As artificial intelligence and cloud storage hoover up more and more space on the nation's computer servers, real estate developers are racing to build new data centers or convert existing buildings to data uses.

Robert Griffin III continued to throw during practice; he continued to run and he continued to be optimistic about his chances for being ready at the start of the season. That’s why, when asked if the start of training camp was a realistic possibility for his return, Griffin didn’t hestitate.

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]

marusin posted a photo:

via Instagram ift.tt/2jjlAkM

The 'WandaVision' actress has secured a lead role, a convicted killer named Candy Montgomery, on a true-story crime drama series co-produced by Nicole Kidman for HBO Max.

The 'Trainwreck' actor is looking forward to the upcoming episode which will see the Tesla boss as a host although some of his co-stars are seemingly not happy with the casting.

In a since-deleted post on the photo-sharing site, the 'Halloween' actress joins 'The Pursuit of Happyness' actor to discuss body positivity and health issue.

The 'WandaVision' actress has secured a lead role, a convicted killer named Candy Montgomery, on a true-story crime drama series co-produced by Nicole Kidman for HBO Max.

The 'Trainwreck' actor is looking forward to the upcoming episode which will see the Tesla boss as a host although some of his co-stars are seemingly not happy with the casting.

In a since-deleted post on the photo-sharing site, the 'Halloween' actress joins 'The Pursuit of Happyness' actor to discuss body positivity and health issue.

In this episode of our podcast, Thomas Domville demonstrates the power of the Virtual Volunteer feature, set to come to the Be My Eyes app in late Q3 2023. Currently in beta testing, this feature, powered by OpenAI's GPT-4 model, has the potential to be a game changer for people with visual impairments. It offers a virtual sighted assistant that can generate context and understanding for images, allowing for a greater degree of independence in everyday tasks.

During the episode, Thomas showcases a variety of real-world use cases for the Virtual Volunteer, including identifying clothing; getting information from food packaging; describing greeting cards, photos from your photo library or places such as Facebook, and weather maps; reading restaurant menus, and more.

We thank the Be My Eyes team for allowing us to record and share this demonstration of the Virtual Volunteer.

Steve Beauchampé takes issue with government and corporate hypocrisy, tazered with a dose of racist malignancy within the private sector.

Jessica Harris enjoys a political drama at The Other Place.

“We have been able to grow a little from 15.4% to 16.7% in H1. But this is coming more from the operational efficiencies point of view. And also a very little from probably I can say, there is an advantage currently where the raw material prices are at most low. This is the advantage we have been able to get in H1. ”

L'Oreal's third quarter sales rose by 3.4% but missed expectations due to low consumer confidence in China. North Asia sales declined 6.5%. Reduced demand for suncare and dermatological products also slowed growth. Chief Executive Nicolas Hieronimus highlighted the need to excite consumers with new innovations, especially targeting young GenZs.

I'm a published writer with a completed script for a non-fiction graphic novel, but no-one to draw it. It's a real-world setting and cast with no fantasy or superhero elements. The story's a serious one, so the art needs to match that tone. Initially, I just need ten pages of finished B&W art (pencils & inks) to use as I pitch the project round suitable publishers. For the right artist this could grow into a paid commission for the full book. I'm happy to agree either a page rate deal or a 50/50 ownership split (including ancillary rights). The story has proven TV/film potential. If you'd like to be considered, please Metamail me with a link where I can find your samples and details of any comics work you've done before. Thank you.

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, contact tracing is downright buzzy, and not always in a good way. Contact tracing is the public health practice of informing people when they've been exposed to a contagious disease. As it has become more widely employed across the U.S., it has also become mired in modern political polarization and conspiracy theories. Misinformation abounds, from tales that people who talk to contact tracers will be sent to nonexistent "FEMA camps" — a rumor so prevalent that health officials in Washington state had to put out a statement in May debunking it — to elaborate theories that the efforts are somehow part of a plot by global elites , such as the Clinton Foundation, Bill Gates or George Soros. At the very least, such misinformation could hinder efforts to contain the coronavirus, and at worst it has sparked threats against tracers, say some observers, including the Institute for Strategic Dialogue , a London-based organization that studies polarization.

When the Atlanta Braves announced their move to the suburbs in 2013, some skeptics foresaw an exodus of residents fleeing game day traffic and crowds. Four years later, Cobb County home sales are outpacing other metro counties.

Have you ever taken the test? The Bible counsels, “Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith.” (2 Corinthians 13:5). Pastor Doug Batchelor offers ten brief but vital checkpoints to help you self-evaluate if you have been genuinely converted. No matter how long you’ve been a Christian, get ready for eye-opening results!

Alma Guillermoprieto habla sobre su libro ¿Será que soy feminista?

La alcaldesa aseguró que el cupo epidemiológico de la ciudad es máximo del 60 %; si se libera espacio, se podrá repartir dentro de los otros sectores.

Panelistas apuntan que no hay un panorama claro tanto en estrategia política, como de guerra; ven lejana una pronta negociación con el gobierno.

Panelistas reflexionaron sobre la crisis de la meritocracia; los problemas de desigualdad, las causas en el sistema educativo y el discurso político.

Panelistas analizaron el panorama de la diabetes en el país; los hábitos que permiten su complicación y los desafíos que enfrenta el sistema de salud

Panelistas analizan lo que está pasando en términos de hidrocarburos, seguridad y el panorama en el suroccidente del país.

Panelistas analizaron los resultados de las elecciones locales en España a la luz de lo que pueda ocurrir en las regionales de octubre en Colombia.

Panelistas consideran que la agenda de sostenibilidad ha sido adoptada tanto por el sector privado como el público, pero señala que debe haber avances en la cooperación.

Panelistas consideran que ni el mandatario actual ni el expresidente se pondrán de acuerdo sobre el panorama político y de derechos humanos en Cuba.

Panelistas consideran que la desaceleración era predecible y hasta necesaria, pero consideran que se necesitan temas estructurales para dar seguridad en inversiones.

Panelistas consideran que sí hubo avances en las votaciones. Otros creen que el avance real sería la elección de la fiscal general.

Panelistas creen que lo dicho por el Presidente hace parte de la retórica, pero que no lo ven en Naciones Unidas diciendo como jefe de Estado, que el Estado colombiano no cumple.

El defensor del pueblo saliente se refirió al último informe de la Defensoría que hace una radiografía a la situación de derechos humanos en el país.

Panelistas analizaron la idea lanzada propuesta por Carlos Alonso Lucio sobre las intenciones del presidente Petro de colapsar el sistema electoral para las elecciones del 2026

Panelistas analizaron el informe del PNUD que plantea el grado de satisfacción de los habitantes de los municipios PDET sobre la implementación del Acuerdo de Paz con las Farc.

Panelistas debatieron desde Villa de Leyva sobre los últimos anuncios en materia de gas y lo que viene para la realidad política del país a partir de los últimos hechos relacionados con el Gobierno.

Panelistas analizaron los resultados del Panel de Opinión que consulta a los líderes de opinión en temas relacionados con gobierno, temas de país y ecosistema mediático.

Adam Lisagor returns to the show to discuss, while wearing, Apple Vision Pro.

Autoconocimiento: experimentar realmente quienes somos.

La realidad de la malnutrición infantil.

“Viva de Milagro” una historia real y de transformación.

Despierta los sentidos internos: entre lo virtual y lo real.

La meditación permite percibir la realidad de forma positiva.

La consciencia, un estado de conexión con mi yo real.

La consciencia, un estado de conexión con mi yo real.