Many low-resource areas of the world are short on medical technology, including incubators. So why not turn parents into pseudo-incubators? When a baby is born prematurely, a good way to help the baby survive and thrive is simply to hold it close to a parent's naked chest. No technology needed!
That's the essence of kangaroo care.
It's a method of holding the baby, clad only in a diaper, right up against a parent's bare chest for skin-to-skin contact. In 1978, physician researchers Edgar Rey Sanabria and Héctor Martínez-Gómez introduced the technique at the maternity ward of the San Juan de Dios Hospital in Bogota, Colombia. //
"It was what we had to do and it saved my child's life" //
"It creates a link to my child and brings me closer with my wife" //
"I started taking part ... to give the love of a father to my children"
The Thomas More Society has filed a complaint with Michigan’s Bureau of Elections against Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson for violating federal law in contracting with the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) to clean her state’s voter rolls.
The complaint — filed on behalf of Pure Integrity Michigan Elections — argues that Benson violated the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) by giving ERIC access to Michigan’s Qualified Voter File, a secure voter list used by the bureau of elections and more than 1,500 election clerks. HAVA requires each secretary of state to maintain and clean voter rolls without outside assistance. //
HAVA does not allow states to share voter data with third parties, but Benson’s agreement with ERIC requires her to do so.
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The datastore is often the most important part of an application. Code can be changed easily, and new code can be deployed without much fuss if you discover that some of your original choices were wrong, but the data model and the way it is handled is much harder to change. This means that you need to give the data model as much thought as you can when starting out, and the choice of datastore greatly influences that decision.
This post is meant to guide you through some common pitfalls, and hopefully explain why a relational database is a much saner default than the schemaless databases I see most people instinctively reach for nowadays. //
Schemas are awesome. More importantly, they’re inevitable. There’s no application that doesn’t use a schema, as there’s no application where you only write data without the reader needing to know what kind of data it’s going to read. The schema is just implicit, in the application code, instead of explicit, in the datastore, where it should be. This means that schemaless databases aren’t really schemaless, they just kick the can down the road and let you get away with not defining a schema early on, which invariably comes back to bite you in the ass later.
When you use a schemaless database, you’re essentially saying “I don’t want to deal with the schema now, just let me write the data, my future self can deal with it when reading”. However, when would you rather get an error? When you write the data in the database and can retry, or a year later, when you read it and it turns out that that one entry had escaped notice and is still using the old format?
In almost all cases, the choice is clear, you want your application to produce an error while writing, when you can still do something about it, and ensure that your datastore will always contain “clean” data. That’s impossible to do without a datastore that enforces a schema.
A few weeks after Iran’s “president,” Ebrahim Raisi, promised stricter enforcement of his nation’s misogynistic dress code, a woman named Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurd, was likely beaten to death by “morality police” for failing to wear her hijab properly. The apparent murder was nothing new for the theocratic “guidance patrols” that have been patrolling cities since the 1979 Islamic revolution, one of the most disastrous events of the late 20th century.
This week, Leslie Stahl of “60 Minutes” interviewed this same theocratic crackpot responsible for Amini’s death wearing a hijab. And it immediately reminded me of Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci’s 1979 interview with Ayatollah Khomeini. The juxtaposition reminds us just how much journalistic integrity has eroded.
Rarely mentioned these days, Fallaci, who died in 2006, was somewhat of a celebrity due to her pugilistic interviews with world leaders in the 1960s and 1970s. A war correspondent for most of her career, Fallaci was shot three times and left for dead during student demonstrations in Mexico City in 1968 in what became known as the Tlatelolco massacre. Striking and sophisticated, uninterested in the ideology or political affiliation of her victims, Fallaci had no patience for moral equivalency. In truth, she was a liberal of the old school, and her infinite skepticism regarding power made her the most formidable interviewer of her time. “Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon,” she is quoted in her book “Interviews with History” (which should be required reading in journalism school). “I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born.” //
Fallaci, barefoot and covered in Islamic garb from head to toe, proceeds to challenge every Khomeini lie, confronting him on his fascistic tactics and murders. You really need to read the transcript to comprehend just how masterfully she handles the interview. Here is a snippet of her challenging the Iranian regime’s insistence that she wear religious garb – a “stupid, medieval rag.”
https://www.nytimes.com/1979/10/07/archives/an-interview-with-khomeini.html
The following is invited public testimony to South Dakota’s Board of Education Standards on September 19, 2022, as written in advance of the hearing. Monday’s was the first of multiple hearings that will occur around the state as part of a curriculum process that began after massive public outcry against a 2021 history curriculum plan that pushed far-left politics.
Gov. Kristi Noem’s chief of staff, Mark Miller, chaired a new commission that started with curriculum guidelines proposed by Hillsdale College and refined them with in-state teachers, tribal leaders, and historians. //
I have read many K-12 standards, and the first standout in these was their clarity. Most curriculum mandates are laden with jargon. Clear language allows everyone to understand what children are expected to learn. This creates unity and accountability for parents, children, teachers, taxpayers, school boards, and state lawmakers.
These requirements are rich in key information and beautifully represent what every American citizen should know (excluding the South Dakota-specific standards, of course). They reflect what research and experience find ensures a high-quality education for all children: core knowledge, carefully arranged and frequently reinforced.
Excellent instruction in the story of humankind helps us all understand human nature, benefit from others’ experiences, and understand our rights and duties. Distributing such core human knowledge broadly, as University of Virginia researchers E.D. Hirsch and Daniel Willingham, and other academics, have shown, reduces social inequality.
Their work also shows what’s wrong with the “critical thinking” canard that pretends filling one’s brain with knowledge is somehow at odds with thinking soundly. It is not, and anyone who says so is poorly informed about cognitive science. Indeed, as Ethics and Public Policy researcher Stanley Kurtz has written of South Dakota’s struggle to update its social studies curricula, “critical thinking” jargon is usually used as a cover for political indoctrination.
In fact, instruction rich in factual knowledge, such as these proposed standards require, is exactly what’s required for critical thinking — because knowledge is the basis of all critical thinking. And it’s clear from almost any data you look at that American children are not being given such core knowledge in most publicly funded schools. //
South Dakota’s constitution rightly observes, “The stability of a republican form of government depend[s] on the morality and intelligence of the people.” Therefore, the lack of strong history and civics instruction is an existential crisis. //
Monarch who through her seven decades of public service became a figure of fascination by remaining steadfastly private //
The 42nd of a line of kings and queens of first England, then Britain, then the United Kingdom, since William the Conqueror, she was also the sixth queen-sovereign of England and the fourth of the UK. In addition, she was queen and head of state of 15 other countries, stretching from Fiji, Australia and New Zealand to the Bahamas and Canada, all once part of the former British empire. She was for seven decades head of the Commonwealth, whose 54 countries comprise 2.1 billion people, a third of the globe’s population.
In accordance with the precedent established by Henry VIII, the Queen was also Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church of England, a role she took much more seriously in both her private and public lives than many of her predecessors. //
During the course of her reign she was served by 15 prime ministers, from Winston Churchill to Liz Truss. She met more than a quarter of all the American presidents who have ever lived, five popes, hundreds of national leaders, from the saintly, such as Nelson Mandela, to the tyrannical, including Robert Mugabe and Nicolae Ceausescu, as well as thousands of celebrities and – it is calculated – more than 2 million more “ordinary” people. She was easily the most travelled monarch in British, indeed world, history: criss-crossing the globe regularly to visit the Commonwealth and just about every other significant country in the world, into her 90th year, and touring Britain year in and year out even longer. //
Yet through all this exposure, renown and public fascination, she never engaged in partisan politics, uttered a truly controversial remark, scarcely expressed an opinion and only rarely showed emotion: exasperation occasionally, but never temper.
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But grid operators, utilities and clean energy advocates say it doesn’t make sense to blame electric vehicles for the soaring electricity demand during the recent heat wave. And in the future, as utilities make needed adjustments for widespread EV uptake, there’s no reason why transportation electrification should overburden the country’s grid, they said.
In fact, experts see EV batteries as part of the solution.
They help to reduce planet-warming emissions and can add needed flexibility to electric utilities that are sure to come under more strain as global temperatures continue to rise.
Garrett Fitzgerald, senior director for electrification at the Smart Electric Power Alliance, called the backlash over California’s charging delays “undue criticism or panic.”
“The grid can handle it, we’re taking the necessary steps, but we’re just at the very beginning of putting those processes and programs in place,” he said. “A future grid will absolutely be able to handle a future demand of transportation electrification.”
That success will hinge on utilities being proactive in planning for millions of additional EVs on the roads in the coming decades. It will also take some adjustments, experts said. EV owners and utilities must take advantage of up-and-coming charging technologies that will save the grid from unnecessary stress. //
Adding capacity to the grid would be necessary with or without transportation electrification. Perhaps a more important consideration, experts and utilities said, is load management—utilities’ ability to accommodate fluctuations in energy supply and demand in real time to avoid outages.
“It’s less about being able to meet the energy consumption required for EV charging, and it’s much more about meeting the demand for that electricity, and specifically when, where and at what power we’re providing that demand,” said Fitzgerald of the Smart Electric Power Alliance. //
Managed charging, for example, allows utilities to remotely start or stop vehicle charging to accommodate grid conditions, with the vehicle owner’s consent. It can be particularly useful for companies that operate many electric vehicles that need to be charged but not necessarily all at once.
Time-of-use pricing encourages EV owners to charge their vehicles during off-peak hours, rewarding them with lower rates for doing so. And vehicle-to-grid or vehicle-to-home technology can allow certain EVs to sell electricity from their battery back to the grid during times of need, or to power a home during an outage. //
Improvements to the grid are seen by experts as necessary not only to prevent power outages from high demand, but also to help the U.S. meet its climate goals by facilitating the transition away from gas-guzzling vehicles. The stakes are high.
“If we don’t get this right, we are not going to be able to reduce our climate emissions, we are not going to be able to mitigate transportation pollution, and we are not going to be able to actually serve this increased demand from people around the country who want to play their part in being part of the solution,” said Baldwin.
The Washington Post is reporting that the US Customs and Border Protection agency is seizing and copying cell phone, tablet, and computer data from “as many as” 10,000 phones per year, including an unspecified number of American citizens. This is done without a warrant, because “…courts have long granted an exception to border authorities, allowing them to search people’s devices without a warrant or suspicion of a crime.”
CBP’s inspection of people’s phones, laptops, tablets and other electronic devices as they enter the country has long been a controversial practice that the agency has defended as a low-impact way to pursue possible security threats and determine an individual’s “intentions upon entry” into the U.S. But the revelation that thousands of agents have access to a searchable database without public oversight is a new development in what privacy advocates and some lawmakers warn could be an infringement of Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures.On November 04, 1965, CDR Clarence W. Stoddard, Jr., Executive Officer of VA-25 "Fist of the Fleet," flying A-1H Skyraider Bu. No. 135297, NE/572, from Carrier Air Wing Two aboard USS Midway, carried a special bomb to the North Vietnamese in commemoration of the 6-millionth pound of ordnance dropped. This bomb was unique because of the type..... it was a toilet!
Also unique to this mission is the fact this aircraft was named "Paper Tiger II" (a temporary name used for just this one flight).
The following is an account of this event, courtesy of Clint Johnson, Captain, USNR Ret. Captain Johnson was one of the two VA-25 A-1 Skyraider pilots credited with shooting down a MiG-17 on June 20, 1965.
"I was a pilot in VA-25 on the 1965 Vietnam cruise.
572 was flown by CDR C. W. "Bill" Stoddard. His wingman in 577 (which was my assigned airplane) was LCDR Robin Bacon, who had a wing station mounted movie camera (the only one remaining in the fleet from WWII).
The flight was a Dixie Station strike (South Vietnam) going to the Delta. When they arrived in the target area and CDR Stoddard was reading the ordnance list to the FAC [Forward Air Controller], he ended with "and one code name Sani-Flush." The FAC couldn't believe it and joined up to see it. It was dropped in a dive with LCDR Bacon flying tight wing position to film the drop. When it came off, it turned hole to the wind and almost struck his airplane. It made a great ready room movie.
The FAC said that it whistled all the way down.
The toilet was a damaged toilet, which was going to be thrown overboard. One of our plane captains rescued it and the ordnance crew made a rack, tailfins and nose fuse for it. Our checkers maintained a position to block the view of the air boss and the Captain while the aircraft was taxiing forward. Just as it was being shot off we got a 1MC message from the bridge, "What the hell was on 572's right wing?"
There were a lot of jokes with air intelligence about germ warfare. I wish that we had saved the movie film. CDR Stoddard was later killed while flying 572 in Oct 1966. He was hit by three SAMs over Vinh."
Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson has said his city will use a private grant to conduct door-to-door canvassing by the city’s election officials to urge people to vote.
To many people, it would seem that nothing could be as innocuous as a simple “nonpartisan” get-out-the-vote (GOTV) effort, even if it is financed by private grants to election officials. It might sound fair enough, if the mayor’s election staff takes no partisan position, and advocates for no particular candidates in their efforts, and given that election officials are required by law to operate in a nonpartisan fashion.
But as The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway tweeted at the time, “Zuckerberg-style targeted private financing — and collusion with supposedly non-partisan election administration — of GOTV operations in Democrat regions is a horrific attack on election integrity.”
Even if we could take Milwaukee Mayor Johnson at his word when he says, “I’m not asking anybody to cast their ballots for 1 party or another or 1 candidate or another. What I’m asking is for people to participate in our process,” what he is suggesting is inherently partisan, at least in Milwaukee, and in most other U.S. urban areas.
Content neutrality of GOTV efforts ultimately has little to do with their partisan effects. The partisan advantage depends far more on the political characteristics of the targeted area.
In a city like Milwaukee, which Joe Biden won in 2020 with 80 percent of the vote to Donald Trump’s 20 percent, a randomly targeted GOTV effort can be expected to increase the Democratic candidate’s vote total by an extra 600 votes for every 1,000 additional voters mobilized. This is because the Democratic candidate would be expected to get an additional 800 votes, while the Republican candidate would be expected to get an additional 200 votes, resulting in a net gain for the Democrat of 600 votes.
If a successful effort in Milwaukee — such as Johnson has in mind this year — results in the mobilization of 40,000 additional voters in Milwaukee, we would expect the result to be an additional 24,000 votes for the Democratic candidate, far in excess of the 20,682 votes by which Biden defeated Trump in Wisconsin in 2020.
You can calculate the “get-out-the-vote multiplier” (GOTV multiplier) for any city or county yourself. All you have to know is the margin by which the Democratic candidate beat the Republican candidate in the previous election, assuming that the political characteristics of the demographic in question haven’t significantly changed.
For example, if an area is 80 percent Democrat and 20 percent Republican like Milwaukee, the GOTV multiplier will be the difference between the Democrat vote share and the Republican vote share, which in this case is 60 percent or 0.60. An additional 1,000 votes will yield an extra 600 votes for the Democrat.
Of course, if the Republican candidate beats the Democrat candidate, the GOTV multiplier will be negative. This is why one never sees leftist nonprofits targeting GOTV efforts in exurban and rural areas, even though many Democratic voters live in those areas.
I wrote this in my personal book of aphorisms on 2021-08-20:
There is nothing virtuous about sleep deprivation. It makes people stupid, sloppy, error-prone, unwise, and unthinkingly obedient. This is why schools and armies so encourage it. We’d all be better off if early-rising “policy makers” got a good night’s sleep or, better still, never woke up.
Is there a way to say “Three Mile Island was scary, but perhaps overblown” without repeating condescendingly that nobody actually died? If so, Stone doesn’t know it. Is there a way to say, “Chernobyl was more a human error than a nuclear power error” without repeating with an implied sneer that no matter how many casualties it caused, it wasn’t as bad as you think it was? Dunno. Stone can’t resist the desire to both-sides his blaming for the political fight against nuclear power in the first place — conservatives are in the pocket of fossil fuel companies and liberals are easily scared hippies — nor to tear solar power and wind power to shreds, just for fun. Honestly, I have no objections to implications that low levels of nuclear radiation never hurt anybody and we should all be noshing on uranium rods like candy canes, but that’s the sort of suggestion — I made up the candy cane part — better delivered by a talking head with a medical degree than in affectless voiceover.
Actually, Stone’s voiceover isn’t affectless. It has the zealotry of a new convert, delivered with the same “I just had this explained to me in a meme!” combination of under-documentation and certainty you would expect from somebody arguing the long-term value of an ape NFT — not somebody telling you that if we don’t reduce emissions entirely by 2050 everybody will die.
In maybe the final 20 minutes, Nuclear finds a purpose. Stone talks to a number of intrepid American scientists and innovators who are trying to make inroads with SMRs — small modular reactors — and other evolutions of the technology. This is finally where Stone stops talking and starts listening, trying to illustrate the merits of what he’s being told. These pioneers are young, thoughtful and in desperate need of support from an energy community that needs its mind opened. Even if this segment of the documentary is a 20-minute commercial for both some small enterprises and some of the largest companies in the world, it feels worthy.
My instinct is that this closing section should be the film — 10-minute introduction and context, followed by 90 minutes of arguments looking to the future. My problem with Nuclear is less that it’s propaganda and more that it should have been better propaganda.
The young American stood in the back of the truck as it moved slowly through the streets of Nalerigu, Ghana. Friends gathered along the road held up flags and cheered for the teenager clad in a Ghanaian national shirt. Bystanders called out to see the two medals clanging on Trey Haun’s chest. He held up the silver and bronze, waved and then quickly ducked his head, trying to hide his smile.
The 16-year-old has lived somewhere between embarrassed and excited since the 2022 Unicycle Convention and World Championship ended. Winning the first ever medals for Ghana created not only international media-buzz but guest appearances at celebrations all over Northern Ghana. While the world wanted the story behind an American representing Ghana at an international competition, the Mamprusi community just wanted to celebrate their son, Manboora Trey.
Basically, a PID loop can be thought of very simply as an equation that takes your current state as input and gives you what you need to do to reach a desired state as output. For example, if you had a radiator and wanted to heat a room, the PID loop would take the current temperature as input and tell you how high you needed to set the radiator on a 0-100% scale to achieve a desired temperature.
The PID loop has three components, and to tune it you need to set three weights that you multiply each parameter with. That means that it’s basically output = Pprop, + Iintgr + D*deriv, where the terms are explained below:
P - proportional: This is the weight of the difference between the current position and the desired position. What this says about the radiator is “we’re still far away, we need more heat!”, so the more P you set, the higher the radiator will be set for a given temperature difference.
D - derivative: Because P is purely based on the difference between the current and target temperatures, it doesn’t know anything about inertia. So, even though your radiator will be getting closer to the target temperature, even when it’s very close, P will be saying “more heat, we’re not there yet!”, and cause you to overshoot your target, having to then go back (possibly turning the AC on, undershooting downwards, and then back upwards, oscillating like that for a long time). D helps by saying “whoa, we’re getting there, slow down with the heat”, and reducing the amount of heat you apply proportionally to how fast you’re getting to your target temperature.
I - integral: I helps in the case where you left a window open in the room, and P is saying “okay we’re pretty close so set the radiator to 10% just for that final push”, but the room is leaking so that 10% will never get you to your target temperature. I helps by saying “Okay we’ve been trying but it’s not working, we’re still far, so we actually need a bit more heat than 10%”, by looking at the constant temperature difference you’ve been having lately, despite your best efforts. Basically, I deals with accumulated error when you think you’re getting closer but all you’re doing is fighting losses, so I allows you to close that gap.
Having worked in web security for years, I know how hard it is to get authentication right, especially when users will find ingenious ways to defeat your system, such as storing their “do not store these codes on your phone” two-factor authentication (2FA) codes on the phone and then throwing the phone in the ocean. Another user surprised me when, instead of properly setting up their authenticator app, they brilliantly used one of the ten backup codes to finish their 2FA setup (and didn’t even store the rest), thus locking themselves out of their account immediately. I fixed that bug immediately and found new respect for the bug-finding abilities of users.
Those (and many more) occurrences have made it painfully obvious to me that securing an authentication system is very hard UX, and, since the user is always right, we need to find ways to make systems that are both secure and easy to use. While working for my previous employer, an encrypted communications company called Silent Circle, we had to find ways to solve this problem, and we arrived at something I believe provides a very good balance between security and usability. I will explain how this system works, and urge you to implement something similar for your authentication, especially if it’s protecting high-value accounts like Playstation Network’s.
This article doesn’t contain seven tips because I hate listicles. It’s just a recounting of my experience working remote for fifteen years now and observations on what works and what doesn’t, but it doesn’t matter, because the amazing title has piqued your interest.
For a bit of background, my first job was working in an office, as IT support for a construction company. I did that for three years, and then I got a remote job and never looked back. Personally, I enjoy the freedom that comes with being able to work from anywhere, and I’m lucky enough to be one of the people who can. Many of my friends have to be at their home office or a coworking space to get work done, but I can focus anywhere, which allows me to travel to another country for a week or two and work from there.
I’m not going to go into the pros and cons of remote working, I assume they’ve been beaten into you by the myriad of other posts, since it’s a trendy topic. Instead, I’ll assume you are interested in improving your existing remote culture and I’ll detail what has worked well for me.
Improving communication
From 2012 to 2019 I worked at Silent Circle, where we (rather inadvertently) created one of the best remote cultures I’ve worked in.
After his outpour of encouragement, I was motivated to create a solution, no matter how hard. I had a rough idea in my mind, but it was going to be tough oh who am I kidding, it’s five buttons connected to a microcontroller, it would take two minutes.
It took four hours. Close enough.
The hardware
Behold.
As I said, the hardware is simple enough: Just a microcontroller and five keyboard switches wired to five of its input pins. Since this build //
Deciding which key presses would correspond to which characters was the hardest part, but also the most creative. Since this is a brand-new keyboard layout, I would not be beholden to the mistakes of the past. No more jamming typewriters for me, no more bigrams, I would have free rein to perform extensive research and decide what the optimal correspondence would be for my layout.
I decided that that was too much work, and that I’d just fall back to the good old etaoin shrdlu. I found the character frequencies in the English language, and made sure that each of the five most frequently used characters (the spacebar, “e”, “t”, etc) had its own key. After that, the next most frequent characters got a double press (the thumb plus one of the four others). Then came double presses between the other keys, then triple presses, etc.