Month: September 2022

Enlarge / Dell's XPS 13 Plus clamshell laptop. (credit: Scharon Harding)

Dell's XPS 13 laptop has been a staple among Windows ultralights, typically offering decent performance for the price, extreme portability, and good looks.

Apparently, that wasn't enough for Dell, so it released the Dell XPS 13 Plus. Introduced this year (alongside a more traditional 2022 XPS 13), it's a revamped version of the XPS 13 that puts performance over everything else.

Wild design choices allow the system to support a 28 W CPU. With the 2021 XPS 13 carrying a 15 W chip and the 2022 XPS 13 supporting up to a 12 W one, this is a notable achievement. But it's also a case of function over form. To put it simply, using the XPS 13 Plus felt weird. From its tightly spaced keys and capacitive touch function row to its minimal port selection, questionable build quality, and extremely high temperatures, this machine can be frustrating to use for daily tasks.

Enlarge / Teenager playing fetch with her dog (credit: Anchiy via Getty Images)

Three years ago, Valli Fraser-Celin adopted a blonde husky mix puppy, whom she named Husk. Fraser-Celin soon started looking for ways to curb Husk’s “totally wild” behavior, she said, like stealing food from the kitchen counter and barking incessantly at strangers. Based on the advice of a YouTube trainer, Fraser-Celin started using an electronic collar, or e-collar, that delivered a small shock when Husk misbehaved, but said she felt “yucky” about it.

Fraser-Celin rethought her approach after hearing about an animal trainer who taught a grizzly bear to cooperate with medical treatment using only positive reinforcement. If that hulking animal could learn with treats and praise, she thought, why were dog trainers using prong and shock collars? “That was the catalyst into my advocacy,” said Fraser-Celin, who studied African wild dogs for her Ph.D. and now works as a remote community liaison for the Winnipeg Humane Society and advocates independently for positive reinforcement training on Instagram. “I really think that there needs to be regulations that are put into place,” she said, “based on the science and the studies that have shown the best type of training for dogs.”

Fraser-Celin is not alone. Many researchers, trainers, and veterinary and training professional organizations are advocating for greater oversight for dog training, which is largely unregulated worldwide—though they sometimes disagree on the best path of action and choose to focus on the research that reinforces their preferred approach. “Right now, it’s the wild, wild West,” said Anamarie Johnson, a psychology Ph.D. student at Arizona State University with a background in animal behavior and dog training. She recently published a study that analyzed the websites of 100 highly-rated dog trainers across the US, which found that most gave no indication whether the trainer had relevant education or certification.

Enlarge / Kate Beaton (credit: Corey Katz / Kate Beaton)

For those who paid attention to the webcomics scene of the 2010s or simply enjoy good humor writing, the name Kate Beaton is likely a familiar one. The Canadian cartoonist’s Hark a Vagrant—a dizzying mix of the literary and historical references, lack of respect for institutions that didn’t deserve any, and gleeful silliness that ran through 2018—was a staple of Best Of lists for years, whether online or in its two print collections.

Outside of that work, Beaton has created kids’ books (The Princess and the Pony and King Baby, which both won awards) and earlier this year an animated series based on one of those books: Pinecone & Pony on Apple TV+.

This week her latest project hits shelves, and it’s arguably her greatest achievement to date. Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is a memoir of her experiences working in the Athabasca oil sands in northern Alberta. It’s a serious, moving, and heartfelt piece of cartooning that is as kind as it is fearless and easily one of the most impressive graphic novels of this year, or works of any kind in the past decade.