Lara Gilmour describes the moment her husband was trapped in Valencia flooding.

The Budget saw the Labour government announce the reintroduction of inheritance tax for farmers.

Palestine Action said its members blocked the entrance to two Elbit Systems UK sites in Bristol.

The activists, who staged protests outside a defence firm on Tuesday, are released on police bail.

The Bristol Downs League has been going for almost 120 years but how can they solidify its future?

Mitchell Curtis 'refused to admit what he had done' to colleagues despite a 'wealth of evidence'.

Well, the Oscars happened last night, and for the first time in 21 years I didn’t bother to watch. Pretty ironic given how many of these movies I ended up seeing and loving, but that’s neither here nor there. I did watch the video of Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper musically fucking on stage while […]

The post A Mediocre Rundown of the 2019 Oscars appeared first on HecklerSpray.

When Ariana Grande wrote “could get it again” next to Big Sean’s picture in her “Thank U, Next” video, she might not have been joking. The two were spotted hanging out yesterday, and maybe they were recording new music, maybe she was bouncing back to that dick, or maybe both. While ex-fiance Pete Davidson has […]

The post Ariana Grande Spotted with Ex, Big Sean appeared first on HecklerSpray.

Beverly Hills 90210 was one of my favorite shows growing up. I mean, I was definitely a bit too young to be watching it, but my mom didn’t really seem to mind. I wanted to be Brenda Walsh or Kelly Taylor, and Brendan Walsh and Dylan McKay were like my sexual fucking awakening. All these […]

The post Luke Perry has Passed Away at Age 52 appeared first on HecklerSpray.

A fir tree in fairytale form.

Meander your way across a dock.

Phew.

LightSounds runs 23-24 November.

Nutcrackers, Snowmen... and A Very Naughty Christmas.

Parts of Roman Watling Street discovered near New Cross.

"Clang clang clang went the trolley..."

The internet is still convinced a Nintendo Switch 2 announcement is going to happen this month, as a part of a major third-party open world game is also rumoured. It’ll […]

The post Is Nintendo Switch 2 about to be announced? Instagram lowers quality of less popular videos appeared first on ShinyShiny.

The Chinese electric vehicle giant BYD has seen its quarterly revenues soar, beating Tesla’s for the first time. It posted more than 200bn yuan ($28.2bn, £21.8bn) in revenues between July […]

The post BYD revenues overtake Tesla’s, Reddit makes profit for first time appeared first on ShinyShiny.

Today in the Guardian, features writer Kira Cochrane has produced a story that is already being widely quoted on the numbers (or lack thereof) of visible women in the media. "In a typical month, 78% of newspaper articles are written by men, 72% of Question Time contributors are men and 84% of reporters and guests on Radio 4's Today show are men. Where are all the women?"

On the one hand, this story is decently written and based on a sound idea. Not least because rather than write an article on lazy assumptions of representations, it goes to the bother of looking at whether the actual numbers match up with the perceptions of the author. This is a good place to start in any conversation about representation and is often overlooked in media or social commentary.

That said, there is a huge difference between "counting numbers" and "producing statistics". Or, indeed, evidence. My problem is not with the article per se, which after all is simply a feature for the Life & Style section of the Grauniad, but rather with the reception it's had on Twitter and elsewhere as if it is le dernier cri in proof. The article is an improvement on most other articles of its kind. But it is also at best a beginning of something that could, and should, be examined further in a way which is compatible with well-designed research.

But the widespread acclaim indicates there is a danger of not taking the piece any further, and adopting its conclusions wholesale as if it was a well-designed in-depth study. It's not (yet). It could be. For example, the article starts with "In a typical month" - to be unimpeachable, you must establish in what way the months selected were "typical".

Because the numbers match so closely with the author's a priori assumptions, care should be taken to assure the reader that the shows selected do not comprise a skewed sample. (Actually, this should be done anyway.) We need to know what the spread of shows on television and radio are that are considered topical, political, or sufficiently serious. Why was Question Time included, and Loose Women excluded? I don't think one is especially more in-depth or topical than the other. Why is Have I Got News For You considered, which is a comedy show, and Moral Maze not, which is a serious radio programme featuring many regular women panellists and guests? Or the Radio 4 News Quiz, hosted by Sandi Toksvig and featuring many women as guests? What about Women's Hour?

Size, as ever, matters. What are the audience sizes for the shows, since clearly that is important? So, too, does sampling. Since it's presumably not practical or useful to count all appearances on all media, there needs to be a way of assuring that the ones considered in such a study comprise a representative sample of media, audience types, and audience sizes. This is something almost no examination of media topics outside academia bother to do (and many inside don't do it either). But if the shows can not be shown to be representative, the stud's conclusions could be accused of being skewed, and the results not taken seriously.

The title of the article, with its unexplored "why?" also presents the danger of interpreting an outcome as if it is the same as the opportunity. Why, indeed, should there be more women on Question Time, when the percentage of female MPs is only 22%? This surely this is a problem that needs to be addressed at root level (why are there not more women in government, considered for such positions, or running for them?) and not by whingeing about token women on politics shows.

The reaction to women going on some of these shows can be extremely negative, which makes other women considering whether to appear think twice. Remember when Fern Britton appeared on Question Time, and the furore over her opening her mouth on topics other than what we thought she should talk about? I was asked to go on QT last year and turned it down because I expected much the same reaction. Would a similarly placed man in media have had the same dismissive reception as Britton, particularly from women like Amanda Platell perceiving them as "lightweight"?

Similarly, the format of the Today programme on Radio 4 is extremely off-putting. Would you like to be shouted at for two minutes first thing in the morning on a show that prides itself on manufacturing controversy, or have a reasonable discussion over on Women's Hour? That, incidentally, is the question more-or-less as it has been put to me by the PR folks at Orion in the past. Come on, it's not even a contest which most women (and men) would choose given the option.

Age is also part of the mix. As one twitter correspondent (@petehague) commented, "I think that the entire debate misses the point that experienced commentators represent past gender policies ... i.e. if you want to get a professor of economics on TV, your selection is influenced by undergraduate gender balance decades ago." And not only the undergrad balance, but especially the percentage making it through study to professorships. David Starkey and his ilk are still rocking up peddling their schtick because, well, the women with the best and most cogent arguments to counter him are not at his level of academic or media experience yet. This phenomenon is almost certainly at work outside the academia bubble as well. And given the continuation of the trend in which women for various reasons choose family or life balance over single-minded pursuit of their careers, it may well never happen.

Finally, we must ask why it is women in media, even ones like say, Laurie Penny, who seem committed to an ideal of being a political writer, end up doing pieces about dating and handbags. Is it because when such assignments are offered, writers would rather take the job than turn it down? And does this, over time, contribute to an impression that anyone who has done so is destined to "lack gravitas"? There is a pink ghetto even - no, especially - at the Guardian. Isn't it ironic that Cochrane's piece is in the Life & Style section, rather than, say, Comment Is Free? On the same day when a man's thoughts on his Movember 'tache does get a spot in CiF?

So in short, while I broadly agree with Cochrane's thesis that it would be nice to see more women on shows like Question Time and Have I Got News For You, I'm not sure the critical applause is warranted. Yet. And I don't think it constitutes "proof" much at all apart from being about those shows on those days. Interesting? Yes. Generalisable to all media at all times? No. The difference between anecdotes and sampling is subtle (perhaps too much so for most media) but crucial.

You may be wondering why this matters on an issue in which most people are in agreement. It matters because if an argument is seen to be slapdash or half-baked, it throws the conclusions into doubt regardless of how worthy they are. It matters because for there to be change it's important to know the real and not imagined extent of the problem. And it matters because if something is worth doing, it's worth doing right. There's a germ of an interesting idea in there. The real question is what is to be done with it?

I went to Australia last month as a guest of the Opera House for the All About Women symposium.  As part of the event, I agreed to do some media appearances on ABC, including the Drum and Q&A.

All About Women was a fantastic day and I feel privileged to have met so many interesting and talented people there, including people I would put in the category of genuine modern heroes. 

As for Q&A… this is the Australian equivalent of Question Time, so I went anticipating a varied panel with a wide variety of opinions jostling to be heard. I was told Tony Jones was a strong moderator, so I went expecting him to rein in the conversation if things went off-piste. This was to be Q & A's first all-woman panel and expectations were high. The topics they circulated beforehand indicated I was in for a grilling while everyone else got softball. I went, not to put too fine a point on it, loaded for bear.

I thought it went pretty well. Opinions differed. Points of view were exchanged. Margaret Thatcher died. All in all, a good night. The producers seemed very pleased with the outcome.

So imagine my surprise, weeks later, that fellow guest Mia Freedman is still flogging her commentary about the appearance as content on her site MamaMia. The topic: should she apologise for continually insulting sex workers?

During the show Mia kept falling back on sloppy, ill-thought, and pat little lines that were easily countered. I found to my surprise a lot of common ground with Germaine Greer, hardly known as a fan of sexual entertainment, on the fact that conditions of labour and not sex per se are the most pressing issue for sex workers worldwide right now. Then in comes Mia with her assumptions about the people who do sex work (men AND women) and the people who hire them (men AND women). With Tony backing her up. So much for the disinterested moderator, eh? Maybe he felt bad for her. I don't know.

Here's the thing. I agree with Mia on this: I don't think she should apologise.

Why not? Because if she did it would be insincere. My first impression when we met backstage was that she was insincere, and damn it, a successful lady editor like her should have the guts to be true to herself and stand by her opinions no matter what they are.

Because the general public needs to see what kinds of uninformed nonsense that sex workers who stick their heads above the parapet get every single day.

Because for every 100 people who visit her site, there is one who is both a parent AND a sex worker, who knows what she is saying is nonsense. Yes, that's right Mia: sex workers raise families too. It's almost as if we're people.

Because she is a magazine editor who cares deeply about hits and attention, and clearly this is delivering on every level.

Because the sort of people who think sex workers should be topics of discussion rather than active participants are fighting a losing battle.

Keep digging, Mia. I ain't gonna stop you. Keep writing off other people simply because they didn't have the privileges you did or didn't make the same choices you did, and you can't accept that. Get it off your chest, lock up your children, whatever you think you need to do. Perhaps you have some issues about sex you want to work out in public, or this wouldn't be the biggest issue on your agenda weeks after the show went to air?

Mia, you have my express permission not to apologise. No, don't thank me… I insist.

Listen to this week's news roundup (January 30, 2012) I really should have named today's update "Planes, Trains and Automobiles", since those were all involved with my commute this unusual morning! This week's podcasts is surely enough recorded from SFO Airport, so I hope you enjoy the atmosphere and the ...

In the round-up: Teams "welcome freedom" of 2026 regulations • Alpine targets Colapinto - reports • Pulling quickest in Formula E test

The controversy which surrounded Red Bull team principal Christian Horner earlier this year "had an impact" on their staff, according to a long-serving ex-F1 engineer.

Mercedes have put the car from Lewis Hamilton's controversial 2021 championship defeat on display in the lobby at their factory.

Gabriel Bortoleto said he was determined not to sit out a year of racing in 2025 after Sauber confirmed he will make his debut for them in Formula 1 next year.

Alpine have officially announced they will use Mercedes power units when Formula 1 introduces its new engine regulations in 2026.

Niels Wittich has unexpectedly stood down from his role as Formula 1's race director. The FIA named Rui Marques as his replacement.

I am 100% on-board with the London Overground being split into six different lines with individual names. It is infuriating to see there are delays on the Overground and have no clear idea of whether they might be on a...

I’ve ditched the usual blurb about “not being a movies person, but anyway…” because since I started going to the cinema regularly in 2022 I’ve turned into the kind of guy who downloads the London Film Festival brochure and meticulously...

Education choice is succeeding in other states

This isn’t the first time a president claimed democracy was ‘under attack’

Uncle Sam’s got his hand in The Mitten

Department of Education targets ed tech companies and foreign-owned vendors

Michigan Rising and Mackinac Center sued MEDC over FOIA delays

In 2022, Google expanded support for Product structured data, enabling enhanced product experiences in Google Search. Then, in 2023 we added support for shipping and returns structured data. Today, we are adding structured data support for Product variants, allowing merchants to easily show more variations of the products they sell, and show shoppers more relevant, helpful results. Providing variant structured data will also complement and enhance merchant center feeds, including automated feeds.

The Google Search Central LinkedIn channel is (finally) here!

I recently accepted a large proofreading job to be completed in SDL Trados Studio 2014. All seemed to be fine until I tried to open some of the project files. This article describes how to deal with “Corrupt file: Missing … Continue reading →

I used to keep the records on my clients, projects, invoices, etc. in Excel sheets and to generate my monthly invoices manually. However, with growing client base, invoicing became a time-consuming and annoying work that had to be performed at the … Continue reading →

It gives me great pleasure to post belated congratulations to Dr. Nabeel Mohamed on completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University.

Nabeel was an employee in WSO2 for a short time before he left to pursue Ph.D. work and is the first of many who have worked in WSO2 and gone onto doing Ph.Ds to complete the degree. Nabeel's Ph.D. thesis topic was "Privacy Preserving Access Control for Third-Party Data Management Systems" and his advisor was Prof. Elisa Bertino. The topic is of immense applicability for cloud data protection. Nabeel is staying on in Purdue as a Post-Doctoral Researcher right now.

La IA generativa está aquí para quedarse. Debemos conocer todo su potencial y usarla en nuestro trabajo diario, pero tomando las debidas precauciones. Nos confesamos creyentes en la Inteligencia Artificial. No está aquí para sustituirnos, sino para ayudarnos a hacer mejor nuestro trabajo: pero no...

La entrada Los riesgos (no tan evidentes) de la IA en la redacción de documentos jurídicos aparece primero en Traducción Jurídica.

Estamos en pleno proceso de preinscripción universitaria y algunos estudiantes se estarán preguntando dónde pueden estudiar el grado de Traducción e Interpretación. […]

There has been a set of discussions about lock-in around Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): Joe McKendrick and Lori MacVittie in particular bring out some of the real challenges here.

Lori brings out the difference between portability and mobility. While I'm not in 100% agreement with Lori's definitions, there is a key point here: its not just code, its the services that the code relies on that buy lock-in into a cloud.

So for example, if you use Amazon SQS, Force.com Chatter Collaboration, Google App Engine's bigtable data store, all of these tie you into the cloud you are deployed onto. Amazon isn't really a PaaS yet, so the tie-in is minimal, but Google App Engine (GAE) is based on Authentication, Logging, Data, Cache and other core services. Its almost impossible to imagine building an app without these, and they all tie you into GAE. Similarly, VMForce relies on a set of services from force.com.

But its not just about mobility between force.com and Google: between two PaaSes. The typical enterprise needs a private cloud as much as public cloud. So there is a bigger question:

Can you move your application from a private PaaS to a public Paas and back again?

In other words, even if Google and Force got together and defined a mobility layer, can I then take an app I built and run it internally? Neither Google nor Force is offering a private PaaS.

The second key question is this:

How can I leverage standard Enterprise Architecture in a PaaS?

What I'm getting at here is that as the world starts to implement PaaS, does this fit with existing models? Force.com and Google App Engine have effectively designed their own world view. VMForce and the recent Spring/Google App Engine announcement address one aspect of that - what Lori calls portability. By using Spring as an application model, there is at least a passing similarity to current programming models in Enterprises. But Enterprise Architectures are not just about Java code: what about an ESB? What about a Business Process engine (BPMS)? What about a standard XACML-based entitlement engine? So far PaaS has generally only addressed the most basic requirements of Enterprise core services: databases and a identity model.

So my contention is this: you need a PaaS that supports the same core services that a modern Enterprise architecture has: ESB, BPMS, Authentication/Authorization, Portal, Data, Cache, etc. And you need a PaaS that works inside your organization as well as in a public Cloud. And if you really don't want any lock-in.... hadn't that PaaS better be Open Source as well? And yes, this is a hint of things coming very soon!

Ponencia presentada por Julia Benseñor en el III CONGRESO LATINOAMERICANO DE TRADUCCIÓN E INTERPRETACIÓN, CTPBA, Buenos Aires, abril de 2001

Inmediatamente, cabe organizar la estructura interna del equipo, es decir, asignar el papel que desempeñará cada integrante sobre la base de la noción de "estaciones de trabajo". La propuesta de nuestro Centro, producto de nuestra experiencia en el campo editorial, consiste en dividir el trabajo en cinco etapas o estaciones, en donde la traducción propiamente dicha es sólo un eslabón en el proceso. Estas cinco estaciones de trabajo son: a) la gestión terminológica, b) la traducción propiamente dicha, c) la corrección de estilo, d) la revisión técnica y e) la corrección de galeras o proofreading.

De este modo, hemos explicado cómo el traductor, a través de una adecuada planificación, está en condiciones de organizar su trabajo de manera tal de cumplir con las nuevas y exigentes demandas del mercado actual. Para ello, debemos comenzar por concebir al traductor como gerente de sus propios proyectos.

“Deed” is sometimes used as a translation for escritura pública. Is it a good translation? What is a deed? A deed is a formal legal document. In England and Wales, transfers of land, mortgages, powers of attorney, some business agreements and wills must be executed as deeds. In the US, deeds are only required for […]

Currently, the World Wide Web is mostly composed of isolated and loosely connected "data islands". Connecting them together and retrieving only the information that is of interest to the user is the common Web usage process. Creating infrastructure that would support automation of that process by aggregating and integrating Web data in accordance to user's personal preferences would greatly improve today's Web usage. A significant part of Web data is available only through the login and password protected applications. As that data is very important for the usefulness of described process, proposed infrastructure needs to support authorized access to user's personal data. In this paper we propose a semantically enhanced Web portal that presents unique personalized user's entry to the domain-specific Web information. We also propose an identity management system that supports authorized access to the protected Web data. To verify the proposed solution, we have built Sweb - a semantically enhanced Web portal that uses proposed identity management system.

An OCR free word spotting method is developed and evaluated under a strong experimental protocol. Different feature sets are evaluated under the same experimental conditions. In addition, a tuning process in the document segmentation step is proposed which provides a significant reduction in terms of processing time. For this purpose, a complete OCR-free method for word spotting in printed documents was implemented, and a document database containing document images and their corresponding ground truth text files was created. A strong experimental protocol based on 800 document images allows us to compare the results of the three feature sets used to represent the word image.

Due to both the widespread and multipurpose use of document images and the current availability of a high number of document images repositories, robust information retrieval mechanisms and systems have been increasingly demanded. This paper presents an approach to support the automatic generation of relationships among document images by exploiting Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) and Optical Character Recognition (OCR). We developed the LinkDI (Linking of Document Images) service, which extracts and indexes document images content, computes its latent semantics, and defines relationships among images as hyperlinks. LinkDI was experimented with document images repositories, and its performance was evaluated by comparing the quality of the relationships created among textual documents as well as among their respective document images. Considering those same document images, we ran further experiments in order to compare the performance of LinkDI when it exploits or not the LSI technique. Experimental results showed that LSI can mitigate the effects of usual OCR misrecognition, which reinforces the feasibility of LinkDI relating OCR output with high degradation.

This work describes a methodology that supports the design and implementation of software modules, which represent the individual and collaborative three-dimensional interaction process phases. The presented methodology integrates three modeling approaches: Petri Nets, a collaborative manipulation model based on the combination of single user interaction techniques taxonomy, and object-oriented programming concepts. The combination of these elements allows for the description of interaction tasks, the sequence of interaction processes being controlled by Petri Nets with the codes generated automatically. By the integration of these approaches, the present work addresses not only the entire development cycle of both individual and collaborative three-dimensional interaction, but also the reuse of developed interaction blocks in new virtual environment projects.

This paper presents a system that simulates, in real time, the volumetric deformation of muscles during human locomotion. We propose a two-layered motion model. The requirements of realism and real time computation lead to a hybrid locomotion system that uses a skeleton as first layer. The muscles, represented by an anatomical surface model, constitute the second layer, whose deformations are simulated with a finite element method (FEM). The FEM subsystem is fed by the torques and forces got from the locomotion system, through a line of action model, and takes into account the geometry and material properties of the muscles. High level parameters (like height, weight, physical constitution, step frequency, step length or speed) allow to customize the individuals and the locomotion and therefore, the deformation of the persons' muscles.

Knowledge, innovations and their implementation in effective practices are essential for development in all fields of societal action, e.g. policy, business, health, education, and everyday life. However, managing the interrelations between knowledge, innovation and practice is complicated. Facilitation by suitable knowledge services is needed. This paper explores the theory of converging knowledge, innovation, and practice, discusses some advances in information systems development, and identifies general requirements for pragmatic knowledge services. A trialogical approach to knowledge creation and learning is adopted as a viable theoretical basis. Also three examples of novel knowledge services Opasnet, Innovillage, and Knowledge Practices Environment (KPE), are presented. Eventually, it is concluded that pragmatic knowledge services, as hybrid systems of information technology and its users, are not only means for creation of practical knowledge, but vehicles of a cultural change from individualistic perceptions of knowledge work towards mediated collaboration.