Despite the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the container ship Oleander continues to work as a “ship of opportunity that acquires important ocean...

The SHPAMEE Project has been updated with new examples. For those who haven't noticed yet, we have a separate feed for updates to this project: http://feeds.feedburner.com/shpamee

(United States Ninth Circuit) - Reversed. The district court dismissed an action brought by exotic dancers for lack of subject matter jurisdiction. Reversing, the panel held the statutory requirement that plaintiffs must be employees as defined in the FLSA is a merits-based determination, not a jurisdictional limitation.

The fire never left Josepha Eyre’s belly. She was a woman of endurance.

Big highway projects along the Front Range have taken advantage of the unprecedented weeks-long lull in traffic set off by the coronavirus pandemic by speeding up some work.

The series was moved up two months to provide content-starved fans with something new to watch during the coronavirus pandemic. ESPN was originally planning to release the documentary in June, coinciding with what would have been this season’s NBA Finals.

The 'Rambo' nickname was bestowed on Keene by teammates at VT, where his long locks, muscled frame and affinity for bruising play made him a fan favorite over three seasons.

Join us in making lemonade cocktails in honor of Queen Bey.

The Federal Highway Administration's “Buy America Act” requires federally funded highway projects to use only steel, iron, and manufactured products produced in the United States. The TRB National Cooperative Highway Research Program's NCHRP LRD 80: Buy America Requirements for Federal Highway Projects summarizes the intent and application of the provision. It also summarizes the procedure that FHWA has implemented for granting waivers and the impact that court interpretation of such waivers has had on t...

Hello Internet! In This Episode: Erin and Weer’d discuss the recent spree killing in Canada, and the conspicuous lack of information on it; David talks about gun parts that are great to have around; Weer’d interviews Logan Metesh of High … Continue reading →

Large-scale, complex airport construction projects have the same issues as construction projects on a smaller scale, but they present a series of specialized legal issues. The TRB Airport Cooperative Research Program's ACRP Legal Research Digest 38: Legal Issues Related to Large-Scale Airport Construction Projects focuses on those legal issues causing the most significant risks during planning, design, permitting, procurement, and construction.

TRB’s Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP) Report 80: Guidebook for Incorporating Sustainability into Traditional Airport Projects describes sustainability and its potential benefits, and identifies different applications of sustainable initiatives in traditional airport construction and everyday maintenance projects. The printed version of the report includes a CD-ROM that includes an airport sustainability assessment tool (ASAT) that complements the guidebook and may be used to assist in identif...

Airports continually balance demands to improve infrastructure within the realities of available budgets. Green revolving funds (GRFs) offer an alternative approach for investing in projects that generate operational savings. These funds work by tracking verified cost reductions from implemented actions, and then transferring those savings to a reserve that provides capital for future qualified projects such as energy system upgrades. A number of universities have managed GRFs for over a decade. Municipa...

I'm lucky enough to own a decades old Nintendo 64 and a handful of games, including the classic Mario 64. My kids love that game. Still, the first thing they asked when I showed it to them the first time is why the screen was letterboxed, why the characters looked like they were made of lego blocks, and why I needed weird cords to plug it all into the flat screen television. The answer to these spoiled monsters' questions, of course, is that the game is super old and wasn't meant to be played on modern televisions. It's the story of a lot of older games, though many PC games at least have a healthy modding community that will take classics and get them working on present day hardware. Consoles don't have that luxury.

Well, usually, that is. It turns out that enough folks were interested in modernizing Mario 64 that a group of fans managed to pull off porting it to PC. And, because this is a port and not emulation, they managed to update it to run in 4k graphics and added a ton of modern visual effects.

Last year, Super Mario 64's N64 code was reverse-engineered by fans, allowing for all kinds of new and exciting things to be done with Nintendo’s 1996 classic. Like building a completely new PC port of the game, which can run in 4K and ultra-wide resolutions.

This is a very new and cool thing! Previously, if you were playing Super Mario 64 on PC, you were playing via emulation, as your PC ran code pretending to be an N64. This game is made specifically for the PC, built from the ground up, meaning it not only runs like a dream, but even supports mod stuff like ReShade, allowing for graphical tweaks (like the distance blur seen here).

As you'll see, the video the Kotaku post is referencing can't be embedded here because Nintendo already took it down. Instead, I'll use another video that hasn't been taken down at the time of this writing, so you can see just how great this looks.

In addition to videos of the project, Nintendo has also been busy firing off legal salvos to get download links for the PC port of the game taken down from wherever it can find them. Now, while Nintendo's reputation for IP protectionism is such that it would almost certainly take this fan project down under virtually any circumstances, it is also worth noting that the company has a planned re-release of Mario 64 for its latest Nintendo console. That likely only supercharged the speed with which it is trying to disappear this labor of love from fans of an antiquated game that have since moved on to gaming on their PCs.

But why should the company do this? Nintendo consoles are known for many things, including user-friendly gaming and colorful games geared generally towards younger audiences. You know, exactly not the people who would take it on themselves to get an old Mario game working on their PC instead of a Nintendo console. What threat does this PC port from fans represent to Nintendo revenue? It's hard to imagine that threat is anything substantial.

And, yet, here we are anyway. Nintendo, after all, doesn't seem to be able to help itself.

For large electric power storage projects the cost of batteries has plummeted. 2008, when battery prices were 10 times higher than they are today. This advance is timely as photovoltaic electric power prices have dropped so far that in SoCal PV is causing a growing drop in mid-day demand and therefore a much bigger spike in evening demand. Therefore there's a growing need for a cheaper way to store power generated in mid day and deliver it in the evening. You can see how much solar power output surges each day in California by clicking on some of the Daily Renewables Watch links at the Cal ISO site (the organization that manages California's electric grid). The growing supply of wind...

Ничто так не подчёркивает важность достоверных новостей, как кризис. Однако пандемия сovid-19 переворачивает вверх дном журналистику и меняет условия труда. Нельзя недооценивать возникающий в результате стресс для психического здоровья работников СМИ.

Last weekend I participated in two investing panels for my friend Anina.net’s global online fashion conference. Anina is the pretty girl next to me in the picture atop this page. My second panel was the final event of the conference, so Anina and I stayed on the line to talk a bit afterward. She had been up for 72 continuous hours. Oddly, what we discussed were N-95 respirator masks, which are in such short supply thanks to COVID-19. Anina lives in Beijing and China is starting to get back to work as the country slowly backs-off from its draconian coronavirus shut-down. Some businesses are retooling to address global coronavirus needs and one of those retooled factories is owned by a friend of Anina’s. His garment […]






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Mayo Clinic and IBM Watson Health today unveiled results from early use of the Watson for Clinical Trial Matching, an IBM cognitive computing system. Use of this system in the Mayo Clinic oncology practice has been associated with more patients enrolled in Mayo’s breast cancer clinical trials.

IBM has successfully prototyped a new software architecture for automating data management, potentially making it easier for researchers to collect usable information from mega-scale data collection projects like the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) global telescope which aims to address unanswered questions about our universe.

(NYSE: IBM) will strengthen Australia and New Zealand’s chances of co-hosting the world’s biggest radio telescope project (SKA), one of the largest scientific projects ever undertaken. The IBM SUR Award of IBM high performance Graphical Processor Unit (GPU) based computer hardware, management software and implementation services, will enable Victoria University to support the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) project, a low frequency SKA pathfinder project hosted in Australia in collaboration with Curtin University, MIT, the Smithsonian Institute, and the Raman Research Institute.

IBM's World Community Grid, a worldwide network of PC owners helping scientists solve humanitarian challenges, today announced several computing projects aimed at developing techniques to produce cleaner and safer water, an increasingly scarce commodity eluding at least 1.2 billion people worldwide.

IBM and Rail Projects Victoria keeping the $11B Metro Tunnel on track

IBM to Lead SAP S/4HANA Project for Department of Defence

Melbourne-based start-up Level35 is using Watson, the cognitive computing platform developed by IBM (NYSE: IBM), and IBM Cloud to help public-sector project managers improve how they communicate within some of the largest government agencies in Australia.

Queensland Motorways has awarded IBM a technology and services contract to introduce automated free-flow tolling across south east Queensland’s toll roads.

Thanks to ambyr's rec, we watched Dukhtar ['Daughter'], (2014, directed Afia Nathaniel).

ambyr described this very well: it does include misogyny and violence, but ultimately it's a hopeful film. The film feels almost like a stage play; it is almost entirely about the characters, a mother trying to save her young daughter, and the roadster who reluctantly helps them. The camera doesn't dwell either on the beautiful scenery (there are mountains in the background, but no gorgeous cinematic shots) or on the violence; there are quite a few shootings in the film, but it's never gory because it's not about gun porn, it's about trying to escape from that violent world of gang / tribal violence. Quite a bit of it is filmed in shaky-cam style as if it were just incidental video of people's lives.

The characters are all really vivid, and I cared about them a lot, partly because the film is so careful to avoid piling on the drama. The tribal enforcers who go around shooting almost-random people in order to make people fear them are squalid, not glamorous. The elder who is desperate enough to sell his 10-year-old daughter for protection is basically pathetic rather than evil. The main character, Samiya Mumtaz' Allah Rakhi is beautiful and brave, but not really a heroine, she's desperate and runs away with her daughter with almost no plan for how they're going to survive. In other words she's really plausible for a barely literate woman married at 15 and sent to a remote, very patriarchal village in the mountains.

The romance between Allah Rakhi and Sohail is likewise really understated. He's not a white knight saving the princess, and in fact they even joke about how much he doesn't fit that romantic stereotype. He's a troubled person who has survived and escaped from the Taliban training camps, and he doesn't really want to get involved but can't just abandon a desperate mother and daughter to their fate. They have a certain amount of tenderness, but don't instantly fall in love and it's not clear whether their relationship will last, or whether it will end up being romantic or more friend-based. I also really liked that the dashing, handsome man who is avuncular with the kid and flirts with the mother in a rather aggressive way turns out to be a bad guy, not the love interest.

The ending is really odd. The credits just happen in the middle of a desperate car-ride taking the heroine to hospital bleeding from a gunshot wound. I think we're meant to infer that she survives but it's really not clear.

Next up: Nigeria, our first African country. Any recommendations of Nigerian films? Ideally from the 21^st century, and not primarily about violence or depressing real-world history.

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Nobody had any recs for Nigeria, so we poked around a bunch of internet best of lists and came up with Lionheart, (2018, dir Genevieve Nnaji), which turned out to be a great choice.

Lionheart is about a young business woman, Adaeze, who has to overcome sexism and save her father's struggling transport business. The director, Nnaji, also plays the title role and does a brilliant job. What I particularly loved about this film was that it undermined my genre expectations of feel-good feminist films. Adaeze doesn't have to outsmart and triumph over the sexist men, she has to learn to collaborate with people different from herself. And the company doesn't win by beating its rivals but by conducting a merger that at the start seemed unthinkable, requiring cooperation between her Igbo, Christian family and some Hausa (I think?) Muslims.

In particular, the eccentric uncle who is inexplicably appointed as acting MD when everybody knows it should have been Adaeze turns out to have some key strengths. He is in fact only annoying, and not a jerk. His people skills and intuition perfectly complement Adaeze's business acumen. (And how nice to have a female lead be the excessively competent and rational one!)

Adaeze does experience some sexism, particularly creepy men who expect sexual favours in return for investment in the business. But most of the antagonists are just nasty in a gender neutral way, like they want to sell the business to a conniving rival for quick money.

Anyway that was a really sweet date-night movie and I do feel our film project is back on track

Any recs for Bangladeshi films? We are most excited about 21^st century films not primarily about violence or depressing real-world history.

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I mentioned a couple weeks ago that it’s always a good idea to pick colors you enjoy embroidering with. If …

Oh golly. I really wanted to show off some serious stitching today. But in fact, I ran into one of …

Personally, I don’t enjoy stitching two similar embroidery projects simultaneously. Sometimes I do this, so that I can troubleshoot or …

Ensemble is a Loretto Care project that supports young people out of homelessness through song writing and music.

On 19 September, Michelle from Iriss travelled to Stirling to speak with Michael Timmons, Community Engagement Lead for the project, and Andrew Sinclair a participant and volunteer. Ensemble received ‘A 'different approach’ award at the Scottish Social Services Awards 2019.

Transcript of episode

Music Credit: Make your dream a reality by Scott Holmes.