International passenger transportation: status of the refugee-related passenger transportation ban after Fourth Circuit Opinion

The majority opinion of the Fourth Circuit US Court of Appeals in International Refugee Assistance Project v. Trump is one of the more important refugee transportation rulings in a number of years. It is likely to be a very important precedent regarding refugee travel transportation (Executive Orders (EOs) 13769 and 13780, “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States”). At this writing it is not certain what the future direction of these bans will be, but it would appear that the Fourth Circuit ruling will hold considerable sway. This paper discusses these EOs’. Procedurally, Chief Judge Gregory and Judges Diaz, Floyd, Harris, King, and Wynn formed the majority. Judges Traxler, Keenan, and Thacker wrote concurring opinions. Judges Niemeyer, Shedd, and Agee composed dissenting opinions

How Romania Can Use Its Tax System for More than Just Raising Revenue and in Fact to Grow Its Economy

Abstract: Tax systems can be more than just the means that governments utilize to fund their budgets. In fact, the Romanian tax system can have provisions for revenue raising, economic growth, social projects, political issues, environmental causes, ease of administration then, and judicially created principles. Whereas the country’s recent experience with Government Emergency Ordinance 34/2009 showed that raising taxes during recessions does not usually work, the Romanian government can actually grow its economy just through proper management of tax principles. This paper seeks to present some tax alternatives that exist in other countries that Romania could adopt for this growth. The methodology will be case study primarily of the US tax system by comparison. The results are that other options exist for the Romanian government to use in its tax system directly to grow its economy and, in solving other issues through the tax code, also indirectly grow its economy

Rhodes Scholar: defining an opportunity

While amateur athletes pursue the Olympics to prove their athletic prowess, collegiate scholars try to quantify their academic success by winning a Rhodes Scholarship. Track athletes must post an acceptable qualifying time just to compete in the Olympic trials where they must earn a berth to the Olympics. Likewise, after receiving their university\u27s formal endorsement, aspiring Rhodes Scholars have to portray their all-around qualities and dreams in an application and essay, hoping to earn the chance just to be selected for a state interview. If they are fortunate at this level, the applicants become one of two nominees from each state to go to a district interview, in which the twelve to fifteen students compete for one of four Rhodes Scholarships, full tuition at Oxford University in England, and an approximately 7, 000 pound stipend as a maintenance allowance

Asynchronous Execution of Python Code on Task Based Runtime Systems

Despite advancements in the areas of parallel and distributed computing, the complexity of programming on High Performance Computing (HPC) resources has deterred many domain experts, especially in the areas of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), from utilizing performance benefits of such systems. Researchers and scientists favor high-productivity languages to avoid the inconvenience of programming in low-level languages and costs of acquiring the necessary skills required for programming at this level. In recent years, Python, with the support of linear algebra libraries like NumPy, has gained popularity despite facing limitations which prevent this code from distributed runs. Here we present a solution which maintains both high level programming abstractions as well as parallel and distributed efficiency. Phylanx, is an asynchronous array processing toolkit which transforms Python and NumPy operations into code which can be executed in parallel on HPC resources by mapping Python and NumPy functions and variables into a dependency tree executed by HPX, a general purpose, parallel, task-based runtime system written in C++. Phylanx additionally provides introspection and visualization capabilities for debugging and performance analysis. We have tested the foundations of our approach by comparing our implementation of widely used machine learning algorithms to accepted NumPy standards

Simulating Stellar Merger using HPX/Kokkos on A64FX on Supercomputer Fugaku

The increasing availability of machines relying on non-GPU architectures, such as ARM A64FX in high-performance computing, provides a set of interesting challenges to application developers. In addition to requiring code portability across different parallelization schemes, programs targeting these architectures have to be highly adaptable in terms of compute kernel sizes to accommodate different execution characteristics for various heterogeneous workloads. In this paper, we demonstrate an approach to code and performance portability that is based entirely on established standards in the industry. In addition to applying Kokkos as an abstraction over the execution of compute kernels on different heterogeneous execution environments, we show that the use of standard C++ constructs as exposed by the HPX runtime system enables superb portability in terms of code and performance based on the real-world Octo-Tiger astrophysics application. We report our experience with porting Octo-Tiger to the ARM A64FX architecture provided by Stony Brook's Ookami and Riken's Supercomputer Fugaku and compare the resulting performance with that achieved on well established GPU-oriented HPC machines such as ORNL's Summit, NERSC's Perlmutter and CSCS's Piz Daint systems. Octo-Tiger scaled well on Supercomputer Fugaku without any major code changes due to the abstraction levels provided by HPX and Kokkos. Adding vectorization support for ARM's SVE to Octo-Tiger was trivial thanks to using standard C+

Wintersongs: A Holiday Concert

The Utah State University Department of Music presents Wintersongs: a holiday concert featuring the USU Chamber Singers, University Chorale, and the USU Women\u27s Choir.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/music_programs/1111/thumbnail.jp

From Piz Daint to the Stars: Simulation of Stellar Mergers using High-Level Abstractions

We study the simulation of stellar mergers, which requires complex simulations with high computational demands. We have developed Octo-Tiger, a finite volume grid-based hydrodynamics simulation code with Adaptive Mesh Refinement which is unique in conserving both linear and angular momentum to machine precision. To face the challenge of increasingly complex, diverse, and heterogeneous HPC systems, Octo-Tiger relies on high-level programming abstractions. We use HPX with its futurization capabilities to ensure scalability both between nodes and within, and present first results replacing MPI with libfabric achieving up to a 2.8x speedup. We extend Octo-Tiger to heterogeneous GPU-accelerated supercomputers, demonstrating node-level performance and portability. We show scalability up to full system runs on Piz Daint. For the scenario's maximum resolution, the compute-critical parts (hydrodynamics and gravity) achieve 68.1% parallel efficiency at 2048 nodes.Comment: Accepted at SC1

Social support in an Internet weight loss community

PURPOSE: To describe social support for weight loss shared by members of a large Internet weight loss community. METHODS: We conducted a mixed-methods study with surveys (n=193) and interviews (n=13) of community members along with a content analysis of discussion forum messages (n=1924 messages). Qualitative data were analyzed for social support themes. RESULTS: Survey respondents were primarily white (91.4%) and female (93.8%) with mean age 37.3 years and mean body mass index 30.9. They used forums frequently, with 56.8% reading messages, 36.1% replying to messages, and 18.5% posting messages to start a discussion related to weight loss on a daily or more frequent basis. Major social support themes were encouragement and motivation, mentioned at least once by 87.6% of survey respondents, followed by information (58.5%) and shared experiences (42.5%). Subthemes included testimonies, recognition for success, accountability, friendly competition, and humor. Members valued convenience, anonymity, and the non-judgmental interactions as unique characteristics of Internet-mediated support. CONCLUSION: This Internet weight loss community plays a prominent role in participants\u27 weight loss efforts. Social support within Internet weight loss communities merits further evaluation as a weight loss resource for clinicians to recommend to patients. Understanding these communities could improve how health professionals evaluate, build, harness, and manipulate social support for weight loss

Deep learning-based denoising streamed from mobile phones improves speech-in-noise understanding for hearing aid users

The hearing loss of almost half a billion people is commonly treated with hearing aids. However, current hearing aids often do not work well in real-world noisy environments. We present a deep learning based denoising system that runs in real time on iPhone 7 and Samsung Galaxy S10 (25ms algorithmic latency). The denoised audio is streamed to the hearing aid, resulting in a total delay of around 75ms. In tests with hearing aid users having moderate to severe hearing loss, our denoising system improves audio across three tests: 1) listening for subjective audio ratings, 2) listening for objective speech intelligibility, and 3) live conversations in a noisy environment for subjective ratings. Subjective ratings increase by more than 40%, for both the listening test and the live conversation compared to a fitted hearing aid as a baseline. Speech reception thresholds, measuring speech understanding in noise, improve by 1.6 dB SRT. Ours is the first denoising system that is implemented on a mobile device, streamed directly to users' hearing aids using only a single channel as audio input while improving user satisfaction on all tested aspects, including speech intelligibility. This includes overall preference of the denoised and streamed signal over the hearing aid, thereby accepting the higher latency for the significant improvement in speech understanding