Community transmission is said to happen when a person who has not been in contact with an infected person or travelled to a country where the virus is active tests positive.

Temperature and latitude are not associated with the spread of COVID-19 disease, according to a global study that found school closures and other public health measures are having a positive effect on containing the novel coronavirus.

Hayden Library - PT2609.N9 H4713 2015

Learning to read minds; roundup of daily news with David Grimm.

New evidence reveals the complicated history of stone tool use 400,000 - 200,000 years ago.

Robert Coontz discusses Science's 2015 Breakthrough of the Year and runners-up, from visions of Pluto to the discovery of a previously unknown human species. Online news editor David Grimm reviews the top news stories of the past year with Sarah Crespi. Hosted by Susanne Bard.

Online news editor David Grimm shares stories on evidence for the earth being hit by supernovae, record-breaking xenotransplantation, and winning friends and influencing people with human sacrifice.   Staff news writer Jocelyn Kaiser joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss how small membrane-bound packets called “exosomes” might pave the way for cancer cells to move into new territory in the body.     [Image: Val Altounian/Science]    

This week, new estimates for the depths of the world’s lakes, a video game that could help kids be safer bike riders, and teaching autonomous cars to read road signs with Online News Editor David Grimm. And Ariana Orvell joins Sarah Crespi to discuss her study of how the word “you” is used when people recount meaningful experiences. Listen to previous podcasts. Download the show transcript. Transcripts courtesy of Scribie.com. [Image: VisualCommunications/iStockphoto; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

This week, we discuss the most accurate digital model of a human face to date, stray Wi-Fi signals that can be used to spy on a closed room, and artificial intelligence that can predict Supreme Court decisions with Online News Editor Catherine Matacic. Caroline Hartley joins Sarah Crespi to discuss a scan that can detect pain in babies—a useful tool when they can’t tell you whether something really hurts. Listen to previous podcasts. See more book segments.

Did people domesticate animals? Or did they domesticate themselves? Online News Editor David Grimm talks with Sarah Crespi about a recent study that looked at self-domesticating mice. If they could go it alone, could cats or dogs have done the same in the distant past? Next, Sinan Aral of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge joins Sarah to discuss his work on true and false rumor cascades across all of Twitter, since its inception. He finds that false news travels further, deeper, and faster than true news, regardless of the source of the tweet, the kind of news it was, or whether bots were involved. In a bonus segment recording during a live podcasting event at the AAAS Annual Meeting in Austin, Sarah first speaks with Ben Munson of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis about markers of gender and sexual orientation in spoken language and then Adrienne Hancock of The George Washington University in Washington, D.C., talks about using what we know about gender and communication to help transgender women change their speech and communication style. Live recordings sessions at the AAAS meeting were supported by funds from the European Commission. This week’s episode was edited by Podigy. Listen to previous podcasts. [Image: Rudolf Jakkel (CC0); Music: Jeffrey Cook]

On this week’s show, Staff Writer Robert Service talks with host Sarah Crespi about a new National Academy of Sciences report that suggests the novel coronavirus can go airborne, the evidence for this idea, and what this means for the mask-wearing debate. See all of our News coverage of the pandemic here. See all of our Research and Editorials here. Also this week, Staff Writer Jennifer Couzin-Frankel joins Sarah to talk about a burgeoning understanding of the biological roots of anorexia nervosa—an eating disorder that affects about 1% of people in the United States. From genetic links to brain scans, scientists are finding a lot more biology behind what was once thought of as a culturally driven disorder. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. Listen to previous podcasts. About the Science Podcast Download a transcript (PDF).

Find a new and historic recipe for a dish to put on your Thanksgiving table in What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking. This cookbook, published in 1881, is highlighted in a recent post on the Library of Congress Blog. Abby Fisher perfected her culinary skills as an enslaved cook on a South Carolina plantation but went on to establish a successful catering business in San Francisco and publish a compilation of her recipes—one of the first by an African-American. Learn more about this remarkable woman and, this Thanksgiving, sample a taste of history!

Click here to go to the Library of Congress Blog post, "Sample a Taste of History This Thanksgiving!"

‘However strange your experience, other people have had it too,’ wrote Woolf in this 1926 essay.

This article discusses insights gained from the national PROMISE evaluation about the current transition system, which are relevant to current initiatives supporting youth with disabilities during the transition to adulthood.

Hayden Library - SB387.7.P385 2018

Rediff reader Pooja Rakesh from Kochi, Kerala tells us why Ruskin Bond is her favourite author.

The Cisco Digital Readiness Index was developed to holistically measure a countryâ€^TMs level of digital readiness.
More RSS Feed for Cisco: newsroom.cisco.com/rss-feeds ...

Alan Dalton uses this, the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, to look back at where we’ve come from, to evaluate where we are, and to look forward to what’s coming next in the future of accessibility guidelines.

Happy United Nations International Day of Persons with Disabilities! The United Nations have chosen “Promoting the participation of persons with disabilities and their leadership: taking action on the 2030 Development Agenda” for this year’s observance. Let’s see how the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) guidelines of accessibility past, present, and yet-to-come can help us to follow that goal, and make sure that the websites—and everything else!—that we create can include as many potential users as possible.

Guidelines of Accessibility Past

The W3C published the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0 on 5th May 1999, when most of us were playing Snake on our Nokia 3210s’ 1.5” monochrome screens…a very long time ago in technology terms. From the start, those guidelines proved enlightening for designers and developers who wanted to avoid excluding users from their websites. For example, we learned how to provide alternatives to audio and images, how to structure information, and how to help users to find the information they needed. However, those guidelines were specific to the web technologies of the time, resulting in limitations such as requiring developers to “use W3C technologies when they are available […]”. Also, those guidelines became outdated; I doubt that you, gentle reader, consult their technical documentation about “directly accessible applets” or “Writing for browsers that do not support FRAME” in your day-to-day work.

Guidelines of Accessibility Present

The W3C published the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 on 11th December 2008, when most of us were admiring the iPhone 3G’s innovative “iPhone OS 2.0” software…a long time ago in technology terms. Unlike WCAG 1, these guidelines also applied to non-W3C technologies, such as PDF and Flash. These guidelines used legalese and future-proofed language, with terms such as “time-based media” and “programmatically determined”, and testable success criteria. This made these guidelines more difficult for designers and developers to grasp, but also enabled the guidelines to make their way into international standards (see EN 301 549 — Accessibility requirements suitable for public procurement of ICT products and services in Europe and ISO/IEC 40500:2012 Information technology — W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0) and even international law (see EU Directive 2016/2102 … on the accessibility of the websites and mobile applications of public sector bodies).

More importantly, these guidelines enabled designers and developers to create inclusive websites, at scale. For example, in the past 18 months:

• Intercom made their web Messenger accessible, achieving Level-AA conformance;
• Vimeo made accessibility updates to their video player to achieve Level-AA conformance;
• Stripe designed a new accessible colour system to conform with success criterion 1.4.3 (“Contrast (Minimum)”).

The updated Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 arrived on 5th June last year—almost a 10-year wait for a “.1” update!—and added 17 new success criteria to help bring the guidelines up to date. Those new criteria focused on people using mobile devices and touchscreens, people with low vision, and people with cognitive and learning disabilities.

(If you need to get up to speed with these guidelines, take 36 minutes to read “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines—for People Who Haven’t Read Them” and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1—for People Who Haven’t Read the Update.)

Guidelines of Accessibility Yet to Come

So, what’s next? Well, the W3C hope to release another minor update (WCAG 2.2) in November 2020. However, they also have a Task Force working on produce major new guidelines with wider scope (more people, more technologies) and fewer limitations (easier to understand, easier to use) in November 2022. These next guidelines will have a different name, because they will cover more than “Web” and “Content”. Andrew Kirkpatrick (Adobe’s Head of Accessibility) named the Task Force “Silver” (because the initials of “Accessibility Guidelines” form the symbol of the silver element).

The Silver Task Force want the next major accessibility guidelines to:

• take account of more disabilities;
• apply to more technologies than just the web, including virtual reality, augmented reality, voice assistants, and more;
• consider all the technologies that people use, including authoring tools, browsers, media players, assistive technologies (including screen readers and screen magnifiers), application software, and operating systems.

That’s quite a challenge, and so the more people who can help, the better. The Silver Task Force wanted an alternative to W3C’s Working Groups, which are made up of employees of organisations who are members of the W3C, and invited experts. So, they created a Silver Community Group to allow everyone to contribute towards this crucial work. If you want to join right now, for free, just create a W3C account.

Like all good designers, the Silver Task Force and Silver Community Group began by researching. They examined the problems that people have had when using, conforming to, and maintaining the existing accessibility guidelines, and then summarised that research. From there, the Silver Community Group drafted ambitious design principles and requirements. You can read about what the Silver Community Group are currently working on, and decide whether you would like to get involved now, or at a later stage.

Emphasise expertise over empathy

Remember that today’s theme is “Promoting the participation of persons with disabilities and their leadership: taking action on the 2030 Development Agenda”. (The United Nations’ 2030 Development Agenda is outside the scope of this article, but if you’re looking to be inspired, read Alessia Aquaro’s article on Public Digital’s blog about how digital government can contribute to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.) In line with this theme, if you don’t have a disability and you want to contribute to the Silver Community Group, resist the temptation to try to empathise with people with disabilities. Instead, take 21 minutes during this festive season to enjoy the brilliant Liz Jackson explaining how empathy reifies disability stigmas, and follow her advice.

Choose the right route

I think we can expect the next Accessibility Guidelines to make their way into international standards and international law, just like their predecessors. We can also expect successful companies to apply them at scale. If you contribute to developing those guidelines, you can help to make sure that as many people as possible will be able to access digital information and services, in an era when that access will be crucial to every aspect of people’s lives. As Cennydd Bowles explained in “Building Better Worlds”, “There is no such thing as the future. There are instead a near-infinity of potential futures. The road as-yet-untravelled stretches before us in abundant directions. We get to choose the route. There is no fate but what we make.”

About the author

Alan Dalton worked for Ireland’s National Disability Authority for 9½ years, mostly as Accessibility Development Advisor. That involved working closely with public sector bodies to make websites, services, and information more accessible to all users, including users with disabilities. Before that, he was a consultant and trainer for Software Paths Ltd. in Dublin. In his spare time, he maintains StrongPasswordGenerator.com to help people stay safe online, tweets, and takes photos.

More articles by Alan

Dewey Library - U21.2.M558 2019

IAF assets have been kept on stand by at various bases, including Raipur and Gwalior.

Shoma stated that since the case is "initiated by the state", she will cooperate.

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Sponsors

• Triplebyte offers a $1000 signing bonus
• Sentry use the code “devchat” for $100 credit
• CacheFly

Panel

• AJ O’Neal
• Joe Eames
• Aimee Knight
• Charles Max Wood
• Chris Ferdinandi

Joined by Special guest: Nicholas Zakas

Summary

Nicholas Zakas discusses the overuse of JavaScript and the underuse of HTML and CSS. The panel contemplates the talk Nicholas Zakas gave 6 years ago about this very same topic and how this is still a problem in the development community. Nicholas expounds on the negative effects overusing Javascript has on web applications and the things that using HTML and CSS do really well. The panel talks about the need for simplicity and using the right tool to build applications. Nicholas recommends the methods he uses to build greenfield applications and to improve existing applications.

Links

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=li4Y0E_x8zE
• https://www.slideshare.net/nzakas/enough-withthejavascriptalready
• https://twitter.com/slicknet
• https://humanwhocodes.com/
• https://www.facebook.com/javascriptjabber
• https://twitter.com/JSJabber

Picks

Chris Ferdinandi:

• The Umbrella Academy Official Trailer
• https://github.com/features/actions

AJ O’Neal:

• Jurassic Park
• Terminator 2
• E6000 adhesive

Aimee Knight:

• https://www.reebok.com/us/reebok-legacy-lifter/BD4730.html
• https://www.holloway.com/g/equity-compensation

Charles Max Wood:

• https://podfestexpo.com/
• http://charlesmaxwood.com/
• https://www.11ty.io/
• https://www.netlify.com/

Joe Eames:

• https://www.mysteryscenemag.com/blog-article/5905-tom-straw-the-author-behind-castle
• Richard Castle books
• https://vanillajslist.com/

Nicholas Zakas:

• The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz
• https://opencollective.com/eslint

Carl Mungazi is a frontend developer at Limejump in London. He is a former journalist and switched to programming in 2016. Today the panel is discussing the benefits of reading source code. Carl began reading source code because he came into programming late and from a different field. His first project was with Mithril, and he read the source code and documentation to help him understand it. The panelists discuss how reading the source code has helped them and others to improve their coding. They compare reading and understanding source code to learning a foreign language, and discuss  different methods. 

Carl gives some suggestions for reading source code effectively. He advises people to be patient and step through the code. Accept that you will probably take a wrong path at some point or another, but the more you read, the more you will see patterns in how libraries are structured. He also encourages listeners to approach the authors, as they are often happy to lend a hand. Reading source code is an active approach of stepping through, debugging, putting in break points, checking the stack, and so forth. It’s also important to do outside research. 

Since he has been reading source code, Carl has come to prefer plain JavaScript and libraries with as little code as possible. The panel discusses the benefits of small, simple libraries. Carl gives examples of techniques that he learned from reading a library source code and how he applied it to his own coding style. Reading source code has made him more careful about mixing logic and UI, and now he separates them. He also is more confident in seeing a problem, going to a preexisting library, and just importing the fix for that problem rather than the whole library. Reading source code is really about understanding the code you use in your project. It may slow you down, but you’ll be thankful in the long term because it will help you solve future bugs more efficiently. Carl talks more about his debugging process. He still relies on a debugger, but reading a library helps you to see patterns and guess the output of a function. These patterns persist in other libraries as well. Once you can guess correctly what will happen, you go back to reading the code and find instances where the output is unexpected, and fix it. Carl’s closing thoughts are that through reading source code, he has learned that although code is used differently in each library, they are all written in the same language, and therefore interrelated. This gave him more confidence in reading code because they’re all fundamentally the same. When a bug is discovered, he encourages listeners to look at the source code before googling a solution. 

Panelists

• AJ O’Neal

• Dan Shapir

• Steve Edwards

• Charles Max Wood

Guest

• Carl Mungazi

Sponsors

• Hasura.io 

• Sentry | Use the code “devchat” for $100 credit

• Adventures in Angular

Links

• Mithril.js

• Preact

• Limejump

Picks

AJ O’Neal

• Zen of Python

• The Go Proverbs

• Go with Versions

• Link’s Awakening soundtrack

Dan Shapir

• Programming Pearls book

• Lord of Light

Steve Edwards

• Jabra Elite 65T

Charles Max Wood

• Garth Brooks

• The Rocky movies

Carl Mungazi

• Follow Carl @CarlMungazi and carlmungazi.com

• EcmaScript Spec

• HTML 5.2

• Snarky Puppy

Catlin, George, 1796-1872

Mallett, Margaret

Krantz, Steven G. (Steven George), 1951-

The Telangana government on Friday began imposing a fine of Rs 1,000 on people roaming in public places without wearing a mask as the state battles to contain new Covid-19 cases.

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