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On the occasion of Family Literacy Day, the COMSEP organization organized a half day of stimulating activities on January 27th.

Nearly 80 people came to participate in fun activities, cooking and academic success workshops. This day was also an opportunity to establish and maintain contacts with the local community and inform families about the literacy programs available.

“At COMSEP, it is very important to celebrate this day because our organization's true mission is to encourage parents to support their children in academic success,” the organization said in a press release. By organizing fun learning activities, parents maintain or improve their own reading and writing skills, strengthen family bonds, and promote the child's acquisition of knowledge. »

(Photo courtesy of COMSEP)

Family Literacy Day was created in 1999 by ABC Life Literacy Canada to celebrate the joy of reading and learning as a family and to encourage Canadian families to devote at least 15 minutes a day to an activity that promotes literacy. “Learn”.

(Photo courtesy of COMSEP)

Founded in 1980, CPE Rhéa provides child care services to 119 children in two facilities in Montreal's Rosemont neighborhood. We are seeking a Food Manager for our 59 place facility, including 10 infants, in the Rosemont neighborhood of Montreal.

At CPE we promote management by involving employees in various working committees. In addition, we are taking a green step to become more and more environmentally conscious! Under the direction of management, the food manager ensures catering in accordance with the philosophy and guidelines of the CPE.

The Food Manager develops varied and balanced menus in consideration of the Canadian Food Guide and Early Childhood Center orientations, prepares complete meals and snacks, purchases and stores groceries, cleans and maintains dishes, utensils, equipment and workstations. He/she keeps the food inventory up to date.

Summary task description:

• Develop balanced menus according to a set budget.
• Prepare morning and afternoon meals and snacks based on standard menus;
• Ensuring good quality and preservation of food;
• Collaborate with staff on food distribution;
• Adjust the menu for children with physiological intolerance (allergy) to certain foods or with dietary restrictions;
• Maintain the kitchen daily;
• Perform any other related tasks.

Requirements:

• You have a MAPAQ recognized certification in Hygiene and Food Safety and: o Either a Professional Studies Diploma (DEP) in Hospitality or an equivalent qualification.

o Three (3) years of cooking experience in a commercial or institutional setting.

Required properties:

• ability to work in a team;
• Initiative, organization, creativity and flexibility.
• Enjoy dealing with children
• Knowledge of the nutritional needs of children ages 0 to 5 years is an advantage
• Professional experience in the CPE area is an advantage

Salary : According to the scale established by the MFA

Work schedule: From 7:00 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., 5 days/week

Input function : As quickly as possible

The discovery of an incoming asteroid by experienced asteroid hunter Sárneczky led to a coordinated global response, culminating in the successful observation of the impact of asteroid 2024 BX1 near Berlin. This event highlights advances in space surveillance technology and the value of international cooperation. Photo credit: Issues.fr.com

• On January 20, 2024, astronomer Krisztián Sárneczky discovered an asteroid on an imminent collision course with Earth.
• A few hours later, it hit our planet's atmosphere 50 km west of Berlin and created a breathtaking fireball.
• Named “2024 BX1,” it is the eighth asteroid discovered by humanity before the impact – and the third discovered by Sárneczky.

Discovery of asteroid 2024 BX1

It was on Saturday, January 20, at 10:48 p.m. CET when experienced asteroid hunter Sárneczky discovered a new asteroid using the 60 cm Schmidt Telescope at the Piszkéstető mountain station, part of the Konkoly Observatory in Hungary.

He immediately sent his data on the asteroid's trajectory to the Minor Planet Center, but with only three initial observations it was impossible to say for sure whether it was on a collision course with Earth.

However, Sárneczky continued to track the asteroid and a few minutes later shared four more observations that clearly indicated a 100 percent probability of an imminent impact.

The final discovery of asteroid 2024 BX1 (originally known as Sar2736 before impact) by Luca Buzzi of the Schiaparelli Observatory in Italy. Recording began on January 20, 2024 at 00:24:55 UTC. The asteroid moves upward from the center of the image and begins to disappear as it enters Earth's shadow. Photo credit: L. Buzzi, GV Schiaparelli Observatory

Global response and impact

Automated impact monitoring systems around the world, including ESA's Meerkat, responded to this new data, springing into action and alerting astronomers and asteroid experts.

Sárneczky continued to make and report his observations, and he was soon joined by others in Europe. More than a dozen observatories focused on the incoming object. With their help, it soon became clear that the small, one-meter-wide asteroid would impact Earth in less than two hours, about 50 km west of Berlin, Germany.

Predicted impact location and time calculated by ESA's upcoming Meerkat impact warning system from the first 14 observations of the object Sar2736 (later named asteroid 2024 BX1). Meerkats update their ratings as they receive new sightings. Image credit: ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Asteroids of this size hit Earth on average every two weeks. They don't pose much of a threat and most are never discovered. But they can help us understand how many small asteroids exist, and we can study the fireballs they produce to determine what they're made of – if we catch them on camera.

Fortunately, large asteroids several kilometers in diameter are much easier to detect and are relatively rare. The vast majority of near-Earth asteroids that would cause devastating damage if they hit our planet have already been spotted, and we don't know that any of them will collide with our planet for at least the next hundred years.

ESA's Gaia spacecraft maps more than 150,000 asteroid orbits. Image credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO, Thanks: Stefan Jordan, Toni Sagristà, Paolo Tanga; Gaia Sky (developed by Toni Sagristà); Gaia DR3 data (https://www.archives.esac.esa.int/gaia)

The event and its meaning

As Saturday evening turned into Sunday morning, astronomers continued to track asteroid 2024 BX1 until it entered Earth's shadow and disappeared from view at 1:25 a.m. ET.

The observers held their breath, but they didn't have to wait long. Minutes later, at 01:32 CET, 2024 BX1 hit Earth's atmosphere, leaving an explosive trail in the night sky. Many people in the Berlin area and throughout Central Europe were able to witness the fireball and a handful of people and automated camera systems even managed to record it.

Late in the evening of January 20, 2024, astronomer Krisztián Sárneczky discovered an asteroid on an imminent collision course with Earth. A few hours later, it hit our planet's atmosphere 50 km west of Berlin and created this amazing fireball at 01:32 a.m. CET on Sunday, January 21st. It was later named 2024 BX1 and is only the eighth asteroid discovered by humanity before the impact. Thanks to the rapid response and information sharing from the asteroid and terrestrial fireball communities, including ESA's Near Earth Object Coordination Center, many people were able to see and record this spectacular spectacle, even though it took place just hours in advance in the middle of the night. This video was captured by the AllSky7 network. Photo credit: ALLSKY7 / Sirko Molau – AMS16 Ketzuer

Only eight asteroids were discovered before they hit Earth's atmosphere. The first of these discoveries took place in 2008, four have been discovered in the last two years alone. As humanity's ability to detect smaller space objects improves, this number is likely to increase exponentially in the coming years.

In the three hours between discovery and impact, around 180 observations were transmitted to the Minor Planet Center, including those from ESA's Near-Earth Object Coordination Center in Tenerife, Spain.

Visualization of the trajectory and impact of asteroid 2024 BX1 on January 21, 2024, created using the Flyby visualization tool from ESA's Near-Earth Object Coordination Center. Image credit: ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Thanks to the rapid response and information sharing of the asteroid and fireball communities on Earth, many people were able to see and record this spectacular spectacle, even though it occurred only a few hours in advance and in the middle of the night.

The hunt is now on for potential meteorites that survived the fiery journey through the atmosphere and reached the ground.

For more on this story, see Small Asteroid Discovered on Imminent Collision Course with Earth.

By Le Figaro Services

Published 1 minute ago, updated 1 minute ago

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Shawn Miller /Science of the Whole Environment An artificial shell is now fashionable for hermit crabs

Shawn Miller /Science of the Whole Environment

An artificial shell is now fashionable for hermit crabs

ENVIRONMENT – Hermit crabs are known for their magnificent shells, which they adopted from other species. But according to a study published Jan. 25 in Science of the Total Environment, these crustaceans now have a new hiding place: the plastic bits that litter the ocean floor.

According to an estimate by the European Commission, between 5 and 13 million tonnes of plastic end up in the oceans every year. With increasing marine pollution, these animals had to cope.

In photos shared on social networks and special underwater photography sites, scientists discovered 386 specimens showing this new habit. Ten of 16 species of terrestrial hermit crabs are beginning to replace their shells with plastic parts, particularly bottle caps.

From the shell to the plastic

Unlike other crustaceans, hermit crabs have a soft belly that is vulnerable to the sun and other animals. To protect themselves, they then hide this body part in a shell that they stole from another animal and which they change as their body grows.

Science of the entire environment

The hermit crab selects debris to build a brand new shell

Given the decline in the number of molluscs and therefore the number of shells available, hermit crabs have found an equally valid and beneficial option: a shelter made of plastic, which is easier to find given the amount of waste in our seas. According to experts, plastic items are also more convenient and easier to transport. This proves to be a very effective strategy for escaping predators: hermit crabs can quickly hide in their artificial shells and camouflage themselves among the debris on the seabed.

Corks, a seduction technique

The cover doesn't just have the function of a shelter. Men actually use this outfit to strut in front of women. When mating, they use this criterion to select their mate based on size and other factors that indicate the male's fertility. Dressing with a clearly visible and larger plastic cap could then be a completely new seduction technique developed by men.

Science of the entire environment

The hermit crab selects debris to build a brand new shell

This adaptability that we are increasingly observing in animals is not only positive. When a hermit crab dies, it sends out olfactory signals to indicate that it is leaving its shell for others to use. However, plastic materials in the sea emit the same chemical that easily attracts crustaceans. But what awaits them is often a tragic end. According to a study published in 2020, 570,000 crabs die each year stuck in debris on tropical islands looking for a new home.

Scientists are also concerned about the impact these new practices could have on the evolution of the hermit crab species. Although they have adapted to the new environment, plastic materials have a direct impact on the animal's reproduction. We will then have to wait for further studies to estimate the extent of the consequences.

See also on HuffPost:

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A team at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) has developed an AI system that can mimic a person's writing style based on a few paragraphs of the original letter. Researchers who presented initial results of their research in 2021 at the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) recently received a patent for the tool from the US Patent and Trademark Office.

The team presenting “Handwriting Transformers” included Assistant Professor of Computer Vision Rao Muhammad Anwer, Associate Professor of Computer Science Vison Salman Khan, Associate Head of the Department of Computer Vision and Professor of Computer Vision Fahad Shahbaz Khan, and Ankan Kumar Bhunia .

Previous research has relied on generative adversarial networks (GANs). However, although these approaches can capture an author's general style, such as the direction of writing or the width of the strokes that make up letters, they encounter two major problems.

First, the connection between style and content is weak, as these features are treated separately and merged together, resulting in a lack of explicit interconnection at the character level. On the other hand, they do not explicitly encode local stylistic patterns such as character style and ligatures, which can be found, for example, in the word “heart” or in the Latin phrase “ex aequo”.

To overcome these limitations, the researchers adopted a novel approach using Vision Transformers, neural networks designed for computer vision tasks.

Fahad Khan explains:

“To imitate a person's writing style, we want to look at the entire text and only then do we begin to understand how the author linked the characters, how the author linked the letters or words with spaces.” All of these tasks require some kind global receptive field, which is not easy with convolutional neural networks. We recognized this gap in existing methods and adopted this transformer-based method.”

The scientists compared their approach to generating handwritten text images, HWT (Handwriting Transformers), with two other handwriting generation technologies. They asked 100 people to rate the text generated by the different models. In 81% of cases, they preferred HWT over other text generators.

They also showed them the original text and the generated one, the participants could not distinguish between the two, confirming the performance of the AI ​​system.

Although this advance paves the way for promising applications, researchers are aware of the ethical implications associated with their technology and warn of the potential danger of counterfeiting and other abuses. They emphasize the need to take countermeasures as part of a responsible operation.

Rao Muhammad Anwer explains:

“We are very cautious about this as there could be misuse. Handwriting represents a person’s identity, so we think about it carefully before using it.”.

Article references: Blog MBZUAI

Authors:

Rao Muhammad Anwer, Vison Salman Khan, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Ankan Kumar Bhunia