Latest news with #Comet
Daily Record
6 hours ago
- Sport
- Daily Record
SFA's amateur system risks another season of chaos for youth football
When the Scottish FA's Comet system crashed last year, you'd have thought it would have acted as ample warning against a repeat. Hundreds of matches were called off and a generation of volunteers were left in a state of frustration over their dealings with the SFA's complex computer registrations system. Several sources last year spelled out that Comet was overly complicated for the grassroots game. And too many people were stuck for too long in a 'computer says no' death loop. But roll on 12 months and with the new season six weeks away the computer pile-up is happening again with Protecting Vulnerable Groups (PVG) checks. We can't overstate the importance of keeping kids safe but after last year's issues, there can be no excuse for another round of infuriating delays, exacerbated by the lack of any human helpline to streamline the process. Football is a moneymaker at the higher levels. And the SFA, which governs our national game, is not short of a few bob, with millions coming in via grant funding before any other revenue is even added up. That's why there is no excuse for failing to see this coming. Join the Daily Record WhatsApp community! Get the latest news sent straight to your messages by joining our WhatsApp community today. You'll receive daily updates on breaking news as well as the top headlines across Scotland. No one will be able to see who is signed up and no one can send messages except the Daily Record team. All you have to do is click here if you're on mobile, select 'Join Community' and you're in! If you're on a desktop, simply scan the QR code above with your phone and click 'Join Community'. We also treat our community members to special offers, promotions, and adverts from us and our partners. If you don't like our community, you can check out any time you like. To leave our community click on the name at the top of your screen and choose 'exit group'. If you're curious, you can read our Privacy Notice. The SYFA needs a team of professional administrators that can master any system or database required to run the game. Professionals must be available at the end of a phone to educate the officials of clubs who give up their own free time to bring youngsters into the game. And the SFA needs to sort this out well before next summer – or they will score a hat-trick of own goals that no one wants to see. Welcome back, Lewis Capaldi Lewis Capaldi's return to music with an unannounced performance at Glastonbury showed just how much he has been missed. The singer had been on an extended break from music since 2023 due to his mental health struggles. The break had followed a concert on the same Pyramid Stage two years ago, when his voice 'packed in' and fans had to help him finish his biggest hit, Someone You Loved. Everyone understood Lewis, who suffers from anxiety and Tourette's, needed to put his health first. It was wonderful to see him once more engaging with his fans in his modest way, despite his incredible talent. He's also back with a new single that deals head on with his troubles and highlights once again what a special talent he is.
Daily Record
10 hours ago
- Sport
- Daily Record
SFA's amatuer system risks another season of chaos for youth football
When the Scottish FA's Comet system crashed last year, you'd have thought it would have acted as ample warning against a repeat. Hundreds of matches were called off and a generation of volunteers were left in a state of frustration over their dealings with the SFA's complex computer registrations system. Several sources last year spelled out that Comet was overly complicated for the grassroots game. And too many people were stuck for too long in a 'computer says no' death loop. But roll on 12 months and with the new season six weeks away the computer pile-up is happening again with Protecting Vulnerable Groups (PVG) checks. We can't overstate the importance of keeping kids safe but after last year's issues, there can be no excuse for another round of infuriating delays, exacerbated by the lack of any human helpline to streamline the process. Football is a moneymaker at the higher levels. And the SFA, which governs our national game, is not short of a few bob, with millions coming in via grant funding before any other revenue is even added up. That's why there is no excuse for failing to see this coming. Join the Daily Record WhatsApp community! Get the latest news sent straight to your messages by joining our WhatsApp community today. You'll receive daily updates on breaking news as well as the top headlines across Scotland. No one will be able to see who is signed up and no one can send messages except the Daily Record team. All you have to do is click here if you're on mobile, select 'Join Community' and you're in! If you're on a desktop, simply scan the QR code above with your phone and click 'Join Community'. We also treat our community members to special offers, promotions, and adverts from us and our partners. If you don't like our community, you can check out any time you like. To leave our community click on the name at the top of your screen and choose 'exit group'. If you're curious, you can read our Privacy Notice. The SYFA needs a team of professional administrators that can master any system or database required to run the game. Professionals must be available at the end of a phone to educate the officials of clubs who give up their own free time to bring youngsters into the game. And the SFA needs to sort this out well before next summer – or they will score a hat-trick of own goals that no one wants to see. Welcome back, Lewis Capaldi Lewis Capaldi's return to music with an unannounced performance at Glastonbury showed just how much he has been missed. The singer had been on an extended break from music since 2023 due to his mental health struggles. The break had followed a concert on the same Pyramid Stage two years ago, when his voice 'packed in' and fans had to help him finish his biggest hit, Someone You Loved. Everyone understood Lewis, who suffers from anxiety and Tourette's, needed to put his health first. It was wonderful to see him once more engaging with his fans in his modest way, despite his incredible talent. He's also back with a new single that deals head on with his troubles and highlights once again what a special talent he is.
Daily Record
10 hours ago
- Sport
- Daily Record
Kids football clubs facing more chaos as coaches in uproar over admin backlog
After huge delays last year with Comet computer software another wave of delays hits the SFA and its youth affiliate, which coaches believe may threaten kids' matches Kids' football is facing another summer of chaos that could stop youngsters playing the beautiful game. Coaches are not being vetted quick enough to be given clearance to work with children - and time is running out. It has led to a huge backlog of adults waiting to be given the green light to coach kids. One fed up coach told us there was no way enough checks would be done in time and said: 'It's a shambles.' The Scottish Football Association has been forced to fund emergency staff to deal with a two-month backlog in processing Protecting Vulnerable Groups (PVG) applications for all adults dealing with kids. PVG clearance must be in place by July 1, otherwise any club or individual will be breaching new safeguarding legislation. The Daily Record can reveal that the latest registrations debacle has led the SFA to announce that a review of the running of its affiliate body, the Scottish Youth Football Association, will now be carried out. A consultancy firm is likely to be appointed in coming weeks, at the agreement of both organisations, which will probe how huge administration backlogs have severely hampered youth football for two seasons in a row. It is understood that some SYFA officials feel bitterly aggrieved at a funding gap, while the SFA board has been angered at the reputational damage caused by the disruption of a sport that involves more than 80,000 players, more than 15,000 coaches and many more from supportive families. The SFA has said the SYFA is now on 'special measures' until the review takes place. One coach said: 'It's hard to see how all the leagues will be up and running by August at this rate. 'We are angry about this because the Comet system last year was a nightmare, far too complex for grassroots teams and volunteer administrators and it definitely led to people leaving the game. 'This latest admin shambles proves that more cash needs to be put into youth football. The SYFA has 15,000 coaches and a handful of staff to deal with this stuff, with no-one to take a phone call. It's a shambles.' The Daily Record told last year of the problems faced by Darren Knight, founder of the Wallyford Rose club, who young team nearly folded due to issues with the Comet system. Darren said he submitted PVG applications around two months ago and is still awaiting clearance. He said: 'We have two approved coaches, which means we will still be able to function, but, in the end, our club was so successful last year we are starting up another team. 'If the PVG clearance doesn't come in time that would be scuppered. But we are not panicking yet and hope it gets processed in time.' To raise awareness, Disclosure Scotland has launched a major advertising campaign, urging anyone in a regulated role to ensure they are fully PVG registered before the deadline. The safeguarding body is working in conjunction with the SYFA, which processes applications via the much maligned Comet system, to clear the backlog. The Daily Record last year told of widespread fury as the Scottish Football Association's complex new Comet computer system wreaked havoc, leading to many games being postponed and some coaches saying they were giving up. Coaches have again contacted us to rage about the many hours they have spent trying to get volunteers registered. The rush for teams to get compliant overwhelmed the threadbare paid staff at the SYFA, causing the two-month backlog. SFA and SYFA at loggerheads over funding - review may pave way for reform The Record's latest revelations on a footie admin fiasco sheds light on a rift between the SFA and affiliate SYFA. The coming review will seek to examine what has gone wrong in the last two seasons with the Comet delays and now the PVG application pile-up. But it will also look at the amount of cash being fed by the SFA into its youth body, where there is a feeling that too much strain is being heaped on volunteer staff. The appointment of Scott Robertson as SYFA chairman, who has spoken publicly of reforming the organisation, was accompanied by calls from within for an independent review of its governance. The latest registration log-jam has led the SFA to get ahead of the bad news. A source at the organisation said: 'The SFA board agreed to the request for financial support for the PVG admin to help clear the backlog, on the proviso that they undertake an independent investigation into how it's run. They have effectively put the SYFA on special measures. 'There has been a general concern over the corporate governance of the organization. 'The SFA wants to get a bit closer to the financial planning and decision making and they believe an independent review will examine how they operate as a body and what steps need to be taken within the organisation. 'As well as the financial part of it will be an independent review into the SYFA. The source added: 'There is a general feeling that the all is not well at the SYFA at board level. 'If you've got an affiliated body that signs up to your articles, you need to know that they're actually coming good on it. 'The SFA wants to get a closer handle on the governance and how the organisation operates. 'The last time around, Scottish FA got the blame for an affiliate not doing its job properly. There's been a few expressions of concern, and the SYFA board themselves have agreed to an independent review of operations.' 'As a board, we can't risk this descending into the same situation as last time. So this is, this is what we propose doing. And in fairness, they seemed receptive to it.' One coach with many years of experience with a prominent club, said the latest hold-up was the last straw and he's quitting the game. The coach said: 'We've been tearing our hair out because the computer system just keeps on rejecting applications on administration errors but offer no solutions or contact details to resolve. 'The reality is that we get no calls back from the SYFA because they have no professional staff assigned to deal with this fiasco.' The coach said that applications had been returned due to confusion over whether PVG applications could be transferred form one club to another. He said: 'With the Comet system we can't work out how we get out of the 'computer says no' loop and standard emails from the SYFA don't help us find a solution. 'What we need is a helpline to speak to a human being who can find solutions not a computer system that issues stock responses which basically say 'computer says no, try again'.' He added: 'After 10 years of this type of nonsense I'm stopping down as a committee member and coach as it's impossible to work under this type of incompetence.' Another grassroots official said: 'This is so reminiscent of the Comet fiasco last year, where volunteers got stick on their computers for days on end and could never get a human being to sort things out for them.' Officials have told us how devised workarounds by placing PVG-registered volunteers in dual roles, as they wait for other individuals to get their own clearance after the legal deadline. A SYFA spokesperson said: 'We fully understand the frustrations of our members around the delay in processing PVG applications. 'With around 15,000 volunteer coaches in our game and more joining daily, it is a mammoth undertaking. In recent weeks, we have advertised, interviewed, and recruited an additional staff member to focus solely on tackling the backlog. 'The Scottish FA has, just last week, agreed to match our commitment and will fund a second PVG admin assistant for six months. 'We hope to reduce the backlog significantly with two new full-time people dedicated to processing PVG's. 'In addition, we will also look at the PVG process and whether this can be streamlined. In the meantime, we are working on issuing a step-by-step guide for our members.' A spokesperson for the SFA said: 'SYFA initially wrote to us requesting support to clear their backlog 'The Scottish FA has initiated special measures to provide funding support to clear PVG backlog, to support the operations and initiate the review.' From April 1 this year, changes to the Disclosure (Scotland) Act 2020 meant anyone in contact with or communicating with children without a PVG would be committing a criminal offence, as would the organisation they operate within. A three month period of grace takes the deadline to July 1 - meaning any teams with coaches stuck in an admin log-jam may be affected.
Time Magazine
21 hours ago
- Science
- Time Magazine
Meteor Fragments Hit the Southeast U.S. Here's What to Know
The inner solar system is a lot calmer than it was 4 billion years ago, during what's known as the heavy bombardment period. Over the course of that violent stretch, which lasted about 500 million years, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and the moon were regularly pounded by asteroids, meteors, and other cosmic ordnance, many of the objects as big as the six-mile-wide rock that wiped out the dinosaurs. Things have gotten a lot quieter since then, but that's not to say everything has gone entirely still. Earth still lives inside a shooting gallery, with thousands of objects—totaling about 48.5 tons per year, according to NASA—entering the atmosphere. Yesterday, one of those space boulders exploded in the skies over Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina at 11:51 a.m EDT, according to the National Weather Service (NWS). The brilliant flash, which was accompanied by a sonic boom that many mistook for an earthquake, resulted in hundreds of calls and posts to the American Meteor Society (AMS), NASA's recommended organization for reporting meteoric fireballs. In Henry County, Ga., one house was struck by debris that broke through the roof and landed inside the residence. There were no reported injuries. 'The Henry County Emergency Management Agency [EMA] passed along to us that a citizen reported that a 'rock' fell through their ceiling around the time of the reports of the 'earthquake,'' the NWS said in a Facebook post. 'Henry County EMA also reported that the object broke through the roof, then the ceiling, before cracking the laminate on the floor and stopping.' The possibility of something tumbling from the skies this week was not entirely unexpected. Yesterday's event occurred during the ongoing Bootid meteor shower, which happens once every 6.37 years, when Earth passes through the remnants of the tail of Comet 7P/Pons-Winnecke. The Bootid is just one of dozens of known showers the AMS lists on its website. Many of those events produce only a fine mist of meteor fragments, visible only at night in dark conditions away from city lights, and commonly called shooting stars. Yesterday's rock was of a decidedly greater caliber, one big enough to be classified as a bolide, a meteor with enough mass to cause a bright flash and a sonic boom as it slams into the atmosphere, but too small for most of it to reach the ground without being incinerated first. To qualify as a bolide, an incoming meteor must reach the brightness of Venus, which, like the moon, is often visible in the daytime sky. A few dozen bolides occur each year, according to NASA. The most explosive recent bolide event occurred over Chelyabinsk, Russia, on Feb. 15, 2013, when an object estimated to have measured about 65 ft., detonated in the atmosphere, injuring nearly 1,500 people and damaging 7,200 buildings. Modern history's biggest bolide also struck Russia, in the celebrated Tunguska event of 1908, when a 350-ft. meteor flattened 830 sq. mi. of forest land. Lesser meteoric fireworks are much, much more common than bolides. According to the AMS, several thousand small fireballs erupt in the atmosphere every day, but 'the vast majority of these,' the organization says, 'occur over the oceans and uninhabited regions, and a good many are masked by daylight.' Notwithstanding the Henry County house that got hit by the recent bolide, the odds of any one spot—or any one person—being struck by space debris are vanishingly small. Barely 5% of objects that enter the atmosphere survive the fires of entry and reach the surface. Roughly 70% of that surface is ocean and much of the rest is desert or other sparsely inhabited terrain. Finally, most of the meteorites that do strike the planet are, by the time of impact, micrometeorites—too small to do any damage at all. In all of known human history, in fact, there is only one person who is believed to have been killed by a meteorite—an Indian bus driver who was struck while walking on the campus of an engineering college in the state of Tamil Nadu on Feb. 6, 2016. That effectively puts your odds of meeting the same fate as one in the total number of human beings who have walked the Earth since the dawn of homo sapiens roughly 300,000 years ago. That's not to say there haven't been close calls. On May 1, 1860, a horse was killed by a meteorite strike in Concord, Ohio. In 1954, an Alabama woman—whose picture was published and story was told in the Dec. 13, 1954 issue of LIFE magazine—sustained severe bruising to her hand and side when a 10 lb. meteorite crashed through her roof while she lay napping on her sofa. Put yesterday's event in the category of lightning strikes or shark bites—theoretically possible, highly improbable, one more thing you can take off your worry list.
Time of India
3 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
Android is currently optimised for…: Why Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas wants Google to rebuild its operating system
Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas wants Google to rebuild its Android operating system. He noted that Android is more optimised for the tech giant's ad-driven business model than for enabling AI-powered experiences for smartphone users. Srinivas took to the social media platform X (earlier Twitter) to share his opinion that highlights a potential conflict as AI assistants become more common in smartphones. With this post, he questions whether current platforms, particularly those tied to advertising like Android, can evolve into intelligent, agentic systems that will primarily serve users. Srinivas questions whether Android's current priorities are aligned with the emerging era of AI agents , which are designed to interact proactively with users. What Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas said about Android In his X post, Srinivas wrote: 'Android needs to be rebuilt for AI. It's currently optimised for preserving Google's ad business rather than a truly agentic OS.' With this post, he suggests that to achieve significant advancements in AI-first mobile computing, Google may need to make some fundamental changes to the operating system itself, rather than merely adding AI features as layers. This suggestion comes as Perplexity develops Comet, an AI browser that will compete with Google by offering query responses with inline citations. This criticism comes at a time when Google is under increasing pressure on several fronts. According to a recent report by Bloomberg, Apple executives have internally discussed the possibility of acquiring Perplexity AI, with M&A chief Adrian Perica reportedly raising the idea with senior leaders, including services head Eddy Cue. Recently, Srinivas also suggested that Google's key weakness lies in its heavy reliance on high-margin search advertising , which remains far more profitable than its other businesses, like YouTube, cloud services, or AI initiatives. At the recently held Sohn Investment Conference, Srinivas explained how the Android-maker is trapped by its success. He noted, 'This is the first time in two decades that Google is extremely vulnerable.'
