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When Hozier said "even when you're not aiming to tell a story, you're telling a story" and when he said "the relationship that a person has with the work is down to them, and also what it helps them through ultimately is still work that they've done" and when he said "to open the set with a few words of Irish and hear a crowd singing that back, on the other side of the planet, singing words in a language that was, for a time, illegal in my own country...that is a special thing" and when he said "history is being told in the very way we construct sentences"

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Also preserved in our archive

By Jess Thomson

Samples from wastewater in several U.S. states have tested "very high" or "high" for levels of the virus that causes COVID-19.

SARS-CoV-2 levels were found by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to be "very high" in New Mexico for the period November 10 to November 16, 2024, and "high" in Arizona, Kentucky, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota.

"Moderate" levels of the virus were detected in Colorado, Idaho, Maine, Maryland, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, and Wyoming.

More From Newsweek Vault: What Is a Health Savings Account?

19 states had "low" levels detected, while "minimal" levels were spotted in 14 states and D.C.

(follow the link for an interactive map!)

However, the data from Arizona, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Mississippi, and Ohio all have limited coverage, meaning that it is "based on a small segment (less than 5 percent) of the population and may not be representative of the state/territory," the CDC explained. North Dakota also has no data for this period.

The week prior, between November 3 and November 9, "very high" levels of viral activity were also detected in New Mexico, with "high" levels being found in Montana, Wyoming, and South Dakota.

Many viruses are excreted in feces, even if the infected individual has no symptoms. This includes SARS-CoV-2, which has been shown to be present in the gastrointestinal tract of infected individuals. Once in the wastewater system, viral particles, or fragments of their genetic material, are carried to treatment plants. Testing of this wastewater can detect these fragments, providing valuable information about the presence of the virus in a community.

By regularly testing wastewater, the CDC can track trends in viral levels, helping public health officials assess whether COVID-19 cases are increasing, decreasing, or remaining stable in a community.

"Wastewater monitoring can detect viruses spreading from one person to another within a community earlier than clinical testing and before people who are sick go to their doctor or hospital. It can also detect infections without symptoms. If you see increased wastewater viral activity levels, it might indicate that there is a higher risk of infection," the CDC explains.

CDC data shows that COVID virus levels have hugely dropped since the summer months, with most regions still trending downwards. However, there is a slight uptick in virus activity in the Northeast and the Midwest

As of November 16, subvariant KP.3.1.1 made up 34 percent of COVID-19 cases in U.S. wastewater over the previous two weeks. New XEC variant made up 21 percent, KP.3 made up 18 percent, JN.1 made up 13 percent, and "other" made up 15 percent.

"There is no evidence, and no particular reason to believe, that XEC causes different symptoms than all the other SARS-CoV-2 currently in circulation," Francois Balloux, a profesor of computational systems biology at University College London in England, previously told Newsweek. "XEC is not expected to cause more (or less) severe symptoms than other lineages currently in circulation."

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only 5 seconds

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im confused about the dnd 5e hatred. yall arent just ignoring rules that are dumb? ur dm actually follows every single thing in the book for real?

if you have to ignore some of the rules for the game to be good then the game is not good

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it’s a great time to be a hater, many things are bad and lots of stuff sucks. it’s also a terrible time to be a hater, because many people will insist that you have to like the bad thing because a company spent millions of dollars making it and it’s just not very nice to say it’s bad

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also it annoys me that when trans men complain about how bad it feels to be excluded from women's spaces now that they're recognized as men, they're often met with sympathy, and many women's spaces make an exception for them because biological essentialism matters more to them than anything else. meanwhile, when trans women express sorrow over having been excluded from even something as minute as friend groups of all girls, we just get shrugged at and told to get over it. meanwhile we're still excluded from women's spaces. it's almost like there's a systemic form of oppression that specifically targets transfems or something.

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get better soon, Anders!

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everything has political content. sorry. theres some guys who get really really angy when you say this but its true

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also I ended up looking at stuff about soviet agricultural experiments and apparently dogbane (Apocyonum cannabinum) was introduced to the USSR as a fiber crop plant? ???

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ENCYCLOPEDIA [TRIVIAL: SUCCESS] – The pins on the women's shirts bear the transgender pride flag.

LONG-HAIRED TRANSSEXUAL WOMAN – "But we don't take kindly to cops anyway, so get lost!" She looks up at the taller, shorter-haired woman. "Isn't that right, big sis?" PERCEPTION [CHALLENGING: SUCCESS] – An upward spike in the tone at the end of the last word, as if a smile had formed at its conception.

LOGIC [MEDIUM: SUCCESS] – You've never known a pair of actual siblings to refer to each other as such.

So they're not really sisters?

Move on. (Proceed.)

LOGIC – Technically they could be, albeit their blood relations are as unlikely as any random pair. But as it stands, they did not grow up together as siblings.

EMPATHY [HEROIC: SUCCESS] – Both of these women are transgender and proud. To establish such an identity is a rejection of those social roles which biology has attempted to thrust upon– or confiscate from– one. Perhaps this is a similar rejection. It may be best not to prod at the status of their sisterhood.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY [CHALLENGING: SUCCESS] – You know what this is. Play along, and you might just be able to join the party.

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Customer: BEAT OFF DMV: OFF (2008) IS BELOVED INDIE VIDEO GAME BY MORTIS GHOST Verdict: ACCEPTED

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Microsoft Office, like many companies in recent months, has slyly turned on an “opt-out” feature that scrapes your Word and Excel documents to train its internal AI systems. This setting is turned on by default, and you have to manually uncheck a box in order to opt out.

If you are a writer who uses MS Word to write any proprietary content (blog posts, novels, or any work you intend to protect with copyright and/or sell), you’re going to want to turn this feature off immediately.How to Turn off Word’s AI Access To Your Content

I won’t beat around the bush. Microsoft Office doesn’t make it easy to opt out of this new AI privacy agreement, as the feature is hidden through a series of popup menus in your settings:On a Windows computer, follow these steps to turn off “Connected Experiences”:

File > Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings > Privacy Options > Privacy Settings > Optional Connected Experiences > Uncheck box: “Turn on optional connected experiences”

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At the California Institute of the Arts, it all started with a videoconference between the registrar’s office and a nonprofit.

One of the nonprofit’s representatives had enabled an AI note-taking tool from Read AI. At the end of the meeting, it emailed a summary to all attendees, said Allan Chen, the institute’s chief technology officer. They could have a copy of the notes, if they wanted — they just needed to create their own account.

Next thing Chen knew, Read AI’s bot had popped up inabout a dozen of his meetings over a one-week span. It was in one-on-one check-ins. Project meetings. “Everything.”

The spread “was very aggressive,” recalled Chen, who also serves as vice president for institute technology. And it “took us by surprise.”

The scenariounderscores a growing challenge for colleges: Tech adoption and experimentation among students, faculty, and staff — especially as it pertains to AI — are outpacing institutions’ governance of these technologies and may even violate their data-privacy and security policies.

That has been the case with note-taking tools from companies including Read AI, Otter.ai, and Fireflies.ai.They can integrate with platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teamsto provide live transcriptions, meeting summaries, audio and video recordings, and other services.

Higher-ed interest in these products isn’t surprising.For those bogged down with virtual rendezvouses, a tool that can ingest long, winding conversations and spit outkey takeaways and action items is alluring. These services can also aid people with disabilities, including those who are deaf.

But the tools can quickly propagate unchecked across a university. They can auto-join any virtual meetings on a user’s calendar — even if that person is not in attendance. And that’s a concern, administrators say, if it means third-party productsthat an institution hasn’t reviewedmay be capturing and analyzing personal information, proprietary material, or confidential communications.

“What keeps me up at night is the ability for individual users to do things that are very powerful, but they don’t realize what they’re doing,” Chen said. “You may not realize you’re opening a can of worms.“

The Chronicle documented both individual and universitywide instances of this trend. At Tidewater Community College, in Virginia, Heather Brown, an instructional designer, unwittingly gave Otter.ai’s tool access to her calendar, and it joined a Faculty Senate meeting she didn’t end up attending. “One of our [associate vice presidents] reached out to inform me,” she wrote in a message. “I was mortified!”

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200 Word RPGs 2024

Each November, some people try to write a novel. Others would prefer to do as little writing as possible. For those who wish to challenge their ability to not write, we offer this alternative: producing a complete, playable roleplaying game in two hundred words or fewer.

This is the submission thread for the 2024 event, running from November 1st, 2024 through November 30th, 2024. Submission guidelines can be found in this blog's pinned post, here.

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