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spanish | Uso y origen de la expresión "pon tú" | En esta respuesta que da @aparente001, leo la expresión "pon tú" en esta frase:
Pon tú: imagina, vas a construir una casa con métodos tradicionales.
Y en una búsqueda rápida me aparecen otros ejemplos como este:
Pon tú que eres parte de la corte rusa y tu familia es invitada a cenar al Palacio de los zares...
y como este otro:
Por el contexto creo que significa "supón" o "imagina". ¿Estoy en lo cierto? ¿Dónde se usa? ¿Qué significa exactamente? ¿Cómo se originó?
| VQAonline_00059629.png | Ésta es una frase que invita al oyente a imaginar o suponer una situación, o da por cierta una suposición a modo de hipótesis; introduce una hipótesis no de la manera sintáctica habitual (Suponiendo que… Supongamos que… Imaginemos que… Vamos a postular que…) sino por medio de un imperativo. No sé qué nombre tiene esta clase de discurso, pero me recuerda mucho a esas traducciones de la Biblia donde se emplea el imperativo ¡mira! casi como puntuación.
Según leo en este foro, en Chile se dice ponte tú también con el significado de "mira, he aquí que", pero por lo demás el significado es el mismo que el notado en la pregunta. En el diario La Tercera encuentro por ejemplo:
"No digo que sea una causa, pero ponte que se perdió una caja con un par de millones justificables allí."
En España (o por lo menos en Murcia) se usa el ponle:
"Ponle que te da un perrengue. Bebes agua sudando, o te comes un espárrago de bote en mal estado, y sufres una embolia."
En Argentina decimos ponele (o ponéle con la tilde ortográfica que ya no es estrictamente necesaria). Se emplea muchas veces sola esta palabra, sin subordinada, con el sentido de "Supongamos que es así". Hay un ponele de esta clase en Un tal Lucas, de Julio Cortázar (1979). Después de una larga perorata de Lucas, el diálogo sigue así:
—Ponele —dice alguien—, pero frente a la coyuntura histórica el escritor y el artista que no sean pura Torredemarfil tienen el deber, oíme bien, el deber de proyectar su mensaje en un nivel de máxima recepción.
Se dice también pongamos (como en la canción de Joaquín Sabina, Pongamos que hablo de Madrid) y hasta pongámosle, como en el tango Se dice de mí:
Si fea soy / pongámosle / que de eso aún / no me enteré.
En el amor / yo sólo sé / que a más de un gil / dejé de a pie.
En todos los casos hay una oscilación entre los dos usos:
El hipotético: "supongamos que", "imaginemos que".
El concesivo: "aceptando que", "dando por cierto que".
Hay un par de apariciones del ponle tú en Calderón de la Barca (aquí y aquí), que me suenan a algo así como un OK, una simple muletilla verbal, uso que no es muy diferente al uso concesivo que actualmente le damos.
Lamentablemente no sé si pueda responder de dónde viene la expresión. En algunas formas suena como un abreviatura de la forma correspondiente del verbo suponer, pero el pronombre le no va bien con esa teoría.
| https://spanish.stackexchange.com/questions/22225 |
spanish | ¿"Hater" en castellano? | En la jerga de internet, es muy común usar el anglicismo "hater":
Últimamente Twitter está lleno de haters: cada vez que alguien
publica algo sobre el partido X, lo critican sin misericordia.
"Hater" se traduce como persona que odia, pero la connotación es de un odio ligero, muy visceral pero circunscrito al ámbito de lo escrito, sin llegar a la violencia: Alguien puede ser un hater de un lenguaje de programación, un jugador de fútbol o vete a saber qué.
Me pregunto si hay alguna palabra en castellana que quiera decir lo mismo. Se me ocurrió decir odioso, porque los haters lo son, pero esto se referiría a lo que se odia, y no a la persona.
Y ya que estamos, ¿cómo traduciríais "haters gonna hate"? ¿"Los que odian van a odiar"?
| VQAonline_00059582.png | No creo que haya un sinónimo exacto (como casi con todo) pero se me ocurren varias traducciones para escoger, dependiendo del contexto. No sé si entiendo bien lo del panda: ¿se refiere a "disfruta, aunque siempre hay alguien a quien le va a caer mal" o "ya verás como incluso esto le cae mal a alguien"?
Un buen término sería "atrabiliario", que suele aplicarse a la crítica, pero que es de poco uso en la lengua cotidiana. Se podría decir "sus comentarios sobre este tema son atrabiliarios". Para usarlo en el ejemplo que das no funciona muy bien.
Criticón: la traducción podría ser "los criticones lo van a criticar" o "los criticones critican" o incluso "siempre va a haber criticones que critiquen".
Aguafiestas: "los aguafiestas te aguarán (o intentarán aguarte) la fiesta".
Colérico: "los coléricos se encolerizarán".
Sañudo: no es un término muy de uso informal pero se puede decir "lo sañudos se ensañarán".
Rabioso: "los rabiosos se enrabiarán".
| https://spanish.stackexchange.com/questions/17159 |
sports | Can a back row setter reach into the plane to play the ball? | A first hit is over passed towards the net and passes partially through the plane of the net. The back row setter is tall and jumps to pull the ball back with a closed fist. Is this a legal hit? Or does the moment the ball touches the plane mean that the back row setter makes an illegal attack on the ball even though he is pulling the ball back for a third hit?
This is the ball position where the back row setter makes contact.
| VQAonline_00059787.png | (Edited per amended question. TL;DR: the setter made a fault of “reaching beyond the net”, signalled by the referee by a hand placed above the net, palm facing downwards.)
There are two issues when a back-row player sets near/above the net:
Whether the hit itself was legal: Did the setter touch the ball within his own playing space? Was it a proper hit? (Was the ball not held/caught/thrown)? According to your image, the setter touched the ball beyond the net, above the opponent’s court. In that case, the setter made a fault of “reaching beyond the net”, signalled by the referee by a hand placed above the net, palm facing downwards.
When the set is imperfect and the setter actually plays the ball towards the opponent’s court, it counts as an attack hit. And back-row players cannot complete an attack hit from the front zone when the ball is completely above the top of the net. This means that if the setter hits the ball completely above the top of the net towards the opponent’s court, it is an “attack hit fault” if the attack hit is completed, which means either the ball crosses the vertical plane of the net completely, or the opponent touches the ball.
But if the back-row setter touches the ball within his own playing area (or, theoretically, above the free zone, if the ball is overflying the net partially or completely outside the antennae), and plays it “backwards” into his own half of the court or parallel to the net or his teammate touches the ball prior to the ball crossing the net completely and prior to any blocking opponent touching the ball, it is valid play.
Relevant rules (see FIVB Official Volleyball Rules 2015-2016):
9: Each team must play within its own playing area and space
11.4.1 [Player’s faults at the net] A player touches the ball or an opponent in the opponent's space before or during the opponent’s attack hit.
13.1.3: An attack hit is completed at the moment the ball completely crosses the vertical plane of the net or is touched by an opponent.
13.2.3: A back-row player may also complete an attack hit from the front zone, if at the moment of the contact a part of the ball is lower than the top of the net.
13.3.3: [Faults of the attack hit] A back-row player completes an attack hit from the front zone, if at the moment of the hit the ball is entirely higher than the top of the net.
Cf. also cases 3.10.2 and 3.30 in the Volleyball Casebook:
3.10.2
Team A’s setter hit the ball above the net so that at the moment of the hit his/her fingers were in the opponent’s space. After the set the ball flew parallel to the net toward an attacker. The blocker of team B touched the ball in team’s A space, so that the team A player could not execute the attack hit. How should the 1st referee decide?
According to Rule 9, each team must play the ball within its own playing area and space (except in the case of Rule 10.1.2). Therefore, since the setter has hit the ball in the opponent’s space, the setter committed a fault. The blocker also committed a fault by touching the ball in the opponent’s space before the attack hit. However, only the first fault is penalized.
3.30
A back row setter jumped from within the attack zone and set the ball while it was completely above the height of the net, directing it towards an attacker. Before the attacker could contact the ball, it penetrated the vertical plane of the net where it was blocked by the opponent’s setter. Was there a fault?
Yes. The set became an illegal attack hit by a back row player when the attack hit was completed (in this case by contacting the opponent’s block). The rally should have been won by the opponents.
| https://sports.stackexchange.com/questions/12116 |
sports | What does the superscript used in tennis scores mean? | In the score below, what do the 7 and 4 superscripts mean in the first set?
| VQAonline_00059816.png | When a set reaches 6-6, a tiebreaker is used to determine the winner of the thirteenth game and hence the set. The first player serves once, then the players alternate serving twice consecutively, scoring one point per point won, until one player has both
seven points or more, and
a lead on the opponent of two points or more
The superscript numbers record the final score in the tiebreaker. The first set went to 6-6, where a tiebreaker was played to a score of 7-4 in Carreno Busta's favour, winning him the set 7-6.
Compare with other matches in the competition on the same day.
Dolgopolov wins first set versus Schwartzman, tiebreaker 7-1.
Seppi wins second set versus Karlovic, tiebreaker 7-4.
Karlovic wins third set versus Seppi, tiebreaker 7-3.
Edmund wins first set versus Basilashvili, tiebreaker 7-0.
Kyrgios wins first set and third set and fourth set versus Tsonga, tiebreakers 7-5 and 8-6 and 7-5.
Cilic wins first and third sets versus Harrison, tiebreakers 7-4 and 7-4.
| https://sports.stackexchange.com/questions/17636 |
sports | Two dismissals off a single ball |
Is it possible to dismiss both batsmen off the same delivery (i.e., by a catch and a run out)?
If the ball touched the lower end of the bat, edged up and touched the bat again, will it be given out? This is assuming that the batsman does not intend to hit it twice.
If the ball hits the bat on the other side of the bat, does it count as a dismissal?
| VQAonline_00059747.png |
Is it possible to dismiss both the batsmen in ground(ie,by a catch and a run out)?
No. It is not possible to dismiss both batsmen on the same delivery. Only one batsman can be legally dismissed. In the event of both being dismissed on the same delivery, the batsman dismissed first goes back to the pavilion while the other continues with his/her innings.
Is "Hit the ball twice" out?
According to the Laws of Cricket (Law 34 - as stated below), if done intentionally, then yes, it is out.
Law 34 (Hit the ball twice)
1. Out Hit the ball twice
The striker is out Hit the ball twice if, while the ball is in play, it strikes any part of his person or is struck by his bat and, before the ball has been touched by a fielder, he willfully strikes it again with his bat or person, other than a hand not holding the bat, except for the sole purpose of guarding his wicket. See 3 below and Laws 33 (Handled the ball) and 37 (Obstructing the field).
For the purpose of this Law, 'struck' or 'strike' shall include contact with the person of the striker.
However, as with any potential dismissal, the batsman can still continue his/her innings in the following cases:
The opposition team does not appeal (Law 27.1).
The appeal is withdrawn by the opposition captain and the umpire consents to the withdrawal, before the batsman leaves the field of play (Law 27.8).
Is it considered a dismissal if the ball hits the other side of the bat?
No. As of the current laws, this does not constitute a dismissal. However, the way the modern bat is designed, the batsmen do not get any advantage by using the other side of the bat. So, it does not make sense for the batsmen to use the other side of the bat.
| https://sports.stackexchange.com/questions/1722 |
sports | Fair Play award and team performances in IPL | In IPL fair play award seem to resemble points table except few outliers.
Does fair play award has to do anything with who won the match also?
| VQAonline_00059833.png | No, this is obviously not the case.
Of the 58 final points table positions after pool play in the IPL seasons 2012-2018, only twelve (12) matched the fair play rank for that team, and only three of these were the award winners.
If final points table positions and fair play award ranks are plotted with a linear regression model, there is almost zero dependence on the points table position (moving one place up or down has an effect of moving about ~0.11 places in the fair play ranking), with the starting position being almost exactly the mean final points table position (the fair play ranks are almost uniformly random rather than being biased to one side), and the data has a correlation coefficient of just 0.0131 (the points table position has as close to zero effect as it probably could!).
If the distance between fair play rank and final points table position is checked instead, the mean absolute difference is 2.48 ranks with an approximately Poisson distribution (a vast majority of ranks are not the same as positions, with many being very different). The actual differences have approximately a normal distribution with a standard deviation of 2.02 (which, given the range of ~7.3, again suggests that fair play ranks are almost perfectly random and separated from table positions).
This should also make perfect sense, since most teams will most often receive most of the fair play points they are eligible for, barring unlikely and extreme events, and teams may show high sportsmanship despite losing or conversely demonstrate poor spirit despite playing very well.
| https://sports.stackexchange.com/questions/21335 |
sports | What are those blue stripes or patches on Balotelli's back? | I've seen a lot of players with those blue stripes or patches like Balotelli wore in the Italy - Germany Euro 2012 semi-final:
What are those stripes / patches/ tapes?
| VQAonline_00059740.png | It is Kinesio Tape, which is an adhesive-tape that is applied to problematic muscles.
Problematic as in, the muscles are weak after returning from injury (you can support them using Kinesio tape), or you can apply it to aching muscles to sooth the pain. It's application can also increase blood flow to the muscles, and speed up the recovery process.
Specifically to Mario, no-one knows the exact reason he's using it.
Here's an article which explains the science behind it (beyond me :P).
| https://sports.stackexchange.com/questions/1043 |
sports | US Assault class gear detail in Battlefield 4 | I am an airsoft player and would like to reproduce the US Assault class in Battlefield 4 as seen below.
For the base layer, I'm assuming any sand balaclava, sand gloves and multicam pants would do. I don't know if Dark Earth combat shirts with sand sleeves exist.
For the head part, A sand Mich 2000 or similar, sand goggles, and a Peltor Comtac.
I have absolutely no idea of what type of chest rig/plate carrier is used. Also the belt is some sort of harness ( I don't know the exact word ).
If anyone could help me, a name or a link to similar equipment would be nice.
| VQAonline_00059767.png | From top to bottom:
OPS-CORE: FAST Ballistic high cut (XP) Helmet: Tan + LUX LINER H-NAPE
Princeton Tec Charge MPLS
MS2000 Strobe
Peltor Comtac 3
XGO Phase 4 Neck Gaiter in Coyote Brown
ESS Profile NVG Military Goggles black with gray Lenses
LBT 6094 in Coyote Brown
VIP IR LED Strobe Light
SAFARILAND 6378USN ALS® Low Signature Holster Multicam
New Eagle Industries USMC MOLLE Coyote FB 9MM Mag Pouch
Two red chem lights
Blackhawk S.T.R.I.K.E 40MM Grenade Molle Pouch in Coyote Tan
LBT-6159 Modular Double M4/M14/MP5 Mag Pouch in Coyote Brown
Double M67 Pouch in Coyote (NSN 8465-01-558-5185)
Combat First Response Pouch (Condor)
Tactical Tailor 40mm Belt 12rd in Foliage
YATES 313 Lightweight Assault Harness in Terra
CRYE Combat Pant AC Multicam + AirFlex™ Combat Knee Pads in Khaki
CRYE G3 Combat Shirt™ Khaki 400
TACOPS® M9 Assault Medical Backpack in coyote + IR reflective reversed Velcro Flag + three red and one white chem light
FR FAST ROPE GLOVE COYOTE (Oakley)
Lowa Elite Desert Ws
All I didn't find is the waist pouch.
I'm building the same loadout and I hope You have success.
| https://sports.stackexchange.com/questions/4786 |
sports | When did jerseys get dots on them? | I thought jerseys have last names (or nothing) on the back of them. However, I recently saw dots on a jersey.
When did jerseys get dots on them? What do they represent? It sorta looks like scoreboard dots.
| VQAonline_00059827.png | I'm pretty sure that's Braille, the writing system for visually impaired people.
The letters spell B-U-N-D-Y, so it's probably Dylan Bundy, who plays with #37 for the Orioles.
| https://sports.stackexchange.com/questions/20231 |
stats | Scale of variable importance in randomForest, party & gbm | I've computed some variable measures using the packages, gbm, randomForest and party. I develop binary classification models predicting survival in cancer patients. Although the gbm package, randomForest package and party package is well described in both CRAN files, vignettes and publications, they don't mention much about the x-axis scale or implications, other than that gbm normalizes the scale to 100. I obtained these results from random forest computed with party package (cforest function):
So the x-axes ranges from 0 to 0.03, which seems strange to an amateur like me. I guess these scales are arbitrary in a sense, but should I be worried? Does the scale matter at al?
| VQAonline_00062046.png | For the variable importance in the party package help("varimp", package = "party") has a short explanation.
Value: A vector of 'mean decrease in accuracy' importance scores.
More details and the exact formulas can be found in Strobl et al. (2008). "Conditional Variable Importance for Random Forests." BMC Bioinformatics, 9(307). doi:10.1186/1471-2105-9-307
However, the values of these importances may also change with the type of permutation (conditional vs. unconditional), the evaluation set (in-bag vs. out-of-bag), etc. And sometimes the importances are rescaled as you point out. So it is not always possible to exactly compare the numeric values between different packages/functions.
| https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/329995 |
stats | What is an analytical expression for so called value function $V^{\pi}$ in reinforcement learning? | One thing that struck me as odd when going through literature on reinforcement learning is how "theoretical" everything is. I expected the results in this field to be things that you can immediately punch into Python or MATLAB and get your hands dirty, but I am seeing most things in reinforcement learning is not expressed are an analytical fashion (and poorly defined - but maybe I am early on in the book).
For instance, this so called value function
https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~sutton/book/ebook/node34.html
But what is $E_\pi$? I cannot punch $E_\pi$ into MATLAB, it is not a function that I am familiar with, so I must get rid of it immediately to arrive at an analytical expression that I can evaluate.
If $\pi(s,a)$ is a probability distribution as I suspect it is, then using the expression of an expectation for a discrete random value, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value, $V^\pi(s)$ should be expressed as:
$$V^\pi(s) = \sum\limits_{a = 1}^n \pi(s,a)\left(\sum\limits_{k =0}^\infty \gamma^k r_{t+k+1}\right)$$
Can someone check if I have the expression for the value function at state $s$ correctly?
| VQAonline_00061674.png | This is answered in the Sutton page you link to, emphasis mine:
Recall that a policy, $\pi$, is a mapping from each state, $s$, and action, $a$, to the probability of taking action $a$ when in state $s$. Informally, the value of a state $s$ under a policy $\pi$, denoted $V^{\pi}(s)$, is the expected return when starting in $s$ and following $\pi$ thereafter.
Expressing the expectation isn't that simple, because subsequent rewards depend on subsequent transitions from state to state. This is why Sutton writes, "A fundamental property of value functions used throughout reinforcement learning and dynamic programming is that they satisfy particular recursive relationships."
Check equation 3.10 on that same page for an expression that expresses this relationship.
| https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/269265 |
stats | ANN regression, linear function approximation | I have built a regular ANN–BP setup with one unit on input and output layer and 4 nodes in hidden with sigmoid. Giving it a simple task to approximate linear f(n) = n with n in range 0-100.
PROBLEM: Regardless of number of layers, units in hidden layer or whether or not I am using bias in node values it learns to approximate f(n) = Average(dataset) like so:
Code is written in JavaScript as a proof of concept. I have defined three classes: Net, Layer and Connection, where Layer is an array of input, bias and output values, Connection is a 2D array of weights and delta weights. Here is the Layer code where all important calculations happen:
Ann.Layer = function(nId, oNet, oConfig, bUseBias, aInitBiases) {
var _oThis = this;
var _initialize = function() {
_oThis.id = nId;
_oThis.length = oConfig.nodes;
_oThis.outputs = new Array(oConfig.nodes);
_oThis.inputs = new Array(oConfig.nodes);
_oThis.gradients = new Array(oConfig.nodes);
_oThis.biases = new Array(oConfig.nodes);
_oThis.outputs.fill(0);
_oThis.inputs.fill(0);
_oThis.biases.fill(0);
if (bUseBias) {
for (var n=0; n<oConfig.nodes; n++) {
_oThis.biases[n] = Ann.random(aInitBiases[0], aInitBiases[1]);
}
}
};
/****************** PUBLIC ******************/
this.id;
this.length;
this.inputs;
this.outputs;
this.gradients;
this.biases;
this.next;
this.previous;
this.inConnection;
this.outConnection;
this.isInput = function() { return !this.previous; }
this.isOutput = function() { return !this.next; }
this.calculateGradients = function(aTarget) {
var n, n1, nOutputError,
fDerivative = Ann.Activation.Derivative[oConfig.activation];
if (this.isOutput()) {
for (n=0; n<oConfig.nodes; n++) {
nOutputError = this.outputs[n] - aTarget[n];
this.gradients[n] = nOutputError * fDerivative(this.outputs[n]);
}
} else {
for (n=0; n<oConfig.nodes; n++) {
nOutputError = 0.0;
for (n1=0; n1<this.outConnection.weights[n].length; n1++) {
nOutputError += this.outConnection.weights[n][n1] * this.next.gradients[n1];
}
// console.log(this.id, nOutputError, this.outputs[n], fDerivative(this.outputs[n]));
this.gradients[n] = nOutputError * fDerivative(this.outputs[n]);
}
}
}
this.updateInputWeights = function() {
if (!this.isInput()) {
var nY,
nX,
nOldDeltaWeight,
nNewDeltaWeight;
for (nX=0; nX<this.previous.length; nX++) {
for (nY=0; nY<this.length; nY++) {
nOldDeltaWeight = this.inConnection.deltaWeights[nX][nY];
nNewDeltaWeight =
- oNet.learningRate
* this.previous.outputs[nX]
* this.gradients[nY]
// Add momentum, a fraction of old delta weight
+ oNet.learningMomentum
* nOldDeltaWeight;
if (nNewDeltaWeight == 0 && nOldDeltaWeight != 0) {
console.log('Double overflow');
}
this.inConnection.deltaWeights[nX][nY] = nNewDeltaWeight;
this.inConnection.weights[nX][nY] += nNewDeltaWeight;
}
}
}
}
this.updateInputBiases = function() {
if (bUseBias && !this.isInput()) {
var n,
nNewDeltaBias;
for (n=0; n<this.length; n++) {
nNewDeltaBias =
- oNet.learningRate
* this.gradients[n];
this.biases[n] += nNewDeltaBias;
}
}
}
this.feedForward = function(a) {
var fActivation = Ann.Activation[oConfig.activation];
this.inputs = a;
if (this.isInput()) {
this.outputs = this.inputs;
} else {
for (var n=0; n<a.length; n++) {
this.outputs[n] = fActivation(a[n] + this.biases[n]);
}
}
if (!this.isOutput()) {
this.outConnection.feedForward(this.outputs);
}
}
_initialize();
}
The main feedForward and backProp functions are defined like so:
this.feedForward = function(a) {
this.layers[0].feedForward(a);
this.netError = 0;
}
this.backPropagate = function(aExample, aTarget) {
this.target = aTarget;
if (aExample.length != this.getInputCount()) { throw "Wrong input count in training data"; }
if (aTarget.length != this.getOutputCount()) { throw "Wrong output count in training data"; }
this.feedForward(aExample);
_calculateNetError(aTarget);
var oLayer = null,
nLast = this.layers.length-1,
n;
for (n=nLast; n>0; n--) {
if (n === nLast) {
this.layers[n].calculateGradients(aTarget);
} else {
this.layers[n].calculateGradients();
}
}
for (n=nLast; n>0; n--) {
this.layers[n].updateInputWeights();
this.layers[n].updateInputBiases();
}
}
Connection code is rather simple:
Ann.Connection = function(oNet, oConfig, aInitWeights) {
var _oThis = this;
var _initialize = function() {
var nX, nY, nIn, nOut;
_oThis.from = oNet.layers[oConfig.from];
_oThis.to = oNet.layers[oConfig.to];
nIn = _oThis.from.length;
nOut = _oThis.to.length;
_oThis.weights = new Array(nIn);
_oThis.deltaWeights = new Array(nIn);
for (nX=0; nX<nIn; nX++) {
_oThis.weights[nX] = new Array(nOut);
_oThis.deltaWeights[nX] = new Array(nOut);
_oThis.deltaWeights[nX].fill(0);
for (nY=0; nY<nOut; nY++) {
_oThis.weights[nX][nY] = Ann.random(aInitWeights[0], aInitWeights[1]);
}
}
};
/****************** PUBLIC ******************/
this.weights;
this.deltaWeights;
this.from;
this.to;
this.feedForward = function(a) {
var n, nX, nY, aOut = new Array(this.to.length);
for (nY=0; nY<this.to.length; nY++) {
n = 0;
for (nX=0; nX<this.from.length; nX++) {
n += a[nX] * this.weights[nX][nY];
}
aOut[nY] = n;
}
this.to.feedForward(aOut);
}
_initialize();
}
And my activation functions and derivatives are defined like so:
Ann.Activation = {
linear : function(n) { return n; },
sigma : function(n) { return 1.0 / (1.0 + Math.exp(-n)); },
tanh : function(n) { return Math.tanh(n); }
}
Ann.Activation.Derivative = {
linear : function(n) { return 1.0; },
sigma : function(n) { return n * (1.0 - n); },
tanh : function(n) { return 1.0 - n * n; }
}
And configuration JSON for the network is as follows:
var Config = {
id : "Config1",
learning_rate : 0.01,
learning_momentum : 0,
init_weight : [-1, 1],
init_bias : [-1, 1],
use_bias : false,
layers: [
{nodes : 1},
{nodes : 4, activation : "sigma"},
{nodes : 1, activation : "linear"}
],
connections: [
{from : 0, to : 1},
{from : 1, to : 2}
]
}
Perhaps, your experienced eye can spot the problem with my calculations?
SEE EXAMPLE IN JSFIDDLE
| VQAonline_00061494.png | I see that you initialize weights with
init_weight : [-1, 1],
init_bias : [-1, 1],
I am not sure what does it do exactly, but i guess your weights are initialized to 1 or -1. If that is the case, then thats your first problem. Since the all weights starts at the same number, they will all produce the same error and therefore will be updated by the same amount. So you cannot really learn any pattern, because all your neurons will be doing the same.
This is not a problem with a linear activation function, because layer full of linear neurons will produce the same output as just the one linear neuron regardless. Because the linear combination of linear functions is still just a linear function.
I thought that maybe you have some bug and you are not updating all the weights but only the bias, which would explain why you will end up with the mean function. This was however not true with linear activation function, which was learning the output correctly.
Next I noticed that with sigma activation function something was happening to the outputs in the beginning of the epoch but not in the later stages and also that the network was working reasonably fine if I use only 10 inputs instead of yours default 100. That usually happen if you don't standardize the inputs before the training. If the inputs are too big, your sigmoid activation function will produce outputs close to 1, however the slope of the sigmoid at this point is close to 0, so your weights wont get updated, because the gradients are close to 0. You can fight this by standardizing the inputs, so by subtracting the mean of the vector and dividing it by its standard deviation. So your input vector will have mean 0 and std 1. This is also related problem to vanishing/exploding gradient problem, where the weights tends to grow too big/too small and you will get the same issue of the neuron outputing values close to 0/1 and therefore not updating the weights. I think you combat this by some form of regularization, for example force all weights to sum to 1 or something like that.
I tried few things in scikit learn implementation of SGD NN and indeed, neural network fail if the inputs are not standardized. However I couldn't find in your code where the heck is actual input vector, so I couldn't try if this also solves your problem.
| https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/244919 |
stats | Where does Jensen's Inequality come into the EM derivation? | I am working my way through the original EM paper Maximum Likelihood from Incomplete Data by Dempster, et al.
I have run into a problem with a statement made in section 3. "General Properties". Specifically I am having a difficult time with Lemma 1:
My understanding of Jensen's inequality is
$$
\mathop{E}[f(X)] \geq f(\mathop{E}[X]) \text{ for convex functions } f(x)
$$
or the reverse for concave functions (e.g. the log of a pdf).
If I am interpreting equation $3.3$ correctly, we have
$$
\mathop{E}[\log k(x|y, \phi')|y, \phi] \leq \mathop{E}[\log k(x|y, \phi)|y, \phi] \\
\implies \int_X \log k(x|y, \phi') p(x | y, \phi) dx \leq \int_X \log k(x|y, \phi) p(x | y, \phi) dx
$$
I am failing to see where Jensen's inequality is applied as both sides of the equation include the function $\log k(\cdot)$ inside of the expectation.
Am I misunderstanding the application of Jensen's inequality?
| VQAonline_00062602.png | This is the proof provided in McLachlan & Krishnan (1997) - The EM Algorithm and Extensions (converted to use the same notation as DLR):
$$
\begin{align}
H(\phi' \mid \phi) - H(\phi \mid \phi) & = E[\log k(x \mid y, \phi') \mid y, \phi] - E[\log k(x \mid y, \phi) \mid y, \phi] \\
& = E[\log \{k(x \mid y, \phi') / k(x \mid y, \phi) \} \mid y, \phi] \\
& \leq \log \{ E[k(x \mid y, \phi') / k(x \mid y, \phi) \mid y, \phi] \} \\
& = \log \int_{\mathcal{X}(y)} k(x \mid y, \phi') dx \\
& = 0
\end{align}
$$
Jensen's inequality is used in moving from the second to the third lines.
| https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/418686 |
stats | For a specific dataset do all the features have the same importance across different algorithms? | I wonder if by implementing a feature selection technic using training with a specific algorithm you can select the feature you need to use with other algorithms also.
To be more specific after I trained an XGBoost model with the default parameters and using the following code:
columns = ['Thresh', 'n', 'selected_features', 'Logloss']
feature_selection = pd.DataFrame(columns=columns)
thresholds = np.sort(model.feature_importances_)
for thresh in thresholds:
# select features using threshold
selection = SelectFromModel(model, threshold=thresh, prefit=True)
select_X_train = selection.transform(X_train)
# train model
selection_model = XGBClassifier(objective='multi:softprob', n_jobs=-1)
selection_model.fit(select_X_train, y_train)
# eval model
select_X_val = selection.transform(X_val)
y_pred = selection_model.predict_proba(select_X_val)
score = log_loss(y_val, y_pred)
result = pd.DataFrame(
np.array([
thresh, select_X_train.shape[1],
X_train.columns[selection.get_support()], score
]).reshape(1, -1),
columns=columns)
feature_selection = feature_selection.append(result, ignore_index=True)
I ended up with:
and I decided to continue with the 22 out of 33 features.
My question is can I use these features as the most important to try other models (including DNN), or their importance is specific for this algorithm?
| VQAonline_00062377.png | Feature importance measurements are strongly associated with the underlying model. That is because different models can utilise a feature differently. Some (like a gradient boosting machine (GBM)) will recursively partition it while others (like a generalised additive model (GAM)) might fit a spline on it. In addition, the way that an algorithm accounts for interactions between variables might be completely different; for example, in a random forest (RF) interactions are essentially detected in an automated way as deeper trees are grown by sequentially examining different features, while in standard linear model (LM) we would need to explicitly define it.
That said, all is not lost, the feature importance from an GBM algorithm does hold some relevance for a GAM model or a neural network (NN) as well. It is totally unreasonable to expect that a given algorithm most important features are useless for the learning task of another algorithm. They will contain relevant information but there is little guarantee that these features will present the optimal set of features for another type of learner too. We can definitely use them as a first educated guess.
A final note: especially for a deep neural network (DNNs) where we commonly have hundreds (if not thousands) of input features it is not always coherent to examine individual variable importance. DNNs are strong exactly because they can synthesize features internally and train themselves on those internal features. For instance, within a image classifier the value of a single pixel is often immaterial, it is the convolution layers that make the big difference. Overall, we might wish to exclude a particular feature (or better yet replacing it with pure noise), retrain our DNN on this new dataset and then compare the performance difference but this method can turn out to be very computationally expensive for anything more than simple cases. There are some further techniques for DNNs that give feature importance for a DNN (e.g. Sundararajan et al. "Axiomatic Attribution for Deep Networks" (ICML 2017)) but once again those are particular to the learner used.
| https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/382112 |
stats | Interpreting Precision-Recall Curves that Cross Each Other |
Since the two Precision-Recall curves are crossing, I cannot decide which one is better.
How should I interpret this?
| VQAonline_00060938.png | The best model depends on what you need it for. Is your number one priority high recall or high precision? In the former case, blue seems best (*) and in the latter case the green one is better.
(*) that blue PR curve looks suspicious because you have a very long line segment there (from recall ~0.3 to 0.95). Are you sure that curve is correct?
| https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/161768 |
stats | Penalization in multi class neural networks backpropagation |
the cost function for my neural network.
In neural networks back propagation we are trying to minimise our cost function W.R.T our parameters ( theta) . We penalize our neural network for every wrong prediction and don't penalize when predictions are right. In multi class where we are trying to classify the outputs into more than 2 categories (y is greater than 2).. The neural network basically gives an output of probability that a output is y is 3 or y is 4(example). So my neural network is predicting that y is 3 by .92(probability) and y is 4 is .78 (probability). actually the value output by neural network is correct ...it is indeed y=3.
But does my neural network gets penalized for predicting y is 4 as .78? because in actual it is y is 3. so should their be any penalty for predicting .78 for y is 4 ?
this is a general situation for illustration...dont ask for the code of above situation.
| VQAonline_00063107.png | In a comment, you say that each sample represents exactly one class. This means that you're modeling mutually exclusive events. This means that $y$ is a vector with exactly one value of 1 and the rest 0. So if you have $K=3$ classes, then all vectors $y$ look like $[1,0,0]$ or $[0,1,0]$ or $[0,0,1]$.
We'll consider the loss for $m=1$ samples and $y=[1,0,0]$.
$$\begin{align}
J(\theta)-L^2 \text{ regulariztion}&=
-\frac{1}{1}\sum_{i=1}^{m=1}\sum_{k=1}^K y_k^{(i)} \log (h_\theta(x^{(i)})_k) + (1-y_k^{(i)}) \log(1-h_\theta(x^{(i)})_k) \\
&= -[\log (h_\theta(x)_1)+0] \\&~~- [0+\log(1-h_\theta(x)_2] \\&~~- [0+\log(1-h_\theta(x)_3)]\\
&= -\log (h_\theta(x)_1) - \log(1-h_\theta(x)_2) - \log(1-h_\theta(x)_3)
\end{align}$$
(We can neglect the $L^2$ regularization for this demonstration because it does not include $h_\theta(x^{(i)})$, which is all we care about.)
You can show the same for the other possible $y$ vectors, and likewise for any $K \ge 2$.
Conclusion. The predictions of all classes are penalized because the loss involves all elements of the 3-element vector $h_\theta(x^{(i)})$.
| https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/487084 |
sustainability | Is it more ecological to take a diesel ferry or drive an EV the longer route? | I'm trying to figure out my daily dilemma: whether it's less polluting to take a diesel ferry that hops me over the river (roughly 160 m) or to drive my electric vehicle (EV) on a 15 km detour to take the nearest bridge?
Ferry
Ships consume a ton of fuel.
On the other hand this ferry travels no matter if I'm there or not.
However this ferry will carry +2 tons of cargo (car+me) which will consume more fuel.
Electric Vehicle
An EV doesn't directly consume gas but indirectly it does consume some fuel and that can be easily approximated to gas consumption.
Odd thing is that driving the EV around costs only about 1/5 compared to taking the ferry.
EV is charged from the power grid. Our energy mix is 55% nuclear, 40% fossil, 5% renewable. However, nuclear plants have a fixed capacity therefore it's sad but fair to assume that excess energy is coming from coal+natural gas peak plants. BTW I also have solar panels on my roof which could flip it to solar but since I mostly charge my car at night -> let's go with a mix of coal+gas as the worst case scenario.
Is there an easy way how I can calculate the amount of extra diesel-fuel the ferry will consume when 2 tons of extra load are added on board?
Time savings are not a factor; environmental gains are more important to me. I'm interested in the overall environmental impact (CO2 + toxic air pollution both local and global). And I'm looking for the most accurate answer possible.
Motivational image:
| VQAonline_00063863.png | Take the ferry!
The short ferry trip likely results in lower emissions of CO2 compared to the long detour, if the EV is charged from a grid that uses fossil fuels (coal/gas).
I think there are actually three different change scenarios worth considering here.
Marginal: You change your route, but nobody else does. (This is looking at the problem from an individual "carbon footprint" perspective).
Group: a significant number of people all change their route.
System: the ferry is shut down entirely.
Marginal Scenario (one more car on the ferry)
From my reading I've learned there are several factors that significantly impact fuel usage and emissions on passenger/vehicle ferry transports (eg. trip frequency, speed, prevailing winds, vessel size, fuel type) but number of vehicles on board is not a significant factor. (disclosure: I am not a marine engineer.)
Although I think your assumption about ship's fuel use (below) is intuitively correct, it's such a small factor that it doesn't make a significant difference and cannot be reasonably measured.
However this ferry will carry +2 tons of cargo (car+me) which will consume more fuel.
Although it's tempting to use a measure of fuel use like litres/passenger-km to estimate the impact of a single trip, the reality is that the actual carbon emissions and air pollution don't really change in any significant measurable way whether you board the ship or not.
Therefore, you can assume approximately zero emissions for the diesel ferry. On the other hand, natural gas peaking plants are designed to scale power output up or down based on power demand from the grid, so using electricity to charge your EV likely does result in a very slight marginal increase to carbon emissions and air pollution.
Winner: Diesel Ferry
Group Scenario (many more cars on the ferry)
Vessel speed and number of return trips have a very significant impact on fuel usage. If many more people decide to take the ferry, the ferry may need to perform more round trips and/or operate at a higher sailing speed. (Although sailing speed probably doesn't matter much for a very short-haul trip like the river crossing you're asking about.)
If the ferry needs to make an additional round trip to handle increased demand, then we can distribute the fuel usage across the group using a measure like litres/passenger-km. Luckily there's a study we can refer to: Comparison of Ferry Boat and Highway Bridge Energy Use.
Examinations of three of the systems found that the passenger-MPG of the ferries ranged from 2.61 to 14.00 (1.11 to 5.95 km/L) [0.90 L/km to 0.16 L/km]
On a per-passenger basis, your 0.16 km river crossing would use between 0.0256 - 0.14 litres of diesel fuel. Diesel engines produce 2.7 kg of CO2 per litre of diesel fuel consumed.1 So a single trip by diesel ferry would result in around 0.07 - 0.38 kg of CO2 emissions.
Electric passenger vehicles typically use around 20 kWh/100 km, so your 15 km drive would use around 3 kWh. Natural gas peaking plants emit 0.91 pounds2 (0.41 kg) of CO2 per kWh produced, so the 15 km drive would result in 1.23 kg CO2 emissions.
Winner: Diesel Ferry
System
[Maybe I'll add this in the future. This answer is already quite long and I have to stop for now.]
| https://sustainability.stackexchange.com/questions/11808 |
sustainability | Why are my LED light bulbs so short lived? | I thought the idea of LED is, that the light bulb has a very long life and uses very little electricity.
I have not invested in full LED lighting but tried the LED bulbs, you screw in your normal sockets and I have to replace them pretty frequently.
They also tend to lose a lot of their performance over time.
Specifically, I have had something like that in my house:
But I have also tried a lot of other bulbs, some of which were LED. I always have the same problems with all new school bulbs:
When you switch the light on, it takes time to reach its full brightness (this problem seems to occur less in recent times)
The light gradually loses its brightness, which is maddening and forces you to replace the bulb, before its broken. The maddening part is, that it is never the same level of brightness, you are either on a continuous progress to less bright, or make a big jump in brightness when you replace the bulb.
They cost a ton of money. I could live with that if they'd perform better.
They never seem to achieve the warm light of a 100W old school bulb, even if you buy the expensive stuff.
So, what am I doing wrong here? Do I have wrong expectations or am I buying the wrong equipment?
| VQAonline_00063856.png | Consumer tests have shown that there are good and bad LED lights; indeed some of them do not reach their advertized life span.
I also have some bad experiences with LEDs dying long before their advertised end-of life, but that's anecdotes, not evidence.
You can imagine that actually testing these is hard, it takes a long time!
A major Dutch consumer organization has been testing LEDs since at least 2013 and they report:
Our latest extra long life test shows that 75% of the LED lamps from a sample reach 20,000 burning hours. At the end of 2014, we reported that 80% of the lamps from that sample achieved 15,000 burning hours.
So, 20% die before 15000 hours, 25% before 20000 hours.
A detailed 2015 breakdown of brands and models is here.
I would add: buy from regular well-known brands and avoid cheap non-name products.
As for diminishing intensity they state:
Our test shows that there is often some deterioration of the amount of light, but usually it remains limited. If a lamp emits 80% of the initial quantity after 15,000 hours, we consider it as: still working well.
Some tips they give:
Preferably do not use a LED lamp in a closed luminaire. It won't be able to get rid of its warmth and will soon be broken.
So this may be something specifically to watch out for. Also:
Because there can be a lower quality lights in a batch (for any brand), our advice remains: keep the proof of purchase and the box of LED lights.
Whether that last thing helps you depends on the consumer laws in your country.
Note also that irregular voltages and spikes can have an impact:
... these high-tech lights have very sensitive electronics in them that can be damaged permanently by a spike in electricity.
Finally, LED lights often do not only show a guaranteed number of hours on the packaging, but also a number of on/off switches. Excessive (automatic?) switching may reduce their life time.
| https://sustainability.stackexchange.com/questions/6990 |
sustainability | Aquaponic system doesn't grow the plants | I have created aquaponic system and tried to plant tomatoes, cucumbers and some other herbs. They sprout without problem but after couple of days they dried out. I tried it 2 times with the same result.
The water circulates 15 min every hour. I'm not using siphon setup but water flow one. At the bottom I have a gravel to filter it and at the top I use clay pellets in which I seeded the seeds.
The white drain pipe goes up to where the clay pellets and the gravel meets. So the seeds are not constantly in the water but absorb the moisture from the pellets. Any idea how to make it work? I'm planning to give up and just to plant some flowers meant for ponds.
| VQAonline_00063840.png | (This is only meant as an extended comment. I hope someone with aquaponics experience will be able to answer your question. I have only seen much bigger aquaponics set-ups, outside.)
I unfortunately don't have any experience with aquaponics, but it looks like your system is inside. My experience with tomatoes is that they need lots of warmth and light. My tomatoes I grow at 30 ºC outside in the sun. On top of that I've been told that tomatoes get sweeter with less water, so I only water them once a day. (I think that cucumbers (like melons), also need light and warmth, and depending on your herbs, they, too might need light and warmth.)
So, I think that a problem with your setup might be not enough sunlight. (Seeds do sprout without sunlight, but as soon as they produce leaves, they need enough light to grow larger.)
| https://sustainability.stackexchange.com/questions/4529 |
sustainability | How to clean a reusable plastic coffee cup, such as KeepCup? | I've owned a KeepCup for about a year and though I clean it after use it really is starting to stink.
I've tried scrubbing it with a scouring pad and detergent and leaving it to soak overnight, but it still smells bad.
The cup looks like the one below. All pieces can be disassembled to make cleaning easy. It's like the smell is in the plastic it's self.
| VQAonline_00063851.png | Wash it in a dishwasher once every month or two. I own a Contigo mug, and once had similar problems with the plastic/rubber lid. I found some tips on their website, but ultimately found that if I washed the mug and lid in the dishwasher about once a month, the smell and staining would go away. I don't have a dishwasher, but find that I visit someone who does often enough to keep the smell at bay.
KeepCup also includes cleaning tips on their website, which you may want to try first if you don't have access to a dishwasher.
Alternatively, KeepCup offers a one year warranty, so if you've owned the cup for less than a year you may want to try contacting them.
| https://sustainability.stackexchange.com/questions/5812 |
sustainability | Why does cheese have such a high carbon footprint? |
(Source of information here)
As you can see, cheese has the third highest carbon footprint. Only beef and lamb have a higher footprint.
Several other sources (such as this) corroborate this.
Why is it so high? You would expect it to be due to the milk production, but milk itself it one of the lowest on the chart.
| VQAonline_00063852.png | TL;DR
The chart is misleading since it compares carbon imprint by mass instead of a measure of how much a human needs to survive.
Argument
The chart you link contains false comparisons. They are comparing mass of foods against each other. However, you don't eat for mass, you eat for calories (or protein or nutriment, or whatever). A better comparison would be to multiply each 1 kg of food by the calories in that food.
I got my numbers from here, with data sourced from USDA. The numbers in my chart below are kilograms carbon per 1000 calories:
Lamb 20.85
Beef 13.78
Turkey 5.83
Broccoli 5.71
Tuna 5.26
Salmon 5.15
Cheese 4.47
Pork 4.45
Yogurt 3.49
Chicken 3.37
Milk 3.17
Eggs 3.06
Rice 2.08
Potatoes 1.46
Beans 1.40
Tomato 1.39
Tofu 1.38
Lentils 0.78
Peanut Butter 0.42
Nuts 0.39
I used the cooked option of each food when available. For the numbers with some options, I used whole milk, pinto beans, plain lowfat yogurt, almonds for the nuts, and part-skim mozarella cheese.
My first conclusion, is that Cheese doesn't have such a high footprint after all. It is just a little higher than Yogurt, which is just a little higher than Milk, which is about even with eggs. All the animal products dominate the top of the list.
My other conclusions are that this is kind of a garbage comparison anyways. Broccoli doesn't provide calories, but it has more vitamin K than everything else on the chart combined. The peanut butter and nuts are really calorie efficient, but so what? If you try to live on peanut butter instead of rice you'll die of heart disease because you are getting 70% of your calories from fat and three times the recommended saturated fat dosage.
| https://sustainability.stackexchange.com/questions/5883 |
sustainability | Does 1 container ship really pollute as much as 50,000,000 cars? | I remember seeing many news articles and posts on social media saying that a single container ship pollutes as much as 50 million cars. Is this true? How could that be possible?
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/11/23/1618229/one-giant-cargo-ship-pollutes-as-much-as-50m-cars
https://newatlas.com/shipping-pollution/11526/
https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1020063_pollution-perspective-one-giant-cargo-ship-emits-as-much-as-50-million-cars
https://go.enfos.com/blog/2015/06/23/behemoths-of-emission-how-a-container-ship-can-out-pollute-50-million-cars
| VQAonline_00063862.png | It depends on how you define "pollution".
Cargo ships use some of the dirtiest fuels available: bunker fuel is basically what's left over after you refine all the good stuff out of crude oil. It's got all sorts of contaminants that something like gasoline or jet fuel doesn't have. On top of that, there are basically no regulations on emissions by cargo ships. This results in very high emissions of nitrogen and sulfur oxides, while cars emit almost none -- a ratio of 50 million to 1 is not unreasonable.
Carbon dioxide emissions are a different story. Cargo ships are the most fuel-efficient way of moving things from one place to another, while passenger cars are the least. Per ton of cargo moved, cargo ships are between a hundred and a thousand times more efficient than cars, depending on how heavily-loaded the car is.
| https://sustainability.stackexchange.com/questions/10757 |
sustainability | What is the difference between energy-from-waste (EFW) and cogeneration? | What is the difference between energy-from-waste (EFW) and cogeneration, and why is the latter more efficient (let's compare electricity to electricity)? Aren't both essentially incineration?
See below from pages 9 and 12 (respectively) from "The Environmental Impact of Paper Waste Recycling: A Comparative Study" (emphasis added):
In fact, due to the energy requirements of paper production, combustion of
unusable fibre can be used even more effectively when integrated into milling. Because a significant portion of the energy required for paper production is thermal, combustion of waste paper can be used directly to fuel the process. Wood fibre cogeneration plants, which generate both electricity and useable thermal energy, obtain efficiencies of 25-30% for electrical generation (mean of 27.5%), and up [to] 75% overall when heat is recovered (FAO 1990). So if the average thermal content of paper is assumed to be 17.3 GJ/T (Morris 1996), a maximum of 2.60 GJ/T could be recovered as electricity through EFW, but 4.76 GJ/T could be recovered through cogeneration, plus an additional 8.23 GJ/T in thermal energy (see Appendices 2, 3). This represents an improvement of 2.16 GJ/T in electrical production, and 10.4 GJ/T overall.
| VQAonline_00063866.png | Cogeneration is a more specialized process with specific fuel requirements which is used to produce electric and heat energy. Energy from waste is a general process whereby any mix of waste is burned to produce electric energy only. This is explained further in the paper. From page seven:
It is important to note the efficiency level of EFW generation. Because these
plants operate by burning all household wastes: organics, plastics, glass, aluminum, etc. as well as paper, it is difficult to optimize plant design for generation due to the variability of the combustibles (Ekvall and Finnveden 2000). As a result of this, and the normal inefficiencies involved in energy conversion, burning garbage to produce
electricity is able to capture only 15% of the waste’s intrinsic energy (Morris 1996),
significantly lower than other fuels (such as coal, which averages approximately 38%
efficiency) (Taylor et al. 2008). This could be improved if further sorting were carried
out in the waste-fuel stream, with specific incinerators for different fuels, but this would largely undermine the simplicity advantage conferred by such a catch-all disposal
method.
Note that when cogeneration is introduced in the quote included in the question it is referred to as wood fibre cogeneration, meaning that the authors are looking at one specific type of cogeneration, and comparing it to a broad array of EFW processes.
| https://sustainability.stackexchange.com/questions/11991 |
travel | Where can I find a list of cities with public bicycles available in Europe? | Whenever I visit a city I find traveling by bicycle very convenient. It's very flexible and you get to see the city in a very friendly way.
I was wondering if there is a website or other resource that lists cities in Europe where public bikes are accessible also to tourists.
Note: I am not referring to companies renting bikes. I am really referring to public systems like exist in Paris or Copenhagen where everyone can use bikes.
If the list contains the requirements to use the bicycles that would be a big plus. Eg.: In Paris, if I remember right, you need a Credit Card.
| VQAonline_00064050.png | Wikipedia is your friend with an entry on Bicycle sharing systems.
| https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/30406 |
travel | In the Netherlands, does the green stripe in the middle of a road always allow to drive 100 km/h? | In the Netherlands, there are roads with a green stripe in the middle. Here an example from Google Street View:
Both times I was driving on such a road there was an autoweg (expressway) sign at the beginning of that section allowing to drive at 100 km/h.
Does this green stripe always mark an autoweg, e.g. can I be sure that if there is a green stripe, then it is allowed to drive 100 km/h?
| VQAonline_00064490.png | Apparently, normally yes, if there is also a continuous line on the outsides of the roadway.
The green area is called a Optische middenberm, which means optical central verge. When I learned driving I was taught it had no other function, but that appears to be untrue (either I remember wrongly, or I was misinformed, or it has changed; I obtained my license in January 2007 and moved out of the country 8 months later). According to Rijkswaterstaat, which is the official road authority in The Netherlands:
De groene kleur tussen twee doorgetrokken strepen geeft aan welke snelheid er gereden mag worden. Bij een dubbele doorgetrokken streep met een groen vlak ertussen, is de maximumsnelheid 100 kilometer per uur, mits [sic] anders aangegeven.
Which means:
The green colour between two continuous lines indicates what speed is permitted. In case there is a double continuous line with a green area in between, the maximum speed is 100 kilometres per hour, if [sic] otherwise indicated.
NB: the use of mits (if) is incorrect, and should be tenzij (unless).
It goes on to note:
Op wegen waar 100 gereden mag worden is de lijn aan de buitenkant van de rijbaan doorgetrokken, op wegen waar maximaal 80 gereden mag worden is de buitenste lijn onderbroken.
which means:
On roads where driving 100 [km/h] is permitted, the line at the outside of the roadway is continuous, on roads where the speed limit is 80 km/h the outer line is interrupted.
So: yes, the green area between two continuous white lines does mean the speed limit is 100 km/h, if there are also continuous lines on the outside. This applies if nothing else is indicated, any locally posted speed limit (permanent or temporary) is still binding (naturally).
Note that it is called a autoweg and not a snelweg. A snelweg is a motorway/freeway with at least two lanes in each direction, fully segregated roadways, speed limits up to 120 km/h or recently 130 km/h, no at-grade intersections, and some other limitations not applying to autoweg. And just as a reminder: both autoweg and snelweg can have locally posted speed limits, either permanently or temporarily, that the posted speed limit remains the legal limit, regardless of what lines are drawn on the road.
(NB: I deleted my previous, incorrect answer to this question)
| https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/123560 |
travel | Name this church in Moscow, please? | I'm trying to type up my notes of Moscow, and can't seem to find the name of this church I took a photo of. After using google image search, however, I refound a photo of it at this location so have a latitude and longitude there, but no name. Can anyone help with this treasure hunt? :)
| VQAonline_00063877.png | Here's my guess...
Trinity Church, in Serebryaniki
Source: http://www.panoramio.com/photo/6837647 (translation)
| https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/1435 |
travel | UK Visitor visa to visit my girlfriend refused under V4.2 (a) (c) & (e) |
Hello,
I'm new here (and to the rules) and apologise for any errors in posting or asking questions which may not fit. In any case please let me know of anything wrong.
I have read almost all the previous great answers on TSE, especially from Gayot Fow (RIP), regarding my situation i.e UK visa refused under V4.2 (a),(c) & (e). These answers helped me understand some flaws in my original application & I am almost ready with my second application (with about 6 pages of explainer cover letter & additional financial proofs).
Questions below are asked particularly in context of my application(s) but may be generalised by others. I would also love your suggestions.
1. My refusal letter (from mid-september) only states -
“Any future UK visa applications you make will be considered on their
individual merits, however you are likely to be refused unless the
circumstances of your application change“
I saw other letters of refusal here mention
‘unless additional evidence is provided’
‘unless your circumstances change significantly’
Question Set 1 -
What does this really mean in my case?
Is there a general 'severity estimate’ based on the different 'languages' used above?
Will they even consider my additional evidence & explanations?
How bad is my refusal vis-à-vis reapplication relevance? Is it even worth making a re-application?
2. There was an error in calculating the value of my fixed deposits by the ECO. The deposit statement I had provided did not mention any totals and thus ECO computed the amounts from Page 2 in their refusal letter which is only a third of my actual deposits, while they completely ignored Page 1. I read here that 4.2(e) is mostly an icing on top of more severe 4.2 (a) & (c)
Question Set 2 -
Will apprising them about this oversight in calculation (which I must bring up) improve my chances even slightly?
What is the best way to communicate this in my new application?
3. Seems they mainly refused me on 4.2 (a) & (c), I assume it was because of my profile - a 30+yo single Indian male, freelance consultant, possible to work & earn remotely in the UK, asking for 4 months to visit his long-term girlfriend. I can see how I fit the refusal profile from UKVI ’s point of view.
I’ve now reduced my visit duration to 2 months (already lost 2 months due to refusal) in my new application, and attaching confirmed return tickets (which I also did last time) but I guess it won’t make a difference. We’ve literally been apart 13 months and I honestly wish to spend 60 days with her. Historically we’ve only managed to have 3 week long vacations together, but want to spend more time than that when it is finally possible. Is it too much to humanly ask?
Question Set 3 -
What are my other options to show ties to the country? I had already attached property details (owned jointly with my mother) to show my ties to land & family, I can explain a bit more but I can’t think of any other positive evidence to show. What do I do?
I have a small bank loan on my apartment, which I didn't mention explicitly, but my expenses reported during application and bank statement show these monthly instalment debits. Do I disclose this in my new application in case it adds value to my ties or acts positively?
How do I prove I am a genuine visitor if I gave them pretty much all the evidence I have already. I can give evidence of my additional income, income being genuinely derived from my profession (tax statements from the government) and the deposits resulting from the income, but that only answers the V4.2(e); points 4.2 (a) & (c) still remain.
I’m just stressed that in my opinion I can give them all genuine reasons (and some new financial evidence) but I’m afraid I’ll fall short to show my intent of being a genuine visitor. Any pointers to improve my application outcome will be super-welcome.
Thanks in advance.
EDIT (for gratitude): Thank you everyone for your help with the answers & comments, specifically @Traveller & @DJClayworth. It has given me a lot of information & other person's perspective to improve my next application. For me, both answers are equally great & sensible, however in order to mark one as 'accepted' I'll just go by the upvotes. Cheers!
| VQAonline_00064686.png | Lets deal with question set 1 first. All of the statements in the refusal are aiming to tell you "You are welcome to apply again, but unless you fix the problems the next application will be rejected too." You can't just repeat the application and hope for a different result. It's standard statements that are always made. Some people think it's like a lottery, and if they just submit the same application again they might win this time.
For the second question set, the calculation error is not a big issue. It's not worth trying to get the decision overturned because of it. You can point it out in your next application, in notes.
Now for the questions you didn't ask. There are two serious issues with your application:
The officer can't find evidence to back up your statements about income
There are unexplained deposits in your accounts.
(The unexplained deposits may be from your income but the officer can't verify that).
You need to find better evidence that the deposits in your accounts actually do come from your work. For example, if your invoices show Customer X paid you a certain amount for some services, then there should be a deposit to your account for that amount from Customer X. Also any substantial deposits need to have an explanation. Any amounts you received that are unexplained will be treated with suspicion. People sometimes try to "pad" their bank balances by borrowing money, and any unexplained deposit may look like that to the officer.
Your comments about "the profile" are reasonable. You do indeed look very like the kind of person who would fail to leave the UK after your visit. You have, on paper, a huge incentive to do that - a girlfriend in the UK, a job you can probably do remotely, no other ties to your home country. (Joint ownership of property is of little value - you could continue to own it and receive income from the UK.)
But the really important question you haven't answered for them is "How can you afford to take four months off work?" Remember that you are not allowed to work, even remotely, while in the UK. Taking that time off, on top of the cost of flying to the UK, would wipe out almost all of your savings. Most people can't afford to have no income for four months. And if you can live without income for four months (for example because your girlfriend is earning enough money for both of you), then maybe you can live without income for twelve months, in which case you have another incentive to overstay your visa.
| https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/169226 |
travel | What cityscape is this picture of? | I have come across this cityscape on the web and I wonder what city it is. Does anyone know?
| VQAonline_00063938.png | Definitely Hong Kong, with Victoria Peak in the background.
Most likely taken from somewhere around North Point - based on the angle I'd say from the top of one of the high-rise buildings in that area.
The original photo is posted on Flickr, although without any details of exactly where it was taken. The same photographer has some other fairly impressive similar photos as well!
| https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/6979 |
travel | How to wash hands if tap water is too hot? | A few days ago I settled in the UK and noticed that hot tap water was not specific to Heathrow Airport. The only option in some toilets (e.g. in restaurants) is "tooooo hot" water. I cannot touch so hot water for even one second, otherwise it is painful.
How can I wash my hands if hot water is the only option?
| VQAonline_00064488.png | As a British person I can say in this instance I just splash my hands, or move them in and out of the water stream very quickly. I would do in the winter when it is very cold, too, even when both taps are present, because splashing quickly with too hot water is often preferable to ice cold water.
Also try using a different sink, because water usually cools in the pipes and/or takes a while to heat up, so you can often get a few seconds of cooler water if nobody has used the sink for a few minutes.
| https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/123392 |
travel | Where can you go lake ice skating in Southern Sweden? | Winter is coming, and if the Swedish Meteorologic and Hydrologic Institute (SMHI) is to be believed, it is going to be even colder than last year.
For reference, last year in Sweden was one of the coldest on record -- lake Vättern froze in a radius of 30 km or so around Jönköping, and I've seen speed skaters crossing the waters from Bankeryd to Huskvarna -- a good 5-10 km run. I tried skating myself, for the first time in my life, and that.. didn't end too well, but it was tons of fun.
Image source - my private collection
This year, I'm much more prepared, and since it's so much more fun than a regular ice rink, I was wondering which lakes in southern Sweden (everything in a radius of 300 km around Jönköping) freeze routinely and are used for ice skating in the winter.
Since my friends and I are fairly new to this, I'd like to stick to more frequented lakes, to be able to get assistance if needed.
| VQAonline_00063893.png | The site skridsko.net is crowd sourcing information about skating in all regions of sweden. You can search there when it starts to get cold enough. I live in the Stockholm area and here municipalities provide with skating lanes on a couple of lakes and also have information on their home pages about the avilability and ice quality. The lake Norrviken north of Stockholm is a good choice for newcomers to the game. You can choose between 3.5, 7, 10.5 and 14 kms tracks. The very best - of course - is when there hasn't been any snow yet and you can skate all over the lake but that is very seldom.
I would guess that vättern - a very deep lake - is less likely to freeze over compared to other lakes. Many winters there is no skating at all in southern sweden but the last 2 ones have been exceptional both for skiing and skating.
| https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/2998 |
ukrainian | How to pronounce `щ`? | I've heard щ to be pronounced in Ukrainian exactly like it pronounced in modern standard Russian (as a single phoneme) or like /ʃt͡ʃ/ (shch) - this screenshot is some kind of evidence that it also can be pronounced like /ʃt/
My question would be - is there a single acceptable form of pronouncing щ. If yes, which one? If no - how acceptable are alternatives (like acceptable in colloquial speech, not acceptable at all etc.)
| VQAonline_00064742.png | No, a commercial software can't serve an evidence of pronunciation.
Especially, if it is about toponyms, which are usually transliterated, not transcribed (see the difference between the two).
In Standard Ukrainian, «щ» is pronounced as a consonant cluster, unlike the standard Russian:
UA: [ʃ t͡ʃ]
RU: [ɕː]
In Eastern Ukraine, where many people speak surzhyk sociolect, if it easy to hear the [ɕː] instead. Assuming the number of speakers, someone may consider it a dialect already.
More phonetic differences are listed here.
And no, «щ» is not the same thing as «шт» [ʃt] (however, there is some historic relation). There's even a pair of words to see the difference:
щука — a pike fish
штука — a thing
As usual, adding dialectal words/pronunciation may add some emotional flavor to one's speech. It can be a double-edged weapon however, so a language learner should probably strive to keep the Standard language unless they master the language well enough.
| https://ukrainian.stackexchange.com/questions/2677 |
ukrainian | Як правильно "блоковий" чи "блочний" | e2u віддає перевагу блоковий перед блочний
block = [blɒk] 1. блок; гру́па; ву́зол || бло́ковий || розбива́ти/розби́ти на бло́ки, об’є́днувати/об’єдна́ти в бло́ки,
зво́дити/зве́сти́ до бло́кової фо́рми // in ~s гру́пами; бло́ками
2. блокува́ти/заблокува́ти
Але в інтернеті можна бачити обидва варіанти. Як правильно?
| VQAonline_00064741.png | Словник УМІФ
блоковий (від: блок — угода)
блочний (від: блок — механізм)
Орфографічний словник української мови
блоковий (від: блок — механізм, угода)
блочний (від: блок — механізм, плита)
Тлумачний словник української мови у 20 томах
блоковий
Прикм. до блок1. Блоковий спосіб скиртування.
спец. Прикм. до блок2. Блокова будова.
політ. Прикм. до блок3. Виглядало на те, що всіх влаштовує блоковий статус. Зрештою, політики дійшли висновку, що пріоритетом є перемога на президентських виборах (з газ.).
Прикм. до блок3. Блокову структуру телевізійної програми було змінено (з газ.).
блочний
Прикм. до блок1. Автонавантажувач, обладнаний блочною стрілою, застосовується в портах, доках і на будівельних майданчиках (з наук.-попул. літ.).
спец. Прикм. до блок2. Блочний матеріал; ／ Який складається зі стандартних блоків. Блочні теплиці — це обʼєднання двосхилих теплиць, у яких немає проміжків між секціями, а бокові простінки замінені стояками (з наук. літ.).
блок
-а (родовий відмінок) Простий механізм для підняття важких предметів, що має форму колеса (на осі) з жолобом, через яке перекинуто ланцюг, канат і т. ін. Міни лежать на палубі й у трюмі, .. блоками опускають їх у морську дорогу (Ю. Яновський); Вітер гуляє у вітах каштанів... Ніжно посвистує блоками кранів (М. Гірник); Слуги ввозили заморські фрукти в вазах з чистого золота і таких важких, що підіймати їх на столи доводилось на обшитих позолоченою шкірою вірьовках, перекинутих через блоки, хитро сховані під стелею (П. Загребельний).
-а (родовий відмінок)
техн. Окрема, незалежна частина споруди, машини і т. ін., що складається також з окремих елементів або деталей. „Прикарпатліс“ — один з провідних постачальників на ринок України пиломатеріалів, дверних та віконних блоків (із журн.).
буд. Природний або штучний будівельний камінь, порізаний на плити. Грубезні його [храму] стіни, муровані з камʼяних блоків, були .. побілені вапном (Р. Федорів); Учені різних країн давно ламають голову над секретом Хеміуна: як він умудрився змонтувати гігантські камʼяні блоки піраміди Хеопса (з наук. літ.); З різних глин виготовляють керамічні блоки для стін, панелей та перекриттів (з наук.-попул. літ.).
Упакування, що містить кілька (багато) однакових предметів. Якби злочинець навідався вчора чи наступного дня, то його здобиччю було б не більше десятка блоків сигарет (з газ.).
-у (родовий відмінок)
політ. Обʼєднання держав, організацій, партій і т. ін. НАТО — військово-політичний блок, до якого на час створення входили США, Великобританія, Франція, Італія, Канада та інші країни (з навч. літ.); Чимало народних депутатів запевняють, мовляв, проголосуйте за мене чи мій виборчий блок, і питання із вкладами Ощадбанку СРСР буде знято (з газ.).
Серія однотипних теле- або радіопрограм, переданих одна за одною, або кілька друкованих матеріалів на одну тему. Одна з частин нової телепрограми — щоденний блок спортивних новин (з газ.).
Логічно завершена частина певної програми або переліку дій. Посібник складається з чотирьох блоків, до яких увійшли інтерактивні вправи, апробовані під час реалізації проекту (з навч. літ.).
Норми української літературної мови (Олекса Синявський, 1941)
-ний, -ній — найширше вживаний наросток при різних пнях і з різноманітним значінням:
а) при іменникових пнях на означення матеріялу, далі відношення, ґатунку, властивости (але в меншій мірі, як -астий, -истий): молочний, пшеничний, залізний, камінний, мідний, розумний, бездоганний, срібний, житній, оксамитний, будівельний, народній, барвний (отже наближається значінням, а іноді й спадається з -овий, -яний).
Від деяких із таких прикметників відокремлюється категорія „багатий на щось“, звичайно з переходом наголосу на -ний:
рибний (ловець) — рибна (річка)
хлібний (квас) — хлібний (край)
(лісовий) — лісний (край)
(сніговий) — сніжна (зима)
(медовий) — медний (рік)
(людовий) — людний (базар)
(горовий і гірний) — гірна (країна)
(хмаровий і хмарний) — хмарний (день)
— звірний (ліс)
Зокрема -ний часто буває в словах чужомовного походження, при тім іноді з чужомовними перед ним наростками -ив-, -атив- тощо: активний, оперативний, ілюстративний.
б) при дієслівних пнях на означення прикметників, іноді близьких значінням до загублених дієприкметників переємних теперішнього часу, а почасти й минулого: прохідний, наступний, доступний, пожи́вний, придатний, чутний, непохитний, незабутній, наступний, непробудний і т. ін. — див. § 89.3 дрібн. шрифт.
в) при прислівникових пнях часто з ш перед -ній: горішній, долішній, колишній, теперішній, тутешній, домашній, справдешній — див. § 54.
г) в дієприкметниках переємних минулого часу: даний, караний, улюблений, засвоєний... — див. § 89.
-овий (-йовий), -евий (-євий) — досить поширений наросток на означення відносних прикметників, отже тільки при іменникових пнях:
а) на питання „з чого?“, „який?“, рідко „чий?“: дубовий, соболевий, їжаковий, воловий, вербовий, паперовий, ли́совий, орловий, лойовий, смушевий, грушевий, баєвий, крицевий, овочевий (порівн. -иний, -ячий, -яний).
б) на питання „який?“ „до чого відносний?“ (прикметники відношення): науковий, службовий, роковий, шляховий, верствовий, загадковий, випадковий, степовий, дощовий, багажевий...
Взагалі наросток -овий у значінні і а) і б) часто чергується з іншими прикметниковими наростками, зокрема з -ний, при тім часто й значіння слова зміняється з зміною наростка, але не так, щоб можна було визначити відмінність -овий супроти інших, напр.: розумовий (прикметник відносний) — розумний (інше значіння, між іншим, з ступенюванням — розумніший), ваговий — важний, але в роковий — річний, оксамитовий — оксамитний вже немає такої відмінности.
Моя думка
Результати вказують, що все залежить від контексту:
Блочний — може замінювати слово складний.
Блоковий — включає значення „блочний“ (вказує яка є „система“) й має відношення до всіх „блоків“, чого не сказати про „блочний“.
Але я вважаю, що правильно й більш є логічним — блоковий.
Подібне
How to choose between the changing consonants in the root?
| https://ukrainian.stackexchange.com/questions/2585 |
ukrainian | "ПіцЕрія" чи "ПіцерІя"? | Як правильно ставити наголос у слові піцерія
"піцЕрія" чи "піцерІя"?
Посилання на обговорення:
https://www.facebook.com/654887197880807/posts/2305225662846944/
Маю певні сумніви щодо наведеного варіанта на зображенні.
| VQAonline_00064759.png | Орфографічний словник української мови
піце́рія іменник жіночого роду
ВТССУМ
піце́рія
-ї, ж. Закусочна, в якій готують та подають піцу.
Вільний тлумачний словник
піце́рі́я -ї, жін. Заклад харчування, у якому головним чином готують
піцу.
Правильно наголос піцЕрія
| https://ukrainian.stackexchange.com/questions/5495 |
ukrainian | Капуста цвітна чи кольорова? | Натрапила на рецепти Обсмажена кольорова капуста з яйцями та Цвітна капуста у вершковому соусі
Цікавить, як правильно назвати вид капусти, зображений на фото - цвітна чи кольорова?
Вікіпедії стаття Капуста цвітна
Кучерява капуста, квітна капуста або цвітна капуста (Brassica oleracea
var. botrytis)
В Google пошук видає обидва варіанти.
| VQAonline_00064758.png | Як правильно в коментарі каже Yola, капуста цвітна, бо цвіте. (Кольорова — це спроба перекласти з російської прикметник цветная, який може позначати і «кольорова», і «цвітна», тому у випадку капусти його часто неправильно інтерпретують.)
«Словник української мови» в 20 томах:
КАПУ́СТА, и, ж[іночий рід]. <…>
△ (7) Цвітна́ капу́ста — сорт капусти, суцвіття якої складається з укорочених та потовщених квітконосних пагонів, що щільно прилягають один до одного. Цвітній капусті належить першість за вмістом найважливіших вітамінів та мінеральних речовин не лише серед інших видів капусти, а й серед овочів взагалі (із журн.); Показала [Марина],
де картопля з морквою, де баняки, пояснила, як вона готує суп з цвітної капусти (Г. Вдовиченко).
Вікіпедія в статті «Капуста цвітна» також наводить варіанти квітна капуста й кучерява капуста, але без джерел.
| https://ukrainian.stackexchange.com/questions/5486 |
ukrainian | Чи можна гадати на Івана Купала? | На Мова — ДНК нації
зіткнулась з такою картинкою
В даному випадку показано, що гадати не може бути синонімом слова ворожити. Але в СУМ-11 слово гадати та ворожити синоніми. То ж чи правильно гадати на Івана Купала?
| VQAonline_00064747.png | В Академічному тлумачному словнику (1970—1980) наведено такі значення дієслова гадати:
ГАДАТИ 1, аю, аєш, недок.
про кого — що і без додатка. Думати, розмірковувати. // Мріяти.
Гадати думу (думку, гадку) — те саме, що Думати думу
(думи, думку) (див. думати).
перев. з спол. що. Мати думку, міркування з якого-небудь приводу; вважати.
// Передбачати, припускати.
з інфін. Мати намір що-небудь робити. // Сподіватися.
ГАДАТИ 2, аю, аєш, недок., заст. Ворожити.
Серед російсько-українських словників знаходимо гадати як відповідник російському гадать лише у Словарі росийсько-українському 1893–1898рр. (М.Уманець, А.Спілка.)
Логічним висновком є такий: дієслово гадати у значенні ворожити для української мови є застарілим, тому і не рекомендується для вживання.
| https://ukrainian.stackexchange.com/questions/3440 |
ukrainian | Шампіньйон чи печериця? | СУМ-11 містить обидва слова
Шампіньйон Те саме, що печериця 1.
Печериця 1. Їстівний гриб родини пластинникових із сірою або
білуватою шапинкою на тонкій білій ніжці, який росте на полях, луках,
городах, у садках і т. ін.; шампіньйон.
На сайті Мова - ДНК нації, наголошують, що правильно лише печериця.
Чи потрібно відмовитись від використання слова "шампіньйон" для означення гриба? Чи можна використовувати обидва слова, як взаємозаміні?
| VQAonline_00064755.png | "Шампіньйон" - це запозичене слово (від фанц. "champignon", що означає гриб (див. Вікіпедію).
А от слово "печериця" (ЕСУМ, ст 364 ПДФ) за походженням ближче до нашої мови. Хоч немає однозначної версії як воно з'явилося (чи то від слова "печера", чи то від слова "пекти" чи навіть від словосполучення "печеня турова").
Подивіться назву розділу Мова ДНК нації - "Антисуржик". Отже, якщо ви хочете уникати суржика, то вам слід замінити слово "шампіньйон" на "печериця". Однак саме вживання слова "шампіньйон" не буде помилкою, бо воно все ж воно є в СУМі і біля нього немає ніяких позначок, які б не дозволяли його вживати.
| https://ukrainian.stackexchange.com/questions/5299 |
ukrainian | Як перекласти з англійської - viewing frustum? | Зараз займаюся перекладом сайту з програмування комп'ютерної графіки. Планую зробити gitbook на основі перекладу. Адреса сторінки.
Словосполучення viewing frustum стосується піраміди, але я не знаю як точно це перекласти.
Буду радий помічі)
Опис до рисунку:
Якщо ви зв'яжете кути канви з оком, яке за замовчанням вирівняне із нашою декартовою системою координат, і продовжите лінії далі вглиб сцени, ви отримаєте певного роду піраміду, яку ми звемо viewing frustum. Будь-який об'єкт всередині frustum (або такий, що перетинає його) вважається видимим і з'явиться на зображені.
| VQAonline_00064736.png | Якщо дослівно — зрізаний конус (або зрізана піраміда) зору (/огляду/погляду/бачення/тощо).
Якщо приблизно за сенсом і точність не така важлива — може, поле зору?
Update 1: Є термін конус зору (рос. конус зрения) — але чи те він означає, невідомо.
Update 2: Російською перекладають як пирамида видимости (іноді конус видимости) — наприклад: «использование наклонной пирамиды видимости (Oblique Frustum)».
Update 3: Українською теж кажуть піраміда видимості чи конус видимості — можливо, що це поширений/загальноприйнятий термін.
Причому конус видимості — навіть частіше за піраміду видимості.
Посібник «Геометричне моделювання і комп’ютерна графіка: використання бібліотеки OpenGL» (А. А. Лященко, В. В. Демченко, Є. В. Бородавка, В. В. Смирнов; Київський національний університет будівництва і архітектури; 2008, 2009), а разом з ним і Вікіпедія, каже [зрізаний] об'єм видимості — в загальному випадку, а як часткові:
[зрізаний] паралепіпед видимості — у випадку ортографічної проекції;
[зрізаний] конус видимості — у випадку перспективи.
| https://ukrainian.stackexchange.com/questions/1239 |
woodworking | Arbor nut keeps working itself loose on my table saw. What am I doing wong? | I recently bought a new Dewalt DWE7491RS table saw (pictured below). And on two separate occasions the arbor nut has come loose on me. Once with a dado stack that threw blades across the room! (Very SCARY!)
The second time it was when I was taking a standard cross-cut blade off and noticed the tension on the nut was very loose, although the blade hadn't slipped out of place yet.
I'm almost certain that I am tightening the nut down pretty well; probably more than I should. And I do put the washer on the nut between the blade and the nut. This is also with all stock parts that are less than a month old.
Any ideas what might be causing this to happen?
| VQAonline_00065103.png | Once the arbour nut is tight, the rotation of the spindle will tend to tighten it. So you just have to make sure it is torqued down appropriately.
Well, it is the rotation into the material that tends to tighten the arbor nut. Once powered down and free-spinning the mass of the blade is now free to loosen the arbor nut, which is why dado sets and saws with brakes may tend to loosen the arbor. The model described here doesn't seem to have a brake, but I suppose a valid check is to make sure the blade or blade stack isn't exceeding their recommendations. (Though, they usually discuss blade size in terms of the the riving knife installed rather than mass.)
This is how most saws like to be treated:
Make sure there is no oil or grease on the nut or the arbour. Make sure the entire spindle and all the spacers and washers are free of sawdust and other debris. If this is a new saw, I'd carefully degrease the entire spindle and blade hardware because it might still be covered in a factory anti-rust coating.
Stack up your spacers or blades correctly; there is usually an identical cupped washer on both sides of the blade, for example. What we don't want is mismatched torque on either side of the blade or blade stack.
Thread the nut on finger-tight, making sure all the slack is taken up as much as possible.
Either lock the spindle or use two wrenches to tighten the arbour a 1/8 to 1/4 turn. The idea is to snug things down fully without stretching the threads too much -- we want to be within the natural elasticity of the spindle metal.
That should be it. If it is working loose after torquing it down then there is a problem with the arbour nut, washers or spindle.
Make sure the blade is torqued down evenly. Spacers or washers must be the same mass and dimensions.
See if the spindle (or arbour nut) threads are obviously crossed or stripped out. Maybe they are stripped toward the end and you aren't getting a proper torque.
If you have over-torqued the arbour nut in the past, you may have stretched the threads on the spindle. There are gauges to check for this, but the idea is that the threads should be the same distance across the spindle. Look closely at the place where the nut tightens for really shiny spots or obvious metal movement.
Check for excessive run-out or vibration. Make sure the bearings aren't failing. There are ways to check for run-out without an indicator which are easy to find on-line. Vibration should be obvious while the saw is running at speed under no load. The unpowered spindle should turn easily with your fingers with no "grumble".
| https://woodworking.stackexchange.com/questions/10582 |
woodworking | Would an inlay affect the structure of an end grain cutting board? | I am in the process of creating an end grain cutting board which is made up of Maple only, but would like to decorate it by inlaying other types of wood into it (Walnut for example). The cutting board size is 18" by 12" and 1.2" thick, and the inlay will be near the a corner of the board with a size of 5" by 5" and .35" deep. Would having this inlay affect the structural integrity of the board?
I am doing the inlay by using the v-inlay method as described in the image below at and angle of 45 degrees which most probably means that the flat base of the inlay wont be touching the board, just the edges:
| VQAonline_00064915.png |
Would having this inlay affect the structural integrity of the board?
I wouldn't have thought so judging from the size you indicate. It will locally affect the strength, but not enough to be a major factor I would have thought (in light of the following).
which most probably means that the flat base of the inlay wont be touching the board, just the edges:
This is a problem I think. The edges of both the inlay and the rebate are end grain, and joints of end grain to end grain are the weakest glue joint. I would highly recommend laying a bed of epoxy underneath the inlay, so that it basically fills the void underneath. Not only will this hugely improve the bond to the inlay it will add strength to that part of the board as well so you get a two-for-one benefit.
| https://woodworking.stackexchange.com/questions/2329 |
woodworking | FIlling up gaps in an old wooden floor | I'm currently in the process of renewing an old wooden floor. What would one use to fill in the gaps between the planks?
I've asked in the local home repair store and they gave me a silicone like mass that resembles the color of the wood.
That seems to work ok for the nail holes, but is kind of soft and somewhat expensive for filling out all space between the boards.
I have seen some youtube videos in which people are mixing sand dust with either wood glue or some special liquid. Does anyone know something on the pros and conns of these approaches?
| VQAonline_00065001.png |
I'm currently in the process of renewing an old wooden floor. What would one use to fill in the gaps between the planks?
Nothing unless there's a draft problem. The gaps aren't generally an issue except visually but they can make for a cold floor depending on the rest of the structure of the house and how much air movement can take place through the floor.
Some argue such gaps are supposed to be there, and if you look at old floors 99 times out of 100 you'll see gaps between boards, sometimes quite wide ones, and in many cases there's no filler and no trace that there ever was any present.
In the past where gaps were filled they used various methods, including the same way gaps were dealt with on ship decks, using oakum and tar (!), as well as with melted wax or wax/resin compositions (also used as a filler material for furniture in this era).
See more discussion on the issue and solutions at these links:
How to Fill Gaps In a Wide-Plank Wood Floor on This Old House.
My home's pine flooring has large gaps in between some of the planks, especially in the kitchen. What can be done to fill or seal them? on Quora.
How to fill gaps in a wood floor? on HomeOwnersHub.
Filler for ancient wood floors? on the WoodenBoat forum.
I've asked in the local home repair store and they gave me a silicone like mass that resembles the color of the wood.
That seems to work ok for the nail holes
That stuff is no good for filling nail holes on a floor. This type of flexible filler is for filling gaps that require some movement to take place without cracking, as in gappy installations of skirting to walls, one wooden moulding piece to the next where some shrinkage and expansion will take place through the year.
If you must fill the nail holes (you don't have to, it's quite normal for them not to be filled) you want a rigid filler and ideally a strong one if it's to take direct foot traffic, i.e. if there's no carpet going on or any rugs being put down.
| https://woodworking.stackexchange.com/questions/5619 |
woodworking | Will the center have enough support for my custom desk/table? | I'm trying to build my first large desk for my computer setup. My plan is to set a 74" × 42" laminate counter top on top of four Alex drawers and I am concerned about the center of the table sagging or breaking without an apron for support. I drew a top down view of the table quickly and was wondering what I should add for support to strengthen the center if needed.
The countertop,
The drawers, The design
Most of the weight will be located near the top of the table with three monitors. Other than that I'm planning on having just a keyboard, mouse, and maybe some light nick-knacks scattered throughout.
| VQAonline_00065156.png | Laminate countertop material is very stiff. 46" is just over 1m and such spans are normal in many kitchen designs. After 1 year of use I expect laminate will deflect, but you will not notice (maybe 1-2mm).
If deflection can be seen after many months easy to install central leg same height as Alex drawers for support.
| https://woodworking.stackexchange.com/questions/14063 |
woodworking | How to freshen wooden box | I have an old Chess set which has been in storage in what would appear to be less than ideal conditions. (Photo taken with flash.)
One half of the box (on one side only, ie the half that is not shown in the image is as fresh as the left side here) is very dull looking. Other than the colour there is no obvious damage. I do not know what has happened to it.
What is the easiest way to achieve uniform appearance?
Edit: the "damaged" side was uppermost I believe, and there were other things on top. I did not notice excessive amounts of dust around it. Wiping with alcohol does not have any effect.
| VQAonline_00065084.png | I would first clean the whole thing up with mineral spirits (not alcohol) and then try something like feed n wax on it. Definitely test this only on a small section (preferably a non visible section) first to see how it looks compared to the existing finish.
Alternatively I would recommend a natural danish oil. I think any colorless oil finish will darken the damaged side enough to blend it right into the non-damaged side, and danish oil has the advantage of also being a varnish so it will provide additional protection from water.
Either way whatever you use, you should try to test it on a small area that is not easily visible to see the results before finishing the entire piece.
| https://woodworking.stackexchange.com/questions/9720 |
woodworking | Can this be a very simple cross cut sled with replaceable zero inserts? | I am trying to reuse an older crosscut sled.
I will have problems with using the old cut for the blade so I googled for a solution and I came across a couple of complicated designs with replaceable zero inserts. Those would add another piece of plywood on top of the one that makes the sled base.
Since my fences are very solid (both front and back) I could practically cut out the piece of plywood 1" or 2" to the left and right of the blade cut and install a replacement screwed to the fence as shown below. Wood nuts will be installed int the fence and then I will use screws to attach a new insert every time I need a new one like below and then make a new cut. I wonder what I am missing since I never seen this simple design
| VQAonline_00065044.png | This will work. This is how mine works. People like to make things very complicated... a lot of people like making jigs more than anything else.
| https://woodworking.stackexchange.com/questions/7249 |
woodworking | Convert a minimalist bench design into a desk | I saw this tutorial and I really want to build it for a workspace area at my job. The measurements of this bench were 16″ high x 40″ long x 13.5″ deep, but I'd like to make a table that's 29" high x 107" long x 20" deep. The tutorial bench is built using a modified box joint with interlocking 2"x4" pieces that are glued together with liquid nails. Each of the 2"x4" pieces have a little bit removed on the 2" side to create a square look with a table saw.
Are any structural concerns with making the table this long? Would the table need to be reinforced underneath with hidden brackets? How much weight should it be able to hold?
I appreciate your help!
| VQAonline_00064978.png |
Are any structural concerns with making the table this long?
No. Even with a top much thinner than you're going to end up with you can have a >100" span.
Would the table need to be reinforced underneath with hidden brackets?
Not at all, the interlocking box joint is very strong (lots of surface area for the glue) and the table will be naturally stiff.
How much weight should it be able to hold?
You could try using The Sagulator to calculate this, but it won't be easy since this isn't any material that it includes (because of the way the boards are oriented). Let's just say a lot.
This design orients the boards edge-up, which is using the wood at its maximum strength as regards resistance to sagging. Couple that with them being glued together what you're making here is in effect a laminated beam, so its strength is immense. I bet a heavy person could stand right in the centre and it wouldn't bow enough to notice.
There is a weight issue that you might not have thought of and that's the weight of the table itself. Obviously you like the chunky style but do be aware scaled up to table size this makes for a great mass of solid wood and it'll weight quite a bit and may be difficult to move around even just made from 2x material. Made from hardwood it would be a two-man or three-man job in a lot of cases!
| https://woodworking.stackexchange.com/questions/4900 |
workplace | Seating arrangements face to face makes me stressed. What can I do about it? |
I had been rejecting jobs in the past which had tables with such arrangement like in the picture. I mean when there is no partition by which you could have privacy from another person seeing you constantly.
But the problem is - I see many big companies, which might be good jobs have such seating.
It is especially hard when I feel very stressed and feel shame to show I am so much stressed. And its bad when you have to give up good job just because seating arrangement.
I usually avoid sitting that way in public transport also. Sometimes I try to sit for a bit - to train myself. Usually I get stressed after that, so when I know I need to feel relaxed, I avoid those training. This happens not with all people. Mostly happens with young, cool people. With old people its easier. Also with my family members its not big deal if its not too close face to face. Same is with girls, they are surprised why I avoid eye contact. But with some who I spend more time, I try to get eye contact and after long time I get used, also because I know that girl likes me the way I am if she is long time with me.
Some say that I would get used. Maybe this is true. Maybe with some guys who like me I could get used. But if there sits a guy who does not like me, and is angry at me often, then I am really not sure.
In some companies they state that monitor will hide my face and people are not staring at me all the time, they have work and they look at their monitors. Which is true.
I might hide behind monitor, but I am afraid that I would not start to hunch.
And also in the IT industry I believe I should not be alone who has problem with eye contact. So I do not get why offices are that way when they know that not all IT guys are good at social interactions.
Update
My question is - have you any suggestions how could I solve this problem? How to feel better? Or maybe solve it somehow technically?
| VQAonline_00065185.png | I have a seating arrangement like this (it isn't a problem for me), for other reasons I requested a 2nd monitor and two monitor stands. My screen wall effectively forms a partition across the desk. The person who sits across from me has three monitors so we actually have to actively stand up to hold a face to face conversation.
In all honesty every job I have ever worked in has this style of seating (UK, cultures may vary) so it is probably a very common problem and one you'll struggle to avoid.
| https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/71629 |
workplace | Why would a job application ask about residency history? | Recently I looked at the online job application for Barnes & Noble (a US bookstore chain) and they asked for a list of your residence history:
It was not a required field, but this seemed like a very odd thing for me to ask, as the locations I have lived seem like they would have nothing to do with whether or not I would be a good worker.
So why would a job application ask for residence history?
| VQAonline_00065180.png | Its because, during the background check process, some companies will go through the criminal records and court cases against the combination of your name and address. If they find a match or a close match, they will come back to you.
This is important, reason being that, if a company processes your VISA for any other country, they need to be sure that you don't have any criminal records at any places.
| https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/56354 |
workplace | Why would a US company tell their employees that they will pay for a union? | I recently read about a union effort in Amazon and a photo of an Amazon flyer was mentioning that accepting a union at Amazon means paying for it:
(source)
I am French and do not know how unions work in the US, so apologies if the question is obvious: are all employees of a company automatically paying for a union once there is one in the company?
By "paying", I mean "having an entry on the payslip with "union fees"".
I can imagine that there are some indirect payments possible (the company must co-pay for the union, and this may ultimately mean that the salaries are lower (this is an extreme example)), or that some employees want to join the union (and pay their fees).
The flyer seems to suggest however that once a union is formed, everyone must pay for it. Is that correct?
| VQAonline_00065208.png | Employees pay something called "union dues" in the United States
Unions are not free to run. They hire benefit administrators. They sometimes manage pensions. They definitely need to hire negotiators. They pay for this by charging their members a fee.
are all employees of a company automatically paying for a union once there is one in the company?
All employees in the bargaining unit, which is nearly always smaller than the number of employees in the company and in this case much smaller. Bargaining units might form around a location, a particular skillset, or even job function.
By "paying", I mean "having an entry on the payslip with "union fees"".
Quite often. The unions often prefer to deduct dues directly from paycheques.
The flyer seems to suggest however that once a union is formed, everyone must pay for it. Is that correct?
Depends on the particular laws of the state. In some states, if a majority vote for a union, everyone must pay. In "right-to-work" states, official membership in the union is optional and so is paying union dues. So the union would still exist, it is just that a large number of people could opt-out of being members.
| https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/169883 |
workplace | Can I take any recourse after being told to take down ' Xinjiang "Reeducation" Camps ' as my location? | Background
Today at work, I got a talking to from my superior about something on my Skype for Business account being too political. Below is what caused the issue:
[
My location was set to Xinjiang "Reeducation" Camp as an (admittedly) edgy joke. I understand this is unprofessional, but our work tends to be informal (we have rubber chickens in my work area). The thing is, I have seen other people put up funny things as locations like "Where we are going, we won't need roads" or something like "Iraq" as their location as a joke. Regardless, this is what my superior stated to me:
At a meeting my superior was at, someone at the meeting had me as their contact.
They saw that I had "Xinjiang "Reeducation" Camps" as my location.
They (presumably) told my manager to tell me to take this down as my location.
My manager meets with me one-on-one and tells me to take this down as soon as possible and "be as bland as possible, we need to act in accordance with policies", the typical schpiel. She mentioned she meant to told me earlier when I had "Saudi Arabia" as my location, but that she didn't get to it because it didn't stay up too long.
Solution
I took this down as requested, since this was a direct order from my manager and replaced it with a Star Trek reference (Romulan Empire Outpost). However, I don't understand why this is political. At my job, you are required to be a U.S. citizen. The Uighur Human Rights Policy Act of 2019 passed unanimously in the senate (meaning bascially all U.S. citizens are on board). The place I work also refers to Taiwan as Taiwan, not Chinese Taipei as the PRC is so apt to call it. When she asked me to explain I said "it is a joke but is meant to refer to the Xinjiang Province concentration camps that China is using to oppress the Uighur minority". She then asked me what word (Uighur) I used. She didn't even know what it was, but yet she came to me saying it was political.
Question
Apologies if this reads like a rant, I really just don't understand the fundamental issue with a viewpoint that most U.S. citizens hold. What reasonable recourse of any kind do I have here given the situation above?
| VQAonline_00065203.png | I'd like to point out a few things here, that I think are a little off in your assessment of the situation.
(Edit: All of this is assuming that your Skype is used for official work)
First
It seems like you think that a joke on concentration camps (Especially one downplaying them like calling them an education camp) can be equated to a silly joke like "Where we are going, we won't need roads". This is not the case at all. One is harsh and should always be kept to a more private setting where you know it won't offend. The other is... well, just silly, non offensive.
With humor it is always advice to use non-offensive humor in work-settings, unless you specifically know that harsh humor is accepted by everyone at your work place.
Second
You talk about the relaxed setting at your work with rubber ducks. This is great and shows that humor is acceptable. Keep in mind that rubber ducks are also innocent in nature, so it doesn't show that everything goes, just that humor like "Where we are going, we won't need roads"is fine.
Third
You talk about human rights and US citizens. This has nothing to do with the situation really. Because even if you are a US citizen, you can get offended by stuff. Someone obviously did here, the human rights act of 2019 has nothing to do with this.
Fourth
You say that your workplace Taiwan as Taiwan. This is fine, but keep in mind that there's no reason to assume that the person was offended by the pro Taiwanese opinion. They might as well just be offended by the joke because of it's dark nature.
Fifth
You mention your manager didn't even understand the joke as if that means she can't ask you to stop. Someone complained about a dark, out of place joke that was political. She probably knew there are no rules specifically stating "No dark jokes" but there's one saying "keep political opinions to a minimum" so she took the route that the rules allowed, to help this person.
TLDR:
You made a joke that was not appropriate. It doesn't matter how many arguments you try to find that supports it being okay, because your manager told you it was not. Keep your humor more light and innocent.
| https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/147026 |
workplace | Should I add my photo to CV if I get benefit from it? | I think everyone will agree with this statement: "A picture is worth a thousand words". It should also be applied to CV too. Searching on the internet, I find many advices tell me to avoid this, most of them are opinions. I don't understand this. The only one article I found which encourage you to adding photo in CV is from Forbes.
An example of a CV with photo:
This is a question that also ask the same thing, and I notice that I have a slightly different question.
The main reason to stay away from putting photo into CV is discrimination. However my country doesn't have that law, and in fact I have benefit from this.
Attractive males received a 19.9% callback rate, almost 50% higher
than the 13.7% response for plain men and more than twice the 9.2%
response to those with no photo.
I am not an attractive one, I have acne. But many of my friends say that I have feature that if I use Photoshop, I will have a nice-looking. So sorry if you feel I'm over confident.
If you have many chances to apply CVs with photos, does adding photo make your CVs have more chance to be accepted?
| VQAonline_00065171.png | Putting a picture on your cv is almost always a bad thing. First it wastes space that can be better used to sell your skills. CVs should never exceed 2 pages and if you put a picture there , you have less room for describing your skills.
Second, it appears naive as if you don't understand how things are done. Being thought of as naive is rarely a good thing when trying to imporess someone enought to schedule an interview.
Third, it could very well make it easy for someone to screen you out based on appearance. So if you are not model-beautifiul, it doesn't work in your favor to have a picture. It is a known problem that short people, overweight people, older people, people of color, and unattractive people are judged more harshly in interviews. If you put the picture out there before the interview, you may get judged that way long before it gets to the interview and you have lost your chance to overcome that by selling yourself with your enthusiasm and technical ability. If you did choose to put a picture in, then it had better be of the highest qualty and that means hiring a really good professional photographer which can be costly.
Fourth, what would you gain from it? Yes a picture is worth a thousand words but how would having a picture help sell you to a potential employer? Are you selling your looks or your skills? A picture tells me nothing about your skills. Might as well put a picture of a cute puppy there, it would have as much positive impact for you.
It is true there are some jobs where a photo would be expected. Jobs where your looks are a large part of what you are selling such as acting or modeling.
| https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/33639 |
workplace | Advocating for space. Is it rude? | My workplace follows the open office layout. My team consists of a product manager and 7 developers (including myself). We have one large table to ourselves and its a cozy setup we have managed. I sit next to the window at the edge of the table with the PM to my left.
Just last week a designer was moved to our team from one of the other teams. He had to sit close to the PM and he decided to squeeze in between the him and me. That left very little wiggle room for me. I requested him to move to some other spot or make some space to which he obliged by moving away a few inches. Good enough.
The next day he got along all the stuff from his previous desk which included a lot of table accessories that take up space. My laptop was about 4 inches away from his mousepad. I had to request him again to make space as this arrangement was not comfortable for me. This time he moved but not without making remarks about how I am being such a baby. This was said in a friendly tone and I would not have given much thought to it, but then 2 other developers sitting across the table made the same comments (still in friendly tones).
Currently the setup is back to being cozy for all of us and I have no complaints but I feel the way I handled this situation ended up making me look stubborn and inflexible. The other developers may or may be okay with having very little breathing room and I would not like to broach the subject for a few days.
Should I clear the air around why I had to make the request I made? What should I do if a similar situation presents itself again?
| VQAonline_00065190.png | Just leave it. If the situation is comfortable now, there is no need to bring it up again. Others probably don't think about this as much as you.
If the situation arises again, tell your team's manager that your team needs a bigger table and let him/her deal with it. If you need to explain yourself, do so firmly and without excuses. It's important to have a comfortable and ergonomic workplace where you can focus and not get distracted!
| https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/86460 |
workplace | Strange job interview -- What were they really looking for? | This was the strangest job interview I ever had. I was interviewing for a position as an engineer at a US based tire manufacturing plant. The interview started pretty normally, and then the interviewer says "please follow me". I'm all dressed up in suit and tie. He walks me into the basement of the building where there were eight large 10x10" timbers, each maybe six or seven feet long. There were two other observers there. He handed me a clipboard, and said you are to supervise the building of this cube structure, using these two workers.
The clipboard had a drawing with a structure looked pretty much like this... (obviously without the swimsuit models and yellow awning...) Each timber was six or seven feet long. They were notched at the ends and drilled for large metal locking pins. Pins were included.
The stated goal of the exercise was to get the structure complete in as quick a time as possible, while still being safe. He gives me gloves and hard hats. We started into it, and I realized it was really a three person hands-on job. I jumped in grabbed the timber lifted it over my head and placed it into position. The doggone things weight 60 or 70 lbs each. All the other beams could be pre-assembled and then tilted from the ground, but not the last two, at least not that I could figure out. Oh well.
I did ask for advice, they absolutely remained silent. We could have easily built the thing upside down, but the clipboard guide showed it right side up. I have thought about alternative building methods (i.e. lean one side up against the wall, and that would have gotten us closer to completion, but that's still a bit unsafe... Note, I was coming out of the military where the mission was get it done, and I took the (remote) risk, not anyone else... I knew I could press 70 lbs easily... even while wearing a suit.
As it turns out I was leaving the US Army Combat Engineers, so I had a lot of familiarity with some of this stuff. At no time did I place either of the two volunteers even remotely at risk. And it wasn't clear to me if they wanted "salaried" folks to get their hands dirty when necessary. This was not a union labor force. At the time, I thought that was part of the test. I was totally in "get it done" mode.
We built the thing quickly, but I did NOT get the job offer. I have no clue what they were really looking for. It was a very odd interview. (Turns out I think I lucked out not working there... that plant had massive layoffs one year later... er... the grapes were probably sour?)
My questions:
Has anybody ever seen a similar exercise at a job interview?
What skills and traits are the interviewers really looking for?
Is there a better way to address / prepare for such an odd interview?
How does one do well?
| VQAonline_00065206.png |
He handed me a clipboard, and said you are to supervise the building of this cube structure, using these two workers.
...then...
I jumped in grabbed the timber lifted it over my head and placed it into position.
You didn't do what was asked.
You were asked to supervise building a structure, but instead you jumped in and actually helped build the structure.
In addition:
Did you have the relevant H&S training to ensure that the structure was being built safely by the workers?
Did you check weights of timbers, ensure that you had enough people to lift them safely, etc.?
Did you check the workers had the relevant H&S training?
Hindsight is everything of course - but in these situations, always clarify if in doubt, and always question what they're actually trying to get out of you here. They probably don't give two hoots if you can actually put together a bunch of wood, so there's an ulterior motive there somewhere - you just need to work out what it is, and play it to your advantage. That's easier said than done of course, and I hate "mind game" interviews (aside from a power trip for the interviewer, I don't see the point) - but that's sadly the reality of many interviews these days.
| https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/153792 |
worldbuilding | Why are potions always brewed in extreme bulk? | This isn't a question intended for any specific setting. Rather, this is a general point of curiosity that occurred to me while brainstorming my story. Potion brewing is almost inexorably tied to the image of a cauldron. Whether it be witches standing over a cauldron big enough to boil someone alive in and stirring it with a big stick, or more reasonably-sized personal cauldrons in, say, Harry Potter, potions are very, very frequently being brewed in these bulky, thick metal pots, to the point that some people don't realize they ever historically saw mundane use.
The thing is... cauldrons are big. Even the small ones for personal use, as far as I can tell, can hold a lot of liquid. Even if we assume half a liter, about the size of a commercial water bottle you'd find for sale at a deli or pizza place, is an appropriate serving size of the average potion, then even tiny cauldrons, when filled with potion ingredients, would make at least a dozen servings of such a thing. And yet in, say, Harry Potter, we're told that on Harry's first day of potions class in the sixth book, Professor Slughorn had a "large, bubbling cauldron" of Felix Felicis on display for the class... a potion where a single serving size looks like this:
The unspoken implication is crystal clear: any world where cauldrons are heavily associated with potion-making is a world where potions are almost always brewed in bulk. Where dozens, maybe even hundreds of servings of a single potion are brewed at a time.
What might the reason be that brewing potions in extreme bulk is such a natural and widespread form of potion-making that cauldrons could possibly become so heavily associated with it?
| VQAonline_00065793.png | Exact Proportions.
The ingredient ratios in a potion must be very precise. The easiest way to achieve this is to brew a large amount.
Suppose you need 1 litre of swamp water, 10 grams of ant juice and 0.5 grams of butterfly testicle powder, and can reliably measure anything up to the closest half gram. Then due to measuring errors you will end up with anywhere from 0 to 1 grams of butterfly testicle powder. In particularly you might use double the correct amount and ruin the potion.
If instead you brew 100 litres of potion, then you need 50 grams of powder, and the error is only between 49.5 to 50.5. So you have at most a 1% error.
This also applies when creating butterfly testicle powder in the first place. The potency varies between butterflies. So if you only need 1 butterfly's worth and I only need 1 butterfly's worth, and we each grind up one butterfly, then we might end up with different potency and cannot trade recipes. Better everyone in the area pools their butterflies. Then the resulting brew is measured for potency and redistributed.
| https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/214194 |
worldbuilding | what would the wind patterns on a world that has a constant "midnight sun" | I created a world that's axial tilt is on a constant 45 degree angle in the northern hemisphere it would look something like this. The problem is I can't figure out how the wind currents would work.
the planet has the same mass, size, orbit speed and rotation speed as earth. If anyone can explain it to me it would be a big help.
| VQAonline_00065870.png | Almost an Eyeball Earth
An Eyeball Earth is a hypothetical type of planet where one side constantly faces the star. There are theories about how the climate would work, mostly on how there are persistent winds between the two sides.
Specifically, the colder, denser air would move closer to the ground, get into the "eye", become warm air, rise up, and then move to the cold side higher up in the atmosphere. I would expect something similar on this planet.
Similar is Not the Same
Ignoring the effects of terrain and ocean currents, both of which are pretty important to climate models, you essentially have a "tropics" ring at very high latitudes. Storms would gain energy there, move to the cold side, and cause rain/snow as they cool off. I would expect something like Hadley Cells to form, but built around the "tropics ring" instead of the equator.
Additionally, since the planet is also rotating, you get Coriolis effects on these storm systems. It wouldn't be a straight shot over to the cold side: everything would drift and spin. This would cause interesting variations in weather patterns.
Inside the Tropics
Additionally, the area inside the "tropics", the cap formed by the ring where the sun is directly overhead, would be very interesting! It would have near constant exposure to the sun and be on the tail end of cold air systems. Surface winds would likely be calm, like the doldrums on earth. There could possibly be a desert or very warm sea there!
| https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/235801 |
worldbuilding | How I explain New France not having their Middle East? | In an alternate history I am designing, France wins the Seven Years War and does not lose their land claims in America. A problem I have reached though is explaining why land east of the Mississippi winds up in American control.
How can I explain why the land east of the Mississippi (represented by the red line) would come into American control?
| VQAonline_00065375.png | The American Revolution Happened Earlier
The reason that the French won the 7 Years War is that the America Revolution happened in the midst of it, and France recognized the territory of the newly independent USA in exchange for a cessation of hostilities on that front.
| https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/59962 |
worldbuilding | Modern soldiers carry axes instead of combat knives. Why? | In my alternative history story, taking place at the end of the 20th century, one country has an army with platoons of airborne scouts. But unlike modern special forces they don't use combat knives as side-arms, but combat axes. Like this one:
So, question is: why do they use them instead of combat knives?
Is there any advantage?
My ideas are:
Traditions (maybe the ancestors of these soldiers were lumberjacks)
When you have to drop in forested areas an axe can be much more useful to chop wood, make shelters, including long-lived shooting points, or traversing young forest areas.
There was a Soviet Union soldier who captured a Nazi tank using an axe during World War II
I know that in close-quarter combat killing with a knife is usually faster; you can kill with a single well-placed jab, and an axe requires space to make a swing. An axe is also harder to conceal. But the main soldier's weapon is an automatic rifle, not a knife or axe.
UPD: As Nex Terren mentioned, an axe, like a shovel, can be used as entrenching tool. Furthermore, Soviet Army used small sapper shovels:
Soviet Spetsnaz units had advanced training with the MPL-50, which
they mostly used not for entrenching, but for close quarters combat.
The spade is well balanced, which allows it to be used as a throwing
weapon.
So using axe not just as a tool but also as a last-chance melee and throwing weapon looks possible.
| VQAonline_00065364.png | Breaching
I'm surprised no one has mentioned breaching.
Urban combat is much more common than it used to be, especially with anti-insurgency suppression and targeted rescue/kill operations.
An infantry company may all have to perform breaching or they may have a special unit for breaching, but in these scenarios an axe has much more utility and versatility as a tool than a knife.
Close Quarters Combat
An axe also has more reach and requires less dexterity than a knife, which can be useful with less training where visibility is low and corners are common. It can also cause more damage with a glancing blow and can be reversed to cause the same puncture damage with less force due to levering action with the handle.
References
Googling around, I was easily able to find references to axes as mechanical breaching tools, often used when explosives are overkill, too dangerous to use in enclosed spaces, or collateral material damage is unacceptable (like public spaces or inhabited buildings).
For example, this is from a US military Infantry Rifle Company handbook chapter on urban operations:
Explosive breaching includes using nonelectrical demolition systems; ballistic breaching includes using direct fire weapons; and mechanical breaching includes using crowbars, axes, saws, hooligan's tools, and sledgehammers.
There's also more online on WWII Axes
The main role of an axe during WWII was to cut wood or material for things such as building a fire, building shelters, etc.
The US Army Ranger Handbook also mentions using hatchets as standard issue (tho headlines with a quote from 1759).
Let the enemy come till he's almost close enough to touch, then let him have it and jump out and finish him up with
your hatchet.
Later it mentions a hatchet as in the Level 3 Survival Kit:
Level 3 Kit (carried in assault pack or ruck) water proof container with more of the materials listed in the level 1 and 2
kits plus shelter making materials (poncho, tarp, bungee cords, or space blanket) and a hatchet or saw.
| https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/57100 |
worldbuilding | Cutting down giant trees | Inspired by Nick Staab's recent work "Jack" (pictured below), how would you go around cutting down massive trees?
In this scenario the simpler the tools the better, as it would allow a primitive civilization to capitalize on their plentiful resource.
| VQAonline_00065297.png | A primitive society which was keen to cut down such a tree might try killing it first.
A strip of bark is removed in a continuous ring around the base of the tree, and then the team cuts into the exposed wood in order to cut off the flow of sap to the tree. After a while it dies, and then the wood can be allowed to dry out and age for a while.
After that, the tree can be cut down in the usual way using axes, wedges and saws, but since the wood is no longer living "green" wood it won't be so elastic and difficult to cut, making it easier to finish the job even with copper axes of other soft metal tools. (Once you get to bronze axes and saws, you are essentially using modern technology, our great refinements is steel can hold an edge for much longer and cross cut saws now have much better designs for the teeth).
| https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/33106 |
worldbuilding | Could there be something like aerobatic smoke trails in the vacuum of space? | Whether exhaust from a solid rocket engine, or something released by spaceships in flight (like aerobatic smoke in the atmosphere), could extended trails behind a ship be created that would not dissipate in the vacuum of space?
Could a trail be formed that a person close enough to see the ship with the naked eye would be able to see the trail?
| VQAonline_00065618.png | Using fumed silica. It is stable in vacuum, after crystallizing it won't spread out and it requires little source material to create large volume agglomerates.
| https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/146988 |
worldbuilding | Fossils on the Moon: Panspermia meets Conspiracy Theories! | This is an answer I found while looking up random factoids. And it's gotten me wondering.
((If I should take down the picture, and just paraphrase the text, please let me know.))
Charlie here is right, in that this is a fairly ridiculous theory. However, the sheer ridiculousness of the concept reminded me of something that, while not quite as absurd as dinosaur fossils on Luna, is very similar in some aspects: Panspermia.
For those who need reminding, Panspermia is the concept that tiny and simplistic microbial life forms can be 'ejected' from their homeworlds by way of impact ejecta, hitch-hike on these wayward meteoroids, and then spread to other worlds when their host meteor impacts another planetary body. Scientific experimentation on this theory (as of this date) has proven a bit iffy, but it's still a popular idea in sci-fi stories and video games.
That being said, let's look back at the lunacy (nyuk-nyuk) of the Dinosaurs on the Moon idea. Suppose an incident similar to this happened earlier on in this planets history - say, when only microbial life forms exist on the surface. As several documentaries have claimed, there are potential places where life forms can survive extreme heat, even in nigh-apocalyptic conditions.
Could a "Rapid Centrifugal Disintegration" event similar to this result in a planet and a moon with life forms derived from the same common ancestors? How could life survive it? Assuming they don't, could fossils of these microbial survivors even be found/survive to the civilized age?
| VQAonline_00065368.png | No. The rapid centrifugal stuff is nonsense.
There are ways to blast rock off a planet though, including an incoming impact. We have found rocks that came from other bodies and fallen to Earth, so it happens!
See the extended quote I included in this answer for current thoughts on how could life survive it.
| https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/57738 |
writers | How to format those little blurbs at the start of chapters? | At the start of each chapter in Dune there are quotes from Maudib and Fremen or Bene Gesserit sayings. There are similar epistolary entries at the start of Mist born.
What is the proper term for them and how do I properly format them in my manuscript?
| VQAonline_00065930.png | You must be talking about Epigraph.
The formatting of epigrams varies widely. Refer to the relevant style guide for your publication.
Broadly speaking, this guidance from an APA style editor, How to Format an Epigraph, can suit most purposes.
The text of the epigraph is indented from the left margin in the same way as a block quote. On the line below the end of the epigraph, the author’s name (and only the author’s last name if he or she is well-known) and the source’s title should be given. This credit line should be flush right, preceded by an em dash. An epigraph’s source is not listed in the References section.
| https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/58894 |
writers | Author order and grouping on technical document | This question pertains to author/contributor order and grouping on a technical document.
I performed tests on some equipment and had two other people directly involved.
My boss and his boss need to both be listed on the document as they ordered the testing and the paper needs them on it to have any validity.
There were several other people who were not actively involved but made contributions ranging from from a comment like "hey, don't forget to test XYZ" to providing a part needed in testing
How do I order the people involved in testing and do I separate the active testers from 'other' contributors?
Below is a screenshot of what I've got right now. (names and subject are changed)
| VQAonline_00065893.png | 1) A comment like "hey, don't forget to test XYZ" gets an acknowledgement at the end.
2) I've never seen a format like this, where you actually separate the author list into two sections. I like it. Just have never seen it.
3) Bosses go at the end of the author list. In academia or government, they should be left off if they had no real involvement. But well-known people often get author credit just for their name recognition. Everyone agrees it is unethical, but many people do it anyway. Industry may be different.
4) Providing a part: Not enough info to decide. Normally, someone who just made something to your specs, using only standard techniques, would not get any share of the authorship. That goes for machining, mixing chemicals, soldering a circuit, etc. Use an acknowledgement.
5) Some journals require an explanation of what each author did, and it gets published with the paper (in a boxed footnote on the first page, in a tiny font). I love that; helps keep people honest. In your case, it would probably defeat the purpose of your publication. "All the real work was done by the first three guys. Our boss told us to take the measurements. The Vice-President of Research did nothing whatsoever." Not a good career strategy. Sadly.
| https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/10836 |
writers | Using real words from a foreign culture feels like 'Calling a rabbit a "smeerp"' | I'm working on a novel, that's set in pre-Islamic Persia, in the same general way that The Lord of the Rings is set in Britain. (Meaning, it's set in a world all its own, but there's this source of inspiration.)
Here's my conundrum: the land is ruled by the Shah - that's a given, that's expected if the setting is Persian rather than European. But what happens under the Shah? Knights, barons, counts and dukes are all titles associated with the European court. They appear to clash with a setting, as if I'm telling a basically European story, only recoloured Middle-eastern.
So the knights are asvarans (it's actually amazing how much the position of the asvarans in 5th century Persia is reminiscent of 10th century European knights). And after much research, I've got vaspahrs, sardars and ostandars. At which point, I'm looking at the trope Calling a Rabbit a "Smeerp" - I'm just giving different names to something that has a perfectly good English word.
Moreover, I have only recently pointed others to this xkcd:
(source)
I do not believe it is relevant that I found the words I'm using in an encyclopedia rather than made them up; to the reader, they are equally unfamiliar.
How do I balance realism against readability in this particular case? I do not want to break the readers' suspension of disbelief by using words that are too European, but I don't want to weigh on the reader with heaps of foreign-language vocabulary either.
(Note: Bioware's Dragon Age franchise uses 'Teyrn', 'Arl', 'Bahn' instead of 'Duke', 'Earl', 'Baron'. However, in their example the replacement words are not too far from the English words, and thus much easier to remember, avoiding confusion. Also, the names they use are for the most part English enough. Consequently, looking at something like 'Arl Eamon', one doesn't have to wonder which part is title and which part is name. As opposed to 'Vaspahr Narseh', for instance.)
| VQAonline_00065915.png | I've found that the main key to unfamiliar words -- and this applies to jargon in technical writing as much as it does to foreign or made-up words in fiction -- is density. The example in the XKCD comic is irritating because it can't get through a single sentence without three new words. The situation is very different if three unfamiliar words are introduced over the span of a chapter.
Another key is how naturally you supply the explanation. Instead of "translating" or explaining, provide context -- introduce the asvarans in a setting where their martial role is apparent, show your sardars in leadership roles, show your ostandars ruling, etc. This might be direct (you show those characters doing those things) or indirect (people refer to them in connection with illustrative events or attitudes).
Imagine if the XKCD example were instead handled like this:
The six fra'ars stood solemnly in front of the gate, their gray beards all reaching nearly to their waists. Despite their years they stood strong and alert. $Name, standing in front of the others, held a large sword aloft in one hand, seemingly effortlessly. $POV-character involuntarily took a step back; he knew that the krytosis was normally wielded two-handed because of its weight.
He heard the din of the many farmlings running and playing beyond the gate. He envied them; they had no cares, were not affected by the ill tidings in the land, and had no idea of their eventual fate. He wished he could be young and oblivious again. [...]
This is more jargon-dense than I would write for "real", but I hope it illustrates the point that you can introduce terms without falling into the "pass the dictionary" trap.
| https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/40637 |
writers | In an action scene, what is it called when a flying/thrown object changes rotation quickly after hitting something? | I am writing an action scene in which a character is thrown/falls and while they are flying through the air either the top or bottom half of their body hits an immovable object mid air, causing them to continue in the same direction but with their body at a different rotation now, without starting to spin because of it. It's essentially like a rug pull but happening in mid air if that makes sense? I think I have read this as "jackknifing" in other writing but I'm not sure if that is the correct use case and meaning? Here is a video example except the character spins after impact, which is not desired.
I have included a diagram to help illustrate this as well (side on view, top of arrows are character's heads, grey object is the ground, green object is stationary and immovable):
Example sentence:
Red guy hit blue guy, sending him flying back into a green object, which ______ his body.
| VQAonline_00065928.png | Fun word games are fun . Some options:
Go simple
... which twisted his body
Change the wording
... he hit the object and that caused him to swivel mid-air
... he collided with the object which made his body veer sharply to the left
Chain more than one action
... his body ricocheted off the object and spun.
Find the exact verb you want...?
Overall, if we're speaking about verbs and their synonyms, I think "turn" is a good starting point in this case:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/turn
Or maybe "twist":
https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/twist
In such cases, I usually start general, then click on the synonym that is the closest in meaning to what I'm looking for, and follow the links.
| https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/55576 |
writers | A flower's head or heart? | I’m currently writing a story and one of my characters is a butterfly. In one of the scenes, she manages to run away from a bunch of hungry lizards and hides into a flower; let’s say a Zinnia.
When describing the scene I wrote:
“……she dived into the Zinnia’s head and hastily rolled into the
pollen….”
But then, I found that the expression “flower head” means: “A dense, compact cluster of small flowers that appear to be a single flower, as of a dandelion or clover.”
Thus, I changed the word to:
“…she dived into the Zinnia’s heart and hastily rolled into the pollen….”
Would it be correct?
| VQAonline_00065922.png | A few alternatives:
She dived into the flower.
She dived into the zinnia's flower.
She dived into the petals.
She dived into the zinnia's center.
Or, simply:
She dived into the pollen.
Add the rolling in pollen parts if needed.
I realize you want to differentiate between zinnia the plant and the actual flower. You don't want your readers thinking she's going to be hiding under the leaves.
Both "head" and "heart" have other connotations; using either of those terms might pull the reader out of the story. My guess is that your story is for children (because of the butterfly character). If this is the case, then you really want your language to be clear and easy to follow. In any case, avoid terms that aren't perfectly clear.
| https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/45934 |
writers | Why do typesetters capitalize the first few words of a new chapter? | Something I've always wondered. You've probably noticed that in some newspapers or books, the first few words of a chapter/story are bolded or capitalized, similar to initials. For example:
This image isn't from a real book, it's from an SE puzzle parodying a newspaper. It should convey my point though.
I've heard that this is a typesetting convention and it is not the writers who capitalize these words. However, what is the point? Is it recommended in publishing? Does it actually help readability, or is there some historical reason?
| VQAonline_00065904.png | That's called a lead-in. The general idea is to use special formatting (e.g. all caps, small caps, italics) to gently guide the reader to recognize where the text begins (or resumes after a break).
If sections are marked with headers, guidance like that isn't strictly necessary. In those cases, the use of lead-ins is a style choice.
And, yes, that kind of formatting is the publisher's job, not the writer's.
| https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/27309 |
writers | Do publishers use LaTeX to produce books for the blind? | What software tools do publishers use to produce books for the blind, i.e. containing embossed Braille?
Is LaTeX one of them? There is a braille LaTeX package, which can be used to print Braille, but I'm not sure it can be used to emboss Braille. If not LaTex, what do publishers use?
I'd be keen to work on a LaTeX package for both printing and embossing Braille but, first, I need to know whether there would be an interest for such a solution...
| VQAonline_00065892.png | I've seen this up for quite a while now and will take a stab at answering your question. However, the answer is much more complicated than the question.
The simple answer is yes, Python is used to convert text to braille tags, and a LaTex package is used to print out the symbols. IF the brailler you are using is not designed for use with a proprietary package. I think Bookmaker and Express machines come with open ports.
As a GNU/Linux user myself, I find it hard to find open source drivers for most hardware. So I have a lot of boat anchors sitting around here.
Now for the complicated answer, simplified.
What do Publishers use?
The Duxbury Braille Translator for Windoze is fairly universal among publishers. It can drive a Thermoform machine, most Embossers, as well as the top plate embossing machines, such as the ET PED-30.
It also works perfectly with the ET BraillePlace double-sided embossing for making books.
If you are interested in producing books, the lowest cost commercial grade double-sided Brailler I am aware of is the ET Bookmaker.
For the final part of your question about interest in software.
I would say no, because of the proprietary nature of the hardware.
As you are well aware, even SANE cannot obtain enough information from manufacturers to create drivers for most of the scanners, printers, and other hardware available. Most of the manufacturers are in bed with Mickey$oft and could care less about the rest of the world.
VTY
Dutch
| https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/10359 |