There is an old Slavic saying – ‘Don’t approach a goat from the front, a horse from the back, or a fool from any side.’ Fools are plentiful around the world.
11 Alternative Search Engines That Find What Google Can’t - MakeUseOf: “Google Search still can’t do everything. These alternative search engines can take care of a few niche jobs for you. Other obscure search engines might actually show you your search from an entirely different perspective. 1. Ecosia Google does a lot of good for the world in its own way. Ecosia does its part, too, albeit from a slightly different angle. This search engineuses a modified Bing custom search—no second-rate APIs here…”>
CRS Report – Big Tech in Financial Services, May 16, 2022: “For the past decade or so, “Big Tech”—which hereinafter refers to the large technology companies Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook (now Meta Platforms), unless otherwise noted—has been offering a variety of financial services products to retail customers. Big Tech uses advanced data analysis and novel partnerships with traditional financial institutions to redefine financial services. The financial service with unanimous participation among Big Tech companies is payments.
Global Farming on the front lines: How Ukraine’s farmers are dodging bombs to feed the world
Grid: “The country [Ukraine] is a major supplier of key staples — in particular corn, wheat and sunflower oil. Countries around Europe and beyond depend on the land long known as a “bread basket” of Europe; there were nearly 50,000 active farms across Ukraine prior to the war. In the most recent estimates, roughly 10 percent of Egypt’s domestic wheat supply came from Ukraine; in Indonesia, the figure was almost a third. All told, Ukraine accounts for roughly 16 percent of the world’s exports of corn, and around 10 percent of global wheat and barley. For sunflower oil, the figure is more than 40 percent. And as Grid has reported, war has interrupted these supplies. Now, the spring planting season — which begins during March and April — is unfolding against the backdrop of a Russian invasion.
All of which means that the world is watching — not only the military movements of the war in Ukraine, but the movements of Yuriy Russu and the nation’s farmers as well. The question is critical for Ukraine and all those countries that depend on it: Can a nation plant and harvest its crops in the middle of a war?…”
Current Affairs, May 2022 – UC-Berkeley’s Nicholas Weaver has been studying cryptocurrency for years. He thinks it’s a terrible idea that will end in disaster. “Despite being hyped in expensive Super Bowl ads, cryptocurrency is now having a difficult moment. As the New York Times reports, “the crypto world went into a full meltdown this week in a sell-off that graphically illustrated the risks of the experimental and unregulated digital currencies.” One of cryptocurrency’s most vocal skeptics is Nicholas Weaver, senior staff researcher at the International Computer Science Institute and lecturer in the computer science department at UC Berkeley.
BBC – “Learning a new language can be tricky, but how many words do you need to know before you can actually get by in a foreign tongue? That was the question posed to BBC Radio 4’s More or Less programme by one frustrated listener. Despite learning German for three years, and practising nearly every day, they still couldn’t seem to retain more than 500 words I was hoping,” they wrote, “you could give me a shortcut, by working out how many words we actually use on a regular basis.” To work out how many words you need to know to be able to speak a second language we decided to look into how many words we know in our first language, in our case English. We considered dusting off the dictionary and going from A1 to Zyzzyva, however, there are an estimated 171,146 words currently in use in the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, not to mention 47,156 obsolete words.
To quote a well-known internet meme “ain’t nobody got time for that”. What we needed was a mathematical cheat. Fortunately for us somebody beat us to it. Linguists Paul Nation and John Read (who doesn’t love a bit of nominative determinism?), along with their colleague Robin Goulden, came up with a test involving only 50 words.
Their theory is that if you count up how many of the 50 words you understand and multiply the total by 500 you are able to estimate your total English vocabulary. Words start off simply enough; dog, editor, immense but they quickly become more obscure, for example would you know how to use “oleaginous” …in a sentence? And now Paul’s free English vocabulary size test, using 100 words, is available online...If you learn only 800 of the most frequently-used lemmas in English, you’ll be able to understand 75% of the language as it is spoken in normal life…”
How many words do you need to speak a language? - BBC
