What do skin moisturizer, anti-malarial drugs and diesel fuel all have in common?

K9s United is a dedicated non-profit organization that focuses on providing essential training, equipment and resources to support law enforcement canines.

Food production is responsible for more than a third of greenhouse gas emissions. To get everyone the food they need in a warming world, governments worldwide must invest in securing our food systems

Los rayos X son un componente habitual de las pruebas diagnosticas y el monitoreo industrial, y se utilizan para todo, desde el control de los dientes hasta el escaneo de maletas en el aeropuerto. Sin embargo, los rayos de elevada energia tambien producen radiacion ionizante, que puede ser peligrosa tras exposiciones prolongadas o excesivas. Ahora, investigadores que publican en ACS Central Science han avanzado hacia rayos X mas seguros con la creacion de un detector altamente sensible y plegable que genera imagenes de buena calidad con dosis mas pequenas de estos rayos.

Jiang He, M.D., Ph.D., Professor and Chair Designate of Epidemiology in the Peter O'Donnell Jr. School of Public Health at UT Southwestern Medical Center, is a 2024 recipient of the American Heart Association's (AHA) highest commendation, the Distinguished Scientist award. The honor recognizes Dr. He's prolific research on reducing the risks of cardiometabolic diseases, including heart disease, stroke, obesity, Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, dyslipidemia, and chronic kidney disease.

Discover the unique Gemini and Libra compatibility! Dive into how these air signs balance each other in love, friendship, and communication. Are they the perfect match?

How can Scotland re-establish its building stone industry?  British Geological Survey

Mary Ann de Lares Norris is Chief Operating Officer of Oblong Industries. She brings her dog LouLou to Oblong's downtown LA headquarters.; Credit: Brian Watt/KPCC

KPCC recently reported on the tech world’s diversity problem. Technology firms face challenges in hiring diverse staffs of its coders, web developers and software engineers.

It’s also a challenge at nonprofits such as Southern California Public Radio,  parent of 89.3 KPCC, which has always sought to build a staff that reflects the region it serves. The section of that staff that develops the KPCC app and makes its website run is all white and mostly male.

But a small talent pool means the diversity challenge is even greater for nonprofits and even smaller tech firms.

“The first problem is that all of the people working for me are male,” says Alex Schaffert, the one female on KPCC’s tech team.  “I’m kind of focusing on maybe getting another girl into the mix.”

Schaffert can use the term “girl” because she happens to be the leader of the tech team:  KPCC’s Managing Director of Digital Strategy and Innovation. 

Why diversity is important

Schaffert recently launched the topic of diversity – or lack thereof – at a weekly meeting of her team. She expected a “stilted and awkward” discussion from the five white men on her team, but a few of them didn’t hold back.  

“Not having diversity represented on the team leaves us more susceptible to circular thinking and everyone sort of verifying each other's assumptions,” said Joel Withrow,  who was serving at the time as KPCC’s Product Manager. “It impacts the work. It limits what you’re able to build.”

Sean Dillingham, KPCC’s Design and Development Manager, said living in a diverse community is what attracted him to Los Angeles, and he wants diversity in his immediate work team, too.

“When I look at other tech companies, I will often go to their ‘about us’ page, where they’ll have a page of photos of everyone, and I am immediately turned off when I just see just a sea of white dudes, or even just a sea of dudes,” Dillingham said.

Big competition, small talent pool

Dillingham and Schaffert are currently recruiting heavily to fill two tech-savvy positions. When a reporter or editor job opens up at KPCC, Schaffert says close to 100 resumes come in.

"But if you post a programmer job, and you get three or four resumes, you may not get lucky among those resumes," she says. "There may not be a woman in there. There may not be a person of color in there."

In other words, the talent pool is already small, and the diversity challenge makes it even smaller. KPCC is competing for talent with Google and Yahoo and all the start-ups on L.A.’s Silicon Beach. 

Schaffert’s being proactive, mining LinkedIn and staging networking events to attract potential candidates. She’s also trying to make sure KPCC’s job descriptions don’t sound like some she's seen in the tech world.

"If you read between the lines, they’re really looking for someone who is male and is somewhere between 25-30 years old and likes foosball tables and free energy drinks in the refrigerator," Schaffert says. “So you read between lines, and you know that they’re not talking about me, a mother of two kids who also has a demanding career. They're talking about someone different.”

Pay vs. passion

Schaffert's challenges and approaches to dealing with them are similar to those of Mary Ann de Lares Norris, the Chief Operating Officer at Oblong Industries. Based in downtown Los Angeles and founded in 2006, the company designs operating platforms for businesses that allow teams to collaborate in real time on digital parts of a project.

“I think technology and diversity is tough,” Norris told KPCC.  She’s proud her company’s management ranks are diverse, but says only 12 percent of its engineers are female. “Pretty standard in the tech industry, but it’s not great,” Norris says. “We really strive to increase that number, and all of the other companies are also, and it's really hard.”

Like Schaffert at KPCC, Norris works hard fine-tuning job descriptions and communicating that her company values diversity and work-life balance. But sometimes, it just boils down to money.

"We have to put out offers that have competitive salaries,” Norris says, adding that she can’t compete with the major tech firms. "The Googles and the Facebooks of the world can always pay more than we can. So we attract people who are passionate about coming to work for Oblong.  And, of course, we also offer stock options."

KPCC doesn’t have the  stock options, but we’ve got plenty of passion. Could that be the secret recruiting weapon for both small tech companies and nonprofits?  

LinkedIn recently surveyed engineers about what they look for in an employer. Good pay and work-life balance were the two top draws. Slightly more women prioritized work-life balance and slightly more men chose the big bucks. 

Clinical Entrepreneurship professor Adlai Wertman says that, historically, nonprofits and small businesses actually had the upper hand over big companies in recruiting minorities and women.

"There’s a feeling that they’re safer, more caring environments, less killer environments, and we know that corporate America has been the bastion of white males," said Wertman. 

But Wertman says that advantage disappears in the tech world because of the "supply-and-demand" problem with talent. When big firms decide to focus on diversity – as some have recently — they have plenty of resources.

"They’re always going to be able to pay more, and in truth they’re getting access to students coming out of these schools in ways that we as nonprofits and small companies never will," said Wertman. 

Wertman worked 18 years as an investment banker on Wall Street, then left to head a nonprofit on L.A.’s skid row. Now he heads the Brittingham Social Enterprise Lab Enterprise Lab at USC’s Marshall School of Business. He believes that, early on, the big companies have the best shot attracting diverse tech talent. But in the long run, much of that talent will turn back to smaller firms and nonprofits.

"I think ultimately people vote with where they’re most comfortable, where 'my values align with my employer's values, and if I don’t feel those values align, then I’m going to leave,'" Wertman said. "Ultimately, I think, for a lot of women and minorities, there’s a lot of value alignment within communities that are doing good in the world." 

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

; Credit: John Rabe

Dear Off-Ramp fans,

What is a blog, after all? Words and images.

And what is a radio story on the web? Words, images, and sound.

Can't they live together in harmony? We say YES.

And with that in mind, we're killing the Off-Ramp blog page.  

But don't fear; we're not cutting back on content: everything that would have found a home here - Marc Haefele's art reviews, recommendations for fun events, etc. -- will now be on the regular web page of the Off-Ramp radio show. 

All the old blog entries will continue to stay on this page as an archive, like Catherine Deneuve's fading vampire lovers in The Hunger.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Egan Food Technologies, a confectionery and baking process equipment manufacturer and service provider, will unveil at Pack Expo a new slab-bar forming line that is manufactured and serviced from the company’s headquarters in Grand Rapids, Mich. 

Hauppauge, NY, January 27, 2014 – The Ross PreMax is a batch-style rotor/stator mixer designed for ultra-high shear conditions and vigorous flow, an ideal combination that supports high-speed production of fine dispersions and emulsions. 

Inclusion Technologies LLC has just introduced an all-natural and non-GMO version of their 100% nut-free Nadanut™ nut analogs.

The new logo reinforces the snack manufacturer’s focus on premium branded snacks.

How can smaller, locally-owned home service businesses compete with larger companies for a new generation of workers? Beyond better pay and a more engaging culture, they must use technology to attract younger employees.

ISHN’s exclusive 2015 Media Technology Study (conducted in the fall 2014) reports on how environmental health and safety professionals make use of today’s business technologies

Kinshuk Dutta honored for more than 15 years of professional success

Discover AppatMe, the fresh approach to online dating! Using AI, our platform creates deeper, personalized connections for singles across the U.S., moving beyond random matches to deliver tailored, meaningful encounters.

October US container imports were 2,494,635 TEUs, marking the fourth month in a row of volumes exceeding 2.4 million TEUs, a threshold that has historically strained US maritime logistics, the November Global Shipping Report by Descartes Systems Group noted. For the first ten months of 2024, volumes grew by 13.1 per cent YoY. At seven of the top 10 US ports, transit time delays rose in October.

This image shows a particular optical illusion that confronts us every day. Notice the difference between the black text on a white background and the reverse. With reversed type — light text on a darker background — the strokes seem bolder.

Black text on white is very familiar, so we can be forgiven for thinking it correctly proportioned. For familiarity’s sake we can say it is, but there are two effects happening here: The white background bleeds over the black, making the strokes seem thinner. With reversed type the opposite is true: The white strokes bleed over the black, making it seem bolder.

One of the most obvious examples of this is with signs where the letters are punched into the surround then lit from inside. In his article, Designing the ultimate wayfinding typeface, Ralph Herrmann used his own Legibility Text Tool to simulate this effect for road and navigational signs.

One might say that characters are only correctly proportioned with low-contrast. Although objective reality hails that as true, it isn’t a good reason to always set type with low contrast. Type designers have invariably designed around optical illusions and the constraints of different media for us. Low-contrast text can also create legibility and accessibility problems. Fortunately, kind folks like Gez Lemon have provided us with simple tools to check.

As fascinating as optical illusions are —  the disturbing, impossible art of Escher comes to mind — we can design around reversed body type. On the Web, increasing tracking and leading are as simple as increasing the mis-named letter-spacing and line-height in CSS. However, decreasing font weight is a thornier problem. Yes, we will be able to use @font-face to select a variant with a lighter weight, but the core web fonts offer us no options, and there are only a few limited choices with system fonts like Helvetica Neue.

Reversing a logotype

For logotype there are plenty of options, but it makes me slightly uncomfortable to consider switching to a lighter font for reversed type logos. The typeface itself is not the logotype; the variant is, so switching font could be tricky. Ironically, I’d have to be very sure that that was no perceivable difference using a lighter weight font. Also, with display faces, there’s often not a lighter weight available — a problem I came across designing the Analog logo.

The logotype worked well when testing it in black on white. However, I wanted a reversed version, too. That’s when I noticed the impact of the optical illusion:

It looked bloated! Objective reality be damned; it simply wouldn’t do. After a few minutes contemplating the carnage of adjusting every control point by hand, I remembered something; eureka!

Punching the paths through a background image in Fireworks CS4 removed the illusion. (Select both the path and the background then using Modify > Combine Paths > Punch.) Is this a bug? I don’t know, but if it is, it’s a useful one for a change!

I grinned. I was happy. All was well with the world again. Lovely! Now I could go right ahead and think about colour and I wouldn’t be far from done. This is how it emerged:

A final note on logotype design & illusions

Before we even got to actual type for the Analog logo, we first had to distill what it would convey. In our case, Alan took us through a process to define the brand values and vision. What emerged were keywords and concepts that fed into the final design. The choice of type, colour, and setting were children of that process. Style is the offspring of meaning.

I always work in greyscale for the first iterations of a new logo for a few simple reasons:

1. The form has to work independently of colour — think printing in greyscale or having the logo viewed by people with a colour-impairment.
2. It allows for quick testing of various sizes — small, high contrast versions will emphasise rendering and legibility issues at screen resolutions, especially along curves.
3. I like black and white. :)

I realise that in this day and age the vast majority of logos need to perform primarily on the Web. However, call me old-fashioned, but I still think that they should work in black and white, too.

Brands and display faces emerged with consumer culture during the 19^th Century. Logotypes were displayed prominently in high streets, advertising hoardings, and on sign boards. In many instances the message would be in black and white. They were designed to be legible from a distance, at a glance, and to be instantly recognisable. Even with colour, contrast was important.

The same is true for the Web today; only the context has changed, and the popularity of logomarks and icons. We should always test any logo at low resolutions and sizes, and the brand must still have good contrast (regardless of WCAG 2.0) to be optimal. A combination of colour and form works wonders, but in a world of a million colours where only a handful are named in common parlance, having the right form still seems a smarter choice than trying to own a palette or colour.

A final word

This article was prompted by a happy accident followed by a bit of reading. There are many references to optical illusions in design and typography books. The example image at the start of this article was inspired by one found in the excellent Stop Stealing Sheep and Find Out How Type Works by Erik Spiekermann and E.M. Ginger. There’s also plenty of online material about optical or visual illusions you can dive into. There’s also more on . Oh, and don’t forget the work of M. C. Escher!

Human eyes are amazing. In two sets of watery bags we get a wide-angle lens with incredibly sharp focus and ridiculous depth of field. Apparently our brain is even clever enough to compensate for the lag in the signal getting from retina to cortex. I know next to nothing about ocular science. Spending a morning reading and thinking about optical illusions, and contemplating my own view here in the garden office is pretty awe-inspiring. If only my photographs were as good as my eyes, illusions or no.

The first Seesmic video microblog post has been published. [27 June 2008]

A page has been setup on the IWMW 2008 Web site which provides access to Seesmic video blog posts. [30 June 2008]

The Scribblelive live blog service will be used to provide a commentary on the plenary talks at the IWMW 2008 event. A test Scribblelive blog page has been set up to allow users to familirise themselves with the service. [4 July 2008]

A number of new blog posts including a 'Welcome to Aberdeen' message have been added to the video blog page. [16 July 2008]

Rob Bristow, JISC as Programme Manager for e-Administration gives a plenary talk on Institutional Responses to Emergent Technologies - What JISC is Doing. As users of all sorts become more familiar with new technologies (including both Web 2.0 type software tools and user-owned devices) and become used to, and expectant of, managing their own data through 'self-service' applications and systems, questions are asked of institutions as to how they will respond to these new demands. JISC has been investigating this area through strands within its e-Learning and Users and Innovation programmes which have been focussed in the main on the learners' and users' experience. JISC has recently funded a further series of projects that address the way that institutions are responding to these new challenges, looking at organisational policies, practice and strategies, as well as funding pilot projects that demonstrate actual institutional responses. This work is in its early stages but the scope of the responses to the call for projects and some of the early results of the landscape study will provide some interesting real life information about institutional responses from across the sector. This talk will describe the work that JISC is doing and relate it to the Institutional Web Manager world.

A new Victorian Government medical technology strategy will position Victoria as an internationally competitive developer of medical technology. Victoria’s Medical Technology Industry Strategy will create more high value jobs and attract investment for the state’s advanced manufacturing sector.

A new wearable pressure sensor has been developed which could be used to monitor people’s health at anytime and anywhere. Researchers from Monash University’s Departments of Chemical Engineering and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and the Melbourne Centre for Nanofabrication, produced the new sensor by sandwiching ultrathin gold nanowire-impregnated tissue paper between two polymer sheets.

Malaria is a devastating disease, affecting 200 million people worldwide and causing more than 600 000 deaths each year. In the past decade, great inroads have been made in reducing the number of infections, primarily through the implementation of insecticide-laced bed nets, and also reducing the death rate with combination therapies. However the emergence of drug-resistant malaria is rendering these therapies less effective, and there is an urgent need to develop novel therapies to cure malaria.

Rohlig Australia will open a new branch office in the Melbourne western suburb of Truganina in mid 2015. The new Melbourne base for the international logistics company will be a modern 8,730sqm facility that includes space for a large warehouse and an open plan office.

La Trobe University in Melbourne will bring its world-class scientific expertise to the newly launched Olivia Newton-John Cancer Research Institute (ONJCRI).

Applications are now open for the second round of the prestigious A$1.8 million Victorian Postdoctoral Research Fellowships Program, being delivered by veski. The fellowships aim to strengthening Victoria’s innovation capabilities by enabling talented young researchers to work at world leading research centres before returning to Victoria. The Victorian Government offered six fellowships in 2013 and is again offering up to six fellowships to begin in 2015.

The Victorian Government has secured the right for Melbourne to continue to host the Australian leg of the world’s largest digital games festival, the Penny Arcade Expo Australia (PAX Aus), for the next five years until 2019.

An additional round of veski innovation fellowships – a prestigious Victorian program to attract outstanding global leaders in science and research to Victoria – is actively seeking applications from outstanding women in science and research.

For the second year in a row, the Penny Arcade Expo Australia (PAX Aus) was held in Melbourne from 31 October 2014 to 2 November 2014. It opened to the news that Melbourne had secured the right to continue to host the event for the next five years, a huge coup for Victoria and for all Australian digital gaming fans. The announcement meant that Melbourne would host the iconic event, which attracts the world’s biggest and most influential digital games developers, publishers, and enthusiastic players, until at least 2019.

The Feynman Prize for Nanotechnology was awarded last month to Dr Amanda Barnard. Often referred to as the Nobel Prize of nanoscience, the prize’s importance is remarkable in that it recognises prodigious talent in the sector and is a reliable predictor of scientific discoveries with a very high translational impact on industry.

Event Begins: Thursday, November 14, 2024 6:00pm
Location: Study Center
Organized By: Maize Pages Student Organizations

Hi all,We are excited to invite you to Ratio Christi Meeting this Thursday 11/14 from 6-7 pm! The question for this week is: "How do Christianity and Buddhism  differ?" Our meeting will be held at the Study Center at 611 1/2 E. William St. Ann Arbor. This is a safe space for inquiring about religion and faith. Your perspectives are valued in fostering a thoughtful understanding of these subjects. All are welcome!! There will be pizza! If you are interested in learning more about us, you can join the Ratio Christi Maize page for updates and discussions: Ratio Christi Maize page. We're also active on Instagram: Ratio Christi Instagram page. We are excited to see you all soon and please feel free to reach out with any questions! Sincerely,Ratio Christi Team ????

Event Begins: Thursday, November 14, 2024 3:00pm
Location: East Hall
Organized By: Topology Seminar - Department of Mathematics

The Torelli group is the subgroup of the mapping class group of a surface acting trivially on the first homology of the surface. The first rational homology of the Torelli group is known for a closed surface of genus 2 by work of Mess, and for closed surfaces of genus at least 3 by work of Johnson. We will discuss forthcoming work with Putman that computes the second rational homology of the Torelli group for all closed surfaces of genus at least 6. In particular, we will show that this homology group is an algebraic representation of the symplectic group. Combined with the work of Kupers and Randal-Williams, this partially resolves Church and Farb's conjecture that the rational homology of the Torelli group is representation stable over the symplectic group.

Event Begins: Thursday, November 14, 2024 3:00pm
Location: Medical Science Unit II
Organized By: Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology

Mentor: Kristen Verhey

Event Begins: Thursday, November 14, 2024 1:30pm
Location: North Campus Research Complex Building 32
Organized By: Chemical Engineering

Abstract:
The chemical and petrochemical industries consume nearly 30% of global energy use, nearly half of which is a result of chemical separations. A major opportunity exists in identifying more efficient, productive, and environmentally friendly processes that operate in a continuous fashion. One attractive possibility is membrane-based separations, but significant materials limitations exist in designing membranes that can selectively distinguish between molecules with sub-angstrom differences in size and nearly identical thermodynamic properties. To survey these challenges and describe emerging opportunities, a brief overview of the current state-of-the-art in membrane-based materials and applications will be presented. Next, several design strategies will be presented on how to leverage pore structure and pore functionality to control separation performance. A particular emphasis will be placed on new materials chemistries with a focus on testing materials under complex gas mixtures and for extended periods of time. Microporous materials, including polymers of intrinsic microporosity (PIMs) and metal–organic frameworks (MOFs), will be highlighted to demonstrate the many opportunities that exist for scientists and engineers to tackle global challenges in chemical separations today.

Speaker Bio:
Zachary P. Smith is an Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT. He has been recognized with several awards, including the DoE Early Career Award, NSF CAREER Award, ONR Young Investigator Award, AIChE 35 Under 35 Award, AIChE Kunesh Award for Separations, and the North American Membrane Society Young Membrane Scientist Award. He was also awarded the Frank E. Perkins Award for Excellence in Graduate Advising at MIT. Prof. Smith serves on the Board of Directors for the North American Membrane Society and is an Associate Editor for Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research. He is a co-founder and Chief Scientist for Osmoses Inc., a startup company aiming to commercialize membrane technology.

Event Begins: Thursday, November 14, 2024 12:00pm
Location: Palmer Commons
Organized By: DCMB Tools and Technology Seminar

This presentation will be held in 2036 Palmer Commons. There will also be a remote viewing option via Zoom.

Event Begins: Thursday, November 14, 2024 9:00am
Location: Dana Natural Resources Building
Organized By: Institute for Global Change Biology IGCB

Join Us for the Institute for Global Change Biology Mini-Symposium!

Explore the cutting-edge research advancing our understanding of public health, sustainability, and ecology at the Institute for Global Change Biology's upcoming mini-symposium. This event will highlight diverse and impactful projects led by our postdoctoral research fellows, showcasing insights that address pressing global challenges. Enjoy a day of science, discussion, and discovery—with snacks and lunch provided!


09:00 Coffee/Tea

09:30 Khandaker Jafor Ahmed: Exploring climate, health, and environment in
coastal vs. Lake Victoria regions of Kenya

09:45 Stephanie Schmiege: Living at the edge: Physiological controls of the
northern limits of treeline

10:00 Leo Ohyama: Macroecological dynamics of ant colony sizes

10:15 Hengxing Zou: Functional shifts of North American avian communities over
half a century

10:30 Kirby Mills: Fire and drought conditions reshape habitat suitability for large
mammals in the American West

10:45 Sarah Raubenheimer: Competition and functional traits mediate CO2
fertilization of plant growth

11:00 Coffee/Tea Snacks

11:20 Wenqi Luo: Continental-scale evaluation of soil fungal biodiversity under
future climate and land-use changes

11:35 Liting Zheng: Plant functional trait responses to long-term elevated CO2
and nitrogen enrichment, and consequences for outcomes of species
interactions

11:50 Tsun Fung Au: Tree growth responses to drought, CO2, and nitrogen
deposition

12:05 Thiago Gonçalves Souza: Increasing species turnover does not alleviate
biodiversity loss in fragmented landscapes

12:20 Kara Dobson: A global meta-analysis of passive experimental warming
effects on plant traits and community properties

12:35 Katie Rocci: Integrating microbial community data into ecosystem-scale
models in the face of climate change

12:50 Lunch

Seer Enters Into a Co-Marketing and Sales Agreement With Thermo Fisher Scientific  Technology Networks

The internet studies scholar holds the David O. Sears Presidential Chair in Social Sciences.

Posted by Brandon Z. on Nov 13

Posted by Roman Tatarnikov on Nov 13

Posted by Francis Booth via NANOG on Nov 13

Posted by William Herrin on Nov 13