An investigation into public money from the Community Development Authority for Meeperbot and sister companies (those under the same ownership) is an investigation by some members of the local government (the municipal administration) into the conduct of other members of the local government (the Community Development Authority). All officials involved were (or are) public officials…
703 search results for "TID 4"
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Friday Catblogging: ‘A Late-Night Sighting, and a Single Hair’
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
By Andries Hoogerwerf (29 August 1906 – 5 February 1977) – http://www.petermaas.nl/extinct/speciesinfo/images/javant3.gif, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1889781 Jon Emont reports A Late-Night Sighting, and a Single Hair, Rekindle Hopes That an Extinct Tiger Lives On (‘Against all odds, DNA analysis suggests that a giant predator may have survived in Java, one of the most densely populated places…
Cats
Friday Catblogging: They’re Only Misunderstood
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Embed from Getty Images Colleen Grablick reports Cats aren’t jerks. They’re just misunderstood (‘Feline researchers say many cats are quite social. Yours might even want to learn a few tricks): Monique Udell is the director of the Human-Animal Interaction Lab at Oregon State University, which has been investigating the social potential of domestic cats. According…
Cats
Friday Catblogging: The World’s Deadliest Cat
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
View this post on Instagram A post shared by Hogle Zoo (@hoglezoo) Justine McDaniel reports The world’s deadliest cat is deceptively cute. Meet Gaia: She weighs less than three pounds, she makes you go aww, and she’s one of the best killers on the planet. Gaia, an 8-month-old black-footed cat, is the…
Cats, Science/Nature, Technology
Friday Catblogging: Space-Transmission Cat
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
??Justine McDaniel reports Taters the cat stars in NASA’s first video streamed from deep space: On the path to Mars, nearly 19 million miles from Earth, Taters the cat got his big break. The orange tabby starred in the first video streamed from deep space, a successful NASA experiment that marked a milestone for advancing…
Daily Bread, Education, Government Spending, Legislation, Lobbyists, Low Standards, Public Relations, Reasoning, Wisconsin
Daily Bread for 12.17.23: The Empty Case Against School-District Competitive Bidding
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 43. Sunrise is 7:20 and sunset 4:22 for 9h 02m 09s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 26.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1903, the Wright brothers make the first controlled powered, heavier-than-air flight in the Wright Flyer at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
By John T. Daniels – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID ppprs.00626.
Corrinne Hess reports Wisconsin school districts would have to comply with competitive bidding requirements under new proposal (‘Wisconsin is only one of three states that doesn’t require schools to go out for bid on construction projects’):
School districts in Wisconsin would have to comply with competitive bidding requirements for construction projects costing more than $150,000 under a new legislative proposal.
Wisconsin is one of only three states that allows a project of any size to be awarded on a no-bid basis, according to data from the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Municipalities, meanwhile, have to seek a competitive bid for any project over $25,000. The same proposed legislation would increase that threshold for municipalities to $50,000.
During a public hearing Thursday before the Assembly Committee on Local Government, Chris Kulow, government relations director for the Wisconsin Association of School Boards, testified against the bill. He argued that requiring a competitive bidding process would take away local control.
Kulow said most school boards are already using competitive bidding. He said having to choose the lowest bidder could mean having to sacrifice the best quality.
“Currently, districts that have long-standing relationships with local contractors have the opportunity to work with them to negotiate deals that include spending resources locally, keeping those dollars in the community,” Kulow said. “They result in the hiring of parents whose children attend the schools. They want to do a good job, and they’re less likely to ask for extra charges.”
All school boards, not merely most, should use competitive bidding for large projects. Kulow’s argument about districts with long-standing relationships with local contractors is unsupported by his testimony. He’s telling a story about local, but his story offers not measurement but instead only unsubstantiated-yet-beguiling claims: “spending resources locally,” “dollars in the community,” “hiring of parents whose children attend the schools,” etc.
Sounds great, right? How often, how much, how many?
Kulow — who asserted his points as a representative of educational boards — offered in his testimony no evidence whatever. Not a shred. See testimony of Chris Kulow, Wisconsin Assembly Committee on Local Government, 12.14.23, video @ 1:17:23. A former superintendent, now part of the school board association’s staff, followed Kulow’s presentation with his own singular experiences in one school district.
Honest to goodness. A knowledgeable or educated person should expect more than this. A student who turned in a term paper so vacuous would deserve a poor grade (or a chance at a re-write); an adult representative of school boards doing the equivalent deserves the intellectual scorn of his fellow Wisconsinites. Our millions of fellow Wisconsin adults did not, each of them, fall off of turnip trucks yesterday.
These men represent school boards; many more men and women are on school boards. There are thousands of superintendents and other administrators in over four hundred school districts in this state. Anyone — any single one — who was graduated from high school, college, or a graduate program with a presentation as light as Kulow’s either learned too little or has forgotten too much.
Those who wish to argue against required competitive bidding — a practice adopted in 47 of 50 states — need to do better than this.
See a massive galaxy cluster evolve in simulation:
Cats, Daily Bread, Science/Nature
Daily Bread for 12.16.23: Fetching
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of 44. Sunrise is 7:19 and sunset 4:22 for 9h 02m 28s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 16.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1773, members of the Sons of Liberty disguised as Mohawk Indians hold a Boston Tea Party when they dump hundreds of crates of tea into Boston harbor as a protest against the Tea Act.
Leo Sands reports Cats can play fetch, too, study finds:
according to a new study, many cats share a trait more frequently associated with pet dogs: They play fetch.
The peer-reviewed study, published Thursday, dispels any lingering myth that cats do not know how to retrieve objects for their owners, said its authors, who based their findings on a survey of the owners of 1,154 cats that played fetch on every continent except Antarctica. Some cats can and do play fetch, they found, although it depended on the feline’s individual traits and the bond shared with its owner.
“It was more common than people were probably expecting, and even I was expecting,” Jemma Forman, an animal psychologist at the University of Sussex and an author of the study, said in an interview. The authors of the study, published in the Scientific Reports journal, said they believe it is the most extensive conducted to date on this specific behavior among cats.
….
The study, limited to cats whose owners already reported fetching, did not assess how prevalent the behavior was among the general cat population. While many cats do fetch, Forman suggested that more research was needed to determine how common it was more generally. A cat’s breed was not a barrier to its ability to fetch, the study found, although Siamese cats were particularly well represented in the sample.
See Forman, J., Renner, E. & Leavens, D.A. Fetching felines: a survey of cat owners on the diversity of cat (Felis catus) fetching behaviour. Sci Rep 13, 20456 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-47409-w
Fetching? Well, yes, of course they are.
How to Give Dead Batteries New Life:
Daily Bread, Social Media
Daily Bread for 12.15.23: Threads, Probably
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 49. Sunrise is 7:18 and sunset 4:21 for 9h 02m 50s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1791, the United States Bill of Rights becomes law when ratified by the Virginia General Assembly.
In his Platformer newsletter, Casey Newton makes predictions for 2024. He’s bolder than I am; I’ve no predictions for 2024 in Whitewater or anywhere else. Newton’s, however, seem sound, and here’s his view of Threads, Meta’s answer to Twitter, X, or whatever Musk decides to call his short-form platform next:
Threads overtakes X in daily users and becomes the leading text-based social network. It’s hard to imagine how Threads could have had a better launch than it did. After its initial record growth tapered off, the app settled at close to 100 million monthly users. But Meta continued to push at an impressive pace; as of today, the company is both beginning to make good on its promise of linking Threads to the Fediverse and opening its doors to the European Union.
Over the next year, expect Meta to continue pushing Threads heavily in Instagram, leveraging the massive audience of its parent app to drive more daily usage of both. The arrival of an API will entice more publishers, public officials, emergency services, sports fans, and other holdouts to begin using the app more heavily. Threads won’t be feature-compete by next December, but it will be the social network that feels like home to most of the US media.
Bonus prediction: With Threads ascendant, Bluesky begins to wither as its development team prioritizes building its underlying protocol over growth, community management, and making improvements to the user experience.
This seems right about Threads nationally and globally. Musk’s repeated mistakes with X have pushed that platform into a long-term decline. It’s a free market, and Musk’s loss will likely prove Zuckerberg’s gain.
And look, and look: Twitter in its prime was a useful site for following journalists and newsmakers, but it had almost no influence in small towns like Whitewater. Perhaps Threads, with Facebook’s parent company Meta behind it, will develop a bigger reach into small places (as Facebook has done). Perhaps.
In the meantime, Threads looks like a solid bet for those looking for a short-form platform with a promising future.
The Original Warrior Energy Bar:
Churchkhela has been a favored snack in many countries for thousands of years. However, despite this, it is still relatively unknown to the wider world. People not familiar with the food often mistake its appearance for a whole number of things ranging from sausages to sticks of dynamite!
Naili Basiladze shows us how to make a traditional Georgian churchkhela with grapes harvested from her own vineyard. Strings of nuts are repeatedly dipped in a mixture of grape juice and flour. Once dry, the finished result is a deliciously sweet stick of churchkhela.
Churchkhela’s extremely long shelf life is a testament to its historical use. Being naturally rich in the calories found within the grape juice, it provided sustenance to Georgian soldiers who would often need to travel long distances.
Daily Bread, Politics, Press
Daily Bread for 12.13.23: Politics & News Avoidance
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 39. Sunrise is 7:17 and sunset 4:21 for 9h 03m 48s of daytime. The moon is new with 0.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Tech Park Board Executive Committee meets at 8 AM and the Landmarks Commission at 4:30 PM.
On this day in 1769, Dartmouth College is founded by the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, with a royal charter from King George III, on land donated by Royal governor John Wentworth.
An except from a new book describes the authors’ study on the relationship between news avoidance and politics. Benjamin Toff, Ruth Palmer, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen ask So who are the consistent news avoiders? (‘No single variable is more predictive of whether someone consistently avoids news than their level of interest in politics and civic affairs’):
In general, consistent news avoidance tends to be more common among young people, women, and lower socioeconomic classes. There are also some important political divides regarding who avoids news. In the United States especially, it is much more common among people on the right ideologically. In most other parts of the world, it is more common on the left. But a bigger and more persistent gap lies along what the political scientists Yanna Krupnikov and John Barry Ryan call “the other divide”: the divide between people who are deeply involved in politics and rarely, if ever, avoid news consistently and those who are largely indifferent toward politics and avoid news far more often. To be clear, we are not suggesting that all or even most young people, women, or people of lower socioeconomic classes avoid news consistently. That is verifiably not the case. But if you do meet someone who consumes practically no news at all, there is a good chance they will fall into one or more of these categories.
Excerpt from Avoiding the News: Reluctant Audiences for Journalism by Benjamin Toff, Ruth Palmer, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen. Copyright (c) 2023 Columbia University Press.
Behold, a Leucistic American Badger:
[spacer height=”300px”]View this post on Instagram
Daily Bread, Nature
Daily Bread for 12.12.23: The Geminids Meteor Shower
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 33. Sunrise is 7:16 and sunset 4:21 for 9h 04m 24s of daytime. The moon is new with 0.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Public Works Committee meets at 6 PM.On this day in 1941, Hitler declares the imminent extermination of the Jews at a meeting in the Reich Chancellery.
Amudalat Ajasa reports What to know about the Geminids, the best meteor show of the year:
The presentation started in late November and will wrap up on Christmas Eve, according to the American Meteor Society. Interestingly, the show will peak and end on the same dates as last year.
The moon won’t act as a spoiler during the peak of the shower because it will illuminate at 1 percent the evening of Dec. 13, according to the American Meteor Society. That means darker skies for viewing.
….
Since the Geminids originate from the constellation Gemini, which rises near sunset during this time of the year, skywatchers could start to see “shooting stars” clearly around 10 p.m., Rice said. But the best time to view is between midnight and 2 a.m.
“We’ll have a nice dark sky that will show meteors. The fact that it’s so close to the new moon means less light pollution,” Rice said.
If you can’t wish upon the shooting stars on Dec. 13, don’t fret! The show will go on for over a week after the peak — there will just be fewer meteors to see.
….
Look for darkness — this may be in a rural location, or if you can’t get to a rural location, look to the darkest part of the sky wherever you are.
Patience — just because there is an average count doesn’t mean that you’ll see that many meteors per hour.
Leave your phone inside — looking at a device before turning to the sky may ruin your innate night vision.
Get comfortable — bundle up and drink something warm if necessary while you wait for the show.
Acrobatic Woolly Opossum Puts Prehensile Tail Into Action At Panama Feeders:
Cats, Science/Nature
Friday Catblogging: Nearly 300 Different Facial Expressions
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
See Think cats are aloof? They make nearly 300 facial expressions, study says: Brittany Florkiewicz has always been a dog person, but she was surprised by what she discovered when reviewing more than 100 hours of cat videos. Florkiewicz, a psychology professor at an Arkansas college, spent her childhood running around her yard with her…
Cats, Good Ideas, Medicine
Friday Catblogging: Doctor Prescribes a Cat
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Embed from Getty Images Cathy Free reports A Virginia woman was feeling sad. Her doctor prescribed her a cat (‘Her doctor, Earl D. King, said he wrote it down ‘because people sometimes don’t follow your instructions’): Robin Sipe’s eyes filled with tears as soon as her doctor entered the examining room. “My cat had recently…