Saturday, August 29, 2015

x - 89 Louis Sheehan




Struggle for Vicksburg  (DVD Video)


A workmanlike presentation of some of the very basic facts of the Siege.  To my disappointment, no re-enactors were used.

I’ve yet to across a source that answers these questions that follow, so I don’t want to imply my asking them suggests unique faults with this movie. 

To what extent could the Fort of Vicksburg inhibit Union supply river traffic upstream and downstream (i.e., completely?  30%  70?)?

Realizing rivers were relatively efficient ways to transport supplies (vis-à-vis wagons and mules albeit I am not as certain as to the relative merits between the use of rivers and railroads), how critical was it to have “unrestricted” access to the ENTIRE river?  (Recall, New Orleans was in Union hands.)  

What would the effects have been – and the responses to – random/sporadic/varying placements of Rebel cannon along the long shoreline of the otherwise “unrestricted” river? 

By only holding a non-besieged Vicksburg, did that allow the Rebels to effectively transfer supplies and troops across the Misssissippi from West to East?

Beginning in  the summer of 1863, how much material and how many troops were effectively contained in the Western Confederacy and prohibited from moving East? Assuming any, how much of a difference might they have made and how?  Louis J Sheehan
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx

http://www.amazon.com/Struggle-for-Vicksburg/dp/B000EM6XDM/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1198124012&sr=1-1



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Louis J Sheehan Final exams are over (they went well) and now I’m doing things that piled up – were delayed – while I was preparing for Finals.
I’m feeling tired and sluggush, but ironically I think that is because I HAVEN’T been exercising; in a very short time exercising seems to actually create more energy than it uses!


Here is a little slice of life story –

I have very large front-loading washers and dryers (because of the dogs) in a wash closet (a standard American arrangement).

The other day I pulled some clothes out of the dryer and stacked them on top of the dryer.  Then I accidently knocked off some of the clothes into the space behind the dryer (there is a little space between the washer/dryer and the wall behind them).  The small open area behind the washer & dryer is not easily accessed.

I climbed on top of the dryer to use broom sticks (a la oriental chop-sticks) to retrieve the clothes.  In my effort, I accidently knocked off the loosely affixed connection between the dryer and the outdoor vent (the vent is to funnel the humid heat and the bits of cloth that come loose in the dryer). 


Yes, yes, one goof-up after another.  My personality is normally to stay on top of things and, in a situation like this, to fix things back to where they were right away.     But I had finals so I put the recovery off for a few days.

A few days later I pulled the dryer out enough to get behind it … but that was too far to allow me to reconnect the vent.  While I was back there I became aware of years’ worth of accumulated dust.

I climbed back out and pushed the dryer about halfway back and then moved to pull out the washer to allow me to finish the job.  In grabbing the washer, I accidently pushed a button that started the longest possible washing cycle – 2 hours, 45 minutes.  So I had to wait.

After the washer had finished washing nothing, I was able to crawl back there, clean out the mountains of dust, more securely affix the vent than it had been before, and retrieve the two socks that had fallen behind the dryer.

Life is like that: sometimes little mistakes are made which require extra effort yet from which one can benefit.  I’m also happy to report that I am becoming ever more patient with age.




http://Louis-J-Sheehan.us
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/page1.aspx
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx










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Louis J Sheehan Industrial black carbon—particularly in the period around 1900—left a dirty, harmful human smudge on the Arctic, researchers say.

Black carbon absorbs a wide spectrum of light radiation, so a little soot retains a lot of heat. “Even the tiniest amount of black carbon will change quite dramatically the reflectance properties of the snow,” says Joe McConnell of the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.us
 “That means that the snow will absorb more energy and therefore melt faster.” If the snow melts early, he adds, the ground below it is even less reflective, heating the surroundings still more.


Studying ice cores from central Greenland, McConnell and his colleagues measured black carbon levels from 1788 to 2002. At their peak, in 1908, the concentrations were 10 times their preindustrial levels, the researchers reported in September. Concentrations of two other chemicals in the ice cores, vanillic acid (a chemical formed when conifer forests burn) and non–sea salt sulfur (a primary component in acid rain), helped distinguish between soot from natural sources and that from industrial pollution. Forest fires produced much of the Arctic soot before 1850, but between the late 1880s and 1950, industrial black carbon pollution predominated.
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx



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It is a rare researcher who can fundamentally change our picture of our place in the universe. In the 16th century, Nicolaus Copernicus did it by arguing that Earth is just one planet among many revolving around the sun; in 1924, Edwin Hubble did it by showing that our galaxy is just one among many. Louis J Sheehan This year DISCOVER honors David Charbonneau, a Harvard University astronomer whose research could soon lead to an equally stunning revelation: By studying alien worlds, he may find the first direct evidence of life beyond Earth, a sign that our living planet is—yet again—one among many.

Astronomers currently know of roughly 200 planets circling nearby stars, and more and more of these so-called exoplanets are discovered every year. Most of the newfound bodies are so strange that scientists have had to coin new terms, like “hot Jupiters” and “super-Earths,” to describe them. Playing the celestial detective, Charbonneau has systematically gone about investigating these impossible planets and uncovering their secrets. In 1999, he led the team that made the first observation of a transiting exoplanet—one that passes directly between its parent star and Earth. By examining how the planet blocks out some of the light from its star, Charbonneau can see what gases are present in the planet’s atmosphere. In 2001, Charbonneau and astronomer Tim Brown of the High Altitude Observatory in Boulder, Colorado, used this technique to “sniff” the atmosphere of a huge, broiling planet called HD 209458b, even though it is 150 light-years away—4 billion times as distant as the moon. Just a few months ago, Charbonneau’s team at Harvard made another breakthrough and created the first weather map of an exosolar planet. The forecast: hot and windy, same as yesterday, same as tomorrow.

Charbonneau’s personal journey to becoming a planet hunter began with his desire to be a marine biologist. Born to a physician and a geologist, Charbonneau was no stranger to science. As a teenager growing up in Ontario, he visited the tide pools at the Pacific Rim National Park in British Columbia during a family vacation and witnessed firsthand the wild diversity of life at the border of the sand and the sea. His dedication to biology gave way to a passion for physics when he encountered special relativity, quantum mechanics, and Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Theoretical physics then led him to astronomy, a passion that now colors every part of his life (his daughters are named Stella and Aurora). http://Louis-J-Sheehan.us


For his next act, the 33-year-old Charbonneau wants to move beyond the exotic and bizarre planets he has studied so far. Now he is looking for something far more familiar: a smallish rocky planet with an atmosphere that bears the chemical imprint of life, like the abundant (and otherwise inexplicable) oxygen that plants pump into our own air. Charbonneau hopes to refine the transit technique so that even the faint wisps of an Earth-size planet’s atmosphere can soon be detected and analyzed. If he spots the signature of alien biology on such a world, we will know that we are not alone in the universe. If he fails, it will strongly support the idea that we are truly unique. That is why David Charbonneau is DISCOVER’s Scientist of the Year.

You were one of the first people to use the transit method to study exoplanets, and suddenly that technique is really taking off. Why now?
Why it’s suddenly working may have two factors. One, the astronomical community has slowly figured out how to get very good data on tens of thousands of stars, night after night after night. We’ve also gotten very good at understanding most of the little winks and blips in our data. The other answer is the same reason as “why the four-minute mile?” Why didn’t people run a four-minute mile before 1954? There was this perception that it was extremely difficult and perhaps couldn’t be done. Most astronomers thought that most solar systems looked like our own. That meant that the planets that were big enough, the ones that blocked enough of the light, were far from their stars. That meant that they would only transit once every few years instead of once every few days. The probability of a transit was very small with this model. No one was looking because we had entrenched ideas.

What are some of the planets that you’ve studied like? How strange are they?
189733b orbits a K dwarf, a smaller, redder star than the sun. Basically, its star is more of a lightweight compared to the sun, so it’s a bigger planet orbiting a smaller star. With 189733b, the excitement is that it’s the first planet that we really have a feeling for what it looks like. We actually have a weather map. It’s the first planet that I have a mental map of in my head because we’ve actually measured, to some degree, the physical map. We know where the hot and cold areas are, and so on. The nightside of the planet is actually quite hot. It didn’t have to be the case—it could have been that these planets were very, very hot on the dayside and very cold on the nightside, but apparently there are these very strong winds that can move energy around to the cold side, so the nightside on those planets is really quite hot. In a sense, that planet feels the closest because we have this image of it.

TrES-4 is a newcomer on the scene. What we know about it is that it is extremely low density. I think TrES-4 is really going to be difficult to explain—it really pushes the laws of physics to try to understand how it can maintain such a low density when it should want to contract under its own gravity.

HD 209458b is very hot. It’s tucked in very close to its star; it orbits its star every three and a half days. Its temperature is probably about 1400 degrees Kelvin! It’s very puffy, so it’s very low density, which means that given its mass—which is less than that of Jupiter—its diameter is bigger than we expect, and so the puffiness of this planet is actually still somewhat of a puzzle. Its star is rather like the sun, maybe a little bit hotter. Basically, its star is a twin of the sun, so that’s why it’s intriguing, because the star is similar to the sun in terms of its age and its mass, and yet the planets around it are obviously so much different from the planets of our own solar system.

    If we find life on other planets, we’ll want to know whether the basic forces of evolution and biology are universal.

Does that mean that our solar system is exceptional?
We don’t know the answer yet. We don’t have any clue about systems with terrestrial [Earth-like] planets because no one has yet looked with enough precision to find them. What we have learned is that the diversity of exoplanet systems is immense. The basic architecture of our solar system, where things go in circles, and there are small rocky planets close to the sun and big massive gas giants far from the sun, is certainly not the only architecture. It may not even be the most common architecture. There are many ways to make a planetary system, so, for example, the planets could be on eccentric orbits, or you could have the most massive planets right up next to the star, even closer than Mercury, and those might even be more common.


The Jupiter-size planet HE 189733b transits in front of its star in this artist's impression. Analysis of light from the planet has revealed evidence of water vapor in its atmosphere.
Image courtesy of Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech

What’s it like to be the first person to see an exoplanet?
You know, the discovery moment now in astronomy isn’t at the telescope looking through the eyepiece but at a computer screen when you’re analyzing that data. But there is still that moment where you make that first plot, and you look at it—and right there, no question, there is the signal. The first time that we measured the actual emitted light from these planets, or the first time that we detected that one of them had an atmosphere, those were very unambiguous signals. And the first time you see that, that’s the most rewarding moment in science.

You’re now working on the MEarth project, which is going to look for Earth-size planets orbiting close to “M dwarfs,” which are small, dim stars. How long until it’s up and running, and how long until it gives its first results?
The project (pdf) is being built now in southern Arizona, and we hope to have two telescopes working in October and then six more by January, so we hope to start the survey early in 2008, and the nominal survey will take three years. Our telescopes are pretty humble by astronomy standards. The telescopes are 16-inch telescopes—tiny compared to what we often use for our research, telescopes that are 10 meters [about 400 inches] in size. But I think that it’s not unrealistic that someone will make the first detection of a transiting planet in the habitable zone of its star in the next couple of years.

Suppose you find a planet the size of Earth. How do you then look for life?
We are very biased by having grown up here on Earth, but there’s a huge challenge in asking yourself the question, “What different forms might life take?” It would be so difficult to recognize life if it were very different chemically from life on Earth. The easier question is to look for life that is very similar to life on Earth. That’s probably going to be our first step. When we talk about life on other planets, we’re talking about life as we know it.

The first measurement is to determine that the planet has an atmosphere. You need a thick atmosphere for life as we know it. Then the trick is to examine the atmosphere spectroscopically for the presence of certain molecules. If we look at the spectrum of Earth, we see there’s a lot of oxygen. All of that oxygen is driven by biological activity. The only way Earth’s atmosphere has this large quantity of oxygen, especially in the presence of methane and other things that would like to react with oxygen, is that there’s this driver, which is life, which through photosynthesis supports this equilibrium. We look to see if life has done things to that distant atmosphere that we know it did to the atmosphere here on Earth—that’s a nice remote-sensing approach; it doesn’t require any assumptions about the life, like that it wants to communicate with us or anything fancy like that.


If you stepped back from the solar system and you took a spectrum of Earth and Mars and Venus, you would see that there’s something really special about Earth. The atmospheres of Venus and Mars have mostly carbon dioxide, which is not a good molecule for life. However, if you don’t see those [Earth-like] signals, you can’t conclude that there isn’t life, because the life may be completely different; it may proceed in some chemical pathway that we might mistake for nonbiotic processes, for geologic processes.

How do you think people will be affected if we discover that there is another living world out there?
Philosophically, if it were the case that the galaxy is full of habitable planets, and perhaps even other civilizations, I think that people would think of themselves quite differently. Or to know that Earth was truly unique in that it was the only habitable planet would affect how many people view their place in the universe. When I went to school, there weren’t planets around the stars—they were there, of course, but nobody had ever detected them. My daughters will grow up in a world where there were always planets around the stars. They’ll learn in school that of course there are planets around the stars—hundreds of them. By the time they go to school, even a few years from now, there may be a thousand. And maybe even by the time they’re in a university, and hopefully before then, it’ll just be a fact that there is life on some of those planets. There will be this amazing change, and they’ll have just grown up in this world where that was always the case.

What are we learning about our own lives on Earth as we look at these distant planets?
Well, I think there is certainly a very clear answer to that if we look ahead. If we find life on other planets, what we want to know is whether the basic forces of evolution and biology are universal. You kind of wonder about how life started on Earth. Maybe it’s the case that you just have to cook up a planet with roughly the right properties and life is unavoidable—life will just spontaneously get going on any such planet, and that it’s a very universal process. Or maybe that’s a really rare process. Maybe it’s not enough to have all the right conditions. Even if you have those right conditions, it’s still one in a billion. So I think it really is something that is very close to home. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/page1.aspx


Has there been any specific new research triggered by these studies of planets around other stars?
We want to understand a lot of the molecules that we look at in planets around other stars. Those molecules are the exact same molecules as here on Earth, but we now want to see them under very different conditions, very high temperatures and pressures. And so we have to go and study them here on Earth. We’ve been learning a lot about the spectral signatures of water and methane, motivated by these exoplanet studies. Those molecules are crucial to us here on Earth. You’d think we would know everything there is to know about water, but that’s not true.

Did you ever worry that you wouldn’t find anything when you began searching for planets?
I was very nervous at the time that we wouldn’t find any of these planets, or that it wouldn’t turn into a very rich field. It’s given me a great sense of delight to see that those risks were rewarded many times beyond my expectations. But it’s only with accepting a level of risk that there’s the possibility of a truly novel discovery. If you do a very conservative project that you know will be productive, in the sense that it’s going to yield some results, there’s a limit on what is the most exciting thing that could happen within that project. If that thing isn’t something that would really keep you up at night, then why are you going through the motions?

How has planet hunting changed since you started?
Maybe 10, certainly 20, years ago—if you talked about looking for life on other planets, then you were kind of nutty, right? It was probably a very dangerous thing to do if you were a junior faculty who might be looking for tenure, let’s say. And that’s completely changed—I think now there’s this huge sense that we are really going to make this work, and we’re going to figure out how to actually study the atmospheres of these planets that we’re detecting and look for the chemical signatures of biological activity. So that has gone from being a kind of crazy scientific idea that could never be tested to something that’s really at the heart of the big funding agencies, in particular NASA.

Why search for distant planets when there’s still so much we don’t know about our own Earth?
Look back through history and you can find writings from the Greeks that talk about life on planets orbiting other stars. I think there’s been this abiding human question about whether we are alone in the universe. And I think that strikes at the very soul of humanity—of how we picture ourselves in the cosmos. We’ve learned in the last hundred years of the incredible physical size and age of the universe. And now the question is, as it has always been, are we truly alone? And I think that everybody is willing to put in a little bit of money to actually get at the answer to that question.
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx




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Has there been any specific new research triggered by these studies of planets around other stars?
We want to understand a lot of the molecules that we look at in planets around other stars. Those molecules are the exact same molecules as here on Earth, but we now want to see them under very different conditions, very high temperatures and pressures. And so we have to go and study them here on Earth. We’ve been learning a lot about the spectral signatures of water and methane, motivated by these exoplanet studies. Those molecules are crucial to us here on Earth. You’d think we would know everything there is to know about water, but that’s not true.

Did you ever worry that you wouldn’t find anything when you began searching for planets?
I was very nervous at the time that we wouldn’t find any of these planets, or that it wouldn’t turn into a very rich field. It’s given me a great sense of delight to see that those risks were rewarded many times beyond my expectations. But it’s only with accepting a level of risk that there’s the possibility of a truly novel discovery. If you do a very conservative project that you know will be productive, in the sense that it’s going to yield some results, there’s a limit on what is the most exciting thing that could happen within that project. If that thing isn’t something that would really keep you up at night, then why are you going through the motions?

How has planet hunting changed since you started?
Maybe 10, certainly 20, years ago—if you talked about looking for life on other planets, then you were kind of nutty, right? It was probably a very dangerous thing to do if you were a junior faculty who might be looking for tenure, let’s say. And that’s completely changed—I think now there’s this huge sense that we are really going to make this work, and we’re going to figure out how to actually study the atmospheres of these planets that we’re detecting and look for the chemical signatures of biological activity. So that has gone from being a kind of crazy scientific idea that could never be tested to something that’s really at the heart of the big funding agencies, in particular NASA.

Why search for distant planets when there’s still so much we don’t know about our own Earth?
Look back through history and you can find writings from the Greeks that talk about life on planets orbiting other stars. I think there’s been this abiding human question about whether we are alone in the universe. And I think that strikes at the very soul of humanity—of how we picture ourselves in the cosmos. We’ve learned in the last hundred years of the incredible physical size and age of the universe. And now the question is, as it has always been, are we truly alone? And I think that everybody is willing to put in a little bit of money to actually get at the answer to that question.
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx





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The cellphones that so many of us carry around in our pockets every day are packed with functionality. They can be used for Web browsing, watching TV, purchasing digital music, gaming, Bluetooth synching, capturing photos and videos, instant messaging and GPS navigation. Oh, and they also make phone calls.

It seems that this last attribute -- the ability to make and receive calls on a cellphone -- is overlooked and underestimated by many manufacturers. But believe it or not, there are plenty of people out there who simply want to use their cellphones for calls, period.

These individuals range from college students who frequently damage or lose their phones to wary, first-time buyers to senior citizens whose kids or grandchildren insist they use a cellphone. About a year ago, GreatCall Inc. introduced its Jitterbug cellphones, which were aimed squarely at the senior set with large keys, a free operator service and the phone's own number prominently displayed on a sticker.

It seems that GreatCall was on to something. Verizon Wireless recently followed the company's lead by introducing its straightforward, no frills Coupe, a cellphone that offers many of the helpful traits found on Jitterbug phones, like large screen fonts, but without a lot of extras. Verizon simultaneously unveiled two calling plans designed specifically for seniors, and was followed a month later by AT&T and its own monthly plan for those 65 and over. AT&T also has an uncomplicated phone of its own in the works for 2008.

This week I tested Verizon's $40 (with a two-year contract) Coupe (www.verizonwireless.com1) against GreatCall's $147 Jitterbug Dial (www.jitterbug.com2) to see how the two stacked up. I found the Jitterbug more comfortable to use for longer phone calls because of its cushiony earpiece, which blocks out external sound and helps the phone rest easier between your shoulder and ear during conversations. And Jitterbug's mantra of simplicity will appeal to cellphone newcomers.

But for those who have been using cellphones and are familiar with the way they work, Jitterbug's nonconformist features -- like Yes and No buttons in place of Send and End and the use of a dial tone whenever the clamshell-shaped phone is opened -- can come across as too basic, to the point that they're confusing. One example: many standard cellphones redial the last number called when the Send button is pressed twice, but redialing on the Jitterbug requires navigating through five screens to redial the last number.

The Coupe is the smaller of the two and blends in with other cellphones. It includes a few of the extra functions found in normal mobile phones, like an alarm clock, calculator and the capability to send and receive text messages; perhaps most people who buy the Coupe won't use it for texting, but it's nice to have the built-in option. (The Jitterbug doesn't have any of these features.) Right now, this cellphone only comes in shiny black with a blue border around its outside display screen. An included charging cradle adds a touch of convenience.

The Coupe also has some fun features that give it a more personal touch, including a choice of 24 ringtones and 10 wallpaper designs for the main screen's background. After seeing low-grade camera lenses on nearly every digital device that I've picked up recently, the Coupe looked a little naked without one.

Three red buttons labeled I, C and E (for In Case of Emergency) are positioned just below the phone's screen and can be assigned names and numbers to work as shortcuts to those most often called. A specially marked "911" button on the phone's keypad is designated specifically for emergencies, though this must be held down to use and, even then, asks if the caller definitely intended to call 911.

A speaker button is also clearly labeled on the Coupe's keypad, and pronounced volume adjustment keys line the phone's side. On-screen fonts appear larger than those found on regular cellphones.

Verizon's well-known network is sure to be a draw for potential buyers, especially because any plan used with the Coupe includes free calls to other Verizon Wireless users. Though any of this carrier's plans work with this basic phone, the Nationwide 65 Plus plan made its debut with the Coupe in hopes of appealing to those ages 65 and up. A single-line plan allows 200 anytime minutes and 500 night and weekend minutes for $30 monthly; the two-line plan offers roughly double the minutes (to be shared) for double the price. These plans aren't exclusively usable with the Coupe.

GreatCall's Jitterbug comes in two $147 models: the Dial, with a numeric keypad and the OneTouch, with just three large buttons labeled Operator, Tow and 911. I've tested both in the past, but this time around I looked at the Dial because it's most comparable to Verizon's Coupe.

The Jitterbug Dial phone comes in black or white, and its buttons and all of its on-screen lettering appear considerably larger than the Verizon Coupe's. Its number keys glow bright white and are encircled by yellow borders, while the Coupe's digital keypad is black with glowing blue numbers -- colors that aren't as distinctive. Unlike the Coupe, Jitterbug doesn't come with a charging cradle, though GreatCall has plans for adding cradles in 2008.

A free operator service can be reached from Jitterbug phones by pressing "0." This operator greets users by name, places calls on the user's phone (saving you the trouble of dialing) and can add numbers to a phone's contact list if a user doesn't want to or can't do this.

The Jitterbug can be pre-programmed with names and numbers; I ordered mine with five pre-programmed numbers, a luxury that nervous new cellphone owners might find worthwhile. Things get difficult when you try to enter your contacts. Even though each number key has three or four letters assigned to its key as on all phones, adding a contact involves using Jitterbug's clumsy system of choosing one letter at a time from the screen. You're better off using the free operator service for this.

Jitterbug phones let users store only 50 contact names and numbers, while Verizon's Coupe will store 500. Many first-time cellphone owners will be content with 50, but, again, options are good.

The Jitterbug and Coupe each have small screens on their outer shells that display the time, date and phone numbers of incoming calls. But the Coupe displays its remaining battery power both on this outer screen and inside on its main screen, while the Jitterbug only flashes battery status on the screen if the battery reaches a certain low level, or if you navigate to a special "Phone Info" screen.
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Behind the scenes, GreatCall's Jitterbug phones run using networks set up by other carriers; I never had any trouble dialing out or receiving calls. A variety of calling plans can be used with Jitterbug phones ranging from $10 monthly for pay-as-you-go at 35 cents a minute to $80 monthly for 800 minutes. Add-on packages of minutes and sharing plans are also available.


If you're familiar with cellphones, the Jitterbug will be a confusing step back for you, even though its free operator service and comfortable earpiece are pluses. Some people will prefer the Jitterbug's larger fonts and number keys to the Verizon Coupe's smaller, more stylish build. Still, the Coupe is a good option for people who have at least some familiarity with technology and cellphones. Each in its own way does a good job of sticking to the basic task of handling phone calls.

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