Federal authorities are grappling with the aftermath of an illegal sheep cloning operation that has scattered hundreds of contraband hybrid animals across multiple states, following the sentencing of the scheme's mastermind. Montana rancher Arthur Schubarth received a six-month prison term for cloning a near-threatened Marco Polo argali sheep from tissue illegally imported from Kyrgyzstan. The cloned animal, named Montana Mountain King, was used to inseminate over 100 ewes, creating a network of unauthorized hybrid offspring. Court documents reveal that Schubarth sold these hybrids to big game hunting enthusiasts, with prices reaching $10,000 per animal. While the original cloned sheep is now housed at New York's Rosamond Gifford Zoo, authorities cannot account for most of its descendants.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

velocityconf: RT @OReillyAnimals Advice, please! Elephant Listening Project asks for ideas/solutions/help with 3 practical problems http://t.co/Y90YP3maoz

Conservative activist Scott Presler, whose organization Early Vote Action helped swing Pennsylvania to the right in the general election, announced Monday he will be working to do the same in […]

The post Democrats Have Another Problem to Worry About as Man Who Helped Trump Win Has Eyes on Blue State appeared first on The Western Journal.

Alexey I. Nesvizhskii
Oct 1, 2005; 4:1419-1440
Tutorial

The UK needs to address growth and debt problems if it is to match resources to ambitions on international priorities Expert comment LJefferson 5 November 2024

The budget marks the lowest amount in decades the country has spent on development, and it is struggling to fund other international priorities too.

The UK’s Chancellor Rachel Reeves unveiled her much-anticipated budget last week, the first of the new Labour government. Labour is in a difficult place. There are numerous calls on the public purse and public services are not performing well. Meanwhile, public debt remains close to 100 per cent of GDP, and there has been a long run of sluggish growth.
 
Reeves argues with some justification that the previous government left her a challenging inheritance – gaps in this year’s spending plans, and persistent debt questions left unresolved. More importantly, there are longer-term concerns about the sustainability of UK public spending – the country’s Office for Budget Responsibility has warned public debt could triple by the 2070s due to an ageing population, the climate crisis, and security risks. The focus has understandably been on kitchen table questions about tax rises and funding public services.
 
But this picture also has longstanding implications for international policy – on whether the UK can afford to invest in its foreign policy. The Chancellor did announce an increase of £2.9bn for defence. But the question of whether the UK can get on a sustainable path to spending 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence is still being worked through in the ongoing Strategic Review, and remains challenging despite increasingly urgent warnings from parliamentary committees about the UK’s defence readiness.

The budget also marks one of the lowest amounts in recent years the UK will spend on development overseas, despite setting an ambition to reset relations with the Global South and recover the UK’s role as a leader in international development.
  
The UK needs to either match resources to ambition, spend much more efficiently, or, in the case of the aid budget, it could seek to focus on priorities that are less dependent on spending. But even this will still require consistent resources, alongside significant diplomatic attention, intellectual leadership, and focus.

Longer-term, the UK may need to consider larger questions: addressing broader problems with its lack of growth and productivity will be critical to fund an expansive international role.

With this budget, UK aid spent overseas is at a historic low

In 2020 the UK government cut its goal for spending on international development to 0.5 per cent of Gross National Income (GNI), ending a longstanding policy of spending 0.7 per cent. Labour have echoed this, promising to only return to previous levels when fiscal circumstances allow.
 
But this masks a bigger issue. Since 2022, significant amounts of the UK’s aid budget have been spent on accommodation for asylum seekers in the UK. This is within the rules governing aid, but reduces the amount spent on reducing poverty overseas. In 2023 this spending was 28 per cent of the £15.4bn aid budget. In 2016, it was 3.2 per cent. 

Previous Chancellor Jeremy Hunt quietly allowed a top-up of aid spending over the last two fiscal years to offset how much is being spent at home on asylum seeker accommodation. That provided an additional £2.5 billion for 2022–23 and 2023–24.

But Rachel Reeves declined to provide extra funding this time, meaning the amount being spent overseas is likely the lowest its been since 2007 – an effective cut – under a Labour government.

The Minister for Development, Anneliese Dodds, speaking at Chatham House last month, said the government is working on clearing the backlog of asylum claims, which should free up more to spend overseas.

But beyond this there has been little clarity on plans to address the issue. And costs for asylum seeker accommodation have increased significantly – the UK appears to spend much more than comparator countries per head, according to the Center for Global Development, raising questions about how this spending is managed.

Development is not just about money – but money is important

The UK debate about development has often focused on the 0.7 per cent figure, which can distract from larger questions about what development policy is intended to achieve. As many experts have argued, development aid is about more than spending, and the wider, complex process by which the UK contributes to broad-based growth and stability for poorer countries is not about hitting a specific number.
 
There are things the UK can do that aren’t about spending more directly. This might include focusing on priorities like reforming multilateral development banks so they provide more low-cost public finance, and more flexible and agile loans to poorer countries – a priority echoed by Dodds. It might also incorporate focusing more broadly on helping developing countries attract more investment to bolster growth. 

There is also the issue of developing country debt, much of which is held by the private sector. Dodds previously said, when she was shadow chancellor, she might consider changing the law to address this issue. However,  she declined to recommit to this when questioned at Chatham House. 

None of this can be done unilaterally – on debt, for example, the UK has spearheaded some creative policies. Its UK Export Finance body developed climate-resilient debt clauses – agreements that countries can pause debt repayments in the event of a climate shock – but the UK holds limited amounts of developing country debt. Impact will only come by galvanizing and coordinating others to adopt similar approaches.

A. B. Bogatyrev
Trans. Moscow Math. Soc. 83 (), 217-225.
Abstract, references and article information

Ran Gu and Bing Gao
Math. Comp. 93 (), 2837-2860.
Abstract, references and article information

Soun-Hi Kwon
Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 377 (), 6021-6022.
Abstract, references and article information

Shengyu Tang
Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 152 (), 5381-5394.
Abstract, references and article information

16 July 2020

For data that is being loaded from a SAS Stored Process Server, an insertion process might fail to a MySQL database with a warning, as well as an error message that says "During insert: Incorrect datetime value…"

In SAS Customer Intelligence Studio, you might notice that the user interface becomes unresponsive, as shown below: imgalt="SAS Customer Intelligence Studio UI becomes unresponsive" src="{fusion_66537

In SAS Customer Intelligence Studio, you can choose to create a new calculated variable in the Edit Value dialog box when you populate a treatment custom detail. Following creation of the new calculated

In SAS Customer Intelligence Studio, you might notice that you cannot clear warnings for decision campaign nodes by selecting either the Clear Warnings  option or the Clear All Warnin

In SAS Customer Intelligence Studio, the following error is displayed when you update a new Link  node in a diagram:   imgalt="Link: MAIQService:executeFastPath:" src="{fusion_665

You encounter this issue when the table metadata matches the data source. In this scenario, no metadata update is required.

In SAS Business Rules Manager 3.3, the initial loading of a rule set and a rule flow takes significantly longer than it does in release 3.2. When this problem happens, long time gaps are evident in the local

If you have configured more than one SAS Application Server, then SAS Visual Data Builder might unexpectedly use the wrong application server when you preview or schedule queries. This problem occurs even though you h

You might see the following error messages: "ERROR: Connection failed. Server returned: SAS Logon Manager authentication failed: Access denied." and "ERROR: Unable to connect to Cloud Analytic Services host-name on port 5570. Veri

Editing and/or saving an action column can take up to a minute to display a window. There are no workarounds identified at this time.

If the response variable is in the CLASS statement variable list before the class variables that also appear in the MODEL statement, and an OM-data-set is used, least squares means results for several of the statistical procedures are incorrect.

You might receive a Segmentation Violation when opening a database table in SAS. The SAS Log contains the error and traceback:

In SAS Life Science Analytics Framework 4.6, group membership removal fails with an exception if a user is set as assignee, a candidate, or a notification recipient in a user task for a Process Flow . The Process

An error might occur when you use the SAS 9 BULKLOAD= and BULKEXTRACT= options load data to or extract data from HP Neoview on the HP Itanium platform. The problem occurs because Hewlett-Packard changed the name of one of

In SAS Merchandise Financial Planning, custom time frame-based data versions do not aggregate correctly when referenced in worksheets with standard hierarchy levels. The data does not aggregate correctly from l

In SAS Retail Space Management, it should be possible to click on any location object, then Show Properties, and change the location fill color. This can be done on the gray-filled objects. However, w

SAS  Episode Analytics 3.1 requires the ability to capture user interactions with the user interface for auditing purposes. To support the required functionality a new table has been add

If the OBSMARGINS= or OM= option is specified in an LSMEANS, LSMESTIMATE, or SLICE statement and a user-defined format is applied to any of the effect variables in the OM-data-set , PROC PLM incorrectly stops proce

When viewing a SAS Visual Analytics report, you might intermittently see an error that includes content similar to the following:

When you use SAS/ACCESS Interface to PostgreSQL to query a Yellowbrick database, the SAS OBS= option is not generating a limit clause on the query that is passed to the database. Click the

In SAS Customer Intelligence Studio,  when you add  Reply- node variable values in the Define Value dialog box, you might notice that two identically labeled data-grid variables are

In SAS Infrastructure for Risk Management, the message "ERROR: Could not move and link one or more files to..." occurs while running a job-flow instance if an orphaned folder exists in the persistent area.

The SAS 9.4M4 (TS1M4) Hot Fix D7G004 for ODS Templates installs national language support (NLS) content regardless of whether the languages were installed during the initial deployment. Having sparse

In SAS Customer Intelligence, a decision campaign can become corrupted and impossible to open. When you try to open the campaign, an error message is displayed that asks you to check the SAS Customer Intel

When you publish a model to SAS Metadata Repository by using SAS Model Manager, the publishing process fails and the following error is generated: "The model model-name has a function of ';Transformation';, which is not supported for

SAS Web Report Studio enables you to link reports based on a group break value. However, when you click the link, it might fail with an HTTP 400 error. The exact message you see depends on which browser you are u

Titles and footnotes do not span the entire width of the page when you use the COLUMNS= option with a value that is greater than 1 with the TAGSETS.RTF_SAMPLE tagset. When a value that is greater than 1 is specified for th

When you log on to the SAS Risk Governance Framework and choose a solution, the web application might fail to load the solution content. When the problem occurs, you continue to see "Loading..." on the screen, an

Certain tables that are created in SAS Scalable Performance Data (SPD) Server might not be displayed correctly by SAS Federation Server Manager. Tables that have Latin5 characters in column names encounter this

Software implementation in high-performance computing is getting more fragmented as organizations opt for tools in their walled garden environments.  However, a new organization formed under the Linux Foundation could bring […]

The post Public and Private Sectors Team up to Solve HPC Software Problem  appeared first on HPCwire.

AI may be a priority at American companies, but the difficulty in managing data and obtaining high quality data to train AI models is becoming a bigger hurdle to achieving […]

The post AI Has a Data Problem, Appen Report Says appeared first on HPCwire.

Although common ‘disorders’ (e.g., eating disorders, anxiety, and depression) look different on the surface, there are some common underlying mechanisms. One of these is checking. I’m going to go explain the role of checking in a selection of common mental health problems. Checking in Health Anxiety Examples: – Person goes to the Dr for blood […]

The post CBT: How Checking Contributes to Mental Health Problems (Eating Disorders, Depression, Anxiety) appeared first on Dr Alice Boyes.

A leadership program for young Black men looks to confront racism in law enforcement. Corey Mitchell explains.

With many students working remotely, there’s no point in administering assessments that ask students to come up with a single answer; it’s simply too easy to cheat.

New Jersey is one of many states that have experienced problems with the online administering of standardized testing this year.

Recent Census data finds households in the South and Midwest lagging those in other regions in access to remote learning technologies and learning interactions with teachers and family members.

Recent Census data finds households in the South and Midwest lagging those in other regions in access to remote learning technologies and learning interactions with teachers and family members.

Female worker bees, which forage for the whole colony, struggle more to detect scents in the heat than males do, per the recent research