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Help us examine historic newspapers on microfilm in order to find out what Americans could have known about the Holocaust through reading their local newspapers.  Articles found during the sprint will be added to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s History Unfolded Project.

When: Thursday, November 14, 2019, 4-7 pm (drop-in hours)

Where: Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room, James Madison Building, Room 133

Please RSVP through Eventbrite: http://bit.ly/Nov2019Sprint

Request ADA accommodations five days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ada@loc.gov.

Please contact Erin Sidwell with any questions about the sprint: esid@loc.gov

Request ADA accommodations five days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov

Click here for more information.

In this episode of On the Evidence, Cindy Hu, a Mathematica data scientist, discusses the prevalence of Poly- and Perfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) in our drinking water, as well as their health implications and ways to address them through public policy.

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Dewey Library - GV1469.3.N484 2017

Most launched hand sanitisers initially, but are expanding their portfolio by entering newer categories such as floor and surface cleaners, disinfectant sprays and immunity building products.

Maruti Suzuki S-Cross facelift was showcased at the Auto Expo 2020. The company has phased out the diesel engine and replaced it with the 1.5-litre, K-Series, BS6-compliant, petrol engine, much like the XL6, Ertiga and the facelift Brezza. Earlier, S-Cross was only available in diesel option with a manual gearbox.

A two-week course of an antiviral therapy, started within 7 days of experiencing Covid-19 symptoms, may improve clinical recovery of patients and reduce their hospital stay duration, according to the first randomised trial of this triple drug combination. The treatment combination, according to the scientists, also appeared safe and well tolerated by patients.

With another US Presidential election on the way in 2020, we can expect the debate around fake news to once again ramp up, and become a key focus of discussion as we look at how political influence spreads online.

What if Fake News Is Not the Real Problem on Social Media?

Social networks can help merchants reach prospects, establish professional contacts, and research markets. They can also be a good way to share experiences and meet people.

Here is a list of new and emerging social networks for 2020. Some of the networks target specific user groups; others offer new ways to interact. These are networks for professional and social communication. Several of the networks are in beta or will launch in 2020.

13 New Social Networks for 2020

A new service called Mailbrew is live that lets you created automated email newsletters. You can set them up from multiple sources including Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, RSS feeds, and more.

Mailbrew aims to save you time by rounding up the news and updates you care about from a variety of sources and popping it in a daily, weekly, or monthly automated email newsletter.

To start, you can create custom brews, choose from pre-made ones, or make use of both. You even get to choose the layout you’d like to use for the newsletters.

complete article

The New England Patriots and Baltimore Ravens both suffered disappointing defeats in last season's NFL playoffs, but they appear headed in opposite directions as the 2020 campaign approaches.

NFL Network's Steve Smith Sr. warns to "beware' of creative tricks from New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick in 2020.

Betty Wold Johnson earned the title of “First Lady of the Jets” throughout her time around the team.

Jason Reynolds has been appointed as the seventh National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature for 2020-2021. The Newbery Honor recipient succeeds Jacqueline Woodson, who served as National Ambassador in 2018-2019.

Reynolds is the author of 13 books for young people including his most recent, “Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks,” a National Book Award finalist, which was named a Best Book of 2019 by NPR, The New York Times, The Washington Post and TIME. 

Click here for more information.

Vibrant springtime traditions of cherry blossom viewing in Japan and Washington, D.C., are explored in the new book “Cherry Blossoms: Sakura Collections from the Library of Congress,” published today by Smithsonian Books, in association with the Library of Congress. Events at the Library in April will feature the book and celebrate the annual return of the cherry blossoms to the nation's capital.

Click here for more information.

Out of an abundance of caution, the Library of Congress announced today that all Library of Congress buildings and facilities will be closed to the public starting at 5 p.m. today until Thursday, April 1, 2020 at 8 a.m. to reduce the risk of transmitting COVID-19 coronavirus.

Library employees, contractors, authorized visitors and other credentialed Capitol Hill staff will continue to have access to the buildings. During the closure, all Library-sponsored public programs are postponed or cancelled through the end of March.

Click here for more information.

The Library of Congress announced today that all public events at the Library are canceled until May 11 to reduce the risk of transmitting COVID-19 coronavirus. Whenever possible, the Library will reschedule the public programs that have been canceled. We will also provide regular public updates on the operating status of Library facilities. Library of Congress buildings and facilities remain closed to the public until Wednesday, April 1, 2020 at 8 a.m.

Click here for more information.

Out of an abundance of caution, all Library of Congress buildings and facilities will be closed to the public, including researchers and others with reader identification cards, until further notice to reduce the risk of transmitting COVID-19 coronavirus. The Library has reduced the number of people in Library buildings to a very small number of necessary individuals.

Click here for more information.

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Get the most recent headlines and stories from Christianity Today, including daily meditations from the president and CEO of Christianity Today written specifically for those struggling through the coronavirus pandemic.

Congregations and pastoral candidates are adapting the hiring process and getting to know each other online.

Phillip Bethancourt’s kids aren’t convinced other children actually live in College Station, Texas. They moved from Nashville a few weeks ago for their dad’s new job as pastor of Central Church, but because of the coronavirus shutdowns, the four boys have yet to go school, make friends in the neighborhood, or meet the kids at their new church.

Bethancourt too is living in his own strange parallel reality, preaching to a video camera in an empty auditorium and waiting for a congregation he hasn’t seen to officially vote him in. If all goes as planned on Sunday, he’ll become a lead pastor for the first time while his flock is still social distancing.

“Nothing matches the opportunity to be with people in person,” said Bethancourt, who left his job as vice president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission to pursue the call at Central Church. “But I would say the process we’ve been using so far is the best substitute we can create.”

Several other pastors and churches are in the same predicament, caught in the process of applying, interviewing, and onboarding during the coronavirus pandemic.

“This is not the time to be without a pastor,” said William Vanderbloemen, who runs a consulting agency that helps Christian organizations with hiring. His phone has been “ringing off the hook” with churches wanting to get serious about their pastoral search.

Many have decided to forge ahead with the process despite the unique challenges of social restrictions and shutdowns due to the pandemic. Several congregations, including high-profile megachurches Moody Church and Willow Creek Community Church, were in the midst of leadership transitions and have named ...

Continue reading...

LIC's New Endowment Plan is a participating non-linked plan which offers an attractive combination of protection and saving features.

Pradhan also said that India favours reasonable prices that give some space to the producer countries.

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2020 is only three weeks old, but there has been a lot of browser news that decreases rendering engine diversity. It’s time for some good news on that front: a new rendering engine, Flow. Below I conduct an interview with Piers Wombwell, Flow’s lead developer.

This year alone, on the negative side Mozilla announced it’s laying off 70 people, most of whom appear to come from the browser side of things, while it turns out that Opera’s main cash cow is now providing loans in Kenya, India, and Nigeria, and it is looking to use 'improved credit scoring' (from browsing data?) for its business practices.

On the positive side, the Chromium-based Edge is here, and it looks good. Still, rendering engine diversity took a hit, as we knew it would ever since the announcement.

So let’s up the diversity a notch by welcoming a new rendering engine to the desktop space. British company Ekioh is working on a the Flow browser, which sports a completely new multi-threaded rendering engine that does not have any relation to WebKit, Gecko, or Blink.

The last new rendering engine to come to the desktop was KHTML back in 2000 in the form of the Konqueror browser. Later Apple adapted KHTML into WebKit. And then Google forked WebKit to become Blink. And ... well, almost everyone browses with a KHTML descendant now. Let’s not forget how it all began.

It is far too early to tell if Flow will have a similar impact, but the news was reason enough for me to conduct an interview with lead developer Piers Wombwell.

PPK: Hi Piers, could you please introduce yourself?

PW: I’m Piers Wombwell, the co-founder of Ekioh, the company behind the Flow browser. I’m also the architect of the project and one of the software engineers on it.

Why did Ekioh decide to create a new browser?

In 2006 we started developing an SVG engine for user interfaces in the set-top box market. No existing browser was full-featured, or was fast enough on the low-powered set-top box chips available at the time. User interface developers wanted HTML, but couldn’t get the performance they needed, especially in animations. SVG seemed better suited to user interfaces as there was no time spent in complex box model layout.

A user interface running on our SVG engine was much faster than any of the HTML browsers at the time and was very popular in this niche market with millions of STBs running it across most continents.

Over the next six or so years, STB chips started to move to multi-core GPUs, at the same as TV resolutions were moving to 4K. HTML was becoming fast enough on set-top boxes. On the other hand, a 4K TV has four times as many pixels as an HD TV, and a multi-core GPU doesn't make each individual core any faster. Thus, a single threaded browser won’t really see any significant speed improvements. That's why we decided to make Flow multi-threaded.

Dabbling with HTML/CSS layout seemed equally fun technically as building an SVG browser, so that’s been the main focus since. It started off being an XHTML/CSS layout engine on top of SVG, but we got carried away and over time moved to full HTML.

But, really, I suppose we did it because it would be fun to do it.

How far along is Flow? Can people download it and use it right now?

Well, it can render and interact with Gmail quite well. It’s pretty much perfect on a few sites we’ve targeted as focuses during development, but it struggles with many others. We only started implementing HTML forms in the last few months in order to log into Gmail.

It’s not yet available for download as I think we need to address the usability of it first. It currently needs a configuration file tailored to your computer, and has no toolbar. You don't want a toolbar for TV interfaces, so we never implemented one.

For which platforms is Flow currently available?

For Mac, Linux, and Android. Plus, of course, for the set-top boxes that are our main market, most of which run Linux. As to Windows, none of us run Windows so its development is untested and lags behind a bit, but I’ve just compiled a version and it seems to work.

Is Flow open source?

It’s not. There’s no current plan for that as we don’t have a large corporation backing our development.

Which JavaScript engine do you use?

We chose Spidermonkey in 2006, and as far as I recall it was because of both licensing and a documented embedding API. It was around the time that TiVo were having arguments over the GPL. The paranoia over that also ruled out use of LGPL licensed libraries for a few years.

The core browser code is abstracted away from any Spidermonkey APIs, largely so we could handle upgrades over the years - we can still handle its legacy garbage collection model quite happily.

What are your long-term goals with Flow?

The primary goal is stability, followed by getting more websites rendering perfectly in Flow. They generally fail because of either layout bugs or missing JavaScript APIs in Flow, so we have to solve those. Even for the embedded market, getting as many websites working as possible improves our confidence that a new HTML user interface will function correctly, first time.

Our roadmap is very flexible, usually because of commercial needs, but also we prioritise what’s interesting to a developer at that given time.

You said Flow is multi-threaded. Which tasks exactly are divided among the multiple threads?

HTML and CSS parsing is single-threaded, as is JavaScript (if you ignore WebWorkers). It’s the layout, primarily word wrap of text, that is done in parallel. Several caveats apply, but in general, two paragraphs can be laid out in parallel since they don’t impact each other apart from their vertical position.

We wrote some technical papers on this process.

Is the word wrap of paragraphs the computationally most expensive part of laying out an HTML page?

Yes. Each letter is a separate rectangle, plus you have word wrap rules for groups of letters. It’s also probably the hardest to achieve, so it's a good place to start. Desktop browsers haven’t touched layout, and have instead concentrated on making whole components run in separate threads.

Is Flexbox one of the caveats you mentioned?

There are multiple passes across the tree, all in parallel. We first calculate, in parallel, essentially the min-content and max-content widths of each paragraph, flexbox or table cell. Once we have those constraints, a relatively quick pass (not in parallel for that one flex box) works out the final widths of each box.

But we can handle multiple flexboxes in parallel, or one flex box and a paragraph outside the flexbox, and so on.

How integral is multi-threading to Flow and its architecture? Could you remove it? Would other browsers be able to copy Flow's multi-threading?

Multithreading can be turned off with a config setting. I suspect it’s always going to be easier to rewrite the layout code with multithreading in mind than rework existing layout algorithms - Mozilla took that approach that with Servo, rather than rework Gecko. The new layout engine could then, in theory, be combined with the rest of an existing browser.

Can you give an example of tricky problems you encountered while creating this browser?

Many sites, Gmail being a good example, were very frustrating as the JavaScript can be so large and obfuscated. It’s almost impossible to tell what they are doing, and much of the debugging was educated guesses as to what it was trying to do. Thankfully, the web platform tests help us make sure we are compatible with other browsers once we figured out the blocking bug or missing feature.

We can’t realistically pass these tests 100% as they test such a huge set of APIs - it would take us years to catch up with other browsers so we can only focus on what is used by priority websites.

And something that was much easier to implement than you thought?

The HTML parser. I first wrote an HTML parser back in 2002, and back then there was no detailed specification of how to handle badly-nested elements. We spent so much time writing test cases to figure out what desktop browsers did in each situation, and trying to behave the same. Ten years later, the detail in the WHAT-WG specification was amazing, and it was perfectly possible to write an HTML parser that is completely compatible with all other browsers.

And a feature you decided not to implement for now?

HTML forms. A TV user interface doesn’t use most, if any, of the features of HTML forms so it was a very low priority. We started adding them because they are needed for general web browsing, but they are not complete.

We haven’t yet implemented WebGL or IndexedDB because they are not used on most of the websites we’ve tried. Obviously Google Maps uses WebGL and Google Docs uses IndexedDB but both have fallbacks. Implementing more features to allow a larger number of websites to work is a priority.

What is Flow's UA string?

For the Mac version, it's the following:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_0) EkiohFlow/5.7.4.30559 
Flow/5.7.4 (like Gecko Firefox/53.0 rv:53.0)

The strings vary depending on the device, but the "EkiohFlow" and "Flow" strings should always occur.

Why do you emulate Firefox? I assumed it'd be Chrome.

We’ve spent ages on that UA string… I could probably write a blog post about it. Essentially, I copied Chrome. Things mostly worked. Then I hit the Instagram site, which decided to use ES6 features based on the UA string. I changed it to FireFox’s, using the version of SpiderMonkey that we were using (53 in the build you have), and the site worked. Then I added more afterwards (the rc:53) to get us to the more modern Google login box.

The UA string isn’t final at all but its choice is full of compromises.

Ekioh creates browsers for set-top boxes. What is Flow’s main purpose on set-top boxes?

It is used to render the UIs created by the box’s vendors, and not for actually surfing the web. But we don’t always get to see the UIs the vendors create, so being able to render all HTML flawlessly is the goal. That way, UI developers can do as they please.

Does the average set-top box have a browser meant for surfing the web?

Sort-of, but not really. I have a 2012 Sony TV with that functionality, but it was useless then and is useless now. IR has a significant lag, and that makes TV remotes far too painful to control a TV browser with. I don’t recall any modern TV/STBs that let you have open internet, but they probably exist. I can’t imagine anyone seriously using them.

Flow also runs on TVs and embedded devices. Could you give a few examples of embedded browsers? And TV browsers?

Back before we started our SVG engine, there were many HTML 4 browser engines for the TV market, such as ANT Fresco and Galio (which I also worked on), Access’s NetFront, Oregan, Espial and Opera. For the non-TV market, we have replaced Internet Explorer Mobile on a line of Windows CE devices. These days, almost all embedded browsers are based on Blink or WebKit.

What are your main competitors in the TV and embedded browser markets?

The main competitors to Flow are Blink and WebKit. Most STB providers often do their own port of one of these browsers. WebKit can be optimised for these low-powered devices, but Flow is usually able to out perform other browsers, and in the areas it’s not as fast, we can usually optimise it.

In a strange way, we also compete with ourselves - we offer our own embedded WebKit-based browser that is more feature-complete than Flow. The same developers work on maintaining and improving that.

Thanks for this interview!

You’re welcome.

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Like everyone else in COVID-19 isolation, Juilliard students are itching to get out and play. For them, the desire is a little more of an imperative. Without meeting and rehearsing together, these dedicated artists at the beginning of their careers can’t hone their skills. “In normal times,” writes Benjamin Sosland at the Juilliard Journal, “Juilliard’s […]

Juilliard Students & the New York Philharmonic Perform Ravel’s <I>Bolero</I> While Social Distancing in Quarantine is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

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