        IN THE COURT OF CRIMINAL APPEALS OF TENNESSEE
                         AT NASHVILLE
                                  March 11, 2014 Session

                  STATE OF TENNESSEE v. KARL P. COOPER

             Direct Appeal from the Circuit Court for Williamson County
                   No. II-CR036314     James G. Martin, III, Judge

             No. M2013-01084-CCA-R3-CD           - Filed December 17, 2014

A Williamson County Circuit Court Jury convicted the appellant, Karl P. Cooper, of driving
under the influence (DUI), second offense; speeding; and violating the open container law.
The appellant received a total effective sentence of eleven months and twenty-nine days and
was ordered to spend sixty days of the sentence in jail before being released on probation.
On appeal, the appellant contends that the trial court erred by allowing the State to violate
the rule of witness sequestration, that the trial court erred by sustaining the State’s objection
to the appellant’s request to have the arresting officer demonstrate a field sobriety test, and
that the evidence was insufficient to sustain his DUI conviction. The State concedes that the
trial court erred by allowing the violation of the rule of sequestration but contends the error
was harmless. Upon review, we conclude that the violation of the rule of sequestration was
reversible error; accordingly, the judgment of the trial court is reversed, and the case is
remanded for a new trial.

 Tenn. R. App. P. 3 Appeal as of Right; Judgment of the Circuit Court is Reversed;
                                 Case Remanded.

N ORMA M CG EE O GLE, J., delivered the opinion of the court, in which J OHN E VERETT
W ILLIAMS, J., joined. J ERRY L. S MITH, J., not participating.

Steven M. Garner, Franklin, Tennessee, for the appellant, Karl P. Cooper.

Robert E. Cooper, Jr., Attorney General and Reporter; Clark B. Thornton, Senior Counsel;
Kim R. Helper, District Attorney General; and Carlin C. Hess, Assistant District Attorney
General, for the appellee, State of Tennessee.

                                          OPINION
                                  I. Factual Background

       About 1:30 a.m. on November 5, 2011, Sergeant Rick Clouse of the Franklin Police
Department was on patrol near the intersection of McEwen Drive and Carothers. Sergeant
Clouse, who was the supervisor of the midnight shift, testified at trial that he saw a white
pickup truck traveling south on Carothers. The truck, driven by the appellant, proceeded at
a high rate of speed through a flashing red light at the intersection. Sergeant Clouse
immediately began following the truck. At the top of a hill, Sergeant Clouse saw Officer Ben
Jones “running stationary radar on Carothers.” Officer Jones radioed Sergeant Clouse to
inform him that the appellant was driving fifty-five miles per hour in a forty-mile-per-hour
zone. Sergeant Clouse responded that he intended to stop the appellant for running the red
light. Officer Jones followed Sergeant Clouse to assist with the stop.

       Sergeant Clouse said that they proceeded south on Carothers toward Liberty Pike. As
they approached the intersection, Sergeant Clouse activated his car’s blue lights. Upon
reaching the intersection, the appellant made a right turn onto Liberty Pike. After making
the turn, Sergeant Clouse activated his car’s siren. Approximately forty-five seconds after
Sergeant Clouse activated the blue lights, the appellant stopped his vehicle at a curb.

        Sergeant Clouse stated that he and Officer Jones parked behind the appellant. Sergeant
Clouse got out of his vehicle and approached the driver’s side of the truck, and Officer Jones
approached the passenger side. When Sergeant Clouse made contact with the appellant, he
immediately smelled alcohol and saw a bottle of Bud Light beer in the console next to the
appellant. The appellant’s eyes were watery and bloodshot. Sergeant Clouse asked the
appellant if he had been drinking. The appellant responded that he had consumed two beers.
Sergeant Clouse informed the appellant that he had been stopped for speeding and running
a red light and asked the appellant to step out of the vehicle so that Sergeant Clouse could
ascertain whether the appellant was fit to drive. When the appellant complied, Sergeant
Clouse confirmed that the smell of alcohol was coming from the appellant. He also noticed
that the appellant had “a fresh dip of snuff” in his lip.

      Sergeant Clouse said that he asked the appellant to perform field sobriety tests, and
the appellant agreed. The first test, the “walk and turn,” had been standardized by the
National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the Tennessee
Governor’s Board of Highway Safety. Sergeant Clouse explained:

              Usually we try to use either the fog line or either a line on the
              street. They are basically straight and they are easy to identify
              and they are thick. They are not something really skinny.

                                             -2-
                     Usually what I do is I have the person stand on the line.
              Usually with his right foot in front of his left or his left foot in
              front of his right touching heel to toe with their arms down . . .
              . They stand heel to toe on the line with their arms down to their
              side. They are required to remain in that position until I get
              finished explaining the tasks and demonstrating that for them.

        Sergeant Clouse said that while he was instructing the appellant on how to perform
the test, the appellant lost his balance. The appellant “played it off a little bit” by stepping
off the line and walking around in a small circle. Sergeant Clouse stepped off the witness
stand and demonstrated how the appellant lost his balance and walked in a circle.

       Sergeant Clouse said that thereafter, the appellant refused to perform any field
sobriety tests. Sergeant Clouse asked the appellant if he wanted to perform a different task,
and the appellant repeated that he did not want to perform any field sobriety tests. Sergeant
Clouse informed the appellant that if he did not take the tests, he would be arrested. After
being handcuffed, the appellant agreed to take the tests.

       Sergeant Clouse said that he uncuffed the appellant and demonstrated the test. The
appellant did not ask any questions and could not “maintain the start position. He was
swaying.” During the test, the appellant began “flaring,” which Sergeant Clouse said was
raising his arms slightly to the side instead of keeping his hands straight down at his sides.
Sergeant Clouse demonstrated “flaring” for the jury. Sergeant Clouse said that the appellant
also stepped off the line and “cant[ed]” his feet. Sergeant Clouse explained that the
appellant’s heels were on the line but that his feet were not. Sergeant Clouse demonstrated
“canting,” which he described as walking as if “you’ve got Bozo feet.”

       Sergeant Clouse said that the appellant exhibited five of the eight clues of impairment
established by the NHTSA: (1) he could not maintain the proper start position, (2) he used
his arms for balance, (3) he stepped off the line, (4) he did not always step heel to toe, and
(5) he did not perform the turn as Sergeant Clouse had demonstrated. He asserted, “[I]f
you’ve got two clues out of the eight, that normally says that a person could possibly be
impaired and that that person [is] considered to be over the per se legal limit of .08.”

       Sergeant Clouse said that the second test was the “one leg stand,” which was also an
NHTSA standardized test. First, Sergeant Clouse ascertained that the appellant had no health
problems that would prevent him from performing the test. Next, Sergeant Clouse explained
and demonstrated that the appellant was to stand on one leg while raising the other leg six
inches, pointing the toes of the raised foot, keeping his hands at his sides, and counting as
instructed.

                                              -3-
        Sergeant Clouse said that the appellant attempted to perform the test. He exhibited
all four clues of impairment by swaying, losing his balance, “flaring” his arms, and setting
his foot down. Sergeant Clouse said that four clues of impairment were associated with the
test and that exhibiting two clues indicated “that the person could be impaired.”

       Sergeant Clouse said that the third test was the “Romberg Task,” which required the
appellant to stand with both feet together,1 arms down at his sides, head tilted back, and eyes
closed. The appellant was supposed to open his eyes when thirty seconds had elapsed.
Sergeant Clouse explained:

                         Usually if a person is slower than 30 seconds it usually
                  shows that you’re under the influence of a depressant such as
                  alcohol. If you’re faster, say 15 seconds, when you’re supposed
                  to be estimating 30, that usually indicates that you’re under the
                  influence of a stimul[ant] such as . . . meth[amphetamine] or
                  crack cocaine.

        Sergeant Clouse said that when the appellant opened his eyes, thirty-six seconds, not
thirty, had elapsed. Additionally, the appellant had “pronounced swaying” during the test
and “had to be instructed twice to put his feet together.” The prosecutor asked Sergeant
Clouse, “How was 36 seconds is that good, is that bad?” Sergeant Clouse responded, “It’s
not 30 seconds.”

       Sergeant Clouse said that near the end of the traffic stop, the appellant asserted that
he had consumed only two beers and that he was not “drunk.” Sergeant Clouse told the
appellant that he could arrange for the appellant to take a personal or portable breath test
(PBT). The appellant refused to take the PBT.

       Sergeant Clouse stated that at least five times, the appellant asserted that he had
consumed only two beers. Sergeant Clouse asserted, “[I]t’s been my experience that pretty
much after two beers that’s the last thing that a person remembered consciously drinking.
If they’re not a raging alcoholic.”

        After the appellant refused the breath test, Sergeant Clouse arrested him for driving
under the influence. He based his arrest upon “the totality of the circumstances, the smell
of alcohol, the beer in the console, he admitted to drinking, his driving behavio[r], and the
fact that he didn’t do very well on the FSTs.” After the arrest, Sergeant Clouse searched the
appellant’s vehicle. He touched the bottle of Bud Light that was in the console and

       1
           Sergeant Clouse demonstrated how the appellant was supposed to stand during the test.

                                                    -4-
determined that it was cold and had condensation on it. A twelve-pack of cold Bud Light
was located behind the passenger seat and had only seven cans remaining. Sergeant Clouse
asked the appellant about the pack, and the appellant said, “‘Oh, okay, yeah, okay, whatever,
all right. I had three beers instead of two, okay, I lied.’”

      Sergeant Clouse stated that he did not have video recording equipment in his patrol
car. However, Officer Jones was driving a newer patrol car that was equipped with a video
camera that recorded the appellant’s performance on the field sobriety tests. The State
showed the video to the jury.

       On cross-examination, Sergeant Clouse said that Carothers was a four-lane divided
highway and that when he first saw the appellant, the appellant was driving south. Sergeant
Clouse was “pretty sure” the light was red when the appellant drove through the intersection
without stopping. Sergeant Clouse did not see the appellant weave or swerve while he was
driving. Additionally, Sergeant Clouse noticed that the bottle of beer in the console was not
empty.

        Sergeant Clouse clarified that he was trained in the NHTSA-approved standards for
field sobriety tests and that he had in-service training on field sobriety tests every year.

        Sergeant Clouse said that while he was giving the instructions for the walk and turn
test, the appellant stepped off the line twice. Sergeant Clouse acknowledged that the video
did not show that the appellant swayed during the test. Sergeant Clouse considered the
appellant’s stepping off the line twice to be an indicator of his intoxication. He explained
that when the appellant stepped off of the line, he refused to take other tests. He said that the
appellant did not step off the starting position the second time he performed the test.

        Sergeant Clouse said that during the test, the appellant was not allowed to move his
hands. He acknowledged, however, that the NHTSA instruction manual stated that the clue
for intoxication was that the “[s]uspect raises one or both arms more than six inches from the
side in order to maintain balance.” Sergeant Clouse said that the appellant’s walking
“pigeon-toed” was an indicator of intoxication. He acknowledged that the NHTSA
instruction manual stated that the clue for intoxication was when the “suspect steps so that
one foot is entirely off the line.” He agreed that if part of the appellant’s foot remained on
the line, the NHTSA might consider it “okay”; nevertheless, he considered “canting” to be
a clue of intoxication.

       Regarding the one leg stand, Sergeant Clouse acknowledged that he instructed the
appellant that he could put his foot down if necessary. Sergeant Clouse said that “[p]utting
your foot down is maintaining balance. The fact that he wasn’t looking at his foot is failure

                                               -5-
to follow the instructions.” Sergeant Clouse said putting a foot down was “not the end of the
world. He just needs to pick it back up and continue to count.” Sergeant Clouse agreed that
on direct examination, he “may have” testified that the appellant failed all four clues of the
test. He further acknowledged that the appellant did not stop the test prematurely, which was
one of the four clues of intoxication.

        Sergeant Clouse said that during the Romberg test, the appellant was supposed to
close his eyes, count thirty seconds, and then open his eyes. The appellant opened his eyes
at thirty-six seconds. After Sergeant Clouse’s response, the following colloquy occurred:

                     [Defense Counsel:] And is that a lot to be – that’s
              missing it by six seconds. But is that a lot? Does that indicate
              he’s intoxicated?

                     [Sergeant Clouse:] It’s not 30 seconds.

                    [Defense Counsel:] So what if somebody did it in 28
              second[s]?

                     [Sergeant Clouse:] Then it would not be 30 seconds.

Sergeant Clouse also acknowledged that the appellant’s speech was not slurred and that he
was not belligerent.

        Patrol Officer Ben Jones testified that at approximately 1:30 a.m. on November 5,
2011, he was parked in a turnaround median on Carothers Parkway north of Liberty Pike,
running stationary radar, when he saw a white pickup truck drive over the hill at a rate of
fifty-five miles per hour in a forty-mile-per-hour zone. Sergeant Clouse was behind the
truck. Officer Jones radioed Sergeant Clouse to inform him that the appellant was speeding.
Sergeant Clouse responded that he intended to stop the appellant’s vehicle. Officer Jones
began following Sergeant Clouse to assist with the stop.

        Officer Jones said that when Sergeant Clouse activated the blue lights on his patrol
car, the appellant began driving more slowly and eventually parked his truck. The officers
parked behind the appellant. Sergeant Clouse approached the driver’s side, and Officer Jones
approached the passenger’s side. Officer Jones looked through the passenger window and
saw a Bud Light beer bottle in the center console; the bottle was not empty. Officer Jones
smelled alcohol on the appellant when he got out of the truck. He also observed that the
appellant’s eyes were bloodshot and watery.

                                             -6-
        Officer Jones said that he watched as Sergeant Clouse administered the field sobriety
tests. The appellant performed poorly on the walk and turn test by stepping off the line and
failing to maintain his balance. Afterward, the appellant said he did not want to perform any
more tests. The officers arrested the appellant, who then asserted that he was willing to
perform additional field sobriety tests. Officer Jones said, “The second attempt for the walk
and turn task [was] similar to what Sergeant Clouse described. He just missed heel to toe,
improper turn.” The State asked, “Did it appear to you that he was canting his feet out as
Officer Clouse described?” Officer Jones responded, “Yes, sir.”

        The prosecutor then said, “Now, I’m going to skip ahead a little bit because Officer
Clouse testified to the majority of the FSTs.” Officer Jones said that after the arrest, he asked
the appellant to take a breath test or have his blood drawn and tested. Officer Jones then read
the implied consent form advising the appellant of the consequences of violating the implied
consent law. When he finished, the appellant asked him to “just kind of plain [E]nglish to
read it to him.” Officer Jones summarized the tenets of the implied consent law, and the
appellant again refused to take either test. Thereafter, Officer Jones transported the appellant
to the justice center. During the drive, the appellant was “very chatty.” Officer Jones opined
that the appellant was under the influence of alcohol and that he was unfit to drive.

        On cross-examination, Officer Jones said that he had been trained on the NHTSA
tests. He said that the video showed that as he was transporting the appellant to the justice
center, the appellant asked if he could still take a blood or breath test. Officer Jones surmised
that he did not respond to the appellant’s question because he “might not have heard him.”
Officer Jones explained that a microphone was located in the backseat, so the appellant’s
voice was clear on the recording; however, Officer Jones could not “hear everything over the
radio and that cage, necessarily, every time.”

       Officer Jones said that during the appellant’s first attempt to perform the walk and
turn test, he lost his balance and could not “maintain the start position”; therefore, the test
was stopped. During the second attempt, the appellant missed touching heel to toe, turned
improperly, and stopped before the task was complete. Defense counsel said, “I thought
that’s what [Sergeant] Clouse said, but I didn’t – I don’t think I got that from his the last –
the second time I asked him that.” Officer Jones clarified that the appellant’s mistake was
that during the test, he asked a question before he finished.

        Officer Jones said that he was familiar with the NHTSA standards for the walk and
turn test and confirmed that the appellant was permitted to raise his arms six inches from his
sides.

       Officer Jones acknowledged that his report stated that the appellant took thirty-six

                                               -7-
seconds to complete the Romberg test. After extensive cross-examination, he further
acknowledged that he timed the appellant during the test and that, on the video, he stated that
the appellant was “[d]ead on it.” He explained that, generally, he allowed about ten seconds
either way because he believed that a few seconds’ variation was understandable. After
watching the video, Officer Jones said that the appellant took thirty-six seconds to perform
the test, noting that he “was given instructions at the beginning at 32 after. He stopped the
task[,] asked a question and began at 38 after.” Officer Jones acknowledged, however, that
he began timing when Sergeant Clouse first gave instructions to the appellant and that
Sergeant Clouse actually instructed the appellant twice. Officer Jones further acknowledged
that from the time of the second instruction, the appellant performed the test in thirty
seconds.

        After the conclusion of the proof, the jury found the appellant guilty of driving under
the influence (DUI), second offense; speeding; and violating the open container law. The
appellant agreed to a total effective sentence of eleven months and twenty-nine days,
suspended after service of sixty days. On appeal, the appellant contends that the trial court
erred by allowing the State to violate the rule of witness sequestration, that the trial court
erred by sustaining the State’s objection to the appellant’s request to have Sergeant Clouse
demonstrate the Romberg test, and that the evidence was insufficient to sustain his
convictions.

                                        II. Analysis

                                 A. Witness Sequestration

      The appellant contends that the trial court erred by allowing Officer Jones, the
prosecuting officer, to testify as the State’s second witness in violation of Tennessee Rule
of Evidence 615. The State acknowledges that Officer Jones should have testified first.
However, the State argues that the appellant has failed to show prejudice.

       Tennessee Rule of Evidence 615 is the rule of sequestration and is “colloquially
referred to as ‘The Rule.’” Neil P. Cohen et al., Tennessee Law of Evidence, § 6.15[2] (6th
ed. 2011). Rule 615 provides

              At the request of a party the court shall order witnesses,
              including rebuttal witnesses, excluded at trial or other
              adjudicatory hearing. In the court’s discretion, the requested
              sequestration may be effective before voir dire, but in any event
              shall be effective before opening statements. The court shall
              order all persons not to disclose by any means to excluded

                                              -8-
               witnesses any live trial testimony or exhibits created in the
               courtroom by a witness. This rule does not authorize exclusion
               of (1) a party who is a natural person, or (2) a person designated
               by counsel for a party that is not a natural person, or (3) a person
               whose presence is shown by a party to be essential to the
               presentation of the party’s cause. This rule does not forbid
               testimony of a witness called at the rebuttal stage of a hearing if,
               in the court’s discretion, counsel is genuinely surprised and
               demonstrates a need for rebuttal testimony from an
               unsequestered witness

The purpose of the rule of sequestration is to “prevent one witness from hearing the
testimony of another and adjusting his testimony accordingly.” State v. Harris, 839 S.W.2d
54, 68 (Tenn. 1992). The rule may be invoked at any time and is mandatory upon its
invocation. See State v. Anthony, 836 S.W.2d 600, 605 (Tenn. Crim. App. 1992).

      Prior to the enactment of Tennessee Rule of Evidence 615 in 1991, our supreme court
had explained the following regarding the rule of sequestration:

                       The attorney for the State has the right to such assistance
               as the prosecutor can give him in the management of the State’s
               case, and, upon his request, it is not error to permit the
               prosecutor to remain in the courtroom after the rule has been
               called for; but the court should impose as a condition that the
               State, if it desires to use the prosecutor as a witness, should
               examine him first. The action of the court in the present case in
               declining to pursue this course was error, but, inasmuch as we
               cannot see that any substantial injury was done to the defense of
               the plaintiffs in error in the court below by such action, it cannot
               be treated as reversible error in the present case.

Smartt v. State, 80 S.W. 586, 588 (Tenn. 1903). In Mothershed v. State, 578 S.W.2d 96,
100-01 (Tenn. 1978), the court, citing Smartt, reiterated that a police officer testifying as the
State’s prosecuting witness is not subject to the rule but must testify first. More recently, this
court explained,

               “Smartt was decided when a testifying defendant was statutorily
               required to be the first witness for the defense. See Clemons v.
               State, 92 Tenn. 282, 21 S.W. 525 (1893). The rule in Smartt
               created a symmetry by preventing either party from having the

                                               -9-
               advantage of a witness being able to conform his testimony with
               that of other witnesses. See Brooks v. State, 406 U.S. 605, 611,
               92 S. Ct. 1891. That symmetry was ended in Brooks when the
               United States Supreme Court held that making the defendant
               testify first or not at all violated the defendant’s right against
               self-incrimination and right to due process. Id. 406 U.S. at 611
               n.5.

                      Although the defendant no longer need testify first, we
               believe the Smartt rule generally remains in effect as shown in
               Mothershed.”

State v. Stephens, 264 S.W.3d 719, 738-39 (Tenn. Crim. App. 2007) (quoting State v. Timmy
Reagan, No. M2002-01472-CCA-R3-CD, 2004 Tenn. Crim. App. LEXIS 452, at *50-51
(Nashville, May 19, 2004)). “When a State’s designated representative does not testify first,
the Defendant is entitled to relief only if the Defendant can show prejudice as a result.” State
v. Reginald Fowler, No. E2009-00293-CCA-R3-CD, 2010 Tenn. Crim. App. LEXIS 807,
at *55 (Knoxville, Sept. 29, 2010) (citing Stephens, 264 S.W.3d at 739).

        In the instant case, the State called for “the Rule” before opening statements.
Thereafter, the State designated Officer Ben Jones as the prosecuting witness. As its first
witness, the State called Sergeant Clouse. Defense counsel objected, arguing, “If Mr. Jones
is going to be in the room then I would assert that he has to go first. I think the rules are
pretty clear on that. The State’s allowed to have the one officer here at the table with them,
but I do believe that person has to go first. And I would object to the order of this calling.”
The prosecutor responded, “I think that’s incorrect, Judge. I mean, I’m allowed a witness
to sit at the table with me. I don’t have to call him first.” The trial court overruled the
objection and allowed the State to proceed.

       At the motion for new trial, the prosecutor conceded that “the State should have called
the designated officer first. I think just doing the research, I think that’s correct.” The trial
court acknowledged that it “miscalled it” by overruling the appellant’s objection.

       On appeal, the appellant contends that the trial court abused its discretion by allowing
the State to violate the rule of sequestration. The State concedes the error. Next, we must
determine the effect of the error, mainly whether the appellant was prejudiced by the error.

        Regarding prejudice, defense counsel contended at the motion for new trial that due
to the sequestration violation, he was “forced . . . to alter [his] trial strategy” and that he was
unable to cross-examine Sergeant Clouse the way he had intended or else he would “tip [his]

                                               -10-
hand to Officer Jones.” Defense counsel explained that if Officer Jones had not been in the
courtroom, he

              would have done exactly what I did to Officer Jones – nine
              pages of voir dire until he admitted that it was 30 seconds. That
              he, in fact – that he had lied or was he mistaken or whatever,
              Judge. I don’t know the answer to that, but I know that on that
              tape, one of those, Officer Jones says he’s dead on it; and yet,
              the police report said 36 seconds and it was filed just a couple
              of hours later or shortly thereafter. So I couldn’t attack
              [Sergeant Clouse] on that issue because Officer Jones is sitting
              here.

Defense counsel asserted that Sergeant Clouse’s “credibility was given a lot of weight by that
jury. And I wasn’t allowed to attack him on that issue.”

       Defense counsel stated:

              Had I challenged [Sergeant Clouse] and went through that voir
              dire, Officer Jones would have changed his testimony right off
              the bat and it would not have taken nine pages for him to get it
              out. So that is exactly my basis that he’s talking about, that
              Officer Jones’ testimony would have changed. Had I voir dired
              [Sergeant Clouse] first, Officer Jones would have simply got on
              the stand and I asked him the question, it was 30 seconds. He
              didn’t do that. It took my nine pages of voir dire to get it out of
              him. And that’s exactly my point.

       The trial court responded:

                     Well, I certainly understand your point of view and I
              respect the vigor on which you argue on behalf of your client.
              The fact is irrefutable, though, that the witness said it was 36
              seconds. The video said it was 30 seconds. Ultimately, Jones
              acknowledged it was 30 seconds. The jury clearly had the
              testimony of [Sergeant Clouse] that it could juxtapose against
              the actual count on the video and draw a conclusion as to
              whether that should impair the credibility of [Sergeant Clouse].
              You had the ability to argue as long and as hard as you wanted
              to to the jury, you can’t believe what [Sergeant Clouse] said

                                             -11-
              because he sat right there and told you it was 36 seconds, and
              you and I and everybody else in this courtroom have looked at
              the video and we know it’s exactly 30 seconds.

                     ....

                      What was my error? My error was allowing a
              representative of the State to sit at counsel table when that
              person was not being called to testify first. The issue is whether
              that error made a difference. What I’m suggesting to you is that
              you made your point, in spades, that [Sergeant Clouse] said it
              was 36 seconds. The video, without equivocation, said that the
              Romberg test resulted in a 30-second count by your client, Mr.
              Cooper. [Sergeant Clouse], therefore, either intentionally or
              negligently misrepresented something when he testified on the
              witness stand. That’s not lost on anybody in this courtroom or
              at that trial. So while I was at error, I don’t see how it
              prejudiced your client.

       On appeal, the appellant contends that “it should be found that the testimony of
Officer Jones was likely influenced by hearing the testimony of his colleague Sergeant
Clouse. . . . The State asked Officer Jones to corroborate Sergeant Clouse’s testimony and
Officer Jones referred to what Sergeant Clouse described because he was able to listen to his
testimony.” The appellant insists that “[m]ost important for the defense was the planned
impact of the videotape to impeach each officer individually in front of the jury regarding the
purported thirty-six seconds that the officers believed the Appellant took to count thirty
seconds as part of the [R]omberg test.” The appellant contends that “the impact of
impeaching both officers immediately after each was examined directly was eliminated and
the effect of only showing that the lower ranking, less experienced Officer Jones was
incorrect on that very important point greatly diminished the Appellant’s case.”

        A leading treatise has suggested that in determining the proper sanction to be applied
for a violation of Rule 615, a court should consider the following non-exclusive factors: (1)
the harm caused by the violation; (2) the importance of the testimony by the witness who
violated the rule; and (3) the party at fault for the violation. Neil P. Cohen et al. Tennessee
Law of Evidence § 6.15[11][c] (LEXIS publishing, 6th ed. 2011). Regarding the first factor,
a court should consider whether the witness heard proof that could affect his or her testimony
or whether the witness was exposed to unrelated proof. Id.

                                             -12-
        In the instant case, only two witnesses testified; accordingly, their credibility was
paramount. The significance of the witnesses’ testimony was made clear to the jury by the
State’s opening statement, wherein the State urged the jury not to focus on the video, which
in our view was at best inconclusive. Instead, the State asked the jury to focus on “the
totality of everything that you hear today. Focus on the driving. Focus on what the
[appellant] says. How he says it. What he does. Focus on these officers[’] training and
experience and what they saw first-hand.” Moreover, during deliberations the jury asked to
review the video of the stop, indicating that the appellant’s performance on the field sobriety
tests was a close question.

        Further, because of the violation Officer Jones was allowed to hear the testimony of
Sergeant Clouse, his senior officer, regarding the very same questions he would be asked.
In fact, the State said that it did not need to question Officer Jones extensively regarding the
field sobriety tests because Sergeant Clouse had already testified about the tests. Regarding
the appellant’s performance of the Romberg test, Officer Jones testified consistently with
Sergeant Clouse concerning the time it took to complete the test. Officer Jones did not
change his testimony until he was repeatedly confronted on cross-examination with the video
recording of the tests, which reflected that on the night in question, he stated that the
appellant was “dead on it” and had performed the test in the exact time allotted. The
appellant’s cross-examination was vital to challenging the credibility of the State’s witnesses,
and his defense was harmed by counsel having to make last minute changes to his trial
strategy which diminished the effect of his cross-examination. Accordingly, we conclude
that the harm was great.

       Turning to the importance of the testimony, as we have noted, Officer Jones’s
testimony concerned the precise facts at issue at trial, namely indicators of the appellant’s
intoxication. Third, a court should consider whether the violation was intentional or
accidental. For example, “[i]f counsel offering the witness knew that the witness was in the
courtroom in violation of the sequestration order, more drastic sanctions . . . may be
appropriate.” Id. Unquestionably, Officer Jones’s presence in the courtroom was due
primarily to the State’s incorrect argument regarding Rule 615. Based upon the foregoing,
we are unable to conclude that the error was harmless. Therefore, the appellant is entitled
to a new trial.

                                   B. Cross-Examination

        As his next issue, the appellant asserts that the trial court erred by sustaining the
State’s objection to the appellant’s request to have Sergeant Clouse perform the Romberg
field sobriety test. The appellant contends that the trial court violated his Sixth Amendment
right to confront witnesses by curtailing his cross-examination. In response, the State

                                              -13-
maintains that the trial court’s ruling was correct.

        The record reflects that on direct examination, Sergeant Clouse demonstrated, without
objection, the proper way to perform the one leg stand test. Additionally, Sergeant Clouse
showed the jury what he meant when he said that the appellant “flar[ed]” his arms,
“cant[ed],” and walked in a small circle with “Bozo feet” during the walk and turn test. On
cross-examination, defense counsel asked Sergeant Clouse if performing the Romberg test
in thirty-six seconds was “bad.” Sergeant Clouse responded, “It’s not 30 seconds.” At that
point, defense counsel asked Sergeant Clouse to close his eyes. The State objected to the
relevance of the request, and Defense counsel responded, “Judge, I want to see if he can do
it.” The State argued that the officer’s ability to perform the test correctly was not relevant
to establish whether the appellant properly performed the test. Defense counsel countered,
“Judge, it’s relevant to whether anybody can do it.” The trial court sustained the State’s
objection, stating, “The only issue is your client and whether he could comply with the
instructions.”

        A defendant’s constitutional right to confront the witnesses against him includes the
right to conduct meaningful cross-examination. Pennsylvania v. Ritchie, 480 U.S. 39, 51
(1987); State v. Brown, 29 S.W.3d 427, 430-31 (Tenn. 2000). Denial of a defendant’s right
to effective cross-examination is “‘constitutional error of the first magnitude’” and may
violate the defendant’s right to a fair trial. State v. Hill, 598 S.W.2d 815, 819 (Tenn. Crim.
App. 1980) (quoting Davis v. Alaska, 415 U.S. 308, 318 (1974)). “The propriety, scope,
manner and control of the cross-examination of witnesses, however, rests within the
discretion of the trial court.” State v. Dishman, 915 S.W.2d 458, 463 (Tenn. Crim. App.
1995). Furthermore, “a defendant’s right to confrontation does not preclude a trial court
from imposing limits upon cross-examination which take into account such factors as
harassment, prejudice, issue confusion, witness safety, or merely repetitive or marginally
relevant interrogation.” State v. Reid, 882 S.W.2d 423, 430 (Tenn. Crim. App. 1994).
Further, a defendant’s right to confront and cross-examine witnesses “does not mean that a
defendant has a right to present irrelevant evidence.” State v. Sheline, 955 S.W.2d 42, 47
(Tenn. 1997). We will not disturb the limits that a trial court has placed upon
cross-examination unless the court has unreasonably restricted the right. Dishman, 915
S.W.2d at 463.

       Generally, whether to allow a courtroom demonstration is a matter that rests within
the sound discretion of the trial court and will not be reversed on appeal absent an abuse of
discretion. State v. Underwood, 669 S.W.2d 700, 704 (Tenn. Crim. App. 1984). This court
has further instructed that “‘[d]emonstrative evidence is admissible only if relevant under
[Tenn. R. Evid.] 401.’” State v. Coulter, 67 S.W.3d 3, (Tenn. Crim. App. 2001) (quoting
Ronald Bradford Waller v. State, No. E1999-02034-CCA-R3-PC, 2000 Tenn. Crim. App.

                                             -14-
LEXIS 558, at *45 (Knoxville, July 18, 2000)). “‘Relevant evidence’ means evidence having
any tendency to make the existence of any fact that is of consequence to the determination
of the action more probable or less probable than it would be without the evidence.” Tenn.
R. Evid. 401; see also State v. Kennedy, 7 S.W.3d 58, 68 (Tenn. Crim. App. 1999).
Tennessee Rule of Evidence 402 provides that “[a]ll relevant evidence is admissible except
as [otherwise] provided . . . . Evidence which is not relevant is not admissible.” The trial
court has the discretion to determine whether the proffered evidence is relevant; thus, we will
not overturn the trial court’s decision absent an abuse of discretion. State v. Forbes, 918
S.W.2d 431, 449 (Tenn. Crim. App. 1995).

        At the motion for new trial hearing, defense counsel argued that he wanted the jury
to see whether Sergeant Clouse was capable of performing the Romberg test within the
allotted time frame. In his brief, the appellant explained that he wanted to compare the
appellant’s performance with Sergeant Clouse’s. The trial court observed that “what
concerns me is that the officer is not on trial. [The appellant] was on trial. The officer may
be a completely competent officer but have a club foot, could do a nine-step walk and turn
if he had to. . . . You know, or it could be that he’s a completely competent officer and he
can’t count to 30. . . . [I]t concerns me that in requiring law enforcement to demonstrate
these tests, or take the tests at the request of defense counsel, that I am, in essence, putting
the law enforcement officer on trial as opposed to the person accused of a crime.” The trial
court asserted that the issue was not whether Sergeant Clouse could perform the test but
whether the appellant could perform the test. We agree with the trial court that Sergeant
Clouse’s ability to perform the test was not relevant to the appellant’s ability to perform the
test. Accordingly, we conclude that the trial court did not abuse its discretion by prohibiting
the test.

                               C. Sufficiency of the Evidence

      Finally, the appellant argues that the evidence is not sufficient to sustain his DUI
conviction. In response, the State asserts that the evidence is sufficient.

       On appeal, a jury conviction removes the presumption of the appellant’s innocence
and replaces it with one of guilt, so that the appellant carries the burden of demonstrating to
this court why the evidence will not support the jury’s findings. See State v. Tuggle, 639
S.W.2d 913, 914 (Tenn. 1982). The appellant must establish that no reasonable trier of fact
could have found the essential elements of the offense beyond a reasonable doubt. See
Jackson v. Virginia, 443 U.S. 307, 319 (1979); Tenn. R. App. P. 13(e).

      Accordingly, on appeal, the State is entitled to the strongest legitimate view of the
evidence and all reasonable inferences which may be drawn therefrom. See State v.

                                              -15-
Williams, 657 S.W.2d 405, 410 (Tenn. 1983). In other words, questions concerning the
credibility of witnesses and the weight and value to be given the evidence, as well as all
factual issues raised by the evidence, are resolved by the trier of fact, and not the appellate
courts. See State v. Pruett, 788 S.W.2d 559, 561 (Tenn. 1990).

       The guilt of a defendant, including any fact required to be proven, may be predicated
upon direct evidence, circumstantial evidence, or a combination of both direct and
circumstantial evidence. See State v. Pendergrass, 13 S.W.3d 389, 392-93 (Tenn. Crim. App.
1999). Even though convictions may be established by different forms of evidence, the
standard of review for the sufficiency of that evidence is the same whether the conviction is
based upon direct or circumstantial evidence. See State v. Dorantes, 331 S.W.3d 370, 379
(Tenn. 2011).

        Tennessee Code Annotated section 55-10-401(a)(1), the DUI statute, provides, in
pertinent part, that “[i]t is unlawful for any person to drive or to be in physical control of any
automobile or other motor vehicle on any of the public roads and highways of the state . . .
or any other premises frequented by the public at large, while [u]nder the influence of any
intoxicant[.]” The proof at trial revealed that the appellant was stopped after he was
observed driving fifty-five miles per hour in a forty-mile-per-hour zone and failing to stop
at a red light. After the officers stopped the appellant and approached his vehicle, they saw
an open bottle of beer in the console. The bottle was cold and had condensation on the side.
Sergeant Clouse asked the appellant if he had been drinking, and the appellant responded that
he had consumed two beers. When the appellant exited his vehicle, both officers smelled
alcohol on the appellant and saw that his eyes were bloodshot and watery. After arresting
the appellant for DUI, Sergeant Clouse again questioned the appellant about his drinking.
The appellant then admitted, “‘Oh, okay, yeah, okay, whatever, all right. I had three beers
instead of two, okay, I lied.’” The officers searched the vehicle and found a twelve-pack
carton of cold beer that had five cans missing. The jury heard the officers’ testimony, the
extensive cross-examination, and viewed the video of the field sobriety tests before finding
that the appellant was intoxicated. We conclude that the evidence is sufficient for a
reasonable jury to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that the appellant was guilty of DUI.

                                       III. Conclusion

      In sum, we conclude that the evidence is sufficient to sustain the appellant’s
convictions and that the trial court did not err by failing to permit defense counsel to ask
Sergeant Clouse to perform the Romberg test. However, the violation of the rule of witness
sequestration was reversible error; accordingly, we reverse the appellant’s conviction and
remand for retrial.

                                              -16-
       _________________________________
       NORMA McGEE OGLE, JUDGE

-17-


Q:

understanding node.js exports/include

I am having a hard time understanding how to export a file and then include it elsewhere on node.js.
Suppose I am working on a game and I want to have the variables which define an object, or more than one, for example a var enemy:
var enemy = {
  health: 100,
  strengh: 87
};

and I save it in a file vars.js.
How can one import these variables from anywhere in my project where I need them?
Thanks in advance.

A:

You would need to export them.
So Enemy.js:
var enemy = {
  health: 100,
  strengh: 87
};

exports.health = enemy.health;
exports.strength = enemy.strength;

And in otherjsfile.js:
var Enemy = require('Enemy.js');

//and then you can do

console.log(Enemy.health); ///etc

Side point:
If the 'enemy' information is changing periodically and you want to get the newest value, you would do:
  Object.defineProperty(exports, "health", {
    get: function() {
      return enemy.health;
    }
  }); //instead of `exports.health = enemy.health;`

  Object.defineProperty(exports, "strengh", {
    get: function() {
      return enemy.strengh;
    }
  }); //instead of `exports.strength = enemy.strength;`


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---
address: |
    TALP Research Center, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona\
    $^*$ DFKI GmBH and Saarland University, Saarbrücken\
    \
bibliography:
- 'lrec2020W-xample.bib'
- 'paper.bib'
title: '[GeBioToolkit]{}: Automatic Extraction of Gender-Balanced Multilingual Corpus of Wikipedia Biographies\'
---

Introduction
============

Gender biases are present in many natural language processing applications [@costajussa:2019]. This comes as an undesired characteristic of deep learning architectures where their outputs seem to reflect demographic asymmetries [@pratesEtAl:2018]. This is of course not due to the architecture itself but to the data used to train a system. Recent research is being devoted to correct the asymmetries mainly by data augmentation techniques in fields such as coreference resolution [@rudingerEtAl:2018; @zhaoEtAl:2018; @websterEtAl:2018] or abusive language detection [@parkEtAl:2018]. Test sets have been created in those cases, but we are not aware of any test set available for machine translation (MT).

From another side, machine translation either neural, statistical or rule-based, usually operates in a sentence-by-sentence basis. However, when translating consistently a document, surrounding sentences may have valuable information. The translation of pronouns, verb tenses and even content words might depend on other fragments within a document. This affects also the translation of the gender markers, specially when translating from a language without these marks (e.g. English) into a language with them (e.g. Catalan). Test sets at sentence level are not useful to evaluate these phenomena. But in the time of claims of human parity in MT, all these phenomena are crucial, and document-level evaluation is needed in order to discriminate among systems [@lubliEtAl:2018]. Beyond these gender-balanced and document-level needs, the rise of multilingual neural machine translation and the lack of multi-way parallel corpus that can evaluate its abilities (e.g. zero-shot), motivates the creation of new multilingual corpora. In turn, this motivation prompts the development of software to automatically create such corpora.

In order to create a *[GeBioToolkit]{} *that is able to systematically extract multilingual parallel corpus at sentence level and with document-level information, we rely on Wikipedia, a free online multilingual encyclopedia written by volunteers. The toolkit is customizable for languages and gender-balance. We take advantage of Wikipedia multilinguality to extract a corpus of biographies, being each biography a document available in all the selected languages. However, given the bias in the representation of males and females also in Wikipedia [@bammanSmith:2014] and, to deliver a balanced set, we need to identify and select a subset of documents just after the toolkit performs the extraction of parallel sentences so it can assure parity. Note that our document-level extraction is consistent (all sentences in a document belong to the same personality) but the documents do not keep coherence anymore, since we are removing some sentences within that document. In our experiments in English–Spanish–Catalan, [GeBioToolkit]{} is able to extract parallel sentences with 87.5% accuracy according to a human evaluation.

Besides providing the tool, we also manually post-edited a small subset of the English (en), Spanish (es) and Catalan (ca) outputs to provide a test dataset which is ready-to-use for machine translation applications; to our knowledge the first gender-balanced dataset extracted from real texts in the area: *[GeBioCorpus]{}*. With these three languages we aim to cover two linguistic families (Germanic and Romance) which differ in morphology and specifically in gender inflection. The choice in languages is intended to allow the evaluation of machine translation outputs in three different settings: distant morphologies for a high-resourced language pair (English–Spanish) and a low-resourced pair (English–Catalan), and closely related languages (Spanish–Catalan). The latter responds the challenge recently initiated in the WMT International Evaluation[^1]. We used native/fluent speakers to provide post-editions on the final multilingual set in the three languages.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section \[s:related\] describes some available multilingual datasets used for machine translation evaluation, related work on parallel sentence extraction from Wikipedia and a brief mention to general research lines on gender bias in NLP. Section \[sec:toolkit\] describes the architecture of the tool and Section \[s:corpus\] the methodology, evaluation and characteristics of the extracted corpora. Finally, Section \[s:conclusions\] summarizes the work and points at several future extensions of [GeBioToolkit]{}.

Related Work {#s:related}
============

There are several multilingual parallel datasets available to evaluate MT outputs. The corpora covering more languages are JRC-Acquis (Acquis Communautaire) and the TED talks corpus. Arab-Acquis [@arabAcquis:2017] is a multilingual dataset for 22 European languages plus Arabic with more than 12,000 sentences coming from JRC-Acquis, that is, a collection of legislative texts of the European Union. In order to make the test set equal in all the languages, only sentences that are parallel simultaneously in the 22 languages were extracted [@koehnEtAl:2009] and, therefore, the document structure of the data is lost.

The Web Inventory of Transcribed and Translated Talks, WIT$^{3(}$[^2]$^{)}$, includes English subtitles from TED talks and their translations currently in 109 languages. Parallel corpora are extracted for several pairs [@cettoloEtAl:2012] and test sets are annually prepared for the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT) evaluation campaigns. Test sets exist for all the pairs among German, English, Italian, Dutch and Romanian; and from English to Arabic, Basque, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, Farsi, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese-Brazil, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish and Vietnamese. In this case the whole talks are aligned at sentence level, so, the document structure is kept but the set is not equivalent in all the languages. Similarly, the news translation task at the annual workshops and conferences on statistical machine translation (WMT) distributes collections of parallel news to their participants. Test sets have been created over the years for pairs including English into Chinese, Czech, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Hindi, Hungarian, Kazakh, Latvian, Spanish, Romanian, Russian and Turkish. Again, the document structure is kept in the dataset but, in general, the set is not equivalent in all the languages. Wikipedia is widely used in natural language processing and it is an excellent resource for multilingual tasks, parallel sentence extraction being among them. However, we do not know of any multilingual corpus of biographies extracted from the resource. On the monolingual side, one can find WikiBiography[^3], a corpus of 1,200 biographies in German with automatic annotations of PoS, lemmas, syntactic dependencies, anaphora, discourse connectives, classified named entities and temporal expressions. The authors in also extract 927,403 biographies in this case from the English Wikipedia. The set is pre-processed in order to learn event classes in biographies.

Regarding the automatic extraction of parallel corpora, Wikipedia has been traditionally used as a resource. In , the authors extract parallel sentences based on the available metadata in Wikipedia texts. Both and extracted parallel sentences by translating the articles into a common language and consider those sentences with a high translation quality to be parallel. The ACCURAT project [@Stefanescuetal:12; @Skadinaetal:12] also devoted efforts in parallel sentence mining in Wikipedia. Later, used the combination of cross-lingual similarity measures to extract domain specific parallel sentences. The most recent initiative is the so-called LASER [@artetxeSchwenk:2019], which relies on vector representations of sentences to extract similar pairs. This toolkit has been used to extract the WikiMatrix corpus [@DBLP:journals/corr/abs-1907-05791] which contains 135 million parallel sentences for 1,620 different language pairs in 85 different languages.

As far as we are concerned, there is no gender-balanced dataset for machine translation, except for the artificial gold standard created for English–Spanish [@font:2019]. However, there are a notable number of works towards doing research in the area: from balancing data sets in monolingual tasks [@websterEtAl:2018; @rudingerEtAl:2018] to evaluating gender bias in several tasks [@basta-etal-2019-evaluating; @stanovsky-etal-2019-evaluating].

![image](diagrama5.png){width="75.00000%"}

[GeBioToolkit]{} {#sec:toolkit}
================

Base Architecture {#ss:method}
-----------------

To extract the corpus previously introduced, we develop [GeBioToolkit]{}. The tool retrieves (multi-)parallel sentences for any Wikipedia category and for any arbitrary number of languages at the same time. In its default configuration, the toolkit retrieves gender-balanced corpora. [GeBioToolkit]{} is composed by three blocks. The first block, corpus extractor, provides a layer to transform, collect and select entries in the desired languages. The second block, corpus alignment, finds the parallel sentences within a text and provides a quality check of the parallel sentences given a few restrictions. The third block, gender classifier, includes a filtering module which classifies the gender of the entry and outputs the final parallel corpus. The gender detection functionality can be activated or deactivated at will, allowing the tool to be used in a more general context, where gender-balanced data is either non-relevant or not needed. Figure \[fig:gebiocorpus\] depicts its architecture.

The tool requires three inputs: [([*i*]{}) ]{}a list of the desired languages, [([*ii*]{}) ]{}the dump files for the languages[^4] and [([*iii*]{}) ]{}a list of the articles’ titles belonging to the category to extract (currently in English). For our purpose of gathering a corpus of biographies, we retrieve the list of articles that belong to the “living people” category by using the PetScan tool[^5]. The **corpus extractor** module starts by looking for the equivalent articles to those input in the other languages via the Wikipedia interlanguage links. The module also retrieves the multilingual titles providing a dictionary of {english\_entry\_title: \[language, title\]} that is used on the file extraction and file selection modules. File extraction retrieves then the selected entries in the previous dictionary from the Wikipedia dump. [GeBioToolkit]{} uses a modified version of the *wikiextractor*[^6] software to retrieve and store the different Wikipedia entries from each language. Finally, file selection generates a dictionary similar to the one obtained before, but it only stores the entries for which the files were successfully retrieved. The **corpus alignment** module makes use of the text and dictionaries retrieved in the previous step and the LASER toolkit[^7]. LASER (Language-Agnostic SEntence Representations) allows to obtain sentence embeddings through a multilingual sentence encoder [@DBLP:journals/corr/abs-1907-05791]. Translations can be found then as close pairs (tuples) in the multilingual semantic space. In order to perform the parallel sentence extraction, we follow the margin-based criterion introduced in . The margin between two candidate sentences $x$ and $y$ is defined as the ratio between the cosine distance between the two embedded sentences, and the average cosine similarity of its nearest neighbors in both directions:

$margin(x,y) = \frac{\cos{(x,y)}}{ \sum\limits_{\substack{z\in NN_k(x)}} \frac{\cos(x,z)}{2k} + \sum\limits_{\substack{z\in NN_k(y)}} \frac{\cos(y,z)}{2k}},$

where $NN_k(x)$ denotes the $k$ unique nearest neighbors of $x$ in the other language, $NN_k(y)$ the same for $y$. To extract parallel sentences on more than two languages, let us say $i$ languages, we use a greedy approach with a pivot language $L_1$. We detect all the parallel sentences in the pairs $L_1$–$L_i$ and then extract the intersection of sentences between the language pairs.

Gender Detection Module {#ss:gender}
-----------------------

The previous two blocks implement a general approach to parallel sentence extraction following a similar methodology as that used to extract the WikiMatrix corpus. But for our purpose, we need to specifically deal with gender bias. Wikipedia is known to have a gender bias in its content. Depending on the language and year of the study, the percentage of biographies of women with respect to the total of biographies ranges from a 13% to a 23% [@reagleRhue:2011; @bammanSmith:2014; @wagnerEtAl:2016]. And it is not only this, but also men and women are characterised differently [@Graells-GarridoEtAl:2015; @wagnerEtAl:2016], showing for instance more man in sports and woman in divorces [@reagleRhue:2011].

To allow extracting a gender-balanced dataset, we detect the gender automatically and filter files in order to have 50% of articles for each gender. Following , the gender of the article is extracted as that corresponding to the maximum number of gendered pronouns (i.e., he and she in English) mentioned in the article. According to their results, this method of gender inference is overwhelmingly accurate, in a random test set of 500 articles, it achieved 100% precision with 97.6% recall (12 articles had no pronominal mentions and so gender was not assigned).

Cleaning Module {#ss:postpro}
---------------

We analyse the accuracy of the extractions in Section \[ss:eval\], but a simple visual inspection already shows a frequent source of noise in the extracted data that can be easily removed with a post-processing step. Some of the extracted sentence pairs include information in one language that is lacking in the other one(s). For example, the sentence in Spanish *“Mahrez se casó con su novia inglesa en 2015 y tuvieron una hija ese mismo año.”* is aligned with the sentence in English *“Mahrez married his English girlfriend Rita Johal in 2015.”*, where the Spanish segment *“y tuvieron una hija ese mismo año.”* is not present in English. To avoid this, we filter out sentence pairs with large length ratio (filter samples in which one of the sentences is at least 20% longer than the others). Such filtering can be generalised to distant language pairs by estimating language-dependent length factors [@pouliquen:2003] or considering more elaborated corpus filtering techniques [@koehn-etal-2019-findings].

File Restructure Module {#ss:file}
-----------------------

Finally, the extracted parallel sentences are written as an xml file using a document-level mark-up. As said before, output documents do not preserve coherence any more, but document-level characteristics such as lexical consistency are kept and the mark-up allows use the information.

Table \[tab:example2\] shows an excerpt of the output file for English and Spanish. For each original biography, we keep the English title as document ID, the original Wikipedia ID, the extracted gender, and in our clean test set (see Section \[s:corpus\]) we also add the topic or category of each document. The `docid` field links documents among languages.

[GeBioCorpus]{} {#s:corpus}
===============

We use the [GeBioToolkit]{} presented in the above section to extract a multilingual parallel corpus balanced in gender for English, Spanish and Catalan. The motivation for extracting this specific dataset is the variation in morphology in English (Germanic language) as compared to Spanish and Catalan (Romance languages). The variation in morphology is one of the most relevant challenges when solving biases in gender, see examples in [@pratesEtAl:2018; @font:2019].

![image](amount_of_samples4.png){width="100.00000%"}

![image](union7.png){width="95.00000%"}

  *[GeBioCorpus]{}-v1*
  ---------------------- ---------- -------- -------- -------- -------- --------
                         F          M        F        M        F        M
  Documents              2287       2741     2287     2741     2287     2741
  Sentences              [8000]{}   8000     8000     8000     8000     8000
  Average sent/doc       3.5        2.9      3.5      2.9      3.5      2.9
  Words                  228.9k     235.3k   230.1k   236.0k   240.9k   245.7k
  Average words/doc      56.9       51.1     56.3     47.3     59.8     53.3
  Vocabulary             24.3k      24.8k    27.1k    27.6k    27.6k    28.0k
  *[GeBioCorpus]{}-v2*
                         F          M        F        M        F        M
  Documents              257        339      257      339      257      339
  Sentences              1000       1000     1000     1000     1000     1000
  Average sent/doc       3.9        2.9      3.9      2.9      3.9      2.9
  Words                  28.7k      27.5k    28.9k    28.0k    30.1k    29.4k
  Average words/doc      61.6       46.6     61.4     46.4     65.4     49.7
  Vocabulary             6.1k       6.0k     6.5k     6.5k     6.7k     6.6k

Data Statistics {#ss:statistics}
---------------

We extract all the articles belonging to the category “living people” in the 40 largest Wikipedia editions to have a rough idea of the number of biographies available per language. Figure \[fig:evollang\] shows the amount of these articles for the 20 languages with the largest number of biographies. The edition with the most available entries is the English one with 922,120 entries. The Spanish Wikipedia contains 148,445 entries (6th largest one) and the Catalan edition 40,983 (20th largest one). All three are highlighted in Figure \[fig:evollang\]. Even if the Catalan Wikipedia is not as big as the English and Spanish ones, there is a noticeable amount of comparable articles between Spanish and Catalan which translates into significant number of parallel sentences — extracted in WikiMatrix 3,377k sentences for en–es, 1,580k sentences for ca–es and 210k sentences for en–ca from the full editions.

[GeBioToolkit]{} extracts multilingually aligned parallel sentences, so it is interesting to study also the union of languages. The more languages involved, the lesser number or comparable articles one will obtain. Figure \[fig:fileslang\] shows the number of articles per sets of languages and broken-down by gender. The total number of documents decays when starting with English and Arabic (set with only 2 languages) and one incrementally adds French, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Russian, Portuguese, Japanese and Dutch. With all languages (set with 11 languages), the number of comparable documents results in 17,285, out of which 13,676 are male bios and 3,609 are female bios. These numbers reconfirm the results by [@reagleRhue:2011; @bammanSmith:2014; @wagnerEtAl:2016] on the underrepresentation of women in Wikipedia. Note that by doing the union of different languages and the intersection of its articles, the amount of documents decays quite abruptly, but the percentual difference between man and woman remains close to be constant.

When we consider English, Spanish and Catalan, we retrieve 31,413 bibliographies. [GeBioToolkit]{} selects 81,405 sentences from them, 53,389 sentences are related to male bibliographies and 28,016 to female bibliographies. 47.5% of the male sentences are removed to obtain a gender-balanced corpus. Then, [GeBioToolkit]{} performs the length-based cleaning, which filters the corpus down to 16,679 sentences on male bibliographies and 10,730 sentences on female bibliographies. As output, we provide two versions of the corpus. [GeBioCorpus]{}-v1 contains 16,000 sentences as extracted from Wikipedia without any manual post-edition. [GeBioCorpus]{}-v2 contains 2,000 sentences with manual post-edition as explained in Section \[ss:cats\]. One set excludes the other in addition to excluding other sentences (1730 for female) that we plan to post-edit in the future. See statistics on number of documents, sentences, words and vocabulary broken-down per language and gender in Table \[tab:statistics\]. Table \[tab:example3\] provides some examples of sentences from [GeBioCorpus]{}-v2.

Manual Post-Editing and Categorization {#ss:cats}
--------------------------------------

After the extraction of the complete corpus, and in order to provide a high-quality evaluation corpus, we ask native/fluent speakers to post-edit 2,000 sentences belonging to both female and male documents. Annotators were asked to either edit segments to make them parallel (if differences were small) or to delete segments that were too different. Also during the process, annotators were asked to provide a topic for the profession of each personality. Categories are based on the Wikipedia list of occupations[^8], which includes: (C1) Healthcare and medicine, (C2) Arts, (C3) Business, (C4) Industrial and manufacturing, (C5) Law enforcement, social movements and armed forces, (C6) Science, technology and education, (C7) Politics, (C8) Religion, and (C9) Sports. This corresponds to the field “topic” added in the header of each document as seen in Table \[tab:example2\]. Figure \[fig:categories\] shows the distribution of the 9 topics by gender. Note that the most unbalanced topics are C5 (Law enforcement, social movements and armed forces), C8 (Religion) and C9 (Sports). We report other statistics for this test set in Table \[tab:statistics\].

Human Evaluation {#ss:eval}
----------------

Finally, we perform a human evaluation on the quality of [GeBioCorpus]{}-v1, that is, the data as extracted by [GeBioToolkit]{}  without any post-edition. For this, we randomly select 50 sentences in the three languages (English, Spanish and Catalan) and present each tuple to 7 different native/fluent speakers. These annotators were asked to score a tuple with 1 if the three sentences convey the same meaning and 0 otherwise. On average, evaluators gave 87.5% accuracy and when computing the majority vote among the evaluators accuracy reached 96%. We computed Fleiss’ kappa [@fleiss1971mns] as a measure for the interannotator agreement which resulted in 0.67, which is considered a substantial agreement[^9]. On average, our [GeBioToolkit]{} plus filtering by length has 87.5% accuracy.

Conclusions {#s:conclusions}
===========

This paper presents two main contributions. From one side, [GeBioToolkit]{}, based on LASER, allows to automatically extract multilingual parallel corpora at sentence-level which can be customized in number of languages and balanced in gender. Document-level information is kept in the corpus and each document is tagged with the ID of the original Wikipedia article, the language and the gender of the person is referring to. From another side, we provide a multilingual corpus of biographies in English, Spanish and Catalan, [GeBioCorpus]{}. Two versions of this corpus are presented. The first version, [GeBioCorpus]{}-v1, contains 16k sentences which have been directly extracted using [GeBioToolkit]{}. This version of the corpus is used to make an evaluation of the quality of the extractions produced by our tool. A manual evaluation shows that the accuracy in the multilingual parallel sentences is 87.5%. The second version of this corpus, [GeBioCorpus]{}-v2, contains 2k sentences which have been post-edited by native speakers and categorized with type of profession. In this case, and in addition to the automatic tags of each document (ID, language and gender), each document is tagged with an occupation category. This labels allows to split the corpus in different subsets to evaluate domain-specific translations and gender accuracy for instance.

As future improvements to the tool, we will remove the dependence on PetScan —or any external tool to obtain lists of articles—, and extract all the necessary information from the input Wikipedia dump. We will also study the viability of using Wikidata information instead of the most frequent pronoun in a text in order to classify the gender of an article.

Both [GeBioToolkit]{} and [GeBioCorpus]{} will be made available in github during the review process of this paper[^10].

Acknowledgments {#acknowledgments .unnumbered}
===============

The authors want to thank Jordi Armengol, Magdalena Biesialska, Casimiro Carrino, Noe Casas, Guillem Cortès, Carlos Escolano, Gerard Gallego and Bardia Rafieian for their help in postediting the [GeBioCorpus]{}, Eduardo Lipperheide, Anna Li, Ayyoub Marroun, Laura Termes, Adrià Garcia, Alba Salomon and Clara Grenzner for the manual evaluation and Melissa Steiner, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski and Pauline Krielke for all the support and fruitful discussions.

This work is supported in part by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, the European Regional Development Fund and the Agencia Estatal de Investigación, through the postdoctoral senior grant Ramón y Cajal, the contract TEC2015-69266-P (MINECO/FEDER,EU) and the contract PCIN-2017-079 (AEI/MINECO). It is also partially funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research under the funding code 01IW17001 (Deeplee). Responsibility for the content of this publication is with the authors.

Bibliographical References
==========================

[^1]: <http://www.statmt.org/wmt19/similar.html>

[^2]: <https://wit3.fbk.eu/>

[^3]: <https://www.h-its.org/en/research/nlp/wikibiography-corpus/>

[^4]: Dumps can be downloaded from\
    <https://dumps.wikimedia.org/>

[^5]: <https://petscan.wmflabs.org/>

[^6]: <https://github.com/attardi/wikiextractor>

[^7]: <https://github.com/facebookresearch/LASER>

[^8]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_occupations>

[^9]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleiss%27_kappa>

[^10]: <https://github.com/PLXIV/Gebiotoolkit>


First picture in the newest, most awesomest channel yet. Wish it luck!

All these are made by me.

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The first one is a quote from the kid in the cap early in Jurassic Park, after being told the similarities between birds and dinosaurs. We now know they were even more closely related than previously thought, being in same family of creatures and sharing many traits.

Second one, pretty self explanatory.

Third one is also from Jurassic Park, where the T Rex for some reason could not see its prey unless it was moving.

Fourth one is pretty much a summary of T Rex science during the past 100 years.

Fifth one mentions Jack Horner, often known as a “T Rex-hater”. One of the first, if not the first people to truly believe T Rex was nothing but a big scavenger and made the T Rex in Jurassic Park 3 the pushover it is.

Sixth one, Barney the Dinosaur, obviously.

Seven is self explanatory too.

And finally the last one, once again referring to the close relationship between dinosaurs and birds. All non-avian dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago, but the avian dinosaurs, the birds, didn’t.


“You could not argue it,” said Way, who began quizzing teammates, coaches and staffers at Redskins training camp in Richmond about the list and kept track of who could name the top 10 programs in the fewest number of guesses. Everyone wanted a turn, and each new attempt attracted an audience. The excitement over this simple off-field diversion ultimately inspired Way to create What’s Your Bid, a team trivia game that combines elements of “Family Feud,” Trivial Pursuit and spades. A Kickstarter campaign to fund the project launches July 31.

“I wasn’t surprised when he told me he created this, because even back in college he said one of his dreams was to create a board game,” said former Oklahoma center Ben Habern, who roomed with Way for two years in Norman. “It was a passion of his and I knew at some point he would find the time to put something like this together.”

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Habern, the marketing and strategic partnerships coordinator for the College Football Playoff, is one of three friends from Oklahoma who agreed to help Way get What’s Your Bid — the debut product from Way Fun Games LLC — off the ground over the last few months.

The genesis of the idea came a year ago, when Colt McCoy and then-quarterbacks coach Matt Cavanaugh needed only 11 guesses to name the AP’s all-time top 10 college football programs. Nick Sundberg, Coach Jay Gruden and Redskins President Bruce Allen were among the group who gave two incorrect answers and tied for second place in the friendly competition, after which one coach asked Way if he had any other lists handy.

“No, but one of the good things about being a punter is that while you guys are in meetings, I’ll come up with some more tonight,” Way replied.

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And he did. Way scribbled topics on his Omni Richmond Hotel notepad and helped satisfy the team’s trivia craving for the remainder of camp while serving as the Redskins’ resident Alex Trebek. By the start of the regular season, trivia had become as popular an activity among players as ping-pong, with questions ranging from the top-grossing Leonardo DiCaprio films to past Super Bowl winners and the 13 original American colonies.

“I got to a point where I probably had three or four hundred topics in one week,” Way said. “We’d sit there in the video room once everything was done, after all of our meetings, and we’d play for an hour. We split into teams and it started growing as more and more people wanted to play, to the point where we started making up rules. I kind of added in there, like in spades with a partner, a bidding aspect, where you bid on how many answers you’re going to get. If you don’t get that bid, you lose your bid to the other team.”

The Redskins’ most dedicated team trivia players last season included Way and fellow specialists Sundberg and Dustin Hopkins, as well as McCoy, Kirk Cousins, Will Blackmon, Quinton Dunbar, Kory Lichtensteiger, John Sullivan, Derek Carrier and video coordinator Mike Bracken. Will Compton occasionally dropped in and provided “some of the funniest answers,” according to Way, while Sundberg was “without a doubt” the team’s trivia MVP. Cousins proved to be a fount of mostly useless information, too.

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“Kirk gets in a little bit of trouble because he always thinks he knows more than he does,” Way said. “If there are eight answers, he’ll bid eight, rattle off six answers really quickly and then he’s like, ‘Oh no, I overbid.’ He’s very good though. Kirk is very good in all categories.”

When Way first mentioned the game to his wife, Brianna, and read her a sample question early last season, she scoffed.

“See, this is why I hate trivia,” the former two-sport star at Oklahoma said, “because I never know the answers.”

It was at that point that Way decided to create a trivia game that everyone would enjoy, even people who were convinced they despised trivia. The nascent version of the game Way played with teammates was heavy on questions related to sports, history and movies. The refined version would feature five categories: Sports & Entertainment, Science & Animals, Around the World & History, Statistics (General Knowledge) and Food & Drink. The key to developing a more accessible trivia game, Way decided, was finding questions with at least a couple of answers that most people know.

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Way registered for an account on Statista, an online database of statistics and facts, and came up with about 50 questions per category. He printed the questions off on corresponding color-coded pieces of paper and laminated them. Way then wrapped the question cards with rubber bands, placed them in Nike shoe boxes and mailed them along with the basic rules to his little brother and a couple of friends. Their reaction to his “janky-looking” early prototype convinced him he had something.

“It blew up,” Way said. “I’m getting pictures from my friends and family of people sitting around a dining room table playing this game, ranting and raving about how much fun it is.”

Way’s agent introduced him to a trademark and copyright lawyer just before Christmas and Way found a manufacturer to produce a non-janky-looking prototype with 100 questions per category. It’s no accident that orange — burnt, or otherwise — isn’t one of the colors featured in a game developed by four former Sooners.

Way has loved board games and trivia for as long as he can remember. As a kid, he played everything from Monopoly to interactive games such as Catchphrase and Scene It. Wahoo, a Parcheesi-like game played with marbles on a wooden board, remains a staple of Way family gatherings. Way bonded with teammates, including Habern, over board games and trivia in college, and the Sooners would spend hours watching “Family Feud” before practice.

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“It was like a religion,” Habern said. “We watched it every day. It was mind-boggling how much we were into the show. We’d yell out answers and freak out if someone made a stupid guess or something like that.”

As in “Family Feud,” success in What’s Your Bid depends on every member of the team contributing. For each question, teams have 30 seconds to decide how many poker chips to bid, depending on how many answers they think they can guess correctly while alternating answers. If a team gives an incorrect answer or fails to reach its bid, the chips go to the other team. The first team to 30 chips wins.

Once the Kickstarter campaign launches, Way will have one month to raise roughly $50,000 to fund the project. Those interested in supporting the campaign may pledge as little as $5. (Update: The Kickstarter campaign goal is $28,000.)

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“Tress’s goal is to make this the most popular and fun trivia game ever, which is obviously a very lofty goal, but it’s something we’ll shoot for,” said Habern, who has handled most of the marketing for the game to date.

“The hardest challenge is getting it in people’s hands,” Way said. “It’s addicting. The only thing better than trivia is more trivia.”

And the only thing better than making one board game, apparently, is making a second board game. What’s Your Bid may not even be the most popular player-created board game in the Redskins’ locker room come training camp.

“I actually came up with another game this offseason because I’m a punter and I have too much time on my hands,” said Way, who described his latest creation, High Noon, as an Old West-themed strategy game with elements of poker. Way said he plans to get started on the design process for High Noon sometime this season. Ping-pong was so 2016.

The following questions are from What’s Your Bid. Test your own knowledge individually or with friends and then scroll down for the answers.

Statistics

Food & Drink

Sports & Entertainment

Around the World & History

Science & Animals


// { dg-do run { target c++14 } }

// Copyright (C) 2013-2019 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
//
// This file is part of the GNU ISO C++ Library.  This library is free
// software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the
// terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the
// Free Software Foundation; either version 3, or (at your option)
// any later version.

// This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
// but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
// MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
// GNU General Public License for more details.

// You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
// with this library; see the file COPYING3.  If not see
// <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

// inserters

// NB: This file is predicated on sstreams, istreams, and ostreams
// working, not to mention other major details like char_traits, and
// all of the string_view class.

#include <experimental/string_view>
#include <stdexcept>
#include <sstream>
#include <fstream>
#include <iostream>
#include <testsuite_hooks.h>

void
test01()
{
  typedef std::experimental::string_view::size_type csize_type;
  typedef std::experimental::string_view::const_reference cref;
  typedef std::experimental::string_view::reference ref;

  const std::experimental::string_view str01("sailing grand traverse bay\n"
	       "\t\t\t    from Elk Rapids to the point reminds me of miles");

  // ostream& operator<<(ostream&, const basic_string_view&)
  std::ostringstream ostrs01;
  try
    {
      ostrs01 << str01;
      VERIFY( ostrs01.str() == str01 );
    }
  catch(std::exception& fail)
    {
      VERIFY( false );
    }

  std::experimental::string_view hello_world;
  std::cout << hello_world;
}

int
main()
{
  test01();

  return 0;
}


Another alleged concern about China-Russia relations that may undermine the potential for an alliance lies in demographic conditions. The issue of China being overpopulated and Russia, especially its Far Eastern territories, being underpopulated frequently appears in publications. Some talk about a “vast population of potential migrants” that may come from China.

Others draw scary pictures of the disappearance of Russia’s ethnic identity, threats to Russia’s territorial integrity, and “creeping sinicization” that may happen because there are too many Chinese and too few Russians along the China-Russia border.

According to Nye, one of the deep problems hindering the formation of a China-Russia alliance is that in Eastern Siberia, six million Russians live across the border from up to 120 million Chinese.Others write that Russia is reluctant to form an alliance with China because it is “demographically in decline,” and there are concerns about the uncontrolled migration of Chinese citizens into the sparsely populated areas of Russia’s Far East and Siberia, which may eventually be taken over by China.

Under closer examination, the statement that demography is what Russia should worry about when forming an alliance with China crumbles. First, Russia’s demographic decline is not the case any longer; the depopulation trend had been reversed by the end of the 2000s. In 2009, Russia recorded population growth, adding 23,300 people. In 2012, its population increased by 292,400 people.

In 2013, Russia’s total fertility rate reached 1.707 children per woman and became the highest in Eastern, Southern and Central Europe; the trend of depopulation had been reversed, and natural population growth has started. Figure 1 reflects Russia’s long-term demographic trend, which refutes the statement that it is in decline demographically.

Regarding the demographic gap between the border regions of Russia and China, the situation is not as troubling as it is pictured, and there are no reasons to expect mass Chinese influx to the Russian Far East. Table 3 compares population density in border provinces of China (first column) with that in corresponding border provinces/regions of Russia and Mongolia (second column). Column three divides the population density of a Chinese province by that of a corresponding Russian and Mongolian border province.

The average density of Russia’s krai and oblast bordering China is 17.83 times lower than that of Chinese provinces bordering Russia. In the case of Mongolia, which also shares a long border with China, this figure is 32.9. The population gap between bordering Mongolian and Chinese provinces is much larger.

China so far has not displayed the slightest desire to occupy the provinces of Mongolia (a state barely able to defend itself), which are much more underpopulated than Russian ones. If China does not occupy the bordering territories of Mongolia what would make China start occupying territories of a nuclear superpower?

Moreover, as Table 3 demonstrates, China has its own Siberia—Tibet and Qinghai—with population densities 60 and 20 times lower than in Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces, which border Russia. The natural population imbalance is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for migration.

Source: World Bank Provincial level data are from various sources, including provincial statistical reports.

Contrary to the assumption that China will be demographically expansionist, the demographic trends within China has entered a phase of extremely low birth rates for some time. In the early 1990s, the total fertility rate crossed the 2.14 mark, the natural replacement rate. By the late 1990s, the TFR had reached 1.8, and by 2011 it was 1.5, significantly below that in the United States, the UK, and France.

According to China’s sixth population census, in large cities, the TFR had dropped to 0.88, which is one of the lowest in the world. The record low of 0.14 for the entire TFR history was registered in 2000 in the urban district of Jiamusi in Heilongjiang province, which borders on Russia. These dynamics caused a rapid aging population. China will need its working population at home in the years to come.

Most importantly, recent research on the patterns of migration reveals that the Chinese do not come to Russia and its Far East in large numbers. Most who do visit return home once their visas or work permits expire. This was the case during the early 2000s, when the population of Russia was in decline and China was poorer, and it is even more so now, when the trend of depopulation in Russia has been reversed and living standards in China have further improved.

The problem of the migration dimension was successfully dismissed by V.Ya. Portyakov in a series of articles on Chinese migration to Russia. The issue of Chinese emigration to Russia has been overblown by irresponsible media and Russian local politicians, who have tried to build political capital by creating an image that they are fending off the Chinese threat.

The essence of the phenomenon was expressed by a Russian journalist who wrote, “Russia is not a lusted-after land for the Chinese eager to settle there, while trips to Russia are simply a compulsory economic necessity.”

Portyakov demonstrates that Russia is not a priority destination for the Chinese emigrants. Responsible voices of the representatives within the Russian academic community, who do not make “threats” out of nothing, are now gaining increasing force. It has become a consensus that Chinese immigration has no significant impact on the demographic situation in the Russian Far East and, when properly managed, can be in Russia’s geopolitical interest.

The myths and imposed stereotypes about Chinese migration to Russia are dissipating, and an adequate understanding of its nature as temporary migration is emerging.


Image Credits: Pradeep Gaur/Mint / Getty Images

Google said in a blog post that it would roll out free access to advanced Hangouts Meet video-conferencing capabilities to all G Suite and G Suite for Education customers globally as the company pitches its remote work tools as an option for companies looking to let employees work from home.

Chief executive Sundar Pichai announced the initiative in a tweet on Tuesday.

We want to help businesses and schools impacted by COVID-19 stay connected: starting this week, we'll roll out free access to our advanced Hangouts Meet video-conferencing capabilities through July 1, 2020 to all G Suite customers globally. https://t.co/OWWF7s5jjR — Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) March 3, 2020

“As more employees, educators, and students work remotely in response to the spread of COVID-19, we want to do our part to help them stay connected and productive,” the company wrote in its post. “And, as more businesses adjust their work-from-home policies and adopt reduced travel plans in response to COVID-19, we’re helping to ensure that all globally distributed teams can still reliably meet face to face, even if employees are not in the same location.”

Google’s move comes as some of the largest industry conferences and events around the world are cancelling due to fears of the spreading new coronavirus, COVID-19. Major canceled events include: GSMA’s Mobile World Congress and Facebook’s F8 conference, along with the Geneva Motor Show and the Game Developers Conference.

It’s not just conferences that are closing their doors. Companies are also doing everything they can to encourage remote work. Twitter has encouraged its workers to operate remotely, and they’re not alone. Stripe, Slack, Square and others are all urging their employees to not come in to the office.

Google’s pitch to companies and educational institutions during the trial is free access for capabilities, including for larger meetings of up to 250 participants per-call; live-streaming for up to 100,000 viewers within a domain; and the ability to record meetings and save them to Google Drive.

Google is enabling all of its customers to use the enterprise functionality for no additional cost until July 1, the company said in a statement.

“We’re committed to supporting our users and customers during this challenging time, and are continuing to scale our infrastructure to support greater Hangouts Meet demand, ensuring streamlined, reliable access to the service throughout this period.”

The company already has one happy customer for its services in Jack Dorsey and Twitter. The embattled chief executive wrote in a tweet, “We just held our first fully virtual Twitter global all-hands using @Google Meet and @SlackHQ.”


Q:

Void pointer as function parameter

I use two structures emulate "OR" & "AND" logic gates. These structures are the  same. I need to create a function which get as parameter one of these two structures. Something like :
int myfunc(void *mystruct, unsigned char param)
{
switch (param)
{
case 'o': ... break; //"OR" logic gate struct
case 'a': ... break; //"AND" logic gate struct
}
}

How to realize this idea in managed code c++/cli?

A:

You can just use a union for your two different structs and then pass the union:
struct AND_gate {
    // ...
};

struct OR_gate {
    // ...
};

union gate {
    AND_gate and_gate;
    OR_gate or_gate;
};

int myfunc(gate * my_gate, unsigned char param)
{
    // ...
}

Alternatively, and perhaps better (hard to tell with the limited information available), it sounds like your design might benefit from using inheritance:
struct gate {    // parent class
    // ...
};

struct AND_gate: public gate {
    // ...
};

struct OR_gate: public gate {
    // ...
};

int myfunc(gate * my_gate, unsigned char param)
{
    // ...
}


‘Superbug’ infections tracking higher at RGH

Roosevelt General Hospital staff members are increasingly concerned about the rise of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA infections, at the hospital.

Director of Patient Care Gayle Richerson told RGH board members Tuesday at their regular meeting that the percentage of staph infections that turn out to be the MRSA strain rose from 43 percent in 2004-2005 to nearly 58 percent in 2006-07. The total number of staph infections has also increased significantly increased.

The so-called “superbug,” essentially a regular staph infection that’s resistant to first-line antibiotics, causes 94,000 severe infections each year with 19,000 deaths, according to a recent federal estimate. Of these infections nationwide, about 86 percent are healthcare-associated and 14 percent are community-associated, according to the Center for Disease Control.

“It doesn’t necessarily mean the hospital is dirty or people are acquiring (the infection) here,” Richerson said. “We have to be able to screen for the infection.”

Tersa Bonifant, director of infection control at RGH, said RGH’s rate of healthcare-associated infection is much lower than the national rate — and community-associated infections much higher.

Richerson believes that may relate to the agricultural-based lifestyle here that puts people in contact with manure, soil and other sources of possible infection.

Richerson and RGH Administrator James D’Agostino said several staff members had recently attended statewide meetings in which the problem has been discussed.

“They’re trying to get everybody together to set some standards (statewide),” D’Agostino said.