A doctor believed to be the last remaining orthopaedic surgeon in northern Gaza has been killed by Israeli tankfire, according to Palestinian officials. Dr Sayeed Joudeh died on Thursday while he was on his way to work. He was a surgeon at Kamal Adwan and al-Awda hospitals in northern Gaza.

[...]

"On his way to al-Awda Hospital to evaluate a patient, one of the tanks fired on him directly," according to Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital.

"Unfortunately, he was killed instantly."

But some eyewitnesses say Dr Joudeh was shot by a drone.

[...]

"It's devastating for his family. It's devastating for people in the north who are relying on so few doctors," said Ms Wateridge.

"Hospitals in the Gaza Strip are not hospitals anymore," she said.

"There's no sanitation. There are hardly any doctors. There's no medical equipment. Patients are dying needlessly."

Ms Wateridge described the humanitarian situation in Gaza as apocalyptic.

"By almost every metric, the harm to civilians from the first month of the Israeli campaign in Gaza is incomparable with any 21st century air campaign. It is by far the most intense, destructive, and fatal conflict for civilians that Airwars has ever documented. Key findings include:

At least 5,139 civilians were killed in Gaza in 25 days in October 2023. This is nearly four times more civilians reported killed in a single month than in any conflict Airwars has documented since it was established in 2014.

In October 2023 alone, Airwars documented at least 65 incidents in which a minimum of 20 civilians were killed in a particular incident. This is nearly triple the number of such high-fatality incidents that Airwars has documented within any comparable timeframe.

Over the course of 25 days, Airwars recorded a minimum of 1,900 children killed by Israeli military action in Gaza. This is nearly seven times higher than even the most deadly month for children previously recorded by Airwars.

Families were killed together in unprecedented numbers, and in their homes. More than nine out of ten women and children were killed in residential buildings. In more than 95 percent of all cases where a woman was killed, at least one child was also killed.

On average, when civilians were killed alongside family members, at least 15 family members were killed. This is higher than any other conflict documented by Airwars."

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17552794

"Our findings indicate that the spatial risk of TC-induced damage to OSW turbines along the US Atlantic and Gulf Coast regions is broadly expected to increase, with strong intermodel agreement on the sign of change (i.e., increase or decrease) in all regions assessed. Detailed regional estimates and their associated uncertainties are outlined in Table 1. Significant increases in yielding risk are expected for the Gulf Coast and Florida peninsula resulting from 20- and 50-year storms (Fig. 1), with the average risk of turbine yielding estimated to increase by nearly 40% for a 20-year storm (Fig. 1c) and 27% for a 50-year storm (Fig. 1f). The Atlantic Coast exhibits similar changes, with projected increases in turbine yielding risk of about 35% for 20-year TCs and 31% for 50-year TCs.

Buckling, being a more acute damage state than yielding, requires higher wind speeds to surpass the structural limit. Historically, the probability that 20- or 50-year storms would induce turbine buckling has been below 10% across all regions assessed. However, under future climate change, this probability is estimated to rise to as high as 57% (Table 1), with the strongest increases and future risk expected for the Southeast and Gulf Coast regions (Fig. 2). For the Gulf Coast and Florida, buckling risk from a 20-year storm is projected to increase from nearly 0% to almost 18% (Fig. 2c). This increase is far more severe when considering a 50-year storm, with the buckling risk in this region expected to grow by almost a factor of eight. Along the Atlantic Coast, the likelihood of TC-induced turbine buckling is projected to rise as well, with anticipated increases in risk of about 9% for a 20-year TC and 34% for a 50-year TC. For both turbine yielding and buckling, the likelihood of damage is markedly higher for the Southeast than the Northeast, differing by almost 12% historically and by over 24% in a simulated future climate (Table 1)."

"Our findings indicate that the spatial risk of TC-induced damage to OSW turbines along the US Atlantic and Gulf Coast regions is broadly expected to increase, with strong intermodel agreement on the sign of change (i.e., increase or decrease) in all regions assessed. Detailed regional estimates and their associated uncertainties are outlined in Table 1. Significant increases in yielding risk are expected for the Gulf Coast and Florida peninsula resulting from 20- and 50-year storms (Fig. 1), with the average risk of turbine yielding estimated to increase by nearly 40% for a 20-year storm (Fig. 1c) and 27% for a 50-year storm (Fig. 1f). The Atlantic Coast exhibits similar changes, with projected increases in turbine yielding risk of about 35% for 20-year TCs and 31% for 50-year TCs.

Buckling, being a more acute damage state than yielding, requires higher wind speeds to surpass the structural limit. Historically, the probability that 20- or 50-year storms would induce turbine buckling has been below 10% across all regions assessed. However, under future climate change, this probability is estimated to rise to as high as 57% (Table 1), with the strongest increases and future risk expected for the Southeast and Gulf Coast regions (Fig. 2). For the Gulf Coast and Florida, buckling risk from a 20-year storm is projected to increase from nearly 0% to almost 18% (Fig. 2c). This increase is far more severe when considering a 50-year storm, with the buckling risk in this region expected to grow by almost a factor of eight. Along the Atlantic Coast, the likelihood of TC-induced turbine buckling is projected to rise as well, with anticipated increases in risk of about 9% for a 20-year TC and 34% for a 50-year TC. For both turbine yielding and buckling, the likelihood of damage is markedly higher for the Southeast than the Northeast, differing by almost 12% historically and by over 24% in a simulated future climate (Table 1)."

New accessibility feature coming to Firefox, an "AI powered" alt-text generator.

"Starting in Firefox 130, we will automatically generate an alt text and let the user validate it. So every time an image is added, we get an array of pixels we pass to the ML engine and a few seconds after, we get a string corresponding to a description of this image (see the code).

...

Our alt text generator is far from perfect, but we want to take an iterative approach and improve it in the open.

...

We are currently working on improving the image-to-text datasets and model with what we’ve described in this blog post..."

based

image:

screenshot of a Tweet from Running With Scissors reading

"We've been told our games are too expensive in some countries but we've been using Steam's recommended pricing for a while. We trust Valve enough to not change this. If our games are still too expensive for you, you can pirate them until you have enough to support us."

"Researchers have developed a highly robust material with an extremely low density by constructing a structure using DNA and subsequently coating it in glass."

“I am a big fan of Iron Man movies, and I have always wondered how to create a better armor for Iron Man. It must be very light for him to fly faster. It must be very strong to protect him from enemies’ attacks. Our new material is five times lighter but four times stronger than steel. So, our glass nanolattices would be much better than any other structural materials to create an improved armor for Iron Man.”

im just glad someone is doing the real research

this browser-based game tests your ability to create the perfect password. overcome various insane password rules to crack the code. awesome, super goofy puzzle-type experience. it's unique and a lot of fun :)

https://neal.fun/password-game/

What Matrix clients do you use for mobile and desktop? Do you prefer Element, Schildichat, FluffyChat, NeoChat, etc?

Why? 👀

Anyone who's been using privacy-respecting frontends for some time will recognise Piped. A YouTube frontend with no ads, integrated SponsorBlock, return dislikes, and a customisable UI.

Piped also allows you to subscribe to as many channels as you want without ever logging into a Google account. You can export your subs list from YouTube and import them to Piped seamlessly.

If you've never heard of it, give it a glance at https://piped.video. For more instances, check here.

We're reaching the end of an era wherein billions of dollars of investor money was shovelled into tech startups to build large user-bases, and now those companies (now monoliths) are beginning to constrict their user-bases and squeeze for every single penny they can possibly extract. Fair or not.

Now more than ever, it's important for us to step back and reconsider whether we want to be billboards for these companies anymore.

For anyone unfamiliar, some good resources to have when starting your degoogling journey are below:

Privacy Guides - A list of privacy-respecting services you can use.

Plexus - A crowdsourced information bank of service compatibility with degoogled devices.

This random PDF - A study from 2018 detailing data that Google tracks about its' users.

Thinking of self-hosting some basic tools; SearxNG, Bitwarden, Lemmy.

What kind of tools are you self-hosting right now? Which ones are easy to manage, which ones are awkward? 👀