EMHJ issue 3 for volume 30 is out
We’re happy to announce that issue 3 for volume 30 of the Eastern Mediterranean Health Journal is out.
#EMRO #EMHJ #issue #volume #RSS
Intel might have a pair of Battlemage GPUs ready to tempt gamers away from AMD or Nvidia at the lower-end of the market, a new leak would have us believe.
Going by shipping manifests uncovered by hardware leaker Harukaze5719 on X, Battlemage X2 and X3 graphics cards are incoming.
BMG X2BMG X3https://t.co/O5v3Tl1Wno pic.twitter.com/lr8uD3bCCzJune 29, 2024
These will have 32 Xe2 cores and 28 Xe2 cores respectively, so as noted, that means these are lower-tier graphics cards.
To give you some perspective, the current flagship for Alchemist, the Arc A770, has 32 Xe cores – but remember that with a new generation, Intel will have implemented architectural improvements for a considerable performance boost. Furthermore, the rate of knots at which Arc graphics drivers are being improved is also a positive sign for future frame rates.
As Tom’s Hardware, which highlighted the above post on X, observes, another recent leak spotted that the 32 Xe2 core GPU is present on an official Intel designer tools web page. So, the evidence is mounting for the existence of this model, apparently coupled with a slightly more modest lower-end GPU as per this fresh leak.
What about a more powerful Battlemage GPU? Well, as you may recall, there was an ‘enthusiast class’ model with 56 Xe2 Cores rumored (referred to as G10), but we heard some time ago that this was likely canceled. This new rumor, and lack of mention of such a beefier, more mid-range GPU (well, it’d be middle of the pack in next-gen terms, certainly), means hopes around such a graphics card have pretty much evaporated.
That’s not to say it still couldn’t happen – there was one hint of its existence dropped more recently, and it could still turn up perhaps further down the line than the initial Battlemage launches – but we don’t hold out much hope at this point. Intel seems to be focusing on the budget end of the GPU market with its 2nd-gen boards, and in all honesty, we don’t think that’s a bad idea – far from it.
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If Team Blue can produce a pair of relatively performant graphics cards that are nicely priced to make them a challenging proposition in value terms for AMD and Nvidia to deal with, that’s all we could ask for in many ways.
The budget end of the market has been long neglected really – especially by Nvidia – so if Intel is going to stir up the GPU world somewhere, it’s no bad thing for it to be at the low end. This is, after all, where a lot of PC gamers, those on stricter budgets, are looking to buy.
Whatever Battlemage turns out to be, we almost certainly won’t see the next-gen GPUs until 2025, as the rumor mill has been saying for some time now.
#Battlemage #GPUs #sighted #Intel #pair #nextgen #graphics #cards #shake #budget #market
The March and May highs of the have created the suspicion of a bull trap as the May breakout has been invalidated in the last sessions. The uptrend line that starts at the April lows is next on the radar as the short to medium-term trends are shifting down.
#Futures #Critical #Time #Ahead
A Russian couple were the first tourists to enjoy the first private tour in the Acropolis of Athens. For this exclusive service they paid of 5,000 euros.
The first private tour of the Acropolis took place on Saturday night, June 29, media reported.
A Russian couple reportedly made the first personalized visit to the Acropolis on Saturday night.
The service of personalized tours will be offered every Tuesday, Friday and Saturday, while the possibility may also be given to the newly established Museum of Modern Greek Culture.
The personalized tour service is offered for 5,000 euros from April 1st to October 31st.
Available to anyone who wants it and can afford it is now the personalized visit service to the Holy Rock of the Acropolis.
The program was created by the Culture Ministry months ago as part of the review of the tariff policy for the archaeological sites, museums and monuments. The initiative caused somee reactions regarding the ways of utilizing the monument.
According to sources from the Organization for the Management and Development of Cultural Resources, a personalized visit was made to the Acropolis as early as last Saturday by two people, namely a Russian couple, who chose to climb the monument in the evening zone available, accompanied by their own tour guide. The couple were given, as expected, souvenirs for their visit.
The same sources also said that some individual visits have been booked for July and August, while soon there will be staff from the cultural resources organization staff in charge of welcoming those who participate.
The service offered, for 5,000 euros, from April 1 to October 31, every Tuesday, Friday and Saturday, at 7-9 am. and 8-10 p.m.
It concerns groups of visitors up to five people each and with the total number of groups not exceeding four per visiting zone.
Those interested can book their VIP visit on the hhticket.gr platform, specifically in the “The Acropolis Experience” option.
The service appears to be available without a guided tour from 9 July and with a guided tour (in seven languages) only from the beginning of August, in order to allow the necessary time to plan the guided tours.
It also seems that this particular service will be promoted more in the next period by the Ministry of Culture, while it may be extended to other sites as well.
Τhe Central Archaeological Council is expected today to give an opinion on the implementation of the personalized visit to the newly established Museum of Modern Greek Culture, in Monastiraki. According to information, the visits will only take place in the evening, will concern two groups and the price will be around 1,000 euros.
source: kathimerini.gr
#private #tour #Acropolis #Russian #couple #pays
With his poll numbers dropping and Democrats writing off his candidacy, Joseph R. Biden Jr. sat down with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News in the hope that a major TV interview could help revive a presidential campaign that appeared all but finished.
The date was Feb. 9, 2020. Mr. Biden would finish fifth in the New Hampshire primary two days later — but he then staged a remarkable comeback, soaring back to win South Carolina and ultimately fighting his way to the presidency.
Four and a half years later, as Mr. Biden faces mounting calls to withdraw from the presidential race, he and his advisers are once again gambling on an anchor who has interviewed him at some of the most dire moments of his political career.
Mr. Stephanopoulos’s high-stakes interview on Friday with Mr. Biden is set to be taped in the afternoon in Madison, Wis., and broadcast in its entirety at 8 p.m. Eastern. It is widely viewed as the president’s best hope to quiet the cascading alarm over his mental and physical fitness in the wake of a cataclysmic performance at last week’s debate against former President Donald J. Trump.
Friday’s interview is likely to last between 15 and 25 minutes, according to three people familiar with the negotiations, who requested anonymity to share details of private discussions between ABC and Mr. Biden’s aides. While presidential advisers routinely haggle over the framework for any major interview, the exact length often depends on what transpires during the taping. Mr. Biden could extend the interview of his own accord, or Mr. Stephanopoulos might press for more time to ask additional questions.
ABC has pledged to air the interview in full and without edits, meaning that any attempt by a Biden aide to cut off the conversation early would be captured by cameras and likely shown to viewers. The prime-time special, “One on One with President Biden,” has been previewed to affiliates as lasting for 30 minutes, but it could be extended.
The plan for the interview began to come together late Tuesday morning, when Mr. Stephanopoulos received a text message from Ben LaBolt, the White House communications director, according to a person familiar with the sequence of events. Mr. Biden’s team wanted to know if the anchor would be up for sitting down with the president.
ABC was chosen by the White House in part because it has a large viewership compared with competitors, and also because it is widely considered a nonpartisan news outlet, according to another person familiar with the Biden team’s strategy.
ABC’s “World News Tonight,” which will air the first clips from the interview at 6:30 p.m. Eastern on Friday, is the highest-rated evening newscast, beating NBC and CBS. ABC also recorded the highest debate viewership of the three big broadcast networks, nearly equaling the audience of the debate’s host, CNN.
Mr. Biden is also well acquainted with Mr. Stephanopoulos, who has conducted dozens of interviews with him throughout his career as a senator, as vice president and finally as president. Mr. Stephanopoulos last interviewed Mr. Biden at the White House in August 2021, when the president faced intense criticism in the aftermath of the United States withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Now Mr. Stephanopoulos, a star anchor and a former Democratic strategist who helped oversee Bill Clinton’s messaging in the 1990s, has the delicate task of pressing the commander in chief on intimate questions of aging, physical decline and what exactly transpired under the lights of the debate stage, where Mr. Biden repeatedly lost his train of thought, stared agape at his opponent and struggled to convey simple political arguments.
Mr. Stephanopoulos has spent the last few days preparing for the interview before he flies to Wisconsin, where Mr. Biden is making a campaign stop on Friday. The executive producer of “Good Morning America,” Simone Swink, and the political director of ABC News, Rick Klein, are expected to be present for the taping, according to one person familiar with the plans.
Mr. Stephanopoulos, who joined ABC in 1997, will inevitably face scrutiny of his own. Will his questions be viewed as too soft and sympathetic, or too harsh and callous? What level of candor will he be able to elicit from Mr. Biden in the time allotted?
Already, some right-wing websites have peddled conspiracy theories that, because the interview is not airing live, ABC could selectively edit and reframe Mr. Biden’s answers. ABC initially said that it would air the interview in full on Sunday morning’s episode of “This Week.” But hours later, the network changed course, announcing that the unedited interview would air on Friday in prime-time instead.
ABC informed the Biden camp of that decision on Tuesday and received no objections, two of the people familiar with the discussions said.
Fans of “Jeopardy! Masters” may be out of luck: ABC’s corporate parent, the Walt Disney Company, agreed to interrupt a rerun of the game show on Friday night to accommodate the prime-time airing of the interview.
Katie Rogers contributed reporting.
#Biden #Gambles #Interview #ABCs #George #Stephanopoulos
On an outdoor basketball court surrounded by seashell-scattered sand last month, a man coached a group of teenage girls through a drill. The staccato pounding of their dribbles alternated in the hot air with a tinnier sound in the distance: men hammering nails into wood while a bleating white billy goat looked on.
The coach, Abibou Sall, 34, instructed his players to dribble along the sideline, first with their left hands, then their right. Don’t look down at the ball, he told them, wanting the girls to learn to trust their hands.
Sall is a physical trainer for the Pikine Basket Club, which practices at the Jacques Chirac Center. About 600 children play basketball at this recreational center in Pikine, a suburb bordering Dakar. The youngest players, ages 6 to 7, are introduced to the game on mini hoops. The oldest are 18. Sall is also a die-hard fan of the National Basketball Association.
It is a picture that would delight the N.B.A. — a devotee of its league teaching basketball to youngsters on a continent in which it sees tremendous economic opportunity.
Recently, after finishing with his club duties, Sall had been staying up late to watch the playoffs — the games often start after 11 p.m. local time — even after his favorite player, LeBron James, was eliminated in the first round.
“I am passionate, I watch every game,” Sall said, playfully offended at the suggestion that he watched only James. “I never sleep,” he added jokingly.
The N.B.A. has been promoting basketball in Africa for more than 20 years, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the effort. The aim is to cultivate an immense potential fan base, the way it has in China, while also tapping into the rich talent pool on the continent. Much of the league’s work is concentrated in Senegal, where it operates an academy for high-school-age players, an N.B.A. Africa office and the headquarters of the Basketball Africa League. N.B.A. Africa’s investors include former N.B.A. players and former President Barack Obama (who also has an equity stake). The B.A.L. was announced in 2019 with FIBA, the sport’s international governing body. Its first season was in 2021.
Although N.B.A. Africa is not yet profitable, the investment seems to be producing results. Soccer may still be the king of sports on the continent, but basketball is becoming increasingly popular. People throughout Africa play on local club teams and in after-school programs. The N.B.A. has generated plenty of good will by building courts, libraries and homes; administering basketball camps and other development programs; and supporting gender equality. But some wonder about the league’s long-term commitment and whether the support needed for basketball to flourish can be sustained.
“As much as we are investing in Africa, the opportunity is so enormous I worry that we’re under investing,” Adam Silver, the N.B.A. commissioner, said in an interview. “There’s so much opportunity, but it’s not always easy to know how to deploy capital, which government you should be dealing with, who the honest brokers are. And so we’re learning as we go.”
The league’s — and Silver’s — connection to Africa goes back decades.
Silver, 62, spent a month in Malawi after college with a friend whose father led the United Nations’ mission there. Bill Russell, the Boston Celtics great, visited the continent on a State Department-sponsored trip in 1959. In 1993, David Stern, the N.B.A. commissioner at the time, led a trip to South Africa, where league executives and players met with Nelson Mandela.
Today, about 10 percent of N.B.A. players are either African or have at least one parent from Africa. A vast majority of its players are African American.
The league is also conscious of population growth figures, which say that by 2050, one in four people on the planet will be African.
The league’s first African office opened in Johannesburg in 2010. Eleven years later, a second was opened in Dakar, followed by others in Lagos, Nigeria; Cairo; and Nairobi, Kenya. Investors and strategic partners like Obama were tapped in 2021 to help make N.B.A. Africa a stand-alone entity that operated its offices and the B.A.L.
Beyond money, the N.B.A. emphasized connection and expertise. Most investors in N.B.A. Africa and the B.A.L. either are African or have conducted business or humanitarian work in Africa.
Luol Deng, who played at Duke University and then spent 15 seasons in the N.B.A., was among the former players who invested. Deng, 39, was born in what is now South Sudan and fled with his family to Egypt as a child. He is the president of South Sudan’s basketball federation, which earned Africa’s automatic qualifying berth to this year’s Summer Olympics in Paris.
On a recent evening, Deng was in Dakar Arena, watching as the stands filled up with fans before a B.A.L. game.
“I went from being a refugee in Egypt, never seen a basketball game, to being in the N.B.A.,” he said. “So now imagine for these kids. This is in their backyard.”
With the B.A.L., the N.B.A. accomplished something it couldn’t do in China: help establish a league that it could operate. The 12 teams in the league play in three conferences, which include the six champions from leagues in Angola, Egypt, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal and Tunisia. Six teams earned their spots this year through a qualifying tournament. Seeding games were played in Pretoria, South Africa; Cairo; and Dakar, with eight teams advancing to the playoffs in Kigali, Rwanda.
Silver remembers meeting with President Paul Kagame of Rwanda and selling him on the positive economic impact that building a basketball arena could have on a city, citing examples from the United States in which arenas helped revitalize urban centers.
“President Kagame, he then, right in a meeting with us, made a decision to build a new arena,” Silver said.
AS Douanes, a team from Dakar, was playing the night that Deng spoke about basketball in Africa. The team won on a buzzer beater in front of a nearly full arena. Fans roared, danced and banged Senegalese drums in celebration. The crowds were more sparse when the local team wasn’t playing.
When APR Rwanda, a team from Kigali, played earlier that day, a group of women blew horns behind the courtside seats. One of them, Denise Uwase, said that her country’s interest in basketball “grew after the genocide against Tutsi. Everyone wants to join because it’s a smart game. It’s a game that healed many people.”
Amadou Gallo Fall, the president of the B.A.L., hopes that the league can one day become one of the best in the world.
He’d also like to see it be profitable.
At the moment, it’s hard to know which goal is more challenging. There have been reports of teams not paying their coaches and players. Often, the teams with the financial resources to compete are tied to national governments, which creates other complications. A team from Burundi had to forfeit its games because it refused to wear jerseys with sponsorships from Visit Rwanda. On Instagram, players on the team said the government of Burundi had forbidden them to wear the jerseys.
As for attracting young fans — who may dream of playing in the N.B.A. — Deng thought back to his own childhood.
“When I was growing up and I was back on the continent, there’s no way I would make my mom pay $10 for me to come watch an N.B.A. game,” he said. “That’s a lot.”
He added: “We’re asking Africans and people that are struggling day to day to actually spend money to come watch this, which, in the Western world and Europe and so on, it works. But in Africa it’s not going to work.”
Deng would like to see sponsors buy tickets to the games and distribute them to local families. Perhaps they could even help with transportation to games, he said.
“These companies in Africa are making so much money,” he said. “For me, I always challenge all these companies in Africa, on the continent, what’s the impact for the work they’re doing?”
About 40 miles inland and east of Dakar, the coastal breeze disappears and gives way to a choking heat. Bougainvillea grow near the highway, like beautiful pink, orange and red flowering weeds, and goats loll around the vegetation and red sand.
This is Thies, one of the largest cities in Senegal and home to the SEED Project, a basketball center that Gallo Fall founded in 1998. Its logo is a baobab tree — also known as the tree of life — sprouting from half a basketball. Gorgui Dieng, a first-round N.B.A. draft pick in 2013, trained here before finishing high school in the United States.
“Most of our kids come from underprivileged backgrounds, and we bring them into the system and give them an education; you give them basketball skills for them to hone further in other countries like the U.S., Europe, Asia,” said Joseph Lopez, the president of the SEED Project.
He added: “After they get their degrees and their basketball experience, they come back to their home countries, where they become contributors to their systems and they create jobs.”
SEED, one of the numerous organizations whose interest in promoting basketball in Africa predate the N.B.A.’s push, opened its boys’ academy in 2002 and now also has a girls’ academy. It served as a blueprint for the N.B.A. Academy, which started in Thies before moving to Saly, a coastal town about an hour south of Dakar. In a nod to its roots, a SEED banner still hangs in the academy’s gym.
About two miles from SEED, a man rode a scooter into a teal-and-salmon-painted gym to drop off water for women participating in a camp for referees and coaches. It was 97 degrees outside and only slightly cooler inside.
Syra Sylla, a former sports journalist who is now a communications professional working to increase access to basketball in Senegal, especially for women and girls, organized the camp. She said it included 10 women from Senegal, eight from Morocco and two from Mauritania. A German governmental organization called GIZ funded the camp.
“In Morocco, it’s normal to be in sports if you’re a woman,” Sylla said. “In Senegal, it’s normal but not so normal. In Mauritania, it’s really rare. So the idea is also that they can see how it’s working in other countries, and sometimes they can see how privileged they are or how not privileged they are.”
Fatou Bintou Mangane, 19, used to hang around her brother’s basketball practices so often that finally a coach suggested she join.
“We’re taught to be leaders, having self-confidence, to be a role model,” she said. “Coming here, I thought they were only going to teach us about coaching, but it’s not the case.”
Khary Fall, 33, brought her 8-month-old son and his nanny to help care for him while she was at the camp. She started a center to promote basketball in Mauritania, and while some have told her that the sport takes away from her ability to care for her son and her home, her husband supports her involvement.
“I don’t have a problem with what people say,” Fall said through an interpreter. “The Federation of Basketball of Mauritania, the president, understands now that many women do sports, especially basketball.”
Sylla, 40, was born and raised in France, but visited Senegal regularly as a child and moved to the country five years ago.
She visits her family village of Gasse Doro, population 150, at least once a month. There is a simple basketball court there with rims attached to wooden backboards. Some children in the village do their homework under the lights on the court because they don’t have electricity at home, she said.
Sylla has “mixed feelings” about the N.B.A.’s work in Africa. She likes that its presence shines a light on the places it visits and makes children in those places feel valued. But she wishes the league would work more with the grass-roots groups spreading the game.
“When they leave, this is the organization who’s staying with the kids,” Sylla said. “And if the kids have frustrations or something, this is the organization who’s responsible. And the N.B.A. doesn’t know what is happening.”
Joel Embiid, who won the N.B.A.’s Most Valuable Player Award in 2023, grew up in Cameroon and didn’t start playing organized basketball until he was 15. The N.B.A. believes that if children play when they are younger, it will both give them a positive outlet and increase the probability that talented players develop into professionals, like Embiid.
“When we opened the N.B.A. Africa office in Johannesburg in 2010, we didn’t say, ‘Let’s launch a professional league.’ It was about making it accessible,” Gallo Fall said. He added, “We believe that when kids are exposed to basketball, if they have access, they’ll love it.”
The N.B.A.’s first official event on the continent was a Basketball Without Borders camp for teenagers in 2003. The league has since held Jr. N.B.A. programs for younger children in 19 African countries and opened its N.B.A. Academy in Senegal for elite high-school-age players from the continent.
The academy participants live on a campus they share with a soccer academy. They practice in a large gym that has two basketball courts and some workout equipment. In the summer, the air-conditioning unit doesn’t quite cool the whole space.
The players attend school, with both academic and practical lessons. Roland Houston, the technical director of the academy, said that one goal was to foster camaraderie among people from different African countries.
“I’ve made a lot of friends, brothers, these guys here in the academy,” said Khaman Maluach, a 7-foot-2 center who will go to Duke next year. “A lot of people from different places have created that bond that will last forever. It’s very special.”
Maluach was born in South Sudan, but grew up in Uganda. He played basketball in part because he became too tall for soccer.
Another academy player, Ulrich Chomche, has entered this year’s N.B.A. draft.
“We built that basketball gym on what used to be banana trees,” said Chris Ebersole, who leads international basketball development at the N.B.A. “To see that and have players go to Duke and the N.B.A. and G League Ignite, to see where it started to that, is really something.”
Silver said that it would be “a while” before the N.B.A.’s ventures in Africa were profitable, and that the league was behind on its projections, in part because the B.A.L.’s start was constrained by the coronavirus pandemic. But he said the league was achieving attendance and viewership goals.
“We’re more focused on top-line growth, on the amount of revenue we can generate, than profitability per se,” Silver said. “Because our plan for the foreseeable future is to continue to invest any revenue we generate back into the business there.”
And the N.B.A.’s footprint does seem to be growing in Africa.
Aziz Sy, 34, grew up in Dakar and runs a business incubator. He started following the N.B.A. as a child so that he could make conversation with the cool kids at school. He soon recognized the league as an example of an arena where Black people set a cultural agenda.
“Michael Jordan in the ’90s was such a huge phenomenon,” Sy said. “With him came the idea of a Black person basically on top of the world.”
Basketball turned into an obsession while he was living in Boston for college. But it was difficult to watch games when he moved back to Senegal. He watched the 2014 finals in a nightclub that agreed to put the game on television at 2 a.m.
Now, Sy has League Pass, which is available in almost every African country. For $75 a year, he can watch every N.B.A. game from home.
As Sy watches companies and foreign governments try to establish themselves in Africa, he worries that some of them, in their efforts to capitalize on the continent’s surging population, aren’t thinking enough about the challenges African people face. The N.B.A., in his mind, has been different.
“They’ve really come in and tried to understand the country, understand the people,” he said.
But considering the league’s altruistic aims could wait for another time. It was close to 1 a.m. in Dakar. The Minnesota Timberwolves were playing the Denver Nuggets in Game 6 of the Western Conference semifinals. There was basketball to watch.
Ousmane Balde contributed reporting. Audio produced by Parin Behrooz.
#N.B.A #Sees #Future
In 1904, a widow named Elizabeth Peck had her portrait taken at a studio in a small Iowa town. The photographer sold the negatives to Duffy’s Pure Malt Whiskey, a company that avoided liquor taxes for years by falsely advertising its product as medicinal. Duffy’s ads claimed the fantastical: that it cured everything from influenza to consumption, that it was endorsed by clergymen, that it could help you live until the age of 106. The portrait of Peck ended up in one of these dubious ads, published in newspapers across the country alongside what appeared to be her unqualified praise: “After years of constant use of your Pure Malt Whiskey, both by myself and as given to patients in my capacity as nurse, I have no hesitation in recommending it.”
Duffy’s lies were numerous. Peck (misleadingly identified as “Mrs. A. Schuman”) was not a nurse, and she had not spent years constantly slinging back malt beverages. In fact, she fully abstained from alcohol. Peck never consented to the ad.
The camera’s first great age—which began in 1888 when George Eastman debuted the Kodak—is full of stories like this one. Beyond the wonders of a quickly developing art form and technology lay widespread lack of control over one’s own image, perverse incentives to make a quick buck, and generalized fear at the prospect of humiliation and the invasion of privacy.
Prior to 1888, cameras often existed in a realm of mystical unknowability. In one famed story from the early days of photography, a man asks for a picture of his recently buried wife, not understanding that someone must be present in order to be photographed. The French writer Honoré de Balzac confessed to fearing that each time a daguerreotype was taken of him, a layer of his skin would be peeled off. Early cameras required a level of technical mastery that evoked mystery—a scientific instrument understood only by professionals.
All of that changed when Eastman invented flexible roll film and debuted the first Kodak camera. Instead of developing their own pictures, customers could mail their devices to the Kodak factory and have their rolls of film developed, printed, and replaced. “You press the button,” Kodak ads promised, “we do the rest.” This leap from obscure science to streamlined service forever transformed the nature of looking and being looked at.
By 1905, less than 20 years after the first Kodak camera debuted, Eastman’s company had sold 1.2 million devices and persuaded nearly a third of the United States’ population to take up photography. Kodak’s record-setting yearly ad spending—$750,000 by the end of the 19th century (roughly $28 million in today’s dollars)—and the rapture of a technology that scratched a timeless itch facilitated the onset of a new kind of mass exposure.
“The impulse to peer into others’ affairs—an age-old feature of village life—had never actually subsided,” writes historian Sarah E. Igo in The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America. Photography became such a phenomenon that “Kodak fiends,” a phrase used to describe those seduced by the devilish pleasures of photography, entered the vernacular.
No one quite knew what to make of or how to control the fiendishness, and privacy was further unspooled by money-making schemes just as ferociously inventive as the new technology.
The same year Kodak cameras hit the marketplace, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported that Anthony Comstock—the anti-obscenity crusader after whom the 1873 Comstock Act is named—had arrested an amateur photographer for selling manually photoshopped pictures that placed “the heads of innocent women on the undraped bodies of other females.” In 1890, a mugshot photographer for the New York Police Department was fired for selling copies of the mugshots to arrestees themselves—an arrangement the New York Times described as a “lucrative business.” Boundless fascination with photographs created a bustling economy. People bought and collected random photographs from dry goods stores, general junk shops, vending machines and even cigarette packs. Demand was so robust that amateurs were just as able to sell to this market as professionals.
The ubiquity of advertising by the end of the 19th century only intensified this demand. “As the growth in productive capacity outpaced the needs of the population, commercial entrepreneurs became obsessed with creating demand for consumer products,” writes historian Samantha Barbas in Laws of Image: Privacy and Publicity in America. “The key agent in this project was advertising.”
By 1900, photography began to replace earlier image-making methods as the ad technology of choice. Photos of women were especially desirable, given their association with respectability and the belief that a pretty face could sell anything. But dominant values around modesty, avoiding indulgence and anti-consumerism meant that most people had no desire to be featured in an advertisement. Commercial modeling and stock photos did not yet exist. Faced with few choices, advertisers resorted to backdoor purchases. In an arrangement Barbas dubs “the crisis of the ‘circulating portrait,’” advertisers began buying portraits from photographers without the permission of the photos’ subjects—as was the case with Peck, temperate widow turned whiskey hound by the magic and obfuscation of advertising.
It wasn’t just ordinary people who found themselves newly exposed. Mass photography was an equalizer twice over: Nearly anybody could use a camera, and nearly anybody might be violated by one. To their grave displeasure, even the elite were unable to assert control over the frenzy. The New York Times reported that President Theodore Roosevelt was “known to exhibit impatience on discovering designs to Kodak him”; the same column mentioned that Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt horsewhipped a man he alleged took a picture of him without permission.
Though newspapers across the country cautioned Americans to “beware the Kodak,” as the cameras were “deadly weapons” and “deadly little boxes,” many were also primary facilitators of the craze. The perfection of halftone printing coincided with the rise of the Kodak and allowed for the mass circulation of images. Newly empowered, newspapers regularly published paparazzi pictures of famous people taken without their knowledge, paying twice as much for them as they did for consensual photos taken in a studio.
Lawmakers and judges responded to the crisis clumsily. Suing for libel was usually the only remedy available to the overexposed. But libel law did not protect against your likeness being taken or used without your permission unless the violation was also defamatory in some way. Though results were middling, one failed lawsuit gained enough notoriety to channel cross-class feelings of exposure into action. A teenage girl named Abigail Roberson noticed her face on a neighbor’s bag of flour, only to learn that the Franklin Mills Flour Company had used her likeness in an ad that had been plastered 25,000 times all over her hometown.
After suffering intense shock and being temporarily bedridden, she sued. In 1902, the New York Court of Appeals rejected her claims and held that the right to privacy did not exist in common law. It based its decision in part on the assertion that the image was not libelous; Chief Justice Alton B. Parker wrote that the photo was “a very good one” that others might even regard as a “compliment to their beauty.” The humiliation, the lack of control over her own image, the unwanted fame—none of that amounted to any sort of actionable claim.
Public outcry at the decision reached a fever pitch, and newspapers filled their pages with editorial indignation. In its first legislative session following the court’s decision and the ensuing outrage, the New York state legislature made history by adopting a narrow “right to privacy,” which prohibited the use of someone’s likeness in advertising or trade without their written consent. Soon after, the Supreme Court of Georgia became the first to recognize this category of privacy claim. Eventually, just about every state court in the country followed Georgia’s lead. The early uses and abuses of the Kodak helped cobble together a right that centered on profiting from the exploitation of someone’s likeness, rather than the exploitation itself.
Not long after asserting that no right to privacy exists in common law, and while campaigning to be the Democratic nominee for president, Parker told the Associated Press, “I reserve the right to put my hands in my pockets and assume comfortable attitudes without being everlastingly afraid that I shall be snapped by some fellow with a camera.” Roberson publicly took him to task over his hypocrisy, writing, “I take this opportunity to remind you that you have no such right.” She was correct then, and she still would be today. The question of whether anyone has the right to be free from exposure and its many humiliations lingers, intensified but unresolved. The law—that reactive, slow thing—never quite catches up to technology, whether it’s been given one year or 100.
This essay is from History News Network, a University of Richmond project dedicated to new interpretations of the past. Read more and subscribe to HNN’s newsletter here.
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#Rise #Camera #Launched #Fight #Protect #Gilded #Age #Americans #Privacy
Dragon Age features a ton of different customization options. Just within the character creator, there are hundreds of options to customize things like hair, body type, what your playable character Rook’s face looks like, and so much more. There are also a ton of armor options, too.
Companions have an armor slot, a ring slot, an accessory slot, and a weapon slot, while Rook has access to even more – a helmet, two weapon slots, a belt, an amulet slot, and two ring slots. A belt having its own slot might sound odd as it’s not an armor piece people typically think of when kitting out an RPG warrior. However, the belt is an important facet of Rook’s kit. The better Rook’s belt, the better the potency of their healing potions, which are replenished by destroying green pots scattered about the world. That’s not all, though, as higher-quality belts can proc [editor’s note: proc is a term used as a shorter way of saying “programmed random occurrence”] additional effects like momentary invulnerability.
When creating your character, you can immediately view aspirational armors, which won’t play into Rook’s class until the “mid-to-late game,” according to game director Corinne Busche. You can also toggle Rook’s starting gear and casual wear in the creator, giving you a pretty good look at how Rook will look in more laidback cutscenes, in combat, and how they might appear later in your Veilguard journey. Busche tells me a lot of the gear in Veilguard is bespoke to your Rook or their followers, which is to say, an armor piece for a Warrior-class Rook probably won’t be in a chest for a Mage-class Rook. On a similar note, armor designed for companion Bellara Lutara can’t be used for another companion like Lace Harding.
In just my few hours viewing Busche play the game as part of my visit to BioWare’s Edmonton office for our current Game Informer cover story, I see a lot of armor to collect from things like chests scattered about Arlathan Forest, for example, and elsewhere. Some of it looks awesome, and some of it doesn’t quite line up with my personal taste. That’s how it goes in the genre of RPGs.
However, Busche tells me there is transmogrification, or transmog for short, in the game, and calls it “robust.” This means you can take an armor’s stats and apply it to a different piece of armor. In other words, if you have a really cool piece of armor you like and find a new piece with better stats but don’t want to give up the look of your current armor, you don’t have to. Transmog allows you to take that new armor’s stats and apply them to your current armor, giving you all the benefits while keeping the visual style you prefer.
Transmog isnt just for Rook, though; you can transmog armor and other things for your companions as well. I don’t get to see how Veilguard’s transmog system works in-game, but just knowing it exists allows me to rest easy knowing my Rook will look as fashionable as possible while saving Thedas.
For more about the game, including exclusive details, interviews, video features, and more, click the Dragon Age: The Veilguard hub button below.
#Bespoke #Armor #Transmog #Aspects #Gear #Dragon #Age #Veilguard
Using the repurposed equipment, a team including Imperial College London researchers have measured parts of the Martian atmosphere that were previously impossible to probe. This includes areas that can block radio signals if not properly accounted for—crucial for future Mars habitation missions.
The results of the first 83 measurements, analyzed by Imperial researchers and European Space Agency (ESA) colleagues across Europe, are published today in the journal Radio Science.
To achieve this, ExoMars’ Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) teamed up with another ESA spacecraft orbiting the red planet: Mars Express (MEX). The two craft maintain a radio link, so that as one passes behind the planet, radio waves cut through the deeper layers of the Martian atmosphere.
Changes in the atmosphere’s refractivity—how it bends the radio waves—cause tiny but detectable shifts in the radio frequencies received by the spacecraft. By analyzing this shift, scientists can determine the density of the lower atmosphere and the electron density in the ionosphere—a charged upper layer of the atmosphere. The technique is called mutual radio occultation.
Lead author of the study Jacob Parrott, a Ph.D. student from the Department of Physics at Imperial, said, “The systems on MEX and TGO were not initially designed to do this—the radio antennas we used were made for communication between orbiters and rovers on the planet’s surface. We had to reprogram them while inflight to carry out this new science.
“This innovative technique is likely to be a game-changer for future missions, proving that mutual radio occultation between two orbiting spacecraft is an economical way to extract more scientific value from existing equipment.”
Previously, radio occultation was conducted using the radio link from a Mars orbiter to large ground stations on Earth. The radio signal from the orbiter would be monitored as the spacecraft “set” (was occulted) behind Mars, meaning the signal passed through the layers of the planet’s atmosphere.
Using two orbiting craft to take this measurement is already a common way to investigate the Earth’s atmosphere: thousands of such measurements occur between global navigation satellites, where the data they provide are used for atmospheric monitoring and weather prediction.
However, this method had only been used on Mars three times before; by NASA in 2007 as a hardware demonstration. The new use by the two ESA spacecraft marks the first time this technique has been routinely applied to another planet.
Now its viability has been proven, the scientists and engineers behind the work are looking into how to expand the use of this technique in future Mars missions.
Study co-author Dr. Colin Wilson, Project Scientist for the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter and Mars Express at ESA, said, “ESA has now demonstrated the viability of this technique, which could be transformational for Mars science in the future.
“There are currently seven spacecraft orbiting Mars; as the number of spacecraft increases, as it will in coming decades, the number of radio occultation opportunities increases rapidly. Therefore, this technique will be an increasingly important tool for studying Mars.”
Spacecraft-to-spacecraft occultation allows more measurements to be taken and allows new regions of the atmosphere to be probed.
Because conventional radio occultation measurements on Mars involve a radio link to a ground station on Earth, the measurement location is fixed relative to Earth’s slow movement. This makes it hard to capture global changes on Mars, as researchers are often looking at the same spots.
Additionally, this method can only sample near sunset and sunrise because of Earth’s proximity to the sun, limiting our view of Mars’ atmosphere.
Moreover, traditional radio occultation suffers from “occultation seasons,” where measurements are only possible for a few months each year due to the spacecraft’s orbit. For example, Mars Express could only perform radio occultation for two months in 2022.
Mutual radio occultation overcomes these problems, allowing researchers for the first time to explore the entire depth of Mars’ ionosphere around noon and midnight.
More information:
Jacob Parrott et al, First Results of Mars Express—ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter Mutual Radio Occultation, Radio Science (2024). DOI: 10.1029/2023RS007873
Citation:
Repurposed technology used to probe new regions of Mars’ atmosphere (2024, July 5)
retrieved 5 July 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-07-repurposed-technology-probe-regions-mars.html
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#Repurposed #technology #probe #regions #Mars #atmosphere
Palestinian officials have condemned a dramatic new settlement drive by Israel in the occupied West Bank which includes retroactively authorising three outposts.
The move is set to further stoke tensions in the territory which has seen a surge in violence since the war in Gaza began on 7 October.
Palestinians claim the West Bank as part of their hoped-for future state. Settlements are widely seen as illegal under international law although Israel disagrees.
The three unauthorised outposts that have now been legalised under Israeli law were described as new neighbourhoods of existing settlements. They are in sensitive areas in the Jordan Valley and near the southern city of Hebron.
In addition, the Israeli anti-settlement watchdog Peace Now said on Thursday that Israeli authorities had approved or advanced plans for 5,295 homes in dozens of settlements.
It also emerged this week that the Israeli government’s Higher Planning Council had approved the largest seizure of West Bank land in over three decades.
Some 12,700 dunams (5 sq miles) has been seized in the Jordan Valley and declared as Israeli state land. This year has marked a peak in the extent of declarations of state land with a total of 23,700 dunams affected.
The Palestinian president’s spokesman, Nabil Abu Rdeinah, said the new announcements confirmed that Israel’s “extremist government is bound by the right-wing policy of war and settlement”.
He said the latest steps would not “achieve security and peace for anyone” and were meant to prevent the establishment of a geographically contiguous Palestinian state in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip.
Last week, Israel’s security cabinet decided to authorise retroactively five settlement outposts built without official government approval.
The UN, the UK and other countries denounced the move as undermining hopes for the two-state solution – the internationally approved formula for peace that would see the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.
“Israel must halt its illegal settlement expansion and hold to account those responsible for extremist settler violence,” the British Foreign Office said.
“The UK’s priority is to bring the Gaza conflict to a sustainable end as quickly as possible and ensure a lasting peace in the Middle East, through an irreversible pathway towards a two-state solution.”
The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not immediately respond to a BBC request for comment on the overall strategy for the West Bank.
However, the far-right Israeli minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who lives in a West Bank settlement, has welcomed the recent steps. “We are building the good land and thwarting the establishment of a Palestinian state,” he said Wednesday on social media platform X.
Not counting annexed east Jerusalem, about half a million settlers live in the West Bank alongside three million Palestinians. Last year, Mr Smotrich instructed government departments to prepare to double the number of settlers to one million.
Since Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East War, successive Israeli administrations have allowed settlements to grow. However, expansion has risen sharply since Mr Netanyahu returned to power in late 2022 at the head of a hardline, pro-settler governing coalition.
Last month, Peace Now released the recording of an address by Mr Smotrich to his Religious Zionism party, in which he proposes transferring the management of settlements from military to civilian officials, building a separate road bypass system for settlers, expanding farming outposts and cracking down on unauthorised Palestinian construction.
Peace Now warned that the plan would irreversibly change the way the West Bank was governed and lead to “de facto annexation”.
#Israel #settlements #drive #heightens #Palestinian #land #angst
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