Become the master of your own destiny in the beauty industry – South Coast Herald

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Due to the impact of Covid-19, more South Africans are looking to become the master of their own destiny by starting a business.

Melany Viljoen, Founder and President of Tammy Taylor Nails SA outlines how women can become business owners and benefit from local trends in the beauty sector.

Career women in our country are struggling to find employment or have lost their job security following the economic meltdown brought about by the global pandemic. While they may have not thought about starting a business in the past, in 2020 they may have to for survival, she said.

I believe we should consider this time as an opportunity to not only survive but thrive! Where we are today is in a time where women empowerment and business ownership can be ours. We just need the right opportunities.

ALSO READ: Sage advice for women in business

Entrepreneurship is not only triggered by the desire to earn an income and be your own boss, but a desire to do something you are passionate about, for having fun, being happy and collaborating with other women. There are many opportunities for women to lean into these desires by participating in the business world, not just for profit but doing something meaningful at the same time.

Female entrepreneurship is an important source of economic growth as women create jobs for themselves as well as others and help support many more families through skilled empowerment.

In Africa there are fewer women business owners than men, and women dont always have the same support their male counterparts enjoy. However, the beauty industry is where they can play and they can play big.

Look at two of the biggest opportunities women have today; the booming beauty industry and the lucrative franchise industry. South Africas beauty market in total is worth over R27 billion according to 2017 figures. In the US alone the nail salon industry is booming and is worth over $5 billion a year.

Even though the nail salon industry is well-established in the country, there are still many opportunities for entrepreneurs who are committed to making a success of their business. In fact, Africas beauty market achieved a compound annual growth rate of 8% according to the Beauty and Personal Care Market in Africa Report: 2015 to 2019, published by global insights firm

Research and Markets:

An article also published by Africa-focused website The Africa Report, says that South Africa and Nigeria are the biggest markets for personal care and cosmetics in Africa, with an estimated worth of US$3,29-billion and US$1.75-billion respectively.

Also, in South Africa on average, franchises turn over more than R700 billion per year equivalent to 15.7% of the total GDP, according to the Franchise Association of South Africa (FASA). Franchise systems also employ an estimated 370,000 people in the country.

It makes sense then that a franchising opportunity in the beauty sector would make an excellent investment. There are 15 000 people a month looking into franchising and becoming involved. It is a system that works because your success comes from the support of a proven business model, systems and people that you can rely on to help make your business a success.

The worlds most powerful consumer women

There is another element that makes the beauty and nail salon industry attractive and that is the demand side. What is powering growth in this sector? The worlds most powerful consumer: women.

The purchasing power of South Africas 18 million female consumers is not something to take lightly. According to research company Nielsen, 21 million female consumers were expected in the local market by 2025 and their labour force participation numbers were also set to increase from the current 9.5 million to 11 million (by 2025).

According to research, greater exposure to high-quality brands and a growing interest in global fashion trends makes the African market an excellent target for beauty brands. Theres also an increasing focus on appearance among African women who have money to spend. According to Datamonitor Consumers 2014 survey, about three quarters of women in Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa and Angola attribute high levels of importance to looks and appearance.

What does that mean for women entrepreneurs?

There is a big target audience of women who will have money to spend. Granted, where women spend their cash will depend on their life stage, earning capacity and lifestyle. However, one thing is for certain every woman walking the earth needs some form of beauty treatment. From skincare, cosmetics, haircare, nailcare and so on, there will be a gap in the market for someone who has the desire to make a business in this sector succeed.

There are many good reasons for women to own a beauty salon business in 2020 and beyond, but here are the top 5:

Also, in the beauty industry they have the ability to create jobs for other women and empower people through skills. The skills these individuals acquire is something that no one can take away from them ever.

Despite a rocky start to 2020 due to the global pandemic, the beauty industry will keep on growing: new products are invented, new technology evolves and people always want the latest and greatest of what is out there. Women want to look and feel great and they will cut other costs before foregoing their beauty regime.

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Become the master of your own destiny in the beauty industry - South Coast Herald

Conservation, Community And Credibility: How One Locally-Owned Safari Brand Is Making Its Voice Heard In Africa – Forbes

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Now, more than ever, the travel world is changing. Spurred on by the momentary pause caused by the pandemic, coupled with a growing concern for our planet, travellerswill be looking for more and more ways to find meaningful experiences through journeys entrenched in authenticity and with companies who work responsibly with local communities.

Offering just that and more isAfrican Bush Camps(ABC), which has 15luxury tented bush camps and lodges across Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Zambia. This line-up includes an upcoming new opening,Khwai Leadwood,inthe community-run Khwai Concession in Botswanas Okavango Delta. Sustainable and responsible tourism are at the heart of the company, which is spearheaded by CEO Beks Ndlovu, a Zimbabwean who founded the company in 2006 and is renowned as one of Zimbabwes top professional guides, as well as being one of a handful of black CEOs leading the way in the safari industry.

CEO Beks Ndlovu

Born in the small rural village of Lupane, on the outskirts of Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe, Beks brings first-hand knowledge of growing up in the bush to his senior position. After qualifying as a professional guide in 1999, he began to work towards realising his dream of creating his own portfolio of camps, which focused on offering a standout guest experience anchored with exceptional guides.

In 2006, African Bush Camps known as ABC was born. Its USP is all about trailblazing true and meaningful interaction with local people and communities. A fully immersive safari experience with ABC means offering guests the chance to know and understand the indigenous communities in the areas where the camps operate in, and, crucially, to see how their tourism dollar empowers the locals.

Enjoy an immersive safari experience at Khwai Bush Camp, Botswana.

Together with his wife and partner, Sophia, Beks has also formed the African Bush Camps Foundation. The Foundationruns a number of community-orientated projects, which are focused on sustainable tourism development, through education, conservation, resource management and community empowerment and is an initiative close to the couples hearts.

Now, as the camps gear up to reopen on 1 September 2020, Beks talks exclusively to Forbes about the growth of his company, the meaning of immersive and sustainable travel and his experience as a black leader.

Close encounters of the elephant kind at Khwai Bush Camp, Botswana.

What inspired you to create African Bush Camps?

African Bush Camps was born out of my desire to reclaim the authentic safari experience. I had a dream to create a portfolio of camps, which not only reincarnated the fantasy of Old Untouched Africa but also focused on the guest experience and delivered the essence of a great safari which is interconnected with exceptional guides. I wanted to offer creative and imaginative experts to teach their guests about Africa. A real safari experience is not complete without the interaction of local people and communities and I wanted to bring to the fore a fully immersive offering, where guests would get to know and understand the indigenous communities in the areas, as well as the wildlife, while making a critical contribution to the well-being of the communities and local environment.

What is your USP? What stands you apart from other similar businesses?

African Bush Camps is a family, and we pride ourselves on our personalised guiding and hosting. Our camps focus on guest connection, allowing for visitors to experience the essence of a privately guided safari and a truly magical experience in the wild and remote areas where we operate. We offer a holistic adventure that expresses the philosophy we stand by: authenticity. Our safaris are not just about wildlife, they are about a 360 approach to travel in a sustainable way: sharing and conserving Africa together while having a complete restorative personal journey.

Beks is also renowned as an expert guide.

As a black leader, in a white-dominated industry, what are the challenges, and indeed, the insights you have come across?

The safari industry has traditionally been a white industry and it very much still is. I climbed the ranks to become a leading safari guide, and in 2006 I realised my dream of opening my own Safari Camp in Hwange National Park, close to where I grew up. Unless you were from a wealthy family, securing investment and funding were hugely challenging. I was lucky during my guiding years I had met some incredibly good acquaintances, who became personal friends along the way, who were incredibly supportive of my dreams and plans.

Growing up in rural Zimbabwe, I understood the local culture; I also knew the problems and issues facing local people. We cannot tackle the dynamics of conservation until we understand the circumstances of the local people. This earned me community trust, which is critical when operating in wilderness areas around community land. All staff in African Bush Camps properties are local people and it is my commitment that by operating in these areas we give communities the opportunity to forge their own paths.

Inside the new Khwai Leadwood Camp in Botswana.

As the spotlight is being turned on diversity and inclusion, how can the travel industry improve in these areas?

We have all been stuck in a paradigm of the past and our industry needs an overhaul in our approach, our thinking, and the way in which we manage our businesses. Having made the most of the opportunities I have been granted, I believe that we all have a responsibility to inspire others. To show that there are ways to not only improve your living circumstances, but to make a mark in the leadership space in both the tourism and conservation spheres.

I would like to see more of this transformation in the industry, especially knowing that there are many guides who have such great potential to be future industry leaders. There are too many stories told by foreigners who have come to Africa, set up a life and started up successful safari camps or operations. It is not necessarily a bad thing, but Africa has so many capable black people who can build businesses and tell their own stories and it is this diversity and inclusivity that the industry needs to support.

Beks Ndlovu paving the way for the future.

Our industry needs to reshape itself for an inevitable future which can only serve us better. We need to be able to attract people of colour into more senior positions to give us the diversity we need to form perspectives and make decisions as a collective culture. I would like to see more industry initiatives and funds that support and groom new African leaders and ambassadors of conservation for the future. The transformation should not just be with our staff but our target market from locals to foreign black travellers they should be encouraged to travel and experience our amazing continent.

Leopard seen at Khwai Leadwood Camp, Botswana.

How important was it for you to have a responsible focus when it came to the operation?

It was and still is of huge importance in the setting up of ABC. Our camps are sustainable, with minimal impact on the environment and our African Bush Camps Foundation projects empower local communities. My passion is in preserving remote lands, such as the beautiful areas in Southern Africa where we have camps. We dont just measure our success by our bottom line but on the positive impact we have on an area.

To recreate the authentic safari experience, it was imperative that we found the right wild locations for our guests. Not only did this mean operating sustainably but also responsibly, and this meant building mutually beneficial relationships with local communities and wildlife. It goes hand in hand.

The African Bush Camps' flagship property is Somalisa in Hwange, Zimbabwe.

What are the aims behind the African Bush Camps Foundation?

I believe in tourism, community and conservation being interconnected. The foundation was set up to provide sustainable development, through creating opportunities that empower rural communities, where we are based, in vulnerable wildlife areas across Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Zambia. The foundation looks to create opportunities for these communities through education, community empowerment and conservation.

I believe that the tourism dollar needs to have a trickle-down effect, and that the communities in the areas should benefit positively from tourism. To date, we have initiated over 40 projects, which not only benefit communities in wildlife areas, but also tie in strongly with the conservation ethos of African Bush Camps as a whole.

ABCF is primarily funded through ABC which donates 2.5% of its annual turnover. Due to the pandemic we have not been able to welcome guests, so funding is a real challenge and thankfully as shareholders we have been able to personally step in. We need to ensure that we remain operational so we can continue to support crucial projects that are needed now more than ever and protect the last 16 years of investment over these coming months.

For more information, you can watch this video.

Somalisa Como, Zimbabwe.

As a guide, what has been the best wildlife experience you have encountered?

In 1999, I worked as guide in Matusadona, Lake Kariba in Zimbabwe. This region was popular for tourism due to its ample black rhino, which were guarded by rangers 24 hours a day. On waking up one morning, I learnt that one of the rhinos had a baby. This was very exciting because there havent been any births for a matter of years. I had a couple on safari with me and I thought about taking them on a tracking exercise to find the mother with her baby. Black rhinos are quite temperamental and when they have calves, they are even more emotional so this was something we needed to bear in mind before starting to track the animals.

After tracking the mother for a significant amount of time, and sidestepping various breeding herds of elephants, we finally found her. We were a good 40 yards from her when we could witness her baby a tiny replica of a humongous animal. At that point, the wind changed, and the mother picked up on our smell. Black rhino are insecure due to their weak eyesight, and the animal approaches scents literally sniffs them out to assert their surroundings. After the mother gave a loud, aggressive snort, we knew she was heading for us. In that moment, we realised the only tree close enough for any of us to climb was about 10 yards away I decided to distract the mother and run to the tree as she charged for me. Meanwhile, the others got a bit further away, trying to climb into another tree.

As they got to safety, I tried to get down from my setting, but the rhino kept on coming back. Eventually, we managed to escape from the mother only to encounter another breeding herd of elephants, and we had another round of trying to escape unscathed. We did, luckily, finally arrive at our vehicle. It was such an amazing, scary experience to remember.

Sadly, only a few days after our experience, I again found the mother, but this time with her calfs carcass at the bottom of a tree after it was killed by a leopard in the night. Although this was a natural cycle of nature, I couldnt help but to be saddened by the sight.

Embracing the African bush at Hhwai Bush Camp, Botswana.

Empowering your community is an important part of what you do, how do you manage this across your portfolio?

Currently, there are eight communities surrounding our properties and which we support through our foundation. We have a small team of dedicated managers and counsellors who are present in these communities, who monitor needs and the progress of our projects, help raise funds and see to that the money raised is dispersed across priority projects. Many of these include skill-building workshops, income-generating groups (arts, crafts, clothing, ironsmiths) where we help people create a self-sustainable lifestyle (one working member can support up to eight people in the communities).

Our everyday staff members also act as representatives of ABC, custodians of wildlife in that they are either from the communities or have built strong bonds with people from the villages. The issue of wildlife/human conflict has always been rife in our communities and it is up to our staff members to uphold an understanding of the importance of wildlife conservation, and so that people can grip the value of their presence for the success of the industry, which, in turn, can only benefit them as well.

Zebra at Mana Pools National Park, where the ABC Kanga Camp is found in Zimbabwe.

How has C0vid affected you and the business?

Personally, the uncertainty that comes with not knowing how long we will have to face Covid-19 is in everything we do. For any business owner, it is enough to keep you awake at night. But our team has been very supportive regardless of the steps we needed to take to ensure a future for the company. Of course, our resources are not limitless, but we can only remain hopeful with the view of recovering in the near future.

Since the news of the outbreak in late December 2019, our team went into full response mode as we anticipated the brooding storm for 2020. At that time, the New Year still looked promising on our books. Our plans for expansion were on track and interest in our new developments was seeing a healthy increase. Considering our properties locations, and the fact that most of our guests were international travellers, we needed to think on our feet and be a step ahead in precautionary health and hygienic measures. It was in February that we introduced new training guidelines for staff and put routine measurements in place to ensure we safeguard our employees and guests wellbeing.

From April, we entered a curl up period and decided to hunker down for four months while assisting clients postpone their trips.

Dinner at Kanga Camp redefines social distancing.

At our properties, we are using this time to manage the camps upkeep and give employees the chance to expand their skills beyond their usual roles. Hosts, waiters, chefs, and room service staff are urged to go out into the bush with our guides and be placed in the position of the guest to learn about the environment. Our guides are spending more time in the bush to learn from each other and act as custodians of wildlife; monitoring and overseeing the local areas to help spot any dangers to the animals.

Lion at Mana Pools, Zimbabwe where the ABC Kanga Camp is located.

Currently, our national parks are exposed to the threats posed by the dire situations that people living on the parks outskirts find themselves in. With the many job losses that have resulted from the Covid-19 lockdown regulations in Zimbabwe, Zambia and Botswana, electricity, water, and basic food items are less accessible. This may drive people to turn to hunting to provide for their communities or for commercial sale. The parks are vast and remote with limited fencing. Anti-poaching units are still operating with the help of the army and national parks rangers, and we at ABC are supporting some of these efforts, lending an extra hand to help monitor the borders.

We plan to open all our camps (including the new Khwai Leadwood) on 1 September 2020. When we have more clarity from governments, and an outlook on the de-phasing of lockdown levels, we can make more sound decisions and predications on our business direction. For now, while all staff is on our payroll, we are using this time to be as creative as our resources allow us to be.

Perfect isolation with a view at Nyamatusi Camp, Zimbabwe.

Do you think the travel industry will change because of it?

When we do start to travel again, the experience will undoubtedly be a vastly different one, but hopefully one in which we all make better decisions and more responsible choices. If there are some positives to be taken from this global crisis then it has been an opportunity for tourists and tourism providers to assess their part in travel and how they can improve practices. Travel is a force for good, so perhaps it might shift towards a more responsible and thoughtful way of travelling which will reduce over-tourism, fight carbon emissions, and increase contribution to local communities.

One of the bedrooms at the new Khwai Leadwood Camp.

What is the highlight of the new camp in Botswana?

Khwai Leadwoods biggest drawcard is undoubtedly the plentiful and extraordinary wildlife on the doorstep you will never be bored here. Its varied ecosystem provides a patchwork of lagoons, shallow flooded pans, open grass plains and woodland forests it is just beautiful.

The Khwai Concession area was formed by the local Khwai villagers and is managed by the Khwai Development Trust. The area used to be a hunting concession but is now actively managed as a conservation area. The villagers took over the area when they moved out of the Moremi region when the Moremi Game Reserve was formed.

The local community now runs all the ecotourism initiatives, actively conserve the environment, and manage the wildlife in the concession. They are an inspirational example of a local community who live in peaceful harmony with wildlife. Like most of our camps its family-friendly, but small and intimate with just seven tents. Social distancing here is not a problem, with lots of private spaces and tents spaced out along the river under theshade of leadwood and sycamore trees.

Beks Ndlovu on how the future will have more of a local focus.

What next for African Bush Camps?

Uncertainty has certainly earned its place in the dictionary this year. The world has been in a tug war of feedback-and-response, trying to keep abreast of the pandemics developments to again pull back on future steps. The virus persistence has succeeded to filter the value of a years time (even more) in a matter of weeks. But humans are resilient. We learn to adapt, and sometimes, if we are good at it, we flourish.

High-end safari operators prioritise the luxury of privacy, space, and attention to detail to personalise the experience for their guests. Our largest camp has 24 rooms (mostly six rooms for a maximum of 12 beds) which only permits two people per room. Villas and family units are prepared with interconnecting passageways on request. Our vehicles transport a maximum of six guests and our partnering air travel operator also has a limited capacity allowance. Considering recent developments, and aligning those with anticipated changes, low volume, high-impact tourism may be the way forward as opposed to mass tourism where a large number of people gather within confined spaces.

International revenue is what we aim to secure in the long term, considering its impact on conservation, community input, and development. The current reality is that we cannot rely on this revenue. We have no certain guarantee that international travel is going to bounce back immediately. So we are thinking more about local tourism, which can enable us for the interim to keep the ball rolling. Where we rely on local suppliers and service providers, supporting the local industry can be a sound way to help us build from the ground up before reeling in international travellers. It is a natural step in progression for us as a local operator. We need to be able to relaunch everything we do. If it is a matter of following a chronological order of business, starting afresh, that is what I believe we need to do.

Regarding international travel, we will likely experience a slow burn in the restructuring of the industry. And since this is the case, we can use this time to rebuild our essence as a company on the local front.

Sleep easy at Kanga Camp.

We are in this together and we will recover together.This is a time to reflect, reconnect and rejuvenate our senses before reliving the world in a renewed glory. In the wilderness of the Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe, on the riverbanks of the Khwai River in Botswana and the inclining waters of the Zambezi River that flows in the Victoria Falls, we will be waiting for our explorers.

Readers can get involved with the Foundation here.

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Conservation, Community And Credibility: How One Locally-Owned Safari Brand Is Making Its Voice Heard In Africa - Forbes

Luton woman helps others share their lockdown stories in new anthology – Luton Today

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A woman from Luton has created an anthology of poems, journals and stories from women during lockdown.

Dee Bailey, from Luton, is the lead author in the anthology, Life Inna Lockdown 2020 - Behind Closed Doors, which includes poems, journals and stories from 22 women.

They were all written between March and May, during the coronavirus lockdown, some of the women are working on the frontline, and some are battling cancer and bereavements.

Discussing lockdown during a weekly zoom community social group was just the springboard Veronica Ebanks needed to plant the seed with Dee Bailey for Life Inna Lockdown 2020 Behind Closed Doors.

This collective of authors had not planned to capture a snapshot in print in an anthology of personal stories of a global experience.

The book captures a six-week snapshot of these womens lives through journals, stories, and poetry. What kept them going? Could they see the light at the end of the tunnel? Who

were their support networks?

Each to their own on how they coped but writing this book together has given them a sense of empowerment and support for each other.

Dee, the founder of Simply Deez events - a Luton based community group, said: "I started running weekly zooms on a Thursday as we could meet up and it was very important that as most people had to 'stay home, stay safe, save lives.'

"It did mean a lot of us were left feeling isolated not being able to go about our daily lives which in all honesty, we now understand we took for granted.

"This is a book of hope. Whatever your challenges are you can make it through.

"Each co-author has let the reader into their personal lives. This is a big thing!

"An opportunity arose and 22 women grabbed it. We have now become co-authors known as The Lifeinnalockdown Crew and looking forward to this journey.

"I still run the weekly #lifeinnalockdown zoom meetings. Anyone interested please email Lifeinnalockdown@gmail.com."

Twenty of the women live in Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire.

A percentage of the royalties will be re-invested back into local community work and various charities.

Published and sponsored by Marcia Spence, CEO of Marcia M Publishing House who recognised that these women had to open their closed doors and tell their stories!

The book, born out of Simply Deez Events and part funding from the National Lottery, is out now and there will be a virtual book launch on Saturday, August 15, from 3pm till 5.30pm, to register your interest, click here.

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Luton woman helps others share their lockdown stories in new anthology - Luton Today

Kick-off of "Hope in the Darkness" 90-day walk from Winnipeg to Vancouver – CHVN Radio

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DetailsWritten by Sylvia St. Cyr Published: 15 July 2020

One man is starting off a 90 Day walking journey with police escort and anyone who will join him, all to raise awareness for youth mental health in Canada.

The Hope in the DarknessNational Walk for Youth Mental Health 2020 begins today, starting at the Canadian Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg and will go for 90 days until Kevin Redsky reaches Vancouver, B.C.

Redsky is the founder of Hope in the Darkness as well as an Anishinaabe police sergeant. He has had a career in community policing for over 17 years and is from the Shoal Lake Forty First Nation.

He says, ""Today we're launching the walk from the Canadian Human Rights Museum. It's a continuation really from 2018 when we had our National walk for youth mental health. It was our mindset that we were going to challenge police officers to give our youth a voice considering the youth crisis in our country."

On April 1, 2018, Redsky walked the other half of Canada, starting his journey in Cape Spear, St. John's, Newfoundland and walked for four months until he reached WInnipeg.

"A number of officers for 125 days walked and met here at the Human Rights museum August 5, 2018. Here we are, 2020, personally it's a goal for me to complete the walk."

Today's walk starts at 10:30 am at the museum, continues west down Portage Ave. until the check point at the University of Winnipeg, where it will then continue up to the perimeter. Anyone interested in supporting Redsky through walking can join in part or the whole for the first day.

Aconversation between a child and their parents is resulting in a Winnipeg man facing charges from the Winnipeg Police Service.

"We're going to be challenging community leaderships with all the issues; the missing murdered, Indigenous women and girls, the opiod crisis, human trafficking, and racism." says Redsky.

"What really inspired the whole thing is that my niece, [who] we lost to suicide in 2013. She was actually in the child welfare system here in Winnipeg and that's why Winnipeg is so important."

For such an arduous feat, there will be moments where quitting looks like the best option, as Redsky knows from the was in 2018.

"In Newfoundland, 21 days into the journey, I thought that was it. I was quitting, but there was some inspiration that day. From that day on I knew I had to complete it." Shares Redsky. The same purpose will hopefully carry him through this time.

"My physical pain is nothing compared to what our youth are going through when it comes to their pain."

In 2018, Redsky walked 40 km a day. Different locations offered free lodging for him throughout the journey, as well as water. He lost 33 lbs during that walk from the constant movement.

This time, to keep old injuries at bay, he will be walking 30 km a day and resting each Sunday for the first eight weeks. He doesn't know exactly where he'll sleep or eat throughout this journey. He will be escorted by local police whenever possible.

"An officer of the Manitoba Police Service is going to help me for the first two weeks up to the Manitoba/Saskatchewan border. Then people will rotate in, perhaps do one month at a time."

His schedule of where he is walking is on their website and Redsky encourages people to join him on short portions of the walk when they can.

"On the highways I'm mainly alone, but we encourage gatherings within municiple areas."

With COVID guidelines, Redsky will also be offering virtual sessions along the way.

"We'll notify communities ahead of time, you're welcome to join us, get a group together, and let's walk and talk mental health."

On the left, Mitchell Boulette participated in the Hope in the Darkness walk in 2018

A friend of Redsky, Mitchell Boulette with the Treaty three Police Service, walked the opposite route Redsky will venture, back in 2018 when he walked from Lake Louise, B.C., all the way to Winnipeg where he met Redsky.

"He was having trouble finding officers to take over that part of the walk. I agreed to come on for a week to help him while he looked for somebody else. I went for eight days and walked from Lake Louise to just outside of Calgary. He couldn't find someone so I took an unpaid leave of absence from work to go and finish the walk." Says Boulette.

Due to the magnitude of this walk and the awareness it brings, Boulette was given a pleasant surprise.

"Part way through the end of the walk, my service thanked me for what I was doing and my unpaid leave of absence ended up being a paid leave."

This walk is quite personal for Boulette.

"I had a family member who took his life, I have nieces that are struggling with depression. Being a police officer since 2004, I see a lot of suicides in communities and it's something that has impacted me. I went through some PTSD and almost took my own life, so it's something that hit home for me."

It was a family ordeal as Boulette's brothers joined him for different portions of the walk.

"The walk was very spiritual, emotional, and amazing. I was glad to be apart of it." Shares Boulette.

CHVN's Sylvia St.Cyr (left) with WPS Inspector Bonnie Emerson right) at the kick off for the Hope in the Darkness event

Bonnie Emerson is the WPS Inspector of the community support division. She along with a team of Winnipeg Police Service were at the send off, as well as cadets and RCMP.

As for an event like this, Emerson says, "It means community. The times in everybody's world is so turbulent and anxiety-inducing in a whole variety of ways. But the police community are the people and the people are the police community."

Many police officers arrive when things are the hardest, but an initiative like Hope in the Darkness brings a proactive stance to suicide and mental health of the country's youth. Police have their role to play.

"Having police officers across the country stand behind the need and importance of this initiative, as well as make ourselves available to have the conversations with youth, sometimes uncomfortable, I think the importance cannot be understated and I hope that there are more ways going forward to engage in a positive way."

Emerson says this initiative is "Proactive in the sense that it's raising awareness and building community."

This walk is looking to promote a message of hope and empowerment for youth. It is also a national mental health initiative for the wellbeing, strong identities, and healthy lives ofyoung people struggling.

Redsky hopes to be finished his walk on October 12, 2020, bringing even more help to those youth in need.

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Kick-off of "Hope in the Darkness" 90-day walk from Winnipeg to Vancouver - CHVN Radio

In Dan Brown’s AI Hype Novel, the Hero Stumbles Onto God – Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence

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In a recent podcast, John Lennox: False Assumptions in the hype over AI, Oxford mathematician John Lennox, author of 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity (2020) discussed common mistaken assumptions with Walter Bradley Center director Robert J. Marks.

One of them seems to be that AI might prove there is no God, replace God, or become God. Things get interesting when these science fictions meet the world of fact.

From the transcript:

Robert J. Marks: In your book, you discussed Dan Browns novel entitled Origin. Now Dan Brown is famous for writing many, I dont know, kind of strange books. One was the Da Vinci Code, but his recent one deals with artificial intelligence and you discuss his novel as the springboard for your discussion about AI in the future. What did you find appealing or compelling about Browns novel that you commented on it so much?

John Lennox: Well, it was the actual story line. The main character in Origin is a billionaire computer scientist and AI expert whos called Edmond Kirsch, and he claims to have solved the fundamental big questions that everybody asks at some time, Where do we come from and where are we going? And he uses AI in the novel to answer these questions. But his intention is philosophical, and thats what caught my attention. In fact, somebody told me that this was in the book and thats why I read it.

His goal was to, I quote, employ the truth of science to destroy the myth of religions, in particular Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and he actually concentrates on Christianity. And so here is someone using AI to answer these big questions in such a way as to completely destroy, in his view, religions answers and hes using AI to do it. And the kind of AI involved is, of course, the more science fiction type. Its the advanced technological modification of human beings into transhuman beings or into super intelligences. And I was very interested in the kind of philosophy thats coming through. And that was one of my motives for writing this book.

Robert J. Marks: I see. Dan Brown has some presuppositions, doesnt he?

John Lennox: Oh, of course he has presuppositions. And its hard to really disentangle his own presuppositions from those of his main characters, except for the very interesting fact that the hero of many of his books is a professor of symbology, whatever that means, called Robert Langdon. And hes an expert at recognizing all sorts of mysterious and rare and hidden patterns in things.

But one of the astonishing things about the book was when Langdon is asked the question about the origin of the genetic code, which figures very largely in the book and theres great interest in developing exactly what this involves. And Landon says something like this, and it raises the questions of God. He says, The question of God, for me, lies in understanding the difference between codes and patterns. Patterns occur everywhere in nature, the spiraling seeds of a sunflower, the hexagonal cells of a honeycomb and so on. Codes are special. Codes by definition must carry information. Codes must transmit data and convey meaning.

And he ends up by saying, Codes are the deliberate inventions of intelligent consciousness. They dont appear organically, they must be created.

And one of the other female heroes in the book says, You think DNA was created by an intelligence?

And he just goes as far as saying, I feel as if Im seeing a living footprint, the shadow of some greater force that is just beyond our grasp.

And I thought, This is utterly fascinating. In a book by someone whos trying to bring down religion by the use of AI, what hes doing is actually heightening evidence for the existence of God by postulating an intelligent designer for DNA. So its a very complex thing.

Robert J. Marks: Very interesting. So Dan Brown, who is obviously agnostic, or certainly not religious in any sense, came to the logical conclusion that I think many theists or deists do, that there must be a creator behind some of these things. At least he was intellectually honest at the end.

Note: The full transcript is available as a download at the podcast page. Show Notes and Resources may be found below.

In an earlier podcast, Lennox and Marx discussed 2084 vs 1984the difference AI could make to Big Brother There, Lennox made the point that we need to seriously think about whether the surveillance AI technology enables is an advantage before were engulfed by it.

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John Lennox: How AI raises the stakes for all of us. AI could cause more serious problems than nuclear energy. You cannot build a bomb in your bedroom but you could hack your way around the world.

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Exclusive!: John Lennox answers our questions about AI in 2084. In his new book, 2084, the Oxford mathematician doubts that AI, now or then, will out-think humans. Our real worry is how the tech will be used.

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In Dan Brown's AI Hype Novel, the Hero Stumbles Onto God - Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence

The Senate’s twin threats to online speech and security – Brookings Institution

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This is a cruel summer. The COVID-19 toll increases daily. Millions are out of work and risk losing their homes. The senseless loss of Black lives continues despite weeks of mass protests. Behind it all lurks the climate crisis. Amid these pressing issues, members of the Senate have decided to spend their time creating their own threat to Americans: legislation that would make Americans less safe, while simultaneously harming online speech, privacy, and encryption.

This threat comes in the form of two bills: the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act, which the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously voted to advance out of committee last week; and the Lawful Access to Encrypted Data Act, which was introduced the prior week by Sen. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, who is also a co-sponsor of EARN IT. The EARN IT Act is described as an attempt to crack down on child sexual abuse material online but ends up drastically undermining user security and privacy in the process. The LAED Act, meanwhile, represents an attempt to outright ban strong encryption technology.

Taken together, the two measures represent a serious threat to online security, and the LAED Acts outlandishness, timing, and lack of bipartisan support have been interpreted to mean that it is a go-nowhere bill intended to make EARN IT look reasonable by comparison. Thats no excuse. The LAED Act doesnt make the EARN IT Act OK. Both of these bills threaten core freedoms online, and moving an attack on encryption from one bill to another is not progress.

LAED is no less than a nuclear assault on encryption in the United States, and, by extension, on security, privacy, and speech online. By modifying the legal framework for search warrants and electronic surveillance, LAED would make encryption backdoors mandatory. It would ban providers in the U.S. from offering end-to-end encryption, encrypted devices that cannot be unlocked for law enforcement, and indeed any encryption that does not build in a means of decrypting data for the police. Security researchers and civil-rights advocates have long feared the introduction of such a radical bill, and now its finally here.

But the hard-line approach of the LAED Act is no reason to endorse the EARN IT Act, which could result in many of the same consequences as the LAED Act, if in a more roundabout way.

The EARN IT Act targets Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which makes online platforms largely immune from liability for the actions of their users and bars most state criminal charges and civil lawsuits (but not federal criminal law enforcement). It was designed to give platforms a free hand in moderating user content by shielding their decisions about what to leave up and what to take down. The law thus protects free speech online by removing the incentive to suppress users speech in response to all-too-common false accusations or threats of litigation.

By narrowing the scope of Section 230 immunity to no longer include child sexual abuse material (CSAM) uploaded by users, EARN IT incentivizes platforms to quash legal user speech in the hopes of avoiding lawsuits. Thats what happened after Congress passed the FOSTA statute in 2018, which carved out sex trafficking offenses from Section 230 immunity. When FOSTA became law, websites such as Craigslist immediately shut down parts of their services, purging large swaths of innocuous content (such as online personals) just in case something in there could get the platform accused of facilitating sex trafficking. Its like a library burning all its romance novels and medical textbooks lest one be deemed obscene. This chilling effect on online speech is why FOSTA is currently being challenged in court for violating the First Amendment.

Its important to fight horrific images and videos of child abuse online, which is why federal law already requires platforms to report it when they find out about it. But EARN IT would expose platforms to liability even for content they dont know about, by excepting a wide array of civil and criminal claims under state laws, some of which impose liability for reckless or negligent behaviora lower bar than the federal reporting laws actual knowledge standard. That carve-out is broader than FOSTAs exception for sex trafficking.

EARN IT recently passed out of committee following major revisions, but those changes, including an amendment by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), may make EARN IT a more dangerous bill. The managers amendment of EARN IT, coupled with Leahys amendment, responded to concerns that the bill had constitutional defects, would effectively ban strong encryption, and would force platforms to weaken their user privacy and security protections. Instead of solving those issues, however, the revised bill still has immense practical and constitutional problems.

Like FOSTA, EARN IT has a fundamental First Amendment problem. But EARN ITs problem is worse: By exposing platforms to liability under a patchwork of state CSAM laws, EARN IT would let the most aggressive states set the rules for the entire Internet. To avoid incurring liability under those laws, platforms would (as with FOSTA) take down large amounts of legal user content lest some illegal CSAM sneak through. CSAM is a persistent, complex challenge for platforms. While they report it millions of times a year, they have still been accused of not doing enough to combat it, and EARN ITs stated goal is to incentivize them to do more. But scaring platforms into censoring lots of protected speech is an unconstitutional way for Congress to achieve that goal.

Whats more, EARN IT raises serious concerns under the Fourth Amendment and risks undermining prosecution of real-world predators and purveyors of CSAM. The state laws unleashed by EARN IT may, explicitly or implicitly, force platforms to scan all user content for CSAM. When done voluntarily (as many platforms already do), this is permissible. If done at government behest, however, the platform becomes an arm of the state, rendering those scans warrantless searches that violate the Fourth Amendmentmeaning any CSAM evidence they turn up will be inadmissible in court. This was a clear problem in the original bill thanks to a carrot-and-stick incentive structure that has now been removed. Now, the bill punts the liability question to the statesand if some of them require scanning all content to avoid liability, or if platforms can only avoid charges of negligence or recklessness by scanning, then compliance still risks turning providers into agents of the state.

The potential stakes are high. Exclusion of evidence in CSAM prosecutions would make it harder to obtain a conviction for a hideous crime. If the senators who unanimously voted this bill out of committee care so much about online child safety, why are they willing to roll the dice on whether the bill will backfire and result in accused CSAM offenders going free?

The Leahy amendment attempts to neutralize concerns about EARN ITs impact on encryption and cybersecurity by preserving immunity from CSAM claims based on the platforms use of encryption. This does not go far enough. The amendment has been called a fig leaf that will merely tie up platforms in litigation. It could also lead platforms to either encrypt everything they can, making detection of CSAM more difficult, or else collect much more private information from their users. Plus, platforms could still be held liable for other measures besides encryption that they take to protect users security (or for refusing to implement measures that would undermine it).

LAED, however, renders Leahys effort superfluous. By outlawing platforms from giving users strong encryption, LAED would swallow Leahys EARN IT amendment. And the LAED bill applies even more broadly than EARN IT, encompassing everything from websites and social media platforms, to apps, email, messaging and chat, videoconferencing and voice calling apps, cloud storage, operating systems, and any electronic device with at least 1 gigabyte of storagea very low bar in 2020.

Any provider of encrypted devices or services that is moderately popularmeaning 1 million or more U.S. customerswould have to redesign its encryption to add a law enforcement backdoor. For smaller providers, the U.S. attorney general (a position currently occupied by the notoriously anti-encryption Bill Barr) would get the power to command them to add in a decryption capability.

The rationale for mandating backdoors is so that if an entity receives legal process requiring it to decrypt data for law enforcement, it will be able to comply. But a backdoor is just a hole by another name. What Graham is proposing isnt merely to make law enforcements job easier. Its to mandate security vulnerabilities in the devices and services we rely on to keep our electronic data and communications private and secure.

The problem with backdoors is that they cant be limited to just the good guys. Theyll also be found and exploited by the bad guys: nation-states, hackers, cybercriminals, organized crime. Under Grahams bill, we wouldnt know who might be exploiting those intentional vulnerabilities to snoop through our electronic data and listen in on our conversations. That has ramifications for free speech, not just privacy. Fear of surveillance chills how people express themselves online. Thats why millions of people, including members of Congress and their staff, use end-to-end encrypted apps such as Signal and WhatsApp to communicate for perfectly legitimate, law-abiding purposes: They feel safer speaking their thoughts when they can be sure no uninvited guests are listening in.

By mandating backdoors that will be used by good guys and bad guys alike, the LAED Act is a grave threat not only to privacy, free speech, and cybersecurity, but also to the economy and national security. A backdoor mandate is a gift to the foreign adversaries that are constantly attacking Americas cyber defenses. Strong encryption was crucial to Americas and Americans security before, and it is even more so now, with COVID-19 shifting much of our lives online.

Its time for lawmakers to stop making ill-conceived threats against Americans cybersecurity, privacy, and online speech rightsespecially with proposals that will create grave new harms themselves. Graham and his Senate colleagues are merely exacerbating the multiple crises ravaging the country, including the silent killer that has taken over 130,000 American lives so far this year. Congress should spend the balance of this legislative session focusing on those towering infernos and stop throwing more fuel on the fire.

Riana Pfefferkorn is the associate director of surveillance and cybersecurity at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.

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The Senate's twin threats to online speech and security - Brookings Institution

Article – The Risk of ‘Take-Home’ COVID-19 and the ‘Next Asbestos’ – HarrisMartin Publishing

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STORY FROM: COVID-19 Litigation Report

July 13, 2020

Download a PDF Version of this Article

[Editor's note: Melissa Boudreau is the Vice President of Modeling and Chief Actuary at Praedicat, a science-based data analytics company. Robert T. Reville is the Chief Executive Officer of Praedicat. This article first appeared in Carrier Management. Replies to this commentary are welcome.]

Estimates of the size of COVID-19s impact on the insurance industry vary widely, but some companies (including Chubb and Willis Re) have suggested that, considering both asset and liability losses, it will be the largest event in insurance history. In the sense of the size of industry loss, then, the coronavirus appears to be the latest candidate for the next asbestos.

Unlike asbestos, which emerged through the U.S. legal system, early estimates for general liability losses from COVID-19 are lower than the predictions from business interruption or event cancellation lines. As an infectious disease spreading widely though the population, it seems challenging to blame infections on the actions or products of specific companies. Therefore, it may, at first glance, appear destined to only result in modest losses for general liability. A deeper review of the risk, however, suggests there are some precedents that could portend a larger loss, and they come precisely from asbestos.

Many of the innovations in tort law, the underlying legal system driving liability risk, have come from asbestos. After several scientific studies in the 1960s found that insulation workers had elevated risk of asbestos-related diseases, the Eastern District of Texas court established in 1971 (Borel v. Fibreboard Paper Products) that insulation workers could sue the product manufacturers responsible for putting the asbestos in the product. This innovation in tort law launched a major wave of asbestos litigation driving general liability losses in the 1970s.

Later, numerous scientific studies found elevated rates of asbestos-related diseases among families of asbestos workers as well. A study (Vianna and Polan) in 1978, for instance, found that family members of asbestos workers were 10-times more likely to have mesothelioma than otherwise equivalent individuals. (Reference: Vianna NJ, Polan AK. Non-occupational exposure to asbestos and malignant mesothelioma in females. Lancet. 1978;1(8073):10611063. doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(78)90911-x)

Subsequently, in the mid-2000s, courts began to award damages to spouses and children of asbestos workers as well. This wave of litigation, referred to as secondary or take-home exposure lawsuits, has been an important factor in the later waves of asbestos litigation. One characteristic of the take-home asbestos litigation is that the basis of the lawsuit is the negligence of the employer itself, rather than a product defect for some supplier. As such, it potentially increases the footprint of the risk outside product exposures, and therefore doesnt just implicate the suppliers but now the employers themselves.

COVID-19 is not a product risk like asbestos. But it is an occupational risk, as workers in hospitals, nursing homes, essential retail, meat production, construction and other industries face elevated rates of transmission, magnified by stay-at-home orders that concentrate transmission within the businesses that remain open. As early as February 2020, published scientific studies from Wuhan identified one of the coronaviruss key risk characteristics as a high degree of intra-family and intra-household transmission. Frequently, workers who are not from vulnerable populations are exposed to COVID-19 at work; then family members, such as spouses or parents, are exposed at home.

Unlike transmission of COVID-19 to customers or transmission in the wider community, where a specific source of exposure may be difficult to prove, take-home COVID-19 for the parent of a nursing home worker, for instance, is relatively straightforward to connect to the specific nursing home. Furthermore, virus tracking using genetic sequencing of potentially linked infections can help associate or dissociate the worker or family members infection from other potential sources. In this sense, take-home or secondary exposure for COVID-19 is a significant phenomenon supported by science, forensics and legal precedent, and therefore may become a significant liability risk as well.

Praedicat has developed scenarios for take-home COVID-19 liability risk. We estimate that approximately 13 percent of COVID-19 deaths are family members of workers who acquired their illness at work. In a scenario where the ultimate size of the U.S. pandemic is 150,000 deaths, a level predicted by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the time of this writing, the scenarios suggest a range of awards and settlements between $11.4 billion and $27.4 billion, depending on the degree to which courts accept this cause of action. In a catastrophic scenario where a second wave of COVID-19 cases occurs in the fall and winter and the ultimate size of the pandemic in the United States is 300,000 deaths, the losses could exceed $50 billion.

These losses would be broadly spread across industries ranging from healthcare to retail and would involve companies of all sizes. If these losses emerge and are covered by insurance, general liability alone will elevate COVID-19 to next asbestos levels.

Take-home asbestos liability has not been uniformly accepted by courts across the United States. Indeed, New York State, which has seen the largest number of COVID-19 deaths, rejected take-home asbestos liability. Other states with large numbers of cases, including Washington, California, New Jersey and Louisiana, have accepted it.

We do not know if take-home COVID-19 will be interpreted the same way as take-home asbestos. Even if the cause of action is accepted, the question of coverage on general liability is unclear, as there may be infectious disease exclusions or the pollution exclusion may apply. There may even be liability protections or alternative compensation mechanisms enacted in various states to assist the recovery from COVID-19s economic impact. Nonetheless, given the social inflation environment that existed as COVID-19 emerged, it is reasonable that insurers should prepare for an adverse take-home COVID-19 liability landscape while hoping for the best.

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Article - The Risk of 'Take-Home' COVID-19 and the 'Next Asbestos' - HarrisMartin Publishing

Singapore Readies International Blockchain Payments Network for Adoption – Chief Investment Officer

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Singapore has successfully developed a blockchain payments network ready for commercial adoption, the nations financial authorities said Monday.

Called Project Ubin, the joint endeavor is supported by the city-states central bank, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), and the island nations sovereign wealth fund, Temasek, plus JPMorgan. The network allows for faster, cheaper, and safer international payments, according to a joint report.

While still a prototype, the network allows payments in different currencies to be cleared and settled within the same network using distributed ledger technology, the firms said. MAS and Temasek asserted that Project Ubin was developed to be production-ready.

Additional technical details on the prototype would also be made publicly available to spur additional innovation from the industry, MAS and Temasek said.

This has built a strong foundation of knowledge, expertise, and experience, and paved a path towards commercial adoption, Sopnendu Mohanty, chief fintech officer at MAS, said in a statement.

This validates Temaseks efforts in exploring and building blockchain solutions focusing on digital identity, digital currencies, and financial asset tokenization, Chia Song Hwee, deputy chief executive at Temasek, said in a statement.

We look forward to supporting commercialization efforts emanating from Project Ubin and other application areas, with a view to drive greater adoption of blockchain technology, he added.

Temasek has long been vocal about its support of a blockchain-based payments network, which advocates say would save billions of dollars in transaction fees. In 2017, deputy chief Chia said the allocator will support the next generation of distributed ledger technology.

Earlier this year, Temasek also joined Libra Association, the global consortium backed by Facebook thats developing a blockchain-based currency. Members of the Libra network are expected to act as validator nodes, which are independent individuals or servers on the blockchain that validate and maintain an immutable history of transactions.

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Singapore Readies International Blockchain Payments Network for Adoption - Chief Investment Officer

Blockchain Bites: Coinbase’s Untraditional Investor Day and the Ethereum-EOS Arms Race in Latin America – CoinDesk – CoinDesk

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Coinbase will host its first investor day, New York State prosecutors won a jurisdictionaldispute involving Bitfinex and a protocol arms race is unfolding in Latin America. Heres the story:

Youre readingBlockchain Bites, the daily roundup of the most pivotal stories in blockchain and crypto news, and why theyre significant. You can subscribe to this and all of CoinDesksnewsletters here.

Top shelf

Not Your Traditional Investor DayOn the same day Reuters reported Coinbase is looking to go public, the exchange scheduled itsfirst-ever investor day,for Aug. 14. Investor days can often signal a planned direct listing, Jamie McGurk, a former operating partner at Andreessen Horowitz, has said.This will not be a traditional investor day, but rather an opportunity to hear our perspective on the cryptoeconomy and learn about Coinbases role in the ecosystem, said Coinbase spokesperson Daniel Harrison.

Employment KerfuffleFormer Tron Foundation employees arechallenging a court orderallowing the foundation to settle a lawsuit through arbitration, rather than in court. The initial complaint centers around allegations of wrongful termination and hostile work practices at BitTorrent, a file-sharing service acquired by the Tron Foundation.

Appeal DeniedBitfinex will have toface allegations from New York State prosecutorsthat it lost $850 million in client and corporate funds and tried to cover this hole with funds from the affiliated tether stablecoin, according to a ruling by the State Supreme Courts Appellate Division on Thursday. The exchanges parent iFinex initially claimed the prosecutors didnt have jurisdiction over the Hong Kong-headquartered firm, which the appeals court rejected. The court also dismissed the argument that tether was neither a commodity nor a security.

Canaan ShakeupThree Canaan Creative directors were dropped from the companys business registry, promptingspeculation of a power grab.For months an internal power struggle between co-founders Micree Zhan and Jihan Wu has wracked the Nasdaq-listed firm, which has been suffering growing competition and reduced profits following the Bitcoin networks programmatic halving.

Ethereum v. EOSEthereum and EOSIO are battling it out overenterprise blockchain businessacross Latin America. The square up pitsConsenSys in one corner and LatamLink in the other, a project backed by the Inter-American Development Bank, over which decentralized protocol will win the arms race.

Quick bites

The big picture

Venezuelas Real Use CaseAfter airdropping cryptocurrency to 60,000 users in Venezuela, an AirTM survey gives a snapshot ofhow crypto is actually used in the economically troubled nation.

Venezuela is often a proving ground for do-gooding crypto companies and protocols. Payments network Dash, for one, famouslymade headwayin the nation beset by hyperinflation.

AirTM distributed approximately $300,000 worth of crypto to Venezuelans, and while only 57% of recipients engaged with the funds, many were able to successfully use the donations to buy food and medicines. Others began treating the AirTM platform as a personal bank.

The bigger picture is coming into focus: Crypto only becomes a viable alternative to traditional financial systems if there is robust infrastructure to support it. If Venezuela offers an example of bitcoin usage, then it appears there is user demand for bitcoin-friendly services provided by a regular fintech company, CoinDesks Leigh Cuen reports.

Market intel

Balance Sheet Contractions. Bullish for Bitcoin?As the U.S. Federal Reserve begins to unwind its balance sheet,contracting $88 billion to $6.97 trillion(-1.5%) in the week ending July 8, some crypto observers are saying this could have negative consequences for bitcoins price. Thats because in recent months bitcoin has been positively correlated with traditional assets, which have rallied on the back of the Feds balance sheet expansion. But thats far from the consensus view. Zooming into the details of the Feds balance sheet reveals the reduction has been primarily driven by a drop in demand for emergency liquidity measures, a sign the coronavirus-induced stress in the financial system has eased, CoinDesks Omkar Godbole writes.

Opinion

Blockchain Credentials, Not CredentialismBlockchain certification can verify expertise and experience, making transferring schools and changing jobs easier. Butcertificate proliferation may be a bigger problem,argues Stephanie Hurder, a CoinDesk columnist and founding economist at Prysm Group. Non-degree credentials, such as badges and certificates, in particular are rapidly multiplying because they can now be digitally transmitted and verified at a minimal cost, she writes.

Podcast corner

Inequality, Social Chaos, Bankruptcy RalliesFrom the Robinhood Rally to the most profit-disconnected stock market in history, these are the mostinteresting ideas from FinTwitlast month.

Who won #CryptoTwitter?

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

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Blockchain Bites: Coinbase's Untraditional Investor Day and the Ethereum-EOS Arms Race in Latin America - CoinDesk - CoinDesk

Blockchain This Week: Prometheus Partners With ValidateMe To Access Records & More – Inc42 Media

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ValidateMe claimed to enable the school to store and access their digital records, remotely

The platform is said to enable the school to store and access their digital archives, perform background verifications and feedback consolidations faster

The global blockchain solution is expected to create close to 395 Mn jobs and generate $10.1 Tn in business opportunities, report

This week, Delhi NCR-based IB candidate school Prometheus announced its partnership with blockchain-based background verification platform ValidateMe to enable access to students records, anytime, anywhere. The platform is said to enable the school to store and access their digital archives, perform background verifications and feedback consolidations faster.

Simply put, this platform gives the school a distinct advantage to the students by setting up digital validated records right from the early years of their education. For parents, this platform will allow access to not just current digital records, but records spanning their childs entire educational journey. Most importantly, it simplifies the students onboarding process in a much more efficient and scalable manner.

According to the Future of Nature and Business study, published by the World Economic Forum, revealed that the blockchain solution could have the capacity to create close to 395 Mn jobs and generate $10.1 Tn in business opportunities in the next ten years. The report also stated that blockchain technology could significantly reduce food wastage in the supply chain, contributing up to $365 Bn.

The report also cited that pilots in Benin, Ghana, India and Rwanda suggested that relatively low-cost storage techniques and handling practices can reduce post-harvest food loss by more than 60% and raise marginal farmers incomes by more than 30%. Citing IBM Food Trust, the report stated that the many players like Walmart, Nestle and Tyson Foods have already started implementing blockchain-based supply chains.

Furthermore, the report also highlights the use case of blockchain applications in energy and mining supply chains, which could potentially generate an opportunity worth $30 Bn in 2030. The WEF said that the scale of blockchains potential will help create $3.5 Tn of value in energy and extractive systems.

In the recent report released by WEF on blockchain business opportunity and jobs across three socio-economic systems shows that the industry can deliver close to $10.1 Tn of annual business opportunities and 395 Mn jobs by 2030, globally.

The US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) unveiled a new initiative focused on food safety leveraging blockchain tech in tracking products. The authorities have released a blueprint document. Accordingly, the food administration body will be using emerging technologies to enhance existing systems and build new ones.

Citing the real-time movement of planes, ride-sharing, and packaged goods, on how it is being tracked using digital tools in the recent past, the FDA in the document noted that its stakeholders should be looking at new technologies such as artificial intelligence, IoT, sensor and blockchain to effectively track and trace food.

New York-based enterprise blockchain technology company R3 recently announced that it has ventured into setting up a corporate bond technology platform called LedgerEdge. The platform offers secondary trading options in the corporate bond market. Most importantly, the new solution aims at improving market liquidity amid the pandemic-induced inefficiencies, thereby creating a centralised store of data and avoiding data leakage.

David E Rutter said that the secondary market for corporate bonds is on the rise, but the existing platforms dont serve the purpose. Working with the industry, we will build a platform that solves the challenges of locating and promoting liquidity and data ownership once and for all, he added.

In a bid to promote digitisation across all in the industry in the post-Covid era, the South Korean government announced its plans to invest over $48.2 Bn in blockchain and other Industry 4.0 technologies for the next five years. Filling the gap, South Korea President Moon-Jae said that the new industrial revolution would bring several benefits that the new industrial revolution could bring to the county, as per his interaction with ZDNet, With this, the plant aims to create close to 56K jobs across different sectors, including big data, networks and article internet.

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Blockchain This Week: Prometheus Partners With ValidateMe To Access Records & More - Inc42 Media

China adds blockchain job titles to its official list of occupations – Decrypt

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In brief

Chinas Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security (MOHRSS) recently announced that two blockchain occupations, Blockchain Engineer and Blockchain Application Operator, have been added to its list of official occupations.

The list defines 'Blockchain Engineer' as someone that works on architecture design, programming, system application, and testing. 'Blockchain Application Operator' focuses on technicians who use blockchain applications in industry, education, or the public sector.

Codifying a Blockchain Engineer as separate from a regular software engineer is significant for the industry, because it allows statisticians and other stakeholders to understand the size of the labor force and participation in it. Universities could look at demand from industry and plan curriculums accordingly.

Another example: the first sign of a bubble bursting in the blockchain sector might come when the headcount of Blockchain Engineers goes down and the number of generic software engineers increases. Conversely, a continued year-over-year rise in the number of people employed in blockchain occupations would show that the industry is sustainable.

An official designation also means the start of the regulatory process for the industry. ST Daily reports that professional standards for those working in the blockchain industry are coming down the pipe, similar to how other occupations also have a code of ethics for the job.

Netizens generally reacted positively to the news. China Dailys coverage of the announcement received 1500 likes and 450 reposts on social media platform Weibo. Some blockchain-related companies also made recruitment advertisements in the comments: we are hiring blockchain engineers, PM me for more information.

The first reference book codifying occupations in China was published in 1999. Its updated on an annual basis with new occupations added as the economy evolves and new industries emerge. 2019s edition, for instance, added 'eSport Athlete' and 'Drone Pilot' to the directory, a sign of the continued growth of the eSports industry and the ever-increasing commercial and governmental applications of drones.

Some of the other occupations added to this years list? Live-streaming online marketing specialist, and online teacherboth trades that have exploded in popularity as hundreds of millions are stuck inside on their computers thanks to COVID-19.

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China adds blockchain job titles to its official list of occupations - Decrypt

Prometheus School Partners with ValidateMe for Blockchain Technology Powered Digital Storage and Verification Platform – Outlook India

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(Eds: Disclaimer: The following press release comes to you under an arrangement with NewsVoir. PTI takes no editorial responsibility for the same.) Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India (NewsVoir)Prometheus School, an IB candidate school in NCR announces its partnership with the digital platform ValidateMe (an initiative under Affidabile Solutions), to enable anytime access to student records. ValidateMe is a blockchain technology powered digital data storage and background verification platform. It serves varied entities across domains such as educational institutions, corporates, job applicants and freelancers. The platform enables them to store and access their digital archives, perform background verifications and feedback consolidations, all in a matter of a few minutes. In the educational sector, the platform helps schools and other higher learning institutions in validating the authenticity of academic certificates and school reports along with school transfer certificates to name a few. Prometheus School, a pioneer in adopting new age technologies, has realised the potential of ValidateMe and has been an early adopter of their services. Ms. Rashima, the Principal Secondary School, stated, In todays age of digital ubiquity, it is important to not just have information online, but more specifically have it reliably and securely online. We, at the Prometheus School take data and data security very seriously and hence are excited at the potential that comes with the partnership with ValidateMe. Ms. Aneesha, the Principal Primary School, quoted, Prometheus signing up with ValidateMe holds a lot of promise long term. It gives a distinct advantage to the Prometheus students by setting digital validated records right from the early years of their education. The school explains the benefits that accompany the partnership for all parties involved; parents, students and the organisation. For parents, this platform will allow access to not just the current digital records, but records spanning their childs entire educational journey. Furthermore, the platform will help Prometheus school facilitate the transfer process for incoming students in a more time efficient manner. Students gain the most out of this platform since it will aid in their college application processes on an international and national level. Mr. Mukesh Sharma, Founding Chairman and Director of the Prometheus School and an investor of ValidateMe, expressed his confidence by stating, Digital security and trust have become more important than ever before. The importance of this service is on the rise given the ground reality with COVID-19. Regardless of the domain you operate in, both trust in the information made available and secure access to the same, will soon become an inevitable necessity. ValidateMe had the foresight to ideate on this state art of blockchain platform to power its solutions that are valuable for all industries and I am very excited at Prometheus signing up to leverage this solution. Adding a testimonial from an early investor of ValidateMe, Mr. P. K. Gupta, Chairman, Sharda Group of Institutions and Chancellor, Sharda University, ValidateMe offers the much needed genuine access to relevant data. It provides the scalability and reliability we all need in todays age of information overload. As a long timer in the educational and medical sectors, I see these as key in the world of digital transformation. With Mukeshs technology background and the idea the team is working on, I have complete confidence in the solutions potential and wish them the very best in the coming days. Mr. Mahesh Balakrishnan, Director Human Touch said, "ValidateMe.Online looks very promising with cutting edge technology, solving a real market need." Mr. Sharma concluded that the one of the core differentiations for ValidateMe is the strong team that continues to support it, not just financially, but also from ongoing business scenarios standpoint Mr. Guptas association with ValidateMe is one such solid example and the latest sign up from Prometheus, is yet another step ahead in the right direction! Image 1: Dashboard: A single-view of all the completed and pending activities carried out Image 2: Template: Template feature available to create certificates using raw data PWRPWR

Disclaimer :- This story has not been edited by Outlook staff and is auto-generated from news agency feeds. Source: PTI

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Prometheus School Partners with ValidateMe for Blockchain Technology Powered Digital Storage and Verification Platform - Outlook India

Quantum Computing Market 2020: Challenges, Growth, Types, Applications, Revenue, Insights, Growth Analysis, Competitive Landscape, Forecast- 2025 -…

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The Quantum Computing Market is segmented on the lines of its application, end-user and regional. Basis of vertical is segmented into Optimization, Machine Learning and Simulation. Based on application BFSI, IT and Telecommunication, Healthcare, Transportation, Government, Aerospace & Defence and Others. The Quantum Computing Market on geographic segmentation covers various regions such as North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, Middle East and Africa. Each geographic market is further segmented to provide market revenue for select countries such as the U.S., Canada, U.K. Germany, China, Japan, India, Brazil, and GCC countries.

The scope of the report includes a detailed study of Quantum Computing Market with the reasons given for variations in the growth of the industry in certain regions.

Browse Full Report Here: https://www.marketresearchengine.com/quantum-computing-market

The report covers detailed competitive outlook including the market share and company profiles of the key participants operating in the global market. Key players profiled in the report include International Business Machines Corporation (NYSE: IBM), 1QB Information Technologies, Cambridge Quantum Computing, IonQ, QbitLogic, QC Ware, Quantum Circuits, Qubitekk, QxBranch, and Rigetti Computing. Company profile includes assign such as company summary, financial summary, business strategy and planning, SWOT analysis and current developments.

Quantum computing harnesses the incredible laws of quantum mechanics to method info. May be the exploitation of quantum computing is often dramatic and have comprehensive consequences as that of the invention of the wheel, agriculture which of the net. In ancient computing, bits are accustomed store or code info as either a zero or one. On the other hand, in quantum computing, quantum bits or qubits are accustomed store info. within the quantum computing thought, theres no distinction between 0 and one and therefore the info can be each zero and one at a similar time, mimicking the properties of subatomic particles like electrons. This happens as a result of the phenomena of superposition and web.

This report provides:

1) An overview of the global market for Quantum Computing Market and related technologies.2) Analyses of global market trends, with data from 2015, estimates for 2016 and 2017, and projections of compound annual growth rates (CAGRs) through 2024.3) Identifications of new market opportunities and targeted promotional plans for Quantum Computing Market

4) Discussion of research and development, and the demand for new products and new applications.5) Comprehensive company profiles of major players in the industry.

The Quantum Computing Market has been segmented as below:

The Quantum Computing Market is segmented on the Basis of Application Type, Vertical Type and Regional analysis. By Application Type this market is segmented on the basis of Aerospace & Defence, IT and Telecommunication, Healthcare, Government, BFSI , Transportation and Others. By Vertical Type this market is segmented on the basis of Simulation Optimization and Machine Learning. By Regional Analysis this market is segmented on the basis of North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, Middle East and Africa.

The major driving factors of Quantum Computing Market are as follows:

The major Restraining factors of Quantum Computing Market are as follows:

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Table of Contents

2.1 Research Data2.2 Market Size Estimation and Data Triangulation2.3 Research Assumptions3. Summary with Insights

7.1 North America7.2 Europe7.3 Asia-Pacific7.4 Rest of the World

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U.S. Chief Technology Officer to Serve as One of the Pentagon’s Top Tech Officials – Nextgov

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The Pentagons new 33-year-old head of research and engineering lacks a basic science degree but brings deep connections to Donald Trump and controversial Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel.

Defense officials announced Monday that Michael Kratsios, the White Houses chief technology officer, would serve as acting undersecretary for research and engineering, a post that oversees top-priority projects in hypersonics, quantum computing, microelectronics, and other fields. He will continue to serve in his White House role.

In seeking to fill this position we wanted someone with experience in identifying and developing new technologies and working closely with a wide range of industry partners, said Defense Secretary Mark Esper in a statement on Monday. We think Michael is the right person for this job and we are excited to have him on the team.

Kratsios came to the White House in 2017 as deputy CTO, and moved up to CTO last year. He led efforts to further White House investment in artificial intelligence and quantum science and to expand U.S. partnerships in those areas. As the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, he helped launch a project to apply U.S. supercomputers to the U.S response.

But Kratsios was a weird pick for these senior technical roles, according to one person who has served as both a senior White House and Defense Department official advising on technology issues.

Kratsios graduated from Princeton with a bachelor's degree in political science and a focus on ancient Greek democracy. The person hes replacing, Michael Griffin, holds a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering and served as a NASA administrator. Indeed, Kratsios will be less academically credentialled than most of the program-managers he oversees. So how did he get here?

After Princeton, he went to work for Peter Thiel, soon becoming CFO of Clarium Capital Management, Thiels investment company. He then became chief of staff for the tech billionaire, who was an early backer of the Trump campaign and who has played a key role in the administrations approach to technology.

Thiel-backed ventures like Anduril and Palantir are playing a growing role in the Defense Department. The former official said theoverlap between Thiel-backed defense contractors and his protege Kratsios need not be a cause for concern. The Department has spent years trying to improve its relationship with the private tech world from which Kratsios emerged. But the official said Kratsios might not prove to be the most effective ambassador.

Its not clear to me that Kratsios is warming up Silicon Valley, the former official said. I dont know how the rest of Silicon Valley thinks of Kratsios.

Thiel has made a variety of enemies in the tech world and beyond; for example, he has slammed Google as being too accommodating to China.

The development, however, is good news for the Peter Thiel portion of Silicon Valley, the former official said.

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U.S. Chief Technology Officer to Serve as One of the Pentagon's Top Tech Officials - Nextgov

MIT’s New Diamond-Based Quantum Chip Is the Largest Yet – Interesting Engineering

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Researchers at MIT have developed a process to manufacture and integrate "artificial atoms" with photonic circuitry, and in doing so, are able to produce the largest quantum chip of its kind.

The atoms, which are created by atomic-scale defects in microscopically thin slices of diamond, allow for the scaling up of quantum chip production.

RELATED: 7 REASONS WHY WE SHOULD BE EXCITED BY QUANTUM COMPUTERS

The new development marks a turning point in the field of scalable quantum processors, Dirk Englund, an associate professor in MITs Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, explained in a press release.

Millions of quantum processors will be required for the oncoming, much-hyped advent of quantum computing. This new research shows there is a viable way to scale up processor production, the MIT team says.

The qubits in the newly-developed chip are artificial atoms made from defects in diamond. These can be prodded with visible light and microwaves, making them emit photons that carry quantum information.

This hybrid approach is described by Englund and his colleagues in a study published inNature.The paper details how the team carefully selected "quantum micro chiplets" that contained multiple diamond-based qubits and integrated them onto an aluminum nitride photonic integrated circuit.

In the past 20 years of quantum engineering, it has been the ultimate vision to manufacture such artificial qubit systems at volumes comparable to integrated electronics, Englund explained. Although there has been remarkable progress in this very active area of research, fabrication and materials complications have thus far yielded just two to three emitters per photonic system.

Using their hybrid method, Englund and his team successfully built a 128-qubit system. In doing so, they made history by constructing the largest integrated artificial atom-photonics chip yet.

Its quite exciting in terms of the technology, Marko Lonar, Tiantsai Lin Professor of Electrical Engineering at Harvard University, who was not involved in the study, told MIT News. They were able to get stable emitters in a photonic platform while maintaining very nice quantum memories.

The next step for the researchers is to find a way to automate their process. In doing so, they will enable the production of even bigger chips, which will be necessary for modular quantum computers and multichannelquantum repeaters that transport qubits over long distances, the researchers say.

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MIT's New Diamond-Based Quantum Chip Is the Largest Yet - Interesting Engineering

Overseas IT directors could need salary of 56,100 to work in the UK – ComputerWeekly.com

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IT directors could be expected to earn at least 56,100 in order for their salary to count towards points for a work visa in the UK, according to the latest government guidelines.

The government has clarified the rules surrounding the tradable points which will be part of the UKs new points-based immigration system due to come into effect in January 2021.

As part of the system, skilled workers applying through the Skilled Worker route need 70 points to be able to enter the UK on a work visa, some of which can be gained by having a PhD qualification relevant to a role, or being on the shortage occupation list as outlined by the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC).

Julian David, CEO of trade body techUK, said in a statement about the new immigration rules: The digital skills gap is not unique to the UK, making tech talent in high demand across the global digital economy.

TechUKs members are committed to building a strong domestic talent pipeline, but for the UK to remain world leading in fields such as AI [artificial intelligence] and quantum computing, it must remain open and attractive to international innovators, investors and the talent that supports that ambition.

The development of a new immigration system provides a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build a system that meets the needs of our dynamic, modern economy while creating a high-level of public trust.

This needs to include the ability to support digital tech talent to move around for short-term activities to support their customers and supply chains. The tech sector is the UKs modern success story and vital todeliveringon the governments ambitionto create ahigh-skill, high-wageeconomythat is fit for the future.

The non-tradable points, which account for 50 of the total, are rewarded for a sponsor-approved job offer, a job at the appropriate skill level, and the required level of English language, and are compulsory for applicants to be accepted for work in the UK.

A skilled workers salary can factor into the remaining points need to make up the 70 which will grant a visa 20 points towards their visa application can be earned by having a salary higher than the threshold of 25,600 and at least the specified salary for their particular job.

Outlined in the new rules are the salaries considered the going rate for several IT-based jobs, including IT director, technical director, and telecommunications director, which have a going rate of around 56,100, according to UK Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) data collected each year by the Office of National Statistics (ONS).

The going rate for a job role is calculated using the 25th percentile of earnings from the UK ASHE, and will be updated as and when new results are published.

For IT specialists managers, including roles such as data centre manager, IT manager, IT support manager, network operations manager and service delivery manager, the going rate is considered to be 38,000 a year, or 18.74 an hour based on a 39-hour working week.

IT project and programmes managers are considered to have the going rate of 40,000, which includes roles such as implementation manager, IT project manager, programme manager and project leader.

IT business analysts, architects or systems designers including roles such as business analyst, data communications analyst, systems analyst, systems consultant, technical analyst, and technical architect would need to earn 36,600 a year.

Meanwhile, the going rate for programmers and software development professionals with roles such as analyst-programmer, database developer, games programmer, programmer, and software engineer is considered to be around 33,300.

Information technology and telecommunications professionals with not elsewhere classified roles such as IT consultant, quality analyst, software tester, systems tester, and telecommunications planner have a going rate of 31,800. Bringing up the rear are web design and development professionals, including internet developer, multimedia developer, web design consultant and web designer, which make about 26,000.

This means for an applicants salary to account for 20 towards their tradable points, they have to have a job offer with a salary of at least the going rate for their role that is also above the general threshold of 25,600.

There are ways to earn 10 points for their salary, for example if it is within the general salary band of 23,040-25,599 and at least 90% of the going rate for their role, but in some cases even if their salary is above the higher general salary of 25,599 and is below a certain percentage of the going rate for their role, they will not gain any points for salary as part of their application.

If the applicant earns under a certain percentage of their going rate and/or the general salary threshold, they could potentially still earn enough points to come and work in the UK using other tradeable criteria such as a PhD qualification related to their role or a role on the shortage occupation list, as long as they earn at least 20,480.

The MAC is responsible for designating the roles of the shortage occupations list currently, IT business analysts, architects and systems designers, programmers and software development professionals, web designer and development professionals and cyber security specialists are on the shortage occupation list.

There are additional rules for certain individuals to work in the UK, depending on if they are a student hoping to transition into work in the UK after study, are new entrants to the UKs job market or hold specialist skills in certain fields such as health and care.

The Tier 1 Exceptional Talent route has also been adapted to form the Global Talent route for highly skilled workers, which will allow some very talented people to enter the UK without a job offer if they reach the requirements for a visa and are endorsed by a relevant competent body.

As the Brexit vote led to a large number of EU workerschoosing not to stay in the UK, an emphasis has been put on ensuring the UK works to develop its own technology talent toprevent the UK falling off a tech talent cliff edge.

When the points-based system was initially announced, home secretary Priti Patel said the aim of the new rules is to end free movement and take back control of our boarders, while attracting talented people from around the world to work in the UK.

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Overseas IT directors could need salary of 56,100 to work in the UK - ComputerWeekly.com

U.S. Universities Must Stop Honoring Racist Scientists of the Past – Union of Concerned Scientists

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The names of scientists whose discredited racial theories continue to pervade U.S. society still adorn prestigious college buildings and are attached to awards and prizes, while their statues stand on campuses and their portraits hang in university museums.

To take just one example, the University of Pennsylvanias Institute for Environmental Studies is housed in Hayden Hall, named after Ferdinand Hayden, a geologist famous for his explorations of Yellowstone but who described Native Americans as savages and Wyoming as infested with hostile Indians. He advocated for U.S. expansionism to include the whole of North and Central America from the Arctic Circle to the Isthmus of Darien and promoted and helped enable White settlement of the West. His 1871 US Geological Survey of Wyoming stated that unless Indians are localized and made to enter upon agricultural pursuits they must ultimately be exterminated. More than 40 topographic features are named after Hayden, and efforts are underway by Indigenous activists to rename the Hayden Valley in Yellowstone National Park as Buffalo Nations Valley.

The history of science is shot through with racism. Ethnology, anthropology, paleontology, archaeology and zoology have all served to support racist theories, doctrines and policies, as have chemistry, medicine, genetics, mathematics and economics. Many scientists who made pioneering advances or whose achievements underpin scientific progress and thinking today held and actively promoted racist views. In their time they were celebrated and honored as important or even great scientists but today it is important that we address their roles in building and perpetuating racist stereotypes, structures and institutions.

University leaders who have been slow to respond to and act upon the legacy of slavery and slave-holding in their histories have been even slower to address the history of racism in science. It was not until 2018 for example, that the University of Pittsburgh stripped Thomas Parrans name from its Graduate School of Public Health. As US Surgeon General from 1938 to 1946, Parran oversaw the infamous Tuskegee biomedical experiment in which treatment for syphilis was withheld from hundreds of Black share-croppers in Alabama who were tricked into participating in the study. He also approved unethical experiments in Guatemala, where female sex workers, prison inmates, mental patients and soldiers were unknowingly infected with syphilis or gonorrhea.

In recent months, as the brutal police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks and others sparked unprecedented nationwide protests and support for the Black Lives Matter movement, calls for action to address racist memorialization on campuses haveincreased. In June, after resisting years of pressure, the University of Southern California finally took the name of Rufus von KleinSmida eugenicist who supported forced sterilizationoff the Center for International and Public Affairs building, which had been named for the former university president. At the University of Maine, however, Little Hall still remains named after former university president and eugenicist Clarence Cook Little who supported laws to limit immigration based on race and to prevent mixed-race marriages.

Eugenics is a major thread weaving through scientific racism. Alexander Graham Bell, H.G. Wells and Marie Stopes were all supporters. Francis Galton, the polymath English scientist & statistician coined the term, meaning well-bred,in 1883. Galton advocated the selective breeding of humans to produce a superior race. Eugenics built on Mendelian studies of heredity and Darwinian notions of fitness and extended the principles of plant and animal breeding to humans, with its proponents seeing it as a way to weed out a broad range of undesirable traits including mental and physical disabilities and racial inferiority.

Photo of Sir Francis Galton taken at Alphonse Bertillons Criminal Identification Laboratory in Paris in 1893.

The roots of some statistical techniques lie in the efforts of Galton and other eugenicists to help prove their racial gene theories. Eminent statistician Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher was the founder of the Cambridge University Eugenics Society. Rothamstead Research, the UK agricultural science laboratory where he worked for many years has recently renamed its accommodation block, Fisher Court to AnoVa Court, and the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies retired the R. A. Fisher Award and Lectureship in June 2020 after 56 years. Freshman statistics students at University College of London (UCL) always had their lectures in the Galton Theatre until it was finally stripped of the name in June 2020. However, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge has yet to remove a stained glass window that honors him and has recently been a target of anti-racist activists.

Eugenics was widely embraced in the U.S. scientific and political establishments, and the dean of Harvard Medical school, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was an early promoter of it. Holmes believed Boston Brahminsthe White elite of Bostonto have hereditary and superior bloodlines.

Harvard students, faculty and alumni are now calling for the renaming of the Holmes Society of the universitys medical and dental schools. In 1927, Holmes son, the former Harvard law professor and Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote the courts opinion in Buck v Bell which, with the infamous words, three generations of imbeciles is enough upheld the right of the Commonwealth of Virginia to sterilize a woman regarded as feeble-minded (she wasnt) and opening the floodgates to state laws allowing sterilization.

Charles Davenport created the member-based Eugenics Records Office at Cold Spring Harbor in 1910 and Stanfords David Starr Jordan was the groups first chair. It received funding and institutional support from philanthropist Mrs. E. H. Harrington, John Harvey Kellogg, the Carnegie Institution and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Davenport provided expert testimony for The Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 which used eugenic arguments to restrict immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. By 1931, 28 US states had sterilization laws and by 1936 at least 60,000 forced sterilizations had been performed, mostly on poor Black people. The Carnegie Institution eventually concluded that there was no scientific merit in eugenics and withdrew funding in 1939.

The U.S. eugenics movement helped to provide the intellectual underpinning for Nazi racial theories and sterilization policies. In Germany, Nazis lauded the success of Californias sterilization laws and used them as a model for their own legislation in 1933. Even after the full horror of the Nazi sterilization programs and extermination camps was uncovered, eugenic ideas maintained a grip in the mainstream scientific community. For example Nobel Prize winning geneticists Francis Crick and James Watson both believed that Black people are genetically inferior, and Crick was an advocate of sterilization.

Decades before eugenics took hold in the U.S., scientific racism had already been firmly established and many of its founders are still memorialized on campuses today.

Louis Agassiz, founder of Harvard Universitys Museum of Comparative Zoology (CMZ) and one the first celebrity scientists was a leading polygenist, believing that several human races were createdseparately according to their climate and geography and that the White European race was superior to all others. Agassiz was inspired by the anthropologist Samuel George Morton who used craniologythe measurement of brain capacity in the skullto try to demonstrate that Caucasians were racially superior.

A statue of Louis Agassiz (left) who believed Black people were an inferior race stands above the entrance to a Stanford University hall named after the eugenicist David Starr Jordan. Scientist and abolitionist Alexander von Humboldt (right) argued that there were no biological different races. Photo: Creative Commons/Dicklyon.

Morton collected and measured hundreds of skulls and proposed that there were five biologically distinct races to which he assigned immutable character traits that he derived from, among other things, reading travel literature. Despite being shot through with biases and distortions and lacking any shred of scientific merit, Mortons work was nevertheless widely accepted in the scientific community. It provided credibility for arguments in defense of slavery, segregation, and the dispossession and killing of Native Americans.

A statue of Agassiz has stood for more than 100 years over the entrance to Stanford University Psychology Departments Jordan Hall. The hall itself is named after David Starr Jordan, Stanfords founding president, an ichthyologist and prominent eugenicist. Stanford is currently reviewing a request from faculty and students to remove the statue and change the name of the hall.

In another egregious example of campus memorialization, the honors college building of the University of Alabama is named in honor of one of the most influential scientific racists of the 19th century. Josiah C. Nott was a surgeon, anthropologist, founder of the University of Alabama School of Medicine and a slaveholder.

He was a polygenist, who believed that if Black and White races mixed, it would lead to extinction through degeneration, and thought Black people to be the lowest point in the scale of human beings. In 1854, with the British Egyptologist George Gliddon he published the book Types of Mankind.

It sold three and a half thousand copies in the first four months and ran to ten printings over 17 years. Scientific proof of the inferiority of Black people was just what the slaveholders of the South were looking for. Frederick Douglass in his commencement address at Western Reserve College in 1854 said that of all the efforts to disprove the unity of the human family, and to brand the Negro with natural inferiority, the most compendious and barefaced is the book, entitled Types of Mankind.

Robert A. Smith of Pittsburg State University argues that Types of Mankind fixed the issue of race in the minds of everyday Americans. The concept of race had been isolated, identified, and finally popularized. The mere fact that we consider race to be an issue at all in the twenty-first century is due in no small measure to Nott and Gliddons efforts in the nineteenth. And yet still Notts name remains attached to a building at the University of Alabama (UA).

Nott Hall at the University of Alabama, named to honor Josiah Nott in 1922. Photo: courtesy of Hilary Green.

In her ongoing Hallowed Grounds Project, Dr. Hilary N. Green, a UA historian, highlights a vilely racist and incandescently angry 17-page letter from Nott the greatest living anthropologist of America to O. O. Howard, head of the post-war Freedmans Bureau, that was published in the July 1866 issue of thePopular Magazine of Anthropology. In it, Nott claimed that History proves indisputably, that a superior and inferior race cannot live together practically on any other terms than that of master and slave, and that the inferior race, like the Indians, must be expelled or exterminated. In every climate where the White man can live and prosper, he drives all others before him.

Nott soon joined the ranks of what historian Daniel Sutherland has termed the Confederate Carpetbaggers, who moved to the Northern states seeking to regain their wealth and status. In New York he became president of the New York Obstetrical Society and a close friend of J. Marion Sims, sometimes referred to as the father of gynecology. Sims is known for his experiments on enslaved women without the use of anesthesia. After years of protests, his statue was eventually removed from New Yorks Central Park in 2018. But monuments to Sims still stand on the grounds of the South Carolina statehouse and the Alabama state capitol.

History is an ongoing effort to understand the past, and heritage is the range of cultures, traditions, buildings, monuments and objects we inherit and pass on to future generations. Both are dynamic and constantly undergoing interpretation, with heritage demanding choices about what is important, to whom and why. Removing or re-contextualizing a monument, changing the name of a building, or taking a portrait off a wall does not erase history as some have argued, but it can reflect a better understanding of past events and motivations, new societal norms, or the values of local or affected communities. Some say that re-naming structures only facilitates forgetting about the past and that what is needed is an explanatory plaque instead, but why should a BIPOC student be forced to be reminded of Louis Agassiz or John Notts abhorrent views whenever they walk by or enter a particular campus building?

There are many ways to unwrap, interpret, teach and remember the complex histories of science and race in universities without maintaining honors and monuments that were bestowed or created many decades ago, not infrequently to uphold and celebrate a racist worldview or create an implicitly White space on campus. In some cases there may be an opportunity to leave a monument or an artwork and create a powerful new one beside it to catalyze reflection and discussion. Such an approach was tried in 2018 at the University of Kentucky, where Black artist Karyn Olivier was asked to create an artwork in dialogue with a controversial 1934 New Deal era mural in its Memorial Hall. In June, however, the university announced that it will remove the original mural, despite the fact that doing so removes the context for Oliviers responsive work and willsilence a contemporary Black voice.

An anti-racist reassessment of whose stories get told and how, is urgently needed on U.S. campuses. Scientists whose views promoted and legitimized genocide, slavery, segregation, forced sterilization, race-based immigration restrictions and structural inequality should no longer be memorialized.

There are many ways that the scientific community must reckon with the harm it has caused through its history and present complicity in racist actions. Removing names from buildings or busts from hallways wont bring an end to systemic and institutional racism in universities, but it is an essential part of the process. And it cannot wait.

N.B. An excellent reading list of decolonizing science resources has been prepared by Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. Kit Mead has a goodeugenics reading list.

USGS/William Henry Jackson

Posted in: Science and Democracy, Uncategorized Tags: Alabama, Black history, Black lives matter, craniology, decolonisation, eugenics, genocide, Harvard, Louis Agassiz, Manifest Destiny, racism, scientific racism, segregation, slavery

Support from UCS members make work like this possible. Will you join us? Help UCS advance independent science for a healthy environment and a safer world.

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U.S. Universities Must Stop Honoring Racist Scientists of the Past - Union of Concerned Scientists

Pre-Cancel Culture and the Silenced Majority Byline Times – Byline Times

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Its almost impossible for someone from an under-privileged background to reach the elite and acquire a platform. This is the real cancel culture scandal, argues Sam Bright

The Stepford Students, they were labelled by the Spectator magazine in 2014. According to the periodical, once edited by Boris Johnson, leftie university undergraduates and high-minded student unions were rabidly no platforming the people they disagreed with mainly conservatives of various persuasions.

These allegations of McCarthy-style censorship from students and the left, that have punctured politics at regular intervals ever since, are to a large extent hyperbolic.

Its true that right-wing speakers have faced protests on campus and have even been sidelined by the media. The former Breitbart editor and alt-right icon Milo Yiannopoulos, for example, is now a pariah banned from Twitter and unwelcome on campuses on both sides of the Atlantic.

Likewise, Katie Hopkins descent into far-right trolldom has been accompanied by her political marginalisation. Formerly a columnist for The Sun, Hopkins must now be content with lurking around obscure social media platforms, in search of her next xenophobic grift.

The debate involves endless navel-gazing from very prominent people about their own prominence.

Yet it can hardly be argued, from a free speech perspective, that Hopkins and Yiannopoulos have been badly treated. Their views are so incendiary that, when given a platform, they actively obstruct the freedoms of others. Hopkins, for example, once wrote that she would use gunships against migrants crossing the channel to Dover, while Yiannopoulos penned the headline: Would you rather your kids had feminism or cancer?

Others who claim to have been cancelled right-wing commentator Toby Young, for example, who lost a Government job in 2018 after people protested his history of sexism and sympathy towards eugenics have not really been cancelled in any meaningful way. Young has a sizeable Twitter following, writes regularly for prominent publications and recently set up a trade union to ostensibly defend free speech, whose trustees include a number of high-profile journalists and academics.

This juxtaposition was epitomised last week by an online fracas between Guardian columnist Owen Jones and the actor Laurence Fox, who claims to have been cancelled following a BBC Question Time appearance during which he accused Prince Harrys wife Meghan Markle of playing the racism card.

Jones claimed that the term cancel culture is meaningless, since so many allegedly cancelled individuals complain about their apparent ostracism in the countrys leading newspapers. In response, Fox suggested that this is evidence people are now refusing to be cancelled. Whatever that means.

This just serves to demonstrate the absurdity of the debate, not least because it involves endless navel-gazing from very prominent people about their own prominence. And, in the process of engaging in this feud, they invariably increase their own profile, regardless of the stance they take (as Fox himself acknowledges).

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The real cancel culture exists beyond the cocktail party wars of the political establishment. The fact is you have to hold a position of power to be cancelled; positions that are invariably, predominantly, held by people from privileged backgrounds.

Indeed, both Jones and Fox are themselves representative of Britains class system in different ways.

Though Jones was born in Sheffield, brought up in Stockport and didnt have a particularly privileged upbringing, he was educated at Oxford, and began his career as a parliamentary researcher for future Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell. Fox, meanwhile, is from a more traditionally elite background. He was born into a theatrical family and was educated at Harrow School one of the countrys top private institutions.

It takes a large amount of privilege to be cancelled. The upper reaches of academia, journalism, politics and business are all dominated by white, privately educated, men. The vast majority of people outside this system, who are unfamiliar with the gowns of Eton and the spires of Oxford, are effectively pre-cancelled. Their opinions cant be shut down, because theyre simply not heard in the first place.

The Stranglehold of Britains Elite

And its not as though our elite industries have a lot of positions on offer. Members of the House of Commons and Lords combined number just under 1,500 (a figure which many say is too high). Mainstream journalism is rapidly shrinking, as the prevailing advertising model slowly disintegrates. And as businesses look to relocate overseas after Brexit, its becoming even more difficult to climb the corporate ladder.

Britains elite is a tightly-knit cabal of former private school kids and heirs to wealth, knowledge and influence. While these elites pontificate over cancel culture, the silenced majority look on in stupefied bewilderment at the bloated sense of entitlement of those who stoke this debate.

Why the likes of Toby Young and Laurence Fox might worry about being cancelled is clear.

Reaping the benefits of an elite education, the patronage of their families (Youngs father was Michael Young, a famous sociologist who helped to write Labours 1945 manifesto) and the entitlement of being white men, they have always been heard; always provided with a platform. Now this seems to be under threat whether largely perceived or not its understandable that they would thrash wildly to preserve their high status.

Unfortunately, however, the rest of us are forced to listen to their identity crisis. The media doesnt have the self-confidence to ignore or critique this largely inane, egocentric conversation. As former BBC journalist Patrick Howse explains in an article for Byline Times this week, our national broadcaster amplifies noise instead of truth and the BBC is hardly alone in this regard.

When someone like Fox kicks off about his loss of social and political status, he immediately creates a conversation about himself that reverberates around newsrooms and broadcasting studios. Political debate then descends into a snooty version of Hello! magazine, whereby fatuous personality battles are given more column inches than, say, why under-privileged families are stuck in a cycle of poverty.

The British (London) establishment has always been infatuated with its own image. Thats why the top private schools and universities wear silly gowns and have exclusive debating societies. But it is a projection; a way to make noise and to be seen.

Its members think they have an innate right to be heard, which is why they are so worried about being cancelled. Its time we stopped listening to their self-interested sermonising and, frankly, talked about something a bit more important.

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Pre-Cancel Culture and the Silenced Majority Byline Times - Byline Times

Astronomers think they can find the Sun’s lost siblings – Astronomy Magazine

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Somewhere in the galaxy, we have a long-lost family. At this very minute, there are hundreds to thousands of stars that began to form and shine in the same dust cloud as our Sun, whose current locations are unknown in the sea of other stars. But what if it were possible to test stars to find our stellar siblings, like a DNA test can reveal unknown family members for humans on Earth? Astronomers think its doable and, whats more, we may have already done it.Although the Sun was born billions of years ago, we know roughly how the process happened by studying stellar nurseries we see today, called nebulae. Nebula means cloud in Latin, and each consists of interstellar gas, primarily hydrogen and helium with trace amounts of other elements. Many nebulae are inert, with no star formation happening in them, their presence betrayed only by the dark regions they form as they block light from more distant stars. In fact, if these dark nebulae did not exist, the Milky Way in our night sky would be much brighter. On the other hand, nebulae that are home to star formation are positively glowing, and several are so bright you can spot them with the naked eye.

Millions of years before the Sun formed, something disturbed the dark nebula containing the gas that would become our solar system. Astronomers believe they know what caused it: a massive explosion from a dying star, called a supernova.

A blast wave from a supernova can trigger star formation in the shock front [the leading edge of the explosion] if the material is dense enough, explains Anna Rosen, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The key to this origin is locked in a surprising location: meteorites.

Meteoroids as meteorites are known when still in space are small chunks primarily made of iron, nickel, and trace amounts of other materials. The composition of most has not changed since the solar system formed; whats more, because they are the only part of outer space that can be physically carried into a laboratory on Earth, they are well studied. In examining them, scientists have discovered elements in amounts only possible if a supernova occurred just tens of thousands of years before the meteorites formed.

We see further evidence all around us. The elements in our world (except hydrogen and helium) formed in stars that died before our Sun was born, from the carbon in your cells to the oxygen in your lungs to the iron in your veins. These elements were then part of the material in our parent nebula that ended up forming Earth. As Carl Sagan said, We are made of starstuff.

After the supernovas shock wave passed through the cloud that would become the solar system, the dust and gas began to collapse in on itself due to gravity. More and more material fell onto it, forming a dense core, known as a protostar, that would become the Sun, and a protoplanetary disk of gas that would eventually become the rest of the solar system.

The Sun was not yet shining at this point. A protostar is not yet fusing hydrogen, so no ancient aliens would see our developing Sun, at least in wavelengths of visible light. There would be a lot of heat from all the collapsing gas, however, so the system would emit infrared radiation. Altogether, the Sun probably spent half a million years as a protostar, although accreting gas in the earlier stages could have taken many times longer.

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Astronomers think they can find the Sun's lost siblings - Astronomy Magazine

Astronomers discover South Pole Wall, a gigantic structure stretching 1.4 billion light-years across – Livescience.com

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Spectacular 3D maps of the universe have revealed one of the biggest cosmic structures ever found an almost-inconceivable wall stretching 1.4 billion light-years across that contains hundreds of thousands of galaxies.

The South Pole Wall, as it's been dubbed, has been hiding in plain sight, remaining undetected until now because large parts of it sit half a billion light-years away behind the bright Milky Way galaxy. The South Pole Wall rivals in size the Sloan Great Wall, the sixth largest cosmic structure discovered. (One light-year is roughly 6 trillion miles, or 9 trillion kilometers, so this "biggest cosmic structure" is mind-bendingly humongous.)

Astronomers have long noticed that galaxies are not scattered randomly throughout the universe but rather clump together in what's known as the cosmic web, enormous strands of hydrogen gas in which galaxies are strung like pearls on a necklace that surround gigantic and largely empty voids.

Related: Cosmic record holders: The largest objects in the universe

Mapping these intergalactic threads belongs to the field of cosmography, which is "the cartography of the cosmos," study researcher Daniel Pomarede, a cosmographer at Paris-Saclay University in France, told Live Science.

Previous cosmographic work has charted the extent of other galactic assemblies, such as the current structural record holder, the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall, which spans 10 billion light-years, or more than a tenth the size of the visible universe.

In 2014, Pomarede and his colleagues unveiled the Laniakea supercluster, a galactic collection in which our own Milky Way resides. Lanaikea is 520 million light-years wide and contains roughly the mass of 100 million billion suns.

For their new map, the team used newly-created sky surveys to peer into a region called the Zone of Galactic Obscuration. This is an area in the southern part of the sky in which the bright light of the Milky Way blocks out much of what's behind and around it.

Cosmographers typically determine the distance to objects using redshift, the speed at which an object is receding from Earth due to the expansion of the universe, which depends on their distance, Pomarede said. The farther away an object is, the faster it will appear to be receding from Earth, an observation first made by astronomer Edwin Hubble in 1929 and which has held up ever since.

But he and his colleagues used a slightly different technique, looking at the peculiar velocity of galaxies. This measurement includes redshift but also takes into account the motion of galaxies around one another as they tug at each other gravitationally, Pomarede said.

The advantage of the method is that it can detect hidden mass that is gravitationally influencing how galaxies move and therefore uncover dark matter, that invisible stuff that emits no light but exerts a gravitational tug on anything near enough. (Dark matter also makes up the bulk of the matter in the universe.) By running algorithms looking at peculiar motion in galactic catalogs, the team was able to plot the three-dimensional distribution of matter in and around the Zone of Galactic Obscuration. Their findings are detailed today (July 9) in The Astrophysical Journal.

The resulting map shows a mind-boggling bubble of material more or less centered on the southernmost point of the sky, with a great sweeping wing extending north on one side in the direction of the constellation Cetus and another stubbier arm opposite it in the direction of the constellation Apus.

Related: The 12 strangest objects in the universe

Knowing how the universe looks on such large scales helps confirm our current cosmological models, Neta Bahcall, an astrophysicist at Princeton University in New Jersey who was not involved in the work, told Live Science. But determining where exactly these enormous, crisscrossing structures begin and end is tricky, she added.

"When you look at the network of filaments and voids, it becomes a semantic question of what's connected," she said.

In their paper, the team acknowledges that they may not have plotted yet the entirety of the vast South Pole Wall. "We will not be certain of its full extent, nor whether it is unusual, until we map the universe on a significantly grander scale," they wrote.

Originally published on Live Science.

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Astronomers discover South Pole Wall, a gigantic structure stretching 1.4 billion light-years across - Livescience.com