otter

I'm considering closing and redirecting !askmen@lemmy.ca and !askwomen@lemmy.ca. They haven't seen much activity in months/years. Usually, people just post in the ask/asklemmy communities and indicate which group of people they want answers from.

Here is a draft for the pinned post so far:

There currently isn't a one to one match for the topic of this community. If you want answers from a specific group (ex. men/women), you could instead start your question with a phrase like "A question for men:". Here are some alternative communities:

"Ask" communities (for starting a discussion):

• !asklemmy@lemmy.world
• !asklemmy@lemmy.ml
• !ask@piefed.social
• !askbeehaw@beehaw.org

For questions that are more specific to your situation:

• !nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
• !nostupidquestions@lemmy.ca

Group specific communities:

• !dull_mens_club@lemmy.world
• !womensstuff@piefed.blahaj.zone
• !dadforaminute@lemmy.world

Broader in topic (not necessarily questions):

• !casualconversation@piefed.social

If you would like to take over this community, please reach out to @admin@lemmy.ca

Do you have any thoughts? Are there other communities that should be included in the list?

!askbeehaw@beehaw.org but

An update for anyone that was following this story

From July 14 to August 13, channel your provincial pride and cast your vote in The Search for B.C.'s Best Symbol: a 5-week long contest powered by your votes. This is your chance to shape our provincial identity, one symbol at a time.

From Monday to Thursday beginning July 14, we'll highlight a series of different symbols to represent B.C. on CBC Radio One and CBC Vancouver News, with features on cbc.ca/bc. Then it's up to you! Jump online and click on the daily voting link on this page to answer polls and vote for your favourite symbol. One by one, symbols will be eliminated based on your votes until the final one is crowned B.C.'s Best Symbol!

Source: https://xkcd.com/3119/

Excerpt:

Hello everyone.

For a while, the project felt stagnant. Progress was slow, and it often felt like we were waiting for something to happen. That's changing. In the last few weeks, we’ve taken more active leadership to inject new energy into Lawnchair, and the release of Lawnchair 15 Beta 1 is just the first step.

Welcome to Lawnstate, a blog that will now be a regular check-in on our progress, our challenges, and our path forward. No more long silences.

From their newsletter:

We’re excited to share that the Greater Vancouver Food Bank was recently featured in Edible Magazine for our work to reduce food waste and preserve fresh, locally grown food.

We’re featured on pages 30 to 34. You can read the full article here or by clicking the button below.

Thanks to your continued support, we have partnered with 19 farms across BC and introduced new preservation techniques such as freeze drying and dehydrating. These efforts are allowing us to save more food and get it to the people who need it most.

This year alone, we’ve seen an 836% increase in fresh food rescued — healthy food that might have otherwise gone to waste, now nourishing 15,000 individuals and supporting 150 community agency partners every month.

From their newsletter:

We’re so excited to share that the 22nd dataset release for Common Voice is now available for download.

Common Voice 22.0 has an additional 281 hours of speech data, bringing the total number of hours to 33,815. This release has also seen a jump in 296 newly validated hours, with a total of 22,640 validated hours of clips. This release welcomes the addition of Aromanian (rup), Tajik (tg), and Venda/Tshivenda (ve) languages.

Aromanian is spoken by around 210,000 people in the Balkans, while Tajik is a language closely related to Persian spoken in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan by over 10 million people. Venda / Tshivenda is spoken by over 2 million people as a first or other language in South Africa and Zimbabwe.

This brings the total number of languages available in this Scripted Speech release to 137.

For those unfamiliar:

Common Voice is a crowdsourcing project started by Mozilla to create a free and open speech corpus. The project is supported by volunteers who record sample sentences with a microphone and review recordings of other users. The transcribed sentences are collected in a voice database available under the public domain license CC0.[1] This license ensures that developers can use the database for voice-to-text and text-to-voice applications without restrictions or costs.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/48067393

A very detailed guide on the privacy implications of Mastodon (how it's better and what to look out for)

A very detailed guide on the privacy implications of Mastodon (how it's better and what to look out for)

A sweeping analysis of health data from more than 1.2 million children in Denmark born over a 24-year period found no link between the small amounts of aluminum in vaccines and a wide range of health conditions—including asthma, allergies, eczema, autism, and attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

The finding, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, firmly squashes a persistent anti-vaccine talking point that can give vaccine-hesitant parents pause.

Small amounts of aluminum salts have been added to vaccines for decades as adjuvants, that is, components of the vaccine that help drum up protective immune responses against a target germ. Aluminum adjuvants can be found in a variety of vaccines, including those against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis, Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib), and hepatitis A and B.

Despite decades of use worldwide and no clear link to harms, concern about aluminum and cumulative exposures continually resurfaces—largely thanks to anti-vaccine advocates who fearmonger about the element. A leader of such voices is Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the current US health secretary and an ardent anti-vaccine advocate.

In a June 2024 interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, Kennedy falsely claimed that aluminum is "extremely neurotoxic" and "give[s] you allergies." The podcast has racked up nearly 2 million views on YouTube. Likewise, Children's Health Defense, the rabid anti-vaccine organization Kennedy created in 2018, has also made wild claims about the safety of aluminum adjuvants. That includes linking it to autism, despite that many high-quality scientific studies have found no link between any vaccines and autism.

While anti-vaccine advocates like Kennedy routinely dismiss and attack the plethora of studies that do not support their dangerous claims, the new study should reassure any hesitant parents.

Source: https://poorlydrawnlines.com/comic/wizard/