National Highways apologises for the problems people are having and pledges to put things right.

Smart-Home Tech Can Achieve ‘Toothbrush-Ready’ Status

How Far Is Too Far With Home Staging?

Arsenal forward Alessia Russo unlocks her phone to reveal her go-to songs, poetry skills and the football idol she chats to on social media.

velocityconf: New #velocityconf speaker interview w/ @sascha_d http://t.co/zg4tzDzIlH Config Management: It's Not About the Tool

The iOS 18 update is a fun one with some intriguing new features, mostly for visual tweaks like adding dark mode icons and color hues, and of course there’s Apple Intelligence AI features if your iPhone is new enough to support those features. One of the other major changes in iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 ... Read More

A Boring Day's DIY head speaker is a one-of-a-kind speaker straight out of the uncanny valley. It's fantastic. 

The speaker is built inside of a plastic mannequin head, with exposed wires that look like the mannequin's hairdo. The sound comes out of the mannequins eye holes which look like bug eyes.To — Read the rest

The post Bluetooth speaker inside a mannequin head appeared first on Boing Boing.

She likes Kamala's polices enough to put a lawn sign up on her property, but when one toll with a postcard personalizes those policies... she loses it.

The post Harris Supporter Outraged By Postcard Trolling… Did They Go Too Far? appeared first on Clash Daily.

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Yu Xue
Sep 1, 2008; 7:1598-1608
Research

Eiji Kinoshita
Apr 1, 2006; 5:749-757
Technology

UK is too tight on the money and too vague on China Expert comment NCapeling 13 March 2023

The new UK Integrated Review fills gaps left by the last one but is dominated by defence. It needs more clarity on Europe, trade, and development – and more money.

Following a long two years, the UK’s Integrated Review from March 2021 now looks prescient in calling Russia the main threat to UK interests. And Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the main – but not the only – reason forcing an update of the review only 24 months later.

The UK’s commitment to Ukraine is now centre stage and so therefore is its cost, which immediately exposes a prime weakness of this review. An extra £5 billion on defence is more than nothing, as was originally rumoured, but far less than £11 billion which UK defence secretary Ben Wallace argues is needed.

UK military support for Ukraine cost £2.3 billion in the past year and a continuation will use up £2 billion of the new money. The report also notes £3 billion will go on infrastructure for building nuclear submarines at Barrow and nuclear training. That does not leave much for anything else.

There is a pledge to end the reduction of the armed forces which is essential if the UK contribution to Ukraine and European defence is to be credible. But an ambition to spend 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence by an unspecified date is all but meaningless – albeit prudent phrasing given fiscal uncertainties.

China challenge is one of balance

Ministers have been wrestling for months over their choice of language on China, and ‘epoch defining challenge’ is what has emerged, while also expressing concern over China’s links with Russia. But the review is careful to stop short of calling China a threat as Liz Truss intended.

The choice of vocabulary reflects a long desire to balance forging commercial ties with an increasing wariness of data and security threats under President Xi’s leadership of China. The UK wants to support the US in its concerns but not to presume conflict is inescapable.

The review does acknowledge the threat to Taiwan for the first time. Two years ago, it was fiercely criticized for not including any mention of that despite the potential disruption supposedly being ‘far more damaging than the renewed illegal invasion of Ukraine’ as MPs on the Foreign Affairs Select Committee put it.

But again the question of resources is inescapable. The ‘Indo-Pacific tilt’ which the UK declared two years ago is offered not just as a recognition of the region’s political and economic heft in any vision of the future, but as a favour to the US.

The UK lacks the resources to make that tilt credible in terms of substantial support to the US – nor, arguably, would it do the US any favours by neglecting the defence of Europe or the Middle East, which gets scant mention.

The AUKUS announcement on the same day appears to fill that gap. UK prime minister Rishi Sunak was in San Diego, California to greet the declaration that Australia will draw on British designs for its new nuclear submarines – a decision which brings more British jobs and underpins an alliance of both symbolic and practical weight in the region. But for the UK to play its part fully, it may need to divert resources from elsewhere, and this review sidesteps that hard choice.

More broadly, the UK would benefit from considering how to respond to the reality of China’s rise – analysing what happens to supply chains if tension disrupted them and how it might use membership of the Asia-Pacific CPTPP trading bloc, which appears likely to happen soon.

One of the biggest omissions in the 2021 review was relations with Europe and that is somewhat remedied but more is needed. The UK has been a leader for Europe in its clear response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – almost the only common thread of passionate agreement between the three UK prime ministers since the invasion – but it should now consider if it wants to take part in joint development of military assets. And a clear statement of cooperation with European Union (EU) governments would be a boost to NATO.

There is also now a Europe-shaped hole in the review’s discussion of trade. The 2021 version mentioned trade 79 times with the focus on new trade agreements outside Europe. It is now clear, if it was not before, these make little difference to GDP. The recent repairing of relations with the EU – and France in particular – may yield more practical results two years from now.

UK power in the world is changing

The review is also largely silent on another difficulty in the UK’s foreign policy which are the aims and size of its development aid – much changed from its original goal of poverty reduction to a focus on national interest with a reduced budget. This is sensitive political territory but must be better spelled out to count as a plan.

The FCDO intends to appoint a second permanent under-secretary to deliver the government’s development priorities and the minister for international development will join the National Security Council. This acknowledges the disruption caused by the merger of the FCO with DFID and the need for development staff to have clear leadership as well as, hopefully soon, a clear policy.

The pledge of a one-off payment of £20 million for the BBC World Service 42 foreign language channels for two years is welcome too as an acknowledgement of their ‘soft power’ value, especially in parts of the world where democracy is absent or in retreat.

13 August 2020

Visual Abstract

Eugen Netz
Dec 1, 2020; 19:2157-2167
Technological Innovation and Resources

Protein quality control is maintained by a number of integrated cellular pathways that monitor the folding and functionality of the cellular proteome. Defects in these pathways lead to the accumulation of misfolded or faulty proteins that may become insoluble and aggregate over time. Protein aggregates significantly contribute to the development of a number of human diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Huntington's disease, and Alzheimer's disease. In vitro, imaging-based, cellular studies have defined key biomolecular components that recognize and clear aggregates; however, no unifying method is available to quantify cellular aggregates, limiting our ability to reproducibly and accurately quantify these structures. Here we describe an ImageJ macro called AggreCount to identify and measure protein aggregates in cells. AggreCount is designed to be intuitive, easy to use, and customizable for different types of aggregates observed in cells. Minimal experience in coding is required to utilize the script. Based on a user-defined image, AggreCount will report a number of metrics: (i) total number of cellular aggregates, (ii) percentage of cells with aggregates, (iii) aggregates per cell, (iv) area of aggregates, and (v) localization of aggregates (cytosol, perinuclear, or nuclear). A data table of aggregate information on a per cell basis, as well as a summary table, is provided for further data analysis. We demonstrate the versatility of AggreCount by analyzing a number of different cellular aggregates including aggresomes, stress granules, and inclusion bodies caused by huntingtin polyglutamine expansion.

You encounter this issue when the table metadata matches the data source. In this scenario, no metadata update is required.

Cross-linking MS (XL-MS) has been recognized as an effective source of information about protein structures and interactions. In contrast to regular peptide identification, XL-MS has to deal with a quadratic search space, where peptides from every protein could potentially be cross-linked to any other protein. To cope with this search space, most tools apply different heuristics for search space reduction. We introduce a new open-source XL-MS database search algorithm, OpenPepXL, which offers increased sensitivity compared with other tools. OpenPepXL searches the full search space of an XL-MS experiment without using heuristics to reduce it. Because of efficient data structures and built-in parallelization OpenPepXL achieves excellent runtimes and can also be deployed on large compute clusters and cloud services while maintaining a slim memory footprint. We compared OpenPepXL to several other commonly used tools for identification of noncleavable labeled and label-free cross-linkers on a diverse set of XL-MS experiments. In our first comparison, we used a data set from a fraction of a cell lysate with a protein database of 128 targets and 128 decoys. At 5% FDR, OpenPepXL finds from 7% to over 50% more unique residue pairs (URPs) than other tools. On data sets with available high-resolution structures for cross-link validation OpenPepXL reports from 7% to over 40% more structurally validated URPs than other tools. Additionally, we used a synthetic peptide data set that allows objective validation of cross-links without relying on structural information and found that OpenPepXL reports at least 12% more validated URPs than other tools. It has been built as part of the OpenMS suite of tools and supports Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems. OpenPepXL also supports the MzIdentML 1.2 format for XL-MS identification results. It is freely available under a three-clause BSD license at https://openms.org/openpepxl.

The development of the HUPO-PSI's (Proteomics Standards Initiative) standard data formats and MIAPE (Minimum Information About a Proteomics Experiment) guidelines should improve proteomics data sharing within the scientific community. Proteomics journals have encouraged the use of these standards and guidelines to improve the quality of experimental reporting and ease the evaluation and publication of manuscripts. However, there is an evident lack of bioinformatics tools specifically designed to create and edit standard file formats and reports, or embed them within proteomics workflows. In this article, we describe a new web-based software suite (The ProteoRed MIAPE web toolkit) that performs several complementary roles related to proteomic data standards. Firstly, it can verify the reports fulfill the minimum information requirements of the corresponding MIAPE modules, highlighting inconsistencies or missing information. Secondly, the toolkit can convert several XML-based data standards directly into human readable MIAPE reports stored within the ProteoRed MIAPE repository. Finally, it can also perform the reverse operation, allowing users to export from MIAPE reports into XML files for computational processing, data sharing or public database submission. The toolkit is thus the first application capable of automatically linking the PSI's MIAPE modules with the corresponding XML data exchange standards, enabling bidirectional conversions. This toolkit is freely available at http://www.proteored.org/MIAPE/.

Intact glycopeptide identification has long been known as a key and challenging barrier to the comprehensive and accurate understanding the role of glycosylation in an organism. Intact glycopeptide analysis is a blossoming field that has received increasing attention in recent years. Mass spectrometry (MS)-based strategies and relative software tools are major drivers that have greatly facilitated the analysis of intact glycopeptides, particularly intact N-glycopeptides. This manuscript provides a systematic review of the intact glycopeptide identification process using mass spectrometry data generated in shotgun proteomic experiments, which typically focus on N-glycopeptide analysis. Particular attention is paid to the software tools that have been recently developed in the last decade for the interpretation and quality control of glycopeptide spectra acquired using different MS strategies. The review also provides information about the characteristics and applications of these software tools, discusses their advantages and disadvantages, and concludes with a discussion of outstanding tools.

The Chatham House Sustainable Laboratories Initiative: Prior Assessment Tool Other resource sysadmin 14 June 2019

Laboratories are critical for supporting effective infectious disease surveillance and outbreak response. This tool is meant to help structure a conversation between funding partners and recipient countries on how to most effectively establish or repurpose laboratories in low-resource environments.

Introduction

Laboratories are critical for supporting effective infectious disease surveillance and outbreak response, and lack of adequate laboratory capacity is a global challenge. As part of global health security initiatives, cooperative threat reduction efforts and international development programmes, sophisticated laboratories have been provided to mitigate biological threats and bolster a country’s capacity for detection, diagnosis and storage of high-consequence pathogens. Very often, these use the assumptions, standards and templates applied in high-income countries. However, it can be difficult or even impossible to sustain these facilities in low-resource environments. There can sometimes be limited local technical capacity and capability, which can result in a high reliance on imported expertise, skills, equipment and other resources. Sustainability can therefore be hard to achieve. In addition, when a funding partner withdraws, the laboratories can become disused, foundering without the trained personnel and financial resources to sustain them.

To help address this situation, a proposal gaining increasing support internationally is to adopt an approach based on a local risk assessment, whereby laboratories are appropriately and optimally tailored to the local risks and to the resources available, both in the short and longer term, without compromising biosafety and biosecurity.

A Chatham House workshop was convened in Abuja, Nigeria, in 2018 to explore what West African countries would find most appropriate in terms of building laboratory capacity, what the main challenges have been so far, and what needs to be done to improve the sustainability of laboratories in the region. It emerged that there was a need for a more structured conversation between the funding partner and recipient country early in the process – prior to embarking on the detailed planning phase for the establishment or repurposing of a laboratory. This should involve careful consideration and an assessment of existing and planned capacity, needs and contextual issues, together with proposals for how to address the issues revealed, so that any ensuing laboratory demonstrably supports the national strategy and therefore flourishes.

Gender, think-tanks and international affairs: A toolkit Other resource NCapeling 9 February 2021

Encouraging a more gender-sensitive approach for think-tank activities such as convening and debate, research and analysis, and communications and publishing.

Compiled by staff at Chatham House, the Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy and the British American Security Information Council, the toolkit provides think-tanks with guidance on ways of adapting organizational structures, activities and practices in order to embed greater awareness of gender issues and adopt gender-sensitive approaches throughout their work.

The toolkit is designed for all people working in international affairs think-tanks, regardless of role, experience or level of seniority. It will be particularly useful for those think-tanks that are just beginning the process of raising greater awareness of gender issues internally, as well as for those that have already begun to make changes but wish to expand this work further.

The work to develop the toolkit came as a response to the commonly gendered nature of think-tanks and their activities. The toolkit recognizes the discrimination and under-representation that women often experience within the sector, as well as the relative absence of women among executive leadership, governance structures and senior researcher positions in many think-tanks.

The toolkit’s focus on gender is a starting point for wider intersectional analysis and action within the think-tank community. Embedding inclusive research, convening and communication practices is not just ‘the right thing to do’. When diversity and inclusion initiatives succeed, organizations are more resilient, innovative and better at decision-making.

While there has already been incremental change within think-tanks, the toolkit’s authors intend that their work will build on the important body of research and practices that already exist by encouraging think-tanks to examine their own processes and develop ways of working that focus not just on women’s representation, but on the structures and systems that perpetuate biases and inequalities.

The law as a tool for EU integration could be ending Expert comment NCapeling 15 October 2021

Poland is not the only EU member state challenging the supremacy of European law, as historic change is happening in how European integration functions.

The Polish Constitutional Tribunal’s ruling that several articles of the European treaties are incompatible with the Polish constitution is prompting much debate, especially in terms of both the similarities and differences between it and rulings by the German constitutional court which have also challenged the European Court of Justice (ECJ).

Pro-Europeans are keen to draw a sharp distinction between the reasoning deployed by the two courts. They see the Polish court’s challenge as an exceptional case which the European Union (EU) cannot ‘tolerate’ because it would lead to the ‘demolition of the EU’s legal order from within’ and argue the EU must take a tough approach to Poland by re-asserting the supremacy of EU law.

But this view misses a bigger long-term shift in the EU. Both the German and Polish cases illustrate some of the basic conflicts within the EU’s legal system for decades. What is being challenged increasingly openly – even since the UK left the EU – is the idea of the EU as a de facto federation in which non-majoritarian institutions such as the ECJ have final say about the quality of democracy in member states.

ECJ’s quiet revolution

Historically ‘integration through law’ was central to the European project and the ECJ was a key institution driving forward integration – usually benefiting from what Erik Stein called ‘benign neglect by the powers that be and the mass media’. Even when European integration in the form of treaties stalled in the 1960s and 1970s, ‘judicial integration’ through the ECJ continued, including its notable 1964 decision that EU law was supreme.

This self-empowerment of the ECJ – what another scholar of European constitutionalism Joseph Weiler calls ‘a quiet revolution’ – was possible because there was a ‘permissive consensus’ in member states which allowed judicial integration to continue largely unchallenged. But this has now changed as both politicians and national courts are more willing to challenge what they see as judicial overreach.

There are important differences between the approach of the German and the Polish constitutional courts. The Law and Justice Party has politicized the Polish court, packing it with judges sympathetic to that party, whereas the German court is more independent.

In addition, whereas the German court made qualified and subdued objections to measures taken in response to the euro crisis during the past decade and, in particular, the steps towards the mutualization of eurozone debt – but often backed down with ‘all bark and no bite’ as Christoph Schmid put it – the Polish court is driven by political considerations and has challenged the supremacy of EU law in a more direct and general way.

However, the German court has made it clear it is the guardian of the German constitution and seeks to impose limits on the ECJ’s self-empowerment by arguing Europe is not a federation. According to the German court’s theory of ‘constitutional pluralism’, there is in effect a constant dialogue and accommodation between the national and EU level rather than a simple primacy of EU law over national law.

The court sees itself as the ultimate arbiter of whether steps in European integration are consistent with the German constitution, and is likely to challenge any further steps in fiscal integration even if the ECJ deems them in accordance with the treaties – as it did with the European Central Bank’s quantitative easing programme.

Supremacy of EU law is under pressure

Right across Europe, courts and politicians are increasingly challenging the ECJ and questioning the supremacy of EU law. Michel Barnier called for France to regain ‘legal sovereignty’ and should no longer be subject to the judgments of the ECJ – an extraordinary demand from the EU Brexit negotiator who regularly lectured the UK about the sanctity of the EU’s legal order.

Other possible French presidential candidates such as Valérie Pécresse and Eric Zemmour are also openly challenging the primacy of EU law. The UK, of course, is fighting its own battle with the EU about the ECJ’s role in the Northern Ireland Protocol.

It was not the current Polish government but the people of France and the Netherlands who blocked the attempt at explicit constitutionalisation of the EU in a referendum just one year after the 2004 enlargement. Whereas the Constitutional Treaty ‘would have codified the doctrine of EU legal supremacy’, that provision was dropped from its successor the Lisbon Treaty, again indicating consensus on EU legal supremacy is not as strong as is often claimed.

Sept. 23, 2024 — Altera, an Intel Company, today unveiled an array of FPGA hardware, software and development tools that make its programmable solutions more accessible across a broader range of […]

The post Intel’s Altera Unveils New FPGA Tools and Kits to Boost AI and Edge Applications appeared first on HPCwire.