The Death of the Mind

Throughout the country, teachers are being forced back into schools before it’s fully safe. And while many teachers’ unions are waging valiant fights against unsafe reopenings, too many of them are losing.
Chicago Teachers Union members demand an end to virtual classroom lockouts during a car picket on January 15, 2021. (Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association / Flickr) “This is not the agreement you deserve.”
So said Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) president Jesse Sharkey, announcing that members had voted to accept a plan to return to school buildings.
Chicago teachers began returning to schools on February 11, after contentious negotiations over whether they would be forced to teach in person. While their district’s animosity…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobinmag.com/2021/02/school-teachers-unions-return-in-person/

“I want to work on optimizing all my queries all day long because it will definitely be worth the time and effort,” is a statement that has hopefully never been said. So when it comes to query optimizing, how should you pick your battles? Luckily, in PostgreSQL we have a way to take a system-wide look at database queries:  Which ones have taken up the most amount of time cumulatively to execute Which ones are run the most frequently And how long on average they take to execute And that’s just a few places you can shine a light on, using pg_stat_statements. pg_stat_statements is an extension that has been…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/50u

… yes, it’s here! After several iterations of alpha, beta and RC, Team Kodi is pleased to announce that Kodi 19.0 “Matrix” has just been formally released on all supported platforms. Dare you take the red pill, and find out how deep the rabbit-hole goes?
By the numbers, then, this version is the product of:
Nearly 50 individual open source developers contributed code
About 5,000 commits in over 1,500 pull requests since the first release of 18.x “Leia”
Over 5,500 changed files, with some 600,000 lines of code added, changed or removed
Countless hours of dedicated free time conceiving, designing, developing and testing (including all the infrastructure you see around them, including this web site)
… and, of course,very little travelling, obviously -…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://kodi.tv/article/kodi-190-matrix-release

You might know that I’ve posted funny emails I’ve received on my blog several times in the past. The kind of emails people send me when they experience problems with some device they own (like a car) and they contact me because my email address happens to be visible somewhere. People sometimes say I should get a different email address or use another one in the curl license file, but I’ve truly never had a problem with these emails, as they mostly remind me about the tough challenges the modern technical life bring to people and it gives me insights about what things that run curl. But not all of these emails are “funny”. Category: not…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/02/19/i-will-slaughter-you/

by Isaac Arnsdorf and Ryan Gabrielson ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. President Joe Biden has ordered enough vaccines to immunize every American against COVID-19, and his administration says it’s using the full force of the federal government to get the doses by July. There’s a reason he can’t promise them sooner. Vaccine supply chains are extremely specialized and sensitive, relying on expensive machinery, highly trained staff and finicky ingredients. Manufacturers have run into intermittent shortages of key materials, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office; the combination of surging demand and workforce disruptions from the…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://feeds.propublica.org/link/9499/14294695/covid-vaccine-supply

Canine friends may not be as dumb as they sometimes like to appear

Canine stars of internet videos the world over have another feather in their cap as a scientific study claims they show signs of self-awareness and understanding the consequences of their actions.…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2021/02/19/dogs_self_awareness/

Despite being branded ‘The Pirate Bay of Science’ for offering free access to millions of otherwise paywalled research papers, Sci-Hub is somewhat of an outlier in the piracy scene.
While sites like The Pirate Bay receive almost universal condemnation outside of piracy circles, Sci-Hub regularly receives praise from academics. Since the ultimate goal is to further knowledge and education, including among those who can least afford it, Sci-Hub is often considered to be doing valuable work.
Courts, on the other hand, have yet to rule in the site’s favor so publishers including Elsevier, Springer Nature and Wiley have been pursuing relentless legal action against Sci-Hub and founder Alexandra Elbakyan in an effort to bring the platform to…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/sci-hub-elsevier-and-springer-nature-obtain-uk-isp-blocking-order-210218/

A new McKinsey Global Institute report predicts that the decline in business travel and increase in working from home will lead to fewer jobs at hotels, restaurants, mass transit and retail, while corporations employ new labor-saving technologies in factories.

External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/02/19/jobs-f19.html

SYDNEY—Citing potentially dangerous messages suggesting the “hoax country” might pass legislation forcing the tech giant to pay for the content its users share, Facebook took down all posts Thursday that spread misinformation about the fictional nation of “Australia” on the social networking platform. “We had to take…

Read more…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.theonion.com/facebook-takes-down-all-posts-spreading-misinformation-1846301464

Gerrymandering. Partisan gridlock. No-choice elections. Lack of diverse representation. These challenges, compounded with the rise of apathy towards our democratic institutions, have led to the most socially and politically divided moment in our lifetimes. Despite these overwhelming challenges, the  passage of the Fair Representation Act would help heal our electoral institutions and lead to better governance. 
With almost 90 percent of congressional districts completely safe for the party that holds them, single-winner, winner-take-all elections don’t work well for urban Republicans, red-state Democrats, independents, women and communities of color. It also doesn’t work for the candidates who fear being primaried in their home districts, forcing them to appeal to a more vocal minority of voters.
The Fair Representation Act…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.fairvote.org/the_fair_representation_act_gaining_media_traction