Month: July 2021

Enlarge / Netflix as a gaming publisher: We know it's happening. But we have many, many questions as to what shape its service will take. (credit: Getty Images | Aurich Lawson)

Netflix's growing fascination with video games will soon explode in the form of a full-fledged game-publishing arm.

While Netflix has yet to post its own announcement about the initiative, the streaming-video provider has confirmed to Ars Technica that it has hired a former EA and Oculus exec to lead a Netflix game-publishing team.

The newly hired exec is Mike Verdu, who most recently worked in developer relations with Facebook's Oculus VR team (his public profile still says that's his current job). He has worked in game development and publishing since the early '90s, and his first studio, Legend Entertainment, was eventually acquired by GT Interactive.

Enlarge / A person gets a sticker after getting a Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. (credit: Getty | Joe Raedle)

Leading public health organizations and a growing number of independent health experts are coming together to push health care facilities to make COVID-19 vaccines mandatory for all health care workers. Some experts say such mandates are overdue and that failure for any health care worker to get vaccinated against the deadly pandemic coronavirus is both "unethical and appalling."

On Tuesday, seven health organizations—including the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America, the Association for Professionals in Epidemiology and Infection, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society—published a consensus statement, saying that "COVID-19 vaccination should be a condition of employment for all healthcare personnel."

Fully vaccinating health care workers have the advantage of protecting vulnerable patients, fellow health care workers, and the community overall, they write. And mandates are highly effective at getting high levels of vaccination among health care staff. For decades, many health care facilities have mandated seasonal flu vaccines to great success, they note. In the 2019-2020 flu season, health care facilities that mandated flu vaccines saw 94 percent of workers get vaccinated, while only 70 percent of health workers got vaccinated in facilities without mandates.

Enlarge / Florida Museum archaeologist Charles Cobb holds an axe head known as a celt, one of more than 80 metal objects likely from the de Soto expedition. To create this distinct shape, a Chickasaw craftsperson reworked Spanish iron to mimic traditional stone versions. (credit: Jeff Gage/Florida Museum of Natural History)

In 1540, Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto, fresh from ravaging the Inca Empire, marched onto Chickasaw lands in what’s now northern Mississippi with 600 men and hundreds of livestock. By the spring of 1541, de Soto had offended the Chickasaw so badly that they burned his camp and drove the whole Spanish expedition off their lands. Archaeologists recently unearthed evidence that people from nearby Chickasaw communities gathered up the things the fleeing Spaniards left behind and put them to use in some innovative ways.

It’s a surprisingly cool story to find buried in a paper titled “Nascent Colonialism and Heterogenous Hybridity,” but that’s academia for you.

The spoils of war

Archaeologists excavating centuries-old Chickasaw sites in an area called Stark Farms unearthed a surprising number of European-metal objects: a cannonball, a mouth harp, a bridle bit with a golden crest, and more. They also found objects which had been broken up or modified into more traditional Chickasaw tools: bits of copper shaped into beads and pendants, pieces of iron horseshoes broken and sharpened into scraping tools, and barrel bands bent, broken, and ground into sharp cutting tools called celts.