Many citizens in Paris were caught off-guard on November 5 when a new ban on motorists in the first four arrondissements of central Paris came into effect. As they looked around their city neighborhoods, residents could see nearly forty signs for the ‘Zone à Trafic Limité’ (ZTL) — or “limited ... [continued]

The post The City Center In Paris Is Now Designated A Limited Traffic Zone appeared first on CleanTechnica.

By Kyle Julian, Regional Director, Commercial & Industrial Sales, U.S. West Without data centers, life as we know it would collapse. That may sound like hyperbole, but our entire digital economy relies on data centers. But it turns out that data centers use a lot of electricity. In fact, the ... [continued]

The post Behind the Curtain: Power Grid Resilience for Data Centers appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Google has added a new promotion type to Google Merchant Center named "Sale events." Sale events are a type data that you can submit on Google and are shown on non-product-centric surfaces. This seems to be available in the US for free Merchant Center listings right now.

This was spotted by Dario Zannoni who posted about it on LinkedIn and wrote, "A new "Sale Event" promotion type has been released in Google Merchant Center."

The help document says:

Sale events highlight a general sale happening in your store on different Google surfaces. Events don't show up on product listings, both organic and ads.

Unlike promotions, events aren't mapped to offers. Since events aren't directly mapped to offers, you can use ranges for discounts, such as 'Up to 40% off,' which isn't allowed with promotions.

Dario Zannoni shared this screenshot:

He wrote, "Standard promotions in Merchant Center require linking to specific products, which can make them challenging to implement. Now, Google has introduced a new promotion type called "Sale Event," which is not tied to individual products. Instead, it can be used to advertise general sales, like "All items discounted up to 70% off" or "Special discount: 10% off on golf bags.""

For more details, check out this help page.

Forum discussion at LinkedIn.

IndieCade's Night Games returns to downtown's Music Center, bringing a host of unique and experimental games focused on communal play. And being silly.

On August 6, we will celebrate the Transfiguration of our Lord, and Fr. Thomas Hopko helps us understand the pivotal nature of this event in Christian history.

Jesus commands some outlandish behaviors. He says love those who don't love you. Do good to those who don't do good to you. And even lend to others expecting nothing in return! How can we do this? By embracing the One True Center of our real lives!

In this episode, Danielle and Jeanine dive into understanding Christ-centered relationships. They discuss where to find these relationships, their benefits, and why it’s helpful to maintain them with other young adults

Self-centeredness is an act of idolatry, addressed by giving of ourselves and our desires to meet the needs of others.

The devotion of the Myrrh-Bearers, Joseph, and Nicodemus shows us what true faith looks like, and it has nothing to do with figuring out how to use God to help us get what we want on our own terms in a pathetic attempt to distract ourselves from the fear of death.

Matthew Gallatin interviews Anne Van Fossen about the Classical Learning Resource Center, an online classroom with instruction in Greek, Latin, mythology, philosophy, and critical thinking.

Bobby Maddex interviews Anne Van Fossen, cofounder of the Classical Learning Resource Center, an online Orthodox classical education program.

Bobby Maddex welcomes back to the program Anne Van Fossen, one of the founders of the Classical Learning Resource Center, to discuss some of the exciting new developments that are taking place at the center.

Bobby Maddex welcomes back to the program Anne Van Fossen, one of the founders of the Classical Learning Resource Center, to discuss some of the exciting new developments that are taking place at the online school.

Bobby Maddex interviews Anne Van Fossen, one of the founders of the Classical Learning Resource Center, about the growing slate of educational offerings at the CLRC.

Bobby Maddex interviews Presbytera Renee Ritsi, Assistant Teams Director and Healthcare Coordinator for the Orthodox Christian Mission Center, about some mission team opportunities for both this year and 2015.

Bobby Maddex interviews Anne Van Fossen of the Classical Learning Resource Center (CLRC). Use the coupon code AFRDiscount10 to receive a 10% discount off the CLRC's Christian Study Courses.

Bobby Maddex interviews Anne Van Fossen and Bryan Smith. Anne is the chief academic officer of the Classical Learning Resource Center, or CLRC, and Bryan is the school’s Chief Operations Officer. The CLRC is offering a 10% discount off any CLRC Christian Studies class for AFR listeners for the next two weeks. The coupon code is AFRDiscount10.

Bobby Maddex interviews Andrew Lekos, the Teams Director at the Orthodox Christian Mission Center (OCMC), about the short-term mission opportunities available at OCMC.

Bobby Maddex interviews Anne Van Fossen, the Chief Academic Officer of The Classical Learning Resource Center. Together they discuss some exciting new developments at the CLRC, including a new online academy!

Christ is the Living Center of the Church, and He does not abandon His Church. The big question is whether we will cling to Him, or get distracted by something else.

Fr. Pat compares the march of the Israelites through the desert, the Church’s march through history, and the Christian's daily walk.

For most business owners, the main reason why they would outsource their call center services is that it’s usually the least expensive option. Be that as it may, there are several factors that go into the final cost of doing so—including the type of call center, its location, and the […]

The post Call Center Outsourcing Costs: How Much Is It REALLY? appeared first on .

You want your call center to be prepared to tackle any challenge and come out safely on the other side. While many may brush over their business continuity plans and adopt a so-called “agile” approach to potential disasters, having a plan in place will make all the difference when facing […]

The post Business Continuity–8 Steps to Future-Proof Your Call Center appeared first on .

Setting up a good IVR (interactive voice response) call flow can pay dividends for your business because it can keep more customers on the line and route more of them to the exact resources they need without delays.  Below, we’ll explore 12 call flows that you can implement in your […]

The post 12 IVR Call Flows You Can Steal (and Use) in Your Call Center appeared first on .

Recruiting and hiring call center employees can be a pain, but it doesn’t have to be so bad. For example, depending on the roles you’re looking to hire, you may not even have to write a job description—because you can just use ours instead.  Below, we’ve put together four of […]

The post Steal These Free Call Center Job Description Templates appeared first on .

Managing a call center well requires a lot of careful decision-making and even more data to back it up. At the same time, though, it can be extremely difficult to know which KPIs and metrics matter the most to your specific business. There are three types of call center reports […]

The post 3 Types of Call Center Reporting and Which Is Right for You appeared first on .

Sound public policy ideas are needed for families and businesses to thrive

Aim/Purpose: In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tracks the disease activity using data collected from medical practice's on a weekly basis. Collection of data by CDC from medical practices on a weekly basis leads to a lag time of approximately 2 weeks before any viable action can be planned. The 2-week delay problem was addressed in the study by creating machine learning models to predict flu outbreak. Background: The 2-week delay problem was addressed in the study by correlation of the flu trends identified from Twitter data and official flu data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in combination with creating a machine learning model using both data sources to predict flu outbreak. Methodology: A quantitative correlational study was performed using a quasi-experimental design. Flu trends from the CDC portal and tweets with mention of flu and influenza from the state of Georgia were used over a period of 22 weeks from December 29, 2019 to May 30, 2020 for this study. Contribution: This research contributed to the body of knowledge by using a simple bag-of-word method for sentiment analysis followed by the combination of CDC and Twitter data to generate a flu prediction model with higher accuracy than using CDC data only. Findings: The study found that (a) there is no correlation between official flu data from CDC and tweets with mention of flu and (b) there is an improvement in the performance of a flu forecasting model based on a machine learning algorithm using both official flu data from CDC and tweets with mention of flu. Recommendations for Practitioners: In this study, it was found that there was no correlation between the official flu data from the CDC and the count of tweets with mention of flu, which is why tweets alone should be used with caution to predict a flu out-break. Based on the findings of this study, social media data can be used as an additional variable to improve the accuracy of flu prediction models. It is also found that fourth order polynomial and support vector regression models offered the best accuracy of flu prediction models. Recommendations for Researchers: Open-source data, such as Twitter feed, can be mined for useful intelligence benefiting society. Machine learning-based prediction models can be improved by adding open-source data to the primary data set. Impact on Society: Key implication of this study for practitioners in the field were to use social media postings to identify neighborhoods and geographic locations affected by seasonal outbreak, such as influenza, which would help reduce the spread of the disease and ultimately lead to containment. Based on the findings of this study, social media data will help health authorities in detecting seasonal outbreaks earlier than just using official CDC channels of disease and illness reporting from physicians and labs thus, empowering health officials to plan their responses swiftly and allocate their resources optimally for the most affected areas. Future Research: A future researcher could use more complex deep learning algorithms, such as Artificial Neural Networks and Recurrent Neural Networks, to evaluate the accuracy of flu outbreak prediction models as compared to the regression models used in this study. A future researcher could apply other sentiment analysis techniques, such as natural language processing and deep learning techniques, to identify context-sensitive emotion, concept extraction, and sarcasm detection for the identification of self-reporting flu tweets. A future researcher could expand the scope by continuously collecting tweets on a public cloud and applying big data applications, such as Hadoop and MapReduce, to perform predictions using several months of historical data or even years for a larger geographical area.

Aim/Purpose: The clustering techniques are normally considered to determine the significant and meaningful subclasses purposed in datasets. It is an unsupervised type of Machine Learning (ML) where the objective is to form groups from objects based on their similarity and used to determine the implicit relationships between the different features of the data. Cluster Analysis is considered a significant problem area in data exploration when dealing with arbitrary shape problems in different datasets. Clustering on large data sets has the following challenges: (1) clusters with arbitrary shapes; (2) less knowledge discovery process to decide the possible input features; (3) scalability for large data sizes. Density-based clustering has been known as a dominant method for determining the arbitrary-shape clusters. Background: Existing density-based clustering methods commonly cited in the literature have been examined in terms of their behavior with data sets that contain nested clusters of varying density. The existing methods are not enough or ideal for such data sets, because they typically partition the data into clusters that cannot be nested. Methodology: A density-based approach on traditional center-based clustering is introduced that assigns a weight to each cluster. The weights are then utilized in calculating the distances from data vectors to centroids by multiplying the distance by the centroid weight. Contribution: In this paper, we have examined different density-based clustering methods for data sets with nested clusters of varying density. Two such data sets were used to evaluate some of the commonly cited algorithms found in the literature. Nested clusters were found to be challenging for the existing algorithms. In utmost cases, the targeted algorithms either did not detect the largest clusters or simply divided large clusters into non-overlapping regions. But, it may be possible to detect all clusters by doing multiple runs of the algorithm with different inputs and then combining the results. This work considered three challenges of clustering methods. Findings: As a result, a center with a low weight will attract objects from further away than a centroid with higher weight. This allows dense clusters inside larger clusters to be recognized. The methods are tested experimentally using the K-means, DBSCAN, TURN*, and IDCUP algorithms. The experimental results with different data sets showed that IDCUP is more robust and produces better clusters than DBSCAN, TURN*, and K-means. Finally, we compare K-means, DBSCAN, TURN*, and to deal with arbitrary shapes problems at different datasets. IDCUP shows better scalability compared to TURN*. Future Research: As future recommendations of this research, we are concerned with the exploration of further available challenges of the knowledge discovery process in clustering along with complex data sets with more time. A hybrid approach based on density-based and model-based clustering algorithms needs to compare to achieve maximum performance accuracy and avoid the arbitrary shapes related problems including optimization. It is anticipated that the comparable kind of the future suggested process will attain improved performance with analogous precision in identification of clustering shapes.

Aim/Purpose: The aim of the research was to examine the relationship between the sub-dimensions of organizational culture perceptions, such as task culture, success culture, support culture, and bureaucratic culture and job motivations of ISMEK Lifelong Learning Center teachers. Background: It is thought that if teachers’ perceptions of organizational culture and levels of job motivation are assessed and the effects of school culture on the motivation level of teachers investigated, solutions to identified problems can be developed. Methodology: The study was conducted using survey research. The sample population consisted of 354 teachers working for the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality’s Lifelong Learning Center (ISMEK). The personal information form prepared by the researchers, the School Culture Scale developed by Terzi (2005) and the Job Motivation Scale developed by Aksoy (2006) were administered to the teachers. Contribution: This study will contribute to research on the job motivations of teachers involved in adult education. Findings: The findings indicated that task culture differs according to gender. Teachers report high levels of job motivation, but job motivation varies with gender, education level, and number of years working at the ISMEK Lifelong Learning Center. A significant relationship was found between sub-dimensions of organizational culture and job motivation. Organizational culture explains more than half of the change in job motivation. The sub-dimensions of organizational culture, task culture, achievement culture, and support culture were found to be significantly predictive of job motivation. Recommendations for Practitioners: In order to increase motivation of teachers, a success-oriented structure should be formed within the organization. It is necessary for teachers and managers to support each other and to establish a support culture in their institutions. In order to establish a culture of support, managers need to receive in-service training. Recommendation for Researchers: This study was carried out in the ISMEK Lifelong Learning Center and similar studies can be done in classrooms, training centers, and study centers. Impact on Society: Teachers working in adult education should be afforded a more comfortable working environment that will positively impact job motivation, resulting in a higher quality of education for students. Therefore, this research may contribute to an increase in the number of students who engage in lifelong learning opportunities. Future Research: This qualitative study utilized a relational survey model. A more in-depth qualitative study employing observation and interviews is warranted.

A fire at a Digital Realty Singapore datacenter by a lithium-ion battery explosion disrupts Alibaba Cloud services.

Charlotte Hornets center Nick Richards is expected to miss at least two weeks after being diagnosed with a right first rib cartilage fracture underneath his clavicle.

The World Health Organization said mpox cases in the region of Congo where a new and more infectious variant was first detected appear to be "plateauing," even as the virus continues to increase in other regions of the country, as well as in Burundi and Uganda.

A new "LinkOut" feature introduced by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) NCBI’s allows the easy linking to content on PubMed and GenBank.  Dryad has already introduced the feature benefitting from easy and fast linking of associated content to the two resources.

PubMed and GenBank, from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), are hugely popular resources for searching and retrieving article abstracts and nucleotide sequence data, respectively.  PubMed indexes the vast majority of the biomedical literature, and deposition of nucleotide sequences in GenBank or one of the other INSDC databases is a near universal requirement for publication in a scientific journal. LinkOut allows the data from an article to be distributed among repositories without compromising its discoverability.

Dryad, intends to expand on this feature in a couple of ways. First, it is planned to make Dryad content searchable via the PubMed and GenBank identifiers, which because of their wide use will provide a convenient gateway for other biomedical databases to link out to Dryad.  Second, open web standards will be used to expose relationships between content in Dryad and other repositories, not just NCBI.

Original source: Dryad news and views

Although jurors sided with plaintiff David Meehan in May after a monthlong trial, confusion arose over how much money they could award in damages.

The post Judge moves to slash $38 million verdict in New Hampshire youth center abuse case appeared first on Boston.com.

Drone strike in Binyamina kills 4 IDF soldiers and wounds dozens. Underground Hezbollah command center discovered 1 mile from Israel's border..1988 Hamas charter details intent to annihilate Israel. Upcoming Jerusalem Prayer Breakfast in Copenhagen.

Novo Building Products is pleased to announce the opening of a new Empire Moulding and Millwork distribution facility in Amherst, New Hampshire. Strategically located 60 miles north of Boston, the new 217,000-square-foot facility services 750 independent lumberyards, specialty millwork shops, stair manufacturers, door fabricators, ProDealers and home centers across New England.

After a comprehensive selection process, BCA Architects was selected to design the new 400-seat performing arts center for Pioneer Valley High School.

In the bustling world of health care, every detail matters, especially when it comes to creating spaces that promote healing and comfort. UCLA Health Center, renowned for its commitment to excellence in patient care, recently underwent a remarkable transformation.

Lowell, MA — A new online training course is designed to introduce Total Worker Health concepts to occupational safety and health professionals.

The Monitoring Association (TMA), along with co-sponsor SDM, unveiled the 2020 Monitoring Center Excellence Award Winners for Monitoring Center of the Year, Manager of the Year, Operator of the Year and Support Person of the Year.