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Showing posts from May, 2020

Truth, Lies & Uncertainty - Scientific American

Truth, Lies & Uncertainty - Scientific American : In this special issue of Scientific American, we set out to explore how it is that we can all live in the same universe yet see reality so differently. Basic science illuminates the deep roots of this phenomenon. Even in physics and mathematics, truth is not entirely clear-cut. And mounting evidence from neuroscience indicates that our perceptions are not direct representations of the external world. Rather our brains—each one unique—make guesses about reality based on the sensory signals they receive.
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Bundesliga: How successful has the league's return been? - BBC Sport

Bundesliga: How successful has the league's return been? - BBC Sport : The only controversy the DFL had to deal with, early after the restart, occurred when some teams started ignoring physical distancing rules. The league's hygiene protocol recommends physical distancing as much as possible when the ball is not rolling. That has made for some awkward moments when players, seconds after they had close body-to-body contact with their opponents, were asked to stay apart from each other and only tap elbows to celebrate a goal.
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Bundesliga: How successful has the league's return been? - BBC Sport

Bundesliga: How successful has the league's return been? - BBC Sport : The fear was that players and staff would get infected and that the Bundesliga could potentially contribute to a second wave of the coronavirus pandemic. "The hygiene concept does not work. The effect will be disastrous," predicted Karl Lauterbach, a health expert representing the Social Democrats in Germany's national parliament.
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Rotten: Youtube calls Dolores Cahill a liar, removes her video | Gript

Rotten: Youtube calls Dolores Cahill a liar, removes her video | Gript : Anyway, what’s the reason for the deletion? Youtube’s message to Cullen suggests that it’s because the video “violated the terms of service”, which Cullen (reasonably) takes to mean that it featured somebody disagreeing with the World Health Organisation. And he’s right, isn’t he? For one thing, there’s no other obvious explanation. For another, Youtube basically said as much last month:
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Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage - Margins by Ranjan Roy and Can Duruk

Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage - Margins by Ranjan Roy and Can Duruk : We went over the actual costs. Each pizza cost him approximately $7 ($6.50 in ingredients, $0.50 for the box). So if he paid $160 out of pocket plus $70 in expenses to net $240 from Doordash, he just made $10 in pure arbitrage profit. For all that trouble, it wasn't really worth it, but that first experiment did work.
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Lauren Beck '20, lowering barriers to entry - Harvard Law Today

Lauren Beck '20, lowering barriers to entry - Harvard Law Today : In February 2019, Lauren Beck ’20 was elected as the 133rd president of the Harvard Law Review. On its own a significant achievement, her election helped create an unprecedented statistical anomaly. In 2019, every flagship law review of the top 16 U.S. law schools elected a woman to lead it. If they had been selected at random, the chance of an all-female cohort would be less than .0016%.
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Remote-First Companies Are Another Covid-19 Calamity | WIRED

Remote-First Companies Are Another Covid-19 Calamity | WIRED Facebook and Google told employees earlier this month that they won’t be required to show up until at least 2021: Zuckerberg later added that he expects that by 2030, half his workforce will be WFH. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey dropped the other shoe, promising his employees that they’ll  never  have to cross the threshold of the company’s louche headquarters building again if they don’t care to. He later extended the offer to his workers at Square. The term “permanent WFH” began to trend. Then Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong  proclaimed  that after quarantine, his company would be a “remote- first ” operation. “After a period of WFH, we think remote work (or part in-office and part remote) are options that many people, including the top talent we’re focused on hiring, will come to expect from employers. It also means we can capture top talent from all over the world.” Piling on was Shopify’s CEO Tobi Lutke, who  tweeted  that his
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Modi the fanatic is using the coronavirus crisis to destroy India's heritage | Anish Kapoor | Culture | The Guardian

Modi the fanatic is using the coronavirus crisis to destroy India's heritage | Anish Kapoor | Culture | The Guardian : Perhaps there is genuine need for a modern parliament building to represent India’s 1.4 billion people but this attempt to push forward without due process is shameful and then to give the job to Mr Patel is to underestimate and under value the architects working in India today. Delhi is a city in crisis – it is perhaps the most polluted city in the world. This rethinking of the centre of Indian power could and should be an opportunity to take on the power of architectural imagination and rethinking of Delhi as the capital of modern India. The destruction of Lutyens’ Delhi is deeply misguided and comes out of Modi’s political fanaticism. This is not the redesign of buildings, it is instead Modi’s way of placing himself at the centre and cementing his legacy as the maker of a new Hindu India.
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'Snap back'? Jacinda Ardern snaps forward with a four day week: no wonder she's popular | Van Badham | Opinion | The Guardian

'Snap back'? Jacinda Ardern snaps forward with a four day week: no wonder she's popular | Van Badham | Opinion | The Guardian : The popularity of New Zealand’s Labour prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, is, presently, stratospheric. With the confidence of popularity, her government is positioned to promote political ideas that were almost beyond imagination only a few months ago. One of them, mooted on Wednesday, is encouraging the country into a four-day working week.
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Opinion | Twitter Could End the Office as We Know It - The New York Times

Opinion | Twitter Could End the Office as We Know It - The New York Times : Twitter is out of the office. Last week, the social media company’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey, informed employees that many of them would be allowed to work from home permanently, even after the Covid-19 pandemic subsides. Other tech giants, including Google and Facebook, have not gone quite so far but have also said that they plan to continue working remotely at least through the end of 2020. This may be a sign of where things are headed for the other white-collar industries that take their cues from Silicon Valley in the design and culture of their workplaces. For an industry that thrives on disruption, this might be its most disruptive move yet. Part of what makes the move to remote work so remarkable is that the technology industry has resisted it for so long. From the midcentury-modern palaces to the playful campuses of today’s tech giants, the industry has invested heavily in the idea that “knowledge
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DRC has seen epidemics before, but Covid-19's toll on older people leaves me sleepless | Global development | The Guardian

DRC has seen epidemics before, but Covid-19's toll on older people leaves me sleepless | Global development | The Guardian : So far in the DRC, there have been more than 50 Covid-19 deaths, all of them in our capital, Kinshasa, where I am based. There are 1,298 confirmed cases, most in the city. I know many people who died, but I was very close in particular to Dorcas, 66, and Michel, 78. They were very much loved and respected members of an older people’s association. Michel and I joked that we were father and son as he shares the same name as my late father. They both knew where all the older people lived and whenever any had problems, they were the first to respond. Dorcas leaves behind a frail, elderly husband who has high blood pressure, and we are very worried for him.
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'The end of an era': oil price collapse may force Saudis to rein in arms spending | World news | The Guardian

'The end of an era': oil price collapse may force Saudis to rein in arms spending | World news | The Guardian : The expected delay of new weapons deals could have long-term political repercussions for the country under the rule of Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince and de facto ruler who has waged a bloody war with neighbouring Yemen.
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Will Bundesliga restart be worthwhile commercially? | Business| Economy and finance news from a German perspective | DW | 15.05.2020

Will Bundesliga restart be worthwhile commercially? | Business| Economy and finance news from a German perspective | DW | 15.05.2020 : Germany's professional footballers and coaches like Heiko Herrlich may enjoy the return to their jobs, but the prime reason behind reopening the Bundesliga is strictly commercial, says Henning V�pel, director of the Hamburg Institute for the World Economy (HWWI). "The league's media partnerships have certainly exerted some pressure because the sale of broadcasting and marketing rights are a fundamental part of professional football's business model," he told DW. Broadcasting and sponsorship deals are normally sealed before the season starts, meaning the league is forced to deliver its product, namely football matches, in order not to be held accountable or run the risk of losing its partners. "In the end professional football is like a circle of interdependent players in a market based on the selling of and paying for perfo
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Detox | An Anxious Daffodil | | Mada Masr

Detox | An Anxious Daffodil | | Mada Masr : Let’s start with a prophecy; soon our planet will be ruled by communism, after the end of the virus’s reign. This is what communist philosopher Slavoj Žižek believes, at least. In his latest book, Pandemic! (2020), he anticipates that “measures that appear to most of us today as ‘communist’ will have to be considered on a global level — coordination of production and distribution will have to take place outside the coordinates of the market.” The transformation will be spearheaded by none other than conservative politicians like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, he says.
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Unhappiness and Mohamed Salah's Egypt | | Mada Masr

Unhappiness and Mohamed Salah's Egypt | | Mada Masr : “Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero,” Andrea cries in the 1938 play, Life of Galileo, by German dramatist Bertolt Brecht, to which Galileo responds: “No, unhappy is the land that needs a hero.” Egypt can be that unhappy land, a land where farewell parties have outstripped homecoming parties. Where a young female doctor laments she wants to leave because “to give birth to a baby here feels morally wrong, it feels sort of illegal.” Where a juice seller sarcastically quips, “We no longer have time to think of anything else but survival, we don’t even have time to contemplate suicide.” When a country is mired in endless social and economic problems, and smothered in despair, the yearning grows for that batal (hero), that one human figure where all painful and complex abstracts will be realised within and resolved without.
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Cosmic love in the year of COVID-19 | | Mada Masr

Cosmic love in the year of COVID-19 | | Mada Masr : Today, I biked through the streets of my neighborhood, carrying a sense of doom, which feels like a hyper alertness this crisis has created. Then, I heard the azan. I could barely make out the new phrasing — the one that calls on people to stay at home — because many mosques have also lowered the volume. But what I thought I heard clearly was the voice of the muezzin breaking before he uttered them, as if he was on the verge of crying. That doesn’t make any sense; it was just my own shaken imagination. Yet, I really can’t imagine a stronger sign of spatial and temporal displacement than mosques in a conservative society closing their doors and telling people to pray at home.
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Egyptian editor briefly detained in Covid-19 reporting crackdown | World news | The Guardian

Egyptian editor briefly detained in Covid-19 reporting crackdown | World news | The Guardian : Lina Attalah, the editor-in-chief of the website Mada Masr, was arrested outside Tora prison in the south of Cairo while interviewing the mother of a jailed activist attempting to bring medication and hand sanitiser to her son. The activist, Abd El Fattah, has been on hunger strike since mid-April in protest at deteriorating prison conditions, including the risk of the spread of coronavirus as well as the suspension of visits and trial hearings due to the pandemic. Atallah was taken to a police station and held for undisclosed charges, before she was questioned by a prosecutor. She was later ordered to be released on bail of 2,000 Egyptian pounds (�105). Mada Masr reported that Attalah’s mobile phone was seized and the media outlet’s lawyer was prevented from seeing Atallah while in detention. The journalist was recognised by Time magazine as a “new-generation leader,” in 2017, when s
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US and UK 'lead push against global patent pool for Covid-19 drugs' | World news | The Guardian

US and UK 'lead push against global patent pool for Covid-19 drugs' | World news | The Guardian : “In general, it is a disappointment, appalling really. There was better text that was rejected,” said Jamie Love, the director of the NGO Knowledge Ecology International. “The US, UK, Swiss and some others pushed against the WHO taking the lead in pushing for open licensing of patents and know-how for drugs and vaccines. “In a global crisis like this, that has such a massive impact on everyone, you would expect the WHO governing body to have the backbone to say no monopolies in this pandemic. It’s one thing for a country to use its economic clout to buy preferential access to drugs or vaccines. It’s another to prevent others from manufacturing and expanding global supply.”
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The Sickness in Our Food�Supply | by Michael Pollan | The New York Review of Books

The Sickness in Our Food�Supply | by Michael Pollan | The New York Review of Books : It’s long been understood that an industrial food system built upon a foundation of commodity crops like corn and soybeans leads to a diet dominated by meat and highly processed food. Most of what we grow in this country is not food exactly, but rather feed for animals and the building blocks from which fast food, snacks, soda, and all the other wonders of food processing, such as high-fructose corn syrup, are manufactured. While some sectors of agriculture are struggling during the pandemic, we can expect the corn and soybean crop to escape more or less unscathed. That’s because it takes remarkably little labor—typically a single farmer on a tractor, working alone—to plant and harvest thousands of acres of these crops. So processed foods should be the last kind to disappear from supermarket shelves.
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The Sickness in Our Food�Supply | by Michael Pollan | The New York Review of Books

The Sickness in Our Food�Supply | by Michael Pollan | The New York Review of Books : The juxtaposition of images in the news of farmers destroying crops and dumping milk with empty supermarket shelves or hungry Americans lining up for hours at food banks tells a story of economic efficiency gone mad. Today the US actually has two separate food chains, each supplying roughly half of the market. The retail food chain links one set of farmers to grocery stores, and a second chain links a different set of farmers to institutional purchasers of food, such as restaurants, schools, and corporate offices. With the shutting down of much of the economy, as Americans stay home, this second food chain has essentially collapsed. But because of the way the industry has developed over the past several decades, it’s virtually impossible to reroute food normally sold in bulk to institutions to the retail outlets now clamoring for it. There’s still plenty of food coming from American farms, but no easy
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Global report: US House passes $3tn stimulus as experts track Covid-19-linked syndrome | World news | The Guardian

Global report: US House passes $3tn stimulus as experts track Covid-19-linked syndrome | World news | The Guardian : According to the Johns Hopkins University tracker there are 4,531,811 confirmed cases worldwide. The number of people who have lost their lives is 307,001 according to official tolls, but the true number is likely to be much higher.
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Barack Obama attacks Trump administration's response to coronavirus pandemic | US news | The Guardian

Barack Obama attacks Trump administration's response to coronavirus pandemic | US news | The Guardian : He added that the injustices faced by African Americans are not new, and described the recent high-profile killing of Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed black jogger who was shot and killed after being pursued in broad daylight by a white former police officer and his son through a neighborhood in Georgia. “We see it when a black man goes for a jog and some folks feel like they can stop and question and shoot him, if he doesn’t submit to their questioning,” said Obama.
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Apple and Google clash with health officials over virus-tracking apps - The Washington Post

Apple and Google clash with health officials over virus-tracking apps - The Washington Post : “If it’s between Google and Apple having the data, I would far prefer my physician and the public health authorities to have the data about my health status,” she said. “At least they’re constrained by laws.” The Apple-Google system uses the short-range Bluetooth antennas in smartphones to log when two people come into contact for a short period of time, but not where that contact took place. An alert is sent if one of the people tests positive for a coronavirus infection, but that information is not shared with public health officials or contact-tracing teams.
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World looks on in horror as Trump flails over pandemic despite claims US leads way | US news | The Guardian

World looks on in horror as Trump flails over pandemic despite claims US leads way | US news | The Guardian : Esmir Milavić, an editor at Bosnia’s N1 TV channel, told viewers this week: “The White House is in utter dysfunction and doesn’t speak with one voice.” Milavić said: “The vice-president is wearing a mask, while the president doesn’t; some staffers wear them, some don’t. Everybody acts as they please. As time passes, White House begins to look more and more like the Balkans.”
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Naga Munchetty: 'I’m not a victim in any shape or form' | Television & radio | The Guardian

Naga Munchetty: 'I’m not a victim in any shape or form' | Television & radio | The Guardian : Munchetty has been at the BBC since 2008, when she joined to present Working Lunch, the business and personal finance show. Before that, she was a business reporter at Channel 4 News. She had started in newspapers as a financial journalist – it suited her logical brain, she says – first on the Evening Standard, then the Observer, before moving into TV at CNBC Europe, then Bloomberg. She joined Breakfast in 2014.
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A Timeless History of the Swatch Watch | Mental Floss

A Timeless History of the Swatch Watch | Mental Floss : Fortunately, a number of things were happening that would prove to offer salvation for the Swiss. ETA SA, a company that made watches and was headed up by Ernst Thomke, had recently invested in an injection-molding machine at the behest of engineer Elmar Mock. Mock, along with his colleague Jacque Muller, spent 15 months crafting a plastic prototype watch that was one piece and welded together. The significance of a sealed unit was that it economized the entire process, turning watches from handcrafted units to models that could be produced by automation. The watches required just 51 parts instead of the 91 pieces typical of most models at the time. In this way, Thomke, Mock, and Muller had produced a timepiece that was both durable and inexpensive.
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How Albert Einstein's Son Tamed the Mississippi River | WIRED

How Albert Einstein's Son Tamed the Mississippi River | WIRED : The forces at work are formidable, breathtaking, dizzying to see. And yet in 1963, with completion of both the Low Sill and the Overbank, the Corps of Engineers breathed a collective sigh of relief. Their job was done. Mission accomplished. The river was saved. “A threat of catastrophic proportions has been ended forever,” chorused a Corps colonel in a triumphal essay the following year. In just under a decade, however, the colonel would be compelled to eat his words. The river, it turned out, had other plans. This was most amply demonstrated when, in the fall of 1972, the weather in the Midwest suddenly turned bad—and when the consequent spring flood of 1973 turned out to be exceptionally and unexpectedly ominous. At the height of the crisis, and on a springtime Saturday evening when the rest of America was glued to the national coverage of the Watergate crisis—how appropriate the word!—the Low Sill very nearly ga
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Thunderbolt Flaws Expose Millions of PCs to Hands-On Hacking | WIRED

Thunderbolt Flaws Expose Millions of PCs to Hands-On Hacking | WIRED : On Sunday, Eindhoven University of Technology researcher Bj�rn Ruytenberg revealed the details of a new attack method he's calling Thunderspy. On Thunderbolt-enabled Windows or Linux PCs manufactured before 2019, his technique can bypass the login screen of a sleeping or locked computer—and even its hard disk encryption—to gain full access to the computer's data. And while his attack in many cases requires opening a target laptop's case with a screwdriver, it leaves no trace of intrusion and can be pulled off in just a few minutes. That opens a new avenue to what the security industry calls an "evil maid attack," the threat of any hacker who can get alone time with a computer in, say, a hotel room. Ruytenberg says there's no easy software fix, only disabling the Thunderbolt port altogether.
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How Much Is a Human Life Worth, In Dollars? | WIRED

How Much Is a Human Life Worth, In Dollars? | WIRED : “In some of the early work, it was pointed out that we don’t put a dollar value on an individual life. The example was, if a girl falls down a well, we don’t say, ‘sorry, it’s going to cost $10 million to go down there and get you, and you’re not worth $10 million, so good luck,’” Banzhaf tells me. “We just don’t do that.” As Banzhaf says, economists of the time were trying to distinguish, in terms of benefits and costs, between private consumption choices made by individuals and population-spanning policy choices made by, like, governments. A former USAF pilot turned PhD candidate named Jack Carlson found the beginnings of a way out. In his dissertation, he tried to put a cost not on a life, but on saving lives—or not saving them. The USAF, Carlson wrote, trained pilots in when to eject from a damaged plane versus trying to land it. Ejecting would save the pilot, and landing might save the (expensive) plane. Carlson ran the num
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De-branding my body

De-branding my body : “Nearly every prostitute we see was a child once trafficked against her will” Scott Arnold, Gracehaven safe house
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'Pucajte po meni, navikao sam': Poznati dizajner o logu predsjedanja EU-om i novom dresu reprezentacije / Novi list

'Pucajte po meni, navikao sam': Poznati dizajner o logu predsjedanja EU-om i novom dresu reprezentacije / Novi list : – Ljudi moji, je li to moguće, uzviknuo bi sportski novinar Mladen Delić. Bit ću otvoren, premda sam i sam sudjelovao u natječaju za službeni logo hrvatskog predsjedanja Vijećem EU-a. Ovaj rad je vizualno nepismen, iako na njemu piše sve što treba – objašnjava Ljubičić.
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Football matches would be played behind closed doors all next season

Football matches would be played behind closed doors all next season under plans being considered by the sport's authorities. Senior figures believe that games in the top four divisions, including the Premier League, will be held without crowds until Christmas as Britain tries to control the coronavirus pandemic. They think this could continue until May next year if government permission for mass gatherings is tied to production of a widely available vaccine. Other sports, music festivals and concerts would also be banned if Boris Johnson takes such a hardline stance. Holding matches behind closed doors for the whole season would mean a big drop in income for clubs, and the Football Association is looking at how to minimise damage to clubs at all levels. Manchester United earn �111 million a season from ticket sales and matchday revenue, 17 per cent of their total income. Across all four divisions the total income lost would exceed �1 billion. Clubs in the lower divisions
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