DALLAS, April 29, 2020 — As the shortage of many goods, resources and services grows during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the American Heart Association, the leading nonprofit organization focused on a world of healthier lives for all, has launched ...

When Andrea Wilson approached me five years ago with her idea of creating a space for writers in our community separate from any offered by the University of Iowa, I must admit I was a bit skeptical,...

One in five people will have some kind of mental illness in their lifetime. Yet despite how common these conditions are — as common as silver cars, and more common than being left-handed — stigma remains the greatest barrier to individuals seeking help regarding their mental illness.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. This serves as a great opportunity for our community to begin eliminating stigma by starting conversations and increasing understanding about mental illness.

Now, more than ever before, it is important to talk about mental illness. Many of us could be feeling increased anxiety, stress and feelings of isolation due to the COVID-19 outbreak and social distancing requirements. For those Iowans who already live with a mental illness, this pandemic could be causing symptoms to compound.

A recent study released by a team at Iowa State University states that increased unemployment and social isolation measures related to COVID-19 could result in an increase in suicide rates of close to 50,000 individuals.

Despite the challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic, there still is help available: Telehealth services during this crisis is critical. Our state leaders, Iowa Insurance Commissioner Doug Ommen and Gov. Kim Reynolds responded immediately by encouraging health providers, insurers and businesses to work together to remove barriers and ensure telehealth is accessible.

Your Life Iowa, a state-operated service, offers referrals for problems related to alcohol, drugs, gambling, mental health or suicidal thoughts and can be contacted by phone, text or online chat 24/7.

Between March 1 and April 19, Your Life Iowa received nearly 500 contacts related to COVID-19 and traffic on the website — YourLifeIowa.org — is up 27 percent. Crisis lines and mental health counselors around the state and country are also reporting an uptick in patients reaching out for resources or virtual counseling. This is important progress.

However, the greatest barrier for those in need of mental health services is stigma.

If you know someone who is struggling, be a voice of support. The silence around mental illness is preventing our fellow Iowans — our friends, neighbors, co-workers and family members — from feeling better. By breaking down the stigma around mental illness, we can help them access the resources and treatment they deserve.

If someone opened up to you about their mental illness, would you know what to say? Do you have a general understanding of the most common mental illnesses? Do you know how to support loved ones dealing with mental illness? There are free resources available at MakeItOK.org/Iowa to learn more.

You can also read stories of Iowans who live with mental illness, take a pledge to end mental illness stigma and learn more about how you can get more involved with Make It OK through ambassador trainings, upcoming events and workplace programming.

Together, we can end the stigma and Make It OK.

Jami Haberl, Iowa Healthiest State Initiative; Lori Weih, UnityPoint Health — St. Luke’s Hospital; Tricia Kitzmann, Linn County Public Health and Mona McCalley-Whitters, Ph.D., NAMI Linn County.

When Andrea Wilson approached me five years ago with her idea of creating a space for writers in our community separate from any offered by the University of Iowa, I must admit I was a bit skeptical, if not defensive. Over a long coffee discussion, I shared with her a detailed look at the literary landscape of Iowa City and all of the things my organization, the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature was doing to make those assets more visible and accessible.

• Coronavirus closes the Iowa Writers’ House - for now

Despite this, Andrea mentioned the need for an “on ramp,” a way for people who don’t feel a part of that community to find their path, to access those riches. It was there, I thought to myself. She just hadn’t looked in the right place.

Then she built that ramp in the form of the Iowa Writers’ House. As she and her team defined what that ramp should look like, what role it should play, the Writers’ House evolved from being an idea with promise to a vital part of our literary infrastructure. She showed that people were hungry for further instruction. They desired more and different ways to connect with one another. These were things beyond the scope and mission of the UI and the City of Literature. She had found her niche, and filled it, nicely complementing what was offered by my organization and others.

But those services do not come without cost. Andrea and her team scrambled, using the house as a literary bed-and-breakfast that was used by many visiting writers. They scheduled workshops. They held fundraisers. But that thin margin disappeared with the onset of COVID-19. Unable to hold those workshops, to serve as a bed-and-breakfast, to provide meaningful in-person connections, the Writers’ House was unable to carry on in its current configuration.

We have every hope and expectation that the Iowa Writers’ House and Andrea will continue to be a part of our literary landscape in the future. This will come perhaps in another form, another space. Conversations have been underway for months about the needs of the literary community beyond the UI. Andrea has been a key part of those discussions, and the work that she and her team has done offer vital information about where those conversations need to go. Gaps have been identified, and while they won’t be filled in the same way, they will be filled.

These conversations join those that have been taking place in our community for decades about the need for space and support for writers and artists. As we all have realized over these past few weeks of isolation just how much we miss when we are not able to gather to create and to celebrate those creations, perhaps those conversations will accelerate and gain focus once we reconvene. The newly formed Iowa City Downtown Arts Alliance, of which we are proud to be a part, is an additional voice in that conversation.

In the meantime, we want to thank Andrea, Associate Director Alisha Jeddeloh, and the team at the Iowa Writers’ House, not just for identifying a need, but for taking the rare and valuable step of actually rolling up their sleeves and doing something to meet it.

John Kenyon is executive director of the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature.

It has almost been two months. First, allow me to apologize for not providing any updates during this time. As … Continue reading Returning to Our Community Roots →

Not an infographic today.

Free online classes, discounts on software, extended trial periods, free online data sources, etc. as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As the Organizer for the DFW Data Visualization Meetup Group, I've started this publicly viewable Google Sheet for the local DataViz community listing various resources that companies are making available during the pandemic. Turns out, these are valuable to DataViz designers everywhere, not just DFW, so I'm sharing the link with all of you.

I’ll continue to update this list as I learn about new resources during the pandemic. Please use the submission link in the spreadsheet if you know of any DataViz-related offers or deals I should add!

-Randy

We equip the type A diagrammatic Hecke category with a special derivation, so that after specialization to characteristic p it becomes a p-dg category. We prove that the defining relations of the Hecke algebra are satisfied in the p-dg Grothendieck group. We conjecture that the $p$-dg Grothendieck group is isomorphic to the Iwahori-Hecke algebra, equipping it with a basis which may differ from both the Kazhdan-Lusztig basis and the p-canonical basis. More precise conjectures will be found in the sequel.

Here are some other results contained in this paper. We provide an incomplete proof of the classification of all degree +2 derivations on the diagrammatic Hecke category, and a complete proof of the classification of those derivations for which the defining relations of the Hecke algebra are satisfied in the p-dg Grothendieck group. In particular, our special derivation is unique up to duality and equivalence. We prove that no such derivation exists in simply-laced types outside of finite and affine type A. We also examine a particular Bott-Samelson bimodule in type A_7, which is indecomposable in characteristic 2 but decomposable in all other characteristics. We prove that this Bott-Samelson bimodule admits no nontrivial fantastic filtrations in any characteristic, which is the analogue in the p-dg setting of being indecomposable.

Most optimization-based community detection approaches formulate the problem in a single or bi-objective framework. In this paper, we propose two variants of a three-objective formulation using a customized non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm III (NSGA-III) to find community structures in a network. In the first variant, named NSGA-III-KRM, we considered Kernel k means, Ratio cut, and Modularity, as the three objectives, whereas the second variant, named NSGA-III-CCM, considers Community score, Community fitness and Modularity, as three objective functions. Experiments are conducted on four benchmark network datasets. Comparison with state-of-the-art approaches along with decomposition-based multi-objective evolutionary algorithm variants (MOEA/D-KRM and MOEA/D-CCM) indicates that the proposed variants yield comparable or better results. This is particularly significant because the addition of the third objective does not worsen the results of the other two objectives. We also propose a simple method to rank the Pareto solutions so obtained by proposing a new measure, namely the ratio of the hyper-volume and inverted generational distance (IGD). The higher the ratio, the better is the Pareto set. This strategy is particularly useful in the absence of empirical attainment function in the multi-objective framework, where the number of objectives is more than two.

By Timothy Schoechle Courtesy of Solar Today A Colorado community is developing a community-based clean energy economy. Boulder, Colorado, sits at the foot of the Rocky Mountains a half-hour drive northwest of Denver. It is a city, but still small … Continue reading →

There’s a cliche that always follows a big tragedy — something we say after natural disasters, economic collapses, school shootings, acts of terrorisms.…

It's all right there in the name: "Community Pint."…

As soon as state Rep. Marcus Riccelli returned home from Olympia, he jumpstarted a community-wide effort to feed Spokane constituents deeply affected by the COVID-19 crisis.…

A modeling framework for evaluating the impact of weather conditions on farming and harvest operations applies real-time, field-level weather data and forecasts of meteorological and climatological conditions together with user-provided and/or observed feedback of a present state of a harvest-related condition to agronomic models and to generate a plurality of harvest advisory outputs for precision agriculture. A harvest advisory model simulates and predicts the impacts of this weather information and user-provided and/or observed feedback in one or more physical, empirical, or artificial intelligence models of precision agriculture to analyze crops, plants, soils, and resulting agricultural commodities, and provides harvest advisory outputs to a diagnostic support tool for users to enhance farming and harvest decision-making, whether by providing pre-, post-, or in situ-harvest operations and crop analyzes.

A method for electrically charging a high-voltage battery of a subject vehicle includes resolving a geographic location of the subject vehicle at a remote charging site, electrically charging the high-voltage battery through a connection of the subject vehicle to an electric power outlet at the remote charging site, monitoring cumulative electric power flow to the high-voltage battery of the subject vehicle, communicating the cumulative electric power flow to a central server, and reconciling billing for the cumulative electric power flow between an owner of the subject vehicle and an owner of the remote charging site.

Jada Imani strives to reflect her inner dreams in her recorded work. Jada Imani has been writing songs since she was five years old. At 21, she is committed to forging her own way as a rapper, writer, emcee, and youth organizer in the Bay Area.…

COMMUNITY CC celebrated winning the Southampton Evening Cricket League at the end of season awards dinner at Trojans Club.

SOUTHAMPTON sports fans are in for a treat with the arrival of the city’s first ever cricket festival.

THE largest producing community theatre in Europe is looking forward to a season of new plays in 2021.

TWO HAMPSHIRE based, community football teams will soon be facing off in a charity game analysed by top ex-professionals.

TRIBUTES have been paid to an inspirational Hampshire businessman who has died on holiday in the Caribbean.

Omid Safi, professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke, knew that the months of April and May would be difficult for the Muslim community this year. Like Easter and Passover, the holy month of Ramadan will be celebrated much differently due to COVID-19’s ongoing social distancing restrictions.

President of Isothermal Community College, Walter Dalton was guest on this segment of 'The Friday Feature' to recap 2019 at the school and look ahead to the future. Dalton discusses ongoing studies and expansion with new buildings here in Rutherford County and new growth coming to the Polk campus. This interview originally aired Dec. 20, 2019. Posted by Host and Producer of WNCW's Friday Feature Interview of the Week- Paul Foster, Senior Producer, News Director, and Morning Edition Regional Host

It's safe to say that the COVID-19 crisis will be more than a footnote in world history. In fact, a new initiative is underway to see that this moment in time will be never be forgotten and that "we're all in this together." For this week's "On the Ground-Ypsi," WEMU's Lisa Barry and Concentrate Media's Sarah Rigg talk to local historian Kim Clarke about the "Ypsilanti Coronavirus Digital Archive," a new photo project designed to preserve memories of everyday life during the pandemic.

The 'Community' cast members are going to reunite for a virtual table read without Chevy Chase who was fired from the show due to his increasingly aggressive and racist antics.

The 'Community' cast members are going to reunite for a virtual table read without Chevy Chase who was fired from the show due to his increasingly aggressive and racist antics.

Bank signs up to help magazine during coronavirus crisis.

Partnership aims to build communities through sport.

West Midlands charities receive donations from Mondelēz International.

Voyage of local Mayflower Pilgrim to be commemorated.

Solihull development to inject over £1.3 million into local services.

Aston station adoption planting project helps local people grow.

£25 million awarded in 25 years.

Noiiz has announced availability of Project-Unity, a sample pack featuring 5,604 loops and samples made by 96 different creators. This HUGE sample pack has been created by the generosity of our creators, partners and community and 100% of proceeds go directly to charity. It’s one of the most inspiring packs we have ever produced. We’ve […]

The post Noiiz launches Project-Unity 10GB sample pack in support of COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund appeared first on rekkerd.org.

Questions implying that terrorism is encouraged under the Islamic faith elicited a public apology from Scottsdale Community College after they appeared on a class quiz.

Molly Melching first went to Senegal in 1974 as an exchange student from the University of Illinois. But, instead of returning to the United States, she stayed on, eventually creating a nonprofit organization to educate and empower women and communities. That organization Tostan created and implemented educational programs focused on human rights, health, literacy, financial management and childhood development. It may be best known for leading thousands of communities in Africa to end female genital cutting and forced childhood marriage. WPSU's Anne Danahy talked with Melching about her work. Transcript Anne Danahy: Welcome to take note on WPSU, I'm Anne Danahy. Molly Melching first went to Senegal in 1974 as an exchange student from the University of Illinois. But instead of returning to the United States, she stayed, eventually creating a nonprofit organization to educate and empower women and communities. That organization, Tostan, created and implemented educational programs

Jessie Sage is a sex worker who writes and speaks publicly on issues related to sex work, feminism, and social justice. James Tison is a stand-up comedian in New York who uses humor to fight stigma against his LGBTQ identity and life with HIV. Sage and Tison recently spoke at an event at Penn State called “Facts not Fear: A Night to Fight Stigma,” and talked with WPSU about fighting the sigma their communities face. This Take Note interview talks about sex work and might not be suitable for children to hear.

Matthew Ferrari is an epidemiologist and associate professor of biology at Penn State who studies infectious diseases and how they spread across populations. He uses mathematical and statistical tools to understand patterns of disease incidence. He talked with WPSU's Cheraine Stanford about the new coronavirus, what we know, what we don’t and what it means for our community and our country.

There’s been a lot of news about strained relationships between police officers and the citizens they serve. Police officials say they’re making changes to improve relations and build trust within the community but critics claim not enough is being done. WNIJ's public forum, “Context - Safe Neighborhoods, Safe City: Changing Roles of Police and Community,” was held Thursday, August 27, 2015, at the Kresge Hall in the Riverfront Museum Park, in Rockford. WNIJ Reporter Sue Stephens moderated the Context panel. Guests were: Rockford Mayor Lawrence J. Morrissey Rockford Police Chief Chet Epperson State Representative Litesa Wallace United Way Community Impact Manager Matthew Simpson For more information about WNIJ's Context series, please contact Maria Boynton, Director of Community Engagement, at mboynton@niu.edu or at (815) 753-9000.

The council had recently organised a webinar on 'Manufacturing of PPE Products under Medical Textiles', which saw about 2,000 participants, mainly apparel exporters from across the country.

The coronavirus crisis has changed the way we congregate but it hasn’t changed the way we come together. The DeKalb community is supporting nonprofits that provide much needed services to the community. The Give DeKalb County campaign, a 24-hour fundraiser, takes place May 7. Ben Bingle is the director of the DeKalb County nonprofit partnership. He said they’ve had to cancel their walk-in donation option due to COVID-19. This option was replaced with a mail-in one. Bingle said this change hasn’t impacted the generosity of the community. “We’ve seen a really strong response so far through the mail,” he said. “And so, we believe we’re going to have a very strong turnout.” Bingle said donors can also support by using the Give DeKalb County website or their mobile phones. He said the website will include profiles for each organization. Bingle suggested that the community may not even know what services are out there for them and the profiles allow them to see what’s available. “It’s

Shops are closing. Newspaper sales are falling. But we’ve chosen to keep our online journalism free because it’s so important that the people of Glasgow stay informed during this crisis.

STEPHEN NEWNS had hoped to be sitting in his Lanarkshire home right now as the freshly-crowned Scottish champion.

As Colorado Springs and El Paso County move into a safer-at-home model in line with state guidelines that eases some novel coronavirus-related restrictions, community officials are urging people to practice social distancing when using shared greenspaces.

Your Legal Rights host Jeff Hayden welcomes John L Burris and Carlos Bolanos for a discussion about inclusiveness and community. With law offices in Oakland (johnburrislaw.com) Mr Burris, known as is both a civil rights activist and police misconduct lawyer, is active in the community as well as in the courtroom. San Mateo County Sheriff Carlos Bolanos has previously served as Chief of the Redwood City Police Department, after serving the cities of Palo Alto and Salinas; he is also active in the Rotary Club and in the Redwood City and San Mateo County communities. Questions for John and Carlos? Please call Your Legal Rights toll-free 866-798-8255.

Luz had never heard Bible truth in her language—until she attended a Spanish-speaking Amazing Facts prophecy series! She devoured the message and wanted more. Today, you can greatly multiply the number of Spanish materials and websites for our Latino friends when you sacrificially support this ministry. Thank you for changing her life and helping to bring the message of life to the people of Cuba.

Compared to the lockdowns and shuttered businesses in countries across the world, Sweden is an outlier. Swedish officials have advised citizens to work from home and avoid travel, but most schools and businesses have remained open. This relaxed approach aims to minimize impact on the economy and slow the spread of the virus through what is known as “herd immunity.” But striving for herd immunity without a controlled vaccine in place can also prove risky.

The closure of schools, restaurants and hotels has wreaked havoc on the nation’s food supply. Dairy farmers are pouring out milk, hog prices are plummeting, and unhatched eggs are being crushed. Jon Jackson is executive director of StagVets and founder of Comfort Farms in Milledgeville. He relies on veterans to help raise heritage breeds of animals and produce — specialty items that were once in big demand from some of Georgia’s top restaurants. Now, Jackson is making them available to hungry families through a virtual farmers market.

Compared to the lockdowns and shuttered businesses in countries across the world, Sweden is an outlier. Swedish officials have advised citizens to work from home and avoid travel, but most schools and businesses have remained open. This relaxed approach aims to minimize impact on the economy and slow the spread of the virus through what is known as “herd immunity.” But striving for herd immunity without a controlled vaccine in place can also prove risky.

Dan Lynch (filling in for Karen) and Bradley discuss a few examples where licensing decisions by companies impacts the health of the software development community.

Show Notes:

Segment 0 (00:00:36)

• Dan interviewed the CentOS developers on FLOSS Weekly. (00:05:52)
• Bradley has a blog post that describes RHEL licensing model. His previous blog post to that one, while mostly off-topic here, has a few points of interest. (00:10:36)
• Dan Lynch mentioned The Smoking Man from the The X Files television series. (00:17:22)
• Bradley mentioned that Lennart Poettering is a Red Hat employee working on systemd, which is now in Fedora, but not in RHEL yet (as far as we know). (00:18:53)
• Bradley suggested that developers starting projects read Karsten Wade's The Open Source Way, and Karl Fogel's Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project, and Bradley's blog post about developing in public. (00:22:16)
• Dan and Bradley briefly discussed copyright abolition. Dan mentioned Stallman's writing on the Pirate Party's copyright positions.

Segment 1 (00:32:30)

• Bradley briefly discussed the history of StarOffice, and the creation of OpenOffice.org. (00:33:40)
• Bradley explained issues related to the LibreOffice fork of OpenOffice.org. (00:37:30)
• Bradley has talked about how proprietary relicensing is very dangerous (00:39:50)
• Fedora, Ubuntu, and OpenSUSE all switched to LibreOffice as a default. Bradley didn't know at recording time that the OpenOffice package in wheezy is a transition package to switch to LibreOffice. (00:41:24)
• Bradley and Dan mentioned a blog post by IBM's Rob Weir that misquotes the FSF to support IBM's positions on the OO.o relicensing issue. (00:58:26)
• Bradley mentioned the idea that Apache-2.0 work can be relicensed under LGPLv3-or-later, as he discussed in his blog post about the OO.o relicensing (01:00:45)
• Dan mentioned Jeremy Allison's comment on the aforementioned post on Rob Weir's blog. (01:02:08)

Segment 2 (01:16:09)

Bradley thanked Dan, on behalf of Karen, for all his work to make Free as in Freedom possible.

Send feedback and comments on the cast to <oggcast@faif.us>. You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and by following Conservancy on on Twitter and and FaiF on Twitter.

Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch of danlynch.org. Theme music written and performed by Mike Tarantino with Charlie Paxson on drums.

The content of this audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Bradley and Karen discuss issues of gender inequality in the software freedom community and technology generally.

Show Notes:

Segment 0 (00:38)

• Bradley and Karen discuss issues of gender inequality in the software freedom community and technology generally.
• Bradley wrote a blog post a while back noting that issues of gender inequality are technology-sector-wide, as shown on PDF page 10 of this study. However, Bradley incorrectly remembered the study: in fact, all levels of academic computer science are (23:19)

• Karen got a 5 on our Calculus AB exam, even though her teacher told her only boys were good at math. Bradley also got a 5 on the Calculus AB exam. (27:06)
• Bradley believes that Stand and Deliver. (29:37)
• Bradley is sure there is no Calculus in Good Will Hunting (30:08)
• Bradley mentioned that S05E11 of American Greed contained an rsync output on a Debian system and Python DBUS binding C code as “code cracking examples” (31:00)
• Miguel de Icaza had a cameo in the file Antitrust. (33:27)
• Bradley mentioned that Craig Mundie keynoted OSCON (38:55)
• Bradley mentioned the USENIX/Freenix to Perl Conference to OSCON history (42:50)
• Karen mentioned the GNOME Marketing Meeting at FOSDEM 2012. (43:27)
• Karen is speaking at Linux Conf Australia on 19 January 2012,Bradley is speaking at Scale 10x, the 2012 Southern California Linux Expo (44:16)

Send feedback and comments on the cast to <oggcast@faif.us>. You can keep in touch with Free as in Freedom on our IRC channel, #faif on irc.freenode.net, and by following Conservancy on on Twitter and and FaiF on Twitter.

Free as in Freedom is produced by Dan Lynch of danlynch.org. Theme music written and performed by Mike Tarantino with Charlie Paxson on drums.

The content of this audcast, and the accompanying show notes and music are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0).