3.5

David Ogilvy, in Ogilvy on Advertising, discusses brand imaging with the following:

You now have to decide what ‘image’ you want for your brand. Image means personality. Products, like people, have personalities, and they can make or break them in the marketplace. The personality of a product is an amalgam of many things — its name, its packaging, its price, the style of its advertising, and, above all, the nature of the product itself. Every advertisement should be thought of as a contribution to the brand image. It follows that your advertising should consistently project the same image, year after year.

Extending this framing of brand image, one might define brand marketing as any activity that inculcates within the consumer a particular brand’s personality. The purpose of brand advertising, with that in mind, is to differentiate one brand from others such that consumers prefer it when confronted with the choice. In Brand equity on mobile, I discuss the concept of brand equity, which is the quantified value of a brand, measured across two vectors of consumer impact: 1) the ability for a brand to charge a price premium given consumer familiarity and receptiveness, and 2) the degree of amplification that a brand bestows upon a firm’s advertising activities (a sort of advertising effectiveness premium). Direct Response marketing is a wholly different undertaking than Brand marketing and fulfills a different objective. Direct Response marketing is almost exclusively accomplished through digital advertising for digital products, and its purpose is to foment an impulse on the consumer’s part to immediately purchase or otherwise engage with the product. Ideally, this opportunity is guided through audience and intent targeting such that the advertisement collides with need or desire at an appropriate time and results in an outcome for the advertiser (known in advertising parlance as a conversion).

It’s unclear how that dispute will resolve, and such patent fights can take years to unfold. It’s also unclear how aggressive the federal agency will ultimately be over its co-inventor status. As Nature pointed out earlier, the agency has tended to let industry partners handle intellectual property rights as it sees its role largely in the foundational research. But with drug prices continuing to skyrocket in the US, political will is shifting for the government to be more involved in the outcomes of its early-stage efforts.

Although VR and AR devices are nowhere to be seen in Apple’s current product line, the company is deemed a key player in the industry. “Everyone, especially VR companies in China, is waiting for Apple’s debut to point them in the right direction,” said Max Ive, an ex-Xiaomi employee who used to work on interactive design for Xiaomi’s AR equipment.

Production at North Sea oil fields between the U.K. and Norway has long tapered, buoying the Brent benchmark seen by investors as a global price gauge. At the same time, U.S. drillers produced a near-record 11.9 million barrels a day in 2022, according to the Energy Information Administration, which projects record highs this year and next. That is depressing the price for West Texas Intermediate crude, the U.S. standard, expanding the difference between Brent and WTI, said Gus Vasquez, head of crude pricing, Americas, at price-reporting firm Argus Media. In recent weeks, winter storms also slammed U.S. refineries, leaving many unable to process as much crude as usual. The disruption led to a relentless build in domestic stockpiles that are now 9% larger than the five-year average observed by federal record-keepers.

When settling healthcare bills, the Old Order Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania rely on an ethos of mutual aid, independent of the government. Consonant with this philosophy, many Amish do not participate in or receive benefits from Social Security or Medicare. They are also exempted from the Affordable Care Act of 2010. This study expands the limited documentation of Amish Hospital Aid, an Amish health insurance program that covers major medical costs. Interview data from 11 Amish adults in Lancaster County depict how this aid program supplements traditional congregational alms coverage of medical expenses. T

Michael Lombardi, Boeing’s archivist, has been the company’s historian for more than 30 years. He’s nearing retirement age and can’t help but think about doing so. But his enthusiasm for his work remains high and contemplating life after this career is challenging. Lombardi has a couple of books in mind as possibilities. He certainly has the resources to fall back on to tell stories that haven’t been told, even by the most dedicated of authors.

All of these areas are really important areas but they require a lot of science behind them.

The changes and belt-tightening have frayed employee relations. A company Slack channel called “airing of grievances” has more than 22,000 members and a string of complaints about attendance proposals and perquisite cuts.

She did so out of desperation. Florence’s husband, Charles Clarence “C.?C.” Butt, fell ill with tuberculosis and couldn’t work; it was up to Florence to support the family, which included three young sons. In the days before antibiotics, prevailing medical wisdom held that tuberculosis could be cured through rest and exposure to fresh air in warm, relatively dry climates. Butt’s doctor had advised him to move to such a place. The family chose Texas—moving first to San Antonio, in 1904, and a year later to Kerrville, a half hour southwest of Fredericksburg. Today the town is a tourist destination, known for its spring wildflowers and summer folk festival—but a century ago it was a remote, rugged place where chronically ill Americans sought refuge. Physician George Parsons, from Chebanse, Illinois, had himself recovered from tuberculosis in the Hill Country town; he later wrote about his experience in a medical journal and started Kerrville’s first sanatorium, bringing still more patients hoping for a cure.

McCaleb’s space habitation company, Vast, emerged publicly last fall with a plan to build space stations that featured artificial gravity. This was significant because NASA and most other space agencies around the world have devoted little time to developing systems for artificial gravity in space, which may be important for long-term human habitation due to the deleterious effects of microgravity experienced by astronauts on the International Space Station. Vast boasted three technical advisers who were major players in the success of SpaceX—Hans Koenigsmann, Will Heltsley, and Yang Li—but did not offer too much information about its plans.

Hong Kong, the refuge for about one million Chinese who had fled the Communists, became the center of activity for the Third Force. The CIA-backed Fight League for a Free and Democratic China operating there recruited volunteers from among the refugees to train as anti-Communist foot soldiers to be smuggled onto the mainland. They were sent for training in counterrevolution in Okinawa, Japan, and in Saipan, a U.S.-controlled island in the Western Pacific. To lead the effort, the Americans hired a disaffected general of Chiang’s Nationalist forces, Zhang Fakui. In a memorable conversation at Hong Kong’s Foreign Press Club, Zhang warned one of the American organizers, “Anyone who lands on the mainland will be captured.” The Communists, he said, would outwit the foreign forces at every turn. He also contended that much of the intelligence on what was going on inside China was fake. Zhang’s suspicions turned out to be correct, but he nonetheless accepted a leadership position in the American scheme.

2023 Food & Wellness Trends

Most importantly, he misunderstands the foundation of the American Empire. It lies in our political stability, our economic growth, our network of allies, and our military power. The role of the US dollar is a result of these things, not a cause.

1,300 of our players provided information to share with one another about their current club, to not only help them make important career decisions, but also help raise standards across the league.

The Global Seed Vault in the Norwegian Arctic, which opened in 2008, is closed to the public and shrouded in mystery, the subject of numerous internet doomsday conspiracy theories. Now, to celebrate the vault’s 15th anniversary, everyone is invited on a virtual tour to see inside the vastcollection of tubers, rice, grains and other seeds buried deep in the mountain behind five sets of metal doors.

I think this latest piece of work can teach us a few things. First, that great cartography, which looks effortless, is not easy. Sure, anyone can make a map, but making a great map demands careful thought, a knowledge of the craft, and the experience of knowing how to approach the hundreds of decisions that are required in getting from an idea to execution. Great maps don’t just fall off the page. They take work to make them work.

Citizens have every right to question the role of their governments, particularly in times of war. Some of the dynamics around policing criticism of Zelenskyy or the Ukrainian government or the U.S. support for it are reminiscent of the efforts to stifle criticism of Israelthrough charges of antisemitism. Not only is this an intellectually bankrupt line of attack, but it also runs contrary to the vital principle of free debate in democratic societies. It also seeks to relegate to a dungeon of insignificance the vast U.S. record of foreign policy, military, and intelligence catastrophes as well as its abuses and crimes by pretending that only lackeys for Moscow would dare question our role in a foreign conflict on the other side of the globe.

An unintended side effect of the Federal Reserve’s rate hikes is that many banks and institutions are holding an unfathomable amount of low-yield debt that is now worth far less than it was a year ago. We went from a world where 100-Year Austrian bonds would pay only 0.39% yields, to one where we’re now concerned about 8-9% annual inflation, in just two years.

10.30

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.

10.9

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.

7.31

What started as a free (yet limited) tool was OpenAI’s strategic move to gather millions of users and data. This set up the pathway for their latest enterprise solution opening up a 100 billion-dollar market. And it also spells the beginning of the end for a human design workforce as AI will eventually replace low-to-medium-skilled graphic designers. In the not-so-distant future, all types of workers will be displaced as AI upends industries. Are you going to be replaced by an AI? The short answer is: yes–it’s only a matter of time. The long answer is more complicated as it varies on the type of work you do and the rate of AI development. And, how can we predict when specific jobs will be automated by AI? To answer that we need to travel around the world, figuratively.

But Mansa Musa was only the second ruler to come along bearing the wisdom of Solomon. The wisdom to keep quiet about the true nature of your ‘lost mine of Ophir’. The wisdom to know that your secret mines will be hidden in plain sight and that the Devil himself has your back. The wisdom to know how to leverage two separate sets of cultural tradition, into one inferential knowledge, and an advantage over all other nations.

“We were in a motel dining room somewhere in Texas. Paul laid his knife and fork down soon after he had started his meal. ‘I don’t know whether to thank you or not,’ he bellowed. ‘Most of my life I could eat anything anywhere, but now look what you have done to me. This damned rubbish …’ With that, he pushed his plate back in disgust.”

“Before Diana’s books, not even people in Mexico thought their food was a big deal,” says Iliana de la Vega, a chef from Oaxaca who knew Kennedy and co-owns the restaurant El Naranjo in Austin. (De la Vega was recently named Best Chef: Texas by the James Beard Foundation.) “Mexican food was eaten at home,” she adds, “and in the markets, but not in fancy restaurants—or really in any restaurants at all.” At that time in Mexico, fine food was European, especially French. “Diana was one of the first people to take Mexican cooking seriously,” she said. “The work she did, traveling around the country, was amazing.”

Hospitals last year came under a similar directive, which stems from the Affordable Care Act, to post what they’ve agreed to accept from insurers — and the amounts they charge patients paying cash. Yet many dragged their feet, saying the rule is costly and time-consuming. Their trade association, the American Hospital Association, sued unsuccessfully to halt it. Many hospitals just never complied and federal government enforcement has proven lax.

These ‘beautiful and impressive photos,’ as Mr. Yamaki says, are the byproduct of the proprietary three-layer design Sigma’s Foveon sensors use. Rather than the Bayer filter mosaic most conventional sensors use, which consists of arranging Red, Green or Blue color filters atop each photo sensor, Foveon sensors capture light with different energies at three different depths in the sensor, then reconstruct the red, green and blue information. This structure results in full color detail at every pixel, and eliminates the softness that comes from the demosaicing process used to fill in the color gaps in the Bayer design

Photographer and visual artist Reuben Wu, whose shot campaigns for the likes of Audi, Google and Samsung, was tasked with capturing a well-known prehistoric monument for the August cover of National Geographicmagazine. Wu always takes an unconventional approach in his work, so it’s hardly surprising that he showcases Stonehenge in a way never seen before with the help of drones.

The study, published Tuesday by the Epic Health Research Network, used data from Epic’s Cosmos database, which includes records from 149 million patients at hospitals and clinics in all 50 states.

Researchers assessed how often Paxlovid is being prescribed and how well it worked for the patients who took it, which in turn provides evidence about the effectiveness of the federal Test to Treat plan, said Dr. Jacqueline Gerhart, vice president of clinical informatics at Epic Systems.

Wait said he logged onto MyVote Wisconsin on Tuesday and entered the names and birth dates of Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R) and Racine Mayor Cory Mason (D) — two officials with whom he has repeatedly clashed, especially on voting-related issues. Posing as them, he asked to have their ballots sent to his own home.

In a letter addressed to the US Congress last month, President Joe Biden confirmed that Washington deployed troops to Yemen to provide military support for the Saudi-led coalition. “A number of American military personnel are deployed in Yemen,” the US president said, “to conduct operations against Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and ISIS, as well as provide military advice and information to the Saudi-led coalition.”

These outcomes make no sense in climate terms, naturally. Nissan is giving up its pioneering electric Leaf in favor of a big electric SUV aimed at affluent shoppers. One manufacturer that speaks confidently of profits in the near term from electric vehicles is Porsche—whose cars don’t rack up Camry-like mileages, don’t displace gasoline-powered trips to the Shop-Rite, and don’t stand a snowball’s chance of offsetting the emissions involved in producing their powerful batteries.

3.27

How did this work? In brief, Europe’s political fragmentation spurred productive competition. It meant that European rulers found themselves competing for the best and most productive intellectuals and artisans. The economic historian Eric L Jones called this ‘the States system’. The costs of European political division into multiple competing states were substantial: they included almost incessant warfare, protectionism, and other coordination failures. Many scholars now believe, however, that in the long run the benefits of competing states might have been larger than the costs. In particular, the existence of multiple competing states encouraged scientific and technological innovation.

Commentary on iPhone cameras

Asia travel notes.

What Data Do The Google Dialer and Messages
Apps
On Android Send to Google

Plus, the black mark on their files means they often can’t get a contract with more favourable fixed rates.

When the device is installed, a stove or anything else requiring 240 volts of electricity won’t work.

Load limiters allow for continued operation of a furnace, a few lights and small appliances (but only one at a time). If too much electricity is used at once, the limiter will trip — turning off the power all together, until the meter is reset physically by the client or remotely by the distribution company.

There are many players in the field – Epic, Cerner, Meditech, AllScripts, AthenaHealth, to name a few. It isn’t necessarily bad to have many players, but these players don’t cooperate in data interoperability, as they see the difficulty of data migration as a competitive moat. (Taxpayers have lavishly subsidized electronic medical record sales)

Hacking Google Maps to fake a traffic jam.

You don’t write the code for the machines, you write it for your colleagues and your future self (unless it’s a throw away project or you’re writing assembly). Write it for the junior ones as a reference.

The Americans came up with a solution: issuing debt to bring the dollar back to the U.S. The Americans started to play a game of printing money with one hand and borrowing money with the other hand. Printing money can make money. Borrowing money can also make money. This financial economy (using money to make money) is much easier than the real (industry-based) economy. Why will it bother with manufacturing industries that have only low value-adding capabilities?

The complete list of alternatives to all Google products

The manager of Blue Origin’s rocket engine program has left the company

Why big nations lose small wars: The politics of asymmetric conflict.

Google routinely hides emails from litigation by CCing attorneys, DOJ alleges

Understanding U.S. values and psychology are not his strong suits. Nor has understanding Russian history and psychology been a strong point of U.S. policymakers.

“When I first noticed the airbrushing on the segment referenced, I thought something was honestly wrong with the video. But then, I watched it again and thought, ‘Wait a minute, this appears to be intentional. Lia’s features are softened,’” Denhoff said. “I then went to my original photo, on the sites that they could access to license the photo, and compared it and immediately saw a difference.”

NCLA Takes on U.S. Surgeon General’s Censoring of Alleged Covid-19 “Misinformation” on Twitter

You can dine and shop well enough in the La Brea district of Los Angeles to forget that its name translates as “tar”. You can savour the treasures of the LA County Museum of Art and ignore the lake of gurgling black goo in the park outside. You can decide against the La Cienega route to LAX and avoid the sight of oil derricks, bobbing up and down like perpetual-motion executive desk toys. In the end, though, even in California, home to the disembodied economy of tech, the coarse physicality of the energy sector is inescapable. And so, ever more, in all our minds, is its importance. The war in Ukraine has put paid to a series of fantasies. No, Germany cannot opt out of History. No, it is not butch to tweet adoringly about a strongman you don’t have to live under or near. Yes, the EU is a dream, not an ogre, for tens of millions of people in its near abroad. Of all the illusions, though, the most quietly punctured is the idea that tech is the industry at the centre of the world: the one that makes it go round. Energy, it turns out, is still a worthier bearer of that mantle. This is an education for anyone born in the half-century since the Opec oil crisis.

The Ultimate Guide to Onboarding Software Engineers

The optimism, however, is the assumption that allowing the war to keep going will necessarily undermine Putin’s position; and that his humiliation in turn will serve as a deterrent to China. I fear these assumptions may be badly wrong and reflect a misunderstanding of the relevant history.

For more than forty years, I struggled to get decent health insurance. My first grown-up job, as a fact checker at a weekly magazine, came with a medical plan, but my wife and I were in our early twenties and therefore didn’t think of that as a benefit. My take-home pay was less than the rent on our apartment, so I quit to become a freelance writer, and for months after that we had no insurance at all. Then my wife, Ann Hodgman, got a job at a book publisher. When our daughter, Laura, was born, in 1984, Ann’s policy covered most of the cost of the delivery.

He began by going to an important center in his industry and becoming an understudy to a master practitioner. Rural Haiti is to health vulnerability what Silicon Valley is to tech innovation. In his early 20s, Paul went there to work for Fritz Lafontant, a Wozniak-like Haitian priest pioneering a community-based approach to the social determinants of health.

San Francisco’s Detracking Experiment

Tom Loveless:

San Francisco Unified School District  (SFUSD) adopted a detracking initiative in 2014-2015 school year, eliminating accelerated middle and high school math classes, including the option for advanced students to take Algebra I in eighth grade. The policy stands today. High schools feature a common math sequence of heterogeneously grouped classes studying Algebra I in ninth grade and Geometry in tenth grade. After 10th grade, students are allowed to take math courses reflecting different abilities and interests.

Implementing Common Core was provided as the impetus for the change. When first proposed, district officials summed up the reform as, “There would no longer be honors or gifted mathematics classes, and there would no longer be Algebra I in 8th grade due to the Common Core State Standards in 8th grade.” Parents received a flyer from the district reinforcing this message, explaining, “The Common Core State Standards in Math (CCSS-M) require a change in the course sequence for mathematics in grades 6-12.” Phi Daro, one of Common Core’s co-authors, served as a consultant to the district on both the design and political strategy of the detracking plan.

The policy was controversial from the start. Parents showed up in community meetings to voice opposition, and a petition urging the district to reverse the change began circulating. District officials launched a public relations campaign to justify the policy. Focused on the goal of greater equity, that campaign continues today. SFUSD declared detracking a great success, claiming that the graduating class of 2018–19, the first graduating class affected by the policy when in eighth grade, saw a drop in Algebra 1 repeat rates from 40% to 8% and that, compared to the previous year, about 10% more students in the class took math courses beyond Algebra 2. Moreover, the district reported enrollment gains by Black and Hispanic students in advanced courses.

Important publications applauded SFUSD and congratulated the district on the early evidence of success. Education Week ran a storyin 2018, “A Bold Effort to End Tracking in Algebra Shows Promise,” that described the reforms with these words: “Part of an ambitious project to end the relentless assignment of underserved students into lower-level math, the city now requires all students to take math courses of equal rigor through geometry, in classrooms that are no longer segregated by ability.”  The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) issued a policy brief portraying the detracking effort as a model for the country. Omitted from these reviews was the fact that the “lower-level math” to which non-algebra 8th graders were assigned was Common Core 8th Grade Math, which SFUSD and NCTM had spent a decade depicting as a rigorous math course, as they do currently.

Jo Boaler, noted math reformer, professor at Stanford, and critic of tracking, teamed up with Alan Schoenfeld, Phil Daro and others to write “How One City Got Math Right” for The Hechinger Report, and Boaler and Schoenfeld published an op-ed, “New Math Pays Dividends for SF Schools” in the San Francisco Chronicle.

In this public relations campaign, there was no mention of math achievement or test scores. Course enrollments and passing grades were presented as meaningful measures by which to measure the success of detracking.

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.

6.6

The science proves people with natural immunity should skip COVID vaccines

After escaping from prison several times in the early 19th century, Eugène-François Vidocq turned himself in — and went on to revolutionize policing.

The possibility of a science in which all the world is thought of computationally casts the study of computers in an important new light. As its practitioners are fond of saying, computer science is not about computers, any more than astronomy is about telescopes, or biology about microscopes. These devices are tools for observing worlds otherwise inaccessible. The computer is a tool for exploring the world of complex processes, whether they involve cells, stars, or the human mind.

A new antitrust case shows that Prime inflates prices across the board, using the false promise of ‘free shipping’ that is anything but free.

The Next Gatekeepers of the Automotive Industry

The most startling aspect, to me, about the modern institutional media is its hyperconformity.

Rear Admiral Harry E. Yarnell of the U.S. Navy had exposed a serious weakness in their defenses and won the simulated attack. And he had done it by going against the prevailing views of military leaders across the U.S. — he believed that in the future, a country’s navy would be successful only if its air capabilities matched its seagoing strength.

Not a shred of doubt: Sweden was right

Why are enterprise systems so terrible?

Looking at the chronology of the dispute, it is apparent that the moment China truly escalated matters was when Canberra demanded an independent inquiry into the origins of Covid-19. Scott Morrison, the Australian prime minister, even called for international experts to be given “weapons inspector-style powers” in conducting their probe. China’s ambassador to Canberra responded by warning that this perceived insult might trigger a boycott of Australian produce by Chinese consumers. Within months, the Chinese government itself had taken the initiative by imposing tariffs.

A grow­ing fight is un­fold­ing across the U.S. as cities con­sider phas­ing out nat­ural gas for home cook­ing and heat­ing, cit­ing con­cerns about cli­mate change, and states push back against these bans.

“all of these disasters brought to you by the total, self-assured unanimity of the highly educated people who are supposed to know what they’re doing, plus the total complacency of the highly educated people who are supposed to be supervising them”.

Why Working From Home Will Stick

Thanks to Facebook and its clampdown on any discussion of the theory that Covid-19 might have been ‘manufactured’ or might have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, people in America, Britain, France and across the globe were subjected to Chinese-style silencing. They were essentially banned from saying things that might embarrass the Chinese Communist Party. The supposedly woke, chilled overlords of the World Wide Web helped to globalise the CCP’s repression of free thought and open debate.

Of course, the Indian paper was quickly withdrawn by its authors, and the notion that COVID-19 could have been man-made was rendered radioactive – for a while.

The statement struck Demaneuf as “totally nonscientific.” To him, it seemed to contain no evidence or information. And so he decided to begin his own inquiry in a “proper” way, with no idea of what he would find. “found that conflicts of interest, stemming in part from large government grants supporting controversial virology research, hampered the U.S. investigation into COVID-19’s origin at every step; “It tackled a fundamental question: How did a novel bat coronavirus get to a major metropolis of 11 million people in central China, in the dead of winter when most bats were hibernating, and turn a market where bats weren’t sold into the epicenter of an outbreak?” In addition, many leading experts had either received or approved funding for gain-of-function research. Their “conflicted” status, said Pottinger, “played a profound role in muddying the waters and contaminating the shot at having an impartial inquiry.” “The sums at stake allow it to “purchase a lot of omertà” from the labs it supports, said Richard Ebright of Rutgers. (In response to detailed questions, an EcoHealth Alliance spokesperson said on behalf of the organization and Daszak, “We have no comment.”)

The nub of the media criticism is, in my view, justified. Last April, I wrote, responding to Rogin’s reporting, that the press should “isolate legitimate questions” from conspiratorial noise “and try and report out the answers”; numerous journalists took this approach to the lab-leak theory, but many others did indeed dismiss it as an illegitimate line of inquiry.

Homeowners, it’s time to ignore your neighbors’ manicured lawns and replace grass with native plants

Hate it when I accidentally develop and deploy a geofenced targeted censorship feature on the anniversary of the censored event, due to human error

5.2.2021

“I think there is a real chance this is a very bad moment for us – ‘Facebook lies about its user #s to get record profits.'” <- Facebook employee.

You can see (familiar) how they strategize spin 1) captured advertising clients lobbying for them, 2) small business!!! etc etc /5

One finds an uncommon freedom at the Farm, in the company of Peter and Kevin, as well as a certain grief, realizing what we’ve habitually missed, and what it’s cost us. If we ignore those who don’t talk, we fail to develop beyond our words.

To succeed, get other people to pay you; to become wealthy, help other people to succeed.

Publishers like The Guardian become conscientious FLoC objectors, as The New York Times and others open to testing the controversial tech

Separating rumor from fact on Covid-19’s origin

An Interview With Linus Torvalds: Linux and Git

The Rise and Fall of a Double Agent

Where Did the Other Dollar Go, Jeff?

The popular cooking website will not publish new beef recipes over concerns about climate change. “We think of this decision as not anti-beef but rather pro-planet,” an article said.

An Ohio Town Grapples With Tearing Down a Plant From the Cold War}

Everything That’s Ever Gone Wrong on My Camping Trips

Apollo 11 Astronaut Michael Collins on the Past and Future of Space Exploration

These are complex decisions that trade off privacy, ease of use and competition, and they might be made by lawyers.

Among the simple programs Chuck Geschke wrote that summer was a way of printing envelopes for the announcement of his daughter’s birth.

That year we anchored in Greece for the summer and spent winter in a Sicilian marina with a good discount.

In short: Don’t wait for the government to fix privacy. Any attempt to curtail and reverse the growing power of surveillance capitalism will have to start from us — the people — through grassroots mobilization. Pass it on.

Your Car Is About To Be a Software Platform, Subscriptions and All

Toilet to table: Michigan farmers feed crops with ‘toxic brew’ of human and industrial waste

Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam lashes out at Western powers for ‘double standards, hypocrisy and lies’

Havana syndrome: NSA officer’s case hints at microwave attacks since 90s

(From a physician friend: “The flu is gone because everyone is sticking to the rules but COVID is rising because no one is sticking to the rules.”)

3.7

Singapore develops new standard for cross-border verification of COVID-19 test results

Epic systems employee climate

I chased the American dream. It brought me back to my father’s deathbed in China.

Xinjiang investigation

Facebook & Privacy

Notes On the Slate Star Codex Controversy

Their goal is to become entrepreneurs. But instead of building products, they create content. Or even worse, they do research and take courses on how to create content.

The Whole Web Pays For Google And Facebook To Be “Free”

Toyota Develops Packaged Fuel Cell System Module to Promote the Hydrogen Utilization toward the Achievement of Carbon Neutrality

TSMC at the head of history’s tide: two high walls and one sharp knife

EVs Could Make Dealerships a Thing of the Past, Too

The Brown M&M’s Principle: How Small Details Can Help Discover Big Issues

India’s new intermediary liability and digital media regulations will harm the open internet

Stupid lessons: It turns out that selecting all objects and changing storage class doesn’t change storage class on all objects. Instead, you have to create a lifecycle rule to transition objects, and tell the lifecycle rule to clear multipart uploads. Otherwise, many objects (in our case, most of them) won’t transition.

This tool lets you confuse Google’s ad network, and a test shows it works

How to poison the data that Big Tech uses to surveil you

The Factual: Best Covid-19 News Sources of 2020

Health Experts Are Telling Healthy People Not to Wear Face Masks for Coronavirus. So Why Are So Many Doing It?

‘I’ve Never Seen Anything Like This’: Chaos Strikes Global Shipping

How Did Absentee Voting Affect the 2020 U.S. Election?

BMW CFO Brushes Off Apple Car Threat: ‘I Sleep Very Peacefully’

Imogen Heap: Decentralising the music industry with blockchain

First flight nears for Berlin Airlift Foundation’s replacement airplane