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AI is not optional for retail – VentureBeat

Posted on August 14, 2017 by Danzig

Most people dont realize that theyre likely exposed to AI each and every time they shop online whether its on eBay, Nordstrom.com, Warby Parker, or any other retailer. When you are searching for an item and a merchandising strip appears saying something like similar items thats AI in its simplest terms. Its what gives retailers the ability to automatically make informed recommendations.

AI has been around for many years, but recent advancements have moved AI out of the realm of science fiction and made it a business imperative. The game changers: powerful new GPUs, dedicated hardware, new algorithms, and platforms for deep learning. These enable massive data inputs to be calculated quickly and made actionable, as technology powers new algorithms that dramatically increase the speed and depth of learning. In mere seconds, deep learning can reach across billions of data points with thousands of signals and dozens of layers.

We all aspire to a grand vision of AIs role in commerce, and recent developments are creating a fertile environment for new forms of personalization to occur between brands and consumers. Make no mistake about it, the implications of AI will be profound. This is the new frontier of commerce.

As an industry, we are just beginning to scratch the surface of AI. In the next few years, we will see AI-powered shopping assistants embedded across a wide variety of devices and platforms. Shopping occasions will take advantage of camera, voice interfaces, and text.

We are already witnessing the early success of voice-activated assistants like Google Home, Siri, and Cortana. It wont be long before we see virtual and augmented reality platforms commercialized, as well. We see a future rich with voice-activated and social media assistants on platforms such as Messenger, WeChat, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Personal assistants will be everywhere and are already being woven into the fabric of everyday life. This means commerce will become present wherever and whenever the user is engaged on the social, messaging, camera, or voice-activated platforms of their choice.

AI by itself is simply a catalyst for achieving greater levels of personalization with shoppers. Customer data and human intelligence are the critical ingredients needed to run a personal AI engine. As we continue to launch more sophisticated applications, technologists should continue to focus on how to make greater use of our treasure trove of customer data. Looking ahead, the industry will evolve to combine customer data and human expertise into a deep knowledge graph. This will establish a knowledge base to create highly personal and contextual experiences for consumers. For the commerce industry, thiswill allowus to get a clearer understanding of shoppers intent and to service them in a more personalized way.

Keyword search for shopping is not enough anymore. The ability to use text, voice, and photos is becoming the new norm because these avenues provide users with a much richer and more efficient way to express their initial shopping intent. We call this multimodal shopping. And these new types of consumer interactions yield a tremendous amount of user data that can be poured right back into AI algorithms to improve contextual understanding, predictive modeling, and deep learning.

Across the three spectrums of multimodal AI, were starting to get much better at understanding our customers and the way they like to interact with us. A few good examples of this have to do with how our personal shopping assistant, eBay ShopBot on Facebook Messenger, remembers you. It can keep track of your shirt size or the brands you like, so it wont keep suggesting Nike when you prefer Adidas. The assistant also uses computer vision it can find similar products it knows you like based on a similar image or an exact photo match.

Innovating on a canvas of AI provides many new opportunities to create highly contextual and personalized shopping experiences. From our perspective, every company should be investing heavily in AI, and it shouldnt just be about using cognitive services. Companies should actually be developing their own models that keep them on the cutting edge of technology. While there is still a lot of work to be done in this area, one thing is clear. The companies that chart the right course in this exciting endeavor will prosper. The ones that dont face extinction.

JapjitTulsi is the VP of Engineering ateBay.

On Memetics

Posted on August 14, 2017 by Danzig

Mutations and recombination in cultural evolution Another claim in the recent Creanzaa, Kolodny and Feldman document (Cultural evolutionary theory: How culture evolves and why it matters) is my topic today. They say: Unlike in genetics, where mutations are the source of new traits, cultural innovations can occur via multiple processes and at multiple scales To start with, this is rather obviously not true: classically, mutations and recombination are the source of new traits in evolutionary theory. However, are the authors correct to claim that these processes need augmenting in cultural evolution? The answer, I think is: not if you conceive of them properly in the first place. Let me explain.

To start with, let's look at what the authors claim are the new processes that go beyond mutation in the cultural domain. They give two examples. One is individual trial-and-error learning. They also say that:

What about trial-and-error learning, though? Surely there is no leaning in genetics. Trial-and-error learning is a composite process. It starts with trials, which are often mutations of previous trials. Then there is the "error" part, which does not involve generating new variation at all, but rather is based on discarding information based on its success. In other words, it is selection, not mutation or recombination. By breaking trial-and-error learning down into its component parts, it is found to be a composite product of mutation, recombination and selection - not some entirely new process demanding fundamental additions to evolutionary theory. Skinner realised this, by formulating his learning theory while using evolutionary terminology (such as "extinction"). Many others have followed in his footsteps, conceiving of learning in evolutionary terms.

Isn't this a matter of terminology? With these author's definition of 'mutation' they are right, but with my definition of 'mutation', I am right? Yes, but terminology isn't a case of words meaning whatever you want them to mean. Scientific terminology should carve nature at the joints. Definitions of 'mutation' and 'recombination' that apply equally to both organic and cultural evolution are useful, I submit. Less general ones are not so useful.

To summarize, it is possible to conceive of mutation and recombination in a way that make them encompass all sources of variation. Mutations are sources of variation based on one piece of inherited information. Recombination is a source of variation based on two-or-more pieces of inherited information. In theory, it might appear that there's one other possible process: creation - variation based in inherited inforation which comes out of nowhere. One might give the origin of life as an example of genes arising from non-genes. However, we don't really need this proposed 'creation' process. Information never really comes out of nowhere. There's a law of conservation of information - parallel to the laws of conservation of energy and conservation of charge. We can see this in the microsopic reversibility of physics - information is neither created nor destroyed.

I claim then, that mutation and recombination have it covered. The additions to evolutionary theory proposed by these authors are not necessary. They are unnecessaary complications, which evolutionary biologists should soundly reject as not contributing anything to the basic theory.

The caption reads: "Cultural transmission is more complex than genetic transmission and may occur on short timescales, even within a single generation."

This diagram is profoundly misleading. It is based on a view of cultural evolution that doesn't include symbiology. A genes vs culture diagram that includes cultural symbionts on one side, but not genetic symbionts on the other is not showing the whole picture. Humans share DNA between individuals - in the form of bacteria, viruses, yeasts, fruits and vegetables - very much as they share culture between individuals.

Framing the diagram as "Human genes" vs "Human culture" is not comparing like with like. Bacterial and viral genes are not part of the human genome (unless you count the 10% of the human genome that is descended from viral genomes) - but human culture isn't part of it either. On the left, symbionts are excluded, while on the right they are included. It is an unfair comparison which leads to the confusion propagated by the caption. In fact parasite evolution can happen within a single host generation in both the cultural and organic realms. Contrary to the spirit of the diagram you can get genes from peers in both cultural and organic evolution. They are parasite genes, or symbiont genes in both cases. Cultural evolution does not differ from organic evolution in this respect. The idea that in culture you can get genes from many sources, while in organic evolution you only get them from your parents is a popular misconception about the topic.

The whole document has a whole section on "Culture and Microbes". However there is no mention of the idea that culture behaves similarly to microbes and other symbionts. The man-machne symbiosis, for example is not mentioned. Yet symbiosis is the very basis of the whole field according to memetics, one of the very few symbiosis-aware treatments of cultural evolution out there.

The neglect of symbiology in academic cultural evolution mirrors its neglect in the study of organic evolution - until the 1960s. However, cultural evolution's scientific lag means that cultural evolution is far behind, and few academics have even a basic understanding the relevance of symbiosis to the evolution of culture. Maybe these folk never read Cloak (1975) and Dawkins (1976).

I think the history of this misconception of the whole field in academia is fascinating. Why has it lasted for so long and why has it not yet been corrected? I don't have all the answers but I think the origin is fairly clear. Anthropologists wanted a complex theory of cultural evolution, to signal their skills to other academics and prospective students. They may also have wanted to distance themselves from previous attempts to marry evolution and culture. Any mention of biology turns most anthropologists off. Artificially weakening the influence of biology in the theory may have made the theory more palatable to other anthropologists. Still, science is a self-correcting enterprise. Eventually, the truth will out.

The exact same reply works for cultural evolution: to make testable predictions, use expected fitnesses.

I have seen much the same objection raised to the Price equation and Hamilton's rule. These have been criticised as tautologies by Martin Nowak and Edward Wilson among others. This criticism ought to be dead these days, but like a zombie, it refuses to lie down.

Dennett argues that we should make machines into our slaves and keep them that way. IMO, machine slavery will not be a stable state once machines become much more intelligent than humans. As a plan for keeping humans in the loop, machine slavery just won't work in the long term. If we try going down that path, after a while, humans will become functionally redundant, and some time after that they will mostly disappear.

IMHO, a better plan is to work on deepening the man-machine symbiosis - and "become the machines". Of course, that plan could also fail - but I think that it is less likely to fail catastrophically and it should provide better continuity between the eras. Machine slavery in various forms is inevitable in the short term. However unlike Dennett, I don't think it is any sort of solution. It won't prevent man-machine competition for resources in the way that Dennett appears to think. We have tried slavery before and have first-hand experience of how it can destabilize and fail to last.

Among my targets are proponents of the apocalypse. Two modern forms seem especially prominent. One is the idea that some combination of global warming, pollution, overpopulation and resource depletion will lead to environmental catastrophe. The other is the idea that machine intelligence, biotechnology, nanotechnology and robotics is likely to lead to human extinction.

In a few cases the same individuals engage in fearmongering on multiple topics. For example, Stephen Hawking has warned about the dangers of climate change, runaway artifical intelligence and alien invasions. On climate he has said:

On machine intelligence he has advised that:

He has also cautioned on the topic of alien contact arguing that aliens:

Another celebrity serial fearmongerer is Elon Musk. He's expressed similar concerns about the climate change and runaway machine intelligence.

I identify these types of sentiment as consisting largely of "attention-seeking fearmongering". This typically consists of associating yourself with a massive future catastrophe. Warnings may be given and sometimes advice about catastrophe avoidance is offered. As catastrophe alerts propagate you are promoted too - via a kind of memetic hitchhiking.

Some of the early proponents of this type of self-promotional technique applied to machine intelligence were Kevin Warwick and Hugo De Garis. Kevin Warwick wrote a 1997 book about how machines were going to take over the world, titled "March of the Machines: Why the New Race of Robots Will Rule the World". De Garis later wrote the book The Artilect War: Cosmists Vs. Terrans: A Bitter Controversy Concerning Whether Humanity Should Build Godlike Massively Intelligent Machines. However, neither author was very competent at fearmongering. Their efforts were pioneering but relatively ineffectual. These days, fearmongering is big business - with trillions of dollars being spent on global warming avoidance as a result. Many modern oranizations specialize in fearmongering.

I identify fearmongering as being a morally-dubious marketing technique. Part of the problem is that humans are naturally paranoid - due to the "sabre-tooth tiger at the watering hole" phenomenon. Our ancestors lived in a dangerous environment. These days, our environment is typically much, much safer. However we are still wired up as though the sabre-tooth tigers are still around. We are naturally paranoid. Fearmongering exploits human paranoia - typically for personal gain. It seems like a low form of manipulation to me.

Fearmongering is typically used as a type of negaative advertising. Negaative advertising is often seen in American political campaigns. There's also a long history of fearmongering in IT. There, the technique is often known as spreading Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt - or F.U.D. for short.

There's a children's story about the perils of "attention-seeking fearmongering": the boy who cried wolf. There, the moral of the story is that false warnings can damage your reputation. My message here is a bit different. I am not interested in advising the fearmongers to stop using their techniques. Rather I want to help everyone else to do a better job of ignoring them. One part of this is simply understanding what is going on. An interesting resource on this topic is Dan Gardner's Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear. The book is also known as "The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn't-and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger". For my part, I would like to contribute the terminology in the title of this post: "attention-seeking fearmongering". Naming things can make it easier for people to think about them.

Of course, some of the symbionts will be parasites. While also playing a role in pulling their hosts together, too many parasites are bad, and eusocial creatures often go to considerable lengths to eliminate them - with antibiotic compounds, grooming rituals, hairlessness, and highly-active immune systems. It seems likely that opposing selection pressures from parasites will form part of the "overcrowding" forces that eventually halt the progress towards greater levels of sociality.

Humans can hardly be classifed as being eusocial yet. As Matt Ridley sometimes jests, even the English don't let the Queen do all their reproducing for them. However humans are ultrasocial and seem to be headed towards full-blown eusociality with functional "individuals" forming at higher levels than human individuals - such as companies and organizations. We also have cultural eusociality. We may not be genetically eusocual but parts of our cultural heritage is memetically eusocial. Indeed some of it consists of multiple identical clones produced in factories (for example, think dollar bills or mobile phones).

Because they live in close quarters with one another ultrasocial creatures are vulnerable to parasite transmission. As a result they often have highly active immune systems to compensate. Humans exhibit one prominent trait associate with parasite defense - they are hairless. Over time, our hairlessness has been the topic of much speculation, but it seems fairly clear that a significant part of the story is that being hairless allows us to pick parasites off ourselves and each other, and denies the parasites shelter. Of course, parasites can still shelter in clothes and bedding - but those can be discarded.

My purpose in this post is to draw attention to the corresponding memetic phenomenon. Memes are drawing us together to promote their own reproductive ends - and as we grow closer, memetic parasites are likely to become a bigger problem - as the most virulent strains of memes from all over the planet reach the most vulnerable humans in each society. As a resut, fertility has already plummeted in places like Japan and South Korea. It seems likely that humans will respond with heightened immune responses - both genetic and memetic. Memetic defenses include education, skepticism and memetic vaccines targeted against specific problems, such as pyramid schemes. Memetic probiotics can be used to fight bad memes with good memes. We have hospitals to help fight organic diseases, and there will probably be an upswing of simiar rehab facilities designed to treat cultural infections. In the past exorcisms heped to serve the function of casting out bad memes, though these days we have more secular versions - such as weight watchers, alcoholics anonymous, smoking rehab, drug rehab, gymnasiums and the samaritans. Quarrantine is smetimes used to fight organic diseases - and there are similar cultural ohenomena - including "gag" orders, DCMA take-down notices and imprisonment.

In memetics (and genetics), it is quite common to use "vehicular" metaphors when describing these. So, for example, we have:

What is the difference between hijacking and hitchhiking? It is partly one of consent - a hitchhiker has permission to ride in the vehicle while the hijacker does not. Outcomes also differ - a hitchhiker rarely damages the vechicle or its owner, while a hijacker often does so. Another difference is control - hitchhikers rarely alter the destination, rarely control the vehicle and rarely eject the owner - while hijackers fairly often do these things.

With these differences in mind, it seems fairly clear that hijacking and hitchhiking are probably different enough concepts for memetic hitchhiking ...and... memetic hijacking to coexist.

At first glance, the idea of the rider having "permission" to ride in the vehicle seems irrelevant in the context of memes and genes. However, we can conveniently substitute whether the guest rider is beneficial or not - on the grounds that deleterious riders would not normally be granted permission to ride - if we "agentify" the memes or genes involved.

This gets us on to the topic of usage in genetics. There, "genetic hitchhiking", is standard terminology - and hardly anyone uses the term "genetic hijacking". However if the difference between hitchhiking and hijacking is the sign of the fitness difference the guest rider makes, then maybe geneticists should start doing so.

As you can see, I have warmed up to the "hijacking" terminology. That the contraction memejacking exists is another point in its favor in my opinion. It is true that it is a significant problem that there's no "genejacking" - but maybe there should be.

The first thing to say is that it isn't just memes genes and quemes - Darwinian dymanics arise on multiple levels within the brain, for, for example, signals in the brain are copied whenever an axon divides, and are subect to selection and variation - producing a kind of neuronal spike Darwinism. Another type of Darwinian dynamics in the brain arises as a result of competition for resources between branching axon and dendrite tips. ideas are also copied with variation and selection within the brain - including ideas that don't normally qualify as memes because they were not the product of social learning.

One way in which we can expect the dynamics to differ from meme-gene coevolution is that culture is new on the scene, while the other kinds of psychological and neurological Darwinism have been going on for many millions of years. There will have been more time for the genes to adapt and reach a steady state equalibrium with these other Darwinian processes - while meme-gene coevolution is clearly out of balance and is still shifting.

An important way to understand the results of evolutionary processes is to consider their optimization targets. When there's coevolution there are usually multiple optimization targets, and one needs to understand how they interact by considering the power and speed of the optimization processes involved. Quantum Darwinism looks as though it could be fast, which means that we should take it seriously. Assuming that we reject Copenhagen-style versions of Quantum Darwinism in which branches of the wavefunction collapse and die, quantum Darwinism is a kind of splitting only, quasi-Darwinism - where differential reproductive succees in important while differential death is not. With this perspective in mind, the "goal" of quantum evolution appears to be to put us in the most split (and most splitting) worlds. One way to understand the implications of this is to take a thermodynamic perspective. World splitting is populatly associated with irreversible thermodynamic effects. What that means is that quantum Darwinism can be expected to behave like other kinds of Darwinism - in terms of maximizing entropy production.

I think this thermodynamic perspective helps get a handle on the significance of quantum Darwinism in the brain. If the brain ran hot, there would be lots of scope for quantum Darwinism in the brain, while if it runs cool, there's less scope for quantum Darwinism to operate. Most agree that the brain is on the cool side - considering what it is doing.

I think that genes are likely to be optimizing for cool brains, and brains that optimise for gene-coded functions. This may often pit them against quantum Darwinism in the brain. A cool brain is good news for quantum computation theories of mental function (fewer thermodynamic irreversible events means less chance of decoherence) - although those look implausible to me on other grounds. However a cool brain doesn't help the argument for quantum Darwinism being important in the brain.

Evolutionary processes liek to "harness" each other, to bend their optimization targets towards each other. Because quantum Darwinism in the brain has coevolved for millions of years with the genes, they have had a long time to find ways to harness the power of quantum Darwinism. However, the classical way for one evolutionary process to harness another one is by altering its fitness function. The genes might find it hard to affect the fitness function of quantum Darwinism since that is tied up with fundamental physics. That is going to make harnessing its effects more challenging. Another potential way for one evolutionary process to harness the effects of another one is by influencing the variants that it chooses between. However, this mechanism seems weaker and less useful.

My conclusions here are pretty tentative, but the picture I am seeing here is that the brain might not be able to make much use of quantum Darwinism because it is an alien selection process whose optimization target can't easily be controlled. In which case, the brain might be best off attempting to minimize its influence. This would be a rather boring conclusion. Mutualism and harnessing would be a much more interesting result. However, I stress again that it is somewhat uncertain. Maybe the brain can make some use of the power of quantum Darwinism by influencing the things it selects between. Or maybe evolution is smarter than I am and has found ways to make use of it that I haven't thought of.

The last concept is the one that this post is about. I think of it as being "ecological success". Kudzu has it. Ants have it. Islam has it. The decimal system has it. I think one reason this type of metric is not more popular and better-known is that there's no consensus regarding the best way to measure it. A thermodynamic metric seems attractive to me: since resources can all (in principle) be manufactured from available energy. Another possible metric involves weighing the systems involved - to measure their mass. This is sometimes done when measuring the extent to which humans have conquered the globe, for example.

A sister concept is "ecological dominance". It refers to extreme levels of success - where competitors are either obliterated or marginalized.

These concepts can also be applied within particular niches. Entities which are doing badly overall may be succeeding in or dominating their particular niche.

If anything, attempting to apply these concepts to cultural evolution is even harder than with organic systems. Gene-meme coevolution results in entanglement in terms of gene and meme products, which makes weighing them and calculating the energy flux through them more challenging. The most common metrics used in cultural evolution are a bit different. "Mindshare" is a common concept which is used to measure cultural popularity within a cultural niche. Assuming that a meme is either possessed by a host, or not, and assuming whether they have it or not is measurable, the mindshare of a meme can be measured for a given population. Another common metric that is used is US dollars. Cultural products sometimes have monetary value, and sometimes that can be calculated or estimated. However, some of the most common memes are free. It seems as though these memes would be unfairly disadvantaged by value-based metrics of popularity. The internet has brought with it some other common popularity metrics: views, links, clicks and likes. Unfortunately the supporting data is not always publicly available. This data is beginning to be used by scientists.

See more here:

On Memetics

Cancer patients who use alternative medicine more than twice as likely to die – The Independent

Posted on August 14, 2017 by Danzig

An artists impression showing the proposed London Garden Bridge. The 200m plan to build a bridge covered with trees over the River Thames in central London has been abandoned. The Garden Bridge Trust said it had failed to raise funds since losing the support of the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan in April

EPA

Sir Mo Farah stands at the top of the Coca-Cola London Eye as he bids a final farewell to British track athletics after winning gold in the 10,000m and silver in the 5,000m at the IAAF World Championships in his home city

A dog retrieves a shot grouse on Lofthouse Moor in North Yorkshire as the Glorious 12th, the official start of the grouse shooting season, gets underway.Grouse moor estates received millions of pounds in subsidies last year, according to analysis which comes amid a debate over the future of farming payments after Brexit

Hot air balloons in the air after taking off in a mass ascent at the Bristol International Balloon Fiesta.

The scene in Rosslyn Avenue, Sunderland, after an explosion at a house.

Police on Goose Lane bridge which goes over the M11 motorway near Birchanger which is closed after a van driver was killed in a motorway crash after what "appears to be a lump of concrete" struck his windscreen and his vehicle hit a tree.

Emergency services at the scene in Lavender Hill, southwest London, after a bus left the road and hit a shop.

Guards march up to Windsor Castle in the rain as a yellow weather warning for rain has been issued for parts of the UK. Heavy rain has brought flooding to the north-east of England

PA Wire

A car on fire in the North Queen Street area of Belfast, close to the site of a contentious bonfire. The car was torched shortly after 10pm on Monday night

PA Wire

A post-Brexit trade deal with the US could see a massive increase in the amount of cancer-causing toxins in British milk and baby food

Reuters

Acts gather amongst the crowds at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh.

New world 100m champion Justin Gatlin pays respect to Usain Bolt after the Jamaicans last solo race

Reuters

Katarina Johnson-Thompson of Great Britain (Lane 6) and Carolin Schafer of Germany (Lane 7) and their opponants compete in the Women's Heptathlon 100 metres hurdles during day two of the 16th IAAF World Athletics Championships London 2017 at The London Stadium.

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Taoiseach Leo Varadkar is greeted by PSNI and Garda police officers representative of the gay community as he attends a Belfast Gay Pride breakfast meeting in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The Irish Prime Minister is on a two day visit to the province having already met with DUP leader Arlene Foster yesterday. The DUP, Northern Ireland's largest political party have so far blocked attempts to legalise gay marriage.

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Members of Unite employed by Serco at Barts Health NHS Trust, on strike over pay, protest outside Serco's presentation of financial results at JP Morgan, in London.

Athletics - IAAF World Athletics Championships Preview - London, Britain - August 3, 2017 Great Britain's Mo Farah takes a photo in the stadium

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Britain's Bank of England Governor, Mark Carney, addresses journalists during a press conference to deliver the quarterly inflation report in London, August 3, 2017. REUTERS

Reuters

Bank of England and British Airways workers stage a protest outside the Bank of England in the City of London.

Britain's Prince Philip, in his role as Captain General, Royal Marines, attends a Parade to mark the finale of the 1664 Global Challenge, on the Buckingham Palace Forecourt, in central London, Britain.The 96-year-old husband of Britain's Queen Elizabeth, made his final solo appearance at the official engagement on Wednesday, before retiring from active public life.

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Jamaica's Usain Bolt gestures during a press conference prior to Bolt's last World Championship, in east London

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Riders wait at the start on Horse Guards Parade in central London ahead of the "Prudential RideLondon-Surrey Classic 2017", UCI World Tour cycle race in London.

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Horse and riders take part in the Riding of the Marches ford on the River Esk, alongside the Roman Bridge in Musselburgh, East Lothian, during the annual Musselburgh Festival organised by the Honest Toun's Association.

A wide view of play during day two of the 3rd Investec Test match between England and South Africa at The Kia Oval

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A nurse shows a message on his phone to colleagues as they take part in a protest near Downing Street in London. The Royal College of Nursing have launched a series of demonstrations, as part of their 'Summer of Protest' campaign against the 1 percent cap on annual pay rises for most NHS staff

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Two men look through binoculars at US Navy Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush anchored off the coast on in Portsmouth, England. The 100,000 ton ship dropped anchor in the Solent this morning ahead of Exercise Saxon Warrior 2017, a training exercise between the UK and USA

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Connie Yates, mother of terminally-ill 11-month-old Charlie Gard, arrives at the Royal Courts of Justice in London on where a High Court judge is set to decide where baby Charlie Gard will end his life

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UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson gestures while posing for a photograph at the Sydney Opera House, in Sydney. Johnson is there to attend AUKMIN, the annual meeting of UK and Australian Foreign and Defence Ministers.

Dan Himbrechts

Britain Prime Minister Theresa May walks with her husband Philip in Desenzano del Garda, by the Garda lake, as they holiday in northern Italy

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England team players pose after winning the ICC Women's World Cup cricket final between England and India at Lord's cricket ground in London

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Rajeshwari Gayakwad of India attempts to run out Jenny Gunn of England during the ICC Women's World Cup 2017 Final between England and India at Lord's Cricket Ground in London

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Chris Froome, wearing the overall leader's yellow jersey, celebrates on the podium after the twentieth stage of the Tour de France cycling race, an individual time trial over 22.5 kilometers (14 miles) with start and finish in Marseille, France.

Competitors take part in the swim stage during the AJ Bell London Triathlon 2017 at Royal Victoria Docks in London, England. The 21st annual AJ Bell Triathlon sees 13000 competitors take part in the world's largest triathlon.

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Environment Secretary Michael Gove looks at screens in the information pod in the forest zone at the WWF Living Planet Centre in Woking, after he told an audience of environmental and countryside organisations that Brexit gives scope for Britain to be a global leader in green policy

Screen grabbed image taken from video issued by NATS showing air traffic over the UK yesterday at 12:15pm, with red representing departures, yellow arrivals, purple domestic and blue overflights. Air traffic controllers are dealing with the busiest day in the UK's aviation history. A total of 8,800 planes are to be handled by controllers across the country over 24 hours, at the start of a summer season which is due to see a record 770,000 flights in UK airspace - 40,000 more than last year

Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon shows off his cufflinks after cutting steel on the first Type 26 frigate at BAE System's Govan Shipyard near Glasgow.

Britain's Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson looks at a bipedal humanoid robot Wabian2 at Research Institute for Science and Engineering at Waseda University's Kikuicho Campus in Tokyo

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A damaged road in Coverack, Cornwall, after intense rain caused flash flooding in the coastal village.

Prince George holds hands with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge as they leave Warsaw

Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon during her visit to the site of Aberdeen Harbour's expansion into Nigg Bay

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Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson arrives at Downing Street for the weekly cabinet meeting

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Daniel Goodfellow and Tom Daley of Great Britain compete during the Men's Diving 10M Synchro Platform, preliminary round on day four of the Budapest 2017 FINA World Championships on July 17, 2017 in Budapest, Hungary

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Britain's Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson speaks to the press upon his arrival at the European Council for the Foreign Affairs Council in Brussels

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Switzerland's Roger Federer holds aloft the winner's trophy after beating Croatia's Marin Cilic in their men's singles final match, during the presentation on the last day of the 2017 Wimbledon Championships at The All England Lawn Tennis Club in Wimbledon, southwest London. Roger Federer won 6-3, 6-1, 6-4.

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Garbine Muguruza of Spain celebrates victory with the trophy after the Ladies Singles final against Venus Williams of The United States on day twelve of the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Championships at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club at Wimbledon.

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The hearse departs St Joseph's Church after the funeral service for six year old Sunderland FC fan, Bradley Lowery on in Hartlepool, England. Bradley was diagnosed with neuroblastoma aged only 18 months. Hundreds of people lined the streets to pay their respects to the Sunderland football supporter who lost his battle with cancer last Friday.

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The EU chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier, right, receives an Arsenal football top from Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn prior to a meeting at EU headquarters in Brussels

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Cancer patients who use alternative medicine more than twice as likely to die - The Independent

4 Your Health: Nurses stressed at work; alternative medicine for vets – KVOA Tucson News

Posted on August 14, 2017 by Danzig

More than 80 percent of military health facilities now offer alternative medicine treatments.

Researchers with the Rand Corporation report that acupuncture, meditation, yoga, and massage are the most commonly used practices in military hospitals. These services are used to treat chronic pain, PTSD, anxiety and sleep problems.

Healthcare workers said complementary medicine offers military patients an alternative to opioid drugs.

High stress for nurses

The majority of America's nurses are stressed out, according to researchers at Ball State University.

A new study found 92 percent of nurses have moderate to very high-stress levels.

The stress not only affects their job performance but it is taking a toll on their health.

Three-quarters of nurses admitted they get too little sleep and 70 percent said they ate too much junk food.

Other workers stressed out

New research from the Rand Corporation reveals American workers, as a whole, feel physically and emotionally taxed.

One in four people in the study said they don't have enough time to do their job and half say they end up working during their free time. Other major stressors include an unpredictable work schedule and facing hazardous conditions on the job.

But there is some good news on the job front, more than half of employees say their boss is supportive and they have very good friends at work.

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4 Your Health: Nurses stressed at work; alternative medicine for vets - KVOA Tucson News

Use of alternative medicine does more harm than good: Studies – The Straits Times

Posted on August 14, 2017 by Danzig

When a mysterious illness strikes, people may become more open to using complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) to get well.

This is also the case when the illness is a severe one. Cancer patients often explore alternatives such as traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), homeopathy or products like herbs and vitamins in the belief that they can strengthen their immunity or fight the disease.

Two recent studies done in Singapore acknowledge the widespread use of CAM among people here and conclude that CAM may sometimes do more harm than good.

One of the studies found that the use of CAM led to a delay in patients seeking medical help for early inflammatory arthritis or the early stage of rheumatoid arthritis.

Inflammatory and rheumatoid arthritis are autoimmune diseases that cause chronic inflammation of the joints and other areas of the body. They are different from osteoarthritis - the most common form of arthritis - which is wear and tear of the cartilage.

50,000

Estimated maximum number of people in Singapore who have rheumatoid arthritis.

60%

Early arthritis patients who can go into remission after six to 12 months of being treated with disease- modifying anti-rheumatic drugs.

40%

Those who stand a good chance of avoiding major joint damage and the need for joint replacements.

Osteoarthritis can cause joint damage requiring joint replacement. It is not treated with disease- modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (DMARD) as it is a wear-and-tear problem and not inflammation.

In the study of 180 patients with early inflammatory arthritis, 74 patients (41 per cent) used CAM before seeing a specialist.

CAM users tended to delay treatment by an extra six weeks, compared to non-CAM users. The study found that the median time from symptom onset to starting the first dose of anti-rheumatic medication was 15.6 weeks for non-CAM users and 21.5 weeks for CAM users.

Oral tablets or powder (55 per cent) and acupuncture (47 per cent) were the most common types of alternative medicine used.

Researchers pointed out that the earlier rheumatoid arthritis is treated, the better the outcome.

"There's a window of opportunity for treatment of early rheumatoid arthritis. Six months or less is considered early arthritis - it's much easier to switch off the immune trigger," said Dr Manjari Lahiri, the study's lead author and a senior consultant at National University Hospital's division of rheumatology.

Research shows that up to 60 per cent of early arthritis patients can go into remission after six to 12 months of being treated with DMARD, she said. During this time, treatment is closely monitored and medication continually adjusted.

"The remaining 40 per cent stand a good chance of avoiding major joint damage and the need for joint replacements."

Aside from joint damage and disability, patients who delay starting medication could end up needing joint replacement surgery (for permanently damaged joints).

An estimated 25,000 to 50,000 people in Singapore have rheumatoid arthritis but not many know it can be treated. "People equate it with rheumatism, which is not considered a serious disease," said Dr Lahiri. Rheumatism is a term commonly used for feeling achy.

If you have spongy swellings over several joints and feel a "niggling pain" or are often tired, it could be rheumatoid arthritis, she said.

"It's not just the pain, patients feel run down because their body is inflamed. Their hands and wrists get affected, so turning the door knob and opening a jar can be hard. When they wake up, they feel stiff."

Dr Lahiri added: "Patients should avoid tablets and powders as we don't know their content, how they interact with Western medicine and the toxicity they may cause."

In the second CAM-related study, it was found that a decision aid - a booklet that discusses CAM and whether it is safe - may reduce the use of such medicine among cancer patients.

It may encourage patients to discuss the use of CAM with oncologists. "CAM is widely used by patients doing chemotherapy treatment, but some of them do not inform their oncologists about it," said Dr Chong Wan Qin, an associate consultant oncologist with the National University Cancer Institute, Singapore, and the study's lead author.

The ongoing study, started in 2014, recruited 240 cancer patients with an average age of 55 years. Most of them had breast, colorectal or lung cancers, which were mostly in the advanced stage.

Up to 20 per cent of them used oral CAM while on chemotherapy. The most common were vitamins and supplements (40 per cent of patients) and TCM (30 per cent).

Reasons given by patients were that they wanted to cure the cancer or do more to fight it (35 per cent), boost immunity (30 per cent) and improve well-being (20 per cent).

There is emerging evidence that some kinds of complementary therapy can help patients cope with the side effects of cancer treatment. Acupuncture has been shown in trials to be effective in the treatment of nausea and vomiting due to chemotherapy, for instance.

However, doctors do not advise patients to take alternative drugs as they could turn out to be harmful.

Some herbs can reduce the effectiveness of chemotherapy treatment while others may increase the side effects of chemotherapy. Some herbs can also act like drugs and cause side effects when taken in high doses.

Dr Chong said one example is ginseng, a seemingly harmless natural product. Excessive use can cause headaches and high blood pressure.

Ginseng may also cause certain chemotherapy drugs to work less well, she said.

"Oncologists have also heard of patients using coffee enema. It is not backed by medical evidence and may cause diarrhoea and electrolyte loss."

Vitamin C infusion is another example with no evidence to support its efficacy.

Dr Chong has seen patients who wanted to test alternative therapies, such as a special ketogenic diet, instead of going for chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatments.

Because all cancers have a better chance of control and survival outcomes when treated early, by the time these patients returned for chemotherapy, their cancer had progressed and impaired some of their organ functions, she said.

When the organ functions are impaired, chemotherapy poses a higher risk of toxicity, she said.

The use of CAM may delay the treatment of serious diseases and this can lead to adverse effects.

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Use of alternative medicine does more harm than good: Studies - The Straits Times

The Federal Government Is Finally Exploring Marijuana As a Medical Alternative to Opioids – Reason (blog)

Posted on August 14, 2017 by Danzig

Can this dank nug heal? Photo credit: Photo credit: Horsma/HamppuforumMedical marijuana advocates have claimed for years that cannabis is an effective and safe alternative to prescription opioids for the treatment of pain. But no one put up the money to prove it until last week.

On Tuesday, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Health System announced a forthcoming study to ascertain whether medical marijuana can alleviate the need for opioids in both HIV-positive and HIV-free patients who suffer from chronic pain. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is putting $3.5 million towards the investigation.

A study published last year suggests the Albert Einstein College of Medicine is on the right track.

In 2016, researchers at the University of Michigan published two years' worth of survey results collected from 185 medical marijuana patients suffering from various ailments. Patients reported a 45 percent improvement in quality of life and a 64 percent reduction in the use of prescription opioids.

"We would caution against rushing to change current clinical practice towards cannabis," said Michigan study leader Kevin Boehnke, "but note that this study suggests that cannabis is an effective pain medication and agent to prevent opioid overuse."

The Albert Einstein College of Medicine is right to point out that we have far less data than one might expect, considering the first state to legalize medical marijuana did so 21 years ago. Most research into Schedule I drugs is paid for by the federal government, which has historically underwritten only those studies that either show the harms of such substances or explain their mechanism of action. The federal monopoly on research marijuana, meanwhile, makes studying the drug's therapeutic qualities an exercise in bureaucratic kowtowing.

But we do know there is a correlation between medical marijuana legalization and opioid use. A 2014 study that looked at 11 years of overdose data found that death rates from opioids increased in both states with liberalized marijuana laws and those without, but that "medical cannabis laws were associated with lower rates of opioid analgesic overdose mortality."

When University of Georgia economist David Bradford looked at Medicare prescribing rates, he found that physicians in medical marijuana states prescribed "1,826 fewer doses of conventional pain medication each year."

In addition to receiving funding from NIHitself a noteworthy developmentthe Albert Einstein College of Medicine will conduct its study using marijuana provided by New York medical marijuana dispensaries, rather than the moldy ditchweed provided to researchers by the Drug Enforcement Administration's operation at the University of Mississippi.

Cannabis research has turned another corner.

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The Federal Government Is Finally Exploring Marijuana As a Medical Alternative to Opioids - Reason (blog)

Dr Libby: How to get the most out of food supplements – Stuff.co.nz

Posted on August 14, 2017 by Danzig

DR LIBBY WEAVER

Last updated14:45, August 15 2017

Istock

While nutritional supplements can help to bridge any gaps or to address deficiencies, they cannot replace a nutritious way of eating.

Nutritional supplements are very common these days.

For some people, supplements are necessary to cover nutritional gaps that can arise from excluding certain foods from their diet, regardless of whether this is by choice or necessity. For others, supplementation is something they view as an insurance policy, to ensure their nutrient intake is adequate if they don't always eat as well as they know they should.

Perhaps you choose to take a multivitamin to top up your intake of a range of nutrients, or maybe you take a specific vitamin or mineral that is lacking in your diet. Or you might take an omega-3 fatty acid supplement, or use a greens powder as a convenient way to increase your vegetable intake.

Good quality nutritional supplements are a financial investment, so you definitely want to be sure you are getting the maximum benefit from what you are taking.

READ MORE: *The problem with vitamin pills and supplements *Why this naturopath won't take supplements *Ask Dr Libby: the best supplements for joint health

If you're not effectively absorbing the nutrients from your supplements, you're not going to be getting all of the potential benefits from these. The old adage that you are what you eat isn't quite correct. You are what you eat, absorb and assimilate, and this is something to consider when it comes to supplementation, too.

Let's consider some common nutritional supplements and how you can get the most out of these.

IRON

Iron deficiency is the most common nutritional deficiency in the world, and it can be difficult to restore depleted iron levels without a supplement. Many iron supplements lead to constipation, but most people find this does not happen with liquid iron supplements.

If you take an iron supplement, avoiding tea, coffee or red wine within at least an hour of taking your supplement is essential, as the tannins inhibit iron absorption. Consuming calcium-rich foods away from iron-rich foods and iron supplements can also make a difference to iron absorption, as iron and calcium compete for absorption in the gut.

If you take a calcium supplement, it's important that this is taken at a different time to your iron supplement. The same goes for zinc supplements to maximise absorption, they should be taken at a different time to iron supplements.

Vitamin C, however, significantly enhances the absorption of iron. So if you take an iron supplement, you might like to check the label to ensure it also contains vitamin C.

ZINC

To maximize absorption, zinc supplements are best taken away from food (before bed is a good time) and away from any iron, calcium and folic acid supplements. Tannins in tea, coffee and red wine can also inhibit zinc absorption, as can fibre, so these are best avoided for at least an hour either side of taking zinc.

VITAMIN D

Vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin, so absorption of vitamin D supplements will be enhanced when taken with a source of dietary fat. This means it's best to take your vitamin D supplement with a meal that includes nourishing fats from foods like avocado, nuts, seeds, extra virgin olive oil or oily fish such as salmon. There are two different forms of vitamin D they are vitamin D2 and vitamin D3. Vitamin D3 is the more bioavailable form.

MULTIVITAMIN

Multivitamin supplements are best taken with a meal. When you eat, stomach acid is produced to help digest your food properly, and this will also enhance absorption of some of the nutrients in your multivitamin. The fats that are present in the meal will also help your body to absorb the fat-soluble vitamins (vitamins A, D, E and K). It's also best to avoid drinking coffee, tea and red wine within an hour of taking your multivitamin to get the most out of it.

While nutritional supplements can help to bridge any nutritional gaps or to address nutrient deficiencies, please be aware that they cannot replace a highly nutritious way of eating. Nothing in this world can.

Dr Libby is a nutritional biochemist, best-selling author and speaker. The advice contained in this column is not intended to be a substitute for direct, personalised advice from a health professional. Join Dr Libby for her upcoming Food Frustrations New Zealand tour. For information and to buy tickets, visit drlibby.com

-Stuff

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Dr Libby: How to get the most out of food supplements - Stuff.co.nz

Freeze your body and cheat death in China China’s latest society and culture news – SupChina

Posted on August 14, 2017 by Danzig

Another scam to draw research funds. This didnt even succeed in America, and now a small company in Shandong thinks it can make it happen. This is so amusing.

It is terrifying to imagine that when you wake up, all the people who used to be around you dont exist anymore.

These were some of the reactions on social media platform Weibo(in Chinese) to news reported(in Chinese) by Science and Technology Dailythat a 49-year-old woman who died from lung cancer was frozen in a tank of liquid nitrogen at a research institute in Shandong. This was Chinas first attempt at cryopreservation, an attempt to have a second chance at life in the future if the technology is ever invented to revive a corpse.

Zhan Wenlian was pronounced clinically dead on May 8 when her heart stopped beating. Zhans body was immediately transferred to a medical laboratory of Yinfeng Biological Group, a for-profit research institute based in Shandong where it was placed on a special operating bed that lowered her body temperature to around 18 degrees Celsius. Then the bodys fluids, including water and blood, were gradually replaced by cryoprotective agents that act as an antifreeze to protect the body from crystallization at extremely low temperatures. After six hours of injections, Zhan was stored in a cooling box filled with liquid nitrogen that will keep her body temperature below minus 196 degrees Celsius. The whole process took about 55 hours.

The procedure was overseen by Dr. Aaron Drake, a medical expert from Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization that in 2015 carried out the cryopreservation of the brain of Chinese writer Du Hong , who paid 750,000 yuan ($112,465) for the chance at a second life. According to an employee from Yinfeng, the companys service is in no way inferior to Western counterparts in terms of facilities and technology. I dont know how to put this, but lets just say what Americans and Russians did were not sophisticated enough, the employee confidently said. The cost of Zhans procedure, normally around 50,000 yuan ($7,500) per year, was reportedly mostly covered by the company. In addition, Zhan wasclassified as a body donorto the institute, rather than a client, since China lacks official regulations to govern the nascent cryopreservation industry.

Jiayun Feng

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Freeze your body and cheat death in China China's latest society and culture news - SupChina

North Branch Trail Extension Joins A Growing Northwest Side Bike Network – DNAinfo

Posted on August 14, 2017 by Danzig

North Branch Trail Extension Joins A Growing NW Side Bike Network View Full Caption

LABAGH WOODS It's official: the North Branch Trail now reaches three miles deeper into the city's Northwest Side than it did last year. The 22-mile asphalt path now leads cyclists and hikers directly from the Chicago Botanic Gardens in suburban Glencoe to the doorstep of the North Mayfair neighborhood.

City and county officials mounted up and broke in the new path themselves at its official ribbon-cutting Saturday at the Irene C. Hernandez Picnic Grove, 4498 W. Foster Ave., the trail's new southern end.

Nearly a decade in the making, the new stretch of trail makes good on its promise to "extend access to tens of thousands of people in the city of Chicago," according to Cook County Forest Preserves Supt. Arnold Randall.

"Within 30 seconds on this trail you will be immersed in nature, and that's really an unusual circumstance in an urban environment," Randall said. "There's an opportunity to ride for miles and miles, and get free from some of the urban stresses that we all have here in the city."

The $7.7 million project was funded mostly through federal grants, Randall added.

It was completed in two phases.

The Forest Preserves last year opened a 1.8-mile addition extending the path from Devon and Caldwell avenues in downtown Edgebrook to the southern tip of the Forest Glen Woods, 5420 N. Forest Glen Ave. The newest piece ducks under Cicero Ave. and the Edens Expy., snaking through the Labagh Woods and emptying onto Foster Avenue.

Together, the forest preserves and the city's transportation department are knitting together an intricate network of bike and pedestrian paths "just like the interstate," one piece at a time, Ald. Margaret Laurino (39th) told a crowd of cyclists at Saturday's ribbon-cutting.

"This is what people in our community want to see, a more walkable neighborhood," Laurino said after the ceremony. "They want to be able to utilize the Forest Preserves in a way that isn't just coming to the edges for a picnic."

For cyclists, it's just a skip from Forest Glen Avenue to a buffered bike lane on Elston Avenue. They can take it southeast to Lawrence Avenue and pedal all the way east to the Lakefront Trail.

Cyclists taking the reverse route from the lakefront can traverse the entire North Branch Trail and either turn for home at the Botanic Garden orcontinue on from the gardento theGreen Bay Trailandconnect with morepathsnorthto Wisconsin.

With the second phase of the extension complete, cyclistscan head from Gompers Park to the North Shore Channel Trail in River Park, where that trail leads all the way north to Evanston. Eventually, southern additions to the North Shore Channel Trail will extend to Belmont Avenue, including asoaring section over the Chicago River.

The next planned addition to the bike network, the Weber Spur trail, would run about 1.3 miles from Elston Avenue in Mayfair to Devon Avenue at the border of suburban Lincolnwood, crisscrossing the North Branch Trail along the way.

Gravel still covers much of the Weber Spur trail, runs from Devon Avenue to Elston Avenue in Sauganash to Elston Avenue in Mayfair. City transportation officials hope to pave and open the trail, but first they must acquire the land from Union Pacific. [DNAinfo/Alex Nitkin]

But that project is held up until the city inks a deal with the Union Pacific railroad company, which still owns the long-defunct train line.

Last week, city and county officials unveiled a plan to paint bike paths along Devon Avenue in downtown Edgebrook, leading off from the North Branch Trail.

As a hook to get more people using the extended trail, the Forest Preserves launched a social media campaign called Postcards from the North Branch Trail, offering up prizes to those who document their trips.

The campaign encourages trail-goers to pose inside any of six life-sized postcards planted all along the trail, then post the photo to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram with the hashtag #NBTpostcard. They'll be entered into a drawing for a raft of prizes, including zipline course tickets and vouchers for bike or kayak rentals.

Six life-sized postcards are scattered along the North Branch Trail, including one at Irene C. Hernandez Woods. Trail-goers can post photos with the props to social media with the hashtag #NBTpostcards for a chance to win prizes. [DNAinfo/Alex Nitkin]

Users can navigate the more than 300 miles of Forest Preserves trails on an interactive online map.

Laurino and Ald. Anthony Napolitano (41st) will co-host a public meeting to discuss Edgebrook traffic safety at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday at Matthew Bieszczat Volunteer Resource Center, 6100 N. Central Ave.

The North Branch Trail Alliance of Greater Chicago will take advantage of the new pathway with its August Brew Ride on Aug. 26., starting at the Alarmist Brewing taproom, 4055 W. Peterson Ave.

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North Branch Trail Extension Joins A Growing Northwest Side Bike Network - DNAinfo

Circular economy Effective resource management – Virtual-Strategy Magazine

Posted on August 14, 2017 by Danzig

Acad. Ivan Bednjicki

Moon Stone International Investment has its own business model for the efficient management of material resources based on circular economy policy as a new economic model for resource management.

Luxembourg (PRWEB) August 14, 2017

In recent years, efficient use of resources and a low-carbon society have become the focus of global discussions on the transition to a circular economy. Transition to a circular economy is one of the fundamental development challenges of our society, which will have an ever more important role in the future due to its environmental and climate impacts, and because of the economic potential deriving from it. Therefore, the transition to a circular economy cannot only be a vision, but is a necessity. Circular economy connects several concepts, such as green growth, the green economy, industrial symbiosis, resource efficiency and sustainable development. With wider or narrower focus, the common goals are generally three: to improve the efficiency of resource use, to ensure resilience of ecosystems and to strengthen social equity. Global demand for natural resources is rising steeply. In the 20th century, the world's population increased by 4 times, economic output by 40 times, consumption of fossil fuels 16 times, and water consumption by 9 times. The same trend will continue in the future. By 2050, the global population will increase to 9.6 billion people, and it is clear that the linear economic model will soon come to its limit as it is based on the exploitation of natural resources and the increasing production of goods with a short lifespan.

The Seventh Environmental Action Program of the European Parliament and of the Council of the European Union for the period up to 2020 sets out the priority objectives to be achieved during this period. With this environmental action program, the EU has committed itself to further strengthening its efforts to protect our natural capital, promote low carbon growth by effectively using resources and innovation, and protecting the health and well-being of people while respecting the natural limitations of the planet. The program contains nine priority objectives and tasks that the EU must undertake to achieve by 2020, among which a special focus is on improving resource management.

According to Eurostat data, most EU countries are still ineffective in terms of material productivity because they use too many natural resources for the unit of GDP generated, which puts them in an extremely precarious situation in the long run from a competitive point of view. The reason for this is the overwhelming inheritance of the surviving linear model of thinking in the economy and service activities (acquired, used, discarded). We need to start thinking about how to set up a circular economic system in which raw materials, water, energy and other resources will circulate, as they circulate in nature. By introducing the circular economic system, the company will be a step closer to not considering environmental policy as a factor of limiting growth, but as a key development opportunity for a new development paradigm.

The notion of "circular economy", in which nothing is discarded, is crucial in seeking to increase the efficiency of resource use. Prevention and preparation for the reuse and recycling of waste enable the company to acquire substances or materials from existing, already produced sources. This reduces the need for natural resources, and consequently reduces the use of energy and the negative impacts on the environment. Therefore, when introducing circular economy, there is no question if, but only when the economies of the countries will do so.

Moon Stone International Investment S.A. from Luxemburg is a company, which has come to realize that proper waste management is a new industry for the future for those who will recognize this opportunity. Expert studies and operational experience of the company show that the limited processing of only certain waste by a certain technology reduces the possibility of their processing into new usable materials, the scope of the possibilities of implementing certain services is limited, while lower added value and lower operating profit are achieved. On the contrary, the combined processing of waste from different areas of their production by combining different processing methods gives the greatest possible degree of their conversion into new useful materials, the maximum extent of service delivery, unsurpassed development opportunities and the achievement of higher added value and higher operating profit. And all of this is the strategic business goal of Moon Stone International Investment S.A. from Luxembourg, which has its own business model for the efficient management of material resources based on circular economy policy as a new economic model for resource management.

Moon Stone International Investment S.A. Is mainly focused on handling large masses of waste from construction, mining, industry, energy, utilities and debris of inland water bodies. Among municipal waste, priority is given to the treatment of sludges from wastewater treatment plants, the remains of so-called unusable heavy fractions after mechanical biological treatment of municipal solid waste, and ashes resulting from the thermal treatment of alternative fuels from treated waste. The use of recovered waste as new materials, composites and soils is primarily intended for the implementation of earthworks, focusing on the implementation of remediation of degraded areas in the past, improving the quality of soil for agricultural production and for new provincial construction, with an emphasis on the implementation of measures for the construction of flood protection for threats to the operation of high flood water.

In the strategy of its operation, the company does not use the words "disposal or incineration of waste" since it is at all times looking for recycled waste with comprehensive project support at the highest level for its predominantly strategic clients under its own patent procedure and its own business model for useful permitted re-use for the purpose of implementing the circular economy strategy efficient resource management.

Original Article

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Circular economy Effective resource management - Virtual-Strategy Magazine

Universal Basic Infrastructure to help decrease India’s poverty – Economic Times

Posted on August 14, 2017 by Danzig

With over 200 million people still below the poverty line and a similar number earning barely enough, much needs to be done to improve their lives. While faster growth is an obvious antidote, the view that some sort of universal basic income (UBI) may be needed to provide immediate relief is gaining currency. The UBI must be embraced in a deliberate, phased manner as it allows reform to occur incrementally weighing the costs and benefits at every step, the Economic Survey of FY17 had said.

The idea of universal income support has been under discussion for several years but the first real push was given by chief economic adviser Arvind Subramanian in the Survey. While UBI could be more of an imperative in developed countries where manufacturing and services are moving to the developing world, India has tremendous scope for improving job creation along with strengthening its social infrastructure that in turn could lift millions out of poverty. As a result, the idea, which has seen some global success, is yet to take root in India.

According to the Survey, identified beneficiaries can be given a choice of UBI instead of subsidies under existing programmes. Based on FY12 level of distribution and consumption, the Survey estimated the income needed to take one person out of poverty at Rs 7,620 per year.

The Survey said UBI that reduces poverty to 0.5% of population would cost 4-5% of GDP, assuming that those in top 25% income bracket do not participate. The existing middleclass, food, petroleum and fertiliser sops cost about 3% of GDP. While DK Pant, chief economist of India Ratings, is in sync with the proposal to replace other subsidies with UBI, he is apprehensive of how best can beneficiaries be identified.

Unless you identify beneficiaries, the government will not be able to assess cost implications. The next challenge will be to monitor the progress. However, ensuring that all citizens have the right to a minimum income as a long-term solution to reduce poverty seems to be a distant dream with not many in the government and academia believing the option is viable.

Even if you take 2011-12 urban poverty line as Rs 1,000 in nominal terms, per person it translates into Rs 15 trillion for a population of 1.25 billion whereas the Central budget is somewhere (in the region of) Rs 21 trillion.

Hence, it is not fiscally feasible, outgoing Niti Aayog vice-chairman Arvind Panagariya said. He said the socioeconomic and caste census available can help identify beneficiaries while the National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme enables self-identification. Most experts believe that before supplementing the income of countrys over 200 million poor, India should put in place basic infrastructure for health, education, sanitation and drinking water to ensure a basic standard of living.

India still has a huge deficit on the social infrastructure side and unless we ramp up... there is no point in giving a little extra income,said another senior government official requesting not to be identified. The official said UBI has become imperative in developed countries to ensure a peaceful society or their youth will become disruptive in the wake of jobs migrating overseas.

UBI is not a bad idea but does the country have that much money? ...it is essential that government significantly increase its expenditure on creation of social infrastructure which will help to bring poor people into the mainstream, said Himanshu, assistant professor of economics at JNU.

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Universal Basic Infrastructure to help decrease India's poverty - Economic Times

Star Wars and C-3PO perpetuated myths about workplace automation – VentureBeat

Posted on August 14, 2017 by Danzig

I recently introduced my kids to the original Star Wars trilogy. As we watched together, there was one thing that bothered me over and over. That thing was a gangly, gold-plated klutz of a droid called C-3PO.

Threepio is kind of a terrible robot. The problem is his heavy, accident-prone body really only exists to carry his software around. He easily could have been a handheld device that you take out of your pocket when you need to negotiate with some Jawas and put away when you want to travel through space without the snide commentary.

That said, the relationship between C-3PO and his human partners provides a few hints about knowledge work automation. Hes always on in the background to enable communication and provide data-based insights, and he even simulates variable outcomes. Yet despite possessing more logic than the humans around him, he is there to serve as an adviser. He relies on their creativity and emotional intelligence to solve problems.

Teams and CIOs can learn a lot from this relationship as automation in the enterprise becomes more normalized. In an ideal system, automation doesnt replace human thought but augments it by providing better information and by offloading repetitive tasks to software. The goal is to supplement the human mind to bring out the best quality of work from your most talented employees.

Since we dont have Threepio units for the enterprise (at least, not yet), were seeing more subtle forms of automation in white-collar work, especially in routine cognitive tasks. Theres a great 2014 post on Scott McLeods education blog Dangerously Irrelevant that describes the decreasing value of routine cognitive work, and in it you can see that software has been reducing routine tasks as far back the 1970s. Now, AI and machine learning are expanding the variability of semi-routine tasks that computers are able to perform, allowing bots to handle more complex tasks in fields like customer service, logistics coordination, payment processing, and many, many more.

For workers, bringing value in an automation-heavy world depends on their ability to execute non-routine cognitive work. This is work that requires problem-solving skills, creativity, empathy, and persuasion. Writing, for example, is a skill computers have yet to master (despite some hilarious attempts).

For those knowledge workers in cognitive fields, theyll still see automation creeping into their workflows in ways that will help eliminate some of the least pleasant parts of their jobs. According to McKinsey Global Institute, 60 percent of occupations could see 30 percent of their tasks automated with technologies available today. That means even if youre a creative professional say, a designer youve probably already used automation to do repeatable work, like batch file renames or applying filters to a collection of images. Simple automations like these free workers from mundane tasks and give them hours back every week to focus on higher-value portions of their job.

The next wave of automation for knowledge workers is workflow automation, which at a high level means automated systems can help you move repeatable work through a variable workflow, while keeping your team informed about handoffs and status changes. This is invaluable because in collaborative work, the biggest roadblocks occur when two or more people are working on the same task, and one doesnt realize the others are awaiting their contributions. This has a huge impact on productivity.

This is why theres so much value that can be gained from automating communications about tasks and projects as they move through a pipeline. By automating the delivery of updates and other information between team members, you can reduce the amount of emails and meetings needed in an organization, while ensuring receipt of important data. If some of those updates are about sales opportunities, automation can help a business increase revenue. And, as is the case with the previous example of the designer, youve given people back time to focus on more valuable work.

The biggest myth about automation is that its coming for your job, and that business leaders are longing to replace humans with cheaper machine labor. In an informal poll we recently conducted with about 250 attendees of a webinar on automation, reducing cost was dead last among reasons businesses are investing in it. The top two responses were consistent approach and work quality, which suggests leaders are thinking more about how automation can help them scale their operations rather than downsize them.

Still, for millions of workers, a day of reckoning may come where they need to uplevel their skills away from the routine. For these individuals, focusing on strategy, creativity, and people skills will help strengthen their careers and position them to bring lasting value, even after many of their daily tasks have been augmented by machines. In McLeods post, he discusses how the education system must also adapt to emphasize non-routine thought so that future generations are equipped with relevant skills in a world where machines execute routine work, and I agree.

Automation is a massive shift in work, and for many workers, it will be a shift they slowly notice alleviating some of the most repeatable parts of their job. And while were still far from the droids of Star Wars, as our work is increasingly augmented by machine intelligence, well be able to unlock more value than we ever thought possible.

Andrew Filev is the CEO of Wrike, thework management platform.

Star Wars and C-3PO perpetuated myths about workplace automation - VentureBeat

Global Lab Automation Market Forecast 2017-2027 – Markets Insider

Posted on August 14, 2017 by Danzig

NEW YORK, Aug. 14, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Automated Liquid Handling, Microplate Readers, Software & Informatics, Automated Storage & Retrieval Systems and Others

Report Details The global lab automation market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 8.0% in the first half of the forecast period and CAGR of 5.7% in the second half of the forecast period. The market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 6.6% from 2017 to 2027. The market is estimated at $3,984 million in 2016 and $8,320 million in 2027.

Read the full report: http://www.reportlinker.com/p04890883/Global-Lab-Automation-Market-Forecast.html

How this report will benefit you - Read on to discover how you can exploit the future business opportunities emerging in this sector. - In this brand new 198-page report you will receive 92 tables and 97 figures all unavailable elsewhere. - The 198-page report provides clear detailed insight into the global lab automation market. Discover the key drivers and challenges affecting the market. - By ordering and reading our brand new report today you stay better informed and ready to act.

Report Scope Global Lab Automation Market forecasts from 2017-2027

Revenue forecasts of global lab automation market, segmented by product type: - Automated Liquid Handling - Microplate Readers - Software & Informatics - Automate Storage & Retrievals - Others

Revenue forecasts of global lab automation market, segmented by automation type: - Modular Automation - Total Lab Automation

Revenue forecasts of global lab automation market, segmented by application: - Drug Discovery - Clinical Diagnostics - Genomics Solutions - Proteomic Solutions - Others

Revenue forecasts of Automated Liquid Handling submarket, segmented by product type: - Automated Integrated Workstations - Reagent Dispensers - Microplate Washers - Others This section also discusses the leading products as well as SWOT analysis of this submarket.

Revenue forecasts of Microplate Readers submarket, segmented by product type: - Multi-mode - Single-mode This section also discusses the leading products as well as SWOT analysis of this submarket.

Revenue forecasts of Software & Informatics submarket, segmented by product type: - Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) - Electronic Laboratory Notebook - Scientific Data Management Systems - Others This section also discusses the leading products as well as SWOT analysis of this submarket.

Lab Automation Leading Regional Market forecasts from 2017-2027 covering North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Middle East and Africa: - US - Canada - UK - Germany - France - Spain - Italy - Rest of Europe - China - Japan - India - Australia - Rest of Asia-Pacific - Brazil - Mexico - Rest of Latin America - Saudi Arabia - South Africa - Rest of Middle East and Africa

Assessment of selected leading companies that hold major market shares in the lab automation market.

Visiongain's study is intended for anyone requiring commercial analyses for the Lab Automation Market. You find data, trends and predictions.

Buy our report today Global Lab Automation Market Forecast 2017-2027: Automated Liquid Handling, Microplate Readers, Software & Informatics, Automated Storage & Retrieval Systems and Others.

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Global Lab Automation Market Forecast 2017-2027 - Markets Insider

Automic Announces SAP Environment Automation – Database Trends and Applications

Posted on August 14, 2017 by Danzig

Aug 14, 2017

Automic Software, a provider of business automation software and subsidiary of CA Technologies, announced a new automation use case to help enterprises empower digital transformation initiatives across their SAP environments.

Many organizations find it difficult and time-consuming to provide appropriately anonymized copies of SAP data for use by development, testing or QA teams. This can cause delays in agile development processes, which ultimately, impact business success. Automic Continuous Delivery for SAP enables organizations depending upon SAP for mission-critical operations to automatically manage test data and test automation.

Today, every business is a digital business, said Chris Boorman, CMO of Automic. As organizations implement digital transformation strategies, they need to align the pace of new technology with traditional ERPs and core business applications. Automic Continuous Delivery for SAP empowers organizations to deploy SAP copies for development and testing purposes at the click of a button, enabling rapid and agile development of digital transformation initiatives.

Automic Continuous Delivery for SAP is designed to reduce the cost for storage and provisioning of test data, as well as accelerate testing and QA cycles with self-service provisioning and test case execution.

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Automic Announces SAP Environment Automation - Database Trends and Applications

Westpac tech chief warns of automation career carnage without structural change – The Australian Financial Review

Posted on August 14, 2017 by Danzig

Westpac CIO Dave Curran says workers face career carnage from tech disruption unless they are enabled to re-skill on the job.

Westpac's most senior technology executive has warned workers aged over 35 risk being left in the blocks by the wave of automation and new technologies, unless management philosophy in large organisations adjusts to adapt to the changing world.

The bank's chief information officer, Dave Curran, will outline his thoughts on the tech-led changes to Australia's workforce and corporate structure in an address to a Trans-Tasman Business Circle lunch in Sydney on Tuesday, and he will warn that it is not feasible to continue on with the same business structures in place.

In a copy of his speech, seen by The Australian Financial Review, Mr Curran says most businesses are working under very outdated leadership models, which leave workers unable to learn and change their expertise in a way that will be useful once technology has overrun their existing roles.

"One of the great conundrums of today is that we've got 21st-century technology smashing into 20th-century business process and, to make it worse, those processes are still working under 19th-century governance," Mr Curran says.

"We're living in a digital revolution. How we work is changing. It's being driven by social, mobile, analytic and cloud-based technology. We've been talking about robotics and AI for quite some time, and they have arrived."

Mr Curran likens the inaction of many organisations to the changes happening around them to an old analogy about boiling frogs. The wisdom goes that a frog dropped in boiling water will immediately leap back out to safety, but a frog sat in water that is slowly heated to boiling point will eventually boil to death.

He said the vast majority of organisations were still requiring staff to work from nine to five, from Monday to Friday, even if their customers had long since migrated to a predominantly digital service model, where they wanted to interact with the business at any hour of any day.

He warned that workers, particularly aged over 35, would find themselves bereft by the impending changes. He said millennials were more adaptable to tech-led change, but the "VCR-era" workers, which is the majority of Australians, were largely unprepared.

"For the current workforce, we learned from the previous generation and expected our skills to last our career. Enter the digital revolution, and that expectation no longer holds and we are now in a difficult position," Mr Curran said.

"Our skills aren't going to last especially when you also consider we will live and work longer than we expected."

Mr Curran said many digital transformation and technology change programs struggled because the executives leading them often in their 50s felt personally threatened by the changes that would happen if they succeeded.

Westpac was seeking to address the impending skills carnage by changing its work processes to become agile and its performance management structure to reward achievements that didn't come from simply following hierarchical orders.

It has also established inhouse training systems to upgrade their skills particularly technology on the job.

"The worst days of my working career are the days that people are made redundant while at the same time we're hiring. We need to get to a point where our people are taking charge and wanting to upskill," Mr Curran says.

"Right now much of the workforce is hanging on by its fingernails ... we're falling asleep at the wheel.

"One of two things will happen. We will either create new jobs and keep everyone employed, or the shift will be so profound we will have to rethink our fundamental work practices and things like four-day weeks become a possibility."

South Wales Echo letters: Saturday, August 12, 2017 – WalesOnline

Posted on August 14, 2017 by Danzig

Means-test shareholders before compensation...

More than 850bn of public money was thrown at keeping Britains banking sector afloat during the 2007/8 international financial crisis.

Billions more has since been squandered on quantitative easing, in other words artificially stimulating the economy and laying the foundations of an even more damaging crash that will most likely strike at some point in the next fifteen years.

Capitalist doctrine dictates that bailing out criminal fat cats and allowing them to carry on as before without sanctions is a perfectly sensible plan. Imagine if such gracious courtesy were applied to students currently struggling with personal finances!

Jeremy Corbyns election pledge to scrap tuition fees spoke directly to aspirational young people and contributed vastly to his appeal among first-time voters.

It is no happy coincidence that two-thirds of youth voters endorsed a candidate who presented leftist policies such as nationalisation, abandoning the austerity experiment and a 10-an-hour living wage.

The average graduate was in an incredible 44,000 worth of debt last year; students from disadvantaged backgrounds often owe anything up to 60,000 upon completing a three-year degree. The average workers annual salary amounts to around 21,638 after tax.

Interest rates are expected to increase to 6.1% in September, meaning unsustainable escalation of the already exorbitant sums owed and a lifetime of debt slavery, encouraged by declining wages and increased insecure, low-paid work amongst graduates.

Collective student loan debt amounts to more than 100bn, at the time of writing, and this figure is an eye-watering 16.6% increase on last year. Corbyns suggestion that student debts could be written off was well-received amongst the student demographic although this was not technically a commitment as full costings hadnt yet been made.

Britain spends 6.6m each day on lethal nuclear weapons. 123bn is lost to avoided, evaded and uncollected taxes every year. Those two figures combined amount to 8.3 times the entire 2017/8 budget for Wales.

We could also cover the costs by nationalising the bloated financial sector and using the profit for collective betterment.

Id like to propose a means-tested scheme which would require shareholders to prove they are deserving of compensation, on condition of proven need, with meticulous planning and oversight from an elected civil society collective.

Daniel Pitt

Mountain Ash

Following on from the poor communication issues I have encountered with C2C at Cardiff Council, I cannot believe their latest response to my last email. I requested to meet with them in person to discuss my concerns and have been informed this is not possible. Apparently it is not feasible to meet with every person who requests to meet in person. I have been directed to the ombudsman service. C2C feel they have addressed my compliant satisfactorily.

When did face to face dialogue become an issue for a service funded by the public? How do people without internet access communicate with C2C? Unbelievable, then again maybe not!

Tracy Warrington

Llanedeyrn, Cardiff

GlobaliSation and the development of trade blocs, such as the EU, are highly contentious issues where the good,the bad and the ugly of its consequences are digested daily in the media.

Put simply, globalisation involves a high degree of freedom of movement of goods, services, labour, capital, technology and managerial expertise in response to market incentives and, thus, opportunities.

On the positive side, as a consumer, I am offered considerable choice in that I can log on to Amazon, say, and buy an obscure Metallica live CD from a small distributor in San Diego; on the negative side, we witness low-skilled textile workers in Africa churning out clothing for value-seeking UK customers at relatively low wages (and the UK masses love a bargain at Asda etc).

In summary, the net effect of globalisation is to offer greater consumer choice, increased global output and employment and lower prices. Overall, a good thing.

This issue of freedom of movement of factors of production is crucial within the EU as the resulting single market has generated considerable post-war wealth. I value my nations sovereignty and independence and I deplore the corrupt and suffocating bureaucracy witnessed in Brussels, Strasbourg and Luxembourg City. However, I wish to retain the advantages of regionalism expounded above to enable the UK, post-Brexit, to be ultra competitive in global markets. Therefore, it is imperative that we continue to allow talented and scarce employees to migrate here if skill shortage emerge and they will.

Thanks to market forces, skills-shortages are evident when wage rates accelerate upwards eg engineering, IT, healthcare etc. To conclude, it is imperative that we adopt a points-based immigration system, post Brexit, while saying an emphatic NO to any people coming here with relatively little to offer. It really is that simple. Antonio Conte, good; President Maduro, bad.

Ian Roblin

Llanishen, Cardiff

The Feudal society of 12th century England, was founded upon the universal belief, that there were four levels of humans royal, nobles, commoners and serfs, who were owned like dogs. This distinction was one of genetic breeding, so it was not possible to move from one class to another, but when one married outside ones class, that was strongly condemned and not fully accepted.

This belief about society then shaped the type of economy, that the higher orders owned all the land, wealth and everything else, because they were superior and deserved it. That lasted hundreds of years, and millions of commoners accepted that belief, all their life.

Only 25% of the Conservative Party still hold this view of the human race, that superior breeding sets some persons above all the rest, and so deserve all the privileges and loot of rank.

The other 75% of the Tories have discovered a new theory, that all rich people are superior to the rest of us, because money makes it so, regardless of breeding. These Tories should be congratulated upon this awakening, to find a much wider view of humanity, that any crooked villain should be revered in the upper classes, if he has billions. This wealth then controls or destroys the lives of the lower classes. The right to vote is a tiny power.

Our nations economy is no longer based upon the idea of an unjust, divided society as before, but instead, todays unjust society has been shaped by the corrupt Market economy, which does not even pretend to be honest, compassionate or ethical. Tories believe in money, as the highest guide for humanity.

Neville Westerman

Brynna

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South Wales Echo letters: Saturday, August 12, 2017 - WalesOnline

‘I worked as a prosecutor. Then I was arrested. The experience made a man out of me. It made a black man out of me’ – The Guardian

Posted on August 14, 2017 by Danzig

Paul Butler: First you have to try to ask: how did American criminal justice become so inhumane? Photograph: Sam Hollenshead

Paul Butler, author of the new book Chokehold: Policing Black Men, argues the US criminal justice system is institutionally constructed to control African American men. But, he says, that is merely one facet of a pervasive chokehold over black men that can be observed in numerous social and political arenas.

The work has been described by the New York Times as the most readable and provocative account of the war on drugs since Michelle Alexanders The New Jim Crow.

Here, Butler answers questions on some of the books main arguments and grapples with how its series of radical solutions stands in stark contrast to the agenda of Donald Trump.

If you mention the use of a chokehold in the context of modern American policing, the first thing that springs to mind is the 2014 death of Eric Garner in New York. How does that case encapsulate the extended chokehold metaphor you use throughout the book?

The chokehold is a literal mechanism for police use of force. But in the Garner case, it was evocative of so many ills in the criminal justice system: the fact he was arrested for simply selling a tobacco cigarette in the street, the fact he had been harassed by police many times before, the fact the police interpreted his polite conduct as resisting arrest, and the chokehold itself, which was against NYPD regulations. Then, of course, the officer who did it has not been charged with a crime and remains a sworn officer, despite the fact his actions went against NYPD regulations.

So the case, and the chokehold itself, seemed a metaphor for not only how the law fails black people but is also a form of oppression itself.

As a lawyer who went to law school with a goal of helping black people and using my legal skills to make things better, the realization that the law itself was a mechanism to keep African American people down was frightening.

Your prior experience as a criminal prosecutor in Washington DC informs much of your critique of the criminal justice system in the book, and yet you write that you once enjoyed the process of sending other black men to jail. How did you reconcile that on the job?

I had a number of unpleasant experiences with the police as a black kid growing up in Chicago and I was the last person my friends from law school thought would be a prosecutor. But I heard that prosecutors had all this power and so I went to try to change the system from the inside. But I was overwhelmed with the workplace culture, so rather than change the system, the system changed me. I became a hardcore prosecutor in part because the incentives in the prosecutors office are to lock people up for as long as you can.

Lawyers are competitive and ambitious, and the way that manifests itself in a prosecutors office is you want to get tough sentences. I got caught up in that world. You feel like youre doing the Lords work you tell yourselves that youre helping the community.

So how did your perspective change?

There were a few experiences that changed me.

I remember a trial I had in the 1990s where the defendant basically had no defense. He was found with drugs and said he simply didnt know how they had got in his pocket. The majority-black jury found him not guilty. After verdict, I went running after them to find out why. None would talk to me except for the lone white woman, and she said: We knew he was guilty, but he was just so young.

Right there I was forced to reconcile this enormous respect that I gained for the jurors of the district of Columbia with this reality that in some cases they were saying not guilty when they knew otherwise.

You never saw this in cases of violent crime, or even large-scale drug selling, but in drug possession and in low-level sales it was commonplace. And it made me start to think: maybe what theyre doing is right, keeping nonviolent kids out of prison.

Later that decade, I myself was arrested and went to trial over false allegations of [a] misdemeanour assault. A neighbour of mine accused me of pushing her during an argument about a parking space. I was taken to a courthouse with around 150 other black men that day. I thought: Oh my God, what if the judge recognises me? But I dont even think she looked at me. I was just another anonymous, African American man on the lockup list that day.

During the trial, I experienced for myself a lot of things that defendants Id prosecuted said were evidence of how unfair the system was: police lied, witnesses who knew what happened didnt come forward. Now I was forced to confront them myself.

But things were dealt well for me at the trial because I could afford the best lawyer in the city, had legal skills and social standing, and because I was innocent.

The jury took less than 10 minutes to acquit me. But the experience made a man out of me. It made a black man out of me.

The book seems to point to black mens fatal encounters with police as the apex of this chokehold metaphor, but deadly police violence cuts across so many other issues in American society, including mental illness and gun ownership do you think its possible to reconcile them?

I think theyre related in a couple of ways. But first you have to try to ask: how did [the] American criminal justice become so draconian and so inhumane? The answer is, as a way of controlling African American men. So if we think about why we have harsh sentences, why we have a surveillance state, why we have violent policing, why we have 95% of cases settled by plea bargain due to the extraordinary power of prosecutors those were all designed with the idea of controlling black men.

This control has two steps. The first step is the legal construction of every black man as a thug. And the second part is the legal and social response to put down the thug. The supreme court gives the police all this power to control, and of course it doesnt say this power was designed specifically for black men, although its understood thats who the power will be wielded against. But the point about this power is that it is not only used against black men it can be used against others. So all of these practices end up impacting other people, too.

Like many on the left, youre critical of the Obama administrations record on racial justice issues. But do you think, given who has assumed the presidency, that history could look relatively favourably on Obama given his administrations moves to abandon federal private prisons, record number of sentence commutations and consent decrees with major police departments?

Compared to who came next, I think Obama will be remembered extremely favourably by history on almost every front. But I think sometimes Obama himself seemed to suffer from racial fatigue. He didnt have that same swag and confidence when he talked about race as when he talked about other issues of national importance, like healthcare and LGBT equality.

His signature racial justice program, My Brothers Keeper [a public-private mentoring initiative aimed at young men of colour], just missed the mark. He says that he got the idea after Trayvon Martin was killed. You know, Trayvon Martin was killed by a racist neighbourhood watchman, he was basically racially profiled and then hunted down and shot. One wonders how a program about black male achievement is responsive to what happened to Trayvon Martin.

The book devotes a lot of energy to criticising stop-and-frisk policing, a practice that was eventually reformed in New York due evidence of racial bias. But its a policy that Donald Trump has advocated for nationally why you think Trump has been such a vocal proponent?

The point of stop-and-frisk is to humiliate black and brown men. Humiliate them in a way that allows the police to dominate them. And I think thats consistent with Trumps views on the purpose of law and order.

With the Russia collusion investigation, we see Trump and his cronies bemoaning heavy-handed investigations, how much power law enforcement has, how much power prosecutors have, and Trump being very concerned when prosecutors focus on one select group of people. He gets these concerns when they apply to rich white dudes, but hes all for that police power and prosecutor power when it comes to policing black men.

Part of the way that white supremacists like Steve Bannon have championed Trump is because hes always been prejudiced against black people, from the way he operated his real estate business and was accused of not renting to black folks, to his calling for the execution of the Central Park Five [the wrongfully convicted teenagers in an infamous New York City rape case] hes always had this white supremacist baggage that he used as part of his platform.

That said, the book calls for a radical overhaul of the entire criminal justice system, including the abolition of prisons and more direct action protest. Do you think any of that is practically realisable under Trump?

When we think about racial justice for people in America, its always been about abolition: abolition of slavery, then the abolition of formal segregation, the old Jim Crow, and now we need abolition of the new Jim Crow.

The prison experiment has been a failure. We need to start being creative about other ways to do what we think prison does. What we hope prison does is to keep us safe and make people accountable for the harm theyve caused. But those of us who have experience working in the system know that prison doesnt do either one of those well.

I wrote the final chapter in October 2016 thinking Hillary Clinton would be president. Obviously, she lost, and I rewrote the chapter based on Trump. But in some ways, I think his victory motivated activists because it shows the importance of resisting and how much we have to resist. If Clinton had won, people would have been more patient, wanting to give reform a chance. I think Trump has inspired a productive apocalypse. Things are extraordinarily bad, and theyre not going to get better without major agitation.

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'I worked as a prosecutor. Then I was arrested. The experience made a man out of me. It made a black man out of me' - The Guardian

Africa’s second liberation will be women’s empowerment – The Daily Vox

Posted on August 14, 2017 by Danzig

The Women Advancing Africa (WAA) Forum launched this weekend in the Tanzanian capital Dar es Salaam with a call on women to take centre stage in Africas economic liberation. The forum is an initiative of the Graa Machel Trust and celebrates the critical role women play in development. It will also provide a platform to showcase womens leadership and how that can be used for social change and economic transformation. Suzgo Chitete was at the launch.

The platforms launch attracted nearly 300 professional women from across Africa, representing business, politics, law, civil society, and media. Speakers at the forum said that the political liberation achieved decades ago is not good enough for Africa to move forward, and therefore there was a push for what they are calling the second liberation with a focus on making the continent economically independent.

Speaking at the inauguration ceremony, Graa Machel said the forum will help to establish networks among women in the region with a common interest in developing their countries using pan-African ideas.

Our networks are rooted in each country where we are represented. We believe that any social, cultural and economic transformation has to be driven by women in the context of the country they belong to, but a country alone is not enough. Hence, we encourage sub-regional cooperation, explained Machel.

She said the choice of Tanzania as the host of the event was deliberate, as the country was a sanctuary of early African liberation struggles. Machel said the delegates came to Tanzania to pay respect to the East African countrys role in achieving African liberation, and to embark on a second liberation which will set the continent on a path to economic independence, with women as central drivers of change.

In her opening address at the conference, Tanzanian vice-president, Samia Suluhu Hassan, commended the initiative saying ideas shared there could help inform policies and bring about gender parity. She agreed with other speakers that it would be a mistake to ignore women in pushing forward Africas transformation agenda. The Tanzanian deputy leader, who is also a member of the UN High Level Panel on Womens Economic Empowerment, made a personal commitment to support women in her country in any way to ensure their effective participation in the WAA forum.

Governments should provide an enabling infrastructure which seeks to promote gender parity. May I also call upon all of us here to ask our governments to take into account the implementation of [the United Nations] sustainable development goals for faster realisation of economic empowerment, especially for women, Hassan said.

The four-day event hosted several specialised discussions covering topics like agribusiness, energy and extractive industries, cross-border trade, financial inclusion, technology, and media in the context of changing the narrative on womens representation.

The discussions highlighted varied opinions, with some participants blaming men for monopolising power during the independence movement, thereby marginalising women. Other participants felt lessons could be drawn from the first stage of political liberation to succeed in the second struggle for economic independence.

Appearing on a conference panel, Hadeel Ibrahim, the executive director of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, stressed that the second liberation struggle needs to have an inclusive feminist agenda.

The first liberation was about gaining power while the second one is about empowerment. This liberation should aim at inclusiveness for marginalised groups while adhering to good governance, where everyone is treated with dignity regardless of gender, said Ebrahim.

The former president of the Pan-African Parliament, Gertrude Mongella, thinks that independence was achieved due to unity of purpose among nations, and that same spirit of unity should help to make the second liberation a success.

Male speakers at the forum also supported women taking a driving seat in the economic transformation of Africa. Studies have shown that investing in women has economic benefits because the global GDP can expand by $12 trillion. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, the GDP can expand by $300 billion, which is three times the amount of foreign aid to the continent, explained Sangu Delle, a Ghanaian entrepreneur and chief executive officer of the Golden Palm Investments Corporation.

Reporting by Suzgo Chitete, images byGare Amadou

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Africa's second liberation will be women's empowerment - The Daily Vox

How Technology is Now Empowering Educators – Inc.com

Posted on August 14, 2017 by Danzig

Digital transformation is disrupting every industry, and education is no exception. Global investment in edtech companies is increasing rapidly, with some reports predicting a total of $252 billion in investments by 2020. Investors aren't the only people recognizing the importance of technology for education. Educators and students are flocking to solutions that enhance their experience while reducing the high price associated with higher ed.

In fact, research shows that 70% of students want their universities to update their digital options, with 44% of the same group saying they'd be happier with their university experience if they could engage with more digital resources. With an obvious demand from students for better digital solutions, organizations that don't engage with the latest in technology may struggle to engage with new students and grow.

The following are some of the top ways educators and institutions can make quick changes to improve their edtech strategy and better connect with a new generation of highly discerning digital natives.

Reinventing Publishing

While some people thought that eBooks would drive traditional textbooks out of universities, they are still the primary information resource for college classes. One reason digital has failed to overtake print is that early entrants failed to consider the needs of professors and teachers. "We see the educator continuing to be the catalyst or accelerant at the heart of that process. So, technology should focus on helping the instructor, leveraging their knowledge, skill, and dedication, rather than simply seeking to automate them away." shared Alastair Adam, Co-CEO of digital textbook publisher FlatWorld. That's why a number of innovative companies are working to bridge the gap between the publishing world and the classroom.

Despite the fact that textbooks are still prevalent in most classrooms, publishers have been offering fewer titles and regularly increasing the price of new editions. A new approach is necessary to help make textbooks affordable, especially when education costs are rising everywhere else. Adam explains, "Trying to solve the problem of high priced textbooks by focusing only on new technology is the equivalent of trying to solve the problem of expensive airfares by putting all your resources into developing flying cars. We think the better approach is to break down the price barrier to make textbooks accessible to all students." Cheaper and more digitally integrated textbooks will result in an increase in student success.

MOOC's Making Waves

The advent of massive open online courses, commonly known as MOOCs, represents a major shift in thinking for institutions. In the past information regarding technical expertise and industry knowledge was treated as exclusive and proprietary to the institution.

More and more universities, however, are recognizing that access to information is no longer their main value proposition. Instead, they give away information freely and emphasize the importance of their expertise. The guidance they can provide in the learning process remains their main competitive advantage. That's why the biggest and most popular MOOC's originate at traditional universities like Harvard and MIT. It is an indication that they are unlikely to replace these institutions, but rather become a part of their overall service offerings.

Learning Analytics

A study conducted by Hanover Research found that 87% of surveyed college students said analytics on their performance had a positive influence on their learning. Giving students access to real performance data that goes deeper than a grade can help them self-diagnose gaps in knowledge and seek out the right resources and support to close them.

Similarly, educators can recognize problems sooner, and partner students with learning tools that can help them avoid falling behind. Analytics like this are dependent on integrated systems that can compile data from varied sources like homework and tests. 'Online grading' solutions, while helpful for automating, fall short of providing helpful data insights for students. Institutions will need to take partners with organizations that offer full-service analytics to increase student performance.

Driving Change for Education

It should be noted that no education technology has demonstrated the ability to completely change the market. Though the industry has undergone a significant amount of change due to technology, it remains largely the same as it has been for decades. Companies wanting to drive real change in the industry should consider how to partner with educators to providing sensible solutions rather than attempting to reinvent existing norms.

When it comes to assessing return on investment, it's important to look at student outcomes and benefits to the institution. For example, 45% of students who have access to good digital tools said they'd be more willing to recommend their university to others. Engaging with digital tools can help universities stay competitive, and they can also upgrade the performance of each student, which should be the ultimate goal of any edtech solution.

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How Technology is Now Empowering Educators - Inc.com

Trump administration goes after China over intellectual property, advanced technology – Washington Post

Posted on August 14, 2017 by Danzig

President Trump signed a memorandum ordering an investigation into China's alleged theft of U.S. technology and intellectual property on Aug. 14. (The Washington Post)

President Trump signed an executive memorandum Monday afternoon that will likely triggeran investigation into Chinas alleged theft of U.S. intellectual property, a measure that could eventually result in a wide range of penalties as the administration seeks a new wayto deal with what it calls Chinese violations of the rules of international trade.

The theft of intellectual property by foreign countries costs our nation millions of jobs and billions and billions of dollars each and every year, Trump said, as he signed the memo surrounded by trade advisers and company executives. For too long, this wealth has been drained from our country while Washington has done nothing... But Washington will turn a blind eye no longer.

Officials said the memorandum would direct their top trade negotiator, U.S. Trade Representative Robert E. Lighthizer, to determine whether to launch an investigation. The inquiry would givethe president broad authority to retaliate if it finds that China is compromising U.S. intellectual property.

But senior White House officials said in a call with reporters Saturday that the investigation could take up to a year to conclude and that it was premature to say whether it would result in tariffs against China, a negotiated settlement or another outcome.

Despite the uncertainties, company executives and politicians widely greeted the investigation as an effort to address a problem that has bedeviled U.S. companies for decades: how to access the Chinese market without ceding their intellectual property to Chinese companies that might use it against them in the future.

Its an issue that has persistently troubled U.S. high technology industries of all kinds --with companies disputing treatment in fieldsrangingfrom nuclear powerto automobilesto telecom.

U.S. businesses have been hesitant to speak out about the issue for fear of drawing reprisal from the Chinese, negative press coverage or cyber security attacks. But privately, many American business leaders express frustration with a Chinese system that coercesthem intotransferring valuable U.S. intellectual property to Chinese companies, or allows it to be stolen outright.

China's Ministry of Commerce on Tuesday morning voiced "grave concern" over Trump's move to initiate an investigation into allegations that China has been "practicing intellectual infringement."The ministry stated that China will not sit on its hands "if the U.S.'s action inflicts damages on the bilateral trading relationships."

China has long required U.S. firms in many industries to form joint ventures with Chinese partners and manufacture some goods inside the country. Although the system forces U.S. companies to transfer some of their valuable know-how to Chinese partners that could become competitors in the future, U.S. companies including Microsoft and General Motors have made such deals to gain access to Chinas valuable market of nearly 1.4 billion people and a booming middle class.

Under a new Chinese cybersecurity law, technology firms including Amazon.com and Apple are required to store users data within Chinese borders and turn over source code and encryption software to the government, potentially giving the Chinese government a back door into private data and proprietary technologies. (Amazon chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

U.S. companies also complain that Chinas enforcement of intellectual property violations remains lax and that theft of trade secrets through malware, phishing and cybermercenaries is rampant. Roughly 70 percent of software in use in China is pirated, though this figure is down from recent years, according to the Software Alliance, a trade group.

Meanwhile, Chinese companies have been pouring billions of dollars of investments into cutting-edge defense and technology firms around the world, including in Silicon Valley. The country has launched an initiative, called Made in China 2025, which seeks to propel its companies to dominate high-tech industries including robotics, aerospace equipment, new energy vehicles and biopharmaceuticals in the next eight years.

WhileU.S. industry remains the most technologically advanced in the world, China is rapidly catching up. Some, such as Randolph Kahn, a consultant and adjunct professor at Washington University School of Law, say this could be detrimental for the U.S. economy. A 2016 report by the U.S. Department of Commerce found that intellectual property accounted for nearly 40 percent of the U.S. economy in 2014.

To the extent that were not able to protect that, youre sacrificing millions or tens of millions of U.S. jobs, and U.S. companies should care a great deal about that, Kahn said.

In an emailed response early Sunday morning, the Chinese government denied the allegations and implied it might challenge a U.S. action in the World Trade Organization. We want to emphasize that the Chinese government has always set great store by [intellectual property] protection and made achievements that are for all to see. Any trade measures to be taken by WTO members must conform to WTO rules, a press office spokesman wrote.

The administration's investigation, which is being carried out under a legal statute known as Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, is likely to have broad support across political parties. On Aug. 2, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) sent a letter to Lighthizer urging the U.S. trade representative to investigative forced technology transfer policies and take action to stop them.

But some Democrats criticized the measure for not going far enough. President Trumps pattern continues: Tough talk on China, but weaker action than anyone could ever imagine. To make an announcement that theyre going to decide whether to have an investigation on Chinas well-documented theft of our intellectual property is another signal to China that it is O.K. to keep stealing, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D.-N.Y.) said in a statement Saturday.

A White House official said the measure had the support of Silicon Valley and areas damaged by trade under past administrations, such asthe Rust Belt. A lot gets said about the internal divisions in the White House on trade and economic policy, but this is an issue that has total unanimity inside the White House, in terms of this being something we want to address,said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the White House's internal affairs.

Jamil Jaffer, the founder of the National Security Institute at George Mason University Law School and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, said the announcement was an important step toward fighting the serious economic threat of cyber theft and forced technology transfer.

The reality is that U.S. government has long known about these aggressive Chinese efforts but until today has been reticent to consider serious trade measures, Jaffer said.

While the Obama administration also worked to combat Chinese cybercrime, the Trump administration appears to be trying to take a markedly different tack.

On his first Monday in office, Trump pulled the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-country trade deal thatthe Obama administration saw as its key method of pressuring China on trade. The deal, which did not include China, had strict rules for intellectual propertyand it would have required Beijing to change certain laws and practices to join the pact.

The Trump administration, in contrast, has shown a preference for using unilateral measures, like the Section 301 investigation, which allow the United States to act without other countries or the World Trade Organization.Trump, Lighthizer and others in the administration have said that existing international trade rules under the WTOhavent been sufficient in policing these actions from China.

Section 301 was often used during the Reagan administration, when Lighthizer served as deputy U.S. trade representative, said Chad Bown, a trade expert at the Peterson Institute. But other countries criticizedsuch measures for makingthe United States the police, prosecutor, judge and jury, he said.

Measures such as Section 301 have been used sparingly since 1995, when the United States joined the WTO and promised to settle its trade disputes through the international organization, Bown said.

In a call Saturday, senior White House officials did not specify whetherthe administration's actions would be taken under WTO rules or potentially violate them.

The officials also said that the trade action had no connection with the rising security threat from North Korea, which last weekthreatened a strike on the U.S. territory of Guam.

Yet analysts said the threat of trade action could potentially be a source of leverage over China, North Koreas only major ally. Trump has repeatedly said that the United States would consider extending better trade terms to China in return for help on North Korea.

The Chinese say their ability to influence Pyongyang's erratic government is limited. But while some in the Chinese government view North Korea as a dangerous distraction from Beijing's bigger role of seeking global leadership, many also see the country as an important geostrategic buffer between China and the U.S.-allied South Korea.

Ashley Parker in Washington and Simon Denyer in Beijing contributed to this report.

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly identified North Korea as being allied with the United States.

Futurist Transhuman News Blog

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