Oh it's ladies night.

The event will be in May and take place live on TNT.

Derrick Johnson wants solutions for a systemic problem

Also, Malcolm-Jamal Warner speaks on Ebony Cosby cover.

Wait 'till you see the newest in their impressive fleet.

From booking and scheduling to events and embeds, these six new blocks for your blog or business website help you to grow your audience, connect with more clients, and reach more customers.

As the Covid-19 pandemic continues to affect countries around the globe, Concacaf has decided to suspend two additional national tournaments. A spokesperson said, “At Concacaf we are continuing to monitor closely the public health situation and our thoughts are with everyone affected by Covid-19. “The health and wellbeing of all individuals participating in Concacaf competitions […] (Click to read the full article)

The Bermuda Police Service continued their police convoy display today [Oct 2] as part of their celebrations of 135 years of policing in our community. Today’s convoy was smaller than yesterday, which involved over 28 vehicles from the police fleet traveling island wide. Some areas were missed in yesterday’s demonstration resulting in the Bermuda Police […] (Click to read the full article)

The International Cricket Council announced that due to the global Covid-19 pandemic, all ICC qualifying events due to take place before 30 June will be postponed subject to further review. A spokesperson said, “The International Cricket Council today has announced further action in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic. “After careful evaluation of the current […] (Click to read the full article)

More than 60 shavees at Saltus raised more than $100,000 today [March 13] bringing the school’s total raised for St. Baldrick’s to more than $1.7 million over the years. It was the 13th year that Saltus has taken part in the event, which raises money for research into childhood cancer, and parents joined students to […] (Click to read the full article)

Elan Daley recently competed at the Ontario Junior International 18 and Under Short Course Meet hosted by Swim Ontario at the Pan Am Pool in Scarborough, Canada. During the competition, Daley broke three Girls 13-14 Bermuda Age Group and Bermuda Open Records that she previously held. During the Girls 200m Freestyle final, Daley clocked a […] (Click to read the full article)

Elan and Elijah Daley claimed more gold medals on the second day of the 2020 Central Region A Championships in Canada. Elan Daley picked up yet another gold medal during the girls 14-year-olds 100 LC meter freestyle touching the wall in a time of 56.93, and Elijah Daley won the boys 13-year-olds 100 LC meter […] (Click to read the full article)

In the wake of America’s Cup, the Bermuda Tourism Authority [BTA] is looking at the feasibility of many other sports-related events, citing that “Bermuda’s successful delivery of the 35th America’s Cup has elevated the destination to a strong position for attracting future sports tourism events and has already helped officials land new events for the […] (Click to read the full article)

Astronomy is advancing to the point where we can see planets forming around young stars. This was an unthinkable development only a few years ago. In fact, it was only two years ago that astronomers captured the first image of a newly-forming planet. Now there are more and more studies into how planets form, including …

Continue reading "More Pictures of Planet-Forming Disks Around Young Stars"

The post More Pictures of Planet-Forming Disks Around Young Stars appeared first on Universe Today.

Bojíte se, že letos nebudete zatlačovat slzu u zlatavých nekonečných obzorů? Ale budete. A mnozí alergici na řepku slzy zatlačují už teď. Rajčata stojí sice 170kč za kilo, květák je už také kaviárem českých domácností, ale heslo "řídit stát jako zemědělství" nám zajistilo širé moře zlaté barvy. Sice se z řepky nenajíme (teda až na ty, co z pěstování rýžují zlaté dotace), ale že jsou to panorámata, co? 

One of the most important tips for protecting yourself from COVID-19 is to wash your hands for 20 seconds, or as long as it takes to sing “Happy Birthday” twice. British teen William Gibson decided he wanted the public to have more song options while fighting the spread of coronavirus.

Gibson created an online tool that allows a user to enter the title of their chosen song and artist to automatically generate a poster. The poster matches lyrics from the song to a 13-step washing routine. The UK’s NHS Health Secretary Matt Hancock has publically praised Gibson’s initiative as the posters have been shared extensively on social media. Gibson thought it would be popular, but has still been surprised to see some of his favorite celebrities posting about it. Visit the Wash Your Lyrics website to create your own poster for washing hands with your favorite song.

Have you heard of Heath Freeman? He's a thirty-something hedge fund boss, who runs "Alden Global Capital," which owns a company misleadingly called "Digital First Media." His business has been to buy up local newspapers around the country and basically cut everything down to the bone, and just milk the assets for whatever cash they still produce, minus all the important journalism stuff. He's been called "the hedge fund asshole", "the hedge fund vampire that bleeds newspapers dry", "a small worthless footnote", the "Gordon Gecko" of newspapers and a variety of other fun things.

Reading through some of those links above, you find a standard playbook for Freeman's managing of newspapers:

These are the assholes who a few years ago bought the Denver Post, once one of the best regional newspapers in the country, and hollowed it out into a shell of its former self, then laid off some more people. Things got so bad that the Post’s own editorial board rebelled, demanding that if “Alden isn’t willing to do good journalism here, it should sell the Post to owners who will.”

And here's one of the other links from above telling a similar story:

The Denver newsroom was hardly alone in its misery. In Northern California, a combined editorial staff of 16 regional newspapers had reportedly been slashed from 1,000 to a mere 150. Farther down the coast in Orange County, there were according to industry analyst Ken Doctor, complained of rats, mildew, fallen ceilings, and filthy bathrooms. In her Washington Post column, media critic Margaret Sullivan called Alden “one of the most ruthless of the corporate strip-miners seemingly intent on destroying local journalism.”

And, yes, I think it's fair to say that many newspapers did get a bit fat and happy with their old school monopolistic hold on the news market pre-internet. And many of them failed to adapt. And so, restructuring and re-prioritizing is not a bad idea. But that's not really what's happening here. Alden appears to be taking profitable (not just struggling) newspapers, and squeezing as much money out of them directly into Freeman's pockets, rather than plowing it back into actual journalism. And Alden/DFM appears to be ridiculously profitable for Freeman, even as the journalism it produces becomes weaker and weaker. Jim Brady called it "combover journalism." Basically using skeleton staff to pretend to really be covering the news, when it's clear to everyone that it's not really doing the job.

All of that is prelude to the latest news that Freeman, who basically refuses to ever talk to the media, has sent a letter to other newspaper bosses suggesting they collude to force Google and Facebook to make him even richer.

You can see the full letter here:

Let's go through this nonsense bit by bit, because it is almost 100% nonsense.

These are immensely challenging times for all of us in the newspaper industry as we balance the two equally important goals of keeping the communities we serve fully informed, while also striving to safeguard the viability of our news organizations today and well into the future.

Let's be clear: the "viability" of your newsrooms was decimated when you fired a huge percentage of the local reporters and stuffed the profits into your pockets, rather than investing in the actual product.

Since Facebook was founded in 2004, nearly 2,000 (one in five) newspapers have closed and with them many thousands of newspaper jobs have been lost. In that same time period, Google has become the world's primary news aggregation service, Apple launched a news app with a subsription-based tier and Twitter has become a household name by serving as a distribution service for the content our staffs create.

Correlation is not causation, of course. But even if that were the case, the focus of a well-managed business would be to adapt to the changing market place to take advantage of, say, new distribution channels, new advertising and subscription products, and new ways of building a loyal community around your product. You know, the things that Google, Facebook and Twitter did... which your newspaper didn't do, perhaps because you fired a huge percentage of their staff and re-directed the money flow away from product and into your pocket.

Recent developments internationally, which will finally require online platforms to compensate the news industry are encouraging. I hope we can collaborate to move this issue forward in the United States in a fair and productive way. Just this month, April 2020, French antitrust regulators ordered Google to pay news publishers for displaying snippets of articles after years of helping itself to excerpts for its news service. As regulators in France said, "Google's practices caused a serious and immediate harm to the press sector, while the economic situation of publishers and news agencies is otherwise fragile." The Australian government also recently said that Facebook and Google would have to pay media outlets in the country for news content. The country's Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg noted "We can't deny the importance of creating a level playing field, ensuring a fair go for companies and the appropriate compensation for content."

We have, of course, written about both the plans in France as well as those in Australia (not to mention a similar push in Canada that Freeman apparently missed). Of course, what he's missing is... well, nearly everything. First, the idea that it's Google that's causing problems for the news industry is laughable on multiple fronts.

If newspapers feel that Google is causing them harm by linking to them and sending them traffic, then they can easily block Google, which respects robots.txt restrictions. I don't see Freeman's newspaper doing that. Second, in most of the world, Google does not monetize its Google News aggregation service, so the idea that it's someone making money off of "their" news, is not supported by reality. Third, the idea that "the news" is "owned" by the news organizations is not just laughable, but silly. After all, the news orgs are not making the news. If Freeman is going to claim that news orgs should be compensated for "their" news, then, uh, shouldn't his news orgs be paying the actual people who make the news that they're reporting on? Or is he saying that journalism is somehow special?

Finally, and most importantly, he says all of this as if we haven't seen how these efforts play out in practice. When Germany passed a similar law, Google ended up removing snippets only to be told they had to pay anyway. Google, correctly, said that if it had to license snippets, it would offer a price of $0, or it would stop linking to the sites -- and the news orgs agreed. In Spain, where Google was told it couldn't do this, the company shut down Google News and tons of smaller publications were harmed, not helped, but this policy.

This surely sounds familiar to all of us. It's been more than a decade since Rupert Murdoch instinctively observerd: "There are those who think they have a right to take our news content and use it for their own purposes without contributing a penny to its production... Their almost wholesale misappropriation of our stories is not fair use. To be impolite, it's theft."

First off, it's not theft. As we pointed out at the time, Rupert Murdoch, himself, at the very time he was making these claims, owned a whole bunch of news aggregators himself. The problem was never news aggregators. The problem has always been that other companies are successful on the internet and Rupert Murdoch was not. And, again, the whole "misappropriation" thing is nonsense: any news site is free to block Google's scrapers and if it's "misappropriation" to send you traffic, why do all of these news organizations employ "search engine optimizers" who work to get their sites higher in the rankings? And, yet again, are they paying the people who make the actual news? If not, then it seems like they're full of shit.

With Facebook and Google recently showing some contrition by launching token programs that provide a modest amount of funding, it's heartening to see that the tech giants are beginning to understand their moral and social responsibility to support and safeguard local journalism.

Spare me the "moral and social responsibility to support and safeguard local journalism," Heath. You're the one who cut 1,000 journalism jobs down to 150. Not Google. You're the one who took profitable newspapers that were investing in local journalism, fired a huge number of their reporters and staff, and redirected the even larger profits into your pockets instead of local journalism.

Even if someone wants to argue this fallacy, it should not be you, Heath.

Facebook created the Facebook Journalism Project in 2017 "to forge stronger ties with the news industry and work with journalists and publishers." If Facebook and the other tech behemoths are serious about wanting to "forge stronger ties with the news industry," that will start with properly remunerating the original producers of content.

Remunerating the "original producers"? So that means that Heath is now agreeing to compensate the people who create the news that his remaining reporters write up? Oh, no? He just means himself -- the middleman -- being remunerated directly into his pocket while he continues to cut jobs from his newsroom while raking in record profits? That seems... less compelling.

Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple News and other online aggregators make billions of dollars annually from original, compelling content that our reporters, photographers and editors create day after day, hour after hour. We all know the numbers, and this one underscores the value of our intellectual property: The New York Times reported that in 2018, Google alone conservatively made $4.7 billion from the work of news publishers. Clearly, content-usage fees are an appropriate and reasonable way to help ensure newspapers exist to provide communities across the country with robust high-quality local journalism.

First of all, the $4.7 billion is likely nonsense, but even if it were accurate, Google is making that money by sending all those news sites a shit ton of traffic. Why aren't they doing anything reasonable to monetize it? And, of course, Digital First Media has bragged about its profitability, and leaked documents suggest its news business brought in close to a billion dollars in 2017 with a 17% operating margin, significantly higher than all other large newspaper chains.

This is nothing more than "Google has money, we want more money, Google needs to give us the money." There is no "clearly" here and "usage fees" are nonsense. If you don't want Google's traffic, put up robots.txt. Google will survive, but your papers might not.

One model to consider is how broadcast television stations, which provide valuable local news, successfully secured sizable retransmission fees for their programming from cable companies, satellite providers and telcos.

There are certain problems with retransmission fees in the first place (given that broadcast television was, by law, freely transmitted over the air in exchange for control over large swaths of spectrum), and the value they got was in having a large audience to advertise too. But, more importantly, retransmission involved taking an entire broadcast channel and piping it through cable and satellite to make things easier for TV watchers who didn't want to switch between an antenna and a cable (or satellite receiver). An aggregator is not -- contrary to what one might think reading Freeman's nonsense -- retransmitting anything. It's linking to your content and sending you traffic on your own site. The only things it shows are a headline and (sometimes) a snippet to attract more traffic.

There are certainly other potential options worth of our consideration -- among them whether to ask Congress about revisiting thoughtful limitations on "Fair Use" of copyrighted material, or seeking judicial review of how our trusted content is misused by others for their profit. By beginning a collective dialogue on these topics we can bring clarity around the best ways to proceed as an industry.

Ah, yes, let's throw fair use -- the very thing that news orgs regularly rely on to not get sued into the ground -- out the window in an effort to get Google to funnel extra money into Heath Freeman's pockets. That sounds smart. Or the other thing. Not smart.

And "a collective dialogue" in this sense appears to be collusion. As in an antitrust violation. Someone should have maybe mentioned that to Freeman.

Our newspaper brands and operations are the engines that power trust local news in communities across the United States.

Note that it's the brands and operations -- not journalists -- that he mentions here. That's a tell.

Fees from those who use and profit from our content can help continually optimize our product as well as ensure our newsrooms have the resources they need.

Again, Digital First Media, is perhaps the most profitable newspaper chain around. And it just keeps laying off reporters.

My hope is that we are able to work together towards the shared goal of protecting and enhancing local journalism.

You first, Heath, you first.

So, basically, Heath Freeman, who has spent decade or so buying up profitable newspapers, laying off a huge percentage of their newsrooms, leaving a shell of a husk in their place, then redirecting the continued profits (often that exist solely because of the legacy brand) into his own pockets rather than in journalism... wants the other newspapers to collude with him to force successful internet companies who send their newspapers a ton of free traffic to pay him money for the privilege of sending them traffic.

Sounds credible.

The coronavirus pandemic and its associated lockdown in most countries has forced major changes in the way people live, work and study. Online learning is now routine for many, and is largely unproblematic, not least because it has been used for many years. However, online testing is more tricky, since there is a concern by many teachers that students might use their isolated situation to cheat during exams. One person's problem is another person's opportunity, and there are a number of proctoring services that claim to stop or at least minimize cheating during online tests. One thing they have in common is that they tend to be intrusive, and show little respect for the privacy of the people they monitor.

As an article in The Verge explains, some employ humans to watch over students using Zoom video calls. That's reasonably close to a traditional setup, where a teacher or proctor watches students in an exam hall. But there are also webcam-based automated approaches, as explored by Vox:

For instance, Examity also uses AI to verify students' identities, analyze their keystrokes, and, of course, ensure they're not cheating. Proctorio uses artificial intelligence to conduct gaze detection, which tracks whether a student is looking away from their screens.

It's not just in the US that these extreme surveillance methods are being adopted. In France, the University of Rennes 1 is using a system called Managexam, which adds a few extra features: the ability to detect "inappropriate" Internet searches by the student, the use of a second screen, or the presence of another person in the room (original in French). The Vox articles notes that even when these systems are deployed, students still try to cheat using new tricks, and the anti-cheating services try to stop them doing so:

it's easy to find online tips and tricks for duping remote proctoring services. Some suggest hiding notes underneath the view of the camera or setting up a secret laptop. It's also easy for these remote proctoring services to find out about these cheating methods, so they're constantly coming up with countermeasures. On its website, Proctorio even has a job listing for a "professional cheater" to test its system. The contract position pays between $10,000 and $20,000 a year.

As the arms race between students and proctoring services escalates, it's surely time to ask whether the problem isn't people cheating, but the use of old-style, analog testing formats in a world that has been forced by the coronavirus pandemic to move to a completely digital approach. Rather than spending so much time, effort and money on trying to stop students from cheating, maybe we need to come up with new ways of measuring what they have learnt and understood -- ones that are not immune to cheating, but where cheating has no meaning. Obvious options include "open book" exams, where students can use whatever resources they like, or even abolishing formal exams completely, and opting for continuous assessment. Since the lockdown has forced educational establishments to re-invent teaching, isn't it time they re-invented exams too?

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Advertise your open positions here for free, no catch, and find opportunities within

Job Alert This week we've got job openings from all over the globe to tempt you, your friends or your past colleagues back into work, or indeed into new ventures.…

Tune in online this month to find out how to protect your business from data extortionists

Webcast It's been "the year of ransomware" for about the past three years. And while you may be tired of hearing about the trend and just getting used to the reality, you may also like to remember: instances of attacks are climbing – quickly – and we’re now reaching a level where more than half of ransomware schemes result in a business paying out.…

Despite you know what, little evidence of a rush to new racks

Equinix has posted its Q1 FY2020 results for the period ending March 31st, along with some interesting insights into how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted data centre consumption.…

Hayabusa 2 expected to return with out-of-this-world material in December

Video Close-up footage of asteroid Ryugu, taken by the Hayabusa 2 spacecraft as it touched down to retrieve a sample, reveals the near-Earth object’s surface may have been torched by the Sun as its orbit changed over time.…

What expression does — did — your mom use all the time? What skill did you learn from her?  What does (or did) she encourage you to do? These are great questions for any mom and child, whether the kid is 5 or 50. And if you click here, you can print out a very […]

At least for some kids, yes, being flung from the stress of a super-structured, super-supervised existence is having a calming, life-expanding effect. I discuss this amazing phenom in this Big Think article, including six short essays by kids themselves, and also in this interview with Bored Panda,  the  pop culture site, where I note that […]

Date: April 30, 2020

As COVID-19 continues to impact communities around the world, people and families everywhere are spending more time at home. In light of this, we’re launching a throwback Doodle series looking back at some of our popular interactive Google Doodle games!

Stay and play at home with today’s featured throwback: 

Our 2016 Doodle game celebrating Clara Rockmore!
 

 

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Help stop the spread of COVID-19 by following these steps.
 

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Learn more here about the latest ways we’re responding, and how our products can help people stay connected during this time.

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Popular journaling app Day One today updated to version 4.13, adding support for trackpad navigation on iPad, a new Day View interface, and other improvements.


This release comes after the launch of iOS and iPadOS 13.4, which added support for trackpads and mice on ‌‌iPad‌‌.

After updating, Day One users on ‌iPad‌ can use various trackpad actions to interact with the app, including two-finger swipe down to dismiss, and two-finger horizontal swipe to open and close the journal drawer.

• How to Use a Bluetooth Mouse or Trackpad With Your iPad

The new Day View offers quicker access to daily entries by tapping on or clicking dates in the calendar or the timeline.

Also in this update, Daily Reminders now include additional information like the number of photos taken and locations visited on a given day, and the Settings pages now provide links to Day One feature documents.

Elsewhere, several bugs have been fixed, including one that caused video thumbnails not to display in the media timeline, and one that prevented photos in the activity feed from showing location or calendar events.

Day One is a free download for iPhone and ‌iPad‌ from the App Store with in-app purchases for premium features. [Direct Link]
This article, "Day One Journaling App Update Adds iPad Trackpad Support, New Day View, and More" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

This week saw a couple of big announcements, led by the launch of an update for the 13-inch MacBook Pro line. Most notably, the update brought the improved Magic Keyboard previously introduced on its 16-inch sibling and the MacBook Air, with high-end models also receiving updated processors.

Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more videos.
The second significant announcement this week was that Apple's first all-digital Worldwide Developers Conference will kick off on June 22. Other news this week included a firmware update for the AirPods Pro, an update on Apple's Mini-LED efforts, and more.

Read on below and check out our video above for recaps of all of this week's most important stories!

New 13-Inch MacBook Pro Announced With Magic Keyboard, 10th-Gen Processors, Up to 32GB RAM and 4TB SSD, and More

Apple this week refreshed its 13-inch MacBook Pro lineup, with key features including the same Magic Keyboard as the 16-inch MacBook Pro, up to 80 percent faster Intel graphics than the previous generation, up to 32GB of RAM, up to 4TB of SSD storage, and 6K display support.


First introduced on the 16-inch MacBook Pro last year, the Magic Keyboard features a far more reliable scissor mechanism with 1mm of key travel. After five years, Apple has finally transitioned its entire notebook lineup away from its issue-prone butterfly keyboard.

10th-generation Intel processor options are only available on higher-end models, with the $1,799 configuration proving to be up to 16.5% faster than the $1,299 base model with an older 8th-generation processor.

Apple's Virtual WWDC Event to Kick Off on June 22

Apple has announced that its first-ever online-only WWDC will begin Monday, June 22 via the Apple Developer app and website. The weeklong event will include a virtual keynote, sessions, and labs, with more details to be shared in June. And it's free!


Apple is expected to introduce iOS 14, iPadOS 14, macOS 10.16, tvOS 14, and watchOS 7 at WWDC 2020, with beta testing to take place over the summer.

Student developers from all over the world can enter Apple's Swift Student Challenge by creating an interactive scene in Swift Playgrounds that can be experienced in three minutes. Winners will receive an exclusive WWDC20 jacket and pin set. Submissions are open through May 17.

Apple Updates AirPods Pro Firmware to Version 2D15

Apple this week released a new firmware version 2D15 for the AirPods Pro, replacing version 2C54.


In recent months, some AirPods Pro owners have been complaining about reduced noise cancellation and crackling or static sounds, so users have listened for any improvements following the update.

Perhaps proving how subjective sound quality can be, feedback has been decidedly mixed, with some users noticing an improvement, some noticing no change, and some noticing further degradation to noise cancellation.

Apple has offered some help in the form of two new support documents for users to troubleshoot noise cancellation or crackling sound issues.

10 Tips and Tricks for the iPad Pro Magic Keyboard

Have you recently picked up a new Magic Keyboard for the iPad Pro? Here's a list of our favorite tips and tricks that you need to know.


The tips and tricks relate to adjusting the backlight brightness, customizing the cursor's behavior, enabling tap-to-click on the trackpad, other trackpad gestures, accessing the Emoji keyboard, and more.

Apple's Mini-LED Product Roadmap May Have Been Pushed Back to 2021

Disappointed that the new 13-inch MacBook Pro was not the rumored 14-inch model? That may be due to a slight delay in Apple's plans to release a range of new products with Mini-LED backlit displays.

Kuo believes Apple's first Mini-LED products might not launch until 2021. The analyst has previously said these products would include a new 14.1-inch MacBook Pro, 16-inch MacBook Pro, 12.9-inch iPad Pro, and more.


Kuo has previously said that Mini-LED displays will allow for thinner and lighter product designs, while offering many of the same benefits of OLED displays used on the latest iPhones, including good wide color gamut performance, high contrast and dynamic range, and local dimming for truer blacks.

NFC-Based Digital Key Specification Released Ahead of Apple's Rumored CarKey Feature on iPhone

Amid rumors that Apple is working on a digital "CarKey" feature for iPhone, the Car Connectivity Consortium has announced that its NFC-based Digital Key Release 2.0 specification has been finalized and made available to its members, which includes Apple.


"CarKey" will allow an iPhone or Apple Watch to unlock, lock, and start an NFC-compatible vehicle. Just like credit cards and boarding passes, users will be able to add a digital car key to the Wallet app, eliminating the need to use a physical car key or key fob.

MacRumors Newsletter

Each week, we publish an email newsletter like this highlighting the top Apple stories, making it a great way to get a bite-sized recap of the week hitting all of the major topics we've covered and tying together related stories for a big-picture view.

So if you want to have top stories like the above recap delivered to your email inbox each week, subscribe to our newsletter!
This article, "Top Stories: New 13" MacBook Pro, WWDC Starts June 22, AirPods Pro Firmware Update, and More" first appeared on MacRumors.com

Discuss this article in our forums

A fundraising initiative spearheaded by Canadian comic retailers and creators aims to auction off items in order to support their struggling industry.

The post Zdarsky, Fabok, & more ask you to “Be Our Heroes” for Canadian retailers appeared first on The Beat.

Undone by Blood #3 is now due out June 10.

The post EXCLUSIVE: More meta revenge in UNDONE BY BLOOD #3 appeared first on The Beat.

IBM today announced it is now offering ThinkData Works’ open data solution on IBM’s platform-as-a-service, Bluemix, to give application developers access to clean, open data from all levels of government in Canada.

IBM today announced that as part of its Celebration of Service, designed to allow employees, retirees, clients and business partners to donate their time and expertise during the company's Centennial year, 300,000 IBMers around the world -- close to three quarters of its global workforce -- are volunteering in more than 5,000 projects in 120 countries, meeting civic and societal challenges and serving millions in need.

IBM has provided extra high performance computing (HPC) capacity to the Universities of Auckland and Otago within a new collaboration called the New Zealand eScience Infrastructure (NeSI) that makes large-scale scientific computing more widely available to New Zealand researchers.

UPDATE: Both workshops filled very quickly. I only do these about once a year; apologies for the imbalance. I have set up a system so people who are potentially interested in future small-class lighting workshops can receive advance notice. More info here.

__________
I'll be teaching two, full-day lighting workshops in the suburban Baltimore/DC area on December 6 and 7.

They are two separate one-day events. These are small-group workshops, with a maximum class size of 12 people each day. These are shooting workshops, and you'll be behind (and/or in front of!) a camera for most of the day.

Assuming you arrive at this class with a basic understanding of f/stops and shutter speeds, you will leave with a strong foundation in the fundamentals of off-camera lighting. You will be comfortable using single and multiple lights both alone and/or balanced with a mix of ambient lighting.

All lighting gear will be provided. We will also provide lunch.

You will need to bring a camera that is adjustable in manual mode and has a hot shoe connection for a flash, a lens that covers normal and/or portrait range, one or two fully charged batteries and an empty storage card. Maybe a notebook and pen if you like.

That's it. Just show up ready to learn and to have fun. Leave the rest to me.


Details

Dates:
December 6 and 7, 2019

Time:
9:30am - 5:30pm

Price:
$259

Location:
Sandy Spring Friends Lyceum
17715 Meeting House Road
Sandy Spring, MD 20860


Note; These are the only small-class lighting workshops I'll be teaching in the US this year. In the past, these have tended to fill very quickly. So if this is something you'd like to do, I'd suggest signing up sooner rather than later.


Sign-Up Links

Friday, December 6 [FRIDAY'S CLASS HAS BEEN FILLED]

Saturday, December 7 [SATURDAY'S CLASS HAS BEEN FILLED]

Who is the top ranked prospect in the upcoming draft? Where does your favorite team pick? Check out our 2020 MLB draft coverage.

Probert had knee surgery a few weeks ago to repair a torn ACL. He actually tore it a few months ago while racing around the yard in jubilation for getting to go for a car ride. Where were we headed? To the vet's new office's grand opening party, of course. She had to take a break from the party to diagnose his injury and prescribe pain medication. So embarrassing. Probert waited a while to have surgery as I was traveling pretty extensively and needed to be home for his rehab (and because the vet said he would be fine to wait). So, a couple of weeks ago, it was done. We went to a different doctor than for Wrigley's surgery a couple of years ago and I was so happy with his care. They gave him a cute cast and even sent him home with a little shoe for going outside. He's off stairs for 6 weeks, so I've been doing a lot of dog-carrying. Here's a photo of he and I. His cast was on for a week and staples came out after two weeks. It's been another two weeks and now there's only two left until he's given the all-clear to return to normal activity. Can't wait!

After Ken Anderson

So like most other Jews I took part in virtual seders this year. It was very emotional and mostly good.

In less than a month, it's been amazing how Jewish communities have adapted to being mostly virtual. My home synagogue went from frowning on use of electronics at all on Shabbat and festivals, to unanimous agreement that we're keeping up the livestreaming once we're allowed back in our physical building, and the most vocal objectors to tech have started leading virtual services. Basically, the first time we did it, with great trepidation, we saw the faces of former members who have moved away, even to other continents, and of disabled and chronically ill members who are only variably able to attend shul in person. And suddenly, we all viscerally understood that using telecomms for religious purposes and to be together as a community is honoring the sabbath, not breaking it.

The other factor is that Zoom is good enough. It's not perfect, but the sound and picture quality, and the interoperability across devices, and the usability for people who aren't really tech savvy, are all good enough that you can just get on and have your virtual gathering. Yes, I know there are privacy and security concerns, but honestly I'm a bit impatient with hearing about those problems from people who live most of their online life in the Google empire. (People who are very strictly Free software only I have more sympathy for, but even then, if you're not providing tech support for people using elderly i-devices who can barely use a web browser, or at least working on products that are actually usable by people who haven't been programming since they could read, then my patience is still limited.)

In less than a month, we've gone from, stick a web cam in front of a service and hope, to people actually creating liturgy for distributed video call services. Even including fake Zoom-bombing by 'Pharaoh' refusing to let the people go, or 'Elijah'. What is still missing is the ritual around the Torah scrolls, and anything more than very limited music; my community pride themselves on their beautiful spontaneous harmonies and that's not really happening. But still, it's been amazing, people are praying together from their homes.

So, I agreed with my family that we would do a Zoom-based seder this year (I'm not quite sure about the coinage 'Zeder'). And planning the liturgy was a bit chaotic, but it's kind of always chaotic. We also all realized that actually, a virtual seder has a rather higher limit on how many people can join together, so instead of having two separate occasions for my family of origin and my family of choice, we all piled in to a huge seder, nine households, and my dad's sister and his oldest friend from uni who sometimes used to join us when we were kids. There was this moment when I was trying to introduce everybody who might not know each other, and I wanted to make it clear that my partners are my partners without getting derailed into a complicated poly coming out thing, and I said something kind of clumsy about usually being a family but less so at the moment under quarantine, and my lovely gf said, no, we're just as much family now, only in different physical places. There's a lot of sadness about not being able to gather in person for the one day in the year when we always manage a family reunion no matter what, but that moment went a long way to make up for it.

I struggled a bit with finding an online Hagaddah. I mean, there are a zillion options, but I found few that met my requirements of being relatively easy to use while you also have your fellow guests in their little video grid in another window, containing all the traditional text in a clear layout that distinguishes it from commentary, and not being intolerably sexist. But we made up seder plates as best as we could, with ingenious substitutions in some houses and the family's heirloom china in others. And mostly we could judge whose turn it was to speak, though it's cognitively extremely taxing compared to being at the same table, and we managed to read the essential words and have some discussions, and Judith (who has been learning Hebrew for about one term) sang the four questions. And we sort of managed to hide and hunt for the afikomen. I hadn't been sure about maintaining the Zoom connection while we were eating, but actually about half the houses dropped out and the rest of us remained and managed to chat and catch up and argue politics and even complete the remainder of a mostly finished Times jumbo crossword over Zoom. Very few aspects of a proper seder meal were lacking!

The thing about a virtual seder is, we finished the main ritual at 10, and clearing up for 2 is much quicker than clearing up for 20, and we didn't have to travel home via spending an hour standing in the doorway talking about how we really must get going, so actually we managed quite an early night. And then the morning service, which I basically never make it to, was online rather than in town, so I showed up. Then second night, my Stoke community completely spontaneously organized a virtual community seder, with no input at all from me. Someone else put together a virtual Hagaddah by combining pages from various sources and making a kind of slide-slow, and got everybody to take part in the reading, and did fun stuff for kids (another pupil from the same Hebrew class where I'm teaching my partners' kid did the four questions) the community just showed up and got on with it. A few stayed away because it's an Orthodox community and some followed the Ashkenazi rabbinate's ruling that Zoom seders are forbidden, but it was lovely to see at least some of my people.

And my sister posted me her amazing Pesach cakes, and she and some other people rallied round to make sure I had matzah, and somehow, it's the most terrible Pesach but it's also a really wonderful Pesach. I am loving reading of everybody else's improvised seders, or their first times leading instead of deferring to their elders, or people who took advantage of the virtual seder to be able to be with both sets of inlaws or even relatives who normally can't stand eachother, or the people who are normally too secular but decided that this year they wanted to mark the occasion. And lots lots lots of people have pointed out that it couldn't be more in the spirit of Pesach that we're all improvising what sanctity we can while we huddle from danger. I was particularly moved by jjhunter's haiku and all the responses:

may it pass over
our elders our sick our home
everyone held safe

Also R' Debbie Young-Somers beautiful meditation on Dayenu:

Perhaps over zoom we will find companionship, or perhaps in the unusual quietness we will create space for the ‘still small voice’. It will be a Passover like no other, but this too shall Pass, and we will have done enough.

Chag sameach to all who celebrate, and extra love to all my Christian friends whose Easter is going to be even weirder than my Pesach has been.

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