The FAA says its push to recruit video gamers as air traffic controllers has helped it hire more than 2,000 trainees, reaching 94% of its hiring goal. Another 2,000-plus candidates are in the pipeline. CBS News reports: U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said in a recent social media post that the federal agency's recruitment campaign to recruit gamers as air traffic controllers has been a "game changer" for the Federal Aviation Administration. [...] When Duffy announced the initiative in April, he acknowledged that the Transportation Department needed to extend its reach to recruit prospective air traffic controllers.
"A lot of what they do playing games ... is what they do ... controlling traffic in the air," Duffy told CBS News senior transportation correspondent Kris Van Cleave in an interview on Tuesday at New Jersey's Newark Liberty International Airport. Duffy added that many current trainees started out as gamers. Only about 25% of controllers hold a traditional college degree, while former controllers note that gaming requires many of the same skills that air traffic controllers use on the job, such as thinking quickly, staying focused and managing multiple sources of information as they guide more than 80,000 flights to their destinations daily.
Als premier van China leidde Zhu Rongji de onderhandelingen over toetreding van zijn land tot de Wereldhandelsorganisatie. Hij gold als de architect van China’s groei tot tweede economie van de wereld.
Voor steeds meer mensen is vakantie te duur. Bij camping Polemonium in het Groningse Opende kunnen gasten gratis kamperen. Een check op het inkomen is er niet. „Mensen die mij bellen, die geloof ik. Ik oordeel niet.”
Justine le Clercq Terwijl half Nederland met de caravan zigeunertje aan het spelen is op een brandende Franse camping, lopen hier onze echte zigeuners te smeken of ze er alsjeblieft een paar woonwagens bij mogen krijgen. Justine le Clercq We zijn weer massaal vertrokken naar mooie ruim opgezette campings in binnen- en buitenland. Heerlijk die vrijheid! Lekker de natuur om je heen. En al die vertrouwde gezichten van vorig jaar weer ontmoeten bij de barbecue. De echte zigeuners, die we zo niet meer noemen, dat zijn de Roma, de Sinti en de Reizigers. Beter gezegd, woonwagenbewoners. Hun levenswijze moeten ze stap voor stap inleveren. Eerst moest men stoppen met rondtrekken. Daarna moest men op grote locaties bij elkaar wonen. Daarna moest men juist weer op kleine locaties wonen (uit elkaar getrokken families). Toen moesten de woonwagenlocaties verdwijnen. En uiteindelijk moest de woonwagenbewoner gewoon een huis nemen. Over Nederlandse woonwagenbeleid de afgelopen decennia kan ik kort zijn: die woonwagenbewoners moeten normaal doen. Hoe doe je normaal? Normaal doen is de kern van het echte Nederlanderschap en wie niet normaal doet, kan rekenen op alle varianten van uitsluiting, discriminatie, repressie en wurgende bestuurlijke besluitvorming. Wij normale Nederlanders weten nu eenmaal beter dan […]
Scientists have long studied how magnetic energy powers solar activity. The constant motion of plasma particles and the sun’s rotation are major contributors to its cycles and events, such as flares and coronal mass ejections, which lob huge quantities of plasma and gas into space.
Sometimes these explosions reach the earth’s magnetic field and cause geomagnetic storms, which are when we see some of the most brilliant auroras. But they also disrupt or damage our communications systems, power grids, GPS, and satellites, and researchers want to further understand how the sun builds up its magnetic energy so we better know how to guard against its massive fits of activity. They’ve also been trying to figure out why the sun’s corona, or atmosphere, is millions of degrees hotter than its surface.
Thanks to the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, which has pride of place at the National Solar Observatory on Maui, Hawaii, the highest-resolution image of the sun ever captured has revealed unique features that may give solar scientists some insight into how this magnetic energy builds.
Rippling forms that physicists call Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability (KHI) demonstrate the effect of two fluids flowing past each other at different velocities. It’s a phenomenon named for the two scientists who observed it for the first time around 1870, and it can be seen in clouds, ocean waves, and the atmospheres of gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn.
The Inouye telescope, the most powerful of its kind, was able to capture features smaller than 12 miles across, providing insights that remained hidden in earlier photos. The details may illuminate part of a solar process that scientists refer to as “flux braiding,” because the way the sun’s magnetic field lines move around one another result in a plaited effect. But the tension builds and builds before eventually breaking, which is when we see flares and similar events. The swirls of KHI may have something to do with how these twists happen in the first place.
“This could solve this biggest mystery of the last half a century for solar physics and astrophysics,” team scientist Dr. David Kuridze told The Guardian. “When you have this instability in the system, it is very easy to cascade the energy into smaller scales. And at some point, it just dissipates as a heat. This could make hot coronas, hot outer atmospheres of the sun and similar stars.”
Oh wow, Williams College’s Hopkins Observatory has a huge collection of eclipse glasses & viewers (and other eclipse ephemera), some of them dating back to 1793. Here are a few of my favorites:
Instagram is full of first-person videos of men harassing women in public. They follow a similar script: A man walks up to a woman or group of women in a store, sitting outside a cafe, or walking home from a bar, and delivers a pickup line. The women almost always nervously laugh, react with barely-veiled disgust, or say "fuck off" while he stalks her or refuses to walk away. The men recording these videos capture them with Meta's smart glasses, which are designed to discreetly capture interactions like these and upload the videos to Meta's platforms where the women in the videos are turned into content for "pickup artist" accounts.
New research reveals this ecosystem works, and how pickup artists (PUA) influencers are using Meta's products, including its smart glasses and social media platforms, to perpetuate a culture of harassment against women.
University of Sydney researchers Joanne Gray, Marcus Carter, and Ben Egliston watched hundreds of these videos to learn how pickup artist content creators use smart glasses, and what specific forms of gendered harms these recordings cause. They published their research paper, "Harm Through the '#RizzCam': Smart Glasses, Ambient Capture and Invisible Harassment," online this week as a preprint article.
The researchers compiled a dataset of 350 Instagram videos posted between September 2023 and March 2026. The videos fit specific criteria: they depicted real-world interactions involving unsolicited approaches to women in public or semi-public settings. "Unsolicited interactions were defined as approaches that appeared to be initiated without prior indication of mutual engagement," the researchers wrote in the paper. "We included videos that appeared to be staged, scripted, or comedic performance as it is often difficult to confidently determine intent in platform content, and such material may still contribute to the circulation and normalisation of these interactions." They found the videos by searching hashtags and keywords commonly used by pickup artist grifters.
The more surreptitious the filming seemed, the researchers found, the more serious the harassment. "The data reveals a clear correlation between the 'covertness' of the filming modality and the severity of the harassment," they wrote. "This combination of first-person perspective and device concealment confirms that the means of production remain largely clandestine, facilitating a condition of low awareness among subjects and reinforcing the deceptive nature of wearable-mediated capture."
When Meta announced its Ray-Ban Meta glasses in 2021, Egliston said, he and several of his colleagues, including those on the research team for this paper, wrote that the company’s safeguards were insufficient. "The company’s answer to covert recording was a light on the device and an expectation that users would somehow just behave responsibly. That has plainly not worked, and it leaves the burden on the people being filmed rather than on the company that built the device and owns the platforms the footage ends up on." Last year, 404 Media reported on the ways people are modding Meta's smart glasses to disable the recording light. Ray-Ban Metas have also been repeatedlyspotted on immigration agents during raids.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri said last month that the platform would start removing harassing content. "If you're posting content that is taking advantage of people and harassing them, like a lot of these pickup line kind of videos that we've heard of and seen, then we're going to take the content down," Mosseri said. "We don't want people to be surreptitiously taking videos of other people and harassing them and then posting them on our platform. So we're trying to fight that every way we can." As of writing— almost a month after that announcement — I easily found pages and pages of Reels by men approaching women while wearing smart glasses where the women being filmed either don't seem to know they're being recorded, or obviously don't want to be filmed and repeatedly tell the man recording them to stop. This isn't even counting the endless videos recommended to me by Instagram's algorithm showing people antagonizing and filming retail workers and shoppers in stores using smart glasses.
In the pickup artist world, this content is both entertaining and instructive, the researchers wrote. It's superpowered by the proliferation of smart glasses like Meta's. "As these devices move from niche curiosities to mainstream products, smart glasses intensify this asymmetry through ambient capture," they wrote. "By leveraging their unobtrusive design, PUAs create point-of-view (POV) recordings that place the digital audience in the literal position of the practitioner. This technical capability covertly embeds the act of filming within the social encounter, effectively weaponising the subject’s lack of awareness. The result is a novel mode of 'borderline' harassment that often evades the scrutiny of existing platform governance mechanisms, as it lacks the overt markers typically required for a policy violation."
The harm doesn't end when the interaction ends, the researchers found. The long digital tail of these videos—which Instagram fails to properly moderate based on its own promises to crack down on this content—means the women in them are subjected to harassment long after they manage to get away from the man in real life. "Combined with the fact that 93.3% of these posts left comments open, subjects were frequently exposed to a digital afterlife of crude, abusive, and misogynistic commentary from the platform audience," the researchers wrote. "Comments frequently framed women’s rejection or discomfort as unnecessarily dismissive, including remarks such as 'she was acting rude' or suggestions that women should 'at least acknowledge' the men approaching them, while others minimised harassment by arguing that people who label such behaviour as harassment are contributing to declining birth rates."
The researchers wrote that they were inspired by the BBC's investigations into how women are targeted by Meta smart glasses wearers when they're trying to go about their daily lives. In one BBC report, a woman who was recorded and posted online by a man using Meta's smart glasses was harassed for weeks after the video went online, and said she was "bombarded" with phone calls because her phone number was posted with the video. "On one occasion, she says she picked up the phone and a man said to her: 'Do you know how stupid you are? Do you regret it? Do you know how easy that made you look?,'" the BBC reported. Men came to her workplace and repeated lines from the video and demanded her social media details, she told the BBC.
“I’ve been surprised by how firmly the ‘pervert glasses’ label has stuck. There’s a widespread aversion here that doesn’t seem quite as present for other surveillance or data-intensive products," Egliston told 404 Media. "But public sentiment — while perhaps meaning people will be less likely to wear the glasses — is not a governance mechanism."
Egliston said that Meta's content moderation record "doesn’t encourage confidence," but hopes to be proven wrong. "Our hope is that the current backlash, combined with emerging legislation imposing a duty of care on platforms, will force more substantive changes."
Thanks to the drought, these black-and-white beauties are struggling to catch worms in the rock-hard earth. But there’s still good foraging on well-watered fairways and greens
Name: Badgers.
Age: European badgers live for five to eight years in the wild. They have been in the UK, where this story is set, for half to three-quarters of a million years.
As much as some people more or less cease to listen to new music in their 30s, I have noticed a retreat to safe, familiar gaming territory among some of my fellow millennial gamers.
Retro collections are started, or resumed; jewel-cases of PS1 classics or cardboard boxes with SNES or Mega Drive games have started to colonise the living-room shelves. People are replaying things from their university days, or sticking to comfort games such as Stardew Valley. Many of the friends I used to game with never bothered to pick up a PlayStation 5 at its launch, and now that current-generation consoles are becoming prohibitively expensive, they see no need. With thousands of great older games, why bother playing something new?
Eclipse to be witnessed by tens of millions across western Europe as enthusiasts gather along path of totality
The last significant partial eclipse was reported in the UK in 1999.
Here is how we covered it at the time at the Guardian:
“Britain was brought to a standstill for almost an hour yesterday as millions of people left their homes, offices and factories to watch the last eclipse of the millennium.
The rush to watch the skies in the West Country and across the country resulted in the biggest power surge ever recorded on the National Grid and is estimated to have cost the country £500m in lost business.
OUDDORP (ANP) - De brandweerman die bij het blussen van een duinbrand bij het Zuid-Hollandse Ouddorp op donderdag 6 augustus zwaargewond raakte, is overleden. Dat meldt de veiligheidsregio. De man overleed op woensdagochtend in het Erasmus MC.
Tijdens het bestrijden van de brand kwam de man onder een brandweervoertuig terecht. Het slachtoffer werd daarna met een traumahelikopter naar het ziekenhuis gebracht. Een dag later liet de veiligheidsregio al weten zich "grote zorgen te maken" over zijn gezondheid.
Arjen Littooij, algemeen directeur van de veiligheidsregio Rotterdam-Rijnmond, schrijft in een bericht op sociale media dat de man een "brandweerman in hart en nieren" was. Zijn overlijden slaat volgens Littooij "een diep gat in ons brandweerhart". Hij spreekt van een zwarte bladzijde in het 20-jarig bestaan van de veiligheidsregio en meldt verder dat zijn gedachten bij de familie en het korps Middelharnis/Sommelsdijk zijn, waar de man actief was.
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