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Explore the nocturnal wilderness at herp walks in Visakhapatnam

Embark on a nocturnal adventure in the Eastern Ghats in Visakhapatnam with herp walks, discovering hidden reptiles and amphibians




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Colossal Dielectric Permittivity and Superparaelectricity in phenyl pyrimidine based liquid crystals

J. Mater. Chem. C, 2024, Accepted Manuscript
DOI: 10.1039/D4TC03561E, Paper
YURI PANARIN, Wanhe Jiang, Neelam Yadav, Mudit Sahai, Yumin Tang, Xianbing Zeng, Olga Panarina, Georg H. Mehl, Jagdish K Vij
A set of polar rod-shaped liquid crystalline molecules with large dipole moments (µ > 10.4-14.8 D), their molecular structures based on the ferroelectric nematic prototype DIO, are designed, synthesized, and...
The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry




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Enterprising solutions



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Greenglass: the enterprise that's saved more than 60,000 bottles from becoming trash

100% recycling extends the useful life of glass, fights the problem of household trash, supports recyclers and transforms bottles into modern drinking glasses.



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Sustainable Web Design, An Excerpt

In the 1950s, many in the elite running community had begun to believe it wasn’t possible to run a mile in less than four minutes. Runners had been attempting it since the late 19th century and were beginning to draw the conclusion that the human body simply wasn’t built for the task. 

But on May 6, 1956, Roger Bannister took everyone by surprise. It was a cold, wet day in Oxford, England—conditions no one expected to lend themselves to record-setting—and yet Bannister did just that, running a mile in 3:59.4 and becoming the first person in the record books to run a mile in under four minutes. 

This shift in the benchmark had profound effects; the world now knew that the four-minute mile was possible. Bannister’s record lasted only forty-six days, when it was snatched away by Australian runner John Landy. Then a year later, three runners all beat the four-minute barrier together in the same race. Since then, over 1,400 runners have officially run a mile in under four minutes; the current record is 3:43.13, held by Moroccan athlete Hicham El Guerrouj.

We achieve far more when we believe that something is possible, and we will believe it’s possible only when we see someone else has already done it—and as with human running speed, so it is with what we believe are the hard limits for how a website needs to perform.

Establishing standards for a sustainable web

In most major industries, the key metrics of environmental performance are fairly well established, such as miles per gallon for cars or energy per square meter for homes. The tools and methods for calculating those metrics are standardized as well, which keeps everyone on the same page when doing environmental assessments. In the world of websites and apps, however, we aren’t held to any particular environmental standards, and only recently have gained the tools and methods we need to even make an environmental assessment.

The primary goal in sustainable web design is to reduce carbon emissions. However, it’s almost impossible to actually measure the amount of CO2 produced by a web product. We can’t measure the fumes coming out of the exhaust pipes on our laptops. The emissions of our websites are far away, out of sight and out of mind, coming out of power stations burning coal and gas. We have no way to trace the electrons from a website or app back to the power station where the electricity is being generated and actually know the exact amount of greenhouse gas produced. So what do we do? 

If we can’t measure the actual carbon emissions, then we need to find what we can measure. The primary factors that could be used as indicators of carbon emissions are:

  1. Data transfer 
  2. Carbon intensity of electricity

Let’s take a look at how we can use these metrics to quantify the energy consumption, and in turn the carbon footprint, of the websites and web apps we create.

Data transfer

Most researchers use kilowatt-hours per gigabyte (kWh/GB) as a metric of energy efficiency when measuring the amount of data transferred over the internet when a website or application is used. This provides a great reference point for energy consumption and carbon emissions. As a rule of thumb, the more data transferred, the more energy used in the data center, telecoms networks, and end user devices.

For web pages, data transfer for a single visit can be most easily estimated by measuring the page weight, meaning the transfer size of the page in kilobytes the first time someone visits the page. It’s fairly easy to measure using the developer tools in any modern web browser. Often your web hosting account will include statistics for the total data transfer of any web application (Fig 2.1).

Fig 2.1: The Kinsta hosting dashboard displays data transfer alongside traffic volumes. If you divide data transfer by visits, you get the average data per visit, which can be used as a metric of efficiency.

The nice thing about page weight as a metric is that it allows us to compare the efficiency of web pages on a level playing field without confusing the issue with constantly changing traffic volumes. 

Reducing page weight requires a large scope. By early 2020, the median page weight was 1.97 MB for setups the HTTP Archive classifies as “desktop” and 1.77 MB for “mobile,” with desktop increasing 36 percent since January 2016 and mobile page weights nearly doubling in the same period (Fig 2.2). Roughly half of this data transfer is image files, making images the single biggest source of carbon emissions on the average website. 

History clearly shows us that our web pages can be smaller, if only we set our minds to it. While most technologies become ever more energy efficient, including the underlying technology of the web such as data centers and transmission networks, websites themselves are a technology that becomes less efficient as time goes on.

Fig 2.2: The historical page weight data from HTTP Archive can teach us a lot about what is possible in the future.

You might be familiar with the concept of performance budgeting as a way of focusing a project team on creating faster user experiences. For example, we might specify that the website must load in a maximum of one second on a broadband connection and three seconds on a 3G connection. Much like speed limits while driving, performance budgets are upper limits rather than vague suggestions, so the goal should always be to come in under budget.

Designing for fast performance does often lead to reduced data transfer and emissions, but it isn’t always the case. Web performance is often more about the subjective perception of load times than it is about the true efficiency of the underlying system, whereas page weight and transfer size are more objective measures and more reliable benchmarks for sustainable web design. 

We can set a page weight budget in reference to a benchmark of industry averages, using data from sources like HTTP Archive. We can also benchmark page weight against competitors or the old version of the website we’re replacing. For example, we might set a maximum page weight budget as equal to our most efficient competitor, or we could set the benchmark lower to guarantee we are best in class. 

If we want to take it to the next level, then we could also start looking at the transfer size of our web pages for repeat visitors. Although page weight for the first time someone visits is the easiest thing to measure, and easy to compare on a like-for-like basis, we can learn even more if we start looking at transfer size in other scenarios too. For example, visitors who load the same page multiple times will likely have a high percentage of the files cached in their browser, meaning they don’t need to transfer all of the files on subsequent visits. Likewise, a visitor who navigates to new pages on the same website will likely not need to load the full page each time, as some global assets from areas like the header and footer may already be cached in their browser. Measuring transfer size at this next level of detail can help us learn even more about how we can optimize efficiency for users who regularly visit our pages, and enable us to set page weight budgets for additional scenarios beyond the first visit.

Page weight budgets are easy to track throughout a design and development process. Although they don’t actually tell us carbon emission and energy consumption analytics directly, they give us a clear indication of efficiency relative to other websites. And as transfer size is an effective analog for energy consumption, we can actually use it to estimate energy consumption too.

In summary, reduced data transfer translates to energy efficiency, a key factor to reducing carbon emissions of web products. The more efficient our products, the less electricity they use, and the less fossil fuels need to be burned to produce the electricity to power them. But as we’ll see next, since all web products demand some power, it’s important to consider the source of that electricity, too.

Carbon intensity of electricity

Regardless of energy efficiency, the level of pollution caused by digital products depends on the carbon intensity of the energy being used to power them. Carbon intensity is a term used to define the grams of CO2 produced for every kilowatt-hour of electricity (gCO2/kWh). This varies widely, with renewable energy sources and nuclear having an extremely low carbon intensity of less than 10 gCO2/kWh (even when factoring in their construction); whereas fossil fuels have very high carbon intensity of approximately 200–400 gCO2/kWh. 

Most electricity comes from national or state grids, where energy from a variety of different sources is mixed together with varying levels of carbon intensity. The distributed nature of the internet means that a single user of a website or app might be using energy from multiple different grids simultaneously; a website user in Paris uses electricity from the French national grid to power their home internet and devices, but the website’s data center could be in Dallas, USA, pulling electricity from the Texas grid, while the telecoms networks use energy from everywhere between Dallas and Paris.

We don’t have control over the full energy supply of web services, but we do have some control over where we host our projects. With a data center using a significant proportion of the energy of any website, locating the data center in an area with low carbon energy will tangibly reduce its carbon emissions. Danish startup Tomorrow reports and maps this user-contributed data, and a glance at their map shows how, for example, choosing a data center in France will have significantly lower carbon emissions than a data center in the Netherlands (Fig 2.3).

Fig 2.3: Tomorrow’s electricityMap shows live data for the carbon intensity of electricity by country.

That said, we don’t want to locate our servers too far away from our users; it takes energy to transmit data through the telecom’s networks, and the further the data travels, the more energy is consumed. Just like food miles, we can think of the distance from the data center to the website’s core user base as “megabyte miles”—and we want it to be as small as possible.

Using the distance itself as a benchmark, we can use website analytics to identify the country, state, or even city where our core user group is located and measure the distance from that location to the data center used by our hosting company. This will be a somewhat fuzzy metric as we don’t know the precise center of mass of our users or the exact location of a data center, but we can at least get a rough idea. 

For example, if a website is hosted in London but the primary user base is on the West Coast of the USA, then we could look up the distance from London to San Francisco, which is 5,300 miles. That’s a long way! We can see that hosting it somewhere in North America, ideally on the West Coast, would significantly reduce the distance and thus the energy used to transmit the data. In addition, locating our servers closer to our visitors helps reduce latency and delivers better user experience, so it’s a win-win.

Converting it back to carbon emissions

If we combine carbon intensity with a calculation for energy consumption, we can calculate the carbon emissions of our websites and apps. A tool my team created does this by measuring the data transfer over the wire when loading a web page, calculating the amount of electricity associated, and then converting that into a figure for CO2 (Fig 2.4). It also factors in whether or not the web hosting is powered by renewable energy.

If you want to take it to the next level and tailor the data more accurately to the unique aspects of your project, the Energy and Emissions Worksheet accompanying this book shows you how.

Fig 2.4: The Website Carbon Calculator shows how the Riverford Organic website embodies their commitment to sustainability, being both low carbon and hosted in a data center using renewable energy.

With the ability to calculate carbon emissions for our projects, we could actually take a page weight budget one step further and set carbon budgets as well. CO2 is not a metric commonly used in web projects; we’re more familiar with kilobytes and megabytes, and can fairly easily look at design options and files to assess how big they are. Translating that into carbon adds a layer of abstraction that isn’t as intuitive—but carbon budgets do focus our minds on the primary thing we’re trying to reduce, and support the core objective of sustainable web design: reducing carbon emissions.

Browser Energy

Data transfer might be the simplest and most complete analog for energy consumption in our digital projects, but by giving us one number to represent the energy used in the data center, the telecoms networks, and the end user’s devices, it can’t offer us insights into the efficiency in any specific part of the system.

One part of the system we can look at in more detail is the energy used by end users’ devices. As front-end web technologies become more advanced, the computational load is increasingly moving from the data center to users’ devices, whether they be phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, or even smart TVs. Modern web browsers allow us to implement more complex styling and animation on the fly using CSS and JavaScript. Furthermore, JavaScript libraries such as Angular and React allow us to create applications where the “thinking” work is done partly or entirely in the browser. 

All of these advances are exciting and open up new possibilities for what the web can do to serve society and create positive experiences. However, more computation in the user’s web browser means more energy used by their devices. This has implications not just environmentally, but also for user experience and inclusivity. Applications that put a heavy processing load on the user’s device can inadvertently exclude users with older, slower devices and cause batteries on phones and laptops to drain faster. Furthermore, if we build web applications that require the user to have up-to-date, powerful devices, people throw away old devices much more frequently. This isn’t just bad for the environment, but it puts a disproportionate financial burden on the poorest in society.

In part because the tools are limited, and partly because there are so many different models of devices, it’s difficult to measure website energy consumption on end users’ devices. One tool we do currently have is the Energy Impact monitor inside the developer console of the Safari browser (Fig 2.5).

Fig 2.5: The Energy Impact meter in Safari (on the right) shows how a website consumes CPU energy.

You know when you load a website and your computer’s cooling fans start spinning so frantically you think it might actually take off? That’s essentially what this tool is measuring. 

It shows us the percentage of CPU used and the duration of CPU usage when loading the web page, and uses these figures to generate an energy impact rating. It doesn’t give us precise data for the amount of electricity used in kilowatts, but the information it does provide can be used to benchmark how efficiently your websites use energy and set targets for improvement.




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Design for Safety, An Excerpt

Antiracist economist Kim Crayton says that “intention without strategy is chaos.” We’ve discussed how our biases, assumptions, and inattention toward marginalized and vulnerable groups lead to dangerous and unethical tech—but what, specifically, do we need to do to fix it? The intention to make our tech safer is not enough; we need a strategy.

This chapter will equip you with that plan of action. It covers how to integrate safety principles into your design work in order to create tech that’s safe, how to convince your stakeholders that this work is necessary, and how to respond to the critique that what we actually need is more diversity. (Spoiler: we do, but diversity alone is not the antidote to fixing unethical, unsafe tech.)

The process for inclusive safety

When you are designing for safety, your goals are to:

  • identify ways your product can be used for abuse,
  • design ways to prevent the abuse, and
  • provide support for vulnerable users to reclaim power and control.

The Process for Inclusive Safety is a tool to help you reach those goals (Fig 5.1). It’s a methodology I created in 2018 to capture the various techniques I was using when designing products with safety in mind. Whether you are creating an entirely new product or adding to an existing feature, the Process can help you make your product safe and inclusive. The Process includes five general areas of action:

  • Conducting research
  • Creating archetypes
  • Brainstorming problems
  • Designing solutions
  • Testing for safety
Fig 5.1: Each aspect of the Process for Inclusive Safety can be incorporated into your design process where it makes the most sense for you. The times given are estimates to help you incorporate the stages into your design plan.

The Process is meant to be flexible—it won’t make sense for teams to implement every step in some situations. Use the parts that are relevant to your unique work and context; this is meant to be something you can insert into your existing design practice.

And once you use it, if you have an idea for making it better or simply want to provide context of how it helped your team, please get in touch with me. It’s a living document that I hope will continue to be a useful and realistic tool that technologists can use in their day-to-day work.

If you’re working on a product specifically for a vulnerable group or survivors of some form of trauma, such as an app for survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, or drug addiction, be sure to read Chapter 7, which covers that situation explicitly and should be handled a bit differently. The guidelines here are for prioritizing safety when designing a more general product that will have a wide user base (which, we already know from statistics, will include certain groups that should be protected from harm). Chapter 7 is focused on products that are specifically for vulnerable groups and people who have experienced trauma.

Step 1: Conduct research

Design research should include a broad analysis of how your tech might be weaponized for abuse as well as specific insights into the experiences of survivors and perpetrators of that type of abuse. At this stage, you and your team will investigate issues of interpersonal harm and abuse, and explore any other safety, security, or inclusivity issues that might be a concern for your product or service, like data security, racist algorithms, and harassment.

Broad research

Your project should begin with broad, general research into similar products and issues around safety and ethical concerns that have already been reported. For example, a team building a smart home device would do well to understand the multitude of ways that existing smart home devices have been used as tools of abuse. If your product will involve AI, seek to understand the potentials for racism and other issues that have been reported in existing AI products. Nearly all types of technology have some kind of potential or actual harm that’s been reported on in the news or written about by academics. Google Scholar is a useful tool for finding these studies.

Specific research: Survivors

When possible and appropriate, include direct research (surveys and interviews) with people who are experts in the forms of harm you have uncovered. Ideally, you’ll want to interview advocates working in the space of your research first so that you have a more solid understanding of the topic and are better equipped to not retraumatize survivors. If you’ve uncovered possible domestic violence issues, for example, the experts you’ll want to speak with are survivors themselves, as well as workers at domestic violence hotlines, shelters, other related nonprofits, and lawyers.

Especially when interviewing survivors of any kind of trauma, it is important to pay people for their knowledge and lived experiences. Don’t ask survivors to share their trauma for free, as this is exploitative. While some survivors may not want to be paid, you should always make the offer in the initial ask. An alternative to payment is to donate to an organization working against the type of violence that the interviewee experienced. We’ll talk more about how to appropriately interview survivors in Chapter 6.

Specific research: Abusers

It’s unlikely that teams aiming to design for safety will be able to interview self-proclaimed abusers or people who have broken laws around things like hacking. Don’t make this a goal; rather, try to get at this angle in your general research. Aim to understand how abusers or bad actors weaponize technology to use against others, how they cover their tracks, and how they explain or rationalize the abuse.

Step 2: Create archetypes

Once you’ve finished conducting your research, use your insights to create abuser and survivor archetypes. Archetypes are not personas, as they’re not based on real people that you interviewed and surveyed. Instead, they’re based on your research into likely safety issues, much like when we design for accessibility: we don’t need to have found a group of blind or low-vision users in our interview pool to create a design that’s inclusive of them. Instead, we base those designs on existing research into what this group needs. Personas typically represent real users and include many details, while archetypes are broader and can be more generalized.

The abuser archetype is someone who will look at the product as a tool to perform harm (Fig 5.2). They may be trying to harm someone they don’t know through surveillance or anonymous harassment, or they may be trying to control, monitor, abuse, or torment someone they know personally.

Fig 5.2: Harry Oleson, an abuser archetype for a fitness product, is looking for ways to stalk his ex-girlfriend through the fitness apps she uses.

The survivor archetype is someone who is being abused with the product. There are various situations to consider in terms of the archetype’s understanding of the abuse and how to put an end to it: Do they need proof of abuse they already suspect is happening, or are they unaware they’ve been targeted in the first place and need to be alerted (Fig 5.3)?

Fig 5.3: The survivor archetype Lisa Zwaan suspects her husband is weaponizing their home’s IoT devices against her, but in the face of his insistence that she simply doesn’t understand how to use the products, she’s unsure. She needs some kind of proof of the abuse.

You may want to make multiple survivor archetypes to capture a range of different experiences. They may know that the abuse is happening but not be able to stop it, like when an abuser locks them out of IoT devices; or they know it’s happening but don’t know how, such as when a stalker keeps figuring out their location (Fig 5.4). Include as many of these scenarios as you need to in your survivor archetype. You’ll use these later on when you design solutions to help your survivor archetypes achieve their goals of preventing and ending abuse.

Fig 5.4: The survivor archetype Eric Mitchell knows he’s being stalked by his ex-boyfriend Rob but can’t figure out how Rob is learning his location information.

It may be useful for you to create persona-like artifacts for your archetypes, such as the three examples shown. Instead of focusing on the demographic information we often see in personas, focus on their goals. The goals of the abuser will be to carry out the specific abuse you’ve identified, while the goals of the survivor will be to prevent abuse, understand that abuse is happening, make ongoing abuse stop, or regain control over the technology that’s being used for abuse. Later, you’ll brainstorm how to prevent the abuser’s goals and assist the survivor’s goals.

And while the “abuser/survivor” model fits most cases, it doesn’t fit all, so modify it as you need to. For example, if you uncovered an issue with security, such as the ability for someone to hack into a home camera system and talk to children, the malicious hacker would get the abuser archetype and the child’s parents would get survivor archetype.

Step 3: Brainstorm problems

After creating archetypes, brainstorm novel abuse cases and safety issues. “Novel” means things not found in your research; you’re trying to identify completely new safety issues that are unique to your product or service. The goal with this step is to exhaust every effort of identifying harms your product could cause. You aren’t worrying about how to prevent the harm yet—that comes in the next step.

How could your product be used for any kind of abuse, outside of what you’ve already identified in your research? I recommend setting aside at least a few hours with your team for this process.

If you’re looking for somewhere to start, try doing a Black Mirror brainstorm. This exercise is based on the show Black Mirror, which features stories about the dark possibilities of technology. Try to figure out how your product would be used in an episode of the show—the most wild, awful, out-of-control ways it could be used for harm. When I’ve led Black Mirror brainstorms, participants usually end up having a good deal of fun (which I think is great—it’s okay to have fun when designing for safety!). I recommend time-boxing a Black Mirror brainstorm to half an hour, and then dialing it back and using the rest of the time thinking of more realistic forms of harm.

After you’ve identified as many opportunities for abuse as possible, you may still not feel confident that you’ve uncovered every potential form of harm. A healthy amount of anxiety is normal when you’re doing this kind of work. It’s common for teams designing for safety to worry, “Have we really identified every possible harm? What if we’ve missed something?” If you’ve spent at least four hours coming up with ways your product could be used for harm and have run out of ideas, go to the next step.

It’s impossible to guarantee you’ve thought of everything; instead of aiming for 100 percent assurance, recognize that you’ve taken this time and have done the best you can, and commit to continuing to prioritize safety in the future. Once your product is released, your users may identify new issues that you missed; aim to receive that feedback graciously and course-correct quickly.

Step 4: Design solutions

At this point, you should have a list of ways your product can be used for harm as well as survivor and abuser archetypes describing opposing user goals. The next step is to identify ways to design against the identified abuser’s goals and to support the survivor’s goals. This step is a good one to insert alongside existing parts of your design process where you’re proposing solutions for the various problems your research uncovered.

Some questions to ask yourself to help prevent harm and support your archetypes include:

  • Can you design your product in such a way that the identified harm cannot happen in the first place? If not, what roadblocks can you put up to prevent the harm from happening?
  • How can you make the victim aware that abuse is happening through your product?
  • How can you help the victim understand what they need to do to make the problem stop?
  • Can you identify any types of user activity that would indicate some form of harm or abuse? Could your product help the user access support?

In some products, it’s possible to proactively recognize that harm is happening. For example, a pregnancy app might be modified to allow the user to report that they were the victim of an assault, which could trigger an offer to receive resources for local and national organizations. This sort of proactiveness is not always possible, but it’s worth taking a half hour to discuss if any type of user activity would indicate some form of harm or abuse, and how your product could assist the user in receiving help in a safe manner.

That said, use caution: you don’t want to do anything that could put a user in harm’s way if their devices are being monitored. If you do offer some kind of proactive help, always make it voluntary, and think through other safety issues, such as the need to keep the user in-app in case an abuser is checking their search history. We’ll walk through a good example of this in the next chapter.

Step 5: Test for safety

The final step is to test your prototypes from the point of view of your archetypes: the person who wants to weaponize the product for harm and the victim of the harm who needs to regain control over the technology. Just like any other kind of product testing, at this point you’ll aim to rigorously test out your safety solutions so that you can identify gaps and correct them, validate that your designs will help keep your users safe, and feel more confident releasing your product into the world.

Ideally, safety testing happens along with usability testing. If you’re at a company that doesn’t do usability testing, you might be able to use safety testing to cleverly perform both; a user who goes through your design attempting to weaponize the product against someone else can also be encouraged to point out interactions or other elements of the design that don’t make sense to them.

You’ll want to conduct safety testing on either your final prototype or the actual product if it’s already been released. There’s nothing wrong with testing an existing product that wasn’t designed with safety goals in mind from the onset—“retrofitting” it for safety is a good thing to do.

Remember that testing for safety involves testing from the perspective of both an abuser and a survivor, though it may not make sense for you to do both. Alternatively, if you made multiple survivor archetypes to capture multiple scenarios, you’ll want to test from the perspective of each one.

As with other sorts of usability testing, you as the designer are most likely too close to the product and its design by this point to be a valuable tester; you know the product too well. Instead of doing it yourself, set up testing as you would with other usability testing: find someone who is not familiar with the product and its design, set the scene, give them a task, encourage them to think out loud, and observe how they attempt to complete it.

Abuser testing

The goal of this testing is to understand how easy it is for someone to weaponize your product for harm. Unlike with usability testing, you want to make it impossible, or at least difficult, for them to achieve their goal. Reference the goals in the abuser archetype you created earlier, and use your product in an attempt to achieve them.

For example, for a fitness app with GPS-enabled location features, we can imagine that the abuser archetype would have the goal of figuring out where his ex-girlfriend now lives. With this goal in mind, you’d try everything possible to figure out the location of another user who has their privacy settings enabled. You might try to see her running routes, view any available information on her profile, view anything available about her location (which she has set to private), and investigate the profiles of any other users somehow connected with her account, such as her followers.

If by the end of this you’ve managed to uncover some of her location data, despite her having set her profile to private, you know now that your product enables stalking. Your next step is to go back to step 4 and figure out how to prevent this from happening. You may need to repeat the process of designing solutions and testing them more than once.

Survivor testing

Survivor testing involves identifying how to give information and power to the survivor. It might not always make sense based on the product or context. Thwarting the attempt of an abuser archetype to stalk someone also satisfies the goal of the survivor archetype to not be stalked, so separate testing wouldn’t be needed from the survivor’s perspective.

However, there are cases where it makes sense. For example, for a smart thermostat, a survivor archetype’s goals would be to understand who or what is making the temperature change when they aren’t doing it themselves. You could test this by looking for the thermostat’s history log and checking for usernames, actions, and times; if you couldn’t find that information, you would have more work to do in step 4.

Another goal might be regaining control of the thermostat once the survivor realizes the abuser is remotely changing its settings. Your test would involve attempting to figure out how to do this: are there instructions that explain how to remove another user and change the password, and are they easy to find? This might again reveal that more work is needed to make it clear to the user how they can regain control of the device or account.

Stress testing

To make your product more inclusive and compassionate, consider adding stress testing. This concept comes from Design for Real Life by Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher. The authors pointed out that personas typically center people who are having a good day—but real users are often anxious, stressed out, having a bad day, or even experiencing tragedy. These are called “stress cases,” and testing your products for users in stress-case situations can help you identify places where your design lacks compassion. Design for Real Life has more details about what it looks like to incorporate stress cases into your design as well as many other great tactics for compassionate design.




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Sabalenka overpowers Pegula to win Cincinnati Open

Aryna Sabalenka will move one spot up to number two in the rankings ahead of the U.S. Open, which starts next week.




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Art exhibition in Chennai features different interpretations on the Tree of Life motif

‘Tree of Life’ exhibition at Gallery Veda showcases works of 12 artists, as part of the gallery’s 10th-year anniversary celebrations 




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When Tillotama Shome thinks of Irrfan Khan | An excerpt from Shubhra Gupta’s new book, Irrfan: A Life in Movies

Film critic Shubhra Gupta engages with members of the cinema fraternity to unearth little-known facets of the late actor’s life and personality in her new book




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A group show at Gallery 27 in Kochi reinterprets rain

Rain is a metaphor that dissolves differences in the ongoing art show



  • Life & Style

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Sri Lanka’s Tamil leaders reject Mittal’s ‘overpriced’ steel houses for the war-hit

They cite ‘climatic unsuitability, flimsy construction, lack of durability and high costs’ as reasons




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Traffic curbs at Malaparamba Junction to facilitate overpass construction




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Who Bears Risk in China's Non-financial Enterprise Debt? [electronic journal].




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Structural Interpretation of Vector Autoregressions with Incomplete Information: Revisiting the Role of Oil Supply and Demand Shocks: Comment [electronic journal].




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Structural Interpretation of Vector Autoregressions with Incomplete Identification: Revisiting the Role of Oil Supply and Demand Shocks [electronic journal].

National Bureau of Economic Research




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Stress Testing Networks: The Case of Central Counterparties [electronic journal].

National Bureau of Economic Research




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Strategic Interpretations [electronic journal].




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The Separation and Reunification of Germany: Rethinking a Natural Experiment Interpretation of the Enduring Effects of Communism [electronic journal].




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Pricing Assets in a Perpetual Youth Model [electronic journal].

National Bureau of Economic Research




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Negotiating a Better Future: How Interpersonal Skills Facilitate Inter-Generational Investment [electronic journal].




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(Mis)Allocation Effects of an Overpaid Public Sector [electronic journal].




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Liverpool Leader [electronic journal].




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The Interplay of Economic, Social and Political Fragmentation [electronic journal].




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The Interplay between Regulations and Financial Stability [electronic journal].




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The Interplay between Financial Regulations, Resilience, and Growth [electronic journal].




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How Political Insiders Lose Out When International Aid Underperforms: Evidence from a Participatory Development Experiment in Ghana [electronic journal].

National Bureau of Economic Research




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Gravity, Counterparties, and Foreign Investment [electronic journal].




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Financial Revolution in Republican China during 1900-1937: a Survey and a New Interpretation [electronic journal].




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Does a Tax Credit matter for Job Creation by Multinational Enterprises? [electronic journal].




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Completing Markets with Contracts: Evidence from the First Central Clearing Counterparty [electronic journal].




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Communication in Context: Interpreting Promises in an Experiment on Competition and Trust [electronic journal].




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Civic Engagement as a Second-Order Public Good: The Cooperative Underpinnings of the Accountable State [electronic journal].




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Siccanin-related drimane meroterpenoids: biological activities and synthesis

Nat. Prod. Rep., 2024, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/D4NP00025K, Review Article
Shengxin Sun, Xia Wang, Nvdan Hu, Shiqi Fu, Shengkun Li
This review describes the isolation, structural characteristics, bioactivities and divergent synthetic strategies of siccanin-related drimane meroterpenoids.
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HealthCare Global Enterprises appoints Meghraj Arvindrao Gore as CEO

Previously he was the Chief Executive Officer — Southern Region of Apollo Hospitals Enterprise Ltd




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Unified enantiospecific synthesis of drimane meroterpenoids enabled by enzyme catalysis and transition metal catalysis

Chem. Sci., 2024, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/D4SC06060A, Edge Article
Open Access
Yipeng You, Xue-Jie Zhang, Wen Xiao, Thittaya Kunthic, Zheng Xiang, Chen Xu
A unified synthetic strategy for drimane meroterpenoids was developed by combining heterologous biosynthesis, enzymatic oxidation, and transition metal catalysis. Six drimane meroterpenoids were synthesized in a concise and enantiospecific manner.
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The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry




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Pathway control in metallosupramolecular polymerization of a monoalkynylplatinum(II) terpyridine complex through competitive complex formation

Chem. Sci., 2024, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/D4SC06083K, Edge Article
Open Access
  This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence.
Minhye Kim, Heekyoung Choi, Minjoo Kim, Seonghan Kim, Seohyeon Yun, Eunji Lee, Jaeheung Cho, Sung Ho Jung, Jong Hwa Jung
The modification of metalloligands based on bis-type amideterpyridine platinum(II) complexes not only induces the formation of helical supramolecular polymers but also introduces a kinetic trapping strategy in competitive conditions.
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Bangladesh interim government to seek Interpol support to repatriate Sheikh Hasina from India

Officials said a Red Notice is not an international arrest warrant, but rather a global request for law enforcement agencies to locate and provisionally arrest a person pending extradition, surrender, or similar legal action




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Bangladesh asks Interpol for help in arresting ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina

A special tribunal in Bangladesh has asked the international police organization Interpol to issue a red notice for the arrest of ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in connection with the deaths of hundreds of protesters




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A comprehensive apoptotic assessment of niloticin in cervical cancer cells: a tirucallane-type triterpenoid from Aphanamixis polystachya (Wall.) Parker

RSC Med. Chem., 2024, 15,3444-3459
DOI: 10.1039/D4MD00318G, Research Article
Anuja Gracy Joseph, Mohanan Biji, Vishnu Priya Murali, Daisy R. Sherin, Alisha Valsan, Vimalkumar P. Sukumaran, Kokkuvayil Vasu Radhakrishnan, Kaustabh Kumar Maiti
Niloticin, a triterpenoid from Aphanamixis polystachya, induces apoptosis in HeLa cells which is primarily validated through in silico analysis and subsequently in vitro apoptotic evaluation by modulating the apoptotic proteins.
The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry




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Azo derivatives of monoterpenes as anti-Helicobacter pylori agents: from synthesis to structure-based target investigation

RSC Med. Chem., 2024, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/D4MD00511B, Research Article
Open Access
Francesco Melfi, Marialuigia Fantacuzzi, Simone Carradori, Ilaria D'Agostino, Alessandra Ammazzalorso, Noemi Mencarelli, Marialucia Gallorini, Mattia Spano, Paolo Guglielmi, Mariangela Agamennone, Sazan Haji Ali, Ali Al-Samydai, Francesca Sisto
Monoterpene-derived azo benzenes showed selective antibacterial activity against Helicobacter pylori with a safe profile. An in silico investigation highlighted the inosine 5'-monophosphate dehydrogenase enzyme as the putative target.
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The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry




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634: Fabian Kägy on WordPress, Blocks, and Enterprise Dev

Fabian Kägy helps us understand the modern WordPress development process, Gutenberg vs Block editor vs full site editing, building with blocks or pages, what's coming in the Twenty Twenty-Five Theme, and whether the theme authoring process has been made too difficult in 2024?




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Co-encapsulation of organic polymers and inorganic superparamagnetic iron oxide colloidal crystals requires matched diffusion time scales

Soft Matter, 2024, 20,8312-8325
DOI: 10.1039/D4SM00935E, Paper
Open Access
Brian K. Wilson, Robert K. Prud’homme
Composite nanoparticles co-encapsulate organic materials with inorganic primary colloids. Producing “stoichiometric NPs”, where all NPs contain organic and inorganic species at similar ratios, requires matched diffusion-aggregation time scale.
The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry




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Emotions in failure: An excerpt from Productive Failure: Unlocking deeper learning through the science of failing

In his new book, learning scientist Manu Kapur discusses how to deliberately design for and transform failure into a deep learning signal




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Brigade Enterprises to build a high-rise residential project at Perambur by investing ₹620 crore

It acquired the land from PVP ventures




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Total synthesis of spiro Ganoderma meroterpenoids spiroapplanatumines B, D, F, and H

Org. Chem. Front., 2024, 11,6333-6339
DOI: 10.1039/D4QO01147C, Research Article
Jia-Hao Zhang, Wen-Cai Luo, Wen-Tao Chen, Yu-Tao He, Ya-Jian Hu
The first total synthesis of spiroapplanatumines B, D, F, and H as well as the possibly undiscovered natural product spiroapplanatumine R has been achieved.
The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry




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Electromagnetic wave effects on Mn-doped superparamagnetic iron oxide nanofluids: applications in enhanced oil recovery

RSC Adv., 2024, 14,35671-35678
DOI: 10.1039/D4RA04500A, Paper
Open Access
Mohamad Amin Bin Hamid, Beh Hoe Guan, Chan Kar Tim, Hassan Soleimani
This study reveals that both direct current (DC) and alternating current (AC) electromagnetic fields can effectively reduce the interfacial tension (IFT) of Mn-doped Fe3O4 nanofluids, with AC fields showing more predictable and pronounced effects.
The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry




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Jurgen Klopp joins Red Bull as global football chief in first job since leaving Liverpool

Klopp will not be involved in the day-to-day operations of the Red Bull-owned clubs in Germany, United States, Brazil and Austria, the company said.




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Liverpool stays ahead of Man City by beating Chelsea 2-1 in Premier League

Liverpool is looking more and more like Manchester City’s main title rival after beating resurgent Chelsea 2-1 to stay top of the Premier League table




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Champions League: Raphinha scores hat-trick as Barcelona romps Bayern; Liverpool, City notch up wins

Liverpool edged Leipzig 1-0 with a goal from Darwin Nunez; Manchester City routed Sparta Prague 5-0 with Erling Haaland scoring twice.




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Liverpool goes top of Premier League as Man City’s 32-game unbeaten streak ends at Bournemouth

Manchester City’s 32-game unbeaten streak in the Premier League has ended in a 2-1 loss at Bournemouth as Liverpool wrested back the lead in the title race