Notes on yet another NYT election season visit to Wisconsin

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Regarding Jonathan Mahler’s article….

A west coast friend asked years ago about Wisconsin and the rise of Scott Walker.

Another friend deep in the political game told me that one must understand The Milwaukee pension scandal, which lead to Mr. Walker’s election as County Executive.

$1.57m for four state senators (WEAC 2010)

Kathy Cramer’s book The Politics of Resentment is worth a read as well.

10.30

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He then publicizes his best scoops on social media — his aim is to produce one big story a week — which is then taken up by mainstream conservative media, not least Fox News, and then bleeds into the rest of the media. “I have the easiest job in the world,” Rufo said. “I just have to find their own information and show it to the world.”

Twitter employees panned for letter to Elon Musk demanding continued employment, ‘safety’

Diversity by diktat: An obscure 1977 OMB memo forms the basis for today’s affirmative-action programs

Last week, NBC reporter Dasha Burns had the temerity to observe the obvious: John Fetterman has trouble with chit chat. Here is what she said: “In small talk before the interview without captioning, it wasn’t clear that he was understanding our conversation.” She got crucified for it by any number of journalists with blue checks.

Mr. Trump questioned Mr. Bolton days later at a White House Christmas dinner, according to people familiar with the conversation. “Why did you arrest Meng?” the president said. “Don’t you know she’s the Ivanka Trump of China?”

I would like to see the U.S. increase its support for Ukraine. But I also want to see a vigorous debate on big U.S. foreign policy questions. Ukraine falls into that basket. I am not a progressive on foreign policy, but I bet I could feign one for a few paragraphs. Therefore, in the interest of promoting debate, here’s the letter I would have drafted if I was trying to promote the progressive worldview:

Despite ballooning funding, I haven’t experienced any significant upgrades to the Epic or Cerner EMR systems in the last 8 years. I find the interfaces to be comically inelegant. I’m frequently staring at screens with over 30 tabs, and when I click one, the system stutters and lags before showing a result. This flawed user experience slows providers down drastically. In one study of a North Carolina orthopedic clinic, the adoption of Epic’s EMR increased physician documentation time by 230% and increased labor costs per visit by 25%. Family medicine physicians have it worse: many spend a whopping 6 hours a day on the EMR. Nurses often spend more time charting in the EMR than on any other task. Multiply this out by the whole healthcare system and the idea that an extra MRI here and there is driving our cost crisis seems laughable. Every day, expensive physician and nursing labor is squandered through unnecessary clicking and scrolling.

Eyetracking Study of Web Readers

By Election Day, by one estimate, Wisconsinites will have endured some $344-million worth of political advertising, much of which seeks to paint the top candidates on either side as “too extreme” for the state. Voters are set to determine whether abortion will remain illegal, how voting will work in their state, who gets to certify the results of the 2024 presidential election, and possibly which party controls the U.S. Senate. Sauk County offers a glimpse into the split mind of Wisconsin on all of these issues, in a state where many people seem sick of politics, but the politics only seem to get worse, because tiny margins can have big results, and each party sees the stakes as existential.

N8 Ag (Nate Silver) of 538 gives Democrat Governor Kathy Hochul a 97% chance of re-election. That makes sense. ‘Tis a Democrat state south of the thruway and in many parts north. Real Clear Politics moved the race to a tossup two weeks ago.

A Post reporter drove more than 400 miles along the drought-stricken Mississippi River. Here’s what he found.

10.23

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Since the beginning of the year, there’s been a steady drip of news coming from Apple about its plans to gradually end its decades-long reliance on China to manufacture the bulk of the company’s products.

By the numbers: Among the four sites, 100 of the 139 eligible people received leases, according to Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Wayne Turnage. The remaining 39 either opted out of the pilot, no longer reside at the encampment, or are still working with outreach to find housing

The CDN is a high-integrity IEEE 802.3 Ethernet network utilizing IP addressing and related transport protocols (UDP). As an A664-P7 compliant network, it also implements deterministic timing and redundancy management protocols. The CDN uses both fiber optic cable and copper wire and moves system information between the various airplane systems connected to it, either directly or through ACSs, FOXs, or RDCs.

“We can’t regulate anything outside the state of Wyoming,” Boner told Cowboy State Daily in June. “The problem is in places like New York, which we have no jurisdiction over.” 

Use of electricity meter and gas meter personal data collected through the Energy Price Guarantee scheme: privacy notice

“but national media outlets routinely rely on anonymous sources in reporting on national security issues”

Constraints help to focus our thinking and direct us. But they can also pigeonhole us and stifle creative exploration. Qasim didn’t let labels like ‘medical student’ stop him from becoming a developer. He didn’t let being just a ‘developer’ stop him from building a successful company.

Unsurprisingly, Mari’s ambitious proposition failed to make inroads into a society bewitched by consumerism, as was shown by the ambivalent initial response to Autoprogettazione, whose true spirit, complained Mari, had been fully grasped by only about one percent of the audience. As Mari recalled, most people who got in touch with him were either looking for cheap ways to furnish their rented flats or were merely interested in the aesthetics of the furniture. (Many commented enthusiastically on the “rustic” appeal of the pieces, which would perfectly suit their mountain cabins.)

Because the last news your readers want to hear, is that this person who is wealthier than you, is also smarter, happier, and not a bad person morally.  Your reader would much rather read about how these folks are overworked to the bone or suffering from existential ennui.  Failing that, your readers want to hear how the upper echelons got there by cheating, or at least smarming their way to the top.  If you said anything as hideous as, “They seem more alive,” you’d get lynched.

On October 10, 2022, there were 576,562 LinkedIn accounts that listed their current employer as Apple Inc. The next day, half of those profiles no longer existed. A similarly dramatic drop in the number of LinkedIn profiles claiming employment at Amazon comes as LinkedIn is struggling to combat a significant uptick in the creation of fake employee accounts that pair AI-generated profile photos with text lifted from legitimate users.

In addition to starting to integrate the European industry, the A300 marked technical and industrial milestones. It was the first European widebody aircraft, and it introduced the concept of only two engines on a widebody, an idea met with massive skepticism by the establishment for years and one of the reasons the airliner’s commercial breatkthrough took so long. “The Americans told us we were crazy,” Gerard Guyot, one of the initial A300B2 and -B4 flight-test engineers, remembers. Boeing followed up with the 767, which entered service in 1982 and later superseded the A300 because of its longer range.

To arrive at a recommended rent, the software deploys an algorithm — a set of mathematical rules — to analyze a trove of data RealPage gathers from clients, including private information on what nearby competitors charge.

Over time the accusations of possible copyright infringement from developers have continued. In a recent Twitter thread, computer science professor Tim Davis found that Copilot was suggesting some of his code back at him.

“This ap­pears to be, ‘Look, I put in my time, I’ve worked for four years. And, you know, now I de­serve $300,000 in the cor­ner of­fice,” he said. “We can’t hire peo­ple at what we think is a rea­son­able price. So, we es­sen­tially wind up turn­ing work away.” Mi­crosoft has also an­a­lyzed tril­lions of anonymized pro­duc­tiv­ity sig­nals from its prod­ucts and found that for the av­er­age worker, meet­ings, chat, and af­ter-hours and week­end work have all in­creased over the past two years.

Julian Assange’s lawyer Jennifer Robinson has called on the Australian government to act swiftly to secure his release from a high-security prison in the United Kingdom, saying she doesn’t know how much longer the WikiLeaks founder can survive.

10.16

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And there’s the rub. Batteries may be clean in operation. But they are far from being a panacea for life-cycle clean aviation.

They’re not planning for 2026. Under Brian Daboll and Joe Schoen, these new-look Giants earned an inspiring win over the Green Bay Packers in London. This is what happens when you clean house.

How Equifax used employment records it collects from 2.5 million companies to fire dozens of its own employees for working second jobs

Essentially what they did is spend an entire week coming up with as many ideas as possible (i.e diverging). They did this by brainstorming and writing down every idea they had, no matter bad it seemed. They brainstormed on the themes mentioned above as well as some additional ones, such as “What are emerging markets that are small right now but will be big in 5 years?” and “The X for Y model” e.g. Uber but for Y.

I know people who have had to travel over the Virginia/Maryland border just to find a wifi spot to have a telemedicine appointment with their MD physician. Ridiculous.

He made a point of highlighting that collective bargaining governed everything from the price of coffee to the rules for the use of bicycles at its Wolfsburg operation and allowed unionised landscape gardeners to be replaced with robot lawnmowers.

On the heels of yesterday’s bombshell:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33198708

First thing this morning I emailed TWNFreeze@equifax.com to request a data freeze as outline at:

https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze/

But I’ve not yet heard anything back.

This is only the initial first step in a process with unknown hoops to jump through, but first I must get the form to reply and submit the freeze request.

And like good fiction, travel changes you. For the better. Mostly.

In 1978, Brian Eno released Ambient 1: Music for Airports, a landmark album in ambient and electronic music. Although it wasn’t the first ambient album, it was the first album to be explicitly labelled as ‘ambient music’. Music for Airports was a continuation of Brian Eno’s experimentation with the tape machine as a compositional tool, a process he’d begun three years prior with 1975’s Discreet Music. It also saw Eno’s further exploration of generative, systems-created music, whereby Eno would focus on creating a system that would generate ambient music, something he continues to explore in the modern age with his range of iOS apps.  In this article, I’ll discuss how Music for Airportswas created, and I’ll deconstruct and recreate the tracks 2/1 and 1/2. Hopefully, the article will demystify some of Brian Eno’s techniques, and give you some ideas about how to adopt some of his ambient music techniques yourself.

10.9

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However, it is not the first time Biden has taken pages out of the Trump playbook. On immigration and the pandemic, he has maintained Trump-era policies for some time

Lindt’s legal team also noticed how much Lidl’s rabbits looked like theirs, and it has argued in court that it deserved copyright protection against Lidl’s lookalikes. Last year, Lindt lost its case in Swiss commercial court, but earlier this week, the federal court in Lausanne ruled in Lindt’s favor.

It’s easy to embrace ambitious green regulations when you pretend there’s no cost. But when Americans are paying more for energy, and especially so in California because of green mandates, those costs are now hitting home. It won’t get better as long as states outsource environmental rule-making to politicians in Sacramento who will long ago have left office when the EV-car mandate strikes.

Surveys are an essential approach for eliciting otherwise invisible factors such as perceptions, knowledge and beliefs, attitudes, and reasoning. These factors are critical determinants of social, economic, and political outcomes. Surveys are not merely a research tool. They are also not only a way of collecting data. Instead, they involve creating the process that will generate the data. This allows the researcher to create their own identifying and controlled variation. Thanks to the rise of mobile technologies and platforms, surveys offer valuable opportunities to study either broadly representative samples or focus on specific groups. This paper offers guidance on the complete survey process, from the design of the questions and experiments to the recruitment of respondents and the collection of data to the analysis of survey responses. It covers issues related to the sampling process, selection and attrition, attention and carelessness, survey question design and measurement, response biases, and survey experiments.

New machine pushes company toward goal of $100 genome sequence

The fact that Mr Musk can, in a single week, get into a Twitter spat with the president of Ukraine, in an online discussion forum that he has just agreed to buy, while also sending people into orbit, demonstrates the extent to which his growing technological superpowers have granted him geopolitical clout. Should that be cause for admiration or concern?

“This plan as announced in practice means that, in certain areas, farmers have to reduce their nitrogen emissions by 70%,” he continued. “That means they simply have to quit.”

UW Health says a “significant” donation from Epic Systems will help it address a shortage of healthcare workers. (Electronic medical records are heavily subsidized by taxpayers).

This quote is a strong condemnation of zoning. Does Gray, a scholar affiliated with the Mercatus Center, successfully make his case? He does. I confess that I was somewhat convinced of this before cracking the book. Decades ago, I read a 77?page article by legal scholar Bernard Siegan who made the case that Houston, the one major city in America that has avoided zoning, was doing well. Gray is quite familiar with Houston and, indeed, devotes a whole chapter to laying out in what ways it does well.

The National Security Archives recently published a declassified list of U.S. nuclear targets from 1956, which spanned 1,100 locations across Eastern Europe, Russia, China, and North Korea. The map below shows all 1,100 nuclear targets from that list, and we’ve partnered with NukeMap to demonstrate how catastrophic a nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia could be. If you click detonate from any of the dots, you can see how large an area would be destroyed by the bomb of your choice, as well as how many people could be killed.

Extending BMV to grade 3b would ban solar from about 41% of the land area of England, or about 58% of agricultural land. Much of grade 4 and 5 land is in upland areas that are unsuitable for solar developments.

During her speech at the Conservative party conference last week, the prime minister, Liz Truss, reeled off a list of “enemies”, including green campaigners, who make up what she characterised as the “anti-growth coalition”. However, green campaigners say blocking the building of renewables would make her government part of such a group.

10.2

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ls us some other things as well. It tells us that strategy – how you change your enemy’s psychology and make them do what you want – is supreme. It also tells us that logistics – your resources or tools for the job – are of crucial importance. And it tells us that morale – that ancient intangible of camaraderie and esprit de corps – is a battle winner.

And, as Providence illustrates, some hospital systems have not only reduced their emphasis on providing free care to the poor but also developed elaborate systems to convert needy patients into sources of revenue. The result, in the case of Providence, is that thousands of poor patients were saddled with debts that they never should have owed, The Times found.

Part 1 of a series on the New York Times, in which I take a close look at how (and when) the New York Times tests multiple headlines for a single article.

FBI Assures Nation They Will Get Back To Figuring Out Why That Guy Shot 400 People In Vegas After They’re Done Investigating Parent-Teacher Meetings

Technology bifurcates problems. 99% of problems go away, but the 1% that are left are awful. Case in point customer service: 99% of the time you don’t even need customer service from Amazon, etc. but the 1% of the time you do you’re suddenly in a story by Kafka.

It now costs £32.41 on average to charge a 64kWh family car such as the Kia e-Niro Long Range to 80% from empty via a public rapid charger, up £9.60 (£22.81) from May and £13.60 (£18.81) from the same time last year.

Over the past century, nearly all American piano manufacturers have been eradicated by foreign competition, declining domestic craftsmanship, and the rise of competing technologies.

I believe that augments are speech, and that augments that are ‘anchored’ to real-world things or people or places are simply speech about those things.

If you don’t have time to start that movie you’ve always wanted to watch, a new set of TikTok accounts has a solution. “This woman knocked over everything in the house, then drew 800 cc of her own blood,” a robotic voice narrated over a clip from the film Gone Girl. The video, titled “High IQ woman revenge for cheating husband,” summarizesthe two-and-a-half-hour film in just seven minutes. A 48-second clip of The Danish Girlsummarized the film as “The wife let the husband dress up as a woman, and he is addicted to it.”

Oh I searched! I found nothing from any Google.com sie, just bits of code for various image search scrapers (here’s one example) (and another). And then I should not be surprised to find reference to this search parameter in a blogpost by my friend John Johnston where he showed how it can be used to aid searches on iPads (where the filter options for CC are not there).

“From our perspective, they have no case, and so we’re going to fight them vigorously in court,” Peter Breen, Thomas More Society senior counsel and lawyer for Houck, told Fox Digital. “This is a new low for the Biden administration in terms of their attack on people of faith and pro-life Americans.”

Puffins around the British Isles – in pictures.

Menus are not merely functional lists – they are self-advertisements, exhibitions, seductions and, occasionally, objects of desire

To critics who see the adoption of childish sensibilities among adults as a kind of social disease, this might seem a grim conclusion. But Japan’s experience implies a startling corollary. Under the right circumstances, regression can nourish. It can be a form of progression, a form of experimentation and creative play. It can pave the way for new ways of thinking and living. It can spawn new trends and identities and lifestyles. These become essential tools for navigating the strange new frontiers of modern life – and, as we adopt them, they transform our definition of what it means to lead healthy ‘adult’ lives.

The document is similar in some respects to Standard Form 86, a questionnaire American intelligence employees are required to complete. But the paperwork of an autocratic one-party state has an added richness, functioning as not only a professional and personal biography but also a political one. Bradley Hull, the FBI special agent who led the investigation of Xu, was asked at one point in his testimony if he’d ever seen such a form. “No,” he replied. “No one has.”

“Chains have been hastily reorganising their aisles to meet the rules…. The regulations restrict the areas in which supermarkets may place products deemed to be high in fat, salt or sugar. Arguably the simplest rule is that no unhealthy food or drink can be displayed within two metres of a checkout or queueing area. But similar restrictions have been imposed on ‘gondola displays’ at the end of shopping aisles, island bin displays and other easy-to-reach spots. A formula based on floor size dictates unhealthy products’ proximity to the entrance, meaning there are different rules for each shop. The minimum distance is calculated by the square root of the area of the store multiplied by 0.03….”

9.25

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That shift is part of a larger trend where travelers are increasingly blurring of the lines between leisure and business trips, Raja said. Revenues from these so-called “blended trips” — also known as the great merging — have doubled since before the pandemic to nearly half of American’s take, and are powering the “real revenue growth”at the carrier.

The fire started at 1:30 a.m. today in one Tesla Megapack at PG&E’s Elkhorn Battery Storage facility that’s near the Moss Landing Power Plant, the utility said in a statement. 

Starting in 2015, and for a period spanning five years, Morgan Stanley hired a moving and storage company multiple times to handle the decommissioning of old hard drives and servers. There were two problems with this decision. The first is that the company selected to handle the drives had “no experience or expertise in data destruction services,” according to the SEC. The second problem was that Morgan Stanley didn’t encrypt the data stored on these drives, and didn’t attempt to delete any of it before handing them over to the moving company.

“If I hear that any of you aren’t sharing information with each other, or you’re hiding information, you’re fired,” Dimon told the 15 or so executives who had gathered for the meeting in New York, according to two people with knowledge of the remarks.

But since the 2016 election cycle, they’ve represented an ever-greater share of politicians’ campaign haul. By the 2020 election cycle, retirees accounted for more than $1 in every $5, amounting to more than $378 million.

How much shale gas is there in the UK and what is the status of fracking?

As part of its takeover of Fitbit, Google will begin requiring customers to use Google accounts to manage their fitness-tracking devices, reigniting privacy concerns over the acquisition in 2019.

Where TikTok search really falls down is the most basic feature of Google: quick access to other stuff on the internet. The most popular searches on Google are words like “Facebook” and “Amazon,” and TikTok is precisely no help there unless what you actually wanted is an endless supply of videos showing weird junkpeople bought on Amazon. 

We were able to show that with less home charging and more daytime charging, the Western U.S. would need less generating capacity and storage, and it would not waste as much solar and wind power,” said Powell, mechanical engineering PhD ’22.

Aerospace analysts say few other engine manufacturers could take on the Overture project. “Nobody else can do an engine in this class, realistically, although Honeywell and Safran aren’t inconceivable,” says Richard Aboulafia with AeroDynamic Advisory.

A history of ARM, part 1: Building the first chip

The Pres­i­dent would have to des­ig­nate 25 en­ergy projects of strate­gic na­tional im­por­tance, but only five must be for fos­sil fu­els or bio­fu­els such as ethanol. Fed­eral agen­cies would be di­rected to try to com­plete en­vi­ron­men­tal re­views on these projects within two years, but noth­ing com­pels agen­cies to meet these dead­lines. Projects the Pres­i­dent doesn’t fa­vor could lan­guish in reg­u­la­tory pur­ga­tory.

9.18

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“Why are we here today? It was the entrepreneurial spirit of our forefathers,” Philip Jones said. “They were very, very creative in how they approached the expansion of the business.”

Another employee, who was hired in April 2020 for an in-person job but has worked exclusively remotely because of the pandemic, said she moved during the pandemic, buying a much larger house in a different part of the Madison area so that she and her husband could both work from home. Her daughter, who didn’t get into her school’s afterschool program, is old enough to entertain herself when she comes home mid-afternoon two days a week but too young to be in the house alone.

The numbers tell a different story from what the headlines suggest. In fact, when it comes to electronics and machinery, the Asian supply chain remains little changed. While there has been some diversification from China, this “shift” is actually less than meets the eye.

“The university has a strong interest in maintaining public trust; this interest is not served by permitting UW physicians to leverage their university positions for personal gain in the manner proposed,” Golden wrote to Zdeblick on June 24, according to letters the Wisconsin State Journal received last week in an open records request.

“We were closed for almost a year due to COVID capacity restrictions, and carryout business never took off for us leading up to that closure,” she wrote. “When we reopened, we faced staffing challenges, and customer counts didn’t bounce back like we had hoped they would.” + This, in concert with two years of pandemic limitations, has forced us to make this hard but prudent decision.”

That meant that individual churches had to give Catholics a reason to attend mass in the neighborhood rather than somewhere else. For example, Cajka notes, the Church of the Gesu in downtown Milwaukee was built in 1894 to serve Irish Catholics. But by the 1940s, attendance was down and local Catholic authorities noted that “the better” parishioners had left, leaving the church largely serving the poor. In response, Gesu reached out to Catholic converts across the city. Thanks partly to its location just off an interstate highway, many of people from other districts began attending services at Gesu. To improve worshippers’ experience, the church upgraded its physical structure, improved lighting, and installed air conditioning in the 1950s. Gesu pastor Father Cahill described the church as a “spiritual oasis in the heart of the metropolis.”

“The total proceeds of 1.07 billion euros generated for the WSF from the sale of its stake significantly exceed the 306 million euros invested to acquire it by 760 million euros,” said Jutta Doenges, who is responsible for the WSF as managing director of the finance agency. With this outcome, “the participation of the WSF ends and the company is back in private hands,” she said.

Was it worth it? I rather think not. Then again, heavy-handed stifling of dissent never is, and the sooner the authorities wise up to that one, the better for everyone in our democracy. At the moment, shows of strength simply look like signs of weakness.

The sale comes as privacy group Citizen Lab alleges authorities have collected DNA from up to a third of the Tibetan population.

The Times was told that the refugees arrived via Texas, but the situation has been fluid and there has been a lot of confusion surrounding today’s events. The Times was told it was a “company” that organized the flights providing individuals with some cell phone numbers before departing. Migrants used translation apps on those phones getting off the plane.

The second phase will see an accessible half-mile meandering path cut through the woods in the park. The tree survey allows the path to be cut without harming healthy trees. A challenge course designed for people of all abilities, with obstacles of varying difficulty, will be constructed during this phase, as well.

The deal is structured in ways that also bring the billionaire other perks, by letting him and his family keep control of Patagonia while shielding them from tax bills that could have totaled hundreds of millions of dollars. By donating most of the company, which is valued at $3 billion according to the New York Times, Chouinard is at the fore of a small-but-growing movement among the ultra-wealthy to use nonprofits to exert political influence long past their lifetimes.

But a wave of high end e-bike companies are ramping up in the American market offering bikes between $1500 to $4000 to appeal to a more style-minded segment of riders, and shake the image of them as a delivery vehicle.

9.11

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Poop and pee fueled the huge algae bloom in San Francisco Bay. Fixing the problem could cost $14 billion

Canadians less satisfied in their access to health care than Americans: poll

I stated it first back in 2007: the coming erosion of the market by smartphones was going to narrow and narrow and narrow the opportunities for the camera makers. That’s happened only a wee bit faster than I anticipated, but it’s ongoing and relentless.

The 2020 Bailouts Left Airlines, the Economy, and the Federal Budget in Worse Shape Than Before

The index published in Economic Freedom of the World measures the degree to which the policies and institutions of countries are supportive of economic freedom. The cornerstones of economic freedom are personal choice, voluntary exchange, freedom to enter markets and compete, and security of the person and privately owned property. Forty-two data points are used to construct a summary index, along with a Gender Legal Rights Adjustment to measure the extent to which women have the same level of economic freedom as men. The degree of economic freedom is measured in five broad areas.

The bird photographer of the yearwinners for 2022 have been unveiled. An image of a rock ptarmigan in winter plumage taking flight above the snow-covered mountains of Tysfjord, Norway, has taken the grand prize in the world’s largest bird photography competition, which saw more than 20,000 entries from all over the world