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Contains embedded videos, view in browser at hmmstudio.com
I've been trialling a new Beta version "News feed" platform called FutureLoop. As the name suggests it is heavily oriented towards progressive forward thinking topics. The platform aims to provide relevant, balanced content that's not in an echo chamber.
It is currently free, I'm not sure if that will be the case once it's out of Beta.
- Futureloop Introduction
- FutureLoop's Mission
- Peter Diamandis Profile
- My experience trialling Futureloop
- Help combat Covid-19 by playing a free puzzle game.
- FutureLoop prediction tool
- Podcast video by the Developer – Morgan McDermott and the Entrepreneur – Peter Diamandis
Creating an account is simple just login through Facebook, Google or an email address. No other unnecessary questions. By logging in you are able to customize your feed categories and preferences.
It has a simple easy to use layout.
When you subscribe / create an account, you get an email at the end of the day with a summary of the days top topics.
The first time you do a search, this login modal ( pop up) will appear.
Once logged in you can save your search topics by clicking follow.
In your feed you are shown article excerpts, with the time or date it was posted.
After you click on the short excerpt, you will see a summary of :
▪ Who the article is by.
▪ When the article was published.
▪ What it's about.
▪ Why it's important.
You then choose to read more or go back to your news feed.
Futureloop is currently a Web App that is optimised for mobile or desktop, so no downloading required, just an internet connection. You can either add their icon to your home screen for quick access, bookmark their site in your browser, or enter their Web address in your search bar each time.
The terms and conditions look to be pretty standard and it even provides the possibility of adding fact checked /proven content for those who are content creators.
FutureLoop's Mission
Below inset is an excerpt from a blog post about FutureLoop, by Peter Diamandis the entrepreneur behind FutureLoop.
FutureLoop's Mission
"Every day, FutureLoop scans hundreds of thousands of articles and journals:
▪Searching for news with 'positive sentiment' that is 'future-oriented'
▪Identifying stories of 'converging exponential technologies' that impact industries
▪Scanning for high-quality, referenced sources and validated stories
▪Filtering out sensationalized and biased news
▪Performing these searches on specific 'user-selected topics'
▪Summarizing articles to extract "What it is" and "Why it's important"
Check out FutureLoop. While the product is still in Beta, it's powerful, high-quality and free.
Your mindset is your most important tool during this pandemic. Consuming the right information is critical to maintaining that mindset.
FutureLoop offers "Data-Driven Optimism."Read more at : www.diamandis.com
Peter Diamandis
Profile Video Below 3min –
Who I am & What I believe – by Peter Diamandis
Sound On 🔊
Peter Diamandis is a very positive and forward thinking individual.
I personally like his work and mentality, but I can see that it would take others who are conditioned to gossip and negative drama driven news, time to adapt to this way of thinking.
"We need to change the conversion from complaining about problems to solving problems . "Peter Diamandis
My Experience trialling Futureloop
Negativity is the norm in today's general population, not necessarily by any fault of your own, but rather it is the only content you have access to, either through geography or economics ( money).
Gossip is free and anyone can create it. There is no talent required other than to have no respect for facts and truth. Quality content is usually more costly because it takes time and expertise to create. Both time and expertise cost money.
When you are conditioned to expect conflict and drama, you may find it hard to appreciate positive things because you don't get the same adrenalin rush which you are used to, with negative gossip or conflict news.
FutureLoop and Peter Diamandis are more about enabling you to think about future possibilities rather than just being told what has happened and how terrible it is, without any solutions on offer or any future solution based thinking.
If you take the time to retrain your mind, you will start to get that adrenalin rush by thinking about the possibilities that are yet to come and actively trying to become part of it, rather than just being a passive observer.
FutureLoop is currently free and you don't have to sell your soul to gain access. An email address or a Google or Facebook account and you are good to go in the beta version.
Being in Beta, means that there may be minor glitches, these glitches need users to help train the system.
I have experienced glitches, but unfortunately I am in a country that actively tries to create problems for me personally.
The glitches I experience may not happen to you, but I have given my feedback to Futureloop, who can decipher what is actually pertinent at their end of the experience.
If it sounds like a platform you would use, give it a go, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Take control of the flow of information to your brain.
Be prepared to suffer withdrawal symptoms from gossip and drama queen, click bait articles.
You don't have to go "cold turkey", mix it up and gradually transition.
Help combat Covid-19 by playing a free puzzle game.
I did a search in Futureloop on COVID-19 and found this great article.
Do you like playing computer puzzle games ?
Well, you can help researchers design new drugs to combat Covid-19 by playing a free puzzle game.
I read about this game prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, it was also used for other medical conditions and has been successful in designing therapeutic drugs.
Below inset is an excerpt from medicalxpress.com
"Citizen scientists are helping researchers design new drugs to combat COVID-19Read more at medicalxpress.com
March 27, 2020 by Meghan Rosen, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Anyone with a computer can pitch in more actively too: by helping scientists design drugs to combat the virus now responsible for hundreds of thousands of infections worldwide."
FutureLoop prediction tool
Video Below: FutureLoop prediction tool
1.30min. short intro video
Sound On 🔊
Podcast by the Developer – Morgan McDermott and the Entrepreneur – Peter Diamandis
Video below 59min : with time stamped main points below the video:
Watch the Instagram podcast posted on YouTube by the Futureloop Platform Developer & entrepreneur to get more insight into the Platform.
Morgan McDermott – Developer & computer scientist of FutureLoop. Peter Diamandis – the Entrepreneur with a background in medicine, medical community.
59 min video
Sound On 🔊
- 0:01 minutes gives an explanation of who and what they do and about FutureLoop.
- 10:00 – Prediction Challenges global (anonymous) provide optimistic and pessimistic view – as opposed to group think or echo Chambers, showing a broader sampling not just one side. Control over bias
- 16:00 Pandemic is accelerating the digital transition, known to many as the singularity estim 2040-2045.
- 19:00 Xprize – FutureLoop will grow to become multilingual and scrape from other language based regions.
- 22:30 Life Longevity and AI in health care. Prediction challenge survey – bunch of experts make a prediction with justification. Anonymously they all look at other's justifications and can analyse their decisions based on anonymous recommendations.
- 26:00 tailored & validated articles Businesses could use The FutureLoop Prediction challenges for products etc.,
- 29:00 Solar, autonomous cars, stem cell grown meats, Covid-19, AI, Xprizes that change the world, habitable environments,
- 32:45 5G and quantum Computing
- 34:00 FutureLoop and its potential role in elections and voting.
- 35:00 No biases, scrape the internet, don't crowd source news at the moment, Contribute to improving the website, accessibility and intuitive.
- 38:00 stay positive and take a break from news TV shows. Universal income, upscaling people
- 41:30 Covid-19 and bio tech
- 43:00 Current Economic crisis prediction
- 46:00 cost of solar and storage and Crispr tech
- 47:50 social media addiction and high quality content,
- 50:30 FutureLoop Facebook group on COVID-19
- 51:00 Stem cells and organ replacement
- 53:00 shape your mindset
This is not a paid promotion by any individual, business or organisation.
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Skills for the next generation data warehouse SAP BW/4HANA
SAP BW/4HANA is SAP's next generation data warehouse, optimized to run only on SAP HANA. It is SAP's most powerful data warehouse to date and adds in-memory processing to provide incredible performance and new levels of simplicity.
Since the arrival of the game changing SAP HANA, it was only a matter of time before BW would be reinvented to power high performance data acquisition and analytics. But BW/4HANA is about more than just speed. It has lost the complexity that was needed to support non-HANA databases, meaning modelling has become simpler, which in turn has lead to greater agility.
Whilst it holds on to many of the design principles first developed with classic BW, BW/4HANA is a brand new solution with a fresh approach. It is critical to invest in BW/4HANA education for your employees to maximize the full potential of your BW/4HANA implementation. Experienced BW team members must "unlearn" some approaches which are no longer optimal for BW/4HANA, learning instead new techniques to ensure the HANA in-memory engines do all the heavy work.
Those who are already experienced with classic BW should upgrade their skills now, so they are fully prepared to participate in BW/4HANA projects. This means :
- Using the new BW/4HANA user interfaces that have been redesigned to support modelling data models and data flows, query building and administration.
- Working with new modelling approaches which lean heavily towards a virtualised data warehouse and mixing SQL based data models from native HANA.
- Using the new best practices for BW/4HANA with LSA++, instead of the old LSA
- Taking advantage of the staggering data integration possibilities. BW/4HANA can consume any type of data, from anywhere. You need to learn how to connect both physical and virtual data sources
- Understanding how to manage data temperatures. What is hot, warm, cool, cold data? We'll show you.
To begin your BW/4HANA journey, a great place to start is the openSAP course 'BW/4HANA in a Nutshell'. This provides a high level overview and builds a great foundation. You should then move on to develop core BW/4HANA skills by taking further SAP Education courses where you will go deeper and develop practical skills with plenty of hands-on opportunities.
If you already have SAP BW experience you should follow one of our new delta courses – the detailed 5 day BW462 , for those upskilling from classic (non-HANA) BW, or the 2 day DBW4H for those upskilling from BW Powered by HANA. Both delta courses bring you to the same outcome: new skills in BW/4HANA so you are fully prepared to be an effective member of the project team.
We have also just launched a new certification – E_BW4HANA_13 – SAP Certified Application Specialist – SAP BW to SAP BW/4HANA (based on the BW462 course), so consultants can gain a qualification to prove their knowledge.
But what if you are completely new to BW? We have been busy developing courses suitable for those without any SAP BW background, to cover all key areas of BW/4HANA. Already available are the BW405 (Query Design) and BW410 (Data Warehousing), with courses for Data Modeling (BW430) and Data Acquisition (BW450) expected in Q1 2018.
Don't forget, we also have an active SAP Learning Room in SAP Learning Hub – 'SAP BW powered by SAP HANA & SAP BW/4HANA Learning Room'. This room has many members already benefiting from the support and guidance of BW/4HANA instructors and experts.

subset: commoncrawl


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Roadtripping on the Anti-Great Ocean Road, Victoria, Australia
Do you remember what the Great Ocean Road was, pre-COVID? Bumper-to-bumper cars ogling the 12 (or so) Apostles, the crashing surf and the koalas.
You can rail against the international travel ban (and god knows, we've all suffered as a result of it), or you can look for the rainbows: no more foreign tourists bogging up the scenic spots, we've got it all for ourselves.
Alternatively, you could try what I've dubbed the Anti-Great-Ocean-Road, the Hamilton Highway, which runs from Melbourne to the pearl of the Road, Port Fairy. Green fields, stone walls, historic pubs and a great dollop of indigenous and Irish history.
I wrote a piece for the Traveller section of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, take a look here for some Victorian travel love.


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The NZ Herald reports that:
"Passenger Rachel Bernam, told London newspaper The News of the World: "It was pretty obvious what was going on." She added: "They started snogging and then she disappeared under the blanket. I was shocked - it was then the steward told them to knock it off." An Air NZ spokeswoman said the airline was "not at liberty" to discuss individual passengers. "However, we can confirm there were complaints in the premium cabin on NZ1 on February 2 that required cabin crew to ask a couple of passengers to modify their behaviour"
However the Brisbane Courier Mail tells more:
"Ridge was busted receiving oral sex from girlfriend Rebecca Loos on an Air New Zealand flight from London to Los Angeles last week. Crew had to interrupt the pair after passengers complained. "It was pretty obvious what was going on. She was giving him oral sex . . . and he was loving it," said passenger Rachel Bernam, seated behind the former league star."
Now there are planes and seats better suited to this than the Air NZ business class pods. For starters, the bathrooms at the back of a 747 are many and not well monitored, especially at night. The rear of the front cabin (nose) on a 747 tends to be quite discreet and private, the back rows especially. The upper deck isn't as good as it seems, because the galley is at the back and the crew rest areas and cockpit at the front. There is another crew rest area which most passengers are unaware of, but unless the crew want to share you, you'll get no chances there. Some Airbus A340s have downstairs toilets or galleys (Thai, Cathay, LAN, Aerolineas Argentinas all fly these to NZ).
So some basic rules of thumb:
1. The bigger the plane the better your chances. Boeing 747s and Airbus A340s are the biggest in the air now, the A380 may offer even more chances.
2. The more exclusive the cabin the better your chances. This is mainly because some airlines make the first or business class toilets bigger, and there are more of them per passenger. It also reflects bigger more private seating, but that is all.
3. Do it in the dark. Wait till after dinner on an overnight flight and then slink off when the lights are dimmed. By then the crew are doing little, most people have their earplugs and eye masks on.
4. Find banks of toilets that are not monitored. Rear ends of planes that don't have galleys are best (747s) though this goes against rule of thumb 2.


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So you've decided it's time to add some of this hot new machine learning or deep learning stuff into your app… Great! But what are your options?
For many machine learning solutions, the approach is as follows:
- gather data
- use that data to train a model
- use the model to make predictions
Let's say you want to make a "celebrity match" app that tells people which famous person they most look alike.
You need to first gather a lot of photos of celebrities' faces. Then you train a deep learning network on these photos to teach it what each celebrity looks like.
The model you're using would be some kind of convolutional neural network and you've trained it for the specific purpose of comparing people's faces with the faces of celebrities.
Training is a difficult and expensive process. But once you have the trained model, performing "inference" — or in other words, making predictions — is easy.
You can give the model a selfie and it will instantly say, "You look 85% like George Clooney but you have Lady Gaga's eyes!"
Exactly what data you need, what sort of model you should design, and how you should train this model all depend on the particular application you have in mind.
But you also need to make some choices about how to put your machine learning system into production. That's what this blog post is about.
The main things you need to decide are:
- Do you want to train your own model?
- Do you want to train on your own computer or in the cloud?
- Do you want to do inference in the cloud or locally on the device (offline)?
In other words, should you use a cloud service to do the deep learning, or maybe roll your own? Let's find out!
The quick & easy option
The first question to ask is: Do you even need your own model? By far the easiest way to get started is to use someone else's model.
There is a growing number of companies that provide machine learning services tailored for specific purposes, such as speech recognition, text analysis, or image classification.
You don't get access to their models directly — that's their secret sauce — but you can use these models through an API.
Examples of such machine learning as-a-service providers:
- Clarifai
- Google Cloud Vision
- Amazon Rekognition, Polly, Lex
- Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services
- IBM Watson
and many others… these kinds of services are popping up all over.
If your app needs to perform one of the specific tasks offered by these services, you should definitely consider using them.
How this works: Your mobile app simply sends an HTTPS request to a web service along with any required data, such as a photo taken by the device's camera, and within seconds the service replies with the prediction results.
Of course, you need to pay for this privilege, usually by the request. But you have nothing else to worry about: the only thing you need to do is talk to the service's API endpoint from within your app. Often there is an SDK that makes the service easy to integrate.
The service provider keeps their model up-to-date by re-training it (using their own data), but this all happens behind the scenes. Any time they improve their model, you automatically benefit from it. You don't have to know anything about machine learning in order to use these services.
Upsides of using such a "canned" machine learning service:
- It's very easy to get started. (There is often a free tier.)
- Completely hands-off and hassle free. No worries about running your own servers or training models.
- You can benefit from machine learning without actually doing any of the hard work.
Downsides of this approach:
- You can't perform inference locally on the device: all predictions are done by sending a network request to their server. This means there is a (short) delay between asking for a prediction and getting the results, and your app won't work at all if the user has no network connection.
- You pay for each prediction request, something like $1 per 1000 requests.
- You can't train on your own data, so this only works for fairly common data such as pictures, video, and speech. If there is something unique or special about your data, then this is not the right option for you.
Note: Some of these services may actually allow a limited kind of training. Clarifai, for example, lets you create your own model by uploading custom training images. This way you can augment their existing model to get better predictions for your own particular kind of images.
Using a fully-managed machine learning service is a great option if an existing model suits all your needs. For a lot of mobile apps this is the absolute right thing to do!
Training your own model
If your data is unique in some sense or existing solutions are not satisfactory, you'll need to train your own model.
Data is key to doing successful machine learning. It's the quality and quantity of the data that makes all the difference. If you're going to do your own training, you need lots of data.
Once you have gathered your training data, the next decision is where and how to train. It depends on the complexity of your model and the amount of training data that you have.
- Small-ish model: you can train this on your desktop computer or on a spare machine you have lying around.
- Large model: a pimped-out machine with multiple GPUs will come in handy, but this really is a job for a high-performance computer cluster.
Unless you have your own data center or are rolling in cash, it makes most sense to rent computer power. There are many cloud platforms that are happy to take your money. These days you can even rent GPUs-in-the-cloud for training deep learning systems.
So it's for you to decide: is renting cheaper than buying? However, there are other considerations besides price. Let's look at some of those.
What about training on the device? If all the data you need to make predictions is available on the user's device — and you don't need data from other sources — then it might be an option to do the training on the device itself and not use the cloud at all. However, this will only work for small datasets and basic machine learning algorithms. It's not something you can realistically do with deep learning.
Training in the cloud
There are two options here:
- general purpose cloud computing
- hosted machine learning
We'll look at general purpose cloud computing first.
How this works: You rent one or more computers in someone else's data center. Whatever you do on these computers is completely up to you. To train your model, you give the cloud computer access to your training data and run your favorite training software on it.
When you're done training, you download the learned parameters for the model and delete the compute instance. You only pay for the compute hours used to train the model. Now you have a trained model that you can use anywhere you like.
Examples of this kind of service are Amazon EC2 and Azure Virtual Machines. For deep learning you can even rent instances with fast GPUs.
- Ultimate flexibility, no responsibility. If you need more compute power, simply provision a few additional compute instances. That's a lot cheaper than going out and buying new computers.
- Training is often done just once, so you only need to rent these computers for a limited amount of time. And if you want to re-train your model, you simply rent the computers again for a few hours or days.
- You're not limited to training a specific type of model, and you can use your training package of choice.
- You can download the trained model and use it however you like.
- You need to know what you're doing. Training the model is completely your own responsibility. If you're not already well-versed in the art and practice of machine learning, you need to hire someone who is.
- You'll need to upload your training data to the cloud service too. So not only do you pay for the compute hours, you also pay for storage.
Note: The above discussion only pertains to training the machine learning model, not to inference. Once you've trained your model you'll need to make it available to the app somehow, so it can use the model for making predictions. If you decide to do this locally on the device then you just need to embed the model into your mobile app. But if you want to do inference in the cloud, you'll still need to set up your own web service for inference. That comes with its own set of considerations (more about this below).
Hosted machine learning in the cloud
The other cloud option is hosted machine learning.
Several companies, such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, now offer machine learning as a service on top of their existing cloud services.
How this works: You don't need to have the expertise to train models. You simply upload your data, choose the kind of model you want to use, and let the machine learning service take care of all the details.
This option is the step between using a fully managed service and doing everything yourself. It's definitely a lot easier than doing your own training, especially if you're not really comfortable training your own models.
However… most of these services do not let you download your trained models. So for the inference part of your app you have no choice but to use their platform as well. You can't take the trained model and load it onto a mobile device and run the predictions on the device itself. You always need to call their API and send along the user's data for doing inference.
This may not be a problem for your app but it is something to be aware of before you get started. For example, when using Microsoft Azure Machine Learning you're basically locked into using Azure forever. If you want to switch to another service, you can't take your trained model with you — you'll have to train from scratch on the new platform and eat the cost for that again.
These kinds of services charge you for the compute hours you use during training, plus any storage for your training data. Since the service provides the API that your app uses to request predictions, you also pay for each prediction request.
Upsides of using a hosted service:
- Just upload the data and don't worry about the training.
- It's easy to integrate these services into your app. You can't do inference offline, but at least it's easy to get the web service side of things up and running.
- You need to use their service for doing inference, you can't do it offline on the mobile device itself.
- You may only have a limited number of models to choose from, so there's less flexibility. For example, Amazon Machine Learning currently only supports linear regression and logistic regression. You can't train a deep learning model with their service.
- The big companies — Amazon, Microsoft, Google — have a wide array of cloud services. To use their machine learning service, you also need to use their storage service, their SQL service, etc. You will have to upload your training data to the cloud service as well, and pay for this separately. So you really have to buy into their whole ecosystem.
Note: A pleasant exception here seems to be Google's new Cloud Machine Learning platform (currently in beta). Like its competition, this cloud service lets you train your models (and if you want deploy them). But you can also export your trained model, which lets you do predictions offline. If you're a TensorFlow fan this service seems like a great option. Then again, TensorFlow also runs on Amazon and Azure compute instances, and it's always worth comparing prices.
Training on your own computers
How this works: This is really no different from training in the cloud, except that you use one or more computers that you own. You load your favorite machine learning package on the computers, give them access to your data, and set them off training.
If you're really serious about deep learning, or if you happen to have a number of spare computers lying around anyway, then this option might be cheaper (in the long run) than renting someone else's computer.
Tip: Even if you want to train in the cloud, it's smart to start out with a reduced dataset on your own computer to make sure the model works correctly. Once you're satisfied the model will give useful predictions, move on to training with the full dataset on a more powerful computer.
One issue with training in the cloud is that you need to upload your data to the cloud service. Since digital storage is their business, these cloud companies usually provide good security for your data. However, your data may be so sensitive that you don't want it to leave your premises. In that case, you'll need to do the training in-house as well.
- Total control. You can train however you want, whatever you want.
- You own the trained model, and you can deploy it any way you see fit: as a cloud service or offline on the device.
- You don't pay rent for using someone else's computer or cloud storage.
- You do pay for the hardware, software, electricity, and everything else it takes to keep your own computers running.
If your model is small enough, training on your own hardware is a sensible choice. However, for big models with lots of training data, using a cloud service makes it easier to scale up quickly should you need more resources.
Recap: training options
Using a "hosted" machine learning service — where you provide your own data but the service takes care of training — has the big disadvantage that you don't own the trained model. If you use such as service, you'll also have to use their web API for doing predictions.
So if you want to train on your own data and be able use the trained model offline, then you are limited to these options:
- train on your desktop or on another computer you own
- train in the cloud by renting someone else's computer or compute cluster (such as Amazon EC2) but not using their hosted machine learning service
- use a service such as Google Cloud Machine Learning that lets you train in the cloud but also lets you download the trained model
You'll definitely want to compare pricing between the different service providers. Most cloud services are very similar in the features they offer, so you might as well pay as little as possible. 💰💰💰
Note: Another thing to consider is how often you need to re-train. Only occasionally, in which case you just go through the same process again, or will you be retraining the model constantly? Not all hosted machine learning providers support online learning. And if you do online learning in the cloud, you'll be renting those computers for a long time. If you run the numbers for this scenario, it might turn out to be less expensive to train on your own hardware after all.
Inference: making predictions
For training it's pretty obvious that it should happen off-device, whether it's on your own computers or on computers that you rent.
But for inference you have the choice of doing it on the device, without requiring a network connection.
Let's look at the options:
If you're using a canned service such as Clarifai or Watson, then you need to make a network request to their servers. Not much choice there.
If you're using a hosted machine learning service such as Azure Machine Learning, then you also need to make a network request to their servers. You've trained the model with your own data, but the model lives on their servers and you don't get access to it except through the web API.
If you trained the model yourself, you own the model's learned parameters. You can decide whether to do inference on a server or on the device.
As with everything, whether it's better to use a server or to do inference locally on the device, depends on a few tradeoffs.
One tradeoff could be speed: is it faster to run inference on the (relatively slow) mobile device, or is it quicker to send a network request to a fast and beefy server, do the inference there, and then send a reply back?
And some inference tasks are just going to be impossible on the device — it simply may not have enough processing power or RAM, or it may be limited by some other constraint.
Which option is more practical totally depends on your use case.
Inference on the server
How this works: You set up a server — either your own machine or one that you rent in the cloud — and load your trained model onto it. The server publishes the endpoint for a web API that your app talks to over the internet.
Suppose you have an app that turns a photo into digital art using deep learning. Users can choose different effects for their photos. The app sends the photo to the server, the server feeds the photo through the deep learning network to apply the desired effect, and a few seconds later it sends the modified image back to the app.
Using a server for inference keeps the mobile app simple. All the complexity is on the server, which is always under your control. You can improve the model or add new features any time you want. To deploy the improved model, simply update the server — you don't have to update the app itself.
- If you already have a back-end for your app, then the inference logic can nicely integrate with your existing back-end.
- You can use the same software package for training and inference. (When doing inference locally on the device you may need to rewrite that logic in a different programming language.)
- Update the model any time you want.
- When all the machine learning logic is on the server, it's easy to port the app to different platforms: iOS, Android, web, and so on.
- Your secret sauce is not embedded in the mobile app, so competitors cannot reverse engineer it.
- Users need to have network access in order to use this feature in your app.
- You need to run your own server. Even if you rent a server, you still need to deal with all the typical server headaches such as protecting against hackers, denial-of-service attacks, preventing downtime, and so on.
- You need to create your own API for processing prediction requests from clients. This includes things like handling authentication so that only authorized users can access the service.
- You pay for the bandwidth. All those photos people are sending to your server quickly add up to a lot of bytes flying through the pipe. If the server is your own machine, you also pay for the electricity bill.
- If your app becomes very popular, you may need to scale up to many servers. It's not good for business if your app goes down because the servers are overloaded.
With a hosted machine learning service it only takes a click on a button to deploy the trained model to a web API. By creating and hosting your own API, you get more flexibility but the obvious downside is… well, that you need to do everything yourself.
If your app is a big success and has millions of (paying) users then it might be worth running your own inference backend. For many apps it's probably cheaper and a lot less hassle to use a full-service machine learning in-the-cloud solution.
Note: Instead of rolling your own API from scratch you can also use existing tools, such as TensorFlow Serving.
Inference on the device
How this works: You load the model's learned parameters into the app. To make a prediction the app runs all the inference computations locally on the device, on its own CPU or GPU — it does not need to talk to a server.
This is the domain of frameworks such as BNNS and Metal CNN on iOS, but some machine learning packages such as TensorFlow and Caffe also run on the device.
Speed is the major reason for doing inference directly on the device. You don't need to send a request over the internet and wait for the reply — instead, the prediction happens (almost) instantaneously.
Take that same example of turning photos into "deep art": what if you wanted to do this to a live camera feed in realtime? There is no way you can do this by sending network requests — it must be done directly on the device.
Note: To be fair, this is not a very realistic example. A lot of deep learning isn't fast enough to do in realtime yet. But you get the point: for speed, you can't beat local processing.
One of the big benefits of doing inference on a server is that you can put improved models into action immediately: upload the new model to the server and you're done. With a mobile app this is not as straightforward, since you need to push out the improved model to all existing app installs somehow.
If you re-train the model often then you may need to set up some infrastructure for distributing the updated model parameters to the users' devices. So you may need to keep a server around after all.
Upsides of doing inference on the device:
- Users can use the app even when they don't have internet access.
- Speed: it can be a lot faster and more reliable than doing network requests.
- If inference happens on the device, then you don't need to run servers. When the app becomes more popular and gets more users then there is no need for you to scale up anything, since there is no centralized bottleneck.
Note: Users now pay for the cost of doing inference with their own battery power. This may actually be a reason to not do inference on the device if the amount of battery power used is unreasonable and creates a bad user experience.
- Including the model in the app bundle will increase the size of the app download signficantly, often by many megabytes.
- It's more difficult to update the model. Users need to download an app update to get the improved model, or the app needs to download it automatically.
- Porting the app to a different platform may be difficult, since you need to rewrite the inference part for each platform (and possibly for each device type).
There is another potential issue you need to be aware of: other developers can dig around inside your app bundle. It's easy to copy over the learned parameters, and if you're including a TensorFlow graph definition or caffemodel file it's very simple for unscrupulous people to steal your entire model. You may want to obfuscate this data if having it gives you a competitive advantage.
As you can tell, there are lots of options to choose from!
And no doubt we'll see many more machine learning services appear on the market in the coming months and years.
What's best for your app and your business — and your users! — really depends on the kind of machine learning you're doing, so it's impossible to give tailored advice without knowing the exact details.
But at least I hope this blog post has given you an idea of the possibilities!
If you're interested in learning more about doing deep learning on iOS devices, then get in touch and let's chat. 😄
First published on Thursday, 16 February 2017.
If you liked this post, say hi on Twitter @mhollemans or LinkedIn.
Find the source code on my GitHub.
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The idea of a general
strike has a lot of resonance in the Occupy Movement. Last November, thousands
of activists converged on Frank Ogawa Plaza
in Oakland for a localized strike that
eventually shut down the Port
of Oakland. For many, it was
the most iconic moment of the movement thus far. When occupiers again shut the
Port down on December 12 in a coordinated West Coast action, the idea of a May
Day strike was born. Since then, Occupy groups in more than 100 cities have
signed on, and each with a unique set of tactics and goals. So far, those
tactics have been surprisingly diverse, from anti-foreclosure occupations to
marches and sit-ins, to strikes.
So what exactly is gonna
go down today? It's hard to say. Though Occupy groups in more than 100
cities have all signed on to the May Day strike, each one has a different set
of goals and tactics. Some plans have been disparate and freewheeling, and some
much more coordinated.
As in the fall, the two
most dramatic focal points will likely be New
York City and the Bay Area. In New York, plans are nothing if not
ambitious. Occupiers have scheduled dozens
of simultaneous picket lines in Manhattan
and Brooklyn, many led by local unions like
the Teamsters and the UAW. Activists also plan to occupy Manhattan's Bryant
Park throughout the day, and hold working groups, assemblies, and rallies
throughout the city–some legally permitted, some not. Aptly named teach-ins
like "How to Keep Your Cool and Occupy: Understanding Aggression" will also
take place. Amid so many diverse actions, the eyes of a lot of media outlets and
police will be on a march from Brooklyn to Union Square, and
then on to Wall Street beginning at 10:30 ET.
Likewise, activists in the
Bay Area have quite a lot planned. And unlike the November 2 strike, this time
around, organized labor is playing a big part. Although bridge workers in San Francisco have scrapped their proposal to shut down
the Golden Gate Bridge, they have no plans to return to
work. Having seen negotiations with management fall apart, they plan to shutdown
buses and ferries in the city as part of a larger strike. Some say blocking
the bridge is altogether off the table, reports Truth Out. Likewise, unions that stopped short of endorsing the
November 2 strike are calling on workers to participate. More than 4,000
members of the California Nurses Association will walk out. SEIU workers plan
to occupy city hall. On the East Bay, longshoremen will shut down the Port of Oakland for the third time in six
In San
Francisco, Occupy events will also include rallies at Delores Park
in the Mission, and beginning nearby, a "Bike
Cavalry" critical mass ride to the Golden
Gate Bridge.
On the East Bay,
rallies are planned throughout Oakland,
culminating in a March
for Dignity and Resistance, from the Fruitvale BART station in East Oakland
to Frank Ogawa Plaza.
Elsewhere, actions may be
less visible on national media outlets, but no less significant. In Chicago, immigrants plan to play a major
role, mirroring 2006's extraordinary Day Without Immigrants, which also
occurred on May Day. In Los Angeles, occupiers
have organized a series of four bike and car caravans to the financial
district from places as far flung as Santa
Monica and South Central. Eventually, they hope to
make downtown inaccessible. Occupy DC organizers are planning a daylong festival with
teach-ins and performances to highlight the history of American labor.
Many of these actions have
happened before, at various times throughout Occupy's brief history. It's hard
to know how big tomorrow's events will be, and yet, as Nathan Schneider of Yes! Magazine argues, there's a good
chance it'll be something
entirely new. Last October, demonstrators in over 900 cities around the
world participated in actions in support of Occupy. But even then, Occupy was
less than a month old, and activists hadn't had the benefit of months
of training and planning–or such extensive support from organized labor. What
sets today apart is a level of coordination and planning that Occupy hasn't
seen before.
If, like us, you're away
from the coasts and other Occupy hubs but still want to follow the action,
check back at Utne.com for the latest rumors, links, and second-hand
Image by Brian
Sims, licensed under Creative Commons.
Sources: Occupy
Wall Street, Truth
Out, Decolonize
Oakland, Chicago Spring,
Occupy May 1st, Occupy DC, Yes!,


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Are you planning a Bali trip and wondering where to stay? Bali is full of gems and hidden beauties. If you want to be close to the surfing spots and beautiful cliffs with beaches, Uluwatu is the place for you. Let us showcase you this great property we checked out for you.
Hidden in the southern part of Bali lies the sleepy Uluwatu region best known for its relaxed nature, surf spots and the famous temple of the same name. There are several quality resorts sprawled along the limestone cliffs, but Anantara have found a perfect spot to nest amongst it all for us.
Where is Anantara Uluwatu located?
From Bali's Ngurah Rai International Airport, it will take you around 40 minutes to get to the Anantara Uluwatu property. It is strategically located close to many beaches like Dreamland beach, Padang Padang beach, Bingin beach and much more! If you are into temples, Pura Luhur Uluwatu, a popular Hindu temple of the south of Bali, is only 8 km away. If you plan to stay in Uluwatu, most fun activities involve the beach so get your swimmers ready.
How to get around from Anantara Uluwatu?
From the airport it is best to get a cab or arrange transportation with the hotel prior to arrival. We recommend to book a Grab Taxi that will cost you approximately 200,000 IDR (Indonesia Rupiah) (~15$US). Grab Taxi is definitely the most affordable way to get around, but we wouldn't take it as main transportation in Uluwatu as there are not many cars around. Best way is that while you are staying at Anantara Uluwatu (or anywhere around) is to hire a motorbike. The hotel can arrange your a motorbike from a third party company for 100,000 IDR (~8$US), which usually would cost from 50k to 80k depending on your negotiation skills if you hire it from outside. Since you stay at the hotel, might as well get it arranged through them for a few dollars more. Tanking will only cost you 20,000 IDR (~1.50$US).
Restaurants at Anantara Uluwatu
You will have plenty of choices at the Anantara Uluwatu which is perfect for longer stays and being able to eat different things. You will have breakfast at the 360 restaurant which is great if you sit outside and enjoy the view. The buffet has a wide range of healthy choices, pancakes & eggs station, asian noodles station, sushis and our favourite which are dim sums! When staying at this property, you must eat at SONO Teppanyaki and witness the master chef's cooking show of delicious Japanese cuisine with weekly special tweaks in the menu. For an ultimate fresh seafood experience, Splash is the place to be and if you feel like a romantic dinner, Anantara will arrange you an amazing set up by the pool which they call Dining by Design. Cocktails and bites are also available by the pool throughout the day.
Anantara Uluwatu Facilities
The gym is absolutely lovely with glass windows so you can feel like you are outside. This is something we love in gym designs as you don't feel like you are trapped in a box. They have all the equipment you will need to have a proper full body workout. Anantara spa facilities includes 4 single and 1 couple treatment rooms; you can also get hair and mani-pedi treatments. There is a little relaxing pool as well that you can use if you have booked any treatment.
There are many resort activities including cooking classes, Balinese dance classes, ceramic making sessions, shuttles to Padang Padang beach if you want to go surfing, shuttles to the Uluwatu temple, yoga sessions and so much more! Concierge will be able to assist you for anything you want to do in Bali.
Anantara Uluwatu Rooms
The hotel is recommended for couples. There is a tiny pool that kids could go, but we would say that the clientele is mostly couples. You come here for calm time and a lot of relaxing moments even at the main pool.
All rooms are suites with either pool or garden views. You can get the option to book with or without a pool. There are Ocean Front rooms that are slightly closer to the pool and cliff area. Bigger villas with different views (Ocean or Garden) are also available and they are the rooms we recommend you to look into! If you fancy the penthouse, it has its own jacuzzi and a lot of space!
If you are looking to stay here, compare prices on Booking.com and Agoda.com
Anantara has a great social culture and offers local artisans and performers opportunities. In terms of materials within the property, soaps are not distributed in plastic containers to be thrown out but in a soap dispenser, which we believe all establishments should be doing moving forward to raise awareness. Although, unfortunately the water bottles distributed at Anantara Uluwatu are made of plastic. Sweets that we were given were wrapped in plastic after you have peeled the banana leaf, which we believe could be avoided. (Plastic is used everywhere in Indonesia and this isn't necessarily Anantara's fault, but something to consider.)
Our Anantara Uluwatu experience
Staying at Anantara Uluwatu was a must for us to visit the south part of Bali and beach hop around Uluwatu. Anantara is a brand that we admire the design, looks and hospitality beliefs, hence we needed to see a Bali property to be able to recommend you whether or not it's a place to be! As a couple, we really enjoyed staying there. We absolutely think that the experience would be optimal in a Villa for any guest that visits, as if you are on the main building, you could feel like it is more resort-y.
Every night the turn down service is on point, distributing daily different local treats and making us excited to come back to the room daily after a long day away. The team is a little bit more shy than usual to fold your belongings up and place them into place, but few guests rather things that way, untouched.
We would've love the resort to provide push-bikes to the guests, but we understand the reason why they are not available: there is not much to see around that is a fast bike ride! The normal traveller doesn't really want to sweat and waste time, so best to take a motorbike if you want quick strolls around like Bingin Beach.
Rooms are all gigantic so if you also love space you must book here. This is a property with an incredible sunset pool and a cliff you must take the elevator to go down and stroll by the beach! This is absolute highlight and you can see the beach at both low and high tide. Make sure to enjoy both experiences of a sunset walking along the beach of Anantara and in the pool. One not to forget.
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If you like this article, follow our Adventures on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram @adventurefaktory & @adventurefaktoryactive, but most importantly sign up to our E-mail list to keep up with updates and travel trends + deals!
Disclaimer: This article contains affiliate links. We use them as a way of assisting us in maintaining our website and follow our passion. Please use them when you are booking as it supports us greatly. We have not been paid to stay here and all opinions are our own. Thank you.


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The sun is shining. The air is humid in Brooklyn and I'm not in class. It's summer in New York City.
And there's work to be done!
The end of the NYU semester came and went with a bang. It was a real hustle to get through the end of the second semester, but I came away with a lot of amazing lessons I learned, not only about game design but about working with others, my own process of dealing with stress, and about myself in general. It was a process of self discovery as well as academia, and as hokey as it sounds it made a profound impact on how I want to work going forward. It was a breakneck pace of work that ended and then-
A break. Summer vacation. It's meant to give you a chance to kick back and relax… right?
For most people past a certain age, summer vacation is no longer the bucolic months of adventure and fun that it is when you're young enough not to work. For me, I haven't had a real summer vacation in years. This is the closest I've had and yet I'm freelancing. And boy, has it been busy. Here's been what I'm up to:
- Phoenix Outlaw Productions, my company, is ramping up it's creation process. Things were slowed due to many factors including graduate school and, honestly, the learning curve of a new company. Now I'm putting boots to ground on wrapping up Wanderlust, my tabletop RPG, and have begun organizing the schedule of projects we want to release. Stay tuned for way more information about that in the days to come.
- June 1st wrapped creation of Wild City, a setting for the upcoming release of the Chronos Theatrical LARP System for Eschaton Media, co-written alongside Josh Harrison. Josh and I had worked on the core book of Chronos as well, so I'm excited to see the release going so well. You can learn more about it on Eschaton Media's Chronos Facebook group right now.
- I'm working with my fellow Team Awesome folks to get Octavia ready for submission for IndieCade. More information about that to come.
- I was asked to come aboard the extremely successful Kickstarter for Trigger Happy by Caias Ward to write a stretch goal scenario, which I'm working on. It's going to be about a kidnapped kid and what you're willing to do to kick butt to get that kid back. Stay tuned for more information.
- I'm working on the translation of the Heroine RPG into a LARP! I'm very excited for this project, as Josh Jordan's game about girls on their adventures has been a person 'I heart it so much' project since I saw it on Kickstarter. I'm so excited to be a part of seeing it come to LARP.
- I've been creative consultant to Michael Consoli on his video game Against the Wall and we've been meeting up
And speaking of LARPS – DEXCON. Oh my gosh, DexCon.
For those that don't know, the Double Exposure conventions in Morristown New Jersey rock. Seriously, they do. I've been a regular at these conventions since 2006 and have enjoyed some of my best gaming experiences there. It's no wonder that the work these good folks are doing is being recognized by the Diana Jones Awards with a nomination this year. I enjoy the hell out of all three of their conventions – Dreamation, DexCon and Metatopia – and would not miss one for the world. That said, I also enjoy the heck out of running LARPs and panels at their conventions and this year is no exception. My DexCon project plate looks like this:
- The Unofficial Dresden Files LARP: We at Phoenix Outlaw Productions are proud to be wrapping up our first chronicle of our Unofficial Dresden Files LARP, started way back two years ago. The project has been very important to me and I'm so pleased to see us come to the end of the four game series with "Final Frost" this summer. After this, we'll be going into another phase of the project, in which players will have dedicated characters in an ongoing chronicle setting. We've also wrapped up our latest version of the rules iteration, based of course on the wonderful Fate Core rules system, and based on iteration done at each of the conventions thanks to experience and great feedback from players. Saturday Night at DexCon, we head back to the Dresdenverse and we'll see who survives the chronicle's climax.
- Battlestar Galactica LARP: At Dreamation I teamed with Mike Maleki of Last Minute Productions to come up with an idea for a Battlestar Galactica LARP. We were approached thereafter by Double Exposure to run this event as a signature LARP for the convention this summer. And so, "Straight On Til Morning: Tales of the Rising Star" was born. We've brought together our two teams to create a large game set aboard the Rising Star, a medical ship in the BSG universe. We've developed a brand new system inspired by more freeform LARP techniques to make this game an intense roleplay experience for folks. Come aboard and give it a spin on Friday night!
- Night's Black Agent Tournament – The LARP: It's no secret I'm a huge Night's Black Agent fan. Well, John Adamus has been involved in writing for the Night's Black Agent tournaments for the incredible Kenneth Hite for a while now. Therefore when Pelgrane Press wanted to incorporate LARP into their tournament's first round, we got the call! Myself, John Adamus and Josh Harrison have been working at building the first Night's Black Agent LARP, where you can play a secret agent out to battle the vampire conspiracy threat! This will be the first round of the NBA Tournament – survive into the second round and see your team to victory.
Those are the three LARPs we've been working hard on for DexCon. Aside from that, I am also pleased to say I'll be reprising two panels from the last convention: Women in Game Design and Let's Talk LARP, a round table discussion with LARP designers. I'm also really humbled to be asked to a Wednesday night reading for authors at the convention. I've been asked to read from my recently published short story from The Lost Anthology by Galileo Press. And somewhere in there, I promise, I will eat a thing and sleep. Somewhere.
With all this going on, I'm also preparing for my upcoming convention schedule at GenCon, WyrdCon, PaxPrime and more, but that's what I like to call 'After July 4th Shoshana's Problem' (July 4th weekend being DexCon).
For now, I'm also reminding myself of the importance of balancing some summer fun with all this work- including attending great conferences like the recent Games for Change conference in New York, spending time with great people at Dystopia Rising (including at the new Pennsylvania game – congratulations to the staff there for an amazing first event!), and getting to see Neil Gaiman speak at Brooklyn Academy of Music the other night about his new book, Ocean At the End of the Lane (read it if you haven't! It's brilliant!).
That's summer vacation, folks, and with that I'm off to get back into work, with a cup of tea and a lot of typing to go. More updates to come!


text:
Ward news
Latest Stories
Community Spotlight
Destyne Butler Jr.
Bronzeville resident and up and coming boxer Destyne Butler Jr. was honored to fight as part of the undercard for the Manny Pacquiao vs. Adrian Broner fight in Las Vegas on January 19, 2019. Destyne defeated David Payne by unanimous decision in the four round bout.
Destyne, 23, is an undefeated (5-0, 3 KOs) welterweight (147 lbs) who trains at Robert Taylor Park (39 W. 47th St.). Boxing since he was around 7 years old, Destyne brought 7 national championships to the Robert Taylor Park Boxing Program. Destyne attended Beasley Academic Center in Bronzeville before going to Dunbar High School on historic King Drive. A hard working, dedicated boxer, Destyne looks forward to continuing his boxing career including his first televised fight, which he hopes will be scheduled for later this year. Join Alderman Dowell and the entire 3rd Ward community in wishing Destyne all the success in the world following his passion.


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SAVE objects to brutal and insensitive plans for the Inner Temple Library
16 March 2017
SAVE objects to brutal and insensitive plans for the Inner Temple Library
SAVE Britain's Heritage has submitted major objections to proposals that would gut and drastically alter a historic library in the City of London.
The Inner Temple Library is a series of beautiful double-height rooms, with upper galleries, oak panelling, pedimented doorways and brass candelabras, rebuilt with great care in the 1950s.
The plans to squeeze in a lecture theatre would see the handsome two-storey rooms of the Library truncated, with a new low ceiling inserted destroying the symmetry of the spaces, and the high-quality woodwork and fittings stripped out, including the classical balustrades around the galleries.
What is currently a light filled welcoming series of rooms with ample study spaces, would be transformed into a darker, oppressive single storey room.
Marcus Binney, Executive President of SAVE said: "This handsome library beautifully panelled in oak, has a wealth of fine architectural detail. It is unbelievable that one of the historic Inns of Court should be proposing to butcher its own heritage in this brutal and insensitive fashion."
Objections have also been submitted by the Inner Temple's Library Users Group who place great value on the existing Library's architectural quality, as well as leading law practitioners including Sir Richard Buxton, Sir Stephen Sedley, and the Rt Hon Lord Lloyd of Berwick.
The application is expected to be determined by the City of London in May 2017. Letters of objection should be sent to email@example.com, quoting planning reference 17/00077/FULMAJ.
The Library
The Inner Temple building was rebuilt following wartime bomb damage, and is the work of T W Sutcliffe, supervised by Sir Edward Maufe, architect of Guildford Cathedral. It officially reopened in 1958.
With great care and attention to detail Sutcliffe produced a sequence of three oak panelled rooms, the largest at the centre, with matching extensions at either end. It is considered one of London's finest examples of sensitive postwar reconstruction.
All the rooms survive in blemishless condition and are of a piece, beautifully executed in oak with floors of polished mahogany, with pedimented doorways, brass candelabra, and an interconnected series of galleries above.
Upon opening, 'Country Life' described it as, 'carefully planned,' and, 'extremely dignified, but never pretentious or pompous'. The rebuilding and restoration of Temple also drew praise from architectural critic Ian Nairn in his 1966 'Nairn's London'.
Note to editors:
1. For more information please contact SAVE on 0207 253 3500 or email@example.com
2. SAVE Britain's Heritage has been campaigning for historic buildings since its formation in 1975 by a group of architectural historians, writers, journalists and planners. It is a strong, independent voice in conservation, free to respond rapidly to emergencies and to speak out loud for the historic built environment.Press release issued by SAVE Britain's Heritage


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Okay, the second day was not so much fun, but I am getting back on the right path, the path of awesomeness, on the third day. Like the previous day, I woke up at 6AM to avoid extra charge to my night pack (yeah, what an effective alarm clock for me) and jumped on the closest train to Tokyo to board Shinkansen to ShiroishiZao. The rough plan was to go to Shiroishi to see the infamous fox village and then head to Sendai to crash before continuing my journey further north to find the cat island and possibly the mother of my future child. However, I had to change the plan after I reached ShiroishiZao and saw the awesome picture of Okama Crater.
So, I stayed for a bit at ShiroishiZao station and asked around for information and decided to postpone the cat island thing for the Okama Crater, however, the plan of going to the fox village still stand.
After the plan was settled, I was looking around for some other company to share a taxi to the fox village. The normal cheap me would have prefer walking since it only take 3hours to get there. But as a professional homeless, you gotta conserve both your money and stamina and find and optimum point between them. Why? Cause when you overexert yourself, you will find yourself more likely to comfort yourself at the end and spending more. Yes, this is what I called the 'Epic Homeless Permutation Theory'. Imagine if I were to walk, I can save 4000yen at the cost of 800kcal ofmy stamina, but then afterwards, I will be more tired and spend more money on food and hotel which is more likely to cost me additional 3000yen (assuming a flat inflation rate of 5%). While if I share a cab, I can at least save 2000yen while still preserving 800kcal of my stamina. To put it simple to the reader with no academic background, I am too lazy to walk at that time.
After like 15 minutes, 2 girls showed up with a camera dangling from her neck. I straightfully assume that they are going to fox village too since there is no other attraction in the area. So I was thinking, maybe I should ask them to share a cab with. But then what if they aren't planning to go there? It will be quite embarrass, not to mention the possibility being them thinking of me as pervert or the like, which I really am. So, I decided to lay back for a bit, watch them from a far while imagining myself having conversation with them about the taxi sharing. And before I know it, they were gone.
So I waited for another 15 minutes but I don't see any sign of other fox village visitor, so I just decided to take the taxi on my own, which deliver a huge blow to my wallet and my pride as an efficient homeless. Thankfully I was be able to share a cab with a couple of westerner for the way back.
After about 20 minutes of taxi ride, I finally reached the fox village which, for some strange reason that I don't know, has a big gorilla statue in their entrance instead of fox. So, I walked in, pay the 1000yen entrance fee, left my carrier bag at the receptionist (cause they didn't allow visitor to bring any big bag in), and enter the so-called fox village.
To tell you the truth, when I googled about the fox village, I thought it was a real village with people living in it and have their own jobs, but somehow naturally has a lot of foxes in it. I imagined in those village, the villager and the foxes co-exist happily and because of that the foxes population nourished. However, it turned out that it was more of a small zoo that specialized in foxes and have a big free space inside where foxes can wander freely and the visitor can enter to interact freely with the foxes. A little bit disappointment but it was no big deal since the free space was quite awesome. Some foxes were afraid and alerted when I approached them, but a few was quite brave enough to ambush me and bite my dangling waist bag when I was crouching and trying to take picture of another fox.
You can also buy some fox food here to feed them for 100yen, but you are only allowed to feed them by throwing it from an elevated platform. I read somewhere that this was done so that the foxes don't learn to snatch things from people's hand.
Actually, I am not really fond of feeding animal. I am having a hard time properly feeding myself, let alone feeding animal. But, since I was here already and the taxi fare is damn cruel, I might as well go all out on this one. So I went to the feeding platform and bought a bag of fox food. One bag consist of roughly ten of short and thick bacon-colored stick. However, I can assure you that they didn't taste like bacon at all. Yes, I took a little bit just to make sure they are not real bacon cause it would be a waste to give bacon to the foxes.
So, me being cheap, I split those sticks into as many pieces as possible so that I have more to feed. I also went as far as rubbing them into my shoes in hopes of making them attracted to me when I wander around. That way I will have an easier time getting good picture. Too bad that didn't worked out cause the food smell couldn't overcome the smell of my feet.
After finished feeding the foxes, I went out again to the free space area to stalk some fox in hopes of getting a good picture for awhile. That went on for like two hours and after I realized that my talent is not in photography, I decided to end this self-torture and head back to ShiroishiZao station because there is some place to see around the station. So, I went back and shared a taxi with a lovely western couple, took a little sight seeing walk around ShiroishiZao station, and then finally crashed at another internet cafe to prepare myself for the hike to Okama Crater on the next day that almost cost me my life (Spoiler alert: I survived).
Stepen – Professional Fox Food Tester


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Two missed chances, and Paul Stirling formed Ireland's highest ODI partnership (174) for the third wicket with captain William Porterfield
Ireland opener Paul Stirling was dropped twice in back-to-back deliveries and the right-hander made good use of his double life in the end with the eighth ODI century of his career.
Stirling eventually scored 130 off 141 balls.
The first chance was grassed in the last ball of the 21st over.
It was a lofted drive from the Irish opening batsman against Bangladesh spinner Mosaddek Hossain, and the ball went up in the air towards long off.
@Irelandcricket have made a decent start with Paul Stirling set on the crease with William Porterfield after losing James McCollum early in their innings. https://t.co/NKTJHEptX6#IRELAND #CRICKET #IRELANDCRICKET #CI #PORTERFIELD #WILLIAM #PAUL #STIRLING #PAULSTIRLING #BCBTIGERS— Dhaka Tribune Sports (@Sport_DT) May 15, 2019
Sabbir Rahman was stationed in that region and he charged in front to take the catch only to drop it while trying to take it with a dive.
Sabbir was perhaps fraction of a second late to react, and Stirling survived.
In the very next over, Stirling got lucky once again as this time, Saifuddin dropped his catch while Shakib al Hasan was bowling.
Two missed chances, and Stirling formed Ireland's highest ODI partnership (174) for the third wicket with captain William Porterfield.
Stirling c Liton b Jayed 130 141
McCollum c Liton b Rubel 5 10
Balbirnie c Mushfiq b Jayed 20 20
Porterfield c Liton b Jayed 94 106
O'Brien c Tamim b Jayed 3 4
Adair hit wicket b Saifuddin 11 7
Wilson c Shakib b Jayed 12 6
Dockrell b Saifuddin 4 5
McCarthy not out 1 1
Extras (lb 6, w 6) 12
Total (50 Overs) 292/8
Fall Of Wickets
1-23 (McCollum), 2-59 (Balbirnie), 3-233 (Porterfield), 4-263 (O'Brien), 5-264 (Stirling), 6-287 (Wilson), 7-291 (Adair), 8-292 (Dockrell)
Jayed 9-0-58-5, Rubel 7-2-41-1, Saifuddin 9-0-43-2, Mosaddek 8-0-32-0, Shakib 9-0-65-0, Mashrafe 8-0-47-0
Tamim b Rankin 57 53
Liton b McCarthy 76 67
Shakib retired hurt 50 51
Mushfiq c Wilson b Rankin 35 33
Mahmudullah not out 35 29
Mosaddek c Wilson b Adair 14 17
Sabbir not out 7 8
Extras (lb 9, w 11) 20
Total (43 Overs) 294/4
Fall Of Wickets
1-117 (Tamim), 2-160 (Liton), 3-224 (Mushfiq), 4-278 (Mosaddek)
Adair 10-0-52-1, McCarthy 10-0-61-1, Little 8-0-67-0, Rankin 7-0-48-2, Dockrell 8-0-57-0
Bangladesh won by six wickets
MoM: Abu Jayed


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FUN FUN: SHERMAN DENAll Events
12 octubre, 2018 @ 23:00
Edu Verdú (Barcelona, 1986) is the man hiding inside the Sharman's Den. Self-taught musician and lyricist, his fate was sealed the day the wreck of an old 3-string guitar fell upon his child hands.
After forming several garage bands during his teens, he ended up joining The Walkers as their guitarist and composer. The band didn't walk so much, but they somehow managed to record an LP produced by the Grammy-awarded producer Doug Boehm: "It's What They Sell You" – Mitik Records (2013).
In between walkers' stumbles, he decided to switch his sunny hometown for the rainy yet musical London. There he took his first steps as Sharman Den, namely serving flat whites to people in suits or busking on the street during the day, and playing in jam sessions or catching up with the psychotropic razzle-dazzle of Dalston at night.
Then he realised that Barcelona wasn't that bad after all… So he came back, gathered a band, cajoled the producer Alberto Pérez (Sol de Sants Studios, Furious Sessions) and recorded the EP "Low Hombre" (2016), a 5-track live compendium of elusive Rock'n'Roll.
The band kicked off quickly, and after trotting about the main venues of the barcelonian scene on an electrifying live show (Luz de Gas, Barts Club, Sidecar, Apolo, Antiga Fàbrica Damm), Sharman Den won the 4th Edition of the Bala Perduda national band contest, earning a slot in the Primavera Sound Festival 2017.


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Fort Myers, FL – Unfortunately, many people, even innocent ones, are arrested every day, and it is imperative to have adequate legal representation when it comes to criminal charges. Once a person is arrested, they will have to prove their innocence as convincingly as possible, which can be especially challenging without the help of an experienced attorney. Attorney Melissa Sherman of The Sherman Defense Law Firm, P.A., emphasizes the importance of hiring a professional attorney, as it can be the difference between paying jail/prison time or being released as soon as possible.
Criminal Defense Lawyers – The Sherman Defense Law Firm, P.A. is a leading criminal defense law firm in Southwest Florida with over a decade of substantial experience in all types of criminal defense cases and personal injury claims under the leadership of attorney Melissa Sherman. Now Ms. Sherman and her team are proud to announce to the residents of Fort Myers and the surrounding areas that the doors of the new office are open to serve their clients with all types of personal injury claims or criminal defense needs.
Announcing its new Fort Myers office, the representative for The Sherman Defense Law Firm, P.A., said: "The early steps of the "Sherman Defense" involves developing a solid theory of the case through various investigative tactics to establish the client's innocence and presenting that information to law enforcement. Also, at this phase of the case, Melissa Sherman will counsel the client through the process of giving a statement to investigating agencies."
Attorney Melissa Sherman's approach to criminal cases has positioned this law firm as one of the top-rated in its field, recognized for its genuine interest in helping its clients obtain the most beneficial results from their cases. Ms. Sherman is committed to using all of her knowledge and experience to fight for her clients' rights, developing a clear theory of defense from the first moment she reviews the case at the initial consultation.
The team from The Sherman Defense Law Firm have extensive experience in a full spectrum of criminal law cases, such as assault and battery, robbery, domestic violence, DUI, hit & run, drug offenses, domestic violence, juvenile crimes, federal crimes, etc. Ms. Sherman's goal is to help her clients lighten the burden of their legal proceedings through objective, effective and transparent, but above all well-documented and consistent representation.
Those looking for premier legal representation may contact The Sherman Defense Law Firm, P.A. via phone 24/7 at (239) 284-5708 for a first consultation. The new office is located at 2256 First St #153, Fort Myers, FL 33901. For more information about the law firm's services, visit its website.
Media Contact
Company Name
The Sherman Defense Law Firm, P.A.
Contact Name
Melissa Sherman
(239) 284-5708
2256 First St #153
Fort Myers
United States
Disclaimer: The views, suggestions, and opinions expressed here are the sole responsibility of the experts. No Daily Pune journalist was involved in the writing and production of this article.


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'Twas the Sunday before Christmas here in New Orleans when the city offered up one of those unforgettable experiences found nowhere else in the United States: large numbers of black people, taking over the streets through song, dance and community, celebrating that their beloved neighborhood, the Lower Ninth Ward, is finally coming back, lo, these five long years since Hurricane Katrina. Sunday, December 19, also happened to be the birthday of two of the city's musical giants: Professor Longhair, the piano genius who died in 1980, and Kermit Ruffins, the singer and trumpet player who is New Orleans's most famous musician of the moment, thanks partly to his appearances in Treme, the HBO series produced by David Simon, creator of The Wire. Ruffins, who has charisma to burn thanks to a gigantic musical gift and an irresistible, nearly constant grin, was born and raised in the Lower Ninth, and he spent his birthday afternoon there, watching with hundreds of his neighbors that uniquely New Orleans phenomenon, a second line street parade.
There are second line parades taking place somewhere in New Orleans nearly every Sunday, sponsored by the "social and pleasure clubs" that historically were among the first community organizations formed by the city's African-American majority. Each neighborhood is allotted a certain Sunday to strut its stuff. The Lower Ninth's turn comes on the Sunday before Christmas. Famous to the outside world as the epicenter of Katrina's death and destruction, the Lower Ninth Ward has also long been home to some of the city's leading musicians and tightest-knit communities. Both were in abundant display as the gloriously raucous procession of costumed dancers and marching musicians, joined along the way by countless passers-by, wound through the streets under mild, sunny skies.
"It's a dream come true, seeing all this come back," Ruffins said as the parade ended. Standing on the median strip of St. Claude Avenue, he pointed to his right and said, "I grew up three blocks over that way. Went to elementary school over there and," turning to point farther right, "high school over there. Now to see people back home, enjoying the neighborhood again, it's a beautiful thing."
Two Lower Ninth social clubs organized this year's second line: "The Original Big 9 Social and Pleasure Club," whose colors were purple and gold, and "The Lower 9th Steppers," outfitted in black and white. The Steppers were led by a sextet of exquisitely beautiful women wearing high heels, fedoras and shiny costumes and waving black-and-white feathered signs in the air as they shimmied down streets closed to vehicles. Behind them, two lines of tuba, trumpet, saxophone and percussion players blew a mighty noise, switching among traditional New Orleans street songs, hosannahs to the Saints football team, a few pop tunes (a joyful medlee of Michael Jackson songs was a particular crowd-pleaser) and more pointed numbers, including one decrying the shameful treatment of New Orleans by federal and state authorities since the storm, "The Backstabbers." ("They smile in your face/All the time they want to take your place/The backstabbers!")
The Lower Ninth Steppers were officially celebrating their 15th anniversary—"Fifteen Years and Still Having Fun," read their black and white feathered signs—but the fact that this year's parade fell on the fifth anniversary of Katrina was lost on no one. As an outsider who has been visiting the Lower Ninth at frequent intervals since the hurricane, I was impressed to see how far the neighborhood has come. By no means has it fully recovered, but life in the Lower Ninth has made steady, sizable progress since those ghastly first months—and years—following the storm, when most buildings and vehicles lay in smashed, rotted ruin (if they hadn't washed away entirely). The Lower Ninth was the last neighborhood in the city to have its running water, electricity and other essential services restored after the storm, even as gun-toting vandals ransacked what little of value remained.
But the December 2010 second line passed unmistakable signs of re-birth: newly constructed or refurbished houses (some sporting the pink or mint green paint often favored here); functioning corner stores and gas stations; accurate street signs; navigable road surfaces. The parade began a few blocks east of the French Quarter and proceeded east on St. Claude Avenue. After crossing the bridge over the Industrial Canal—whose levee collapse was the single deadliest catastrophe of the Katrina nightmare—the second liners entered the Lower Ninth proper. At the command of the two social clubs' leaders and in apparently friendly coordination with the watchful but relaxed presence of New Orleans police officers, the parade soon turned south to visit the Holy Cross section of the Lower Ninth, where Brad Pitt's "Make It Right" green housing project is now up and running and most other houses look comfortably inhabited again. The parade then headed north to Claiborne Avenue, passing along the way Fats Domino's modest, and now apparently empty, house and business complex, before returning to St. Claude Avenue and concluding a few blocks shy of the bridge.
One reason the Lower Ninth was looking good on this Sunday before Christmas was that the parade avoided the hardest-hit parts of the neighborhood, which is understandable. The next day, I bicycled back to the Lower Ninth to get a fuller picture. I was most interested in the Jourdan Avenue area immediately adjacent to the Industrial Canal, the epicenter of Katrina's death toll. The horror there was set in motion when Katrina's floodwaters loosed a massive barge from its moorings farther up the canal and sent it crashing into the east side of the levee. The levee gave way with a bomb-like crash and roiling water gushed through the breach. Within minutes, the flatlands north of Clairborne were drowning as the floodwaters quickly submerged nearly all the houses. Authoritative accounts, including the masterful Breach of Faith by New Orleans Times-Picayune journalist Jed Horne, suggest that more people died here, more quickly, than anywhere else during Katrina.
Today, this section of the Lower Ninth is still mostly empty lots, though here too there are unmistakable signs of recovery. The Army Corps of Engineers has made strengthening the Industrial Canal a priority, and local experts, including John Barry, the author and long-time critic of the Corps who is now leading a local levee board, have expressed confidence that the Corps has done its job well this time. Meanwhile, even here most of the ruined houses have been torn down and the tall weeds cut, leaving behind open space on which to rebuild. The Common Ground Recovery Center, a presence in the Lower Ninth since the earliest days after Katrina, has helped rebuild many houses, as have other religious, student and civic-minded volunteers. Many, though not all, of the new houses reflect one of the key climate change adaptation lessons learned from Katrina: the houses rest on foundations that have been elevated three to six feet or more above the ground.
Not long after Katrina, I met a woman named Miss Bobbie who lived about fifteen blocks east of where the levee collapsed. In her sixties, she was able to get around only with help from her walker or a friend. Miss Bobbie had been fortunate enough to get a ride out of the neighborhood before the storm. When the authorities finally let her return for a visit months later, she found her three room shotgun house only barely standing; its wooden walls now leaned so steeply to the left, they looked like they could fall over any second. Inside, the floor was covered with heaps of crumbled plaster and mildewed, broken furniture.
I've tried to contact Miss Bobbie on my last three visits to New Orleans, but the cell phone number she left me no longer answers. Most likely she will never return, if she is even still alive. But perhaps Miss Bobbie would be pleased to know that the plot of ground next door to hers is another budding sign of hope in the Lower Ninth. An organic garden and school, Sustainable Community Empowerment, now occupies the corner lot where the Blair Family Grocery, one of the few grocery stores in the Lower Ninth Ward pre-Katrina, once sat. Sustainable Community Empowerment is a project organized by a coalition of volunteers from New York City including Qasim Davis, a young African-American from Harlem who is the school's dean of students.
Standing near rows of greens and carrots, Davis said he'd been coming here with the New York to New Orleans Coalition for three years now, just one of countless such civil society initiatives aiming to "Build It Back Green," as the local slogan goes. "Yeah, things have gotten better," Davis agreed. "Now, we have a farmer's market here every Sunday from 10 am to 4 pm. Our aim is to create a fresh food source for this neighborhood, which has been a fresh food desert. The people here love it. And it feels good to make a difference."


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Manuscript Collection
ANDERSON, CHARLES B. (ca. 1919- )
LEAD SHEETS (copies).
Physical description:
.25 l.f.
ca. 1900s-1950s (predominantly 1920s-1940s)
This photocopy was the gift of Charles B. Anderson, San Diego, California who owns the original volume.
Biographical sketch:
Charles B. Anderson (ca. 1919- ) of San Diego, California played saxophone with big band and jazz combos in the 1940s. When he returned from World War II, however, he went into construction "as there weren't enough music jobs to go around." (Letter 6 December 1988).
Performing and collecting popular music remained a lifetime hobby, and by 1988 Anderson has accumulated over 6000 pieces. He also continues to play baritone saxophone with a 40 piece band which gives summer concerts in Balboa Park and works part-time in the library of the Heritage Band Society.
Scope and content:
ca. 2500 saxophone lead sheets (copies) for combo/big band/swing music, 1900s-1950's (predominantly 1920s-1940s). Each entry includes information on the date of first publication, composer, lyricist and associated performer(s). Many also have data on the source and/or history of the song.
The title index which follows was completed by Charles Anderson and includes date of first publication for each song.
This collection is filed by accession number with other manuscript collections.


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Seductive, Country Lodge Club & Resort joins the best of the rural & urban worlds.
Located in the natural heart of Bsalim,
Mount Lebanon. It is only 30 minutes drive from Beirut International Airport & 20 minutes
from Beirut Central District, National Museum, Archaeological sites, shopping malls, entertainment
spots & ski slopes.
Hotel Country Lodge offers
62 rooms & suites, ensuring comfort & personalized service, with the latest in-room technologies
Many other activities & sports equipment are available such as
Aerobics, Martial Arts, Mini-Football, Tennis, Squash & Basketball Courts.


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On a recent, crisp, cold January morning, over 20 nonprofits were represented in Norwich University's Kreitzberg Library's Multi-Purpose room for Green Mountain United Way and Norwich University's Volunteer Coordinator Panel and Networking event. Carrie Stahler of Green Mountain United Way facilitated a discussion by panelists Greg McGrath from Norwich University, Erin Regan from The American Cancer Society and Patty Connor from Central Vermont Home Health and Hospice to discuss volunteer recruitment, placement, retention, and management from a variety of viewpoints.
Greg organizes campus events and activities throughout the school year working with various student groups to accomplish his work. Greg brought a studied volunteer management perspective and spoke about creating systems that benefit your organization and a volunteer's interests. Erin's focus is on working with groups of volunteers regionally to operate the Relay for Life events in Central Vermont and Caledonia County. Erin's input helped us all learn more about successful outreach and relationship building, working with groups and committees, and she really lit up when talking about how to use social media to reach and communicate with volunteers. Patty brought us the perspective of a smaller nonprofit organization and covered how to engage volunteers in various tasks, how to work with departments who use volunteers to ensure volunteers and staff are working well together.
Nonprofits were engaged and had a lot of general and specific questions that informed the conversation. Nicole Didomenico from Norwich University's Center for Civic Engagement hosted the event and shared her experience and ways that Norwich students could help organizations meet their volunteer needs and what limitations faced students that nonprofits should be aware of.
Green Mountain United Way holds volunteer coordinator meetings quarterly alternating between Central Vermont and the Northeast Kingdom. The next meeting will take place in the Northeast Kingdom in April. To get an invitation, join our mailing list by emailing email@example.com.


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Maltodextrin 8 oz
Maltodextrin is used to enhance body and mouthfeel as it is less than 5% fermentable for the majority of yeast strains.
A great way to add body to any type of beer, even gluten-free beers!
This is an 8 oz package of maltodextrin. We also have 1 lb Maltodextrin packages, or if you want to add a little sweetness along with the mouth feel, try using Lactose.


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I am thrilled to be the Growing in Unity Gal for this week. I fell in love with Unity Stamp Company back in 2008 when they came out with an innovative cassette and handle system for stamping. I remember admiring the rows of stamps at the local stamp store hanging in their unique brown paper packages.
Donna Downey's Designs were the first Unity Stamps were the first I fell in love with ... so those are the ones I'm going to use for my first card.
The oldest set in my collection is Unity Stamp Company's Advent!, which Donna featured on her blog in 2010.
I combined one of the wonderful sentiments with a combination of designer papers from the Prima Engraver Collection, some of my favorite soft ivory fiber, and some black gems to frame the sentiment. I collect (and sometimes hoard) beautiful designer papers ... and a single sentiment like this one is often the perfect way to let those papers shine.
In April 2008, I had the privilege to attend Donna Downey's first Inspired! Event. It was a pivotal moment for me as an artist (basically acknowledging to myself that I was an artist, and that I wanted to commit time in my life to creativity) ... and that experience led me down the path I have enjoyed the last 12 years (with opportunities like sharing with you today).
The next card features a stamp from Donna Downey's Empowered Words Unity Stamp set... so many sentiments in this set speak to me. This card will be going into my stash for Chemo Angels, an organization I have volunteered with for the last 12 years, sending cards to individuals who are going through chemotherapy.
The paper in this one was too busy to stamp directly on, so I found another piece of paper from the DCWV Preserved Paper Collection and framed it with another green designer paper that was on the reverse. In keeping with the vintage feel of those big blooms, I layered on a piece of vintage receipt pad and some vintage trading stamps (I'm always on the hunt for these at resale shops) before finishing with a scattering of pearls and that same nubby fiber.
Among those artistic opportunities I've had the pleasure of experiencing the last 12 years was meeting Angela, Whitney and Nick at Junkiefest and getting to take creative classes with them ... truly one of the highlights of the event for me. They are some of the kindest most genuine people in this industry.
And in keeping with their kindness, one of the stamp sets they released in 2019 was #lettersforhenry. This stamp set honors the life and work of Postal Worker Henry Groenveld who loved his job ... but was the victim of workplace bullying ... and proceeds from the sale of the set go to benefit and organization chosen by his daughters to honor his memory (www.intheforefront.org).
The Monday post on my blog is usually a Makeover Monday ... where I take inspiration from one of my earlier card designs and re-make it today. I chose this card from July 2012 to inspire my design (my husband is also a mail carrier, so I tend to collect postal related images).
I loved the fun color combination and layout, so I kept those for my new design. I stamped Henry's Mailbox on the same Coral Cardstock and then paper pieced it with both of the background designer papers.
I used the post-mark image in the set and a 1" paper punch to create my balloons and finished with the hashtag sentiment from the set - #lettersforhenry.
Thanks again for joining me for Day 1 of my Growing in Unity Week. Remember, leave a comment on this post (and the four other posts coming this week) for a chance to win one of two special prize packages filled with Unity Stamp Company Rubber Stamps.
TWO lucky winners will be randomly chosen from the list of commenters. Winners will be posted on this blog, as well as on the Unity Stamp Company Growing in Unity Facebook page after xx.


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|How to Buy
|£7Fits Size 8-10
Women's Coat & Jackets
Women's Sandal & Shoes
Women's Tops & Shirts
View More>>
Women's Leggings/Jeans/Skirts/Trousers
£2Black Leggings Size 8
£6Bay 3/4 Shorts
Other Pages
- Kids Kingdom-collection for Children Fashion's & Accessories
- Bags & Luggages
- Electronics & Gadgets & Accessories
- Jewelry Watches & Eyeglasses
- Men's Clothings & Accessories
Hi there! I have started as a seller on ebay, and gain more than 1000 feedback then finally taken off by the admin due to some unfair if not errors we committed along the way while selling thru ebay. Ebay have striken me down and paypal took my money at their own pleasure. So, I made my own website and from time to time listing the items I have collected and selling.
I have loads of classic mobile phones that I am continuesly selling but have limited time in uploading all the pictures so I have some few just listed and some can be found on facebook marketplace.
I am also collecting clothes for kids, clothings of size 8, 10 and 12 for Women, so why don't you have a look?https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/selling/
So enjoy and Have fun!


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Bob bought a nice little condo in Cary.
He contacted me a couple of weeks later and told me he was getting a sales pitch from someone who was peddling a "Certified Deed."
He wanted to know if this is something he needed.
No. He doesn't need a "Certified" Deed.
This is just a low-level scam that comes around now and then. The scammer follows closings at the courthouse and contacts new homeowners with an official looking letter, offering to help them protect themselves with a "Certified Deed," usually for a fee in the $70–$150 range.
And it is totally unnecessary and useless.
Bob's deed was recorded at the Wake County Courthouse Register of Deeds Office, and is on the public record. When he emailed me asking about the "Certified Deed" scam, I emailed him a link to the recorded deed. That recordation carries more weight than any scammer's fake deed.
And, I told him if he ever had a question about his deed and ownership, he should contact his closing attorney.


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Gravestones And Other Markers
Tracing the development of differing objects of memory provides a general background for understanding the development of gravestones and other markers from colonial times to the present in North America. Based on this overview, three broad traditions emerge: memento mori markers, markers that evoke the phrase, "in memory of," and ignoratio mori markers.
Memento Mori
The memento mori (remember death) tradition, which began with colonization and continues into the present, emerges from and belongs to a set of values that insists on both a devaluation of the body (indeed, all things temporal) and a valorization of the spirit or soul. The most obvious and significant consequence of such insistence is that markers belonging to this tradition discursively and iconographically encourage viewers to remember death as a means of reminding the living to prepare for judgment.
Gravestones and markers belonging to the memento mori tradition tend to be relatively modest structures (between one and five feet in height and width and between two and five inches thick). Characteristically, marker inscriptions provide only the deceased's name, age, date of death, and, less frequently, date of birth, cause of death, and family or community status, with by far the largest number providing nothing more than a brief inscription. Mottos such as the Latin phrases Memento mori and Fugit hora ("time flies" or, more literally, "hours flee") appear on countless early markers from this tradition and leave little room for doubt as to what viewers are to remember. To restate and reinforce the lesson, markers also continually confront viewers with time- and death-related icons.
In Memory Of
A second tradition, which began to emerge during the early years of the eighteenth century and also continues into the present, identifies a particular individual as the object of memory. Initially, proponents of this tradition, which we may designate the "in memory of" tradition, borrowed heavily from the memento mori tradition by producing markers nearly identical in size, shape, and general appearance. However, rather than instructing viewers to "remember death," these new markers discursively and iconographically emphasized the deceased, often drawing attention to emotions occasioned by the individual's death.
With the introduction of rural cemeteries, which specifically reflect the values of this tradition, came a remarkably increased facility for patrons to produce an enormous variety of gravestones and markers. Despite that variety, such markers fall into two general categories.
The first category abides principally by the creed that memorials are, or ought to be, works of art insofar as they serve primarily to draw attention either to the memorial as a work of art or to the work of art as a memorial. Typically, markers belonging to this category borrow heavily from Egyptian, Greek, Gothic, and Roman sources.
The second category draws attention not only to the memory of the deceased and to the work of art as a memorial (or to the memorial as a work of art), but also to pathetic sentiments. Some of the more common focal points for this kind of marker are the faithful animal, the poised angel, women and children, and replicas of nature or natural phenomena. In all, markers within this tradition generally serve not as a means of reminding viewers of their urgent need to bring order out of chaos in order to prepare religiously for death, but as a means of encouraging viewers to live aesthetically, homeopathically, and naturally in the moment.
Ignoratio Mori
A third tradition, which we may designate the ignoratio mori ("ignore death") tradition, began to appear in gravescapes as early as the mid–eighteenth century and continues into the present. This tradition initially borrowed heavily from previous traditions. However, rather than replicating themes indicative of those traditions, this tradition sets death aside and focuses heavily on the lived accomplishments of the deceased. In general terms this tradition developed in three divergent but complementary directions.
The first direction produced markers that explicitly emphasized the deceased's worldly achievements, social or cultural standing, and heroic actions. The second direction produced memorials specifically designed to be erected in towns and cities, which afforded the double advantage of allowing proponents to construct memorials of sufficient size and of dissociating their tradition from the gravescape (and, thus, death). The third direction emerged as a consequence of the introduction of the lawn cemetery, a gravescape explicitly designed to reflect and articulate the values underlying this tradition. Here, markers (and again death) are flush with or slightly depressed into the ground so that the only immediately visible memorial efforts are those selected by adherents to this tradition and thus can insure that all memorials contained within this funerary environment conform to appropriate values.
See also: Burial Grounds ; Cemeteries AND Cemetery Reform ; Epitaphs ; Lawn Garden Cemeteries
Ariès, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death, translated by Helen Weaver. New York: Vintage, 1982.
Farrell, James J. Inventing the American Way of Death. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980.
Forbes, Harriette Merrifield. Gravestones of Early New England and the Men Who Made Them, 1653–1800. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927.
Gorer, Geoffrey. Death, Grief, and Mourning. New York: Doubleday, 1965.
Linden Ward, Blanche. Silent City on a Hill: Landscapes of Memory and Boston's Mount Auburn Cemetery. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989.
Ludwig, Allan I. Graven Images: New England Stonecarving and Its Images, 1650–1815. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1966.
Meyer, Richard E., ed. Cemeteries and Gravemarkers: Voices of American Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1989.
Morris, Richard. Sinners, Lovers, and Heroes: An Essay on Memorializing in Three American Cultures. Albany: SUNY Press, 1997.
Tashjian, Dickran, and Ann Tashjian. Memorials for Children of Change: The Art of Early New England Stone Carving. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1974.