HP has purchased Poly, the company formerly known as Plantronics, for $3.3 billion. “HP Inc sees the future of its business as one supporting a workforce partially based at home and partially in the office, and appears to have bought office telecom giant Poly for that reason,” reports The Register. From the report: Formerly known as Plantronics, Poly changed its name shortly after it acquired Polycom in 2018. HP didn’t mention in its acquisition announcement whether or not it would keep the Poly brand separate, but it’s still early: the deal is not expected to close until the end of the 2022 calendar year. HP described the $3.3 billion purchase ($40 per share) as a bid to refocus its portfolio on growth and take advantage of what it said is a massive growth opportunity due to the likely permanence of hybrid work.

Plantronics and Polycom have long had a considerable presence in the enterprise space, with Polycom’s and Plantronics video conferencing hardware and headsets likely familiar to people in the world of work. Plantronics itself has a history reaching back to early airline headsets and the Apollo 11 mission: It’s a Plantronics headset that relayed Neil Armstrong’s “one small step” back to Earth. The value of peripherals like headsets hasn’t declined in the years since, with HP saying the peripheral market is growing 9 percent annually and is worth $110 billion. Workforce solutions, like conference room telecom equipment, represents a $120 billion market segment that HP said is growing 8 percent yearly.

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Source: Slashdot – HP Bets Big On Future of Hybrid Work With .3 Billion Poly Buy

More students are being exposed to historical narratives through game play — but what exactly are they being taught? From a report: Analyzing video games is particularly difficult for two reasons. First, their influence is hard to track: Teachers may not even notice that the student asking why the Ottomans didn’t colonize America or what happened to Burgundy may have a view of history that was molded by Paradox games. “The student in your class that knows what Prussia is is the student that played Europa Universalis IV,” Devereaux said. And second, unlike other cultural mediums, “games are about systems; they’re about the mechanics,” Devereaux told me. Those systems and mechanics are how video games can “teach” people history. The presence of such mechanics, though, does not mean that players will necessarily understand them. “The major challenge is getting players to recognize and think explicitly about these systems,” Marion Kruse, an assistant professor of classics at the University of Cincinnati and a dedicated gamer, told me.

In my experience, Europa Universalis is particularly effective at teaching users about its systems. Playing in Spain in Europa Universalis, you’ll learn the power of a good marriage when you see that Spain is actually the result of a personal union between the crowns of Castile and Aragon. If you’re unlucky enough to choose a country in the Balkans, you will quickly understand the full force of the Ottoman invasions of Europe. Invade the Soviet Union in Hearts of Iron, Paradox’s Second World War simulator, and you’ll be reminded why Napoleon and Hitler both failed to subdue Russia: “General Frost.” The processes the player engages with teach them claims about how the world works — what The Atlantic’s Ian Bogost has called “procedural rhetoric.”

Paradox’s titles don’t take a single view of history, but each game does provide a framework for understanding a particular historical period, buoyed by a number of procedural claims. Take Europa Universalis. The game essentially simulates the story of Europe’s rise from a relative backwater to a continent that dominated the world. That means that no matter what exact course the game takes, it usually results in the consolidation of large, powerful, centralized states in Europe and their rise to global primacy. The game uses a mechanic of “institutions,” such as the printing press and the Enlightenment, which appear in a preset order at 50-year intervals, almost always in Europe, before slowly spreading around the world. Without these institutions, new technologies can be adopted only at much greater cost, meaning that over the centuries Europe slowly pulls ahead of the rest of the world technologically. The player is taught that what made Europe exceptional was the adoption of these institutions, which allowed technological growth to flourish and thereby gave European countries the advantage they used to dominate the world.

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Source: Slashdot – Kids Are Learning History From Video Games Now

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: One of the first products made using a novel animal-free egg white is now available in the United States. The unique macarons are the first to be made with an egg white protein that comes from engineered yeast, designed to be indistinguishable from what is found in chicken eggs. The Every Company, founded in 2014 under the name Clara Foods, is one of several food technology companies working to create real animal-free proteins using a method called precision fermentation. The idea behind the process is to break down certain animal products, such as milk and eggs, to their molecular components and then use microorganisms to produce those components. Earlier this year the first cow-free dairy milk using this method hit supermarket shelves in the United States. That product was created using whey proteins from engineered fungus, while other companies are working on similar dairy products using engineered yeast to produce the desired milk proteins.

The Every Company has spent the last few years focusing on using the same technique to produce chicken-free egg whites, working with engineered yeast to produce proteins found in egg whites. The company has not disclosed the specific combination of proteins used to create its final egg white product, however it is likely ovalbumin — the primary protein component in egg whites — plays a strong role in the recipe. Arturo Elizondo, CEO of Every Company, said the new egg white product functions exactly like a chicken-derived egg white. It whips, aerates and bakes in ways identical to traditional egg whites, and the company has teamed up with San Francisco-based bakery Chantal Guillon to launch the product in a line of iconic French macarons. The chicken-free egg white is the third animal-free product created by the Every Company. Its first fully commercialized product was an animal-free pepsin, launched in early 2021.

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Source: Slashdot – First Chicken-Free Egg White Product Reaches US Markets