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AstroTurf Offers Program to Help Clients Re-Open Athletic Fields in the Wake of Covid-19 – Yahoo Finance

Posted on June 13, 2020 by Prof Baldwin

It may be a mistake to think that just because a synthetic field has not been played on in four months it should be in good condition. That could be far from the truth. There is still a lot to consider before you open your fields back up for play.

DALTON, Ga., June 12, 2020 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ --Over the last several months, COVID-19 restrictions have meant that most all sports facilities have been closed and off limits to athletes for quite some time. Hopefully, facilities are making plans to reopen athletic fields in the very near future and have considered all the necessary steps to do so. It may be a mistake to think that just because a synthetic field has not been played on in four months it should be in good condition. That could be far from the truth. There is still a lot to consider before you open your fields back up for play.

Today's synthetic turf systems are more like natural grass. Manufacturers have been able to simulate the look and feel of natural grass by using taller, grass-like fibers and fill the fiber matrix with infill like sand, rubber, or organic materials. The finished product requires specialized, consistent maintenance to remain uniform, predictable, and high performing, especially in terms of shock attenuation, traction, and ball response. Proper maintenance will contribute to greater durability and longevity of your synthetic turf system.

Your turf system may just need a deep-brushing, or it may require an intensive cleaning. Even though the field has been closed, it should be inspected for vegetation, animal activity, vandalism, or other contamination. Only some minor grooming may be in order, but for reassurance and peace of mind, an intensive grooming program that includes a field disinfectant is highly recommended.

AstroTurf's Maintain the Game Aftercare Program has put together a comprehensive field maintenance program that considers the surface safety concerns facing our world today. This regular service program can be upgraded to include ProGienics. ProGienics Concentrated Hard Surface Disinfectant is a proactive approach to disease prevention & odor control that can be used on a wide range of surfaces found in athletic fields, fitness centers, weight rooms, common areas, children's playgrounds or anywhere with synthetic turf. This application is effective against a wide variety of mold, bacteria, fungi, and viruses including COVID-19. The result is a completely disinfected playing surface that is safe for athletes.

The use of ProGienics has been determined to kill 99.9% of germs, virus, bacteria, mold, fungus, mildew, and microbes that cause diseases and infections on contaminated surfaces including artificial turf, athletic fields, playgrounds, locker rooms and more. The treatment is 100% human, animal, and is environmentally friendly.

Not only will the Maintain the Game Program provide a decontaminated surface, it will also provide an extensive fiber brushing, removal of foreign objects and debris, decompaction of the infill and give a beautiful, predictable, high-performing playing surface.

So, before you just open the gate to the field and let the users play, be responsible and go down this checklist.

For more information on how to best care for your field and to have it professionally inspected or groomed, please reach out to maintenance@astroturf.com

About AstroTurf: For athletes and sport enthusiasts, AstroTurf has redefined the way the game is played. The brand offers advanced, state-of-the-art, multi-sport and specialized synthetic turf systems with proprietary engineered technologies. A growing number of high schools, colleges, professional sports teams, and municipalities continue to select AstroTurf-branded products for their premium quality, technical superiority, and safety. To learn more, visit AstroTurf's website at http://www.astroturf.com.

SOURCE AstroTurf

13 Habits Linked to a Long Life (Backed by Science)

Posted on May 28, 2020 by Prof Baldwin

Many people think that life expectancy is largely determined by genetics.

However, genes play a much smaller role than originally believed. It turns out that environmental factors like diet and lifestyle are key.

Here are 13 habits linked to a long life.

The link between calorie intake and longevity currently generates a lot of interest.

Animal studies suggest that a 1050% reduction in normal calorie intake may increase maximum lifespan (1).

Studies of human populations renowned for longevity also observe links between low calorie intake, an extended lifespan, and a lower likelihood of disease (2, 3, 4).

What's more, calorie restriction may help reduce excess body weight and belly fat, both of which are associated with shorter lifespans (5, 6, 7).

That said, long-term calorie restriction is often unsustainable and can include negative side effects, such as increased hunger, low body temperature, and a diminished sex drive (3).

Whether calorie restriction slows aging or extends your lifespan is not yet fully understood.

Nuts are nutritional powerhouses.

They're rich in protein, fiber, antioxidants, and beneficial plant compounds. Whats more, theyre a great source of several vitamins and minerals, such as copper, magnesium, potassium, folate, niacin, and vitamins B6 and E (8).

Several studies show that nuts have beneficial effects on heart disease, high blood pressure, inflammation, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, belly fat levels, and even some forms of cancer (9, 10, 11, 12).

One study found that people who consumed at least 3 servings of nuts per week had a 39% lower risk of premature death (13).

Similarly, two recent reviews including over 350,000 people noted that those who ate nuts had a 427% lower risk of dying during the study period with the greatest reductions seen in those who ate 1 serving of nuts per day (14, 15).

When it comes to anti-aging strategies, turmeric is a great option. Thats because this spice contains a potent bioactive compound called curcumin.

Due to its antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, curcumin is thought to help maintain brain, heart, and lung function, as well as protect against cancers and age-related diseases (16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22).

Curcumin is linked to an increased lifespan in both insects and mice (23, 24, 25).

However, these findings have not always been replicated, and no human studies are currently available (26, 27).

Nevertheless, turmeric has been consumed for thousands of years in India and is generally considered safe.

Consuming a wide variety of plant foods, such as fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, whole grains, and beans, may decrease disease risk and promote longevity.

For example, many studies link a plant-rich diet to a lower risk of premature death, as well as a reduced risk of cancer, metabolic syndrome, heart disease, depression, and brain deterioration (28, 29, 30, 31).

These effects are attributed to plant foods nutrients and antioxidants, which include polyphenols, carotenoids, folate, and vitamin C (32).

Accordingly, several studies link vegetarian and vegan diets, which are naturally higher in plant foods, to a 1215% lower risk of premature death (33, 34).

The same studies also report a 2952% lower risk of dying from cancer or heart, kidney, or hormone-related diseases (33, 34).

Whats more, some research suggests that the risk of premature death and certain diseases increases with greater meat consumption (35, 36, 37).

However, other studies report either nonexistent or much weaker links with the negative effects seeming specifically linked to processed meat (38, 39).

Vegetarians and vegans also generally tend to be more health-conscious than meat eaters, which could at least partly explain these findings.

Overall, eating plenty of plant foods is likely to benefit health and longevity.

It should come as no surprise that staying physically active can keep you healthy and add years to your life (40).

As few as 15 minutes of exercise per day may help you achieve benefits, which could include an additional 3 years of life (41).

Furthermore, your risk of premature death may decrease by 4% for each additional 15 minutes of daily physical activity (41).

A recent review observed a 22% lower risk of early death in individuals who exercised even though they worked out less than the recommended 150 minutes per week (42).

People who hit the 150-minute recommendation were 28% less likely to die early. What's more, that number was 35% for those who exercised beyond this guidance (42).

Finally, some research links vigorous activity to a 5% greater reduction in risk compared to low- or moderate-intensity activities (43).

Smoking is strongly linked to disease and early death (44).

Overall, people who smoke may lose up to 10 years of life and be 3 times more likely to die prematurely than those who never pick up a cigarette (45).

Keep in mind that it's never too late to quit.

One study reports that individuals who quit smoking by age 35 may prolong their lives by up to 8.5 years (46).

Furthermore, quitting smoking in your 60s may add up to 3.7 years to your life. In fact, quitting in your 80s may still provide benefits (44, 46).

Heavy alcohol consumption is linked to liver, heart, and pancreatic disease, as well as an overall increased risk of early death (47).

However, moderate consumption is associated with a reduced likelihood of several diseases, as well as a 1718% decrease in your risk of premature death (47, 48).

Wine is considered particularly beneficial due to its high content of polyphenol antioxidants.

Results from a 29-year study showed that men who preferred wine were 34% less likely to die early than those who preferred beer or spirits (49).

In addition, one review observed wine to be especially protective against heart disease, diabetes, neurological disorders, and metabolic syndrome (50).

To keep consumption moderate, it is recommended that women aim for 12 units or less per day and a maximum of 7 per week. Men should keep their daily intake to less than 3 units, with a maximum of 14 per week (51).

It's important to note that no strong research indicates that the benefits of moderate drinking are greater than those of abstaining from alcohol.

In other words, there is no need to start drinking if you don't usually consume alcohol.

Feeling happy can significantly increase your longevity (52).

In fact, happier individuals had a 3.7% reduction in early death over a 5-year study period (53).

A study of 180 Catholic nuns analyzed their self-reported levels of happiness when they first entered the monastery and later compared these levels to their longevity.

Those who felt happiest at 22 years of age were 2.5 times more likely to still be alive six decades later (54).

Finally, a review of 35 studies showed that happy people may live up to 18% longer than their less happy counterparts (55).

Anxiety and stress may significantly decrease your lifespan.

For instance, women suffering from stress or anxiety are reportedly up to two times more likely to die from heart disease, stroke, or lung cancer (56, 57, 58).

Similarly, the risk of premature death is up to three times higher for anxious or stressed men compared to their more relaxed counterparts (59, 60, 61).

If you're feeling stressed, laughter and optimism could be two key components of the solution.

Studies show that pessimistic individuals have a 42% higher risk of early death than more optimistic people. However, both laughter and a positive outlook on life can reduce stress, potentially prolonging your life (62, 63, 64, 65).

Researchers report that maintaining healthy social networks can help you live up to 50% longer (66).

In fact, having just 3 social ties may decrease your risk of early death by more than 200% (67).

Studies also link healthy social networks to positive changes in heart, brain, hormonal, and immune function, which may decrease your risk of chronic diseases (68, 69, 70, 71, 72).

A strong social circle might also help you react less negatively to stress, perhaps further explaining the positive effect on lifespan (73, 74).

Finally, one study reports that providing support to others may be more beneficial than receiving it. In addition to accepting care from your friends and family, make sure to return the favor (75).

Conscientiousness refers to a person's ability to be self-disciplined, organized, efficient, and goal-oriented.

Based on data from a study that followed 1,500 boys and girls into old age, kids who were considered persistent, organized, and disciplined lived 11% longer than their less conscientious counterparts (76, 77).

Conscientious people may also have lower blood pressure and fewer psychiatric conditions, as well as a lower risk of diabetes and heart or joint problems (78).

This might be partly because conscientious individuals are less likely to take dangerous risks or react negatively to stress and more likely to lead successful professional lives or be responsible about their health (79, 80, 81).

Conscientiousness can be developed at any stage in life through steps as small as tidying up a desk, sticking to a work plan, or being on time.

Both coffee and tea are linked to a decreased risk of chronic disease.

For instance, the polyphenols and catechins found in green tea may decrease your risk of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease (82, 83, 84, 85, 86).

Similarly, coffee is linked to a lower risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and certain cancers and brain ailments, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's (87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92).

Additionally, both coffee and tea drinkers benefit from a 2030% lower risk of early death compared to non-drinkers (93, 94, 95, 96).

Just remember that too much caffeine can also lead to anxiety and insomnia, so you may want to curb your intake to the recommended limit of 400 mg per day around 4 cups of coffee (97, 98).

It's also worth noting that it generally takes six hours for caffeine's effects to subside. Therefore, if you have trouble getting enough high-quality sleep, you may want to shift your intake to earlier in the day.

Sleep is crucial for regulating cell function and helping your body heal.

A recent study reports that longevity is likely linked to regular sleeping patterns, such as going to bed and waking up around the same time each day (99).

Sleep duration also seems to be a factor, with both too little and too much being harmful.

For instance, sleeping less than 57 hours per night is linked to a 12% greater risk of early death, while sleeping more than 89 hours per night could also decrease your lifespan by up to 38% (100, 101).

Too little sleep may also promote inflammation and increase your risk of diabetes, heart disease, and obesity. These are all linked to a shortened lifespan (102, 103, 104, 105).

On the other hand, excessive sleep could be linked to depression, low physical activity, and undiagnosed health conditions, all of which may negatively affect your lifespan (106).

Longevity may seem beyond your control, but many healthy habits may lead you to a ripe, old age.

These include drinking coffee or tea, exercising, getting enough sleep, and limiting your alcohol intake.

Taken together, these habits can boost your health and put you on the path to a long life.

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13 Habits Linked to a Long Life (Backed by Science)

Fitful nightly sleep linked to chronic inflammation, hardened arteries – UC Berkeley

Posted on June 8, 2020 by Prof Baldwin

3-D illustration of blood vessels with plaque buildup. (iStockphoto)

Disrupted nightly sleep and clogged arteries tend to sneak up on us as we age. And while both disorders may seem unrelated, a new UC Berkeley study helps explain why they are, in fact, pathologically intertwined.

UC Berkeley sleep scientists have begun to reveal what it is about fragmented nightly sleep that leads to the fatty arterial plaque buildup known as atherosclerosis that can result in fatal heart disease.

Weve discovered that fragmented sleep is associated with a unique pathway chronic circulating inflammation throughout the blood stream which, in turn, is linked to higher amounts of plaques in coronary arteries, said study senior author Matthew Walker, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology and neuroscience.

The findings, published today, June 4, in the journal PLOS Biology, adds poor sleep as a key risk factor for cardiovascular disease, which ranks as the top killer of Americans, with some 12,000 deaths each week although COVID-19, which has killed, on average, 1,000 a day during the pandemic in the U.S., comes close.

To the best of our knowledge, these data are the first to associate sleep fragmentation, inflammation and atherosclerosis in humans, said study lead author Raphael Vallat, a postdoctoral researcher in Walkers Center for Human Sleep Science at UC Berkeley.

Established risk factors for cardiovascular disease in humans include poor diet, lack of exercise, obesity, high blood pressure and smoking.

Using statistical modeling, the researchers analyzed the diagnostic data of more than 1,600 middle-aged and older adults using a national dataset known as the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis.

To isolate the effect of sleep quality on heart health, the study controlled for age, ethnicity, gender, body mass index, sleep disorders, blood pressure and high-risk behaviors such as smoking.

The researchers then tracked the results of the study participants, analyzing their blood tests, their calcium scores that can gauge plaque buildup, as well as several different measures of sleep, including wristwatch-assessed sleep across a week and a night in a sleep laboratory that measured electrical brainwave signals.

The final outcome clearly linked disrupted sleep patterns to higher concentrations of circulating inflammatory factors and, specifically, of white blood cells known as monocytes and neutrophils, which are key players in atherosclerosis, researchers said.

In revealing this link with chronic inflammation, the findings suggest a missing middleman that is brokering the bad deal between fragmented sleep and the hardening of blood vessels, Walker said.

Indeed, these associational results in humans mirror recent data in which experimentally manipulated sleep disruption in mice led to higher levels of circulating inflammation that caused atherosclerotic lesions in the rodents, added Vallat.

The findings linking poor sleep to atherosclerosis via chronic inflammation have major public health implications, researchers said.

For example, atherosclerosis often begins in early adulthood. Unfortunately, this process goes largely unnoticed until the plaque buildup, in middle or old age, suddenly blocks arterial blood flow to the heart, lungs, brain and/or other organs, hence its moniker, silent killer, said Vallat.

The insidious nature of the disease requires that we pay extra attention to our sleep hygiene, even starting in early to midlife, said study co-lead author Vyoma Shah, a doctoral student in Walkers lab.

To more accurately gauge ones sleep quality, the researchers recommend the use of clinical grade sleep trackers, because the study found that peoples subjective assessments of their sleep were not reliable.

If you track your sleep patterns using objective measures, the same way you track your weight, blood pressure or cholesterol, you can make modifications to your sleep habits, which could make a tangible difference to later life health outcomes, said Shah.

With chronic inflammation shaping up to be a bridge connecting poor sleep to cardiovascular disease, its worth exploring its role in a plethora of other diseases where inflammation is known to be a possible factor, the researchers said.

This link between fragmented sleep and chronic inflammation may not be limited to heart disease, but could include mental health and neurological disorders, such as major depression and Alzheimers disease, Walker said. These are new avenues we must now explore.

In addition to Walker, Vallat and Shah, co-authors of the study are Susan Redline at Harvard Medical School and Peter Attia, founder of Attia Medical, a medical practice focused on the science of longevity.

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Fitful nightly sleep linked to chronic inflammation, hardened arteries - UC Berkeley

Longevity and Anti-senescence Therapy Market Projected to Experience Major Revenue Boost During the Forecast Period Between 2020-2026 | Covid-19…

Posted on May 16, 2020 by Prof Baldwin

ReportsnReports recently added a detailed overview and industry professional survey report on the global Longevity and Anti-senescence Therapy Market. In this report, titled Longevity and Anti-senescence Therapy Market Size, Share and Industry Analysis by Technologies, By Product, By Application, By Distribution Channel, and Regional Forecast 2019-2026.

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The scope of the report encompasses the major types of Longevity and Anti-senescence Therapy Market that have been used, as well as the major applications being developed by industry, academic researchers and their commercialization offices, and government agencies. It analyzes the current market status, examines future market drivers, and presents forecasts of growth over the next five years. Technology developments, including the latest trends, are discussed. Other influential factors such as screening strategies for pharmaceuticals have also been included.

The global Longevity and Anti-senescence Therapy Market is comprehensively profiled in the report, including a detailed study of the markets key drivers and restraints, major market players, and leading segments.

Report Scope:

The scope of this report is broad and covers various therapies currently under trials in the global longevity and anti-senescence therapy market. The market estimation has been performed with consideration for revenue generation in the forecast years 2018-2023 after the expected availability of products in the market by 2023. The global longevity and anti-senescence therapy market has been segmented by the following therapies: Senolytic drug therapy, Gene therapy, Immunotherapy and Other therapies which includes stem cell-based therapies, etc.

Revenue forecasts from 2028 to 2023 are given for each therapy and application, with estimated values derived from the expected revenue generation in the first year of launch.

The report also includes a discussion of the major players performing research or the potential players across each regional longevity and anti-senescence therapy market. Further, it explains the major drivers and regional dynamics of the global longevity and anti-senescence therapy market and current trends within the industry.

The report concludes with a special focus on the vendor landscape and includes detailed profiles of the major vendors and potential entrants in the global longevity and anti-senescence therapy market.

Any Query or Discount? Ask our Expert athttps://www.reportsnreports.com/contacts/discount.aspx?name=2255402

Report Includes:

71 data tables and 40 additional tables An overview of the global longevity and anti-senescence therapy market Analyses of global market trends, with data from 2017 and 2018, and projections of compound annual growth rates (CAGRs) through 2023 Country specific data and analysis for the United States, Canada, Japan, China, India, U.K., France, Germany, Spain, Australia, Middle East and Africa Detailed description of various anti-senescence therapies, such as senolytic drug therapy, gene therapy, immunotherapy and other stem cell therapies, and their influence in slowing down aging or reverse aging process Coverage of various therapeutic drugs, devices and technologies and information on compounds used for the development of anti-ageing therapeutics A look at the clinical trials and expected launch of anti-senescence products Detailed profiles of the market leading companies and potential entrants in the global longevity and anti-senescence therapy market, including AgeX Therapeutics, CohBar Inc., PowerVision Inc., T.A. Sciences and Unity Biotechnology

Summary:

Global longevity and anti-senescence therapy market deals in the adoption of different therapies and treatment options used to extend human longevity and lifespan. ?Human longevity is typically used to describe the length of an individuals lifetime and is sometimes used as a synonym for ?life expectancy in the demography. ?Anti-senescence is the process by which cells stop dividing irreversibly and enter a stage of permanent growth arrest, eliminating cell death. Anti-senescence therapy is used in the treatment of senescence induced through unrepaired DNA damage or other cellular stresses.

Global longevity and anti-senescence market will witness rapid growth over the forecast period (2018-2023) owing to an increasing emphasis on Stem Cell Research and an increasing demand for cell-based assays in research and development.

An increasing geriatric population across the globe and a rising awareness of antiaging products among generation Y and later generations are the major factors expected to promote the growth of global longevity and anti-senescence market. Factors such as a surging level of disposable income and increasing advancements in anti-senescence technologies are also providing traction to the global longevity and anti-senescence market growth over the forecast period (2018-2023).

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According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the total geriatric population across the globe in 2016 was over REDACTED. By 2022, the global geriatric population (65 years and above) is anticipated to reach over REDACTED. An increasing geriatric population across the globe will generate huge growth prospectus to the market.

Senolytics, placenta stem cells and blood transfusions are some of the hot technologies picking up pace in the longevity and anti-anti-senescence market. Companies and start-ups across the globe such as Unity Biotechnology, Human Longevity Inc., Calico Life Sciences, Acorda Therapeutics, etc. are working extensively in this field for the extension of human longevity by focusing on study of genomics, microbiome, bioinformatics and stem cell therapies, etc. These factors are poised to drive market growth over the forecast period.

Global longevity and anti-senescence market is projected to rise at a CAGR of REDACTED during the forecast period of 2018 through 2023. In 2023, total revenues are expected to reach REDACTED, registering REDACTED in growth from REDACTED in 2018.

The report provides analysis based on each market segment including therapies and application. The therapies segment is further sub-segmented into Senolytic drug therapy, Gene therapy, Immunotherapy and Others. Senolytic drug therapy held the largest market revenue share of REDACTED in 2017. By 2023, total revenue from senolytic drug therapy is expected to reach REDACTED. Gene therapy segment is estimated to rise at the highest CAGR of REDACTED till 2023. The fastest growth of the gene therapy segment is due to the Large investments in genomics. For Instance; The National Human Genome Research Institute (U.S.) had a budget grant of REDACTED for REDACTED research projects in 2015, thus increasing funding to REDACTED for approximately REDACTED projects in 2016.

The latest Longevity and Anti-senescence Therapy Market report provides readers with a deeper understanding of potential target consumers to create a lucrative marketing strategy for the 2019-2026 forecast period. For entrepreneurs seeking information about potential customers, it will be particularly helpful. Selective statements provided by leading vendors would allow entrepreneurs to gain a deeper understanding of the local market and prospective customers.

Table of Contents:

Chapter 1 Introduction

Study Background

Study Goals and Objectives

Reasons for Doing This Study

Scope of Report

Methodology and Information Sources

Geographic Breakdown

Market Breakdown

Analysts Credentials

.Continued

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Longevity and Anti-senescence Therapy Market Projected to Experience Major Revenue Boost During the Forecast Period Between 2020-2026 | Covid-19...

Expert Jason Hope on using AI to learn from pandemic – Augusta Free Press

Posted on May 16, 2020 by Prof Baldwin

Published Thursday, May. 14, 2020, 8:33 pm

Front Page Business Expert Jason Hope on using AI to learn from pandemic

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Since the initial recognition of COVID-19, and throughout the remarkable trajectory of the global pandemic to date, the scientific community has sought to garner unprecedented insight regarding the connection between Coronavirus, and a myriad of human connections. From the Epidemiologists investigating patterns of infection throughout the world to the Biologists seeking an effective vaccination, the scientific community is brimming with brilliant minds searching for ways to gain an understanding of the pandemic, the human body, modern disease mitigation, and the impacts of COVID-19 on other aspects of the general lifespan. For Jason Hope, along with researchers in the niche field of longevity studies, the Coronavirus pandemic has opened a breadth of new considerations, topics of study, and important connections that could impact the quest for long-term wellness and preservation.

As a widely renowned thought leader and champion within the realm of human longevity research, expert Jason Hope has dedicated his breadth of time, experience, and knowledge to propel technology, public understanding, and research needed to propel the field. With a firm belief in the potential benefits that a broader understanding of human longevity can provide, the entrepreneur and mentor, who previously developed a successful mobile communications company, now focuses on leveraging his skills to drive the field forward. Recently, shed light on the connection between artificial intelligence, human longevity, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

In discussing the impact of COVID-19 within the field of longevity studies, Hope sat down with the Director of Aging Research at Kings College London, Dr. Richard Siow. After his own firsthand experience with battling Coronavirus-like symptoms, Siow spoke at length about the experience, his understanding of the pandemic as it related to human longevity, and what the scientific community can learn from the current Coronavirus pandemic.

In speaking about his experience, Siow shared that he did stop taking the immunosuppressives for the two weeks to try and recover, so Ive also had an increase in my arthritis symptoms. So you can see that there are consequences for my Longevity by having an underlying health condition. According to Hope, it can be surmised that individuals who test positive for COVID-19 may experience a myriad of symptoms, potentially more difficult to deal with in the presence of other already present healthcare conditions. Thus, when utilizing medications or treatments to combat the symptoms of Coronavirus, these individuals may experience a resurgence of symptoms related to their other existing conditions, sparked by medication interaction, or a push-and-pull effect of the human body. In this sense, the presence of COVID-19 in any individual can directly impact overall wellness, the aging of the body, and the prospect of increasing longevity.

With these vastly important conclusions in play, it is important for professionals within the field of anti-aging and human longevity to research ways to mitigate the negative impacts of infectious diseases like COVID-19 in terms of longevity. While Dr. Siows previous studies focused primarily on cardiovascular aging, the current pandemics interference with human longevity has motivated him to pivot his studies. Dr. Siow has stated, my interest now is to align my research background and the longevity consequences of COVID-19 and see how my research might be able to mitigate and prevent some of these long term impacts on health and wellness and also future infections. As a trusted thought provider in the field, Hope touts that this increased focus on maintaining longevity efforts for individuals affected by infectious conditions like COVID-19 will undoubtedly create a much more informed, efficient, and successful blueprint for action, in the event of a future pandemic outbreak.

While the presence of Coronavirus presents immediate risks and dangers to individuals, it also poses long-term concerns and can exacerbate conditions that may remain dangerous long after the virus leaves the individual. While a full recovery may signal the disappearance of immediately related COVID-19 symptoms, it doesnt account for the potentially grim aftermath that the presence of Coronavirus may leave behind. Experts like Jason Hope ponder the notion that COVID-19 could potentially predispose individuals to the future emergence of age-related conditions, including dementia, heart disease, and other serious medical considerations. Thus, increasing overall human resilience may be the key to boost overall wellness, longevity, and health, which could minimize the seriousness of symptoms for future outbreaks.

In seeking scientifically backed answers to these very current considerations, Dr. Siow looks to personalization, technology, and artificial intelligence to customize prevention to meet the needs of every individual. At the Longevity AI Consortium, a Kings College initiative focused on marrying industry and academic personnel to create personalized aging insights, garnering insight from healthy individuals is the first step to creating a roadmap for maintaining wellness. To do this, Dr. Siow looks at specific biomarkers for wellness to create proactive planning to retain health and wellness through positive intervention. Championing the potential impact of this proactive approach, Hope notes that creating a bespoke and effective proactive regimen for individuals to follow could greatly impact their ability to harness an efficient immune system and be best prepared to stave off potential complications throughout another outbreak like the current Coronavirus pandemic.

Bridging the tech-based advancements with the practical consumer-facing application will be the key to generating universal data sets that can then be analyzed, and utilized to create trustworthy statistics, recommendations, and information that can undoubtedly help individuals across the globe. While this sector remains fragmented, philanthropists and investors like Jason Hope believe that through constant advancement, the marriage of AI, technology, science, and medicine, will be able to propel the field of anti-aging and human longevity forward. With broad considerations for the myriad of ways that different facets of human functionality impact longevity on a long-term basis, growth within the field can unlock answers that can help countless individuals to remain healthy well into the geriatric age. Furthermore, in times of a global healthcare crisis, the field of longevity can offer unparalleled insight into how conditions like COVID-19 can impede longevity, exacerbate tertiary conditions, and create long-term negative effects.

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Expert Jason Hope on using AI to learn from pandemic - Augusta Free Press

Survival of the fittest for DTC brands – Retail Dive

Posted on May 14, 2020 by Prof Baldwin

Alex Song is CEO of Innovation Department. Views are the author's own.

While COVID-19 deals a major blow to almost every retail vertical (grocery, wellness and drug stores as the primary exceptions), direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands are in an especially vulnerable state. Even before the pandemic turned consumer activity upside down, we were already seeing flaws in the DTC model. The implosion of athletic apparel company Outdoor Voices represented the wider trend of putting influencer status ahead of sound business practices. And the disastrous Casper IPO shined a light on the vulnerability of hot-out-of-the-gate brands that lack a solid plan for customer retention and longevity.

Already in 2020, we have seen Brandless and Super Heroic shut down and the Federal Trade Commission block the Harry's, Edgewell merger. The economic decline, unicorn bubble burst and disappointing news in the industry have turned the DTC landscape into a push for the survival of the fittest.

So what will it take for DTC brands to not only survive in this current environment but to thrive?

Facing an uncertain market, businesses around the world have taken the initial critical step: protecting their cash flow. Brands have taken actions within their control by limiting their expenses and fostering their marketing and sales pipelines.

The next move must be a careful analysis of the supply chain factors a business is far less able to control. Most factories are either closed or running at half capacity (at best) and fulfillment centers are operating at a reduced capacity while under directives to prioritize products deemed essential. Output has stalled and shipments are delayed. Each part of operations is vulnerable: sourcing, supply chain, fulfillment and distribution.

It's time to build beyond plan A, which has likely not been dependable since the beginning of March. DTC brands must account for ever-changing variables. For example, if a business has nurtured a relationship with a fantastic seller abroad, but customs delays mean the time from order to delivery is simply not sustainable, it's time to dig into the supplier landscape to explore new relationships.

This is no time to act out of desperation by sacrificing long-term sustainability for short-term wins. Growing DTC brands must remember the fundamentals of scaling. Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is bound to be lowest at the early life stages of a brand when customers looking for the next big thing are willing to overlook near-term sacrifices. But in later stages of growth, brands are pulling customers from the mainstream majority a more discerning audience so CAC will only become higher. At this phase of acquisition, a business must have a keen understanding of that customer's lifetime value to justify increased spending.

Even with digital advertising costs down in light of reduced competition, if brands simply try to fill the top of their funnel, without planning how they'll nurture leads to maximize lifetime value (LTV), they're setting themselves up for massive disappointment (and revenue loss) in the future.

Look at Casper. The DTC mattress brand's revenue may have grown by 43% from 2017 to 2018, but its overall economic earnings that represent cash flow went from negative $78 million to negative $95 million in the same period. After a customer purchased a mattress (a fairly easy sell), the brand had no significant plan for what would come next. End of relationship.

Meanwhile, Warby Parker took eyewear, a product traditionally associated with low customer LTV, and flipped the equation on its head by decreasing the cost. The brand made it common for customers to shift from one pair of everyday glasses to one for each outfit by offering affordable prices, stellar user experience, and engaging marketing. And they're now offering contact lenses, a product with even more powerful unit economics and reorder rates.

A tough economy is not the time to abandon marketing. It's the time to tweak it and become even more laser-focused on community engagement. While reduced budgets will force brands to sacrifice some of the more expensive mediums, staying engaged with customers is crucial. Glossier founder Emily Weiss has proven, perhaps better than anyone, the power of authentic community-building with the creation of her online beauty gathering, "Into the Gloss." Users sharing their interests, beauty tips, and favorite products built a community that not only resulted in sales but truly drove demand.

DTC brands can take a page out of Glossier's book and double down on their content strategy in a time when people are striving for authenticity and more human interactions (not sales calls). And considering it costs five times more to acquire a customer than to retain one, nurturing relationships is also a more budget-friendly way to steer marketing.

It was never a good idea to focus solely on one distribution channel. Harry's recognized the need for wider distribution and brilliantly partnered with Target in 2016. It is much more expensive to drive traffic to a business's own website than to piggyback on the clout of retail behemoths like Amazon, Target and Walmart. Plus, customer behavior naturally favors those bigger marketplaces. Two-thirds of shoppers begin their searches not on Google, but Amazon. If a business conducts all of its sales exclusively through its own channels, it removes itself from 66% of searches.

Now is the time for DTC brands to investigate diverse sales channels especially as the failure of other brands leaves both virtual and physical shelf space for new entrants.

Consumer habits will forever change as a result of COVID-19, and businesses have to keep up. We're not talking about a temporary glitch. Following the 2003 SARS outbreak in China and subsequent desire for more online vs. in-store shopping, Chinese retail king Alibaba saw its valuation grow to about $500 billion.

Customer behavior and marketplace dynamics are undergoing massive changes. With a disciplined operational plan and a little luck, DTC brands that survive will come out of this struggle stronger than ever.

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Survival of the fittest for DTC brands - Retail Dive

Why Australian scientists may have the solution to the coronavirus puzzle – Sydney Morning Herald

Posted on May 16, 2020 by Prof Baldwin

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In the beginning, we had only the human body and its inherent ability to fight disease. Then at some point after we emerged from the primeval swamp, developed an opposable thumb, and picked our first therapeutic herb we had medicine. And now we have a world in which diseases are found and fought in laboratories a thousand miles from any suffering human frame.

On the spectrum between primordial murk and Petri dish, vaccines occupy all points on the scale. They lie at the very forefront of medical science they are our most sophisticated hope for a solution to the pandemic of COVID-19 and yet they rely fundamentally on the most basic resource of the human body: its ability to recover from, and thereafter resist, disease.

Amid all the extraordinary battles raging against the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 around the world at this moment, none is more important than that being fought by scientists. Its a battle on two fronts: to find treatments to cure or mitigate the disease affecting millions of people; and to develop a vaccine that will potentially protect billions.

Currently, there are more than 100 possible vaccines in development globally, many under the aegis of the World Health Organisation and CEPI (the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, an international body founded in 2016 to finance vaccine development against emerging infectious diseases). Australias place in this maelstrom is both small, yet potentially significant, which is a familiar position for Australian science to occupy. Despite our small population, Australian scientists consistently "punch above their weight", says Anna-Maria Arabia, the CEO of the Australian Academy of Science, "both in terms of the quality of our research and publication rates per capita".

This expertise is particularly notable in the fields of immunology and vaccine development. Two of our most famous Australians, Peter Doherty and Ian Frazer, are both still working in vaccine technology. "It very well could be Australians who beat this thing," says Frazer, a Brisbane-based immunologist who co-created the HPV vaccine, which since 2006 has protected some 300 million women against cervical cancer.

"We have very talented people. We have the immunologists, the virologists, the protein chemists and cell biologists."

"Weve got really good science here," agrees Doherty, who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on human T-cell immunity. "Bang for buck, compared with the US, where I worked for a long time, we do extremely well. Weve got some really good people. In fact, I dont think Ive really appreciated how good they are until now."

In January, Australian scientists (at the Doherty Institute in Melbourne, named after the great man himself) were the first outside China to sequence the COVID-19 genome, grow the virus, and share it internationally.

Renowned Australian scientist, HPV vaccine co-creator Ian Frazer.Credit:Paul Harris

Multiple labs and hospitals around the country are investigating drugs like remdesivir (an Ebola antiviral), tocilizumab (an immunosuppressive used mainly for rheumatoid arthritis), the HIV drug Kaletra and malaria treatment hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19. At the same time, REMAP-CAP, an ongoing Australian-based multifactorial trial at more than 100 sites around the world that usually looks into treatments for severe pneumonia, has pivoted to testing drugs on COVID-19 patients, with the ability to alter their medication on the basis of ongoing analysis.

"Weve got a lot of drugs that were trying to repurpose," explains Frazer. "And maybe some of them will work but at the moment it would be fair to say the trials areempiric. In other words, were guessing."

Weve got a lot of drugs that were trying to repurpose. And maybe some of them will work but at the moment it would be fair to say the trials areempiric. In other words, were guessing.

"Drugs are good," says Doherty. "But unlike a vaccine, no drug can give you immunity. Even convalescent serums [antibodies extracted from recovered patients blood and given therapeutically] and monoclonal antibodies [lab-grown versions of antibodies] are only temporary. You have to keep taking them, just like a drug, because their protection gradually disappears."

Even vaccines are not without problems. In the past, work on vaccines for other coronaviruses (such as MERS and SARS) has raised questions regarding the strength and longevity of vaccine-produced immunity; and about the negative impacts of a vaccine on the immune system. There has even been debate about whether a vaccine is possible for COVID-19, given no human coronavirus vaccine has ever been produced.

Australian scientist and Nobel Prize winner Peter Doherty.Credit:Simon Schluter

"Theres one for chickens!" says Doherty, betraying his veterinary origins. "My wife and I both worked on it about 50 years ago!" He laughs. "But no, seriously, you hear this thing about no vaccines for coronavirus, but in fact they were making a lot of progress with both MERS and SARS vaccines. The reason they didnt go anywhere was basically because SARS burnt out, and although MERS still grumbles away, it only infects about 200 people a year. Theres just no big impetus with that level of infection."

He laughs. "Im a very simplistic thinker. But the fact is, all the drug treatments are stopgaps. What we want for COVID-19 is a vaccine. And I think well get one, and that it will work fine."

Fittingly, the oldest records of inoculation come from the source of the worlds newest pandemic China. The first disease ever contained by vaccination was smallpox. Devastating, incurable, with a 20 to 60 per cent death toll and survivors often left blind and horribly scarred, smallpox was unfashionable as it is to point out a far more dangerous pathogen than coronavirus. But by the 1500s (and possibly far earlier), Chinese doctors had realised that if sufferers could only survive the first onslaught of smallpox, they never caught it again. After the first attack, something in survivors own bodies permanently protected them.

Working backwards from this conclusion, doctors took the scabs from healing smallpox pustules and ground them into powder. Then they blew the powder up healthy patients noses. There was also a second technique, which may have originated in India, in which pus from smallpox sores was scratched into incisions in the skin of healthy people with a needle. (Nobody said medicine was pretty.) In both cases, those treated contracted a milder form in theory at least of the disease, from which they could more easily recover.

These strategies, particularly the needle technique, known as variolation, worked in a surprising number of cases: by the 18th century, only one or two patients in every hundred were dying from deliberately induced smallpox. These odds though horrifying to the modern mind were so much better than risking the unmediated disease that variolation spread from China throughout the Arab world. Eventually, in the 1700s, it reached England, the US and Australia.

Variolation was practised on princesses and kings, but perhaps its most important application was to the arm of a Gloucestershire schoolboy. Edward Jenner, now recognised as the father of immunology, was variolated during his childhood, and thus rather against 18th-century odds did not contract smallpox. Instead, he grew up to develop the worlds first vaccine.

Jenner realised that using the pus from lesions of cowpox, a much less serious illness that nonetheless provided effective immunity against smallpox, was a far safer treatment than traditional variolation. By the time of his death in 1823, hundreds of thousands of people had undergone "vaccination" (the word comes from the Latin vaccinus meaning "from a cow"), and a direct line can be drawn from his work to the final eradication of smallpox from the earth in 1980: the greatest triumph of vaccination, and the single most successful medical intervention, in terms of lives saved, in human history.

Illustration by Tim Beor.Credit:

Weve come a long way since Jenner built a "Temple to Vaccinia" in his English backyard, but to experts in pandemic diseases, it must often seem as if weve made no progress at all. Professor Trevor Drew, the director of the Australian Centre for Disease Preparedness (CDP) at the CSIRO in Melbourne, has spent years dealing with the fact that, pre-COVID-19, the man on the street simply couldnt believe that a global pandemic would ever, really and truly, happen. "To most of the world it has come as a terrible shock," he says, managing to sound only slightly rueful. "But we in infectious diseases have known for years that it was a question not of if, but when. We didnt know what it would be, or where it would come from, but we knew it was coming."

Nonetheless, it was only in January this year that the CDP signed a contract with CEPI to run animal trials on potential COVID-19 vaccines. This was before virtually anything was known about the virus, including its lethality and the CDP is one of only a handful of labs in the world designated as BSL-4 (biosafety level 4), authorised to deal with the most dangerous pathogens on earth the likes of Ebola, Marburg and hantaviruses.

"Its been an extremely big challenge," admits Drew, with a scientists feel for understatement. "Weve had to be extremely agile, and its a huge tribute to my team that weve been able to get organised so fast."

COVID-19 social distancing measures have created many headaches in staffing labs and organising teams Drew is talking from his spare bedroom, no doubt a typical site of breakthroughs in all fields of human endeavour these days but nobody on his team has flinched. "Im so proud of them. They all just got on with it."

The CDP is a world leader in the use of animal testing in vaccine development. Its scientists were first in the world to confirm, for instance, that ferrets were susceptible to COVID-19, thanks to the fact that they have a similar lung cell receptor, ACE 2, to that of humans. Its this receptor that the now-famous "spike protein" of COVID-19 plugs into to infect cells. So ferrets, like us, can catch coronavirus (though, unlike us, their worst symptom is a mild cough).

The CSIRO is now running animal trials using ferrets for two vaccines one from American biotech company Inovio Pharmaceuticals, and one from Oxford University. Both were sent there because they looked particularly promising. "Our job is to assess the data and send it back to CEPI and WHO," explains Drew. "Then theyll decide if theyre worth taking to the next stage."

Animal trials are always crucial in establishing whether candidate vaccines are safe and efficacious. But in the case of COVID-19, Drew and his team may help to solve two other problems. One is temporary immunity, which means more than one vaccine dose may be necessary (a big deal if youre potentially dealing with billions of people); the other is that some COVID-19 deaths appear to be caused not by the virus but by the bodys response to it: a wild immune overstimulation known as a cytokine storm.

"For both those problems, our trials are looking at different routes of administering the vaccine orally, intramuscularly to see if that might affect those outcomes," explains Drew. "Vaccine route might prompt a different level of immunity. It might also be important in avoiding immune mediated disease."

Scientists are always collaborative, but these levels of co-operation this global response are really unprecedented. But then, these are unprecedented times. Our competition is against the virus, not against each other.

Things so far look promising: the ferrets have had no adverse effects to either vaccine, and theyll have been exposed to the virus before this article goes to press. And so, by the time you read this story, as many as 6000 people in the UK may have been given the vaccine in a safety trial. Should it happen, this human trial will be able to proceed, in part, thanks to the animal testing carried out by the CSIRO.

"Its a real global effort," concludes Drew. "Scientists are always collaborative, but these levels of cooperation this global response are really unprecedented." He pauses. "But then, these are unprecedented times. Our competition is against the virus, not against each other."

Professor Nigel Curtis and his team at the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute in Melbourne are testing the potential of the BCG tuberculosis vaccine in treating COVID-19.

Professor Nigel Curtis is sitting in his office at the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute (MCRI) in the Royal Childrens Hospital in Melbourne. As head of the infectious diseases and microbiology research group at the MCRI and professor of paediatric infectious diseases at the University of Melbourne, he works not only in the lab, but with patients, and on the weekend of January 27, he thought the hospital switchboard was accidentally ringing him on his day off.

"I answered the phone and said, Look, Im afraid Im not on call today. And they said, No, its the special medical adviser from the World Health Organisation, calling from Geneva. So I said, Oh, right, Ill take that call."

The WHO was contacting Curtis about COVID-19. Not about an innovative new technique for this equally novel virus, but for his expertise in one of the oldest known vaccines, the BCG vaccine for tuberculosis.

By the 19th century, TB often called "consumption" was estimated to have killed one in seven of all the people who had ever lived. The BCG vaccine was developed by two French bacteriologists in the early years of the 20th century (their work continued through World War I thanks to the help of occupying German veterinary surgeons) and was first administered in 1921. It has been given to more than 4 billion people and is still used to vaccinate more than 100 million children annually. "Its incredibly safe and extremely well studied although the extraordinary thing is we still dont really know how it works," laughs Curtis.

Of course, BCG is not a vaccine for COVID-19. But the WHO is interested in its off-target effects; its "accidental advantages", as Curtis calls them, which may impact on the severity of COVID-19. This is because in hundreds of studies, including many by Curtis and his colleagues, BCG has been shown to significantly boost general immunity. Babies given BCG, for instance, quite apart from their protection against TB, are also less likely to get sick with other things, including diarrhoea, sepsis or respiratory illness. "It can reduce all-cause mortality by between 30 and 40 per cent," explains Curtis. "Thats a dramatic reduction.

"It seems to work in a number of different ways, but the main thing we think is happening is that the vaccine provides immune training for the innate immune system."

This part of the immune system is rarely involved in vaccine action, because it has nothing to do with antibodies, which are a function of B cells in the adaptive immune system. But "its the frontline defence, if you like: it holds the fort until the adaptive system gets its act together. And what weve shown, along with our partners in the Netherlands, is that BCG changes some of your immune cells, so that your initial, innate response is more intense, more profound. And so we think that if youve had BCG recently, the response of your innate immune system when you get COVID-19 will be faster and stronger. It will kill the virus and reduce the viral load."

In January, the WHO asked Curtis and his colleagues if they would run a study using BCG on health workers in Wuhan in China, to see if it would help protect them against the new and threatening coronavirus known to be circulating there. "As it turned out, there was complete chaos in Wuhan at the time, and it was just way too hard to get a study going," says Curtis. "But a few months later, when it became apparent that the virus was going to spread across the world, my whole research team got together one Sunday and we said, Right, lets stop everything were doing, and put all our effort into this."

That was on March 8. Usually a big randomised control trial the most rigorous and reliable form of scientific evidence-gathering takes at least six to 12 months to get going. But three weeks later, with the whole MCRI team working "seven days a week, and very long hours", they were ready. The first participants in whats known as the BRACE trial all Australian health workers were recruited at the end of the same month.

It works via an app, which is tracking every illness participants experience using a daily diary of symptoms and disease progression. At the time of writing, the trial had just received $10 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to increase its participant numbers to 10,000 and expand its trial sites overseas: the single largest philanthropic donation to an Australian COVID-19 initiative to date. BRACE has also been personally endorsed by the WHOs director-general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

Interim results are expected next month, andCurtis is hopeful about what they might show. "If I didnt think it would work, I wouldnt have been working 24/7 for the past month to get this study off the ground!" he told a briefing a few weeks ago. "But in science we need the RCTs. Big randomised studies with controls are the only way to know if anything works."

"The great thing is that if it does work, it can be delivered incredibly quickly and safely," he now explains. "Its already readily available in many WHO-accredited labs around the world though we must be careful not to leave TB-vulnerable children without the vaccine so production could be scaled up rather than started from scratch. For those who were vaccinated as children, meanwhile, they can take the vaccine again: indeed, the effects may be enhanced by a second dose. There are also very strict indications for use outside trials, so you wont get people rushing out and vaccinating themselves, as with chloroquine."

And finally and significantly the use of BCG as a proven therapeutic may be important not just for COVID-19, but for the next global health crisis, and the next, and the next.

"Who knows when the next pandemic will come along," says Curtis. "But it will come. Many of us have been saying it for years, and no one was listening. The UK and the US have both failed preparedness tests [the UK failed a major pandemic simulation exercise in 2016; and the US dissolved its White House Pandemic Office and connected funding in 2018]; even now I think many of us fear that we wont learn the lesson: we wont be ready. Next time round it will be something different; perhaps far more deadly than COVID-19. We need to be prepared. We may need a stopgap until we develop a vaccine. And this might be the thing we can use."

The University of Queenslands Daniel Watterson, Christina Henderson, Paul Young, Keith Chappell and Trent Munro.Credit:Courtesy ofTheUniversity of Queensland

Australias most advanced possibility for a home-grown vaccine for COVID-19 did not begin dramatically. Senior research fellow Dr Keith Chappell started it as a "sideline project" after he returned to Brisbane from Madrid nine years ago. "He came back to my lab and asked if he could continue looking at it," recalls Professor Paul Young, head of the school of chemistry and molecular biosciences at the University of Queensland (UQ). "And he came up with the idea of what is now our vaccine technology."

The problem Chappell, Young and fellow researcher Dr Dan Watterson (who now jointly own the patent) had to solve is a basic characteristic of virus behaviour: their shape-shifting nature. "The proteins on viruses undergo a lot of shape changing," explains Young, which makes them hard to lock into a stable vaccine form. "If we take COVID-19 as an example, when the virus enters the body its in whats called a pre-fusion form: its very unstable. Its a bit like a mousetrap set to spring.

"Then, when it inserts itself into the host cell, it flips through this very dramatic change, which is what fuses it to the host cell so that it can begin replicating. [No virus can reproduce on its own: it must hijack a host cell for replication.] So if you can block that step, its a very efficient way to prevent infection. Weve developed what we call a molecular clamp, which acts like a bulldog clip on the mousetrap, clamping down and stopping it from springing." This bulldog-clip, or molecular clamp, is the basis of the UQ vaccine.

One of the beauties of the molecular clamp is that it can be applied to a wide range of viruses. The UQ team has already demonstrated that it works on (among others) Ebola, MERS, influenza and herpes. Its been so successful that in 2018, the team was only the second academic organisation in the world to be funded by CEPI.

This funding was aimed at developing a "rapid response vaccine system". Along with partners including the CSIRO, the Doherty Institute and Australian National University, the idea was to organise the molecular clamp technology for use as a universal vehicle, into which they could slot whatever pathogen protein came along. Barely a year after the funding arrived and, like the CSIRO, far sooner than they were expecting they were called on by CEPI for COVID-19.

Everyone has been working 24/7 for three months, so were all exhausted, but were all exhilarated at the same time.

"The original funding application from CEPI specified that you be capable of having a vaccine ready for clinical trials within 16 weeks," recalls Young. "And in those days, everyone said, Well, thats just crazy." The mumps vaccine of the 1960s the fastest in history took four years. "But its a good goal to have; and actually, were confident well meet it."

This confidence is based on the fact that, firstly, the key aspect of their technology the molecular clamp is ready to go. Also, that they have been specifically investigating ways to speed up the standard vaccine pipeline.

"Traditionally, vaccine development is a linear sequence over several years," explains Young. "Discovery, development, preclinical animal testing, then humans trials by phases [small safety trials, larger studies for efficacy, then really large populations]. Only then do you go to a regulatory authority; and only if thats granted does the manufacturer come in."

So how do you speed up that process without sacrificing science or safety? UQ decided to focus on manufacturing. "Weve uncoupled the manufacturing element from the whole process," says Young. "So were continuing with our preclinical studies, while simultaneously setting up for manufacture."

Its a high-risk strategy, because it means, literally, producing a vaccine that may not work. But the point, says Young, is that its a financial risk, "not a safety risk. You could be devoting a lot of resources to something that may not get there, thats true. But were confident it will."

Research at the University of Queensland is on track to hold human vaccine trials by July this year.Credit:Courtesy oftheUniversity of Queensland

When we speak at the end of April, the UQ vaccine has just passed a significant milestone: it induces an extremely potent immune response in animals. In cell culture, meanwhile, tests at the Doherty Institute have shown it stimulates an even better antibody response than patients whove recovered from COVID-19 (whove developed their own antibodies to the live virus).

The next steps are to challenge the test ferrets and hamsters with the live virus (just as Trevor Drew is doing at the CSIRO), complete the standard toxicology studies, and keep the manufacturing timeline on track for this year. "Were already generating reagents and getting the infrastructure organised thats required for large-scale production, and were in discussions with manufacturers right now," explains Young. "There are actually not that many companies in the world that can cope with a global vaccine. Hundreds of millions of doses only large pharma can do that."

Young admits hes "relieved" the vaccine has done so well so far and says hes optimistic about its future.

"Our timeline is next month, maybe July for human trials," he says. "And were on track." In the best-case scenario, the UQ vaccine could be ready for production in September, and available for widespread use by early 2021.

Its clear that Young, who is speaking from his Brisbane home, feels both the responsibility and the thrill of this position. He and his team may be on the cusp, literally, of changing the world. "The lab is just incredibly excited," he confesses. "Everyone has been working 24/7 for three months, so were all exhausted, but were exhilarated at the same time."

The months since COVID-19 appeared have been memorable ones for most people on earth. Like the scientists of COVID-19, weve all learnt many things since that microscopic spark of destruction emerged from the putative wet market in China. Unlike the scientists, its not clear whether well remember any of them. But one thing, surely, will stay with us. We now understand, in a way we never have before, that vaccines are not just a quotidian detail of modern health care, but a miracle of human ingenuity: a miracle which allows us to cheat death.

Paul Young, like all the scientists in this story, is modest, friendly and confidence-inspiring. But he may hold the power of life and death for millions of people in his laboratory, and he knows it.

"Most people enter this kind of science to make a difference," he says. "In our hearts, thats what we all desire. And were in one of those rare moments in history where thats really possible."

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.

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Why Australian scientists may have the solution to the coronavirus puzzle - Sydney Morning Herald

Twenty years of power and energy engagement goes on | ESI-Africa.com – ESI Africa

Posted on May 14, 2020 by Prof Baldwin

From its simple beginnings as a metering conference African Utility Week, along with its trusted official host publication ESI Africa, has spent the past two decades closely mirroring the growth of the continents energy, power and water value chains.

This article first appeared inESI AfricaIssue 2-2020.Read thefulldigimaghereorsubscribe to receive a print copy here.

As the continents water and power systems grew and became more sophisticated, the conference and exhibition expanded into one of the largest events on the continent, morphing into African Utility Week and POWERGEN Africa (AUW & PGAF).

David Ashdown, Managing Director Africa for Clarion Events, in conversation with ESI Africa chalks up AUW & PGAFs longevity to its ability to mirror the development and evolution of the market. With the expo weve done well to deliver a premium audience of professionals, representing more than 90 countries. The conference brings together a good cross section of speakers from the continent and abroad while being focused on solution-providing and knowledge-sharing, says Ashdown.

He is curious and excited to see what the future holds for AUW & PGAF as it enters its third decade. While it is too early to tell how a sudden burst of digitisation brought to the fore by the COVID-19 pandemic will affect the event industry as a whole, Ashdown thinks it isnt so much that the digital world is encroaching on live events but that the two are finding a way to blend: Clarion Events has been working across the two forms of media for the past ten years and we have seen a steady convergence. The reach we have through our digital media now culminates in live events as a meeting place.

Enforced lockdowns around the world have changed how Clarion Energys entire global workforce operates: Ultimately, we have to support the industry we serve; however, we can now provide support in the development plans of our stakeholders, to work with them to achieve real results in the power and energy sector.

It is going to be challenging, bouncing back from the pandemic crisis. Our products are well positioned and the discussions at AUW & PGAF in November will be about the resilience of the industry sector and the future outlook. How does Africa manage a crisis situation? I think the situation will accelerate the digitalisation of the sector, of the energy space in Africa and the infrastructure, smart city and IoT elements.

In terms of the traditional conference and exhibitions space, Ashdown does not foresee a move away from face-to-face engagement, as we are human; it is the way we interact.

He adds that through the events media arm, we can communicate with an industry for 365 days a year and connect industry professionals to the benefit of their business, its that element that makes us very valuable. We provide a wide range of media content through our journals platforms, which range from a webinar where individuals speak on a curated topic to a panel bringing industry experts together or a debate on a web portals news story where you can take the conversation into a whole new direction.

Webinars have a huge role to play but rather than replace a physical conference, he believes there will eventually be a blended approach a simulcast where a person who cannot travel can still participate in a virtual way to attend a live conference.

Again, Ashdown points out that one simply cannot remove the human need to connect. There are people who will take a more conservative approach in the short term and the fear and anxiety created by COVID-19 might limit peoples comfort zone. It is our responsibility as event organisers to recognise that and to bring in measures in November to create a safe space.

Is the future of event conferencing virtual, though? That is the holy grail of questions, isnt it? What is the model and what would it look like? That debate could go on for many hours and end with different conclusions. But, what you lack in a purely virtual exhibition is the human connection. A virtual handshake is not the same as President Cyril Ramaphosas elbow greeting, says Ashdown. ESI

http://www.african-utility-week.com | http://www.powergenafrica.com

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Twenty years of power and energy engagement goes on | ESI-Africa.com - ESI Africa

COVID sheds light on importance of health on the farm – Western Producer

Posted on May 14, 2020 by Prof Baldwin

Farmers have always been connected to several aspects of a healthy lifestyle. As food producers, were closely connected to the lifecycle of food, from field to fork.

Were also early pioneers of the concept of community, which happens to be a primary factor for self-reported happiness. But as agriculture has evolved, have we lost aspects of health in our daily lives?

A farm business is only as healthy as its operators and neglecting a healthy lifestyle can result in a vulnerable farming operation and food supply. At the forefront of most health-related topics is physical health.

Farmers often consider themselves to be in good physical condition. Many arent anymore, notes Mike Raine, managing editor of The Western Producer.

There are many reasons for this, but many of them boil down to technology, isolation and automation.

City folks often referred to us as farmer-strong because we grew up lifting bales or twisting and bending to get under or onto equipment. It was heavier work then. The farming lifestyle that the country was built on mostly doesnt exist anymore, and now farmers need to supplement with fitness, says Raine.

Whats less obvious to many is the impact that our psychological health has overall health. And while COVID-19 has only infected a small percentage of the population, the virus that has infected nearly everyone is the virus of fear. Fear is highly contagious, and farmers arent immune.

Whether its the fear of getting sick or the fear of losing a family farming operation due to the economic downturn, this fight or flight response to danger has substantial impacts on immune response. There is strong evidence indicating that healthy individuals respond to COVID-19 more favourably than unhealthy individuals. Much of this can be traced back to the bodys psychological state, which affects the body on a biochemical level.

When we perceive stress, the body produces cortisol. Cortisol is the fight-or-flight response hormone responsible for regulating blood pressure and inflammation. During this process, the body also produces a less desirable hormone called norepinephrine, what is more commonly known as adrenaline. This hormone causes increased heart rate and blood pressure. In situations of chronic stress, the body is unable to produce cortisol and the result is unopposed norepinephrine. The link between mental and physical response to stress, whats referred to as mind-body connection, is more relevant than ever before.

Whats also less mentioned is how closely related anxiety is to asthmatic symptoms and other respiratory conditions. While mild stress can most often be managed, situations of chronic stress often results in physical ailments later on in life. Our mental state, has significant impacts on how the body responds to physical stress.

A prime example of this is the impact that the human mind can have on the outcome of major surgeries. Research has found that viewing a surgeon in a favourable light can have a positive impact on the outcome of surgery.

Certainly, fear isnt always a bad thing; doctors can also use this technique to motivate patients to make positive lifestyle changes to improve overall health.

The dominant factor responsible for increased longevity and happiness is not diet or exercise, its the feeling of being a part of a community. While farmers have always been community-based, they are also incredibly isolated in some circumstances. The possible result of this is loneliness.

Current research suggests the perception of loneliness is the greatest indicator of premature mortality, and isolation can increase this by up to 45 percent. As humans, we are hardwired to be with other humans and these social connections are one of the greatest indicators of health and happiness.

As humans, we are constantly exposed to threats in various forms. Yet somehow it seems as though we believe our health is something that will be gifted to us.

How often does an individual visit their doctor while they are actively working to stay healthy, as opposed to when a significant health-related crisis is occurring?

Arguably, COVID-19 has prompted more people to consider their own health and explore ways to improve their lifestyle. And for good reason, especially considering that many farmers take great satisfaction in having the ability to farm into their 90s.

Staying healthy is critical to our worlds food supplies and the sustainability of the family farm. Health is not merely the absence of illness, but a long-term strategy to building a more sustainable future. Healthy individuals manage profitable family farms and, as an industry, we need to support this.

Katelyn Duncan, PAg, BSA, is a Saskatchewan farmer and agrologist.

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COVID sheds light on importance of health on the farm - Western Producer

Dr. David C. Karli’s Opinion on Regenerative Medicine and Age Prevention | – SpaceCoastDaily.com

Posted on May 3, 2020 by Prof Baldwin

Aging is an inevitable process. We cannot escape or prevent getting older but what if theres a fascinating field of medicine that can manage the aging process and prolong our health and vitality and longevity as we age?

Keeping in mind that there may never be an approach to totally stop or reverse aging, there have been some surprising disclosures to how Regenerative Medicine can naturally heal our body without the use of any surgical procedure.

Rejuvenating Old Cells to Healthy ones

The paces, stresses, and complexities in life drive us to age prematurely thereby breaking down our cells. Cell breakdown may lead to several health conditions like cancer, heart disease, Alzheimers and others.

Driving our bodies to age quickly, cell-breakdown is host to many age-related diseases, causing more than 100,000 deaths per day.

Dr David C Karli is an Ivy-trained physician, specialized in treating athletic injuries by inducing regenerative medicine and stem cell therapy in treatments.

He accepts the fact that patients can increase an additional 30 years of life by using Regenerative Medicine. One such innovation uses stem cells, however, there are issues with these cells.

They may not replace the original, diseased cells rapidly enough, or they may start to replicate uncontrollably, bringing about malignant growth.

Yet, Regenerative Medicine definitely guarantees the complete curing of a wide range of diseases, and ideally, slowing down the aging process too.

Stem Cell Therapy Programs with Promising Results

With solid funding and rapid advancements, one stem cell therapy that promises great outcomes is transfusions. In this therapy, stem cells are extracted from the patient and grown in cell culture to increase the number of cells. Following this, those cells are injected back into the patients body.

Dr. Karlis keen interest in Transfusions led him to create biologic products that can cause an age-related decline in a persons strength, endurance, and various other physical abilities.

At his biotech firm, Greyledge Technologies, biologic products are prepared by processing materials (blood or bone marrow) and implanting them into the human body to replicate the diseased tissues.

With an FDA-registered laboratory environment, the outcomes are promising and are an anti-aging protocol.

Telomeres may be the next-gen solution for Anti Aging

Telomeres are essential parts of our DNA that are connected to the premature aging cells. Situated at the end caps of our DNA strands, the information within Telomeres is lost while DNA replicates to the extent that they stop replicating.

If DNA replicates without losing information, scientists believe that Telomeres can significantly help to slow down the aging process.

Similar is the case with Metformin, a pharmaceutical reagent that improves wound healing. Proven to counteract aging, Metformin is now being tested for its unique ability to mimic calorie restriction.

Anti-Aging Through Regeneration

Utilizing induced tissue regeneration, this technology is a new approach to anti-aging treatment. Combining telomerase therapy and induced tissue regeneration, anti-aging through regeneration includes the study of the impact on age-related diseases like diabetes, metabolic disorders, cardiovascular disease, and others.

This technique focuses on the cells that are generated in our body during youth. As we age, these cells are lost and lead to a metabolic imbalance.

Scientists and Researchers are trying to find a way in which these cells can be restored to reverse the signs of aging and create a balance.

Humans have the ability to regenerate damaged and diseased tissues. However, this only happens during the first few weeks of development. With the help of Artificial Intelligence, scientists are trying to unlock this potential ability in humans.

The Future of Anti-Aging

With several breakthroughs on the horizon, cure-all promises and best outcomes, these anti-aging protocols have a long way to go.

While the introduction of regenerative medicine and stem cell therapies to redefine orthopedic treatment sounds like a miracle, there are still unexplored paths that need to be taken.

With all the benefits regenerative medicine has to offer, there will always be an eye on the never-ending search for the fountain of youth.

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Falcons Mount Rushmore heavy on the now, yet mindful of who started it all – Atlanta Journal Constitution

Posted on May 14, 2020 by Prof Baldwin

Just so you know, were not taking this Mount Rushmore project as simply a lark to fill some space until sports comes back. OK, maybe some of us were. But then it was the Falcons turn, and things got a little tense.

There was the series of phone calls to the writer of this story from an obviously troubled sports editor. He kept suggesting the authors preference of center Jeff Van Note over defensive end Claude Humphrey was unwise. Our dear leader had been chewing and chewing on that choice. Obsessively some might say. Captain Queeg-like others might add.

Then there was the report that the newspapers beat man for the Falcons, D. Orlando Ledbetter, was considering a strongly worded memo, perhaps even an angry Zoom web conference, if Humphrey didnt make the Final Falcons Four.

Suddenly, where before there were only blissful hypotheticals, now there was pressure. It was as if the scales of posterity would pop its springs if we didnt get this right. And the writer of story folded like an old road map.

MORE: Where is Steve Bartkowski?

In many ways, the Falcons presented quite the challenge in coming up with a foursome that represents the best of this franchise since its start in 1966. Its not like theres a championship upon which to moor a selection. And, face it, some of this teams more dynamic players from the past had some real cracks in their character.

One notable quarterback, a civic flashpoint since 2001, had to be excluded because of the clearly stated rules in the Imaginary Mount Rushmore Handbook against dogfighting. If only Michael Vick had just gambled on his own team or torched a homeless shelter, then maybe he would have been up for more serious consideration.

Another, the flashiest player ever to wear black, the one who claimed to have seized the Georgia Dome as his very own house, needed to hang around considerably longer than a fad. Deion Sanders was only five years a Falcon, but so consumed all oxygen in the locker room that it seemed longer. He won Super Bowls with San Francisco and Dallas. He won one first-round playoff game in Atlanta (Braves time excluded).

So mottled is the Falcons past that half their representation on the mythical Mount Rushmore here the two leading vote-getters among the readers as a matter of fact are still-active players. Their personnel file is not even complete, and yet they eclipse the weightiest of Falcons careers dating to the beginning. Were taking it on faith that Matt Ryan is not going to take up dogfighting between now and retirement.

Tommy Nobis already looked like he was cut from stone when he arrived as this franchises first-ever draft pick in 66, so hes a natural for the mountainside. Just look at some old picture of him, you could sharpen a knife on that chin.

A linebacker by trade and a human nail-gun at heart, Nobis was the first Falcon to be named to the Pro Bowl, after recording 294 combined tackles as a rookie. Either he was relentless or the same people who count attendance at Mercedes-Benz Stadium now where charting tackles back then.

For 11 seasons, Nobis was the most feared player with a franchise that too often inspired only indifference. He was martyred on the alter of expansion, enjoying just one winning season and no trips to the postseason. After his playing days, he was a point man for the franchise for decades. Wracked with cognitive and physical ailments later in life, he died in 2017.

For reasons never clear, Nobis cant break through in Canton, to the everlasting discredit of the Hall of Fame. But he is affixed as a Falcons franchise favorite. Of the 2,037 reader votes, Nobis was on 60% of the ballots, third among the electorate, but tops with this one-man electoral college.

Safe to say Thomas Dimitroff is off the hook for trading a jumbo pack of draft picks in 2011 to move up 21 spots to select Alabama receiver Julio Jones. At the time, the hand-wringing was intense. But now it seems to really make it fair, the Falcons should still be sending Cleveland some latter-round compensation.

The top vote-getter in this poll, by a wide margin on 80% of the ballots Jones is recognized as the most gifted and dynamic of Falcons offensive types. He should have had the one single most lovely catch in team annals, the one to cinch a Super Bowl, but you know how that ended.

He is 31 years old, on the other side of prime. But Jones was made from a different batch than the rest of us and no predicting exactly how much more hell polish his resume before hes done. And what he has done to date is plenty: Franchise leader in receiving yards (12,125); receptions per game (6.3) and soon to catch Roddy White in career receptions (his 11 behind Whites 808) and receiving touchdowns (six back of Whites 63).

Now to the throwing part of the equation.

The Falcons have had one league MVP in their history. Even with that singular distinction, Ryan (the 2016 winner) seems to attract an unnatural amount of shrapnel from the fans. At least he came in second, at 68%, in this poll.

In the 192 regular-season games the Falcons have played since 2008, Ryan has started 189 of them. His record as a starter is 109-80. He is eighth all-time among quarterbacks in fourth-quarter comeback wins (30, according to Pro Football Reference.com).

Ryan does more incredible things with numbers than a mob accountant. Take the total of the next three on the list of Falcons career passing yardage leaders Steve Bartkowski, Chris Miller and Chris Chandler. Add them together. And that number still falls short of Ryans 51,186 yards.

Hes 34, a still-dependable high-mileage vehicle. Youll miss him when hes gone, whenever that might be.

Some may have held his exit from Atlanta against Humphrey. Fed up with losing four games into the 1978 season, his option year, Humphrey just left the building. And thus leveraged a trade to Philadelphia in 1979 in exchange for what turned out to be a couple of fourth-round draft picks.

Some may have placed a higher value on longevity, lobbying for Van Note, who led the team in most seasons (18) played, while going to the Pro Bowl six times.

But then some just caved to the argument that Humphrey, after all, is the Hall of Famer between the two, a distinction he mostly earned during nine-plus seasons as a Falcon (1968-78). Three years in Philly earned him a Super Bowl appearance that eventually appeased some Hall of Fame voters (although it took Humphrey 33 years after his retirement to get in).

We yielded as well to the fact that Humphrey just edged Van Note in the fan voting, 37% to 34%.

Humphrey was a 6-foot-4 rush end who terrorized quarterbacks in an age before the sack was an official stat. He, like Nobis, was a rookie of the year, making a great first impression on what was a two-win team. A five-time first team All-Pro, Humphrey was an anchor of the 1977 Grits Blitz defense that allowed a then NFL-record average of only 9.2 points per game.

As for the contentious good-bye, all has been forgiven: In 2008, the Falcons added Humphrey to the teams Ring of Honor. But when carving his likeness onto our Mount Rushmore, a suggestion: Leave it the slightest bit little incomplete perhaps taking just a bit off the end of the nose to mark the 10 games he sat out at the end here.

In the AJCs reader poll, 2,037 voters cast a total of 8,590 votes. Here are the results:Julio Jones, 1,629 votes, 80%Matt Ryan, 1,376 votes, 68%Tommy Nobis, 1,214 votes, 60%Deion Sanders, 1,055 votes, 52%Claude Humphrey, 761 votes, 37%Jeff Van Note, 682 votes, 34%Michael Vick, 548 votes, 27%William Andrews, 530 votes, 26%Mike Kenn, 439 votes, 22%Roddy White, 356 votes, 18%

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Falcons Mount Rushmore heavy on the now, yet mindful of who started it all - Atlanta Journal Constitution

The four worlds of the social-ecological state – Social Europe

Posted on April 30, 2020 by Prof Baldwin

The coronavirus crisis highlights the need to update the European welfare state to a social-ecological state, able to socialise 21st-century ecological risks.

Exactly 30 years ago, the Danish sociologist Gsta Esping-Andersen proposed, in line with Richard Titmuss founding work, a new approach to the welfare state. According to him, this institution, born in Europe in the 1880s, was based on a common principle yet with differentiated regimes.

The common principle, identified by Esping-Andersen after Karl Polanyi, was that of de-commodificationthe protection of labour from market logic by means of social policy, to aim for an ethically superior value of human wellbeing. With social protection, the idea that labour was not a commodity gradually gained ground.

This guiding principle became embodied throughout the world in distinct institutional logics, which gave it more or less strength. The Esping-Andersen typology, which has become classic, was, as with Titmuss, a tripartite one, which contrasted the corporatist (as in Germany), social democratic (as in Sweden) and liberal (as in the United States) modelseach characterised by a particular purpose, funding method and governance. At the end of the 20th century, Esping-Andersen therefore perceived three worlds of what he called welfare capitalism.

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At the same time, in the early 1990s, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development undertook a long-term work to measure the impact of structural rigiditiesat their forefront the social protections which had strongly developed in Europe and beyondon labour-market performance, assessed using unemployment and growth rates. The perspective of these studies was radically opposed to that of Esping-Andersen on two counts: work was relegated to its economic utility and convergence towards a single social modela model considered almost exclusively from the angle of cost-benefit optimality was promoted.

Thirty years on, it is clear that the debate on the welfare state has largely turned to the advantage of the proponents of economic efficiency, who have succeeded in convincing those in powerespecially in Europe where it was bornthat social protection is a burden rather than a boon.

This does not mean that the principles of the welfare state have become obsolete or that the resulting public policies have ceased to be effective and just. Rather, a simplistic vision of the functioning of the economy, which opposes a predatory state to a liberating market, has come to dominate public debate.

From this point of view, a speech by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, on March 12th, amid the shock of the Covid-19 health crisis, appeared as an epiphany as radical as it was late: What this pandemic is already revealing is that free health care, without condition of income, course or profession, our welfare state, are not costs or burdens, but precious goods, essential assets when fate strikes There are goods and services which must be placed outside the laws of the market.

All of this is true. It is also diametrically opposed to the policy conducted in France since the 2017 presidential election and during the previous mandate, when Macron exerted a considerable influence on the dismal presidency of Franois Hollande. It is also not precise enough. If fate strikes humanity today, it does not fall from heaven: humans, in the age of the environmental crises of the Anthropocene, have become the source of their own fatality.

The decade that is opening is indeed that of the ecological challenge: faced with climate change, the destruction of biodiversity and the degradation of ecosystemsvisible and tangible everywhere on the planethuman communities must initiate a profound transformation of attitudes and behaviours to prevent the 21st century being one of self-destruction of human wellbeing. The first months of the first year of this decisive decade leave little doubt about the urgency of this collective effort.

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First, Australia was ravaged by a succession of giant fires, which only rain eventually extinguished. Then the Covid-19 pandemic rendered inactive almost half of humanity and, with that, the global economy. Yet the worldwide health crisis is, at its origin, ecological: this virusas before it SARS, MERS, Ebola and to some extent HIV-AIDSis a pathology of the human-animal frontier. It is because humans have gone too far in the destruction of ecosystems, the conquest of biodiversity and the commodification of life that they are today affected, panicked and paralysedin other words conquered in turn.

Faced with these ecological crises, for which we are fully responsible, we need to rediscover the equalising power of the welfare state, which alone can transform uncertainty into risk, hazard into protection, chance into justice. In short, we must mutualise social risks to reduce them in the name of human wellbeingstarting with health, the key interface between people and ecosystems.

This is where the concept of the social-ecological state comes in. An extension of the genius of the welfare state, its guiding principle is denaturalisationor, put positively, socialisation. This entails transforming ecological uncertainty into social risk, by means of public guarantees and insurance, to make the social consequences of the environmental crises of the 21st century as fair as possible and therefore, in principle, mitigate their natural violence.

But, as with the welfare state, this principle varies widely from one country to anotherindeed from one region to anotheras regards the demand and capacity for socialisation. Different social-ecological state systems are thus emerging, according to at least three criteria: vulnerability (exposure to risks, state of health of the population and so on), protection (development of social protections, degree of social inequality, etcetera) and resilience (social cohesion, trust, quality of institutions). Using these three criteria, four different regimes appear on the planetfour worlds of the social-ecological state seem to emerge.

Bio-techno power is the first such world. What Michel Foucault called half a century ago the power over life is today combined with digital-control tools whose omnipotence he could not imagine. In the beginnings of the Covid-19 crisis, a mode of socialisation of environmental crises emerged which combines strong exposure to risk, authoritarian power, civil discipline and digital surveillance.

South Korea is the most emblematic country of this model but China has prefigured and applied it on a larger scale. The admiration for this social-ecological regimepalpable in European countries whose populations are considered less reliable and governments deemed too laxdisregards what ecological authoritarianism has cost the whole world: the initial alerts on what was then only a regional epidemic were fiercely repressed by the Chinese autocracy in the autumn of 2019. The effectiveness of bio-techno power is thus doubly doubtful, from the factual and the ethical point of view.

The second world is that of ecological neoliberalism. In Brazil, the United States and Australia, market fundamentalism takes the place of social-ecological policy. Environmental regulations as well as health protections are weakened in favor of a small minority who have captured political power and exploited it as a source of rents, to extract huge profits from health privatisation and environmental degradation. Yet, in these countries, exposure to environmental risks is high and collective protection is already weak and fragile, as the unfolding health tragedy in the US makes clear. The political development of Australia in the coming years will be a good indicator of the viability of ecological neoliberalism.

Economic naturalism appears as the third world of the social-ecological state and it is the prerogative of European countries. Unable to define together a new social-ecological regime calibrated for the 21st century, they have opted for a naturalisation of the economic system they have built in common since the 1950snotions borrowed from the living world, such as growth and competition, ending up governing human societies and social systems. We can see today how secondary these superficial economic realities are, conditioned by human wealth and social co-operation.

The health crisis triggered by Covid-19 hit the French healthcare system, for instance, at the exact moment when political powernot globalisation nor demographic ageingwas pushing it, knowingly, to its breaking point. The national madness of the budgetary rationalisation of the social system is the reflection of European rules which seem to have as their objective collective ill-being.

The fourth and last world of the social-ecological state is that of natural regulations. Even if the welfare state were to continue its global expansion, it still encompasses only 30 per cent of humanity. In most of Africa and Asia, human communities simultaneously face very high exposure to environmental risk while enjoying very little social protection. Take India, where annual health spending per capita is around $60 (70 times lower than that of OECD countries).

Humans there need to rely mostly if not solely on natural protections, such as the heat, varying with the seasons, with its power to destroy many viruses. More generally, the regulatory services provided by ecosystems protect humans: climate regulation, purification of air and water, tsunami mitigation, destruction of parasites and pathogens, and so on. These natural regulations, more or less degraded by humans since the industrial revolution, are in India both enemies and allies, with heat waves appearing when viruses are absent and mangroves protecting land submerged by human-induced climate change.

The major difference between this rudimentary typology and that, much more sophisticated, of Esping-Andersen is in its temporality: Esping-Andersen conceived his Weberian ideal types after a century of evolution of the welfare state, while a strong path dependency had helped stabilise its different regimes. The four worlds of the social-ecological state, as we can see them today, are still in their infancy. Far from being crystallised, their internal contradictions will make them evolve rapidly.

In fact, as with the nascent welfare state of the late 19th century, the social-ecological state remains largely to be invented. From this point of view, the Covid-19 crisis is not an opportunityit has neither interest nor merit nor virtue. It is a human disaster whose response breeds another human disaster.

But there are consequences of this crisis from which we can hope to draw useful lessons for the future, to avoid further shocks and to mitigate the shocks we cannot avoid. One of these is that human communities around the world have converged at staggering speed towards the underlying universal value of humanity, revealing that their common priority is health and not economic growth. We are hence called to a double revolution: putting health back at the heart of our public policies, while putting the environment at the heart of our health policies.

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The four worlds of the social-ecological state - Social Europe

Local Farmers and Ranchers Are Seeing Strong Demand For Their Products, But They’re Having to Get Creative to Reach Consumers – Lost Coast Outpost

Posted on May 3, 2020 by Prof Baldwin

Arcata Farmers Market | File Photo

COVID-19 has caused alarm about food shortages nationwide, but local farmers believe they will be able to pick up where the mega-farms leave off. While attendance has been down, sales and produce are up at local farmers markets, according to Laura Hughes, director of market operations for the North Coast Growers Association.

Even though it looks dead, farmers have been doing really well, Hughes told the Outpost. I think people are really trying to support farmers.

She said meats and the staple vegetables (carrots, onions, leafy greens, etc.) have been selling well. To comply with social distancing standards something Hughes said has been hard to do and plan for in the future the market stands have been spaced out a bit further than usual and the buying process has also slowed down quite a bit.

Farmers have to select the produce each customer wants and deal with them on a one-on-one basis. To help streamline this, the growers association is starting a preorder service, where buyers can order what they would like to get and staff will prepare a box for them to pick up.

This serves the needs for those who dont want to shop at the market and the needs of the farmer, Hughes said, adding that NCGA has been accused of simultaneously not taking enough precautions and of overreacting.

We are getting guff from both sides, Hughes said. As we get further into the season, more farmers will come onto the market, which may be a problem in the future for social distancing,

To comply with health orders, Hughes is anticipating more control of entrances to the plaza to help with the crowds and lingerers. She also expects demand for local produce will be much higher than the supply. Most stands are selling out during the markets. CalFresh usage is also up.

Now that a lot of students arent in town, we are seeing a consistency of CalFresh shoppers, Hughes said, adding this has been a good thing for farmers. According to the Humboldt County Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), Humboldt has 23,111 CalFresh recipients as of April 17, up by more than 3,000 from April 2019.

But Hughes is worried that once more produce starts to ripen, there will be an overabundance due to the lack of space for people to come to the market. So farmers have been diversifying the ways they reach customers. Hughes said some farmers have upped their digital sales by offering services on their websites and the Facebook marketplace, while the more digitally-challenged farmers have resorted to good ol fashioned phone calls and increasing their roadside farm stand presence and hours.

There are a lot of different ways our farmers are adapting and theyre not having a hard time offloading, Hughes said. She gave a couple of examples, including a nursery owner having her best day in 10 years, and another farmer who sold five months worth of poultry in three days.

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Hughes said most of the cattle and dairy farmers in Humboldt arent a part of the NCGA and have to rely on larger outlets where some of the breakdowns in supply chains are expected to hit in the coming days.

However, Melissa Lema of Western United Dairies wrote to the Outpost stating, Weve been seeing a ton of misinformation about what is going on locally and nationwide regarding the food supply and specifically the dairy and meat industries.

Lema put the Outpost in touch with Cody Nicholson-Stratton with the Foggy Bottom Boys, a certified organic farm located in the Eel River Valley. Nicholson-Stratton primarily produces dairy for cheese (sold exclusively to the Rumiano Cheese Company), but also raises grass-fed beef and lamb, as well as poultry and rabbits, and produces eco-friendly fibers. Nicholson-Stratton said he has noticed a difference in how people are getting their food and a big reduction in food service and school-based demands for their products.

That has created some stumbling blocks for the dairy industry, Nicholson-Stratton said.

He said butter and cheese usage is down by about 50 percent for food service needs nationally, but this hasnt affected Rumiano Cheese Co. just yet. Nicholson-Stratton said that offloading product hasnt been much of an issue, but he knows of other farms and businesses across the state that are having trouble.

The decreased demand from schools and restaurants hasnt hindered the ability of some small farms to adapt to local consumer needs. Nicholson-Stratton pointed to how the demand for locally grown products has been a key factor in the longevity of farmers.

We have a thriving local agriculture industry and we are blessed to have them, and so I dont see a problem [for food shortages] locally, he said. The food is there and you may see a change in the cut you want, but there will be food in the stores. Humboldt has such a bountiful local ag scene that we will always be able to rely on it.

Ginger Sarvinski, co-owner of Sarvinski Family Farms, also feels that local farmers will be able to meet consumer demand. Sarvinskis farm produces vegetables, pork, beef and dairy products.

A lot of our product stays locally, Sarvinski told the Outpost. Were isolated and weve heard a lot of good feedback about people wanting our product.

To get her product out, Sarvinski does delivery services and parks a roadside stand at a number of locations throughout the county. She said she thought about stepping up her production but is holding off for now because of the time needed to focus on her dairy cows. Sarvinski said she doesnt want there to be any misconceptions or fears about a lack of food being produced by local farmers.

We have a very good local food shed and we have a lot of vegetables and meats, she said. A lot of people have been stepping up and buying locally lately.

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Here is a link to NCGAs list of Alternative Sales Outlets.

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Local Farmers and Ranchers Are Seeing Strong Demand For Their Products, But They're Having to Get Creative to Reach Consumers - Lost Coast Outpost

Forces of nature – strategy+business Today

Posted on April 30, 2020 by Prof Baldwin

The concept of a business ecosystem was firstarticulated by the strategist James F. Moore in his seminal1993 Harvard Business Review article, Predators and Prey: A New Ecology of Competition, and the idea has since gained substantial currency. A business ecosystem is a community of enterprises and related organizations that coevolve over time and align themselves with directions set by one or more central companies. Examples of business ecosystems include a computer company and its users, investors, and third-party app developers; or an energy company with its network of suppliers, customers, traders, and resellers; or an auto manufacturer and the suppliers, retailers, and marketers that surround it.

The ecological analogy is apt because it emphasizes the fact that ecosystem members may both cooperate and compete with one another in complex ways that lead the entire community of enterprises to thrive. But theres a key difference between biological and commercial ecosystems. In nature, ecosystems can survive and thrive for long periods of time, almost in perpetuity. By contrast, business ecosystems tend to fall apart in a matter of decades, and the clock speed seems to be increasing. Furniture manufacturers near High Point, N.C., flourished for more than a century after reaching critical mass in the 1890s, whereas the minicomputer ecosystem, located along Massachusettss Route 128, lasted for less than 30 years after its 1960s heyday.

How can business ecosystems emulate the vitality and longevity of their biological equivalents? An answer may be found in what Canadian ecologist C.S. Holling(pdf) called the adaptive cycle. This cycle is a natural process, often represented as an infinity loop, that perpetuates a natural ecosystem through repeated destruction and rebirth. Organisms are born, and they grow and mature and reproduce. And then they decline, so that the overall structure of species continually improves. But it doesnt happen in steady, linear fashion. Instead, the dynamic ecological balance has long processes of growth, which Holling framed as exploration and conservation, offset by periods of rapid meltdown and renewal, which Holling called release and reorganization (see The adaptive cycle).

In a natural ecosystem such as a forest, the earliest growth phase (exploration) begins in an open patch, where all organisms have equal access to sun and rain, and everything grows in an unconstrained fashion. In business, this is analogous to the first part of an S curve, in which growth processes accelerate. First movers and fast movers flourish, like so many weeds.

But this loosely connected startup system does not last for long. Exploration gradually gives way to exploitation and, eventually, conservation. Early fast-growing organisms bump into others, and competition for resources breaks out. In a forest, the resources are sun, rain, and soil nutrients. In a startup industry, the resources are capital, skilled talent, and access to customers. The survivors are those who capture resources first and, even more important, exploit them efficiently, typically through economies of scale.

As exploration and exploitation proceed, the forest matures, going through a well-recognized succession: from weeds to shrubs to small trees and, eventually, large trees. The trees are the equivalent of efficient, substantial, tightly connected hierarchies; they hog the sun and the rain. Other plants struggle to grow in their shade. In this phase, little new development (for example, the development of other new species) is possible. Similarly, in business, mature and stable enterprises come to dominate the value chain, the limits of the market are recognized, and the growth of the sector levels off.

Ecologists used to think that this mature conservation phase was a stable or even permanent condition, but it is not. Retail shopping malls are a case in point, as traffic through them dwindles under the onslaught of online competition. Evolution is still taking place in nature as well as technology and room must be made for the new. Startup conditions must be recreated. In nature, destructive natural processes such as wind, fire, flood, and pestilence open up the forest canopy and create spaces for new growth. They sweep away the tall hierarchies, which were rendered vulnerable by their inflexibility and inability to resist attack, and release their components as resources for the next generation. Reorganization follows rapidly. Those elements that were released into the soil are recombined to become nutrition for the next generation of organisms. In business, this process is called creative destruction or disruption: Old enterprises break apart and their human and capital resources migrate to the new, and the adaptive cycle begins again.

Of course, theres a big difference between forests and corporations. The latter are populated by sentient humans who try to influence outcomes. Now imagine being inside an organization during this adaptive cycle. As human beings, business decision makers are more active than trees. They cant change the cycle itself, but they can react to it, with one of three emphases:

Passion: innovators creating startups and bringing them to life

Reason: managers and leaders making deals and organizing more effective operations

Power: administrators using their position and resources to force others to comply with their policies, strategies, and procedures

The resulting infinity loop is analogous to natures adaptive cycle. But its not exactly the same. And it goes through its own phases (see Adaptive cycles in business). The solid line is the slow front loop of the cycle; the dotted line is the fast back loop:

In the Passion stage of the cycle, enterprises are conceived as communities of trust. The innovators who founded them are free to act but often dont know what to do. They are guided by their passions and those of the communities in which they find themselves. They may take the advice of Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak to try to make valuable what they are good at, or they may try to solve an irritating problem. In 1995, for example, Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, who worked together at Apple, were annoyed when the corporate firewall prevented them from accessing their personal AOL email accounts. So they invented Web-based email. Hotmail, the company they founded, sold in 1997 to Microsoft for shares valued at US$400 million.

Most nascent enterprises die in the early stage, because passion is not sufficient to guarantee commercial success. Those startups that survive develop a logic for their value creation process and assemble their value chain, moving into a stage of Reason. Former innovators evolve into managers. They are still free to act, but now they know what to do and their task is clear: to scale the enterprise as rapidly as possible. As companies move into the Reason part of the cycle, their priorities become raising financial resources, managing growth, recruiting people, and preserving the startup culture.

But these priorities become increasingly challenging as scale and geographic dispersion grow. According to anthropologist Robin Dunbar, head of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group at Oxford University, the maximum number of personal relationships that human beings can comfortably maintain is about 150. So once an organization grows beyond that size, more formality is required. Managers must turn to the panoply of mainstream management methods.

They do so for the very best of reasons: to embed and preserve the enterprises recipe for success. If the firm has gone public to raise capital and monetize the founders stakes, this is especially important. The corporation will have to deal with a slew of new stakeholders who require formal communication in prescribed formats and who look for high performance. Demand increases for professionals with technical skills, even if they dont fit with the original startup culture. Tension grows as jobs become specialized, activities are specified, processes are formalized, and a hierarchy emerges.

As more and more constraints are introduced, the corporation moves into the Power stage. The organizations members find that though they know what ought to be done, they are not always free to act. In the early entrepreneurial days, if they needed a resource, they had to find or create a customer. Their focus was external, and they were free to go anywhere. Now if they want resources, they have to navigate a bureaucratic maze, negotiate budgets, and fight turf wars. Their focus is internal. They are hamstrung by policies and processes and constrained by narrow job definitions. At the top of the organization, senior managers live in a world of simplifying abstractions reports and metrics that allow them broad scope in what they can manage, but lack depth. Leaders must make extraordinary efforts to find out what is really happening on the ground. The top of the corporation may now become a self-regarding autocracy. Like a mature forest, incapable of responding to change, the corporation is set up for crisis and destruction, unless it can find its way to renewal.

Unfortunately, most corporations are not well equipped for the crisis and confusion that typically follow. To respond effectively, business leaders must shatter the tightly connected structures that constrain peoples activities and limit the ways in which resources can flow through the system. They must recreate startup conditions in which small-scale experimentation is possible. Leadership (as opposed to management) now becomes critical as the original purposes of the organization are rediscovered and renewed. To get the organization back to its roots, the leaders must stop focusing on their own internal hierarchy and get back to the field, where value is created and destroyed.

Vanishingly few large organizations commercial or otherwise have managed to pull off this pivot. One prominent example of such activity on a world stage is one of the oldest continually functioning organizations in the world: the Roman Catholic Church. When Pope Benedict XVI resigned in 2013, the College of Cardinals replaced him with Cardinal Bergoglio (Pope Francis), the first Jesuit ever to become pope. The Jesuits, along with some of the other religious orders, have traditionally been the change agents of the Catholic Church. For instance, the Jesuits led the Counter-Reformation movement, the process of renewal that saw the corrupt Renaissance Church reformed and returned to a focus on its customers: the communities and parishes. Clamped to the side of the church, of it but not in it, the Jesuits live ascetic lives that would be disruptive of the broader community if allowed free rein. Here they wait for the day when they will be needed to take the church back to its roots. Since his installation in 2013, Pope Francis has led by example. He refuses to live in the Vatican Palace, to wear the mitered crown, or to ride in luxury limousines. All of these trappings of power, he believes, get in the way of people telling him what is really happening. He has described the Vatican-centric church bureaucracy, the Roman Curia, as narcissistic, self-referential, and the leprosy of the Papacy. With his newly created Council of Cardinal Advisors to counsel him on how to structure the Curia, he thinks of his search as one for a new balance and for an organization that is horizontal, not just vertical.

On the back loop of the cycle, the role of leadership is to gather up the fragments of the old structures into new configurations, and to create a social, even spiritual movement around a new narrative that outlines the organizations mission, its reason for being. With the articulation of that mission, people are brought back into a new community of shared values and trust. The organization now finds itself once again in the top left portion of the cycle, where people are free to act, guided by their passions and experiences and those of the communities to which they belong.

A successful company can make its way around this cycle several times in a century. But most dont, because their leaders fall into one of two major traps, as shown in Adaptive cycles contain two major traps.

On the left of that diagram is the failure trap (or poverty trap), in which the community develops numerous options but none get beyond the first stage. Business intelligence firm CB Insights has documented the top 20 reasons startups fail: The top three are a lack of market need, a lack of cash, and a failure toassemble the right team. On the right is the rigidity trap (or competence trap), in which the organization simply cannot let go of the processes and procedures that have made it successful and thus cannot renew itself. Kodak spun in the rigidity trap for decades before it declared bankruptcy in 2012. It had pioneered digital photography in 1975 but then tried to use it to prop up its film, paper, and chemical businesses. These efforts did not succeed.

The failure trap has been around forever, and the rigidity trap has been a feature of large-scale organizations ever since they emerged in substantial numbers after the Industrial Revolution. Walter Bagehot, founder of the Economist, wrote in the middle of the 19th century about the difficulty that institutions experienced getting out of a fixed law; not of cementinga cake of custom, but of breaking the cake of custom; not of making the first preservative habit, but of breaking through it, and reaching something better. History is littered with examples: the stuffiness and conservatism of family firms in Great Britain at the turn of the 19th century, the inability of U.S. railroads to adapt to the rise of trucking in the 1950s, the collapse of the U.S. television manufacturers in the 1970s, the helplessness of the Detroit automakers in the face of Japanese competition in the 1980s, and the shocking falls of many well-known companies that made computers and handheld communications devices more recently.

The problem is so pervasive that its root causes must have a strong systemic component. Firms dont fall into the rigidity trap simply because of personal failings, management myopia, or executive complacency. These may be symptoms, but they are not root causes. The root causes lie in the context of large complex ecosystems.

If organizations are like ecosystems, shouldnt they be able to live in perpetuity, continually renewing themselves? They could, but only if they are capable of structuring themselves as genuine ecosystems and finding a way to dwell in the sweet zone of continuity and change that lies between the twin traps of rigidity and failure. It is difficult to name many Anglo-American corporations that have been able to do this for any length of time. Intel went through one renewal when, in the mid-1980s, it switched from making random access memory (RAM) chips to microprocessors, but it seems to be struggling with the shift to mobile. IBM under Louis Gerstner in the 1990s made the jump from hardware to software, but now seems stuck again. Netflix managed to switch from sending DVDs through the mail to a streaming service, but perhaps that was not too much of a challenge, as it preserved its basic subscription model. At one time, when it was a medical and scientific instrument company, Hewlett-Packard seemed capable of indefinite renewal. But it apparently lost this ability when it entered the large-scale systems business. HP spun off the instrument business as Agilent in 1999, so maybe one can think of the old HP as alive and well and living under an assumed name.

Given the burdens of being a publicly held company, it seems likely that the purest examples of organizations-as-ecosystems may be privately owned companies. Firms like Cargill, Hallmark Cards, S.C. Johnson, and Tata Group come to mind. Private ownership insulates organizations from the short-term demands of quarterly reporting, reduces the allure of debt and careerism, encourages frugality, and allows companies to focus on resilience, sustainability, and the long term. Family firms have their own pathologies, but well-run examples may fill the bill.

W.L. Gore & Associates, best known for its invention and production of Gore-Tex fabric, is frequently cited as an example of such a company, with its flat, lattice organization structure that delivers hierarchy on demand and physical clusters of businesses, none of which exceeds more than a few hundred people in size. Company leaders seem to act more as gardeners than as engineers, continually cultivating the soil in which people and new ventures can take root and grow. Of course, its basic technology plays an enabling role here. Gores versatile PTFE (polytetrafluoroethylene) technology allows the small-scale manufacture of myriad high-margin spin-off products in the medical and high-tech fields. It is almost impossible to imagine how an integrated steel mill could organize itself inthe same way.

Statistical evidence also suggests that, in practice, corporations cannot live in perpetuity. Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute has done extensive work in contrasting corporations with cities and examining how they scale. Both show economies of scale as they grow a city doubling in size doesnt need twice as many gas stations; it needs about 1.85 times as many. But as cities grow, their outputs grow faster than they do. According to West, in contrast with cities, all corporations eventually die.

I believe that West based this conclusion in part on a misreading of corporate vitality. He observed that corporations die when they stop reporting financial results. So he records YouTube as having died when it was acquired by Google in 2006 yet it is a stronger and healthier organization than before. Setting aside these data flaws, however, Wests belief that cities tolerate fringe activities much more readily than corporations do seems sound. As a result, the corporate bureaucratic side and the imperatives of economies of scale steadily overwhelm the innovation dynamics present at the businesss founding. This assumption certainly seems to square with the ecological narrative, and it is a powerful reminder that in nature what survives is the ecosystem, whether or not each individual organism that makes up that ecosystem survives.

In ecosystems, stability and change are entangled with each other: Stability is achieved only through change and vice versa. Nothing lasts unless it is incessantly renewed. Natural ecosystems have evolved to renew themselves automatically. To some extent, so have human ecosystems, albeit less perfectly. Both democracy and capitalism have ecological features, but they and their component institutions and organizations are prone to getting stuck in rigidity traps. Humans seem to have an attraction to hierarchical power and the status quo that trees do not share. But change cannot be postponed indefinitely. As conservative politician and philosopher Edmund Burke wrote, A state without means of some change is without the means of its conservation. In his book Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Peter Drucker, legendary management writer and self-described social ecologist, contended that every organization had to be sloughing off yesterday and that managers had to learn to run, at the same time, their existing managerial organization as well as a new innovative one.

In ecosystems, stability and change are entangled with each other: Stability is achieved only through change and vice versa.

The only way to do this is to run them as true ecosystems. This takes enormous focus and dedication on the part of an organizations managers. It demands spaces for constant conversation and experimentation. As an organization scales, system dynamics propel it inexorably toward the top right conservation phase where power rules. Purpose is lost as what were once means become ends in themselves. Short-term reward systems and cultures bent on financial maximization can plunge a firm into a rigidity trap, where fierce competition within the corporation erodes trust. Ed Catmull, a pioneer in digital animation and former president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios, describes the challenge of keeping power and structure out of the creative process as a Sisyphean task.

Capitalism is a process of creative destruction. But taking an ecological perspective reminds us that creation and destruction operate on different timetables and in different contexts. The dynamic balance between the two is a central problem of management, and a true decision area at all levels of the ecosystems in which we live and work and on which we depend.

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Covid-19: US governments aid agency announces additional $3 million grant for India – Scroll.in

Posted on April 30, 2020 by Prof Baldwin

The United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, has announced an additional grant of $3 million (Rs 22.54 crore) to India to help it combat Covid-19. USAID has so far granted India $5.9 million (Rs 43.59 crore). It had granted $2.9 million (Rs 21.79 crore) to India on April 6.

This additional funding represents our commitment to building a safer and healthier world, United States Ambassador to India Kenneth Juster tweeted on Thursday. The United States government will provide the funds through USAID.

A press release from the US embassy said that the aid will be provided through Partnerships for Affordable Healthcare Access and Longevity project, a financing platform established by IPE Global, an Indian international development consulting group.

This additional funding to support India in its continuing efforts to combat Covid-19 is yet another example of the strong and enduring partnership between the United States and India, Juster said according to the press release.

The embassy added that the United States has through USAID and Department of Health and Human Services agencies, provided India over $1.4 billion (Rs 10,525 crore) in health assistance and nearly $2.8 billion (Rs 21,050 crore) in total assistance over the last 20 years.

India has so far reported 33,050 cases of Covid-19, including 1,074 deaths, according to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. On March 26, the Narendra Modi-led government announced an economic bailout package worth Rs 1.7 lakh crore to help the poor tide over the impact of the countrywide lockdown, that is in place to combat Covid-19. The lockdown has been extended till May 3.

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Finding The Connection – Entrepreneur

Posted on June 20, 2020 by Prof Baldwin

Rajiv Bajaj, Chairman & Managing Director, Bajaj Capital who is also the Founder & Director of OmniLife tells Entrepreneur India on what inspires him

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June15, 20204 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.

I am 50 today and have been working in our family business of wealth management designed for middle income Indians, Bajaj Capital, since the age of 20.

All through these years, I have always pondered- what would I do, if I werent born with this silver spoon and had to take my own path, like many other entrepreneurs.I kept toying with semi- baked ideas like being a Creative Head of anadvertising firm, since I have a dire passion for design, creativity and new ideas.

In my mid- thirties, with my mid- life crisis in full bloom, I intensified the search of finding the true me.I joined Entrepreneurs Organization (EO) around that time and formed a forum along with seven other entrepreneurs, working on goals around business, health, family and self-growth.

As I neared the age of 40, I realisedthe need to find mylife purpose or Ikigai, as it is called in Japanesephilosophy. This ancient wisdom is encoded in every Japanese persons brain and they would know their Ikigai very instinctively.

My curiosity towards this philosophy took me to many places. I visited Okinawa Island in Japan, which is called a Blue Zone, or a centre of healthy longevity,as it has the largest population of healthy centenarians. There, I met several elderly Japanese people and understood the prime and foremost reason behind their long and happy lives they all knew their Ikigai, they all knew how to be happy every day in their daily pursuit of choice, as per National Geographic magazine research.

I also met Professor Akhihiro Hasegawa from Toyo Eiwa University, Japan, who indeed is the only man I know to have done a PHD in Ikigai.I learnt from him that ones Ikigai gives a sense of fullness or value of living, countered to a feeling of emptiness despite immeasurable material success.

Ikigai is a deep emotion; anything which doesnt trigger an emotional response in you cant be your Ikigai.

This journey of researching Ikigai also took me closer to my own Ikigai, which was the study of human longevity and particularly, the interplay between health, wealth and longevity.I realised that helping people discover their Ikigai gives me true joy, and this became my own Ikigai.

Further, this helped me sharpen the mission statement of our company Bajaj Capital to financial well-being over a lifetime, as we stay committed tooffering financial well-being solutions to investors.Therefore, finding my own Ikigaitriggered a series of actions and helped us refine and align our Corporate Mission and discover our Company Ikigai.

This journey also led me and my wife, Anu to find our common Ikigai in total wellbeing, or how to live your life well with full vitality. This led to the birthing of our total wellbeing platform, OmniLife,which became an outcome of our common passion for wellness.

I consider it as a blessing, to wake up each morning with full energy and vigour to work towards my mission.Commercial success is hence, nothing more than a sweet fruit of this labour of love; the true joy is in the journey of following your purpose itself.The Ikigai Venn diagram has truly come alive in our lives, where our vision, mission, passion and profession have all blended together into one.

I invest time over the weekends in coaching people and companies, helping them to explore their Ikigai, and I find true joy in doing the same.

(This article was first published in the Marchissue of Entrepreneur Magazine. To subscribe, clickhere)

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Olivia de Havilland, Gone With the Wind actress and Hollywood royalty, dies at 104 – Boone News-Republican

Posted on July 26, 2020 by Prof Baldwin

Olivia de Havilland, one of the last pillars of Hollywood royalty and a contemporary of Bette Davis and Errol Flynn, died "peacefully from natural causes" Sunday at the age of 104, talent agent Jim Wilhelm told USA TODAY. Her death marks the passing of one of the last stars of classic films of the 1930s, an actress before her time in the fight for equality, and an icon who took on the studio system and won.

Best known for her sweet-natured role as Melanie Hamilton in "Gone With the Wind," the two-time Oscar winner (for 1946's "To Each His Own" and 1949's "The Heiress") will be remembered most for her beautiful diction, an air of refinement and gumption, and grace on and off camera. Outspoken and steely in real life, de Havilland starred in more than 50 films on the big and small screen from 1935 to 1988, and was known as a staunch advocate for actors rights and creative freedom in Hollywood.

Bound by the grip Warner Bros. held on her career, the 27-year-old star sued the studio in 1943, prompting a collapse of oppressive long-term contracts in Hollywood. And in the latter years of her life, the British-American actress reminded she was no pushover, making headlines by filing a lawsuit in Los Angeles over being portrayed as a gossip monger in Ryan Murphys FX show "Feud: Bette and Joan," which chronicled the longtime rivalry between actresses Davis and Joan Crawford.

She was born Olivia Mary de Havilland in 1916 in Tokyo, where her father Walter Augustus de Havilland taught English at the Imperial University and then became a patent attorney. Her mother Lilian Augusta Ruse was a stage actress educated at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, but she left her career to move to Japan with her husband.

On a family trip to California in 1919, Olivia became ill with a bronchial condition and her younger sister Joan (later to become the actress Joan Fontaine) developed pneumonia. Lilian decided to remain in California with Joan and Olivia for her daughters health. They settled in Saratoga, a suburb of San Francisco, while her father abandoned the family and returned to Japan. De Havillands mother divorced in 1925 and married George Fontaine, a strict stepfather the girls resented.

Fontaine died in 2013 at age 96. De Havilland's death was also preceded by son Benjamin Goodrich in 1991. She is survived by her daughter, Gisele Galante Chulack, son-in-law Andrew Chulack and niece Deborah Dozier Potter. Funeral arrangements will be private, Wilhelm said.

After making her Hollywood debut in a version of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," de Havilland - named for the Bard's "Twelfth Night" character Olivia - made an early mark opposite Flynn. In 1934, she had signed a contract with Warner Bros., who decided to pair her with the then-unknown Australian They starred a year later in "Captain Blood," a swashbuckling hit that made the two of them bonafide stars, and they made seven more movies as one of Hollywoods most memorable on-screen romantic pairings. She played Maid Marian to Flynn's title rogue in "The Adventures of Robin Hood" in 1938, and they last appeared together in 1941s "They Died With Their Boots On."

With David O. Selznicks 1939 Civil War epic "Gone With the Wind," de Havilland said at the time that having read the Margaret Mitchell novel, she knew she could bring the character of Melanie to life, and the actress' soft voice and graceful manner made her the perfect fit for a pivotal role: Melanie's indelible goodness saved Scarlett OHara (Vivien Leigh) from social ruin more than once and even touched Scarletts hard heart. Though far less showy than Scarlett, de Havillands iconic role is deeply etched in audiences hearts.

The character earned de Havilland her first Oscar nomination, for best supporting actress, but she lost to her "Wind" co-star Hattie McDaniel. De Havilland's second nod came for 1941s "Hold Back the Dawn," where she shared the best actress category with her sister, who won for "Suspicion." De Havilland took home her own best actress Oscar five years later, for her performance in "To Each His Own," and they are still the only siblings ever to have won lead acting Academy Awards.

But de Havilland and Fontaine fostered a heated competitiveness that lasted all their lives, from childhood to stardom. That rivalry rumored to have escalated into a feud where the two didnt speak was the subject of Hollywood gossip for decades.

In 2016, three years after her sister's death, de Havilland finally broke her silence on their relationship to the Associated Press: "A feud implies continuing hostile conduct between two parties. I cannot think of a single instance wherein I initiated hostile behavior." However, she added, "I can think of many occasions where my reaction to deliberately inconsiderate behavior was defensive.

In 1949, Fontaine put it differently, telling columnist Hedda Hopper: You see, in our family, Olivia was always the breadwinner, and I the no-talent, no-future little sister not good for much more than paying her share of the rent."

De Havilland referred to her sister as Dragon Lady.

"Dragon Lady, as I eventually decided to call her, was a brilliant, multi-talented person, but with an astigmatism in her perception of people and events, which often caused her to react in an unfair and even injurious way," de Havilland said in 2016.

De Havilland, who won her second best actress Oscar for "The Heiress," was also nominated for her performance in 1948s "The Snake Pit," one of the earliest films to feature a realistic portrayal of mental illness. That role also cemented her reputation for embracing flawed and unglamorous characters.

I believed in following Bette Davis example, she told the Los Angeles Times in 1988. She didn't care whether she looked good or bad. She just wanted to play complex, interesting, fascinating parts, a variety of human experience. I wanted Melanie to be just one of the images. Let's have a few others.

Being as well-received as she was both by the public and critically for her part in "Gone With the Wind," de Havilland longed for more substantial parts early in her career, particularly more serious ones than as Flynns demure leading lady, who was usually a damsel in distress. But Warner Bros. did not support her efforts. De Havilland grew increasingly frustrated by the lack of challenging roles and began to reject scripts.

While De Havilland wanted to pursue opportunities with other studios, Warner Bros. told her they added six months more to her seven-year contract for times she had been on suspension. (Legally, studios could suspend contract players for rejecting a role, then add that time to the contract period.)

At the urging of her lawyer, she sued Warner Bros., supported by the Screen Actors Guild. The case went to the Supreme Court of California and the court ruled in her favor in 1945. Known as the de Havilland Law, the landmark decision proved to be one of the most important and far-reaching legal rulings in Hollywood, reducing the power of the studios and giving greater creative freedom to actors.

Performers of that era and later benefited from her legal case, and the law won de Havilland much respect among her peers and colleagues. Fontaine was even quoted as saying Hollywood owes Olivia a great deal. But Warner Bros. circulated a punitive letter that essentially blacklisted de Havilland. She did not work for a film studio for two years until Paramount signed her in 1946.

"As soon as my victory was legally confirmed and I was free to choose the films that I made, Paramount presented me with the script of 'To Each His Own,' " playing an unwed teenage mother. This was exactly the kind of challenge for which I fought that case," she told the AP with pride in 2016.

In addition to championing actors rights, de Havilland was known for her liberal political stance. She organized a fight for control of the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions, which she felt was being manipulated by a small group of Communists. She failed and then resigned, triggering a wave of resignations, including that of an actor she had recruited to the group, Ronald Reagan. Even though she had very publicly worked to organize Hollywood resistance to Soviet influence, she was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1958 because of her vocal liberal activism.

On the personal front, de Havilland was romantically involved with Flynn, Jimmy Stewart, director John Huston and filmmaking mogul Howard Hughes, though Havilland eventually married Navy veteran and novelist Marcus Goodrich in 1946, before divorcing in 1953. They had one son, Benjamin, who died in 1991 after a battle with Hodgkins disease.

She wed French journalist Pierre Galante in 1955, moved to Paris, and had a daughter, Gisele. De Havilland's adjustment to Parisian life was recounted in her 1962 memoir "Every Frenchman Has One." The couple divorced in 1979.

De Havilland only appeared occasionally in films in the 1950s and turned down the role of Blanche Dubois (which won Leigh her second best actress Oscar) in 1951's "A Streetcar Named Desire." While some thought it had to do with the suggestive themes of the story, she said in 2006 that she declined the part because she had recently given birth to her son.

Her few film roles in the 60s included "Lady in a Cage" (1964) and "Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte" (1964). In 1965, she was the first woman to preside on a jury for the Cannes Film Festival.

De Havilland continued acting in films until the late 1970s and on television through the 1980s. She won a Golden Globe in 1987 and also earned an Emmy nomination for "Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna." And In 2009, she lent her distinctive voice to the narration of a documentary on Alzheimers disease entitled "I Remember Better When I Paint."

In her later years, she maintained perspective on her impressive longevity: All the artists I had known during the Golden Era (live) elsewhere, she said in 2016, including the after world.

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How to extend the life of your laptop – CNET

Posted on April 23, 2020 by Prof Baldwin

Pro tip: If people refuse to touch your laptop without PPE, that's probably a sign it needs to be cleaned. When you need to touch someone else's grody laptop and don't want to waste disposable protective gloves, you might try putting a sheet of cling wrap between your fingers and the keyboard.

Whether you need to delay a new laptop purchase because of uncertain finances (to put it mildly), want to reduce your contribution to the e-waste problem or simply have more important things to think about, there's a lot you can do to stretch the lifespan of your existing system.

The longevity horizon of a laptop is analogous to the longevity of a human: It partly comes down to responsible behavior, partly genetics and partly just dumb luck. There's no guarantee that anything you do can save it from dying young or failing to keep up with increasingly demanding tasks. And there's no guarantee that if you treat it like crap it won't last far longer than expected -- in 10 years you might find yourself cursing it. "Fail already you slow POS so I can justify buying a replacement!" That's the argument I have daily with my 7-year old iPad.

I kept on using it, thinking the trackpad was just going bad, until it popped out completely and I realized the battery beneath it had swollen. Ah, the joys of the early ultrathin models! (This is a 2013 Samsung ATIV Book 9.)

It baffles me, for instance, that my friend's 5-plus-year-old Lenovo Yoga 2 13 still functions, and actually functions well. It's filthy, it's been knocked off precarious perches by flying cats, it sits baking in hot sunlight, endures summers with 90% humidity indoors, and its operating system hasn't been updated in... I don't think ever. She still hasn't filled up the 128GB drive.

Yet, in the interim, I've gone through at least two laptops, one with a battery that swelled up and another with a wiring and broken plastic issue that rendered the display unusable. They exited in close to pristine aesthetic condition.

Data backup is on my long, long list of "do as I say, not as I do" advice. But the longer you hold onto a laptop, the more irreplaceable files and information you'll accumulate on it. And the greater the chance it'll crumble into e-waste. So before you touch your laptop it to address any issues -- including cleaning -- you want to make a backup.

The unwritten rule is this: If you don't back up your laptop, it will experience a catastrophic failure. But if you do, then nothing will happen. Because that's the way the universe works.

No. Just no.

I don't mean sing it a lullaby before you put it to sleep every night, or even treat it gingerly. Just use some common sense when it comes to handling and storage. For example, don't think "Awww, cute. Instagram it!" when your cat curls up on your laptop keyboard seeking attention or warmth. Think "That cat is going to annihilate my MacBook's butterfly keyboard."

Other simple practices include:

You should also check the adapter cable periodically, especially if you've got pets. Run your fingers along it feeling for teeth marks. A chewed-through cable won't ruin your laptop -- they're designed to stop working if the insulation is punctured -- but it can get expensive replacing them. My cat, Iris the Destroyer, earned her name by chewing through two Dell AC adapters at $70 a pop (among other reasons). If you catch it early, you can reroute them for safety. Plus, it's not good for them.

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It's easy to ignore basic maintenance, especially if you use your laptop every day. You just stop noticing the crud after a while. But periodically taking a minute to examine entry points around keycaps, the keyboard surface, touchpad surface, speaker grilles, hinge, ports, vents and screen may save you some heartache (and money) in the long run. Even if none of it poses a long-term health issue for your system, you don't want to wait until detritus builds up so much that it's almost impossible to get out or off. Keeping the fan vents clear and dust-free is especially important.

Every now and then, take a pass through applications and files, as well as programs and services that run at startup, and jettison anything you don't need. Will doing that extend the life of the system? Probably not, except perhaps by reducing a fractional amount of heat generated by unnecessary processor activity.

But at the very least, periodically weeding it can make it feel faster, just like cleaning out a room can make it feel bigger. And at best you will experience some real performance improvements, including improved battery life. It may also turn out that you don't need the memory or storage upgrades that you thought you did.

At some point, you'll probably feel like the incremental approach isn't working for you anymore. Then it's time to consider wiping it off and starting from scratch: You'll need to reinstall the same version of the operating system and applications. This can be trickier, since it may require repurchasing old programs, recustomizing every aspect of the operating system or application behavior, debugging system glitchesagainand more. Plus, you run the risk of breaking something that was working fine before.

That's software. What about hardware? Aside from upgrades, a laptop's hardware remains pretty static. There's no magic wand to wave will make your trackpad feel five years younger. One exception is battery life: Changing your software settings can make a big difference to the battery's longevity.

A powered, external hub can greatly expand the usability of an older system as well as reduce wear and tear on the connections.

Using accessories such as an external keyboard, mouse or monitor -- even cheap ones -- may help save wear and tear on the built-in components and hinge. More important, once those components of a laptop start to get wonky, the system itself will still be usable if you can find external replacements for the devices.

If you're constantly moving between desktop locations, it's worth getting a dock or hub for those external devices. This will save wear and tear on the connections from constant plugging and unplugging. It also adds extra ports, which is another perk that will extend the useful life of your laptop.

Because real upgrades always require some expense, this is probably one of the final steps you'll consider. But small, incremental upgrades can make a big difference. Not as many laptops support internal memory or storage upgrades as they used to -- replaceable batteries even less so -- but if you can, you should definitely take advantage of the option as you start to hit limits. That's one of the advantages of hanging onto an older laptop -- it's more likely to be upgradable.

That's as long as you feel comfortable opening it up to stick things in. Before you start down this path, make sure to find an upgrade or maintenance guide for your particular system to verify that it supports your plan. You should also check that it doesn't require expensive nonstandard components, which will cost more than it's worth.

When I bought this inexpensive Asus UL30 in 2009, it was partly for its upgradability and removable battery. The display failed before I even got a chance to take advantage of that. (It was probably fixable, but wasn't worth it given the price.)

External upgrades can be easier and more practical, though in some cases they don't provide as big a boost. Or they may not make as big a difference as you thought they would. I secretly added a Netgear Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) USB dongle to a tech-challenged friend's laptop, which was equipped with pokey Wi-Fi 4 (802.11 b/g/n). Speedtest showed that throughput doubled. Given how much time she spends online, that seemed to make it worth the money.

She didn't notice any difference.

If you're running short on storage, an external drive is an obvious enhancement. Unless you only plan to use it to offload files you don't use often, you may want to avoid going too cheap. A slow external drive can be more annoying than uplifting. You can also potentially improve performance by booting from an external drive, though that depends on the connection and the drive speed.

Another possible performance upgrade -- only if you've got a newer laptop with a Thunderbolt 3 connection, though -- is to add an external graphics processor (eGPU) to boost speed in applications or games with heavy GPU usage. This can be a pricey upgrade, though, and the enclosure and the graphics card are frequently sold separately, which can obscure the true cost.

You may want to consider moving to a newer version of the operating system if you're not on it already. I don't consider it a no-brainer, though. If you're laptop's crumbling to dust, a newer version of the OS may not unequivocally improve things. And you also run the risk of losing the ability to run some applications.

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Case in point: The latest version of Mac OS, Catalina (10.15), removed support for 32-bit applications. So if a program hasn't been migrated from 32 to 64 bit -- and there are good reasons why it may not have been -- the upgrade would actually be a step backward for you.

Sticking with an outdated version of an operating system is widely considered to be bad hygiene, though, because you don't get the constant barrage of virus, malware and security updates that up-to-date systems receive.

And finally, when you're at the end of your rope, you've got nothing to lose by replacing the operating system with something new altogether. If your laptop powers on and at least most of the keys work, there's a good chance it can be converted into a Chromebook, running Google's Chrome OS, to give it at least a little more useful life before it goes to live upstate on a retired laptop farm.

Read more from the original source:
How to extend the life of your laptop - CNET

Precision Medicine Software Market (impact of COVID-19) Growth, Overview with Detailed Analysis 2020-2026| Syapse, Allscripts, Qiagen, Roper…

Posted on June 8, 2020 by Prof Baldwin

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The left only loves science when it suits their cause – The Post Millennial

Posted on June 20, 2020 by Prof Baldwin

Where social media was once the space for artists to expose their talents and for political acts to be exposed, today it has become a minefield of wokerati. In the run-up to a global pandemic, we witnessed how social media has pushed for authoritarianism in demanding curbs to freedom of dissent concerning matters of science where gender identity has been medicalized. Then during the pandemic, we saw this same left suddenly shift only to insist that medical science, even in its early days researching COVID-19, be hailed and rigidly supported.

Raise your hand if you got whiplash watching this bait and switch.

Despite the fact that the science on this coronavirus is far from complete, there are certain scientific facts that have informed public policy, much of it based on the successes of social distancing from the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic: namely social distancing. A cursory glance at how Philadelphia and St. Louis approached the Spanish flu demonstrates a vastly different mortality rates between both cities because of how St. Louis employed social distancing measures within two days of its first case. Conversely, Philadelphia took 16 days to implement social distancing measures which had tragic results: Philadelphias mortality rate was more than double that of St. Louis. Lessons were learned a century ago that seem to not have trickled down through the generations.

Still, science has formed a large part of the social and political discourses throughout the twentieth century to the present and science has improved human longevity over the past 100 years with remarkable success. If it wasnt the dangers of nuclear fission, science was debating the pros and cons of protease inhibitors in the followup care to HIV+ patients. Still as Ebola and SARS, far away from the reality of most of our lives struck thousands, anti-science views came into preponderance in western, mostly anglophone countries since the turn of this century as identity politics sought to usurp scientific discourse and empirical evidence with feelings.

So, the one thing that changed in the initial weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic was an absolute silence in mainstream media, a virtual island retreat vacation from the hokum of identity politics that had been covered in hyperbolic numbers by the mainstream media for the past decade. Its almost as if for a brief moment in time earlier this year that most media understood, finally, the difference between pandering to upper-middle class readers with penchants for reading Pink News while trolling those they dislike on Twitter and those individuals who urgently needed healthcare information while caring for their loved ones.

That vacation, Im afraid to break it to you, dear reader, is now over.

As evidenced by hundreds of death threats and other rather rapey harassment sent to JK Rowling the anti-science mob is back.

Ta-dah! Alas the rampant misogyny from the lips of alleged peace-loving leftists.

All this because of Rowlings response to an earlier bout of harassment for her support of womens rights wherein she quite eloquently exposes her reasons for supporting womens rights.

Aside from this we are facing squarely the after party of where a global pandemic meets fairy dust. Heres the spoiler: it doesnt end well.

Daniel Radcliffe quickly spoke out in disagreement with Rowling stating, Transgender women are women, adding Any statement to the contrary erases the identity and dignity of transgender people and goes against all advice given by professional health care associations who have far more expertise on this subject matter than either Jo (Rowling) or I.

This is a completely anti-science statement for Radcliffe to make given that neither healthcare associations nor doctors make the claim that changing ones sex is possible. Yet, Radcliffe self-isolated during the COVID-19 pandemic and read parts of JK Rowlings Harry Potter to fans across the globe. So what is it? Is a global pandemic a feeling or a reality, or was Radcliffe performing lockdown as part of the larger 5G conspiracy that has been floating about the netherworld in recent months? Radcliffe even apologizes for Rowling in one media report. Welcome to the 19th century where women are spoken for!

Other stars jumped in the mobbing such as Eddie Redmayne who wrote, I disagree with Jo's comments. Trans women are women, trans men are men and non-binary identities are valid. Perhaps Mr. Redmayne ought to consider, therefore, the ire set upon him by trans activists when he took the role of a transgender-identified male, Lili Elbe, in The Danish Girl (2016) disappointing another host of fans who believe that to have the role you must be the person (apparently) in real life.

But wait, what is this you say? Eddie Redmayne has been raising money for Partners In Health (PIH), a nonprofit organization fighting COVID-19 in some of the most vulnerable countries around the world. Its quite odd that when it comes to highlighting their own virtues these actors knows quite well where to put their money, and when it comes to trashing a writer who not coincidentally happens to be female, they know precisely how to cash in on the mobbing.

Heres Ruppert Grint stating more anti-science nonsense, the Ave Maria of gender ideology, Trans women are women, and here he is with a face mask. Me thinks that Grint knows his science when it suits his best interests. And here is Emma Watson decrying Rowlings transphobia. Oh but wait, here she is again virtue signalling for the #IStayHomeFor them campaign. Either Grint or Watson are feigning scientific knowledge about COVID-19 or they are feigning that sex can be changed. It really is that simple.

As one commenter wrote beneath Andrew Doyles discussion with Douglas Murray on woke culture, When victim hood is considered currency there's bound to be counterfeits. There is no more perfect example of the counterfeit culture of wokerati science when in the same sentence you can expound upon the magical, almost Hogwarts-worthy fiction of men becoming women while you wear a face mask telling your fans to stay home. Its time we hold up the counterfeits to the light and move forward with discussing in a civil manner the facts that separate science from fiction.

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The left only loves science when it suits their cause - The Post Millennial

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