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Latest Study explores the Blockchain Technology in Healthcare Industry Market Wi – News.MarketSizeForecasters.com

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Danzig

Latest Study explores the Blockchain Technology in Healthcare Industry Market Witness Highest Growth in near future

The 'Blockchain Technology in Healthcare Industry market' research report now available with Market Study Report, LLC, is a compilation of pivotal insights pertaining to market size, competitive spectrum, geographical outlook, contender share, and consumption trends of this industry. The report also highlights the key drivers and challenges influencing the revenue graph of this vertical along with strategies adopted by distinguished players to enhance their footprints in the Blockchain Technology in Healthcare Industry market.

The Blockchain Technology in Healthcare Industry market report comprises of the key trends which influence the industry growth with respect to the regional terrain and competitive arena. The study highlights the opportunities that will support the industry expansion in existing and untapped markets along with the challenges the business sphere will face. Besides this, the report also offers an intricate analysis of case studies including those of COVID-19 pandemic, with the aim to provide a clear picture of this industry vertical to all shareholders.

Request a sample Report of Blockchain Technology in Healthcare Industry Market at:https://www.marketstudyreport.com/request-a-sample/2836584?utm_source=news.marketsizeforecasters.com&utm_medium=AG

Pivotal pointers from COVID-19 impact assessment:

Highlights of the Blockchain Technology in Healthcare Industry market report:

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Analysis of the regional terrain:

Major Highlights from Table of contents are listed below for quick look up into Blockchain Technology in Healthcare Industry Market report

For More Details On this Report: https://www.marketstudyreport.com/reports/covid-19-outbreak-global-blockchain-technology-in-healthcare-industry-market-report-development-trends-threats-opportunities-and-competitive-landscape-in-2020

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Latest Study explores the Blockchain Technology in Healthcare Industry Market Wi - News.MarketSizeForecasters.com

Blockchain demonstrator helps energy companies explore the potential of distributed ledger technologies – The Engineer

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Danzig

A tool developed by Frazer-Nash Consultancy demonstrates how distributed ledger technology could be used to help shape the UK energy distribution network

Systems, engineering and technology consultancy, Frazer-Nash, has been working with the Energy Innovation Centre and three of the distribution network operators (DNOs): SP Energy Networks, Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks, and UK Power Networks, as well as Cardiff University, to imagine the future of the distribution network.

The company has developed a demonstrator tool that is helping the DNOs to explore Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) more broadly, as a potential solution for solving new challenges posed by their transition to being Distribution System Operators (DSOs), such as contracting with distributed energy resources (DERs).

Frazer-Nash Renewables and Future Networks Consultant, Tom Bransden, explains: DNOs will have to manage high levels of distributed generation, flexible loads and energy storage, as part of the transition towards DSO. This more active role may require large numbers of contracts with DERs, and multiple transactions for multiple resources to be approved at high frequency over the course of a day. The DSO will need effective, accessible and neutral technology solutions to help them do this.

Distributed ledger technologies offer a potential solution, and could enable data sharing in line with the aims of the Energy Data Taskforce. As part of a Network Innovation Allowance (NIA) funded project, weve developed a prototype flexibility platform that uses Blockchain to show how these multiple contracts could be managed. Our work illustrated the benefits and challenges associated with the technology.

In short timescales, we leveraged Microsoft Azure, Serverless Infrastructure and an Ethereum-based Blockchain to create a smart-contracts based flexibility procurement platform demonstration. We modelled a future stage of power system for 2030, using National Grids Future Energy Scenarios, including quantities and market prices for DERs. Our model focuses on two areas of the UK and four sample daily periods that show very different peak demand and generation levels, two from winter and two from summer. This allowed simulation of future Electricity System Operator (ESO) and DSO services on a single platform.

Based on the Energy Networks Association (ENA) Open Networks World A[i], this system demonstrates a novel framework that enables secure contracting via a distributed ledger to thousands of DERs. These DERs include a range of low carbon technologies, and reflect the decentralisation of demand through new load types that are being seen on the energy networks for example, smart charging electric vehicles, residential battery storage and demand side response with electric heat pumps.

As part of the UKs green recovery while enabling remote working, leveraging cloud technologies to develop and share projects between collaborators is key to rapid development, deployment and scalability of solutions.

Ben Oxley, Project Manager and Software Lead, continued:

There are still a lot of misconceptions in the marketplace surrounding Blockchain technologies, misconceptions like high energy usage, lack of control and poor frequency of updates/throughput of transactions. Through this project we demonstrated that this is not a limitation of the technology, just of some implementations. Using a Proof of Authority consensus mechanism we demonstrated fast block mining and high rates of transactions.

We have drawn upon our understanding and experience with a whole range of cloud technologies in order to develop and deploy this project on the short timescales demanded. The solution uses Ethereum Blockchain, Solidity Smart Contracts, React, Azure App Service, Signal R, Event Grid, ASP.NET Core, Azure Devops, Docker, Azure Active Directory in fact, over 20 different individual applications are integrated to deliver the demonstrator.

Potentially, suggests Tom, a Blockchain solution could increase participation in the flexibility markets:

In the current UK flexibility markets, energy resources are typically procured through auctions: DER providers provide bids to deliver power to the network, in terms of megawatt quantities and prices for those megawatts and time windows during the day. These are generally set in advance for contracts over months and years. The long duration of these contracts may reduce the participation of smaller demand users in these flexibility markets, and limit liquidity. Moving to more of a spot pricing market could deliver significant cost savings, and allow operators to respond more directly to demand on a minute-by-minute basis.

With individual contracts required with each supplier, there can also be a significant administrative cost on both sides. While not completely replacing formal contracts, providing computer-generated smart contracts between parties can reduce administrative burdens and decrease contractual costs, potentially opening up the flexibility markets to increased participation.

But operators have to be certain that any new solution will offer benefits when compared to existing systems, and these will have to be weighed against the risk of implementation. With this in mind, Tom outlines the benefits found from comparing the demonstrator Blockchain solution against a conventional flexibility platform solution.

Through undertaking a cost-benefit analysis, we found a number of benefits in terms of lower upfront costs, lower costs of contracting, transparent security reviews, and the potential for peer verification of transactions without a trusted third party. The latter could open the door for true peer-to-peer trading between network users.

Ben concluded: Were looking forward to continuing to support the energy industry in navigating the DSO transition, and exploring the potential benefits that distributed generation can bring to the networks of the future. Our work on this project has shown that Distributed Ledger and Cloud Technologies could equally be applied to solve the challenging problems faced by our customers across a range of sectors, and were excited to be investigating this innovative and pioneering approach.

Glossary

[i] The Energy Networks Association Open Networks Project investigated a range of potential future worlds, in which a DNOs and DSOs would have different responsibilities, functions and roles. In world A, DNOs transition to being DSOs, which have high levels of responsibility and coordinate flexibility at the distribution network level. The DSO would also be responsible for boundary flow limits between distribution and transmission at the grid supply points.

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Blockchain demonstrator helps energy companies explore the potential of distributed ledger technologies - The Engineer

Can Blockchain E-Passports Help Save the Tourism Industry? – Cointelegraph

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Danzig

Enterprise-focused blockchain company ShareRing has launched a blockchain based contact tracing solution it will offer to 2.6 million hotel and activity providers that currently use one of the companys services. The anonymous e-passport app hopes to solve the privacy issues facing similar tracing apps.

ShareRings app, which focuses on tourisms $9 trillion tourism industry, allows users to upload important documentation, such as e-visa on arrival (eVOA), passport information, travel insurance, flight and accommodation bookings and a negative COVID-19 test result.

When a user of the app subsequently tests positive to the virus, the app will anonymously send the necessary information to the government, allowing others to be notified if they have been in contact.

The app can also integrate with eVOA systems, travel insurance companies, airlines, hotels and other relevant organisations, allowing companies to scan the app to reveal test results without revealing any personal information. ShareRing Co-Founder Jane Sadler-Kidd explained that documentation and personal information does not leave the device:

When someone signs up for a ShareRing ID, we take their photo, video selfie, name, DOB, address, etc and store it in an encrypted file that never leaves the users device. We also take a fingerprint of the data and documentation and store that on the blockchain.

In order to speed up adoption, ShareRing enables governments and businesses to integrate the passport app on existing solutions without using the ShareRing brand. Kidd added the Covid-19 passport was low-cost, and appealing to consumers.

It encourages adoption among the population by building it in a way that provably safeguards their privacy.

Contact tracing is not the only front that companies are utilizing blockchain to fight the global pandemic. The worlds third largest pasta producer, De Cecco is adopting the Infection Risk Management solution My Care built on VeChain to help ensure the safety of employees and operators throughout Italy.

In March 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO) launched a blockchain based platform MiPasa to facilitate fully private information sharing between individuals, state authorities and health institutions.

The Netherlands is also using the blockchain platform Tymlez to map and analyse the countrys medical supply chain, while a similar application is being used in the United States and Canada in collaboration with IBM.

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Can Blockchain E-Passports Help Save the Tourism Industry? - Cointelegraph

"Resist Everything Except Temptation": Anarchism in Art – Ms. Magazine

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Danzig

What can be gained from reading art for its politics? We stand now in a political moment in the U.S. as in other parts of the world, where fascism is rising along with political attempts to frame certain people as other and therefore worthy of mistreatment, disdain and death.

Simultaneously, history and intellectuality are being derided as defective somehoweven in an era when we have more information about history, writing and art at our fingertips via the internet, along with all manner of nonsense produced there as well.

This precarious political moment makes art all the more important. Much can be gained from cultural shiftschanging hearts and minds, even when political access is diminishing for some (via voter suppression, most immediately, in the United States). Few would question the important cultural shifts emboldened by the work of writers like Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Margaret Atwood and Oscar Wilde.

The latter is the topic of Kristian Williamss new book, Resist Everything Except Temptation. He offers deep scholarship on the anarchist philosophies of Oscar Wilde while also delivering a pleasurable read.

The title derives, of course, from the witticisms and strong writing for which Wilde was known. He was equally known for his selfishness, excess, incarceration, exile, and yes, homosexuality. (A term, Williams does well to point out, that he would not have used in the 1800s.)

Wilde did not often proclaim himself an anarchistwhich might make the focus of this book odd, were it not for how the trope of anarchism places Williamss scholarship in the context of social change in the late 1800s. He cleverly puts Wilde in dialogue with the practical ideas of self-proclaimed anarchists such as Kropotkin and Goldman.

This book is also timely, as anarchists and anti-fascists are being targeted as terrorists by President Donald Trump, who shows no understanding of what anarchists might profess. (Might being the operative word, for such a diverse group of people.)

Here atMs., our team is continuing to report throughthis global health crisisdoing what we can to keep you informed andup-to-date on some of the most underreported issues of thispandemic.Weask that you consider supporting our work to bring you substantive, uniquereportingwe cant do it without you. Support our independent reporting and truth-telling for as little as $5 per month.

As a person who creates art for the express purpose of positive cultural change, I believe Resist Everything but Temptation offers a way of framing creative work that can lead us to its more conscious political use and allow us to enjoy and explore it more deeply.

As Williams says:

By putting the politics first, it is possible to find a kind of unifying outline for Wildes thoughts as a whole. His politics connect to his aestheticism, to his sexuality and nationality, to his humor and irony and to his deeply tragic view of life. Wildes political commitments were subtly but centrally present in even his purely aesthetic works; and conversely, his aesthetics, his critical perspective, and even his keen wit and sense of irony had their role in shaping his politics.

He was clearly interested in a depth of individual freedomand not just for menthat I believe should interest us today.

Though Wilde is often depicted in contemporary times as a gay dandy, interested mainly in beauty and selfishness, there is scant evidence that he carries the pursuit as far as contemporary upper-class white gay men often do, into the realm of apolitical living and even misogyny. One might err historically to call Wilde a feminist in the same way that homosexual is a misnomer. Still, the overall direction of his thoughtand, as importantly, his desireswas toward an ideal of freedom, toward a humane society, and in sympathy with those who fight to free themselves from oppression.

In his actual dealings with women, Wilde promoted expression in an unusual way for the time period. For two years (1887-9) Wilde edited the publication Womens World.

Before he took charge, the Ladys World was a failing fashion and gossip magazine. Changing the name and recruiting an impressive collection of contributors, Wilde set out to make it the recognized organ for the expression of womens opinions on all subjects of literature, art and modern life and to deal not merely with what women wear, but with what they think, and what they feel. Contributors included feminists, suffragists, and trade unionists, the anti-racist and anti-imperialist agitator Olive Schreiner, and the anarchist poet Louise S. Bevington.

Similarly, in his own marriage, while he could not liberate his wife from the effects of his behavior and its persecution, this did not mean he lacked love for his family. Evidence suggests that he participated and cared for his wife and children: He was eager that his wife Constance have and pursue her own ideas, her own interests, her own projects and commitments.

Indeed, she was often more politically active than he, advocating for womens suffrage, non-oppressive fashion standards for women and home rule in Ireland. Perhaps most notably, Constance believed that marriage should exist as a contract of limited duration, renewable if desired.

As Wilde argued in The Soul of Man under Socialism, With the abolition of private property, marriage in its present form must disappear. He was concerned for the individuality of all whom it constrained.

Analysis of Wildes writings form the bulk of Williams book and its a pleasure touring back through his canon with anarchism and liberation as the frame. In so many ways, his plays in particular helped audiences to consider the conventions of gendered interactions and capitalist notions of conformity. There is much to inspire our current work in this regardand to prompt us to remember that not all positive social change happens in the realm of law and politics. Much of it comes from art and creativity.

As Williams reminds us, Where Nietzsches strategy was a frontal attack, Wildes was one of infiltration and subversion. By provoking but not antagonizing, he disarmed the audience with his wit and made them complicit with their laughter.

The coronavirus pandemic and the response by federal, state and local authorities is fast-moving.During this time,Ms. is keeping a focus on aspects of the crisisespecially as it impacts women and their familiesoften not reported by mainstream media.If you found this article helpful,please consider supporting our independent reporting and truth-telling for as little as $5 per month.

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Western Slope Skies – The Limits of Space | KVNF Public Radio – KVNF Public Radio

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Danzig

We consider our universe to be limitless. Over the decades, people have explored that infinity to discover what is out there, even who is out there. But what about the space closest to us? The low Earth orbit is overcrowded by satellites, space junk, and the leftover remnants of space exploration. These leftover pieces affect how scientists and people experience space.

Episode aired Friday, Aug. 7th & Wednesday, Aug. 12th, 2020

Orbital debris, also known as space junk, are objects left in space that no longer function as intended. Objects in orbit will eventually return to the ground but are currently launching faster than they are re-entering. Many objects stay in orbit for decades. NASA estimates the amount of orbital debris in the low Earth orbit exceeds over 100 million pieces, ranging from one millimeter to over ten centimeters. This is enough for around one third of Americans to have their own piece of space junk.

The low Earth orbit also holds many objects currently in use, like satellites for weather and communications, the Hubble Telescope, and the International Space Station. However, even these essential devices contribute to overcrowding. When stargazing or photographing the night sky, it is hard not to see the bright streak of a satellite in view.

The oldest man-made object still in orbit is Vanguard 1. Launched in 1958, it was the fourth satellite launched into space. On Earth, after 50 years even trash becomes a part of an areas historical landscape. Do we leave these random remnants of past space projects in orbit to commemorate the history of human space exploration?

In order to preserve the beauty of our night sky, we must balance objects that provide value to humanity with decluttering our orbit.

This balance may not be hard to strike. We can sustain the overcrowding of the low Earth orbit by removing five of the highest risk objects each year, both small pieces that risk collision and large pieces that affect long-term accumulation. Scientists are currently working on the best way to remove items, however, there is no overarching regulatory body to create concrete removal plans.

We consider space to be limitless, but just like any other resource, it does have limits. We need to learn how to balance this resource. Not just for the humans of right now, but also those of the future. Will we look back in 30 years and wonder why no one tried to preserve it earlier?

Western Slope Skies is produced by members and friends of the Black Canyon Astronomical Society. This episode was written and recorded by Megan Spencer from Devils Tower National Monument.

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Western Slope Skies - The Limits of Space | KVNF Public Radio - KVNF Public Radio

More of the Cyberpunk 2077 soundtrack was released during today’s Night City Wire – GamesRadar+

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Danzig

CD Projekt Red released another snippet of the Cyberpunk 2077 soundtrack during today's Night City Wire stream.

The new song is A Like Supreme, the latest from the in-game band Samurai which is played by the real-life band Refused. I can only assume that A Like Supreme was written as a post-social media tribute to John Coltrane's A Love Supreme. You can now stream it on Spotify along with Chippin' In, Never Fade Away, and The Ballad of Buck Ravers, giving us a total of four songs from the band.

Samurai, you may recall, is the band of Keanu Reeves' character Johnny Silverhand. Dennis Lyxzn, lead vocalist of Refused, discussed the challenge of adapting his band's style to suit Johnny's legacy. "I wouldn't write these lyrics for myself," he says. "So it's kind of interesting to get into the mind of, like, who is this character and what would they write about? What's their agenda? It's interesting to try to catch a language that's his and part of this game Of course, there are things you can relate to with this outcast that's fighting against the corpos. That's definitely something that's been a part of my life and a part of the Refused life."

"They wanted a sound that's contemporary for when Johnny is supposed to have had the band," drummer David Sandstrm adds. "He's an anti-establishment kind of guy. We really worked on these songs to make them as good as possible, but then, they're not actually our songs. It's been a mind fuck."

Sounds like the perfect music to listen to while you explore the destructive possibilities of the Cyberpunk 2077 weapons.

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More of the Cyberpunk 2077 soundtrack was released during today's Night City Wire - GamesRadar+

Live: Watch the Cyberpunk 2077 Night City Wire Livestream Right Here – Push Square

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Danzig

CD Projekt Red is back with its second Night City Wire episode, detailing just some of the things you can expect from upcoming RPG Cyberpunk 2077. This particular livestream will focus on Lifepaths, the types of weapons included in the game, and Refused's transformation into SAMURAI. There could also be one or two surprises. Given the length of the previous show, we expect this Night City Wire livestream to last roughly 30 minutes. The digital event starts at 5pm BST / 9am PDT / 12pm EDT so make sure you stick around to see the latest on Cyberpunk 2077.

Live Blog

17:00

Cyberpunk 2077 Night City Wire starts RIGHT NOW!

16:55

We're just FIVE minutes away from out next look at Cyberpunk 2077, come join us in the chat!

13:12

Join us LIVE from 9AM PDT / 5PM BST for the latest Night City Wire showcase. What are you expecting to see?

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Live: Watch the Cyberpunk 2077 Night City Wire Livestream Right Here - Push Square

From the creator of the Cyberpunk keeblade comes an adorable Ditto keyboard – PC Gamer

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Danzig

Pack your bags everyone, we're never going to find a keyboard any more adorable than this excellent Ditto one from Qlavier. This Pokemon-themed keyboard is custom made by Quen, a keyboard designer from Belgium, and it's just the sweetest thing.

The keyboard is based on the Zlant PCB, hence its off-kilter layout. It's made out of bubblegum-pink pastel acrylic, and features SA Vilebloom key caps for that final touch.

Qlavier is the work of a single design student, and most of their boards are manufactured to commission, so I'm afraid you aren't able to buy one for yourself right now. This Ditto keyboard is just one of many stunning keyboards created by the tiny outfit, and you may recognise one of them, at least: Qlavier was responsible for the Cyberpunk keyboard.

Many of Qlavier's designs are built upon brightly coloured acrylic, which makes for quite the statement piece once finished. You'd also be hard pressed to discern these bespoke designs from the finest high-end boards produced by the biggest manufacturers going in terms of build and finishbut isn't that nearly always the case.

This Ditto keyboard sure puts the China-exclusive Razer Pikachu keyboard and mouse set to shame. It's like comparing the N64 with Pikachu infused into the console and the Stadium version with some Pokemon stickers on itthey're leagues apart.

There's a whole world of custom keycaps, keyboards, mouse mats, and more out there if you're keen to get into the hobbyjust be warned, it isn't always the cheapest vice.

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From the creator of the Cyberpunk keeblade comes an adorable Ditto keyboard - PC Gamer

Cyberpunk 2077 Night City Wire event: Watch the gameplay livestream right here – Pocket-lint

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Danzig

(Pocket-lint) - CD Projekt Red is hosting a series of online events for Cyberpunk 2077 this summer.

Called Night City Wire, the first broadcast was streamed at the end of June - detailing some of the features and showing a large portion of new gameplay.

Now the studio is ready to give you more information, with the second event scheduled for later today.

Here are details of how to watch it, plus what you can expect.

The next stream is taking place today, Monday 10 August, starting at 6pm CEST.

Here are the times in your region:

You can watch it via the video feed below.

However, it will also be live on CD Projekt Red's Twitch channel. And, you can follow the Cyberpunk Twitter account for more information up to and throughout the event.

Sadly, Cyberpunk 2077's original and even rescheduled release dates were shifted to 19 November 2020, so there is still plenty of time before you'll get your hands on it yourself. But, in the meantime, CD Projekt Red has not been shy in giving us some great glimpses of what to expect.

The first episode of Night City Wire, for example, offered a thoroughly engrossing look at how you'll be able to hack cameras to get in-depth looks at past events, and utilise your detective skills. The developer also announced a new anime series for Netflix. You can watch episode 1 of the preview event below.

The next instalment will apparently show off some of the weapons you'll be wielding, as well as some of the different lifepaths you can to choose from for your character.

Cyberpunk 2077 will be released for Xbox Series X, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, PS4 and PC 19 November. A Google Stadia version will follow at some point afterward.Both the next-gen versions will also feature free upgrades, whereby if you buy either the Xbox One or PS4 copies, you get a respective update to the Series X or PS5 at no extra cost.

Writing by Rik Henderson.

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Cyberpunk 2077 Night City Wire event: Watch the gameplay livestream right here - Pocket-lint

Revisiting Munnar Strikes: A Fight For The Rights Of Tea Plantation Workers – Feminism in India

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Danzig

7 mins read

In the first week of September 2015, on a mundane afternoon, the natives of Munnar (a hill town in the Idukki district of Kerala) were taken aback by the sound of an unknown songwell,more like a collection of loud human voices which followed a rhythm, albeit it did not sing of beauty. It was a song rooted in rage, exploitation and resistancethe source of which were the women tea plantation workers of Kannan Devan Hills Plantation Limited (KDHPL) sloganeering in front of the management office of the company.

Even though tea plantation workers and their work comes under the organized sector, the wage of the workers is lower than most of the unorganized sector workers.The protest (in the form of a strike and road blockage) which lasted for almost nine consecutive days was started on the pretext of the companys decision to reduce the bonus to 10% which earlier was 20%.

The unprecedented nature of this agitation where more than 12,000 women were mobilized, becomes apparent in the first glance at its anatomy. The movement in its entirety was spearheaded by women workers, who came from the most marginalized intersections in the tea industry. Majority of the women were non-unionised, working class, Tamil migrants with little or no formal education belonging to the lower caste communities. The group named itselfPombilai Orumaiwhich translates to Womens Unity, and went on to become a registered all womens trade union. From its very genesis, it were the women workers who occupied the centre as well as the backstagefrom strategy making, to protesting, talking to the media and the crowd, and finally representing the group during the marathon negotiations with the then Chief Minister of Kerala, Oommen Chandy, and the Labour MinisterShibu Baby John which ended in the reinstatement of 20% bonus.

The movement in its entirety was spearheaded by women workers, who came from the most marginalized intersections in the tea industry. Majority of the women were non-unionised, working class, Tamil migrants with little or no formal education belonging to the lower caste communities. The group named itselfPombilai Orumaiwhich translates to Womens Unity, and went on to become a registered all womens trade union.

The men be it tea plantation labourers or the trade union leaders were all merely allowed to occupy the peripheral space both literally as well as metaphorically throughout the movement.

We couldnt feed ourselves or educate our children, so we organized.

The demands and concerns raised by its leaders like Lisy Sunny and G. Gomathi were more nuanced than the simple issue of a wage hike or bonus, and focused on the necessity of anti-capitalist movements to also be anti-patriarchal and anti-caste. They criticised KDHPL for extracting surplus by exploiting the labour of the tea plantation workers without paying them a fair wage and explained their further subordination by the virtue of their gender and caste identities in the hands of male leaders of various party affiliated tea plantation unions like, All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC), Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), and Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC).

The unions were called out for being patriarchal in their functioning and structure, by not prioritising the issues raised by women and giving out all the top positions and decision-making power to men, respectively. They were also questioned for being an accomplice to the capitalist class in exploiting the labouring class by not implementing the existing welfare measures efficiently for personal gains. One of the major demands was construction of sanitary toilets which was ignored by the unions in earlier strikes.

The women in the movement spoke openly about the oppressive family structures that uphold power imbalance in the favour of men in marital relations which has made it socially acceptable for men to spend all the hard-earned money including womens wages on alcohol. Alcoholism according to the protesting women rendered them financially incapable to educate their children or access health care facilities. This highlights the feminisation of all the work that is performed outside the site of productive labour, which results in doubling the burden borne by women to earn money and perform care work.

They further elaborated on the existing gender discrimination in the tea plantation work in which women did most of the labour-intensive work like tea leaf plucking and carrying heavy loads which results in various health issues among women in the long run and were still paid lower wages than men even after the Equal Renumeration Act was passed in 1975.

The movement by placing the issues that women tea plantation workers faced in and outside their work together resulted in blurring the boundaries of their domestic and professional lives just how they exist in the realm of reality. A space for assertion of different identities becomes a necessity for any social struggle to escape the creation of hierarchy within its cadre. Pombilai Orumai stands for a newly recognized collective identity which helped these women to forge solidarities on the basis of their shared lived experiences of oppression by the social structures of gender, class, caste and region.

Also read: 6 Strikes By Indian Women That Will Inspire You

To think of this strike only in terms of class relations would be an erasure of the novelty of the space that it has carved out for collective bargaining which calls for a more inclusive reimagination of the labour question.

To challenge Chinas monopoly in the global tea trade, British colonizers started the first commercial tea plantation in India in Upper Assam in 1837 and now India is its second largest producer globally.Since tea could only be cultivated in certain far off hilly areas with very less human civilization, most of the tea workers were migrants belonging to the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes who owned very less in the mainland. These workers have continued to live in deplorable conditions since the beginning.

Tea cultivation is mainly dependent on manual labour and since the colonial times, the entire families of the migrants including children, were employed in it. Sarkar and Bhowmik in Trade Unions and Women Workers in Tea Plantation write that, ...family migration ensured that the labour could be reproduced which in turn would ease the problem of further recruitment in the future. This also meant that one of the most efficient ways to cut production cost in order to gain profit was to pay abysmally low wages to the workers.

Even though the Plantation Labour Act, 1951 makes it necessary for the employer to provide accommodation, medical, educational and creches facilities to the workers and their families, its implementation is yet very poor. The lack of these facilities forces women to devote all their time outside the plantation work in childcare, fetching water, cooking etc. These regions were mostly cut off from the spaces where major collective politics was happening. Post-independence, this isolation was somewhat lessened which led to mass organization of the workers.

Since tea could only be cultivated in certain far off hilly areas with very less human civilization, most of the tea workers were migrants belonging to the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes who owned very less in the mainland. These workers have continued to live in deplorable conditions since the beginning.

In 1948, the first tea plantation workers union Dooars Cha Bagan Workers Unity was formed in West Bengal and even though the trade union movement started late in this sector, it grew rapidly and for a brief period of time it was also militant in nature. The West Bengal tea workers strike with the support of more than 20,000 workers where most women were at the forefront in 1955, is considered to be the most important initial movement in the sector for the implementation of the Bonus Act, Maternity Rights etc.

With the liberalisation of the Indian economy, there was a shift of focus from workers rights to interests of the capitalist classes which made it difficult for the trade unions to demand for labour friendly policies resulting in loss of significant bargaining power of the unions. Most of the prominent trade unions are party affiliated and more than often, the partys agenda side-lines a holistic engagement with labour question and the representation that these unions claim to make reduces to mere tokenism in case of most women workers.

Even though women make more than half of the workforce in tea plantations and a huge chunk of their population is unionised, one rarely sees women as leaders in any of the mainstream unions. The stringent gender roles make working class women time poor and they can rarely take part in trade union activities which require attending meetings and other gatherings, most of which are outside the domestic boundaries. The sexist understanding that women are incapable of leading movements and holding positions of power over men, prevents women from carrying on their association with union wholeheartedly.

As most of these women are at the lower level working positions in the industry, they are rarely given respect or taken seriously. Thus, for women, it has become a never-ending loop of trauma and exploitationa civilized slavery as some call it. In 2018, following the steps of Pombilai Orumai, more than 500 women workers protested against the tea estates of Harrisons Malayalam Ltd. in Idukki and Wayanad districts by slowing down the tea leaf picking process.

The current pandemic in 2020 has brought the worst for these workers as most of the plantations continue with the production process even during the lockdown without implementing any safety measures of social distancing or masks. Given the knowledge that most of these workers especially women and children are anaemic and malnourished, this can prove to be fatal but these state-facilitated capitalist companies couldnt care less. Due to this and non-payment of wages, the workers of Happy Valley tea garden in Darjeeling are on a strike for something which is rightfully theirs.

Also read: Darjeeling: Womens Exploited Labour Behind Our Cups Of Tea

Amidst the states willingness to dilute the labour laws and most male dominated unions apathy, things have looked a little hopeful as these workers, especially women, have started to organise themselves and have spoken up against their exploiters, but the real transformation demands to be structural which still is a far-fetched dream.

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Revisiting Munnar Strikes: A Fight For The Rights Of Tea Plantation Workers - Feminism in India

The Deck Is Not Rigged: Poker and the Limits of AI – Singularity Hub

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Danzig

Tuomas Sandholm, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, is not a poker playeror much of a poker fan, in factbut he is fascinated by the game for much the same reason as the great game theorist John von Neumann before him. Von Neumann, who died in 1957, viewed poker as the perfect model for human decision making, for finding the balance between skill and chance that accompanies our every choice. He saw poker as the ultimate strategic challenge, combining as it does not just the mathematical elements of a game like chess but the uniquely human, psychological angles that are more difficult to model preciselya view shared years later by Sandholm in his research with artificial intelligence.

Poker is the main benchmark and challenge program for games of imperfect information, Sandholm told me on a warm spring afternoon in 2018, when we met in his offices in Pittsburgh. The game, it turns out, has become the gold standard for developing artificial intelligence.

Tall and thin, with wire-frame glasses and neat brow hair framing a friendly face, Sandholm is behind the creation of three computer programs designed to test their mettle against human poker players: Claudico, Libratus, and most recently, Pluribus. (When we met, Libratus was still a toddler and Pluribus didnt yet exist.) The goal isnt to solve poker, as such, but to create algorithms whose decision making prowess in pokers world of imperfect information and stochastic situationssituations that are randomly determined and unable to be predictedcan then be applied to other stochastic realms, like the military, business, government, cybersecurity, even health care.

While the first program, Claudico, was summarily beaten by human poker playersone broke-ass robot, an observer called itLibratus has triumphed in a series of one-on-one, or heads-up, matches against some of the best online players in the United States.

Libratus relies on three main modules. The first involves a basic blueprint strategy for the whole game, allowing it to reach a much faster equilibrium than its predecessor. It includes an algorithm called the Monte Carlo Counterfactual Regret Minimization, which evaluates all future actions to figure out which one would cause the least amount of regret. Regret, of course, is a human emotion. Regret for a computer simply means realizing that an action that wasnt chosen would have yielded a better outcome than one that was. Intuitively, regret represents how much the AI regrets having not chosen that action in the past, says Sandholm. The higher the regret, the higher the chance of choosing that action next time.

Its a useful way of thinkingbut one that is incredibly difficult for the human mind to implement. We are notoriously bad at anticipating our future emotions. How much will we regret doing something? How much will we regret not doing something else? For us, its an emotionally laden calculus, and we typically fail to apply it in quite the right way. For a computer, its all about the computation of values. What does it regret not doing the most, the thing that would have yielded the highest possible expected value?

The second module is a sub-game solver that takes into account the mistakes the opponent has made so far and accounts for every hand she could possibly have. And finally, there is a self-improver. This is the area where data and machine learning come into play. Its dangerous to try to exploit your opponentit opens you up to the risk that youll get exploited right back, especially if youre a computer program and your opponent is human. So instead of attempting to do that, the self-improver lets the opponents actions inform the areas where the program should focus. That lets the opponents actions tell us where [they] think theyve found holes in our strategy, Sandholm explained. This allows the algorithm to develop a blueprint strategy to patch those holes.

Its a very human-like adaptation, if you think about it. Im not going to try to outmaneuver you head on. Instead, Im going to see how youre trying to outmaneuver me and respond accordingly. Sun-Tzu would surely approve. Watch how youre perceived, not how you perceive yourselfbecause in the end, youre playing against those who are doing the perceiving, and their opinion, right or not, is the only one that matters when you craft your strategy. Overnight, the algorithm patches up its overall approach according to the resulting analysis.

Theres one final thing Libratus is able to do: play in situations with unknown probabilities. Theres a concept in game theory known as the trembling hand: There are branches of the game tree that, under an optimal strategy, one should theoretically never get to; but with some probability, your all-too-human opponents hand trembles, they take a wrong action, and youre suddenly in a totally unmapped part of the game. Before, that would spell disaster for the computer: An unmapped part of the tree means the program no longer knows how to respond. Now, theres a contingency plan.

Of course, no algorithm is perfect. When Libratus is playing poker, its essentially working in a zero-sum environment. It wins, the opponent loses. The opponent wins, it loses. But while some real-life interactions really are zero-sumcyber warfare comes to mindmany others are not nearly as straightforward: My win does not necessarily mean your loss. The pie is not fixed, and our interactions may be more positive-sum than not.

Whats more, real-life applications have to contend with something that a poker algorithm does not: the weights that are assigned to different elements of a decision. In poker, this is a simple value-maximizing process. But what is value in the human realm? Sandholm had to contend with this before, when he helped craft the worlds first kidney exchange. Do you want to be more efficient, giving the maximum number of kidneys as quickly as possibleor more fair, which may come at a cost to efficiency? Do you want as many lives as possible savedor do some take priority at the cost of reaching more? Is there a preference for the length of the wait until a transplant? Do kids get preference? And on and on. Its essential, Sandholm says, to separate means and the ends. To figure out the ends, a human has to decide what the goal is.

The world will ultimately become a lot safer with the help of algorithms like Libratus, Sandholm told me. I wasnt sure what he meant. The last thing that most people would do is call poker, with its competition, its winners and losers, its quest to gain the maximum edge over your opponent, a haven of safety.

Logic is good, and the AI is much better at strategic reasoning than humans can ever be, he explained. Its taking out irrationality, emotionality. And its fairer. If you have an AI on your side, it can lift non-experts to the level of experts. Nave negotiators will suddenly have a better weapon. We can start to close off the digital divide.

It was an optimistic note to end ona zero-sum, competitive game yielding a more ultimately fair and rational world.

I wanted to learn more, to see if it was really possible that mathematics and algorithms could ultimately be the future of more human, more psychological interactions. And so, later that day, I accompanied Nick Nystrom, the chief scientist of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Centerthe place that runs all of Sandholms poker-AI programsto the actual processing center that make undertakings like Libratus possible.

A half-hour drive found us in a parking lot by a large glass building. Id expected something more futuristic, not the same square, corporate glass squares Ive seen countless times before. The inside, however, was more promising. First the security checkpoint. Then the ride in the elevator down, not up, to roughly three stories below ground, where we found ourselves in a maze of corridors with card readers at every juncture to make sure you dont slip through undetected. A red-lit panel formed the final barrier, leading to a small sliver of space between two sets of doors. I could hear a loud hum coming from the far side.

Let me tell you what youre going to see before we walk in, Nystrom told me. Once we get inside, it will be too loud to hear.

I was about to witness the heart of the supercomputing center: 27 large containers, in neat rows, each housing multiple processors with speeds and abilities too great for my mind to wrap around. Inside, the temperature is by turns arctic and tropic, so-called cold rows alternating with hotfans operate around the clock to cool the processors as they churn through millions of giga, mega, tera, peta and other ever-increasing scales of data bytes. In the cool rows, robotic-looking lights blink green and blue in orderly progression. In the hot rows, a jumble of multicolored wires crisscrosses in tangled skeins.

In the corners stood machines that had outlived their heyday. There was Sherlock, an old Cray model, that warmed my heart. There was a sad nameless computer, whose anonymity was partially compensated for by the Warhol soup cans adorning its cage (an homage to Warhols Pittsburghian origins).

And where does Libratus live, I asked? Which of these computers is Bridges, the computer that runs the AI Sandholm and I had been discussing?

Bridges, it turned out, isnt a single computer. Its a system with processing power beyond comprehension. It takes over two and a half petabytes to run Libratus. A single petabyte is a million gigabytes: You could watch over 13 years of HD video, store 10 billion photos, catalog the contents of the entire Library of Congress word for word. Thats a whole lot of computing power. And thats only to succeed at heads-up poker, in limited circumstances.

Yet despite the breathtaking computing power at its disposal, Libratus is still severely limited. Yes, it beat its opponents where Claudico failed. But the poker professionals werent allowed to use many of the tools of their trade, including the opponent analysis software that they depend on in actual online games. And humans tire. Libratus can churn for a two-week marathon, where the human mind falters.

But theres still much it cant do: play more opponents, play live, or win every time. Theres more humanity in poker than Libratus has yet conquered. Theres this belief that its all about statistics and correlations. And we actually dont believe that, Nystrom explained as we left Bridges behind. Once in a while correlations are good, but in general, they can also be really misleading.

Two years later, the Sandholm lab will produce Pluribus. Pluribus will be able to play against five playersand will run on a single computer. Much of the human edge will have evaporated in a short, very short time. The algorithms have improved, as have the computers. AI, it seems, has gained by leaps and bounds.

So does that mean that, ultimately, the algorithmic can indeed beat out the human, that computation can untangle the web of human interaction by discerning the little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do, as von Neumann put it?

Long before Id spoken to Sandholm, Id met Kevin Slavin, a polymath of sorts whose past careers have including founding a game design company and an interactive art space and launching the Playful Systems group at MITs Media Lab. Slavin has a decidedly different view from the creators of Pluribus. On the one hand, [von Neumann] was a genius, Kevin Slavin reflects. But the presumptuousness of it.

Slavin is firmly on the side of the gambler, who recognizes uncertainty for what it is and thus is able to take calculated risks when necessary, all the while tampering confidence at the outcome. The most you can do is put yourself in the path of luckbut to think you can guess with certainty the actual outcome is a presumptuousness the true poker player foregoes. For Slavin, the wonder of computers is That they can generate this fabulous, complex randomness. His opinion of the algorithmic assaults on chance? This is their moment, he said. But its the exact opposite of whats really beautiful about a computer, which is that it can do something thats actually unpredictable. That, to me, is the magic.

Will they actually succeed in making the unpredictable predictable, though? Thats what I want to know. Because everything Ive seen tells me that absolute success is impossible. The deck is not rigged.

Its an unbelievable amount of work to get there. What do you get at the end? Lets say theyre successful. Then we live in a world where theres no God, agency, or luck, Slavin responded.

I dont want to live there, he added I just dont want to live there.

Luckily, it seems that for now, he wont have to. There are more things in life than are yet written in the algorithms. We have no reliable lie detection softwarewhether in the face, the skin, or the brain. In a recent test of bluffing in poker, computer face recognition failed miserably. We can get at discomfort, but we cant get at the reasons for that discomfort: lying, fatigue, stressthey all look much the same. And humans, of course, can also mimic stress where none exists, complicating the picture even further.

Pluribus may turn out to be powerful, but von Neumanns challenge still stands: The true nature of games, the most human of the human, remains to be conquered.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

Image Credit: Jos Pablo Iglesias /Unsplash

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The Deck Is Not Rigged: Poker and the Limits of AI - Singularity Hub

Top Ranked Poker Sites to Play in 2020 – Programming Insider

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Danzig

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Top Ranked Poker Sites to Play in 2020 - Programming Insider

Know the odds before you act when playing poker – GamingTodaySlotsToday

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Danzig

Playing Texas holdem, after the flop, if you hold a drawing hand, it is important to understand and know how to use the pot odds and the card odds.

It is not that difficult. Doing so will make it easy to decide whether you should continue to invest in that hand: Do you have a positive expectation?

The pot odds are simply the number of chips in the pot, including the last bet/raise by an opponent, compared to the number of chips you must call to see the next card. For example, lets say there are 20 chips already in the pot, and you must call a 4-chip bet to stay in the hand, then the pot odds are 20 divided by 4. That is 5-to-1 very easy to figure.

A bit more complicated is calculating your card odds. What are the odds of catching the card that makes your hand and hopefully big enough to win the pot? To facilitate the calculation, you can use a chart such as the following. Alternatively, you can use the 4-2 Rule which allows you to do the calculation in your head to get a reasonable estimate.

The 4-2 Rule and how it works: Count your outs the number of cards that will make your hand. After the flop, simply multiply your card outs by 4 for the odds of catching one of your outs on the turn or on the river. Then, if you fail to connect on the turn, multiply your card odds by 2 for the river.

Compare this with the pot odds. If the pot odds are higher than the card odds, you have a Positive Expectation. The laws of probability favor you. In the long run, you will be a winner.

What if the numbers are close, or if the pot odds are slightly lower than the card odds? In that case, use the implied pot odds: Estimate the pot odds after including the number of chips that will likely be added to the pot on subsequent rounds of betting. Use that new total divided by your cost to call the next bet, to determine if the pot odds are still higher than the card odds.

It takes only a second or two to use the 4-2 Rule. It is a reasonable estimate that is suitable for our purposes.

But there are also bad outs. All card outs are not the same. Bad outs are those that might also benefit your opponent. He could make a better hand than you do. They could be very costly when you catch one.

If you believe one of your outs is in that category, it would be best not to include it in your count or reduce its value.

As an example: You are drawing to an open-end straight; that gives you 8 card outs. You believe your opponent is drawing to a heart flush, for which 2 of your 8 outs would make his hand. What if the turn makes your straight, but he makes a flush with the same card? In that case, your good outs are reduced to 6 (rather than 8). If you are not too sure, then you might reduce your outs to 7.

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Know the odds before you act when playing poker - GamingTodaySlotsToday

Chrome Dragons Riding Club hosts 2nd Annual Kids and Heroes Poker Run – WBOY.com

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Danzig

ELKINS, W.Va. The Chrome Dragons Riding Club hosted its second annual Kids and Heroes Poker Run at the American Legion Post 29 in Elkins on Saturday.

Admission for the event was $15 for riders and $10 for any passenger. The riders drove more than 140 miles through the Appalachian mountains to help local children and veterans in need. Participants came back to enjoy dinner, prizes and a 50/50 drawing.

The drawing funds will go to benefit a local child named Mollie, who was recently diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. All proceed will go towards the training and fees of a service dog that will detect spikes in her glucose levels.

Chrome Dragons president, Jim Harris, emphasized that events like these help give back directly to the local community.

We are supporting kids and heroes, thats the chrome dragons riding clubs mission. Weve done that mission since January of 2016 and continue to roll strong, Harris explained. When we give of ourselves, we all benefit and thats what were about is just giving of ourselves.

Chrome Dragons Riding Club (CDRC) is arecognized club through the West VirginiaMotorcycle Association (WVMA). This club was officially chartered on January 26th 2016 through the AMA, and became a Member of the WVMA on May 7, 2017.

Harris also explained that those who wish to get involved dont have to ride motorcycles. Anyone wishing to donate to help local children and veterans can do so by either visiting the CDRC Facebook Page or its website.

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Chrome Dragons Riding Club hosts 2nd Annual Kids and Heroes Poker Run - WBOY.com

Variations of Poker That is Worth Knowing About – Programming Insider

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Danzig

Poker remains one of the most preferred games out there. But did you know it has the most variations too, both as a table game or online? These variations, however, originate from two vital formats of the game, namely stud poker and draw poker. These descriptions are often used online without explanations or descriptions. Therefore, it is useful for individuals who are new to the game to be familiar with what they mean.

Draw poker

In draw poker, a complete five-card hand is dealt to every player prior to betting commencing. The players can get rid of any number of cards that is not suitable (including their full hand) and substitute them by drawing new cards. This is where the name comes from. Betting then begins based on the fresh hands.

Five-card draw poker

Five-card draw is the most well-known variant founded on draw poker. The order of play happens as follows. Every player is dealt with five cards, face down and one at a time. The remaining deck is placed to one side. The players look at their own cards and perform one round of betting followed by the draw. Every player then discards. The top car of the balance deck is cast-off (this card is referred to as the burn card) and every player is dealt the number of cards that he or she discarded. The second rounds betting takes place and if multiple players stays in the fray, the showdown takes place. The player that has the highest-ranking hand during the showdown round takes the pot. Most casino video poker multiline games contain at least one line which is played in draw poker format.

Stud poker

The crucial factor of stud poker is that all the cards are not dealt beforehand. Every player received several cards, for example, three, after which one round of betting happens. The players that remain in the game, gets a fourth card, followed by another round of betting. The final card is then dealt, followed by the final betting round, and a showdown if necessary. Betting rounds have been named specific terms in stud poker. The first round that happens after three cards are dealt, is referred to as third street. The same goes for the fourth and fifth streets, but the final betting round before showdown is referred to as the river. In most variations, the fifth street and the river overlap. In certain variations that cards will be dealt face up for all players to see. The cards which are then dealt face down, is referred to as hole cards.

Community card poker

This variation of stud poker, the cards will be dealt progressively after sporadic rounds of betting, recognizing the variant as stud poker. However, the later cards will not be dealt separately to every player but kept in the middle of the table to be accessible to all players in combination with the cards that was dealt to them individually. These cards are called community cards, hence the term community card poker. One of the most played online poker games played in this format, is Texas Hold em.

Variations of Poker That is Worth Knowing About - Programming Insider

Poker, board games and the core group helped the newest Flyers get comfortable | On the Fly – The Philadelphia Inquirer

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Danzig

Shame to see Michael Raffl get hurt the other day. No idea how long hell be out, but hes been with the Flyers for seven years and is one of the more popular players in their locker room.

Alain Vigneault will have to dip into his reserves and bring Joel Farabee up for Thursdays game against the Capitals. A win in regulation will assure the Flyers of finishing with no worse than the No. 3 seed, with the outlook of moving even higher a distinct possibility.

Youre signed up to get this newsletter in your inbox twice a week for the rest of the Flyers season. If you like what youre reading, tell your friends its free to sign up here. We want to know what you think, what we should add, and what you want to read, so send me feedback by email or, more preferably, on Twitter (@EdBarkowitz). Thank you for reading.

Ed Barkowitz (flyers@inquirer.com)

Thompson and Grant fit right on in

For any number of reasons we are all too familiar with, its easy to forget where the Flyers were when Chuck Fletcher acquired Nate Thompson and Derek Grant at the trade deadline.

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They were three points from being out of the playoffs. At least the playoffs as originally intended.

If play had been halted on Feb. 24 and the new postseason format drawn up, the Flyers would have been the Easts sixth seed and in the middle of a five-game qualifying series against Florida.

But, of course, play continued until March 12. The Flyers, who were on a three-game winning streak when Thompson and Grant were acquired, stretched it to nine games before a loss to the Bruins on March 10.

They jumped ahead of the Penguins, who acquired Conor Sheary and Patrick Marleau in their trade-deadline haul. They sped past the Islanders, who added Jean-Gabriel Pageau, the biggest name on the market.

Thompson has played for eight teams in 13 years. Hes been traded four times, so he knows all about being the new kid trying to make friends in a new school. Or, in his case, a new team.

This group has a lot of fun together, said Thompson, who scored a goal Sunday and helped kill three Boston power plays. I saw it right from when I got here, me and Derek Grant. I think its the core group of guys here thats been here a while. Its an inclusive group.

Raffl is among that core group.

The nature of the quarantine, Grant said, has helped grow the off-ice relationships Grant and Thompson have with their 30 or so new friends.

There were online poker tournaments during the stoppage and some more bonding up in the Toronto bubble. Its even been a little profitable for Grant, who should expect a nice raise from his league-minimum $700,000 contract as an unrestricted free agent when the season ends.

I dont think weve played any poker yet [in Toronto), but we have a team lounge here and the guys are always hanging out in there, said Grant, mentioning a spirited game of Jenga recently. Whether were watching games or playing board games, I think me and Nisky [Matt Niskanen] took Pitters [Tyler Pitlicks] money yesterday in a game of Sequence. Theres lots of things to do here for us, and the lounge is a great place to hang out.

The Flyers are 7-1 since acquiring the two centers. Parlor games aside, I go back to what Shayne Gostisbehere said the day the Flyers acquired Thompson (6-foot-1, 205 pounds) and Grant (6-3, 206). The real reason they were brought to Philadelphia.

I call them playoff bodies, for sure, Ghost said. You look at the couple teams that won [Stanley Cups lately], they had some big bodies like that. I think thats a huge positive for us.

The Flyers killed three Boston power plays Sunday, a key reason for their victory. The top four forwards used by assistant coach Mike Yeo on the PK groups were not with the club last season.

Here is how the penalty-killing ice time was distributed among the forwards: Tyler Pitlick, 2:16; Nate Thompson, 2:06; Kevin Hayes, 1:59; Derek Grant, 1:54; Sean Couturier, 1:25; Scott Laughton, 1:03; Claude Giroux, :57; Michael Raffl, :20.

The standard over/under for a hockey game is 5.5 goals. Sometimes its higher. Rarely is it lower.

Of the first 16 games since meaningful play began Saturday, 12 have been under 5.5 goals. Theres been a lot of sweating from bettors, however, as seven of those 12 have finished exactly at five goals. Nothing was wilder than the end of Winnipegs 3-2 win over Calgary on Monday when the Jets just missed a goal into an empty-net shot from 190+ feet away in the scramble of the waning seconds.

All games in Toronto/home team listed has last line change.

Wednesday: Tampa Bay at Boston, 4 p.m. (NBCSN)

Thursday: Washington at Flyers, time/TV TBA

Saturday: Flyers at Tampa Bay, time/TV TBA

Sunday: Boston at Washington, time/TV TBA

Tuesday, Aug. 11: First round of playoffs begin

Question: Of the possible opponents the Flyers could have in the first round who would you least want them to play? Brandon McComsey via Twitter

Answer: Pittsburgh is the obvious answer, based on experience, skill and how much an opening-round series against a bitter rival would take out of the survivor. Another team that would concern me is Carolina. I know the Flyers were 3-0-1 against Rod BrindAmours team during the regular season, but the Canes added a number of solid pieces at the trade deadline (Vincent Trocheck, Sami Vatanaen, Brady Skjei) and it looks like Dougie Hamilton is close to returning.

Send questions by email or on Twitter to Ed Barkowitz (@EdBarkowitz) or Sam Carchidi (@BroadStBull), and they could be answered in a future edition.

Irish poker player scoops $100k and World Series of Poker gold bracelet 22 years after father won same title – The Irish Sun

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Danzig

AN IRISH poker player was celebrating yesterday after scooping $100,000 and a World Series of Poker gold bracelet - 22 years after his father won the same title.

Eoghan ODea, 35, from Dalkey, Dublin, would usually be in Las Vegas competing for big money prizes but the Covid-19 restrictions meant this year he was limited to playing online.

The talented player, who has been playing professionally for about 15 years, was up until 5.30am before clinching his title - and with it became only the fifth Irish person, alongside his dad Donnacha, to win the WSOP bracelet.

Eoghan said his father, who won his bracelet in 1998, was the first person he messaged after he officially joined the elite club.

He told the Irish Sun: I probably wouldnt be playing if it wasnt for him. He taught me when I was younger.

He wouldnt usually be up that early but he was awake at about 6am today when I messaged him.

Hes pretty proud alright. Its great to win the cash but the World Series of Poker bracelets are really prestigious.

We both have one now which is brilliant. My aim now is to go one better than him and win another. That would be unreal.

Eoghan said he has been playing since he was teenager but started taking it seriously when he was about 20.

He added: I was about 16 or 17 when I started really playing. I was maybe 21 or 22 when I started playing professionally.

In fact the first time I played in Las Vegas I was only 20 so I was playing illegally.

In some of the smaller tournaments you can get away with using a fake id but for the World Series of Poker, which is loads of events, you need to have a passport.

So I guess Ive been over there every year playing since, its usually about five to six weeks in June and July but events go on throughout the year.

Eoghan, who is single, became the first Irish player to win a gold bracelet since 2008. He beat over 2,000 players in the WSOP Event #51 at online poker room GGPoker to do so.

His father Donncha was a swimmer for Ireland in the 1968 Olympics before turning his own hand to professional poker.

The WSOP has run since 1970 and in past years would draw tens of thousands of players from all over the world to Las Vegas.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, this year is the first in which the events have not taken place live in Nevada, and have moved online instead.

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The WSOP Online events run at GGPoker from July 19-September 6 and as of Sunday over $59,000,000 in prizes have been won and more than 129,000 entries recorded in the events so far.

But despite Eoghans huge win in the early hours of yesterday morning, its only a fraction of his biggest win at the WSOP.

He added: I finished sixth over all in 2011 and won $1.6 million. Thats the biggest Ive ever won."

Irish poker player scoops $100k and World Series of Poker gold bracelet 22 years after father won same title - The Irish Sun

Liberals turn over thousands of pages on WE decision, lawyers now vetting docs – moosejawtoday.com

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Danzig

OTTAWA The federal Liberal government has handed over thousands of pages of documents related to the WE controversy to a House of Commons committee, which lawyers are now vetting for personal information and cabinet secrets.

The finance committee demanded the documents last month as it probes whether Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's relationship with WE Charity influenced the government's ill-fated decision to have the organization run a federal student-volunteer program.

Committee members are hoping the documents will shed light on the discussions that led to the decision to have WE run the Canada Student Services Grant, before the deal was cancelled amid controversy in early July.

"People are asking a lot of questions," NDP finance critic Peter Julian said in an interview. "There's been a lot of contradictions in testimony. So the documents should be revealing a lot more of what the real answers are."

Yet while the Liberals turned more than 5,000 pages over to the committee ahead of Saturday's deadline, it wasn't clear when they would be released to members as committee lawyers go through them to prevent the release ofprotected information.

"We don't know," Conservative finance critic Pierre Poilievre said during a news conference on Sunday when asked when committee members would get the documents."We have asked. They have not given us the timeline."

Committee chairman Wayne Easter, a Liberal MP,predicted the documents would be released in the coming days to members as additional lawyers from the public service have been brought in to help review them for cabinet secrets and other information.

Even after the documents are released, however, there will could be disagreements about why certain information was withheld.

While Poilievre and Julian suggested they were keeping the door open to challenging any redactions, Easter said the vetting was being conducted by the professional public service and noted the tradition of Parliament respecting cabinet confidence.

Usually prepared for ministers to aid government deliberations and decision-making, documents marked as cabinet confidences hold closely guarded political secrets and are legally protected from unauthorized release.

Trudeau has previously faced pressure to waive cabinet confidence when it came to allegations he tried to pressure then-justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould on a deferred prosecution agreement with Quebec engineering firm SNC-Lavalin.

"We respect the integrity of the public service," Easter said when asked about the lawyers redacting cabinet confidences in the WE documents. "That's why there is no political involvement in the redacting of these documents. That's why the law clerk is involved."

The Liberals have been embroiled in controversy since it was revealed on June 25 that WE had been selected to run the Canada Student Services Grant, which promised up to $5,000 toward the education costs of students who volunteered during COVID-19.

The sole-sourced agreement with WE was to pay one of its foundations up to $43.5 million to administer a grant program designed to encourage students to sign up for volunteer work related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Trudeau and Finance Minister Bill Morneau have since apologized for not recusing themselves from cabinet's discussions about the agreement before it was awarded to WE given their respective families' ties to the Toronto-based charity.

Trudeau has spoken at six WE Day events since becoming prime minister, while his mother and brother have been paid almost $300,000 and reimbursed about $200,000 in expenses for appearing at WE events.Trudeau's wife has also had expenses covered.

Morneau, meanwhile,acknowledged last month that he repaid WE about $41,000 in sponsored travel for him and his family to view the charity's humanitarian projects in Ecuador and Kenya in 2017.

Yet the government has insisted that the decision was based on a recommendation from the non-partisan public service following its conclusion that WE was the only organization capable of running the grant program.

Opposition critics, meanwhile,are also training their sights on an agreementbetween a Crown corporation and a company employing the husband of Trudeau's chief of staff, Katie Telford.

The agreement between the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. and MCAP, where Telford's husband Rob Silver is an executive vice-president, involves the administering of a rent-assistance program for small businesses affected by COVID-19.

The Prime Minister's Office has said Telford established clear ethical walls between herself and MCAP in January, even before COVID-19 shook the country's economyand led to the creation of the Canada Emergency Commercial Rent Assistance program.

But Poilievre questioned why the government didn't simply ask the Canada Revenue Agency to run the rent-assistance program given it is already managing the federal wage subsidy for businesses struggling during the pandemic.

"CMHC, which is strangely running this program, exists for the sole purpose of providing affordable housing. Not commercial real estate," Poilievre said.

"Now, of course, the easy way to deliver this program would have been through CRA. CRA already had a program stood up to deliver a wage subsidy."

Audrey-Anne Coulombe, a spokeswoman for CMHC, said in a statement Sunday thatthe federal housing agency had decided to go with an outside sub-administrator because it "does not have the internal capacity to stand up the program in short order."

Coulombe said CMHC sought bids from two financial institutions and chose MCAP because its proposal was stronger and cost less. She saidSilver was not involved in contract negotiations or thedelivery of services.

Easter expressed concern about the committee getting distracted by opposition "fishing" efforts and not focusing on its main task of preparing for next year's federal budget and overseeing COVID-19 spending.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 9, 2020.

Lee Berthiaume, The Canadian Press

Barton Swaim: Young radicals are right that liberal orthodoxy on race has failed – Fox News

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Danzig

There isnt much to be said for those who loot and riot in the name of racial equality. But what do we say about the far larger number of young middle-class Americans who genuinely believe that America is a fundamentally racist project?

You probably know one or more educated 20-somethings who regard cops as cogs in an oppressive machine and who consider nearly everything in American life irredeemably racistordinary words and phrases, great works of literature, the flag, the mascots of sports teams, the names of buildings and cities. Why do they believe this?

Educational indoctrination plays a role but doesnt explain it all. Todays youthful radicals appear to despise precisely the consensus liberalism their education system was designed to advance.

CABOT PHILLIPS: CANCEL CULTURE DISTORTS HISTORY TO PORTRAY US AS EVIL NATION THAT MUST BE TRANSFORMED

Liberals find this hard to grasp. When statues of men who achieved great victories for racial equality were torn down by radical agitatorsUlysses S. Grant in San Francisco, Frederick Douglass in Rochester, N.Y.media reports treated the incidents as unthinking excesses or maybe retaliation by White supremacists. But these werent mistakes.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE OPINION NEWSLETTER

Nobody who has spent time among politically attuned high school or college students over the last decade or two will find it difficult to believe that, in the minds of some young radicals, Grant and Douglass are representatives of a racist and xenophobic regime now at last getting the disrespect it deserves.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

These young Jacobins are the product of an assortment of social and economic forcesparental coddling, lassitude born of affluence, the need for some kind of righteousness in the absence of religion. But they have a point, and its not the one their sympathetic liberal interpreters think.

CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING BARTON SWAIM'S COLUMN IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The rest is here:

Barton Swaim: Young radicals are right that liberal orthodoxy on race has failed - Fox News

Nova Scotia politicians begin kicking the tires on Liberal leadership – CBC.ca

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Danzig

At least two Nova Scotia cabinet ministers and a member of Parliament say they're now considering what the future holds for them following Premier Stephen McNeil's announcement Thursday that he intends to resign.

Central Nova MP Sean Fraser, the parliamentary secretary to the minister of finance,said in a statement that he's giving "real consideration" to whether a provincial Liberal leadership run makes sense for him.

Nova Scotia Education Minister Zach Churchill and Business Minister Geoff MacLellan both said in interviews with CBC News that they hadn't given it much thought before but, with a leadership contest now looming, they aren't ruling out seeking their party's top job.

"Nothing is off the table," said MacLellan. "I don't want to be vague or clichd, but it's a lot to think about.

"Everyone dreams about being the premier and the prime minister and the centrefielder for the Yankees, but when it actually comes into a legitimate conversation, it's a much different story. What happened yesterday changes a lot for many people, including myself."

McNeil's decision could also change things for Churchill, who, like MacLellan, was first elected in a byelection in 2010. Both were named to cabinet in McNeil's first term as premier after forming government in 2013.

Like MacLellan, Churchill said he's mainly been focused on the premier's decision and the role McNeil has played in his life.

"I was surprised by that [announcement]," he said. "Part of me is sad that he's doing thatbecause he was a mentor and a friend."

Churchill said he now needs to reflect on what the future holds for the party, the caucus and himself.

Fraser's statement said he deeply values his current role as a member of Parliament and what he's been able to do for his riding through that work, but after receiving many calls from supporters he's now looking at whether the opportunity to serveas the premier of Nova Scotia "makes sense for me and for our province."

"These are big decisions that have an impact not only on those who seek public office, but also their loved ones. I will take the time necessary to make an informed choice about the next step in my career in politics here at home in Nova Scotia."

It's something other members of the party are likely also now weighing, although Fraser, Churchill and MacLellan were the only people out of about a dozen CBC contacted Friday who returned calls to say they're considering it. In a text message,Community Services Minister Kelly Regansaid she is interested in the continued growth of the partyand province, but hasn't yet given any real consideration to seeking the leadership.

A spokesperson for Halifax Mayor Mike Savage, long rumoured as being interested in the job, said he has no plans to seek the leadership. Savage is fully committed tohis bid for re-election in October's municipal election, according to Shaune MacKinlay.

Halifax MP Andy Fillmore said he isn't interested in the job, either.

"I'm entirely focused on the job I have right now," Fillmore said in an interview a day after announcing a long-time goal of his: regular visitor access to Georges Island.

"There's more work to be done for Halifax here in Halifax, and there's more work for me to do for Halifax in Ottawa."

Nova Scotia Liberal Party officials say they will meet soon to establish the parameters for a leadership race and just what form it will take in light of thecoronavirus pandemic.

McNeil has said he will continue to govern until the party selects a new leader.

Katherine Fierlbeck, a political scientist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, said the race to replace McNeil seems wide open because there is no obvious successor. That can at least be partly attributed to no one anticipating McNeil's departure.

And while winning the leadership comes with the added bonus of becoming premier, whoever gets the job will be inheriting a government that's facing major financial challenges. COVID-19 has created an $853 million deficit in Nova Scotia.