11/2/2022 0 Comments U2 aircraftAccording to a report from Defense News, the Air Force hasn't formally committed to it, though there is a plan to retire the U-2 in 2019. In September 2015, 60 years after the U-2 was introduced, Lockheed Martin said it would unveil a replacement for the venerable spy plane, called the TR-X. (Although, the kind of missile that could reach a U-2 is more likely to be in the repertoire of a major military power than a small group of militants in a remote area, Aboulafia noted.) The plane flies high enough to "peer in" to airspaces where they might not be allowed, as it's no longer a good assumption that radar can't detect the planes or that a surface-to-air missile can't hit them. The U-2 still conducts reconnaissance missions there are two flying in the Middle East on any given day to monitor the Islamic State, reported the Los Angeles Times. Air Force, the U-2 carries an "electro-optical infrared camera, optical bar camera, advanced synthetic aperture radar, signals intelligence and network-centric communication" for reconnaissance flights.īut the U-2 is still a notoriously difficult aircraft to fly, Aboulafia said, even though the only remaining part from the 1950s version of the plane is the airframe. "You can fit a lot more on them now than you could then," Aboulafia said. The engines, avionics and surveillance equipment have all been updated as technology has improved. The first U-2s carried large-format cameras, but the sensors on board have grown much more sophisticated over the years, as have the controls. While NASA no longer uses the original U-2 model, a modified U-2, called the ER-2, still flies for the agency. In 1971, NASA started using U-2s as part of the agency's Earth Resources Aircraft program, flying the plane over the United States to gather scientific data. (The Christian Scence Monitor reported that a U-2 was even stationed in Cyprus in 2011, to monitor the no-fly zone established in Libya). Even after the USSR shot down one of the planes in 1960, the aircraft was still used in a number of conflicts such as the Vietnam War, providing intelligence to the U.S. The U-2 was introduced into military service in 1957. Johnson's design also dispensed with conventional landing gear and a pressurized cabin. The airframe also wasn't as strong or as heavy as the usual military-grade models, allowing for higher flight with less fuel. To make the plane efficient at high altitudes, he adopted long and straight wings rather than a swept-back design, to improve lift at relatively low speeds (for a jet). Such specifications added weight, and made it more difficult to design a plane that could fly high enough. One of the changes to previous designs was that the plane didn't have to be equipped with the heavy armor or weaponry that were the hallmarks of military planes before, Pedlow and Walzenbach wrote. Air Force asked aircraft companies to submit designs for a plane that could reach altitudes of 65,000 to 70,000 feet (20,000 to 21,300 meters), and just as important, be able to stay there for long periods. Later that year, with the outbreak of the Korean War, Moscow adopted a policy of shooting down aircraft that violated its airspace. That changed in 1950, when the USSR shot down a U.S. Moscow protested these flights but didn't shoot any down (though they fired warning shots). Pedlow and Walzenbach said the USSR didn't have complete radar coverage of its borders or interior at that time, and modified B-47 bombers would fly in to take photos of sensitive targets, and then fly out. had been flying spy planes into the USSR as early as the 1940s, according to Gregory Pedlow and Donald Walzenbach, authors of "The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance: The U-2 and OXCART Programs, 1954-1974" (Military Bookshop, 2013). government wanted a way to fly over what was then the Soviet Union without being detected or shot down. Spy planes were in operation as far back as World War I, when aircraft were used to take photos of enemy positions. By the time the first U-2 flew in 1955, the problem of gathering intelligence was becoming more acute.
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11/1/2022 0 Comments Legion of gaius julius caesarFor most of the Roman Imperial period, the legions formed the Roman army's elite heavy infantry, recruited exclusively from Roman citizens, while the remainder of the army consisted of auxiliaries, who provided additional infantry and the vast majority of the Roman army's cavalry. (Provincials who aspired to citizenship gained it when honorably discharged from the auxiliaries.) The Roman army, for most of the Imperial period, consisted mostly of auxiliaries rather than legions. In terms of organization and function, the republican era legion may have been influenced by the ancient Greek and Macedonian phalanx. In the fourth century AD, East Roman border guard legions (limitanei) may have become even smaller. By the third century AD, the legion was a much smaller unit of about 1,000 to 1,500 men, and there were more of them. Legions also included a small ala, or cavalry, unit. In the late republic and much of the imperial period (from about 100 BC), a legion was divided into ten cohorts, each of six (or five) centuries. During much of the republican era, a legion was divided into three lines of ten maniples. The subsequent organization of legions varied greatly over time but legions were typically composed of around five thousand soldiers. In the early Roman Kingdom "legion" may have meant the entire Roman army but sources on this period are few and unreliable. A Roman legion (from Latin legio "military levy, conscription", from legere "to choose") was a large unit of the Roman army. Let’s begin with a brief historical reference. 11/1/2022 0 Comments Beatunes macYou are able to click on your favourite tracks and get instant suggestions from the Beatport catalogue within the app is great. To top that off, you can listen to a two-minute preview within beaTunes 5 as well. So, I linked the app to my Beatport account and set about testing how well they complement each other. That might be useful to some but I was more interested in the Beatport integration. You hover your cursor over the artwork to see what the track is and then click on it to be sent to the Amazon store. Chartsįrom the off, you are able to see various Amazon Music charts by clicking the appropriate tab on the left. The first thing I did was switch the view to the new dark theme, I find this looks much sleeker than the default theme. So, with those minor hiccups out of the way, I started to have a look around the app to check out beaTunes 5’s new features. In Use After library analysis was done, I switched to the new dark theme and set about playing around with the Beatport integration. It would have saved me a lot of time, each time I analysed my library it took around three hours for nearly four thousand tracks. Either that or have the key, colour and danceability analysed by default. This left me thinking that it might be useful to implement a set-up wizard for when you first open the app. Third time lucky, my tracks were analysed successfully and all the data was there. I hadn’t realised that on the “Analyse” page, I hadn’t opted in to have these values determined. I couldn’t find any information about this in the FAQ, so I contacted the developer and he quickly pointed me in the right direction. So, I hit analyse again and waited for a few hours, only to see that while my library had been imported, the key, colour (more on that later) and danceability data was missing. It was then that I went back to the FAQ on the site and saw that I had to make sure iTunes would allow beaTunes to access my library. The first time I did this, nothing worked. When you first load up beaTunes, you are asked to analyse your library. However, it lacks the ease of use of iTunes and you will have to do everything manually. I like the familiar look, it makes it easy to navigate the app. #Beatunes mac full versionAfter the trial period, you can unlock the full version for US$34.Īs you can see, beaTunes adopts a lot of its look from iTunes, which isn’t a problem. Some features are limited or locked, the ability to correct detected errors in your library being the main one. #Beatunes mac downloadTo get the most out of the app, you are required to “opt in” to determine a number of values like key and danceability.īeaTunes5 comes as a free download with a 14-day trial. MacOS 10.11.6, 10.12.5, 10.13.6, 10.14.6, 10.15.First Impressions / Setting up After downloading and installing beaTunes, you are asked to import your tracks for analysis.
11/1/2022 0 Comments Tidiness meanWe’ve found these tidy tools extend naturally to many text analyses and explorations.Īt the same time, the tidytext package doesn’t expect a user to keep text data in a tidy form at all times during an analysis. By keeping the input and output in tidy tables, users can transition fluidly between these packages. Tidy data sets allow manipulation with a standard set of “tidy” tools, including popular packages such as dplyr ( Wickham and Francois 2016), tidyr ( Wickham 2016), ggplot2 ( Wickham 2009), and broom ( Robinson 2017). In the tidytext package, we provide functionality to tokenize by commonly used units of text like these and convert to a one-term-per-row format. For tidy text mining, the token that is stored in each row is most often a single word, but can also be an n-gram, sentence, or paragraph. This one-token-per-row structure is in contrast to the ways text is often stored in current analyses, perhaps as strings or in a document-term matrix. A token is a meaningful unit of text, such as a word, that we are interested in using for analysis, and tokenization is the process of splitting text into tokens. We thus define the tidy text format as being a table with one-token-per-row. Each type of observational unit is a table.As described by Hadley Wickham ( Wickham 2014), tidy data has a specific structure: Using tidy data principles is a powerful way to make handling data easier and more effective, and this is no less true when it comes to dealing with text. 11/1/2022 0 Comments Life tower leaks creaks breaksThe 96th floor penthouse at the top of the building sold in 2016 for nearly $88 million to a company representing the Saudi retail magnate Fawaz Alhokair. The building, a slender tower that critics have likened to a middle finger because of its contentious height, is mostly sold out, with a projected value of $3.1 billion. The disputes at 432 Park also highlight a rarely seen view of New York’s so-called Billionaire’s Row, a stretch of supertall towers near Central Park that redefined the city skyline, and where the identities of virtually all the buyers were concealed by shell companies. It has already been surpassed by a newcomer on New York’s Billionaire’s Row in Midtown Manhattan, but it remains one of the most expensive apartment buildings in the world.Credit…Karsten Moran for The New York Times The tower at 432 Park Avenue, far left, became the tallest residential building in the world in 2015. It has already been surpassed by a newcomer on New York’s Billionaire’s Row in Midtown Manhattan, but it remains one of the most expensive apartment buildings in the world. ImageThe tower at 432 Park Avenue, far left, became the tallest residential building in the world in 2015. Engineers privy to some of the disputes say many of the same issues are occurring quietly in other new towers. Less than a decade after a spate of record-breaking condo towers reached new heights in New York, the first reports of defects and complaints are beginning to emerge, raising concerns that some of the construction methods and materials used have not lived up to the engineering breakthroughs that only recently enabled 1,000-foot-high trophy apartments. The claims include millions of dollars of water damage from plumbing and mechanical issues frequent elevator malfunctions and walls that creak like the galley of a ship - all of which may be connected to the building’s main selling point: its immense height, according to homeowners, engineers and documents obtained by The New York Times. Six years later, residents of the exclusive tower are now at odds with the developers, and each other, making clear that even multimillion-dollar price tags do not guarantee problem-free living. The nearly 1,400-foot tower at 432 Park Avenue, briefly the tallest residential building in the world, was the pinnacle of New York’s luxury condo boom half a decade ago, fueled largely by foreign buyers seeking discretion and big returns. Resident complaints at 432 Park, once the tallest residential building in the world, and a symbol of the luxury condo boom of the last decade, are revealing strife inside one of the city’s most secretive and exclusive towers.Credit…Karsten Moran for The New York Times Resident complaints at 432 Park, once the tallest residential building in the world, and a symbol of the luxury condo boom of the last decade, are revealing strife inside one of the city’s most secretive and exclusive towers. The Downside to Life in a Supertall Tower: Leaks, Creaks, BreaksĤ32 Park, one of the wealthiest addresses in the world, faces some significant design problems, and other luxury high-rises may share its fate. |
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