RANT to people who don’t follow leash laws. Please keep your dog on a leash like all the other dogs! Leash laws pertain to ALL dogs! No one gets a pass on this. RAVE to Ridwell, a locally grown company, that picks up plastic film (Saran wrap, etc.), plastic bags, chip bags, plastic seal wraps from […]

On the TV, a bearded man sits alone in an empty white room. He’s dressed like a military officer in a campy musical and is holding a giant bowl of popcorn that he touches only after using hand sanitizer. It’s a 15-second advertisement starring Captain Obvious, the spokesman for Hotels.com, urging everyone to keep their […]

The PGA says food security should not be the focus in the planned national review of agriculture with the country exporting surpluses every year.

There has been a mixed reaction from Western Australia's two biggest farm lobby groups to the release of further details of the Federal Government's agricultural white paper.

It was not only the spice trade, science, commerce and the arts that flourished in the Dutch Golden Age of the 17th century. Publishing also exploded and an innovation called advertising sustains it and ushers in the modern world.

Communities in western New South Wales are mourning the suspension of their local newspapers with some saying the publications are the "heart" of the communities.

A Swinburne University scientist loses his job after an internal investigation into alleged research misconduct and dozens of his papers were retracted by scientific journals.

Translated by Yoko Ishiguro

The Pyrenees Advocate will release a new weekly paper from May 1 to fill the void left in Ararat by the closure of the 163-year-old Advertiser.

Toilet paper is the butt of jokes in Australia but it has become currency for a desperate Far North Queensland cafe with dwindling supplies.

A South Australian MP is calling for an increase in travel subsidies, coverage of services like Airbnb and Uber, and more flexibility for patients to see their own medical specialists under the state's Patient Assisted Transport Scheme (PATS).

This is Phil Gregurke. He is havingtotravel 200kmjust topickup acartonofbeerand some toiletpaper for his pub on the Birdsville Track.

Former Fairfax Media executive Antony 'The Cat' Catalano strikes a $115 million deal to buy his old employer's regional newspaper group.

The custody notification system, designed to help prevent Aboriginal deaths in custody, has been rolled out in the Northern Territory but there are concerns the people most at risk of harm have been excluded from its operation.

Operations will cease at Albury's Norske Skog paper mill, with 183 employees to lose their jobs after the company announced the sale of its Ettamogah site to Australian papermaker Visy.

State and territory leaders have agreed to establish a timetable to work towards a waste export ban.

What makes the Squarosaurus paper plane stay airborne for so long? Consider the size of the wings in comparison to the body - or the fuselage. What do the winglets do? What is the dihedral angle and why is it important? Now go and fold your own Squarosaurus and time how long it stays in the air. Then see if you can improve the design so it will stay airborne even longer. Don't forget to consider how you're actually throwing it!

This note examines the published data protection impact assessment (DPIA) released by NHSX in relation to their contact tracing/proximity tracing app. It highlights a range of significant issues which leave the app falling short of data protection legislation. It does this in order so that these issues can be remedied before the next DPIA is published.

(United States Sixth Circuit) - In a company's suit under section 301 of the Labor Management Relations Act (LMRA) to vacate or modify the arbitration award against it, district court's grant of summary judgment in favor of the union is affirmed where: 1) the arbitrator did not exceed his authority by interpreting the CBA in a way that allowed the company to be found liable for a breach; 2) the arbitrator did not exceed the scope of his authority to decide a representational issue in this case because the arbitrator's successor decision was permissible in furtherance of his interpretation of the CBA; 3) the award's remedy does not violate public policy; and 4) the arbitrator did not dispense his own brand of industrial justice.

From Avery Burns, the new Acquisitions Editor for the Cumberland Law Review. Our theme for Issue 2 of Volume 51 is arbitration, mediation, negotiation, and other forms of the ADR practice. I am reaching out to see if you would be interested in possibly writing an article for the Law Review on any of the … Continue reading Cumberland Law Review Call for Papers →

Says troubled marriage inspired her to become a feminist.

The TRB Standing Technical Committee on Bicycle Transportation has been in existence for about 45 years, founded in 1974 as the Bicycling and Bicycles Committee. We had an early name change to the Committee on Bicycling and Bicycle Facilities shortly after our birth and became the Bicycle Transportation Committee in 1996. The committee's existence closely parallels the history of bicycle transportation research in the United States. Very little was done prior to the mid-1970s, when a surge of interest in...

The Alcohol and Other Drugs Committee's Centennial Paper to review what it has accomplished since its inception in the early 1970s, how it has evolved along with the field, and what challenges and opportunities it confronts going forward. To learn more about the history of impaired driving and the Standing Technical Committee on Alcohol, Other Drugs, and Transportation (ANB50), check out the Committee's Centennial Paper. As part of TRB's Centennial Celebration, the Technical Activities Council invited al...

TRB 2021 Committee Paper Review will go on as scheduled. The submission site will open June 1 and the deadline is August 1. We have learned a lot during this year’s transition to the TRR Editorial Board workflow for publication papers and have listened to your feedback. Important improvements this year include: • Committee review comments will go to authors by October 31. • Full papers will be posted in the interactive program unless the authors “opt out” because they wish to publish the paper elsewhere....

TRB 2021 Committee Paper Review will go on as scheduled. The submission site will open June 1 and the deadline is August 1. We have learned a lot during this year’s transition to the TRR Editorial Board workflow for publication papers and have listened to your feedback. Important improvements this year include: • Committee review comments will go to authors by October 31. • Full papers will be posted in the interactive program unless the authors “opt out” because they wish to publish the paper elsewhere....

The University of Texas at Austin is hosting Bridging Transportation Researchers (BTR) Online Conference  on August 11-12, 2020. TRB is pleased to cosponsor this event. This zero-carbon, zero-cost conference will host multiple Zoom-based tracks to virtually and globally unite transportation engineers, planners, and policymakers to discuss a wide range of transportation research topics and results, including: Multi-modal transportation network and systems Travel demand forecasting, including connecte...

Standing Technical Committee on Critical Transportation Infrastructure got its start as the Task Force on Critical Transportation Infrastructure Security tied directly in response to the Presidential Decision Directive 63, Critical Infrastructure Protection (PPD-63). Soon after the task force was established, as a way to bring awareness to this topic, TRB published a special edition of TR News (211): Transportation Security: Protecting the System from Attack and Theft (November-December 2000). The editio...

In this reboot of the Three Paper Thursdays, back after a hiatus of almost eight years, I consider the many different ways in which programs can be sanitised to detect, or mitigated to prevent the use of, the many programmer errors that can introduce security vulerabilities in low-level languages such as C and C++. We … Continue reading Three Paper Thursday: Sanitisers and Mitigators →

The platforms, providers, and infrastructures which together make up the contemporary Internet play an increasingly central role in the business of governing human societies. Although the software engineers, administrators, business professionals, and other staff working at these organisations may not have the institutional powers of state organisations such as law enforcement or the civil service, … Continue reading Three Paper Thursday: The role of intermediaries, platforms, and infrastructures in governing crime and abuse →

Recent advancements in Machine Learning (ML) have taught us two main lessons: a large proportion of things that humans do can actually be automated, and that a substantial part of this automation can be done with minimal human supervision. One no longer needs to select features for models to use; in many cases people are … Continue reading Three Paper Thursday: Adversarial Machine Learning, Humans and everything in between →

People have tried to develop many different attack vectors on cryptocurrencies, from codebase flaws, cryptographic algorithms, mining processes, consensus protocols and block propagation mechanisms to the underlying network layer. Most attacks could be patched quickly by modifying the source code, but preventing attacks that exploit the network layer remains a non-trivial problem as the network … Continue reading Three Paper Thursday: Attacking the Bitcoin Peer-to-Peer Network →

Just as in other types of victimization, victims of cybercrime can experience serious consequences, emotional or not. First of all, a repeat victim of a cyber-attack might face serious financial or emotional hardship. These victims are also more likely to require medical attention as a consequence of online fraud victimization. This means repeat victims have a … Continue reading Three Paper Thursday: Exploring the Impact of Online Crime Victimization →

Software Guard eXtensions (SGX) represents Intel’s latest foray into trusted computing. Initially intended as a means to secure cloud computation, it has since been employed for DRM and secure key storage in production systems. SGX differs from its competitors such as TrustZone in its focus on reducing the volume of trusted code in its “secure … Continue reading Three Paper Thursday: What’s Intel SGX Good For? →

Well, April felt simultaneously short and long! I should have just posted these at the beginning of the month, my SIGBOVIK papers from 2020:

Is this the longest chess game? is another needless chess paper, here trying to figure out the longest possible legal game. There are several rules that make sure games can't go on forever, and some surprisingly subtle details/ambiguity to those rules. The whole game is of course included in the paper (17697 moves), but I was far from being the largest waste of space in this year's proceedings, as one provocateur had a paper with 150 pages of citations. Mathieu made a 5-hour video of the chess game I computed for his companion blog post.

What is the best game console? A market-based approach is a silly idea taken too far. It was a year in the making (mostly waiting) and didn't quite turn out the way I was expecting due to world events, but that's part of the "fun" I guess!

Conditional Move For Shell Script Acceleration was another collaboration with Jim (mostly his doing, but I like to lather on an additional patina of absurdity).

This month I have mostly been trying to keep sane and healthy during the shelter-in-place order. It's been harder than usual to find the energy to be creative, but I have had some spurts. I basically only leave the house to run (not going anywhere near other people). But I have been doing that pretty regularly, so between that and the prohibition against going out to bars and ice cream, I'd say I'm currently in the best I have been in ~6 years. Yesterday I claimed some course records for some Strava segments in my neighborhood! I also finished up Doom: Eternal, which was good but you pretty much already know what it's like and I'm playing Animal Crossing and haven't yet gotten sick of that. The timing for the release of that latter game couldn't have been more perfect, huh? Sometimes I need something with a little challenge, so I just started Nuclear Throne. I'm liking it but not sure if I have decided whether it's good enough to invest the time in to win (I almost always play games to the end but these randomized roguelikes demand a certain kind of potentially infinite investment. Like I never did beat the last boss in Wizard of Legend, and even in Dead Cells, which I loved, I had to settle for some modest personal criteria for "winning.") Any other recs? Could use a good Metroidvania perhaps?