Author<EMAIL_ADDRESS>(Jerry Saravia) Subject: Review: Cecil B. Demented (2000) Approved<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Newsgroups: rec.arts.movies.reviews Organization: None X-Questions-to<EMAIL_ADDRESS>X-Submissions-to<EMAIL_ADDRESS>Followup-To: rec.arts.movies.current-films Summary: r.a.m.r. #28087 Keywords: author=saravia
CECIL B. DEMENTED Reviewed on March 28th, 2001 By Jerry Saravia
I am not sure what to make of John Waters at this point.  For every "Hairspray" and "Serial Mom," there were travesties to cinematic decency such as "Cry-Baby" and "Pecker." "Cecil B. Demented" shows me a director who is sinking to such a low extreme that I found myself trying to come up for air repeatedly.
Cecil B. Demented (Stephen Dorff) is a no-budget film director/cult leader who along with his crew, known as the "Sprocket Holes," kidnap a famous movie star, Honey Whitlock (Melanie Griffith) and force her to star in their own demented production. Cecil's intent is to shoot a film titled "Raging Beauty" about outlaw filmmakers who bust in and out of multiplexes, production meetings and more multiplexes to proclaim their rant that Hollywood, basically, sucks! Their hostage, Honey with a peroxide hairdo, will help them fight their cause by threatening everyone with a gun and ranting their philosophies such as "Death to those who support mainstream cinema!"
"The Sprocket Holes" are a motley crew of punkish, insufferably smug character types that include Cherish (Alicia Witt), an incest victim who is also a former porno star; a drug addict named Lyle (Adrienne Grenier) who consumes all substances and plays the leading man in Demented's film, and Rodney (Jack Noseworthy), the hair stylist, who hates being heterosexual. There is also a makeup artist, Raven (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a Satanic worshipper who adores Kenneth Anger and Aleister Crowley, and a butch female cinematographer and producer, and so on. None of these characters elicit much interest or inspiration. They come across as flat caricatures.
In the end, that may be the problem with John Waters. His last excruciating film, "Pecker", was so flatly staged that it induced boredom more than anything else. There is no drive, no energy, no real sense of movement in this film either. You get the sense that Waters only filmed one take of every scene with no punch or irony. Of course, none of that would matter if the film was funny but it is decidely not. The fundamental question is: who is Waters really attacking in this film? It may seem like Hollywood but that is a moot point when you consider savagely funny satires such as "The Player", "Living in Oblivion" and "My Life's in Turnaround," to name but a few. Also consider how in the last few years, independent films have become almost as mainstream as Hollywood. Has Waters heard of Miramax, which is literally Hollywood in the East Coast, the same company that produced "The English Patient"? The term "indie" has been abused so often that the line between Hollywood and independent is very thin. And what company has produced Waters latest? Well, it is Artisan entertainment, the same company that puts its label on a new video edition of Schwarzeneger's "The Terminator"!
"Cecil B. Demented" is simply not demented enough or savage enough to really attack its targets and so as satire, it fails miserably. The actors shout and rant but with little purpose or ingenuity.  It may seem radical but I would call it desperate at best.
For more reviews, check out JERRY AT THE MOVIES at http://moviething.com/members/movies/faust/JATMindex.shtml
E-mail me with any questions, comments or complaints at<EMAIL_ADDRESS>or at<EMAIL_ADDRESS>The review above was posted to the
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SHOWGIRLS A Critic's Worst Nightmare A film review by J. Neil Schulman Copyright 1995 J. Neil Schulman
Suppose you had a movie whose director and screenwriter had previously collaborated to produce a classic in the suspense genre--a director who had in addition produced a couple of the best science-fiction films ever made. Suppose this creative team had produced a brand-new movie which was particularly dependent on the press for box-office success because they had made a huge gamble: producing the first serious adults-only major motion picture since MIDNIGHT COWBOY in the 1960's.
Now suppose that the universal critical reaction in all major media was to attack this new movie as being incompetent in every respect--accusing it of being badly written, badly directed, badly acted--with critics accusing it not merely of being unprofessional, but in essence a gross fraud upon the movie-going public.
That was the paradox I was contemplating earlier tonight as I took a seat in my local theater, along with fellow science-fiction author Brad Linaweaver, to see SHOWGIRLS, written by Joe Eszterhas and directed by Paul Verhoeven, who previously collaborated on the suspense classic, BASIC INSTINCT. Either I was about to see a truly awful movie inexplicably made by a very talented creative team--or the critics were for some reason trying to assassinate a singular masterpiece.
As Brad and I walked out of the theater afterwards, we knew we had just seen a masterpiece.
Now let me tell you what *I* saw on the screen.
I saw a film which stars Elizabeth Berkley, an actress whose next role should be Helen of Troy. Berkley is an actress who might be called Marilyn Monroe's sister--the *pretty* one--except that Elizabeth Berkley is already a more evocative and powerful actress than Monroe was at her prime--and she's a dancer of powers equal to her acting strengths.
I saw a film, about the seedy side of show business, which combined the raw power of Scorcese's GOODFELLAS, in its ability to highlight the workings of evil minds, with Bob Fosse's ability to combine the onstage and backstage life of dancers in ALL THAT JAZZ.
In a phrase, SHOWGIRLS is A CHORUS LINE's evil twin.
I saw a film with a main character, Nomi Malone, that I would have thought only Ayn Rand could write: a diamond in the rough, a pearl cast before swine. Elizabeth Berkley's portrayal of Nomi Malone, as written by Joe Eszterhas and directed by Paul Verhoeven, evokes an innocence that can stroll through Hell itself--emotionally scorched by evil, a violent nemesis to evil, but unscarred and ultimately unconquered by it. Malone is a Candide figure who expects the best of all possible world in the glitter of Las Vegas--and when she learns better that the glitter is a paper-thin covering for corruption worthy of Nero's Rome, she walks out as decisively as a cowboy riding off into the sunset, leaving the bad guys in her dust.
 America has an unfortunate history in that its puritan founders never understood that sex is not merely procreative but a core expression of our nature as rational animals.
With Elizabeth Berkley's natural beauty combined with masterful choreography, lighting, and direction, a man watching this film would have to be a eunuch not to be aroused by it--and a woman would have to be one of Germaine Greer's female eunuchs. When critics call this movie non-erotic, all I can think of is that they're lifelong member's of Orwell's Anti-Sex League in his dystopian NINETEEN-EIGHTY-FOUR.
The plot of SHOWGIRLS is more symbolic than dramatic; it uses the background of A STAR IS BORN, FAME setting to display for us the conflict between artistic ambition and moral integrity. Those who seek nothing great never experience the forces which would tempt them to sell their dreams--and *that* is why critics, who make their living as parasites on creative products they could never themselves create, are so offended by geniuses who have the bad taste to show them what artistic integrity looks like--and the worse taste to show that the moral lesson works even in the near pornographic setting of erotic dance.
Nomi Malone in SHOWGIRLS is a young individualist who is unwilling to sell herself out. She does what is necessary to survive, even if distasteful, but she never loses sight of the value of her own life. When she is accused of having low self-esteem, her immediate reaction is to spit in the eye of the man who said it--a man who truly does not understand the nature of the insult. Malone is capable of being extremely violent, but her violence is well-aimed at worthy targets; and she is generous enough to grant the boon of charity to an enemy who probably doesn't deserve it.
I have written in other places that we get what we pay for and do not get what we do not pay for. The price of having works of genius as part of our culture--works that stand above the lowest-common-denominator which is our daily fare--is that we not allow them to be marginalized. Whatever the value of a great movie is to the enrichment of our culture and the recognition of our human nature, we owe it to those capable of producing works of original merit that we not ignore them at the urging of the moral cripples who have seized control of the critical organs of our culture.
The sexually explicit SHOWGIRLS is not for children, but then neither are matches. Grown-ups who know that sex and violence can be an integral part of our moral life should see this movie before the critics empty the theaters and leave it to subsequent generations to discover its greatness--leaving its writer, director, and star to wonder why their virtues are being despised.
"Showgirls"
Cast: Nomi Malone: Elizabeth Berkley Zack Carey: Kyle MacLachlan Cristal Connors: Gina Gershon Molly Abrams: Gina Ravera Tony Moss: Alan Rachins
Mario Kassar presentation, Chargeurs/Charles Evans production in association with Carolco Pictures Inc., Joe Eszterhas and Ben Myron, released by United Artists. Director Paul Verhoeven. Screenplay Joe Eszterhas. Producers Alan Marshall, Charles Evans. Executive producer Mario Kassar. Cinematographer Jost Vacano. Editor Mark Goldblatt, Mark Helfrich. Costumes Ellen Mirojnick. Music David A. Stewart. Production design Allan Camern. Art director William F. O'Brien. Set decorator Richard C. Goddard. Running time: 2 hours, 11 minutes. Rating: NC-17: No children under 17 allowed.
-- J. Neil Schulman, September 24, 1995 P.O. Box 94, Long Beach, CA 90801-0094 Voice Mail & Fax: (500) 44-JNEIL<EMAIL_ADDRESS>http://www.pinsight.com/~zeus/jneil/
The preceding article is under submission. Reproduction in computer message and file bases is permitted for informational purposes only. Copyright (c) 1995 by J. Neil Schulman. All other rights reserved.
The review above was posted to the
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Written by: Sherry Bilsing-Graham & Ellen Plummer
Transcribed by: Eric Aasen
[Scene: Monica and Chandler's, Monica and Phoebe are preparing for Rachels baby shower.]
Rachel: (entering) Hi!
Monica: Hey!
Phoebe: Hey!
Rachel: So whats the final head count on my baby shower?
Phoebe: About twenty, a couple people from work who had something else to do.
Monica: Also both of your sisters called and neither can make it.
Rachel: What?! You mean theyre not coming to a social event where theres no men and theres no booze?! Thats shocking! I dont care, as long as my moms here.

Rachel: What?!
Monica: Well, given that we forgot to invite her it would be an awfully big coincidence if she was.
Rachel: My God!
Monica: Well it wasnt my fault, Phoebe was in charge of the invitations!
Phoebe: Well I dont, I dont have a mother so often I forget that other people
Monica: (interrupting her) Oh give it a rest!

Phoebe: No. (Pause) Neither is mine.
Monica: Okay, yknow what? Dont worry, okay? Well take care of it. Well call her. Just go home and get ready.
Rachel: Please, make sure she comes. Its really important to me, I mean its my mom!
Phoebe: I know. I know, whats her number?
Rachel: I dont know.
Monica: Go! I have it in my book. Go! (Rachel leaves and Monica calls Mrs. Green.) (To Phoebe) Wait a minute! If youre in charge of the invitations why am I the one who has to call herHello Mrs. Green! Hi, its Monica Geller.
Mrs. Green: Oh, hello Monica.
Monica: (on phone) Hi, umm I know this is last minute, but weve decided to throw an impromptu baby shower for Rachel today.
Mrs.
Monica: Yeah, Im sorry. Im-Im so sorry.
Mrs. Green: For what dear? For not inviting me or lying about it?
 Please! Can you come? Its today at four.
Mrs. Green: Well all right. Ill see you at four.
Monica: Thank you. (Hangs up.)
Phoebe: Isnt it at three?
 (Calls Mrs. Green again.)
Opening Credits
[Scene: Joey's Apartment, Joey is reading a script as Ross and Chandler enter carrying a basketball.]
Chandler: Hey Joe!
Joey: Oh no, I cant go. Im practicing; I got an audition to be the host of a new game show.
Ross: Oh cool!
Chandler: Thats great.
Joey: Yeah-yeah, and if I get it by day Ill (In a sexy voice) Dr. Drake Remoray, but by night Ill be (In an announcers voice) Joey Trrrribbiani!
Chandler: Youll be perfect for this! Thats already your name!
Joey: But the auditions in a couple hours and I dont even understand the game.
Ross: Well do you want some help?
Joey: Oh really? Thatd be great! You guys can be the contestants!
Ross: Awesome!
Chandler: Okay, I guess we can lose to junior high girls some other time.
Joey: (announcer voice) All right! Lets play Bamboozled!
Chandler: Bamboozled?
Joey: Yeah, isnt that a cool name?
Ross: (simultaneously with Chandler) Yeah!
Chandler: (simultaneously with Ross) No!
Joey: All right. Uhh, okay. Our first contestant is Ross Geller.
Ross: Well uh, I-Im a paleontologist. Umm, I-I live in New York. I have a son Ben. Uh, hi Ben! (Waves.) And uh
Joey: I said a little bit Ross. Now, how about you Chandler?
Chandler: Well Joey, Im a headhunter. I hook up out of work Soviet scientists with rogue third-world nations. Hi Rasputin! (Waves.)
Joey: Excellent! Lets play Bamboozled! Chandler, youll go first. What is the capital of Columbia?
Chandler: Bogota.
Joey: Its Ba-go-ta, but close enough. Now, you can either pass your turn to Ross or pick a Wicked Wango card.
Chandler: What does a Wicked Wango card do?
Joey: I should know that. Lets see, just one moment please.
Chandler: Higher or lower than what?
Joey: This is embarrassing. (Looks it up.)
Chandler: (To Ross) Can you believe how lame this is?
Ross: Im sorry, I dont believe contestants are allowed to talk to each other.
[Scene: Monica and Chandler's, Rachels baby shower is underway. Monica and Phoebe are working in the kitchen.]
Phoebe: Oh, I told the stripper to be here at five. Thats good right?
Monica: You ordered a stripper for the shower?! That is totally inappropriate!
Phoebe: What? Hes gonna be dressed as a baby! (Mrs. Green enters.) Oh hi Mrs. Green!
Monica: Hi!
Phoebe: Im so glad you could make it.
Monica: Yes, thank you so much. And again, were so sorry. We could not feel worse about it.
Mrs. Green: Try. Theres my little girl. (Goes over to Rachel.)
Monica: Shes still mad.
Phoebe: Yeah I know. Isnt it great? One less person we have to make small talk with.
Monica: Phoebe, Sandras mad at you too. It-it doesnt bother you?
Phoebe: No look, weve apologized twice! I cant do anymore than that.
Monica: Okay. I can do that.
[Cut to Rachel and Mrs. Green.]
Mrs. Green: Look at that face! Just like when you were in high school! If I didnt know better Id say you were a cheerleader in trouble. Come on, lets get some tea.
Rachel: Okay. (Mrs.
Mrs. Green: Oh my look at that. Only three weeks to go, now have you picked your nanny yet? Now I dont want you to use your housekeeper cause it would just split her focus.
Rachel: Oh well actually gonna use a nanny and uh, I dont even have a housekeeper.
Mrs.  Rachel, you must get a nanny. You dont know how overwhelming this is going to be. I mean when you were a baby I had full time help, I had Mrs. Kay.
Rachel: Mrs. Kay! Oh yeah, she was sweet. She taught me Spanish. I actually think I remember some of it, tu madre es loca. (I think thats your mothers crazy.)

Rachel: Well, however great she was I just cant afford that.
Mrs. Green: Oh Rachel!
Rachel: What?
Mrs. Green: I just had the greatest idea!
Rachel: Wh-wh-what? What?
Mrs. Green: Oh, Im so happy Im gonna do this for my little girl. Aw, look at you. You have tears in your eyes.
Rachel: Yes. Yes I do.
[Scene: Joey's Apartment, the guys are still playing Bamboozled.]
Joey: All right Ross youre in the lead, would you like to take another question or spin the Wheel of Mayhem?
Ross: The wheel has not been my friend tonight Joey. Uh, Ill take another question.
Joey: Okay, this is gonna be tough. Hold your breath.
Ross: Its okay, Im ready.

Joey: Okay, what do you have a fear of if you suffer from this phobia, Tris Holy cow, thats a big word. Trisc Seriously look at this thing. Chandler, how do you say that?
Chandler: Let me see that.
Joey: This one right here. (Ross whines.)
Chandler: Triscadecaphobia.
Ross: (exhaling) The fear of Triscuts!
Joey: No! No, fear of the number 13.
Chandler: Fear of Triscuts?
Ross: Its possible, they have really sharp edges.

Ross: Wait a minute, I-I believe Im entitled to use my Angel Pass for a free turn?
Chandler: This game makes no sense!
Ross: Yknow what?
Chandler: Oh come on Ross, I think were all losers here.
Joey: All right. Chandler, you can either spin the wheel or pick a Google card.
Chandler: Let me think. Let me thinkOh! I dont care.
Joey: You-you must choose Mr. Bing.
Chandler: Either, it makes no difference.
Joey: Choose, you jackass!
Chandler: Ill take a card.
Joey: Okay, you picked the Gimmie card! You get all of Rosss points!
Ross: What?!
Chandler: This game is kinda fun.
Ross: (To Chandler) You dont think its a little crazy that you get all my points just cause you
Chandler: I dont think the contestants are supposed to speak to each other.
[Scene: Monica and Chandler's, the baby shower is continuing as Rachel walks over to Monica and Phoebe.]
Rachel: Why did you invite my mother?!
Monica: What?
Rachel: She wants to move in with me and Ross to help take care of the baby.
Phoebe: For how long?
Rachel: Eight weeks. I mean I love my mother, but my God, a long lunch with her is taxing.
Monica: I personally would be honored if she wanted to live with me.
Phoebe: She cant hear you.
Rachel: What? You guys, come on! What am I going to do?
Phoebe: Well, if you dont want your mother to move in with you, just tell her.
Rachel: Youre right. Youre right. I mean Im about to have a baby, I can tell my mother that I dont want her to just be sleeping on my couch! Oh my God! Shes gonna want to sleep in my bed with me. This cannot happen!
Monica: Thats right. That is right, you go over there and tell her you dont want her to live with you. Do not take no for an answer!
Rachel: Okay. (She goes over to tell her mother.)
Monica: (To Phoebe) This is great! Now shes gonna be mad at Rachel! Yknow what? And Im just gonna swoop in there and be like the daughter she never had.
Phoebe: I have new respect for Chandler. All right everybody! Its time to open the presents!
Monica: Yes! Yes! And I think that the first gift that Rachel opens should be from the grandmother of the baby, because youre the most important person in this room. And in the world!
Mrs. Green: Well uh, I dont have a gift because I wasnt invited until the last minute, but thank you so much for bringing that to everyones attention.
Phoebe: How about you less important people, lets open your presents!
(Mrs. Green goes into the kitchen and Rachel follows her.)

Mrs. Green: Well, I kinda did. Me. Eight weeks of me.
Rachel: Oh yeah. Okay, see mom, the truth is I can do this on my own.
Mrs. Green: Sweetheart I know youre gonna be terrific mom, I just think you need a little help, especially at the beginning.
Rachel: But mom, I really know what Im doing. I can handle this.
Mrs. Green: Really? Remember Twinkles?
Rachel: He was a hamster! I am not going to vacuum up my baby!
Phoebe: Okay, come on Rach its present time! Yknow youre the glue thats holding this whole party together. Its kinda falling apart here.
Mrs. Green: Oh look.
Rachel: Wow!
Phoebe: Okay, this is from your friend at work.
Rachel: Oh my gosh! Oh wow! Oh, I know what this is! (Shes holding an item with a large suction cup connected to a yellow plastic box, with a long narrow tube and bottle connected the yellow part.) Wait a minute. That cant be right. Is that a beer bong for a baby?
Mrs. Green: Darling, thats a breast pump!
Rachel: Did I say I was done guessing? Okay, thank you for that. Oh wow! Whats this?
Woman: Its a diaper genie.
Rachel: Oh, it dispenses clean diapers!
Woman: No! Its where you put the dirty ones!
Rachel: Well thats gross, why dont you just take it outside and throw it in a dumpster?
Mrs.
Rachel: What?! It goes ten times a day! What are we feeding this baby?! Indian food?!
Mrs. Green: No dear, thats what babies do.
 She is very smart.
Mrs.
Rachel: I dont know, Id leave it on the changing table? (Everyone gasps.) What?! Whatd I do? Whatd I do?!
Mrs. Green: You cant leave a baby alone!
Rachel: Oh come(Stutters)Of course I know that. I mean of course you never leave a baby alone! I mean who wouldshe wouldnt be safe as she would be with me, the baby dummy. Oh God, okay. Yknow what? I think opening the presents right now is a little overwhelming right now. So I think umm, Im just gonna maybe open them a little bit later, but thank you all for coming. And for these beautiful gifts, and this basket is beautiful.
Woman: Its actually a bassinet.
Rachel: Okay mommy, dont ever leave me. (Hugs her.)
Commercial Break
[Scene: Joey's Apartment, the guys are still playing the game only everyone is really into it.]
Joey: (To Chandler) In what John Houston film would you hear this line, "Badges? We dont need no stinkin badges!"
Chandler: Treasure of the Sierra Madre!
Joey: Correct! Theres a possible backwards bonus!
Chandler: Madre Sierra the of Treasure!
Joey: Yes!
Chandler: Id like to go up the ladder of chance to the golden mud hut please.
Joey: Wise choice, how many rungs?
Chandler: Six!
Joey: (makes a sound like a monkey) That noise can only me one thing.
Chandler: (disappointed and simultaneously as Ross) Hungry monkey.
Ross: (excited and simultaneously as Chandler) Hungry monkey! (To Chandler) Haaa! (To Joey) Id like a Wicked Wango card!
Joey: Okay, its an audio question, name this television theme song. (Starts humming the theme to I Dream of Genie.)
Ross: (thinking) Oh. (Pause) Oh! Oh my God! Okay, I know this, give me-give me a second!
Chandler: Tell it to the Time Turtle!
 I Dream of Genie!
Joey: Yes! Yes, youre back in the lead!
Ross: Id like to spin the wheel!
(Joey makes a sound like a game show wheel spinning with the pointer bouncing off of the bars on the wheel as it slows and comes to a stop.)
Chandler: (annoyed) Oh come on!!
Joey: All right! All right! Uh, umm, Super-Speedy Speed round!
Ross: Is there a hopping bonus?
Joey: Of course!
(Ross gets up and starts to hop on one leg.)
Joey: Who invented bifocals?
Ross: Ben Franklin.
Joey: Correct! Which monarch has ruled Great Britain the longest?
Ross: Queen Victoria.
Joey: Correct again! But, you forgot to switch legs between questions, so no hopping bonus!
Ross: Noooo!!! Every time!!!
Joey: Now, over to Chandler.

Chandler: Yes! (Pause) No! (Pause) Google!
Joey: Oh my God! Congratulations Ross, because Chandler, youve been Bamboozled!
Chandler: Nooo!!
Ross: Yeah!!
Chandler: This is the best game ever!!!
[Scene: Monica and Chandler's, the baby shower has ended and everyone except for Mrs. Green have left who is talking to Rachel while Monica and Phoebe are cleaning up.]
Rachel: So umm, youre gonna stay with me as long as I need you?
Mrs. Green: Of course I am!
 Ive read all kinds of books on pregnancy and giving birth, but I-I just didnt think to read the part about what to do when the baby comes. And-and then guess what? The babys coming and I dont know what to do. Oh, can I throw up in my diaper genie?
Mrs. Green: No. Sweetie, youre gonna be fine. (Starts to get up.)
Rachel: Wait-wait where are you going? Where are you going?
Mrs. Green: Im going to the bathroom.
Rachel: Okay.
Mrs. Green: Now dont worry! Everythings gonna be okay. (Hugs Rachel while she is standing and Rachel is sitting, seeing this Monica decides to join in on the hugging by hugging Mrs. Green from behind her back.)
Monica: It is going to be okay! (Mrs. Green glances over her shoulder and glares at Monica while she heads for the bathroom.) It was worth a shot.
Ross: (entering, out of breath) Hey!
Phoebe: Hey! Why are you all red and sweaty?
Ross: I just Bamboozled Chandler! (Flexes in victory while everyone stares at him.) Which is not uh sexual thing. That was a quick shower.
Phoebe: Not if you were here.
Ross: Wow! It looks like we got a lot of good stuff.
Rachel: Oh we did, but my mom got us the greatest gift of all.
Ross: (excited) A Play-Dough Barber Shop?
Rachel: No. Shes going to live with us for eight weeks.
Ross: Uh, what?
Rachel: Yes! Shes gonna help us take care of the baby! Woo-hoo. (Sees that Ross isnt happy.)
Ross: WhatYoure not serious. I mean shes a very nice woman, but there is no way we can take eight weeks of her. Shell drive us totally crazy.
Mrs. Green: (entering from bathroom) Hi Ross!
Ross: Hi roomie! (Hugs her and looks at Rachel.)
[Scene: Joeys Audition, Joey is being shown in.]
Man: Hey Joey, hi! Im Ray; Im the producer of the show.
Joey: (announcer voice) Its a pleasure to meet you Ray.
Ray: And this is Duncan (points to the cameraman) and Erin, theyre gonna help us out with the audition. So uh, lets get the camera rolling.
Joey: (announcer voice) Rightie-O Ray!
Ray: Whenever youre ready.
Joey: (to the camera) Hello, Im Joey Tribbiani! Lets play Bamboozled! Erin, you get the first question! In hockey, who is known as The Great One?
Erin: Wayne Gretzky.
Joey: Correct! Now, would you like to pick a Wicked Wango card or spin the Wheel of Mayhem?
Ray: Uh Joey, didnt your agents give you the revised rules? Weve eliminated all of that. No wheel, no cards.
Joey: WhatWhy?!
Ray: Uh well, the game was too complicated and research showed people didnt follow it.
Joey: Well whats complicated? You spin the Wheel of Mayhem to go up the Ladder of Chance. You go past the Mud Hut through the Rainbow Ring to get to the Golden Monkey; you yank his tail and boom! Youre in Paradise Pond!
Ray: Yeah all thats gone. Its basically just a simple question and answer game now.
Joey: Well whats fun about that?
Ray: Well, therell be women in bikinis holding up the scores.
Joey: (announcer voice to the camera) Lets play Bamboozled!
[Scene: Monica and Chandler's, Mrs. Green is telling Ross what needs to be done to baby proof his apartment.]
Mrs. Green: and all those dinosaur nick-knacks you have Ross, I thought they might be more at home in the garage.
Ross: Well we we dont have a garage.
Mrs. Green: Did I say garage? I meant garbage.
Ross: Yknow what? Maybe, Mrs. Green, its not absolutely vital that you live with us.
Mrs. Green: Well Rachel needs help with the baby.
Rachel: I do. I really do. I dont know anything.
Ross: Im-Im sure thats not true.
Rachel: Oh no? Pheebs? Monica? Do I know anything about babies?
Phoebe: No, not a thing.
Monica: Its frightening.
Ross: Well uh, yknow what? Even if she doesnt know anything, I do! I have a son. And his mother and I didnt live together, and whenever he was with me I took care of him all the time, by myself.
Mrs. Green: Thats true. You do have another child.
Ross: Yeah.
Mrs. Green: With another woman.
Ross: Thats a different issue. Uh, the point is, when the baby comes I will be there to to feed her and bathe her and change her. And more than that I want to do all those things.
Mrs. Green: Well then you really dont need me to live with you.
Ross: Yes! Yes, youre gonna be so missed.
Mrs. Green: Youre gonna be a great father.
Ross: Well youre gonna be a wonderful grandma. (They hug.)
Rachel: Hello?!
Ross: Oh, come on, every first time mother feels that way. Youllyoure gonna pick it up. (Rachel doesnt believe that.) Hey! You will! Uh look, yknow when you first came to the city? You were this spoiled helpless little girl who-who still used daddys credit card. Do you remember?
Rachel: I hope youre going somewhere with this.
 WhatYoure-youre this big executive! You are much more capable than you give yourself credit for.
Rachel: Really?
Ross: Im telling you.
Rachel: Thank you. (Hugs him.)
Mrs. Green: All right you two, Im gonna get going.
Ross: Oh. (Rachel and he start to stand up.)
 Ill let myself out. Its like Im not here, which I almost wasnt.
Monica: (laughs) Youre still so funny. Youre so funny. (To Phoebe) What do I do?
Phoebe: Nothing! You have apologized to her like a million times and shes been nothing but terrible to you. And dont forget you just threw her daughter a lovely, albeit slightly boring, shower, and she hasnt even thanked you for it.
Monica: Yknow what? Youre-youre right.

Monica: Really?
Phoebe: Uh-huh!
Monica: Okay! I will! Mrs. Green? Mrs. Green! (She ignores Monica and Monica follows her out into the hall with Phoebe in tow.) It is rude to leave a party without saying good-bye to the host! Yeah, and-and also when someone apologizes to you the decent thing to do is to accept it! Now what I did to you, it wasnt on purpose! But what youre during to me now is just plain spiteful!
Mrs. Green: Spiteful?!
Monica: Thats right! Maybe its time you took a good hard look at a mirror young lady old lady lady!
 Good day! (Monica and Phoebe reenter the apartment and Monica closes the door on a stunned Mrs. Green.) I cant feel my legs!
Phoebe: You were fantastic!
Monica: Yeah? Im proud of me too.
Phoebe: You should be!
Monica: Yeah could-could-could you get me something to drink?
Phoebe: You got it!
Monica: Okay. (When Phoebe turns around Monica runs out into the hall after Mrs. Green.) Mrs. Green! Okay Im really sorry!! Im apologizing for the(She trips and falls down the stairs.) (Pause) Okay, I bit my tongue, but Im still really sorry!
Closing Credits
[Scene: Ross and Rachel's, Ross is helping Rachel study for when the baby comes.]
Rachel: (closing a book) Okay! Im ready.
Ross: You sure?
Rachel: Yes, Ive done my studying and I really know my stuff.
Ross: All right then. (Gets up, in an announcers voice) Rachel Green! Lets play Bamboozled! (Reading from a note card.) How do you test the temperature of the babys bath water?
Rachel: Uh, put your elbow in it.
Ross: Excellent! How do you put a baby down for a nap?
Rachel: Full, dry, on its back, and no loose covers.
Ross: Thats correct! This is an audio question, what do you do when the baby makes this sound? (Makes a sound like someone is choking a cat.)
Rachel: Check if its wet, check if its hungry, burp it!
Ross: Excellent! Excellent, now-now do you want another question or a Wicked Wango card?
Rachel: A card! A card! I pick a card!
Ross: Oh, Im sorry youve been Bamboozled!  (Rachel stares at him agape.) Ive lost sight of why were doing this! (Rachel gets up and walks away.)
End


In cryptography, a Caesar cipher, also known as Caesar's cipher, the shift cipher, Caesar's code or Caesar shift, is one of the simplest and most widely known encryption techniques. It is a type of substitution cipher in which each letter in the plaintext is replaced by a letter some fixed number of positions down the alphabet. The method is named after Julius Gajus Caesar, who used it in his private correspondence.
The encryption step performed by a Caesar cipher is often incorporated as part of more complex schemes, such as the Vigenère cipher, and still has modern application in the ROT13 system. As with all single alphabet substitution ciphers, the Caesar cipher is easily broken and in modern practice offers essentially no communication security.
The cipher of Vigenère that was mentioned before is visualized further in this program. If you move on to the next visualization you can learn and try it yourself.
The ROT13 cipher is quiet interesting because of its presence in the modern world. For example Windows XP used it for encrypting its registry entries. The funny thing is that ROT13 is a normal Caesar cipher with a key of 13. Therefore easily crackable.


Pat's Salmon Cookies LLC
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@* * Copyright 2019 HM Revenue & Customs * * Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); * you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. * You may obtain a copy of the License at * * http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 * * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and * limitations under the License. *@ @import include._ @import org.joda.time._ @import utils.DateHelper @import utils.Strings._ @import forms2._ @import forms.EmptyForm @(businessName: String, processingDate: LocalDateTime)(implicit messages: Messages, request: Request[_]) @header = { @heading("status.withdraw.title", "summary.status") } @main(title = messages("status.withdraw.title"), heading = header) {
@Messages("status.business")
@businessName
@Messages("lbl.registration.status")
@Messages("status.withdraw.registration-date.label", DateHelper.formatDate(processingDate))


Click on the calendar to select a single month.
Selected date: {{singleDateModel.selection(singleDateModel.currentSelection).start}}
Drag the month on the calendar to select month ranges.
Clicking two different months is also supported.
Selected range: {{dateRangeModel.selection(dateRangeModel.currentSelection)}}
Limit to date range:


Module: ByteObject
- Defined in:
- lib/ByteObject.rb
Overview
The ByteObject module adds several attribute methods to any class that includes it, to aid in writing programs that require manipulating bytes of specific size. It also has helper methods to make working with binary files easier.
Defined Under Namespace
Modules: ByteAttributes
Instance Method Summary collapse
-
#from_hash!(hash) ⇒ Object
Takes a hash (or hash-like object whose #each method yields a key-value pair) and assigns the values of its keys to instance variables with the same names.
Instance Method Details
#from_hash!(hash) ⇒ Object
Takes a hash (or hash-like object whose #each method yields a key-value pair) and assigns the values of its keys to instance variables with the same names. If there is an attribute writer method, it will attempt to use that; otherwise it will set the instance variable directly (much to the chagrin of whoever wrote the official Ruby documentation).
As the bang might suggest, this method is dangerous and modifies the calling object.
83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 |
# File 'lib/ByteObject.rb', line 83 def from_hash!(hash) hash.each do |key, value| if methods.include?("#{key}=".to_sym) send("#{key}=", value) else instance_variable_set("@#{key}", value) end end end |


--- layout: toolbox title: Hyperlink Generator favicon: favicon.hypergen.ico ---
Generates links from cartesian product of parameters. Wrap the parameters with a pair of braces and separate them by comma. Click here to show an example.


"Light Makes Right"
June 25, 1999
Volume 12, Number 1
Compiled by
All contents are copyright (c) 1998,1999, all rights reserved by the individual authors
Archive locations: text version at
http://www.acm.org/tog/resources/RTNews/text/
HTML at
http://www.acm.org/tog/resources/RTNews/html/
You may also want to check out the Ray Tracing News issue guide and the ray tracing FAQ.
Actually, real-time ray tracing rendering techniques (RTRTRT) is a hot topic now. Remember SIGGRAPH 98? The Ray Tracing Roundtable was more than just a shmooze-fest last year, with the idea of using ray tracing in a real-time setting discussed as a serious possibility. Well, real-time ray tracing has been possible for years on a PC, but only through demo programs - see http://www.acm.org/tog/resources/RTNews/demos/overview.htm for a page put together by Piero Foscari. That a 4K program can do anything, let alone rapidly ray trace, is pretty great. For an online Java interactive ray tracer in action, see http://www.eyeone.no/raytracing/index.html.
Parker et al. at the University of Utah just presented a paper, "Interactive Ray Tracing", at the 1999 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics. 35 million spheres at 15 frames per second on 60 processors. Admittedly, a lot of those spheres were occluded by being in a dense array (hey, even if spread out, there are only so many pixels on the screen), but the point is that a hidden surface algorithm which simply threw the entire database at the screen currently cannot compete. The announced Playstation 2 (which I've read one reviewer say is about 4.5x as fast as an InfiniteReality 2) can do 20 million polygons a second. This is pretty good (no, actually, it's incredible), but a far cry from 525 million spheres a second. With Moore's Law it would take pure Z-buffer based machines almost a decade to catch up to Utah's feat. See their paper at http://www2.cs.utah.edu/~bes/. The one word summary of their paper: optimization. For every hour spent programming algorithms they spent four hours optimizing the code.
It is interesting to see that, as architectures change, the importance of avoiding cache misses and branches and whatnot has become much more important than worrying about algorithm operation counts (i.e. how many adds and multiplies there are). See "Efficiency Issues for Ray Tracing" by Brian Smits, published in the journal of graphics tools. It is also available online at http://www2.cs.utah.edu/~bes/
The Utah paper has one of the best hacks I've seen in years for ray tracing, a great way of faking soft shadows. It's explained in the article in this issue, and is one of the main reasons I felt the need to get out an issue. It was going to be the lead article, but then I received Havran and Sixta's article on hierarchical grid efficiency scheme testing. Their results are surprising, plus they give a nice grid traversal speed-up, so they're now in the lead spot.
To finish up, here's an interesting puzzle, from an MAA question book: given an axis-aligned cube with corners at (0,0,0) and (1,1,1), cut it with the three planes x=y, y=z, and x=z. How many pieces is the cube cut into?
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________
Mark VandeWettering contributed a much better hashing function by Bob Jenkins for the fractal mountain generator in the Standard Procedural Databases code. If you make fractal mountains using the SPD and generate a huge number of polygons you'll notice patterning artifacts. The new hashing function gets rid of these. http://www.acm.org/tog/resources/SPD/overview.html
________
Teddy is an amazing modeler which will be presented at SIGGRAPH 99 - easy to learn, use, and it's fun. Play with the Java version at http://www.mtl.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~takeo/teddy/teddy.htm. For links to other SIGGRAPH 99 papers, see Fredo Durand's site at http://w3imagis.imag.fr/Membres/Fredo.Durand/Book/sig99.html.
________
Xfrog creates extremely impressive plant forms and more, exporting to POV-Ray, Rayshade, DXF, OBJ, RIB, VRML, and Maya formats. Currently on SGIs, they're seeking beta sites for the Windows and Linux versions. http://www.greenworks.de/.
________
3DWin, a shareware 3D file converter, is available at http://www.stmuc.com/thbaier/
________
The paper
Image-Based BRDF Acquisition Including Human Skin, by Steve Marschner, myself, Eric Lafortune, Ken Torrance, and Don Greenberg,
presented at the 10th Eurographics Workshop on Rendering, is now available online at
http://www.graphics.cornell.edu/~westin/pubs/egwr99-marschner.pdf
It describes how we measured the BRDF of various surfaces, including living human skin, using only a digital camera, an electronic flash, and a Cyberware scanner. The measurements have been verified against measurements on our gonioreflectometer; in the best case, they appear to be accurate to within the limits of the gonioreflectometer.
Stephen H. Westin<EMAIL_ADDRESS>________
For mathematical definitions and tidbits (along with collections on other topics), try Eric Weisstein's treasure trove: http://www.treasure-troves.com/. The book made from his math collection, "CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics", is an amazing achievement - no great depth, but an incredible range of material and fun to just page through.
Various geometric formulae can be found at http://freeabel.geom.umn.edu/docs/reference/CRC-formulas/. Linear algebra definitions can be found at http://maths.uwa.edu.au/~keady/M25n/M25nS1/laglossary.html. Finally, for a quick reference to mathematical formulae in general, try Dave's Math Tables at http://www.sisweb.com/math/tables.htm.
back to contents
In RTNv10n3 we observed an interesting discussion concerning hierarchical grids. The problem with the algorithms published was that they were developed more or less independently on different platforms and hardware, and they could not be compared against one another. We decided to take up the gauntlet and make some comparisons. There have been about three methods published; let us recall the basic properties of these approaches:
a) Jevans and Wyvill's article (GI'89) - we call this approach the recursive grid here. The principle is simple: construct a uniform grid over the set of objects, assign the objects to all voxels where they belong. Then recursively descend; that is, for each voxel that contains more objects than a given threshold construct a grid again. The construction of grids is terminated when the number of primitives in the voxel is smaller than a threshold or some maximum depth for grids is hit (usually 2 or 3).
b) Cazals, Drettakis, and Puech articles (EG'95 and SCG'97) - we call this approach the hierarchy of uniform grids (HUG) here. The principle is more complex; first, we compute the histogram according to object size. Using the histogram we split the objects into groups, we use three groups here for explanation. The first group contains large objects, the second group middle-size objects, and the last group small-sized objects. Within the middle-size and small-size groups we perform clustering according to the distance between the objects. Thus each group contains several clusters. For large-size group objects we construct an initial global grid. For all clusters having a large enough number of objects we also construct the grid. These grids are inserted into the global grid recursively, so the smaller grids are contained in bigger ones. The author's statement in the paper's introduction that the method is fully automatic is true as far as it goes; however, it does require at least two parameters to be set initially (the number of groups and delta-connectivity).
c) Klimaszewski and Sedeberg (Klimaszewski PhD thesis and IEEE'97 article) - we call this approach the adaptive grid here. The algorithm principally differs from HUG. The first step of algorithm is clusterizing of objects according to some criteria based on the distance between two candidates. A candidate can be the current cluster or an object. The criteria consider candidates' and the resulting cluster's surface areas. Moreover, the resulting cluster must be small enough in comparison with the scene bounding box. In the second phase of the algorithm, bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) is built up over the clusters. The grids are then constructed for the clusters (leaves of BVH). We have found that the number of children in the interior nodes of BVH is small, so it is unsuitable to create grids for these nodes. In the last phase, so called sub-voxel grids are constructed for voxels, where the number of objects is greater than a given threshold.
The hierarchical grids (b) and (c) differ from (a), since voxels in recursive grids cannot overlap, so each nested grid along the ray path is tested exactly once. The HUG approach requires having mail boxes in the traversal algorithm, where the grids are taken as an object. The ray traversal for hierarchical grids is somewhat similar for all the approaches, but it differs between (b) and (c), since the BVH is traversed in (c).
In forming the list of objects for a grid cell, we use the simple scheme of comparing only the object's bounding box to the grid and adding the object to overlapped cells. This can result in a cell having objects in its list which in fact do not overlap the grid cell, thereby causing superfluous ray intersection tests to occur. However, we also implemented pruning (exactly testing the primitives' surfaces against the cells). The results do not improve very much for SPD scenes (by 10% at most).
Ray Traversal:
There are several issues concerning the hierarchical grids construction. How many voxels should be in the grid of a given size containing N objects? The same question arises for uniform grids as well. The answer is usually the pragmatic rule often called the (N^1/3) rule: the axis-aligned bounding box is split on each axis into (N/1^3) cells. The construction of adaptive grids also provides another approach called the heterogeneous grid, where the number of voxels is proportional to the number of objects, but the voxel is made to be cubic as much as possible (that is, the number of cells along an axis is proportional to the relative length of the axis). We found out this setting is generally more efficient than the regular one. It can lead to better performance since it assumes the direction of rays is uniform, even if this assumption is usually violated. The second important issue is the parameter settings for grid hierarchy construction. What should be the threshold and the number of objects to construct a grid over its child and maximum hierarchy depth? What should be the distance criteria (delta-connectivity) and number of groups for the HUG approach, or the two parameters for merging in adaptive grids and the threshold for construction of subvoxel grids?
Suitable settings should be found experimentally, even if the authors recommend some values to use. The problem of parameter setting is complex and the best settings can differ from scene to scene.
We implemented the uniform grid and hierarchical grids schemes in the GOLEM rendering system (http://www.cgg.cvut.cz/GOLEM). Due to space restriction and readability we present here only the final timings for the SPD scenes. Several other parameters reflecting the finer points of hierarchical grids behavior obtained from testing can be found in supplementary statistics at http://www.acm.org/tog/resources/SPD/overview.html. The interested reader will find much more information in this statistics document.
The testing was conducted on an Intel Pentium II, 350 MHz, 128 MBytes, running the Linux operating system, compiler version egcs-1.1.2.
T_B[s] .. time for construction of grid hierarchy T_TR[s] .. time for ray tracing a scene of resolution 513x513, depth of recursion 4, according to the SPD description. Scenes Timings --------------------------------------------------------- -------------- balls gears lattice mount rings teapot tetra tree Uniform Grid - D = 1.0 T_B[s] 0.19 0.38 0.38 0.26 0.35 0.3 0.13 0.22 T_TR[s] 244.7 201.0 54.68 28.99 129.8 28.68 5.54 1517.0 Uniform Grid - Customary ( D = 20.0 ) T_B[s] 0.39 1.13 1.27 0.4 0.98 0.65 0.34 0.33 T_TR[s] 38.52 192.3 34.21 25.15 83.7 18.6 3.86 781.3 Recursive grid T_B[s] 0.39 5.06 0.16 1.98 0.39 1.55 0.47 0.28 T_TR[s] 36.73 214.9 82.05 30.28 113.9 22.67 7.23 33.91 HUG T_B[s] 0.4 1.04 0.3 0.16 0.45 0.53 0.24 0.48 T_TR[s] 34.0 242.1 71.62 62.31 116.3 25.61 7.22 33.48 Adaptive grid T_B[s] 2.79 5.88 0.6 2.54 1.82 3.16 1.19 1.46 T_TR[s] 30.51 330.0 129.6 59.05 167.7 43.04 8.71 18.38It is apparent that the time for construction is always less than 10% of the time for ray tracing itself. We devoted special care to the efficiency algorithm for grid traversal. It requires four comparisons per traversal step when the voxel is empty. We studied the Rayshade grid traversal code. The result of our studies is our traversal code is much more efficient than Rayshade's. One trick is to compute in advance the coordinates of the voxel in the grid where to terminate the traversal (i.e. the voxel where the ray leaves the grid), as it saves comparisons during the traversal.
The uniform grid (Uniform Grid Customary) constructed with a high number of voxels can be very efficient for SPD scenes (excluding scenes which are extremely sparse). With custom setting of the grid resolution, it outperforms hierarchical grids for some SPD scenes. The full results show that the rule of thumb of having the number of voxels equal to the number of objects is not very good. We call the ratio between the number of voxels and number of objects the voxel density. Uniform Grid Customary has the density set to D = 20.0 and uses a resolution setting according to Woo's GI'92 article: "Ray Tracing Polygons Using Spatial Subdivision" (i.e. strive to create cubical voxels). It always outperforms density D=1.0, and in many cases outperforms any hierarchy of grids, regardless the construction algorithm. The disadvantage of setting a high voxel density is the total memory used; the memory consumed for a hierarchical grid is typically much smaller, with similar performance.
Recursive grids is the simplest hierarchical grid scheme to implement and in most cases shows reasonable performance in comparison with methods (b) and (c). In our opinion, implementation of HUG and adaptive grids is rather difficult and brings interesting efficiency improvements only for the scene tree and, we suspect, for other very sparse scenes as well. You should consider carefully if the implementations of HUG and adaptive grids pays off for your application.
The three methods for construction of the grid hierarchy are not the only ones which can be used, someone can develop his own method with different performance characteristics. In order to compute ray shooting quickly, the methods try to organize the free space and the objects in the scene in some reasonable, adaptive way according to the local scene properties. We would like to stress that even if the traversal of the grid is a very efficient algorithm, there are unavoidable drawbacks of hierarchical grids.
First, the initialization of the variables for ray traversal in the grid is expensive; that is why, for some scenes, the uniform grid with a high number of voxels can outperform the hierarchical grid. Second, we need to set the grid resolution somehow, and how to compute the resolution setting for real scenes is a difficult and still rather unsolved problem. Moreover, the cells' boundary positioning does not take into account the objects boundaries, which seems to be important. That is, a slightly different resolution along an axis can noticeably change how many cells the objects overlap and the tightness of the fit. To traverse the grid efficiently, the voxels along the axis have to be the same size, so local changes in cell size seem unwise.
To conclude our observations from testing, we consider the approaches of hierarchical grids appealing and promising, but their best/optimal/suboptimal construction algorithms (clustering, resolution setting, etc.) is still relatively unsolved and is a difficult problem needing more research. We agree with the opinion that the best setting of parameters is scene dependent. Generally speaking, performance also depends on the viewer position and global illumination algorithm, since these affect the distribution of rays. It should be also interesting to test efficiency of the hierarchical grids for scenes with huge number of objects, say hundreds of thousands, but we do not have such models available (The SPD models can be made to produce more primitives, but we have found the computation time to grow very slowly with increasing size, perhaps due to the fractal nature of these models. We would like to try different large scale models). It would also be worth researching how grid resolution is dependent upon the object distribution in space, not just upon the number of objects. We have done some research along these lines for BSP trees (see "Rectilinear BSP Trees for Preferred Ray Sets", http://sgi.felk.cvut.cz/~bittner/abstracts.html).
The future work in this area should also include the optimization of hierarchical grids construction that will be based on the known or predicted rays distribution for given global illumination task. It is interesting this topic of the non-uniformity of ray distribution (what is the distribution? can we predict and utilize this distribution knowledge somehow?) has not yet been researched.
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Start with a triangle casting a shadow on a ground plane. One way to get a soft shadow is to shoot a number of rays from a point on the ground plane at the area of a light source. Count up the times the light was hit vs. missed and you have a rough guess of the coverage of the triangle and can attenuate (dim) the light's contribution accordingly. Do this for all pixels and you've got a soft shadow cast on the ground plane. However, the cost is excessive: just to get 16 gray levels you need to cast 16 shadow rays from each test point. Even with this the soft shadows are noisy: at one pixel 14 rays hit the light, the next has 10 hit, the next 13 hit, due to changing sampling patterns (and you do want to change the light's sampling pattern, otherwise visible patterns such as banding can arise; noise is better than banding). There are various acceleration schemes which can trim away at having to fire 16 shadow rays for each sample (e.g. by identifying areas on the plane that must be fully illuminated or fully obscured). But in general this classic stochastic sampling of area lights is costly and noisy, sparkling when you animate it.
So, wouldn't it be nicer if the penumbra of the shadow wasn't noisy? What if I said that such a technique exists, and that it costs little more than sending one shadow ray per sample? Now how much would you pay? But wait, this technique can also be added to any ray tracer in just a few hours. Well... there is a little fine print, the shadows are a bit overstated and some banding is also possible. Let's dispense immediately with the criticism that this method is not realistic. The authors present it in the context of making an interactive ray tracer, where the computing time is short. I believe the method is useful in a number of other areas, such as previewing and in artistic or even technical rendering. Many techniques in computer graphics, such as environment maps and bump maps, Phong lighting, etc. are attempts at realism with simplifications. Perceived realism often does not have to match physical realism (that said, physical phenomena and theory are great sources of ideas and algorithms for computer graphics; hacks do have their limits). A soft shadow, improperly drawn, is almost always better than a hard shadow, which can be misinterpreted as a crease or a material change in the occluded object instead of as a shadow.
The idea developed at Utah is that the penumbra grows linearly with the distance of the occluder from the shadowed surface. This isn't quite true in reality, but accept it for now. In a classic, point light ray test the ray is shot from the plane (or whatever) to the triangle and the triangle either blocks it or not. In the Utah test, the ray is first tested against the triangle's plane. If the plane is hit, the length of the ray (the distance from the ground plane to the triangle's plane) is used to extend the original triangle outwards. You may wish to look at their figure at http://www.cs.utah.edu/~bes/papers/coneShadow/shadow-node5.html. The idea is that the triangle itself fully blocks the shadow test ray. As we get farther away from the triangle's edges, the amount of light stopped by the triangle falls off, until finally at some maximum distance the light is not blocked at all by the triangle.
Because the width of this "extended area" of the extended triangle is proportional to the distance of the triangle from the ground plane, the penumbra works about right. When the triangle is close to the ground plane, the extended area, and hence the penumbra, is narrow; as it moves further away, the extended area increases and so does the penumbra. The same idea can be easily done with occluding spheres (other primitives are trickier - you want to grow their extents in a smoothly changing and easily calculable way).
Less obvious, but also good, is to notice what happens with a triangle which is, say, perpendicular to the ground plane and touches at one vertex. Near this vertex the shadow cast will be sharp, because the distance from the ground plane to the triangle will be small. At the other vertices, further away from the ground plane, the shadow generated will be fuzzy.
One question is how this system works with, say, a mesh of triangles. Say three extended triangles are hit by a shadow test ray, letting through 0.4, 0.8, and 0.3 of the light. How much light really gets through? The authors tried a number of methods (multiplication and addition of various sorts); the most effective method, called thresholding, is simply to take the lowest value found, e.g. 0.3.  The umbra is over- or understated: the object casts a hard shadow, but is extended outwards with a false penumbra. In reality an object smaller than the light's area can cast a shadow with no umbra; an object larger than the light's area can cast a larger umbra. With the Utah method the umbra is always the size of the object (though I guess you could simply change the interpolation function in the extended, fringe areas to be an umbra, then drop off as a penumbra, so this understated umbra is less of a problem).
One idea is to make the overstated umbra smaller by having the penumbra area not only extended beyond the triangle, but also extended inwards towards the center of the triangle. This then would give a triangle an umbra that would decrease in size as it moved away from the ground plane. Nice in theory, but it has a fatal flaw. Imagine a checkerboard, and imagine each checker square pulling in as the checkerboard moves away from the ground plane. With each checker shrinking, light can now leak in between neighboring checkers, and a checkered shadow produced. Obviously this is not what should happen with a solid checkerboard.
Note that the scheme is somewhat more expensive than classic shadow testing, but not much more. The ray/triangle test is more complex and returns a percentage instead of a hit/miss bit. Hitting these extended triangles does not necessarily end testing; only a full occlusion by the initial triangle does. The efficiency scheme holding the shadowing objects also has to take into account the maximum increased size of the triangles.
How much to move out the edges of the triangle is an interesting question. As mentioned, the distance extended is proportional to the distance the ray travels from the test location to the intersected plane. This in fact is how Steve Parker first implemented it, and it looks pretty good. However, the angle between the ray and the occluding plane's normal should also affect the amount to extend the edges. Think of the edge of a square shadowing polygon. Now rotate the square around one of its edges. As it turns on this edge, compared to the light this edge will need to be extended further to cast the same sized penumbra. The square's opposite, parallel edge will also have to be extended more. Notice that the other two edges do not have to be extended, even though the square is being rotated. Each edge has to be extended a variable amount, something like 1/DotProduct(d,en), where "d" is the ray direction and "en" is the edge's normal in the triangle's plane. However, even this is not quite right, as these extended edges could go out quite far and so the intersection distance can increase considerably, causing a larger penumbra. Also, you don't even want to think about how to join variable sized edges' endpoints to give curved corners. Finally, such huge triangles will cost extra processing time, as the largest possible triangle has to be used in forming the efficiency structure storing the scene.
Happily, just recall this is a hack and then live with the simple solution of extending edges based only on distance. While one particular triangle may have its edges understated due to its orientation, recall that there are normally two triangles touching any silhouette edge and that the odds are with you that one of these will be fairly well aligned with the ray direction and so cast a reasonable penumbra.
However you do it, these extended triangles are larger than their original primitives. This means that the efficiency structure put around them must take their larger size into account. Either a separate structure must be created for shadow computations, or the shared efficiency structure must be made less efficient for eye/reflection/refraction rays (since these do not need to have extended triangles).
As far as actually testing the ray against this extended triangle, here are a few approaches. If you're not interested in implementing this method, skip to the last paragraph or two. I'm making some of this up as I go, so feel free to correct me if you try something out and it fails miserably. The original paper says you extend the edges and round the corners. In practice, Steve Parker (first author) said they extend the edges of the triangle out, also clamping the corners by this extension distance, and do not bother with rounding.
One way to implement extending the edges and corners is to use barycentric coordinates (see RTNv5n3) and extend the edges out by loosening the range 0 to 1 requirement. In barycentric coordinates, the point is in the basic triangle if all three coordinates are between 0 and 1. However, giving different ranges for these coordinates results in different primitives. For example, if the intersection point's barycentric coordinate is -0.1 for a given vertex, this means the point is 1/10th of the way outside the triangle edge opposite from this vertex. Values above 1 means the point is beyond the vertex compared to its opposite edge. Say you allow the triangle to extend by +/- 0.5 for a given coordinate, i.e. from -0.5 to 1.5. From 0 to 1 is then the umbra, and something like 1.3 would dim the light by 0.4 (the light would be multiplied by 0.6), since it is 60 percent of the way from 1.0 to 1.5. Compute the attenuation for each coordinate and choose the one that dims the light the least (i.e. is highest). Varying the allowed range of these coordinates allows you to limit how far the triangle extends, vary the penumbra, and also compute the attenuation.
 Allowing the values to be below 0 pushes the edges out, and values above 1 move the amount each corner extends out (essentially, controls the bevel formed at the corner). The corners are worth limiting because a corner with a sharp tip, when extended, will have a penumbra which extends quite a distance as a sharp extension.
The amount each barycentric coordinate is extended is relative to the width of the triangle for that coordinate. For example, say corner A is across from the long side of a right triangle (a triangle where corner A is 90 degrees and the other two corners B and C are each 45 degrees). Say the triangle is 4 units across from corner A to the opposite edge. To extend the opposite edge and corner A out 1 unit, change the range from [0,1] to [-0.25,1.25]. However, for corner B (and C), the opposite edge is 4*sqrt(2) far away, so to extend it 1 unit the range is only [-0.1767,1.1767].
I've tried to figure out a way to add rounding to the corners while using barycentric coordinates but can't quite figure out a foolproof way to do it. Enter method two, which is less efficient but higher quality: simply build the extra geometry needed on the fly and test against it. First test against the triangle, of course - if it's hit, you're done. Else, each edge is extended perpendicularly outwards to form a rectangle, each of which is tested. If any of these are hit, immediately return the amount of attenuation from it, since only one rectangle can be hit. You might test the longest edge's rectangle first, since this is most likely to be hit. If none are hit, then test against a circle around each vertex. If inside one or more circles, return the value which dims the light the most (i.e. is closest) - note you have to test against all circles, not just stop when you first get a hit [well, this isn't quite true - you have to test against all circles only if the radius of these circles is larger than the length of the smallest edge of the triangle].
Up to this point I've assumed a linear falloff in the penumbra region. This is in fact the sort of shadow you would get if a shadow edge was aligned with a light source which was rectangular. However, this gives sharp slope changes where the penumbra starts. To avoid the discontinuities at both edges of the penumbra, the falloff could be determined instead by a form of the Bernstein polynomial (essentially, an S curve):
f = (3 a^2 - 2 a^3)
with a=0 at the umbra's edge, a=1 at the point entering full illumination, and f being the resulting falloff.
That's about it. Now someone find some time to code it up into POV-Ray or Rayshade or somesuch! Should be easy.
I do not believe this idea has yet been used in Z-buffer projective shadows, i.e. extend each triangle with an alpha-blended fringe. This sort of thing should work, though as mentioned, thresholding seems to yield the best results, which is not normally supported in graphics accelerators. Still, such soft shadows would be of higher quality than typical methods used, such as accumulation buffers (jitter the projection of the shadow and average the results) or post-process blurring of the projection.
back to contents
I'm trying to find out about fast methods for traversing octrees. It strikes me that you could use some kind of integer math method like a 3D Bresenham algorithm to get a list of cells a ray intersects. I assume I'm not the first to think of this, and that somewhere there is some C source code for such a method, or at least a detailed description of how to do it. I found a fragment in Graphic Gems IV, by Daniel Cohen. Unfortunately, it's complex, uncommented code, and the email address listed is no longer in use.
____
Eric Haines<EMAIL_ADDRESS>replies:
People do essentially use a 3D Bresenham to traverse a grid efficiency structure, getting the cells as they go. There are many ways of looking at octree traversal, Erik Jansen wrote an article discussing some of these, in the book _Data Structures for Raster Graphics_, Springer-Verlag. In the RT News, Jim Arvo's "Linear-Time Voxel Walking for Octrees" in RTNews2 is an interesting method of examining the octree and minimizing octree traversal. Graphics Gems III has an article by Sung and Shirley on walking through octrees (BSP trees, but essentially the same thing) and some skeletal code. Personally I tend to just find the next three intersections (one for X, Y, and Z) and take the closest one and walk to the next neighbor. But I've definitely become a nested grids convert over the years so have lost track of what the best octree traversal methods are.
____
Hanan Samet<EMAIL_ADDRESS>replies:
With respect to the octree Bresenham, etc. I saw the Ray Tracing News issue of sometime back that discussed this problem. There are fast methods of doing this and in fact am close to finishing up a paper on doing it on the sphere as well. So, the bottom line is that there are very fast ways of doing the neighbor finding. I wrote it up in the style of my book for a rewrite of the section. However I found some errors while writing the paper on the sphere. I will try to fix it next week (it is on my stack). If I get somewhere I will let you know.
By the way, the ray tracing code in my Applications book is rewritten and published in the newer printings of the book. Look for the latest printing which came out in 1995.
____
Erik Jansen<EMAIL_ADDRESS>writes:
As far as I know there is no dominant "fastest" method yet/still. The "nested grids" is indeed a good choice. Easy, robust, and fast. The BSP traversal is also fast and if you have a bintree spatial subdivision a good choice. It should be very easy to adapt the BSP-traversal to octrees (do some extra recursions for the x,y,z direction). You can also apply some intelligent coding like in the HERO-algorithm (I have no copy any more of the paper). The SMART algorithm is also a variant in the same style. Then there is the DDA-Octree traversal, which is the grid traversal but mapped to an octree (or more the other way around: the octree mapped to a grid).
The last comparison we did is with the grid, our BSP-traversal, and the DDA-Octree. It is reported in RTNv7n2, Comparison of Ray Traversal Methods.
That was the last thing we did. The (nested) grid (with some tweaking) was the winner. But with other data models, the results may be slightly different, but not dramatically.
____
Ben later writes:
One easy way to convert a grid traversal to octree traversal is to pretend the octree is actually a grid of resolution equal to the octree depth. In many data sets I've tried, the average depth of an octree is close to the max depth, so this simplifying assumption isn't too wasteful. Then you must cull out grid cells which aren't actual octree cells, by doing some lookup into the real octree.
I have developed a 2 pass algorithm over the last few days to do this. I've coded it up but it isn't debugged, so I've no runtime figures yet.
Pass 1 traverses a grid and fill and array with grid coordinate for the cells pierced by the ray. Essentially a normal grid traversal. In my implementation, I convert these (i,j,k) co-ordinate into a 64bit key which uniquely specifies an octree cell location. Each depth level is encoded into three bits in the key, with a depth value occupying the last few bits of the key. The conversion process is all bit manipulation should it should execute fast.
Pass 2 culls out the missing cells. I map ID values to Cell pointers via a hash table. If they table returns null for an ID, I derive that Cell's parent's ID (bit manipulation again) and try the hash table again, repeat until found. The found cell will have 0 or more subsequent cells in the octree which are also missing, depending on how high in the tree it was. The ID of the cell can be quickly bit-manipulated into a template which can be matched against subsequent IDs in the list, enabling further culling without a hash table lookup.
I believe it will run fast because its basically integer traversal, then bit manipulation and hash table lookups. The actual octree never needs to be touched. Result - little bus activity, most calculation stays in the registers or the L1 cache. it would work well in SMP enviroments and on ultra fast CPUs with (relatively) slow buses/main memory.
Anyway, hopefully I can get the thing to work soon and I'll know. The bit-manipulation stuff is pretty heavy and its tedious to debug. Once again, I hate to be doing this if someone else has (I try never to reinvent a wheel) already, so if what Im saying sounds all too familiar, please send me the right way.
____
Erik Jansen<EMAIL_ADDRESS>replies:
Ben,
The thing you are doing is what we call a DDA-Octree traversal algorithm. There is a paper by Kelvin Sung in the Eurographics Proceedings of 1991:
K. Sung, A DDA Octree Traversal Algorithm for Ray Tracing, Eurographics'91, North Holland-Elsevier, ISBN 0444 89096 3, p. 73-85.
In this paper Kelvin compares the DDA-Octree some other traversal algorithms including the recursive bintre traversal, which he called ARVO. I started a discussion with him because his implementation was not optimal. A result of this was that he made a better ARVO implementation and published this in Graphics Gems. In the meantime I asked some students here to also make a comparison, which resulted in the figures that I mentioned in my previous message. Of course you can do some tuning and clever coding, and make one method look better than an other. (The other strategy is to implement other methods dummer than necessary, also an often applied strategy.)
(there's a followup to this article in the next RT News)
(there is also in-depth coverage of octree schemes in the next RT News)
back to contents
1) Form a grid structure, say 20x20x20, of pointers to linked lists. 2) Insert each object into the grid, e.g. find the bounding box for the object and for each grid cell overlapped by the box add the object. The object is added to the front of the linked list pointed to by the grid structure.
This grid structure is then accessed as is, walking through the linked list on each access. Linked list access is usually not as fast as pure indexing, i.e. it would be nice to just have a list of pointers at each grid cell to walk through, vs. grabbing "next" pointers. Even if of comparable speed, linked list nodes can be allocated in a fragmented fashion - some nodes are on this page of memory, some on that, etc. This leads to more paging than is necessary. Also, linked list nodes take up more memory than indexed lists. Finally, allocating a huge number of separate nodes is expensive both in time and in additional memory header costs. Some of these problems can be solved for linked lists by using a preallocated pool of memory which can then be used to quickly dole out link nodes. Nonetheless, linked lists are generally clunkier than need be, and are just an artifact of the way the grid structure is built. Also, indexed arrays allow such tricks as on-the-fly sorting: when an object in a cell is found to be intersected by a ray, you can swap that object to the top of the grid cell's indexed list, on the theory that it is likely to be the first thing hit next time the cell is accessed. This can buy you a few percent speed improvement (though I have occasionally seen performance get worse, strangely enough).
So, one method to get indexed lists at each cell of the grid structure is to post-process the linked lists, tossing out each linked list and replacing it with a list of pointers. That is, if a grid cell has a linked list consisting of 5 nodes, replace it with a single list of pointers to the 5 objects, plus a NULL pointer at the end of the list. Better yet, you could have kept a count of all the linked list nodes in use in the grid structure and allocate one hunk of memory of this length, plus additional space for the NULL end of list pointers. In this way a single piece of memory is allocated, minimizing both storage and page misses.
However, we can do even better, though at possibly a (generally small) additional cost. Allocating memory for linked list nodes can be costly, so this could be done away with by doing a two pass method. On the first pass, find out how many grid cells are overlapped by each object. Say you are doing the simple (but inefficient for ray tracing itself) method of seeing which grid cells are overlapped by the object's bounding box. It's trivial to compute how many grid cells are overlapped by each: sum up, and after you go through the objects once you know exactly how many list elements are needed in your array. Also allocate an array for the grid structure, to keep track of how many objects are in each grid cell. You then go through this array and can set where the beginning of each grid cell list begins in the large allocated list of elements. That is, for cell (0,0,0) in the grid you point at element 0. This cell has, say, 5 objects in it found in the first pass, so cell (0,0,1) will point at element 5+1 (+1 for the NULL end of list pointer). Add in this next cell's number of objects+1, this is where cell (0,0,2) is set to point, etc.
Once the grid structure's pointers are set up, go through the list of objects again, this time saving the pointer to the object in each overlapped grid cell's list. Since you know the exact number of list elements and how many are in each grid cell before the second pass, the object pointers will perfectly fit when stored. No additional memory (except for the piece which stored how many objects were in each grid cell; this piece could be reused as the array which holds the grid cell object lists) is allocated or freed.
Even if you do a more elaborate test than bounding box overlapping the grid, i.e. you precisely test whether the object itself overlaps each individual grid cell, two passes may still be worth it just for avoiding memory fragmentation or even to avoid running out of memory. You could also use a hybrid method, where the first pass just does box overlap testing to get an upper bound on the number of object pointers needed, then the second pass is more precise and so does not use all the memory allocated - it is still most likely a win over storing linked lists.
Anyway, perhaps this is more than you ever wanted to know, but it makes for a fairly efficient grid cell allocation scheme that avoids memory headaches and is simple to code, to boot. It's not for everyone, but is a way of thinking worth knowing about. There are a bunch of extra tricks to squeeze more memory out of the grid cell lists - using short or byte sized indices instead of pointers to the objects, using the sign bit or lowest bit of a word-aligned pointer to denote the end of an object list so you do not have to store NULL pointers, etc.
(Followup article in RTNv15n1.)
back to contents


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<EMAIL_ADDRESS>contact@demo.com


Before Change
rp_tree_init=True,
leaf_array=leaf_array,
verbose=verbose)
knn_indices = tmp_indices.astype(np.int64)
if np.any(knn_indices < 0):
warn("Failed to correctly find n_neighbors for some samples."
"Results may be less than ideal. Try re-running with"
"different parameters.")
for i in range(knn_indices.shape[0]):
order = np.argsort(knn_dists[i])
knn_dists[i] = knn_dists[i][order]
knn_indices[i] = knn_indices[i][order]
sigmas, rhos = smooth_knn_dist(knn_dists, n_neighbors)
for i in range(knn_indices.shape[0]):
for j in range(n_neighbors):
After Change
metric_nn_descent = make_nn_descent(distance_func,
tuple(metric_kwds.values()))
// TODO: Hacked values for now
n_trees = 5 + int(round((X.shape[0]) ** 0.5 / 20.0))
n_iters = max(5, int(round(np.log2(X.shape[0]))))
leaf_array = rptree_leaf_array(X, n_neighbors,
rng_state, n_trees=n_trees,


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| Number of Classes | Line Coverage | Mutation Coverage |
|---|---|---|
| 16 | 72% | 48% |
| Name | Line Coverage | Mutation Coverage |
|---|---|---|
| AbstractBlock.java | 89% |
69% |
| BlockBorder.java | 71% |
35% |
| BlockContainer.java | 90% |
68% |
| BlockParams.java | 57% |
33% |
| BlockResult.java | 100% |
100% |
| BorderArrangement.java | 88% |
61% |
| CenterArrangement.java | 19% |
9% |
| ColorBlock.java | 59% |
50% |
| ColumnArrangement.java | 21% |
17% |
| EmptyBlock.java | 58% |
67% |
| FlowArrangement.java | 71% |
27% |
| GridArrangement.java | 89% |
74% |
| LabelBlock.java | 65% |
53% |
| LengthConstraintType.java | 26% |
0% |
| LineBorder.java | 94% |
36% |
| RectangleConstraint.java | 90% |
85% |


no of red flags raised {{flag}}
No. of red flags cleared {{cleared}}
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No. of users blocked {{blockuser}}


Across the globe, numerous resources exist to shine a light on money, politics, access and influence. Even with limited data on purely political money—campaign contributions and expenditures—creative ways exist to better understand the influence industry. We urge you to let us know of any additional sources of information to include here.
Global Tools to Explore Money, Politics and Influence
-
Ad Hawk
USA
This mobile app is a product of the Sunlight Foundation that aggregates data on political ads from a variety of sources and allows users to identify who is backing ads in an attempt to influence the vote.
-
aHÁLÓ
Hungary
This searchable database of individuals, institutions and subsidies is a joint-project by K-Monitor, Transparency International Hungary and partners for the Association for Human Rights that brings greater transparency in public spending and decision-making in Hungary.
-
As Claras
Brazil
Run by Transparencia Brasil, this website has a database on all political finance information in Brazil.
-
Cuentas Claras
Columbia
Web-based tool with the support of numerous groups, Cuentas Claras is used to submit campaign finance information, and contains a searchable database of political finance information.
-
Dinero y Política
Argentina
An initiative of Poder Ciudadano Foundation, Dinero y Politica is an online database which aggregates political finance data from 23 different provincial databases and 713 recognized political parties to help others investigate and make meaningful comparisons on influence.
-
FollowTheMoney.org
USA
FollowTheMoney.org, a project of the The National Institute on Money in State Politics compiles political finance information in all 50 states, and makes it publicly available and searchable.
-
Hypocrisy Campaign
Hungary
A joint initiative of Transparency International Hungary and K-Monitor to monitor the campaigns of the main political parties during the 2014 parliamentary election and to share the information with the wider public on estimated costs of campaigns through a real-time repository of collected data.
-
Influence Explorer
USA
Influence Explorer provides an overview of campaign finance, lobbying, earmark, contractor misconduct and federal spending data in the US. Influence Explorer is a project of the Sunlight Foundation.
-
Inspector de Intereses
Chile
This Fundacion Ciudadano Inteligente project lets citizens and journalists cross-reference data on Chilean members of parliament with potential conflicts of interest depending on their policy area and economic interests.
-
MAPLight
USA
MAPLight provides journalists and citizens with transparency tools that connect data on campaign contributions, politicians, legislative votes, industries, companies, and more to show patterns of influence.
-
Open Duka
Kenya
Open Duka, a project of the Open Institute, maps relationships from various sources, including shareholder, procurement and company data to help citizens, journalists, and civic activists understand the ownership structure of Kenyan entities.
-
Money, Government and Politics
Albania
The Albanian Institute of Sciences aims to provide access to visualizations and well-structured data on assets declarations, public assets and procurements, public spending data, fiscal data, electoral financing data and data on corporations financed by public funds to compare potential conflicts of interest over time.
-
Open Interests
EU
Open Interests explores the relationship between lobbying, expert consultations, public expenditure and procurement in the EU. The project mines and aggregates bulk data from a variety of sources about key actors and their policy agendas.
-
Open Secrets
USA
OpenSecrets.org is the Center for Responsive Politics’ website that tracks the influence of money on US politics, and how that money affects policy and citizens' lives.
-
PartidosTransparentes
Chile
A project of Transparency International Chile, PartidosTransparentes is an index that monitors and measures the transparency of Chilean political parties.
-
Poderopedia
Chile
This collaborative platform uses data visualization and technology to help citizens understand the relationships between people, companies and organizations that influence policy in Chile, Colombia and Venezuela.
-
Political Finance Monitoring Project
Georgia
Transparency International Georgia’s on-going effort to monitor the contributions, spending and activities of political parties and campaigns through data collection and advocacy.
-
Political Party Time
USA
Political Party Time, a product of the Sunlight Foundation, uses crowdsourced data to document the political fundraising circuit in the US.
-
PolitickeFinance.cz
Czech Republic
PolitickeFinance.cz, by the Center for Applied Economics, is a searchable database that visualizes donations made to parties and visualizes them in a user-friendly fashion.
-
El Precio del Poder
Argentina
An activist uses officially published information to conduct a complex analysis of the characteristics of political financing in Argentina.
-
Quién Manda
Spain
Quién Manda, a project by Civio, is a map of political and economic power in Spain, that combines data research, photographs and investigative journalism to document a network of the most influential people in the country.
-
La Ruta Del Dinero
Argentina
A group of journalists and hackers launched a contest to promote the use of data to track “ the route of public money,” and are using political finance data to create a searching and analysis tool for journalists. Though based in Argentina, there is also focus on Chile, Peru, Bogota, Mexico, and Miami among other countries and municipalities.
-
La Ruta Del Electoral
Argentina
La Ruta Electoral, a joint project from Poder Ciudadano, CIPPEC, LaNacion and Andy Tow, tracks and visualizes money donated to electoral campaigns from 2007 to 2013. It displays information on an individual donor's record, but also aggregates this data to make meaningful conclusions about donations more generally.
-
Who pays?
Uruguay
This political finance database, created by Sudestada.uy, scrapes public records on political funding and visualizes them in a searchable database. Sudestada.uy blends this data with journalistic storytelling to reveal how political funding is shaping the political system.
-
Webinar Series Exploring Political Finance Transparency
-
Political Finance in the Digital Age: How can accountability be enhanced by technology and open data?
View Webinar Slides
February 11,2014 -
How can the transparency of political finance be enhanced when we don't have reliable government data?
View Webinar Slides
March 11,2014 -
Beyond government: How can you inject political finance information in your life and why should anyone care? What's next?
View Webinar Slides
April 15,2014
Studies and Recommendations on Political Finance Transparency
Global
-
If Money Talks, What Does it Say? Corruption and Business Financing of Political Parties
Iain McMenamin, 2013
Based on intensive case studies of Australia, Canada and Germany, this book places business financing of political parties in the contexts of debates about political corruption.
-
The Funding of Political Parties and Election Campaigns: A Handbook on Political Finance
International IDEA, 2014
Addresses the problems of money in politics by analyzing political finance regulations around the world and providing guidance for reform.
-
Money in Politics: A Study of Party Financing Practices in 22 Countries
National Democratic Institute, 2005An in-depth comparison of party financing and corruption across 22 countries.
-
Monitoring Election Campaign Finance: A Handbook for NGOs
Open Society Foundations, 2005A handbook with several case studies and strategies for effectively monitoring parties and candidates financing.
-
Opening Government: A Guide to Best Practice in Transparency, Accountability and Civic Engagement Across the Public Sector
Transparency and Accountability Initiative, 2011A guide to best practice in transparency, accountability and civic engagement across the public sector.
-
Transparency and Integrity in Political Finance
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 2012A analysis of trends in political finance regulations in its Member countries, making recommendations for best practices.
Europe
-
Fighting Corruption: Political Funding
Council of Europe’s Group of States against corruption (GRECO)The Council of Europe’s Group of States Against Corruption (GRECO) evaluates the transparency of political party funding in Europe and draws general lessons.
-
Policy Position: Standards on Political Funding and Favours
Transparency International, 2009Policy standards to ensure that elected politicians make decisions in the broader public interest and not to the benefit of those that funded their ascent to power.
-
The Funding and Oversight of Political Parties and Election Campaigns in East Central Europe
Frank Bold, 2015Drawing upon three post-communist states—the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland, this study presents a comparison of legislation surrounding political parties’ finances as well as quantitative and qualitative data on the practices of political campaigning within the region.
-
Political Party Integrity: More Accountable, More Democratic
Transparency International, 2012A discussion of how transparency can help respond to integrity deficits in political parties.
-
Recommendations of the Committee of Ministers to Member states
Council of Europe, 2003The Council of Europe puts forth recommendations to combat corruption in the funding of political parties and electoral campaigns.
Asia
-
Reforming Political Financing
MalaysiaAn examination of the impact of political finance reform in Malaysia.
North America
-
Campaign Disclosure, Privacy and Transparency
William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal, 2011, USAAn examination of the tension between privacy and transparency in the US in the age of electronic reporting of campaign finance disclosure.
-
From the Public Interest to the Poisoned Subsidy? Public funding of political parties in democratizing countries
Harvard University, 2006, MexicoUsing Mexico’s generously publicly-funded party system, this paper begins to address how public funding can affect electoral outcomes.
South America
-
Inter-American Convention Against Corruption
These measures, adopted in 1996 in Venezuela, put forth a framework to prevent, detect, punish and eradicate corruption in the Americas.
Africa
-
Guidelines for African Union Electoral Observations and Monitoring Missions
African Commission on Human and People’s RightsThese principles are intended to provide guidelines for African countries as they carry out and monitor democratic elections.
Evaluating Regulations: Political Finance Databases
-
Perceptions of Electoral Integrity
The Electoral Integrity ProjectThis study includes data on campaign finance released every year for all presidential and parliamentary elections around the world.
-
Global Integrity Report
Global IntegrityA periodic evaluation of transparency policies and implementation of these policies, including political finance, in countries all over the globe.
-
Key Findings from the Global Integrity Report
Global IntegrityA cross-country analysis of all data generated by the Global Integrity reports.
-
Political Finance Database
International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA)A comprehensive database on national political finance regulations from 180 countries.
-
Political Finance Regulations Around the World
International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA)An overview of the International IDEA Database, highlight key trends and correlations between political finance regulation and other variables.


Our vision for this project is to create a website, where the wishes of minority groups are published to the public allowing volunteers to choose which ones they want to contribute to. Examples of these wishes include volunteers helping children who wish for better grades by tutoring.
Head of Wish Comes True
Head of Wish Comes True
| Communications and Logistics | Coding | Marketing |
|---|---|---|
| Noshin CHOWDHURY | Jasmine YEUNG | Sunwoo JOO |
| Ritika VASWANI | Kanav MEHTA | Harshita PARMAR |
| Kashish NANIKRAM | Kay LAU | Hiren KHARE |
| Akshay RAMCHANDANI | Dennis CHOW | Jami CHENG |
| Jenny CHAN | Arthur CHEUNG | Kiros CHONG |
| Vyapti WADHWANEY | Manun CHAUHAAN | Roshita SAJNANI |
| Winnie PAU | Nikhil RAMCHANDANI | Sofia PAYMASTER |
| Kiki LEUNG | Charis PAO | |
| Rika KASUYA | Diya SAMTANI | |
| Ian LAI | Mir KALYANI | |
| Haysen WONG | Anders LAM | |
| Krishna VAKATI | Jainam SANGHVI | |
| Jake O'HANLON | ||
| Tin Chi LO |


My Account
Friends
Where to Stay
How to Move
Home
The More The Merrer
Plan With Your Freinds
......connect with your friends and enjoy
Invite Freinds
Invite Freinds


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Researcher name


Approach
In cloud computing environments the performance measurements can vary significantly. This may be due to being assigned different physical systems across different experiments at different times or, the performance may be impacted due to sharing, in this case variations occur due to other applications that are executing on the same physical hosts (e.g., affecting disk through put) or elsewhere in the same cloud environment (possibly affecting network latencies or throughput). When conducting a comparison of two or more competing alternatives, care must be taken to ensure that any differences in performance are due only to the differences in alternatives and not because, one alternative might be executing in a more favorable environment (e.g., in the absence of other applications running on the same node or on a faster node). Therefore, here we have used Randomized Multiple Interleaved Trials (RMIT) to record the booting and shutting down time for the VMs as suggested in this paper.
We perform this separately for different types of instances to keep the homogeneity of instances. For every experiment iteration we randomly choose 5 numbers between 1 and 5 and start those many number of instances and, record their booting and shutting-down time and save to database. Then we repeat the experiment 5 more times as shown in below figure. Here the number in boxes represent the number of instances started in that experimeny iteration.
Now, after collection of data we used two approaches to find the botting and shutting down time.
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Average accross experiments :
Here we do the average of all the instances group (group is how many instances to start simultaneously) across experiment iterations.
For example:
If our experiment has :
- 2, 2 -> in Experiment Iteration 1
- 0, -> in Experiment iteration 2
- 2 -> in Experiment Iteration 3
- 2 -> in Experiment Iteration 4
- 2 -> in Experiment Iteration 5
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Regression :
In this approach we apply Polynomial regression in which the relationship between the independent variables { CoreCount, NumInstances, Mem_gib } and the dependent variable BootingTIme and Shutting-Down Time is modelled as an nth degree polynomial. Below is the sample figure for the table and below is the sample regression plot generated at different degrees for t2.medium. Degree 8 gave the least RMS error.