Hey, Marc, does it get any creepier than working with Chinese government backed organizations to develop surveillance tools?

“In the long run, talent wins over experience, and an entrepreneurial culture over heritage.”

They seem to be saying (among other things) that government is worse under Republican administrations because Democrats in the bureaucracy are not as loyal to their missions? 

However, the data tells us that attacks have been declining since 2016. Why did they claim the opposite?

According to reports, this is perhaps the first instance of the FBI sanitizing private servers in the aftermath of a cyberattack.

First GMO Mosquitoes to Be Released In the Florida Keys

Ideas of India: The History of Textiles

A look at Próspera, the charter city taking shape in Honduras

JW v HHS Humanized Mice FDA prod 3 00876

Bitcoin miners buying power plants.

SpaceX was one of two providers hired by NASA to fly its astronauts to the International Space Station. It flew two missions with astronauts last year and has its next mission scheduled for Thursday. Boeing is the other company hired to ferry crews to the station and back. But it has stumbled badly, and has yet to fly a test mission with astronauts.

The estimate represents a 52% rise in the nation’s home shortage compared with 2018, the first time Freddie Mac quantified the shortfall.

During the Olympics Tokyo will probably have consistent winds around 7 mph mostly from the South or East.  To establish a record events like the 100 and 200 meter sprint, 110 meter hurdles and the long and triple jumps record the wind velocity and require a trailing windspeed to be less than 2 meters per second – about 4.5 mph – measured at the track.

It’s Leonard Euler’s 314th birthday today. In network circles the grandfather of graph theory is perhaps best known for his 1735 solution to the problem known as the Seven Bridges of Königsberg. Using novel graph theory techniques Euler was able to show that a route across the seven bridges without crossing the same one twice was impossible.

Adobe co-founder Charles Geschke dies at 81

Correlation Between 3790 Quantitative Polymerase Chain Reaction–Positives Samples and Positive Cell Cultures, Including 1941 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 Isolates

The lost apps of the 80s

an increase in profit motive, and a decrease in ambition

How Lower-Income Americans Get Cheated on Property Taxes

How a Secret Weapon Normally Used to Keep Precious Artworks Clean Is Helping Museums Fight the Coronavirus Pandemic

In retrospect, I should have known right away, from my first day, that something was wrong with utopia. On my arrival, I was struck by the fact that the pantry of the communal kitchen was locked.

Who keeps buying California’s scarce water? Saudi Arabia

7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?

But it’s different when FBI agents sit across a table from you, with all the power of the government behind them, accusing you of things you have never done and would never do. I was scared, and I was especially scared for my family’s safety.

We sampled tap water across the US – and found arsenic, lead and toxic chemicals

An unlikely coalition of Republicans, Democrats, and labor leaders are concerned by the solar industry’s dependence on goods linked to Chinese forced labor camps, a development that threatens President Joe Biden’s push for a green energy economy.

Everyone wants a cheap and easy solution to extremely difficult problems.

The column references a proposal led by India and South Africa — joined by Kenya, Bolivia, Pakistan, and dozens of other countries — to request a temporary waiver of intellectual property rights over the creation of Covid-19 vaccines.

New Mexico Governor Signs Historic Legislation to End Qualified Immunity

“I think we’re so at a point where people are just going to ignore restrictions,”

Anyway, hiring is broken, we all know it. I accepted a position with a company that had a sane, speedy hiring process.

On Wednesday, California launched a public website that, for the first time, combines all 44 databases, and reports some basic statewide statistics that describe homelessness and local efforts to address it.

It shows, for example, that outreach workers provided services to 280,130 people in the state last year. That far exceeds the estimated total of just over 161,500 people who are homeless on a given night and gives some insight into the number of people who are homeless for brief periods during the year, and receive help getting back on their feet, but don’t show up in the annual counts conducted in January.

The doc­u­ment also sheds more light on a once-se­cret deal be­tween Face­book Inc. and Google, known as Jedi Blue, which al­legedly guar­an­teed Face­book would both bid in—and win—a fixed per­cent­age of ad auc­tions.

Obama wins the right to detain people with no habeas review

We need a strategy — and we need one now.

Sadly, it’s no surprise to see Washington on its back foot against the Chinese Communist Party. Where American officials struggle to think beyond the latest news cycle, leaders in Beijing think in centuries-long historical epochs. 

His Plane Crashed in the Amazon. Then Came the Hard Part.

To calculate the real dislikes on a video, we tabulate only increases to the dislikes, and ignore decreases. On normal YouTube videos (e.g., on PewDiePie’s videos), the official YouTube stats and our real stats completely agree. On many White House videos, there is a huge discrepancy between official dislikes and our calculated real dislikes.

Yellow Journalism Turns Blue. Ron Johnson is under attack from a press that’s abandoned honesty and fairness.

Give pause before you raise a glass to the prospect of a vaccine passport

Climate of ‘fear’ prevents experts from questioning the handling of the pandemic

H&M erased from Apple Maps, other platforms in China amid boycott

After choosing “privately insured” in the online mask instead of “statutory insurance”, she was offered an earlier vaccination appointment. We followed up on this information to find out whether privately insured people are preferred when making appointments. It quickly became clear: It probably has nothing to do with the insurance status. It was simply a coincidence whether you could get an appointment online yesterday for April 12th, or a month later, for May 15th, in the same vaccination center.

The decline in church membership is primarily a function of the increasing number of Americans who express no religious preference

How then should we conceptualize software freedom?

Which brings me to the reason experts should be more reluctant to lie to the public: They aren’t experts on the topic of when to lie.

Misdemeanor Prosecution

China’s government passes Hong Kong “patriot” election law

By comparison, the federal retail pharmacy program reported March 11 it had administered nearly 1 million dose s over a single day. Over the course of the next four days, the program’s pharmacies administered more than 5 million more doses, according to the federal vaccination data obtained by POLITICO.

Amazon’s Twitter Army Was Handpicked for “Great Sense of Humor,” Leaked Document Reveals

Google collects 20 times more telemetry from Android devices than Apple from iOS

Congressional Candidate Laura Loomer Banned From Payment Processing Company Stripe

Live on national television, Diana Church calmly explained to the Prime Minister that her son’s doctor had asked to see him in a week’s time, and yet the clinic had refused to take any appointments more than forty-eight hours in advance. Otherwise, physicians would lose out on bonuses.

Apple’s cooperation with authoritarian governments

Meet the Russiagate Prober Who Couldn’t Verify Anything in the Steele Dossier Yet Said Nothing for Years

Obama Transportation Secretary Hid Foreign Cash Loan

Eye-Opening Photos and Video Taken Inside Illegal Click Farms

Does electoral fraud stabilize authoritarian rule or undermine it?

The zombie economy and digital arm-breakers

Vaccine distribution and political contributions

Dahua and Hikvision Co-Author Racial And Ethnic PRC Police Standards

The exorbitant tax privilege

Why the World Needs a Software Bill Of Materials Now

For 250 years of American history, politicians have held the peacetime budget deficit in check because of fears of either inflation or higher interest rates (or perhaps a loss of confidence in the gold standard.) What would happen if they begin to sniff out that the actual risk is not inflation or much higher interest rates next year, rather the risk is higher taxes in 20 years, after they’ve safely retired? How would they respond to this information?

But the net effect recalls the old joke about the firing squad that stands in a circle.

Major flaws found in machine learning for COVID-19 diagnosis

Data and Models

Court says Northern Virginia restaurant defying mask mandate can remain open

Disease and demographic development: the legacy of the plague

Pedestrian Traffic Fatalities by State: 2020 Preliminary Data

How a Personal-Photo Curator Separates the Is-This-a-Rash Selfies from the Keepers

National U.S. publications and TV networks cover Covid news much more negatively than foreign media, scientific journals or regional media within the U.S.

TSMC: how a Taiwanese chipmaker became a linchpin of the global economy

Fauci said, “When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent … Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85. We need to have some humility here …. We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 to 90 percent. But, I’m not going to say 90 percent.”

Dr. Fauci has said that we don’t have good data on natural immunity. That is largely because his own National Institutes of Health has done little to answer this and other important clinical questions. The NIH and CDC, which together receive more than $40 billion a year from taxpayers, should have focused on answering the most basic Covid-19 clinical questions that affect Americans. If we say we’re going to follow the science, then we need to be willing to consider all the data.

How a container ship blocked the Suez canal – visual guide

20 Minute Neighborhoods.

On Apple’s Privacy Practices

US Mortality Monitoring – Deaths, Excess, Z-Scores, State Map

The bank effect and the big boat blocking the Suez

The decision to block an “expert” level cyberattack has caused controversy inside Google after it emerged that the hackers in question were working for a US ally.

CNN’s Chris Cuomo got special treatment from New York, confirming worst suspicions about media elites

Much of the press no longer has a com­mit­ment to truth, fair­ness or hon­esty. Its com­mit­ment is to De­mo­c­ra­tic power.

Annie’s Mac and Cheese is based in the Bay Area, but Annie is not. Here’s her story.

Hollywood Executive Reveals How China’s Politics Have Shaped Movie Industry

Ten Questions the Press Should Have Asked President Biden

Biden falsely claims the new Georgia law ‘ends voting hours early

William Grimes:

Benjamin Yount:

There are new numbers to go along with claims that online classes are leaving school kids in Wisconsin behind.

Milwaukee Public Schools on Wednesday said just over 30% of high school students failed the fall semester.

Data from Milwaukee schools showed 30.3% of MPS high schoolers failed last fall, compared to 18.8% in the fall of 2019.

The difference, besides the huge increase, is that Milwaukee Public Schools were online only in the fall of 2020.

The revelation comes as Milwaukee schools prepare to welcome some students back to class next month. MPS’ board this week approved a return to in-person classes for kids in elementary school and junior high. MPS will bring high school seniors back, but freshmen, sophomores, and juniors will continue to learn from home.

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

Fort Meade:

The National Security Agency published a cybersecurity product, “Embracing a Zero Trust Security Model,” on Thursday. This product shows how deploying Zero Trust security principles can better position cybersecurity professionals to secure enterprise networks and sensitive data. To provide NSA’s customers with a foundational understanding of Zero Trust, this product discusses its benefits along with potential challenges, and makes recommendations for implementing Zero Trust within their networks.

The Zero Trust model eliminates trust in any one element, node, or service by assuming that a breach is inevitable or has already occurred. The data-centric security model constantly limits access while also looking for anomalous or malicious activity.

Adopting the Zero Trust mindset and leveraging Zero Trust principles will enable systems administrators to control how users, processes, and devices engage with data. These principles can prevent the abuse of compromised user credentials, remote exploitation, or insider threats, and even mitigate effects of supply chain malicious activity.

Jon Marcus:

 A Yale-educated evolutionary biologist and a member of the faculty at Catholic, liberal arts-focused Sacred Heart University, Geffrey Stopper also oversees one of its newest courses: Advanced Craft Beverage Brewing.

Sacred Heart is launching career-focused programs like this to give its students vocational credentials that can speed them into their first jobs while expanding the university’s market to older adults who are hoping to get new ones.

After all, there are 115 breweries in Connecticut, according to the Connecticut Brewers Guild, employing about 6,000 people. But there are no other formal training programs in the state to cover such things as brewery management and brewing theory.

“You need to know how enzymes work and how acids work and apply equations to what you’re doing,” Stopper said of the program, standing on a catwalk overlooking fermentation tanks and repurposed wine and whiskey barrels filled with beer in the cavernous warehouse of Two Roads Brewery, where the course is taught.