Some good info in this article on Tudor-era trading. Mostly coastal, as it turns out.
Originally shared by Tam McD
Jul
26
Jul
24
SF becomes fact: sprayable sensors.
Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh
SF becomes fact: sprayable sensors. “Using tiny 2-D materials, researchers have built microscopic chemical sensors that can be sprayed in an aerosol mist. Spritzes of such minuscule electronic chips, described online July 23 in Nature Nanotechnology, could one day help monitor environmental pollution or diagnose diseases.
Each sensor comprises a polymer chip about 1 micrometer thick and 100 micrometers across (about as wide as a human hair) overlaid with a circuit made with atomically thin semiconducting materials (SN Online: 2/13/18). This superflat circuit includes a photodiode, which converts ambient light into electric current, and a chemical detector. This chemical detector is composed of a 2-D material that conducts electric current more easily if the material binds with a specific chemical in its environment.
[…]
Right now, researchers can determine whether their sensors have come in contact with certain particles only after the fact — by collecting the chips and hooking them up to electrodes. These electrodes test how easily electric current flows through a chip’s chemical detector, which reveals whether it touched a particular chemical after it was sprayed. But future sensors could emit light signals when in contact with target particles, says study coauthor Michael Strano, a chemical engineer at MIT.”
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/new-kind-spray-loaded-microscopic-electronic-sensors
Jul
20
I’m watching these developments with interest, since I’m increasingly tending to choose not to eat meat for various…
I’m watching these developments with interest, since I’m increasingly tending to choose not to eat meat for various reasons.
Originally shared by Linda Teppler (S0rceress0)
Jul
19
Nice profile of this physicist.
Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh
Nice profile of this physicist. “In 1963, Maria Goeppert Mayer won the Nobel Prize in physics for describing the layered, shell-like structures of atomic nuclei. No woman has won since.
One of the many women who, in a different world, might have won the physics prize in the intervening 55 years is Sau Lan Wu. Wu is the Enrico Fermi Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and an experimentalist at CERN, the laboratory near Geneva that houses the Large Hadron Collider. Wu’s name appears on more than 1,000 papers in high-energy physics, and she has contributed to a half-dozen of the most important experiments in her field over the past 50 years. She has even realized the improbable goal she set for herself as a young researcher: to make at least three major discoveries.
[…]
Sau Lan Wu was born in occupied Hong Kong during World War II. Her mother was the sixth concubine to a wealthy businessman who abandoned them and her younger brother when Wu was a child. She grew up in abject poverty, sleeping alone in a space behind a rice shop. Her mother was illiterate, but she urged her daughter to pursue an education and become independent of volatile men.
[…]
Although she originally intended to become an artist, she was inspired to study physics after reading a biography of Marie Curie. She worked on experiments during consecutive summers at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, and she attended graduate school at Harvard University. She was the only woman in her cohort and was barred from entering the male dormitories to join the study groups that met there. She has labored since then to make a space for everyone in physics, mentoring more than 60 men and women through their doctorates.
Quanta Magazine joined Sau Lan Wu on a gray couch in sunny Cleveland in early June. She had just delivered an invited lecture about the discovery of gluons at a symposium to honor the 50th birthday of the Standard Model. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.”
Jul
18
Via a private share.
Via a private share.
I am a New Zealander married to an American, living in New Zealand. By complete and total coincidence, my brother-in-law (my wife’s sister’s husband) is a New Zealander married to an American, living in the US. There’s a family story about how he claimed, while they were playing the game Therapy, to be the most emotionally stable person in the family – pretty much because his standard of “emotionally stable” was based on New Zealand, not California.
What emotional expression is within acceptable ranges, how it’s expressed, how it’s evaluated, under what circumstances it can be expressed, what it’s considered reasonable to expect out of life – all of these things are highly culture-dependent. So what happens when multinational corporations (mostly, though not entirely, based in the US) start creating emotional management applications that are used around the world?
https://aeon.co/essays/can-emotion-regulating-tech-translate-across-cultures
Jul
17
If you fancy trying your luck with the Random Penguin House…
If you fancy trying your luck with the Random Penguin House…
Be aware: I have seen books from them with bad copy editing. There are probably badly promoted books, too, but by the nature of things I haven’t seen those.
Just because they’re big doesn’t mean you’ll get more help. It does mean you’ll get a smaller proportion of the money than you would from self-pub or from many small presses. But it might… might… get you more visibility.
Originally shared by Erica Verrillo
DAW Books, a division of Penguin/Random House, and the oldest publishing company devoted exclusively to science fiction and fantasy, has opened its doors to unagented manuscripts. You can submit online through Submittable. There is no charge to submit. https://publishedtodeath.blogspot.com/2018/07/daw-books-opens-its-doors-to-sci-fi-and.html
Jul
17
These women are tough, dedicated, skilled, and “not corruptible”.
These women are tough, dedicated, skilled, and “not corruptible”.
Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh
Woah. Don’t mess with these rangers. “Mander said Akashinga is a departure from the male-centric military and special-ops world in which he has long operated — what he calls “one of the ultimate boys’ clubs” — and his newer realm of conservation rangers, where the male-to-female ratio is 100 to 1.
To build his Akashinga team Mander, who had not previously trained women, sought applicants from among the most vulnerable females in rural areas. He recruited abuse survivors, abandoned wives, orphans, sex workers and single mothers — women who, he said, “weren’t victims of circumstance; they were victims of men.” Also joining the team this past December was Vimbai Kumire, the youngest daughter of Zimbabwe’s president Emmerson Mnangagwa, reportedly as a show of her support for the women and their role in rebuilding the country.
[…]
The Akashinga recruits initially “went through 72 hours of hell,” said Mander, but only three of 37 women who entered the program dropped off after those first three days. They continued through the same paces as male rangers who train for anti-poaching work and completed an extensive program that covers camouflage and concealment, conservation ethics, crime scene preservation and crisis management. In Akashinga, they also learn how to deal with dangerous wildlife, democratic policing, firearm safety and proper use, first aid, human rights, information gathering techniques, leadership, patrolling, search and arrest, and unarmed combat.
The discipline the women displayed every day of training, and since, is also seen in their diet. All are vegans — a commitment they made to themselves and to the terms of Akashinga.
[…]
What matters, Mander said, are results, and so far their efforts are paying off. As of this writing, the Akashinga team has about 60 arrests, which have resulted in more than 41 years of jail sentences. Recent actions resulted in arrests for serious crimes related to ivory smuggling, zebra poaching and sable antelope snaring.
Mander said Akashinga has been “more effective than anything I’ve seen.” He noted too that the women have an uncanny ability to “de-escalate everything.””
Jul
15
In contrast to the hype you’ll see elsewhere.
In contrast to the hype you’ll see elsewhere.
Originally shared by Esther Schindler
Is Vertical Farming the Future of Your Salad? https://www.eater.com/2018/7/3/17531192/vertical-farming-agriculture-hydroponic-greens
https://www.eater.com/2018/7/3/17531192/vertical-farming-agriculture-hydroponic-greens
Jul
14
He’s completely open to being convinced.
He’s completely open to being convinced.
Jul
13
I found this thought-provoking.
I found this thought-provoking. Particularly since I’d just read a post on how YouTube is a hostile environment for women with STEM shows, and blocked a commenter who was demonstrating why. In retrospect, maybe I should have reported him as well.
Originally shared by Michael “Draco” R
This brings us to the only thing I know for sure in all this: often, the online abusers win because the game is set up for them to win the moment they decide to play.
…
But ultimately, if we care about abuse, we cannot care most about whether we have comforted, converted, or even fed them.
We have to care more about the people they hurt.