Bimonthly newsletter released by the Institute of Transport Studies at Monash University

Elon Musk has been frustrated that Tesla’s Fremont factory has remained shut down due to Alameda County’s lockdown order, and that anger has apparently reached the boiling point. Musk has claimed that he’ll move Tesla’s headquarters to Nevada or Texa...

Pletení, to přece není práce pro chlapa, řeknete si. Ovšem ve slovenských Čičmanech (a vůbec v celé oblasti Horního Pováží) by mnozí nesouhlasili. Tady bývalo pletení ponožek z ovčí vlny výsostnou činností tamních bačů. V dnešní době je ovšem takový pletač nadmíru vzácný.

Rozvolňování opatření proti šíření koronaviru v Česku zdárně pokračuje podle plánu. Otevírají se obchody a instituce, firmy obnovují svoji činnost a zanedlouho otevřou zahrádky u hospod. Lidé už začali plánovat dovolenou a nervózně sledují vývoj zpráv, jestli budou moct letos k moři či nikoliv. Vše by mohlo nasvědčovat tomu, že se všechno brzy vrátí do starých kolejí. Ale to je omyl, česká společnost se vrátí do poněkud odlišnějšího světa. Protože u toho už nebude řada firem a desítky či možná stovky tisíc lidí budou pracně zajišťovat svoji existenci.

Někteří badatelé tvrdí, že dějiny Židů v Číně začínají již v 6. století před naším letopočtem za dynastie Čou, k tomu však nejsou žádné archeologické či jiné materiální důkazy. Všeobecně se tak počítají počátky židovské přítomnosti až od 8. století našeho letopočtu, za vlády dynastie Tang, kdy do Říše středu dorazily první skupinky obchodníků po Hedvábné stezce a usazovali se podél ní. Dnes od 18 hodin můžete na Facebooku Reflexu sledovat premiéru speciálního hudebního pořadu Židé v říši středu. Dějiny izraleského národa a Číny jsou zajímavě propojené.

V pražských Košířích má svou ulici. Národní umělec Vítězslav Vejražka  (1915–1973). Články, které se čas od času objeví, zdůrazňují jeho mužnost. „Prostě chlapák,“ tak pojmenoval svůj medailón Týdeník Televize. Ve skutečnosti byl Vítězslav Vejražka placenou štětkou Státní bezpečnosti a na rozkaz se vyspal s každým, koho mu tajná policie předhodila. Včetně vlastní tety. Přečtěte si bizarní příběh herce, který by dnes slavil 105. narozeniny.

Bojíte se, že letos nebudete zatlačovat slzu u zlatavých nekonečných obzorů? Ale budete. A mnozí alergici na řepku slzy zatlačují už teď. Rajčata stojí sice 170kč za kilo, květák je už také kaviárem českých domácností, ale heslo "řídit stát jako zemědělství" nám zajistilo širé moře zlaté barvy. Sice se z řepky nenajíme (teda až na ty, co z pěstování rýžují zlaté dotace), ale že jsou to panorámata, co? 

The Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS) announced the winners of its annual New Product Awards Monday afternoon at the 9th Annual SLAS International Conference and Exhibition in San Diego, CA, USA.

The beauty of slow TV, says Spencer Stoner, is that it’s different things to different people – a travelogue, an immersive experience, an awesome screensaver. After the success of last year’s Go South, Stoner has spent a month at sea filming Go Further South, a 12-hour journey from Bluff to Antarctica.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Go Further South is perfect for self-isolation.
It’s kind-of an unhappy accident. I’ve been in the final stage of editing and every day I feel like I’m sailing through the Ross Sea in Antarctica and it’s cool to think that…

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Even Exchange’s marketing bod reckons tests of new Reply-All-stopper could be a career-defining moment

Microsoft may just have made Reply All storms a thing of the past, by adding a suitable blocker to Exchange in Office 365 environments.…

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) finds Tesla's Autopilot cuts crashes by 40%. How cool is that? Autonomous vehicles are going to cause a huge decline in accidents and deaths. Even short of autonomous vehicles, when you get your next car try to get one that supports automatic braking on imminent collision detection. You could get a large fraction of the collision avoidance benefit at a much lower cost today. Check out Insurance Institute for Highway Safety ratings of collision avoidance systems in current cars. Watch a Tesla react to a crash in front of it: Watch a Tesla avoid hitting a reckless driver: A recent analysis finds that autonomous vehicles will allow 2 million disabled people to get...

We need a mass movement of tens of millions of people prepared to say that we want national health care, that we want the millionaires and multi-national corporations who are not paying their fair share, to pay their fair share. Continue reading →

Гитарист SLIPKNOT Jim Root в недавнем интервью рассказал о том, что использует время на карантине для сбора идей для возможного сольного альбома:

«Теперь, когда мы переживаем эту безумную пандемию, я пытаюсь заставить себя писать.

Многие люди спрашивали меня о создании сольного проекта, и сейчас, думаю, у меня появилось дополнительное время, которое я могу ему посвятить. Я уже некоторое время сочиняю материал, который, возможно, не впишется в привычное творчество SLIPKNOT. Но в настоящее время я испытываю что-то вроде творческого кризиса.

Мне бы хотелось запустить соло-проект, потому что я хочу заниматься делом. У меня нет семьи, я никогда не был женат. И мне известно, что Corey (фронтмен SLIPKNOT) упоминал о желании сделать сольный проект вне STONE SOUR. И если бы я не писал для SLIPKNOT, я бы не знал, куда девать своё время.

Мне легко сочинять аранжировки и идеи для SLIPKNOT — они для меня естественны, просто потому, что я провёл очень много времени с (покойным басистом SLIPKNOT) Paul'ом Grey'ем. Когда пишешь столь много, сколько я написал для последних двух альбомов, особо задумываться не приходится. Но для сольного проекта я собираюсь думать до тех пор, пока с ума не сойду, поэтому, быть может, этот материал вообще никогда не выйдет.

Это один из тех случаев, когда ты задаёшься вопросом вроде: "И в каком направлении я иду? Я вообще думал о направлении?" Позволю ли я вещам просто случиться естественным образом? Буду ли использовать те наработки, которые создавались для SLIPKNOT, но к которым SLIPKNOT вовсе не стремятся и считают их не очень-то подходящими для группы? Не то чтобы существовали правила насчёт того, что можно считать SLIPKNOT’овским, а что нет. Хорошая песня есть хорошая песня, кому бы она ни предназначалась.

Разумеется, SLIPKNOT — это мой приоритет навсегда. Я буду фокусироваться на группе, как только смогу, пока команда жизнеспособна, пока все мы пожелаем продолжать совместную работу.

Что я сделаю в рамках сольного проекта? В каком направлении двинусь? Думаю, это естественным образом вытекает из всех аранжировок, которые я сделал для последних двух записей SLIPKNOT. Не знаю, нужен ли мне другой механизм творческого самовыражения. Но я намерен постараться — поставить цель и посмотреть, смогу ли я её достигнуть. Времени у нас теперь предостаточно». #Slipknot #Metal #_Metal #AlternativeMetal #Alternative_Metal #NuMetal #Nu_Metal

I recently had the pleasure of talking with Sven of the KidsLab podcast and the Evil Mad Scientist episode is now live! KidsLab is “a podcast for parents, educators and everybody passionate about #STEAM education.”

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 […]






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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 […]






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Are my tools going to be stolen? Is my car going to be stolen? What if she refuses to leave? What if she leaves in the middle of the night? What if she leaves the door open? What if she has lice or bedbugs or hepatitis? What if she locks herself in the bathroom? What if she never wakes up? And I'm sure she worried about me.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that Queensland Sugar Limited (QSL), a global leader in raw sugar marketing that manages over 90 percent of Australia’s raw sugar exports, has selected IBM advanced storage systems to support rapidly growing data demands.

Lingmo’s Translate One2One uses IBM Watson Artificial Intelligence technology to translate in natural language.

IBM Australia and the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, University of Melbourne, today announced the launch of the IBM-Melbourne Institute 'Innovation Index of Australian Industry’ second edition. The Study revealed that the annual increase in the rate of innovative activity in Australia in 2006 was only 0.7 percent, with only four industries experiencing an increase in the annual rate of innovation in that period: communication services; mining; finance; and the insurance industry.

Queensland Motorways has awarded IBM a technology and services contract to introduce automated free-flow tolling across south east Queensland’s toll roads.

Hope Kahn is a Maryland-based journalist who is doing all of the sorts of things I was doing at her age: honing her writing and reporting skills, putting out a student newspaper, and always scrambling to find a good local story.

But that's where the similarities stop. Over the last couple of years she's been punching way above her weight class, having been published in national outlets such as Ms. and The New York Times. Suffice to say those are not exactly things I had accomplished before graduating high school.

More important, she writes about subjects that are touchstones for her generation. Her work with #SinceParkland is a great example of someone from Generation Lockdown working to effect change for her peers.

Recently we did some head shots. The idea was to help her with visually branding herself as the serious, thoughtful journalist she is fast becoming. The setup we used was classic Lighting 101 head-shot-in-a-corner fare, with an L102 and L103 twist. Read more »

White marble, dark chocolate, one light source. Problem?

Not at all. Because pretty much everything you can actually see across the top of that box is not really the "correct" tonality of the chocolate. It's all specular highlights.

Controlling the density of specular highlights is what compresses the subject's wide tonal range and unifies everything into one smooth exposure.
__________Read more »

You do something long enough, you'll eventually learn the little things you can do to help interesting stuff happen. One thing I have learned is this phrase:

"I'm a photographer. What can I do to help you?"

Just something as simple as that opens up all kinds of doors and possibilities. This week, it's how I ended up shooting Mexican sodas on a table-top studio in my basement.
Read more »