All posts tagged: Harder

Europe races to make it harder for Trump to rattle NATO – POLITICO

Europe races to make it harder for Trump to rattle NATO – POLITICO

Published by Sam Flores

Swedish Defense Minister Pål Jonson warned against inserting a “European preference” into EU defense procurement rules. “My responsibility, first and foremost, is to get weapons in the hands of these warfighters,” Jonson said on Saturday. “Sometimes that can be from Europeans, sometimes it can be from the Americans or somewhere it can be from Asia.” Jonson’s warning landed weeks after Thomas DiNanno, the U.S. under secretary of state for arms control, traveled to Poland, Romania and Estonia. The State Department said his Warsaw meetings with U.S. industry representatives included discussions on “EU defense protectionism” and the “America First Arms Transfer Strategy.” Romanian Foreign Minister Oana Țoiu also framed the balance between equipping troops and building up local defense industries. “Localization was very important, investment in jobs at home was very important,” she said on Saturday. But Bucharest also wants to “create the space to advance in the engagement with the United States,” she said, adding that Romania’s procurement plan included “more than $2 billion” of U.S. kit. That need to calibrate domestic interests against keeping …

The case for water plumes on Europa just got much harder to make

The case for water plumes on Europa just got much harder to make

Published by Jenni Sidey

Europa’s faint glow in ultraviolet light once looked like a possible water plume punching through ice. After 14 years of Hubble data, that signal now looks far less certain. Meanwhile, a different picture of the moon’s escaping hydrogen atmosphere comes into sharper view. Europa has long tempted scientists with the same question. If a salty ocean lies beneath its ice, can any of that buried water break through to space? For a time, one set of Hubble observations seemed to hint that the answer might be yes. A bright patch seen in ultraviolet light near the moon’s limb was interpreted in 2014 as possible evidence of a faint water vapor plume. Now, after a much broader reanalysis of Europa observations from 1999 and 2012 through 2020, that case has weakened sharply. “The evidence for water vapor plumes on Europa isn’t as strong as we first understood it,” Southwest Research Institute scientist Kurt Retherford said. Retherford was part of the team behind the earlier plume claim and is also an author of the new reanalysis. The …

Read Harder This AAPI Heritage Month

Read Harder This AAPI Heritage Month

Published by José Betancourt

May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month! To celebrate, I’ve curated a list of fantastic books by AAPI authors that also check off tasks on the 2026 Read Harder Challenge. We have a nonbinary fantasy series, an anti-colonialist gothic novel, a Chinese American romantasy book, a Native Hawaiian picture book, and more to choose from. Of course, that doesn’t even scratch the surface of all the AAPI books worth reading this month and every month. Scroll to the end of this list to find links to even more recommendations. We want to hear from you! As we move through 2026, we want to make sure Book Riot remains your go-to destination for all things bookish. Whether you’re here for the curated recommendations, latest industry news, or deep dives into reading culture, your feedback informs our media kit and how we represent this community. It will also shape our content and make Book Riot a place you want to be. To show our appreciation for your time, everyone who completes the survey will be entered …

Selective colleges try harder to get rural students to attend : NPR

Selective colleges try harder to get rural students to attend : NPR

Published by Sam Flores

Admitted students and their families, including some from rural areas, take a tour of the Amherst College campus as they decide whether or not to enroll. Lucy Lu/The Hechinger Report hide caption toggle caption Lucy Lu/The Hechinger Report AMHERST, Mass. — Crowding around an Amherst College campus fire pit, earnest-looking high school seniors offered fire-building suggestions as intently as if they were taking a final exam. “This is our test of how rural you are,” the college’s assistant dean of admissions, Nathan Grove, joked before he finally got the neatly stacked logs to ignite so the group could make s’mores: “how good you are at making a fire.” The occasion was a two-day visit to encourage admitted applicants to enroll — including this particular group. These students hail from rural places where top-ranked private colleges like Amherst rarely used to recruit. This gathering around the fire pit was an attempt to make them feel welcome. “I was frankly sort of shocked that they cared about rural students,” said Jack Hancock, a high school senior from …

Ousting Keir Starmer is harder than it looks – party rules mean he can choose to keep fighting

Ousting Keir Starmer is harder than it looks – party rules mean he can choose to keep fighting

Published by Sam Flores

Between 2016 and 2024 the UK saw four changes of prime minister by way of a party leadership contest. In that time, even casual observers became familiar with the dramatic process that the Conservative Party uses to topple one leader and select another. Secret letters to the 1922 Committee, the dramatic confidence votes, and then two selected in a dog-eat-dog process to face the final vote by members. What may be about to happen in the Labour Party will be different in important respects. If the Conservative Party is historically a body with its head in parliament and limbs extended into the country, Labour is more like a mountain with only its peak protruding into the parliamentary arena. Even today, Labour has a deep institutional culture and a set of rules that anchor the legitimacy of the leader in the broader party membership as much as in parliament. In the past, Labour’s systems for selecting its leader were as complex as the structure of the party itself. Rules were repeatedly redrawn in factional conflicts between …

Monday Microsofty 78: Card Sharks That Bite Harder

Monday Microsofty 78: Card Sharks That Bite Harder

Published by Jenni Sidey

If you go to a gambling establishment and play the one-armed bandit, the outcome for each of your turns is determined by computer software. To write good code for that, you need to know how to generate random numbers. I once consulted for a gaming establishment  involved in a lawsuit. I examined the software for a number of machines and became an expert in generating them. But interestingly, computer code can’t generate truly random numbers. The best it can do is generate pseudo-random numbers. To make sure that the pseudo-random number generator works, those who write software for gambling or sweepstakes must have their code analyzed by a third party to make sure that the pseudo-random number generator is working accurately. Here’s the transcript. To win at gambling, you need probability on your side. In pure chance games like roulette, craps, and one-armed bandits, the house edge guarantees you’ll lose over time. In probability theory, this is guaranteed by the Law of Large Numbers. That’s right. It’s the law: You lose. On the other hand, …

How helping your rivals makes you harder to beat

How helping your rivals makes you harder to beat

Published by Jenni Sidey

On the morning of May 23, 1925, a 6.8-magnitude earthquake struck the small hot spring town of Kinosaki, near the coast of the Sea of Japan. The timing was catastrophic. It was late morning, and nearly every household in the village was cooking lunch over an open flame. Within minutes, fires leapt from kitchen to kitchen across the dense wooden architecture, consuming everything. By the time the ground stopped shaking and the fires burned out, 283 people were dead and virtually every building in Kinosaki was rubble. After the earthquake, the surviving ryokan (inn) owners sat down together — competitors, all of them — and held over 100 meetings to decide, collectively, how to rebuild. What emerged from those meetings was a radical idea. The owners agreed to treat the entire town as a single inn. Each ryokan would function as a “room.” The streets would be the hallways, and the public bathhouses would be shared amenities, belonging to no single business but to the town as a whole.  They adopted a guiding philosophy and …

3 Ways That Self-Awarness Can Make Life Feel Harder

3 Ways That Self-Awarness Can Make Life Feel Harder

Published by Jenni Sidey

Self-awareness is portrayed as a hallmark of emotional intelligence with the underlying promise that the more you understand yourself, the better your life becomes. And to a large extent, that holds true. Those who are self-aware tend to have better emotional regulation skills, stronger relationships, and are more thoughtful decision-makers. But there is a different side to this virtue that is discussed far less often. When self-awareness becomes unusually high, it can introduce psychological complexities that make everyday life feel heavier rather than lighter. The same capacity that allows you to reflect deeply on your inner world can also amplify doubt and emotional sensitivity, leading to persistent self-questioning. This makes insight powerful but not always comfortable. Like many psychological strengths, self-awareness can come with unexpected trade-offs. Here are three of them. 1. Self-Aware People Notice Emotional Patterns That Others Easily Ignore There is a certain degree of automaticity with which people move through their emotional lives. They feel irritated, sad, or anxious without necessarily feeling the need to dissect where those feelings come from or …

AI is flooding peer review, and editors say it’s making science harder to judge

AI is flooding peer review, and editors say it’s making science harder to judge

Published by Jenni Sidey

The pileup began quietly, then turned into something journal editors could no longer ignore. At Organization Science, one of the leading journals in management research, submissions jumped 42% after ChatGPT arrived in late 2022. That alone might have looked like a burst of productivity. But the journal’s editors say the extra papers were not, on average, better papers. Many were harder to read, more stuffed with jargon, and less likely to survive the review process. A new analysis from the journal’s AI Task Force lays out what the editors have been seeing across the peer review pipeline. Drawing on 6,957 initial submissions and 10,389 text-entry reviews handled between January 2021 and February 2026, the team found that heavier AI use tracked with weaker prose, higher rejection rates, and a growing burden on the unpaid academics who keep the system running. The numbers suggest a problem bigger than awkward phrasing. The same tools that can speed up writing are also colliding with an academic culture that often rewards output more than care. Monthly Submission Volume at …