Oct 16, 2015

In a poignant comment, Albert Einstein once said that "an empty stomach is not a good political adviser." African leaders are starting to appreciate this message by paying more attention to the importance of high-level political support for agricultural transformation.

Jun 1, 2016

Calestous Juma (@calestous) will host a joint Twitter chat with the Elumelu Foundation on June 18, 2016, at 9:00 AM (EDT). Ask questions via #AskCJuma or #TEEPagricReport!

From newspaper editors to TV anchors to bloggers, the default symbol of African agriculture is an African woman holding a hand hoe. This imagery highlights the drudgery African women face in farming. But it also conflates family farming with the broader agricultural enterprise.

Feb 29, 2024

Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Ed Djerejian says Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin once told him, “There is no military solution to this conflict, only a political one.” Rabin was assassinated a few years later, and today bullets are flying, bombs are falling, and 1,200 Israelis are dead after the Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7 and nearly 30,000 Gazans have been killed in the Israeli response. Yet Djerejain still believes that a breakthrough is possible even in the current moment, as horrible as it is. Djerejian, a senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Relations, says the crisis has shaken the regional status quo to the point where—if the United States pursues diplomacy that includes principled pragmatism, coalition-building, and good old-fashioned backbone—a breakthrough may finally be possible. But in a recent paper he argues that any breakthrough will have to be built around a two-state solution, which he says is the only path to peace and stability not only in Israel and Palestine, but the wider Middle East. Djerejian’s career as a diplomat spanned eight U.S. presidential administrations beginning with John F. Kennedy’s, and he also served as U.S. Ambassador to Syria and Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs.  

May 7, 2024

If you want to understand why generals support a presidential power grab, then you need to understand the logic that motivates them. Why they leave the barracks — and what we must do to get them to stand down.  

Jan 8, 2024

Sensors, actuators, and IoT devices will enable AI to interact with the physical plane on a massive scale. The question is, how does one build trust in its actions?

Sep 2, 2023

Amid the global energy transition, investors are anxious to pour billions of dollars into many of these countries to turn the new fossil fuel finds into hydrogen. The element is the key feedstock for fuel cells, which use chemical reactions to generate electricity cleanly, with water as the main byproduct. Notwithstanding the considerable technological challenges ahead, demand for the gas in Europe and elsewhere is widely expected to surge as vehicles, factories, and other energy users seek to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

For Southern Rim nations, however, this tantalizing opportunity for economic development risks turning into just another Sahara mirage. That’s because the hype surrounding hydrogen may continue to distract the regions’ leaders from addressing the tough domestic social issues that are behind the migration crisis. If the technology does become viable, revenue from hydrogen exports to Europe could just perpetuate rent-seeking behavior by political and economic elites at the expense of their own citizens.

Jun 5, 2024

Harvard Kennedy School hosted Leah Stokes, Anton Conk Associate Professor of Environmental Politics at UC Santa Barbara, to discuss how the historic Inflation Reduction Act succeeded where so many previous climate bills failed.

Jun 26, 2024

Global demand for renewable energy is surging so why make solar panels, wind turbines and EVs dearer for western consumers?

May 21, 2024

Stephen Walt argues that realists oppose Israel's actions in Gaza (and U.S. complicity in them) because the combination is undermining the United States' global position and bringing the United States precisely zero strategic benefits.

Jul 16, 2024

Mohammad Tabaar's analysis posits that yet even if Khamenei gives Pezeshkian a relatively long leash, his government is unlikely to negotiate another ambitious nuclear agreement. It will, instead, look to ink a deal that could freeze or incrementally scale back Iran's nuclear advances, including by reducing the quality and quantity of the uranium Iran enriches, in exchange for sanctions relief. Such a transactional deal would have multiple advantages for Pezeshkian. Given Khamenei's support, Iran's conservatives would be less likely to sabotage that deal than they were the 2015 agreement. And it would be easy for Tehran to ramp up its program if the United States withdraws again, as occurred under President Donald Trump in 2018.

Mar 26, 2024

India aims to become a leading producer of green hydrogen by the next decade as part of its broader industrial and decarbonization strategies. This brief provides an overview of India's current hydrogen strategy, as well as the challenges - land and water scarcity, infrastructure gaps, and financing gaps - that must be addressed in order for India to achieve its ambitious goals.

Jul 8, 2024

Green, grey, blue, turquoise, pink, yellow, orange – Nicola De Blasio provides a guide to the color codes used to classify hydrogen produced from different sources.

Ulmart�s stunning growth continues unabated as sales for the first six months of 2014 were up 31% in a year-on-year comparison. Sequential quarterly growth increased by 47%.

Get mortgage help. This is why. MakingHomeAffordable.gov :60

2017 Hyundai IONIQ Hybrid Dynamic B-roll

Genesis Reveals Hybrid Sports Sedan Concept At New York International Auto Show

#5MoreNow

When Christen Press puts her game face on, she makes sure she helps protect it with Coppertone� Sport. Use and reapply as directed.

Video 1 Preview Image Caption

Atrial Fibrillation affects your heart, but it can also affect your mind. The risk of stroke is five times higher in those with AFib. Learn more and take an online AFib risk assessment at MyAFib.org (1)

Video 1 Preview Image Caption

Visit FuelUpToPlay60.com to access new Spanish-language materials and get your school involved.

Robert Kuske, MD

A landmark study helps to explain the genetic roots of cancer risk in children and how this may ultimately change patient care in the future.

Meta Heart 2 Heart Featuring Michael and Gene Strahan

Watch the video of Pr Jean Krutmann, Chair of the Jury explaining the Exposome concept

Mary Murphy partners with Osteo Bi-Flex�

In this article, we explore the key reasons why LLPs are increasingly favoured, focusing on the advantages of LLPs for small business owners.

The Alloy Origins Core is a tenkeyless mechanical keyboard made of airplane-grade aluminum, which prompts the question: Why don't they make the whole plane out of keyboard?

Renowned singer Chappell Roan has stirred discussions among her fans after she commented on Billboard’s post that stated that she has parted ways with her management team and manager, Nick Bobetsky. She recently made headlines after her name was inducted into the list of candidates who are nominated in the big categories of next year’s […]

The post Why Fans Think Chappell Roan Has Fired Her Manager Nick Bobetsky appeared first on ComingSoon.net - Movie Trailers, TV & Streaming News, and More.

Fans of Voltron: Legendary Defender are disheartened by the news that the series is leaving Netflix. The beloved animated show, which aired for eight seasons from 2016 to 2018, follows teens who join an intergalactic battle while piloting robotic ships shaped like animals. With the news sparkling debates, viewers are eager to learn why it’s […]

The post Why Is Voltron Leaving Netflix & Where Could It Stream Next? appeared first on ComingSoon.net - Movie Trailers, TV & Streaming News, and More.

The internet has been buzzing with excitement over what many fans initially thought was an official Agent Venom trailer from Sony. The clip, featuring Tony Revolori as Flash Thompson transforming into Agent Venom, quickly went viral and sparked discussions about a possible new Venom movie. Fans seem to be excited about the prospect of seeing […]

The post Why Fans Think Sony’s Agent Venom Trailer Is Real appeared first on ComingSoon.net - Movie Trailers, TV & Streaming News, and More.

Donald Trump has been reelected president of the United States. Ahead of Kamala Harris’s expected concession speech, we speak to professors Carol Anderson and Michele Goodwin to discuss Harris’s historic campaign — and historic loss. “The Confederacy won,” says Anderson, a professor of African American studies at Emory University. “It paints a picture of what Americans are willing to embrace,” says Goodwin, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown and an expert on healthcare law, who warns of the public health dangers of a second Trump administration and discusses the election’s implications for reproductive rights.

In the wake of the reelection of Donald Trump, some of the richest people in the world saw their net worths soar as stock prices rapidly shot up. “What was different about this election was how central billionaires were in the entire political discourse,” says The Lever's David Sirota, who joins Democracy Now! to discuss the outsized role of the super-rich in U.S politics, pointing out that both Trump and Kamala Harris campaigned heavily with billionaires, including Elon Musk and Mark Cuban. “These people are not giving money simply out of the goodness of their hearts. They want things. They have policy demands,” Sirota says. “The investors, the donors, like billionaires, are looking for a return on their investment.” Sirota, who previously worked as a communications adviser and speechwriter for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, also explains how Elon Musk's influence on Trump’s campaign is a preview of the power he could wield if he ends up appointed to the Trump administration.

Virtual-reality could assist researchers in decoding how emotions spur a decision to commit a crime

Engaging the fine motor system to produce letters by hand has positive effects on learning and memory

Without adding an extra day to February every four years, our calendar would get increasingly out of sync with the cosmos

Snakes saw a burst of adaptation about 128 million years ago that led to them exploding in diversity and evolving up to three times faster than lizards

Jungle “Let’s Go Back” One of the most distinctive elements of Jungle’s style is the way they stack vocal harmonies so it feels like a warm breeze or like being submerged in hot water. It’s cozy and calming, but also enveloping and elemental. You get a lot of that in “Let’s Go Back,” a new […]

Quality control is an important business function for any company. When your company is shipping devices with safety concerns, it's even more important. In some industries, a quality control failure is bound to be national headlines.

When the quality control software tool stopped working, everyone panicked. At which point, GRH stepped in.

Now, we've discussed this software and GRH before, but as a quick recap, it was:

written by someone who is no longer employed with the company, as part of a project managed by someone who is no longer at the company, requested by an executive who is also no longer at the company. There are no documented requirements, very few tests, and a lot of "don't touch this, it works".

And this was a quality control tool. So we're already in bad shape. It also had been unmaintained for years- a few of the QC engineers had tried to take it over, but weren't programmers, and it had essentially languished.

Specifically, it was a quality control tool used to oversee the process by about 50 QC engineers. It automates a series of checks by wrapping around third party software tools, in a complex network of "this device gets tested by generating output in program A, feeding it to program B, then combining the streams and sending them to the device, but this device gets tested using programs D, E, and F."

The automated process using the tool has a shockingly low error rate. Without the tool, doing things manually, the error rate climbs to 1-2%. So unless everyone wanted to see terrifying headlines in the Boston Globe about their devices failing, GRH needed to fix the problem.

GRH was given the code, in this case a a zip file on a shared drive. It did not, at the start, even build. After fighting with the project configuration to resolve that, GRH was free to start digging in deeper.

Public Sub connect2PCdb()
        Dim cPath As String = Path.Combine(strConverterPath, "c.pfx")
        Dim strCN As String

        ' JES 12/6/2016: Modify the following line if MySQL server is changed to a different server.  A dump file will be needed to re-create teh database in the new server.
        strCN = "metadata=res://*/Model1.csdl|res://*/Model1.ssdl|res://*/Model1.msl;provider=MySql.Data.MySqlClient;provider connection string='server=REDACTED;user id=REDACTED;database=REDACTED;sslmode=Required;certificatepassword=REDACTED;certificatefile=REDACTEDc.pfx;password=REDACTED'"
        strCN = Regex.Replace(strCN, "certificatefile=.*?pfx", "certificatefile=" & cPath)
        pcContext = New Entities(strCN)
        strCN = "metadata=res://*/Model1.csdl|res://*/Model1.ssdl|res://*/Model1.msl;provider=MySql.Data.MySqlClient;provider connection string='server=REDACTED;user id=REDACTED;persistsecurityinfo=True;database=REDACTED;password=REDACTED'"
        strCN = Regex.Match(strCN, ".*'(.*)'").Groups(1).Value

        Try
            strCN = pcContext.Database.Connection.ConnectionString
            cnPC.ConnectionString = "server=REDACTED;user id=REDACTED;password=REDACTED;database=REDACTED;"
            cnPC.Open()
        Catch ex As Exception

        End Try
    End Sub

This is the code which connects to the backend database. The code is in the category of more of a trainwreck than a WTF. It's got a wonderful mix of nonsense in here, though- a hard-coded connection string which includes plaintext passwords, regex munging to modify the string, then hard-coding a string again, only to use regexes to extract a subset of the string. A subset we don't use.

And then, for a bonus, the whole thing has a misleading comment- "modify the following line" if we move to a different server? We have to modify several lines, because we keep copy/pasting the string around.

Oh, and of course, it uses the pattern of "open a database connection at application startup, and just hold that connection forever," which is a great way to strain your database as your userbase grows.

The good news about the hard-coded password is that it got GRH access to the database. With that, it was easy to see what the problem was: the database was full. The system was overly aggressive with logging, the logs went to database tables, the server was an antique with a rather small hard drive, and the database wasn't configured to even use all of that space anyway.

Cleaning up old logs got the engineers working again. GRH kept working on the code, though, cleaning it up and modernizing it. Updating to latest version of the .NET Core framework modified the data access to be far simpler, and got rid of the need for hard-coded connection strings. Still, GRH left the method looking like this:

    Public Sub connect2PCdb()
        'Dim cPath As String = Path.Combine(strConverterPath, "c.pfx")
        'Dim strCN As String

        ' JES 12/6/2016: Modify the following line if MySQL server is changed to a different server.  A dump file will be needed to re-create teh database in the new server.
        'strCN = "metadata=res://*/Model1.csdl|res://*/Model1.ssdl|res://*/Model1.msl;provider=MySql.Data.MySqlClient;provider connection string='server=REDACTED;user id=REDACTED;database=REDACTED;sslmode=Required;certificatepassword=REDACTED;certificatefile=REDACTEDc.pfx;password=REDACTED'"
        'strCN = Regex.Replace(strCN, "certificatefile=.*?pfx", "certificatefile=" & cPath)
        'pcContext = New Entities(strCN)
        'strCN = "metadata=res://*/Model1.csdl|res://*/Model1.ssdl|res://*/Model1.msl;provider=MySql.Data.MySqlClient;provider connection string='server=REDACTED;user id=REDACTED;persistsecurityinfo=True;database=REDACTED;password=REDACTED'"
        'strCN = Regex.Match(strCN, ".*'(.*)'").Groups(1).Value

        'GRH 2021-01-15.  Connection information moved to App.Config
        'GRH 2021-08-13.  EF Core no longer supports App.Config method
        pcContext = New PcEntities

        Try
            ' GRH 2021-08-21  This variable no longer exists in .NET 5
            'strCN = pcContext.Database.Connection.ConnectionString
            ' GRH 2021-08-20  Keeping the connection open causes EF Core to not work
            'cnPC.ConnectionString = "server=REDACTED;user id=REDACTED;password=REDACTED;database=REDACTED;SslMode=none"
            'cnPC.Open()
        Catch ex As Exception

        End Try
    End Sub

It's now a one-line method, with most of the code commented out, instead of removed. Why on Earth is the method left like that?

GRH explains:

Yes, I could delete the function as it is functionally dead, but I keep it for the same reasons that a hunter mounts a deer's head above her mantle.

A climate-cooling La Niña pattern was expected to develop in the Pacific Ocean months ago, but forecasters now say it won't appear until November

A lithium-ion battery made from three droplets of hydrogel is the smallest soft battery of its kind – and it could be used in biocompatible and biodegradable implants

In a small study, women experienced more empathy for strangers who were experiencing pain after an eight-week meditation training programme

The earliest evidence of livestock with modified horns has been discovered in ancient Egypt – sheep skulls with horns that point in unnatural directions suggest humans forced them to grow that way

The brain pathway that causes hairy mammals like mice and dogs to shake themselves dry appears to have more to do with pressure than temperature

In order to figure out how something came from nothing, we first need to explore the different types of nothing