A groundbreaking study released today by Economists for Ukraine reveals that the actual value of U.S. aid to Ukraine is significantly lower than widely reported. Contrary to the U.S. government's estimate of more than $60 billion in military assistance, the study finds that the real value amounts to approximately $18.3 billion. The full report is available at https://econ4ua.org/aid-value.

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“Public narratives about aid to Ukraine often overlook the distinction between appropriations and actual delivered value,” said the Economists for Ukraine leadership team. “This study provides a comprehensive, data-driven assessment that clarifies how much Ukraine is truly receiving.”

Meanwhile, in the early 2010s, the company shifted its focus from “music enthusiasts” to what it calls “lean-back consumers”, effectively the kind of people who would once have turned the radio on in the morning and left it burbling in the background all day. The purpose of the playlists it designed to target them – “chill vibes”, “mellow morning”, “mood-booster” – was, and is, to provide unobtrusive background noise or, as Pelly suggests, a latter-day equivalent to muzak: nothing striking, unusual, out-of-the-ordinary, or indeed any of the things one might reasonably want music to be. The message that quickly filtered through to artists was that the more beige your sound, the more likely it was to find a place on a Spotify playlist and earn some cash. Hence the rise of a homogeneous genre dubbed “Spotifycore”, which you’ve doubtless heard even if the term seems unfamiliar. It’s a bit ambient, a bit electronic, a bit folky, a bit indie, a nonspecific wish-wash possessed only of a vague wistfulness, the sonic equivalent of a CBD gummy: music “for any place, for anyone”, as one producer put it, that ends up being “music for no place, for no one”.

Spotify encouraged it, developing an “optimisation tool” called Spotify4Artists that urged musicians to examine the data, see what is doing well and tailor their music to be more like that. Given how hard it is for musicians to make a living in the 21st century, you can understand the pressure on artists to join this particular race to the bottom. “To be sustainable,” says one indie record label executive dolefully, “you have to put out records that are going to get repeat listens in coffee shops.”

This website contains all the lectures, project materials and tools necessary for building a general-purpose computer system and a modern software hierarchy from the ground up.

The materials are aimed at students, instructors, and self-learners. Everything is free and open-source, as long as you operate in a non-profit setting.

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Searle's paper, titled "Dazed & Confused: A Large-Scale Real-World User Study of reCAPTCHAv2," found that Google's widely-used CAPTCHA system is primarily a mechanism for tracking user behavior and collecting data while providing little actual security against bots. The study revealed that reCAPTCHA extensively monitors users' cookies, browsing history, and browser environment (including canvas rendering, screen resolution, mouse movements, and user-agent data) — all of which can be used for advertising and tracking purposes. Through analyzing over 3,600 users, the researchers found that solving image-based challenges takes 557% longer than checkbox challenges and concluded that reCAPTCHA has cost society an estimated 819 million hours of human time valued at $6.1 billion in wages while generating massive profits for Google through its tracking capabilities and data collection, with the value of tracking cookies alone estimated at $888 billion.

In this article, I will compare nerve-wracking vs. nerve-racking. I will outline when it is appropriate to use each spelling, and, at the end, I will give you a useful memory tool that you can use to decide whether nerve-wracking or nerve-racking is the word you want.

TL;DR: "Nerve-racking" is a lot more common so stick with that unless you are following a style guide that says otherwise.

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There’s good reason for optimism. In 2003 the National Renewable Energy Laboratory published results from a lab study of American Kestrels suggesting that painting a single blade black could protect birds by cutting down on motion smear. The report recommended that scientists test the idea in the field. A team in Norway answered that call and published a paper in 2020 showing a 72 percent reduction in avian fatalities at a small wind farm on the island of Smøla. “That really lit things on fire,” says Robb Diehl, leader of the Wyoming project’s science team and an ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

The humans use Arecibo to look for extraterrestrial intelligence. Their desire to make a connection is so strong that they’ve created an ear capable of hearing across the universe.

But I and my fellow parrots are right here. Why aren’t they interested in listening to our voices?