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WATCH: Dolly Parton Scholarship winner on loss of the country legend
In pictures: The dotty world of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who has died aged 97
Uefa preparing criminal legal action against Infantino
Andy Burnham’s autumn of pain– podcast
It’s been a month since Andy Burnham became prime minister. And while polls have shown a ‘Burnham bounce’, the coming months will force the new PM into making some tough – and potentially unpopular – decisions that will reveal how serious he is about delivering the changes he believes the country needs. Kiran Stacey and Peter Walker look at the choices facing Burnham
Please keep sending your comments and questions to Pippa and Kiran at politicsweeklyuk@theguardian.com.
Listen back to Kiran’s interview with Bridget Phillipson here
And, read Kiran’s article about possible changes to Insolvency Law here
Continue reading...HTTP API для разработчика: практический гайд по проверке конфликтов при изменении одной сущности
Когда несколько клиентов работают с одной записью, проблема часто скрывается не в самом запросе, а в моменте между чтением данных и их сохранением.
Разберём, как тестировать такие ситуации через последовательные и параллельные запросы, какие ответы считать корректными и почему одного успешного HTTP‑ответа недостаточно, чтобы подтвердить безопасность изменений.
Читать далееDolly Parton: Making the most of everything
Administration Lawyer Chosen to Lead Panel Considering Trump Construction Projects
“Anxious Generation” Author Jonathan Haidt on the Meta Settlement
Uefa preparing criminal legal action against Infantino
Dame Jenni Murray died after being dazzled by headlights and crashing car, inquest hears
Tropical Storm Dolly forms in the Atlantic
Нейроранжирование. Отказ от бустинга в пользу нейросетей
Привет! Меня зовут Михаил Трапезников, я руководитель группы рекомендательных технологий в AI VK.
В одной из прошлых статей мы рассказали, как устроен нейропрофиль пользователя в рекомендациях VK. Обновление стало фундаментом для нового подхода к ранжированию. Сегодня расскажем о том, как нам удалось перейти от бустинга к нейросетям и как устроена архитектура нейроранкера.
Читать далееТочечная маршрутизация на роутере через VLESS/Trojan-подписку со своей балансировкой (OpenWrt/Keenetic)
Многие сервисы сегодня выдают клиенту не один конкретный конфиг для подключения, а VLESS/Trojan-подписку — ссылку, за которой стоит целый пул из десятков серверных конфигураций сразу. Провайдеру это удобно (не нужно вручную вести отдельный конфиг под каждого клиента), но у пользователя тут же встаёт главная практическая проблема: подключить роутер именно через такую подписку так, чтобы соединение работало стабильно. Один конкретный сервер из пула сегодня быстрый, завтра перегружен, послезавтра вообще не отвечает — а подписка в целом при этом продолжает исправно работать, просто нужно каждый раз заново находить, какой именно из десятков серверов сейчас реально живой.
Решает это балансировщик — механизм, который сам, постоянно, в фоне проверяет каждый сервер пула подписки и автоматически выбирает самый быстрый живой, без участия человека.
Об этом и статья: что такое точечная (доменная) маршрутизация на роутере, зачем нужна автоматическая балансировка между серверами одной VLESS/Trojan-подписки, и как это устроено в нашем универсальном проекте SmartRoute — для роутеров на OpenWrt и KeenticOS (через xkeen), который умеет и то, и другое из коробки.
‘Grand slams are the engine to make a living’: Mackenzie McDonald on why players still compete when injured
American talks life on the professional circuit and those making sacrifices for a pay cheque, often compromising physical and mental welfare
For Mackenzie McDonald the players’ push for greater prize money and welfare contributions from the grand slam tournaments could result in the difference between putting food on the table and making a decent living.
After 10 years on the ATP Tour the 31-year-old American is not pleading poverty, but knows that life on the professional circuit can be a hand-to-mouth existence, with players’ physical and mental welfare often compromised due to their desperation to get back on court.
Continue reading...Robert Carlyle: ‘When we did The Full Monty strip, the reaction from the crowd was terrifying’
The actor on which star he’d devour first on a lifeboat, why he prefers pigeons to dogs and how Trainspotting put the Scottish accent on the map
You’re stranded on a lifeboat with Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller, Kevin McKidd, Peter Mullan, James Cosmo, Keith Allen and Irvine Welsh. Who do you eat first? DarkAnaemicI77
I suppose you have to think about who’s the healthiest and has looked after their body best. I reckon Ewan would be a wee bit too chewy, and Irvine a wee bit pickled. I’ll go for Kevin McKidd because he’s been out in LA for 20 years, eating good food.
Did you really not like Zippy the West Highland terrier who played Wee Jock in Hamish Macbeth? Campbell97
Continue reading...Hold up, there’s a new Twitter in town
NASA chief outlines plans to build moon base in space race with China
Ratko Mladic, so-called "Butcher of Bosnia," dies in prison at 84
Sprains, pain, and whiplash: Waymo and Zoox test drivers are getting hurt as robotaxis scale
Tottenham sign Man City's Marmoush on loan
ICE officer charged in Minneapolis shooting released in Texas after immediate extradition rejected
At Least One in Four NFL Players May Have CTE
An alarming number of professional football players in the U.S. may someday have chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the neurodegenerative disease associated with repeated concussions and sub-concussive hits to the head, a new study suggests.
The research, published in the BMJ, studied the brains of NFL players who died from 2016 to 2021 and found that one in four had CTE—a figure that is almost certainly an undercount, the researchers say. Depending on how they crunched the numbers, the CTE incidence rose as high as 91%.
“The one in four figure is intentionally the most conservative estimate possible,” says lead author Dr. Daniel Daneshvar, chair of the department of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Mass General Brigham and associate professor at Harvard Medical School. “We know the true prevalence is higher than that.”
It was in 1928 that pathologist Harrison Martland first described the condition now known as CTE in boxers experiencing what he called “punch drunk” syndrome. It was not until 2002 that the disease was first diagnosed in an NFL player, when neuropathologist Bennet I. Omalu examined the brain of Mike Webster, a former player for the Pittsburgh Steelers, and found the buildup of tau proteins around blood vessels, thinning of tissue, and overall brain atrophy that characterize the disease. CTE is only firmly diagnosable by autopsy, but the range of symptoms that point to the disease—including memory loss, confusion, aggression, depression, apathy, tremors, and slurred speech—can be pronounced during a person’s life.
“Many of these former players had dementia,” says Daneshvar, “meaning their cognitive symptoms were severe enough to interfere with their ability to function independently. These are not just microscopic changes that we happen to find when someone dies. We are talking about a disease that can profoundly affect people’s ability to think, work, maintain relationships, and live independently.”
What the research found
In the new study, Daneshvar and his colleagues examined the brains of 235 former NFL players who had donated their brains to science. (A total of 878 players died in that 2016-2021 window.) Of the brains studied, 215 were found to have CTE—or 91%. The researchers arrived at their much lower one-in-four figure by making the exceedingly cautious assumption that none of the remaining 643 brains would have shown signs of the disease—an assumption that Daneshvar believes would not stand up if the brains had been examined.
“Among the people who did not donate,” he says, “16% had dementia listed on their death certificate. That certainly does not mean they had CTE, but it illustrates how unrealistic it is to assume that every non-donor was disease-free.”
Another part of the study looked at a larger time window—from 2008 to 2021—during which 1,712 former NFL players died. Of those, 338, including the 235 already analyzed, donated their brains to research, and of that group, 315 had CTE. That makes for a possible CTE prevalence of as high as 93.2%, though if the researchers once again made the conservative—if unrealistic—estimate that all of the unexamined brains were disease-free, the figure would drop to 18.4%.
How to make football safer
What makes CTE particularly insidious is that it is a cumulative disease, one that builds up over a career’s-worth of hits that don’t begin when a player is tapped for the NFL, but can stretch back into college, high school, and even childhood play. In 2011, the NFL, mindful of the growing incidence of CTE, established its concussion protocol, sidelining players who take a hit and exhibit any signs of possible concussion, such as confusion, amnesia, ataxia—a lack of muscle control—or any loss of consciousness.
That’s a big improvement over the days when concussed players were simply described as having had their “bell rung,” and then sent back out onto the field to continue the game. But concussions are only the most extreme symptoms of brain trauma; there’s a lot of damage that’s done invisibly, with no signs at all. According to one 2012 study in the Annals of Biomedical Engineering, a college football player may sustain up to 1,000 subconcussive hits to the head over the course of a single season of play.
“Concussion protocols are important,” says Daneshvar, “but concussion management and CTE prevention are not the same thing. The evidence increasingly suggests that CTE risk is related to cumulative exposure to repetitive head impacts, including the many impacts that never cause a diagnosed concussion. A player can follow every concussion protocol appropriately and still accumulate thousands of head impacts over a year.”
In addition to the concussion protocols, the NFL has made other rule changes to reduce the incidence of brain trauma, including outlawing both helmet-to-helmet hits and so-called blindside blocks, in which an unsuspecting player is struck from behind, often leading to head and neck injuries. Bigger changes could come during practice, when 70% of hits occur, Daneshvar says. These friendly collisions, he adds, do as much cerebral damage as actual blows sustained during a game.
“The NFL has already moved dramatically in this direction,” he says. “NFL players now have less than one full-contact practice per week.”
Another concern is that measures like this may be coming too late, since young players may be reaching the NFL having sustained brain damage already. Former New England Patriots player Aaron Hernandez, for example, was only 27 when he died by suicide while serving a life sentence for murder. He had spent just four years in the NFL and he was posthumously diagnosed with the worst case of CTE that Boston University researchers had ever seen in a person his age.
“We don’t need to eliminate football to make it substantially safer,” says Daneshvar—but just like in the pros, high school and college football programs could be changed to minimize or eliminate collisions in practice, and to outlaw hits during games that could be exacerbating trauma to the brain.
West Point’s only climate scientist fired after continuing to teach human causes of climate change
Adam Kalkstein compared administration’s order to ‘trying to teach the law’ without mentioning ‘the constitution’
The only climate scientist teaching at West Point, the US army’s military academy, was fired after he resisted an order to stop teaching about the human causes of the climate emergency, a lawsuit claims.
Dr Adam Kalkstein, a civilian professor of geography at the New York institution, was terminated after the spring semester this year, six months after a testy meeting with Brig Gen Shane Reeves, then dean of West Point’s academic board, the court filing said.
Continue reading...ICE agent charged with Minnesota shooting released from jail in Texas
Judge rules Christian Castro, accused of shooting man and lying about it, cannot be held pending extradition request
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer charged with shooting a man and lying about it during the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis was released from a Texas jail on Thursday, after a judge refused to order his return to Minnesota.
Christian Castro was released at the break of dawn from a detention center in Brownsville. He motioned his hand toward a few camera operators and a reporter crowding around him and quickly got into an SUV that drove off.
Continue reading...Homes damaged as storms follow heatwaves in England and Wales
Environment Agency issues 40 flood alerts across Midlands, Yorkshire and south-east of England
Dozens of homes have been damaged by flooding and the Met Office had issued warnings for thunderstorms and heavy rain at the end of a summer in which most of England and the whole of Wales was declared in drought.
The Met Office said thundery showers in England and Wales could cause 75mm of rain to fall in just 12 hours in some areas.
Continue reading...Ratko Mladić, the ‘Butcher of Bosnia’, dies in The Hague
Bosnian Serb commander responsible for Srebrenica massacre dies in prison while serving life sentence for genocide
From the archive:
Fourteen years a fugitive: the hunt for the Butcher of Bosnia
Ratko Mladić will die in jail. But go to Bosnia: you’ll see that he won
Ratko Mladić, the infamous Serbian general who was serving a life sentence for genocide committed during the Bosnian war, has died in prison in The Hague.
Mladić had been one of the main architects of the policy of ethnic cleansing during the Bosnian war. He was convicted of genocide for orchestrating the 1995 killing of at least 8,000 Muslims in the UN-designated “safe area” Srebrenica, the worst massacre in Europe since the second world war.
Continue reading...Ratko Mladić, the ‘Butcher of Bosnia’, dies in The Hague
Bosnian Serb commander responsible for Srebrenica massacre dies in prison while serving life sentence for genocide
From the archive:
Fourteen years a fugitive: the hunt for the Butcher of Bosnia
Ratko Mladić will die in jail. But go to Bosnia: you’ll see that he won
Ratko Mladić, the infamous Serbian general who was serving a life sentence for genocide committed during the Bosnian war, has died in prison in The Hague.
Mladić had been one of the main architects of the policy of ethnic cleansing during the Bosnian war. He was convicted of genocide for orchestrating the 1995 killing of at least 8,000 Muslims in the UN-designated “safe area” Srebrenica, the worst massacre in Europe since the second world war.
Continue reading...British woman died after becoming 'trapped' by Spanish wildfires
Перезапустить недостаточно: как я сделал проверяемое автоматическое восстановление сервисов
restart-hook вернул 202, а сервис всё ещё не отвечает. Повторить запрос — рискнуть вторым перезапуском; закрыть инцидент — записать восстановление, которого не было. На этом конфликте построен recovery в Vigil: система проверяет сервис до и после действия, отсекает устаревшие задачи и останавливает автоматизацию, когда пора звать человека.
Blake Lively awarded $400,000 of $8m she claimed for legal fees in Baldoni battle
Зачем принц Гарри и Меган вернулись в Великобританию?
Australian police arrest two over TeamPCP hacks targeting Mercor, OpenAI, and others
AI’s memory crunch is coming for Android apps
Arsenal only likely exit for Alvarez as striker skips training
Hackers steal data from millions of airport customers
Что нового в маркетинге: чему Запад учится у Китая, а Китай — у Запада. Семь идей в одном обзоре
Как маркетинг прошёл путь от управления каналами к индивидуальному клиенту — и почему китайские компании подключили к этому контуру платформы, логистику и фабрики?
Российского маркетолога легко узнать по первому вопросу на совещании: «Какой канал сработал?» Дальше начинается знакомая перекличка. Яндекс подорожал, Telegram дал охват, маркетплейс съел маржу, рассылка принесла продажи, нейросеть написала сорок семь постов, из которых живому человеку хочется дочитать примерно ни одного. На этом основании компания считает, что занимается современным маркетингом. Иногда даже цифровой трансформацией — если презентация была достаточно дорогой.
Проблема не в том, что каналы перестали быть нужны. Реклама никуда не исчезла, как не исчезли магазины, продавцы, упаковка и скидки. Изменилась единица управления. Пока одна компания выбирает, куда перенести бюджет, другая уже решает, в каком состоянии находится конкретный клиент, что ему показать, какое действие предложить и когда лучше вообще оставить его в покое. А третья смотрит, какой сигнал создало поведение этого клиента, какой товар следует проверить небольшой партией и нужно ли перестраивать под обнаруженный спрос производство.
Это просто три разных маркетинга. Первый из них управляет каналом коммуникации. Второй — индивидуальной траекторией человека. Третий соединяет эту траекторию с рынком, логистикой и фабрикой.
Россия при этом не сидит в землянке с газетным объявлением. В 2025 году объём рекламы в российских медиа достиг 981,6 млрд рублей, а весь рынок маркетинговых коммуникаций превысил 2,4 трлн. Интернет-сервисы получили больше половины медиарекламных денег. Технологий и рекламного инвентаря у нас достаточно. Но именно поэтому отставание особенно хорошо видно: рынок умеет покупать контакт, однако гораздо хуже передаёт знания о покупателе в продукт, сервис и производство. По данным НИУ ВШЭ, среди российских компаний, уже использующих искусственный интеллект, маркетинг и продажи входят в число главных областей применения. Одновременно 48% крупных и средних организаций не видят потребности в AI, 58% считают препятствием высокие затраты, а влияние технологии на сокращение срока вывода продукта на рынок пока отмечается значительно реже, чем эффект для отдельных процессов. Мы внедряем инструмент быстрее, чем меняем устройство компании. АКАР, НИУ ВШЭ
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America’s new sanctions are unlikely to topple Iran’s regime
When obeying an American law means breaking a Chinese one
Daron Acemoglu responds to our article
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Steelyard blues
Harry and Meghan are ghastly and back in Britain. Good
Почему одно ноу‑хау умирает от популярности, а другое — от неё крепнет
Прекратите это делать! Начните делать другое! Я говорю о двух типах ценности — одна тает от массовости, другая ею живёт.
Есть приёмы, которые работают, только пока о них знают немногие. Рабочий способ обхода блокировки, удачная торговая стратегия, налоговая лазейка, лайфхак против корпоративной политики паролей — все они могут терять силу, как только становятся известны всем. А есть противоположный класс вещей: пока ими пользуются мало людей, толку от них почти нет, а ценность растёт как раз с ростом числа участников.
Дальше в статье — что это за механизмы, кто их впервые описал и какие практические выводы отсюда следуют.
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