You have reached your limit of 4 free articles.
Get unlimited access to TIME.com.
Subscribe for just $15.
Thank you for reading TIME. You have a limited number of free articles.
You have 3 free articles left. Get 1 year for just $15.
You have 2 free articles left. Get 1 year for just $15.
You have 1 free article left. Get 1 year for just $15.
This is your last free article. Get 1 year for just $15.
Subscribe Subscribe Now
Translation? Officials really want you to stop causing car crashes in construction zones.
ABBOTT UNDERCOOKED: Twitter beefs with Texas governor after he tweeted a fake story
To kick the week off, the Texas Department of Transportation put out five suggestions for drivers to make construction zones safer.
A good-faith effort from our highway-building overlords, the suggestions are rules every driver should follow in construction zones – and everywhere else on the road, for that matter.
But some drivers in Houston couldn't care less about "rules" or "laws" or "public safety" as we know it. Take one trip around the Loop, and you'll know I'm right.
Here are TxDOT's five suggestions for work zones, and how they are commonly interpreted by Houston drivers:
TxDOT: "Slow down. Follow the posted speed limit and drive to conditions. Unsafe speed is one of the main causes of crashes in work zones."
Houston translation: "Speed up. You don't need to be stuck in construction traffic like everyone else. Take the shoulder."
TxDOT: "Pay attention. Avoid distractions, keep your mind on the road and put your phone away."
Houston translation: "Text your friends. Traffic is slower in a work zone anyway, how bad can it be?"
TxDOT: "Watch out for road crews. The only protective gear they wear is a vest, a hardhat and safety boots. Remember, they want to get home safe, too."
Houston drivers: "In your car, you're in a protective bubble where you're only responsible for your own safety."
TxDOT: "Don’t tailgate. Give yourself room to stop in a hurry if you need to. Rear-end collisions are the most common kind of work zone crashes."
Houston drivers: "Tailgate."
TxDOT: "Allow extra time. Road construction can slow things down. Count on it, and plan for it."
Houston drivers: "Sure, you can expect construction on any trip across the city. So why check each time?"
These warnings come after a staggering increase in deadly construction zone crashes across Texas in 2020.
Even with millions working from home and staying off the streets, there was a nine percent increase in deadly work-zone crashes from 2019 to 2020: There were more than 22,000 crashes that killed 186 people, according to the Texas Department of Transportation.
Of those killed, four were construction workers. The others were either drivers or passengers.
The awareness week lasts through April 30.
More Transportation
Official press release from the state capital Wiesbaden, 26 April 2021
Courtesy Translation: Nadine Bower, USAG Wiesbaden Public Affairs
Federal emergency brake and school closures
With the entry into force of the Infection Protection Act - "Emergency Brake" - on Friday, 23 April, the issue of school closures will also be regulated. Schools, vocational schools, universities, extracurricular adult education institutions and similar institutions must stop classroom teaching starting at an incidence of 165 or more. Exceptions may be made on the state level for graduating classes and supporting schools. Kitas and day care must switch to emergency care starting at an incidence of 165.
Due to the regulations of the new Infection Protection Act, the Hessen Ministry of Social Affairs has stipulated that the so-called Federal Emergency Brake for cities with a 7-day incidence of more than 165 will come into force in Wiesbaden starting on Tuesday, midnight, meaning that schools will close until further notice, only distance lessons will be offered.
The following rules apply to the graduation classes: face-to-face teaching continues; starting Monday, May 3, alternating classes will also be introduced there. For support schools (Förderschulen), alternating classes will be offered there starting tomorrow. The aim is to provide emergency care in schools starting Tuesday, Apr. 27, for children attending a pre-class or classes 1 and 2, for four hours, and for children in grades 3 to 6 for the duration of five hours. Details are determined by the individual schools.
In order to be entitled to emergency care, a certificate signed by the employer must be presented. This certificate must be completed by single parents simply, for two parents by both employers.
The schools have already been informed by the State School Board of the school closures as of Tuesday, and many schools have already passed the information on to the parents of the school children via their mailing lists.
The rules apply accordingly to afternoon activities at schools (elementary school childcare, afternoon offers). For children with a care contract, emergency care will also be set up after the school offer; early care is no longer necessary for the duration of the closure. As there will be limited provision of childcare, there will be a refund of parental contributions. Details of this will be provided.
Source: https://ift.tt/3xtwaJg
| Date Taken: | 04.27.2021 |
| Date Posted: | 04.27.2021 11:22 |
| Story ID: | 394853 |
| Location: | WIESBADEN, HE, DE |
| Web Views: | 6 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Courtesy Translation: Emergency Brake and School Closures in Wiesbaden, by Nadine Bower, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://ift.tt/2vbbNT7.
TipRanks
The S&P 500 is showing a 6-month gain of 24%. Stocks generally have been gainers as the coronavirus crisis recedes, economies reopen, and the Federal Reserve remains committed to low-rate regime. In this environment, it’s no wonder that many companies are considering going public through an IPO. The high-return environment we’re experiencing right now makes the IPO attractive as a way to not just raise capital but to also cash in on the rising stock market. With interest rates at historic lows, stocks have become the go-to vehicle for investors seeking growth, and for companies seeking investors – the cohort conducting or contemplating IPOs – the partnership is natural. An IPO brings costs with it, in the form of compliance and disclosure rules – the market’s rapid gains outweigh them for the present. This brings us to Goldman Sachs. The banking firm’s stock analysts have been looking for the equities primed to gain in current conditions. And just this week, they’ve tapped two stocks new to the public markets as likely to jump 60% or more in coming months – a solid return that investors should note. We ran the two through TipRanks database to see what other Wall Street's analysts have to say about them. Compass, Inc. (COMP) Tech meets real estate in Compass, Inc., a technology company founded in 2012 to make relevant, cloud-based tools available to realtors. The company’s platform facilitates buying, renting, and selling real estate. The company aims to replace the real estate industry’s antiquated ‘paper’ model with a seamless digital experience that empowers agents and satisfies both buyers and sellers. The company’s large size, and its agent-centered approach, give it advantages over online rivals such as Redfin and Zillow. Compass boasts a 4% market share in the crowded residential segment; by comparison, competitor Redfin’s market share is 1%. Looking at Compass by the numbers paints an impressive picture. In its fiscal year 2020, Compass employed over 19,000 real estate agents, facilitated over 145,000 transactions with a total gross value of $152 billion, saw top-line revenues of $3.7 billion, and operated in 46 markets across 16 states. Based on that performance, on April 1, the company went public. Compass put 25 million shares of common stock on the market, at price of $18 each, and netted $450 million. Among the bulls is Goldman analyst Michael Ng, who likes the fundamental of this newly public stock. “Compass is the largest independent U.S. real estate brokerage by gross transaction value (GTV) and differentiates itself from competing brokerages by providing its residential real estate agents with a first party, end-to-end platform for workflow and customer management, driving higher annual commissions for Compass agents over time. Compass targets the $2 trillion existing home sales addressable market in the US and, within that, ~$95 bn in annual real estate agent commissions,” the analyst wrote. Getting to the bottom line, Ng adds, “[We] believe that attractive valuation and adjacent services optionality create a positive risk-reward…” To this end, Ng rates Compass shares a Buy along with a $32 price target. Investors stand to pocket ~79% gain should the analyst's thesis play out. (To view Ng's track record, click here) After less than month in the public markets, Compass has already picked up 9 analyst reviews. These break down to 5 Buys and 4 Holds, giving the stock a Moderate Buy analyst consensus rating. The average price target of $23 implies an upside of 28% from the current trading price of $17.89. (See COMP stock analysis on TipRanks) Smart Share Global (EM) Smart Share Global, also called Energy Monster, is a Chinese firm that has staked out a fascinating niche in the digital world: it rents out power banks. The company has backing from Alibaba, and in the last three years has secured a 34% market share and over 219 million users, making it the largest charging service provider in China’s mobile device ecosystem. Large market share in a large market has brought in the cash. The company’s revenue in 2020 hit 2.8 billion yuan, or $431 million at current exchange rates, and has spread out to encompass a network of 664,000 power bank rental spots across more than 1,500 of the country’s 2,846 counties and local districts. The user base expanded by 47% in 2020. Smart Share Global started trading on the NASDAQ on April 1, with the offering of 17.65 million shares to the public at an initial price of $8.50. The stock actually opened at $10, and closed that first day at $8.54, putting the total capital raised in the neighborhood of $150 million. Analyst Ronald Keung, of Goldman Sachs, sees plenty of reasons to buy into Smart Share Global, and in his initiation report on the stock he lays them out. "We like EM’s: (1) growing network effect, with an extensive national network of 5mn power banks at 664k POIs across 1,500cities (by YE2020), driving better user experience and brand recognition... (2) better-than-peer unit economics with the company picking POIs of high margin/monetization potential, thereby generating Rmb2 daily revenue per power bank, vs peers’Rmb1-1.5. As a result, EM has a very fast cash payback period of five quarters per power bank, which we estimate will lead to double digit net profit margin by 2022; and (3) improving revenue visibility, thanks to key accounts (KA) such as Disney, HTHT, and KFC that are exclusive and long term in nature," Keung wrote. Keung puts a $13.90 price target on the stock, to go along with his Buy rating. At current levels, that suggests a one-year upside potential of ~65% for the shares. (To watch Keung’s track record, click here) The Goldman review is the first on file for this company, which is currently trading for $8.43 per share. (See EM stock analysis on TipRanks) To find good ideas for stocks trading at attractive valuations, visit TipRanks’ Best Stocks to Buy, a newly launched tool that unites all of TipRanks’ equity insights. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the featured analysts. The content is intended to be used for informational purposes only. It is very important to do your own analysis before making any investment.
Security expert publishes coffee table book for cryptographers to explain the science of secrecy.
Image: iStockphoto/ivanmollov
What do the Bass0matic, blockchain and zero-knowledge proofs have in common? Each term shows up in Jean-Philippe Aumasson's new publication: "Crypto Dictionary: 500 Cryptographic Tidbits for the Curious." Aumasson is the chief security officer and cofounder of Taurus Group, a Swiss fintech company and the author of "Serious Cryptography: A Practical Introduction to Modern Encryption."
Aumasson writes in the preface that the dictionary is not meant to be a comprehensive look at cryptography's diverse areas. It does include many of the major notions and algorithms that cryptographers work with today as well as an "opinionated selection" of terms that the author found important for practical, theoretical and historical reasons. Aumasson calls the dictionary a coffee table book that shows off the "richness of cryptography, including its exotic and underappreciated corners, to share knowledge and be a gateway to a better appreciation of the science of secrecy."
The dictionary starts with two numbers: 2013 and 65537. The first entry is the year Edward Snowden leaked information about the NSA's classified activities, which put end-to-end encryption in the spotlight for the first time. The other numerical entry is the most common RSA public exponent: "Large enough to not be insecure, small enough to make exponentiation fast and of a form that optimizes implementations' speed."
SEE: Identity theft protection policy (TechRepublic Premium)
Entries also cover cryptography trivia such as the origin of the name of a cipher designed by Phil Zimmerman, the creator of PGP, the default security standard for email. The dictionary explains the Bass0matic entry:
"As Zimmermann commented in the source code, "Bass0matic gets its name from an old Dan Aykroyd Saturday Night Live skit involving a blender and a whole fish. The Bass0matic algorithm does to data what the original BassOmatic did to the fish."
Aumasson includes his own observations and editorial comments in the entries, which makes for a more interesting read than most dictionaries. For example, he calls blockchain both a blessing and a curse. In the "Thanks, blockchain?" section, Aumasson explains why the biggest benefit of this new technology is its impact on the practice, funding and deployment of cryptography.
Readers also can use the dictionary for a crash course in the field and assemble a reading list of important texts, such as "Applied Cryptography," a 1996 book by Bruce Schneier, and COPACOBANA (Cost-Optimized PArallel COde Breaker), an academic proof of concept of an FPGA-based DES cracker and "Cryptonomicon," a novel by Neal Stephenson that relies on facts and genuine cryptographic techniques, as opposed to other books "in which the crypto is mostly made up and laughably unrealistic."
Image: No Starch Press
Here is a sampling of terms that shows the scope and tone of the Crypto Dictionary:
Strengthen your organization's IT security defenses by keeping abreast of the latest cybersecurity news, solutions, and best practices. Delivered Tuesdays and Thursdays
Sign up today
This much we know. But Magnasco doesn’t think that anyone has achieved a basic understanding of dolphish. “I’m not yet confident that I know what is the signal, what is the variation, what is the intention,” he said. “You need an extremely large body of data to do that, and it’s unclear that we have enough yet.” Still, there are hints that it might be possible. In 2013, Herzing and her team at the Wild Dolphin Project used a machine-learning algorithm called Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry (CHAT), designed to identify meaningful signals in dolphin whistles. The algorithm picked out a sound within a dolphin pod that the researchers had earlier trained the dolphins to associate with sargassum seaweed—a clumpy, floaty plant that dolphins sometimes play with. The dolphins may have assimilated the new “word,” and begun using it in the wild.
And yet, in an important sense, dolphish may be more than a language. Dolphins don’t just make whistles—they also employ body language and a variety of sounds, including clicks, which they use for sonar echolocation. From the acoustic reflections created by the clicks, a dolphin can form a mental picture of an object’s size, shape, and density. Dolphins can interpret one another’s sonar signals. “They are able to see shapes of things when they passively eavesdrop on someone else’s clicks,” Magnasco said. Using sound alone, they can see what another sees.
With cephalopods such as octopuses and squid, the gap widens further. Our common ancestor with them is thought to be a flatworm with only the most rudimentary of nervous systems; octopus brains are essentially a separate evolutionary experiment in developing intelligence. An octopus has around five hundred million neurons in its body—in the same range as a dog—but they are spread around, mostly in the arms, where they form clusters called ganglia, connected to one another. Even the brain in the center of the body is bizarre, because the creature’s esophagus, through which food is ingested, runs right through the middle of it. Some researchers hold that, with this distributed nervous system, cephalopods might host a “community of minds.” It isn’t clear, for instance, whether it’s the brain or the arms that “decide” what the arms do.
“An octopus mind is nothing like a primate mind, nor indeed like a dog’s, elephant’s or bat’s mind,” the evolutionary ethologist Phyllis Lee, of the University of Stirling, in Scotland, has written. According to the Australian philosopher of mind Peter Godfrey-Smith, cephalopods are “probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.” Some researchers still hesitate to attribute “mind” to octopuses at all—and yet their behavior is often indicative of memory, problem-solving, cunning, personality, and even, some argue, sentience. They figure out how to unscrew jars, how to sabotage laboratory lights with jets of water (they may not like brightness), how to escape from their tanks just when their human wardens aren’t looking. They appear to gather items sometimes not for any obvious use but simply because they find them interesting. Some octopuses in captivity have been known to take what seems to be a dislike to individuals, squirting them with water at every opportunity. “They talk to you, reach out to you,” Michael Kuba, a marine biologist who has worked at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, in Japan, told me. “But only to people they know.”
Octopuses seem to have designs of their own, which may subvert ours. Their agendas are often unfathomable. “When I first saw octopuses play,” Jennifer Mather, a professor at the University of Lethbridge, in Alberta, Canada, who specializes in cephalopod behavior, said, “I realized that we only saw it as play because it looked like our play.” She instead describes such behavior as motivated by exploration and led by the question “What can I do with this object?” (And yet an octopus might not even have an “I.”) Ultimately, Mather said, it’s hard to know for sure what the actions mean, because we don’t know where each one starts and finishes; we have no lexicon for translation.
Traditional efforts in animal cognition have attempted to build such a lexicon. Researchers have devised systems of symbols that animals can use by touching or pointing. In the nineteen-eighties, Reiss developed an underwater keyboard for dolphins; the animals quickly figured out, without instruction, how to request a body rub or a ball. Reiss also used mirrors to explore dolphin self-recognition: the animals not only appeared to recognize themselves (a sign, some researchers think, of a degree of consciousness) but also seemed to “play” with their reflections (by spinning, for example). Between 2016 and 2019, at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, Reiss and Magnasco collaborated on studies that used an eight-foot underwater touch screen fitted with dolphin-friendly interactive apps, including a version of Whac-A-Mole in which fish move across the display.
Using such systems, it’s possible to ask animals about their preferences among two or more alternatives—the same approach that child psychologists often take in trying to understand the reasoning of preverbal infants. Roger Payne, a whale-song expert—he co-discovered the songs of humpback whales, in the late nineteen-sixties—has explained how groups of alternatives might be used to pose ever-more-specific inquiries. “We might try asking dolphins direct questions,” he said, at a workshop of the Interspecies Internet project, at M.I.T., in 2019. “Do dolphins fear boats? Are sharks scary? Which of the following sharks is most scary? Is your mother afraid of sharks?” We might find out if dolphins lie regularly to each other as humans do, he said. “I would be surprised if they didn’t.”
The challenge, of course, is that it’s humans posing the questions and determining the choice of answers. But that’s changing. “The exciting thing about artificial intelligence and computer technology is that we are beginning to be able to decipher animal languages and animal cognition on terms that are meaningful to the animals, and not on our terms,” Slobodchikoff told me. Today’s machine-learning systems analyze data and look for correlations with startling efficiency; often, they find statistical connections that human analysts miss. They can, for example, deduce the “shape” of a language space, which depicts where words and concepts sit in relation to one another (“king” will typically be as far from “man” in this space as “queen” is from “woman”); these conceptual spaces turn out to be surprisingly similar for different languages—presumably because they are all representations of the same external world. Remarkably, the same sort of conceptual mapping will work not just for languages but for images. Researchers at Google have developed an A.I. system that can translate from an “image map” to a language map. After being trained to label a wide variety of images, it can be given an image that it has never seen before—of a dog, say—and make a good, sometimes even excellent guess at the word for what it has been shown. Given enough training data, these A.I. algorithms can extract semantic meaning from a range of non-linguistic inputs.
Britt Selvitelle, a computer scientist who worked on the team that created Twitter, is a founding member of the Earth Species Project, an organization founded in San Francisco that is developing A.I. approaches like this to animal communication. “We’re working on decoding the first nonhuman language,” he said, at the M.I.T. workshop—a goal that he thinks can be reached in five to ten years. In theory, a machine-learning system is particularly well suited to the problem of translating animalese. The loose correspondences between human and animal words and concepts may not matter to an A.I.; neither will the fact that animal ideas may be expressed not as vocalizations but as gestures, sequences of movements, or changes in skin texture. A neural network makes no assumptions about the nature of the input data; as long as there is some aspect of an animal’s behavioral repertoire that represents or expresses something that our languages can also express—a type of species, a warning, a spatial direction—then the algorithm has a chance of spotting it. “We’re really asking people to remove their human glasses, as much as possible,” Selvitelle said. One Earth Species Project collaboration, called Whale-X, aims to collect and analyze all communications among a pod of whales over an entire season.
It will be hard for the team to tag and track the individual whales. But Magnasco told me that he is also skeptical of the approach on a conceptual level. Even if the data can be gathered and analyzed, he said, it’s not obvious that we’ll have a word-for-word translation of whale to human terms, particularly without more understanding of their behavior. “If there is a vocabulary that has to do with their living environment, there is a massive amount of our vocabulary that just won’t make sense to them,” he said. In trying to import language-translation techniques to other species, the Earth Species Project might be “postulating an inherent similarity that we have no reason to assume.”
Many human languages seem to converge on a small list of omnipresent concepts formulated as individual words. Perhaps the most widely used lists of such words were derived in the mid-twentieth century by Morris Swadesh, an American linguist. The canonical Swadesh lists have between a hundred and two hundred and fifteen items. They contain personal pronouns, body parts, common animals such as “bird” and “dog,” verbs such as “eat,” “see,” and “hear,” and objects and substances such as “sun,” “water,” “stone,” and “smoke.” Magnasco points out that most of the items on the Swadesh list could have no “dolphish” equivalents, even in principle, because they have no relevance to the dolphin’s world. Among those excluded, he argues, would be “common words from our terrestrial environment, like ‘dog,’ ‘louse,’ ‘tree,’ ‘leaf,’ ‘root,’ ‘bark,’ ‘horn,’ and ‘mountain’ ”; words from terrestrial-animal anatomy—“nose,” “claw,” “foot,” “knee,” “hand,” “neck,” “feather,” “hair”; and words related directly to gravity, such as “walk,” “lie,” “stand,” “path,” and “swim”; and also the colors red and yellow, which dolphins can’t see. Finally, there are “words that do not exist or lose meaning in an aquatic environment”: “water,” “drink,” “rain,” “earth,” “fire,” “burn,” “ash,” “dry,” and “wet.”
If we could speak to them, dolphins wouldn’t understand the metaphor of a glass being half full or half empty. But how much does that matter? We can be discouraged by the fact that concepts that are universal among humans have no place in the conceptual landscape of the dolphin; alternatively, we can be encouraged by the possibility that there might be any overlap at all. It’s incredible to think that people and dolphins might communicate about anything, even seaweed; also, it’s striking to imagine dolphins shaking their heads, or the equivalent, over our inability to grasp concepts that seem obvious to them. It may be that the most interesting, revealing part of dolphish is precisely the part that lies outside our own lexicon—which is to say, outside our own minds. If, in fact, we find ourselves unable to fully reconstruct another creature’s mental world, it may be enough just to acknowledge the reality of what we can’t articulate.
In other ways, even basic communication may be of value. Some of our mistreatment of other species is obviously callous and selfish, as in factory farming, but some of it arises from a communications breakdown. Dogs are often surrendered to shelters, Slobodchikoff said, because people have trouble “reading and understanding the signals with which they are trying to communicate with us.” And, by changing what we believe about the minds of animals, even attempts at communication may affect how we think of them as legal entities. More than a hundred experts have signed a declaration urging the banning of octopus farming on the grounds that these “sentient and sophisticated” animals should not be kept in “sterile” and “monotonous” environments. Octopuses have long been denied the consideration and welfare that we give to vertebrates, but many marine biologists now agree they should be seen as possessing minds. Organizations such as the Great Ape Project and the Nonhuman Rights Project are seeking to extend minimal legal rights to certain animals such as great apes, elephants, dolphins, and whales.
In “King Solomon’s Ring,” Konrad Lorenz suggested that Solomon could communicate with animals not because he possessed a magical object but because he had the gift of observation. Lorenz “made the space to see and hear what other animals were doing,” Reiss told me. New technology may or may not help us to communicate with animals. But even the attempt at translation suggests a deepening of respect for them—and a willingness to free ourselves from our human preconceptions and prejudices.
The Public Affairs Section (PAS) of U.S. Embassy in the Kyrgyz Republic is pleased to announce the call for proposals for the 2021 Book Translation Program (BTP). PAS is soliciting proposals from publishing houses, academic institutions and non-governmental organizations to publish books by American authors and/or books reflecting U.S. values, translated into the Kyrgyz language or jointly into Kyrgyz and English languages. The program provides funding for the copyright acquisition (if required), translation, printing, and distribution of the title, along with follow-up programming, such as trainings, mater-classes, website creation, contests, etc. PAS expects to fund two awards with an average award amount of $25,000 per title, with a minimum print run of 3,000 copies. Books will be distributed by the grantee, U.S. Embassy, and partners to educational institutions, public libraries and American Spaces throughout the Kyrgyz Republic. The program will fund awards on a competitive basis conducted by panel review.
FY2021 proposals may include fiction or non-fiction titles and must focus on one or more of the following themes:
Priority Audience: Primarily Kyrgyz language speaking young professionals and youth aged 10-25.
A complete application package must be submitted in English to include:
Application packages must be submitted electronically to BishkekProjectProposals@state.gov by 17:00, June 25, 2021. All proposals must include a two-year timeline for the project to allow for lengthy copyright negotiations.
For more information, please contact Public Affairs Section by e-mail: PASBishkek@america.gov with the subject line “2021 Book Translation Program.”
Applicants are encouraged to check the list of previously translated titles. Applicants may not propose titles already included in this list.
For more detailed information on program’s requirements, target audiences, goals and objectives, please see Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) (Microsoft Word, 47 KB) attached.
