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  • Chris needs
    from gooftroop by paulproteus
    Chris: "I want juice." Asheesh: (incredulous) "What do you mean?" Chris: "Fruit juice." Asheesh: (silence)... Read More >
  • Another, summer day
    from jenny by jenny
    Who will look at pictures of me when I die and miss my smell and the weight of my breasts against his chest, the way I taste after a shower, my hair wet on his shoulders? Who will look at pictures of me and know how afraid I lived each moment not being known, no tenderness to trust alighting in my heart? Who will touch my things and remember me? Who will have pet the depths of my need so lightly to have released it into living like light on the leaves, the back yard, the day, gone now, hot, humid, leaving its wetness to cool, pool, air too thick to take it back, leaving it to coldness and the dew.... Read More >
  • Asheesh measures the lay of the land
    from gooftroop by chris
    Asheesh: "But, there are more breasts here than in your living room."... Read More >
  • Chris the prophet
    from gooftroop by moreacesd
    Chris: I had a revelation -- no, sorry, an epiphany.... Read More >
  • Asheesh applies a template
    from gooftroop by chris
    Asheesh: "It's possible she's not really cool, just brain-damaged."... Read More >
  • ghost file
    from sukye by sukye
    FATAL ERROR: Output Reference WCS "72_wcs.fits" already exists! Please delete. --> delete 72_wcs.fits Warning: Attempt to delete a nonexistent file (72_wcs.fits) --------- http://server.ccw.com.cn/yyjq/htm2005/20050906_0994b.htm find . -name "graphcap" -print... Read More >
  • Brand Optimization And Why It Matters A Lot
    from The Brand Optimization Weblog by shuleatt
    Brand Reputation is a discipline separate from that of traditional branding campaigns. Brand Reputation recognizes that due to increased transparency and access to information, ’traditional branding’ whether through mission statements, marketing or affiliations can easily be verified and evaluated. Thus reputation plays an increasing role in keeping organizations honest and forcing them to take definitive actions, rather than simply making public statements. Both consumers and employees are getting into the game. Brand Reputation is sort of like ’Brands 2.0.’ Until recently brands had largely been considered ’intangible’ concepts. Accounting contributed to this conception by identifying ’goodwill’ as the excess over the book value one company was willing to pay for another. That excess was brand value. Times have changed. More than ever before brands are increasingly the key element of any business model. Much of this power is because people view brands as a means of personal identification. Brands now trump actual products in terms of importance. For example, Abercrombie & Fitch used targeted branding and outreach to drive incredible revenues despite its products being of questionable quality. Brands now must interact with an audience, as explained by the brothers Heath in ’Made to Stick.’ Another shift has been organizations coming to embrace themselves as brands. For example, the university one attends, or the organizations one affiliates are increasingly recognizable and monetizable. Knowing that someone attended a certain college, or is affiliated with certain brands conveys all sorts of ethnic and class related information. Globalization has further complicated branding due to differences in cultural and geographic interpretations. Still, the primary catalyst for these changes is the ever increasing prominence of the internet. As consumers have been given greater access to information they have become empowered (better informed) to decide how and where they spend their money. This empowerment has resulted in creating greater accountability on the part of businesses and organizations alike. Even Congress and international legislators have begun to demand increased accountability and sustainable practices partially as a result of online advocacy and scorecard groups who have now found an audience. In business school we learn that the ’goal of management’ is to increase shareholder value. As it turns out, the definition of a ’shareholder’ is increasingly broad and can encompass anyone from a holder of company equity to management to employees to vendors. While traditional business practices have focused on the bottom line, a shift toward focusing on brand reputation takes a more holistic approach and recognizes that revenue and corporate social responsibility are not mutually exclusive. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Think Patagonia, think Ben & Jerry’s. Think of the amazing things you hear about working at Google. Recent business trends have proven that brands by themselves are of increasing importance. Business leaders and financiers are recognizing that a strong brand can ultimately be monetized down the road. For example, MySpace, Facebook and YouTube are all companies with exceptionally strong brands but whose revenue streams (in recent memory) have been low or non-existent. Nevertheless, these companies all either received buyout offers or additional investments at valuations unrelated to actual cash flows. That says something. Brand Reputation is community driven. Its appeal is often on a more human or emotional level and is acted out through user-engagement. It is greatly enhanced by the interactions of community members with the brand itself and by community members interacting with other community members. As discussed previously, Brand Reputation Optimization has both internal and external components. The strongest brands are grown organically and start with a focus on building internal relationships - allowing collaboration to flourish and building passion to drive the organization’s mission and objectives. After establishing such internal buy-in, the potential for building a strong brand is limited only by the degree of external engagement a firm builds into its online presence, marketing and CRM efforts. See the original article... Read More >
  • Jon tries the awesome sauce
    from gooftroop by chris
    Chris: I'm at another I'm From Barcelona show! Jon: Fuck you!... Read More >
  • how to use tweakshifts
    from sukye by sukye
    we could register images precise to 0.1 pixel by iterating multidrizzle (mul) and tweakshifts (twe). since twe only works when the shifts are within 1 pixel or there are tiny rotations, we have to find the rough shifts by hand. step 0. create files list to be the input: list_mul: ---------------- a_flt.fits b_flt.fits ---------------- list_twe: ---------------- a_single_sci.fits b_single_sci.fits ---------------- The first file will be the reference image. step 1. create the refimage: mul a_flt.fits imcopy a_single_sci.fits refimage.fits step 2. mul @list_mul *turn off all the steps of mul except driz_separate+ *keep temporary files: clean=no *no difference for updatewcs=yes or no step 3. measure the relative shifts manually from the *single_sci.fits *choose 2-5 stars far away in the images and use e.g. imexam to find their positions. *create the shiftfile: ---------------- # frame: output # reference: refimage.fits # form: delta # units: pixels a_flt.fits 0.0 0.0 b_flt.fits -3.4 -5.1 ---------------- step 4. repeat step 2. and *refimage=refimage.fits *shiftfile=shiftfile step .5 repeat step 3. and if the additional shifts are within 1 pixel continue with step 7. otherwise, step 6. step 6. if the shifts in x axis (or y axis) for the stars are of the same sign, goto step 4. otherwise, rotational adjustment is needed. ---------------- # frame: output # reference: refimage.fits # form: delta # units: pixels a_flt.fits 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0 b_flt.fits -3.4 -5.1 359.9 1.0 ---------------- goto step 4. step 7. twe @list_twe *undisturb=no *no difference if shiftfile is provided *fitgeometry=shift *clean=no check the output shiftfile: all shifts should be display b_single_sci.fits 1 zr- zs- z1=0.01 z2=6 ztrans=log >tvm b_single_sci.match step 8. repeat step 4. and then step 7. the numbers of matched objects should be no less than those of the last run and the shifts produced by twe should also be decreasing . step 9. repeat step 7. when all the shifts suggested by twe are < 0.1 pixels. *it's possible it's only reachable for 0.2 pixels Thanks to Max Mutchler and Warren J. Hack. They are really experts. http://www.stsci.edu/hst/acs/documents/handbooks/DataHandbookv2/acs_Ch47.html http://www.stsci.edu/hst/wfpc2/analysis/WFPC2_drizzle_registration.html http://forums.stsci.edu/phpbb/viewtopic.php?p=172 ... Read More >
  • Ambassador Edward Peck
    from Lost in Translation by pekingli
    copy from wiki Ambassador Edward Peck Criticism of G. W. Bush plan to invade Iraq and of Middle East policy Edward Peck argued against invading Iraq prior to the March 2003 invasion. He argued, in part, "when you take out Saddam Hussein, the key question you have to ask then is, what happens after that? And we don't have a clue. Nobody knows, but it's probably going to be bad. And a lot of people are going to be very upset about that, because that really is not written into our role in this world is to decide who rules Iraq." Peck has been highly critical of U.S. policy toward Israel, arguing through the Council for the National Interest (CNI) in which he plays an active role, that the U.S. should be more even handed in its Middle East policy. He argues that while Hezbollah could be considered a terrorist organization, it is no more terrorist than Israel or the U.S. itself. He supports a dialogue with Hezbollah. He claims that in 2000, at the Camp David talks, Israel offered the Palestinians "12 little Bantustans [see December 22 interview link below]." His speech was publicized in a documentary produced by If Americans Knew. Speaking in July 2006 to syndicated US radio news programme Democracy Now!, Peck said that: "In 1985, when I was the Deputy Director of the Reagan White House Task Force on Terrorism, they asked us — this is a Cabinet Task Force on Terrorism; I was the Deputy Director of the working group — they asked us to come up with a definition of terrorism that could be used throughout the government. We produced about six, and each and every case, they were rejected, because careful reading would indicate that our own country had been involved in some of those activities. […] After the task force concluded its work, Congress got into it, and you can google into U.S. Code Title 18, Section 2331[1], and read the U.S. definition of terrorism. And one of them in here says — one of the terms, “international terrorism,” means “activities that,” I quote, “appear to be intended to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping.” […] Yes, well, certainly, you can think of a number of countries that have been involved in such activities. Ours is one of them. Israel is another. And so, the terrorist, of course, is in the eye of the beholder."[2] Jeremiah Wright  In September 2001, Reverend Jeremy Wright in a sermon quoted [3] Peck as allegedly having said on a Fox News broadcast: "We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye...and now we are indignant, because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought back into our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost." [3] In March 2008, during the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, spliced excerpts of these quoted statements from the sermon were broadcast on ABC News, and attributed to Wright. [4] References ^ US Code Title 18, Section 2331 ^ Democracy Now. ^ a b Video of Wright's sermon. Wright misidentifies Peck as Ambassador Anthony Peck ^ Obama's Pastor: God Damn America, U.S. to Blame for 9/11 Brian Ross and Rehab el-Buri, ABC News, March 13, 2008 ... Read More >

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