Top Posts Tagged with #charleswang

HARTFORD WOLF PACK AND SPRINGFIELD THUNDERBIRDS PREVIEW

By: Gerry Cantlon, Howlings HARTFORD, CT - The Hartford Wolf Pack went thru the paces Tuesday in preparation for Game 1 with the Springfield Thunderbirds at the Mass Mutual Center on Wednesday and Game 2 on Friday at the XL Center. Dylan Garand is being handed the baton to handle the goaltending, and the Pack forwards must work on solving the Thunderbirds goalie Joel Hofer. The Thunderbirds (38-26-3-5) were 9-2-0-1 in the season series and had points in nine of the twelve games. The Pack defense also needs to find a way to neutralize forwards Will Bitten, the top scorer in the season series. Bitten has eight goals and 15 points after playing in all 12 games. Martin Frk led the team in the season's scoring with 30 goals and 64 points. He, too, did well against the Pack in the regular season. The Pack must also contend with containing defenseman Mike Perunovich. On the Wolf Pack side, they will need to get offense and score on Hofer, who was 7-1-1 with three shutouts against the Wolf Pack. He holds a .955 save percentage, and Hofer had three of the four shutouts the team endured this season. The Wolf Pack were scoreless over 120 minutes in the last two meetings. Will Cullye led the Wolf Pack in the head-to-head matchup. He had nine points in twelve games (six goals and three assists) in the season series and fifth best among all AHL rookies. The Wolf Pack (35-26-4-7), with 81 points, enter the playoffs in fifth place in the Atlantic Division. Cullye and Lauri Pajuniemi had hat tricks against the T-Birds, the first the franchise has had in a year and a half. The Wolf Pack's road mark this year at 17-13-4-2 was the best since 2015-16, when they last made the playoffs with 21 road wins. The Pack lost leading scorer Jonny Brodzinski (21 goals and 48 points) to recall by the Rangers to be among their Black Aces for the playoffs. NOTES: The Wolf Pack did some roster housecleaning and made depth transactions with Jacksonville. In separate transactions, goalie Parker Gaghen, who came in as an emergency backup twice, will be available along with Talyn Boyko for backup duty behind Garand. The defense added Cooper Zech for depth. He was acquired at the trade deadline from the Chicago Wolves as part of the multi-layered Patrick Kane deal. Easton Brodzinski was returned to the Icemen. The Rangers won Game 1 of their series against the New Jersey Devils, 5-1. One-time CT Whale Chris Kreider scored twice. THE ISLANDERS WILL STAY IN BRIDGEPORT The Bridgeport City Council agreed to $28 million in arena upgrades at the Total Mortgage Arena in exchange for a new ten-year lease to replace the expired 20-year lease from last year at the original $20M figure. The late Roy Boe initially negotiated the lease in 2000 when he brought the Beast of New Haven from Carolina thirty days after they were suspended and briefly mothballed. His bid of 20 years at $20M beat out the Beast by a wide margin (11 years at $1.1 M). After making the initial payment, however, Boe never made another payment. The lease was then negotiated with Center Plate Management, the food and beverage company of the arena that initially ran the building for the first ten years starting in 2000. However, Center Plate elected not to renew its management deal when it expired or made a bid on a new contract. The new deal concludes four years of contentious negotiations between the city, who owns the building, and the Islanders. The city cited legal costs over $6000K, matching the figure the city claimed the Islanders owed in back rent. In addition, the Islanders said that promised building renovations were never performed as per the original lease and never occurred under Boe or the aegis of Charles Wang either. Boe and Charles Wang both had ownership of the AHL team at different times. Unfortunately, both men are now deceased. The Islanders (nee Sound Tigers) also cited the new amphitheater across from the parking lot from the arena on the stadium site of the Bridgeport Bluefish, a former Atlantic League baseball team, and they felt it violated the non-compete clause in the original lease. Boe turned over ownership after failing to pay the Islanders their required affiliation fee. They nearly had the franchise suspended by the now-retired AHL President, CEO, and AHL HOF member, Dave Andrews. The late Bill Torrey, a former NY Islanders part-owner, General Counsel, and NHL heavyweight in his day, persuaded Boe to relinquish his operating control of the franchise. In addition to defaulting on paying their affiliation fee, Boe and his son Todd didn't pay many local vendors and employees during their brief ownership. The XL Center is run by OVG (Oak View Group), which also runs the Total Mortgage Arena. They are waiting for bids on the long overdue renovations at the XL Center to come back in. OVG hopes the bids come in close to the $107.2M estimates they received last month from SCI Architects and Dimeo Construction. In addition, they are handling the stalled, unfinished construction of the sports betting area at the XL Center. Does OVG operate the arena in Bridgeport under a management fee or on profit/loss? It is unknown. Spectra, at the time, inspected the books; a source revealed at the time, 'they ran from the building' and never put in a bid. Unfortunately, the contents of the contract are not a matter of public record, so there's no way to know what is in the details. When Wang came in after 2010 to run the building, he created a company to do it after the management deal with Center Plate expired. The company Wang created was run by the owner of The Rinks at Shelton, Howard Saffan. He was summarily dismissed several years later after his billing to the Islanders for their practice ice time in Shelton was less than honorable. He owns and operates the amphitheater with long-time concert promoter Jim Koplik. The number of NCAA college pro signees is 226 from Divisions I and II. Hockey East leads the six collegiate conferences with 36 signees for the second straight year. The rest are NCHC-36, CCHA-31, Big Ten-28, ECACHL-23, AHA -20, NCAA Division I Independent,t-13, and Division III-28. Ten head to Europe; departing early are 37. The transfers for both grad and in-school are even at 35. Canadian college is just one so far. University of Dubuque (Iowa) is going NCAA D3 in both men's and women's hockey in the NCHA conference as they will get a shipment of players from Finlandia University (Hancock, MI) from the school that is closing entirely at the end of the school year. The team will share the Dubuque Ice Arena in the city with the USHL Dubuque Fighting Saints. One coach has stepped down, and another one has signed an extension. After 30 years, Colgate Red Raiders (ECACHL) coach Don Vaughn has stepped down. A national search for a new bench boss has already begun. After a strong year, Alaska-Fairbanks Nanooks (NCAA Independent) Erik Largen was given a new five-year deal, as the school just missed out on an NCAA regional berth. However, they collected 20 wins for the first time in nearly two decades. Cheshire native and former Hartford Jr. Wolf Pack, Robert "Bert" Malloy, and his fellow Australian teammates dropped the first two games at the IIHF Division II Group A tournament. They suffered an 8-1 loss to host Spain in game two. Malloy had two shots and was a plus-one in the loss. HARTFORD WOLF PACK HOME Read the full article

•18+ Adults Only

Watch Anya Live on Cam

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.

✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality

Anya is LIVE right now

FREE

Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming

Envisioning Safer Cities with Artificial Intelligence

Over the past several decades, artificial intelligence has advanced tremendously, and today it promises new opportunities for more accurate healthcare, enhanced national security and more effective education, researchers say. But what about civil engineering and city planning? How do increased computing power and machine learning help create safer, more sustainable and resilient infrastructure?

U.S. National Science Foundation-funded researchers at the Computational Modeling and Simulation Center, or SimCenter, have developed a suite of tools called BRAILS -- short for Building Recognition using AI at Large-Scale -- that can automatically identify characteristics of buildings in a city and detect the risks a city's structures would face in the event of an earthquake, hurricane or tsunami. SimCenter is part of the NSF-funded Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure program and serves as a computational modeling and simulation center for natural hazards engineering researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.

Charles Wang, the lead developer of BRAILS, says the project grew out of a need to "quickly and reliably characterize the structures in a city. We want to simulate the impact of hazards on all the buildings in a region, but we don't have a description of the building attributes." For example, he says, "in the San Francisco Bay area, there are millions of buildings. Using AI, we are able to get the needed information. We can train neural network models to infer building information from images and other sources of data." To train the BRAILS modules and run the simulations, the researchers used supercomputers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center -- notably Frontera, the fastest academic supercomputer in the world, and Maverick 2, a GPU-based system designed for deep learning. "Frontera is a leadership computing resource that serves science and engineering research for the nation," says Manish Parashar, director of NSF's Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure. "We are excited about the new computational methods and techniques Frontera is enabling to transform how engineering discoveries are being made to make our lives safer." The SimCenter recently released BRAILS version 2.0, which includes modules to predict a larger spectrum of building characteristics. These include occupancy class, roof type, foundation elevation, year built, number of floors, and whether a building has a "soft-story" -- a civil engineering term for structures that include ground floors with large openings like storefronts that may be more prone to collapse during an earthquake. "Given the importance of regional simulations and the need for large inventory data to execute these, machine learning is really the only option for making progress," says SimCenter co-director Sanjay Govindjee. "It is exciting to see civil engineers learning these new technologies and applying them to real-world problems." Stay Tuned For More Latest Research and Development

Read the full article

#Artificialintelligence #BRAILS #CharlesWang #EnvisioningSaferCitieswithArtificialIntelligence #SimCenter

When will things get better? Have faith Isles fans

Well, I've got some semi-good news and some bad news. I'll start with the sort of good news: we got a point! The bad news, we still lost in overtime. Stressful doesn't even begin to describe it. Giveaways, turnovers, poor defensive plays, and giving up the game-tying goal with 40 seconds left.

First, let's do a little recap of what happened this week. We lost to Winnipeg on Wednesday 3-2, in a close but still very far game. What killed us? As usual, poor defensive plays and turnovers. Overall, goaltending wasn't terrible, but a loss is a loss. On Friday, we dropped another one to Detroit, this one being a 5-0 blowout. I think the reason we lost is self-explanatory. And then tonight, we had a 2-1 lead against the Caps with less than a minute left (ON A POWERPLAY) and gave up the game-tying shorthanded goal. We then went on to lose in overtime. Yes, we got a point, but the losses keep racking up, and things keep getting uglier.

People at the game were booing the Isles off the ice in between periods (which is disgraceful- but I'll get to that later) and were even chanting "Fire Cappy", which is also disgraceful, to say the least. It is clear a change is needed, but many fans are starting to lose hope that that change is going to happen. Is it the coaching? Is it the management? (GM, Owner, etc.) Is it the players? Well, many argue it's a bit off all three. Many people want Cappy gone, which as much as I hate to say it, may be the right choice at this point. The coach is the main person to blame when a team has such a nasty stretch like this, but the finger is to be pointed at other people too. Many people are also blaming the decisions (or lack thereof) of GM Garth Snow. They are waiting for him to make blockbuster moves for a goalie or defensemen, and his lack of action is angering many fans. When is he going to step up and either A) fire Cappy, B) make a trade for some big name player, or C) get fired himself? These are all questions that nobody can answer, but that everyone is thinking about. Yes, the players are to blame too, but I already talked about what they need to do in my last post, and in due time they will all start to click again like the playoff-contenders they were last Spring.

On another note, personally, I have found the lack of faith from the Isles' fanbase disgusting. What kind of fan are you if you boo your own team off the ice, and indulge in chants that involve firing your head coach? Even if Cappy does need to go, that doesn't make it right for you to scream it with every other fairweather fan around you. The message: HAVE FAITH IN OUR ISLANDERS. If you are a true fan, like me, you have stuck with them through thick and thin, and will continue to do so, despite a rough start to this season. Things will change, and they will begin to click again, so booing them off the ice won't help either way. I know there are fans just like me that feel the same way about these fans being so negative toward their own team, so for those of you who understand me, thanks.

The main point is, it is clear it is time for change, and it is only a matter of time before something big happens and sets the Islanders in the right path again. When will this change happen and what will the change be? Who knows. But have faith fans, and let's go Islanders!

-Eric

#newyorkislanders #hockey #NHL #GarthSnow #CharlesWang #Isles #faith #Capuano #change #roughpatch

Unit 2 Assessment: Smells Like Racism

Smells Like Racism

“If you’re not white, you’re black” (141). I strongly disagree with this statement. There are plenty of people in the world that are neither white nor black. “New York state's Asian Indian population, meanwhile, grew by a healthy 24.6 percent over the 10-year period, to 313,000” (http://newamericamedia.org/2011/05/census-asian-indian-population-explodes-across-us.php). Here is just one of many examples proving that there are other races in world. The chapter states, “the combination of white American refusing to acknowledge anti-Asian discrimination, and minority America minimizing anti-Asian discrimination, foists a formidable burden upon Asians: to combat our own internalized racial alienation, and to fight extrinsic racial classifications by both whites and other minority groups” (143). A lot of Asians have immigrated to America and have succeeded in many fields such as entrepreneurship, technology, and education. Charles Wang is America’s most successful Asian entrepreneur ever. He was born in Shanghai and moved to Queens New York when he was eight years old. Wang was later honored by the Los Angeles Chinese Historical Society of Southern California in “Celebrating Chinese Americans in Sports”. He is just one of thousands of Asians who has become an unbelievable and mind-blowing hard worker. I agree with the book when it says, “we need to be more sophisticated in our analysis of racism, and less equivocal in our condemnation” (143). Instead of immediately judging someone based on race, we should get to know the person. Do not judge a book by its cover represents this idea perfectly. As I continue to explore different issues in race, class, and gender, I will further my thoughts and opinions on different cultures and how they are interpreted in everyday lifestyle.

#CharlesWang #Asians #Whites #Blacks #Indians #hardwork #race #difference #cultures