Supreme Court of the United States, Sonia Sotomayor, Donald Trump, Amy Coney Barrett
#major #takeaways #historic #Supreme #Court #term
A US citizen has been sentenced to 12.5 years at a maximum security penal colony by a Russian court after being convicted on drugs charges.
Robert Woodland, 32, was detained in Moscow in January and accused by prosecutors of seeking to sell a large quantity of methadone. His lawyer told the Reuters news agency that he had partially confessed to the charges.
Mr Woodland, who was born in Russia and adopted when he was two, had travelled to the country in 2020 to find his birth mother. His journey was documented by a Russian reality TV programme.
He is the latest US citizen to be imprisoned in the country, with some Western officials suggesting the Kremlin is “hoarding” Americans to trade for allies and operatives imprisoned abroad.
In a statement released after Mr Woodland’s conviction on Thursday, Russian prosecutors said he had been caught while packaging a large quantity of narcotics at an apartment in the Russian capital.
They claimed he had been working with a large-scale criminal group and had transported 50-grams of the drug from a pick-up point outside the city.
His lawyer, Stanislav Kshevitsky, had initially denied the charges, saying officials had presented “no evidence” of drug sales before the court.
But he told the Reuters news agency on Wednesday that Mr Woodland had confessed to some of the allegations against him. It remains unclear which charges he has accepted.
Footage carried by state media in Russia showed Mr Woodland sitting inside a glass cage in court, staring impassively ahead as the verdict against him was read out.
Russian media reported that Mr Woodland decided to remain in the country after meeting his mother in 2020 and worked as an English teacher near Moscow. His tearful reunion with his mother was broadcast on state television at the time.
The Interfax news agency said he holds US and Russian citizenship.
At least a dozen US nationals, including journalists and active duty soldiers, are currently being held in Russian prisons and penal colonies.
Among those is Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter detained over a year ago on espionage charges which he denies. The US considers him to be “wrongfully detained”.
Western officials have long suspected that Moscow is seeking to detain Western citizens to use as bargaining chips in prisoner swaps. US law prohibits the payment of ransoms to terror groups, but successive administrations have been willing to offer concessions to other states to secure the release of Americans.
This is what happened to Brittney Griner, who was released at the end of 2022 in a prisoner swap with the US in return for the controversial Russian arms dealer Victor Bout.
While the US state department said earlier this year that it was aware of Mr Woodland’s case, it avoided commenting directly on the allegations.
Instead, it issued a statement saying it “has no greater priority than the safety and security of US citizens overseas”.
US officials have repeatedly warned US citizens in Russia to leave the country, citing the risk of wrongful arrest and harassment by authorities.
#Russia #jails #citizen #years #drugs #charges
Roger Federer retired from tennis at 41 having achieved everything there was to conquer: 20 Grand Slam titles and a reputation so sterling that his home country of Switzerland minted his face on a coin. (He was even once voted the second most admired person in the world after Nelson Mandela.) “Federer: Twelve Final Days,” a polite documentary by Asif Kapadia and Joe Sabia, follows the living legend throughout September 2022, from his goodbye announcement to his last professional match. The camera stays at a respectful distance as Federer exits private planes and cars and navigates news conferences where, as every sports fan knows, candid feelings are as rare as talent like his.
Federer’s gravity-flouting litheness has always made a striking contrast against his grounded disposition. In his farewell match, playing doubles alongside longtime rival Rafael Nadal, his expressed hope is simply to “to produce something that’s good enough.” Federer describes himself as an emotional guy, but with the international press and his management team nearly always on the sidelines, there’s little privacy to get personal. One of the more vulnerable moments the film manages to capture comes when Federer wears the wrong dress shirt to a photo call.
To deliver sentiment, the film instead relies on a score that sniffles as though a racehorse is being taken out to get shot. Yet, athletes do witness their own wakes. Flickers of spliced-in footage from Federer’s youth eulogize the grace that will forever outshine his four brutal knee surgeries. When he flubs a shot at his last match, the spectators look funereal — and the colleagues in attendance, from Björn Borg to Novak Djokovic, appear to recognize that this tragedy, this mass bereavement for an aging superhuman, has happened to them. Or it will.
Federer: Twelve Final Days
Rated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Prime Video.
#Federer #Twelve #Final #Days #Review #Roger
Ten months into the Civil War, the Union was short on a crucial supply, the absence of which threatened to sap the fighting strength of the Northern army: coffee. This critical source of energy and morale was considered almost as vital as gunpowder; Union General Benjamin Butler ordered his soldiers to carry coffee with them always, saying it guaranteed success: “If your men get their coffee early in the morning, you can hold” your position.
But by 1862, imports of coffee were down by 40 percent since the start of the war. Though coffee was cultivated around the world from Java to Ethiopia to Haiti, Brazil had been the main supplier to the United States. The Union blockade of Southern ports, including New Orleans, had slowed coffee imports from Brazil to a trickle—and Union merchants and military contractors were able to reroute only a portion of that Brazilian coffee northward; even with Union port cities trying to pick up the slack, the U.S. imported 50 percent less by value from Brazil in 1863 than it did in 1860. Demand, meanwhile, had quadrupled since the fighting began, fueled by a commitment to provide each Union soldier with a generous 36 pounds of coffee per year. Finding a new source of coffee had become a matter of survival.
Luckily for the Union, Stephen Allen Benson, president of the relatively young Republic of Liberia, had a plan. In February 1862, he sent a message to Americans in the North: “In Liberia there are about 500,000 coffee trees planted … [and] there is now more coffee exported from Liberia than in any previous period.” Born in Maryland to free Black American parents, Benson had emigrated with his family to the West African colony at the age of 6. By the outbreak of the Civil War, in April 1861, he was one of the largest coffee farmers in Liberia—and he hoped that this new country, to which several thousand Black Americans had fled to escape American racial animus, could provide an essential fuel in the Union’s own fight against slavery. A ship that left the port at Monrovia in August 1862 carried 6,000 pounds of premium African coffee. It was the first major shipment to the Union—and would prove vital in the North’s victory.
Coffee replaced tea as the U.S. drink of choice around the time of the American Revolution. From the moment patriots tossed chests of tea into Boston Harbor in December 1773, drinking coffee—and boycotting tea—became a sure sign of loyalty to the cause of independence. Pretty soon, the country was obsessed: By the 1830s, coffee consumption was outstripping tea by five to one. In 1832, Andrew Jackson replaced army alcohol rations with coffee, in hopes of energizing the troops and reducing instances of drunken insubordination. By 1860, the U.S. was importing six pounds of the stuff each year for every man, woman and child in the country—and at the outbreak of the Civil War, Americans were drinking twice as much coffee as they were 30 years before.
But the war introduced a problem for the Union’s coffee drinkers. The sudden demand for more coffee as a crucial army provision combined with the blockade of the Southern ports created a crisis. What the Union could import was hardly enough to keep its army supplied, let alone to caffeinate Northern civilians in the manner to which they’d become accustomed.
Yet there was a promising workaround: An early alliance between Northern abolitionists and the Liberian people had begun to bring small quantities of Liberian coffee to the North before the war. In 1848, before his presidency, Benson had formed a partnership with the Quaker merchant and activist George W. Taylor, whose “Free Labor Warehouse” in Philadelphia exclusively sold goods, food and clothes made without enslaved labor. Benson shipped roughly 1,500 pounds of coffee to Taylor that first year, and their partnership continued fruitfully throughout the next decade as they supplied coffee drinkers who were looking for slavery-free alternatives.
Just as some consumers today boycott brands that trouble them, buy fair trade products and otherwise vote with their wallets, some abolitionists used commerce to fight slavery. Liberian coffee was especially attractive to the American Free Produce movement, with its explicit mandate of using ethical commerce to undermine the global slave trade. Coffee had long been championed by Quakers and other Free Produce advocates like Taylor. It was a product that free laborers could grow and that consumers could support with their purchases, even if it cost a little more to pay the farmers.
At the time, the United States had not yet officially recognized the Republic of Liberia, and no formal trade treaties existed between the two countries. Southern states had stood in the way of recognizing Liberia since its independence in 1847, arguing that it would be inappropriate for the U.S. to host a Black diplomatic representative in Washington. But secession created an opening, and right away, Benson began lobbying the U.S. government to extend “treaties of friendship and commerce” that would allow Liberian farmers to bring in coffee on equal terms with other coffee-producing countries.
By the start of 1862, Benson was not alone in his conviction that the farmers of Liberia could bolster the Union war effort. Mercifully for Union generals, President Abraham Lincoln officially recognized the republic that year and raised the tariff on coffee imports to 4 cents a pound as a war-funding effort. That created an opening for imports of Liberia’s more expensive, but also more ethical, coffee—now not so different in price from more established coffees like those from Java. Taylor’s Philadelphia Free Produce store expanded its network in Liberia, bringing new coffee to market from Liberian farmers like Othello Richards and Thomas Moore.
The Union also sent advisers to Liberia, including Edward Morris, a Philadelphia merchant, who visited in 1862 to give free lectures to farmers about best practices for planting coffee—and to ask farmers what support they needed to increase the scale of this new coffee economy. His success was conspicuous. One Liberian settler, William C. Burke, who had been manumitted to emigrate to Liberia by Confederate General Robert E. Lee, wrote to his American contacts that after Morris’ visit, “the attention of almost every [Liberian] farmer has been lately turned towards raising coffee” for the U.S. market.
Newspapers from Maine to Ohio to California reported encouragingly on the supplies of Liberian coffee. On the ground, meanwhile, the Union’s ability to purchase and distribute coffee from Liberia, alongside other sources, was helping the army’s morale. In December 1862, one soldier wrote that “what keeps me alive must be the coffee.” The North was gaining a powerful caffeinated edge over the Confederacy, where importers, stymied by the Union’s ongoing blockade, were having far less success. Indeed, by 1863, coffee had become ludicrously scarce throughout the Confederacy. A Vermont soldier, marching through Louisiana, noted: “The richest planters have had no tea or coffe [sic] for over a year—when any poor coffe has been brought here it sold for $8 a pound.” In contrast, a receipt issued by Taylor’s Free Produce shop in Philadelphia in 1863 shows that he charged just 40 cents per pound for his prime Liberian beans, described by one arbiter to be of “superior” quality compared with non-Liberian coffee; one longtime Philadelphia customer extolled Liberian coffee’s “strength, flavor and aroma.”
Confederate soldiers, huddled over their campfires in the predawn light, had to make do with unpalatable coffee substitutes brewed from acorn grounds, sweet potatoes and other dubious ingredients. Military discipline was reportedly difficult to maintain in the Confederate Army, where, one Union soldier noted, “they get no tea or coffee but plenty of whiskey.” One desperate Confederate soldier wrote a hastily scrawled, undated note to Union troops across the line in Fredericksburg, Virginia: “I send you some tobacco and expect some coffee in return … yours, Rebel.” The lack of coffee was fast eroding Confederate morale.
The Union Army acted decisively to press its caffeine advantage. At the end of August 1864, the Alexandria Gazette in Virginia lamented that the Union troops in Sherman’s siege of Atlanta had “destroyed 500 sacks of genuine Rio coffee” intended for Confederate consumption—about 55,000 pounds in all. At this point in the war, Union supplies of coffee, including those from Liberia, were so assured that Northern soldiers could even afford to destroy the Confederate stock rather than confiscate or consume it themselves. An article on the same front page of the Gazette noted that a ship had recently arrived in New York with “40,000 pounds of ‘Liberia-Mocha’ coffee.” Benson’s small individual contribution in 1864, around 220 pounds of coffee sold through Taylor’s Free Produce Warehouse that same year, would have been enough to supply six soldiers for the full final year of the war.
At the Confederate surrender at Appomattox in April 1865, Michigan soldier William Smith noted that the Confederate soldiers present were licking their lips hopefully, with “a keen relish for a cup of Yankee coffee.” The end of the war and Benson’s much-mourned death in 1865—an Ohio newspaper noted his passing as a “great loss”—did not put a damper on Liberian coffee exports to the U.S., where, after the war, coffee from the republic was increasingly available far beyond Free Produce shops.
For their part, Liberian farmers counted their trading partnership with the Union a success. The war had created a new and durable market for their coffee, thanks in part to cooperation with the Free Produce Movement. As more people tried Liberian coffee, they tended to become devoted to it. As one Yale University chemistry professor recorded at the time, “Its quality was so much superior to most coffee in common use in this country that I at once ordered a sample.” Coffea liberica, as it was officially dubbed in 1876, was not only delicious, but also resistant to diseases that affected other varieties, and it won Liberia plenty of new trading partners: By 1885, its annual exports to countries including Britain and Germany reached an impressive 800,000 pounds—and then, only seven years later, a whopping 1.8 million.
The U.S. coffee market, in turn, was forever changed by the war. Indeed, Smithsonian curator of political history Jon Grinspan says that drinking coffee three times a day had hooked America’s soldiers, with the enlisted men “developing lifelong peacetime habits while camped at Shiloh or Petersburg.” By 1885, the U.S. was importing 11 pounds of coffee per person, per year—nearly double prewar levels. Some news reports from this period—written, perhaps, after a third or fourth cup of Liberian brew—sometimes described coffee as a universal remedy, even touting its alleged benefits as a disinfectant.
And in 1880, after the end of Reconstruction, with many reformers turning their attention from racial justice to temperance, the Philadelphia Times expressed the hope that “coffee houses would yet win the victory over gin palaces.” With the help of the prolific Liberian coffee plant, nothing seemed out of reach.
Manic birds, excitable goats and other invigorating tales behind the birth of our java addiction
By Sonja Anderson
Get your goat
According to legend, a ninth-century Ethiopian shepherd named Kaldi noticed his goats acting hyper after eating berries from a strange tree. He harvested some for himself and, upon consuming them, enjoyed a similarly energizing effect. Kaldi shared his zippy discovery with some nearby monks, who disapprovingly threw the berries into a fire—accidentally roasting their seeds, which we call beans. The fragrant beans were scooped from the coals, crushed, and soaked in water—creating the first cup of joe.
Sea fare
Ethiopians took nourishment from the coffee shrub in various ways: brewing its leaves and berries into tea, grinding and mixing the seeds with animal fat, or simply chewing on them. Some say that enslaved Northeast Africans—captured and forced across the Red Sea during a 1,300-year period of slave trade that began in the seventh century—may have carried such sustaining snacks onto ships, accidentally transporting the crop to another region that calls itself the birthplace of coffee: Yemen.
Early birds
In a different account, a 13th-century Moroccan mystic named Sheikh al-Shadhili saw a flock of amped-up birds soaring overhead, chewing unfamiliar-looking berries as they flew. After munching on some of the morsels the birds had dropped, Shadhili felt strangely alert—and he formed a habit.
Energy for days
Yemen’s coffee origin story credits one of Shadhili’s disciples: Omar, a healing priest once exiled from the town of Mocha for moral transgressions. Stranded in the hills, nearly starving, Omar plucked some red berries from a shrub. Finding the raw fruits’ seeds inedibly bitter, he opted to cook them over a fire, which hardened them beyond edibility. To correct this mistake, Omar boiled the roasted seeds, watching while the water turned brown and sweetly fragrant. Omar drank the dark liquid and, it is said, enjoyed days of sustained energy.
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#Coffee #Helped #Union #Caffeinate #Victory #Civil #War
Paging all bird enthusiasts: Researchers need your help solving a long list of mysteries — namely, what has happened to 126 species of birds and, most importantly, if they even exist anymore.
The Search for Lost Birds, a collaboration between Re:wild, the American Bird Conservancy and BirdLife International, is a newly updated dataset of bird species that have been “lost” to science, meaning they have not been accounted for in at least 10 years.
And that’s where citizen scientists come in, acting as ears and eyes to help confirm whether these species are still gracing the land and skies around the world.
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To curate their lost birds list, researchers combed through more than 42 million photos, videos and audio recordings listed on citizen scientist platforms dedicated to wildlife — The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Macaulay Library, iNaturalist and xeno-canto — as well as parsing through museum collections, search engine results and research papers. Local experts were also brought in to help, giving insight into which bird species have not had a documented sighting between 2012 and 2021.
The initial analysis, published in 2021, originally identified 144 lost bird species, but in the years since they have managed to rediscover 14 of the species that were thought to be missing, two species were subject to taxonomic clarification and another two species were found living under the care of humans.
The list highlights birds that have newly disappeared, as well as many who haven’t been seen for more than 150 years. For example, the most recently lost species, the Papuan whipbird, hasn’t been documented by scientists or registered on citizen science platforms in 13 years. South America’s white-tailed tityra, however, is the longest-lost bird and hasn’t had a confirmed sighting in 195 years.
Birding in Alberta’s wetlands
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“Figuring out why these birds have become lost and then trying to find them can feel like a detective story,” John C. Mittermeier, the director of the Search for Lost Birds at American Bird Conservancy, said in a press release for the project.
“While some of the species on the list will be incredibly challenging or maybe even impossible to find, others might reveal themselves relatively quickly if people get to the right places. Regardless of the situation, working closely with local people and citizen scientists is the best way to find lost birds and begin conservation efforts to ensure that these species don’t become lost again.”
Interestingly, most of the undocumented species are concentrated in a handful of geographic regions, with Asia, Africa and the scattered islands of Oceania missing the most birds. In some cases, the study notes, species may be considered lost only because they were first observed in such far-flung areas of the planet that no one has been back to document more sightings.
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It’s also helpful to note that most of the so-called lost birds hail from warmer regions because countries near the equator quite simply have more bird species than northern areas. These areas, too, have faced severe habitat devastation and loss due to deforestation and development.
In Canada, just one bird, the Eskimo curlew, is considered lost, and the continental U.S. only has two underreported species, the ivory-billed woodpecker and the Bachman’s warbler. An additional six are reported missing in the Hawaiian islands, as well as another handful from Central America and the Caribbean.
But that doesn’t mean that Canada’s bird populations are necessarily thriving — in fact, we are just decades away from having more species added to the lost birds list, says Jody Allair, director of community engagement for Birds Canada.
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“We’ve got birds right now that are not lost, but they’re living on the edge,” he tells Global News, stressing the need for both reactive conservation efforts like the Lost Birds project as well as “keeping common birds common” through preventive and direct conservation.
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“There are lots of bird species in Canada that are declining — we are in a period of time right now where we’re seeing some of the largest declines in our history,” he continued, explaining that in Canada aerial insectivores are facing a 59 per cent population decline since 1970, shore birds have declined by 40 per cent and grassland birds in Alberta have declined by 57 per cent.
Allair said that while the lost birds contained in the database “all have a different story,” there are common themes behind many of the listed birds.
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“Some have faced severe habitat loss, some were probably very rare on the landscape to begin with, maybe there hasn’t been an effort to go in and figure out where some these birds live and some of them have just evaded science.”
This is where bird enthusiasts, or “birders,” come in.
At one time, birding evoked images of a retired English professor, clad in khaki and Tilly, roaming the countryside with a pair of binoculars, a notebook and perhaps a high-quality camera.
But now birders cannot be pigeon-holed into any one stereotype.
“Birding is no longer perceived as a retirement activity,” Allair says. “Everyone from every demographic is getting into birding now.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, as people were cooped up at home or seeking out more time in nature away from others, birding exploded in popularity when people turned their eyes to the skies to stave off boredom and stress.
People turning to ‘really therapeutic’ backyard birding during COVID-19 pandemic
But Allair says even as restrictions began to lift, people continued to look up.
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“I think people are starting to recognize the positive mental health benefits, as well as it’s a really interesting hobby that you don’t need much to do and it’s wildly addictive. A snowflake turns to blizzard really fast when you start birding.”
Birds Canada is embracing and encouraging Canadians’ love for birding by helping common folk turn their avian obsession into important research. It offers more than 40 citizen scientist projects throughout the year, where it calls on the public to help keep an eye on bird behaviour and populations and report back with what they’ve seen and heard.
Employing the help of citizen scientists has already led to the successful return of several species to science. In the case of the Lost Birds study, the Bismarck honeyeater, long-billed bush warbler, rusty thicketbird, and Kangean tit-babbler have all been rediscovered. Most recently, the Santa Marta sabrewing was rediscovered in Columbia in 2022 and the dusky tetraka was rediscovered through its unique song in 2023 in Madagascar.
Citizen scientist projects like the Lost Birds project and those done through Birds Canada are “not a vanity project,” Allair says.
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“Losing any kind of bird species looks terrible on us, as humans. If the birds are there, they probably need some incredibly urgent conservation work to bring them back.”
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EA Sports FC 25 will be released in September.
That’s according to prolific game leaker Billlbil-Kun, who writes on Deallabs that the game will likely be revealed within the next 10 days.
The game will reportedly be released in a Standard and Ultimate Edition. Players who purchase the Ultimate Edition of the game will receive a week of early access, as has become standard with EA‘s football titles, it’s claimed.
EA Play players will allegedly also receive this benefit alongside their 10-hour trial. EA Play players will also reportedly receive a discount to in-game currency and will be able to transfer in-game currency between EA FC 24 and EA FC 25. This will be a one-time offer, as has been the case in recent years.
As the UEFA Euro 2024 championships are currently taking place, it’s possible that the game will be announced during the final game, which takes place on Sunday, July 14.
UEFA is partnered with EA for EA Sports FC meaning it’s possible that the announcement could be integrated with the tournament.
In VGC’s review of the current-gen versions of EA FC 24, we said: “EA Sports FC 24 isn’t the huge departure that we’d hoped for. While Ultimate Team devotees will likely be happy, the rest of the game feels like an afterthought in the transition away from the FIFA license.”
#Sports #coming #September #claimed
Can you remember your last in-person exam? You’re waiting outside the venue with your identification, pens and back-up pens. Everyone is nervously looking at their notes or avoiding eye contact.
The doors open and you enter a cavernous space of numbered tables in rows. You find your seat and, waiting to start, glance around the vast space that surrounds you.
Our research suggests this environment may have an effect on your ability to perform at your best.
In our new study, we looked at the impact of ceiling heights on the exam performance of Australian students.
Exams date back more than 1,300 years and are still one of the most common forms of assessment for school and university. They are often conducted in large spaces for efficiency in supervision and space use. This often includes gymnasiums, auditoriums, showgrounds, halls and exhibition buildings.
While the pandemic led a shift to online exams, growing concern over AI and other forms of cheating has seen a renewed emphasis on this traditional style of in-person assessment (even if research shows “high stakes” exams are not good for learning or the prevention of cheating).
In our previous 2022 lab-based study, we found if rooms were larger, there was an impact on brain activity associated with our ability to concentrate.
This led us to wonder whether, in everyday life, large rooms have an impact on cognitive performance (or how well our brains can perform tasks)—and therefore whether traditional large exam halls have an impact on students’ results.
To test this, in our new study, we compared students’ exam results across different sizes of rooms.
We looked at the results from 15,400 psychology undergraduates at one Australian university over eight years (2011–19), and across three campuses.
We matched exam scores and the room dimensions where the examinations were held. This included rooms with ceiling heights between 2.79 meters to 9.50m, and internal floor areas between 38m² to 1,562m².
As we relied on non-experimental data (things in their natural state), we were careful to account for other variables that might account for the results.
We factored in students’ coursework scores as well as variables such as their gender, age, past exam experience and the unit of study. We also looked at geographic location, as admission requirements were different across campuses. All of these helped us understand what might affect our results.
To do our analysis, we used a statistical model called a “linear mixed model.” This meant we could add these different variables to try and understand the extent to which they predict something (in this case, exam performance).
The “significance” score for coursework was less than 0.001 and for ceiling height it was 0.002. A score below 0.05 means the result is unlikely to happen by chance, so we can be confident there’s a real effect.
This means a students’ prior coursework scores had a bigger impact on their exam score. But we still found ceiling height was a significant predictor of their results. In other words, even after accounting for other factors, higher ceiling heights were a significant predictor of the students’ exam scores.
This suggests study habits matter but so too do the dimensions of the room in which you sit the exam.
Our fresh findings suggest several questions ripe for further research. These include:
We also need to consider what is happening now for online exams. This has introduced new variability around the environmental conditions for students. Here, a student may have an advantage if they feel cozy and relaxed at home, or perhaps they may struggle to concentrate due to other environmental and social factors at home.
Given we only studied students in one discipline (psychology) we also need to replicate these findings in different areas and groups of students.
This work also feeds into our broader research about how building design can effect what our brains need to do.
There is already significant community awareness of how buildings can impact upon our physical health—and building codes and regulations to make sure they meet these standards.
But as our research shows, the way spaces are designed can have an impact on the way we think and how well we perform a task. This could be applied beyond exams to how we learn or do our jobs in the broader world.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Citation:
Should we ditch big exam halls? Research shows how high ceilings are associated with a lower score (2024, July 5)
retrieved 5 July 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-07-ditch-big-exam-halls-high.html
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Microsoft is retiring its artificial intelligence (AI) agent builder tool GPT Builder along with support for Copilot GPTs. The tech giant announced that the feature will be removed from the Copilot Pro subscription bundle between July 10 and July 14. After its removal, subscribers will also lose access to the GPTs they have created. The company has not shared any reasons behind rolling back the feature. Notably, GPT Builders was introduced just three months ago, when Microsoft launched the Copilot Pro subscription in global markets.
In a support document, Microsoft has now confirmed that the feature will be removed. It said, “Microsoft will remove the ability to create GPTs starting July 10, 2024, and then remove all GPTs (created by Microsoft and by customers) along with their associated GPT data also starting July 10, 2024, through July 14, 2024.”
GPT Builder was introduced as a tool that would allow Copilot Pro subscribers to create mini chatbots for specific purposes. These GPTs, also known as AI agents, can be created with specific instructions and knowledge bases.
Due to their small size, they adhere to the guidelines efficiently. For instance, one can create a Copilot GPT to analyse research papers and find any inconsistencies in them. At the time of launch, Microsoft said these GPTs could also be used to save time by reusing a set of AI prompts.
While the company did not specify any reason to discontinue the feature, it highlighted that it is evaluating its strategy for Copilot extensibility, and for the time being, will be prioritising the core product experiences for Copilot. Interestingly, GPTs will still be offered to Microsoft’s commercial and enterprise clients and are only being retired for the consumer-focused AI platform.
Microsoft has also asked users to save the instructions for any Copilot GPTs created before July 10, as GPTs and the data will not be accessible after that. To see the instructions, users can open the GPT in edit mode and go to the Configure tab. The company said it will delete any subscriber data that was collected by Copilot GPT from its servers.
In India, the company’s Copilot Pro subscription is priced at Rs. 2,000 per month. Microsoft has also shared details in case users want to cancel their subscription.
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We can imagine it’s sometime around two or three in the morning. Music is blaring — cumbia or punk-rock — yet shards of well-lubricated conversation and laughter manage to steal into the sweaty, smoky air. The moment is buzzing with romantic and sexual chemistry, and intimate scenes are unfolding in the room’s corners.
Somewhere in the crowd, Reynaldo Rivera is clicking the shutter of his camera, chatting with friends, and lovingly documenting all this energy and animation.
Over the 1980s and ’90s, Rivera, a young and self-taught photographer, compiled a vibrant and vivid chronicle of the people, places and moods that shaped the Latino and queer underground scene in Los Angeles at that time. The world that Rivera’s photographs picture is a clandestine one, and Rivera a steward of secrets that we are carefully, partially let in on.
Now, 50 of these images are gathered at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, for “Fistful of Love/También la belleza,” billed as the first solo museum exhibition for an artist who — until his inclusion in the 2020 Hammer’s “Made in L.A.” Biennial and the publication of a monograph of his work that same year — has worked beyond the scrutiny of the art world. Rivera’s images are as intoxicating as the world they picture. Yet, a certain skepticism at my own access to it crept into the frame as I was reminded that this work was made under the radar.
Born in Mexicali, Mexico, in 1964, Rivera grew up working as a migrant farmer and a soup canner alongside his father. The two shuttled between cities on both sides of the border, including Stockton, Pasadena and San Diego de la Union in Mexico’s Guanajuato province. It was against this backdrop of instability that he discovered photography as a teenager while rifling through old photo books and magazines at a bookshop in Stockton.
In these early days, he was taken by the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lisette Model and Brassaï, whose noirish influence is plainly legible in several works on view at PS1. At age 16, he bought his first camera and began photographing those around him: his sisters, friends, and cleaning staff at the hotel where his father worked.
In the 80s, Rivera landed in Echo Park, then a predominantly Latino Los Angeles neighborhood where he was a photographer for LA Weekly. Working there meant access to concerts and fashion shoots, which he would photograph both for the publication and for his own personal pleasure. Though Rivera continues to live and work in Los Angeles today, the images at PS 1 cast a focused and retrospective gaze at a small slice of personal history between 1981 and 1997.
He’s crafted an indispensable archive of a moment that many did not deem worthy of being remembered, with a clear sensitivity to its beauty. Rivera dotes on the same set of local characters — among them his sisters Connie and Martine, his partner, Christopher “Bianco” Arellano, and performer friends who are often identified by their stage names, like “Mrs. Alex” and “Paquita” — deepening the emotional flavor of his images.
Glass vitrines in each gallery display well-chosen selections from Rivera’s amassed ephemera, immersing us in the ideas, tastes and histories from which the photographs emerge, bringing together items like Sonic Youth concert posters and fliers advertising Chicano studies courses. Among the most striking are photographs and paraphernalia from “Chance: Three Days in the Desert,” a wild, wayward convening of artists and thinkers organized by Jean Baudrillard (the French post-structuralist philosopher) and Chris Kraus (the American author and art critic), who hired Rivera to photograph the event — situating him in a milieu of late-90s transnational counter-culturalism.
The camera meanders through queer nightlife, onstage and off, from the campy glamour of drag and music venues like Le Bar and Silverlake Lounge to the feverish social rhythm of house parties. Much of this scene, once an enclave of safety and self-fashioning, has since been washed away by a confluence of AIDS and gentrification.
Among these images, we encounter a few staged portraits of club-goers and performers, including the rock musician Siouxsie Sioux and the performance artist Vaginal Davis. But the best of Rivera’s nightlife images are offhand candids like “Paquita and Reynaldo Rivera, Le Bar” (1997/2021). Here, in the busy, balmy grit of a backstage dressing room, as a drag queen named Paquita applies makeup in the mirror, we glimpse Rivera’s reflection in the corner, face buried behind his camera. He was no interloping fly on the wall, but a trusted part of this surreptitious social sphere.
These private and personal tones deepen in tender domestic scenes from Rivera’s own life — his “blue” series, which is focused on intimacy and sexuality, including “Bianco, Echo Park” and “Bianco, Reynaldo, Echo Park” (both 1992/2023). In the first of these images, Rivera’s partner (now his spouse) is lying in bed, back to the camera, and in the second, the two join in a tangle of limbs and lust. There is an unflinching eros here that hums in a visual minor key, with soft light and melancholic shadows. Queer touch and sensuality assume a sober, quiet tone that prompts the viewer into an almost reverent way of looking — an urgent antidote to the pathologizing of queer desire.
The wall text attached to these and other more explicit images, such as “Steven and Reynaldo, Downtown Los Angeles” (1990/2023), indicates that they were not originally meant for public viewing. The artist and the organizers of the show — Lauren Mackler, a guest curator, and Kari Rittenbach, PS 1 assistant curator — collectively decided to unveil this private realm. In an interview, Rittenbach elaborated that “this body of work is part of a conversation” — one that Rivera “wasn’t wanting to make public at a certain point. But now, our discourse is changing. It was important for us to show that it’s always been part of everyday life.” One must respect these intentions. But as a viewer, it was hard to escape the feeling of being in the gray area between authorization and encroachment.
“Bus Stop, Sonora” (1991/2020), among the most challenging and convincing images in the show, marks a thematic departure. We find an eerie bus station waiting room that is empty except for a television screen and two shadowy figures in the background. Rivera has stepped into a zone of mystifying disquietude: We have departed Los Angeles for Mexico and substituted the elated bustle of the club for an alienated aesthetic that evokes Eugène Atget or Lee Friedlander. In its haunting near-desertion, this image presents a narrative of unnoticed life that made me hungry for more like it: Its tensions and discomforts offer a thrilling ambiguity with which to wrestle.
The kaleidoscopic whirl of Rivera’s pictorial universe springs to life in “Fistful of Love” (2024), a scrappy 102-minute film shot with an old-school hand-held camcorder, which occupies its own gallery. Jumbled snippets of the photographer’s life and friends let us crash the party with its ebullient bachata performances, drag shows, birthday parties and frank conversations about gender and sexuality. Rivera’s voice occasionally wafts in as he teases friends, goading the viewer to wander further into all of this stylishness and seediness, this fun and fraught landscape. Yet I found myself still cautiously at its edge, unable to shake the feeling that this is all too preciously intimate for our eyes. Maybe we just had to be there.
Reynaldo Rivera: Fistful of Love/También la belleza
Through Sept. 9, MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Ave, Queens; (718) 784-2086; momaps1.org.
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