Manchester's Christmas Markets return for its 26th year, set across nine sites in the city.

BBC Children in Need makes a real difference to young people in Cambridgeshire.

Turtle Dove supports young women who are unemployed, or at risk of it, gain confidence and skills.

Former RNC student Chris McCausland has been winning the hearts of the nation in recent weeks.

The Beefy Boys are in the running to be crowned the World's Best Burger!

Panto is back - oh yes it is!

Spruce up on your arboreal knowhow.

Book riverside igloos and rooftop domes for your festive socialising.

From traditional retellings to drunk adaptations.

Pop-up cinemas screening Christmas classics.

After months of planning, WSO2Con 2013 is starting today in London. We already ran the tutorials in Sri Lanka last week - today (Tuesday 12th) is tutorials in UK and then the main conference is Wednesday 13th and Thursday 14th.

Yes this is a globally distributed conference! We have nearly 500 registrants (which is at least 50% more than we expected) in the two locations and they are connected via 4 high quality video streams so we have 2-way video interaction. The amount of technical details underneath is incredible - we will blog about that later. We even have one speaker doing his presentation from New York as he was unable to travel .. if everything goes off without a hitch that'll be a technological marvel :-).

We have 4 fantastic external keynote speakers:

Eben Upton, Founder & Trustee of the Raspberry Pi Foundation talking about the hottest little computer in the world. Oh and BTW, if you haven't heard yet, we've been putting together around 40 node R-Pi cluster and that system will be live running WSO2 middleware powering the WSO2Con app. Azeez has been blogging about it.

Brian Behlendorf, Founder of Apache, CollabNet and a long time god of open source (and my friend and also WSO2 Advisor) and currently Senior Advisor for Science and Technology at the World Economic Forum talking about how open source can still save the world.

Pankaj Srivastava, Vice President of the Cisco Industry Solutions Group talking about how they are building next generation cloud and embedded business systems. Guess what stuff they use :-).

 Yefim Natis, VP and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner talking about their view of Platform as a Service. Yefim leads Gartner's analysis on PaaS and has a super clear view of the future.



In addition, Paul and I will be doing keynote talks as well - I will be talking a bit about WSO2, our vision and most importantly how we see the future of enterprise computing. Paul will be talking about how to achieve that vision incrementally via a pragmatic milestone plan.

In addition we have nearly 20 external speakers (selected from over 50 submissions which we got in response to our open call for papers) and another 20 WSO2 speakers covering all aspects of our product platform.

We also have some super cool sponsors for the first time this time. Thank you to our Gold Sponsors Suse and Yenlo and our Silver Sponsors Grid Solut, Wipro and Redpill-Linpro.

The App

Oh yes the conference app .. we have a conference app that lets you do a bunch of stuff including rating talks and chatting to others. This too of course was written our stuff (and PhoneGap) and the back end will run on the Raspberry Pi cluster. Crazy? Yes. But super fun and majorly cool :-). Search for WSO2Con in the Google Play Store or you can use it with a browser here: https://wso2con.com/m/.  You need to have a WSO2 user account to log in - get one at https://wso2.org/user/register. Unfortunately the wonderful people in the Apple App Store haven't yet approved the updated version :-( .. we're keeping our fingers crossed it will happen today at least.

Putting it together

This event, like every previous WSO2Con event and all WSO2 events, is being organized by our internal marketing team. Hasmin (Director of Communications) is the general chair and she lives in Saskatoon, Canada and most of the rest of the team are in Sri Lanka! Harindu is out event God and he doesn't seem to lose hair yet. The "advance team" (of Harindu and Tasha) moved to London about 3 weeks ago and have been operating out of our Portsmouth office putting the final touches together. The rest of the marketing folks operating the UK event started arrived a week ago. There's another team managing the event in Sri Lanka. The Sri Lanka event is at a rather odd time since it starts at 2:00pm and runs until 10:30pm! We were very keen to have a live, bi-directional telecast in Sri Lanka as that's where we are based and that's where we have our team and a large community of supporters, users, and customers.

Coming back to London, overall we have nearly 50 WSO2 folks flying in from all over the world to London! I'd be remiss if I didn't acknowledge the infinite amount of work done by Maryam and our outsourced travel team lead by Zakir .. its not easy to manage all of this while still running the daily operations of the company.

Thank you to all the wonderful team at WSO2 for putting this together! And thank you to everyone participating (whether in London, Colombo or just watching over the Internet) ... we're doing this for you.

I look forward to a fun week :-).

Aim/Purpose: This paper presents an exploratory case study into using 360° videos to present small segments of lecture content for IT students in an Australian University. The aim of this study was to understand; what is the impact of incorporating 360° videos into class content for students and teaching staff? In this study the 360° videos are described as “learning atoms”. Learning atoms are short duration videos (1 to 5 minutes) captured in 360°. Background: Within this paper we conducted experiments in the classroom using 360° videos to determine if they have an impact on student's feeling of presence with class content. Additionally, to follow up, how does the inclusion of 360° impact on the teaching experience. Methodology: The methodology used in this study focused on both quantitative and qualita-tive aspects. Data was captured at the same time during the teaching period to address the research questions. In order to gauge the feeling of presence within the classroom a short survey was administered to students in the undergraduate IT class at the start (pre) and end (post) of the semester using the same questions to measure any change. Contribution: The main contributions from this study were that we demonstrated there is a potential for providing an alternative ‘immersive’ content presentation for students. This alternative content took the form of 360° learning atoms, whereas further showed our nuance process for creating and publishing of these atoms. Findings: The results show that for students, learning atoms can help improve the sense of presence, particularly for remote students, however the interactive experience can take student’s attention away from the lecturer. The results present potential for providing an alternative ‘immersive’ content presentation for students, however problems for uptake are present for both students and teachers, such as image capture quality and file size Impact on Society: We foresee this approach as being a new approach to teaching students in higher education within online spaces to increase engagement and move towards having a richer virtual experience no matter the location. Future Research: Future research will be conducted to resolve whether presence and engagement is supported by the inclusion of 360° videos in the classroom.

As a result of the rapid development of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and the growing interest in Internet-based tools for language classroom, it has become a pressing need for educators to locate, evaluate and select the most appropriate language-learning digital resources that foster more communicative and meaningful learning processes. Hence, this paper describes a mixed research project that, on the first hand, aimed at proposing a Checklist for evaluating language websites built on the principles of the Communicative Approach, and on the second hand, sought to strengthen the teachers’ Knowing-how-to-do skill as part of their digital competence. To achieve these goals, a four-phase research procedure was followed that included reviewing relevant literature and administering qualitative and quantitative research methods to participants (i.e., language teachers, an expert in the Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) field and a college professor) in order to gain insights into problematic issues and, thereafter, to contribute to the creation and validation of the Checklist model and the Study Guide. The findings revealed that: (a) evaluating language websites leads to the enhancement of the teachers’ practical skills and their knowledge of the technological language; and (b) having an assessment instrument allows educators to choose the materials that best meet their communicative teaching purposes.

Accumulated knowledge on organizational justice leaves little reason to doubt the notion that organizational members benefit when leaders adhere to interpersonal justice rules. However, upon considering how justice behaviors influence subordinates' cognitive processes, we predict that interpersonal justice has a surprising, unintended negative consequence. Supervisors who violate interpersonal justice rules trigger subordinates to search for reasons why their supervisors are threatening them, causing subordinates to be more attuned to supervisors' individual characteristics and therefore unlikely to use stereotypes when evaluating them. In contrast, supervisors who adhere to interpersonal justice rules allow subordinates to divert attention away from them, leading subordinates' judgments of their supervisors to be influenced by stereotypes. Consistent with these predictions, in a survey we found that minority supervisors faced bias relative to Caucasian supervisors when supervisors adhered to—but not when they violated—interpersonal justice rules. We replicated this effect in an experiment and established that it is explained by an alternating pattern of stereotype activation and inhibition: participants viewed minority supervisors to be more deceitful than Caucasians when supervisors adhered to—but not when they violated—interpersonal justice rules. We then conducted exploratory analyses and identified one factor (unit size) that mitigates this troubling pattern.

Uncover the cutting-edge design of the Magpul FDP-9 and FDC-9. Learn how these folding firearms are redefining personal defense.

Welcome to Ask Clark, a column designed to answer your financial questions, by money expert Clark Howard. How Can I Find an Affordable and Legit Online School? Tim from Georgia asks: “I’ve heard you a few times in the past few months say to consider skills and knowledge that may be outside of a career job position. […]

The post Where Do I Look for Affordable and Legitimate Online Schools? appeared first on Clark Howard.

If you’re interested in learning a new skill, hoping to get a raise at work or considering a career change, taking a free online course could help you get closer to your goal.  In this article, we’re going to take a look at 23 online resources where you can find educational videos and university-level courses […]

The post Where To Take Free Online Courses appeared first on Clark Howard.

From Iqra to Alia, brides are switching it up when it comes to their wedding day looks

This is about to be your hair's new obsession!

Relive the wildest moments that prove the VMAs are never short on drama or surprises!

This article is going to show you where can you find the store list of Shopify stores. There are several ways to do this, let's review the most helpful ones.

The post Where can I find store list of Shopify stores? appeared first on Template Monster Help.

FDA has announced that the Office of Prescription Drug Promotion (OPDP) is planning a study to evaluate the influence that statements made in a promotional communication about patient adherence to a medication may have on the resulting preference for a … Continue reading →

Privacy: Our analog parents had the right to meet whomever they liked, wherever they liked, and discuss whatever they liked, without the government knowing. Our digital children have lost this, just because they use more modern items.

For a lot of our digital children’s activities, there’s no such thing as privacy anymore, as they naturally take place on the net. For people born 1980 and later, it doesn’t make sense to talk of “offline” or “online” activities. What older people see as “people spending time with their phone or computer”, younger see as socializing using their phone or computer.

This is an important distinction that the older generation tends to not understand.

Perhaps this is best illustrated with an anecdote from the previous generation again: The parents of our parents complained that our parents were talking with the phone, and not to another person using the phone. What our parents saw as socializing (using an old analog landline phone), their parents in turn saw as obsession with a device. There’s nothing new under the sun.

(Note: when I say “digital children” here, I am not referring to children as in young people below majority age; I am referring to the next generation of fully capable adult professionals.)

This digital socializing, however, can be limited, it can be… permissioned. As in, requiring somebody’s permission to socialize in the way you and your friends want, or even to socialize at all. The network effects are strong and create centralizing pressure toward a few platforms where everybody hang out, and as these are private services, they get to set any terms and conditions they like for people assembling and socializing – for the billions of people assembling and socializing there.

Just as one example to illustrate this: Facebook is using American values for socializing, not universal values. Being super-against anything even slightly naked while being comparatively accepting of hate speech is not something inherently global; it is strictly American. If Facebook had been developed in France or Germany instead of the US, any and all nudity would be welcomed as art and free-body culture (Freikörperkultur) and a completely legitimate way of socializing, but the slightest genocide questioning would lead to an insta-kickban and reporting to authorities for criminal prosecution.

Therefore, just using the dominant Facebook as an example, any non-American way of socializing is effectively banned worldwide, and it’s likely that people developing and working with Facebook aren’t even aware of this. But the Freedom of Assembly hasn’t just been limited in the online sphere, but also in the classic analog offline world where our analog parents used to hang out (and still do).

Since people’s locations are tracked, as we saw in the previous post, it is possible to match locations between individuals and figure out who was talking to whom, as well as when and where this happened, even if they were only talking face to face. As I’m looking out my window from the office writing this piece, it just so happens that I’m looking at the old Stasi headquarters across from Alexanderplatz in former East Berlin. It was a little bit like Hotel California; people who checked in there tended to never leave. Stasi also tracked who was talking to whom, but required a ton of people to perform this task manually, just in order to walk behind other people and photograph whom they were talking to — and therefore, there was an economic limit to how many people could be tracked like this at any one time before the national economy couldn’t sustain more surveillance. Today, that limit is completely gone, and everybody is tracked all the time.

Do you really have Freedom of Assembly, when the fact that you’ve associated with a person — indeed, maybe just spent time in their physical proximity — can be held against you?

I’m going to illustrate this with an example. In a major leak recently, it doesn’t matter which one, a distant colleague of mine happened to celebrate a big event with a huge party in near physical proximity to where the documents were being copied at the same time, completely unaware and by sheer coincidence. Months later, this colleague was part of journalistically vetting those leaked documents and verifying their veracity, while at this time still unaware of the source and that they had held a big party very close to the origin of the documents.

The government was very aware of the physical proximity of the leak combined with this person’s journalistic access to the documents, though, and issued not one but two arrest-on-sight warrants for this distant colleague based on that coincidence. They are now living in exile outside of Sweden, and don’t expect to be able to return home anytime soon.

Privacy, including Privacy of Location, remains your own responsibility.

Are We There Yet? – wethepeople in Australien

Our bro Felix Prangenberg was visiting Australia with his Wethepeople team mates Jordan Godwin and Ed Zunda. Unfortunately, the weather was not quite on their side, despite all the guys had a good time in Down Under! Enjoy the video, your kunstform BMX Shop.

Video: Callum Earnshaw

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The Doomed Brand boys went to Alicante (Spain) a couple weeks ago, where they've filmed a new trip video, which you can check out now!

Enjoy the Videos, your kunstform BMX Shop Team!



Video: Doomed Brand



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It's hard to find the right words here. Dennis Enarson has set it in his head to leave a lasting mark in the BMX world with his new video. To this end, Dennis has teamed up with none other than Rich Forne. Eight months of filming regardless of losses have definitely paid off and will leave your mouth open. By the way: Dennis also has a new pair of Signature shoes by VANS, which you can find below.

Have fun with the video, your kunstform BMX Shop Team!

Video: Richard Forne/VANS

Related links:

• all products of VANS
• all signature products of Dennis Enarson

We first met James Carter and Theresa Marable on the 3300 block of Greenmount Avenue in back 2012, in the very first episode of Out of the Blocks. This episode, we reunite with James and Theresa, we listen back together to their original recordings, and we ask them, “What’s changed in your life in the past nine years?”

President-elect Donald Trump's resounding victory may spell doom for the anti-freedom, anti-prosperity international movement that is the push for net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.

The World Health Organization said mpox cases in the region of Congo where a new and more infectious variant was first detected appear to be "plateauing," even as the virus continues to increase in other regions of the country, as well as in Burundi and Uganda.

Fifteen new episodes wrap up the season in 2024, now streaming on Disney+

The post The Final Season of Star Wars: The Bad Batch Is Here! first appeared on SciFi Stream.

Apple TV+'s adaptation of the books by Hugh Howey has a good four seasons in it, producers say.

The post Here’s How Long Apple’s Silo Show Could Run first appeared on SciFi Stream.

Huge data encompassed into a unique georeferenced macrobenthic assemblages database

A new peer-reviewed data paper offers a comprehensive, open-access collection of georeferenced biological information about the Antarctic macrobenthic communities. The term macrobenthic refers to the visible-for-the-eye organisms that live near or on the sea bottom such as echinoderms, sponges, ascidians, crustaceans. The paper will help in coordinating biodiversity research and conservation activities on species living near the ocean bottom of the Antarctic.
The data paper "Antarctic macrobenthic communities: A compilation of circumpolar information", published in the open access journal Nature Conservation, describes data from approximately 90 different expeditions in the region since 1956 that have now been made openly available under a CC-By license. The paper provides unique georeferenced biological basic information for the planning of future coordinated research activities, for example those under the umbrella of the biology program Antarctic Thresholds – Ecosystem Resilience and Adaptation (AnT-ERA) of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR). The information collected could be also beneficial for current conservation priorities such as the planning of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) by the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR).
The expeditions were organised by several famous explorers of the Antarctic. The area covered by the paper consists of almost the entire Southern Ocean, including sites covered by a single ice-shelf. The vast majority of information is from shelf areas around the continent at water depth shallower than 800m. The information from the different sources is then attributed to the classified macrobenthic assemblages. The results are made publicly available via the "Antarctic Biodiversity Facility" (data.biodiversity.aq).
A specific feature of this paper is that the manuscript was automatically generated from the Integrated Publishing Toolkit of the Antarctic Node of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (AntaBIF IPT) and then submitted to the journal Nature Conservation through a novel workflow developed by GBIF and Pensoft Publishers. (see previous press release). Data are made freely available through the AntaBIF IPT, and sea-bed images of 214 localities through the data repository for geoscience and environmental data, PANGAEA- Data Publisher for Earth and Environmental Science (sample: http://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.198682).

The Mediterranean Institute for Biodiversity and Ecology (IMBE, Aix-Marseille University, Aix-en-Provence, France), in its research group "Macroecology and Biogeography of Global Change (MacroBio)" has a PostDoc position open for applications. The post has a duration of 36 months, the initial contract is made for 18 months, being extended based on an assessment of performance. The position is funded by the European Commission through the FP7 Research Project LUC4C and affiliated to the French National Scientific Research Centre (CNRS).

The main topic is to improve the way LULCC processes are represented in the DGVM LPJmL through enhanced soil and vegetation process representation. Work should improve the model's capacity to project climate-LULCC interactions for the computation of net climate effects, and ecosystem services. One focus is on the representation of diverse agricultural management systems, cropland abandonment/afforestation and forest management, in order to develop ways to account for their effects on biochemical cycles and biophysics.

 

Pro-iBiosphere meeting 2 will be held from 11 to 14 February 2013 in Leiden. It will consist of three workshops on: e-platforms & e-tools for taxonomy Legacy literature – Semantic mark-up generation, data quality and user-participation infrastructure Prospective Literature – Toward Best Practices for data acquisition and curation using e-tools for taxonomy. More information can be found at: http://wiki.pro-ibiosphere.eu/wiki/Workshops_Leiden_February_2013

Pro-iBiosphere meeting 3 will be held from 20 to 24 May 2013 in Berlin. It will consist of three workshops on: 1) Coordination and routes for cooperation across organizations, projects and e-infrastructures 2) Measuring and constraining the costs of delivering services 3) Stakeholder requirements Second Management committee meeting and Advisory Board meetings will be held from 23-24 of May 2013. More information can be found at: http://wiki.pro-ibiosphere.eu/wiki/Workshops_Berlin,_May_2013

 

Agentschap Plententuin Meise (Botanic Garden Meise), Bouchout Castle – Meise (Brussels), Belgium

 

The pro-iBiosphere project supported by the European Commission (DG CONNECT) through its FP7 research funding programme has the pleasure to invite you to join its Final Event.

The project has the vision of implementing an Open Knowledge Biodiversity Management System (OBKMS), i.e. an integration platform that will allow to produce Biotas (i.e. Floras, Faunas, Mycotas and other revisionary taxonomic literature) of the future in a flexible semantically-driven online environment.

During its two year duration, pro-iBiosphere contributed to making fundamental biodiversity data digital, open and re-usable. The achievements of the project will be presented in a series of activities (Event Flyer) detailed below that will take place from Tuesday the 10^th to Thursday the 12^th of June 2014 at the Bouchout Castle (Botanic Garden Meise, Belgium).

 

Tuesday June 10 (PM)

Workshop on Model Evaluation

Wednesday June 11 (all day)

• Demonstrations on pro-iBiosphere pilots

• Demonstrations on outcomes of pro-iBiosphere Data Enrichment Hackathon

• Workshop on Biodiversity Catalogue

• Training on WikiMedia

• Poster session

Thursday June 12 (all day)

• Final Conference 

• Networking Cocktail

 

For more information on the Final Event (agenda, logistics,…), visit the dedicated wiki page.

Registration is free of charge but compulsory due to room capacity constraints. You can register by filling out the online registration form at http://tiny.cc/pib-final-event.

In case you are interested in giving a presentation during the Final Event activities or in submitting a poster in the poster session, please contact us at final-event@pro-ibiosphere.eu

 

A crowd lined up for a screening at the 2024 Wisconsin Film Festival (Source: Wisconsin Film Festival Facebook) KT here: About a month ago, August 17 to be precise, Variety published an essay by Owen Gleiberman. In it he decries the fact that while national grosses of mainstream films, especially blockbusters, have been recovering from […]

“It's a real shame for sufferers of PTSD and CPTSD, who can greatly benefit from therapy with these substances,” one respondent said.

The post Voters rejected Question 4. Here’s why readers are ‘disappointed.’ appeared first on Boston.com.

Spoiler alert: it "looks like a whole store."

The post Here’s a peek inside Jayson Tatum’s sneaker closet appeared first on Boston.com.

Boston City Councilor At-Large, Henry Santana, and Northeastern graduate student, Yadah Ampofo, each share how they would spend a perfect day in Boston’s Mission Hill neighborhood.

The post Here’s how to spend the perfect day in Mission Hill appeared first on Boston.com.

Plus: Thanksgiving hot dogs, thoughts on Question 5 results, and a Jurassic Park-themed drag brunch

The post Here are the best restaurants to try this month appeared first on Boston.com.

“Get a rake and tend to your home. This is not rocket science."

The post Readers say those who ‘Leave the Leaves’ should make like a tree and get out of here appeared first on Boston.com.

While philosophers and scholars of the pre-modern era kept studying music from a harmonic point of view and often delved deeper into the concept “musica ... Read more

The post Here is What Great Philosophers Thought of Music appeared first on CMUSE.

Seventh album of darkly rockin’ blues from Londoners channelling spirits of New Orleans.

The sun’s magnetic field is currently at the peak of its 11-year cycle, making solar storms and northern lights more frequent.

The post Solar flares may cause faint auroras across top of Northern Hemisphere appeared first on Boston.com.