Interface interoperability is becoming closer to reality, but more work is needed.

The integration of OpenAI with Twilio's Communications APIs will enable developers to create voice experiences. (Featured on SmartCustomerService.com.)

[Daily Trust] The Nigerian Telecommunications (NITEL) now Nigeria's External Communications Operations (NEM) House stands as the tallest building nationwide.

What is the human capital strategy for NASA? How did NASA respond to the pandemic and keep its workforce performing? Join host Michael Keegan as he explores these questions and more with Jane Datta, Chief Human Capital Officer, at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on next week's The Business of Government Hour.

The post Building the quality and depth of talent: A conversation with Jane Datta first appeared on Federal News Network.

Blue Yonder, the supply chain solutions provider, has released its largest product update in the history of the company, launching what it describes as the first set of interoperable solutions across the entire supply chain – from planning to warehouse, transportation, and commerce – delivered on the company’s Luminate Cognitive Platform.

Major players in the logistics and industrial real estate world are set to convene with innovative start-ups at the BUILDINX – INNOVATIONS FOR LOGISTICS PROPERTIES show being held at Messe Dortmund exhibition centre between 19 and 21 November 2024. Tickets are now on sale.

Learn how AI is reshaping government operations and what lies ahead for its responsible adoption

The post Future forward: Building trustworthy AI in government first appeared on Federal News Network.

FEDtalk host Jason Briefel, a non-attorney partner and Director of Government and Public Affairs at Shaw Bransford & Roth P.C., sits down with Kettle and Eggers to discuss how the government agencies can break free from organizational boxes and rigid, top-down leadership to enact meaningful change.

The post Bridgebuilders – How Government Can Transcend Boundaries to Solve Big Problems first appeared on Federal News Network.

During this exclusive webinar, moderator Scott Maucione and guest Steve Wallace, chief technology officer at the Defense Information Systems Agency will discuss the IT landscape and asset management in the era of zero trust. In addition, Tom Kennedy, vice president at Axonius will provide an industry perspective.

The post Building zero trust as IT devices continue to multiply first appeared on Federal News Network.

Data center optimization efforts paved the way for cloud adoption and hybrid evolution across government. Pick up insights and lessons learned from cloud leaders at DHS, GSA, NOAA and SEC in our new Executive Briefing.

The post How agencies continue to build on data center optimization to modernize IT first appeared on Federal News Network.

The added training will begin in October and comes as the Army tries to reverse years of dismal recruiting when it failed to meet its enlistment goals.

The post As recruiting rebounds, the Army will expand basic training to rebuild the force for modern warfare first appeared on Federal News Network.

Gencore AI provides the same capability for the safe construction of AI tools that their core platform has provided from its inception.

Location: Electronic Resource- 

Location: Engineering Library- TH7417.M33 2015

Location: Engineering Library- QA76.9.D343M34 2016

Building and Rebuilding Good Credit

Amazon and Grubhub today announced they are partnering to make restaurant delivery to customers’ doors more convenient and affordable.

A new report published today by Logistics UK lays out the opportunity which the sector, that operates at the heart of all UK economic activity, has to drive recovery.

As Netflix continues to invest more in games, it is expanding its titles based on its popular reality shows including 'Too Hot to Handle' and 'Selling Sunset.'

Writers and other creators see OpenAI's forthcoming Media Manager as an attempt to evade responsibility for the theft of intellectual property.

When you’re a web designer, graphic designer, or similar professional in a creative field, you have two essential tools for attracting new clients: word of mouth and a stellar portfolio. The latter can be invaluable so it’s critical that you’re able to build a strong one and drive traffic to it. Neglect these tasks and […]

Ursula K. Le Guin's Revolutions - "Le Guin's work is distinctive not only because it is imaginative, or because it is political, but because she thought so deeply about the work of building a future worth living."

"Imaginative fiction trains people to be aware that there other ways to do things, other ways to be; that there is not just one civilization, and it is good, and it is the way we have to be," Le Guin says in Arwen Curry's new documentary, The Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin.[1,2,3,4] Le Guin spoke in defense of science fiction and fantasy, which were and often still are maligned or outright ignored by critics. But her statement admits another, deeper necessity: We must be trained to imagine. But imagine what? ... A feminist and a critic of capitalism, Le Guin must have known that progress was as much a necessity as it was an uncertainty. Nobody knows exactly what will happen when they set out to do what no one else has ever done. Le Guin's work is distinctive not only because it is imaginative, or because it is political, but because she thought so deeply about the work of building a future worth living. She did not just believe that a society free of consumerism and incarceration, like Shevek's homeworld, could exist; she explored how that society could be built and understood the process would be hard work, and probably on some level disappointing. The future is not a static thing; to its architects, it is always in motion, always mid-creation, never realized. Le Guin's utopianism perhaps explains why her characters exhibit a certain adaptability, as did Le Guin herself. In her work, she mostly eschewed great battles; a reader of her work should not expect to find a clash at Helm's Deep. A Le Guin character may be at war with his basest self, but the health of the body politic can be at stake at the same time. In The Left Hand of Darkness, Genly Ai only completes his mission to bring Winter into the Ekumen after he overcomes his own prejudicial beliefs about the people who live there. Le Guin found herself embroiled in a similar struggle, which she recounts to Curry. As acclaimed as The Left Hand of Darkness became, feminists criticized it because, while Le Guin's alien race changed genders, in their default state they used male pronouns. Genly is male, too. "At first I felt a little bit defensive," she told Curry. "But as I thought about it, I began to see that my critics were right." There's a quiet radicalism about her admission.

Yuval Noah Harari & Natalie Portman - "Yuval Noah Harari sits down with the award-winning actress, director, and Harvard graduate Natalie Portman to discuss his new book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century."[5]

0:57 The myth factory 2:22 The role of fictions 4:38 Fictions and co-operation ...

Balance of power: The Economic Consequences of the Peace at 100 - "Ann Pettifor finds astonishing contemporary resonance in John Maynard Keynes's critique of globalization and inequity."[6]

In December 1919, John Maynard Keynes published a blistering attack on the Treaty of Versailles, signed in June that year. The treaty's terms helped to end the First World War. Keynes's The Economic Consequences of the Peace[(fre)eBook] revealed how they would also pave the way to the Second... This is a bold, eloquent work unafraid of the long view. It contributed to the economic stability of the mid-twentieth century. And in a world still grappling with the socio-economic and environmental costs of globalization, Keynes's critiques — not least of the era's international financial system, the gold standard — remain powerfully germane.[7] Keynes censures the disregard of world leaders for the "starving and disintegrating" people of war-torn Europe. "The future life of Europe was not their concern; its means of livelihood was not their anxiety," he wrote. Keynes, however, was concerned for Europe's future. His book's significance lies in his revolutionary plan for financing recovery not just in Europe, but across the world. Keynes called for a new international economic order to replace the gold standard, which had held from the 1870s until the start of the war. That system had led to a form of globalization that benefited the wealthy, but impoverished the majority and ultimately destabilized both the financial and political systems... For a book published 100 years ago, the contemporary resonance is unsettling. Keynes writes: "England still stands outside Europe. Europe's voiceless tremors do not reach her ... But Europe is solid with herself." In another passage, he notes that the "principle of accumulation based on inequality was a vital part of the pre-war order of society". And in an era innocent of Amazon and containerized shipping, Keynes wrote that wealthy Londoners could order by telephone "the various products of the whole earth" and expect "their early delivery" to their doorstep. The globalized pre-First World War economy was the template for the modern one. Driven as it was by the international financial sector, the consequences of this economic system were predictable: rising inequality, economic instability, political volatility and war. Thus, a bankrupt Germany and its allies (the Central Powers) — all heavily indebted sovereign governments — were to endure increasingly frequent economic crises after 1919. Their creditors, the victorious Allied Powers, made no effort towards a sound and just resolution of these crises.[8,9,10]

Now's the time to spread the wealth, says Thomas Piketty - "His premise is that inequality is a political choice. It's something societies opt for, not an inevitable result of technology and globalisation. Whereas Marx saw history as class struggle, Piketty sees it as a battle of ideologies."[11]

Every unequal society, he says, creates an ideology to justify inequality. That allows the rich to fall asleep in their town houses while the homeless freeze outside. In his overambitious history of inequality from ancient India to today's US, Piketty recounts the justifications that recur throughout time: "Rich people deserve their wealth." "It will trickle down." "They give it back through philanthropy." "Property is liberty." "The poor are undeserving." "Once you start redistributing wealth, you won't know where to stop and there'll be chaos" — a favourite argument after the French Revolution. "Communism failed." "The money will go to black people" — an argument that, Piketty says, explains why inequality remains highest in countries with historic racial divides such as Brazil, South Africa and the US. Another common justification, which he doesn't mention, is "High taxes are punitive" — as if the main issue were the supposed psychology behind redistribution rather than its actual effects. All these justifications add up to what he calls the "sacralisation of property". But today, he writes, the "propriétariste and meritocratic narrative" is getting fragile. There's a growing understanding that so-called meritocracy has been captured by the rich, who get their kids into the top universities, buy political parties and hide their money from taxation. Moreover, notes Piketty, the wealthy are overwhelmingly male and their lifestyles tend to be particularly environmentally damaging. Donald Trump — a climate-change-denying sexist heir who got elected president without releasing his tax returns — embodies the problem... Centre-right parties across the west have taken up populism because their low-tax, small-state story wasn't selling any more. Rightwing populism speaks to today's anti-elitist, anti-meritocratic mood. However, it deliberately refocuses debate from property to what Piketty calls "the frontier" (and others would call borders). That leaves a gap in the political market for redistributionist ideas. We're now at a juncture much like around 1900, when extreme inequality helped launch social democratic and communist parties.

Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle - "Do clashes between ideologies reflect policy differences or something more fundamental? The present research suggests they reflect core psychological differences such that liberals express compassion toward less structured and more encompassing entities (i.e., universalism), whereas conservatives express compassion toward more well-defined and less encompassing entities (i.e., parochialism)."[12,13,14,15,16,17]

• In Our Time, The Rapture - "Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the idea that believers will vanish from the world, touching on religious entrepreneurialism, William Miller, dispensational modernism, premillennialism, and other such eschatological battiness."
• Medieval cannibal babies - "How a collective of intellectuals can engage in the production of unlikely stories to protect a cherished theory."
• Three Decades Ago, America Lost Its Religion. Why? - "'Not religious' has become a specific American identity—one that distinguishes secular, liberal whites from the conservative, evangelical right."[18,19]

Zadie Smith: Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction - "I could never shake the suspicion that everything about me was the consequence of a series of improbable accidents—not least of which was the 400 trillion–to-one accident of my birth. As I saw it, even my strongest feelings and convictions might easily be otherwise, had I been the child of the next family down the hall, or the child of another century, another country, another God."[20] We should all be reading more Ursula Le Guin - "Her novels imagine other worlds, but her theory of fiction can help us better live in this one."[21]

"The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,"[pdf] an essay Le Guin wrote in 1986, disputes the idea that the spear was the earliest human tool, proposing that it was actually the receptacle. Questioning the spear's phallic, murderous logic, instead Le Guin tells the story of the carrier bag, the sling, the shell, or the gourd. In this empty vessel, early humans could carry more than can be held in the hand and, therefore, gather food for later. Anyone who consistently forgets to bring their tote bag to the supermarket knows how significant this is. And besides, Le Guin writes, the idea that the spear came before the vessel doesn't even make sense. "Sixty-five to eighty percent of what human beings ate in those regions in Paleolithic, Neolithic, and prehistoric times was gathered; only in the extreme Arctic was meat the staple food." Not only is the carrier bag theory plausible, it also does meaningful ideological work — shifting the way we look at humanity's foundations from a narrative of domination to one of gathering, holding, and sharing. Because I am, despite my best efforts, often soppy and sentimental, I sometimes imagine this like a really comforting group hug. But it's not, really: the carrier bag holds things, sure, but it's also messy and sometimes conflicted. Like when you're trying to grab your sunglasses out of your bag, but those are stuck on your headphones, which are also tangled around your keys, and now the sunglasses have slipped into that hole in the lining. Le Guin's carrier bag is, in addition to a story about early humans, a method for storytelling itself, meaning it's also a method of history. But unlike the spear (which follows a linear trajectory towards its target), and unlike the kind of linear way we've come to think of time and history in the West, the carrier bag is a big jumbled mess of stuff. One thing is entangled with another, and with another. Le Guin once described temporality in her Hainish Universe (a confederacy of human planets that feature in a number of her books) in the most delightfully psychedelic terms: "Any timeline for the books of Hainish descent would resemble the web of a spider on LSD." This lack of clear trajectory allowed Le Guin to test out all kinds of political eventualities, without the need to tie everything neatly together. It makes room for complexity and contradiction, for difference and simultaneity. This, I think, is a pretty radical way of looking at the world, one that departs from the idea of history as a long line of victories. Le Guin describes her discovery of the carrier bag theory as grounding her "in human culture in a way I never felt grounded before." The stick, sword, or spear, designed for "bashing and killing," alienated her from history so much that she felt she "was either extremely defective as a human being, or not human at all." The only problem is that a carrier bag story isn't, at first glance, very exciting. "It is hard to tell", writes Le Guin, "a really gripping tale of how I wrested a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then I scratched my gnat bites, and Ool said something funny, and we went to the creek and got a drink and watched newts for a while, and then I found another patch of oats..." As well as its meandering narrative, a carrier bag story also contains no heroes. There are, instead, many different protagonists with equal importance to the plot. This is a very difficult way to tell a story, fictional or otherwise. While, in reality, most meaningful social change is the result of collective action, we aren't very good at recounting such a diffusely distributed account. The meetings, the fundraising, the careful and drawn-out negotiations — they're so boring! Who wants to watch a movie about a four-hour meeting between community stakeholders? ... We will not "beat" climate change, nor is "nature" our adversary. If the planet could be considered a container for all life, in which everything — plants, animals, humans — are all held together, then to attempt domination becomes a self-defeating act. By letting ourselves "become part of the killer story," writes Le Guin, "we may get finished along with it." All of which is to say: we have to abandon the old story.[22]

Future Tense Fiction: Stories of Tomorrow Has Arrived - "A thought-provoking excursion into the futures we would and would not want to live in."[23]

Though a sign on Washington State Route 129 points you in the right direction, driving the nearly 12 miles along Cloverland Road to arrive at the Cloverland Garage in Asotin County can make you feel like you're, well, chasing ghosts…

A map of downtown Spokane's east end, circa 1910, would be barely recognizable to most locals today…

It doesn't take long for a really old building to fall apart…

Of all the proposed solutions to Spokane County's emergency shortage of houses, one is glaringly obvious: build more houses…

There are only three rules in improv: Be mentally present in the scene, always make your scene partner look good, and approach every scene with a "yes and..." mentality…

JS Wright to sponsor Stourbridge Lions rugby team.

Teenagers turn urban designers with St. Modwen Homes.

Labour’s West Midlands Mayor candidate pledges to build 3,000 new affordable homes per year.

Construction is now underway on the latest phase of homes to be built on the former MG Rover factory in Longbridge, near Birmingham.

Pupils from St Columba’s Catholic Primary School received a lesson in site safety from local housebuilder St. Modwen Homes;

Birmingham City Council officials have written a report to the Cabinet stating that the 40-year-old Central Library building is not only vacant but ‘obsolete’ as well, reveals Alan Clawley.

For years, Matt Harris dreamed about building a treehouse out behind his back fence in Knoxville, Tenn. He never got around to it, though, until the pandemic hit. "It was just a matter of finding time," Harris says. "And that didn't come until everything kind of shut down for a little bit." When the coronavirus canceled youth sports for the season, Harris suddenly found his weekends free. And his children — ages 8, 7 and 4 — made a willing construction crew. "They were good measurers and markers of the wood," Harris says. "You don't let small children use power tools, necessarily. But in terms of things they could help [with], they were enthusiastic about it." As he set about buying supplies, Harris noticed a lot of other housebound families seemed to be working on their own projects. "There were definitely some days when we went to Lowe's where it looked like a swarm of locusts had come through," says Harris, an economist at the University of Tennessee. "I think the lumber industry

Thanks for listening to EcoRadio KC! We bring you vital information underserved or ignored by mainstream media. We are supported by listeners who share our mission. EcoRadio KC is glad […]

The post HOW CAN YOUR CITY MEET THEIR CLIMATE GOALS? BUILD AND USE SOLAR! appeared first on KKFI.

From the Whole Earth Catalogue to Facebook drag queens: a short history of online counterculture.

A PROPOSED five storey development in Bellevue Hill approved by Woollahra Council on Monday night has been likened to a cruise ship.

Stop your self-centered whining, and let’s get on with the job of building more badly needed housing. And thank the Kroenkes’ for investing in Denver’s housing stock.

"When you’re doing a thing, and you’re having fun at it, or you’re having an adventure, you never know where that falls in with the best times of your life."

The truth is loose: The Broncos are colts, an increasingly younger team tasked with cobbling together a foundation for the future. They are cheaper, shrewder investments, their signings requiring Google searches for statistics and correct spellings of names.

A company planning to build a new data center in north Denver will no longer seek a $9 million tax break from the city, but CoreSite still plans to build the center.

CedarBridge Academy students have “embarked on personal goals involving development of leadership qualities and have signed up with the Hamilton Rotary Club as Rotary Interact members.” A spokesperson said, “Students at CedarBridge Academy have started their year honing their leadership skills in preparation for the future. “They have embarked on personal goals involving development of […]

The Bermuda Hospitals Board [BHB] announced it has “purchased Craig Appin House in Hamilton in a favourable deal that protects it from future rental increases.” A spokesperson said, “BHB has rented space in Craig Appin for over ten years, after it had to decant its Human Resources, ITS and Finance offices from the Queen Elizabeth […]

Somersfield Academy MYP students partnered with BZS to build a Bermuda Micro Forest Project on their campus in Devonshire. A spokesperson said, “This project was spearheaded by M3 students, Zoë Mir, Adriana DeCouto, and Aura Doran. Under the guidance of MYP Community Project Coordinator, Ria Swan, and Science Teacher Natalia Frith, the students raised more than $3,500 […]

McKenzie Bean — a Bermudian who lives in Colorado — recently competed in the NPC Colorado Cup Bodybuilding Show, winning first place in the true novice category, and placing second in the heavyweight class, and fourth in overall novice. “Mr Bean, who has been training for 9 years, told Bernews, “My coach and I went […]

[Written by Stephen Wright] When Kyle Webb decided to hang up his running spikes, he needed an activity to replace the adrenalin rush he experienced rocketing down the 100 metres track as a Bermuda sprinter. Webb, who competed at the Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast, Australia, in 2018, admits it was a wrench to […]