Tag Archives: applications

This Week on Crypto Twitter: Grayscale Wins Against SEC, SEC Delays ETF Applications – Decrypt

  1. This Week on Crypto Twitter: Grayscale Wins Against SEC, SEC Delays ETF Applications Decrypt
  2. SEC delays BTC ETF decision, Grayscale triumphs over SEC and BitBoy gets the boot: Hodler’s Digest, Aug. 27 – Sept. 2 Cointelegraph
  3. JPMorgan analysts predict SEC will approve multiple spot bitcoin ETFs following Grayscale’s legal victory – Cryptopolitan Cryptopolitan
  4. Grayscale’s Victory Against SEC a ‘Major Win’ for Crypto: Grayscale Chief Legal Officer CoinDesk
  5. This Week in Coins: Bitcoin and Ethereum Unmoved in Slow Market Week Decrypt
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First Mover Asia: Bitcoin Maintains $30K as Prospective Issuers Refile ETF Applications – CoinDesk

  1. First Mover Asia: Bitcoin Maintains $30K as Prospective Issuers Refile ETF Applications CoinDesk
  2. Bitcoin flat, Ether gains in mixed crypto market; Solana rebounds, Litecoin leads winners Yahoo Finance
  3. Double or Nothing: Top Analyst Benjamin Cowen Expects Bitcoin to Double in Price Crypto News Flash
  4. Bitcoin Teeters at $30.5K! Is BTC Price Showing Warning Signs or Buying Opportunity for July? Coinpedia Fintech News
  5. Bitcoin Gearing Up for Next Move Following Quick Correction, According to Top Analyst – Here’s His Target The Daily Hodl
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Patent expert calls Sony ‘childish’, ‘unprofessional’ for calling rivals ‘inferior’ in patent applications | VGC – Video Games Chronicle

  1. Patent expert calls Sony ‘childish’, ‘unprofessional’ for calling rivals ‘inferior’ in patent applications | VGC Video Games Chronicle
  2. Xbox Fans Are Upset With Sony’s Patent Application Language PlayStation LifeStyle
  3. Sony Has Been Calling Competitors “Inferior” In Their Patents For Over A Decade Now Gameranx
  4. For more than a decade, Sony’s patent applications have been disparaging Microsoft and Nintendo as ‘inferior manufacturer[s]’ of video game consoles: gratuitous, childish, unprofessional FOSS Patents
  5. Sony Throws Shade at Microsoft and Nintendo in Newly Published Patent GameRant
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Biden-Harris Administration Opens Applications for First Round of $2.5 Billion Program to Build EV Charging in Communities & Neighborhoods Nationwide | FHWA – Federal Highway Administration

  1. Biden-Harris Administration Opens Applications for First Round of $2.5 Billion Program to Build EV Charging in Communities & Neighborhoods Nationwide | FHWA Federal Highway Administration
  2. Gov’t opens $2.5 billion for EV chargers in rural and underserved areas Ars Technica
  3. Biden Government Initiates $2.4B EV Charging Program – Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA), Ford Motor (NYSE:F), General Benzinga
  4. Biden admin announces $2.5B in grants for EV chargers Fox Business
  5. US government opens $2.5 billion in funding for community EV chargers Engadget
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Student loan forgiveness applications now open through beta mode website, Biden administration says



CNN
 — 

The Biden administration has opened the application process for Americans seeking student debt relief in a beta period starting Friday evening, officials told CNN, allowing applicants to begin signing up before the website is formally unveiled later this month.

In August, President Joe Biden announced his decision to cancel up to $10,000 in student loan debt for individuals making less than $125,000 a year or as much as $20,000 for eligible borrowers who were also Pell Grant recipients.

“Tonight, the Department of Education will begin beta testing the student debt relief website. During the beta testing period, borrowers will be able to submit applications for the Biden-Harris Administration’s student debt relief program,” a spokesperson for the Department of Education told CNN exclusively Friday.

The website is available at: https://studentaid.gov/debt-relief/application.

Anyone who applies for the debt relief in the beta period will receive a confirmation email, but their application will not be processed until the site formally launches, expected at a to-be-announced date before the end of October. Once processing begins, most qualifying borrowers are expected to receive debt relief within weeks.

The spokesperson continued, “Those borrowers will not need to reapply if they submit their application during the beta test, but no applications will be processed until the site officially launches later this month. This testing period will allow the Department to monitor site performance through real-world use, test the site ahead of the official application launch, refine processes, and uncover any possible bugs prior to official launch.”

The Department of Education’s technical team will be looking at site performance in real time and the beta version of the website will have scheduled pauses as the team assesses what refinements and tweaks are needed, an administration official told CNN in a phone interview, another official adding that “high spikes of demand” are expected. Anyone who is trying to submit their application during a beta pause will be encouraged to check back.

While there won’t be any changes made to the application itself, there could be changes to the website software as the tech team tracks how it’s working in the beta mode.

The form to apply will include information on the debt relief, who qualifies for it and how it works. It will ask applicants for information including their full names, Social Security number, date of birth, phone number and an email address.

Potential applicants who previously signed up for updates on the student debt relief process will receive an email notifying them about the beta website, and once the website is formally launched, the White House will begin to leverage its social channels to spread the word. There are also plans to brief digital creators and influencers in the coming weeks, officials said.

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A ceramic aerogel made with nanocrystals and embedded in a matrix for use in thermal insulation applications

Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04784-0″ width=”800″ height=”530″/>
Multiscale design of hypocrystalline ceramic nanofibrous aerogel. a, Deformation modes and the corresponding ν and α of crystalline (C), amorphous (A) and hypocrystalline (H) ceramic fibrous cells under mechanical and thermal excitations. The colored scale bar indicates the variation of ceramics from amorphous to crystal by using a local-entropy-based fingerprint to characterize the crystallinity of each atom in the simulated system. b, Illustration of the zig-zag architecture design based on hypocrystalline fibrous ceramics. The units of the colored scale bars are millimeters, presenting absolute displacement values in ν and α calculation. The triangle, square and pentagon cells are the building units to assemble the fibrous aerogel structure. Credit: Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04784-0

A team of researchers at the Harbin Institute of Technology, in China, working with a colleague in the U.S., has developed a new kind of aerogel for use in flexible thermal insulation material applications. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes how they made their aerogel and how well it worked when extreme heat was applied.

Prior work has shown that aerogels made using ceramic materials work very well as thermal insulators—their very low densities have very low thermal conductivity. But such materials are brittle, making them unavailable for use in flexible material applications, such as suits for firefighters. They also tend to break down when exposed to very high temperatures. In this new effort, the researchers have developed a method for making a ceramic based aerogel that can be used in flexible applications and also does not break down when exposed to very high temperatures.

To create their aerogel, the researchers took a novel approach—they pushed a zirconium-silicon precursor, using a plastic syringe, into a chamber with turbulent airflow—an electrospinning approach that produced a ceramic material that resembled cotton candy. They then folded the resulting material into a zig-zag pattern and heated it to 1100° C. Heating it in such a way changed the texture of the material from a glassy state to a nanocrystal. Study of the resulting material using a spectroscope showed that their approach had resulted in the creation of a material with nanocrystalline bits embedded in an amorphous zircon matrix—a flexible aerogel made using a ceramic that was not prone to breaking down under high temperatures.

The researchers tested the material by using it to insulate an airplane fuel tube and applying a butane blowtorch for five minutes. They found that using a generic polyimide barrier allowed the temperatures in the tube to reach 267° C, while a conventional aerogel kept the temperature to 159° C and the new gel maintained it at just 33° C. They also found that the material was flexible enough to allow for use in flexible cloths, such as those used to make protective clothing for firefighters.


Aerogel integrated wood provides better insulation than existing plastic-based materials


More information:
Jingran Guo et al, Hypocrystalline ceramic aerogels for thermal insulation at extreme conditions, Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04784-0

© 2022 Science X Network

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A ceramic aerogel made with nanocrystals and embedded in a matrix for use in thermal insulation applications (2022, July 1)
retrieved 2 July 2022
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Developing Time Crystals for Use in Real-World Applications

Time crystals that persist indefinitely at room temperature could have applications in precision timekeeping.

We have all seen crystals, whether a simple grain of salt or sugar, or an elaborate and beautiful amethyst. These crystals are made of atoms or molecules repeating in a symmetrical three-dimensional pattern called a lattice, in which atoms occupy specific points in space. By forming a periodic lattice, carbon atoms in a diamond, for example, break the symmetry of the space they sit in. Physicists call this “breaking symmetry.”

Scientists have recently discovered that a similar effect can be witnessed in time. Symmetry breaking, as the name suggests, can arise only where some sort of symmetry exists. In the time domain, a cyclically changing force or energy source naturally produces a temporal pattern.

Breaking of the symmetry occurs when a system driven by such a force faces a déjà vu moment, but not with the same period as that of the force. ‘Time crystals’ have in the past decade been pursued as a new phase of matter, and more recently observed under elaborate experimental conditions in isolated systems. These experiments require extremely low temperatures or other rigorous conditions to minimize undesired external influences.

In order for scientists to learn more about time crystals and employ their potential in technology, they need to find ways to produce time crystalline states and keep them stable outside the laboratory.

Cutting-edge research led by UC Riverside and published this week in Nature Communications has now observed time crystals in a system that is not isolated from its ambient environment. This major achievement brings scientists one step closer to developing time crystals for use in real-world applications.

“When your experimental system has energy exchange with its surroundings, dissipation and noise work hand-in-hand to destroy the temporal order,” said lead author Hossein Taheri, an assistant research professor of electrical and computer engineering in UC Riverside’s Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering. “In our photonic platform, the system strikes a balance between gain and loss to create and preserve time crystals.”

Advancing the notion pondered a decade ago by Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek, a team of researchers led by UC Riverside Assistant Research Professor Hossein Taheri demonstrates new time crystals which persist indefinitely at room temperature, despite noise and energy loss.

The all-optical time crystal is realized using a disk-shaped magnesium fluoride glass resonator one millimeter in diameter. When bombarded by two laser beams, the researchers observed subharmonic spikes, or frequency tones between the two laser beams, that indicated breaking of temporal symmetry and creation of time crystals.

The UCR-led team utilized a technique called self-injection locking of the two lasers to the resonator to achieve robustness against environmental effects. Signatures of the temporally repeating state of this system can readily be measured in the frequency domain. The proposed platform therefore simplifies the study of this new phase of matter.

Without the need for a low temperature, the system can be moved outside a complex lab for field applications. One such application could be highly accurate measurements of time. Because frequency and time are mathematical inverses of each other, (function(d, s, id){ var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v2.6"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));

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Marilyn Mosby: Baltimore state’s attorney indicted on charges of perjury and making false statements on mortgage applications

State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, who gained national attention in 2015 for charging officers in the in-custody death of Freddie Gray, now herself faces perjury charges over documents she submitted to apply for loans against her retirement plan in 2020, according to the indictment.
In doing so, Mosby, whose term in office ends this year, allegedly used a withdrawal option created under the CARES Act, passed to help people who were financially impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic.

When Mosby applied for two loans against her 457(b) retirement plan, she signed documents that indicated she “experienced adverse financial consequences” due to Covid-19, according to the indictment. However, the indictment said her gross income in 2020 was $247,955.58, an increase of nearly $10,000 from the previous year.

Mosby received $36,000 in May and $45,000 in December of 2020 from her retirement account, according to the indictment.

The money Mosby received allegedly went toward the purchase of two vacation homes in Florida, and she is also charged with making false statements on the mortgage applications, according to the indictment.

She secured a $490,500 mortgage in 2020 and a $428,400 mortgage in 2021, but she did not disclose in the applications that she owed more than $45,000 in federal back taxes, the indictment says.

Additionally, Mosby allegedly stated that she would be the primary resident of one of the homes for at least a year in order to receive a lower mortgage rate. But she had already entered an agreement with a vacation home management company to rent out the house the week before, the indictment alleges.

She sold one of the properties in November for a $150,000 profit, the Baltimore Sun reported.

Mosby’s lawyer said she is innocent of the charges.

“I remain confident that once all the evidence is presented, that she will prevail against these bogus charges — charges that are rooted in personal, political and racial animus five months from her election,” attorney A. Scott Bolden said in a statement.

If convicted, Mosby faces a maximum sentence of five years in a federal prison for each perjury count and a maximum of 30 years for each count of making false statements on a mortgage application, according to the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Maryland. She could also be forced to forfeit any property found to have been obtained by fraud, the indictment says.

“We’re not commenting beyond what’s on the indictment. It speaks for itself,” Marcia Murphy, spokesperson for Maryland US Attorney Erek Barron, told CNN.

Mosby will have an initial appearance in the US District Court in Baltimore, but the hearing has not yet been scheduled, according to the US Attorney’s office.

Mosby was elected as the state’s attorney for Baltimore City in 2014 and reelected in 2018.

In 2015, she charged six Baltimore police officers in the death of Freddie Gray, who died in police custody after suffering a neck injury while being driven unrestrained in the back of a police van. His death became a symbol of the Black community’s mistrust of police and triggered days of protests and riots in Baltimore. None of the six officers arrested was convicted.

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Baltimore Prosecutor Charged With Perjury and Filing False Loan Applications

Marilyn Mosby, Baltimore’s top prosecutor, was indicted Thursday on charges that she perjured herself to obtain money from a retirement fund and made false statements on loan applications to buy two vacation homes in Florida.

The charges against Ms. Mosby, 41, who was first elected state’s attorney in 2014 and drew national attention the following year for her handling of the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old Black man who died in police custody, came after a monthslong investigation by federal authorities.

Ms. Mosby filed two requests in 2020 to withdraw about $90,000 from her city retirement account, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Maryland.

She faces two counts of perjury for those requests, which were made through the CARES Act, because she claimed that the pandemic had caused her financial difficulties. But at the time, she was fully employed and making almost $250,000 a year, according to the indictment.

“Rather than experiencing a reduction in income in 2020, Mosby’s gross salary in 2020 increased,” the indictment said, noting that she had received a raise of nearly $10,000 from the year before.

She also faces two counts of making false statements on a loan application for two vacation homes in Florida, prosecutors said.

Ms. Mosby used the money she had withdrawn for down payments on the homes, according to the indictment. She did not disclose on her mortgage applications that she owed more than $45,000 in taxes to the Internal Revenue Service. In March 2020, the I.R.S. placed a lien on all the properties belonging to Ms. Mosby. The lien also applied to her husband, Nick Mosby, president of the Baltimore City Council. He is not charged in the case.

Prosecutors said that Ms. Mosby also did not reveal her tax troubles in an agreement she had signed with a management company to rent out one of the vacation homes. That way, they said, she could obtain a lower interest rate on her mortgage.

The mortgages amounted to more than $900,000 for both homes — which were in Kissimmee and Longboat Key — according to the indictment. She was listed as the sole owner of both homes. In November, she sold the Kissimmee property, an eight-bedroom home, according to property records.

If convicted, Ms. Mosby would face a maximum sentence of five years in prison on each of the perjury counts and 30 years on each of the charges of making false loan applications.

A. Scott Bolden, Ms. Mosby’s lawyer, vigorously denied the charges against his client and labeled them “bogus.”

In an interview on Thursday night, he said that the investigation was part of a “historical attack on Black female prosecutors.” Ms. Mosby had no plans to step down from her position, he added.

Mr. Bolden said that Ms. Mosby contended that she had financial hardship because she owned a travel start-up, and that she did not disclose the tax lien on her properties because she did not know about it. He said that Ms. Mosby’s husband handled the couple’s taxes.

Mr. Mosby did not respond to emails on Thursday night.

When Ms. Mosby became state’s attorney for Baltimore City in 2015, she was 34 years old, the youngest top prosecutor of any major American city.

Three months into her term, Freddie Gray died in police custody after sustaining a spinal cord injury. Video footage showed officers carrying his limp body into a police van. His death fueled protests against excessive force and amplified awareness of police killings of Black people. Riots broke out, and police cars were set on fire. The city was placed under curfew.

Two weeks after Mr. Gray’s death, Ms. Mosby announced she would prosecute six officers. They were charged with crimes including manslaughter and murder. This decision was contested, with critics stating that she moved too hastily in what was inevitably an uphill battle.

Three officers were acquitted by a judge, who said there was insufficient evidence. Then, Ms. Mosby dropped remaining charges against three police officers, another divisive decision.

Still, in 2018, Ms. Mosby handily won another four-year term, which expires this year. At least two candidates have announced they will challenge her in this summer’s Democratic primary. They expressed concern on social media on Thursday about Ms. Mosby’s alleged actions.

Ms. Mosby and Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland have repeatedly clashed over the proper approach to addressing violence in Baltimore.

In a Fox News appearance last month, Mr. Hogan blamed Ms. Mosby and her refusal to prosecute violent crime as a “big part of the problem” of escalating violence. Ms. Mosby responded with an open letter accusing Mr. Hogan of issuing “incessant dog-whistling attacks about Baltimore crime” and stoking fears to “score political points with your conservative base.”

Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.

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The co-founder of a San Francisco pizza chain says he received no applications for an assistant manager, despite raising the salary to $70,000

A Bay Area pizza-chain owner has highlighted his struggle to hire for a key role during the labor shortage.SimpleImages/Getty Images

  • Assistant managers are becoming increasingly difficult to hire, per WSJ.

  • One co-founder of a pizza chain said he didn’t receive any applications for the role in 10 months.

  • He even upped the annual salary for the position to $70,000 but still had no success.

Businesses across many industries are finding it extremely hard to retain workers and fill roles amid the labor shortage in the US.

But according to The Wall Street Journal, one particular role has become even more challenging to recruit for: assistant manager.

The co-founder of Square Pie Guys, a San Francisco pizza chain, said he tried to fill an assistant manager role for months and eventually had to give up, per The Journal.

“This job is seen particularly as thankless, overworked and underpaid — full stop,” Danny Stoller told the publication.

Stoller said he advertised the position in November 2020 and didn’t receive any applications from a qualified candidate. He even raised the annual salary over the 10-month period it was advertised from $55,000 to $70,000.

After two months, Stoller said he changed the role to a general manager position. “Applications shot up, and the company recently extended an offer to one candidate,” The Journal’s report said.

Square Pie Guys did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.

A record number of Americans are quitting their jobs in search of better wages, benefits, and working conditions.

Some employees in the hospitality industry said they feel overworked and underpaid as a result of taking on too many roles during the labor shortage. For example, Dana Gurry, a store manager at Dairy Queen, said she quit her job after nearly 14 years for those reasons, Insider’s Judy Brumley reported.

It’s not just managers or assistant managers, however, who have stepped into vacant roles amid the labor shortage. Insider’s Grace Dean reported that an 81-year-old retiree re-entered the workforce to take a job as a runner at her favourite restaurant, after it shut its dining room due to staff shortages.

Recently, the vice mayor of a California city took up a third job at a local restaurant to tackle the city’s labor shortage. “I decided to lead by example,” Sarah Aquino told CBS News.

If people can “get out there and help these businesses fill these positions, it helps the businesses while also helping the city of Folsom,” she added.

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