The Australian Federal Government today announced that it has awarded IBM (NYSE: IBM) a new AU$1B, five-year Whole of Government agreement to be a major technology partner with the Australian government.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that the University of Melbourne, a world class research university, has selected IBM to design and install a high efficiency, high density cooling solution to support new IT initiatives such as Cloud and Research computing, in its new data centre, Data Hall 2.

【JOSEPH】〜REI YUZUKA MOROCCAN JOURNEY〜宝塚歌劇団　花組トップスター 柚香 光さんをヴィジュアルに起用したイベントをスタート！womens/photo-gallery/moroccan-journey/ pic.twitter.com/LyAzWCS02H— ONWARD_PressRoom (@onwardpressroom) March ...

IBM today announced it has been selected by Australian energy provider Western Power as the systems integration and project management partner for its SmartGrid-Advanced Meter Infrastructure pilot program.

Matt Ridley on putting everything in perspective I love this guy… he always has a fresh perspective on things. Daily Photo – Carnival Row at Disney When I was at Disneyland in Anaheim, I thought this would make excellent subject-matter for an HDR shot. This mix of lights and textures usually comes out pretty cool. […]

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

Southern Cross Computer Systems Pty Ltd has been named winner of the award for “Innovation in Green IT Data Center Solution” in the annual IBM Beacon Awards competition, honoring IBM Business Partners for their ingenuity, innovation, customer satisfaction and outstanding achievements in providing business solutions.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that Digital Alchemy, a leading Australian database marketing service provider, has extended its commitment to IBM’s Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) software to more quickly and easily enable cross-channel interactive campaigns for its clients.

Hope Kahn is a Maryland-based journalist who is doing all of the sorts of things I was doing at her age: honing her writing and reporting skills, putting out a student newspaper, and always scrambling to find a good local story.

But that's where the similarities stop. Over the last couple of years she's been punching way above her weight class, having been published in national outlets such as Ms. and The New York Times. Suffice to say those are not exactly things I had accomplished before graduating high school.

More important, she writes about subjects that are touchstones for her generation. Her work with #SinceParkland is a great example of someone from Generation Lockdown working to effect change for her peers.

Recently we did some head shots. The idea was to help her with visually branding herself as the serious, thoughtful journalist she is fast becoming. The setup we used was classic Lighting 101 head-shot-in-a-corner fare, with an L102 and L103 twist. Read more »

The war is over and Ginny returns to school, but it isn't easy to pretend like everything is the same as before.

[sequel to 'all your fumble words']

This Thursday (4/9), eighteen authors (including yours truly!) will be doing live readings to celebrate International Unicorn Day!!! At 10:30am ET, I'll be on Facebook Live on my author page here: https://www.facebook.com/sarahbethdurst

And I may be wearing a unicorn onesie... 

Emmy Nominee Leslye Headland to write, produce, and serve as showrunner for new untitled Star Wars series for Disney+.

Luke Skywalker discovers a powerful lesson that can be valuable to your own younglings.

There was a time – before I sank my teeth into the board game hobby and before I took on the demands of being a stepmom to three children - that I planned frequent trips for my friends circle. Each month would see us jet setting off to a different part of the United States (or a different part of the world) in search of adventure and great cuisine. I would pour myself into the research project that proper trip planning requires and create a custom itinerary for our group, working to ensure we caught all the highlights of our destination. This post is about the one I worked up for our last trip to some of the great Western National Parks in the United States.  I share it here with the hope that you might find the itinerary useful in planning your trip out west.

--> Full Photo Gallery – Come and Explore 

Earlier this year, the team from Wyvern Gaming provided me with a review copy of Sojourn. This solo game was designed by Philip Loyer and released in 2019.

In Sojourn, a player takes on the role of a time traveler trying desperately to return home. To travel to a specific named time period (such as the one in which the traveler’s home exists), the traveler must use a Timesphere, which has unfortunately shattered into fragments that have been scattered across different time periods. Luckily, the traveler still has a handful of temporal charges at the ready that allow them to jump into random time eras in search of the fragments that can be reassembled into a working Timesphere. Before running out of the charges, or dying from injuries sustained in the various destination time periods, the traveler must find all of the fragments and make the leap home.  

The premise here is very good, even if it does evoke classic time travel tropes (Quantum Leap anyone?). The problem is in the execution. I got Sojourn to the table several times over the past couple of months, and each time I hoped I’d have a better experience than before, but it never worked out that way. The components feel cheap – while the wooden cubes are adequate, the included cards are very thin and poor in quality (easy to bend and tear). The artwork is unremarkable. 

The rulebook is lacking. It doesn’t include an inventory of items, which is one of my pet peeves. How are you supposed to know if anything is missing or what things are without a proper inventory? For example, the rules reference Lockout cards, but without a visual inventory, I had no idea what these were until I thumbed through all the cards (turns out they are part of the Timestream card deck). The rules also reference the traveler meeple, but don’t indicate whether that is the blue or red meeple included in the components. I’m assuming it is the blue meeple based on a picture in the rulebook showing the game set up for play, but it would be nice if the designer included specifics in the text of the rulebook. More unanswered questions – how many Paradox cards are in the deck? This is important since a Paradox card lets you make a time jump without using a temporal charge and thus is the only way to win the game if you’ve run out of charges.

A lot of these problems might be possible to overlook if the gameplay itself was engaging. It isn’t.

At any time during the game one can play Timestream cards from one’s hand (these cards have positive effects such as restoring temporal charges, healing the traveler, etc.), open a new destination in the timeline, or travel to a destination in the timeline. You must travel to multiple destinations to collect the fragments, but each time the traveler makes a jump to a destination, they risk injury, which is calculated by rolling dice and comparing the outcome to the injury risk value printed on each destination time period card. There are so many destinations with 50% or higher values that it makes it very difficult to survive for long in the game. I felt as though I was just going through the motions as each game progressed, and there wasn’t any joy in it. Perhaps executing the game in two player competitive mode would spice things up, but that requires two complete copies of the game, and I don’t think it’s worth the $30+ gamble to find out. 

I have another game from this designer on my “To Play” shelf, and I’m willing to keep an open mind and give it a try (because everyone has ideas that don’t work out well in practice from time to time) but I cannot endorse Sojourn as a game that belongs in anyone’s collection.

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Publisher: Wyvern Gaming

Players: 1

Actual Playing Time (vs the guideline on the box): About 15 minutes

Game type: solo game (competitive and coop modes available by combining decks), dice rolling, action queue

Rating:

Jenni’s rating scale:

OUI: I would play this game again; this game is ok. I probably would not buy this game myself but I would play it with those who own it and if someone gave it to me I would keep it.

OUI OUI: I would play this game again; this game is good. I would buy this game.

OUI OUI OUI: I LOVE THIS GAME. I MUST HAVE THIS GAME.

NON: I would not play this game again. I would return this game or give it away if it was given to me.

Procesem takzvaného vzorkování začne od pondělí znovu výroba v karlovarské sklárně Moser. Mistři sklářského oboru po přestávce vynucené koronavirovou pandemií začnou připravovat kolekce na druhou polovinu letoška a na rok 2021. Skláře čekají přísné hygienické podmínky, výroba bude najíždět postupně.

On March 31, the volunteer computing part of SETI@home will stop distributing work and will go into hibernation.

We're doing this for two reasons:

1) Scientifically, we're at the point of diminishing returns; basically, we've analyzed all the data we need for now.

2) It's a lot of work for us to manage the distributed processing of data. We need to focus on completing the back-end analysis of the results we already have, and writing this up in a scientific journal paper.

However, SETI@home is not disappearing. The web site and the message boards will continue to operate. We hope that other UC Berkeley astronomers will find uses for the huge computing capabilities of SETI@home for SETI or related areas like cosmology and pulsar research. If this happens, SETI@home will start distributing work again. We'll keep you posted about this.

If you're currently running SETI@home on your computer, we encourage you to attach to other BOINC-based projects as well. Or use Science United and sign up to do astronomy. You can stay attached to SETI@home, of course, but you won't get any jobs until we find new applications.

We're extremely grateful to all of our volunteers for supporting us in many ways during the past 20 years. Without you there would be no SETI@home. We're excited to finish up our original science project, and we look forward to what comes next.

I’m sorry you will not be president, but I understand and appreciate your decision to end your...

U.S. Financial System “Monitor” Failed to Flash Warning as Fed Pumped $6 Trillion Emergency Liquidity into Wall Street

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 8, 2020 ~  The Office of Financial Research (OFR) was created under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010 to keep the Financial Stability Oversight Council (F-SOC) informed on emerging threats that have the potential to implode the financial system — as occurred in 2008 in the worst financial crash since the Great Depression. The Trump administration has gutted both its funding and staff. One of the early warning systems of an impending financial crisis that OFR was supposed to have created is the heat map above. Green means low risk; yellow tones mean moderate risk; while red tones flash a warning of a serious problem. On September 17, 2019, liquidity was so strained on Wall Street that the Federal Reserve had to step in and began providing hundreds of billions of dollars per week in repo loans. By January 27, 2020 (before … Continue reading →

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The Swiss hockey federation says it won't seek to host the 2021 men's world championship after losing this year's event because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Professional and high-performance athletes in Spain were allowed to return to practice, but some were jeered for doing so during the coronavirus pandemic.

To the women from all over the world I'm privileged to know, and everybody who loves international women.

I have been saving up some articles for the occasion: here are two marvellous bios of trans lesbian elders.

Jan Morris. [Content note: the article is in the Guardian which takes a somewhat transphobic editorial stance, though this article is very positive towards trans women. However it does deadname Morris and includes a picture of her from back when she was presenting as male.]

Sandy Stone, a couple of years old from Vice but it came to my attention recently.

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Mornings go best when I’m ready to go before anyone else gets out of bed. I need to save my knees for my commute and cannot take the stairs at work. (Having discovered how much this helps, I am now reconsidering all the previous times in my life when my knee issue flared up.) I … Continue reading Things I learned in 4 months of full time employment

I have to say, I think Anand is learning more at home being unschooled than he was in school, and is much happier. Which isn’t to say that he isn’t missing some things that could use more disciplined teaching, and I’m hoping Kevin and I will have more time to do that this summer after the semester’s … Continue reading "Learning From Home"

Slow morning, it feels like. I did get up reasonably early, but ended up spending an hour sorting through exercise clothes, trying to figure out what fits well, what’s worn out, etc. Since I’m constantly going in and out of my house gardening these days, I want clothes that I’m comfortable being seen in, which … Continue reading "Slow Morning"

Все знают, коллектив MusicAeterna и его художественный руководитель Теодор Курентзис с декабря 2019 года активно работают над проектом культурно-образовательного центра Р. А. Д. И. О. в Санкт-Петербургском Доме Радио. Но карантин вносит в эту работу свои коррективы, и в конце апреля было объявлено об открытии digital platform — виртуальной творческой резиденции MusicAeterna. В скором времени на ней будет доступна онлайн-версия перформанса Алексея Ретинского «Слышать», посвященный Людвигу ван Бетховену. Анонсируем это событие статьей Анны Самсоненко, побывавшей на единственном представлении в феврале.