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What was highest label on your first car speedometer?

  • 80 mph
  • 88 mph
  • 100 mph
  • 120 mph
  • 150 mph
  • it was in kph like civilized countries use you insensitive clod
  • Other (please specify in comments)

[ Results | Polls ]
Comments:45 | Votes:98

posted by janrinok on Sunday July 31 2022, @07:35PM   Printer-friendly
from the can't-you-smell-that-smell? dept.

Smell and taste dynfunction after covid-19:

"It was sudden, like turning an electric switch off." This is how one patient described her abrupt loss of smell and taste following infection with covid-19. "I was eating some lunch on day three after contracting covid-19 and one moment I could still smell and taste the flavours of my soup, and the next everything vanished."

She was not alone in this. In fact, smell and taste loss are common complaints among patients with covid-19, with an estimated 50% of patients reporting these symptoms. This is thought to occur due to conductive barriers and nerve damage from the extensive inflammation in covid-19 infection.

The recovery of smell and taste is very much a gradual process for some. In our analysis of 3699 patients from 12 countries, recently published in The BMJ, we found that at the 30 day mark following the initial infection, only 74% and 79% of patients are expected to recover their smell and taste respectively. Recovery rates rise with each passing month, reaching a peak of 96% for smell and 98% for taste after six months. [...]

Besides a quantitative impairment in smell, a sizeable proportion of patients also report qualitative smell impairment following covid-19 infection, manifesting as distortion of odour (known as parosmia) or a perception of smell in the absence of an odour (known as phantosmia). These patients often struggle to tolerate everyday smells and become increasingly withdrawn. Such a phenomenon has been postulated to occur due to aberrant regeneration of the neurons in the olfactory system during recovery.

[...] Our sense of smell and taste is something that we very much take for granted. In one patient's words, "I don't think that as human beings we can truly understand, appreciate, and comprehend how important and how deeply connected to all aspects of our life our sense of smell is until we lose it." The abrupt loss of smell and taste that covid-19 infection brings has a formidable impact on patients' quality of life. Smell and taste impairments may hinder the enjoyment of food, causing patients to feel as if eating has become "a chore, a merely functional transaction with the only scope of providing nutrients." It is unsurprising that smell and taste loss has been linked to malnutrition.

Many patients struggle with lack of support as medical practitioners have not been equipped to deal with long covid and this unprecedented wave of patients with persistent smell and taste loss. There are too many questions and far too few answers. Why are women particularly affected by persistent smell loss? Is the sensory loss going to be permanent? Is there anything that patients can do to hasten the recovery? Will olfactory training improve outcomes? These are important questions, and ones that need to be taken seriously and investigated by the medical and research community.

I completely lost my sense of smell and taste early in the pandemic and it was devastating. Eating indeed became a chore and turned into an ordeal to get through. Within a month my senses (as far as I can tell) fully recovered, but to this day I do get bouts of phantosmia. Did any of you experience this, and if so, how did you get through it?

Journal Reference:
Benjamin Kye Jyn Tan, Ruobing Han, Joseph J Zhao, et al., Prognosis and persistence of smell and taste dysfunction in patients with covid-19: meta-analysis with parametric cure modelling of recovery curves [open], 2022. DOI: 10.1136/bmj-2021-069503


Original Submission

posted by chromas on Sunday July 31 2022, @02:50PM   Printer-friendly
from the inward-eye-that-is-the-bliss-of-solitude dept.

People underestimate how enjoyable it is to sit and think:

People consistently underestimate how much they would enjoy spending time alone with their own thoughts, without anything to distract them, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

"Humans have a striking ability to immerse themselves in their own thinking," said study lead author Aya Hatano, PhD, of Kyoto University in Japan. "Our research suggests that individuals have difficulty appreciating just how engaging thinking can be. That could explain why people prefer keeping themselves busy with devices and other distractions, rather than taking a moment for reflection and imagination in daily life."

The researchers found that people enjoyed spending time with their thoughts significantly more than they had predicted. [...]

These results are especially important in our modern era of information overload and constant access to distractions, according to study co-author Kou Murayama, PhD, of the University of Tübingen in Germany. "It's now extremely easy to 'kill time.' On the bus on your way to work, you can check your phone rather than immerse yourself in your internal free-floating thinking, because you predict thinking will be boring," he said. "However, if that prediction is inaccurate, you are missing an opportunity to positively engage yourself without relying on such stimulation."

That missed opportunity comes at a cost because previous studies have shown that spending time letting your mind wander has some benefits, according to the researchers. It can help people solve problems, enhance their creativity and even help them find meaning in life. "By actively avoiding thinking activities, people may miss these important benefits," Murayama said.

Journal Reference:
Aya Hatano, Cansu Ogulmus, Hiroaki Shigemasu, and Kou Murayama, Thinking About Thinking: People Underestimate How Enjoyable and Engaging Just Waiting Is [pdf], J Exp Psychol Gen, 2022. DOI: 10.1037/xge0001255


Original Submission

posted by hubie on Sunday July 31 2022, @09:34AM   Printer-friendly
from the Re-Enter-the-Dragon dept.

Sheep farmers find large pieces of debris including serial numbers after a loud bang was heard earlier this month.

It is believed to be space junk from the first manned SpaceX mission to the International Space Station.

Story: Space junk potentially found in NSW Snowy Mountains paddocks

A large piece of debris found in the middle of a sheep paddock could be space junk from a SpaceX mission, and linked to a large bang heard across the region earlier this month.

Many of those who heard the bang on July 9 took to social media to report it across the Snowy Mountains in southern NSW, and as far away as Albury, Wagga Wagga and Canberra.

Speculation was rife that it may have been caused by the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft re-entering earth's atmosphere after it launched in November 2020.

Mick Miners, who runs a sheep farm at Numbla Vale, south of Jindabyne, stumbled across an almost three metre high object wedged into a remote part of his paddock on Monday.

[...] Australian National University College of Science astrophysicist Brad Tucker said the debris was most likely from the unpressurised crew trunk of the craft.

He said it was possibly the largest piece of documented debris in Australia since NASA's Skylab space station came plummeting back to Earth above Esperance in Western Australia in 1979.

It appears to either be a piece of space junk, or an early prototype Firstborn Monolith [hubie].

See also: Uncontrolled Rocket Descents Pose a 10% Risk of Killing One or More People Over the Next 10 Years


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Sunday July 31 2022, @04:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the next-time-ask-the-guru-on-the-mountain dept.

Critics say it's a profession riddled with ignorance, conflict and moral hazards:

When the bankrupt cryptocurrency lender Celsius began foundering last month, Ben Armstrong was among the industry personalities leading the online charge against the firm.

"You can't possibly EVER support Celsius Network or [CEO Alex] Mashinsky in any way," Armstrong, who goes by the moniker Bitboy_Crypto, told his nearly 900,000 Twitter followers after Celsius froze all depositors' money in June.

There was only one problem: Armstrong had been central to encouraging them to deposit their money with Celsius in the first place.
Armstrong had talked up the company often on his daily YouTube show and, just two weeks earlier, even appeared with Celsius's chief executive on its weekly promotional video. ("Atlanta is famous for BitBoy, no longer for CNN," Mashinsky had said admiringly.)

Armstrong is a leading example of a crypto influencer. One-part media personality, one-part untrained investment adviser, the 39-year-old Georgia native wields significant power in the world of cryptocurrency investment, steering tip-hungry online trawlers to the latest token. [...]

BitBoy's rise — and even his recent Celsius wobble — highlights how low the threshold can be for gaining power amid the morass of gamified finance. In the land of crypto, the one-eyed man is king — and the line between carnival barker and investment guru extremely difficult to find.

[...] "I think it's easy to say, 'Why would you listen to some stranger on the internet tell you where to put your money?'" said Nicholas Christakis, a Yale University sociologist and physician who wrote "Connected," a seminal book on the scientific underpinnings of online influence, when asked why so many have flocked to BitBoy. "But what the research shows is that, particularly when there's a lot at stake — like all the money online in crypto — online interactions can be as influential as in-person ones."

He said the idea of large groups communicating within these online bubbles can amplify the effect. "This sense of shared community — 'We're all in this together' — makes people trust more. It's not that different from the logic of a cult. I mean, don't we all have a desire to find a guru who can tell us the meaning of life and protect us from bad decisions?"

[...] It's not surprising perhaps that Armstrong would amass influence in this space in particular. Like stocks, crypto is a system that demands a constant stream of people to buy in if the value is to continue going up. Unlike stocks, though, there is little to fuel those buyers — no earnings, products or market need. That means hypesters are needed, say experts who follow such markets.

"Since you're not really buying anything of actual value, in my view, you need someone to tell you what it's worth," said Peter Schiff, a controversial money manager and prominent crypto skeptic. "I think what you have to ask with any influencer is who they're actually serving — or if they're just serving themselves."

[...] "This is the really interesting area where crypto and social media intersect," said Jason Goldman, an early Twitter executive and chief digital officer at the White House during the Obama administration. "You've always had people who sell snake oil. But they had to go door to door, and now with social media they can sit at home and be amplified to every corner of the world."


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Sunday July 31 2022, @12:06AM   Printer-friendly
from the Arachno-Necro-Techno dept.

Arachnophobia and Necrophobia warning:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/07/inflating-spider-corpse-creates-robotic-claw-game-of-nightmares/

Shortly after the Preston Innovation Lab was set up at Rice University, graduate student Faye Yap was rearranging a few things when she noticed a dead curled up spider in the hallway. Curious about why spiders curl up when they die, she did a quick search to find the answer. And that answer—essentially, internal hydraulics—led to delightfully morbid inspiration: Why not use the bodies of dead spiders as tiny air-powered grippers for picking up and maneuvering tiny electronic parts?

Yap and her colleagues—including adviser Daniel Preston—did just that. They transformed a dead wolf spider into a gripping tool with just a single assembly step—essentially launching a novel new research area they have cheekily dubbed "necrobotics." They outlined the process in detail in a new paper published in the journal Advanced Science. The authors suggest the gripper could be ideal for delicate "pick-and-place" repetitive tasks and could possibly be used one day in the assembly of microelectronics.

  https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.202201174

Also At:
Dead spiders reanimated as creepy 'necrobots'


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Saturday July 30 2022, @07:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the you-gotta-know-when-to-hold-'em-and-when-to-fold-'em dept.

Artificial intelligence firm DeepMind has transformed biology by predicting the structure of nearly all proteins known to science in just 18 months:

DeepMind has predicted the structure of almost every protein so far catalogued by science, cracking one of the grand challenges of biology in just 18 months thanks to an artificial intelligence called AlphaFold. Researchers say that the work has already led to advances in combating malaria, antibiotic resistance and plastic waste, and could speed up the discovery of new drugs.

Determining the crumpled shapes of proteins based on their sequences of constituent amino acids has been a persistent problem for decades in biology. Some of these amino acids are attracted to others, some are repelled by water, and the chains form intricate shapes that are hard to accurately determine.

UK-based AI company DeepMind first announced it had developed a method to accurately predict the structure of folded proteins in late 2020, and by the middle of it 2021 it had revealed that it had mapped 98.5 per cent of the proteins used within the human body.

Today, the company announced that it is publishing the structures of more than 200 million proteins – nearly all of those catalogued on the globally recognised repository of protein research, UniProt.

[...] Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind, says that the database makes finding a protein structure – which previously often took years – "almost as easy as doing a Google search". DeepMind is owned by Alphabet, Google's parent company.

[...] While the tool is often, even usually, extremely accurate, its structures are always predictions rather than explicitly calculated results. Nor has AlphaFold yet solved the complex interactions between proteins, or even made a dent in a small subset of structures, known as intrinsically disordered proteins, that seem to have unstable and unpredictable folding patterns.

"Once you discover one thing, then there are more problems thrown up," says Willison. "It's quite terrifying actually, how complicated biology is."

[...] Pushmeet Kohli, who leads DeepMind's scientific team, says that the company isn't done with proteins yet and is working to improve the accuracy and capabilities of AlphaFold.

"We know the static structure of proteins, but that's not where the game ends," he says. 'We want to understand how these proteins behave, what their dynamics are, how they interact with other proteins. Then there's the other area of genomics where we want to understand how the recipe of life translates into which proteins are created, when are they created and the working of a cell."


Original Submission

posted by hubie on Saturday July 30 2022, @02:34PM   Printer-friendly
from the snooze-time dept.

Office workers in Japan can now take a cat nap at work with 'Nap Box'. What is it? Basically, a windowless box that shuts out the light and the world for a while allowing a person to relax, de-stress, and get back to work recharged.

"In Japan, there are a lot of people who will lock themselves up in the bathroom for a while [to nap], which I don't think is healthy," Saeko Kawashima, communications director of furniture maker Itoki, told Bloomberg News.

"It's better to sleep in a comfortable location."

The device, which resembles a sleek water heater, will support occupants' heads, knees and rears so that they will not fall over, according to the outlet.

[...] "I think a lot of Japanese people tend to work continuously with no breaks," Kawashima said. "We are hoping that companies can use this as a more flexible approach to resting."

People took to Twitter on Friday to poke fun at the nap boxes, with one user joking, "This is how we get people back to the office."

"Capitalism always wins," another Twitter user said.

How are you supposed to sleep standing up?


Original Submission

posted by hubie on Saturday July 30 2022, @09:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the what's-the-affiliate-program-going-to-look-like-for-this? dept.

Amazon to buy One Medical, which runs 180+ medical offices throughout the US:

When Amazon launched Amazon Care to its employees in 2019, the goal was to test the product before rolling it out nationwide. After that rollout happened earlier this year, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told Insider that the expansion would "fundamentally" change the health care game by dramatically enhancing the medical-care process. He predicted that patients in the future would be so used to telehealth and other new conveniences that they'll think that things like long wait times and delays between in-person visits commonly experienced today are actually "insane."

Now, The Wall Street Journal reports, Amazon has gone one step closer to that future by agreeing to a $3.9 billion deal to purchase One Medical, a company that operates a network of health clinics. With this move, Amazon will expand the number of patients it serves by gaining access to "a practice that operates more than 180 medical offices in 25 US markets and works with more than 8,000 companies to provide health benefits to employees, including with in-person and virtual care."

Echoing Jassy's enthusiasm, Neil Lindsay, Amazon Health Services' senior vice president, told WSJ that the company thinks "health care is high on the list of experiences that need reinvention." Purchasing One Medical is a way for Amazon to break further into the $4 trillion health care industry at a time when Amazon's revenue is down and costs are up.

[...] After the deal is done, One Medical chief executive Amir Dan Rubin "will remain CEO." In a news release to One Medical investors, Rubin expressed a lot of enthusiasm for the deal.

"The opportunity to transform health care and improve outcomes by combining One Medical's human-centered and technology-powered model and exceptional team with Amazon's customer obsession, history of invention, and willingness to invest in the long-term is so exciting," Rubin says. "There is an immense opportunity to make the health care experience more accessible, affordable, and even enjoyable for patients, providers, and payers."

[...] It has not been a total success story, though. Almost half a billion of Amazon's investment in One Medical is paying off the company's debt.

One Medical also recently came under fire in 2021 during a Congressional investigation into how it administered COVID-19 vaccines when they first became available in December 2020.

[...] Rubin was leading the company at the time. He has been CEO of One Medical since 2017 and has previously held executive roles for decades at health care companies, including a recent stint at UnitedHealth Group.

Congress' recent investigation into One Medical's untimely delivery of vaccines to vulnerable communities is not mentioned in the joint press release from Amazon and One Medical. Instead, Lindsay expresses full confidence in how One Medical handles delivery of patient care, saying Amazon will benefit from One Medical's "human-centered and technology-powered approach to health care," which Amazon believes "can and will help more people get better care, when and how they need it."


Original Submission

posted by hubie on Saturday July 30 2022, @05:05AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-goes-around-comes-around dept.

Switch to a circular economy could protect the environment while generating more value:

In 1924, a cartel of lightbulb manufacturers including General Electric and Philips agreed to artificially limit the lifespan of their products to about 1,000 hours, down from 2,500. The scandal, revealed decades later, came to epitomize the linear consumption model of making, consuming, and then discarding products that took hold during the Industrial Revolution and has been dominant ever since.

It may have enriched individual firms, but this system is reaching a dead end. It's economically inefficient and environmentally damaging. Its costs range from the pollution of air, land, and water to sharp fluctuations in the prices of raw materials and potential disruptions to supply chains.

"The linear model depletes the planet of its natural resources, it damages ecosystems, and creates lots of waste and pollution in the process. It's an unsustainable model. It cannot continue," says Barchi Gillai, the associate director of the Value Chain Innovation Initiative at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

In a new white paper, Gillai and her colleagues find that a growing number of companies are realizing the urgency of shifting their operations toward circularity. This means designing products for durability and recyclability, reducing material requirements, consuming fewer resources in manufacturing and shipping, and keeping items in circulation to boost their lifespan.

And the transition to a circular economy need not come at an economic cost; it can help companies generate more value from the resources they consume. With fewer mines, landfills, and incinerators, and more trees, the circular economy reduces waste and environmental harm. But there are several business benefits, too—lower operating costs, reduced supply chain risks, additional revenue streams, and access to new markets.


Original Submission

posted by hubie on Saturday July 30 2022, @12:26AM   Printer-friendly
from the I'm-a-Copenhagen-junkie dept.

Two players leverage quantum rules to achieve a seemingly telepathic connection:

A quantum particle can exist in two mutually exclusive conditions at once. For example, a photon can be polarized so that the electric field in it wriggles vertically, horizontally, or both ways at the same time—at least until it's measured. [...] The polarization emerges only with the measurement.

That last bit rankled Albert Einstein, who thought something like a photon's polarization should have a value independent of whether it is measured. He suggested particles might carry "hidden variables" that determine how a two-way state will collapse. However, in 1964, British theorist John Bell found a way to prove experimentally that such hidden variables cannot exist by exploiting a phenomenon known as entanglement.

Two photons can be entangled so that each is in an uncertain both-ways state, but their polarizations are correlated so that if one is horizontal the other must be vertical and vice versa. Probing entanglement is tricky. To do so, Alice and Bob must each have a measuring apparatus. Those devices can be oriented independently, so Alice can test whether her photon is polarized horizontally or vertically, while Bob can cant his detector by an angle. The relative orientation of the detectors affects how much their measurements are correlated.

Bell envisioned Alice and Bob orienting their detectors randomly over many measurements and then comparing the results. If hidden variables determine a photon's polarization, the correlations between Alice's and Bob's measurements can be only so strong. But, he argued, quantum theory allows them to be stronger. Many experiments have seen those stronger correlations and ruled out hidden variables, albeit only statistically over many trials.

[...] Now, Xi-Lin Wang and Hui-Tian Wang, physicists at Nanjing University, and colleagues have made the point more clearly through the Mermin-Peres game. In each round of the game, Alice and Bob share not one, but two pairs of entangled photons on which to make any measurements they like. [...]

If hidden variables predetermine the results of the measurements, Alice and Bob can't win every round [...] and on average, they can win at most eight out of nine rounds.

[...] Generating two pairs of entangled photons simultaneously is impractical, Xi-Lin Wang says. So instead, the experimenters used a single pair of photons that are entangled two ways—through polarization and so-called orbital angular momentum, which determines whether a wavelike photon corkscrews to the right or to the left. The experiment isn't perfect, but Alice and Bob won 93.84% of 1,075,930 rounds, exceeding the 88.89% maximum with hidden variables, the team reports in a study in press at Physical Review Letters.

[...] Xi-Lin Wang says the experiment was meant mainly to show the potential of the team's own favorite technology—photons entangled in both polarization and angular momentum. "We wish to improve the quality of these hyperentangled photons."

arXiv paper: Jia-Min Xu, Yi-Zheng Zhen, Yu-Xiang Yang, et al., Experimental Demonstration of Quantum Pseudotelepathy, arXiv:2206.12042v1 [quant-ph] 24 Jun 2022


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Friday July 29 2022, @09:40PM   Printer-friendly

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Results from the largest prospective study of its kind indicate that in the initial days and weeks after experiencing trauma, individuals facing potentially threatening situations who had less activity in their hippocampus -- a brain structure critical for forming memories of situations that are dangerous and that are safe -- developed more severe posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms.

This association between reduced hippocampal activity and risk of PTSD was particularly strong in individuals who had greater involuntary defensive reactions to being startled.

This research, published in the JNeurosci, suggests that individuals with greater defensive reactions to potentially threatening events might have a harder time learning whether an event is dangerous or safe. They also are more likely to experience severe forms of PTSD, which include symptoms such as always being on guard for danger, self-destructive behavior like drinking too much or driving too fast, trouble sleeping and concentrating, irritability, angry outbursts, and nightmares.

"These findings are important both to identify specific brain responses associated with vulnerability to develop PTSD, and to identify potential treatments focused on memory processes for these individuals to prevent or treat PTSD," said senior author Vishnu Murty, PhD, assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Temple University.

This research is part of the national Advancing Understanding of RecOvery afteR traumA (AURORA) Study, a multi-institution project funded by the National Institutes of Health, non-profit funding organizations such as One Mind, and partnerships with leading tech companies. The organizing principal investigator is Samuel McLean, MD, MPH, professor of psychiatry and emergency medicine at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and director of the UNC Institute for Trauma Recovery.

AURORA allows researchers to leverage data from patient participants who enter emergency departments at hospitals across the country after experiencing trauma, such as car accidents or other serious incidents. The ultimate goal of AURORA is to spur on the development and testing of preventive and treatment interventions for individuals who have experienced traumatic events.

Journal Reference:
Büşra Tanriverdi, David F. Gregory, Thomas M. Olino, et al. Hippocampal Threat Reactivity Interacts with Physiological Arousal to Predict PTSD Symptoms [$], Journal of Neuroscience (DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0911-21.2022)


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Friday July 29 2022, @06:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the more-money-than-sense dept.

Saudi Planning Skyscraper That's 75 Miles Wide:

[...] the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told engineers and designers he wanted his next architectural project to be as grand as the Egyptian pyramids.

According to the WSJ, the plans would make it the world's largest structure. The skyscraper would be a set of two parallel buildings, each 1,600 feet tall, and spanning 75 miles of terrain. Prince Salman is calling it the "Mirror Line" and wants it to house about five million people. It could cost as much as a trillion dollars and looks like a long, golden paradise in the photos shown below.

[...] The WSJ said Salman is, essentially, hoping to create an architectural feat designers have long dreamed of — a linear city. In concept, the Mirror Line is set to include nearly everything its residents could ever dream of needing, like a stadium, yacht club and renewable sources of energy and food.

In reality, though, it kind of sounds like a nightmare waiting to happen. What happens when Salman's weird isolated city runs out of food during internal supply chain shortages, or when another pandemic rips though millions of people trapped in tight, close quarters between two buildings?


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Friday July 29 2022, @04:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the sieve-of-gLinux dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

In 2018, Google moved its in-house Linux desktop from the Goobuntu to a new Linux distro, the Debian-based gLinux. Why? Because, as Google explained, Ubuntu's Long Term Support (LTS) two-year release "meant that we had to upgrade every machine in our fleet of over 100,000 devices before the end-of-life date of the OS."

That was a pain. Add in the time-consuming need to fully customize engineers' PCs, and Google decided that it cost too much. Besides, the "effort to upgrade our Goobuntu fleet usually took the better part of a year. With a two-year support window, there was only one year left until we had to go through the same process all over again for the next LTS. This entire process was a huge stress factor for our team, as we got hundreds of bugs with requests for help for corner cases."

So, when Google had enough of that, it moved to Debian Linux (though not just vanilla Debian). The company created a rolling Debian distribution: GLinux Rolling Debian Testing (Rodete).  The idea is that users and developers are best served by giving them the latest updates and patches as they're created and deemed ready for production. Such distros include Arch Linux, Debian Testing, and openSUSE Tumbleweed.

For Google, the immediate goal was to get off the two-year upgrade cycle. As the move to Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) has shown, these incremental changes work well. They're also easier to control and rollback if something goes wrong.

To make all this work without a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, Google created a new workflow system, Sieve.  Whenever Sieve spots a new version of a Debian package, it starts a new build. These packages are built in package groups since separate packages often must be upgraded together. Once the whole group has been built, Google runs a virtualized test suite to ensure no core components and developer workflows are broken. Next, each group is tested separately with a full system installation, boot, and local test suite run. The package builds complete within minutes, but testing can take up to an hour.

[...] release Sieve's code so we can all start producing rolling Linux desktop releases. How about it, Google? What do you say?


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Friday July 29 2022, @01:28PM   Printer-friendly
from the ketchup-with-china dept.

Senate passes massive package to boost U.S. computer chip production

[....] The 64-33 vote represents a rare bipartisan victory a little more than three months before the crucial November midterms; 17 Republicans joined all Democrats in voting yes. The package, known as "CHIPS-plus," now heads to the House, which is expected to pass it by the end of the week and send it to President Joe Biden for his signature.

[....] The centerpiece of the package is more than $50 billion in subsidies for domestic semiconductor manufacturing and research.

Supporters on Capitol Hill, as well as key members of Biden's Cabinet, have argued that making microchips at home — rather than relying on chipmakers in China, Taiwan and elsewhere — is critical to U.S. national security, especially when it comes to chips used for weapons and military equipment.

[...] The final chips bill is a slimmed-down version of a much broader China competitiveness package that House and Senate lawmakers had been negotiating. Earlier, the Senate passed its bill, known as USICA, while the House passed its own version, the America COMPETES Act. But lawmakers couldn't resolve their differences, and leading Democrats decided to switch their strategy and scale back the legislation.

The package also includes tens of billions more in authorizations for science and research programs, as well as for regional technology hubs around the country.

If passed, will this be well spent? Will the US actually be globally competitive in chip manufacture?


Original Submission

posted by janrinok on Friday July 29 2022, @10:41AM   Printer-friendly

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Cities have an important role in making progress on sustainability and climate change issues. And for them to achieve this, urban residents need to be involved in achieving set goals. This means that cities need to provide opportunities and guidance to their residents to help them make progress.

While national targets—like Canada's goal to reduce its annual greenhouse gas emissions to 110 megatons in 2030 from 191 megatons in 2019—are important, they do not mean much to a city resident or an organization.

It can be difficult to determine how to address large and complex national issues. These need to be translated from theoretical commitments into measurable goals to create a sense of commitment and urgency. For example, Canadian emission targets need to be broken down into actionable objectives at the city level, which would make it more meaningful to its residents, who can then make small contributions that amount to significant outcomes for the city and beyond.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are recognized as strategically important for sustainability. They cannot be achieved without commitment at every scale, from individuals to different levels of government.

Public and private organizations in cities can set the stage to engage everyone to contribute to shared goals. The SDGs may seem large and difficult to achieve, but they can be localized and broken down into achievable pieces.

This is being done by dozens of cities internationally who are reporting their progress in voluntary local reviews. The European Aalborg Charter is evidence of a can-do attitude among cities.

Urban leadership needs to develop a shared vision that guides residents on their individual and collective contributions. The combined achievements at the urban level contribute to global improvements. Measurable indicators and targets are set—such as monitoring energy consumption—reflect a commitment to targets.

Taking collaborative action on larger goals can address concerns with leadership that have been recently reported in the media. The response of world leaders to the ongoing climate challenges and the global COVID-19 pandemic have produced a global crisis of trust. People need to see action and be part of the solutions that are being proposed.

To build trust, city leadership needs partners, collaborators and residents to work with them on setting goals, developing a measurement system and collecting data. There are a number of available platforms and technologies to assist with developing a measurement system and engaging residents in reporting.

[...] Establishing measurable goals at the city level needs and will result in the engagement of residents. Everybody wins in the long run—quality of life improves, urban governance is more effective, and businesses develop more efficient models. Canada has lagged behind other countries in localizing sustainability targets identified in the Canadian 2030 Agenda—for Canadian cities, there is a lot more to be done.


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