Home Builder Developer - Interior Renovation and Design

TOPEKA Governor Laura Kelly announced today that GAF, a Standard Industries company and North Americas largest roofing and waterproofing manufacturer, will invest more than $300 million in Newton by constructing a new shingle plant. The estimated 275,000-square-foot facility will create more than 130 high-skilled manufacturing jobs in management, engineering, and operations.

GAFs expansion into Kansas once again showcases our status as a national leader in advanced manufacturing, Governor Laura Kelly said. The companys innovative production methods and proven track record of community involvement make it an ideal partner for Newton and the entire state.

GAF has more than 4,800 employees and operates in 30 locations across the U.S. producing commercial and residential roofing and waterproofing products and services for customers throughout North America. The Kansas Logistics Parks in Newton will be the companys first location in Kansas.

With one in four homes in the United States protected by a GAF roof, this investment enables the company to add residential roofing manufacturing capacity and enhance best-in-class service to customers nationwide.

Construction is expected to begin in June 2024, with production anticipated to begin in 2027. The company expects to reach full production capacity by mid-2029.

Diversifying our state economy has been a focus of the Kelly-Toland Administration since Day One, Lieutenant Governor and Secretary of Commerce David Toland said. The career opportunities this will provide for Kansans right now and for future generations will help us continue our unprecedented economic growth by keeping more of our young talent right here at home.

Newton and Harvey Countys talented workforce, location relative to other GAF operations, and proximity to major highways and railways made the investment ideal for the company.

This new facility allows us to meet growing customer demand for our market-leading roofing products and expands our ability to innovate as we look to the future, GAF CEO John Altmeyer said. We are excited to work with city and state officials throughout this process to build a state-of-the-art factory that will generate new, good-paying jobs and support the greater Newton area through meaningful community involvement.

GAF Community Matters, the companys social impact initiative, focuses on making a positive difference as neighbors and partners in the community by leveraging roofing expertise, resources, and products to help build resilient communities.

We are thrilled to welcome GAF and the opportunities they are bringing to our community, Newton Mayor Rod Kreie said. The greater Newton area offers a strong pipeline of talent, and were excited about the significant economic and community impact GAFs expansion will bring. GAF has been an excellent partner throughout the process, and we thank all those who played a role in helping bring this opportunity to Newton.

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Governor Kelly Announces North America's Largest Roofing Manufacturer to Invest More than $300M; Create More ... - Sunflower State Radio

ATTLEBORO The new $259 million Attleboro High at 1 Blue Pride Way stands tall and proud as the citys flagship school.

And while the school department struggles with an underfunded budget of at least $10 million, the track at the high school, which was not part of the new construction, is beginning to wear away.

School maintenance chief Jason Parenteau said the base is still solid but the top is developing divots which will have to be repaired or replaced soon if the city does not want to replace the whole track.

The $3.3 million football field and track were completed in September 2013 in time for the Blue Bombardiers opening football game.

Parenteau estimated it would cost about $325,000 to repair.

The base is in very good shape, he said. It will be 24 months before its impacted. Its not a crisis.

And Parenteau said at least two schools have leaks in their roofs.

Thacher Elementary and Coelho Middle have leaks where old meets new, he said. Both were renovated in the 1990s and both had additions put on.

At Thacher, there are major leaks in what is known as the pavilion.

During a tour provided by Parenteau and Finance Manager Marc Furtado, city councilors got to see the leaks for themselves because it was raining when they got there.

In fact, a new leak was discovered and someone had to place a wastebasket under it to catch the drips.

All told there were five buckets of some kind catching water.

Theres a lot of water in the pavilion, Parenteau said. The roof is leaking where the additions are. Were chasing leaks on a regular basis.

At Thacher, cracks are emerging in the floors, again where old meets new.

At Coelho, there is what is known as a ballasted roof, which means it has stony surface.

The water is reaching some of the metal beams and rust is developing.

Its tough chasing leaks on that kind of surface, Parenteau said.

This kind of roofing is very difficult to maintain, he said. You cant tell where the leaks are.

And meanwhile, some of the fiberglass skylights in both schools are starting to yellow from exposure to the sun.

George W. Rhodes can be reached at 508-236-0432.

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Attleboro High track, roofs at two other schools need repairs - The Sun Chronicle

A lack of existing inventory that continues to drive buyers to new home construction, coupled with strong demand and mortgage rates below last falls cycle peak helped push builder sentiment above a key marker in March.

Builder confidence in the market for newly built single-family homes climbed three points to 51 in March, according to the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB)/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index (HMI) released today. This is the highest level since July 2023 and marks the fourth consecutive monthly gain for the index. It is also the first time that the sentiment level has surpassed the breakeven point of 50 since last July.

Buyer demand remains brisk and we expect more consumers to jump off the sidelines and into the marketplace if mortgage rates continue to fall later this year, said NAHB Chairman Carl Harris, a custom home builder from Wichita, Kan. But even though there is strong pent-up demand, builders continue to face several supply-side challenges, including a scarcity of buildable lots and skilled labor, and new restrictive codes that continue to increase the cost of building homes.

With the Federal Reserve expected to announce future rate cuts in the second half of 2024, lower financing costs will draw many prospective buyers into the market, said NAHB Chief Economist Robert Dietz. However, as home building activity picks up, builders will likely grapple with rising material prices, particularly for lumber.

With mortgage rates below 7% since mid-December per Freddie Mac, more builders are cutting back on reducing home prices to boost sales. In March, 24% of builders reported cutting home prices, down from 36% in December 2023 and the lowest share since July 2023. However, the average price reduction in March held steady at 6% for the ninth straight month. Meanwhile, the use of sales incentives is holding firm. The share of builders offering some form of incentive in March was 60%, and this has remained between 58% and 62% since last September.

Derived from a monthly survey that NAHB has been conducting for more than 35 years, the NAHB/Wells Fargo HMI gauges builder perceptions of current single-family home sales and sales expectations for the next six months as good, fair or poor. The survey also asks builders to rate traffic of prospective buyers as high to very high, average or low to very low. Scores for each component are then used to calculate a seasonally adjusted index where any number over 50 indicates that more builders view conditions as good than poor.

All three of the major HMI indices posted gains in March. The HMI index charting current sales conditions increased four points to 56, the component measuring sales expectations in the next six months rose two points to 62 and the component gauging traffic of prospective buyers increased two points to 34.

Looking at the three-month moving averages for regional HMI scores, the Northeast increased two points to 59, the Midwest gained five points to 41, the South rose four points to 50 and the West registered a five-point gain to 43.

HMI tables can be found at nahb.org/hmi. More information on housing statistics is also available at Housing Economics PLUS (formerly housingeconomics.com).

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Builder Sentiment Rises Above Breakeven Point | NAHB - National Association of Home Builders

Wouldn't it be nice to pull out an old, dated bathtub and have contractors install a beautifully tiled, modern walk-in shower, perhaps even with a bench? Participants on "My Lottery Dream Home" typically create homes that are slightly more expensive thanks to their winnings. And removing bathtubs has become somewhat of a popular design trend in recent years, but before you do so yourself, consider David Bromstad's warning.

"I'd usually recommend keeping the tub for resale value," he told the couple, who won $5 million in a scratch-off ticket and were exploring a property that needed upgrades throughout. The design expert reflected on the importance of a bathtub for one clear reason: families. When selling a home, the more people you can market the property to, the easier it is to sell. More so, it's often beneficial to make the home as fitting to most people's needs as possible.

Having a very eclectic, over-the-top paint color isn't a problem because it's easily updated. Removing the only bathtub in the home immediately makes it less accessible to people with children since you can't bathe them in a walk-in shower. By removing the tub, homeowners essentially eliminate or drastically limit the desirability of their property to families with young kids especially since they'll need to consider the value of renovating to add a bathtub.

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David Bromstad Says Removing This Bathroom Feature Can Hurt Your Resale Value - House Digest

Meta has unveiled details about its AI training infrastructure, revealing that it currently relies on almost 50,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs to train its open source Llama 3 LLM.

The company says it will have over 350,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs in service by the end of 2024, and the computing power equivalent to nearly 600,000 H100s when combined with hardware from other sources.

The figures were revealed as Meta shared details on its 24,576-GPU data center scale clusters.

The company explained These clusters support our current and next generation AI models, including Llama 3, the successor to Llama 2, our publicly released LLM, as well as AI research and development across GenAI and other areas.

The clusters are built on Grand Teton (named after the National Park in Wyoming), an in-house-designed, open GPU hardware platform. Grand Teton integrates power, control, compute, and fabric interfaces into a single chassis for better overall performance and scalability.

The clusters also feature high-performance network fabrics, enabling them to support larger and more complex models than before. Meta says one cluster uses a remote direct memory access network fabric solution based on the Arista 7800, while the other features an NVIDIA Quantum2 InfiniBand fabric. Both solutions interconnect 400 Gbps endpoints.

"The efficiency of the high-performance network fabrics within these clusters, some of the key storage decisions, combined with the 24,576 NVIDIA Tensor Core H100 GPUs in each, allow both cluster versions to support models larger and more complex than that could be supported in the RSC and pave the way for advancements in GenAI product development and AI research," Meta said.

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Storage is another critical aspect of AI training, and Meta has developed a Linux Filesystem in Userspace backed by a version of its 'Tectonic' distributed storage solution optimized for Flash media. This solution reportedly enables thousands of GPUs to save and load checkpoints in a synchronized fashion, in addition to "providing a flexible and high-throughput exabyte scale storage required for data loading".

While the company's current AI infrastructure relies heavily on Nvidia GPUs, it's unclear how long this will continue. As Meta continues to evolve its AI capabilities, it will inevitably focus on developing and producing more of its own hardware. Meta has already announced plans to use its own AI chips, called Artemis, in servers this year, and the company previously revealed it was getting ready to manufacture custom RISC-V silicon.

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Meta sheds more light on how it is evolving Llama 3 training it relies for now on almost 50000 Nvidia H100 GPU, but ... - TechRadar

From Bugsy Siegel to Frank Rosenthal, organized crime has a special place in Las Vegas history. And, as posited by local journalist and author Lissa Townsend Rodgers, women have a special place in the history of organized crime.

Published by the locally based Huntington Press, Shameless: Women of the Underworld delves into the lives of six women who made a name for themselves in their respective circles of criminals. Most historical accounts seek to cast figures like Kathryn Kelly, Bonnie Parker, Stephanie St. Clair, Virginia Hill, Geri Rosenthal and Liz Renay as supporting acts to their male counterparts and companions. Rodgers brings their stories to center stage in the book and at a reading and book signing at the Mob Museum on March 26.

Theyre stories that defy societys roles for women. As she notes in her introduction, If the America of the early to mid-20th century was a time when women knew their place, the gender roles and rules were even more rigid in the underworld of the era.

Obviously, it was much worse back then, Rodgers tells the Weekly. As serious and as much as it was in everyday life, it was even worse in the world of the mob, where you clean things, you tidy things, youre a side piece, you keep your mouth shut.

While societys and the underworlds expectations for women were rigid, the author highlights how the crime queens broke that moldwhether it was Virginia Hill, widely known as Bugsy Siegels girlfriend, using her sexual prowess to work her way up in the mob; or Bonnie Parker, Clyde Barrows other half, posing for an immortal photo with cigar in mouth, shotgun in hand and one foot perched on a car fender.

Years of extensive research not only roots the stories in factual history, but also makes readers feel as though theyre a fly on the wall. The author weaves together firsthand accounts, news reports from the time, menus, guests lists and various sources to paint vivid scenes and transport readers back in time. Take this example from Geri Rosenthals chapter:

In the early 70s, the Stardust glowed with smoke mirrors, pink neon and action. It was Vegas at its post-Rat Pack zenith, the stars and spangles of Strip signage blitzing and glimmering, everything humming from senatorial suite and steakhouse to sports book. Dancers cha-cha-ed with giant bananas onstage at the Lido show as Siegfried & Roy made another tiger disappear. Saudi Arabian arms dealers dropped a ten-grand courtesy bet at the tables, Eartha Kitt purred languidly on the rotating stage in the lounge.

And in the middle of it all, the mad queen of a crazy town was Geri, in a Halston halter and diamond-ruby necklace, blown out of her mind on Percodan and vodka rocks, ready to throw a drink, start a fight, kick down an empire.

Not only the womens surroundings, but also their inner lives take shape in the narratives Rodgers crafts. She captures their emotional states, from the highs of thrilling heists to the lows of ending up penniless and mysteriously dead.

Las Vegans may find themselves particularly drawn to the chapters about Virginia Hill, Liz Renay and Geri Rosenthal, whose plots all touched Sin City at one point or another. And for many of the crime queens featured in the book, Shameless offers history previously untold.

There are so many great stories that people dont tell, Rodgers says of the subjects of her book. For a lot of them, its the only serious record thats in one place.

SHAMELESS: WOMEN OF THE UNDERWORLDMarch 26, 7 p.m., $20-$35. Mob Museum, themobmuseum.org.

ClickHEREto subscribe for free to the Weekly Fix, the digital edition of Las Vegas Weekly! Stay up to date with the latest on Las Vegas concerts, shows, restaurants, bars and more, sent directly to your inbox!

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Las Vegas author Lissa Townsend Rodgers sheds light on historic women in organized crime - Las Vegas Weekly

This gain quickly followed the previous days gain in the official and parallel market. A report by the Punch newspaper shows that the Naira closed at N1,410 per US dollar on the black market on Wednesday.

According to data obtained from the FMDQ Securities Exchange, the Nigerian currency ended trading on Wednesday at 1,410/dollar in the parallel market and N1,492 at the official Nigerian Autonomous Foreign Exchange Market.

The currency's gain in the official market is equivalent to an appreciation of N68, or 4.5%, over the N1,560/$1 reported at NAFEM the previous day. In the parallel market, the gain is equivalent to N190, or 13.5%.

"The dollar supplied by FX market players increased to $288.47, an increase of $2 or 7.46 percent from $268.29 million recorded on Wednesday from $195.13 million at NAFEM," the Punch's report reads.

This denotes that in the past few weeks, the Naira has gained N500 against the US dollar from its record low this year at the black market.

As promised by Governor Olayemi Cardoso, the Central Bank of Nigeria announced on Wednesday that it has successfully settled all legitimate foreign exchange backlogs, settling $7 billion in inherited claims.

The Central Bank of Nigeria issued several circulars in recent weeks which have assisted in fixing loopholes that had previously been exploited by money speculators and racketeers.

Additionally, the president warned against Nigerians sabotaging the currency, calling such an act unpatriotic and deserving of burnt fingers.

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The Nigerian currency sheds off N500 against the US dollar - Business Insider Africa

{KXLG -Watertown, SD} After a brief clarifying discussion, the Watertown Regional Library acquired the approval of a conditional use permit from the Board of Adjustment for storage units to put up a 12 x 24 shed on adjacent vacant property owned by the City of Watertown.

Before approval, Board member Todd Kays commented, What if this request was from a resident and Community Development Manager Brandi Hanten responded.

Resident Mike Kludt spoke up, stating the letter he received from the City wasnt very clear.

Hanten responded that the unit has to fit the residential nature of the neighborhood.

Library Director Maria Gruener explains some background.

Gruener describes it as similar to a garden shed.

Kays made a specific motion and was seconded by Board member Bonnie Oletzke.

Kays welcomed a friendly amendment from Board member Jeff Brink that it cannot be rented out for commercial use.

Once the motion was modified, it was voted on and unanimously approved.

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Library approved for storage shed thanks in-part to a $10000 donation from Friends of the Library - mykxlg.com

Led by the University of Nottingham, in collaboration with Kings College London and Newcastle University, researchers have created a quantum tornado to see how black holes behave.

The team created a giant quantum vortex within superfluid helium that is chilled to the lowest possible temperatures.

Through the observation of minute wave dynamics on the superfluids surface, the research team has demonstrated that quantum tornadoes mimic gravitational conditions near rotating black holes.

The research was published in the journal Nature.

The team created a bespoke cryogenic system capable of containing several litres of superfluid helium at temperatures lower than -271C.

Liquid helium acquires unusual quantum properties at this temperature.

These properties act as a barrier to the formation of giant vortices in other quantum fluids like ultracold atomic gases or quantum fluids of light.

The system shows that the interface of superfluid helium acts as a stabilising force for these objects.

The papers lead author, Dr Patrik Svancara from the School of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Nottingham, said: Superfluid helium contains tiny objects called quantum vortices, which tend to spread apart from each other.

In our set-up, weve managed to confine tens of thousands of these quanta in a compact object resembling a small tornado, achieving a vortex flow with record-breaking strength in the realm of quantum fluids.

The team found interesting parallels between the vortex flow and the gravitational influence of black holes on the surrounding spacetime.

The achievement provides the opportunity for simulations of finite-temperature quantum field theories within the realm of curved spacetimes.

Professor Silke Weinfurtner, leading the work in the Black Hole Laboratory where this experiment was developed, said: When we first observed clear signatures of black hole physics in our initial analogue experiment back in 2017, it was a breakthrough moment for understanding some of the bizarre phenomena that are often challenging.

Now, with our more sophisticated experiment, we have taken this research to the next level, which could eventually lead us to predict how quantum fields behave in curved spacetimes around astrophysical black holes.

The research has received 5m in funding from the Science Technology Facilities Council.

The project has also been supported by both the UKRI Network grant on Quantum Simulators for Fundamental Physics and the Leverhulme Research Leaders Fellowship held by Professor Silke Weinfurtner.

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Quantum tornado sheds light on black holes - Innovation News Network

TROY -- One person was hospitalized after a fire ripped through a homein Troy Wednesday afternoon.

Multiple crews spent hours battling heavy flames ata residencealong the Barker Road. The Troy Fire Department was alerted of the fire around 1:30 p.m.

"There was a fire that started in one of the wood shops and then spread to the house and the house became fully involved, somebody noticed it that was up by the animals and called 911 and we responded to the scene," said Troy Fire Chief Chris Phillips.

Chief Philips says the house was fully involved when they got to the scene but everyone were already out of the house.

He says the house was too unstable for firefighters to enter making it difficult to extinguish, resulting in a total loss.

"If it was a safe interior we probably could have gotten more done quicker but because it was an unsafe interior because it was fully involved at the town we had to complete surround it and extinguish it from that point," said Phillips.

Two sheds also destroyed were housing animals, however the chiefwas unsure if any animals were hurt.

According to Chief Phillips, the homeowner was hospitalized for smoke inhalation.

The fire department was assisted by crews from Thorndike, Dixmont, Plymouth, Detroit and Unity.

The cause of the fire is currently unknown.

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Fire destroys home and sheds in Troy | Local News | foxbangor.com - FOX Bangor/ABC 7 News and Stories