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JK Rowling urges students not to volunteer at orphanages

Author highlights evidence suggesting that ‘orphanage tourism’ drives families apart and makes children vulnerable to abuse

JK Rowling has called on students around the world not to volunteer at orphanages, pointing to emerging evidence that “orphanage tourism” drives family separation and child trafficking.

Speaking at the One Young World summit in London, the global forum for young leaders, the Harry Potter author and founder and president of children’s charity Lumos, said orphanages do “irreparable harm” and “perpetuate the abuse” of children and communities.

“Despite the best of intentions, the sad truth is that visiting and volunteering in orphanages drives an industry that separates children from their families and puts them at risk of neglect and abuse,” she said.

[...] Rowling was launching a three-year global campaign to challenge attitudes toward orphanage tourism and volunteering, #HelpingNotHelping. The campaign is backed by recently revised travel advice from the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office warning of the potential harm of orphanage tourism and volunteering.

[...] Children in institutions are 500 times more likely to take their own lives, 40 times more likely to have a criminal record and 10 times more likely to be involved in prostitution, the charity claims.

[...] “Most children in orphanages are not even ‘orphans’ – they are placed there due to reasons such as poverty, disability, or to receive an education, and many have a family who could care for them, given the right support,” said Alex Christopoulos, deputy CEO of Lumos.

Tucson police: Woman shoots 2 intruders dead
Shaq Davis Arizona Daily Star Oct 17, 2019 Updated Oct 23, 2019

A woman shot and killed two men who were trying to break into her midtown home early Wednesday morning, police said.

The woman was not injured in the confrontation. Her home was specifically targeted in the attempted home invasion, said Sgt. Pete Dugan, Tucson Police Department spokesman. The attempted home invasion appears to have been narcotics related, he said.

Officer Frank Magos, a Tucson police spokesman gave the following account in a news release:

The woman, who was alone in the home, woke up around 3:45 a.m. to noise coming from the rear of the house.

She confronted and shot the two men accused of trying to force their way into the home in the 4600 block of East Duncan Street. The home is near North Swan and East Grant roads.

The woman then sought help from a neighbor and called 911.

Officers arrived to find the two who were shot, Corey Teixeira, 18, and Ali Mohamed, 18, in the home’s backyard.

Teixeira was pronounced dead at the scene. Authorities transported Mohamed to a hospital where he died shortly after arriving.

It is unclear if the woman will face charges, Dugan said.

Police are asking anyone with information about the incident to call 88-CRIME, an anonymous tipster line.

Wednesday’s shooting is one of more than 100 incidents in the area reported to law enforcement in the past six months, according to Crime Reports, a crime-tracking website.

“I’m definitely going to get a gun to protect myself, too,” said Jay Spencer, a neighbor who has lived in the area for about seven months.

Spencer said that in the short time he has lived there, he already has caught a man attempting to break into the rear of his home. When police arrived, the man had already fled, he said.

He said there have been several other recent crime-related incidents in the neighborhood, including a woman reporting a break-in at her home, items stolen from a truck, as well as a person shown on video stealing a cactus from a home.

“There’s not enough enforcement, to be honest,” Spencer said.

https://tucson.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/tucson-police-woman-shoots-intruders-dead/article_c70d5fe6-f022-11e9-99d7-fbeb8a97095c.html

Ohhhhhh - it appears that the story doesn't end there though!

Detectives said in the court document that two “spent” .38 caliber shell casings were recovered from the property. Other items taken by police included: a Remington 870 shotgun; two .38 caliber Smith & Wesson Special Revolvers; a knife; suspected psilocybin mushrooms; LSD sheets and tablets; marijuana seeds; packaging materials; and a vacuum sealer, according to the document.

Pills suspected to be Xanax, a knife sheath and duffel bags were taken from a vehicle apparently used by the two slain men, according to the document.

The woman has not been charged with a crime.

https://tucson.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/drugs-guns-found-in-home-of-tucson-woman-who-shot/article_1e23a3c8-5dcb-5db4-9bff-f3e5295fe5c3.html

So, then, is this young lady dealing in illicit drugs? Not charged with a crime? Does that mean the drugs found don't belong to her? The guys breaking in brought the drugs with them? Hmmmmm . . . Maybe she has just very, very recently started dating the sheriff?

My First Time Playing Minecraft, Ever: Testing The Ray Tracing Beta

Article contains nice slider comparison screenshots.

Next up: OpenMW.

Just as I've begun experimenting on Aaron Logue's circuit, some further research has shown that such circuits using the base-emitter junctions of transistors in that way are not stable in the long run. After about three months of being electrically stressed in a configuration like that, the oxide in the emitter-base junction of the transistor will begin to degrade, and the circuit will begin to be less and less effective at producing randomness. Rob Seward has a variant circuit that tries to compensate for this effect, but the fact is, the manufacturers of 2N3904s and other transistors which are (ab)used in this way can't make any kind of assurance that their components will remain stable in the long term. This kind of makes me a little bit concerned, because there are many commercial hardware RNGs out there (e.g. ChaosKey, OneRNG, and many others) that use transistor junctions in exactly the same way as the Logue circuit, and if this is true, they will all become unreliable when used for extended periods.

I did some further research and found that noise from Zener diodes is another good way to produce randomness, and Zener diodes at least are intended to be biased in that way, so they should be more stable. The big problem is that while the transistor B-E junction circuits need at least 12 volt supplies, the Zener circuits need even higher voltages, because it seems that the 12 volt Zeners are those which produce most noise. The circuit from betrusted.io is of this type, however, it uses a load of really weird surface mount devices. The power supply in particular uses a TPS61158, which annoyingly comes only in a ridiculously tiny WSON package with no exposed leads that is basically impossible to solder by hand. I'm not investing in a heat gun or other specialised equipment just for that...

Fortunately, I did find a few more designs out there, one of which was actually described in a conference paper. The bill of materials there looks like it uses only stuff I can realistically work with given the equipment that I am likely to have. The TPS61040 it calls for is available in SOT23, which is comparable in size to the ATECC508a (SOIC8). Soldering that by hand is possible: I've done it a few times. There are a few more components out there that I couldn't find in the electronics stores we've got here though, like the 1N759 Zeners that it uses, so I had to order those online.

And so at first I tried to go to RS Online, which I've used before to get some components (as well as my first Raspberry Pi) but they didn't have a lot of the key components I needed. So next I tried to go to DigiKey. They had everything I needed, but they wanted something like $16 to ship the stuff internationally. For a bill of materials that isn't much more than that, it's a pain. But then someone from corporate HQ in Denver is coming by to my part of the world to meet with us in a couple weeks so I asked them to ship it to the company address in Denver instead. $4 shipping, not too bad. But then a few hours later they suddenly tell me that they failed to authorise my payment with PayPal. When I asked what the hell was going on their clueless customer service kept giving me cryptic and unhelpful one-sentence replies to all of my questions, so I told them screw you, cancel my order. And I wound up at Mouser. Seems they would ship it all to me for free if I bought $40 or more from them, so I got a few more items to fill it up and now I'm waiting for my order to get here, which it should by around next week.

In the meantime, I tried to build something like the circuit from that above paper, which they call the Lampert circuit (shown on page 8 of that PDF). I was able to get LM358s from my friendly neighbourhood electronics shops, but I substituted a different 12V 0.5W Zener for the 1N759, a 1N5242. I don't have any diodes equivalent to the MBR0530 (D5) so I substituted a 1N4148. I also don't have a TLV3202 comparator (more's the pity I forgot to order it!), so I substituted an LM319. With a laptop power supply brick to feed 19V into the circuit, it seems to actually work. I've tried feeding the random circuit into an Arduino first and it does seem to be generating good random data based on some of the simple statistical tests I've applied. It mostly passes the FIPS tests and ent, but the random data it produced crashed the OPERM5 test from Diehard (this is known to be unstable though). Longer term testing for the design is warranted, but I'll wait until I get the rest of the components before I start soldering anything.

I'll get all the rest of the components within the next few weeks and then we'll see about building the boost converter into the circuit as well, and then I can build a new RNG hat.

Hillary Clinton called me a 'Russian asset'. The establishment is losing its grip - Jill Stein

The McCarthyist smear against the Green party shows the lengths to which Clinton will go to blame others for her 2016 defeat

Ralph Nader did nothing wrong.

Rosa Parks died on this day, in 2005. The impeachment inquiry is currently trying to establish how Donald Trump did it.

https://www.thewrap.com/donald-trump-met-rosa-parks-muhammad-ali-photo/

A video caught white students saying the n-word. Amid outcry, they’ve been criminally charged. (archive)

The three people walking through a dimly lit parking lot near a University of Connecticut student apartment complex probably didn’t know they were being watched. But as the trio crossed in front of an open window repeatedly saying the n-word louder and louder, a person inside wasn’t just observing — they were recording.

Now, university officials say an investigation into the 11-second video, which started to widely circulate on social media earlier this month, has prompted campus police to arrest and charge two students Monday night with violating a Connecticut hate crime statute.

Jarred Karal and Ryan Mucaj, both 21 and described by police as white, were charged with ridicule on account of creed, religion, color, denomination, nationality or race. The misdemeanor charge is punishable by a maximum of 30 days in jail, a fine of up to $50 or both, according to state law.

[...] David Embrick, another sociology professor, also called on the university to take responsibility, delivering an impassioned speech during Monday’s demonstration, the Daily Campus reported.

“Injustice anywhere is injustice,” said Embrick, who donned a shirt bearing the words, “White Supremacy is Terrorism.” He continued, “We should do something about it.”

You want to talk to a law professor, not a sociology professor. You can ask them about the unconstitutional law, or how two students were arrested weeks after quietly saying the N-WORD to nobody in particular.

The sociology prof should be asked to perform a qualitative analysis of how white the two criminal perpetrators were.

Also at NBC.

I took one of the more scenic routes home from work today. I needed a router bit, so stopped off at the local lumber yard / tool shops. Business finished, I started thinking about food. There's a Burger King just down the hill from Bailey's Building supplies, so I thought I'd give that impossible burger a try.

It's important to understand a couple things:
1. I ordered the burgers to go, and I ate one driving down the road toward home.
2. I was hungry to start with.
3. I did not unpackage the burger for inspection before eating it.

So, I'm tooling along, with one red light between me and the open road. Reach into the bag, and pull out a burger. Fold that flap back - the light stays green - and I take a tentative bite. Hmmm - not bad. It tastes pretty good, really.

So, over the course of five miles or so, I'm chowing down. And, getting less hungry. That's kinda the whole point, I think. Fill belly until hunger fades, or something like that. And, as the hunger fades, the sandwich tastes less beefy. The next couple miles pass, and the sandwich seems to last longer and longer. Hunger is gone, and that sandwich just doesn't taste like beef anymore. In fact, that last bite was something of a chore to finish chewing, and swallowing.

Now, let me start over. The appearance of the meatless patty is pretty convincing. It even has char-broiling stripes across it, just as you expect with a Burger King burger. The texture is pretty convincing too. It's a rather dry burger, but very burger like. The smell . . . it doesn't smell beefy, but it doesn't smell bad. Chewing the patty was convincing, initially, but at some point, it became less convincing.

Luckily, I bought two of them, so I could evaluate it when I got home.

Fold back the paper, and you see a pretty standard sesame seed bun. Pull the top off, you see standard lettuce, tomato, onions, a bit of pickle, and some mayo-based sauce. The patty looks like a pretty standard 1/4 pound burger. Pinch off a bit of patty, and there are no strands, no tubular shaped spirals, and no evidence of fat. It's a fibery mat, really. Taste it, and it's kinda beef-like, but not beefy. Smell it - there's no sign of cow.

Do I like it? Well, when I was hungry, it went down pretty well. It's hamburger-like enough to convince a hungry stomach that it's pretty real. But, it just doesn't cut it as I get filled up. I highly doubt that I'll ever buy another. I might eat one again, if someone buys it and offers it to me.

They might do better deep frying these things. Call it a beef flavored fritter, or a beef flavored hush puppy. If the patty had a bit of crunch to it, I might enjoy it more. Or, maybe if the interior of the patty contained more moisture, it would be better.

This thing isn't "bad", but it's just not "good".

I recommend that everyone try one, and make your own mind up about it. It's unlikely to leave you gagging, but I don't think you're going to fall in love with it.

Want the details? Here’s the ingredient list:

Water, Soy Protein Concentrate, Coconut Oil, Sunflower Oil, Natural Flavors, 2% or less of: Potato Protein, Methylcellulose, Yeast Extract, Cultured Dextrose, Food Starch Modified, Soy Leghemoglobin, Salt, Soy Protein Isolate, Mixed Tocopherols (Vitamin E), Zinc Gluconate, Thiamine Hydrochloride (Vitamin B1), Sodium Ascorbate (Vitamin C), Niacin, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride (Vitamin B6), Riboflavin (Vitamin B2), Vitamin B12.

Contains: Soy

https://faq.impossiblefoods.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018937494

Enjoy your own adventure! I'll stick with beef when I feel like eating beef in the future. I've done my bit for scientific research!

Could polygyny be the answer to Russia's problems?

What one thing could prevent depravity and fornication in Russia?

Well according to one legal advisor in Islamic law - or mufti - in Moscow, Ildar Alyautdinov, the answer is polygyny (where the practice of polygamy only applies to men).

He told state-owned news agency RIA Novosti men having more than one wife at the same time would not only "ensure the enforcement of women's rights" but there would also be "much less depravity and fornication, which is spreading so rapidly nowadays".

The mufti also pointed out polygyny would help the demographic situation in Russia, as there are many more women than men in the country.

🤔