Whoever thought of this must've been really tipsy.

Michelle Drumm interviews Ben Farrugia, Director of Social Work Scotland.

Ben held a variety of policy roles down in London (with a particular interest in education and children's services). In 2009, he moved up to Scotland to work in the government’s Looked After Children team and in 2011 moved to the University of Strathclyde to join the team that would soon after become CELCIS.

In his own words, he is 'now very proud to be leading Social Work Scotland’s small Edinburgh based team, which provides support to various committees and groups, and represents members in discussions with Parliament, Government and other partners'.

Freshly Squeezed is an Iriss podcast which aims to 'squeeze' information and inspiration from key influencers in social services in Scotland.

Transcript of episode

Music Credit: Make your dream a reality by Scott Holmes

Some better and fantastic balloon news from the USA

Adventurer David Hempleman-Adams has told how he landed a balloon in pitch black darkness to avoid plunging into one of the planet's biggest lakes.

The explorer from Box has just won the world's oldest air race with an 1,100-mile flight across the USA which ended on his 52nd birthday.

He and his co-pilot Jon Mason, 35, had been forced to choose between a complete darkness landing or the risk of ending up in Lake Michigan as they scented success in the prestigious Gordon Bennett gas balloon race.

Father-of-three Mr Hempleman-Adams took the decision to land the balloon in the dark rather than risk flying over the Great Lake without enough ballast.

He said: "I know you should never land a balloon at night but we had to make that decision as we didn't have enough sand to go over the lake and the balloon was going down."


The pair made two attempts to land in the drama on Friday at the end of the race, in which the winner is the crew flying the furthest distance.

"It's hard to judge from the air at night what is on the ground. During our first attempt what we thought were small bushes turned out to be 45 ft trees so we had to try again. We flew over the trees and landed near a maize crop."

The pair had taken off on Monday from Albuquerque in New Mexico and landed north of Chicago at 5am on Friday in their balloon Lady Luck.

They did not discover they had become the first British team ever to win the competition named after the man who gave his name to the famous exclamation until they had had a few hours of sleep.

Mr Hempleman-Adams said: "The sheriff picked us up and took us to the local hotel where we collapsed.

"We'd been flying for 74 hours taking it in turns to sleep at two-hourly intervals curled up on the floor of the basket. When we woke there was a note under the door from our chase team which said, 'Well done boys, you've won!'

"We thought we'd come second so it was a very good birthday present."

There were 12 crews in the contest, the 52nd ever held.

Mr Hempleman-Adams said. "It was a very tactical race with everyone trying to outdo each other like a game of poker."

Co-pilot Mr Mason, a consultant clinical psychologist who works in Canterbury, said: "We are a great duo and a foil for one another. David needs someone to restrain him and I need someone to encourage and push me. We arrive at a middle ground. We also work well together because we have different skills. "David is excellent at looking at the bigger picture and navigating while I am good concentrating on the detail doing what we have to do there and then."

He said he accepted the risky decision his co-pilot had made.

"It's easy to highlight the dangers but people do things all the time that are risky that, in the end, become routine.

"Gas ballooning isn't rocket science. You fill the balloon with gas that's lighter than air and you take sand with you. The risk isn't flying a gas balloon - it is flying a balloon for four days in bad weather when you are tired and in the dark."

One of their scariest moment came when the duo were hit by a snowstorm.

Mr Hempleman-Adams said: "We had some difficult weather. During the day it reached 42 degrees but at night it crashed to about 8 degrees and we would shiver.

"Once, we were up at 13,000 ft and it started to snow. The cooling on the balloon made it come down very quickly and we descended to 5,000 ft."

Another brush with death was when the team spotted two jets flying too close for comfort.

"At one stage we were over Albuquerque at 5,000 ft and two jets came in underneath us with only 500ft clearance and scared the daylights out of us," Mr Hempleman-Adams said.

The pair were due to fly back into Britain this morning.

The competition - founded by newspaper tycoon and adventurer Bennett - is described as the most prestigious event in aviation and the ultimate challenge for the balloon pilots and their equipment.

It was started in 1906, when 16 balloons were launched from Paris, but has never before been won by Britons.

It was put on ice at the outbreak of the Second World War and not revived until 1983.

The victory means the race will start from the UK in 2010.

Mr Hempleman-Adams turned to extreme and endurance ballooning after years of conquering mountains and polar regions.

He has climbed the tallest peaks on all seven continents, travelled to both the North and South Poles, completed the first balloon flight to the North Pole and the first flight across the Northwest Passage. He also completed the first balloon flight across the Atlantic in an open wicker basket in 2003. He holds the world altitude record for Roziere (a combination of gas and hot air) balloons at more than 41,000 ft.

This week for Case Mod Friday we have what might be the ultimate bench build! It is from KillR_MODZ and he calls it the IndominAORUS Bench featuring all new Z490 hardware and some awesome watercooling!

The post Case Mod Friday: IndominAORUS Bench appeared first on ThinkComputers.org.

Jedi Master Luke Skywalker, Lor San Tekka, and young Ben Solo encounter the Knights of Ren

 “All for Earth” podcast speaks with Ben Strauss about working at the frontlines of communicating climate science — the local weather forecast.

Silke Weitendorf war das erste Mädchen, das in Deutschland Pippi Langstrumpf lesen durfte. Später wurde sie Astrid Lindgrens Verlegerin. Hier erzählt sie, was die Schriftstellerin und ihre berühmteste Figur gemeinsam hatten.

Er gehörte zu den einflussreichsten Musikern in der Frühphase des Rock 'n' Roll, inspirierte die Beatles und Elvis Presley. Nun ist der US-Sänger Little Richard mit 87 Jahren gestorben.

Do new societal needs increase charitable giving or simply reallocate a fixed supply of donations? We study this question using IRS datasets and the natural experiment of deadly tornadoes. Among ZIP Codes located more than 20 miles away from a tornado's path, donations by households increase by over $1 million per tornado fatality. We find no negative effects on charities located in these ZIP Codes, with a bootstrapped confidence interval that rejects substitution rates above 16 percent. The results imply that giving to one cause need not come at the expense of another.

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We use longitudinal data from the income tax system to study the impacts of firms’ employment and wage-setting policies on the level and change in immigrant-native wage differences in Canada. We focus on immigrants who arrived in the early 2000s, distinguishing between those with and without a college degree from two broad groups of countries – the U.S., the U.K. and Northern Europe, and the rest of the world. Consistent with a growing literature based on the two-way fixed effects model of Abowd, Kramarz, and Margolis (1999), we find that firm-specific wage premiums explain a significant share of earnings inequality in Canada and contribute to the average earnings gap between immigrants and natives. In the decade after receiving permanent status, earnings of immigrants rise relative to those of natives. Compositional effects due to selective outmigration and changing participation play no role in this gain. About one-sixth is attributable to movements up the job ladder to employers that offer higher pay premiums for all groups, with particularly large gains for immigrants from the “rest of the world” countries.

Public schooling systems are an essential feature of modern states. These systems often developed at the expense of religious schools, which undertook the bulk of education historically and still cater to large student populations worldwide. This paper examines how Indonesia’s long-standing Islamic school system responded to the construction of 61,000 public elementary schools in the mid-1970s. The policy was designed in part to foster nation building and to curb religious influence in society. We are the first to study the market response to these ideological objectives. Using novel data on Islamic school construction and curriculum, we identify both short-run effects on exposed cohorts as well as dynamic, long-run effects on education markets. While primary enrollment shifted towards state schools, religious education increased on net as Islamic secondary schools absorbed the increased demand for continued education. The Islamic sector not only entered new markets to compete with the state but also increased religious curriculum at newly created schools. Our results suggest that the Islamic sector response increased religiosity at the expense of a secular national identity. Overall, this ideological competition in education undermined the nation-building impacts of mass schooling.

Most jobs require teamwork. Are some people good team players? In this paper we design and test a new method for identifying individual contributions to group performance. We randomly assign people to multiple teams and predict team performance based on previously assessed individual skills. Some people consistently cause their group to exceed its predicted performance. We call these individuals “team players”. Team players score significantly higher on a well-established measure of social intelligence, but do not differ across a variety of other dimensions, including IQ, personality, education and gender. Social skills – defined as a single latent factor that combines social intelligence scores with the team player effect – improve group performance about as much as IQ. We find suggestive evidence that team players increase effort among teammates.

In an interview, Alex Zhu, the head of the Chinese video app TikTok, defends the company against accusations of spying and censorship and explains why he isn't interested in making the platform a place for political debate.

Blogging has changed dramatically over the past decade. What was once considered a niche hobby or small point of differentiation has become a common practice in nearly every industry. It’s no longer a rudimentary aspect of business, either. It’s a very strategic mechanism with a wide range of benefits – enhanced SEO chief among them.
 
The State of the Blogosphere
Blogs, bloggers and blogging; these are heavily-discussed topics of conversation in the world of business and marketing. Are you ...

The post The 5 Biggest SEO Benefits of Blogging appeared first on RSS Feed Converter.

In Côte d’Ivoire, employees at Fairtrade-certified cocoa cooperatives have higher salaries and better working conditions than those at non-certified organizations. Farm laborers, on the other hand, don’t fare as well.

Thwaites Glacier is melting fast. But to understand how climate change is driving its decline, scientists need to send instruments through 2,000 feet of ice into the water below.

Ben Muessig has been named technology editor of the Los Angeles Times.

‘Hamilton’ star Renee Elise Goldsberry, Drama Desk Award winner Montego Glover, Thom Sesma, Angel Desai, Kendyl Ito, William Jackson Harper, Tony Award winner Brian Stokes Mitchell will join Uggams in the comedy about a wealthy novelist who invites the eccentric clairvoyant to his home to conduct a séance, hoping to gather material for his next book. And Uggams is playing the medium, named Madame Arcati.

A new study of 10 coronavirus patients in China gives further credence to the effectiveness of convalescent plasma therapy.

Jared Ingold wanted to help his laid-off freelancer friends. He and his design partner ended up creating a collection of T-shirts, sweatshirts and caps inspired by the coronavirus pandemic.

It's alive! Watch Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller switch off in the lead roles in a stage adaptation of "Frankenstein."

A catch in the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program could disqualify many workers.

Newsom says low-income families will receive $365 per child to buy food to make up for the loss of free and reduced-priced lunches provided by schools.

One opinion on the best (and worst) Ben & Jerry's flavors

The author of "The Topeka School," winner of the 2019 Times Book Prize for fiction, speaks on poetry, debate, citizenship and crisis homeschooling.

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Countless people have applied for unemployment benefits they cannot get. This can create a crisis worse than the coronavirus outbreak.

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POPE BENEDICT is "making Francis' life a misery" as rumours of a major row between the two Vatican titans continue to boil, an expert has warned.

Rangers could be without Alfredo Morelos and Scott Arfield for their trip to play Hearts on Sunday.

Chelsea have entered negotiations with Leicester over Ben Chilwell after the left-back reportedly told his agent he wants a transfer to London.

Leeds are already looking to find a replacement for Ben White, with the defender set to return to Brighton at the end of his loan spell, and the Whites are now turning to Middlesbrough stalwart Daniel Ayala, as Marcelo Bielsa plans his moves in the transfer market for life in the Premier League.

TIPPING POINT saw Alan Davies win £20,000 for his chosen charity this afternoon but not before he silenced host Ben Shephard.

LINE OF DUTY has been keeping BBC viewers hooked for nearly a decade and with the show set to return for its sixth season in the coming months, could one of its key cast members be revealed as a corrupt officer in a huge twist?

ARCHAEOLOGISTS have discovered a long lost mass grave of US Civil War soldiers in Mississippi.

LINE OF DUTY has been keeping BBC viewers hooked for nearly a decade and with the show set to return for its sixth season in the coming months, could one of its key cast members be revealed as a corrupt officer in a huge twist?

Chelsea have reportedly entered talks with Leicester over a move for Ben Chilwell, so how could the Foxes full-back fit in at Stamford Bridge?

Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh's proposal on rules for college players thinking NFL could help reduce talent base at programs like Ohio State, Alabama.

I FEAR that holding Downing Street media briefings about the virus every single afternoon is now totally counterproductive.

Ariela and Verania Andrade are graduating near the top of their class at Ben Davis High School. They're also preparing to serve their country.

The Kansas commit threw five touchdown passes against a defense that entered the game allowing just 6.5 points per game.