EIFS is like any other building material in the sense that it is well-suited for some uses and not for others. This column is a compilation of my thoughts about where EIFS works well and where it does not, including some unusual specialty uses.

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.

With all the over-the-counter and prescription products available for treating a wide array of skin care conditions, most people are not aware of which dry skin treatment lotions are the best for one's skin.

Casi dos millones de españoles (6,1 %) sufre insomnio crónico, un problema que afecta más a las mujeresy que tiene una enorme repercusión social y económica. En España genera la pérdida de 10.703 millones de euros al año, el 0,8% del PIB. Visitamos las camas patrias en busca de aquello que nos quita el sueño. Leer

 Leer

Ideas reviejas en un mundo moderno.

Este es un artículo sobre el cambio climático, pero dejo a los lectores que encuentren el porqué.

En la tesitura global, necesitamos una cultura no tribal.

Una ciudadana critica el estado del consulado español en Argelia.

El líder del PP está convencido de que las explicaciones que dará Mazón el jueves en las Cortes "reconfortarán parcialmente" a los ciudadanos Leer

El fracaso escolar en la Comunidad Valenciana llega ya al 33%. Se dice que en la Comunidad Valenciana "sólo el 2% de los alumnos que suspende asignaturas recibe clases de repaso". ¿Qué entendemos por refuerzo? ¿Volver a repetir lo dado? Quizá el problema esté en la base del aprendizaje; en saber cómo aprende el que aprende...

On Wednesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The ReidOut,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) vowed to “do everything that I can to protect our undocumented immigrants.” But also stated that the state “had the problem of the very inhumane shipping of migrants”

The post Pritzker: I’ll Protect Illegal Immigrants, It Was a ‘Problem’ When Texas Sent Us Migrants appeared first on Breitbart.

Leading AI systems are solving less than 2% of problems in a new advanced mathematics benchmark, revealing significant limitations in their reasoning capabilities, research group Epoch AI reported this week. The benchmark, called FrontierMath, consists of hundreds of original research-level mathematics problems developed in collaboration with over 60 mathematicians, including Fields Medalists Terence Tao and Timothy Gowers. While top AI models like GPT-4 and Gemini 1.5 Pro achieve over 90% accuracy on traditional math tests, they struggle with FrontierMath's problems, which span computational number theory to algebraic geometry and require complex reasoning. "These are extremely challenging. [...] The only way to solve them is by a combination of a semi-expert like a graduate student in a related field, maybe paired with some combination of a modern AI and lots of other algebra packages," Tao said. The problems are designed to be "guessproof," with large numerical answers or complex mathematical objects as solutions, making it nearly impossible to solve without proper mathematical reasoning. Further reading: New secret math benchmark stumps AI models and PhDs alike.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We spoke to the Bishop of Dover, Rose Hudson-Wilkin from Canterbury.

Small Solutions for Big Problems in Drug Discovery and Delivery  News-Medical.Net

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Royal assent was granted to two right to repair bills last week that amend Canada's Copyright Act to allow the circumvention of technological protection measures (TPMs) if this is done for the purposes of "maintaining or repairing a product, including any related diagnosing," and "to make the program or a device in which it is embedded interoperable with any other computer program, device or component." The pair of bills allow device owners to not only repair their own stuff regardless of how a program is written to prevent such non-OEM measures, but said owners can also make their devices work with third-party components without needing to go through the manufacturer to do so. Bills C-244 (repairability) and C-294 (interoperability) go a long way toward advancing the right to repair in Canada and, as iFixit pointed out, are the first federal laws anywhere that address how TPMs restrict the right to repair -- but they're hardly final. TPMs can take a number of forms, from simple administrative passwords to encryption, registration keys, or even the need for a physical object like a USB dongle to unlock access to copyrighted components of a device's software. Most commercially manufactured devices with proprietary embedded software include some form of TPM, and neither C-244 nor C-294 place any restrictions on the use of such measures by manufacturers. As iFixit points out, neither Copyright Act amendments do anything to expand access to the tools needed to circumvent TPMs. That puts Canadians in a similar position to US repair advocates, who in 2021 saw the US Copyright Office loosen DMCA restrictions to allow limited repairs of some devices despite TPMs, but without allowing access to the tools needed to do so. [...] Canadian Repair Coalition co-founder Anthony Rosborough said last week that the new repairability and interoperability rules represent considerable progress, but like similar changes in the US, don't actually amount to much without the right to distribute tools. "New regulations are needed that require manufacturers and vendors to ensure that products and devices are designed with accessibility of repairs in mind," Rosborough wrote in an op-ed last week. "Businesses need to be able to carry out their work without the fear of infringing various intellectual property rights."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Filed under: Asia, Thailand

Not only are tourists still coming, but they've been arriving in increasing numbers in recent years, according to government data.

Continue reading Demonstrations in Thailand? No Problem, Travelers Say.

Demonstrations in Thailand? No Problem, Travelers Say. originally appeared on Gadling on Mon, 02 Dec 2013 11:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Filed under: Asia, Japan, Airlines, News

Continue reading Another Boeing 787 Dreamliner Has a Battery Problem

Another Boeing 787 Dreamliner Has a Battery Problem originally appeared on Gadling on Tue, 14 Jan 2014 14:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Let's look at Sir Francis Bacon: The content in the Shakespearian dramas are politically recognized viewpoints of Sir Francis Bacon (His "enemies" are frequently caricatured in the plays.) The religious, philosophic, and educational messages all reflect his personal opinions. Similarities in style and terminology exist in Bacon's writings and the Shakespearian plays. Certain historical and philosophical inaccuracies are common to both (such as identical misquotations from Aristotle.) Sir Francis Bacon possessed the range of general and philosophical knowledge necessary to write the Shakespearian plays. Sir Francis Bacon was a linguist and a composer. (Necessary to write the sonnets.) He was a lawyer, an able barrister and a polished courtier and possessed the intimate knowledge of parliamentary law and the etiquette of the royal court revealed in the Shakespearian plays. Bacon furthermore visited many of the foreign countries forming the background for the plays (Necessary to create the authentic local atmosphere. There is no record of William Shakspere's ever having travelled outside of England). ... Why the secrecy? Manly Palmer Hall writes: "Sir Francis Bacon knew the true secret of Masonic origin and there is reason to suspect that he concealed this knowledge in cipher and cryptogram. Bacon is not to be regarded solely as a man but rather as the focal point between an invisible institution and a world which was never able to distinguish between the messenger and the message which he promulgated. This secret society, having rediscovered the lost wisdom of the ages and fearing that the knowledge might be lost again, perpetuated it in two ways: (1) by an organization (Freemasonry) to the initiates of which it revealed its wisdom in the form of symbols; (2) by embodying its arcana in the literature of the day by means of cunningly contrived ciphers and enigmas."

(I posted this to the DnD subreddit also: link.)

The Open Gaming License fiasco with Dungeons & Dragons producer Wizards of the Coast is a symptom of a larger problem: our insane Intellectual Property system that currently protects material for the life of the author plus 70 years. As a comparison, patents generally only protect inventions for 20 years.

The purpose of intellectual property laws is to balance public and private interests. IP law is an agreement between society and creators: the creator is guaranteed an exclusive right to their creation for a period of time, and in exchange the public gets rights to the creation afterwards. It's intended to be a balance of interests, but the balance has gotten completely out of whack thanks to (obviously) lobbying throughout the 20th century by major copyright holders like Disney.

In my opinion, the current copyright term, life of the author plus 70 years, is grossly unfair to the public. I believe that the internet era has demonstrated that creators would be incentivized to create even without such a long period of exclusivity. Think about it: would you create less stuff if your great-grandkids didn't get exclusive rights? I doubt it.

Listen: creators should be able to make money from their work. I don't think copyright should go to zero, but why not bring it in line with patent protection with a 20-year term?

Disney, DnD, and many other creations are part of our generation's cultural legacy, part of a 10,000+ year inheritance that has been handed down through time to our grandparents, our parents, and now us. It's morally wrong for our ancestors and corporations to lock our inheritance away from us.

Copyright protections must be re-balanced to protect both creators and the public. This problem with WotC shouldn't be just about a license, it should be about the IP laws that grant them exclusive rights to creations that are over 50 years old. Our generation should re-open these negotiations and come up with a fair copyright term.

Then, as the recovery progressed, taxes and regulations reemerged.   But over the last year, those two concerns have been displaced by the availability of qualified labor.  Finding qualified employees is always a concern in a growing economy and has certainly grown in importance in this expansion, even more prominent than in 2000, when the ratio of employment to the population hit a record high.

Assisting its rise to number one has been the decline in the concerns about taxes and the cost of regulatory compliance.  The sharp decline in concerns about taxes and regulatory compliance are most likely due to the policies of this administration.  Record levels of proposed regulations peaked in the last two years of the last administration but dropped to practically nothing early in this term.  Since then, many existing regulations and rules have been eliminated or scaled back.

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Title: Symptoms of 12 Serious Diseases and Health Problems
Category: Diseases and Conditions
Created: 8/14/2006 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 5/16/2022 12:00:00 AM

Okay, I got home, sat down to check my favorite bloggers, news sites, and stuff, and found a problem. I...

A posting from Brand autopsy that really makes us think.

Do SomethingOne of the earliest business rules I can recall that made a HUGE difference in my professional style was...

Never present a problem to your boss without having a suggested solution ready. Don't be part of the problem, be part of the solution.In their book, Why People Business People Speak Like Idiots, Fugere, Hardaway & Washawsky take this lesson further. They call it... Do Something.

Here's an excerpt of the passage...

"...Never present a problem without actually doing something that represents a positive step to fix it. Even if it's nothing more than scheduling a trip to visit the disgruntled customer, do something. Show momentum toward and answer, even if you don't know what the answer is. There's a difference between bad news with signs of hope and bad news presented from the deepest pits of despair. You don't want to be the happy messenger, but it's not much better to be the hopeless prophet of doom."

For those passionate professionals wondering how they can position themselves for the next role at their organization this is one of those priceless tips.

For more tips on being better at your job, I highly recommend the book The Unofficial Guide to Power Managing by Alan Weiss. We've mentioned this before on Brand Autopsy... This book is so good you won't want to tell your co-workers you're reading it.

Ezine Acts Love Commentaries include hundreds of emotional stories many people wrote to solve sentimental problems. They have also many sentimental solutions provided. Find your solution.

Love consulting services index the rest of the love consultation pages on this network and highlight some problems with affectionate and passionate people who requested the services.

Love Problem Solution includes responses to sentimental problems posted by people in love to get their problems solved. You may find love resolution here. Read, share or provide resolutions.

We have love problem although our parents accepted the proposal to get married. We do not want to go to village and leave our city and careers to manage some businesses the family has in the village.

A very interesting post on how cross cultural differences between makers of airplanes Boeing and Airbus (located in small power distance countries) and pilots from South Korea (large power distance country) caused series of dangerous situations and accidents in the late 90’s. Planes produced by Airbus and Boeing are supposed to be flown by 2 …

Continue reading "How cross cultural differences caused Korean Airlines problems"

Cooking with items that make it easier and more convenient isn’t always the best option for your health.

A tool called Headliner is solving the discoverability issue in podcasting in a couple different ways, for both consumers and creators.

On the creation side, Headliner allows podcasters to upload snippets of their podcasts, which Headliner transforms into videos, complete with automatic captions and spiffy images or clips of your choice. The resulting files, called audiograms, can be uploaded to the social media site of your choice (unlike audio files, which no major social network allows to be uploaded).

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With commuting on hold and everybody Zooming all the time, podcast consumption has taken a bit of a hit as listeners look for new ways to fit shows into their daily routines.

Last month, the analytics firm Chartable released research suggesting that podcast downloads were 10% lower on March 25 than they were on February 26.

Those numbers deserve to be taken with a grain of salt. Chartable, like Podtrac and other podcasting analytics services, is an opt-in analytics service, and many different podcast networks, ranging from Entercom to Vox Media, showed increased listening last month.

Discover amazing secrets to saving time and money by learning how to obedience train your dog properly, and easily, without wasting time using training techniques that don't work.

Windows registry scanner - scans your Windows registry for errors and suggests solutions.

The last thing to do before I issue the next release is to eliminate the log file and move the messages that were reported in the log file into the File Information section of the Everything Report.

In doing so, I am revisiting all the error and warning messages that Behold produced. I'm rewriting them and making their text customizable (so different languages can be supported) and making them selectable (so they can be turned off if you don't want them).

I see that I can classify them into two types: Possible GEDCOM problems and possible data errors.

GEDCOM standards have changed over time, and every program outputs its data into GEDCOM in slightly different forms, often not conforming to the latest GEDCOM standard. I've made Behold to be very forgiving so that it reads everything possible. But when Behold reads files that may be GEDCOM but seem to have something wrong with them, Behold will report these to let you know. Maybe the file was truncated or maybe the character set was wrong. But Behold will still read as much data as possible from the file and try to continue processing. Often you can just ignore these GEDCOM errors knowing that Behold will read everything it can.

But you will want to look at the problems reported as possible data errors. These will tell you where you might need to fix your data. For example, there might be duplicate IDs, multiple husbands, missing links or undefined sources. To fix these, you'll need to go into your genealogy program that created the GEDCOM and update your data. When version 2 of Behold is out, you'll be able to fix your data right in Behold.

The messages up to now were are real hodge-podge. I added them as I developed. They are inconsistent in form and style. So I am now turning each into one of the two types: GEDCOM problems and data problems, improving their default text and getting them to work in a consistent way. There are over 50 of these messages, and I'm going through them one by one. This should take a couple of days and then the new release will be out.

So first I was told that Behold was not detecting the new version when you "Check Online for New Version".

What had happened was I went from version 0.98.9d to 0.98.9.5. I changed from the letter suffix to the point number for Vista compatibility.

Version 0.98.9d detects the new version okay, but 0.98.9c, b, or a do not. Those three previous versions checked to see that the running program's version is LESS than the online version. But that's a problem because "." is greater than "a" or "b" or "c" in a computer string comparison. I changed the check in the 0.98.9d version that it be UNEQUAL rather than LESS than. So it's not a problem if you previously had upgraded to 0.98.9d.

The bottom line here is that if you still have the 0.98.9a, b or c versions, you will not be able to use the "Check Online for New Version" to upgrade. Instead, you'll have to go to the Behold download page, click on the "Click Here to Download" and say "Run". That will run the new install file and put the newest 0.98.9.5 version on your machine. You won't have to re-register.

The second problem was that Behold stopped working in Windows 98. I didn't realize that I still had a user using Windows 98, but I do. It ended up being a memory call that I purposely changed so that more than 2 GB could be reported. Unfortunately that call causes an error in Windows 98.

So I found a way to make the correct call depending on the Operating System. Google searches do wonders. It found the method to do this in a forum, and it didn't matter that the forum was in German.

So if you are still running in Windows 98, let me know, and I'll give you a link to the fix you need.

Arches National Park in Utah recently announced that rangers are looking for comments on a proposed plan to deal with congestion. For over a decade, the National Park Service (NPS) has struggled to keep the park from becoming a gridlocked traffic mess as outdoor recreation has become more popular while ... [continued]

The post E-Bikes Could Solve A Big Problem For Arches National Park appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Fr. Stephen examines the use of legal imagery and the problems it causes when we try to apply it to our relationship with God. Instead, he looks at the language of "being" used in the Fathers.

Is there a consistent morality or ethical system planted in human beings? If so, why doesn't this sytem include the protection of baby girls?

The priest is often not recognized unless he is on the cross. And in some communities, there’s always one -- or a handful -- that will try to make sure he stays there! (Yet these folks need salvation too.) Fr Joseph unpeels a bit of the Onion Dome.

Join Michael as he discusses how we are either living in repentance or rebellion at any given time in our response to God grace, and how this determines the quality of our existence both now and in the life to come.

On this feast of the Apostle Matthew the former tax collector, Fr. Andrew discusses how he was healed of his problem with money and how we may be, as well.

Mathew Monos once again interviews Fr. Brendan Pelphrey—this time about the Problem of Evil.

Houston made the news recently—a story involving local legislation, "gender confusion," and restrooms. Fr Joseph, who ironically often wears a "dress" to the Men's Room, rants about . . . something else?

One of the problems with vainglory, according to St. Isaac the Syrian, is that “it hands that person over to” either fornication or pride. But before we can talk about how vainglory hands one over to either fornication or pride, we need to understand what vainglory is. Nowadays the word vain means to have a high opinion of oneself, but that is not what it originally meant, nor what it means in the Bible or in the hymnology of the Church. This is why many English-speaking Orthodox Christians have no idea what vainglory means.

In this long-delayed episode (due to work on The Age of Nihilism, available at store.ancientfaith.com/the-age-of-nihilism-christendom-from-the-great-war-to-the-culture-wars), Father John presents the historical origins of liberalism as a modern secular ideology. Atheistic philosophers like Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill provided the philosophical basis for hope in a secular "kingdom of posterity."