The Melbourne Cup is almost upon us again with a field of 24 local and international horses racing over 3200m for a whopping $8 million in prizemoney.
Here are the key things you need to know ahead of the 162nd running of the great race.
The Race That Stops The Nation - Bet On The Melb Cup 2022
Andrew Wylie, ‘The Jackal’ of books: ‘Amazon is like ISIS; it takes no prisoners’ El Pais
Don’t shoot the pianists, protect them The Critic
Two Sides of Dignity Commonweal Magazine
The New York Times – TikTok has become massively influential We’re here to help you understand how it all works. “It has become impossible to ignore TikTok. It’s been a hugely popular short-form video app for hyperkinetic bursts of self-expression for years, now with more than a billion active users worldwide (some even use it as a search engine). TikTok is not just for viral dance videos — it’s also wildly complicated. Its algorithm, which makes it easy to consume videos, has been blamed for amplifying misinformation and other harmful content.
The Biden administration is currently negotiating with ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, over concerns about national security and the safety of Americans’ personal data on foreign servers. And there are ongoing concerns about the mental health harms the app may pose to teenagers and young people. But at least for now, TikTok is only growing in influence. If you’ve constantly heard it mentioned by your friends (and children) but have been unsure how it works, this guide is for you.
No need to be embarrassed. Once you’ve learned the basics, you’ll be better equipped to delve into #BookTok and other trends making news, supervise a child’s new account or just see what all the fuss is about…”
Will Putin Fall Like Khrushchev and Gorbachev?Peggy Noonan. “If we’re facing Armageddon, that should be taking up all the president’s time. JFK wasn’t at fundraisers in October 1962, and when he spoke it was in a studied, careful way, and to the entire nation.” Read all the way to the end; I’m not sure the United States is, to coin a phase, gravitas-capable.
Receivers for Elon Musk’s Starlink Internet Are Being Smuggled Into Iran Time
Mossad’s agents used chalet in Malaysia to interrogate abducted Palestinian: Report Straits Times
Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cybersecurity issues – October 22, 2022 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness.
Four highlights from this week: Weakness in Microsoft Office 365 Message Encryption could expose email contents; How Facebook Became the Internet’s Covid-19 Misinformation Hub; TX AG Ken Paxton Sues Google Over Facial Recognition in Photos; TikTok Parent ByteDance Planned To Use TikTok To Monitor The Physical Location Of Specific American Citizens; and Here’s 5 of the world’s riskiest connected devices.
Wired – “Whether it’s for accessibility or research purposes, you have lots of tools to work with here. “There are plenty of reasons why you might want to pull the text out of an image you find online: instructions on a YouTube still, for example, or items on a printed menu, or inspirational quotes in your Instagram feed.
Whatever the reason, there are text extraction tools that will do the job of recognizing and copying the words inside those images for you. As image identification techniques improve, these tools are getting better and better at accurately converting text in an image into usable, editable text. In fact, you might already be using one of these tools—there are several to choose from, so whatever your use case is, you should be able to find a service to match…”
How to Extract the Text From Any Image Wired
Amou Haji, Known as ‘World’s Dirtiest Man,’ Dead at 94 ‘Not Long After’ First Bath in 60 Years People
Cats React to ‘Baby Talk’ From Their Owners, but Not Strangers Smithsonian. Cats: “Owners? Owners?!”
Cats are as good as dogs at helping us beat stressSky News
Mike Davis (1946 –2022): Enemy of the StateVerso. Commentary
WSJ – Sentiment has fallen to levels typically associated with worse financial and economic conditions than today’s: “The University of Michigan survey of consumer sentiment measures how U.S. consumers feel about their personal finances, business conditions and buying conditions. Recent surveys have shown that consumers have rarely felt more downbeat about all of these measures. In the past, when consumer sentiment was as depressed as it is today, stocks were in a bear market, unemployment was higher than average or prices were rising faster than usual.
This year, inflation has been near four-decade highs and a main driver of consumer pessimism. The S&P 500 is in a bear market, but up 7% from its 2022 low. Uncharacteristically of periods with low sentiment, unemployment is historically low…A souring mood for consumers is a concerning sign because household spending accounts for about 70% of U.S. economic output…”
