Hundreds of Toxic Chemicals Are Coursing Through Our Tap Water, New Report Says Truthout
Liberal Senator Gerard Rennick says he is yet to decide how long he will continue to withhold his vote on government legislation as part of his protest against state covid vaccination mandates.
Coalition MP George Christensen today joined five Coalition Senators - including Gerard Rennick - in threatening to vote against Government legislation, until the Prime Minister intervenes in state rules requiring COVID-19 vaccination in some workplaces.
Senator Gerard Rennick on Covid And Complexities One Vaccine ๐ Does not Fit All
Fast Company: “Some of the world’s most intriguing innovations are so new that their full impact is yet to be felt. This is what we’re highlighting in the inaugural edition of Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech.
The culture that is Viennese (and alternatively, Swiss).
Exclusive: LAPD partnered with tech firm that enables secretive online spying Guardian
Another Intel Chip Flaw Puts a Slew of Gadgets at Risk Wired. “Oh noooooooooo, someone could hack my Internet connected bird feeder.”
Great Art Explained: The Mona Lisa (The Extended Cut) - Kottke.org: “In the most recent episode of the excellent YouTube series Great Art Explained, James Payne expands on an earlier, shorter video on the Mona Lisa with this double-length extended cut.
For Mona Lisa, Leonardo used a thin grain of poplar tree and applied an undercoat of lead white, rather than just a mix of chalk and pigment. He wanted a reflective base. Leonardo painted with semi-transparent glazes that had a very small amount of pigment mixed with the oil, so how dark you wanted your glaze to be depends on how much pigment you use. He used more like a “wash”, which he applied thin — layer by layer. Here you can see two colors of contrast — light and dark. When you apply thin glaze over both of them, you can see it starts to unify the contrast but also brings depth and luminosity. The lead white undercoat reflects the light back through the glazes, giving the picture more depth and in essence, lighting Mona Lisa from within.
This was fascinating, not a wasted moment in the whole thing. I’ve read, watched, and listened to a lot of analysis of the Mona Lisa over the years, but Payne’s detailed explanation both added to my knowledge and clarified what I already knew.”
Make Use Of - The Top 10 Websites to Get Your Daily Dose of Science: “Whether you’re a science buff or are just looking to learn, here are the top ten websites you can use to get your daily dose of science…”
OPM – Leveraging Telework and Remote Work in the Federal Government to Better Meet Our Human Capital Needs and Improve Mission Delivery: “…The COVID-19 Pandemic Has Transformed the Federal Workplace As We Know It The COVID-19 pandemic forced changes to the workplace. Many employees learned how to perform the functions of their job in a new way during a difficult time, meeting the challenges head-on. Agencies demonstrated that they have been able to carry out their missions effectively. Accordingly, agencies now have an opportunity to revisit how they were operating prior to the pandemic and leverage lessons learned during the pandemic to integrate telework and remote work into their strategic workforce plans. As we look to the future, OPM is encouraging agencies to strategically leverage workplace flexibilities such as telework, remote work, and alternative/flexible work schedules as tools to help attract, recruit, and retain the best possible workforce…
This 2021 Guide to Telework and Remote Work in the Federal Government is designed to replace the contents of OPM’s 2011 Guide to Telework in the Federal Government. This new guide offers resources to help contextualize the continued evolution of telework and remote work as critical workplace flexibilities given the increased adoption of these flexibilities as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. This guide is composed of two distinct parts that cover: Part 1– Technical Guide on Telework: An overview of telework arrangements, laws, agency roles and responsibilities, and guidance to develop agency telework policies Part 2– Technical Guide on Remote Work: A review of implications, considerations, and strategies for the appropriate use of remote work arrangements…”
Flowing Data – How Much Women and Men Work By Nathan Yau – “Over the years, more women have entered the workforce while the percentage of men has gone down slightly. The chart below shows the shifts since 1960. The breakdowns from 1960 to 1990 come from the decennial census. The data from 2000 to 2019 comes from the American Community Survey. With the exception of 2019 data, the values in between decades are interpolations. You can see people working more weeks out of the year, especially for women. In 1960, about 42% of women and 87% of men 21 and older worked at least one week out of the year. In 2019, about 62% of women and 73% of men 21 and older worked at least one week…”
Washington Post – “At the Help Desk, we’ve recommended “burners” — or prepaid phones not tied to your name — as a last-ditch option for the privacy conscious. But you can also spin up virtual burner email addresses, phone numbers and credit card numbers online to stop companies from collecting and sharing your real information. Burners help protect you from data breaches, spam and unwanted charges, and they’re easy to use. DoNotPay, which makes automated tools that speed up annoying processes like contesting a speeding ticket or canceling a gym membership, has seen a spike in demand for its fake phone number and credit card generators since Apple launched its App Tracking Transparencyprivacy feature, according to founder and CEO Joshua Browder. That might be because without constant tracking, companies are hungrier than ever for your personal data…”
Oxford University Press Blog: “Fake, false, inaccurate, misleading, and deceptive. This rhetoric is all too familiar to the news consuming public today. But what is fake news and how does it differ from misinformation and disinformation? Referring to falsified or inaccurate information, “fake news” can be defined as “false information that is broadcast or published as news for fraudulent or politically motivated purposes,” whereas “misinformation” refers to any false information with intent to deceive its audience. “Disinformation,” by contrast, refers to false information that has the intent to mislead and usually refers to “propaganda issued by a government organization to a rival power or the media.” Given this language and skepticism surrounding the news industry, can the media and journalists regain public trust?..”
Lumen.org: “Lumen collects and studies online content removal requests, providing transparency and supporting analysis of the Web’s takedown “ecology,” in terms of who sends requests, why, and to what ends. Lumen seeks to facilitate research about different kinds of complaints and requests for removal – legitimate and questionable – that are being sent to Internet publishers, platforms, and service providers and, ultimately, to educate the public about the dynamics of this aspect of online participatory culture. Conceived and developed in 2002 by then-Berkman Center Fellow Wendy Seltzer,
Lumen (until recently known as Chilling Effects) was nurtured with help from law school clinics at Berkeley, Stanford, University of San Francisco, University of Maine, George Washington School of Law, Santa Clara University School of Law, and Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic (based at the Berkman Klein Center). Initially focused on requests submitted under the United States’ Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Lumen now includes complaints of all varieties, including those concerning trademark, defamation, and privacy, both domestic and international.
Currently, the Lumen database contains millions of removal requests, and grows by more than 20,000 notices per week, from companies such as Google, Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, Reddit, Medium, Github, Vimeo, and Wordpress. Because of recent dramatic increases in notice volume, in 2014 the project upgraded to a more robust, scalable website that provides more granular data and API access for notice submitters and researchers…”
