FaZe did not have a good season. #esports #blastpremierworldfinal #counterstriker

We've only just reviewed the RingConn smart ring, and Gen 2 is already here with a host of improvements. #ringconn #smartring

Acrobatic aircraft defy gravity in world-first loop under Montenegro’s tallest bridge

Austrian pilot breaks world's longest wingsuit flight records

MiMi Aung, project manager for the Mars Helicopter, offers a peek into the high-frontier culture at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

From the Great Wall of China to the iconic Taj Mahal, uncover the fascinating histories and cultural significance of the New 7 Wonders of the World.

Why is wheat diversity important? To help address feeding the world's growing population, experts turn to 100-year-old wheat.

A controlled scary experience can leave you exhilarated and relaxed afterward.

Find all the latest Avatar World Codes right here in this article! Read on for more!

An experimental aircraft could someday play a role in providing internet access to rural areas or disaster zones

Location: Special Collections Hevelin Collection- PS3558.A778D4434 1964

Location: Electronic Resource- 

Location: Special Collections Hevelin Collection- BD511.Y6 1928

Library - Art Library, Location - LIB, Call number - F2230.1.A7 K39 2016

Library - Art Library, Location - OSIZ, Call number - FOLIO N6537.D87 A4 2017

Library - Art Library, Location - LIB, Call number - Video record 43520 DVD

Location: Main Media Collection - Video record 42295 DVD

Location: Law Library- JZ6369.U55 2016

Location: Electronic Resource- 

Location: Electronic Resource- 

Location: Electronic Resource- 

Location: Engineering Library- TA217.B4D46 2016

Location: Engineering Library- TA1215.L47 2016

Beyond Fuel From World Fuel Services Reliable Fuel Supply Global Logistics And Innovative Technology Solutions We Deliver By Lan... Bill Stover, Vice President Internal Audit, Executive Management, Doral, FL, United States

Treatment of Christians around the world

In this expansive interview with Simon Crownshaw, Microsoft's worldwide media and entertainment strategy director, we discuss how Microsoft customers are leveraging generative AI in all stages of the streaming workflow and how they're using it in content delivery and to enhance user experiences in a range of use cases. Crownshaw also digs deep into how Microsoft is building asset management architecture and the critical role metadata plays in effective large-language models (LLMs), maximizing the value of available data.

Applications to the World Post & Parcel Awards 2024 are still open! There are 8 awards categories that you can choose to submit an entry for.

Triangle Management Services is delighted to announce the shortlisted applications for the World Post & Parcel Awards 2024.

A huge congratulations to the winners of the 2024 World Post & Parcel Awards  who were announced last night (19 June), at a Gala Dinner at Hotel Puerta America in Madrid, Spain.

The U.S. Open is being hosted at the exclusive Los Angeles Country Club for the first time in the club's history, with the world getting an up-close look at one of the most mysterious golf courses in the country.

Taiwan, which makes one-fifth of the world's semiconductors, is facing a severe shortage of workers.

Santa Clara chipmaker Nvidia has ridden the AI revolution to briefly vault over Microsoft and Apple and become the world's most valuable company.

Geopolitical tensions and technological constraints make the chip industry more complex to navigate. A groundbreaking engineer talks about it future.

The mayor of Ukraine's capital of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko, and his brother, a champion boxer, have been photographed in military uniform after pledging they would fight to protect the city.

Newlook Marketing has registered a business account with WorldPay, to accept online payment of its online purchases. All transactions are encrypted using 128 bit Secure Socket Layer (SSL) architecture ...

Ursula K. Le Guin's Revolutions - "Le Guin's work is distinctive not only because it is imaginative, or because it is political, but because she thought so deeply about the work of building a future worth living."

"Imaginative fiction trains people to be aware that there other ways to do things, other ways to be; that there is not just one civilization, and it is good, and it is the way we have to be," Le Guin says in Arwen Curry's new documentary, The Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin.[1,2,3,4] Le Guin spoke in defense of science fiction and fantasy, which were and often still are maligned or outright ignored by critics. But her statement admits another, deeper necessity: We must be trained to imagine. But imagine what? ... A feminist and a critic of capitalism, Le Guin must have known that progress was as much a necessity as it was an uncertainty. Nobody knows exactly what will happen when they set out to do what no one else has ever done. Le Guin's work is distinctive not only because it is imaginative, or because it is political, but because she thought so deeply about the work of building a future worth living. She did not just believe that a society free of consumerism and incarceration, like Shevek's homeworld, could exist; she explored how that society could be built and understood the process would be hard work, and probably on some level disappointing. The future is not a static thing; to its architects, it is always in motion, always mid-creation, never realized. Le Guin's utopianism perhaps explains why her characters exhibit a certain adaptability, as did Le Guin herself. In her work, she mostly eschewed great battles; a reader of her work should not expect to find a clash at Helm's Deep. A Le Guin character may be at war with his basest self, but the health of the body politic can be at stake at the same time. In The Left Hand of Darkness, Genly Ai only completes his mission to bring Winter into the Ekumen after he overcomes his own prejudicial beliefs about the people who live there. Le Guin found herself embroiled in a similar struggle, which she recounts to Curry. As acclaimed as The Left Hand of Darkness became, feminists criticized it because, while Le Guin's alien race changed genders, in their default state they used male pronouns. Genly is male, too. "At first I felt a little bit defensive," she told Curry. "But as I thought about it, I began to see that my critics were right." There's a quiet radicalism about her admission.

Yuval Noah Harari & Natalie Portman - "Yuval Noah Harari sits down with the award-winning actress, director, and Harvard graduate Natalie Portman to discuss his new book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century."[5]

0:57 The myth factory 2:22 The role of fictions 4:38 Fictions and co-operation ...

Balance of power: The Economic Consequences of the Peace at 100 - "Ann Pettifor finds astonishing contemporary resonance in John Maynard Keynes's critique of globalization and inequity."[6]

In December 1919, John Maynard Keynes published a blistering attack on the Treaty of Versailles, signed in June that year. The treaty's terms helped to end the First World War. Keynes's The Economic Consequences of the Peace[(fre)eBook] revealed how they would also pave the way to the Second... This is a bold, eloquent work unafraid of the long view. It contributed to the economic stability of the mid-twentieth century. And in a world still grappling with the socio-economic and environmental costs of globalization, Keynes's critiques — not least of the era's international financial system, the gold standard — remain powerfully germane.[7] Keynes censures the disregard of world leaders for the "starving and disintegrating" people of war-torn Europe. "The future life of Europe was not their concern; its means of livelihood was not their anxiety," he wrote. Keynes, however, was concerned for Europe's future. His book's significance lies in his revolutionary plan for financing recovery not just in Europe, but across the world. Keynes called for a new international economic order to replace the gold standard, which had held from the 1870s until the start of the war. That system had led to a form of globalization that benefited the wealthy, but impoverished the majority and ultimately destabilized both the financial and political systems... For a book published 100 years ago, the contemporary resonance is unsettling. Keynes writes: "England still stands outside Europe. Europe's voiceless tremors do not reach her ... But Europe is solid with herself." In another passage, he notes that the "principle of accumulation based on inequality was a vital part of the pre-war order of society". And in an era innocent of Amazon and containerized shipping, Keynes wrote that wealthy Londoners could order by telephone "the various products of the whole earth" and expect "their early delivery" to their doorstep. The globalized pre-First World War economy was the template for the modern one. Driven as it was by the international financial sector, the consequences of this economic system were predictable: rising inequality, economic instability, political volatility and war. Thus, a bankrupt Germany and its allies (the Central Powers) — all heavily indebted sovereign governments — were to endure increasingly frequent economic crises after 1919. Their creditors, the victorious Allied Powers, made no effort towards a sound and just resolution of these crises.[8,9,10]

Now's the time to spread the wealth, says Thomas Piketty - "His premise is that inequality is a political choice. It's something societies opt for, not an inevitable result of technology and globalisation. Whereas Marx saw history as class struggle, Piketty sees it as a battle of ideologies."[11]

Every unequal society, he says, creates an ideology to justify inequality. That allows the rich to fall asleep in their town houses while the homeless freeze outside. In his overambitious history of inequality from ancient India to today's US, Piketty recounts the justifications that recur throughout time: "Rich people deserve their wealth." "It will trickle down." "They give it back through philanthropy." "Property is liberty." "The poor are undeserving." "Once you start redistributing wealth, you won't know where to stop and there'll be chaos" — a favourite argument after the French Revolution. "Communism failed." "The money will go to black people" — an argument that, Piketty says, explains why inequality remains highest in countries with historic racial divides such as Brazil, South Africa and the US. Another common justification, which he doesn't mention, is "High taxes are punitive" — as if the main issue were the supposed psychology behind redistribution rather than its actual effects. All these justifications add up to what he calls the "sacralisation of property". But today, he writes, the "propriétariste and meritocratic narrative" is getting fragile. There's a growing understanding that so-called meritocracy has been captured by the rich, who get their kids into the top universities, buy political parties and hide their money from taxation. Moreover, notes Piketty, the wealthy are overwhelmingly male and their lifestyles tend to be particularly environmentally damaging. Donald Trump — a climate-change-denying sexist heir who got elected president without releasing his tax returns — embodies the problem... Centre-right parties across the west have taken up populism because their low-tax, small-state story wasn't selling any more. Rightwing populism speaks to today's anti-elitist, anti-meritocratic mood. However, it deliberately refocuses debate from property to what Piketty calls "the frontier" (and others would call borders). That leaves a gap in the political market for redistributionist ideas. We're now at a juncture much like around 1900, when extreme inequality helped launch social democratic and communist parties.

Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle - "Do clashes between ideologies reflect policy differences or something more fundamental? The present research suggests they reflect core psychological differences such that liberals express compassion toward less structured and more encompassing entities (i.e., universalism), whereas conservatives express compassion toward more well-defined and less encompassing entities (i.e., parochialism)."[12,13,14,15,16,17]

• In Our Time, The Rapture - "Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the idea that believers will vanish from the world, touching on religious entrepreneurialism, William Miller, dispensational modernism, premillennialism, and other such eschatological battiness."
• Medieval cannibal babies - "How a collective of intellectuals can engage in the production of unlikely stories to protect a cherished theory."
• Three Decades Ago, America Lost Its Religion. Why? - "'Not religious' has become a specific American identity—one that distinguishes secular, liberal whites from the conservative, evangelical right."[18,19]

Zadie Smith: Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction - "I could never shake the suspicion that everything about me was the consequence of a series of improbable accidents—not least of which was the 400 trillion–to-one accident of my birth. As I saw it, even my strongest feelings and convictions might easily be otherwise, had I been the child of the next family down the hall, or the child of another century, another country, another God."[20] We should all be reading more Ursula Le Guin - "Her novels imagine other worlds, but her theory of fiction can help us better live in this one."[21]

"The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,"[pdf] an essay Le Guin wrote in 1986, disputes the idea that the spear was the earliest human tool, proposing that it was actually the receptacle. Questioning the spear's phallic, murderous logic, instead Le Guin tells the story of the carrier bag, the sling, the shell, or the gourd. In this empty vessel, early humans could carry more than can be held in the hand and, therefore, gather food for later. Anyone who consistently forgets to bring their tote bag to the supermarket knows how significant this is. And besides, Le Guin writes, the idea that the spear came before the vessel doesn't even make sense. "Sixty-five to eighty percent of what human beings ate in those regions in Paleolithic, Neolithic, and prehistoric times was gathered; only in the extreme Arctic was meat the staple food." Not only is the carrier bag theory plausible, it also does meaningful ideological work — shifting the way we look at humanity's foundations from a narrative of domination to one of gathering, holding, and sharing. Because I am, despite my best efforts, often soppy and sentimental, I sometimes imagine this like a really comforting group hug. But it's not, really: the carrier bag holds things, sure, but it's also messy and sometimes conflicted. Like when you're trying to grab your sunglasses out of your bag, but those are stuck on your headphones, which are also tangled around your keys, and now the sunglasses have slipped into that hole in the lining. Le Guin's carrier bag is, in addition to a story about early humans, a method for storytelling itself, meaning it's also a method of history. But unlike the spear (which follows a linear trajectory towards its target), and unlike the kind of linear way we've come to think of time and history in the West, the carrier bag is a big jumbled mess of stuff. One thing is entangled with another, and with another. Le Guin once described temporality in her Hainish Universe (a confederacy of human planets that feature in a number of her books) in the most delightfully psychedelic terms: "Any timeline for the books of Hainish descent would resemble the web of a spider on LSD." This lack of clear trajectory allowed Le Guin to test out all kinds of political eventualities, without the need to tie everything neatly together. It makes room for complexity and contradiction, for difference and simultaneity. This, I think, is a pretty radical way of looking at the world, one that departs from the idea of history as a long line of victories. Le Guin describes her discovery of the carrier bag theory as grounding her "in human culture in a way I never felt grounded before." The stick, sword, or spear, designed for "bashing and killing," alienated her from history so much that she felt she "was either extremely defective as a human being, or not human at all." The only problem is that a carrier bag story isn't, at first glance, very exciting. "It is hard to tell", writes Le Guin, "a really gripping tale of how I wrested a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then I scratched my gnat bites, and Ool said something funny, and we went to the creek and got a drink and watched newts for a while, and then I found another patch of oats..." As well as its meandering narrative, a carrier bag story also contains no heroes. There are, instead, many different protagonists with equal importance to the plot. This is a very difficult way to tell a story, fictional or otherwise. While, in reality, most meaningful social change is the result of collective action, we aren't very good at recounting such a diffusely distributed account. The meetings, the fundraising, the careful and drawn-out negotiations — they're so boring! Who wants to watch a movie about a four-hour meeting between community stakeholders? ... We will not "beat" climate change, nor is "nature" our adversary. If the planet could be considered a container for all life, in which everything — plants, animals, humans — are all held together, then to attempt domination becomes a self-defeating act. By letting ourselves "become part of the killer story," writes Le Guin, "we may get finished along with it." All of which is to say: we have to abandon the old story.[22]

Future Tense Fiction: Stories of Tomorrow Has Arrived - "A thought-provoking excursion into the futures we would and would not want to live in."[23]

Hosts Steve Aagard, Cliff Baines, Wandering Joel, Wayne Lennon and DJ Kitty guide you through a diverse mix of music from cultures and places around the world.

Tucked inside a nondescript building on Washington State University's Pullman campus is a bank holding an abundance of the world's wealth, where row after row of temperature-controlled filing cabinets store something far more precious than savings bonds or artwork: seeds…

Chase James is ready for his crowning achievement…

As preparations begin for the 50th anniversary of EXPO '74 next year, we want to reflect on one of the greatest periods in our history, when the Spokane community somehow pulled together to put on a World's Fair and, at the same time, tackled some of the biggest challenges our community had ever faced…

In January 2024, Stacy Gessler found herself outdoors in below-freezing temperatures at Yellowstone National Park, waiting for just the right sliver of a second to photograph scenes of a pack of wolves as they went about their day…

Don't judge a book by its cover…

In a surprising twist, the upcoming Netflix series is executive produced by Robert Downey, Jr., who is famously known as Iron Man in Marvel Cinematic Universe, and his wife Susan Downey.

The November concerts set to take place at at NRG Park will be curated by the 'Sicko Mode' rapper around the creative theme 'Open Your Eyes To A Whole New Universe'.

The 'Sicko Mode' rapper is expanding his Houston music festival to two days while the 'Cars' hitmaker is set to perform his new album 'Intruder' live at an online concert.

The 'Midnight Sky' actor shows up at a random guy's house and stays there during lockdown, bringing with him posters and pillow with Brad Pitt's face printed on it.

The 'Midnight Sky' actor shows up at a random guy's house and stays there during lockdown, bringing with him posters and pillow with Brad Pitt's face printed on it.

In this episode of our podcast, we're joined by Melissa Roe, who introduces us to the exciting world of Purple Friday, an immersive mobile audio game adventure in which you time travel to the futuristic 80s. Melissa guides us through the game, which features cutting-edge binaural audio technology, professional voice actors, and over 700 sound assets. As we explore the game's rich and detailed environments, Melissa shows us how players use simple swipe gestures to uncover hidden clues and objects and interact with the game's cast of characters.

This episode is a trimmed version of the full audio game playthrough of Purple Friday available on Melissa's own podcast at https://celestialvoice.net/podcast/episode-13-thank-god-its-purple-friday/

In this episode of our podcast, Thomas Domville demonstrates the power of the Virtual Volunteer feature, set to come to the Be My Eyes app in late Q3 2023. Currently in beta testing, this feature, powered by OpenAI's GPT-4 model, has the potential to be a game changer for people with visual impairments. It offers a virtual sighted assistant that can generate context and understanding for images, allowing for a greater degree of independence in everyday tasks.

During the episode, Thomas showcases a variety of real-world use cases for the Virtual Volunteer, including identifying clothing; getting information from food packaging; describing greeting cards, photos from your photo library or places such as Facebook, and weather maps; reading restaurant menus, and more.

We thank the Be My Eyes team for allowing us to record and share this demonstration of the Virtual Volunteer.

In this episode of AppleVis Extra, Thomas Domville talks with Jianfeng Wu about VoiceVista, an iOS app that is essential for the blind and low vision community.

VoiceVista is based on Microsoft’s discontinued and open-source project Soundscape and is licensed under the MIT License. The app uses cutting-edge iOS audio technology and precise location services to help people develop a greater awareness of their surroundings, providing comfort in unfamiliar spaces, and supporting individuals in creating mental maps and making personal route choices.

VoiceVista is available for download on the App Store and can be used on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices. The app has received positive reviews from users, with many praising its accessibility features and ease of use.

The developer of VoiceVista, Jianfeng Wu, has done an outstanding job in creating this app and has made a significant contribution to the blind and low vision community. Jianfeng is also actively seeking feedback from users to help improve the app.

Voice Vista on the App Store
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/voicevista/id6450388413