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...

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Racism is 'unfortunately part of' football said Bristol Rovers forward Shaq Forde, after he was sent online abuse last month.

Police officer and domestic violence survivor Sharon Baker features in a documentary by the Queen.

Meet Dominic Reid, London's 'Mr Big Event'.

Praying hard for a lump of concrete.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 has finally dropped for gamers to get stuck into. The Call of Duty (CoD) series is one of the best-selling in history with more […]

The post Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 launches, Kia EV3 scoops EV award appeared first on ShinyShiny.

It is with some interest that I have been following media reports of the alleged conduct of Ashton Kutcher, a well-known campaigner against sex trafficking. As has been pointed out elsewhere, the "problem" his advocacy claims to address is certainly hugely overstated and possibly being manipulated by people who are at least as interested in money and credibility as they are in philanthropy.

Interestingly, on Quora, which Kutcher has called "the smartest place on the internet" (you know, because academic journals and research forums are where the dumb kids hang out), there was a question not long ago which asked, "Why is it so common to include voluntary prostitution in the category of sex trafficking?"

Kutcher stepped in, as did others, in defence of the idea that foreign-born women voluntarily choosing to enter sex work - such as, say, myself (and yes, one of them did mention me specifically) are trafficked. Also people being transported over state and international borders, or something.

When you hear the word "trafficking", maybe you imagine a foreign child being kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery. Not only is that not accurate, it's also not what the lobbyists against sex work even seem to believe themselves. But it is an assumption they appear happy to exploit. As the Quora discussion shows, Kutcher and people like him claim that "trafficking" includes people going into sex work willingly and migrating willingly. In other words, equating consensual sex work with involuntary slavery. Actually a lot of other "rescue industry" types buy that as well. It's a stand with a lot of errors of logic, but it's their platform, they defend it, they own it.

Right. Now, let's check out an article from the Daily Mail dated 03 October 2011 (no link since Istyosty has gone now, HuffPo covers it and so does The Frisky, also it's screensnapped below). It includes quotes from someone who not only claims to know the person Kutcher allegedly cheated with, but who also appears to indicate that the presence of girls like her at celeb parties is, shall we say, not entirely without reimbursement.

Here's the bit in the Mail that caught my eye:

Naumoff, who arranges for good looking girls to be shipped to certain hotspots,  also told the newspaper: 'Sara’s a great girl. My job is to round up hot girls and bus them into clubs in San Diego or Vegas.

The girls get free booze, food, whatever, and they attract rich and famous guys to the clubs. It’s a two-way street. The girls get to meet rich men and the guys get what they want.’

Which is? ‘Sex, obviously.’

Is Naumoff paid to do this? If so, by whom? The Mail doesn't say.

You could be charitable and interpret this as kind of an introduction service. But then again, some of the men in question are already married. You could alternatively think this setup sounds an awful lot like people being reimbursed for travel and sex. Which might not only count as prostitution to some people, but trafficking as well. If you were the sort of person who was inclined to see things that way.

Me? I don't believe anyone who enters any kind of quid-pro-quo relationship, be it sex for money or naked hot tubbing for a drinks tab, and does so willingly, is trafficked. So far so sugar daddy. But read the Quora opinions, and consider what's being quoted in the Mail, and ask yourself whether you think this alleged situation would tick the rescue industry's boxes for "prostitution: trafficking" or not. Whatever would the missus think?

Do you remember when bloggers just sometimes did short posts about things they had enjoyed and just wanted to share them? I know, I am such a boomer*. Anyway, here is one of those, with a couple more to follow...

Clearly one of the best British bands of the last one hundred years, on Friday the Cure are releasing their first new album for 16 years. Regular readers will know that I do the Guardian’s Thursday quiz, but today as...

Decision creates incentives for more secrecy

Desde que puse en marcha este sitio, he usado WordPress. Todavía me queda mucho que aprender, pero desde hace un tiempo me […]

En la meetup de abril en Valladolid, descubrimos por qué WordPress es el mejor amigo para tu emprendimiento. Mauricio Gelves nos contó […]

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Si utilizás el buscador Google Chrome podés encontrar herramientas de mucho provecho. Acabo de toparme con la extensión en línea de Academic Earth, que ofrece el acceso gratuito a videos de los cursos y conferencias de las universidades más destacadas de Estados Unidos y en las materias más diversas. ENJOY KNOWLEDGE!

 
Podrás presenciar conferencias como, por ejemplo,
Language in the Brain, Mouth and the Hands
By Paul Bloom - Yale

TRADOS + Wordfast se dictará en la Universidad del Centro de Educación Latinoamericano durante el mes de junio de 2012.

LA CHRONIQUE DE WILLIAM THAY. Le nouveau gouvernement a provoque un climat anti-riches en rompant avec la politique fiscale attractive menee ces dernieres annees.

These days, commodity-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and software are used to build high-end and powerful workstations and servers to be deployed in today's local area networks of private homes and small- to medium-sized business. Typically, these servers are multipurpose and shared - running networking functionalities involving IP packet forwarding in addition to other CPU intensive applications. In this paper we study and investigate the impact of running CPU-bound applications on the performance of IP packet forwarding. We measure and compare the impact and performance for the two operating systems of choice for home and small-business users, namely Linux and Windows XP. The performance is studied in terms of key performance metrics which include throughput, packet loss, round-trip delay, and CPU availability. For our measurements, we consider today's typical home network hosts of modern processors and Gigabit network cards. We also consider different configuration setups and utilize open-source tools to generate relatively high traffic rates. Our empirical results show that Linux exhibits superior performance over Windows XP in terms of IP forwarding performance. Results also show that, unlike Windows XP, the IP forwarding performance of Linux is not significantly impacted by running CPU-bound applications.

An OCR free word spotting method is developed and evaluated under a strong experimental protocol. Different feature sets are evaluated under the same experimental conditions. In addition, a tuning process in the document segmentation step is proposed which provides a significant reduction in terms of processing time. For this purpose, a complete OCR-free method for word spotting in printed documents was implemented, and a document database containing document images and their corresponding ground truth text files was created. A strong experimental protocol based on 800 document images allows us to compare the results of the three feature sets used to represent the word image.

With the emergence of the Web 2.0 phenomena, technology-assisted social networking has become the norm. The potential of social software for collaborative learning purposes is clear, but as yet there is little evidence of realisation of the benefits. In this paper we consider Information and Communication Technology student attitudes to collaboration and via two case studies the extent to which they exploit the use of wikis for group collaboration. Even when directed to use a particular wiki designed for the type of project they are involved with, we found that groups utilized the wiki in different ways according to the affordances ascribed to the wiki. We propose that the integration of activity theory with an affordances perspective may lead to improved technology, specifically Web 2.0, assisted collaboration.

This paper presents a system that simulates, in real time, the volumetric deformation of muscles during human locomotion. We propose a two-layered motion model. The requirements of realism and real time computation lead to a hybrid locomotion system that uses a skeleton as first layer. The muscles, represented by an anatomical surface model, constitute the second layer, whose deformations are simulated with a finite element method (FEM). The FEM subsystem is fed by the torques and forces got from the locomotion system, through a line of action model, and takes into account the geometry and material properties of the muscles. High level parameters (like height, weight, physical constitution, step frequency, step length or speed) allow to customize the individuals and the locomotion and therefore, the deformation of the persons' muscles.

Interactive video is increasingly becoming a more and more dominant feature of our media platforms. Especially due to the popular YouTube annotations framework, integrating graphical annotations in a video has become very fashionable these days. However, the current options are limited to a few graphical shapes for which the user can define as good as no dynamic behaviour. Despite the enormous demand for easy-creatable, interactive video there are no such advanced tools available.

In this article we describe an innovative approach, to realize dynamics and interactivity of video annotations. First we explain basic concepts of video-markup like the generic element model and visual descriptors. After that we introduce the event-tree model, which can be used to define event-handling in an interactive video formally as well as visually. By combining these basic concepts, we can give an effective tool to the video community for realizing interactive and dynamic video in a simple, intuitive and focused way.

One of the challenges in Dynamic Software Product Line (DSPL) is how to support the coordination of multiple instances of a service feature. In particular, there is a need for a decentralized decision-making capability that will be able to seamlessly integrate new instances of a service feature without an omniscient central controller. Because of the need for decentralization, we are investigating principles from self-organization in biological organisms. As an initial proof of concept, we have applied three bio-inspired techniques to a simple smart home scenario: quorum sensing based service activation, a firefly algorithm for synchronization, and a gossiping (epidemic) protocol for information dissemination. In this paper, we first explain why we selected those techniques using a set of motivating scenarios of a smart home and then describe our experiences in adopting them.

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.

The massive growth in ontology development has opened new research challenges such as ontology management, search and retrieval for the entire semantic web community. These results in many recent developments, like OntoKhoj, Swoogle, OntoSearch2, that facilitate tasks user have to perform. These semantic web portals mainly treat ontologies as plain texts and use the traditional text classification algorithms for classifying ontologies in directories and assigning predefined labels rather than using the semantic knowledge hidden within the ontologies. These approaches suffer from many types of classification problems and lack of accuracy, especially in the case of overlapping ontologies that share common vocabularies. In this paper, we define an ontology classification problem and categorize it into many sub-problems. We present a new ontological methodology for the classification of web ontologies, which has been guided by the requirements of the emerging Semantic Web applications and by the lessons learnt from previous systems. The proposed framework, OntClassifire, is tested on 34 ontologies with a certain degree of overlapping domain, and effectiveness of the ontological mechanism is verified. It benefits the construction, maintenance or expansion of ontology directories on the semantic web that help to focus on the crawling and improving the quality of search for the software agents and people. We conclude that the use of a context specific knowledge hidden in the structure of ontologies gives more accurate results for the ontology classification.

La Russie lance un "nombre record" de drones sur l'Ukraine. Barrage de drones ukrainiens sur Moscou

La police arrête des dizaines de personnes à Amsterdam après l'interdiction de manifestations

Moyen-Orient : Israël visé par des drones et des missiles. Lourd bilan à Gaza et au Liban

No Comment : les mariachis se réunissent à Mexico pour battre le record du monde de chant

1. Vendée Globe. Coup dur pour Clarisse Crémer : elle a perdu son grand gennaker  Voiles et Voiliers
2. Vendée Globe : «J’ai un peu honte», la tuile pour Clarisse Crémer qui perd sa voile principale dans l’océan  Le Figaro
3. Vendée Globe : Crémer a perdu sa grande voile  Toute l'actualité sportive sur Orange
4. VIDÉO. Vendée Globe : « Les gestes techniques de Clacla », Crémer se console après son avarie  Ouest-France
5. Vendée Globe 2024 : Clarisse Crémer perd sa plus grande voile au large du Portugal  Le Journal des Sables

« La bisexualité d’Alain Delon était impossible à révéler » : une nouvelle biographie par Bernard Violet  Le Parisien

1. Sauvetage de Casino: les syndicats retirent leur plainte en appel après avoir conclu un accord avec la direction  Le Figaro
2. Plan de sauvetage de Casino : accord avec la direction, les représentants du personnel retirent leur plainte en appel  France 3 Régions
3. Sauvetage de Casino : un accord social enfin trouvé pour clore le dossier  Capital.fr
4. Casino: les représentants du personnel retirent leur appel formulé à l'encontre du plan de sauvegarde  Investir
5. Plan de sauvegarde de Casino : la direction trouve un accord avec le personnel  La Tribune.fr

1. Management of opioid use disorder: 2024 update to the national clinical practice guideline  CMAJ
2. New set of guidelines set to combat opioid usage  CTV News Toronto

1. Bear encounter recorded in Whistler Village prompts conservation officer warning  CTV News Vancouver
2. Tourists 'shocked' to see man approach black bear in Whistler  Pique Newsmagazine

1. Former B.C. premier John Horgan dies aged 65, after third bout of cancer  National Post
2. Adam Pankratz: John Horgan wasn't your typical NDP premier  National Post
3. John Horgan: Reluctant leader became B.C.'s most-loved premier  Vancouver Sun
4. Premier’s statement on the passing of John Horgan  BC Gov News
5. UBC political scientist remembers former B.C. premier John Horgan’s legacy  CBC.ca

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

A gauche, Barbès. A droite, la nouvelle Place du Panthéon. Aux mêmes heures !

C’est une vaste opération lancée depuis 2015 par la Mairie de Paris. «Donner plus de place à celles et ceux qui ont envie de vivre dans une ville plus pacifiée, avec moins de voitures et moins de stress» selon les mots d'Anne Hidalgo. Sept grandes places parisiennes vont être « réinventées » : ...

J'ai lu les titres et articles de presse à propos d'Asia Argento et de sa supposée agression contre Jimmy Bennett. Ça sent le traquenard à plein nez. 

Le type assure avoir été agressé sexuellement par l'actrice à l'âge de 17 ans. Il se fout de la gueule de qui, le petit traumatisé ? La prétendue agression ne l'empêchait pas de titrer quelques semaines après que "Maman" lui manquait. Pour la petite histoire, les deux acteurs jouent à la mère et au fils depuis qu'ils ont tourné ensemble dans un film alors que Jimmy avait 7 ans et qu'Asia incarnait sa ...

Les faisans ne sont pas tous égaux face au renard, les plus doués en termes de mémoire ayant le plus grand territoire et surtout les plus grandes chances de survie, selon une étude lundi.

En théorie, rien de nouveau, la taille du territoire de la plupart des animaux serait liée à ses capacités cognitives, ne serait-ce que pour se souvenir de ses limites. Mais cela reste difficile à prouver "parce qu'ils peuvent avoir d'autres raisons de se limiter à un petit territoire", par exemple s'ils y trouvent suffisamment de ressources, explique le biologiste de l'évolution Robert Heathcote, de l'Université de Bristol.

Pour en avoir le cœur net, une équipe de l'Université britannique d'Exeter, et d'universités néerlandaise et israéliennes, a mené une expérience grandeur nature dans une forêt du Devon, dans le sud-ouest de l'Angleterre.

Avant d'y être lâchés, 126 faisans élevés en captivité ont subi sur quelques semaines trois tests jaugeant leur capacités cognitives, et notamment deux types de mémoire spatiale.

La mémoire dite de travail, qui est de court terme, permet à un individu de se souvenir que s'il a trouvé un ver de terre à un endroit, il ne sert à rien d'y retourner cinq minutes plus tard. La deuxième, dite mémoire de référence spatiale, de plus long terme, permet au faisan de se souvenir d'un trajet même après plusieurs jours.

L'étude publiée dans Nature Ecology & Evolution établit que c'est cette mémoire de référence spatiale qui dicte la taille du territoire d'un faisan. Ce territoire, "qui est la zone où il passe l'essentiel de son temps, est aussi celui qu'il connaît le mieux", selon M. Heathcote. Son étendue va de moins de cent mètres de long et jusqu'à un kilomètre carré.

- Territoires de la mort -

En l'espace de six mois, les chercheurs ont enregistré la prédation de 45 faisans, tous sous les crocs de renards roux. Chaque volatile était équipé d'une minuscule balise d'une dizaine de grammes, conçue par les chercheurs israéliens, permettant sa localisation quasiment en temps réel.

"Ce qui a permis de savoir quand la trajectoire de la balise n'était plus celle du faisan, mais était devenue celui du renard", explique en souriant M. Heathcote à l'AFP. La déambulation prudente du volatile se muait, une fois saisi dans la mâchoire de son prédateur, en trajectoire rectiligne, rapide et lointaine du renard, vers un endroit où dévorer tranquillement sa proie.

Les faisans les plus susceptibles de terminer leur existence de cette manière étaient ceux ayant une piètre mémoire de référence spatiale. Leur fin était aussi beaucoup plus probable aux frontières de leur territoire. "La connaissance d'une zone aide le faisan à rester vivant", et inversement, selon le Dr Joah Madden, de l'Université d'Exeter, cité dans un communiqué.

Même dans les zones de chasse préférées des renards, que M. Heathcote a baptisé "territoires de la mort", les chances de survie d'un faisan dépendent avant tout de son expérience du terrain. Les plus habiles n'évitent pas la zone de la mort, mais "avec le temps ils peuvent apprendre quelles sont les voies les plus rapides et les plus sûres pour échapper à une attaque".

Pour les faisans qui échappent aux crocs, reste le risque de finir criblé de plomb par l'homme.

(Belga) Le président américain Joe Biden a nommé lundi une émissaire spéciale sur les droits de l'Homme en Corée du Nord, un poste laissé vacant pendant tout le mandat de l'ancienne administration de Donald Trump.

Le poste a été confié à une diplomate de carrière, Julie Turner, qui dirige actuellement la section Asie du bureau des droits de l'homme au sein du département d'État américain. Il avait été laissé vacant depuis janvier 2017, alors que l'ancien président Donald Trump cherchait à nouer des liens avec Pyongyang, rencontrant le dirigeant nord-coréen Kim Jong Un à trois reprises. Cela avait conduit à apaiser les tensions entre les deux pays, sans que cela ne débouche sur un accord à long terme. Le poste, qui a le rang d'ambassadeur, avait été créé par une loi en 2004 visant à faire pression sur la question des droits de l'homme en Corée du Nord, l'un des pays les plus autoritaires au monde. La tension est montée de façon spectaculaire ces derniers mois entre la Corée du Nord et son voisin du Sud ainsi que les États-Unis et le Japon en raison du nombre record en 2022 de tirs de missiles par Pyongyang. Dans son dernier rapport annuel sur les droits de l'homme, le département d'État avait dénoncé de vastes abus dans le pays communiste reclus, y compris l'emprisonnement de masse et le travail forcé. Mme Turner, qui parle couramment le français et le coréen selon sa biographie officielle, doit encore être confirmée à ce poste par un vote du Sénat américain. (Belga)

Pas de dividendes en pￜriode de crise. En annonￜant qu'il n'accorderait aucune aide (comme des reports de cotisation) aux entreprises qui verseraient des dividendes ￜ leurs actionnaires, le gouvernement a tentￜ...

L'information est passï¿œe inaperï¿œue mais elle ne manque pas de sel. Alors que la gestion de la crise du covid-19 par le gouvernement est trï¿œs contestï¿œe (au retard dans la livraison de masques s'ajoute...

To reduce the location cost of cross-border e-commerce logistics sites, this article proposes a multi-logistics site location method based on return uncertainty. Firstly, a site selection model is established with the objective function of minimising site construction costs, transportation costs, return costs, and operating costs, and the constraint conditions of return recovery costs and delayed pick-up time; Then, using the Monte Carlo method to simulate the number of returned items, and using an improved chicken swarm algorithm based on simulated annealing, the cross-border e-commerce multi-logistics site location model is solved to complete the location selection. Experimental results show that this method can effectively reduce the related costs of cross-border e-commerce multi-logistics site selection. After applying this method, the total cost of multi-logistics site selection is 19.4 million yuan, while the total cost of the five comparative methods exceeds 20 million yuan.

Départager LFI et le RN. Nous sommes tombés bien bas. N'y a-t-il que des raisons politiques ? N'est-ce pas aussi une culture qui le permet ? Culture marquée par une déroute de la raison, supplantée par le relativisme, le subjectivisme et l'émotivisme. Comment changer ?

Elections hold immense significance in shaping the leadership of a nation or organisation, serving as a pivotal moment that influences the trajectory of the entity involved. Despite their centrality to modern democratic systems, elections face a significant hurdle: widespread mistrust in the electoral process. This pervasive lack of confidence poses a substantial threat to the democratic framework, even in the case of prominent democracies such as India and US, where inherent flaws persist in the electoral system. Issues such as vote rigging, electronic voting machine (EVM) hacking, election manipulation, and polling booth capturing remain prominent concerns within the current voting paradigm. Leveraging blockchain for electronic voting systems offers an effective solution to alleviate the prevailing apprehensions associated with e-voting. By incorporating blockchain into the electoral process, the integrity and security of the system could be significantly strengthened, addressing the current vulnerabilities and fostering trust in democratic elections.

Software start-ups generally use development practices that are adapted to their agile and innovative environment. However, these practices, although consolidated, may not be the best ones for a specific context. This paper aims to present a set of guidelines for software development in start-ups. It also aims to show the results of three studies to validate and refine the proposed guidelines: a confirmatory survey, a focus group, and an expert panel. The participants were actors from both the industry and the academia. The results revealed that the guidelines obtained a positive perception from the participants of both contexts. Based on their approval, we can infer that those guidelines can increase the quality of products generated by start-ups and the chances of success for these organisations. Besides, the need for some improvements has been identified, and they will be implemented in the next version of the guidelines.

This study aimed to assess the level of GW in Jordanian university students and compare the level of awareness of students according to their academic level (high and low), faculty (science and humanities), gender (male and female), and year of study (first and final years). This study is quantitative research that provides a comprehensive view of GW in Jordanian universities. A total of 383 university students of currently registered undergraduate programs from six independent universities in Jordan were recruited. An online questionnaire covering three aspects of GW was sent to participants in December 2020. Inferential and descriptive statistics were used to analyse data. Participants had 'good' (67%) overall knowledge about GW, a 'very good' level of GW causes (81%), and a 'poor' level of knowledge about the GW impacts on humans and the environment (47%) and knowledge about GW possible solutions (59%). Significant differences were founded between males and females, students from scientific faculties and students from other faculties, students with higher academic achievement than lower achievement in the total GW knowledge. But no significant differences were between students in the first year and the final years.