On March 7, Dana Cuff will discuss architecture’s ability to design more equitable futures at UCLA’s Faculty Research Lecture.

TORONTO, ON — An invasive ant species that has become increasingly abundant in eastern North America not only takes over yards and delivers a nasty sting, it’s helping the spread of an invasive plant species.  The ants are very effective dispersers of invasive plant seeds and new research suggests that together they could wreak havoc on […]

Toronto, ON – A study by researchers at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto shows that four-year-olds with average and lower vocabulary skills learn more effectively with an adult reading an eBook to them versus relying solely on the eBook’s voiceover. Adult reader versus e‑book voiceover In the study, […]

It never hurts to be prepared for the worst. Especially when it comes to losing your job.

Giving feedback can be tricky and awkward, especially if you’re conflict averse. How do you give feedback that’s empathetic yet effective?

The standardization of screw threads has been a historical endeavor involving several organizations. However, the ASME B1 Screw Thread Committee has emerged as the primary organization responsible for holding, updating, and curating these standards.

Taper Pipe Threads are one of the more challenging threads to produce and measure. The ASME B1.20.1-2013 Pipe Threads, General Purpose (Inch) is the current standard that covers both the part thread specifications and the gages for NPT, NPSC, NPTR, NPSM and NPSL threads.

Gage accuracy depends on product info. Thread form plating changes pitch diameter. Compensate for buildup to make correct pre-plate allowances. 60° UN threads change pitch diameter by 4x plating thickness.

This article is an adaptation of my popular presentation, “Beyond the Sticker & the Cert (Ensuring Better Measurements & Reducing Risk).” Product manufacturers, testing labs, and calibration labs often overlook the importance of thoroughly reviewing calibration certificates, leading to potential measurement inaccuracies and increased risks.

Ready to Learn by Lladro Black Legacy is a(n) Open Edition. The Edition is Limited to n/a pcs

ER Foundation (Extensive Reading Foundation). September 5 (Fri) - 9 (Tue) 2025, at Hokusei Gakuen University, Sapporo City, Hokkaido, Japan.

Air-Tro Inc., a heating and air conditioning contractor in Monrovia, California, announced that the company has won the 2016 Readers Choice Award for San Gabriel Valley. This is the third year in a row that the company has won the award.

The tech who showed up to the house was probably just as surprised as I was that my dad was getting the ducts cleaned. But he saw this appointment as an opportunity, not a waste of time. He talked to my dad, found things out about him and the house. Because he spent just a few minutes with my dad, he was able to add on additional products and services. That tech turned a $375 duct cleaning job into a $1,500 IAQ solution job.

The article provided valuable information on maintenance and cleanliness issues related to refrigeration equipment in restaurants and c-stores.

The U.S. DOE will soon begin enforcing its 2017 rule that mandates minimum energy efficiency requirements for walk-in coolers and freezers.

A ban on the installation of natural gas infrastructure in new buildings is coming soon to a town near you, and the local HVAC industry needs to be prepared — or maybe not.

The first phase took effect on January 1, 2018, and increased the minimum efficiency of commercial rooftop units (RTUs) by about 13 percent.

One Stop Cooling studies technicians’ readings recorded on service calls. If you do the same, you might be surprised with the mistakes you find.

Different areas have particular needs and also embrace new technology at different speeds.

I’ve heard a lot about power bills, even with new a/c units. New units show increased savings, but it’s nothing like the mini splits of today.

As the federal government plans millions in grant funding to boost heat-pump manufacturing in the U.S., a big player in the market as well as a newcomer are thrilled with the opportunity.

Contractors need to equip themselves to be ambassadors when it comes to zoning.

In this episode Markus discusses with Chris Read basics and some advanced topics in the space of continuous integration. We cover concepts, some tools, as well as a number of best practices.

Chris Riccomini and Dmitriy Ryaboy discuss their book, The Missing Readme, which is intended to be the missing manual for new software engineers. Felienne spoke with Riccomini and Ryaboy about a range of topics that new software engineers might not have..

Today we're going to perform some AMD TRX40 motherboard VRM thermal testing using the powerful 64-core Threadripper 3990X. To apply load we're using Blender with the system running at stock and overclocked to 3.8 GHz. The typical power draw for this system is around 450 watts, but once overclocked we are hitting as much as 850 watts. Toasty!... [PCSTATS]

Brent Simmons, the developer of the NetNewsWire RSS reader, is questioning his decision to put an unread count next to each feed, reasoning that it encourages people to be too obsessive about reading every item:

Instead of a dozen bookmarks, people had a hundred feeds. Or two hundred. Or two thousand.

And there was a tyranny behind keeping track of unread items and showing an unread count. People reacted in different ways, but many people felt like they always had to go through everything.

Including me. To this day.

I did not know this was going to happen. That was not the idea: it was a side effect of reasonable (at the time) choices.

I like seeing these counts on feeds where I need to read all items that are posted, but that's only a small percentage of the 100-120 feeds I follow. It would be nice to turn that off for others I read more casually.

Feedly presents unread counts on each feed and folder of feeds. There's a Mark As Read button to clear a count, but when you click it, the confirmation dialog acts like it's an extremely consequential decision: "Are you sure you want to mark this entire source as read? This operation cannot be undone."

I've posed a question on the RSS-Public mailing list: Do you think feed readers should count unread items?

If you need to load an RSS feed with the PHP programming language, the open source library SimplePie greatly simplifies the process of pulling in items from a feed to present on a website, store in a database or do something else coooool with the data. There's a full installation guide for SimplePie but you can skip it with just three steps:

1. Download SimplePie 1.5.
2. Copy the file autoloader.php and the folder library to a folder that's accessible from your PHP code.
3. Make note of this folder; you'll be using require_once() to load autoloader.php from that location.

SimplePie has been designed to work the same regardless a feed's format. It supports RSS 2.0, RSS 1.0, Atom and the earlier versions of RSS. Additionally it can read feed elements from nine namespaces.

Here's PHP code that loads feed items from the news site Techdirt and displays them in HTML:

// load the SimplePie library
require_once('/var/www/libraries/simplepie-1.5/autoloader.php');

// load the feed
$feed = new SimplePie();
$feed->set_feed_url('https://www.techdirt.com/feed/');
$feed->init();
$feed->handle_content_type();

// create the output
$html_output = '';
foreach ($feed->get_items() as $item) {
  $html_output .= '<p><a href="' . $item->get_link() . '">' . $item->get_title() . '</a></p>';
  $html_output .= $item->get_description();
  $html_output .= '<p>By ' . $item->get_author(0)->get_name() . ', ' . $item->get_date();
}

// display the output
ECHO <<<END
$html_output
END;


The API documentation for SimplePie_Item lists the functions that can extract data from each feed item. The versatility of the library is demonstrated by get_authors(), which can retrieve an item's authorship information whether it was in the RSS author element, Dublin Core creator, iTunes author, or Atom author.

SimplePie supports caching so that a feed isn't downloaded every time code is executed. The addition of these lines turns on caching, specifies the location of a cache folder and sets the time to use a cached version to four hours (14,400 seconds):

$feed->set_cache_location('/var/www/cache/');
$feed->set_cache_duration(14400);
$feed->enable_cache();

SimplePie was created by RSS Advisory Board member Ryan Parman, Geoffrey Sneddon and Ryan McCue. The project is currently maintained on GitHub by Malcom Blaney.

There are a lot of libraries for processing XML data with Java that can be used to read RSS feeds. One of the best is the open source library XOM created by the computer book author Elliotte Rusty Harold.

As he wrote one of his 20 books about Java and XML, Harold got so frustrated with the available Java libraries for XML that he created his own. XOM, which stands for XML Object Model, was designed to be easy to learn while still being strict about XML, requiring documents that are well-formed and utilize namespaces in complete adherence to the specification. (At the RSS Advisory Board, talk of following a spec is our love language.)

XOM was introduced in 2002 and is currently up to version 1.3.9, though all versions have remained compatible since 1.0. To use XOM, download the class library in one of the packages available on the XOM homepage. You can avoid needing any further configuration by choosing one of the options that includes third-party JAR files in the download. This allows XOM to use an included SAX parser under the hood to process XML.

Here's Java code that loads items from The Guardian's RSS 2.0 feed containing articles by Ben Hammersley, displaying them as HTML output:

// create an XML builder and load the feed using a URL
Builder bob = new Builder();
Document doc = bob.build("https://www.theguardian.com/profile/benhammersley/rss");
// load the root element and channel
Element rss = doc.getRootElement();
Element channel = rss.getFirstChildElement("channel");
// load all items in the channel
Elements items = channel.getChildElements("item");
for (Element item : items) {
  // load elements of the item
  String title = item.getFirstChildElement("title").getValue();
  String author = item.getFirstChildElement("creator",
    "http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/").getValue();
  String description = item.getFirstChildElement("description").getValue();
  // display the output
  System.out.println(">h2>" + title + ">/h2>");
  System.out.println(">p>>b>By " + author + ">/b>>/p>");
  System.out.println(">p>" + description + ">/p>");

All of the classes used in this code are in the top-level package nu.xom, which has comprehensive JavaDoc describing their use. Like all Java code this is a little long-winded, but Harold's class names do a good job of explaining what they do. A Builder uses its build() method with a URL as the argument to load a feed into a Document over the web. There are also other build methods to load a feed from a file, reader, input stream, or string.

Elements can be retrieved by their names such as "title", "link" or "description". An element with only one child of a specific type can be retrieved using the getFirstChildElement() method with the name as the argument:

Element linkElement = item.getFirstChildElement("link");

An element containing multiple children of the same type uses getChildElements() instead:

Elements enclosures = item.getChildElements("enclosure");
if (enclosures.size() > 1) {
  System.out.println("I'm pretty sure an item should only include one enclosure");
}

If an element is in a namespace, there must be a second argument providing the namespace URI. Like many RSS feeds, the ones from The Guardian use a dc:creator element from Dublin Core to credit the item's author. That namespace has the URI "http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/".

If the element specified in getFirstChildElement() or getChild Elements() is not present, those methods return null. You may need to check for this when adapting the code to load other RSS feeds.

If the name Ben Hammersley sounds familiar, he coined the term "podcasting" in his February 2004 article for The Guardian about the new phenomenon of delivering audio files in RSS feeds.

New citizens—whose votes may prove pivotal in swing states—are considering myriad issues as they cast their first ballots in a presidential election.

Research by the National Literacy Trust (NLT) charity suggests that the number of children reading has gone down to around one in three. We want to know about your reading habits.

If you read the runes, you understand what is likely to happen because of the current circumstances.

New Lesson Plans Entry: 'IELTS Reading homework instructions and reflection' has just been added to the Lesson Plans area of UsingEnglish.com.

New Articles Entry: 'Reading in English problems and solutions' has just been added to the Articles area of UsingEnglish.com.

New Articles Entry: 'Reading English with your child: problems and solutions' has just been added to the Articles area of UsingEnglish.com.

When reactive power devices, whether capacitive or inductive, are purposefully added to a power network in order to produce a specific outcome, this is referred to as compensation. It’s as simple as that. This could involve greater transmission capacity, enhanced... Read more

The post Do you know what reactive power compensation is? If not, keep reading, it’s important. appeared first on EEP - Electrical Engineering Portal.

In order to create a consistent and technically correct single line or wiring diagram, more than basic knowledge about the engineering field in question is required. Besides electrical installation and equipment, the design engineers should be familiar with electrical symbols... Read more

The post Eight common mistakes in reading and creating single line and wiring diagrams appeared first on EEP - Electrical Engineering Portal.

Microsite resource and accompanying free clips DVD suitable for Primary Literacy. Featuring PDFs for a whole-school assembly and homework activities.

Free Cineschool screening for secondary schools 

Pace was appointed and won in an election against Jim Dillenbeck last night.

The post New schools, more bus drivers and improved reading scores are among Chuck Pace’s priorities for his next year on Albemarle County School Board appeared first on Charlottesville Tomorrow.

The coffee is said to be the first super-concentrated coffee available in plastic bottles.

Nestlé Waters North America’s ReadyRefresh by Nestlé delivery service has expanded its beverage portfolio as part of ReadyRefresh’s mission to deliver healthy, convenient and great-tasting hydration to its customers. 

ProAmpac's patent-pending innovation, ProActive Recycle Ready Retort RT-3000, is suited for pet and human food. RT-3000 pouches are available in stand-up and three-side seal configurations and are EU and FDA compliant for food contact in retort applications.

Following the mission of repacking the planet, Paboco consistently drives for solutions that improve on what has come before; creating lasting, impactful change that brings innovation into reality.

At Packaging Strategies, we stay on top of packaging innovations. However, it's also important to gain a broader perspective on specific industry segments.

S. Rozen’s buns and Vienna Beef Hot Dogs say they came up with a solution 16 years ago.

The election is going to dominate early November trading so making moves based on seasonals is unwise. That said, it's useful to keep them in mind as the dust settles.

• November is the best month for USD/JPY
• Best month for the Nasdaq
• Third-best month for the US dollar
• The November through February is strong for gold
• Second-best month for the S&P 500
• Second-best month for the MSCI world index
• Second-best month for the German DAX
• Best month for the Nikkei 225
• The final month of the seasonal slump for oil. Seasonals neutral in Dec-Jan then strongly positve from Feb-June

Going into last November, the S&P 500 had declined for three straight months but that month marked a turning point as it recouped nearly all the gains in what was the beginning of a five-month rally. This time, we're coming into the month with better momentum, though October was negative for stocks.

Good morning, afternoon and evening all. Any charts, technical analysis, trade ideas, thoughts, views, ForexLive traders would like to share and discuss with fellow ForexLive traders, please do so:

Washington, D.C. -- NAB Show the world’s largest annual conference for broadcast , entertainment and technology professionals, will host attendees from 154 countries and exhibiting companies from 38 nations at the 2022 NAB Show, held April 23 – 27 in Las Vegas, Nev.