"Work Comp Matters" - the central location for all your workers' compensation, employment and labor law matters. Steve Appell hosts this weekly podcast from sunny southern California - presenting some…

"Work Comp Matters" - the central location for all your workers' compensation, employment and labor law matters. Steve Appell hosts this weekly podcast from sunny southern California - presenting some…

"Work Comp Matters" - the central location for all your workers' compensation, employment and labor law matters. Steve Appell hosts this weekly podcast from sunny southern California - presenting some…

"Work Comp Matters" - the central location for all your workers' compensation, employment and labor law matters. Steve Appell hosts this weekly podcast from sunny southern California - presenting some…

This program will educate attorneys and claims adjusters on the various methods for assessing the credibility of psychiatric injury claims. Attorneys will gain a better understanding of psychological testing and…

Whether you are an employer, claims examiner, medical provider or attorney, this program will provide you with a clear understanding and practical approach of how the MTUS and Formulary to…

The Oklahoma Workers' Compensation Commission announced that maximum benefits for injuries, illnesses and deaths will increase 4.3% in January to match an increase in the state's average weekly wage. The state's…

A New York appellate court upheld a grant of summary judgment on a worker’s Labor Law claim for his injuries while dismounting a bucket he was using as a makeshift…

The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration cited a contractor in Crystal Lake, Illinois, for allegedly exposing workers to fall hazards. OSHA said it fined 595 Construction LLC $287,465 for one…

The Alabama Court of Civil Appeals upheld the denial of a widower’s claim for benefits for a nursing home worker’s death after her COVID-19 infection. Rose Harrison worked for the Marion Regional…

The Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation announced that the owner of an electrical service company pleaded guilty to workers’ compensation fraud and has paid restitution of nearly $16,000. BWC’s Special Investigations Department received…

The Kentucky Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal of a citation against a crane service provider but reinstated another. Case: Secretary of the Education & Labor Cabinet v. Sterett Crane and…

The Montana Department of Labor & Industry announced that the maximum weekly compensation rate will increase by 4.84% for the fiscal year starting July 1. “For injuries occurring on or after July…

The Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that an injured worker lost his ability to pursue a civil suit he had filed under a false name and an illegally obtained identity. Rafael Antonio…

Embargoed until 7 a.m. CT/8 a.m. ET, Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2024 DALLAS, Nov. 6, 2024 — Lauren H. Sansing, M.D., M.S., FAHA, professor of neurology at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, will receive the Basic Research Prize from the ...

A number of weeks ago I posted that I was considering putting together a new website. There were several reasons, but two which were of paramount importance: when I initially coded my current website using Dreamweaver there was no concern about how people might view the site on mobile devices.  The situation is very different […]

Puntos destacados de la investigación: Una versión de la puntuación de riesgo de enfermedades cardíacas del Estudio multiétnico de la aterosclerosis (MESA) que no incluía la raza predijo el riesgo de enfermedades cardíacas tan bien como la versión...

This news release contains updated information and data not included in the abstract. Research Highlights: U.S. survival rates from out-of-hospital cardiac arrests fell significantly at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and only slightly ...

ESC, the leading sustainability consultancy in Asia, and Design Sojourn, a renowned design thinking and innovation consultancy, have partnered to launch the Innovating for Sustainability Programme (ISP). This new programme aims to help Singaporean companies capture new innovative business opportunities and enhance their capabilities in...

The post ESC and Design Sojourn’s Innovating for Sustainability Programme Offers Grant Support for Singaporean Companies appeared first on Design Sojourn. Please click above if you cannot see this post.

Running a business is widely recognized as challenging, with the average startup lasting only about five years. While starting a business might seem straightforward, maintaining it proves to be the true test, a reality faced even by large multinational corporations.   Consider this: nearly 90%...

The post Design Thinking: A Catalyst for Business Growth appeared first on Design Sojourn. Please click above if you cannot see this post.

On our website designworkplan we used Google Analytics for collecting visitors data. When we started the blog way back in 2008 it was a good way to find out which content viewers of our website liked and disliked. A user-friendly dashboard to find out important metrics related to viewers of the website.

Google Analytics gave us insights on popular pages and were people visited our website from. This allowed us to target those audiences more and as a result we gained traction to our (design) website. Our content evolves around design, typography and wayfinding. Wayfinding is a design niche that focusses at connecting people to information and environments.

If you want to learn more about wayfinding, please read our page Introduction to Wayfinding.

Over time Google Analytics grew in complexity to an extend we have a hard time understanding the metrics shown in the dashboards.

Google Analytics back to the future

In the beginning Google Analytics was plain and simple, the right fit for our design content. As a content creator we are interested in how visitors perceive information on our website. Information about popular pages, demographics and referral sources are meaningful for establishing an understanding of what visitors are looking for.

Privacy and data collection

Over time we realized Google used our collected data for their benefits. Although Google says to “never” sell any personal information. The collective gathered information through Google Analytics is an immense source of valuable information about browser behaviour online. Not only it provides information on topics people are interested in, it also gives information about reading time, bounce rates and related information people are interested in. Maybe Google doesn’t use the information gathered from our website, but sure it can create a broader sense of what people in general are interested in.

As Google remains to control most of the internet search queries and related internet services such as advertising. Google can combine Analytics and Adwords to maximize their profit ratio. In other words, we believe as Google has a tremendous amount of information from the Analytics part of their database. The Adwords part of Google will benefit from this information, as they are familiar with what people search for and what related information people would be interested in.

Our most popular posts on the blog

Over the years we have published many articles on the blog. Via our visitors data tracking we could see these are our most popular posts:

• A arrow symbol collection, with over 1M (Million) downloads! 56 Free Arrow Symbols & Icons
• The guide into color contrast for sign and wayfinding design. Signs and color contrast
• A free collection of 50 common used symbol signs. Symbol Sign Collection

Our series about typography did very well over the last years, including the following articles:

• An example collection of typeface usages with Arial. Arial is everywhere
• Another collection with FF Meta typeface examples FF Meta is everywhere

Our book series are popular with the following reviews:

• A comprehensive book about wayfinding by David Gibson. The Wayfinding Handbook
• The industry standard for learning about wayfinding by Per Mollerup. Wayfinding > Wayshowing

Over the years we have continued our writing, consider looking at our blog to learn more about wayfinding.

Seamless reading experience

We are wayfinding and information designers. Our core services evolve around information, people and places. Connecting information at the right time and place. As we are browsing the internet, the reading experiences are mostly dreadful. Pop-ups, reminders, boxes, ads, etc.

At our website we want people to enjoy our content, without having to read privacy policies and forcing visitors to click "Accept" buttons. We want to create a seamless reading experience without distractions.

The brilliant website How I Experience Web Today is a fantastic example of most browsing experiences today. So familiar, yet so disappointing experiences.

According to research the average internet user spends ~3 hours online every day, visiting anywhere from 5 up-tp 100 website each day. Imagine the time lost for accepting all those cookies each and every day.

Recently it came to our attention that Google Analytics is in conflicts with European regulations and is not fully GDPR complaint. In relationship to the cookie, accept privacy terms and UX issues it got us to rethink the analytics part of our website.

From past to present

As we want to comply to European guidelines regarding data collection and to create a seamless reading experience, we started to seek an alternative for Google Analytics.

As also found Google Analytics was found illegal in an Austrian court decision. The details of that decision can be found here

From here our search began looking for an alternative way to collect visitors data at our website. We have tried other different analytics services, which include:

• Matomo analytics, a self hosted analytics service. Comes with many features and is free to use. We have found installing the software and dashboard somewhat complicated to use.
• Statscounter, great alternative. The dashboard has a good UX design and the service has many features to track visitors behaviour. Statscounter is an anonymous web tracking service which is good to become GDPR compliant. The paid version starts at $19,- per month.
• Fathom, a very user friendly interface, cookie-free and GDPR proof with anonymous web tracking. Starting at $14,- per month. ($140,- p/y)

Our research was plain simple, trying out the services as mentioned above for ~14 days. The experiment gave us insights on what we wanted to see in our analytics, useful metrics, ease of use, GDPR free. As running websites is NOT our daily focus, we found out our needs are UX and ease of use based. Meaning a single dashboard solution, main metrics and great UX design. In our quest for the Google Analytics alternative we landed at Fathom Analytics.

Use Fathom Analytics

Our basic requirements are formulated as following:

• GDPR Proof and anonymous pageview tracking
• Fast loading script, by-passing ad blockers and no cookies
• Easy to use dashboard, in one overview
• Information about pages, average time on site/page and traffic sources
• Information about devices, browsers and countries
• Possibility to track specific actions or events on webpages (easy funnel)
• Track multiple websites in one dashboard/account

As we deploy multiple websites, a single dashboard solution is ideal to gain overview insights on performance.

Reading experience & privacy

Our website and content creation is focussed on providing niche information for design, typography and wayfinding. In our opinion Google Analytics has become a complex platform with too many functionalities. We understand that professional website creators and builders could use Google Analytics to its full potential. We simply want to put out great content and gather information about the visitors to our website.

Our goal is provide a visitor to our website a seamless reading experience and enjoying our content without annoying pop-ups or related privacy issues.

From now on forward we have disabled Google Analytics from our websites and are fully compliant with European regulation around collecting information from visitors on our website.

Fathom is a paid service which collects anonymous data from visitors on our websites. We are using a $140,- yearly plan for collecting visitors data from our websites.

Full disclosure

We work as a designers for Google Offices, where we develop and create wayfinding solutions for their visitors and employees. We respect Google for their vision and the way how they organize their workplaces, people and environments. At our website (designworkplan) we have chosen to use fathom for reasons stated in this article. We are not paid or sponsored by usefathom. If you want to support us, please use our affiliate link below.

Final thoughts

This post is different from our usual design content, we wanted to be fully transparant in the way how we collect visitors data from our websites. Consider thinking about the way you collect visitors data at your website(s).

If you are planning to use Fathom, consider using our referral link (highly appreciated) Use Fathom referral code CCPSXY

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Sylvain Sarrailh is a French illustrator and concept artist with over a decade of experience in the video game and film industries. He has collaborated with prominent companies such as Ubisoft, Rocksteady, Amplitude, Psyop, Oculus, Insomniac Games, Sony Pictures, and DreamWorks. Sarrailh’s portfolio showcases a diverse range of vibrant and detailed artworks, reflecting his versatility […]

A glitchy theme, built with Blockbase.

If you are in the business world, chances are you’re looking to grow your business in some capacity.  You would probably never say that where you see your company in 5 years is lying stagnant in exactly the same place you’re in now.  Especially in today’s fast paced world, it is almost unheard of for […]

The post Why are you still using that dinosaur phone system? first appeared on TECH Intelligence and is written by Brian Wallace.

As businesses adopt digital to be more efficient, stay ahead of the curve and meet changing demands, their IT teams are faced with the growing challenge of supporting the software infrastructure. Due to the high costs of employing software developers and the scarcity of capable programmers, the pressure on IT teams has become enormous. As...

The post What is the Future of Citizen Development in Modern Businesses? appeared first on noupe.

If you have a profitable side hustle, you’ve probably considered taking your business full-time. However, before you take the leap and transition to life as a full-time entrepreneur, there are a few things you should do. Some tasks are simple, like opening a business bank account and setting concrete goals. Others, like building a professional...

The post 8 Things to Do Before Transitioning Your Small Business From a Side Hustle to Full-Time appeared first on noupe.

About 3 years back we as a Web Design and Development Company, decided to chose WordPress as the only platform we will develop blog/websites on. The progress since then proves that our decision was right. Some of the achievements of WordPress as underlined by Matt in the recent Wordcamp in San Francisco and what it […]

Are you prepared with the financial risk management strategies that can keep your business steady […]

Whether you’re a brand-new startup or a small business trying to scale, you will need nerves of steel when you are dealing with a laundry list of concerns that are not always straightforward to solve. The best solutions are sometimes a bit unorthodox, which, of course, makes them ideal for those who not only want […]

The post Overcoming the Biggest Challenges Facing Growing Businesses appeared first on Designer Daily: graphic and web design blog.

So, you’ve got your business website up and running, but it feels like it’s missing a little something. Maybe the speed isn’t quite there, or you need more features to really enhance user experience.  Sounds familiar? Don’t worry—plugins can help with that. Plugins are like the extra tools you didn’t know you needed. They boost […]

The post Top 8 Must-Have Plugins to Supercharge Your Business Website appeared first on Designer Daily: graphic and web design blog.

Follow along with this Adobe Illustrator tutorial to create a colourful gradient logo design. I’ll show you how Illustrator’s shape builder tool makes it easy to construct the basic vector logo design, then we’ll apply a vibrant colour scheme using gradients. Subscribe to the Spoon Graphics YouTube Channel Source File Download with membership

The post Design a Modern Gradient Logo Using Adobe Illustrator’s Shape Builder Tool appeared first on Spoon Graphics.

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Psychotherapy is as effective treatment for PTSD patients after multiple traumatic events.

Western University researchers are taking a unique global approach to finding an effective treatment for people living with long COVID. Led by Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry professor Dr. Douglas Fraser, the projects represent the first multi-continental research conducted on long COVID, with study sites in Africa and North and South Americas. The long-term effects of long COVID – including symptoms such as brain fog, fatigue and difficulty breathing – can be debilitating and greatly impact quality of life. At least 65 million people around the world are affected by the condition. 

For many people, it’s a ray of hope rooted in research. Recent research is presenting a new way of thinking about suicide prevention, and both experts and patients believe it’s already saving lives.

Today we release our first self-hosted Auphonic Speech Recognition Engine using the open-source Whisper model by OpenAI!
With Whisper, you can now integrate automatic speech recognition in 99 languages into your Auphonic audio post-production workflow, without creating an external account and without extra costs!

Whisper Speech Recognition in Auphonic

So far, Auphonic users had to choose one of our integrated external service providers (Wit.ai, Google Cloud Speech, Amazon Transcribe, Speechmatics) for speech recognition, so audio files were transferred to an external server, using external computing powers, that users had to pay for in their external accounts.

The new Auphonic Speech Recognition is using Whisper, which was published by OpenAI as an open-source project. Open-source means, the publicly shared GitHub repository contains a complete Whisper package including source code, examples, and research results.
However, automatic speech recognition is a very time and hardware-consuming process, that can be incredibly slow using a standard home computer without special GPUs. So we decided to integrate this service and offer you automatic speech recognition (ASR) by Whisper processed on our own hardware, just like any other Auphonic processing task, giving you quite some benefits:

• No external account is needed anymore to run ASR in Auphonic.
• Your data doesn't leave our Auphonic servers for ASR processing.
• No extra costs for external ASR services.
• Additional Auphonic pre- and post-processing for more accurate ASR, especially for Multitrack Productions.
• The quality of Whisper ASR is absolutely comparable to the “best” services in our comparison table.

How to use Whisper?

To use the Auphonic Whisper integration, you just have to create a production or preset as you are used to and select “Auphonic Whisper ASR” as “Service” in the section Speech Recognition.
This option will automatically appear for Beta and paying users. If you are a free user but want to try Whisper: please just ask for access!

When your Auphonic speech recognition is done, you can download your transcript in different formats and may edit or share your transcript with the Auphonic Transcript Editor.
For more details about all our integrated speech recognition services, please visit our Speech Recognition Help and watch this channel for Whisper updates – soon to come.

Why Beta?

We decided to launch Whisper for Beta and paying users only, as Whisper was just published end of September and there was not enough time to test every single use case sufficiently.
Another issue is the required computing power: for suitable scaling of the GPU infrastructure, we need a beta phase to test the service while we are monitoring the hardware usage, to make sure there are no server overloads.

Conclusion

Automatic speech recognition services are evolving very quickly, and we've seen major improvements over the past few years.
With Whisper, we can now perform speech recognition without extra costs on our own GPU hardware, no external services are required anymore.

Auphonic Whisper ASR is available for Beta and paying users now, free users can ask for Beta access.
You are very welcome to send us feedback (directly in the production interface or via email), whether you notice something that works particularly well or discover any problems.
Your feedback is a great help to improve the system!

We're excited to announce the release of our new speaker diarization feature! With our latest update, we can now detect individual speakers within a single audio recording, allowing users to see precisely who said what and when. This information is then reflected in the transcript.
Previously, this feature was only available in Multitrack Productions.

What is Speaker Diarization?

Speaker diarization is the process of identifying different speakers and segmenting an audio file accordingly, making it easier to accurately determine who said what. This is particularly useful in scenarios like meeting recordings, interviews, and podcasts involving multiple speakers.

What's New

Until now, Auphonic users had to use our Multitrack Production Workflow to gain access to speaker identification. With our recent update, this feature is now also accessible for single track productions, thereby further simplifying our workflow.

How It Works

When selecting Auphonic Whisper ASR as your speech recognition engine on our production page, the option to use “Speaker Detection” appears. You can select the number of speakers in the recording yourself, or have the AI identify and label them automatically.

Select "speaker detection" in the speech recognition menu

The identified speakers will then be shown next to what they said in the captions of our audio player and within the generated transcript. We know exactly who is saying what at any given time.

If you need to change speakers' names, you can edit them in our Transcript Editor. By changing the name of the speaker, the changes will be applied automatically within the whole transcript.

Click here for an example transcript to play around with!

The transcript editor also lets you edit the generated transcript's content and correct any mistakes. This gives our users the final say in quality control.

For more information on how to use our transcript editor, click here!

Conclusion

With our newly released speaker detection feature for single track productions, we simplified the automatic transcription process even further. You can drop a single audio file into our algorithms, the AI automatically detects and transcribes its contents and attributes speakers correctly. And if the model should unexpectedly be wrong at any time, you can correct it in our Transcript Editor.

Feedback

We're looking forward to having you utilize our new speaker diarization feature!
Please, feel free to send us feedback through our Contact Form or submit it directly in the status page of your production.
Happy detecting!

In the midst of a creative marathon, the sprint towards the finish line can feel all-consuming. For me, that’s been the reality as I hammer out the final chapters of my next book. Picture it: weeks of rewrites, a direction that felt “off” until it was nearly scrapped and started anew. It’s a doozy of a process, one that demands the lion’s share of my attention and energy as I push to wrap things up for my publisher. Yet, amid this whirlwind of deadlines and word counts, I’ve stumbled upon a not-so-secret secret to maintaining not just my sanity, but also my creative spark: Play. Yes, play. Those moments of uninhibited, carefree joy that seem diametrically opposed to the seriousness of looming deadlines. But here’s the thing—integrating brief, playful breaks into your work routine can be incredibly rejuvenating and is often the overlooked ingredient in making great stuff. Harnessing the Power of Play During this intense writing phase, I’ve found solace in a few key activities, which, while they might seem like diversions, are actually vital to my process. For starters, music has been a cornerstone of my creative life, notably during the early days of the Chase Jarvis LIVE...

The post Surprising Secret to Boosting Productivity first appeared on Chase Jarvis.

The post Surprising Secret to Boosting Productivity appeared first on Chase Jarvis.

Ever find yourself chasing after more, only to feel emptier than before? It’s a paradox many of us live: the more we strive for, the less satisfied we become. When does what you do and what you have become enough? It’s a question we rarely ask ourselves. Our society pushes the myth that having more—more money, more stuff, more accolades—is the ultimate path to happiness and success. But here’s the thing: it’s a myth, and like all myths, it’s worth challenging. The Illusion of More We’re bombarded daily with messages that glorify the hustle and celebrate accumulation. Social media feeds us a never-ending stream of highlight reels, making it seem like everyone else has it all. This constant chase for more often leads to a sense of emptiness rather than fulfillment. The Problem with Always Wanting More Our desire for more is deeply ingrained in our culture. We’re never satisfied and always want more—more money, more clothes, more toys, more square feet, more followers. This insatiable pursuit creates a cycle of never-ending wants and desires. No matter how much we accumulate or achieve, there is always something more to strive for, making true contentment elusive. Our natural state is one...

The post Why Chasing More Is Leaving Us Empty first appeared on Chase Jarvis.

The post Why Chasing More Is Leaving Us Empty appeared first on Chase Jarvis.

Payam Zamani’s journey from refugee to tech mogul is a masterclass in resilience and innovation for creators and entrepreneurs. At 16, Payam fled religious persecution in Iran, arriving in the U.S. with just $75 in his pocket. Within 11 years, he had founded AutoWeb, a company he would later take public for over a billion dollars. His story is not just about success against the odds, but about transforming challenges into catalysts for growth and innovation.For creators and entrepreneurs in their 30s and 40s, Payam’s experiences offer valuable insights on how to leverage adversity. Here are seven ways you can turn challenges into your greatest business assets: 1. Embrace Difficult Journeys as Opportunities for Growth Payam’s harrowing escape from Iran taught him to view challenges as opportunities rather than obstacles. In business, this mindset can help you navigate market volatility and emerge stronger from crises. Action Step: When faced with a setback, ask yourself, “What can I learn from this? How can this experience make me and my business stronger?” 2. Cultivate Hope as a Driving Force Despite facing extreme adversity, Payam maintained hope for a better future. This hope became a powerful motivator, driving him to pursue opportunities and...

The post 7 Ways to Turn Adversity into Your Greatest Business Asset first appeared on Chase Jarvis.

The post 7 Ways to Turn Adversity into Your Greatest Business Asset appeared first on Chase Jarvis.

Focus on mastering your craft rather than chasing followers. Real influence comes from consistently creating meaningful work and engaging with your community.

The post Stop Chasing Followers: Why Real Influence Comes from Mastery first appeared on Chase Jarvis.

The post Stop Chasing Followers: Why Real Influence Comes from Mastery appeared first on Chase Jarvis.

I am *ridiculously* excited to announce a new edition of data cuisine workshop. This time, it is the Data Cuisine Workshop Barcelona! The workshop is happening in coordination with CCCB, the Big Bang Data exhibition, and Sónar. For the culinary side of the project, we will collaborate with Sebastian Velilla — a chef who has […]

The Data Cuisine Workshop Barcelona was fantastic, we had a really great time. Big thanks to my collaborators Dr. Susanne Jaschko and Sebastian Velilla, thanks to Jose Luis de Vicente and Olga Subiros for bringing us over, and last but not least for our great participants for the crazy dish ideas they came up with! […]

In today’s fast-paced digital marketplace, the way customers experience your product can make or break your business. But what exactly is Product Experience Management, and why is it so crucial for your business’s success? Let’s explore this essential aspect of [...]

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The post What is Product Experience Management & Why Is It Crucial for Your Business? first appeared on CSS Reset.

When exploring the arsenal of digital marketing tools, the concepts of email signature banner prominently feature as pivotal elements for interaction and outreach within the expansive domain of email marketing. While at a glance they may appear similar, email signatures [...]

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The post Harnessing the Power of Email Signatures and Banners in Digital Marketing first appeared on CSS Reset.