your kids miss school, I learnt that the hard way. We were sent a letter and not the Hogwarts letter I was waiting for. It said that my home was not a good place because I lived in a cocoon. What? We didn't lose me enough in the forest with just crumbs to find my way home, basically and I was too 'Gilmore-girls' w/ my mom. 🙄 We were given 3 months to fix it, or I'll be sent to psychiatric care*. Fool of themselves to think that demons can be scared away like that.
* I'm taking shortcuts because there were many, many letters.
Instead of psychiatric care, we took my parents' guardianship and placed me in a kids home. I'd like to say: we are not crocodiles. Kids should play hide-and-seek and ask their mom/dad to save the day. They don't have to be their own superheroes yet. They don't have to learn how to do laundry*. « What will you do when your mom is gone? » is a thing we said to me all too often. Laundry is the least of my worries, I can tell you. WHO WILL LISTEN TO ME FOR TWENTY MINUTES AND TELL ME 'IT SOUNDS LIKE YOU ARE SPEAKING MARTIAN.' In all seriousness, I should be allowed to love my mom for more than laundry.
* I totally forgot how to do laundry, btw. 🤣 I learnt mathematics by myself, I think I can figure laundry. l o l
ANYHOW! The first few days in kids home, I dehydrated myself. I was so terrified to go to the bathroom. It's when the demon started to whisper outside of school ground, and I swallowed many of its friends. It's funny when you know I actually swallowed only ONE demon at first and all the spells within the magic solutions just created more demons, really. 🙃 I was so helpless I was hospitalised the third nights for depressions and 'maybe-anorexia*'.
* Anorexia is a thing that was here all my teen years, not because I'm anorexic, but because I'm small in all way. It really damaged how I see myself– at times, I feel like I see all my bones.
I stayed for a while in psychiatric care, but all I know are things that are in my file and glimpses I have. I was allowed to see my family only on Sundays for a few short hours, and though I was really happy, I shied away when they wanted to hug me. That's the saddest part because I can't seem to fix what they broke here.
I went back to kids home eventually, and I was promised that after 3 months I'd go home. I went home when I was 17yo. 🙃 Their ' magic solution ' didn't cast out any demons, it made them bigger and my oldest friends. I have generalised anxiety now. I have trouble talking to people, going grocery shopping or walking my dog, I can't sleep and have nightmares. I'M OKAY! ☠
Yeah, my happiness wasn't really the number one priority. That I didn't sleep or that my anxiety literally was eating me wasn't really important as long as I went to school. It's awful, but that was all my social worker cared about. I don't think she ever really spoke to me actually?
It may sound like I did not have any help, but I did. Someone told me to build a toolbox and put all the tools to make the demons less scary and busy in. They sought with me spells that works and also told me that I did not have to hurt myself casting these spells too fast– it's better to focus on the long ways than the shortcuts. They didn't push me or shake me like a tree to get better.
I wished that in all those years when magical solutions were created for me someone told me that it's okay to ask for help, but it's also okay to say when it makes it worse. If it sounds like an Avada Kedavra to you, don't allow them to cast the spell. Tell it won't help! It can be for something as small as your best friend tricking you to stay at the train station for a few minutes alone when they promised they wouldn't. If that's an Alohomora that can help you, ask for it!
I knew stories save my day so I keep asking for books with ghouls, ghosts and apocalyptic worlds. I was infested by stories, surely that was a good thing?? After all, it made me slip in the gaps of reality and shape me into my own superhero to help fight the dragon. That was my Alohomora. Ask for yours. 💛