Mahboob's Journal

11-May-2020 Did India miss a trick in testing? [Mint] Countries with relatively high testing rates had to impose fewer lockdown restrictions, and have been able to open up far more quicker than India. KCR-chaired meet favours controlled farming [The Hindu] Denial of Rythu Bandhu, MSP to farmers not raising crops suggested by government mooted https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Hyderabad/kcr-chaired-meet-favours-controlled-farming/article31552943.ece Plasma therapy trials from today [The Hindu] 15 people, who recovered from COVID, ready to donate their plasma

Donald Trump posts a link to his very own ‘Real News Update’ on Facebook. Donald J. Trump/Facebook John Keane , University of Sydney This article is part of the Revolutions and Counter Revolutions series, curated by Democracy Futures as a joint global initiative between the Sydney Democracy Network and The Conversation. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century. It is also part of an ongoing series from the Post-Truth Initiative , a Strategic Research Excellence Initiative at the University of Sydney. This essay is much longer than most Conversation articles, so will take some time to read. Enjoy! We live in an unfinished revolutionary age of communicative abundance. Networked digital machines and information flows are slowly but surely shaping practically every institution in which we live our daily lives. For the first time in history, thanks to built-in ch...

Originally posted on Facebook So far, the Congress party has not clearly stated that it is against NRC. But things may change as an interesting Monday is ahead, when the Jharkhand results will be declared.

Supporters of Nigeria’s All Progressives Congress presidential candidate, President Muhammadu Buhari, at a rally earlier this year. EPA-EFE/Stringer Nic Cheeseman , University of Birmingham There is growing concern about the potential for the message and media sharing platform WhatsApp to undermine democracy in a number of countries across the world including Brazil and India .

By Vanessa Bates Ramirez The robots are coming, and they’ll probably take your job when they get here. Oh wait—have you heard that recently? As recently as, say, yesterday? In the news, or from a coworker, or in a sinister dystopian movie, maybe? Sounding the alarm about job losses to automation has become commonplace—in fact, it’s more of a nonstop siren these days. Multiple Democratic presidential candidates are featuring their plans to combat Big Tech and solve technological unemployment as talking points of their campaigns. Dread of a robot-dominated future is mounting.

-- Moti Mizrahi ‘In logic, inconsistency is the cardinal sin, and consistency the first of the virtues.’ Patrick Shaw, Logic and Its Limits (1981) In 2018, the US Surgeon General declared e-cigarette use among young people an epidemic in the United States. As a result, parents were encouraged to talk with their children about smoking. One of the Surgeon General’s tips for parents is to ‘set a positive example by being tobacco-free’. But what if parents are smokers, too? What if children respond to their parents’ plea to refrain from smoking by saying: ‘You use tobacco, so why shouldn’t I?’ This retort is an example of ad hominem argumentation.

During the last four years, until the early part of 2018, I worked on a MacBook. Sometime in the second quarter of last year, I shifted to a Windows 10 laptop. The transition has been quite smooth and delightful. There were two Rails applications that I had to write and maintain. The first application, let's call it webapp-1, was coded by me in 2016 using Ruby 2.3.1 p112 and Rails 4.2.6. The second application, hereafter referred to as webapp-2, is a new application that I had to write from scratch, so I chose the latest versions: Ruby 2.5.3, Rails 5.2.1. For both these applications, the database was MySQL, and I decided to install the latest version, i.e., 8 running on Windows. The MySQL installer tools make the installation and configuration very easy and I could bring up MySQL quickly. I started setting up the Rails environment for webapp-2 first. The installation program for windows that I downloaded was rubyinstaller-devkit-2.5.3-1-x64.exe. I ran it, selected MSYS2 ...