Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002

Daily Archives: December 11, 2019

The Year in Pictures 2019

The New York Times – “So much of the year’s news played out in the streets. Week after week, protesters poured onto the wide boulevards of Hong Kong, where the photographer Lam Yik Fei seemed to be everywhere. Brexit drew tens of thousands into the streets of London. A subway fare increase was the final spark that led to protests in Santiago, Chile, and people heaved makeshift bombs along a bridge linking Venezuela and Colombia. The tumult of mass gatherings produced some of the year’s most powerful pictures. But a quiet image of two people stood out as perhaps the saddest: Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez lay with his arm limply draped over his 23-month-old daughter, Angie Valeria, their lifeless bodies locked together on the banks of the Rio Grande, where they drowned trying to cross from Mexico into the United States.
Every year the photo editors of The New York Times cull through 365 days of photographs in an attempt to recapture and visually distill the year. The result is this collection of images, a visual chronicle of violence, political power struggles, climate catastrophes, mass shootings and a few poignant scenes of everyday life. Some stories were obvious in their photographic power. The wildfires that erupted across California seemed urgent and frightening. Blazes destroyed large parts of the Amazon rainforest. And the entire roof of the 850-year-old Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris caught fire, and came perilously close to bringing down the medieval structure. By comparison, Washington’s power struggles mostly eluded the camera. The intrigue that may lead to the impeachment of an American president — the biggest domestic story of this year and probably the next — took place over secret phone calls and behind the closed doors of the Oval Office. Nonetheless, our photographers Doug Mills, Erin Schaff and Damon Winter made subtle and telling images of a process often obscured by political maneuvering and stagecraft…”

George Laurer, Who Developed the Bar Code, Is Dead at 94

The New York Times – “George J. Laurer, whose design of the ubiquitous vertically striped bar code sped supermarket checkout lines, parcel deliveries and assembly lines and even transformed human beings, including airline passengers and hospital patients, into traceable inventory items, died on Dec. 5 at his home in Wendell, N.C., near Raleigh. He was… Continue Reading

Think you can’t escape Google? You haven’t seen anything yet

FastCompany – The future of Google is post-phone, post-Internet, ambient computing all around you. “…The news of today is that Google is repositioning an open source technology it developed called Flutter to have a bigger scope. It’s a software development kit that allows designers to build an app UI just once, and then use that… Continue Reading

Learning at work is work and we must make space for it.

MIT Sloan Management Review Magazine Winter 2019 -“The event was running over, the car was waiting, but the keynote speaker did not seem to mind. He was enjoying fielding questions from a large auditorium packed to the rafters with executives, aspiring entrepreneurs, and management students. “Get ready for an age in which we are all… Continue Reading

Journalists imprisoned in 2019

“The number of journalists imprisoned globally for their work in 2019 remained near record highs, as China tightened its iron grip on the press and Turkey, having stamped out virtually all independent reporting, released journalists awaiting trial or appeal. Authoritarianism, instability, and protests in the Middle East led to a rise in the number of… Continue Reading

Icebound The climate-change secrets of 19th century ship’s logs

Reuters – “An eccentric group of citizen-scientists called Old Weather has transcribed millions of observations from long-forgotten logbooks of ships, many from the great era of Arctic exploration. As the polar regions grow ever warmer, the volunteers have amassed a rich repository of climate data in a 21st century rescue mission… Meteorologists have long recorded… Continue Reading