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Category: misc
Owning an electric vehicle
It looks a little bit like this
Recently I bought a fully electric powered car, second hand. It's a 24kwh, Nissan Leaf Tekna with a 2015 number plate approaching 28k mileage, bought from a dealer for £9.5k (plus an 'admin fee', which I later found out was optional, bah!).
It was £700 off in a clearance sale which seemed genuine – it looks like it had been sitting around in the dealer for 8 months. This is a concern as if a electric car battery is on high charge, having it sitting around unused can be a bad thing, and general car dealers might well not know this.
The car was listed as having an onboard 3.3kw charger, but it has the expensive option of a 6.6kw charger, which allows it to be charged twice as fast on middling kinds of chargers. It's apparently quite common for dealers to not know what they're selling, and in this case I think it made the car a reasonable deal.
There are scare stories of having to replace the main car battery every five years, I think thanks to rumours spread by Top Gear (a UK entertainment show that pretends to be about cars). The battery on this one is completely fine, with the dash showing the maximum of 12 bars of battery health, despite approaching its fifth birthday. It is possible for dealers to reset this so you have to be careful, but it's stayed at 12 so I think it's good. You can get more detailed information by plugging in an 'OBD-II dongle' and reading data off the battery management system using an Android app. However despite buying two different dongles (a wifi and a bluetooth one) I still haven't got this working..
[Update: I got the bluetooth dongle working finally, not sure what was wrong.. It's showing 91.4% state of health, not bad!]
Driving range is heavily dependent on driving style and weather – you get to drive further on a single charge in summer, but it seems I can comfortably get 60 miles at the moment and still have 10-20 miles range on reserve for peace of mind. You need this because sometimes public chargers are out of action, or "ICEd" – occupied by a fossil fuel-driven car (ICE = internal combustion engine) using a charging spot as a parking space. There's a lot of discussion about the people who do this (sometimes known as ICEholes) on the forums.
There's also a lot of misinformation on the forums. If you do get a OBD-II dongle working you can get an accurate-looking percentage about battery state of health, and this goes up if you do a 'rapid charge'. But in truth, the state of health number is a guess, and it seems that doing too many rapid charges are actually bad for your battery health. At least this article seems fairly evidence based, and instead says that resting your battery on low charge seems to help it recover.
So what does it feel like to drive? After my old ford fiesta, it's absolutely amazing. It's super quiet, which means it's really great for listening to music (on the bose 2.1 system). It has heated seats and steering wheel (this is amazing, and also much more efficient than the main heating system, which shaves some miles off the range). Plus 360 camera for parking (top-down, early grand theft auto style), and so on.. I learned to drive late in life, but hired a lot of cars in the past and have never really enjoyed driving at all before. I'd still much prefer a nice train journey for longer distance, but this is actually not bad.
EV drivers talk about 'range anxiety', and it is real. The longest drive I did so far was to the arcade club in Leeds, which happened to have free vend EV charge spaces. Thanks to the 6.6kw charger it was fully charged during our 2-3 hour visit, ready for the return journey. That was a 'destination charger' on 'fast charge'. At home I've been using trickle charge off a standard 3 pin plug, which takes longer but charges fully overnight (I've ordered a podpoint which will allow the full 6.6kw charge at home). We're planning a longer trip to the south coast which will need a few charges on the way.. This is where those rapid charges come in, in my old 24kwh model (newer Leafs are up to 64kwh) this means stopping around every 50-60 miles to charge up for 20 minutes or so. You basically have to stop for X minutes in order to go X miles, so it doesn't really take you any longer to stop more often, as long as the chargers are all on your route. For battery chemistry reasons you can only rapid charge up to 80%, then it goes slow enough to not be worth waiting around for.. Which means your first leg from 100% can be a bit longer, and you can probably get back up to 100% over lunch.. Lets see how that goes.
[Update: just did a drive from Sheffield to Manchester, didn't quite have the charge for the return journey, and had a stressful half hour or so finding a spare place to charge.. Took a few attempts in city centre traffic, but got a (free!) charge in the end. Not convenient though, I should have just parked up anywhere and got a rapid charge on the motorway on the way home, or just taken the train..]
Running costs are super low. Without an ICE, there's not much to go wrong, and these cars have proved reliable. 'Fuel' is often free, or at worst several times cheaper than petrol/diesel. There's no vehicle tax (for now), and on-street parking and all the council car parks in Sheffield is free (you have to register first). If/when EV sales take off, this is all subject to change.. But electricity will always be cheaper than petrol.
In terms of local air pollution, they're great. Brake pads are hardly used (the energy goes back into the battery via a generator), cutting down on airborne fine particulates. You tend to drive more smoothly to conserve energy, which I naively guess means less tyre wear in the air. Plus of course, there's no exhaust. We use green energy at home (good energy), and the chargers tend to run off green energy too. (I realise it all comes via the national grid, but please save me that argument..)
In terms of impact on the climate, things are less clear. The impact of manufacturing a car and battery is very high. Probably better than a 'conventional' ICE, and they seem to be lasting longer too, but hey. EVs are not The Answer. But still, at least when you drive them you're not contributing to illegal and extremely dangerous levels of local air pollution.
That said, electricity companies are currently experimenting with using EVs for energy storage. All those batteries could really help solve how to smooth out renewable but intermittent energy from wind and solar. They're testing whether they can do this without causing early battery degradation. Definitely plausible.
In privacy terms it's a bit of a disaster.. I didn't have to sign up with Nissan, but now I have, they seem to know where my car is at all times. On the plus side so do I, and I can check its charge remotely, and get loads of stats and stuff.
Anyway, it seems good overall. Eventually the battery will show degradation, but nonetheless I have a feeling now is a good time to buy second hand. Electric motors don't wear like combustion engines, and third parties are starting to replace EV batteries with new ones of higher capacity than the originals. EV batteries are currently made with limited materials such as cobalt, so it's not guaranteed that they'll get cheaper.. But maybe technology will soon advance to the point where we work around these dependencies, and I'll be able to swap in a new one for relatively little. That glosses over the conflict and pollution around battery manufacture, but again, that probably works out considerably better than oil..
Pattern and decoration
Posted in misc - 2020-02-21 - 3 Comments
I finally took some time to watch the video recordings of the AlgoMech Symposium on Dancing and Braiding, which I co-organised but couldn't attend, because I was running around co-organising the rest of the Algomech festival at the time. I was struck by Berit Greinke asking the question "What more can repeat patterns do?" in the second talk in this panel shared with the Kate Sicchio and chaired by Victoria Mitchell. Later in response to a perceptive point from an unseen audience member (please shout if it's you!) Berit points out that repeat patterns haven't been in favour in textile design, being dismissed as "decorative" (see 53m30s). As an outsider, I found this surprising, isn't textiles all about pattern? But it's also the case in classical music, where music and pattern seem synonymous, but accusing a composer of making patterns would be extremely insulting. In a fantastic blog post Andrew Hugill notes that it ".. implies that you have nothing original to say and fall back on mechanical formulae." It's super interesting to me to see "mechanical formulae" as pejorative, which I can feel even though I run a whole festival celebrating algorithmic and mechanical movement!
Both Berit and Andrew are making the same point – that the word pattern means different things in different fields. But in a way it seems it isn't taken seriously by the highbrow in any field. Andrew points out that designers talk about "depatterning" as important – you start with a pattern in order to get away from it. Berit is implying that once you link meanings of pattern across two or more fields, you get to see how it is misunderstood. You then see pattern as active structure, that is, after all, all around us.
I'm also reminded of Dave Griffiths demonstrating his incredible Fluxus live coding environment many years ago at an event in Rotterdam, with a recursive unfolding form of a fern-like structure, a standard Fluxus demo that just takes a couple of lines. A media design theorist in the audience gave a withering response by pointing out that the animated visual results were 'decorative'. I suppose he partly meant that this technical demo wasn't high minded conceptual art (which shouldn't be surprising, introductory, technical demos rarely are), but I think there is something here about the rejection of fractals and other patterns because they come from an identifiable procedure. It's as though if you can tell how something was made, then it is worthless. Running counter to this view, Dave's work always has the principles of openness in its foundations..
I think that from the outside, almost anyone would argue that the fields of textiles and music are all about pattern. But from the inside, composers, textile design academics and media theorists alike reject pattern as decorative, and therefore besides the point and theoretically worthless. This is a disciplinary blindness. We have to rise above these fields to really see pattern for what it is – active structures of making, that allow us to reach beyond our imaginations.
Time spirals
I've long thought about time in Tidal as a spiral – where cycles develop over time. I don't think I've really made the connection to vinyl before though. Alexandra posted a DJ battle between D-Styles and Qbert to fb, which lead me to watch this from D-Styles:
The whole thing is great but the one-step back two-steps forward bit from around 1m15s reminded me a lot of shifting patterns in Tidal. I think seeing this repeated gliding happening on a slower scale has really opened up the complexities of turntablism as a whole for me.
It's also inspiring because it helps me see Tidal's limitations. Tidal has a spiral timeline which you can manipulate, but not in the same way. When I've tried scratching in the past it's super difficult, I don't know anything about it really but it feels like you're constantly managing the state of the record.. It's one thing to scratch the record and totally another to recover from the needle ending up in a different point in the timeline. I could never work it out by myself.
Tidal doesn't suffer from this problem because there is no state – you don't move time, you jump between different manipulations of time. For example if you reverse time, it's not like moving backwards from where you are. Instead you jump to a different reality when time was always reversed. This is clearer with e.g. slowing down time. If you halve time you might play half a cycle, but then if you double time Tidal won't continue from halfway through the cycle.. It'll act as if time always was doubled, and therefore continue from the start of a cycle some way into the future. In terms of a turntable, if you add slow 2 to a pattern, you're not doing something like moving the pitch slider down, you're doing something more like swapping the record with another one with the music recorded slower, and putting the needle on the same place as the original.. It'll sound slower, but you'll have jumped to a different part of the track. It's hard to imagine DJing under these circumstances..
Watching this video it's clear this 'problem' of state isn't a problem at all, but fundamental to the music. It would be amazing if you could do something like this in Tidal – not slow down a pattern, but slow down the timeline.. I.e. add the ability to pattern changes to time, rather than jump around the timeline. I'll have to think about this, it could be something easy to implement that I just have never thought about..
Patternuary
I've been making a video every day this month as part of '#jamuary', got as far of the 12th so far, hoping to get the full set. The youtube playlist is above, and I'm also uploading to the Internet Archive.
I'm off on a minitour this week, linking up Bilbao, Barcelona and Paris by train:
Weds 6th Nov Bilbao – Concert at Azkuna Zentroa
Thurs 7th Nov Barcelona – Algorave @ Hangar (free!)
Thurs 7th+ Fri 8th Nov Barcelona – TidalCycles workshop @ Hangar
Sat 9th Nov Paris – NØ LIVE CODING MEETUP
Looking forward !
Ojack in the lab
I was happy to host Olivia Jack in the slaboratory (my studio in Sheffield) a couple of weeks ago, between the Live Code Summerschool and workshops at Diversityfest in Rotherham Show. Olivia is the creator of Hydra, a web-based system taking over a good portion of the live coding VJ world with feedback patterns heavily inspired by analogue video synthesis techniques. We had some time for collaboration, and recorded a couple of the things we made. Olivia worked some of her experiments in reading pixel data into kind of pattern generating machines, which she send to my laptop over the OSC protocol so I could sonify them:
There's also some subtle audio input into the above patch, creating a feedback loop. This felt like a really nice a/v collaboration. I've worked with a lot of VJs and other visual artists, and this was the first time I was really looking at visual work while still focused on the code and sound. We tried a range of things but found the above minimalism approach worked great, getting to the point where it was hardly possible to edit code any more because it was so trance-inducing.
We used a HDMI capture card to combine the a/v on my laptop for the recording, which meant I had a window showing Olivia's desktop on my screen, next to my code. This simple technological tweak helped a surprising amount. Before this I didn't know it was possible to collaborate with a visualist on this level, because my usual focussed code+sound feedback loop is so damn engrossing. Lots to think about.
The above collab was a bit less minimal, but we tried a lot of things along the way including sampling pixels in circles, and came back to good ol' sixteen step sequencing on three levels, mapping from brightness to audio filtering in quite a direct way. A lot of fun and the possibilities really open up when Olivia starts mixing in some Hydra patterns to mess with video.
One experiment we didn't manage to film was using tidal.pegjs by Charlie Roberts and Mariana Pachon Puentes. It's an implementation of Tidal's mini-notation for polyrhythmic sequences, and although it's still a little bit buggy (if not matching with Tidal's behaviour is a bug) but I think has loads of potential for enabling collaboration through shared metre.
By this I mean sharing underlying a single pattern or sequence between live coders, where anyone can edit it at any time. Rather than playing the sequence directly, each person could use it as a base for pattern transformation, shifting it, doubling it up, making it interfere with other sequences / patterns and so on.. But underlying everything would be this metrical structure. The magic would then come when someone changes that underlying pattern – everything would change at once, hopefully with a perceivable relationship in terms of changing complexity, tactus/tatum and so on. A super simple idea but I think it'd be a lot of fun..
Anyway it was great to find some time to collaborate with Olivia on this, and hopefully will have some outcomes in performance when we're next in the same city..
This is also something I want to do a lot more of. In this past I've organised a lot of algoraves etc where friends have travelled to perform but when I've hardly had a chance to talk to them let alone collaborate. So let me know if you're passing through!
Hack Circus podcast
I had a nice chat with the amazing Leila Johnston recently, and she put it on the internet ! We talked about live coding, weaving and building communities. You can listen on the Hack Circus podcast website or on Apple iplayer, Spotify or playerFM, where you should definitely click subscribe.
Leila's things are always amazing by the way, check out the Daily Leila, and all the other things. She'll be talking about some of her AI projects in Sheffield on 12th October, at an event I'm putting together as part of No Bounds festival, more on that very soon..
Summer school performances
The livecode summerschool a few weeks back was a huge success I thought. We had around 40 people in Sheffield, learning Foxdot and Hydra from their creators Ryan and Olivia, and learning Tidal from me and Lucy Cheesman, with the students smashing it with really great performances at the end, far beyond my expectations.
Judging by the feedback, the Tidal workshop went really well (well, all three did), with Lucy reportedly being a better teacher but backed up by my viewpoints as Tidal creator. We spent some time working up a modular worksheet-based approach, with focus on how to perform as well as the technical side of language learning, which I think went really well, and has started me thinking again about the possibility about building them up into something like a Tidal 'book'. Lets see!
The bit of the summer school that made it out to the evening Peak District excursion!
Ten years of TidalCycles
I started working on musical patterns in Haskell in 2006 (see this old blog post).
But only really shared work on what was to become TidalCycles in 2009 (see Patterns in Haskell and Haskell Hack
So I guess TidalCycles is now 10 years old. Happy birthday!
So it's nice that I've just posted a fresh insight I just had into the way Tidal combines patterns, over on the PENELOPE blog. Pure functional pattern is the gift that keeps giving, looking forward to many more years of insights with this thing.
It was so great working with hmurd + getting two rooms of corsica filled with amazing a/v + great audience! We proved it's possible to fill a two-roomed event in a top-notch venue with this live coding stuff, and pay everyone almost half-decently (including ourselves!).
It was also time consuming and stressful, and left no time to develop the CCAIFOOD link-up between CCAI and hellocatfood. I also feel I need to explore new ideas and in the process get some forever projects completed.
So I'm going to try to take a moratorium on algorave organisation for a while. Will still be organising some other activities – running the live code summer school, working with no bounds fest on algorave stuff (but with artist development and more diffused through their programme), and hopefully working with a Roma girls group on bringing live coding to a festival in Rotherham.. But focused on artistic development and community building rather than big algoraves (although starting advanced planning for algomech #4 already..).
I have a kind of addiction to event organisation but now I just feel I need more time to focus on my own arts research. If anyone else wants to do algoraves in Sheffield (or elsewhere) then I'm very happy to share tips + resources though! I'll have some new projects that I could propose too :)


Has Twitter signed its own death warrant?
Twitter's decision to block LinkedIn and other "inconsistent" applications from using its data feed could kill the Twitter developer ecosystem, at exactly the time it needs it to grow revenue.
Like most online services, Twitter has rules about the way developers of third-party applications can use its application programming interface (API). But Twitter's are stricter than most, going beyond technical and legal rules that help prevent overloading the network or getting people sued, to include "display guidelines" of how tweets must appear in different contexts.
When the Patch Monday podcast discussed Twitter on its fifth birthday in March 2011, Australian developer Jeff Waugh dismissed concerns about the API rules.
"My perspective on it, having read the announcement email and their new terms of service, is that it's much more about focus than kicking people out or denying clients access or anything like that," Waugh said. "Twitter has to build a business out of this amazing platform that they've created."
That business imperative is becoming urgent.
Twitter is now valued at US$8.4 billion, following a US$300 million investment in December 2011 from Saudi prince Al Waleed Bin Talal. The company hopes to float on the stock market in a year or so, yet its estimated revenues in 2011 was a mere US$140 million, expected to grow to only US$260 million in 2012. That will need to improve to prevent Twitter's share price doing a Facebook-plummet.
And now Twitter is kicking people out.
LinkedIn has been denied access. Twitter's blog post on the issue hints at further evictions to come, with even stricter rules to be announced in the next few weeks.
On Patch Monday this week, we discuss Twitter's future: it's a picture of uncertainty.
In Twitter's early days, the openness of its API was "kind of unprecedented", according to Henare Degan, co-founder of Bleeply, who make Twitter tools for business. Third-party developers were told that Twitter, itself, didn't want to build client software. Now, that's changed.
"They've worked out what their place is in the world, and they're now trying to say 'This is part of our core functionality, we don't want you to do this', [and] they were really explicit about saying 'Don't build clients that do exactly what Twitter does'. [But] people were like, 'Hang on, but you actually told us to do that originally," Degan said.
Twitter is trying to turn into Facebook, said Leslie Nassar, technology director at digital agency Amnesia Razorfish and founder of TweeVee TV, which provides tools for integrating Twitter with live television.
"To me, they're really just turning into every other social network ... Facebook with 140 characters. Facebook with less functionality," he said.
"Facebook just went public and, for whatever reason, Twitter has made all these changes that are making them more and more like Facebook. And one of the first changes has been to have a similar regard for developers, where they'll just change the terms whenever they feel like it."
TV programs may use Twitter for live interaction at the moment, but Nassar said that networks could easily switch to something else and the fans would follow them. Both TweeVee TV and Bleeply could easily integrate a new network's messaging into their products, the developers said.
Twitter's blog post is all about making things better for marketers, creating "more interactive experiences within expanded Tweets", making it easy for users to "discover even more great content on Twitter".
"The technology behind expanded Tweets — Twitter cards — gives developers and publishers a way to tell richer stories on Twitter, directly within Tweets, and drive traffic back to their sites," the company wrote.
Twitter has discovered that marketing is their real business, according Kate Carruthers, business strategist and founder of Social Innovation.
"A lot of people on Twitter are wanting to get their messages out, and that's why Promoted Tweets is working for them," she said. That's creating a tension between Twitter's original user base, which came out of the creative and developer communities, and its new role as a mass market platform.
Said Nassar: "If you want to see what the future of Twitter is, and get some evidence of the MySpaceification of the Facebookification of Twitter, I think you need to look at these new brand pages that they've started experimenting with, like [the one for] NASCAR."
But can Twitter negotiate this change and increase revenue, without alienating users and developers?
To leave an audio comment on the program, Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney 02 8011 3733.
Running time: 34 minutes, 15 seconds.


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Sanctuary of Fátima and Coimbra City Tour
Follow in the footsteps of pilgrims and visit the magnificent Sanctuary of Fátima. Learn about the Marian apparitions, and then visit the historical university city of Coimbra.
Spanish, English, French, Portuguese
Pickup possible at hotels between Porto and Vila Nova de Gaia.
English Spanish French Portuguese
Visit the legendary Sanctuary of Fátima
See the magnificent cathedral in the historic heart of Coimbra
Marvel at the UNESCO World Heritage monuments of the University of Coimbra
Visit one of the great religious centers of Portugal on a full-day tour to the Sanctuary of Fátima in Cova da Iria. Learn about the Marian apparitions that took place at the site in May 1917. Look inside the magnificent Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary and other religious monuments, before visiting the Chapel of the Apparitions at the very heart of the sanctuary.
Attracting more than 5 million visitors per year, Fátima is one of the largest sanctuaries in the world and the most popular pilgrimages occur in October and on May 12 and 13 on the anniversary of the visions. See the house of the shepherd that the Virgin Mary appeared before, and then continue to the university city of Coimbra.
Explore the historic center to see medieval houses among the majestic Renaissance monuments. Discover remnants of the Roman Empire, and go to the university area to admire the UNESCO World Heritage buildings of one of the oldest universities in the world.
Free time for religious activities
• This tour is subject to availability
• Guides are available in Portuguese, English, Spanish, and French
• Children under 5 years old are free of charge
Highlights of Fátima & Coimbra Tour
Fátima and Coimbra Full-Day Tour from Porto
From Porto: Fátima and Coimbra Full-Day Private Tour
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Little hope of breakthrough as US, Russia hold high-stakes Ukraine talks
last updated: Jan 21,2022
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken (L) greets Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov before their meeting, in Geneva, on January 21, 2022. Washington and Moscow's top diplomats meet in Geneva in a bid for a solution over Ukraine. The United States increasingly fears that Russia will invade despite warnings of severe reprisals. (Photo: AFP)
Geneva, Switzerland — On Friday, Washington and Moscow's top diplomats met in Geneva for high-stakes talks on Ukraine, but with little hope of a breakthrough that would ease fears of a Russian invasion. اضافة اعلان
The talks between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov come just 11 days after their deputies met in Geneva and agreed to preserve dialogue amid Russia's build-up of tens of thousands of troops on Ukraine's border.
Blinken and his team arrived at Geneva's lakeside luxury Hotel President Wilson shortly before the meeting began at 11:00 (1000 GMT), and were ushered into a conference room decked out with lavender orchids and US and Russian flags.
"You have said you are not expecting any breakthroughs," Lavrov said as the talks began.
"We are not expecting a breakthrough from this meeting either, we are expecting answers to our concrete questions," Lavrov said.
Blinken stressed that Washington remained open to finding a diplomatic solution, but warned of a "united, swift and severe" response if Russia does invade Ukraine.
Blinken and Lavrov are expected to have a concise exchange as they determine whether diplomacy remains possible.
Veteran diplomats who have encountered each other for years, Blinken is known for his unflappable calm and Lavrov for his mordant intensity.
President Joe Biden bluntly assessed on Wednesday that his counterpart Vladimir Putin is likely to "move in" on Ukraine and warned of a "disaster for Russia".
The United States and its allies have warned of severe economic sanctions for an invasion.
- Cold War redux? -
Russia, which already fuels a deadly insurgency in eastern Ukraine that has killed more than 13,000 people since 2014, has demanded guarantees that NATO never admit the former Soviet republic or expand otherwise in Moscow's old sphere.
The United States has declared the idea a "non-starter" and accused Russia of undermining Europe's post-Cold War order by bullying another country into submission.
Russia went a step further in its demands on Friday, with the foreign ministry saying Moscow wants the "withdrawal of foreign forces, hardware and arms" from countries that were not NATO members before 1997, including Bulgaria and Romania.
Blinken headed to Geneva after a solidarity trip to Kyiv and talks with Britain, France, and Germany in Berlin.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned on Friday that Russia would pay a "considerable and serious price" if it invades Ukraine.
In a phone call on Thursday evening, the two leaders agreed that "further military aggression by Russia against Ukraine must be averted" and there would be consequences if the situation were to escalate, the German chancellery said.
Even while rejecting the core Russian demands, the Biden administration has said it is willing to speak to Moscow about its security concerns.
One proposal by the United States is to revive restrictions on missiles in Europe that had been set by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a Cold War deal trashed by former president Donald Trump's administration as it accused Moscow of violations.
- US says clock is ticking -
The Biden administration has also offered more transparency on military exercises.
Russia has not rejected the proposals but says that its core concern is Ukraine. On Thursday, Russia announced massive naval drills in the Atlantic, Pacific, Arctic, and Mediterranean as a show of force.
Blinken has called for Putin to choose the "peaceful path" of diplomacy and, hoping to find common ground, said he will not hand a formal response to Lavrov on Russia's proposals, which were presented last month in unusual detail as draft treaties.
After their meeting, Lavrov and Blinken will head to the cameras for potentially dueling accounts of what transpired.
The United States has warned that the clock is ticking, putting forward intelligence alleging that an invasion could come shortly and be preceded by a "false-flag" operation as Russia tries to trigger a pretext against Ukraine.
Lawmakers in Russia's parliament have put forward a bill that would ask Putin to recognize the independence of two pro-Moscow separatist territories in Ukraine, Donetsk, and Lugansk.
Lower house speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said Friday that such a move -- sure to enrage Ukraine and prompt Western condemnation -- would be "a solution to provide for the security of our citizens and countrymen" in the two regions.
On Friday, Ukraine's military intelligence service accused Russia of sending fresh arms and equipment to the rebels since the start of this month, including tanks, artillery and ammunition.
Read more Region and World news
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Catching up with Author Nina Kaye
March 11, 2020 March 10, 2020 sandybarker
It is a pleasure to welcome fellow author, Nina Kaye to my blog. I asked her some questions about her debut novel, The Gin Lover's Guide to Dating, which I absolutely loved, and about her work as an author.
Tell us what inspired you to write The Gin Lover's Guide to Dating?
The seed of my debut novel, The Gin Lover's Guide to Dating, was first planted when my literary agent, Kate Nash, said to me, 'whatever you write about, make sure it has gin in it'. But obviously there was more to it than that. The three key ingredients were the beautiful setting of Edinburgh, my experience working in the hospitality industry, and (of course) my appreciation of gin! It was important to me to bring real life issues into my novel, but I also wanted to show the light-hearted side of life in Scotland. I've actually written a guest blog post on 'the story behind my story'. You can read it here.
I started writing properly just over five and a half years ago when I was fighting a debilitating illness and desperate to get my life back. This is a story I intend to share when I'm able to bring my most recent work in progress to my readers, so I'll park that for now and focus on my journey to publication instead.
My initial goal was to see if I could write a full-length novel. It was daunting to begin with, but it came more easily than I expected, and after six months I had my first full draft. Then, after lots of editing to shape and polish it, I asked myself: what next? I knew nothing about the publishing industry, so I did some research and decided I had nothing to lose by querying with Literary Agents. Fifteen rejections later (thankfully, with encouraging feedback!), I accepted that my first novel wasn't going to be my big break and self-published instead. But a month later, a late response came back from my querying, and this turned into an offer of representation.
After more shaping and polishing, my manuscript went on submission to publishers for their consideration. I spent months biting my nails as one rejection after another flowed into my inbox (but with very encouraging feedback once again). By then, I was writing book number two and the focus had shifted to that. We then went through the same process, and first came the inevitable flurry of rejections – which I was used to by then. People kept saying to me, all it takes it one person to say 'yes', and they were right. The day my publishing offer flashed up as a notification on my phone, my legs went to jelly and I shared an emotional hug with a perfect stranger in the ladies toilets of my then workplace.
That was last June and after working closely with my publisher on yet more shaping and polishing, my debut novel, The Gin Lover's Guide to Dating, was released in November. It's been an amazing (and nerve wracking!) process, and I'm so glad I kept at it. Now my focus is on building my profile as an author and getting visibility for my book.
There's so much I love about being an author. Someone once referred to me as a 'frustrated creative' and that label really struck a chord. In my day job I'm creative, but I'm also very structured and focused – and it's those skills that people tend to seek me out for most often. I've long needed a creative outlet that's mine and mine only, and writing is perfect for that. I love that I can escape into this whole other world where the story takes whatever direction I choose. It's so vivid, I feel like I'm there watching it unfold.
I also love the new friendships and connections I've made through being a client of the Kate Nash Literary Agency and a member of the Romantic Novelists Association (RNA). So many like-minded people I can really connect with, and we're all on this journey together. The RNA is fantastic. I've never been part of something that has such a sense of community before. It doesn't matter whether you're a newbie or an esteemed author, you're welcomed and included – and everyone cheers each other on!
I'm currently working on two different pieces. My main work in progress is another romantic fiction novel about a character who's diagnosed with a life changing illness, and her determination to reclaim her life (including her romantic life). I'm using my own personal experience as inspiration for this. It's perhaps a bit more poignant than my debut because of the subject matter, but I've used plenty of humour to keep it as light and engaging as possible.
My second piece is the sequel to my very first novel, which is currently unpublished. This 'two-parter' is a fast-paced, humorous story about a woman who's very ambitious but who lacks the confidence to be the assertive, successful person she wants to be – and there's a dollop of romance in there too.
What do you hope readers will take away from The Gin Lover's Guide to Dating?
The Gin Lover's Guide to Dating is a light-hearted romcom, so I have no unrealistic expectations that it will change anyone's life. But this is a tough world we live in, and I felt it was important to represent some of that struggle within the story. I also believe it's important that we (and by 'we' I mean the human race) never lose our sense of humour. People say 'laughter is the best medicine', and while I realise this saying has become a bit of a cliché, I know that having a sense of humour has helped me through some very difficult times.
Ultimately, what I hope for is to give my readers a good laugh, make them think a bit, make them feel good – and give them that satisfying happy-ever-after.
If you haven't read it already, here's the book blurb:
When life gives you lemons… add a splash of gin!
When Liv's high-flying career goes off the rails, she finds herself working at a glitzy new gin bar to pay the bills. She's never let romance distract her, but with one very hot colleague, a mysterious online follower who might just be her soulmate, and a lot of cocktails, her dating life is about to be shaken up…
But is Liv looking for a sparkling flirtation, or something a little stronger?
Sometimes you have to face up to your past, seize your future, and mix your own recipe for happy ever after…
And here's where you can get your own copy:
Amazon UK | Amazon AU | Amazon US
author, Autobiography, Humour, love, Mental Health, romance, Writing author, authors, Books, characters, Humour, novel, RomCom, writers, Writing Leave a comment
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Love in the Time of C̶h̶o̶l̶e̶r̶a̶ COVID-19 →


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Postgraduate Diploma On Campus
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The Philosophy program at The University of Notre Dame Australia is ideal for students interested in developing philosophical methods of enquiry. This program is a compelling introduction to the fascinating world of philosophical thought—from ancient times to the present day—and proves useful in any career that requires razor sharp thinking and clear expression.
The University of Notre Dame Australia Multiple locations
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Why study this degree?
The Philosophy program at The University of Notre Dame Australia is designed to facilitate skills associated with studying philosophy and to provide a firm foundation for independent research. The program also provides an opportunity for students to explore subject areas pursuant to their own interests, such as history, theology, business, education and law.
The program comprises courses suitable to the personal and professional needs and interests of students from a variety of backgrounds, including teachers of religious education. Career opportunities for philosophy graduates are extremely varied and range from corporate roles to policy development for government, political research or investigative journalism.
Courses include:
Aesthetics: Philosophy of Art
Cosmology and Philosophy of Science
Moral Philosophy
Myth and Meaning
Philosophy of the Human Person
Application deadline not specified.
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TOEFL® IBT
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Philosophy & Ethics General Studies & Classics Liberal Arts View 33 other Masters in Liberal Arts in Australia
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The program is open to applicants who have a recognised Bachelor's degree in any discipline.
Based on the tuition of 30500 AUD per year during 12 months.
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S.F. Moves to Enact Wiener's Conservatorship Bill
Despite drawing the support of many politicians, the bill fails to win the support of frontline workers and organizations that serve homeless people in S.F.
by Nuala Sawyer Bishari • 10/30/2018 5:48 pm - Updated 10/31/2018 1:03 pm
A homeless man is picked up by paramedics on the Embarcadero, April 2018. (Courtesy Image)
A controversial mental-health bill that entered the State Senate earlier this year may have found its home in San Francisco. SB 1045, authored by Senator Scott Wiener, would grant authorities the right to take away someone's rights if they are frequent users of the city's hospital, jail, and psychiatric wards.
Supervisor Rafael Mandelman introduced a local bill nearly identical to Wiener's at a Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday. Under the legislation, a person would meet the new conservatorship criteria if they are homeless and are a high utilizer of emergency departments, have a history of frequent incarceration due to behavior resulting from severe mental illness or a substance-abuse disorder, or a history of 5150 holds.
"I see this as a start of a conversation for our city, and I look forward to collaborating in the weeks ahead with stakeholders, advocates, and key city departments to make this program as effective as possible," Mandelman said. "We can't allow our neighborhoods to serve as open-air mental institutions, our jails as shelters, and our hospitals as a temporary way-station between the two. It's not humane and it's not the response of a civilized government in one of the wealthiest cities in the world."
Wiener, Assemblymember David Chiu, and Mayor London Breed also support the bill.
"Conservatorships we know are a challenge, and we are going to continue to engage all stakeholders on finding solutions for the purposes of helping this population," Breed said Tuesday.
But despite the support of many politicians, the bill has failed to win the support of many of the aforementioned "stakeholders," including independent health centers and homelessness organizations in S.F. Some adamantly oppose it.
"There has not been any showing of current barriers in existing law or practice that prevent counties from providing the care and services they propose with this bill," Mary Howe, executive director of the Homeless Youth Alliance, says. "SB 1045 does not propose a solution that meets the sponsors' goals of addressing homelessness and the need for behavioral health care. San Francisco is already failing and unable to meet the housing and medical needs of the very people this bill seeks to help."
Dr. Vitka Eisen, president and CEO of HealthRIGHT 360, is concerned that the main change in conservatorship law expressed in SB 1045 was the specific inclusion people who use drugs. The current law is limited to those who abuse alcohol.
"We're coercing treatment for substance use in a way that has not actually been done," Eisen tells SF Weekly, noting that the only way to do that currently is through a court order.
"This is in fact a level of coercion that has not previously existed," she says. "I have pretty deep concerns about that. That being said, I truly do understand the tremendous challenges faced by people who have a substance-abuse disorder related to methamphetamine. Those people who suffer from that condition exhibit behaviors that appear to be pretty self-destructive. I want to believe that the people that are putting this legislation forward want to approach this same condition with compassion. But what else can we do before we step over and coerce people into substance-use treatment?"
Other health organizations have also expressed skepticism over the legislation. According to the Examiner, groups such as the San Francisco Mental Health Board, the Mental Health Association of San Francisco, and Senior and Disability Action — which were only invited to speak with politicians three business days before the bill was scheduled to be introduced — expressed everything from concern over the speed with which this was moving to fears it was taking a big step backward and criminalizing the mentally ill.
The number of people affected by the conservatorship bill vary depending on who you talk to. Simon Pang, captain of the San Francisco Fire Department EMS-6 team, which responds to the regular high users of 911 services, says he estimates "less than 10 individuals have such severe substance-abuse disorder and mental disorganization that they cannot perform routine acts of daily living." In contrast, the city's Department of Public Health says somewhere between 50 and 100 people would qualify. Earlier this year, Wiener said it would apply to "only a tiny percentage of people on our streets — perhaps 1 percent of the population," which, if the annual homeless point-in-time count is accurate — hint: it isn't — would be 75 people.
Currently, the above numbers also only apply to unhoused people living on our streets. In the new legislation, that's changed.
"When we initially introduced the bill, it was limited to chronic homeless," Wiener tells SF Weekly. "We did that to try to make it a little more targeted, but that requirement was removed. There are groups who are marginally housed who are also in crisis, although most people who have the ability to pay rent are probably less likely [to qualify]."
This puts a slight damper on the concern that conservatorship would only apply to people without homes, adding to the litany of ways in which San Francisco criminalizes homelessness.
After all, as Howe points out, "If someone is required to be confined for their own safety, then one's housing status is irrelevant."
With the introduction of SB 1045 this week, the city faces a conundrum. The mental and physical health crises on our streets are absolutely unacceptable, but is this the right path? As the Department of Public Health states, 12 percent of the unhoused people who accessed health services last year accounted for 74 percent of the department's costs. And if that's true, then housing appears to be the obvious answer. With Nov. 6 right around the corner, it's odd that these politicians aren't standing up for Proposition C, which would double their homelessness budget.
"I know everyone up here is supportive of the need to build up our funding for responses to homelessness," Mandelman said at a conservatorship press conference Tuesday, as he stood next to Chiu, Breed, and Wiener.
If only that were true.


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Very Good Condition: Unmarked. Intact spine. 3-hole punched. Sheet music copy of Thank God for the Promise of Spring by William J. and Gloria Gaither. Scored in 4-part choral arrangement, shape-note edition. Score is 2 pages. Alexandria IN: Gaither Music, 1973. Free shipping on domestic orders $25 and over!


Total costs per acre to grow corn on Illinois grain farms.
Yields and costs in 2006 by percentage of farmland in corn on grain farms in Illinois FBFM in northern and central Illinois.
Predicted and final corn and soybean yields (bu/acre) in 00 for three states and the nation (Changnon and Changnon, 00b).


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HP expands security portfolio to battle threats from mobile, cloud, and social media
In an effort to combat increased security threats facing enterprises, HP today expanded its Enterprise Security Solutions portfolio with integrated solutions from such HP brands as ArcSight, Fortify and TippingPoint. The new portfolio includes new capabilities to help enterprises assess, transform, manage and optimize their security investments.
The threats that enterprises face from security breaches are growing in both number and complexity. In just the past year the types of attacks are up, the costs associated with them are higher and more visible, and the risks of not securing systems and processes are therefore much greater. Some people have even called the rate of attacks a pandemic.
The path to reducing these risks, even as the threats escalate, is to confront security at the framework and strategic level, to harness the point solutions approach into a managed and ongoing security enhancement lifecycle. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
HP's strategy then is to provide a fabric of technology along with a framework of processes, to progress to a lifecycle of preparedness that helps organizations become and stay more more secure, said Rebecca Lawson, Director of Worldwide Security Initiatives at HP.
"It's important to bring the right people together and to assess the whole situation, and those people are going to be from all over the organization: IT, AppDev, legal, accounting, supply chain," she said. "You need to really assess the full situation so that everyone is not only aware of where vulnerabilities might be, or where the most costly vulnerabilities might be, but to look ahead and say … let's make sure we build security into everything from the get-go."
In addition to the new products, HP announced an Enterprise Security Discovery Workshop, an expanded Secure Boardroom (an online portal that combines existing sources of security data into one central system), and released a report from HP Digital Vaccine Labs on vulnerability, threat and attack data for the first half of 2011.
Organizations today are quickly realizing the importance of a comprehensive risk management strategy to securing assets across their corporate infrastructures.
Cyber threats have become more sophisticated, persistent and unpredictable, said Lawson. Research conducted on behalf of HP demonstrates that the volume and complexity of security threats has continued to escalate.
HP's research shows that more than 50 percent of senior business and technology executives surveyed believe that security breaches within their organizations have increased during the last year. Nearly 30 percent responded that they experienced a security breach by unauthorized internal access, while 20 percent responded that they had experienced an external breach.
"There are so many different points at which different incidents can occur that getting your arms around all of them and focusing your attention on those that are most likely to cause reputation damage or financial damage or operational damage, that's really the trick," said Lawson.
"We also noticed in our research that the number of attacks, particularly on web applications, is just skyrocketing. And of course we know that web apps are used on mobile devices and they are used on laptops and desktops. And so we are really seeing an alarming rate of web attacks happening. … The context can change so rapidly that you have to really think differently about what it is you are protecting and how you are going to go about protecting it. So it's really, it's a different game now," she said.
ArcSight Express 3.0
ArcSight Express 3.0, a unified security solution, transforms the delivery of advanced correlation, log management and user activity monitoring to improve an organization's ability to rapidly detect and prevent cyber threats. Powered by the new Correlation Optimized Retention and Retrieval Engine (CORR-Engine), it delivers the scalability required to correlate, process, and store vast amounts of data to advance the detection and prevention of cyber threats and risks.
ArcSight Express 3.0, a single turnkey appliance that simplifies the installation and operation of a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution, enables IT administrators and security analysts to more quickly respond to business threats.
TippingPoint
HP has also launched the updated HP TippingPoint Web Application Digital Vaccine (WebAppDV) 2.0 service, which delivers real-time identification of vulnerabilities in web applications and delivery of virtual patches until a fix can be developed. This is achieved by HP WebInspect, a security scan that incorporates the new Adaptive Web Application Firewall Technology (WAF) to protect commercial and custom-built online applications, such as retail websites or online banking sites from vulnerabilities.
Many network firewalls cannot discriminate between normal network activity and malicious traffic aimed to disrupt web applications. To address this gap in protection, the updated WebAppDV 2.0 filters are deployed alongside the traditional Digital Vaccine filters in the HP TippingPoint Intrusion Prevention System (IPS).
TippingPoint IPS is powered by research from HP DVLabs, which discovered four times the number of critical vulnerabilities than the rest of the market combined. Updates and patches addressing these vulnerabilities are created and automatically delivered to clients online each week, or immediately when critical vulnerabilities and threats emerge.
Other offerings in the security portfolio include:
Reputation Security Monitor, which provides ArcSight clients with an advanced, real-time list of known bad IP and DNS addresses to combat attacks that exploit web application vulnerabilities.
Fortify Software Security Center suite, a comprehensive application security testing solution available on-premises or on-demand that scales to identify vulnerabilities in thousands of applications.
Information Security Management (ISM) services, an approach to managing security policies and processes, enabling clients to make informed security decisions and minimize risks.
Enterprise Cloud Service (ECS) protects desktop and notebook PCs and servers against viruses, malware, spyware and intrusions by blocking unauthorized communication and preventing installation of unwanted programs.
SIEM services collect and log security-relevant events to provide a unified view of the security activity across an enterprise as well as generating predefined reports to demonstrate compliance with policies and regulations.
More than 50 percent of senior business and technology executives surveyed believe that security breaches within their organizations have increased during the last year.
Application Security Testing-as-a-Service identifies and closes security vulnerabilities in the application layer with code scanning and web penetration services that reduce the risk, time and investment needed to deliver software security assurance.
Secure Boardroom, an enterprise-level online portal that combines existing sources of security data into one central system. Senior-level executives and CIOs are provided greater insight and actionable information that facilitates business-led strategic investment and management decisions.
Digital Vaccine Toolkit (DVToolkit) 2.0, which allows clients to import custom or open-source IPS filters, such as Snort, directly into the HP TippingPoint IPS.
TippingPoint Reporting and Archiving. Powered by Logger software, this solution collects security event activity and analyzes data to create custom reports, perform trend analysis and integrate reporting to support compliance requirements.
Enterprise Security Discovery Workshop, a one-day workshop designed to help clients understand their organizations' vulnerabilities to external and internal threats, identify the critical success factors for a secure enterprise, and create tailored transformation programs based on best practices.
ArcSight Express 3.0 is expected to be available worldwide soon.
WebAppDV 2.0 is currently available worldwide. Price varies based on the number of web application scans.
DVToolKit 2.0 is currently available worldwide at no additional cost to clients with an existing HP TippingPoint IPS solution.
HP TippingPoint Reporting and Archivingis currently available worldwide to Logger clients as an add-on product at no additional cost.
HP delivers applications appliance solutions that leverage converged infrastructure for virtualization, data management
HP delivers NMC 9.1 as new demands on network management require secure, integrated, and automated response
New HP Service Manager tackles time and cost associated with help desk productivity
HP's IT Performance Suite empowers IT leaders with unified view into total operations, costs
HP takes plunge on dual cloud bursting: public and-or private apps support comes of age
HP rolls out EcoPOD modular data center, provides high-density converged infrastructure with extreme energy efficiency
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Ideal Fastener Corporation Invests $5.7 Million To Expand Oxford, North Carolina, Manufacturing Campus
2014 Gold & Silver Shovel Awards: New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania Awarded Silver Shovels - States with Populations 8 to 15 Million
In Focus: Five Features of Successful Business Relocations and Expansions
STEM Talent Needed to Employ Additive Manufacturing Technologies and Advance Innovation
Ideal Fastener Corporation will invest more than $5.7 million to expand its facility in Oxford, North Carolina. The company plans to create 155 jobs in Granville County by the end of 2019.
Ideal Fastener Corporation is a privately held company established in 1936 and is the second-largest zipper manufacturer in the world. The company is involved in every aspect of the styling, technology and manufacturing of zippers. The company has more than 3,500 employees with six manufacturing facilities in four different countries, as well as sales and support offices in more than 18 countries. The company currently employs 226 people at its Oxford facility.
"This expansion in Oxford will enable Ideal Fastener to manufacture a zipper using new technology that its customers will be able to apply to their products," said state Commerce Secretary Sharon Decker. "To have this new product made by North Carolina workers is further evidence of the quality workforce we have to offer employers."
"We have been manufacturing in North Carolina for over 45 years and we are excited about our continued growth and future here," said Steven Gut, Vice President for Ideal Fastener. "With the support of the North Carolina Department of Commerce and the Granville County Economic Development Commission we are continuing to invest in additional capacity to help us better service our valued customers."
Governor Pat McCrory said, "These new jobs resulting from this expansion will make a significant impact in the economy of Granville County and the City of Oxford."
The project was made possible in part by an award to Ideal Fastener from the state North Carolina Job Development Investment Grant program, as voted by the state Economic Investment Committee. Receipt of the award is based on proof of job creation and other performance requirements. JDIGs are awarded only to new and expanding businesses and industrial projects whose benefits exceed the costs to the state, and which would not be undertaken in North Carolina without the grant.
Under the terms of the company's JDIG award, Ideal Fastener is eligible to receive up to 12 annual grants equal to 62 percent of the state personal income tax withholdings from the eligible new jobs created since the date of the initial award. Receipt of each annual grant is based on state-certified proof that the company has fulfilled incremental job creation requirements. Over 12 years, the JDIG award could yield aggregate benefits to Ideal Fastener of over $1.3 million upon the creation of 155 jobs.
Other partners who assisted with this announcement include: The N.C. Department of Commerce, NC Community College System, Vance-Granville Community College, NC Works, Granville County and Granville County Economic Development Commission.


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Chance The Rapper Breaks Down His $500k Deal With Apple
Danielle Clark	, Danielle Clark
Celebrate Nina Simone's Birthday With This Inspirational Message
The Roots Brought Out Brandy For A Special SXSW Performance
Another Film Inspired By President Barack Obama Is Being Made
Source: NBC / Getty
Being an independent artist means saying "no" to a lot of proposals, especially when you're as talented as Chance the Rapper.
The Grammy award-winning Chicago-bred rapper's claim to fame, has always been not being signed to a major label. In layman's terms: He's self-employed and collects all his money off top.
But a recent campaign to smear his name, after donating a whopping $1 million to Chicago public schools, has certain individuals claiming he's not as genuine as he claims to be. The most recent accusation is that he signed a contract with Apple Music that would make him contractually obligated to them, thus not independent of corporate interests.
Chance being the transparent phenomenon he is, quickly cleared that up in a series of tweets.
"I never felt the need to correct folks on my relationship with @apple but now that more people have tried to discredit my independence," he starts off by saying on Twitter. "I wanna clear things up. @apple gave me half a mil and a commercial to post Coloring Book exclusively on applemusic for two weeks. That was the extent of my deal, after two weeks it was on SoundCloud for free. I needed the money and they're all good people over there."
I feel like if I didnt clear it up people would keep trying to discredit all the work we did to make Coloring Book what it became https://t.co/05v81I38ur
— Lil Chano From 79th (@chancetherapper) March 17, 2017
I think artist can gain a lot from the streaming wars as long as they remain in control of their own product. https://t.co/6agVO3uIdf
I just wanna remain transparent. Folks out there without a deal need to know they're doing everything right just keep at it. https://t.co/5udstMPX62
His last point was an important one, saying, "If you come across oprtunities to work with good people, pick up cash and keep your integrity I say Do It."
So there you go. Being independent doesn't mean going broke. And working with major companies that will ultimately give a wider platform for your message of love and hope, isn't the worst thing in the world.
Press on, Chano.
Chicago Newspaper Blasted Over Story About Chance The Rapper's Child Support Issues
Chance The Rapper Donates $1 Million To Chicago Public Schools
Chance The Rapper's Meeting With Illinois Governor Sheds Light On Political Complacency
Apple Music	, Chance The Rapper	, Chicago	, independent artist


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Maritime experts tackle food security issues in Pacific
ANCORS funding boost aims to improve wellbeing of Pacific island nations
Catching, trading and eating fish is central to the South Pacific way of life, but in recent years rising populations and associated increased fishing pressure has led to a decline in coastal fisheries.
By the year 2030, an additional 100,000+ tonnes of fish per year will be needed across the Pacific region to ensure good nutrition and health outcomes.
Since 2013, UOW's Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security (ANCORS) has worked closely with international research agency WorldFish, on research into community based fisheries management in Kiribati, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu.
The Australian Government recently announced a second phase for the program to build on this work to scale out improvements in the wellbeing of people in Pacific coastal communities through more productive and resilient fisheries and better food and nutrition security.
The project team, which comprises ANCORS, WorldFish, the Pacific Community and national agencies, is funded by the Australian Government through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR). Funding of $8 million from the Australian Government's aid program to UOW and partners is augmented by $2.5 million committed to the project by the University. Collaborating partners in the Pacific region are contributing further in-kind support of $1.5 million.
The renewed partnership will be officially launched today (Wednesday 24 January) by the Minister for International Development and the Pacific, Senator the Hon Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, at a special event at ANCORS' base at UOW's Innovation Campus.
Project Leader, Professor Neil Andrew from ANCORS, said the collaborative partnership seeks to change the trajectory of coastal fisheries management in the Pacific, particularly in Kiribati, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu.
"We're working at community, national and regional scales to ensure better productivity of coastal fisheries, better household access to fish and better community knowledge about how fish can improve health outcomes," he said.
"The project will address a broad range of issues around fish and fisheries, including gender and social inclusion, governance, and improving rural livelihoods. We seek to increase the contribution of fish in tackling the public health crisis developing in the region as a result of poor diets."
Minister Fierravanti-Wells said it was important to continue such an important research and development program which brings together national agencies, international bodies and scientific expertise to improve coastal fisheries management in Kiribati, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and the Pacific region as a whole.
"On behalf of the Australian Government, I am proud to be announcing the renewal of this partnership with funding from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR)," the Minister said.
"Already the program has supported the development of community-based fisheries management plans in Kiribati, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, which will deliver long term sustainability by banning destructive fishing methods."
"This extension of funding will assist these Pacific countries to create a much more holistic approach to coastal fisheries management and will be able to take on learnings from previous work, building on capacity, especially with individuals, and filling in the gaps where knowledge is needed to accelerate development."
✔@abcnews
Rising populations and increased fishing activities are threatening fisheries. To combat this, many countries are implementing community-based fisheries management systems. Dirk Steenburgen explains how they work.
4:40 PM – Jan 27, 2018
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UOW COVID-19 response update
UOW assists student to access medical testing services The University of Wollongong has today (Wednesday 4 March) assisted a student to access health services for the purpose of being tested for coronavirus COVID-19 after she presented to the campus medical clinic with flu-like symptoms.
Protecting student, staff and community safety.
Shortbread Christmas trees
INGREDIENTS 250g butter, softened 1/3 cup (75g) Coles Caster Sugar 2 cups (300g) plain flour 1/4 cup (45g) rice flour 2 tsp mixed spice ROYAL ICING 1 Coles Australian Free Range Egg white 1/2 tsp lemon juice 1 1/2 cups (240g) pure icing sugar Green, blue, pink and yellow liquid food colouring Coles Australian Free Range Egg white, extra Lemon juice, extra METHOD Line 2 baking trays with baking paper.
UOW Commerce student wins 2020 Illawarra and South Coast Local Business Awards
Youngest participant to win the award in the new business category A University of Wollongong (UOW) student with an entrepreneurial mindset and a believer in getting things done has won an award at the 2020 Illawarra and South Coast Local Business Awards (ISLBA).
UOW researchers awarded $5M in ARC Discovery Projects grants
Scheme supports research that delivers economic, environmental, social or cultural benefits.
We collaborate with government, industry and the community to drive our outcome-orientated approach to research and development. These bodies form our multidisciplinary Ideas Network, which equips our tenants with actionable insights to drive local and global growth.
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The Idiot Factor: corruption folly
This site focuses on Republican politicians and conservatives that rip off their constituency. We have the Tea Party, fundamentalist churches, the corruption of ALEC and other special interests groups. But the site also supports progressive Democrats and the local Democratic Socialist of America. We must have ideas on how to replace regressive and corrupt politicians with something better. For comments steveotto2001@yahoo.com.
Iraqi court systems violate human rights—And they are a product of the US government and army
By SJ Otto
The newly liberated land in Iraq is turning out to be a hell hole for all those who did ANYTHING to cooperate with the ISIS (Islamic State) government before it fell. People have been given ridiculously long prison terms and they are being executed for simply having had a job that in any way helped the ISIS officials who ruled over that part of Iraq for the last few years.
There has been a report from a Human Rights Watch (HRW) that criticized Iraq and the autonomous Kurdish authorities over mass trials of suspected ISIS group militants. According to The Times of Oman:
"In "Flawed Justice: Accountability for ISIS Crimes in Iraq", HRW said Baghdad and the Kurdish authorities in the north were holding "thousands of trials of IS suspects without a strategy to prioritise the worst abuses under Iraqi and international law". "The
broad prosecution under terrorism law of all those affiliated with ISIS (IS) in any way, no matter how minimal, could impede future community reconciliation and reintegration, and clog up Iraqi courts and prisons for decades," the New York-based group said.
Sarah Leah Whitson, HRW's Middle East director, said that in acting this way, "Iraqi justice is failing to distinguish between the culpability of doctors who protected lives under ISIS rule and those responsible for crimes against humanity".
The report goes on to say that Iraqi justice is failing to distinguish between culpability of doctors who protected lives under ISIS rule and those responsible of actual crimes against humanity. Even lawyers who have represented accused ISIS collaborators have been targeted as criminals just for doing their jobs. It is getting harder now for those accused of ISIS crimes to get legal representation during these trials. HRW identified 7,374 cases of suspects charged since 2014, of whom 92 have been executed. The Times article continues:
"Its (HRW) researchers estimate the total number of people imprisoned for suspected IS membership at 20,000. Anti-terrorism laws allow judges to charge a large number of people, even those not involved in violence but who are suspected of having helped IS, such as doctors who worked in hospitals or cooks who fed fighters."
These courts are including life in prison or the death penalty, even for belonging to the jihadist group.
Sarah Leah Whitson, writing for Human Rights Watch and Reuters:
"At the height of its power in Iraq, Islamic State (also known as ISIS) controlled 40 percent of the country's territory and the daily lives of millions of Iraqis. Tens of thousands of Iraqis came to serve the ISIS administration, including as doctors, teachers, judges, cooks, and lawyers, arguably contributing to the group's control of the cities it occupied.
Just as Iraqis were forced to join the Baath party under Saddam Hussein, many in ISIS-controlled areas say they were forced to join the group to keep their jobs – though no doubt some also supported ISIS's extremism."
It would be easy to just claim that this is Iraq and this is what passes, in that culture, for normal behaviour. But the truth is that it was the US army that went in and trained the Iraqi troops and led their armies to remove ISIS from all Iraq territory. The Iraq Army is a part of the Iraq government that the US built from the ground floor up. In other words this is an extension of the US government and the US Army. All of this is a product of the US. The responsibility for these human rights abuses fall squarely on the US government and its policies in this part of the world. On top of all of these unnecessary and repressive trials, are other human rights abuses, such as a policy of executing all captured soldiers. There are no prisoners of war being kept in Iraq because all capture soldiers are executed shortly after they surrender.
This is the results of a policy of US imperialism where Iraq was already an occupied country by the US. It is a part of what are leaders call "nation building." The idea is to recreate so called "democracies" that fully support the US Empire and its goals and objectives. There is no effort to further develop the economies of these puppet states nor is there any real effort to create a system of justice. The US has created an ugly repressive state to serve its own interest and not the interest of the people who live under these repressive so called "democracies."
During this war the US mainstream press did a good job of letting us know how repressive life was under ISIS occupation. Now that the battles are over there seems to be little interest in letting Americans know what kind of repression the US has replaced ISIS with.
Posted by SJ Otto at 2:23 PM
SJ Otto
Works at Otto's Book Store, Attended Wichita State University, Lives in Maize, KS. "I'm an author, blog writer and blog editor." This is now a part of a blog collective. We appeal to several different interests, cultural, political and personal.
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Here is a guy who did almost nothing (money or work) to win a special election. This slacker really doesn't believe he should have to work too hard now that he sits in Congress living off of your tax dollars while doing almost nothing to earn that money.
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If you work for someone and hate unions- not all that smart


text:
Q: Newbie Angular Q - Modifying service output I've been working on my first angular app all day and have a basic question.
The goal is to create a text field with two strings describing the current url route and action like the following:
 You are on: {{urlRoute}} / {{urlAction}}
This information will be in the header bar for all pages of the application and needs to be updated as the user visits pages.
How can I run a string .split("/") on the output of $location.path() and return it to the view as two strings, urlRoute, urlAction in the root scope namespace? So far I have this from another stack overflow post:
var blogApp = angular.module('blogApp', [
  'ngRoute',
  'blogControllers'
]).run(function($rootScope, $location) {
    $rootScope.location = $location;
    $rootScope.urlRoute = $location.path().split('/')[0];
});

while I can access {{location.path()}}  in the ngIncluded header template using the above, I can't access {{urlRoute}} - I feel like I'm missing something basic, can someone enlighten me?

A: You are only trying to set this at runtime, and it's likely that route may not even get set before run() fires. Even if it was there you have no way to listen for changes
Listen to one of the routeChange events
.run(function($routeScope, $location){

    $rootScope.$on('$routeChangeSuccess',function(current,previous){
         /* do what you want with either arguments or $location*/
         /* log "current" to console, will see lots of properties */
    })

})

$route docs

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


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text:
Crowd attends 'FrackNation' screening
By Jessica Maher |
October 19, 2013 at 12:06 p.m.
As a Loveland resident, Jon Krizman knows he'll likely have a decision to make sometime in the future about hydraulic fracturing within his city.
Though a ballot measure for a two-year moratorium on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is in legal limbo, Krizman attended a free screening of the documentary "FrackNation" at the Chilson Senior Center on Friday.
"I want to see both sides of the issue," he said.
More than 100 people attended the afternoon screening of the pro-fracking film, which was hosted by the Loveland Energy Action Project (LEAP). The organization formed in response to a proposed ballot initiative to enact a fracking moratorium within Loveland city limits, and director B.J. Nikkel said the push continues even though voters will not decide the issue in November.
"People are still very hungry for information about the issue," she said.
The documentary was funded by Kickstarter backers and largely aims to debunk claims in the anti-fracking documentary "Gasland." Nikkel said "FrackNation" aims to combat misinformation that has circulated on energy development.
Loveland resident Hope Chrisman has made her mind up about the benefits of fracking on the economy, but with the debate heating up across Colorado, she wanted to see the film to be able to better articulate her viewpoints to people.
"You need all the information," she said. "I do think sometimes we don't research something before making a choice."
The group seeking a ballot initiative to halt hydraulic fracturing in city limits for two years while its effects are studied is remaining active even though its question will not be decided Nov. 5.
Protect Our Loveland organizer Sharon Carlisle said that in addition to waiting for legal proceedings to move forward with respect to the ballot initiative, some of the group's energy has gone to campaigning for candidates in the City Council election. Carlisle also said the group is planning a health forum and other future events.
Protect Our Loveland is one of the sponsors of "Shale Boom or Shale Bubble?" a public discussion 6:30 p.m. Tuesday with fracking economics expert Deborah Rogers. That event will be held at the Fort Collins Council Tree Library, 2733 Council Tree Ave.
Jessica Maher can be reached at 669-5050, ext. 516, or maherj@reporter-herald.com. Follow her on Twitter: @JessicaMaherRH.
Jessica Maher
Larimer County offering scholarships for people looking to become a wildland firefighter
Loveland weather on Tuesday: mostly cloudy and 49
Victims of package theft would get tax credit if new Colorado bill becomes law


Animation can explain whatever the mind can conceive. When animation is functionally applied to a website or app, the event flow can easily map with the user's ability to navigate through the app.
In the post Animating React Applications, we covered multiple ways to animate in React, including mounting and unmounting animations without explicitly using the lifecycle hooks. We were able to do this simply with ReactCSSTransitionGroup and better with other tools like ReactMotion and ReactMove. Vue ships with transition components that operate in a similar way. They are <transition> and <transitionGroup>.
The Vue transition components help with simple interpolated animations between states rather than fully declared animation. For the difference between both, look at the handbook.
See the Pen Vue transition dropdown by Joseph Rex (@josephrexme) on CodePen.
The sudden visual state change makes the experience unsavory. This is where transitions come in. By wrapping that changing visual element in a transition, we could achieve a more pleasant UX.
but simply adding a transition wrapper does not smoothen the experience as there are no built-in transition effects.
To understand how transitions are being applied to lifecycle mount and unmount states, see this section from the react animation post.
The illustration below also clearly explains how the classes get added with the use of transition component.
The name attribute needs merely to have an animate.css class name as value.
The <transitionGroup> component works similarly enough to the transition component, but as the name implies, it works better when animating a group of things. A typical example is animation of items on a list.
See the Pen Vue - Transition-Group by Joseph Rex (@josephrexme) on CodePen.
The transition-group component will not render items without a key binding.
Here is a more interesting example of <transition-group> with a FLIP animation.
See the Pen FLIPing slides with Vue.js by Shaw (@shshaw) on CodePen.
We can eliminate third-party libraries by leveraging the built-in features of Vue.
To learn more about Vue transitions, you should look in the docs which covers directives like mode, appearance, and so much more.
Previous transition component examples base on interpolating animations between the mount and unmount states or vice-versa, and with transition-group, we could animate the position update of items in a list. That leaves the question, how can a mounted state be transitioned to another mounted state? Vue provides a watchers method for that. It monitors the state changes of a section of the DOM and provides access to create tweens between them.
By adding a watcher here, the new state of the checkbox can be derived in its callback as well as the old state. So a tween can be created from oldState to newState. This example uses GSAP TextPlugin to toggle Activate and Deactivate as the toggler state changes.
See the Pen Vue Watcher state transition by Joseph Rex (@josephrexme) on CodePen.
The documentation covers more state transition examples with dynamic state transitions.
We can achieve many more interesting animations in our applications by introducing these tweening libraries.
Velocity.js and GSAP especially have pushed the capabilities of web animations since the era of flash. There are other great tweeting libraries like Popmotion, JustAnimate, and more but I will simply demonstrate how GSAP can be used with Vue.
In this example, the emoji expression is being morphed with the GSAP morphSVG plugin as the range input changes. More interestingly, the submission uses TimelineMax to go through various stages till a finished checkbox.
See the Pen Feedback by Joseph Rex (@josephrexme) on CodePen.
Applying the things learned so far we can begin to apply some animation techniques for dataviz.
See the Pen Airport Distance Map by Shaw (@shshaw) on CodePen.
The demo above by Shaw combines Greensock's morphSVG, GSAP, and D3 in a Vue environment.
Sarah Drasner who happens to be a Vue, SVG, and animation expert has also created the following data visualization demo using Vue.
See the Pen Chart made with Vue, Transitioning State by Sarah Drasner (@sdras) on CodePen.
This example takes advantage of the built-in math ability of svg and adds Vue's logic making it not to require any external chart library.
Sections of the svg can be separated as their own components and Vue directives can be used on the SVG.
Sarah also gave an interesting talk where she explains things like hooking animations to custom directives, that can be found here.
If you would rather use a library like chart.js, this linked pen shows examples of representing datasets in donuts and line graphs. There is also a vue wrapper for chart.js.
Vue is a flexible view library, and its ease of use makes it delightful to build complex animations with little or no complications at all. It works great with popular animation libraries and more tools keep getting made to make working with Vue as a frontend developer astonishing. There is a Vue extension for Lottie and for Three.js which have proven to be invaluable tools in interactive front end development. It can only get better.


text:
SM at 60: What would our lives be without the mall?
Gerald Anderson, Anton del Rosario, Margarita Fores, Raymond Gutierrez, Janeena Chan, Teresa Herrera, Sea Princess, Ruffa Gutierrez, Sarah Lahbati, Richard Gutierrez, Tim Yap, Denise Laurel, Xian Lim –Ryan Ong
We've got it all for you!"
Say this line and Filipino shoppers will quickly follow with, "SM," and point to the nearest mall in the area. Today, SM Prime Holdings operates 70 malls in the Philippines and seven more in China.
SM recently opened its 70th mall, SM City Telebastagan, in San Fernando, Pampanga.
This comes in time for SM's 60th anniversary celebrations this year. On May 21, SM lit up its landmark Mall of Asia (MOA) globe and kicked off a series of 60 visual attractions and fun interactive activities for the public to enjoy until October in SM malls nationwide.
SM was once known as Shoe Mart, a shoe store that opened 1958 in downtown Manila. Hardworking visionary Henry Sy Sr.'s first landlord was my grandfather Vincent Rufino.
His business grew into a chain of shoe stores, and a department store in the 1970s.
When Mr. Sy was on his buying trips abroad, he saw the shopping center development in the United States from the East to the West coasts. He believed that it would also happen in the Philippines.
The original SM
In 1983, when he started building his first shopping mall, SM City North Edsa, he said people thought he was crazy. There was a political crisis, interest rates were as high as 45 percent, and the location of the mall was in the middle of nowhere at that time.
SM City North Edsa opened in 1985, and, as they say, the rest is history. It was not only a huge success, it also changed lifestyles in the country.
SM spearheaded what is known as malling with the opening of SM Megamall in 1991, and upped the ante even more with SM MOA in 2006, both bigger than anything in the country or the region at the time they opened. The latter was 195,000 sq m, and is still growing. The current expansion will enlarge SM MOA to a total of 67 hectares of retail and entertainment space.
As the growth continues, SM is also pushing architectural design, with its latest malls becoming landmark buildings in their area, including SM Aura Premier, The Podium and S Maison.
Through SM Foundation, the company reaches out to communities with its educational, health and livelihood-training programs aimed at making farmers self-sufficient.
Through SM Cares, SM has undertaken environmental programs by building green spaces in its malls and undertaking sustainability efforts. The malls also have breastfeeding centers and easy access for PWD customers.
At the launch of SM's 60th anniversary celebration at the SM MOA, I was honored to carry the balloon for SM Accessories. Celebrity doctor couple Hayden Kho and Vicki Belo were also present. The Sy family was in full force, led by matriarch Felicidad Tan-Sy and her children; Hans is chair of the executive committee, Herbert is vice chair of SM Retail, Tessie Sy-Coson is vice chair of SM Investments, and Elizabeth is president of SM Hotels and Conventions.
Read more: Inquirer


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Admin Asst - APN Software Services Inc.
• Manage individual Mailboxes via phone and e-mail.
• Work the Suspended Loans to meet Underwriting conditions for approval.
• Review and request departmental information including Bank statements, Income documents, Legal Identification, Payoffs, Home Owners Insurance Clause updates and more.
• Assign FHA case numbers & VA IRRRL LINs.
• Establish, maintain, and update files on Encompass, databases, records, and/or other documents for recurring internal reports.
• Order fraud, flood, tri-merge credit, credit supplements, appraisal and title.
• Assure that all customer files are complete and in compliance with regulatory agencies and internal policies.
• Ensure RESPA B, Z and TILA policies are enforced at all times.
• Must have high level of interpersonal and communication skills. Deals with a diverse group of important external clients and visitors as well as internal contacts at all levels of the organization.
• Must have advanced working knowledge of a variety of computer software applications in word processing, spreadsheets and database software.
• Work requires continual attention to detail in composing, typing and proofing materials, establishing priorities and meeting deadlines.