Survives another day!

It's hard to keep up with the Zoomers!

Familial dysautonomia (FD) is the most prevalent form of hereditary sensory and autonomic neuropathy (HSAN). In FD, a germline mutation in the Elp1 gene leads to Elp1 protein decrease that causes sympathetic neuron death and sympathetic nervous system dysfunction (dysautonomia). Elp1 is best known as a scaffolding protein within the nuclear hetero-hexameric transcriptional Elongator protein complex, but how it functions in sympathetic neuron survival is very poorly understood. Here, we identified a cytoplasmic function for Elp1 in sympathetic neurons that was essential for retrograde nerve growth factor (NGF) signaling and neuron target tissue innervation and survival. Elp1 was found to bind to internalized TrkA receptors in an NGF-dependent manner, where it was essential for maintaining TrkA receptor phosphorylation (activation) by regulating PTPN6 (Shp1) phosphatase activity within the signaling complex. In the absence of Elp1, Shp1 was hyperactivated, leading to premature TrkA receptor dephosphorylation, which resulted in retrograde signaling failure and neuron death. Inhibiting Shp1 phosphatase activity in the absence of Elp1 rescued NGF-dependent retrograde signaling, and in an animal model of FD it rescued abnormal sympathetic target tissue innervation. These results suggest that regulation of retrograde NGF signaling in sympathetic neurons by Elp1 may explain sympathetic neuron loss and physiologic dysautonomia in patients with FD.

Cornel West and Tavis Smiley criticize President Barack Obama for being to the right of even President Richard Nixon. Continue reading →

The Berlin police department is looking to build a new facility, but some residents don't think spending $21 million should even be considered. Continue reading →

Questions surrounding Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation continue to grow. On Sunday, Democratic National Committee interim chairperson Donna Brazile defended Clinton’s meetings as secretary of state with Clinton Foundation donors, saying, "When Republicans meet with their donors, with their supporters, their activists, they call it a meeting. When Democrats do that, they call it a conflict." Donna Brazile’s comments come in response to an Associated Press investigation revealing that while Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state, more than half of the private citizens she met with during the reporting period had donated to the Clinton Foundation. The AP investigation comes after a three-year battle to gain access to State Department calendars. The analysis shows that at least 85 of 154 people Hillary Clinton had scheduled phone or in-person meetings with were foundation donors. We speak to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept. His most recent piece is headlined "Why Did the Saudi Regime and Other Gulf Tyrannies Donate Millions to the Clinton Foundation?" Continue reading →

As climate change accelerates, IBM is galvanizing the global science community with a massive infusion of computing resources, weather data, and cloud services to help researchers examine the effects of climate change, and explore strategies to mitigate its effects. IBM pledges to help direct the equivalent of up to $200 million for up to five climate-related projects judged to offer the greatest potential impact, and will then broadly share the experiments' results.

IBM announced today that the U.S. Army’s Logistics Support Activity awarded IBM a contract to continue providing cloud services, software development and cognitive computing, constituting the technical infrastructure for one of the U.S. federal government’s biggest logistics systems.

Forty-one years ago this summer I was a young investigator working in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and Washington, DC for the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, a big federal investigation chaired by Dartmouth Professor John Kemeny, who is best known as the father of the BASIC programming language. I learned a lot that summer and fall not only about nuclear accidents but about how governments and industries respond to crises. Some of those lessons apply to the current COVID-19 pandemic, which is also being poorly managed. This may surprise you (that 41-year-old lessons can still apply) but governments, especially, change at a glacial pace. The two federal agencies with which I mainly dealt were the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Nuclear […]






Digital Branding
Web Design
Marketing

My last column was about crisis management lessons I learned back in 1979 while investigating the Federal Emergency Management Agency for the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island (TMI). Let’s just say that FEMA wasn’t ready for a nuclear meltdown. Today we turn to the other federal agency I investigated at that same time — the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). While FEMA was simply unprepared and incompetent, the NRC was unprepared and lied about it. Like FEMA, the NRC had recently undergone a rebranding from its previous identity as the Atomic Energy Commission — a schizoid agency that had been charged with both regulating nuclear power and promoting it. It’s difficult to be the major booster of technology while at the same […]






Digital Branding
Web Design
Marketing

why am I helping to pay so much for the U.S. Military? I don't own anything.

IBM Security today released a global study examining consumer perspectives around digital identity and authentication, which found that people now prioritize security over convenience when logging into applications and devices. Generational differences also emerged showing that younger adults are putting less care into traditional password hygiene, yet are more likely to use biometrics, multifactor authentication and password managers to improve their personal security.

Un nuevo estudio de IBM pone en entredicho algunas de las creencias que se tienen acerca de la generación del Milenio. Según el estudio elaborado por la Compañía, los nacidos en la Era Digital no son “ni perezosos, ni egoístas, ni superficiales” y aconseja a las empresas detenerse a conocer qué motiva a cada empleado para poder así maximizar sus cualidades únicas.

IBM today announced it plans to shift $100 million investment over the next five years into a major Research effort which aims to advance mobile services and capabilities for businesses and consumers worldwide.

IBM today announced that as part of its Celebration of Service, designed to allow employees, retirees, clients and business partners to donate their time and expertise during the company's Centennial year, 300,000 IBMers around the world -- close to three quarters of its global workforce -- are volunteering in more than 5,000 projects in 120 countries, meeting civic and societal challenges and serving millions in need.

El 67% de los usuarios en todo el mundo se siente actualmente cómodo utilizando tecnologías biométricas (lectura de huella dactilar, escaneado de retina y reconocimiento facial o de voz) para acceder a sus aplicaciones, según el estudio IBM Security Future of Identity elaborado por IBM.

ANZ, one of Australia and New Zealand’s leading banks, has signed a five-year, AU$450 million strategic agreement with IBM. This partnership will provide ANZ with increased capability to drive productivity and innovation across the Group, as well as improving its capacity to deal with the rapidly growing number of customers and transactions across the bank’s branch, digital and mobile channels and support ANZ’s regional expansion.

That trip to Tosche Station can wait!

The actor behind Luke Skywalker takes StarWars.com on a journey through filming the Star Wars sequel in time for the 40th anniversary of its release.

V dubnu bylo bez práce 254 tisíc lidí, nejvíce od března 2018. Nezaměstnanost vzrostla na 3,4 procenta, potvrdil ve čtvrtek Úřad práce. V evidenci přibývá lidí z oboru služeb. O dubnových číslech hovořila již v pondělí ministryně práce Jana Maláčová (ČSSD). Podle ní jsou data stále příznivá.

Hospody a restaurace Češi prostřednictvím projektu Zachraň hospodu podpořili deseti miliony korun. Poukazy do více než 1 500 podniků si od začátku dubna, kdy byl projekt spuštěn, koupilo přes devět tisíc lidí. Stravovací zařízení budou moci od pondělí obsluhovat hosty na zahrádkách, iniciativa se tím však nezastaví.

Každá krize znamená příležitost.Takovým heslem se řídí egyptský miliardář Naguib Sawiris. Podle něj se bude ropa do roku a půl obchodovat za sto dolarů za barel. Zatímco jiní miliardáři se podílů v leteckých společnostech zbavují, Sawiris je chce nakupovat. Potenciál vidí i v turismu.

Nezaměstnanost se šíří světem podobně jako virus. Nejhorší je situace v USA. Tamní centrální banka čeká až třetinovou nezaměstnanost. Jednou z nejvíce postižených zemí v Evropě bude Španělsko, kde se může ocitnout bez práce více než pětina lidí.

Anyone know what this lovely tree is? Spotted in Mills Park.

The Iron Dragon's Mother received a long, thoughtful, and positive review from Matt Hilliard in the March 30 issue of Strange Horizons. Rather than give you the usual pull-quote carefully excised from the corpus of the text, I thought I'd share with you one of Hilliard's observations:

That raises the question: what is Swanwick up to with this setting? If he wants to write fun faerie stories, why not just write about faeries the normal way? Or, since a valid way to describe this book is to say it’s “about a faerie fighter pilot, but it’s reallyabout living in a corrupt world and dealing with death,” why not just write about corruption and death in the real world where both can be found in abundance? To answer the second question, a common defense of genre fiction is that both fantasy and science fiction give us a different perspective on things that don’t change. They defamiliarize the world around us by situating us in the future or a past that never existed, and in doing so they can teach us things about humanity that we wouldn’t otherwise have known.

It’s been sixty-five years since J. R. R. Tolkien published The Fellowship of the Ring and spawned a host of imitators, and for most of Swanwick’s readers, fantasy has become deeply familiar. If it’s too familiar, it no longer defamiliarizes. What to do? Some authors, such as those of the New Weird, responded by moving away from Tolkien’s folklore influences, pushing into stranger territory. Swanwick has done the opposite, hewing closely to the peoples and monsters of folklore traditions from around the world (albeit with the occasional references to Tolkien himself, as with Caitlin’s brother, named Fingolfinrhod). But by mixing together elves and Gucci handbags, dwarves and cigarettes, or dragons and jet fighters, Swanwick continually shifts the context his reader must use. Whenever you find yourself getting comfortable, the novel suddenly sounds like this: “With the easy, racist phrasing of his class, her brother said, ‘Well, the kobold is in the henhouse now, to be sure’” (p. 289).

Overall, the review is positive, the sort of thing that warms a writer's heart. Hilliard has some negative things to say along the way, but since they're based on a careful reading of the book I actually wrote, I don't see that I have any right to complain.

You can read the whole review here.  Or go to Strange Horizons here and wander around, maybe read a story or two while you're there.

Above: Cleaning office, I came across the above photo of myself at age 23, when I was new to Philadelphia and determined to be a science fiction writer. It captures my mood then pretty well.

 Digging through a box of figures yesterday I found an old Grenadier Orc that I had painted back in 1986 or so. Well, I thought time to draft you into the army my son!
It was only when I brought him down stairs to the painting table I realised I had bought some orcs from EBay that matched him exactly. In fact I think the sculpt had been cut up to create the other as from the head down to the belt were identical. Well not being one to break up a family, this lot will be based together on the same base. The range is an old Grenadier box set I think.

 I will rebase him, but I did have to stop and take a trip down memory lane as I studied his base. Back then rather than painting hordes of figures, I would spend hours on just one. This one is based on a piece of cardboard cut from an art pad. Polly filler was then used for the grass and pricked with a needle to create grass, then painted. Boy, now I just wash and go with new improved ground mix from Luke’s APS.
I used to spend hours and days on just one character at a time, glad to say those days are long behind me but it was quite moving looking at the way I used to work as a teenager.

1. Barbaro family makes emotional plea as manhunt continues following death of Melbourne mum  9News
2. Ellie Price’s murder investigation ramps up as police from three states unite in manhunt for Ricardo Barbaro  7NEWS.com.au
3. 'Please come forward': Fugitive's step mum pleads for Ricardo Barbaro to make contact  The Age
4. Ricardo Barbaro’s stepmother pleads ‘please come forward’ as police continue manhunt  NEWS.com.au
5. Fugitive suspected of murdering Ellie Price, 26, in Melbourne had just got out of jail  Daily Mail
6. View Full coverage on Google News

Guinness World Records has named a South African restaurant as the official titleholder for 'Most Varieties of Milkshakes Commercially Available'.

 Naturally, people use search terms that match their interests and experience, with phrases like ‘engineering jobs’ or ‘jobs in finance.’ And it’s no surprise that people often add geographical factors to narrow the results, such as ‘in Dallas,’ ‘near me,’ or ‘remote.’ What’s intriguing is that job seekers also use terms that identify their […]

The post Did you know there are millions of searches every month for ‘jobs’ on Google? appeared first on DiversityJobs.com.

An attractive rewards credit card for frequent Delta flyers. While some American Express rewards cards offer great perks, like complimentary access to its exclusive network of airport lounges, you won’t get that perk with the (lounge access costs $39 per visit). However, you will get attractive rewards rates on several types of travel-related purchases along with other valuable travel benefits. This card offers you the highest reward rate when you make purchases with Delta or spend on hotel bookings, which […]

The post Delta SkyMiles® Platinum American Express Card Review appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

A top-shelf rewards credit card with luxury travel perks. The gives you access to coveted airport lounges, which is a unique benefit that will be highly attractive to some. Only a few American Express rewards cards will get you into the 10 Centurion Lounges around the world. Additionally, the card offers a number of other travel benefits, including access to Delta Sky Clubs and a free checked bag on Delta flights. Like any credit card, it does come with some […]

The post Delta SkyMiles® Reserve American Express Card Review appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Iriss.fm is delighted to broadcast an episode on the work of Plumtree, an Australian not-for-profit organisation that provides support for young children from birth to 8 years old with a developmental delay or disability and their families.

Sylvana Mahmic (CEO) and Dr Melanie Heyworth (Peer Worker) tell the story of Now and Next, a project that has been successful at involving families as peer workers in early childhood intervention.

Three key messages:

Peer workers offer unique benefit to families of young children with disabilities that are not available through existing services, but which are complementary to them. Benefits include feelings of leadership, agency and community. Learning from mental health practice could be applied to the disability sector, so there was no need to spend time reinventing the wheel. It made it cost effective, quick and provided maximum benefit. Implementation of peer work into any existing organisation will face challenges and barriers, but these can be mitigated by pre-emptive organisational action.

Transcript of episode

Music Credit: Make your dream a reality by Scott Holmes

In 2006 Mencap produced a comprehensive review of short break provision. Now, 10 years on, they are revisiting the support available for family carers to see whether recent policy initiatives and investment have delivered the much-needed change. A total of 264 family carers responded to their survey on short breaks provision and experiences of caring. They also sent Freedom of Information requests to all 152 local authorities in England that provide social care services. This report looks at short breaks provision in a climate of cuts to central and local government budgets. It examines the extent to which these cuts have impacted on the lives of people with a learning disability and their family carers. It also looks at the state of affairs for family carers of children and young people across the full spectrum of learning disability; from people with mild and moderate learning disabilities, to people with severe and profound disabilities.

We may have to vote by mail or we die. But 22% of mail-in ballots are never counted — that’s well over one out of five. That means, if we go to 80% mail-in voting, we’ll have 25 million lost votes in November. If it were random, it obviously

The post 25 Million Ballots Could be Lost in Shift to Mail-in Voting appeared first on Greg Palast.

I get it:  We all must vote by mail—or we die. 
There is really no other safe choice. But there is much to fear, with a switch to all-mail voting—unless our broken absentee ballot system is fixed. Here’s what the “Go Postal” crowd doesn’t tell you

The post Rush to Vote-by-Mail could cost Dems the Election<div id='sec-title'>Mail-in Voting puts Millions of Minority Ballots at Risk</div> appeared first on Greg Palast.

Fox News' Pete Hegseth calls for people to go out and get infected by coronavirus: "Now that we are learning more, herd immunity is our friend. Healthy people getting out there -- they are going to have to have some courage." pic.twitter.com/PCSHm9yUAW

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) May 7, 2020

Working from home is tough, and when Isaac Parker tries to have a productive meeting with his team, his annoying younger stepbrother, Johnny Ford, refuses to leave him alone. Pretty soon, the businessman puts the virtual meeting on mute and lets the little guy suck his cock while he works! See more at FamilyDick.

The post FamilyDick: Brotherly Affection – Chapter 2: Virtual Presentation appeared first on QueerClick.

For centuries, nations have expanded geographically and economically by taking land and labor from indigenous people. One of the narratives used to justify this colonialist expansion portrays indigenous land and space as empty, simply there for others to occupy. This narrative is known as indigenous absence. Kleinman and Kleinman write that this kind of erasure […]

A panoramic view of the Milky Way galaxy's dusty core reveals several colorful deep-space nebulas.

Tucked into the foothills of California's beloved Laurel Canyon, the Laurel Hills Residence by Assembledge+ is an exquisite example of modern, sustainable home design. Comprised of three cedar-clad volumes with massive glass panels, the house features interconnecting pavilions that are topped with a broad overhangs to shield the interior spaces from extensive sun exposure.[...]

When Sam Goree and his colleagues came across articles and blog posts that claim or ask that websites today look very similar to each other, they were intrigued. Unfortunately, since these articles didn’t have an empirical study to back them up, they ran a test to determine whether this claim had any truth to it, and if so, the reason behind it.

We ran a series of data mining studies that scrutinized nearly 200,000 images across 10,000 websites.

And what did they find out? Websites, indeed, were becoming very similar.

More details about this study over at Fast Company.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: 200degrees/ Pixabay)

In a recent highly targeted BEC attack, hackers managed to trick three British private equity firms into wire-transferring a total of $1.3 million to the bank accounts fraudsters have access to — while the victimized executives thought they closed an investment deal with some startups. According to the cybersecurity firm Check Point, who shared its latest investigation with The Hacker News,

Soon after he offered public assurances that the government was ready to battle the coronavirus, the powerful chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr, sold off a significant percentage of his stocks, unloading between $628,000 and $1.72 million of his holdings on Feb. 13 in 33 separate transactions. As the head of the intelligence […]

By Dan Duddy  Published: May 06th, 2020 

Today we have goo Ranking looking at where Japanese rate as the tastiest family restaurant. “Family restaurant” is another example of Japanese English; it isn’t “family-owned”, but “family-friendly”. Saizeria as number one (incidentally, it’s also the foreign traveller’s favourite) is a little surprising; their pasta is all dried pasta, and their pizza bases are just […]

HELLO! PLEASE DISABLE YOUR ADBLOCKER OR WHITELIST US! IT MEANS A LOT! THANK YOU!!

Donalyn Miller's #BookADay Challenge is usually in the summer. After talking with people on Twitter and Facebook, Donalyn (happily) decided to hold a Coronavirus social distancing #BookADay challenge, so that readers who miss talking with other readers can gather and share.

You can see the "official" #bookaday guidelines on the Nerdy Book Club blog.