Most asked questions are answered on the East West Rail project, linking Cambridge and Oxford.

Turtle Dove supports young women who are unemployed, or at risk of it, gain confidence and skills.

A reward of up to £1,000 is on offer for information after a strong of robberies.

Two women and a man are denied bail and remanded in custody.

The HSE confirms the sealing of the borehole is now complete and that the cement has cured.

The comedian has been praised by students at the Royal National College for the Blind, where he studied.

The 46-year-old man is remanded in custody and due before magistrates on Wednesday.

Car-obsessed teenager Dakota, who has muscular dystrophy, is treated to a trip to Silverstone.

Ben Brook was appointed as the service's new Chief Fire Officer on Friday.

‘Don’t play Wordle’ is the plea from striking New York Times workers who are complaining about what they say are unfair labour practices. The New York Times Tech Guild, which […]

The post Boycott Wordle – New York Times workers plead, DNA firm disappears without trace appeared first on Tech Digest.

A couple of weeks ago I received an email from an A&R person at a global dance music label. It was a pretty standard email along the lines of “hey we like your song, would you be interested in licensing it to us?” which I’ve received before and usually they amount to nothing. This often...

Like many people who live in America I have donated to US political candidates and campaigns. And like many people who live in America I have subsequently found my entire life suddenly and completely overwhelmed by text-messages and e-mail spam and phone calls and any number of other venal, stressy, desperate campaign messages. Now of […]

This is an exceptionally long post detailing pretty much everything I learned at an event shortly before Christmas at Meta’s offices in San Francisco. I’ve been delayed in writing it up because of traveling back to the UK for Christmas and other commitments – and because I wanted to capture everything. It’s roughly written, and […]

“Investors, both individual and professional, want more than just the data that independent services can provide. They want the company’s own story and investment vision. What they don’t want is to wade through complex or irrelevant information.” Investor Relations on Corporate Websites, Nielsen Norman Group

Understand investor jobs-to-be-done

Primary users of investor relations areas on a website include, obviously, investors themselves but also analysts and financial journalists. There is an important secondary audience of potential customers and employees too. But the core audience is generally looking for:

• Company background and overview
• Press releases
• Stock exchange filings
• One-page financial overview
• Annual reports
• Quarterly reports
• Historical financial information
• Executive biographies
• Share price information
• Press and IR contact details
• Corporate governance information

Of course, each company will go beyond statutory reporting to add content and user journeys specific to their needs. For example, if they are dealing with specific events in their company history, such as acquisitions, crises or if they are approaching an IPO.

Interestingly, according to NN/Group, some of the fancier functionality that you often see on an IR site, such as webcasts, slides and investment calculators, were less important to real users. “People research company financials are more interested in getting facts quickly than in the technology used to deliver them.”

Best practice examples

GE Aerospace does well with very clear navigation on a fast-loading site that is designed to get people to the information they are looking for quickly.

Microsoft’s IR site clearly surfaces stock price information with a tidy design and recent company news, but we are not fans of carousels as a user interface solution.

In contrast, Alphabet (Google’s parent company) has the leanest, text-only IR page, which, like GE’s, aims to get visitors to key information as quickly as possible. Notably, they offer HTML and PDF versions of key reports, and we think this is good practice. PDFs are not great for usability but have an important role in communicating statutory information in a compliant way, so it’s important to find a user-friendly, SEO-friendly parallel structure to sit alongside them.

Michelmersh combines Microsoft’s visual approach with direct access to the most important information.

Core and optional functionality

We use a tool called Octopus to collaborate with clients to design a website’s information architecture and the high-level structure of individual pages.

For investor relations areas, the following site map templates from NN/Group are good starting points for high, medium and low-priority content. But each client is different and so understanding client needs and their users’ needs is always a project in itself.

Don’t forget basic website usability

For more information about how Articulate tackles the website design and development process, including information architecture and user journeys, see How we build websites at Articulate. For the end results, take a look at our Portfolio.

We think all sites - and all visitors - deserve a well-designed, easy-to-use website that helps them find the information they want. In particular, this means that IR areas need to be:

• Mobile-friendly. The widespread use of PDFs makes many IR sites difficult to use on mobile devices, representing an opportunity for forward-thinking companies to improve the user experience by offering HMTL options.
• Searchability. IR information should be searchable alongside other site content, either with a domain-specific search box (i.e. just the IR section) or as part of an integrated site-wide search.
• Accessibility is a basic requirement for a modern website, yet 97 percent of websites have fundamental accessibility issues. Designing for accessibility is good for every visitor. For example, our blog’s speed reading mode and audio player help people engage with our content whether they have specific needs or not. See our article about why accessibility is crucial for website design.
• Loading speed. Google and GE prioritise loading speed and ‘time to find’ for visitors over fancy imagery and functionality. This is in line with NN/Group’s user study findings. Some clients prefer more fizz and ginger on their IR sites as part of their investor brand, but this should never come at the expense of loading speed. For more on improving Core Web Vitals (as Google calls them) see: Don't lose traffic because of Google’s Core Web Vitals.
• SEO. Investors, journalists and advisors, like most of us, use Google to find information. IR areas should get the same SEO attention as the rest of the site. For more on our approach to SEO see: The ultimate SEO guide for B2B technology companies.
• PDFs vs. web pages. IR pages are loaded with PDFs for annual reports, statutory filings, and other important documents. It may be the case that these files have to be in PDF format—we’re not lawyers, so we can’t say for certain—but we think it would be valuable, as with Google, not to also make them available as web pages, even if it is a high-level summary page with a link to the downloadable PDF. There are strong usability reasons to avoid PDF files if at all possible.
• Carousels. We strongly recommend against Carousels. Buy us a pint, and we’ll bore for England about why.
• Use of videos, webcasts and podcasts. IR pages often feature investor briefings and other content in video format. This should never be a substitute for clear, scannable, searchable text. Where possible, provide transcripts or summaries. Where possible, provide short (<4 minutes) highlight reels as well as longer content. Videos should have captions and chapter headings so that people can find what they need quickly. Never autoplay videos.

Examples of investor-specific functionality

Company overview

“Offer a brief company overview that highlights a few significant facts, along with a link to more detailed corporate information.” For example, Causeway’s website has this succinct summary right on its homepage as well as more detailed information in a ‘Why us’ section.

Biographies

“Provide information about the company’s high-level managers, including each person’s name and job title, a recent picture, and a link to a full biography,” advises The Nielsen Norman Group. For example, HealthHero has a really easy-to-use, highly visual, and on-brand biographies section on its About Us page.

Press information

Journalists don’t just need press information, they need relevant, high-resolution images, logos, PR contacts and company information.

Press releases

Your news page should look like high-end news site or blog with all the support infrastructure such as the ability to sign up for alerts, search for specific information, filter and sort the information, as on this example from TCN.

ESG reports. Your investor brand goes beyond statutory reporting. Increasingly, environmental, social and governance information influences investment decisions and build investor confidence. HPE does a great job of communicating its progress in this area, and, ahem, we think our own Impact Report is pretty good, too. (Related to this, see our guide to establishing a strong ESG tone of voice.)

Security, availability, access controls and approvals

• Security and access control. IR areas often include market-sensitive information such as earnings announcements or new product introductions. For this reason (and others), it is important that any content management system (CMS) used for IR pages should have robust security and access controls, meaning that only authorised users can add or modify IR pages. We recommend HubSpot Content Hub which has granular user permissions, access control to specific assets (e.g. individual web pages) and (with an Enterprise tier) SSO integration and role-based permissions.
• Content approvals. HubSpot also has the option to require approvals before website changes are published. This may be valuable to ensure that legally responsible people, e.g. directors, have a final review and approval of statutory updates to the site, even if they delegate the content creation to others.
• Scheduling for publication. With time-sensitive and embargoed information, it is important to be able to set a specific publication time and date for content so that you can prepare the pages in advance but make sure they are published at the right time. With HubSpot, this is possible for pages and blog/new posts.

How Articulate can help

We design and code signature websites using our proprietary Nucleus technology, which are hosted on HubSpot Content Hub (CMS). See our website services page for more information.

Brochure websites are old-school. Instead, our team will build you a marketing engine that drives traffic, leads and customers, all while telling your brand story.

If you’d like an SEO, usability, or content review of your investor relations website or if you’d like us to help build a new one, please get in touch.

There are two words that every writer needs to know if they're going to learn how to write well: lede and kicker. Most writers will be familiar with these, but in case the terms are new to you, let’s define them.

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When Ariana Grande wrote “could get it again” next to Big Sean’s picture in her “Thank U, Next” video, she might not have been joking. The two were spotted hanging out yesterday, and maybe they were recording new music, maybe she was bouncing back to that dick, or maybe both. While ex-fiance Pete Davidson has […]

The post Ariana Grande Spotted with Ex, Big Sean appeared first on HecklerSpray.

Praying hard for a lump of concrete.

"Clang clang clang went the trolley..."

Nearly half of all dogs are affected by Bonfire Night displays, with 45% of owners saying their dog is not calm when they can hear fireworks Sky and NOW have […]

The post Sky and Now team up with Dogs Trust for pop up Bonfire Night channel appeared first on ShinyShiny.

I was re-reading Iceberg Slim recently (as you do), and wondering what exactly it is the anti-sex brigade mean when they go around calling people "pimps".

I've been called a pimp before. By Julie Bindel, to my face, and I laughed because it is so ridiculous: I have never profited off of anyone's erotic capital but my own… and arguably Billie Piper's, though that makes me no more and perhaps significantly less pimp-like than (say) her agent and the show's producers.

I don't get particularly offended by such obviously over the top labels. But the word itself has started to crop up more and more in the arguments surrounding sex work and the proposed laws regarding prostitution. Take for example in Ireland, where the widespread assumption is that all sex workers are a) women and b) "pimped". Both of these are demonstrably and flagrantly not true, and yet are found in virtually any media coverage of the topic which is heavily influenced by an unholy coalition of extreme religious groups and extreme radfem ideologues.

The side issue dogging the proposed changes, that is, the discourse about what exactly constitutes trafficking and who exactly is trafficked, is of course pretty openly racist - both the words and the imagery. This has been covered in some detail and extremely well by eg. Laura Agustin, whose work on the topic I highly recommend.
 

Typical "trafficking" propaganda: shades of White Slavery all over the place.
 
Anyway, back to the concept of "pimp". Now we all know, or think we know, what a pimp is, and much of this archetype comes from highly fictionalised misrepresentations of Mr Slim's own work.
Go on, you know exactly what people mean by the word. What "pimp" implies. A man who runs women, lures them with money and romance, then turns them out to whoring, often beaten, always drug-addicted.

And he is black.

Starting to sound like casual use of "pimp" is dog-whistle racism, isn't it?

For the life of me I have never met a person even remotely like the stereotypical pimp, and yet I "know" they exist, largely because I have been told so over and over again. I've met streetwalkers, both drug-addicted and not; escorts and call girls, same; not one ever had what popular imagination would classify as a "pimp," but then I keep getting told I'm not representative, so maybe the literally hundreds of men and women, cis and trans sex workers I've met are just "not representative" too?

Occasionally you also hear talk of the "Eastern European gangmaster", but for some reason the class- and racially-evocative term "pimp" comes up far, far more often. Could that be because plain xenophobia just doesn't inspire the troops in quite the same way bald racism does?

Independent sex workers who organise their own affairs and work solo. Roommates who share a flat and both happen to sell sex. Managers running escorts agencies with a dozen or so girls they mostly interact with by text. Massage parlour owners. Women whose house is used by other sex workers, so technically I guess are madams. People who set up message boards and internet forums where clients and sex workers talk among themselves and with each other. All of these are people who get called "pimps" by the anti-sex lobby.

A guy in a crushed velvet suit on a street corner, keeping his girls high and working the neighbourhood? Not so many of those to the pound.

But, let's say he really is out there, because we all keep getting told he is. This working-class black man in the loud clothes who is sexually and physically aggressive and probably has a criminal record. This "pimp".

Do you think his choice of work isn't somehow constrained by society too? That he wouldn't rather be earning money some other way? Because anyone with any sense can surely suss out that a lot of activities, both legal and illegal, would be far more profit and far less hassle than running girls.


Iceberg Slim: hustling because it's not as if you were going to save him and his mother from poverty, were you?
 
This is the reality of waged work, all waged work, whether sex is involved or not. No one, but no one, has "free choice". If you think otherwise, remind yourself what you wanted to be when you grew up, and reflect on how exactly you ended up where you are now. Did you freely select from all career choices in the world, ever? Or did you choose as best you could from the options offered by your abilities and (more crucially) your circumstances? You know, like Iceberg Slim did?

Some folks seem especially resistant to acknowledging the truth about work, so I'll underline it some more. Entire towns in the North weren't full of miners because everyone there just happened to have the aptitude and preference for that sole job, but because it was the only job going. NE Scotland isn't full of fishermen because they have a particular concentration of people whose life's dream was to catch fish, but because that's what the job market offers. Everyone's outcome is the product of limited choices, from streetwalkers to the Queen. And no one's suggesting she needs to be "rescued" from her lack of career options.

If you want to improve someone's options, you address the things that constrain their choices in the first place. Poverty, addiction, education, to name a few. Not take away the only choices they have.

The pimp as we perceive him is a low-end tough. He's not exactly a criminal mastermind. And unlike a lot of the people who talk about "pimps" and whatnot, I know criminals. I have seen that life up close and fucking personal. I have lived in their neighbourhoods and their houses, and even in their families. I know that anyone who runs a business in the way the supposed pimp supposedly does is making little money, if any. What's 50% of that £10 anal bareback the anti-sex lobby claim is available in red lights everywhere? A fiver? Yeah, that sounds logical. Now pull the other one.

I know that his power - again, if he exists, because even when I was living in Cracktown, Pinellas County I saw shit that would stop your heart but I never once saw a "pimp" - is a power of an extremely limited kind. The power of someone with few and possibly no other options.

The anti-sex lobby's fantasy use of the term "pimp" is bogus and it is racist. Anyone who claims otherwise is being purposely disingenuous for the sake of striking fear into white, English-speaking, middle-class people.

In the round-up: Alpine must make up for 0.3-second deficit with 2025 chassis - Briatore • Stolen Lauda helmet goes on display • Wittich 'has not resigned'

This isn’t the first time a president claimed democracy was ‘under attack’

21 states allow manufacturer-to-consumer sales with no restrictions

This post is about the new Google Trends Tutorials YouTube series. In these videos you'll learn how to use Google Trends to analyze patterns in Google Search and Youtube searches, and use them to create interesting content online.

CSV, or files with “comma separated values”, is a simple format that everyone should be able to handle.  Certainly you’d think so except nothing is ever that straightforward and if you’ve ever spent time trying to work with these files and having to deal with all the problems inherent to this format then you’ll know … Continue reading Working with CSV’s…

Responsive open learning environments (ROLEs) are the next generation of personal learning environments (PLEs). While PLEs rely on the simple aggregation of existing content and services mainly using Web 2.0 technologies, ROLEs are transforming lifelong learning by introducing a new infrastructure on a global scale while dealing with existing learning management systems, institutions, and technologies. The requirements engineering process in highly populated test-beds is as important as the technology development. In this paper, we will describe first experiences deploying ROLEs at two higher learning institutions in very different cultural settings. The Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China and at the “Center for Learning and Knowledge Management and Department of Information Management in Mechanical Engineering” (ZLW/IMA) at RWTH Aachen University have exposed ROLEs to theirs students in already established courses. The results demonstrated to readiness of the technology for large-scale trials and the benefits for the students leading to new insights in the design of ROLEs also for more informal learning situations.

The quality attributes of a software system are, to a large extent, determined by the decisions taken early in the development process. Best practices in software engineering recommend the identification of important quality attributes during the requirements elicitation process, and the specification of software architectures to satisfy these requirements. Over the years the software engineering community has studied the relationship between quality attributes and the use of particular architectural styles and patterns. In this paper we study the relationship between quality attributes and Aspect-Oriented Software Architectures - which apply the principles of Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) at the architectural level. AOSD focuses on identifying, modeling and composing crosscutting concerns - i.e. concerns that are tangled and/or scattered with other concerns of the application. In this paper we propose to use AO-ADL, an aspect-oriented architectural description language, to specify quality attributes by means of parameterizable, and thus reusable, architectural patterns. We particularly focus on quality attributes that: (1) have major implications on software functionality, requiring the incorporation of explicit functionality at the architectural level; (2) are complex enough as to be modeled by a set of related concerns and the compositions among them, and (3) crosscut domain specific functionality and are related to more than one component in the architecture. We illustrate our approach for usability, a critical quality attribute that satisfies the previous constraints and that requires special attention at the requirements and the architecture design stages.

RDF data can be analyzed with various query languages such as SPARQL. However, due to their nature these query languages do not support fuzzy queries that would allow us to extract a broad range of additional information. In this article we present a new method that transforms the information presented by subject-relationobject relations within RDF data into Activation Patterns. These patterns represent a common model that is the basis for a number of sophisticated analysis methods such as semantic relation analysis, semantic search queries, unsupervised clustering, supervised learning or anomaly detection. In this article, we explain the Activation Patterns concept and apply it to an RDF representation of the well known CIA World Factbook.

1. Hiking with a backpack is the workout of 2024. An exercise scientist says it’s worth the extra effort  The Globe and Mail
2. Military-Inspired Workout Has 'Huge Wins' for Women, Says Personal Trainer  MSN
3. How Rucking Can Turn Your Walks into a Full-Body Workout  Verywell Health
4. What Is Rucking and Is It Better Than Regular Walking? Here's What Personal Trainers Say  EatingWell
5. Rucking: Why It’s a Great Workout & How to Get Started  Athletech News

1. Teenager in critical condition with Canada’s first human case of bird flu  The Guardian
2. B.C. teen with avian flu is in critical condition, provincial health officer says  CBC News
3. What do you do when a goose dies in your backyard, amid concerns about avian flu?  CityNews Kitchener
4. B.C. teen with Canada's first human case of avian flu in critical condition, Dr. Bonnie Henry says  CTV News Vancouver
5. B.C. teen diagnosed with bird flu in critical condition, with source of virus likely to remain unknown  The Globe and Mail

The banking sector has experienced a substantial technological shift that has opened up new and better opportunities for its customers. Based on their technological expenditures, the study assessed the two biggest public Indian banks and the two biggest private Indian banks. The most crucial statistical techniques used to demonstrate the aims are realistic are bivariate correlations and ordinary least squares. This work aims to establish a connection between research and a technology index that serves as a proxy for operational efficiency. The results show that for both public and private banks, the technology index positively influences operational efficiency metrics like IT costs, marketing costs, and compensation costs. This suggests that when the technology index increases, so do IT, marketing, and compensation costs, even though it has been shown that the technology index favourably improves operational efficiency measures like depreciation and printing. This means that the cost to banks is high despite greater investment in technology for these activities.

Emergency disaster management presents substantial risks and obstacles to shield tunnel building projects, particularly in the event of water leakage accidents. Contemporary water leak detection is critical for guaranteeing safety by reducing the likelihood of disasters and the severity of any resulting damages. However, it can be difficult. Deep learning models can analyse images taken inside the tunnel to look for signs of water damage. This study introduces a unique strategy that employs deep learning techniques, generative adversarial networks (GAN) with long short-term memory (LSTM) for water leakage detection i shield tunnel construction (WLD-STC) to conduct classification and prediction tasks on the massive image dataset. The results demonstrate that for identifying and analysing water leakage episodes during shield tunnel construction, the WLD-STC strategy using LSTM-based GAN networks outperformed other methods, particularly on huge data.

In the context of smart city development, the managed pressure drilling (MPD) drilling process faces many uncertainties, but the characteristics of the process are complex and require accurate wellbore pressure control. However, this process runs the risk of introducing un-modelled dynamics into the system. To this problem, this paper employs neural network control techniques to construct a dual-network system for throttle pressure control, the design encompasses both the controller and identifier components. The radial basis function (RBF) network and proportional features are connected in parallel in the controller structure, and the RBF network learning algorithm is used to train the identifier structure. The simulation results show that the actual wellbore pressure can quickly track the reference pressure value when the pressure setpoint changes. In addition, the controller based on neural network realises effective control, which enables the system to track the input target quickly and achieve stable convergence.

New web technologies have enabled online education to take on a massive scale, prompting many universities to create massively open online courses (MOOCs) that take advantage of these technologies in a seemingly effortless manner. Designing a MOOC, however, is anything but trivial. It involves developing content, learning activities, and assessments to accommodate both the massiveness and openness of the course. To design an effective MOOC, instructors need to integrate both pedagogical and information systems theory. In this paper, we present a case study of a MOOC grant and a series of decisions made in its development. These decisions, when paired with the theoretical framework, suggest five principles – meaningful, engaging, measurable, accessible, and scalable – may be applicable to future MOOC development projects.

The paper describes the development of four learning modules that focus on technical details of how a person’s privacy might be compromised in real-world scenarios. The paper shows how students benefited from the addition of hands-on learning experiences of privacy and data protection to the existing information technology courses. These learning modules raised students’ awareness of potential breaches of privacy as a user as well as a developer. The demonstration of a privacy breach in action helped students to design, configure, and implement technical solutions to prevent privacy violations. The assessment results demonstrate the strength of the technical approach.

Aim/Purpose: Compared student academic performance on specific course requirements in a C# programming course across three instructional approaches: traditional, online, and flipped. Background: Addressed the following research question: When compared to the online and traditional instructional approaches, does the flipped instructional approach have a greater impact on student academic performance with specific course requirements in a C# programming course? Methodology: Quantitative research design conducted over eight 16-week semesters among a total of 271 participants who were undergraduate students en-rolled in a C# programming course. Data collected were grades earned from specific course requirements and were analyzed with the nonparametric Kruskal Wallis H-Test using IBM SPSS Statistics, Version 23. Contribution: Provides empirical findings related to the impact that different instructional approaches have on student academic performance in a C# programming course. Also describes implications and recommendations for instructors of programming courses regarding instructional approaches that facilitate active learning, student engagement, and self-regulation. Findings: Resulted in four statistically significant findings, indicating that the online and flipped instructional approaches had a greater impact on student academic performance than the traditional approach. Recommendations for Practitioners: Implement instructional approaches such as online, flipped, or blended which foster active learning, student engagement, and self-regulation to increase student academic performance. Recommendation for Researchers: Build upon this study and others similar to it to include factors such as gender, age, ethnicity, and previous academic history. Impact on Society: Acknowledge the growing influence of technology on society as a whole. Higher education coursework and programs are evolving to encompass more digitally-based learning contexts, thus compelling faculty to utilize instructional approaches beyond the traditional, lecture-based approach. Future Research: Increase the number of participants in the flipped instructional approach to see if it has a greater impact on student academic performance. Include factors beyond student academic performance to include gender, age, ethnicity, and previous academic history.