text:
Static/Dynamic Filtering for Mesh Geometry
The joint bilateral filter, which enables feature-preserving signal smoothing according to the structural information from a guidance, has been applied for various tasks in geometry processing. Existing methods either rely on a static guidance that may be inconsistent with the input and lead to unsatisfactory results, or a dynamic guidance that is automatically updated but sensitive to noises and outliers. Inspired by recent advances in image filtering, we propose a new geometry filtering technique called static/dynamic filter, which utilizes both static and dynamic guidances to achieve state-of-the-art results. The proposed filter is based on a nonlinear optimization that enforces smoothness of the signal within designated neighborhoods, while preserving signal variations that correspond to features of certain scales. We develop an efficient iterative solver for the problem, which unifies existing filters that are based on static or dynamic guidances. The filter can be applied to mesh face normals followed by vertex position update, to achieve scale-aware and feature-preserving filtering of mesh geometry. It also works well for other types of signals defined on mesh surfaces, such as texture colors. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed filter for various geometry processing applications such as mesh denoising, geometry feature enhancement, and texture color filtering.
1 Introduction
Signal filtering, the process of modifying signals to achieve desirable properties, has become a fundamental tool for different application areas. In image processing, for example, various filters have been developed for smoothing images while preserving sharp edges. Among them, the bilateral filter [1] updates an image pixel using the weighted average of nearby pixels, taking into account their spatial and range differences. Its simplicity and effectiveness makes it popular in image processing, and inspires various follow-up work with improved performance [2, 3, 4, 5].
Besides image processing, filtering techniques have also been utilized for processing 3D geometry. Indeed, many geometric descriptors such as normals and vertex positions can be considered as signals defined on two-dimensional manifold surfaces, where image filtering methods can be naturally extended and applied. For example, the bilateral filter has been adapted for feature-preserving mesh smoothing and denoising [6, 7, 8, 9].
Development of new geometry filters has also been inspired by other techniques that improve upon the original bilateral filter. Among them, the joint bilateral filter [2, 3] determines the filtering weights using the information from a guidance image instead of the input image, and achieves more robust filtering results when the guidance provides reliable structural information. One limitation of this approach is that the guidance image has to be specified beforehand, and remains static during the filtering processing. For image texture filtering, Cho et al. [4] address this issue by computing the guidance using a patch-based approach that reliably captures the image structure. This idea was later adopted by Zhang et al. [10] for mesh denoising, where a patch-based guidance is computed for filtering the face normals. Another improvement for the joint bilateral filter is the rolling guidance filter proposed by [5], which iteratively updates an image using the previous iterate as a dynamic guidance, and is able to separate signals at different scales. Recently, this approach was adapted by Wang et al. [11] to derive a rolling guidance normal filter (RGNF), with impressive results for scale-aware geometric processing.
For guided filtering, the use of static vs dynamic guidance presents a trade-off between their properties. Static guidance enables direct and intuitive control over the filtering process, but is not trivial to construct a priori for general shapes. Dynamic guidance, such as the one used in RGNF, is automatically updated according to the current signal values, but can be less robust when there are outliers or noises in the input signal. Recently, Ham et al. [12] combine static and dynamic guidance for robust image filtering. Inspired by their work, we propose in this paper a new approach for filtering signals defined on mesh surfaces, by utilizing both static and dynamic guidances. The filtered signal is computed by minimizing a target function that enforces consistency of signal values within each neighborhood, while incorporating structural information provided by a static guidance. To solve the resulting noncovex optimization problem, we develop an efficient fixed-point iteration solver, which significantly outperforms the majorization-minimization (MM) algorithm proposed by [12] for similar problems. Moreover, unlike the MM algorithm, our solver can handle constraints such as unit length for face normals, which are important for geometry processing problems. Our solver iteratively updates the signal values by combining the original signal with the current signal from a spatial neighborhood. The combination weights are determined according to the static input guidance as well as a dynamic guidance derived from the current signal. The proposed method, called static/dynamic (SD) filtering, benefits from both types of guidance and produces scale-aware and feature-preserving results.
The proposed method can be applied to different signals on mesh surfaces. When applied to face normals followed by vertex updates, it filters geometric features according to their scales. When applied to mesh colors obtained from texture mapping, it filters the texture image based on the metric on the mesh surface. In addition, utilizing the scale-awareness of the filter, we apply it repeatedly to separate signal components of different scales; the resulting components can be combined according to user-specified weights, allowing for intuitive feature manipulation and enhancement. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our filter. We also release the source codes to ensure reproducibility.
In addition, we propose a new method for vertex update according to face normals, using a nonlinear optimization formulation that enforces the face normal conditions while preserving local triangle shapes. The vertex positions are computed by iteratively solving a linear system with a fixed sparse positive definite matrix, which is done efficiently via pre-factorization of the matrix. Compared with existing approaches, our method produces meshes that are more consistent with the filtered face normals.
In summary, our main contributions include:
we extend the work of Ham et al. [12] and propose an SD filter for signals defined on triangular meshes, formulated as an optimization problem;
we develop an efficient fixed-point iteration solver for the SD filter, which significantly outperforms the MM algorithm from [12] and is able to handle constraints such as unit normals;
we propose an efficient approach for updating vertex positions according to filtered face normals, which produces new meshes that are consistent with the target normals while preserving local triangle shapes;
based on the SD filter, we develop a method to separate and combine signal components of different scales, enabling intuitive feature manipulation for mesh geometry and texture color.
2 Related Work
In the past, various filtering approaches have been proposed to process mesh geometry. Early work from Taubin [13] and Desbrun et al. [14] applied low-pass filters on meshes, which remove high-frequency noises but also attenuate sharp features. To better preserve features, more sophisticated image filtering techniques such as the bilateral filter [1] were adapted to mesh domains. On images, the bilateral filter updates a pixel using a weighted average of its neighboring pixels, with larger contribution from pixels that are closer in spatial or range domain. It can smooth images while preserving edges where there is large difference between neighboring pixel values [15]. Different methods have been developed to adapt the bilateral filter to mesh geometry. Fleishman et al. [6] and Jones et al. [7] applied the bilateral filter for feature-preserving mesh denoising, by treating vertex positions as geometry signals. Later, Zheng et al. [8] performed mesh denoising by applying the bilateral filter on mesh face normals instead, followed by vertex position update to reconstruct the mesh shape. Recently, Solomon et al. [9] proposed a framework for bilateral filter that is applicable for signals on general domains including images and meshes, with a rigorous theoretical foundation. Besides denoising, bilateral filtering has also been applied for other geometry processing applications such as point cloud normal enhancement [16] and mesh feature recovery [17].
The bilateral filter inspired a large amount of follow-up work on image filtering. Among them, the joint bilateral filter [2, 3] extends the original bilateral filter by evaluating the spatial kernel using a guidance image. It can produce more reliable results when the guidance image correctly captures the structural information of the target signal. This property was utilized by Eisemann & Durand [2] and Petschnigg et al. [3] to filter flash photos, using corresponding non-flash photos as the guidance. Kopf et al. [18] and Cho et al. [4] applied the joint bilateral filter for image upsampling and structure-preserving image decomposition, respectively. In particular, [4] constructed a patch-based guidance to capture the structure of the input image. This idea was later adopted in [10] for filtering mesh face normals, where the guidance normals are computed using surface patches with the most consistent normals. Zhang et al. [5] proposed a different approach to guidance construction in their iterative rolling guidance filter, where the resulting image from an iteration is used as a dynamic guidance for the next iteration. The rolling guidance filter produces impressive results for scale-aware image processing, and is able to filter out features according to their scales. Wang et al. [11] adapted this approach to filter mesh face normals; the resulting rolling guidance normal filter enables scale-aware processing of geometric features, but is sensitive to noises on the input model. Recently, Ham et al. [12] proposed a robust image filtering technique based on an optimization formulation that involves a nonconvex regularizer. Their technique is effectively an iterative filter that incorporates both static and dynamic guidances, and achieves superior results in terms of robustness, feature-preservation, and scale-awareness. Our SD filter is based on a similar optimization formulation, but takes into account the larger filtering neighborhoods that are necessary for geometry signals. It enjoys the same desirable properties as its counterpart in image processing. In addition, the numerical solver proposed in [12] can only handle unconstrained signals, and is less efficient for the large neighborhoods used in our formulation. We therefore propose a new solver that outperforms the one from [12], while allowing for constrained signals such as unit normals.
Besides filtering approaches, feature-preserving signal smoothing can also be achieved via direct optimization. Notable examples include image smoothing algorithms that induces sparsity of resulting image gradients via -norm [19] or -norm [20] regularization. These approaches were later adapted for mesh smoothing and denoising [21, 22, 23]. Although effective in many cases, their optimization formulation only regularizes the signal difference between immediately neighboring faces. In comparison, our optimization compares signals within a neighborhood with user-specified size, which provides more flexibility and achieves better preservation of large-scale features.
From a signal processing point of view, meshes can be seen as a combination of signals with multiple frequency bands, which also relates with the scale space analysis [24]. Previous work separate geometry signals of different frequencies using eigenfunctions of the heat kernel [25] or the Laplace operator [26, 27]. Although developed with sound theoretical foundations, such approaches are computationally expensive. Moreover, as specific geometric features can span across a wide range of frequencies, it is not easy to preserve or manipulate them with such approaches. The recent work from Wang et al. [28] provides an efficient way to separate and edit geometric features of different scales, harnessing the scale-aware property of the rolling guidance filter. Our SD filter also supports scale-aware processing of geometry signals, with more robustness than RGNF thanks to the incorporation of both static and dynamic guidances.
3 The SD Filter
The SD filter was originally proposed by Ham et al. [12] for robust image processing. Given an input image and a static guidance image , they compute an output image via optimization
where are the pixel values of , and respectively, and are user-specified weights, denotes the set of 8-connected neighboring pixels, and
The first term in the target function is a fidelity term that requires the output image to be close to the input image, while the second term is a regularizer for the output image. The function (see Fig. 2) penalizes the difference between adjacent pixels, but with bounded penalty for pixel pairs with large difference which correspond to edges or outliers. When approaches , approaches the norm. Function is a Gaussian weight function according to the guidance, giving higher a weight to a pixel pair with more similar guidance. Thus the regularizer promotes smooth regions and preserves sharp features according to the guidance, while being robust to outliers.
In this paper, we propose an SD filter for signals defined on 2-manifold surfaces represented as triangular meshes. We begin our discussion with filtering face normals, a common approach for smoothing mesh geometry [29, 8, 9, 10].
3.1 SD filter for face normals
For a given orientable triangular mesh, let be the oriented unit normal of face , computed as
where are its vertex positions enumerated according to the orientation. We associate the normal with the face centroid . We would like to filter the face normals, and update the mesh vertices according to the filtered normals. To define an SD filter for the normals , we must consider some major differences compared with image filtering:
Image pixels are located on a regular grid, but mesh faces may result from irregular sampling of the surface.
To smooth an image, the SD filter as per Eq. (1) only considers the difference between a pixel and its eight neighbor pixels. On meshes, however, geometry features can span across a large region, thus we may need to compare face normals beyond one-ring neighborhoods [11]. Moreover, similar to the bilateral filter, such comparison should consider the difference between the spatial locations, with stronger penalty for normal deviation between faces that are closer to each other.
Therefore, we can compute the filtered normals by minimizing a target function
with a user-specified weight . Here is a fidelity term between the input and output normals,
where are the face normals on the input mesh, and is the area of face on the input mesh. is a regularization term defined as
where are the guidance face normals, and denotes the set of neighboring faces of . The Gaussian standard deviation parameters are controlled by the user. Compared with the image regularizer in Eq. (1), this formulation introduces a Gaussian weight for the spatial locations of face normals. Here is defined according to the Euclidean distance between face centroids because of the simplicity of its computation, but other distance measures such as the geodesic distance can also be used. For each face , its neighborhood is chosen to be the set of faces with a significant value of the spatial weight . Using the empirical three-sigma rule [30], we include in the faces with , which can be found using a breadth-first search from .
The target function is nonconvex because of , and needs to be minimized numerically. In the following, we first show how the majorization-minimization (MM) algorithm proposed by [12] can be extended to solve this problem. Afterwards, we propose a new fixed-point iteration solver that significantly outperforms the MM algorithm and is suitable for interactive applications.
MM algorithm. For the SD image filter, Ham et al. [12] proposed a majorization-minimization (MM) algorithm to iteratively minimize the target function (1). In each iteration, the target function is replaced by a convex surrogate function that bounds it from above, which is computed using the current variable values. This surrogate function is then minimized to update the variables. The MM solver is guaranteed to converge to a local minimum of the target function. Thus a straightforward way to minimize the new target function (4) is to employ the MM algorithm, using the convex surrogate function for at [12]:
Specifically, with the variable values at iteration , we replace the term in the target function by its convex surrogate according to Eq. (7). The updated variable values are computed from the resulting convex problem
Due to the symmetry of neighboring relation between faces (i.e., ), the optimization problem (8) amounts to solving a linear system:
where with being the number of faces, stack the values of and respectively, and is a symmetric matrix with diagonal elements
and off-diagonal elements
The linear system matrix in Eq. (10) is diagonally dominant and symmetric positive definite, and can be solved using standard linear algebra routines.
Fixed-point iteration solver. Although the MM algorithm works well on images, its performance on meshes is often unsatisfactory. Due to larger face neighborhoods, there are a large number of nonzeros in the linear system matrix of Eq. (10), resulting in long computation time for each iteration. In the following, we propose a more efficient solver that is suitable for interactive applications. Note that a local minimum of the target function (4) should satisfy the first order optimality condition for each , which expands into
The equations (11) can be solved using fixed-point iteration
with . In this way, the updated normal of a face is a convex combination of its initial normal and the current normals of the faces in its neighborhood. The convex combination coefficient for a neighboring face normal depends on both the (static) difference between the guidance normals on the two faces, and the (dynamic) difference between their current normals , hence the name static/dynamic filter. Moreover, there is an interesting connection between the fixed-point iteration and the MM algorithm: it can be shown that the iteration (13) is a single step of Jacobi iteration for solving the MM linear system (10).
It can be shown that the fixed-point iteration monotonically decreases the target function value until it converges to a local minimum. A proof is provided in the supplementary material. Moreover, the face normal updates are trivially parallelizable, which enables significant speedup on GPUs and multi-core CPUs. Our fixed-point solver is significantly faster than the MM algorithm, as shown in Fig. 3 where we compare the change of target energy with respect to the computational time between the two solvers. Here the spatial Gaussian parameter is set to three times the average distance between neighboring face centroids in the mesh. To achieve the best performance for the MM solver, we tested two strategies for solving the MM linear system: 1) pre-computing symbolic Cholesky factorization of the system matrix, and performing numerical factorization in each iteration, with the three right-hand-sides for -, and - and -coordinates solved in parallel; 2) conjugate gradient method with parallel sparse matrix-vector multiplication. Due to the large neighborhood size, the MM system matrix has a large number of non-zeros in each row, and the Cholesky factorization approach is much more time-consuming than conjugate gradient. Therefore, we only show the timing of the algorithm with conjugate gradient solver. We can see that the fixed-point solver is much more efficient than the MM algorithm, drastically reducing the energy to a value close to the solution within a fraction of the computational time for one MM iteration. This phenomenon is observed in our experiments with other models as well. Detailed results are provided in the supplemental materials.
Enforcing unit normal constraints. The target function in Eq. (4) adapts the SD filter to mesh face normals in a straightforward way, but fails to recognize the requirement that all normals should lie on the unit sphere. In fact, starting from the unit face normals of the input mesh, can be decreased by simply shrinking the normals without changing their directions, and the filtered normals can have different lengths across the mesh. In other words, without the requirement of unit normals, the difference between two normal vectors is not a reliable measure of the deviation between their directions, which makes less effective for controlling the filter. To resolve this issue, we derive a new target function for optimization, by substituting each normal vector in with its normalization . However, such normalization increases the nonlinearity of the problem and makes its numerical solution more challenging. The MM algorithm is no longer applicable, because the quadratic surrogate in Eq. (7) does not hold here. On the other hand, the fixed-point iteration solver can be slightly modified to minimize efficiently. At a local minimum, the first-order optimality condition amounts to
and is the identity matrix. The matrix represents the projection onto the subspace orthogonal to . Geometrically, condition (14) means that the linear combination must be parallel to . Therefore, we can update via
with . Compared with the previous iteration format (13), this simply adds a normalization step after each iteration.
Similar to the previous fixed-point iteration format, the new solver with Eq. (15) is embarrassingly parallel, and rapidly decreases the target function within a small number of iterations (see Fig. 4). In the following, all examples of SD normal filtering are processed using this solver.
Vertex update. After the face normals are filtered, the mesh vertices need to be updated accordingly. Many existing methods compute the new vertex positions by enforcing the orthogonality between the new edge vectors and the target face normals [29]. Although very efficient, such methods can result in a large number of flipped triangles, because the orthogonality constraint is still satisfied if the updated face normal is opposite to the target one. To address this issue, we propose a new update method that optimizes the vertex positions by directly enforcing the oriented normals as soft constraints, in the same way as [31]. Specifically, for each face with a target oriented unit normal , we define as the feasible set of its vertex positions for which the resulting oriented unit normal is . The new vertex positions are then determined by solving
Here the first term penalizes the deviation between the new vertex positions and the original vertex positions , with being the Frobenius norm. is a user-specified positive weight, which is set to 0.001 by default. Matrix stores the vertex positions of face in its rows. Matrix
produces the mean-centered vertex positions for a face. are auxiliary variables representing the closest projection of onto the feasible set , and is an indicator function for , so that
The second term of the target function (16) penalizes the violation of oriented normal constraint for each face, using the squared Euclidean distance to the feasible sets. The use of mean-centering matrix utilizes the translation-invariance of the oriented normal constraint, to allow for faster convergence of the solver [31]. Overall, this optimization problem searches for new vertex positions that satisfy the oriented normal constraints as much as possible, while being close the original positions. It is solved via alternating minimization of and , following the approach of [31]:
First, we fix and update . This reduces to a set of separable subproblems, each projecting the current mean-centered vertex positions of a face to the corresponding feasible set . Namely, we look for vertex positions that is closest to while achieving the target oriented unit normal . Note that for the oriented normal condition to hold, must lie on a plane orthogonal to . Moreover, as the mean of the three vertex positions in is at the origin, it can be shown that the mean of must also lie at the origin. As a result, must lie on a plane that passes through the origin and is orthogonal to . The closest projection from onto this plane can be computed as
Let be the oriented unit normal for the current vertex positions . Then depending on the relation between and , we have two possible solutions for .
If , then the oriented unit normal for is , and we have .
If , then the oriented unit normal for is . In this case, the solution degenerates to three colinear points that lie in the plane of and minimizes the distance . This can be computed as
where is the right-singular vector of corresponding to its largest singular value.
The subproblem for each face is independent and can be solved in parallel.
Next, we fix and update . This is equivalent to
where the sparse matrix collects the mean-centering matrix coefficients for each face. This amounts to solving a sparse positive definite linear system
where is the identity matrix. The three right-hand-sides of the system corresponds to the -, -, and -coordinates, and can be solved in parallel. Moreover, the system matrix is fixed during all iterations, thus we can pre-compute its Cholesky factorization to allow for efficient solving in each iteration.
The above alternating minimization is repeated until convergence. We use 20 iterations in all our experiments, which is sufficient to achieve nice results.
Our vertex update method can efficiently compute a new mesh that is consistent with the target face normals, while being close to the original mesh shape. Fig. 5 compares our approach with the vertex update method proposed in [11], which also avoids flipped triangles. Given the target oriented normal for each face, they first rotate the current face to align its oriented normal with the target normal; then the new vertex positions are computed by matching the new face gradients with the rotated ones in a least-squares manner, by solving a Poisson linear system. For each method, we evaluate the deviation between the resulting mesh and the original mesh by aligning their centroids to minimize their norm of their vertex deviation (shown in the top center of Fig. 5), and then visualizing the deviation of each vertex via color coding. The resulting mesh using our method is noticeably closer to the original mesh, as we explicitly enforce closeness in our target function. This is desirable for many applications such as mesh denoising. In addition, we compute the deviation between the resulting face normals and the target normals, and visualize their distribution using histogram as well as color-coding on the mesh surface. Our method leads smaller deviation between the target and the resulting normals. Although computational time of our method (0.4313 seconds) is higher than the method from [11] (0.1923 seconds), it does not make a significant difference to the total filtering time (see Table I).
3.2 SD filter for texture colors
Our SD filter can be applied to not only face normals, but also other signals defined on mesh surfaces. One example is RGB colors from texture mapping. Given a texture image associated with a triangular mesh, we can use the texture coordinates to identify each pixel that gets mapped to the surface, as well as its mapped position on the mesh. Let be the guidance colors for these pixels. We can compute the filtered texture colors for the pixels by minimizing the target function in Eq. (4), with replaced by respectively, and with the neigborhood determined according to the 3D positions . In this way, the texture image is filtered according to the metric on the mesh surface instead of the distance on the image plane. The optimization problem is solved using unconstrained fixed-point iteration similar to (13). Fig. 6 shows some examples of texture color filtering.
4 Results and Applications
In this section, we use a series of examples to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our SD filter, as well as its various applications. We also compare the SD filter with related methods including optimization [22] and rolling guidance normal filter (RGNF) [11].
Implementation. Our algorithm is implemented in C++, using the Eigen library [32] for all linear algebra operations. For filtering of face normals, we run the iterative solver until one of the following conditions is satisfied: 1) the solver reaches the maximum number iterations, which is set to 100 for all our experiments; or 2) the area-weighted norm of normal changes between two consecutive iterations is smaller than a certain threshold angle , i.e.,
We set to 0.2 degrees in all our experiments. For filtering of texture colors, we run the solver for 50 iterations. Unless stated otherwise, all examples are run on a desktop PC with 16GB of RAM and a quad-core CPU at 3.6 GHz, using OpenMP for parallelization.
In all examples, the spatial Gaussian parameter is specified with respect to the average distance between adjacent face centroids, denoted as . By default, the initial signal is used as the guidance. For more intuitive control of the optimization, we also rescale the user-specified regularizer weight according to the value of . As increases, the integral of spatial Gaussian on the corresponding face neighborhood also increases, and the relative scale of the regularizer term with respect to the fidelity term grows. Therefore, we compensate for the change of the regularizer scale due to , by rescaling with a factor .
The source code for our SD filter is available at https://github.com/bldeng/MeshSDFilter. The parameters for the examples in this section can be found in the supplemental material.
Scale-aware and feature-preserving filtering. The SD filter can effectively remove features based on their scales according to the user-specified parameters. This is demonstrated in Fig. 7, where the input models are a sphere and a cube with additional features of different scales on the surfaces. Using different parameter settings, the SD filter gradually removes the geometry features of increasing scales, while preserving the sharp edges on the cube. Similar scale-aware and feature-preserving effects are observed for filtering of texture colors, as shown in Fig. 6.
In Figs. 8, 9, and 10, we show more examples of scale-aware and feature-preserving filtering of mesh geometry using the SD filter, and compare the results with optimization method from [22] and RGNF from [11]. We tune the parameters of each method to achieve the best results, while ensuring the comparable effects from different methods. In all examples, the SD filter achieves better or similar results compared with RGNF, and outperforms optimization. In Fig. 8, the input model is a cube with additional features on each face, and resulting mesh with the SD filter is the closest to the cube shape. The RGNF leads to a result with larger deviation from the cube shape, because the filtered signals are computed as a combination of the original signals within a neighborhood; as a consequence, when there is large deviation between the input signals and the desired output within a certain region, RGNF may not produce a desirable result inside the region. In Fig. 9, the SD filter is able to smooth out the star-shaped features on the knot surface, while enhancing the sharp feature lines between different sides of the knot. Although optimization also enhances the feature lines, it leads to piecewise flat shapes because the norm promotes piecewise constant signals. In Fig. 10, the three methods produce similar results on the Merlion model, while the scale-awareness of the SD filter enables it to remove the fine brick lines at the base while clearly retaining the letters.
Choice of parameters. Our filter is influenced by four parameters: the regularizer weight , the spatial Gaussian parameter which also influences the neighborhood size, the guidance Gaussian parameter , and the range Gaussian parameter . For both and , a larger value leads to a smoother result, as shown in Fig. 12. Parameters and determine which face normals within a neighborhood affects the central face in a fixed-point iteration. For more intuitive control, we propose a method to interactively set the and parameters. Firstly, the user selects two smooth regions on different sides of a feature intended to be kept. We denote the two regions as and , and compute the mean and variance () of the normals within each region via
Then the range of is determined using the following strategy: should be small enough such that the two mean normals have negligible influence on each other according to the range Gaussian; at the same time, within each region the normals should influence each other such that sharp features do not emerge. Based on this strategy, we first determine the lower- and upper-bounds of via
If , then the user needs to select another pair of regions; otherwise, a value between and as the parameter . In our experiments, good results can often be achieved by choosing and setting with . Fig 11 shows the effects of different values on the Chinese lion model.
Feature manipulation and enhancement. The scale-awareness of our filter enables us to manipulate mesh details according to their scales. Given an input mesh , we can apply the SD normal filter with different parameters, to obtain a series of filtered meshes with less and less fine details retained. If we denote the input mesh as , then forms a coarse-to-fine sequence of meshes, with being the base mesh, and being the original mesh. We encode the difference between two consecutive meshes by comparing their corresponding vertex positions and face normals, represented as and , where and are the vertex positions and face normals of mesh . These differences represent the required deformation for to introduce the additional details in . They can be linearly combined according to coefficients and added to the face normals and vertex positions of the base mesh, to derive the target vertex positions and target face normals for a new mesh :
Note that the target vertex positions and target face normals are often incompatible, i.e., the face normals for a mesh with the target vertex positions are different from the target normals. To combine the two conditions, we determine the new mesh by solving the same optimization problem as our vertex update (16), with the matrix in the target function storing the target vertex positions. In this way, the linear combination coefficients indicate the contribution of geometric features from the original model within a certain range of scales. By changing the value of , a user can control geometric features according to their scales. Setting all coefficients to 1 recovers the original mesh, while setting a coefficient to a value different from 1 can boost or attenuate the features of the corresponding scales. Moreover, the linear system matrix for the optimization problem is fixed regardless of the value of , and only needs to be pre-factorized once. Afterwards, the user can choose any value of , and the resulting mesh can be efficiently computed using the pre-factorized system. This allows the user to interactively explore different linear combination coefficients to achieve desirable results. Figs. 1, 13, and 14 show examples of new meshes created in this manner. We can see that the coarse-to-fine sequence of meshes captures the geometrical features of different scales, which are effectively manipulated using the linear combination coefficients. In some application scenarios, it is desirable to only modify the features within a certain region on the surface. In this case, the target vertex positions and target normals are only computed via linear combination within user-selected regions; outside these regions they remain the same as the original mesh. Fig. 16 shows such an example, where a 3D human face model is locally enhanced.
Similarly, we can manipulate and enhance texture colors based on the SD filter, as shown in Fig. 15. We first filter the input texture image incrementally to derive a coarse-to-fine sequence of texture images . Then a new texture image is computed via linear combination with coefficients :
Mesh denoising. By constructing appropriate guidance signals, our SD filter can also be applied for mesh denoising, as shown in Fig. 17. Here we repeatedly apply the SD normal filter to an input mesh to remove the noise. In each run of the SD normal filter, the guidance normals are computed from the current mesh using the patch-based construction approach proposed in [10]. For each model, we run the SD filter for multiple times to perform denoising. The results are evaluated using the average normal deviation and the average vertex deviation from the ground truth mesh as proposed in [10]. In addition, similar to [9], we measure the perceptual difference between the denoised mesh and the ground truth using the spatial error term of the STED distance proposed in [33], computed with one-ring vertex neighborhood. Fig. 17 compares our denoising results with the guided mesh normal filtering (GMNF) method from [10]. The results from the two methods are quite close, with similar error metric values. Detailed parameter settings are provided in the supplementary materials.
Performance. Using parallelization, our SD filter can compute the results efficiently. Table I provides the representative computation time of the SD normal filter on different models, showing the timing for each part of the algorithm:
: the pre-processing time for finding the neighborhood;
: the average timing of one iteration;
: the timing for mesh vertex update;
: The total timing for the whole filtering process.
For meshes with less than 100K faces and with , the whole process typically takes only a few seconds.
|Welsh Dragon
5 Discussion and Conclusion
We present the SD filter for triangular meshes, which is formulated as an optimization problem with a target energy that combines a quadratic fidelity term and a nonconvex robust regularizer. We develop an efficient fixed-point iteration solver for the problem, enabling the filter to be applied for interactive applications. Our SD filter generalizes the joint bilateral filter, combining the static guidance with a dynamic guidance that is derived from the current signal values. Thanks to the joint static/dynamic guidance, the SD filter is robust, feature-preserving and scale-aware, producing state-of-the-art results for various geometry processing problems.
Although our solver can incorporate simple constraints such as unit length for normal vectors, we do not consider global conditions for the signals. For example, we do not ensure the integrability of normals, i.e., the existence of a mesh whose face normals match the filter results; as a result, some parts of the updated mesh may not be consistent with the filtered normals. Neither do we consider the prevention of self intersection of the updated mesh. Due to the local nature of our fixed-point iteration, it is not easy to incorporate such global constraints into the solver. A possible remedy is to introduce a separate step to enforce these conditions after a few iterations. A more in-depth investigation into such global conditions is an interesting future work.
In this paper, we only consider the filtering of face normals and texture colors on mesh surfaces. But our formulation is general enough to allow for other scenarios. In the future, we would like to extend the filter to other geometry signals such as curvatures and shape operators, and to other geometric representations such as point clouds and implicit surfaces.
We thank Yang Liu for providing the implementation of RGNF. The Welsh Dragon mesh model was released by Bangor University, UK, for Eurographics 2011. This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (No. 2016YFC0800501), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61672481, No. 61672482 and No. 11626253), and the One Hundred Talent Project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
- [1] C. Tomasi and R. Manduchi, "Bilateral filtering for gray and color images," ser. ICCV '98, 1998.
- [2] E. Eisemann and F. Durand, "Flash photography enhancement via intrinsic relighting," ACM Trans. Graph., vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 673–678, 2004.
- [3] G. Petschnigg, R. Szeliski, M. Agrawala, M. Cohen, H. Hoppe, and K. Toyama, "Digital photography with flash and no-flash image pairs," ACM Trans. Graph., vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 664–672, 2004.
- [4] H. Cho, H. Lee, H. Kang, and S. Lee, "Bilateral texture filtering," ACM Trans. Graph., vol. 33, no. 4, pp. 128:1–128:8, 2014.
- [5] Q. Zhang, X. Shen, L. Xu, and J. Jia, "Rolling guidance filter," in Computer Vision–ECCV 2014. Springer, 2014, pp. 815–830.
- [6] S. Fleishman, I. Drori, and D. Cohen-Or, "Bilateral mesh denoising," ACM Trans. Graph., vol. 22, no. 3, 2003.
- [7] T. R. Jones, F. Durand, and M. Desbrun, "Non-iterative, feature-preserving mesh smoothing," ACM Trans. Graph., vol. 22, no. 3, pp. 943–949, 2003.
- [8] Y. Zheng, H. Fu, O.-C. Au, and C.-L. Tai, "Bilateral normal filtering for mesh denoising," IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graphics, vol. 17, no. 10, pp. 1521–1530, 2011.
- [9] J. Solomon, K. Crane, A. Butscher, and C. Wojtan, "A general framework for bilateral and mean shift filtering," arXiv preprint arXiv:1405.4734, 2014.
- [10] W. Zhang, B. Deng, J. Zhang, S. Bouaziz, and L. Liu, "Guided mesh normal filtering," Comput. Graph. Forum, vol. 34, no. 7, pp. 23–34, 2015.
- [11] P. Wang, X. Fu, Y. Liu, X. Tong, S. Liu, and B. Guo, "Rolling guidance normal filter for geometric processing," ACM Trans. Graph., vol. 34, no. 6, p. 173, 2015.
- [12] B. Ham, M. Cho, and J. Ponce, "Robust image filtering using joint static and dynamic guidance," in CVPR, 2015.
- [13] G. Taubin, "A signal processing approach to fair surface design," ser. SIGGRAPH '95, 1995, pp. 351–358.
- [14] M. Desbrun, M. Meyer, P. Schröder, and A. H. Barr, "Implicit fairing of irregular meshes using diffusion and curvature flow," ser. SIGGRAPH '99, 1999, pp. 317–324.
- [15] S. Paris, P. Kornprobst, J. Tumblin, and F. Durand, Bilateral filtering: Theory and applications. Now Publishers Inc, 2009.
- [16] T. Jones, F. Durand, and M. Zwicker, "Normal improvement for point rendering," IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 53–56, 2004.
- [17] C. C. Wang, "Bilateral recovering of sharp edges on feature-insensitive sampled meshes," IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graphics, vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 629–639, 2006.
- [18] J. Kopf, M. F. Cohen, D. Lischinski, and M. Uyttendaele, "Joint bilateral upsampling," ACM Trans. Graph., vol. 26, no. 3, p. 96, 2007.
- [19] L. Xu, C. Lu, Y. Xu, and J. Jia, "Image smoothing via gradient minimization," ACM Trans. Graph., vol. 30, no. 6, pp. 174:1–174:12, 2011.
- [20] L. I. Rudin, S. Osher, and E. Fatemi, "Nonlinear total variation based noise removal algorithms," Phys. D, vol. 60, no. 1-4, pp. 259–268, 1992.
- [21] G. Taubin, "Introduction to geometric processing through optimization," IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 88–94, 2012.
- [22] L. He and S. Schaefer, "Mesh denoising via minimization," ACM Trans. Graph., vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 64:1–64:8, 2013.
- [23] H. Zhang, C. Wu, J. Zhang, and J. Deng, "Variational mesh denoising using total variation and piecewise constant function space," IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 21, no. 7, pp. 873–886, 2015.
- [24] P. Perona and J. Malik, "Scale-space and edge detection using anisotropic diffusion," IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell., vol. 12, no. 7, pp. 629–639, 1990.
- [25] J. Sun, M. Ovsjanikov, and L. Guibas, "A concise and provably informative multi-scale signature based on heat diffusion," in Proceedings of the Symposium on Geometry Processing, 2009, pp. 1383–1392.
- [26] B. Vallet and B. Lévy, "Spectral geometry processing with manifold harmonics," Computer Graphics Forum, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 251–260, 2008.
- [27] H. Zhang, O. Van Kaick, and R. Dyer, "Spectral mesh processing," Computer Graphics Forum, vol. 29, no. 6, pp. 1865–1894, 2010.
- [28] R. Wang, Z. Yang, L. Liu, J. Deng, and F. Chen, "Decoupling noise and features via weighted -analysis compressed sensing," ACM Trans. Graph., vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 18:1–18:12, 2014.
- [29] X. Sun, P. L. Rosin, R. R. Martin, and F. C. Langbein, "Fast and effective feature-preserving mesh denoising," IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graphics, vol. 13, no. 5, pp. 925–938, 2007.
- [30] F. Pukelsheim, "The three sigma rule," The American Statistician, vol. 48, no. 2, pp. 88–91, 1994.
- [31] S. Bouaziz, M. Deuss, Y. Schwartzburg, T. Weise, and M. Pauly, "Shape-up: Shaping discrete geometry with projections," Computer Graphics Forum, vol. 31, no. 5, pp. 1657–1667, 2012.
- [32] G. Guennebaud, B. Jacob et al., "Eigen v3," http://eigen.tuxfamily.org, 2010.
- [33] L. Vasa and V. Skala, "A perception correlated comparison method for dynamic meshes," IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 220–230, 2011.


text:
From Declan Breathnach, TD (23 June 2016)
To ask the Minister for Finance his views on a rebate of value added tax on authorised works associated with protected structures. [11546/16]
From Minister Michael Noonan, Department of Finance
The VAT treatment of goods and services is subject to the requirements of EU VAT law (primarily Council Directive 2006/112/EC) with which Irish VAT law must comply. Under the VAT Directive, construction services are liable to VAT and no exemptions are permitted, whether for specified purposes or otherwise.
In order to maintain the integrity of the VAT system Ireland has not introduced any new VAT refund orders since the 1980s and any changes to VAT refunds since then have been either by EU requirement or making minor changes to existing refund orders. The scope of such a scheme could prove to be very wide and there would be considerable risk of abuse as well as significant administrative costs.
However, where a protected structure is used for the purposes of making supplies that are liable to VAT, the trader can recover the VAT borne in respect of works on such a structure, provided he or she is registered for VAT.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Your shopping cart is empty
In stock
Hand-made royal icing flower cupcake decorations with leaves.
These handmade royal icing decorations contain 6 Pink flowers and 6 leaves to make individual and unique cupcake toppers.
Pack of 12.
Potato starch; sugar; rice flour; emulsifiers: E414, E466; glucose syrup; colours: E102, E122, E129, E133; cornstarch; glazing agents: E903, E904.
E102, E122 & E129 may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children.
Allergy Advice:
Suitable for vegetarians. Gluten free.
Nutritional Information: Typical values per 100g


text:
Our Office Listings
Lot 110 48 Powers Road in Whites Lake: 40-Timberlea, Prospect, St. Margaret`S Bay Vacant Land for sale (Halifax-Dartmouth) : MLS®# 201919992
Lot 110 48 Powers Road Whites Lake B3T 0H6 : 40-Timberlea, Prospect, St. Margaret`S Bay
Don't miss this opportunity to own your own piece of land in beautiful Whites Lake, Build your Dream home, get away cottage, or whatever you desire. Close to Schools, Shops, Granite Springs Golf, Marinas and much more. I hear they stopped making land a while ago, get yours before its gone! Call today for more information!
Data was last updated July 6, 2020 at 11:20 AM (UTC)


text:
Frederick II
Frederick II or Frederick the Great, 1712–86, king of Prussia (1740–86), son and successor of Frederick William I.
Sections in this article:
- Introduction
- Foreign Affairs
- Character
- Early Life
- Bibliography
- Internal Affairs
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
See more Encyclopedia articles on: German History: Biographies


text:
Today's blog post comes from our friend Meredith Wood over at Fundera.
Read ON!
Today's blog post comes from our friend Meredith Wood over at Fundera.
Read ON!
Topics: Career, CEO Advice
Today is International Women's Day. I've been thinking about today and Women's History Month for weeks in order to write this post. What words of wisdom would I be able to share with our colleagues, our clients and our followers?
Topics: Gender Diversity, Business Imperative, Making the Business Case, CEO Advice, Leading Women
Just in time for International Women's Day, Worldwide Business with kathy ireland® announced an exclusive story featuring our CEO and Founder, Susan Colantuono. Susan will be discussing the importance of closing the gender gap that exists within various industries, sectors and companies on Sunday, March 4, 2018 (check your local listings for times).
Topics: Closing the Gender Gap, Gender Dynamics, Gender Diversity, Women's Leadership Development, CEO Advice
In advertising, it's the transition from managing the client to
managing the business.In construction, it's the transition from managing the project to
managing the business.In professional services firms it's the transition from delivering client services to
advancing the business by revenue generation.In your company, it is likely the transition from managing managers to
running a business.
Topics: Talent Development, Leadership, Career, IWiN, CEO Advice
In an interview on Worldwide Business with kathy ireland® that will be airing this coming weekend, Leading Women's CEO Susan Colantuono was asked the question: "If you had one piece of advice to give to a CEO, what would it be?
She answered, "As a CEO, or as an executive or director for that matter, if women aren't proportionately represented throughout your organization, you aren't facing a women's issue — you're facing a talent development issue with business implications. And so it's important to bring your personal commitment and the same level of organizational accountability to that challenge as you would to any business issue."
Topics: Talent Development, Gender Dynamics, Leadership, Gender Diversity, Women's Leadership Development, Making the Business Case, CEO Advice


text:
Anytime. I am just a phone call, text, or email away! Enjoy your beauty experience at home or in my Edmonton area home studio💕
0item(s) in your Bag
Your bag is currently empty
Independent Sales Director
Carissa McKee
Send me a message
(306) 807-0013
(306) 807-0013
What you need for flawless skin.
Colour to suit your style.
Revitalize from head to toe.
Find your signature scent.
Be perfectly groomed.
The perfect little something.
We use cookies and other similar tools to help you discover what you love about Mary Kay. By continuing to use this site, you consent to the use of cookies on your device unless you have disabled them. You can change your cookie settings using the controls on your web browser at any time, but parts of our site may not function correctly without them... (Click To Close)


text:
Wednesday, June 25, 2014
Stripping MAIS Of Its Authority Akin To Belittling The Sultan
The calls to curtail MAIS' authority came after the council did not agree with the Selangor state executive council's order for JAIS to return the 300 over bibles it confiscated from the Bible Society of Malaysia (BSM) in January.
On June 17, four PAS Parliamentarians - Khalid Abdul Samad (Shah Alam), Dr Siti Mariah Mahmud (Kota Raja), Hanipa Maidin (Sepang) and Che Rosli Che Mat (Hulu Langat) urged the Selangor State Government to abolish executive powers from MAIS, so that it no longer has authority over JAIS.
The move is to free the Selangor state government from the MAIS' authority in administering Islam in the state.
However, the calls have incensed the Muslims who fear MAIS may end up a victim of a vicious political game, and that the move reflected the continuous onslaught on Islam of late.
A senior lecturer with the Al-Quran and Al-Sunnah Studies Department at the Islamic Studies Faculties in Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) Dr Fadlan Mohd Othman in commenting on the matter said any proposal to strip MAIS of its authority is not a wise move.
"Those who want to see MAIS' wings clipped are those who fail to see the real picture as the move will weaken the Islamic administration in the state," he said to Bernama.
He pointed out further that it was highly inappropriate and improper to undermine the state religious councils as the councils operate under the powers vested on the Sultan as the head of Islam.
Fadlan noted that there were two school of thoughts over this call, it is part of the freedom of expression as espoused in a democratic nation or an affront to the Sultan.
"Even if it is about freedom of expression, the elected representatives have to behave ethically and with great respect. I do not know why the elected representatives from PAS made such unwise proposal," he said.
Fadlan, who is also the Chairman of the Malaysian Young Ulema Congregation (Ilmu), believed that the call made by PAS to strip off MAIS' of its authority is akin to belittling the Sultan.
In fact, the Selangor Chapter of the Council of Former Elected Representatives Malaysia (Mubarak) voiced its opposition over the calls to curtail MAIS' authority.
Mubarak Selangor was reported saying that MAIS and JAIS, established to administer and advocate Islam in Selangor, had carried out their roles and responsibilities effectively.
"As Islam in the state comes under the purview of the Sultan of Selangor, the call not only belittles the powers of his highness but also of all Malay rulers.
"Mubarak Selangor emphasizes that all elected representatives in Selangor should show their loyalty to the state and the sultan," said Mubarak Selangor.
Prior to this, the Attorney-General's Chambers announced there would not be any prosecution related to the seizure of the Bibles, simultaneously closed the case.
Subsequently, Selangor Menteri Besar Tan Sri Abdul Khalid Ibrahim ordered JAIS to return the Bibles to BSM.
Nevertheless, on June 14 MAIS disagreed with the Selangor Government's directive, clarifying it was outside the jurisdiction of the state government.
No comments:
Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)


text:
I don't know if the current musical Sister Act is better than the Whoopi Goldberg film it is based on. I didn't see the original. But the musical, playing at the Broadway Theatre, was definitely the highlight of my recent trip to New York. It is nonstop funny. And Alan Mencken, the composer, did a good job in making variety even among its mock-disco songs. Yet it was probably Chester Gregory, dancing as Eddy, who stole the show. All in all, it produced probably the most enthusiastic audience I've witnessed.
While we were in NY, my wife and I also went to Top of the Rock, located at 30 Rockefeller Center. At the top of 30 Rock, we were given a view of the rivers surrounding Manhattan similar to that provided by the Empire State Building. Our tour of Rockefeller Center, which was part of the package, was helped by a knowledgeable guide, who showed us a large amount of Art Deco sculptures and paintings.
The Saturday night of our visit was marked by Occupy Wall Street activity in Times Square. That night we stayed away from Time Square. We'd seen the show the night before. But walking down Sixth Avenue in the forty blocks, we saw considerable commotion. A large number of police officers stood watching the side streets, and paddy wagons sat filled with protesters.
That's the thing about New York. You see much that is historical, but you also see history being made.
Finally, I can't omit mentioning our first visit to the Magnolia Bakery located in Rockefeller Center. We'd been to the Greenwich Village Magnolia numerous times, so we decided to try the midtown branch, and found it in a relatively small nineteenth century building. The midtown cupcakes actually tasted much better than the Village ones.
As with Sister Act, improvements can be made on the original.


text:
26 Birds killed following Windsor Park cockfighting bust
Twenty-six game birds were confiscated and later humanely put to death last Wednesday when officers executed a search warrant at an address in Windsor Park.
According to a release from the police about the incident, the DoA Animal and Welfare Unit had received several complaints about animal cruelty at the location.
Acting on complaints received from the community, a search was undertaken at the address and the birds were confiscated.
The birds confiscated during the operation were later humanely euthanized on veterinary advice, according to the release.
A 42-year-old man at the residence was also warned for prosecution for animal cruelty.
"From our officers' observations almost all of the roosters had no access to food and water, and some appeared to be suffering from recent trauma consistent with fighting ventures," said Brian Crichlow, Assistant Director of the Department of Agriculture.
"Cockfighting is brutal, cruel and illegal, and is being treated as the crime that it is." He added.
"This operation was a priority for us not only because of the cruel and illegal activities believed to be taking place but also because it came about in response to community complaints," Inspector Courtney Myles, Head of the RCIPS Community Policing Department.
"When residents identify and share information with us about issues affecting their neighbourhoods, whatever they may be, we will always take concrete steps to address them, together with our enforcement partners," added Myles.
The incident is under joint investigation by police and DoA officers.
Anyone with further information regarding this incident or other instances of is asked to contact the George Town Police Station


text:
It so happens that I grew up knowing that I would have had a cousin who, if she had lived, would have been much older than me.
I was told she was a very beautiful child who looked normal in every way but could do very little for herself. She had some kind of incurable brain disorder but I don't know what it was.
I was told that my aunt travelled the world far and wide with her ill daughter looking for a cure.
I have no idea whether any doctor said they could help or whether they told her nothing could be done.
I have no idea how much money she spent looking for a cure or whether she encountered any medical quacks on the way. If she did I have no idea whether she paid them money for their quackery.
I often think about the sickness burdens that people have to bear, and how normal it would be to want, in desperation, to travel to the ends of the earth looking for a cure for your child. It often strikes me also, how vulnerable such people are when they are offered false hopes in exchange for financial gain.
Last weekend there was quite a little flurry of potential legal activity on the medical blogosphere. Copyright law, harassment law and heaven knows what other kinds of law were entering the scene.
By far the most moving of these fracases involved a child from the UK with a rare brain tumour who is attending a clinic in the USA known as "The Burzynski Clinic"
It has a website:
It looks as if it is a major, important, well-funded centre of excellence.
The child is a little girl whose name is Billie, and people are rallying round to raise money to help her travel to and from Texas to obtain treatment that they feel may help her. It is treatment that is not available in this country. The Billy Butterfly Fund has been set up.
The Observer newspaper on 20 November carried an article about her.
To be honest, The Witch Doctor was completely unaware of this establishment, or the treatment it offers. The name of the treatment sounds convincingly scientific. It is known as Personalised Gene Targeted Cancer Therapy, using certain peptides known as Antineoplastons.
If Antineoplastons are so important in the treatment of cancer, why has The Witch Doctor never come across them before?
When she first heard the term she knew what the word implied, but she hadn't a clue what the damned things were!
Is she an ignorant, poorly trained, out of touch witch who does not read the journals and doesn't keep up to date?
After all, she missed that they are mentioned on the National Cancer Institute's website:
Why are they not being used in the UK? Has NICE stepped in and decided the treatment is too expensive?
NICE may have its faults, but depriving a child of effective treatment for a rare brain tumour is not one of them.
Has Dr S R Burzynski made a cancer breakthrough?
If so, we should all know about it, because that is the nature of research and The Scientific Method.
Is there something rotten the State of Texas?
It seems some bloggers who are more educated than The Witch Doctor on these matters are well aware of Dr Burzynski's antineoplaston therapy and have been keeping an eye on it for some time.
They are expressing views that are not favoured by those working in the Burzynski Clinic.
Bloggers have been very seriously threatened and, as a consequence, antineoplaston therapy has gone viral!
It is good that controversial views are being aired publically over this clinic because it is definitely in the public interest since it involves patients worldwide including some from the UK. If, as it is alleged, that a lot of money is passing from the hands of vulnerable cancer patients and their relatives, or charities set up to help them, to those making bogus claims over a useless cancer drug, information is now available on the WWW that can be followed up and any Wibblers of Woo that are around can be exposed.
Alternatively, if the clinic concerned has indeed found a treatment that can significantly help cancer patients, even if it is not a cure, and the oncologists worldwide are ignorant of it, then that is good news too. After all, ethical doctors can have no secrets when it comes to sharing cancer research that might benefit patients worldwide.
Either way, opening the conversation up in the blogosphere is in the public interest.
No doubt it will eventually become apparent whether this is a scam, a fanatical belief in the power of a useless medication, or a genuine cancer drug that offers hope to at least some cancer patients.
However, questions need to be asked about why a spokesman for the Burzynski Clinic is threatening a group of bloggers who, in the public interest, want to learn more about the Scientific Method being used to asses the treatment being offered by this clinic.
Here are links highlighting among other things, the bloggers who have been targeted by Marc Stephen, head of marketing for the Burzynski Patient Support Group.
It all makes interesting reading.
It needs to stay viral until the research surrounding this therapy has been revealed and published in the medical journals and has been thoroughly peer reviewed.
The Witch Doctor – Link to a random page
© Dlundin | Dreamstime.com


text:
Virtual volunteering is at its peak. Explore our interactive map of the most in-demand skills, and how nonprofits in the field are adapting quickly.
I like to say that I am an experienced beginner in Excel and would like to become "intermediate". I am looking to learn how to do pivot tables, etc. that are considered more intermediate level.
I use Excel quite often and I feel that I am not using it to the fullest. I do a lot with tracking donors/sponsors and the logistics for a booster card program and I want to have systems in order to make it much more efficient.
The mission of the Boy Scouts of America is to prepare young people to make ethical and moral choices over their lifetimes by instilling in them the values of the Scout Oath and Law.
The Boy Scouts of America was created in 1910, and has been active in New Jersey since that time. The Jersey Shore Council was formed in 1992 with the merger of the Ocean County and Atlantic Area Councils. The service area includes all those two counties plus southeastern Burlington County and Ocean City. More than 5,500 youth were served in 2016 throughout our service area. It is among the largest youth serving organizations in the state of New Jersey led by approximately 1,750 volunteers. More than 100 community organizations, representing educational, religious, non-profit, civic, and business organizations join in partnership with Jersey Shore Council by chartering 175 Scouting units (packs, troops, teams, crews, posts and groups). From Cub Scouting, with thrilling outdoor programs such camping, and other outdoor adventures - on to Boy Scouts and Venturers, with camporees, summer camps, Scouting shows, and national jamborees - families can enjoy building a lifetime of experiences unmatched by other organizations. This experience can lead to The Order of the Arrow, Scouting's national camping honor society to obtain the rank of Eagle Scout, extending their participation from teen years well on into adulthood.
(No testimonial has been submitted by Kim)
(No testimonial has been submitted by Jack)


text:
Triple Tone – Designer Jewellery
Earring and Necklace Real Gold Look 24K Set
You want to make a style statement and stun all, look no further than this unique triple tone choker necklace. Featuring a mix of three best shades of Gold, Rose Gold and Moon Silver. The curved design is sure to light up any event while the Stainless Steel plating never fades giving you the perfect look every time!
"This products is environment friendly and does not contain lead, cadmium, nickel. Triple plating prevents fading and discoloration"


text:
The Goat Girl Of Bandra, originally uploaded by firoze shakir photographerno1.
I am street photographer a beggar poet .. I shoot misery cavorting with hope I shoot original content. I am Shia Sufi Hindu all in One
Thursday, October 7, 2010
The Goat Girl Of Bandra
The Goat Girl Of Bandra, originally uploaded by firoze shakir photographerno1.
Poetry and Prose
Poetry and Prose, originally uploaded by firoze shakir photographerno1.
149,104 items / 1,142,364 views
the soul of humanity
the simian guru with
his two legged
disciple firoze
up close
the guru
me photography
poetry and prose
which together 'as a
a paper boat called blog
on cybernetic waters
of my angst flows
touching the shores
of your destiny
as it grows and grows
pain passion pathos '
intertwined in
worldly woes
time and tide
in bodily throes
for a second
like a drop of tear
'on a mound of her
her sensuality
it terminally froze
it was not me
bound by her karma
it was another
man she lovingly
chose ..a friend
of a friend
of my foe
not fred
not benn
not glenn
not bill
not joe
bursting 'the bubble
of my denuded dream
with a lethal blow
memories through
'the trapdoor of my
my mindlessness
move to and fro
her fragrance
the muskiness
of her sweaty body
slithering as
she ethereally
kisses my dead
body bleeding
on the floor
time stops
as the dead
poets soul
echoes and roars
some women
were born angels
some women
were 'christened
as whores
Shah-e-Mardan Sher-e-Yazdan Quwat-e-Parwardigar Lafata Ila Ali La Saif Ila Zulfiqar , originally uploaded by firoze shakir photographerno1 ....
Ek Shahenshah Ne Banake Yeh Haseen Tajmahal Ham Gareebon Ki Mohabbat Ka Udaya Hai Mazak.. , a photo by firoze shakir photographerno1 on Fli...


text:
Agoura Hills, Ca | (818) 707-2365
These last few days have been very busy up on campus. The remediation team is hard at work and has begun the process of cleaning all of the classroom spaces. They have begun pulling up the carpeting, removing the ceiling tiles and cleaning the books and toys that are in the classrooms. They have also begun to power wash portions of campus, so once a building is cleaned we will not track any contaminants back into the rooms.
This week we are hopeful that the temporary power will be installed and some additional debris removal (wood chips, sand, etc…) and landscaping will begin. We will be rebuilding the fence along the freeway in the coming days, and you soon you will notice temporary fencing to enclose portions of the campus.
The weeks ahead will be busy and we will be sure to keep everyone posted of our milestones as they occur.
Thank you.
Global sidebar elements will load here. Edit them on this page.
Request a campus tour
Or call us today
(818) 707-2365
Request a Campus Tour
© 2015 Ilan Ramon Day School | Staff Login
Privacy Policy


text:
Rent a car by supplier Alamo at with BookingCar - profitable, convenient and easy.
In case of any problems associated with the rental car, BookingCar company decides them as quickly as possible.
We will be there for you 24 hours a day.
Feel free to contact us at +1 (573) 664-02-88.
For the price of the questions there, the car could have been better to offer
For the first time we rented a car for 10 days. Long thought, after all, the term is long and there is little that will happen. But it's hard for children to be without a car in another country, they decided to take a chance. I can say that there is not much difference in how much you take the car. The main thing is to learn the rules and drive neatly.
There was an emergency situation, could not contact the company representatives, it was a day off. It would be necessary to establish somehow this issue. And in general the car was in good condition, there were no traces from previous customers. It is noticeable that they try to please every client.


text:
Churches mobilize to help families impacted by immigration raids
Free Press wire reports | 8/16/2019, 6 a.m.
CANTON, Miss. - The children of Sacred Heart Catholic Church streamed out into Mississippi's blistering heat last Sunday afternoon, carrying what they said was a message of opposition against immigration raids their parents could not.
"I will not sit in silence while my parents are taken away," read a sign carried by two Hispanic boys. They were among a group of several dozen marchers who set out on foot from the church to the town square in Canton to protest the 680 migrant arrests at seven poultry plants in Mississippi on Aug. 7.
"Imagine coming home and not finding your parents," said Dulce Basurto-Arce, an 18-year-old community college student, describing how parents of friends were arrested. "We are marching so no other kid has to go through what we went through. Let our voices be heard!"
The student spoke from the steps of the same courthouse in Canton where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once rallied protesters against segregation in a 1966 "March Against Fear" across Mississippi.
Churches were the backbone of the Civil Rights Movement. Today, as President Trump and his Republican allies continue to defend the raids, churches have emerged as the top sources of spiritual and material support to the mostly Mexican and Guatemalan workers targeted by the immigration raids.
Some churches are going beyond comfort and material aid, with their response flaring into political opposition. Mississippi's Catholic, Episcopal, United Methodist and Evangelical Lutheran bishops denounced the raids in a joint statement Aug. 9.
The bishops said they would aid the immigrant families, saying there is "an urgent and critical need at this time to avoid a worsening crisis."
"We are called ... to speak the truth. And the truth is this is not right," said Bishop Brian Seage of the Episcopal Diocese of Mississippi, speaking at a news conference a day after the raids.
On Sunday, Trump administration officials defended their actions amid emotional pleas from children to let their parents go.
Acting Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan acknowledged that one video of an 11-year-old sobbing was "emotional," but said the girl was quickly reunited with her mother.
"I understand that the girl is upset. And I get that," Mr. Morgan said on CNN. "But her father committed a crime."
Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan acknowledged that the timing of the raids was "unfortunate," coming hours before President Trump visited El Paso, Texas, where a man who told authorities he was targeting Mexicans killed 22 people on Aug. 3. But Mr. McAleenan told NBC the operation had been planned for more than a year.
Hours after the officials' televised appearances on Sunday, more than 250 people filled Sacred Heart to overflowing. A few were white people there to show support, but most were Hispanic congregants who normally attend the weekly Spanish-language Mass. Deacon Cesar Sanchez, who is originally from Mexico's Michoacan state and is studying to be a priest in the Jackson, Miss., diocese, gave a homily in Spanish in which he spoke of Jesus also being an immigrant and a refugee. He said the church is a pilgrim church and that "God is with his people."


text:
Makaton symbols and signs to help enjoyment and understanding of the book Ten in the Bed by Penny Dale.
Rob Delaney reads and signs Ten In The Bed for the CBeebies Bedtime Story
This was the first time Makaton has been used for the CBeebies Bedtime Story.
"My family loves to read together so naturally we're fans of CBeebies Bedtime Stories. I am beyond honoured to be the first person to read and sign a book using the Makaton language. Our family learned Makaton to be able to communicate with our son Henry, who couldn't speak due to a tracheotomy. We're sad Henry isn't here to see it but we're happy other families will get to enjoy a story told in Makaton." Rob Delaney
See also: Susan Laughs: the second Makaton-signed CBeebies Bedtime Story, read by Mr Tumble.


text:
|Consecrator Support Track
|Order of the Talon
|Unit Type
|Light Tank
|Offensive Support
|Secondary Ability
|Reverse nozzle
Consecrator leaves a trail of flame behind it, damaging enemies
|Production Time
|Veterancy Upgrade(s)
|• Increased range (vet)
• Blinding oil (elt)
• Increased speed; corrosive oil (her)
• Oil spray ablaze (div)
|Dev. Status
|Country of Origin
|Forged by
|Dagda Forge
|Key Features
| » Crude oil tank (capacity classified)
» Rotating nozzle configuration
» Steam engine overcharged to dangerous levels
» Talon Steel roasting forks
» Ample stash of marshmallows
"Oil? What do they think they're - AAAAHHHH! IT BURNS!!!"
- - Unfortunate Noble Officer
Tactical Analysis Edit
- Now all we need is a lit match: The Consecrator sprays oil onto enemies, soaking them in extremely flammable oil that, when an affected unit is subsequently targeted by a Talon flamethrower, results in an even more spectacular conflagration than usual. Or in layman's terms, more damage.
- Dirty water: The Consecrator and its oil spray has a use at sea, too - submarines are blinded and forced to surface, while ships are slowed in the gooey mess. Amphibious infantry and animals, including dolphins, tend to die a messy death if caught in the oil slick.
- Trailblazer: By reversing the oil spray and taking advantage of unsafe engineering, the Consecrator can lay down a trail of fire behind the vehicle to discourage pursuit or create brief barriers in the field. Theoretically, active use of this ability could even see a Consecrator crew gain veterancy.
- Supporting unit only: As a result of their decidedly unsafe design, Consecrators are not at all durable, and barring their trail of fire and infantry at sea, cannot directly damage enemies on their own. The trail of fire is itself easily avoided, and won't bother tanks in any event. Consecrators are support units, and their threat is directly proportional to the other Talon forces with the machines.
Background Edit
At times, military forces deployed at war have found themselves facing unexpected difficulties that don't leave room for an elegant solution, and the Order of the Talon is not immune to such developments. What would later be branded the Consecrator Track had its origins in such an incident. Shortly after the First World War, the Talon had tracked a group of its hated enemies to a fortified stronghold in England.
The Order deployed a cell to eliminate the problem, but nature itself seemed bent on denying the Talon - England was drenched in a series of torrential downpours so fierce that many of the Talon's incendiary weapons found themselves doused or otherwise of only limited use. Cleric tracks were only of limited use against the Cult stronghold, in the eyes of the cell, while an infantry assault would demand unacceptable losses.
The Talon warriors needed a way to use their flame weapons to effect in the most adverse conditions, and the solution they found was as crude as it was effective.
The crusaders had captured the Cult's fuel reserves in a depot outside their base, and an innovative (and possibly insane) craftsman suggested a solution: attach one of the captured fuel tanks to a stripped-down Wraith mortar track, put the thing on a rotating dais, and hook up a large spray nozzle to the tank. Even if the environment was damp and soggy, oil seldom fails to be flammable.
The resulting jury-rigged machine was volatile, slower than the original, put a massive strain on the engine, was crewed by a crew of lunatics who didn't mind the duty, and... effective. Anything covered by the oil would light up like a candle, even vehicles and bunkers usually boasting a resistance to flame damage. Cultists who tried to escape into the sea found themselves mired in minor oil spills, with rapidly fatal results.
Another interesting development occurred when a group of cultists managed to get behind the machine, and the crew rotated the nozzle to spray the offending infantry - if nothing else, an oil spray would probably blind them. Instead, a great deal of the oil ran over the back half of the track, which included the perilously overcharged steam engine. The oil ignited immediately, resulting in a trail of fiery destruction stretching behind the machine. With the aid of this new weapon, the Cult stronghold was successfully purged.
Afterwards, the Talon's smiths decided to formalize the vehicle and adding it to the Talon military worldwide. Dubbed the Consecrator, the machine otherwise saw remarkably few changes from the original improvised weapon. Its armour was reinforced, especially over the vulnerable oil tank, and a sluice channel added to the rear to channel the incendiary oil in a relatively controlled fashion, but the machine has otherwise survived today as much the same weapon.
Crusaders have found its oil spray to also be useful for spreading oil slicks at sea that slow down surface vessels and force submarines to the surface, but by and large, its primary role is still dousing enemies in oil to ensure even more spectacular pyrotechnics than usual when Talon flame-based weaponry strikes the hapless foe.


text:
Tom Dundon, the Alliance of American Football's new majority owner, has threatened to fold the league despite having invested $70m (€62m) into the business.
It is unclear how serious Dundon is with his threat but he is looking to secure cooperation from the NFL Players' Association to use young players from NFL rosters in Alliance squads.
The NFLPA is believed to be reluctant to loan active NFL players to the Alliance because it would violate the terms of the Collective Bargaining Agreement and because of the injury risk.
Dundon, who also owns the NHL's Carolina Hurricanes, committed to invest $250m into the Alliance and he has reportedly already invested $70m after just six weeks.
"If the players union is not going to give us young players, we can't be a development league," Dundon told USA Today. "We are looking at our options, one of which is discontinuing the league."
Dundon is poised to make a decision about the league's future later this week.
The Alliance, which was founded by Charlie Ebersol, has struggled with TV ratings and attendances since it launched and recently moved its championship game from Las Vegas to a 12,000-seater venue in Frisco, Texas.
For more on the vision behind the AAF, click here.


text:
Items where Author is "Giaglis, G"
|Up a level
Group by: Item Type | No Grouping
Jump to: Article
Number of items: 1.
Giaglis, GM, Klein, S and O'Keefe, RM (2002) The role of intermediaries in electronic marketplaces: developing a contingency model INFORMATION SYSTEMS JOURNAL, 12 (3). pp. 231-246.
Information about this web site
© The University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, GU2 7XH, United Kingdom.
+44 (0)1483 300800
+44 (0)1483 300800


text:
Nov 29, 2018
Category: Living
There's no way to tell when or if the apocalypse will actually befall us. But that doesn't mean it's not going to happen. As such, it might be better to be prepared. And, if you're wealthy enough, one of the best ways to make that happen is by purchasing a Vivos xPoint Survival Bunker.
Located in the Black Hills of South Dakota — a location chosen for the fact that it's a non-seismic area, far from major metropolitan areas, and outside the range of tsunami submersion zones — this 18-square-mile plot of land is one of the safest places in North America. And while that's the primary selling point, the prospect is not without its creature comforts, as each unit boasts 2,200 square feet of space, arched ceilings, customizable floor plans, and LED simulations of natural outdoor lighting. There are even amenities similar to normal gated communities, including onsite 24/7 security, a members-only restaurant and bar, a gym — there's even a medical center. Units start at $35,000 — but there is a stringent application process.


text:
Product details
ZW Self priming sewage pump/trash pump/waste water pump
Product details
ZW series self-priming sewage pumps are with self priming and sewage discharge. It means the pumps can not only be self priming as the same as ZX series self priming pump for clean water without foot valve and pouring water but also suck and discharge the large grain and long fiber and sediment and impurity in the waste water. And the performance is very steady. It is very convenient to operate and move and install and maintain.
①Environment temperature≤45℃,Liquids temperature≤120℃。
②Liquid PH: Cast iron pump :6~9,Stainless steel :1~14。
③Max grain diameter can be 60% of caliber for pump. Length of fiber can be 5 times as caliber for pump.
④Impurity weight into liquid can not more than 15% of liquid weight. Liquid density≤1240kg/cm3
Same type of products More...
ZW Self priming $ 0.00
Automatic satur $ 1,000.00
Lubricant oil p $ 1,000.00
10L single Wall $ 1,800.00
1U Redundant Pow $ 0.00
|Comment on the content:
|Enter verification code:
Seller information
|Zhangjiagang free trade zone kenshine international trading Co.,LTD
|Shine Xin
|suzhou Jiangsu
|Room 216-108, Textile Resources Market,Zhangjiagang


text:
Download: 800x600 | 1024x768 | 1280x800 | 1280x1024 Wallpaper size image of celebrities Sonam Kapoor, Shekhar Ravjiani, Atul Kasbekar and Shabana Azmi from the movie Neerja (2016).
Join Bollycurry for free to comment on this photo. Have an account already?
Use Login to comment.
View: 1799 Comments: 0
Forum Code
HTML Embed Code
Direct Wallpaper Sized images of Cast of 'Neerja' with Neerja Bhanot's real brothers at Promotional Event of the film Image Download Links 800x600 | 1024x768 | 1280x800 | 1280x1024 from Atul Kasbekar Event Photo Gallery.


text:
Dennis Kucinich in the Democratic primary for Ohio governor: endorsement editorial
For Democrats in this year's race for Ohio governor, the choice should come down to passion, vision and an ability to grasp the bully pulpit to inspire Ohioans about the need for change.
Only one candidate fulfills those criteria: Dennis Kucinich, the former Cleveland mayor and nine-term congressman.
Ohio's next governor must be a fighter — a fighter for greater equity, justice and common sense; a fighter for the state's urban centers; and a fighter against the moribund thinking on education, diversity, economic opportunity and home-rule rights that's held Ohio back for too long.
The editorial board of cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer is as aware as any could be of Kucinich's flaws.
But of the major Democratic candidates, Kucinich is the one most likely to challenge Statehouse inertia.
For 24 of the last 28 years, Ohio's had Republican governors. The Ohio Senate's been Republican since 1985, the House, apart from two years, since 1995. Old habits die hard. But die they must.
Yes, Kucinich, 71, needs aides who will say no. And he must never again make nice with Syrian butcher Bashar Assad. But business as usual in Columbus has left too many Ohioans behind. And a Kucinich governorship wouldn't be business-as-usual.
A Democratic governor would likely face a GOP-run Senate and probably a GOP-run House. So he would have to be the megaphone spurring citizens to demand legislative action on such problems as these:
* Unintentional drug overdoses that killed 4,050 Ohioans in 2016, compared to 3,050 a year earlier.
* Accelerating gun violence with a legislature more interested in allowing guns in bars and day care centers than applying common-sense brakes on the most lethal weaponry, requiring universal background checks and letting cities beset with gun crimes set their own policies.
* Infant mortality rates that in Cuyahoga County in 2015 were almost double the national average.
* GOP tax cuts that failed to spur the promised jobs bonanza and instead have widened the income gap. Two Ohio State University researchers recently found that "the last year Ohio's per capita income was equal to the nation as a whole was 1968." That was 50 years ago.
Six Democrats want to be governor. The front-runners, besides Cleveland's Kucinich, are: former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray of suburban Columbus; former Supreme Court Justice Bill O'Neill of Chagrin Falls; and state Sen. Joe Schiavoni of Youngstown. Also running: former exotic dancer Larry E. Ealy of Dayton and political newcomer Paul E. Ray of Alliance, neither of whom responded to the editorial board's invitations to provide campaign materials or participate in endorsement interviews.
Cordray, 58, was director of the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from its inception in 2012 until last year, and was Ohio's treasurer from 2007-08. He then served one term as Ohio attorney general before being defeated for re-election in 2010 by Mike DeWine, the front-runner in this year's Republican primary race for governor.
The well-informed Cordray wants to bring Ohioans together, as partners, to address the state's problems, but if he's passionate about leading Ohio or has a vision for its future, he hid it well during the endorsement interview.
O'Neill, 70, a proven statewide vote-getter, wants to create a state mental health hospital network, legalize marijuana and close for-profit prisons. But last November, our editorial board labeled him "unfit for any public office," after he boasted on Facebook of having been "sexually intimate with approximately 50 very attractive females." That followed his self-serving decision not to step down as a state Supreme Court justice after announcing his candidacy for governor — later participating in as many as 99 decisions released by the court, in clear contravention of the state Code of Judicial Conduct, which says: "Upon becoming a candidate in a primary or general election for a nonjudicial elective office, a judge shall resign from judicial office."
Schiavoni, 38, the Ohio Senate minority leader from 2014 to last year, says his experiences representing the Mahoning Valley give him a deep understanding of the economic ills and worries that led so many in that traditionally Democratic area of Ohio to support Donald Trump for president. He's an appealing candidate with a promising political future ahead of him.
Democrats should vote for their futures by nominating Dennis John Kucinich for governor of Ohio. Early voting for the May 8 primary has begun.
Facebook Pages and Groups for You to "Like and Share"
Marietta Oh 9-12 Project
Guernsey County 9-12 Project
Noble County 9-12
Monroe County-9-12
Morgan County-9-12
Muskingum County 9-12


text:
15 October 2011 – 19 February 2012
A small display featuring portraits of children by Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-79), one of the most influential figures in early photography.
The images explored Cameron's vision of childhood, in which children are sacred and the embodiment of innocence. She strove to establish photography as an art form, using soft focus and compositions inspired by Renaissance paintings, and incorporating the irregularities of early photographic processes in her pictures. In doing so, her portraits succeed in conveying the emotional and spiritual aura of the sitter.


text:
Gas burner (Gasburnerindustry), gas welding equipment. Electronic ignition, locking function, continuous use does not hurt welding tip, firepower up to 1300 degrees, butane fuel, adjustable firepower. Can be used for small welding or strong windproof lighter. For electrical maintenance, outdoor picnic fire, light wood can easily ignite.
The use of butane gas as fuel, the flame temperature of its jet flame up to 1300 ℃, due to its good windproof, small size, easy to carry, can be repeatedly inflated, has been widely used in various occasions, such as auto repair, field ignition, welding and Molten plastic rubber parts, metal quenching and welding, connecting and cutting of synthetic materials.


text:
I watched "Dark Heart" starring Tom Riley, going in without any real expectations. I have not read the book on which the drama is based on. Some spoilers follow but not the main reveal.
Will Wagstaffe, aka Staffe is called away from his holiday plans by an unusual murder. Another attack follows. Someone is targeted unconvicted paedophiles and torturing them. Will insists the paedophiles are victims and deserving of justice because the law is paramount. This means dragging up the past for the young victims and their families.
Will is also haunted by the approaching anniversary of his parents' deaths. They were murdered and the perpetrator never found. (This drives Will's desire for administering justice but no progress is made in this case – there are further books featuring the character so possibly it will be addressed later).
Will also has issues with his relationships; his ex girlfriend is the most sympathetic, acknowledging the anniversary and offering him support (emotional but also sexual). Meanwhile Will's sister Juliette aka Jules (Charlotte Riley, no relation to Tom Riley as far I know) and her son, Hal, have come to stay with him in their parents' home. She wants Will to sell the house and move on.
However Jules is a single mother whose idea of moving on is to marry and have more kids with Paulo, who likes to punch her in the face. She says she's staying with Will because the boiler is broken but it's clear she's getting away from Paulo. Yet she soon brings him into Will's home and life, determined to, as Will points out, keep punishing herself by making bad choices.
Will is afraid for his sister and nephew and in one scene follows Paulo and attacks him. Paulo thinks it was a random mugging. Will is willing to break the law when it suits him, despite his earlier sermonising. (He later also compromises evidence by obtaining it illegally.)
The drama is dark in tone and the message seemed to be that everyone is pretty awful. There is no hope in this bleak world, and past tragedies can never be overcome. There's a lot of cigarette smoking which seems to be used to indicate low class/unsympathetic characters.
I guessed the reveal well before it was shown, but it didn't spoil my enjoyment. In fact the more frantic last thirty minutes were the better part of the drama.
Will is hard to summon up strong feelings for. His past tragedy makes him sympathetic, as does his desire to protect his remaining family, but I didn't find him a compelling protagonist. Perhaps he's supposed to be numb hence his world weary attitude.
The supporting police officers were good, Josie Chancellor, willing to call Will out when he needs it, and steadfast Dave Pulford.
The plot summary reads that the drama takes place during a heatwave but I saw no evidence of this, nor any bearing of the weather on the plot.
Overall if you can bear the subject matter it's not a must watch but it is watchable. If future adaptations of the novels are filmed I would check them out.
Dark Heart aka Wagstaffe at IMDB
Dark Heart aired on ITV Encore in November 2016 and was made available On Demand. Check your local listings for current showings.


text:
Apple's new MacBook Pro revenue outpaced every other laptop in its first five days of availability. Well, except for one, its year-and-a-half-old sibling the 12-inch MacBook.
The MacBook Pro revenue in its first five days has reached 78 percent of last year's MacBook, Slice Intelligence said Tuesday. In addition, the new Mac has generated nearly four times that of Microsoft's Surface Book challenger since its debut a year ago.
The figures indicate a huge pent-up demand for the new MacBook Pro lineup, which had gone years without a major revamp.
The figures are not a total win for Apple, as some consumers apparently grew tired of waiting for a new MacBook Pro and bought Windows-powered machines in the meantime. Slice found that among consumers who bought an Apple laptop in 2014, 40% of those shoppers had bought another brand since. But it should also be taken into consideration that some of those customers may have purchased the Windows machine for use as a second computer, or for a family member.
Slice Intelligence bases its figures on behavior of its panel of 4.4 million online shoppers, and tracks online sales only. However, considering the size of their sampling, their numbers likely reflect all shoppers behavior fairly closely.
(Via 9to5Mac)


text:
A parking lot off Riverside's Central Avenue turned into a tent village Wednesday as dozens of people camped out for a chance to win free food at the opening of a new Chick-fil-A drive-thru.
The first 100 people who camp out for 24 hours at the new fast-food restaurant will receive a free sandwich, fries and drink once a week for a year.
Jeremiah and Sarah Dean were the first to arrive, getting there at 4 a.m., two hours before registration began, and their dome-shaped tent got the position closest to the building.
By 3 p.m., the Deans were surrounded by 75 people in an odd assortment of temporary dwellings. By then they were pretty tired, but they had video games and Netflix to pass the time.
Chick-fil-A supplied a DJ and entertainers from a company called Elevate Experiences to keep the participants occupied with pastimes such as scavenger hunts and "Name That Tune."
Chick-fil-A also served them three meals and supplied beverages. The restaurant chain also gave the Deans and other participants identifying wristbands and buttons reading, "I'm one of the first 100." Sarah Dean said staff members conducted regular line checks.
The event ends at 6 a.m. Thursday when participants will be brought inside the restaurant at 3640 Central Ave., Riverside. It opens to regular customers at 6:30 a.m.
The prize for endurance is one free Chick-fil-A Sandwich, a medium order of waffle fries and a medium drink per week for a year. That amounts to about $8 worth of food times 52, meaning that winners get about a $400 return on their time investment.