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David Degner

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New H-1B Visas Rules Are Unaffordable

Tech Startups Say New H-1B Visas Rules Are Unaffordable Published in the Wall Street Journal New rules from the Trump administration restricting skilled foreign workers are unnerving U.S. startup hubs, as founders and investors say the limitations will hamstring their ability to recruit top-tier talent to grow their businesses.

Filed Under: Photography, Sketchbook Tagged With: Boston, economy, education, technology

How Rhode Island Reopened Schools

Physical Education class has been reorganized around no-contact sports. Some students play tossing rings while others play a modified version of dodge ball called gaga ball in the background. How Rhode Island Reopened Schools During a Pandemic For the New York Times At LaPerche Elementary School Principal Julie Dorsey takes a student’s temperature as students […]

Filed Under: Photography, Sketchbook Tagged With: Covid-19, education, elementary school, Rhode Island

Professor Ali Mohamed Zaki and the Corona Virus

A portrait of Professor Ali Mohamed Zaki in his office in CAIRO, EGYPT on March 15 . Dr. Zaki diagnosed the first patient with a strain of the Corona Virus in Saudi Arabia. He was then fired for announcing it himself, but the information was later used to help diagnose another patient in the UK.

Filed Under: Photography, Sketchbook Tagged With: Covid-19, Egypt, research

Robots learn to use their hands

Self-Supervised Correspondence in Visuomotor Policy Learning A video of the latest research by Peter Florence, Lucas Manuelli, Russ Tedrake of MIT’s CSAIL lab. It was republished by MIT. Having robots learn dexterous tasks requiring real-time hand-eye coordination is hard. Many tasks that we would consider simple, like hanging up a baseball cap on a rack, […]

Filed Under: Sketchbook, Video Tagged With: education, MIT, research, robotics, technology

Hobo Tags

In 2007 I was photographing for a month in Clarksdale, Mississippi and ran across this set of tags on the side of trains that were pulled off the main track.  They are called “streaks” if done with chalk or a grease pencil or a lumber crayon, “Tags” if done with spray paint. Sometimes they are […]

Filed Under: Photography, Sketchbook Tagged With: Clarksdale, Ethnography, Mississippi

The Best Egyptian Photographers on Instagram

There has been a surge of high quality photographers in Egypt and many of them are sharing their work on Instagram. I started with a list of 50 photographers and edited it to about 15 that I feel have something special to say about Egypt and the world through their photography.  Nariman El-Mofty – Started covering […]

Filed Under: Essays, Sketchbook Tagged With: Egypt

Chelsea, A Covid-19 Hotspot

Ambulance Ride-Along in a Covid-19 Hotspot Chelsea, Massachusetts was designated as a Covid-19 hotspot with the highest infection ratio in the state. For weeks the local ambulance services and fire-fighters work circling the Boston suburb picking up suspected cases, transferring them between hospitals and trying not to get infected themselves. These photos are from a […]

Filed Under: Photography, Sketchbook Tagged With: Covid-19, health, Massachusetts

Who still supports Morsy?

When President Morsy was removed from office by a military Junta thousands joined a month long sit-in at Rabaa al-Adawiya. State media reported that the protesters were terrorists, weapon wielding, foreign, mercenaries. These portraits are an attempt to directly photograph and quote the people I met in Rabaa al-Adawiya to decrease any distortion. Taher Gamal […]

Filed Under: Photography, Sketchbook Tagged With: coup, Egypt, politics, portraits, revolution, supporters

Behind the scenes of a contact tracing study

Proximity Pilot Contact Tracing App A video produced for Julie Shah’s team and their study of a contact tracing app, Proximity Pilot. It is long and descriptive because it was designed for the longform TEDxMIT. This talk describes the launch of a study on the effectiveness of digital contact tracing and aims to mature new […]

Filed Under: Sketchbook, Video Tagged With: bluetooth, Covid-19, MIT, research, technology

Jihadi Rehab

Al-Ha’ir Prison and The Prince Mohammed bin Nayef Center are two of Saudi Arabia’s five facilities holding its more than 5,000 inmates charged with terrorism-related offenses. They are part of a reform program staffed by psychologists and religious officials who try to deradicalize inmates by teaching them what Nasser al-Ajmi, a psychologist with the center, […]

Filed Under: Photography, Sketchbook Tagged With: politics, prison, religion, Saudi Arabia, still life

Sinai Trail

The Sinai Trail has been in development since 2014 and is now ready to walk. Egypt’s first long distance public hiking trail and one of a number of new hiking trails being built across the Middle East. Beginning by the Gulf of Aqaba and ending in the highlands of St Katherine – the so-called Roof […]

Filed Under: Photography, Sketchbook Tagged With: bedouin, development, Egypt, exercise, outdoors, rural

Mahraganat Music

Through the warren of Cairo’s unplanned neighborhoods, mahraganat (festival) music blasts from tuk-tuks, cigarette stalls and cranked up cellphone speakers; auto-tuned voices mixing with heavy electronic rap beats. The sound quality is low and the lyrics are unmistakably vulgar. Egyptians can’t get enough. Sha’abi music (literally translating to the music of the ‘poor’) is the […]

Filed Under: Photography, Sketchbook Tagged With: art, culture, Egypt, lifestyle, music