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Get inspired and connect with others at Tanween, the Middle East’s premiere creative festival

Posted on 20/10/2022

You may not have heard of Ithra, the trailblazing cultural center in Saudi Arabia, which opened in 2016. But already, it’s been listed in Time Magazine as one of the world’s top 100 places to visit, attracting a cool million visitors in 2019.

And that’s not surprising because Ithra, aka the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture, is a fantastic place to visit. Designed by Norwegian architects Snøhetta, its jaw-dropping design represents a deep of oil-bearing rocks smoothed by desert winds, all wrapped in a 350km-long steel pipe. It’s quite a sight: and worth the trip just to look at the exterior.

Of course, you’d be a fool not to take advantage of the free entry and go inside too. Here, you’ll find an astonishing 85,000 square meters of space, housing a museum, theatre, library, cinema, exhibition galleries, ideas lab and knowledge tower. It’ll certainly take you more than a day to fully appreciate Ithra’s architectural wonder and cultural treasures.

And now there’s an extra reason to visit! The annual Tanween Creativity Season offers a unique program of talks, workshops, masterclasses, demos, exhibitions and other attractions celebrating risk-taking creatives and innovators.

What is Tanween?

The term Tanween comes from a

Bay Area election officials defend use of Konnec software after arrest

Posted on 20/10/2022

Three of the Bay Area’s largest counties will continue to use polling station software that was ensnared in a Los Angeles data breach investigation and in at least four other elections jurisdictions ditching the software amid allegations of embezzlement and Chinese data sharing.

Alameda, Contra Costa and San Francisco counties all use the PollChief software – produced by the company Konnech – to manage poll worker schedules and track voting equipment, but not to tabulate votes. Unlike Los Angeles, local elections officials in Contra Costa and San Francisco say sensitive data on election workers was never shared with Konnech and they are confident that other polling station information stored on Konnech servers was kept within the United States. Alameda County did not return multiple requests for comments.

Last week, prosecutors in Los Angeles accused Konnecch CEO Eugene Yu of storing the personal data of thousands of Los Angeles election workers on servers in China, where it was accessed by Chinese contractors.

One Konnech project manager called the situation a “huge security issue,” according to the criminal complaint filed in Los Angeles. Prosecutors said Yu violated Konnech’s agreement to store data in the United States thereby embezzling public funds.

An attorney

This gadget will cut your water bill in half

Posted on 20/10/2022

Clean water is becoming increasing precious, wherever in the world you live. Growing populations need more of it, but climate change means there’s less available. Addressing this means talking about waste water, which isn’t a popular topic, but hey, buckle up. Up to 75 per cent of household waste water is “greywater”, the lightly contaminated kind that comes from showers, baths and washing machines. Hydraloop is a device that collects and cleans this stuff to make what they call “household water”, suitable for flushing loos, irrigation and feeding back into the wash.

The inventor, Dutchman Arthur Valkieser, was inspired to act when he realized how much drinking water is piped into cisterns to flush loos – around 35 liters per person per day. Hydraloop flushes with cleaned greywater instead, an idea so brilliant that the World Intellectual Property Organization, a UN agency, has recognized it as a tool to help reduce water consumption.

Preparing the plumbing is, according to Hydraloop, “not difficult”, and they provide clear instructions. The unit takes up around

Could software be the weak link in China’s electric vehicle dominance?

Posted on 20/10/2022

China dominates the global electric vehicle market. The country accounted for 57% of global EV sales last year, and wields significant control over the EV battery supply chain.

That dominance isn’t set in stone, however. Competition is heating up as other countries ramp up investments in minerals, batteries, and EV production to reduce reliance on China. And China’s EV industry has its own strategic weaknesses, too.

China’s EV chip crunch

The chip constraint is well-known. China has long worked to develop a domestic semiconductor industry to cut dependence on foreign chips, but so far has had mixed success. That effort is now complicated by Washington’s sweeping restrictions on chip technology exports to China. And EVs need a lot of chips—easily twice as many as an internal combustion engine car.

Major Chinese EV makers are now reportedly scrambling to develop their own car chips in response to the US export restrictions, but

Marvel turns baseball mascots into fearsome superheroes

Posted on 19/10/2022

Marvel and the MiLB have a surprising amount in common. They both possess a cast of colorful characters that battle against adversity and are idolised by their respective fans. So it probably makes sense that Minor League Baseball logos are getting the Marvel treatment.

The legendary comic book brand is turning its hand to redesigning the logos of a massive 96 MiLB teams for a series of special games dubbed Marvel’s Defenders of the Diamond, to be held in 2023 and 2024. The Marvel-created logos feature the teams’ mascots as powerful superheroes and will be worn on-field by the teams. Read on to see how Marvel’s designs compare to some of the teams’ current logos (and for tips on creating your own designs, see our guide to how to design a logo).

It felt like there was a bit of an awkward silence as Marvel characters meet and greet Minor League Baseball mascots for a photo opportunity at the New York Comic Con at the Javits Center in Manhattan earlier this month (see the video above). Perhaps the MiLB mascots were a little starstruck. But this was the launch for Marvel’s sponsorship of the MiLB Defenders of the Diamond series,