mukara

For each $1 of federal research funding, the university can take a cut of as much as $0.6 owing to the fact that researchers are using university facilities and admin staff. In fact, the money itself is not even managed by the recipient researchers themselves. The university manages the funds since they use them to pay the professors, grad students, etc.

This might be shocking to some, but when a researcher receiver a federal grant (for example), the university takes a significant cut which they refer to as Facilities and Administrative (F&A) costs [1]. The F&A covers the so-called "indirect" costs of conducting research on university facilities: buildings, utilities, admin and accounting, support staff for compliance with federal regulations, etc.

Each university has its own F&A rate, which can be as much as 60% of received federal funds [2]. This rate has historically trended upward.

An example of funds allocation for a typical small NSF grant: https://austinhenley.com/blog/grantbudget.html

[1] https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED517263.pdf

[2] https://financeandbusiness.ucdavis.edu/finance/costing-polic...

The story of Turia, with all sorts of terrible hardships she endured, is told in the second episode [1] of a BBC Radio 4 series [2] called "Being Roman" by the English classicist Mary Beard.

The series wonderfully contextualizes the Roman empire and its cultural mix in 8 episodes (~30 minutes each). It uses stories of six individuals from different walks of life; from the emperor Marcus Aurelius, to a (possibly enslaved) child prodigy, to a traveling Syrian man who gets married on Hadrian's wall to an enslaved English girl around 2nd century CE.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001sctb

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0gq54cg/episodes/

It is said that Franklin D. Roosevelt encouraged Chaplin to make the The Great Dictator. Indeed, around the time the film was made, the two men shared political views on a lot of things. When Churchill and FDR saw a pre-release private screening of the film, they liked it. (Incidentally, Chamberlain had vowed to ban it in England for fear of angering the actual dictator.) FDR even invited Chaplin to read this very speech on his inauguration in 1941.

Ironically, this is the film that made Americans turn against him. Later that year, he was subpoenaed by a congressional committee investigating pro-war propaganda (this was a few months before the US entered the war.)

In the following years, Chaplin was extremely vilified by the Americans mainly for his pro-Soviet and communist views (or rather, for his refusal to be anti-Communist). This led to politically-motivated prosecutions, and culminated in him being exiled from the US when the president Harry Truman(!) canceled his re-entry permit while away on family vacation. (Chaplin was never an American citizen, despite living in the country for over 40 years.)

There’s a recent good book review summarizing this: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/charlie-chapli...

MetNet-3 is not open-source, and the announcement said it's already integrated into Google products/services needing weather info. So, I'd doubt there's anything like a colab example.

DeepMind recently merged with the Brain team from Google Research to form `Google DeepMind`. It seems this was done to have Google DeepMind focused primarily (only?) on AI research, leaving Google Research to work on other things in more than 20 research areas. Still, some AI research involves both orgs, including MetNet in weather forecasting.

In any case, GraphCast is a 10-day global model, whereas MetNet is a 24-hour regional model, among other differences.

>All common handset devices used in CONUS (every iphone, android phone, etc) will ignore BeiDou signals.

This is correct for smartphones and the likes (all handsets??), though not entirely correct for all GNSS receivers. For example, I regularly use receivers with uBlox F9P chipsets with BeiDou enabled from factory [0].

>Would love if someone hacked the GNSS firmware to make it usable, but haven't seen it happen yet.

If we ask the Broadcom or Qualcomm engineers nicely, they might tell us how to unblock them for their smartphone chipsets in the US. I might’ve seen it before :)

[0] https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/ardusimple/AS-RTK...

Not sure about “technically” or what the legal situation is. In practice, I know consumer smartphones in the US use a combination of all 4 constellations for positioning. If you have Android, you can easily verify this using various apps. If you're on the west coast (California Bay Area, at least), you can even receive unreliable signals from one or two Japanese QZSS satellites, which are supposed to be regional over the Asia-Oceania region. You can even see a few SBAS satellites (mainly used in aviation.)

Signals from Galileo, GLONASS, and BeiDou (and other semi-regional navigation satellite constellations) can be received in the US. Any decent GNSS receiver you can purchase in the US will be able to receive all 4 major global constellations. I know this cause I work with them everyday.

Even the typical “premium” cellphone will receive all 4. (I know some Android manufacturers disable the used of BeiDou, but they can still receive it.) The iPhone 15 Pro’s tech specs mention “Precision dual-frequency GPS (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, QZSS, BeiDou, and NavIC)”.

There are some non-profits specializing in buying up medical debt and forgiving it (e.g. RIP Medical Debt [0]). These non-profits usually rely on individual donations, and $100 can relieve as much as $10,000 of medical debt. They also frequently rely on donations from other organizations such as churches [1]. There are examples of churches buying up tens of millions of dollars worth of debt [2]. I'm not aware of this being done for other kinds of debts, although I would assume it happens.

[0] https://ripmedicaldebt.org/ [1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/26/us/debt-jubilee-medical-trini... [2] https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/10/25/metro/new-england-chu...

You probably already know this, but Fitbit is now a Google product. One would imagine this Pixel Watch have more than a few things in common with some Fitbit products.

For GPS, we use the government's recommendation of pi = 3.1415926535898 to compute satellite orbits...2 digits less than NASA's. Other constellations (Beidou, Galileo, etc.) follow GPS.