Brand Values Out and About

I find personal brand expression fascinating while exploring here and there.

The supermarket – Andrew Yang:

Philadelphia – Milwaukee Tool, with an appearance by John Deere:

Madison – A Mercedes-Benz SUV adorned with an “I Deserve it” license plate:

Madison – Emotions on a Nissan:

And, I would be remiss to mention an Alfa Romeo; “Pronto” (so small!):

Oh, back to Milwaukee; this time a bartender:

Posted in Uncategorized.

American History and Civics in Our Schools

Miguel Cardona:

The teaching of civics and history – an opportunity to better understand our past and how our government works so we can engage in and influence our future – has long provided the foundation for students to be active participants in society and help our nation live up to its highest ideals. These values have been championed over the years by Americans of all backgrounds, and they are deeply embedded in our commitment to both patriotism and progress.

One of the ways the Department carries out these efforts is through programs like the American History and Civics grant programs, part of which was first launched in the early 2000’s, authorized in 2017 and supported by bipartisan leaders in the House and Senate. The goal of this program is to improve the quality of American history, civics, and government education in order to provide more students the opportunity to learn about the rich history of our nation and build the skills needed to fully participate in civic life. The program enables higher education institutions, non-profit organizations, and other interested applicants the opportunity to explore innovative and creative ways to support educators and the teaching of history to students, aiming to build a more active, engaged society. This program, however, has not, does not, and will not dictate or recommend specific curriculum be introduced or taught in classrooms. Those decisions are – and will continue to be – made at the local level.

Today the Department is posting the Notices Inviting Applications for this year’s American History and Civics grant competitions. The notices include two priorities that are invitational, meaning they encourage applicants to address topics that are important to the Department. The first invitational priority encourages projects that incorporate racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse perspectives into teaching and learning. This priority is included because the Department recognizes the value of supporting teaching and learning that reflects the rich diversity, identities, histories, contributions, and experiences of all students. As every parent knows, when students can make personal connections to their learning experiences, there are greater opportunities for them to stay engaged in their education and see pathways for their own futures.

7.18

The foreigners in China’s disinformation drive

Feeling Lonely Increases Interest in Previously Owned Products

If you want to learn more about what’s going on in your gut, the first step is to turn your poo blue

For the cover of its diversity report, ODNI bought a stock photo called “Portrait Of Multi-Cultural Office Staff Standing In Lobby” and then photoshopped a woman in a wheelchair and a blind guy into it.

Thanks to a MS-DOS emulator called iDOS 2 on the App Store, you can install Microsoft Windows 3.1 on your iPad—then play classic Windows games or simply shock your friends. Here’s how to set it up.

Effort to Decipher Hospital Prices Yields Key Finding: Don’t Try It at Home

Inside L.A.’s Ultimate Mid-century Modern Home

Ex-Nissan boss Carlos Ghosn: How I escaped Japan in a box

Apple Music Style Guide 2.1.6

It wasn’t to be. Dante’s friend Giovanni del Virgilio promised to secure him the laureate’s crown in Bologna if he produced a poem worthy of it, perhaps a military epic in Latin. Dante declined, just as he had declined the humiliating terms on which the Florentines offered to revoke his exile.

Employees were already stirred up over opaque policies on remote work. Then a senior executive announced he’s moving to New Zealand in what some workers consider special treatment.

Spanish court rules COVID-19 home confinement was unconstitutional

Merkel seems to genuinely care about human rights, and she certainly does not seem to be eyeing any payoffs of her close ties to China during her post-chancellorship. Unlike her predecessor Gerhard Schröder, who now makes his money serving Russian President Vladimir Putin as chairman of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, Merkel is not at all driven by personal wealth, and it’s very unlikely that she will accept a cent from the Chinese or Russian government or companies after leaving office this fall.

On the referendum #21: Branching histories of the 2016 referendum and ‘the frogs before the storm’

A Facebook spokesman declined to share what percentage of its users have accepted the company’s tracking prompt, but roughly 75% of the world’s iPhone users have downloaded the newest operating system, according to Branch. Seufert estimated that in the first full quarter users see the prompt, the iOS changes could cut Facebook’s revenue by 7% if roughly 20% of users agree to be tracked. If just 10% of users grant Facebook tracking permission, revenue could be down as much as 13.6%, according to his models. The first full quarter with the prompt is the third quarter. Facebook reports second quarter earnings at the end of July.

Many of my predictions in “The most likely outcome for HK” (3-Sep-2019) have come to pass, thankfully without material bloodshed. The civil service, legislature and district councils have been, or are being, cleansed of pandemocrats in a kind of inverse McCarthyism. Pro-democracy media have either been shut or are self-censoring. In schools, the Liberal Studies curriculum has been replaced with “Citizenship and Social Development”, and teachers are being watched more closely. In universities, Student Unions are being derecognised. The public broadcaster RTHK has been reined in (although I still appear on its air, while I can).

Incident: Baltic BCS3 at Copenhagen on Jul 11th 2021, both engines shut down automatically on touch down

Public API Lists

“Hokusai’s Breathtaking and Rarely Seen Wave Painting Will Go on View This Month” at the Freer Gallery of Art

TECH

Google parts with Cloud VP after uproar over his manifesto renouncing his antisemitism

“It’s hard to know whether they are going to devote resources toward successful implementation or just talk about how they support transparency but not make it a priority,” Blase said.

Citizenship for sale: fugitives, politicians and disgraced businesspeople buying Vanuatu passports

The first park she illustrated for the Instagram account was Arches and its non-license-plate-worthy scenery. Once she put up a few more and shared the account, the project took off. With more than 350,000 followers, the account has been called “an immediate hit,” taking “creativity to a whole new level” and providing “comic relief in strange times.” Soon enough, literary agents were sliding into Share’s DMs to get her to create a book with them.

Paris Memories

Elizabeth Von Guttman recently shared a short video clip of the French Foreign Legion Pioneers marching through the Jardin du Lexembourg.

I’ve pondered these scenes while visiting memorials, particulary as the percentage of American veterans continues to decline, now below 10% [1].

The awareness and experience gap must be enormous across the US population, which is rather challenging given the footprint our armed forces have across the globe [2].

1. The changing face of America’s veteran population by Katherine Schaeffer

2. The infographic reveals for the first time that the U.S. is now operating in 40 percent of the world’s nations. Stephanie Savell and 5W Infographics

Posted in Uncategorized.

7.11

Santa Clara County Revises Official COVID-19 Death Toll Down by 22 Percent: “In the midst of everything COVID people were sort of putting down that cause of death as COVID,” Gandhi said. “It is important to go back and do this accounting to see if COVID was actually the cause of death.”

The Future Is in Symmetrical, High-Speed Internet Speeds

How Underground Fiber Optics Spy on Humans Moving Above, Vibrations from cars and pedestrians create unique signals in cables. Now scientists have used the trick to show how Covid-19 brought life to a halt.

Six Days in Suez: The Inside Story of the Ship That Broke Global Trade

“that effort applied to earlier decisions increases errors later”

2 tap fast e-commerce fused with beautiful visual experiences.

The gift of print fostered distrust in institutional narratives, but this new technology did not automatically teach people how to adapt, nor ensure the level of self-education it demanded of them. Protestantism announced itself as a corrective to this, partly by granting interpretive powers to the individual based on the strength of faith alone (sola fide, sola scriptura). Gutenberg’s revolution democratized information and Luther’s revolution democratized knowledge by placing the individual’s sense-making ability on par with men of the cloth.

The Biblical teaching of election to salvation is full of comfort, but as Paul acknowledges in Romans (9-11), must be handled with great care for it to have the intended purpose of comforting afflicted and troubled Christians.

The cost of cyber insurance increased 32 per cent last year and shows no signs of easing

Welcome to dystopia: getting fired from your job as an Amazon worker by an app

Vaccine efforts, and much of public health for that matter, are about convincing and manipulating people rather than providing them options, data, or decision-making tools.

Fact Check: Did Demon Slayer Really Outsell All of American Comics?

Hospitals Often Charge Uninsured People the Highest Prices, New Data Show

Disagree and Commit: The Importance of disagreement in decision making

If we want to fix climate change, we need honesty

We Got the Phone the FBI Secretly Sold to Criminals

The Cookbook and Home Economics Collection includes books from the Young Research Library Department of Special Collections at UCLA, The Bancroft Library at The University of California, Berkeley, and the Prelinger Library. These fascinating books take us back to an America in the early decades of the 20th century covering topics on cookery, textiles, family and home, budgeting, domestic sciences, and many other delightful topics.

At the same time, events like the present European football championship are allowed. We saw a packed Wembley football stadium yesterday amid an explosive uptake of Delta variant contagion in the UK. The restrictions on different activities are not rational meant Walsh, they are politically driven.

The @StatePolicy Bob Williams Award Finalists have been announced! Selecting finalists was not easy as it was an incredible year for the network. We counted 235 policy wins-actual policy changes-from the submissions alone. Here are the finalists. 1/

In 1932, Huang had enrolled in Yenching University in Beijing (then “Beiping”), a school run by American missionaries. At Yenching, Huang mixed with left-wing professors and got hooked on books about Marxism. In short succession, he’d marched against Japanese aggression, joined the Communist Party, experimented with homemade explosives, and found himself imprisoned for subversive activities. Huang’s support for the Communists spoke to a passionate, almost visceral desire to remake his country through revolution and restore it to a place of dignity. Like many of his contemporaries in the underground Communist movement, he adopted a new name on joining the Party. Wang Rumei became Huang Hua. In Snow, the Party saw an opportunity to raise its profile in elite circles in the United States. Its treatment of Snow helped establish an enduring model where flattery and careful stage management secured the support of foreign “friends.”

“Nearly every war that has started in the past 50 years has been a result of media lies.” —Julian Assange

How Intel Financialized and Lost Leadership in Semiconductor Fabrication

Trust in Software, an All Time Low

This was true with everyone, from CIA Dir Brennan & Adam Schiff – who were on TV saying they’d seen clear evidence of collusion w/Russia, while admitting under oath behind closed doors that they hadn’t – all the way down the line. In the end we learned that it was ALL fake.

Latin & English: Thomas Aquila’s Prologue

Aquinas.cc

Prologue
Quia Catholicae veritatis doctor non solum provectos debet instruere, sed ad eum pertinet etiam incipientes erudire, secundum illud Apostoli I ad Corinth. III: tanquam parvulis in Christo, lac vobis potum dedi, non escam; propositum nostrae intentionis in hoc opere est, ea quae ad Christianam religionem pertinent, eo modo tradere, secundum quod congruit ad eruditionem incipientium.

Because the Teacher of Catholic truth ought not only to teach the proficient, but also to instruct beginners, according to the Apostle: As unto little ones in Christ, I gave you milk to drink, not meat (1 Cor 3:1–2), we purpose in this book to treat of whatever belongs to the Christian religion in such a way as may befit the instruction of beginners.

Consideravimus namque huius doctrinae novitios, in his quae a diversis conscripta sunt, plurimum impediri, partim quidem propter multiplicationem inutilium quaestionum, articulorum et argumentorum; partim etiam quia ea quae sunt necessaria talibus ad sciendum, non traduntur secundum ordinem disciplinae, sed secundum quod requirebat librorum expositio, vel secundum quod se praebebat occasio disputandi; partim quidem quia eorundem frequens repetitio et fastidium et confusionem generabat in animis auditorum.

We have considered that novices in this doctrine have often been hampered by what they have found written by various authors, partly on account of the multiplication of useless questions, articles, and arguments; partly also because the things such novices need to know are not taught according to the order of the discipline, but according as was needed for commenting on books, or according as an opportunity for raising a disputed question presented itself; partly, too, because frequent repetition of the same things brought weariness and confusion to the minds of the readers.

7.4

It seems to me that the key issue is what allowed this software error to be found on the airplane rather than in the lab.

Britain leads the pack on vaccination, but lags far behind America, Germany and France on liberation. A big reason is that our Government remains in thrall to a profession that has performed uniquely badly during the pandemic: modellers. The Government’s reliance on Sage experts’ computer modelling to predict what would happen with or without various interventions has proved about as useful as the ancient Roman habit of consulting trained experts in “haruspicy” – interpreting the entrails of chickens.

Three years ago, a small group of academics at a German university launched an unprecedented collaboration with the military – using novels to try to pinpoint the world’s next conflicts. Are they on to something?

The Economics of Dollar Stores

Western media promoting Chinese Communist Party propaganda. Western world, with a few notable exceptions, abandoned usual pandemic response & blindly followed China’s lockdown strategy. Not surprisingly no country replicated China’s fantasy outcomes. The @WHO complicit..

Huy Fong’s Sriracha hit revenue of $150m+ a year…with no sales team, no trademark and $0 in ad spend. Its creator is Vietnamese-American David Tran, making the sauce’s success a tale of immigrant hustle and a product that literally sells itself. Here’s the story

It’s time to pull this discussion into the modern era and consider what the implications of this “RISC versus CISC” comparison are for the ARM and x86 CPUs actually shipping today. The question we’re really asking when we compare AMD and Intel CPUs with Apple’s M1 and future M2 is whether there are historical x86 bottlenecks that will prevent x86 from competing effectively with Apple and future ARM chips from companies such as Qualcomm?

What mRNA is Good For, And What It Maybe Isn’t

That’s the result of a Reuters analysis of data from a model that calculates the lifetime emissions of vehicles, a hotly debated issue that’s taking center stage as governments around the world push for greener transport to meet climate targets.

How Amazon, Google and Other Companies Exploit NDAs

On July 1, 2021, Carl Hahn will be 95 years old. The former Volkswagen CEO looks back on his past and shares his vision of the future.

Inside the risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan. It has also revealed little about its new system for assessing gain-of-function risks, which is carried out by an anonymous review panel whose deliberations are not made public. Until there’s more sunlight, the agency will be fighting speculation, from Paul and others, that what occurred is a scenario Fauci himself had outlined in a 2012 commentarydiscussing research on pandemic germs.

Intuit to Share Payroll Data from 1.4M Small Businesses With Equifax

The well is owned by Pemex, a state-owned entity formed from the nationalization of private assets.

With no local access to Rx drugs, this town of mainly cattle ranchers and hay farmers has crowdsourced a delivery system, taking advantage of anyone’s trip to those bigger cities to pick up medications for the rest of the town.

Will We Ever Fly Supersonically Over Land?

They said I don’t exist. But I am here’ – one woman’s battle to prove she isn’t dead

Biohackers have built small patches of flexible electronics and microfluidics, worn on the body much like a nicotine patch, capable of crafting specific mrna sequences in situ and inserting them into the bloodstream. New sequences can be beamed to the patch from a smartphone or computer.