Jimny (5-door) will be available in Zeta and Alpha variants with Automatic and Manual transmission choices for customers, Maruti Suzuki India said.

Its flavour and aroma are a combination of the quality of ingredients — the cooking method, and as in all things creative, the experienced hand of the Khansama, meaning cook.  

At a special pop-up in Marriott Hyderabad, Chef Robert brought flavours from his hometown Tangra in Kolkata

On National Highway-65, the one place where everyone stops at is 7 Midway Plaza at Suryapet

Amninder Sandhu is using open-fire cooking and indigenous ingredients in her regional Indian restaurant

Beer is the most consumed alcoholic beverage in the world but how well do you know it?

The Ambur Canteen serves a variety of flavours that its founders grew up on, including recipes from their mothers, grandmothers and cooks

There is a wide range of affordable Iftar take away boxes including vegan, and special Arabian and Hyderabadi dishes are made available on the menu in some restaurants in Chennai throughout the month of fasting

1. OWC’s Thunderbolt 5 Hub Takes Full Advantage of the Fastest New Macs  PetaPixel
2. My first Thunderbolt 5 experience has been a massive bust  PCWorld
3. OWC Thunderbolt 5 SSD gets first review, and yes, it can reach 48Gbps — making it the fastest single-drive portable SSD that you can buy  TechRadar
4. OWC’s first Thunderbolt 5 hub is available for preorder.  The Verge
5. Thunderbolt 5 in New Macs: Features, Benefits, and Is It Needed?  MacRumors

Do you remember how to find the circumference of a circle? What about the capital of New Jersey? We’re about to quiz you game-show style with a variety of elementary school trivia questions, from math and science to history, geography, and language arts. Answer these 12 “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” questions to test your knowledge and see if you come out on top!

The 2005 U.S. federal budget includes just $5 million for the eGov fund. The amount requested for the year was $45 million. Last year the fund received just $3 million, which means over the last two years just $8 of...

Someone came to the site looking for a Felony Offender registry. As far as I can tell the only state that has an online registry of felony offender is Tennessee. Here are two lists of links to official Megan's Law...

Summary: The overhead of performing even simple tasks online is getting larger and larger. I question the security of almost all these supposedly "secure" messaging systems. And I'm tired of the 'Utopia of Rules' mindset pervasive in every organization. It's exhausting how they expect customers to constantly adapt to their needs.

I don't know if you recall the game Kerplunk. It's a classic children's game that has been around for decades. I remember playing it with my sister. The basic setup involves a transparent plastic tube, a number of sticks, and marbles. The sticks are threaded through the tube to form a web or nest at the bottom on which the marbles rest. We'd take turns removing a stick at a time, trying not to let any marbles fall through the web and out of the tube. At some point, the remaining sticks can't hold the marbles and everything falls down.

The modern web reminds me more and more of a big Kerplunk game and I think the marbles are about to fall. What started out as an easier way to do things like shop, bank, and get health care information has become increasingly complex over time. More and more of the email I receive seems to be simply directing me to log into some bespoke system to retrieve a message or engage in some workflow. And even with a password manager, the act of logging in is often a chore with different user interfaces, custom MFA requirements, and weird rules for passwords. Once you're on the system, session time-outs induce their own form of anxiety since stepping away for a few minutes to attend to something else might require going through the whole Kafkaesque process all over again. The modern web has turned into a dystopian theater of the absurd where even reading a simple appointment reminder from your doctor requires several minutes of stress-inducing interaction with baroque systems and processes.

And it's not just doctors, of course, banks, government agencies, hospitals, ecommerce sites, and customer service systems all adopt these special purpose messaging systems. If you ask these organizations why they use bespoke messaging systems, they'll list things like "timely and improved communication," "convenience," and "privacy and security." But the real reason is that it's more convenient for them because these systems are integrated with their backends and make their processes more manageable. There's certainly nothing about them that's more convenient, timely, or better than email for their customers¹.

I also question the privacy and security premise. Email can be insecure. And your email provider can see the contents of your emails. But the messaging system run by your doctor or bank is likely less secure than the email systems run by Apple, Google, and the others. And achieving privacy by making everything incompatible so that you have to use a different system for each correspondent is like chopping off your finger to prevent hangnails.

How did we get here? Bureaucracy. Not just government bureaucracy, but bureaucracy of all kinds. In Utopia of Rules², David Graeber talks about how power imbalances force the less powerful group to perform what he calls interpretive labor, the work of understanding and implementing what's better or more convenient for the more powerful partner. People are not equal participants in online interactions. We don't have the tools to be fully embodied online³. Because of this we are forced to play by the rules organizations online who are digitally embodied with servers, identity systems, customer management systems, and so on. And part of that is being forced to use their inconvenient and anemic messaging systems.

What's the answer? People need tools. I think digital wallets (a bad name for an important tool), autonomic (peer) identifiers with strong cryptography, and verifiable credentials are a huge step forward. These tools provide the means for people to be peers online rather that mere ghosts in someone else's machine. That's why I insist on using the term self-sovereign rather than decentralized to describe these systems. Cogito Ergo Sum.

Notes

1. For a deeper dive into why one-off messaging systems are never as good as email, see Rich Sharing and Personal Channels. Email and other useful messaging systems exhibit a property called rich sharing that makes them much more robust that the simple idea of "sharing a message" would bring to mind.
2. If you're interested in power imbalances and how they come about, I can't recommend Graeber's book highly enough. He had such a keen understanding of this problem and wrote about it in a way that's both informative and entertaining.
3. I talk about this in more detail in Chapter 17 of Learning Digital Identity when I discuss authentic digital relationships.

Photo Credit: Playing Kerplunk from DALL-E (public domain) Prompt: Draw a picture of a boy and girl playing kerplunk that's 1200x500 pixels

Tags: web identity authentication authorization verifiable+credentials

Kyra Wilson, Aylin Caliskan, Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, Nov 13, 2024

The topic of AI-based recruitment and hiring has been discussed here before and research continues apace. This item (13 page PDF), despite the characterization in GeekWire, is a fairly narrow study. It looks at three text-embedding models based on Mistral-7B-v0.1, and tests for gender and racial bias on applications containing name and position only, and name and position and some content (the paper discusses removing the name but does do it). The interesting bit is that intersectional bias (ie., combining gender and race) is not merely a combination of the separate biases; while separate biases exaggerated the discrimination, "intersectional results, on the other hand, do correspond more strongly to real-world discrimination in resume screening." Via Lisa Marie Blaschke, who in turn credits Audrey Watters.

Roberto J. Rodriguez, et al., Office of Educational Technology, Nov 13, 2024

This is a longish (79 page PDF) resource from the U.S. government's Office of Educational Technology. "The Department heard educators say that AI is here to stay, AI will keep changing, and safely integrating AI in educational settings will require informed leadership at multiple levels across the education system." The toolkit is divided into three sections: migitating risks, strategy for AI integration, and guiding its use. The risks considered include privacy and data security, student civil rights, accessibility, and digital equity. The second section is weaker, focusing on the 'instructional core' (credited to Elmore, but basically Moore (1989)), with a corresponding focus on instruction. The third section begins with a discussion of AI literacy (limited to "includes the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to engage with AI safely") and promotion of "responsible use". 

Vinay K. Chaudhri, The Hechinger Report, Nov 13, 2024

This is an idea straight from the 50s but expect to see more of the same as companies wrestle with how to make their publications relevant in the age of AI. Vinay K. Chaudhri beghins with a reaffirmation of the importance of textbooks (as "a carefully curated body of knowledge... nearly 100 percent accurate... (and) the view of an expert educator"). Needed now, though, is "authoring textbooks so that their concepts can be read as computer code." How? Back to the 50s - a controlled vocabulary. "Textbooks, using the discipline of knowledge engineering, can support the curation, preservation and learning of all forms of human knowledge." Next up? I guess it would have to be the unification of the sciences.

Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, The Scholarly Kitchen, Nov 13, 2024

We expect The Scholarly Kitchen to represent the publishers' point of view, since that is its intent, but in this case it ventures into the realm of pure propaganda. No open access charges subscription fees to readers. In 'Gold' open access, publishers charge authors 'article publication fees', while in 'Green' open access no such fees are charged. So how is there a "cost" to readers? According to this article, it's in the time and effort it takes to find the 'version of record' of an article as compared to what is found in typical 'green' venues such as preprint repositories. This argument, of course, assumes readers want to find the 'version of record', and the author is ready with a 'fear, uncertainty, doubt (FUD)' argument. The author also argues that green versions are hard to find, compared to gold versions, ignoring such services as Unpaywall that index open access articles.

A federal interagency committee on government information has drafted "Requirements for Enabling the Identification, Categorization, and Consistent Retrieval of Government Information." This document has insights of value for those in government engaged in making information more accessible through portals and search engines.

As I sit at my computer tapping out this article, the sun is shining in beautiful Brisbane, capital of Queensland, Australia. We are moving into summer and the sun is up long before I am. When I awake, the house battery is filling up and charging the car. Soon, the ... [continued]

The post Renewables Gallop Ahead Down Under — A Queensland Sample appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Tired of Chrome? While Google Chrome is a popular choice for many due to its speed and extensive library of extensions, it’s not the only option out there. If you’re looking for a change, here are three web browsers that offer unique benefits and might just enhance your browsing experience. DuckDuckGo  Known primarily for its […]

Other World Computing (OWC) has launched the Thunderbolt 5 Hub, which promises to elevate device connectivity for Macs, PCs, and even tablets like the iPad Pro. This new hub delivers an impressive 80Gb/s of bi-directional data speed -- double that of Thunderbolt 4 and USB4 -- and supports up to 120Gb/s for users needing higher display bandwidth. With just a single cable, users can expand their device’s ports to include three Thunderbolt 5 ports and a USB-A port, making this hub a productivity game changer. For tablet users, the OWC Thunderbolt 5 Hub is especially transformative, turning an iPad Pro… [Continue Reading]

When it comes to protecting sensitive information like financial data, personal information, and intellectual property, encryption has become a must. By scrambling data through the use of algorithms, only those with access to decryption keys are able to read what's being secured. Encrypted traffic has fulfilled its intended mission: to lock down data. But, could it simultaneously be helping bad actors slip by undetected? And could encrypted traffic actually make it harder for network defenders to spot threats before it's too late? To find out, we sat down with Phil Owens, VP of customer solutions at Stamus Networks. Phil believes… [Continue Reading]

Achieving digital accessibility and optimizing your platform for screen readers, can be a strategic decision with multifaceted benefits. Not only does it reflect empathy and inclusivity for visually impaired users, but it also potentially expands your audience and the reach …

Google is testing placing a second link directly under the main ad headline link, some call the title link, that pull from your Google Ads assets or extensions. It is unusual to see these links right next to each other, sometimes you'd see them as sitelinks under the ad description but not directly under the main headline link.

This was spotted by both Anthony Higman who posted it on LinkedIn and X - here are his screenshots:

And this desktop variation by Jonathan Cottrell on LinkedIn:

This seems weird but it can probably have a huge impact on an ads click through rate, but again, it is just a test right now.

Forum discussion at X and LinkedIn.

Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have discovered an ingenious new way to recycle Lithium Ion batteries, and it’s so simple that even your mum could do it. Maybe. The problem with battery recycling has always been that it’s rather cumbersome. Traditional methods involve breaking down batteries into their constituent parts, then extracting the valuable materials such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel. The process works, but it’s not exactly what you’d call efficient, and it can be quite costly....

The post Quick-Release Binder – Recycling Lithium Ion Batteries Just Got Super Easy appeared first on The Red Ferret Journal.

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.

This week, SEO expert Brie Moreau doesn’t share his business results but, rather, the results of an incredibly in-depth study he did analyzing 260k search results to find an answer to a major question: what does Google want exactly? Using…

The post How Brie Moreau Studied 260k Search Results to Understand How Google Views Content appeared first on Niche Pursuits.

Welcome back, everyone, to the latest episode of the Niche Pursuits News Podcast, where we bring you the biggest headlines in the industry over the last week and a good dose of inspiration for your personal projects. Jared and guest…

The post Married Couple Wins €2 Billion from Google for Deranking Their Website appeared first on Niche Pursuits.

Nos últimos tempos, a América Latina experimentou um rápido crescimento no uso de CTV, graças à ampla variedade de conteúdo e à expansão das plataformas de streaming de vídeo. Embora na América Latina o consumo tenha crescido consideravelmente, atingindo mais de 150 milhões de espectadores, o equivalente a 41% da população digital latino-americana, quando olhamos para os cortes de consumo por país, identificamos grandes lacunas na região, que representam oportunidades de crescimento em cada país.

Fr. Stephen looks at the role wonder should play in the Christian life.

Fr. Stephen speaks at length about the place of Orthodoxy within the modern world. Orthodox history is unknown to most Americans but has something to say to them and to help them in the healing of their own culture.

With this podcast, Fr. Stephen begins a small series of reflections on the character of the modern world and the particular difficulties it presents to the Orthodox faith.

Continuing his series on the "Modern Project," Fr. Stephen looks at the role "choice" plays in the modern world and contrasts that with older disciplines in the Christian life.

The frightful pressure felt by the young as they struggle to find their vocation is deeply enmeshed in the Modern Project. Fr. Stephen looks at those expectations as well as the true vocation of Christians.

The post 3 Factors to Consider Before Starting a Blog – Maintaining Blogging Momentum appeared first on ProBlogger.

Originally posted by Darren Rowse, Updated for 2024 Starting a blog is an adventure—a journey I’ve embarked on more times than I can count. And along the way, I’ve learned a thing or two about what it takes to keep that momentum going. Today, I want to share some updated ...more

The post 3 Factors to Consider Before Starting a Blog – Maintaining Blogging Momentum appeared first on ProBlogger.

The post Engaging Your Audience: How Building on Reader Comments Can Fuel Your Blog’s Growth appeared first on ProBlogger.

Maintaining Momentum in Blogging Series Blogging thrives on conversation. It’s not just about broadcasting your ideas; it’s about sparking dialogue and engaging with your community. One of the most vibrant places for these interactions is often overlooked—the comment section. As we continue “maintaining momentum” on your blog, let’s explore a ...more

The post Engaging Your Audience: How Building on Reader Comments Can Fuel Your Blog’s Growth appeared first on ProBlogger.

The post Mastering Engaging Opening Lines: 11 Creative Strategies to Hook Your Readers appeared first on ProBlogger.

My wife’s first words to me were… ‘Hi Michael, it’s nice to meet you’ …which was both funny and memorable since my name is DARREN, not Michael!   Ever wondered how some posts keep you hooked while others don’t catch your eye? It’s all in the opener. The first words ...more

The post Mastering Engaging Opening Lines: 11 Creative Strategies to Hook Your Readers appeared first on ProBlogger.

oday, I'm talking with friend and author Angela Doll Carlson about living the liturgical year. From logistics and practicalities to marriage and community, there's a little something for everyone in this episode (yes, even men!).

My next book isn't the one I asked to write, it wasn't the one I dreamt of creating when I was a little girl with authorial ambitions. But in the end, I think it's the book I needed to write. In this episode, I share the story behind my next book and read the description. Under the Laurel Tree will be released later this fall, 2019, with Ancient Faith Publishing. (The intro and outro songs in this episode were "Idea" and "Remedy for Melancholy" by Kai Engel.)

Nicole reflects on an interview she watched this week between comedian Stephen Colbert and journalist Anderson Cooper, in particular, the divergent ways grief affected their sense of time. (Watch the interview here. The intro and outro of this episode is "Idea" and "Remedy for Melancholy" by Kai Engel.

Bill focuses on 5 of the critical dimensions of effective Orthodox Christian Servant Leaders and some of the latest research and best practices materials on the subject, as well as the teachings from Holy Scripture and the Church Fathers on how to cultivate better leaders within our churches and ministries.

Leadership consultant SteveTibbs joins Bill Marianes to address six dimensions of servant leadership.