~Charles Bukowski
As Henry Longfellow wrote: “Often times we call a man cold, when he is only sad”
As Henry Longfellow wrote: “Often times we call a man cold, when he is only sad”
“New Year's eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights”
Hamilton Wright Mabie
Analysis: A young doctor visited China in 1959, and now his predictions are coming to pass
Hamilton Wright Mabie
Building certifiers leave a trail of chaos
The Sydney Morning Herald
A small group of private certifiers have signed off on 130 buildings with compliance problems, ...
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The Sydney Morning Herald
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NSW government scrambles for answers at building defects inquiry
The Australian Financial Review - 5 hours ago
The inquiry – chaired by Greens MP David Shoebridge – also heard that only eightprivate certifiers ...
Mascot Towers owner breaks down at NSW inquiry into building ... The GuardianMascot Tower owner breaks down at inquiry 9News | 
The Australian Financial Review
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Serial offenders signed off on apartment blocks
The Sydney Morning Herald
The state government granted private certifiers the right to sign off on building work two decades ago, ...
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The Sydney Morning Herald
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Analysis: A young doctor visited China in 1959, and now his predictions are coming to pass
Nieman Lab – “Organizations (ABC News, Snopes, PolitiFact, FactCheck.org,
and the AP) to help stem the flow of false information on the platform. Over
time, it’s expanded these third-party fact-checking partnerships: It now has more than 50 partners globally, fact-checking in 42
languages. Full Fact, the independent U.K. fact-checking
organization, signed on as one of Facebook’s
third-party fact-checking partners in January. (All partners must be members of
Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network, though that
hasn’t completely prevented disputes over who should qualify to be
a fact-checker; some original partners like Snopes have
dropped out.) Six months in, the organization has released a
report about its experience so far — what it’s learned, what it likes, and
what it thinks needs to change. Full Fact’s two major concerns about the
fact-checking program are scale and transparency — ongoing complaints among Facebook’s
partners. “Facebook’s focus seems to be increasing scale by extending the
Third Party Fact Checking Program to more languages and countries,” the report
notes. “However, there is also a need to scale up the volume of content and
speed of response” — being available in a lot of countries isn’t enough if
individual country partners are only able to skim the surface of misleading
content..”
The New York Times – It’s not the first self-driving bike. But equipped with an A.I. chip, it may be the nearest to thinking for itself. “As corporate giants like Ford, G.M. and Waymo struggle to get their self-driving cars on the road, a team of researchers in China is rethinking autonomous transportation using a souped-up bicycle. This bike can roll over a bump on its own, staying perfectly upright. When the man walking just behind it says “left,” it turns left, angling back in the direction it came. It also has eyes: It can follow someone jogging several yards ahead, turning each time the person turns. And if it encounters an obstacle, it can swerve to the side, keeping its balance and continuing its pursuit. It is not the first-ever autonomous bicycle (Cornell University has a project underway) or, probably, the future of transportation, although it could find a niche in a future world swarming with package-delivery vehicles, drones and robots. (There are even weirder ideas out there.) Nonetheless, the Chinese researchers who built the bike believe it demonstrates the future of computer hardware. It navigates the world with help from what is called a neuromorphic chip, modeled after the human brain…”
The New York Times – It’s not the first self-driving bike. But equipped with an A.I. chip, it may be the nearest to thinking for itself. “As corporate giants like Ford, G.M. and Waymo struggle to get their self-driving cars on the road, a team of researchers in China is rethinking autonomous transportation using a souped-up bicycle. This bike can roll over a bump on its own, staying perfectly upright. When the man walking just behind it says “left,” it turns left, angling back in the direction it came. It also has eyes: It can follow someone jogging several yards ahead, turning each time the person turns. And if it encounters an obstacle, it can swerve to the side, keeping its balance and continuing its pursuit. It is not the first-ever autonomous bicycle (Cornell University has a project underway) or, probably, the future of transportation, although it could find a niche in a future world swarming with package-delivery vehicles, drones and robots. (There are even weirder ideas out there.) Nonetheless, the Chinese researchers who built the bike believe it demonstrates the future of computer hardware. It navigates the world with help from what is called a neuromorphic chip, modeled after the human brain…”
Outside – The Trump administration is trying to remove public input from Forest Service decision-making – “The Trump administration is quietly trying to strip public input from the decision-making process used by the U.S. Forest Service. Doing so would mean that logging companies could clear-cut at many as 4,200 acres at a time, and you wouldn’t know about it until you turned up at your favorite spot to find it decimated. But you have one last chance to stop that from happening.
“This is a speak-now-or-forever-lose-your-ability-to-have-input situation,” says Sam Evans, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC). The organization has put together an easy tool that will enable you to participate in what’s potentially the last public-comment period about the vast majority of decisions affecting national forests. If the public doesn’t speak up now and stop this proposed logging rule from going forward, it won’t have a chance to weigh in when logging, roads, or even pipelines threaten the lands where they recreate. Way back in 1969, Richard Nixon signed into law the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires all federal agencies to begin considering the environmental impacts of any projects they undertake. Part of that is a requirement to solicit public input and look for less impactful alternatives. NEPA is one of the mechanisms that makes federal management of public lands so much more robust and democratic than state management. Everyone with a stake in national-forest management, including local users, has a right to comment. And the agency is supposed to be accountable to those people…”
