Historically Speaking: The flu epidemic we’ve been here before – Roswell Daily Record

Posted on by

By Janice Dunnahoo

Special to the Daily Record

I know by now everyone is getting weary of hearing the word pandemic. It is scary and yes, we are living in a time and place we have never navigated in our lifetimes, but historically, this is not that unusual. I have written about the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic a couple of years ago, but in doing research I found a bit more, which I would like to share here, just to prove that times do change in some ways, but in others they do not.

Lets start with some Roswell Daily Record articles from the year 1918.

The first one is dated October 25, 1918

Notice To The Public

Whereas the present epidemic of Spanish influenza requires rigid regulations to control and abate it.

Therefore, be it resolved by the Board of Health of the City of Roswell.

1. That all places of business in the City of Roswell, except drugstores, hotels and restaurants, and auto filling stations and garages, be closed during all hours of the day except from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM, except Saturdays, when they should close at 7:30 PM, and all persons are urged to stay off the streets except when attending to necessary business.

2. Physicians must require patients with colds and running temperature, which in their opinion are incipient influenza cases, to remain at home as long as danger threatens.

3. All persons suffering from this disease are required to remain at home for three days after they cease to run temperature.

4. All physicians are required to report at the home of the City Physician during the morning hours for all additional cases of this disease.

These orders to take effect Monday, October 21, 1918.

Board of Health of the City of Roswell,

By W.C. Buchly, secretary

Another Roswell Daily Record article is dated October 25, 1918.

Warning To The Public

All persons are hereby warned not to congregate upon the streets or in stores or other public places at any time. All people are forbidden to congregate at night upon the streets or in other places after six oclock, and people having business to transact in stores or other places open to the public are hereby requested and directed to go into such places of business, immediately attend to the matter in hand, and at once return to their homes.

By order of the Board of Health of the City of Roswell, this October 12, 1918.

By W.C. Buchly, Secretary

A proclamation was published in the Roswell Daily Record, Oct. 26, 1918 by Governor Washington Ellsworth Lindsey, who was the third governor of New Mexico after it became a state in 1912.

A PROCLAMATION

By The Governor Of The State Of New Mexico

Notwithstanding the continued publication of precautionary advices touching the control of the epidemic of Spanish Influenza in the State of New Mexico, it is apparent daily increase, warrants the exercise of utmost diligence on the part of all our people in the observance of rules and regulations promulgated by competent health authorities designed to curb its progress.

In the absence of an organized system for compulsory health conditions reports in the State, reliance as to such conditions must be had upon the news columns of the public press and other less effective media. The volume of information thus accumulated relative to the epidemic intensity, universal spread and high percentage of fatality of this disease should alarm every citizen to combative repressive action.

While several municipalities in the State have published and are enforcing repressive regulations very effectively, not state wide suggestion has yet gone forth.

NOW THEREFORE, I, W.E. LINDSEY, GOVERNOR OF THE STATE OF NEW MEXICO, in the interest of the public health welfare and the war work of the people of this state do urgently request the discontinuance of all pending court sessions in the State; the adjournment of the public schools, the isolation or quarantine of all collegiate Institutions; penal and charitable institutions; the discontinuance of all church and other public assembly; the avoidance of unnecessary burial attendance and services; the prevention of the group assemblage of children in homes.

I further urgently request that all the people give strict observance to instructions relative to prevention of infection and the proper care and treatment of those attacked.

I respectfully but urgently call upon on the police authorities of the state to actively aid in the enforcement of all health laws and regulations and to urge the observance of the requests enumerated in this proclamation as well as the observance of all other proper and necessary precautionary and remedial measures.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the Great Seal of the State of New Mexico to be affixed. I one at the City of Santa Fe, this the 17th day of October, 1918 A.D., 1918.

W.E.LINDSEY,

ATTESTED: Antonio Lucero

Following is a segment Dr. Elvis Fleming wrote on the epidemic:

The flu epidemic of 1918-19

The annual flu season always seems to elicit discussions about the worldwide flu epidemic of 1918-19, in which deaths attributed to the disease are estimated at some 20 million.

More than 500,000 Americans died during the epidemic, which is more than the deaths in both world wars, the Korean War and the Vietnam War combined. The flu was no respecter of people. No matter whatones station in life, place of residence, or any other factor, no one was assured of eluding the dreaded disease.

More than 1,000 New Mexicans perished in the flu epidemic, according to an article in the Valencia County News-Bulletin published on Nov. 25, 1998, by Richard Melzer and Oswald Baca. The writers observed, Much of the epidemic remains a mystery to this very day. Not even its name, The Spanish Flu, is understood because the epidemic did not originate in Spain or any other Spanish community. Evidence points to its origin in March 1918 at an Army camp in Fort Riley, Kansas, from which it spread in two terrible waves around the world.

Some people felt sure the epidemic was caused by germ warfare launched by the Germans during the final stages of World War I, according to Melzer and Baca. The leading evangelist of the times, Billy Sunday, proclaimed that the epidemic was the wrath of God against a sinful generation.

Vital statistics for the city of Roswell show that 92 people died of influenza, influenza pneumonia and pneumonia between Oct. 12, 1918, and March 10, 1919. The deaths were spread out over the six-month period, with 52 coming in October, 15 in November, 16 in December, seven in January and only one each in February and March. These numbers show, as Professor Melzer puts it, that the epidemic hit with incredible force in the last days of the First World War, showing no mercy to a world already ravaged by four years of violence and death.

Most of the Roswell deaths took place at home, but 36 percent of them were at St. Marys Hospital. Eight patients of Dr. C.M. Yater died at his sanitarium at 310 North Richardson Ave. Yaters ad in the city directory stated: Medical and Surgical; special facilities for the care of confinement cases, including a perfectly equipped confinement room. All on the ground floor.

Strangely, the ad also claims, No contagious diseases admitted.

Thirteen other doctors also lost patients, the largest number being the 21 patients of Dr. W.C. Buchley. Dr. J.B. Keister lost 12; Dr. Eugene M. Fisher lost 10; and Dr. W.W. Phillips and Dr. Yater lost eight each. Dr. W.E. Goodsell and Dr. J.E. Crawford each had seven patients deaths; while Dr. David H. Galloway lost six; Dr. C.T. McClane lost four; Dr. W.T. Joyner lost three; and Dr. J.J. Walker lost two. Dr. C.L. Parsons, Dr. Charles F. Beeson and city physician and health officer Dr. R.L. Bradley each lost one patient.

A local doctor who was also mayor of Roswell at the time also succumbed to this flu. A note from his obituary dated October 14, 1918 reads as follows:

Dr. C.F. Montgomery, the mayor of the city and also one of Roswells finest types of manhood passed away today. In his passing the city and the state loses one of its most capable and conscientious workers as well as a perfect gentleman.

The demographics of the victims show that 54 percent were male, two thirds were Anglo and one third were Mexican. No other ethnic groups are listed. None of the victims were more than 70 years old, and only five were between 57 and 70. All the others were under 50. Most of them were in their late 20s and early 30s. The age categories were as follows: 36-50, 11 deaths; 16-25, 17 deaths; 6-15, 10 deaths; 0-6, 11 deaths. Eight of those under six were infants. (Totals do not add up to 92 deaths because some of the information is not available on some of the victims.)

The occupations most frequently listed for the victims were housewife, 10; rancher, five; farmer, two; bookkeeper, two; New Mexico Military Institute cadets, five; and other students, two. Several other occupations were listed once, including a doctor and a teacher.

In an interview in February 1975, Colonel E.L. Lusk, one-time high school principal at New Mexico Military Institute, remembered that the commandant, Captain H.P. Saunders Jr., took it first. Lusk came down with it about three days later and was sick for a week. The hospital was full, so many of the cadets who were ill with the flu could not be admitted.

Some of the faculty took cadets into their homes to nurse them back to health. About the time Lusk got over his affliction, Capt. R.G. Breland, the English instructor, took it. Luskbrought Breland to his house where Mrs. Lusk attended him for about a week. Then Mrs. Lusk took down with it herself.

Thus, World War I ended in Roswell and the United States.

To paraphrase Melzer and Baca: The epidemic took the lives of innocent people who lived thousands of miles from any battlefield of the war, but they had no protection from an enemy so minuscule that they could not see it even with the most powerful microscope of the time.

Following is a remedy of the day, I thought it would be fun to include. Dont try this at home:

Cough medicine

The following is a recipe for cough medicine that will give relief when all others fail; 1/2 pint flax seed, two quarts water, juice of six lemons, one pound honey, 1/2 pound sugar, 1/2 pint good whiskey. Boil the water and the flaxseed together for a few minutes, strain and add lemon juice, honey and sugar. Boil this mixture a few minutes until well mixed. When it is cool add the whiskey, which is to preserve it. Half of this recipe makes two large bottles full.

Janice Dunnahoo is chief archivist at the Historical Society for Southeast New Mexico Archives. She can be reached at 575-622-1176 or at jdunna@hotmail.com.

Visit link:

Historically Speaking: The flu epidemic we've been here before - Roswell Daily Record

The Plague and the Long War – Inkstick

Posted on by

Neither were the physicians at first of any service, ignorant as they were of the proper way to treat it, but they died themselves the most thickly, as they visited the sick most often; nor did any human art succeed any better. Supplications in the temples, divinations, and so forth were found equally futile, till the overwhelming nature of the disaster at last put a stop to them altogether.

Such concludes the introduction to the Plague of Athens from Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War. The historian, an Athenian general who lived through the events he described, captures the horror of life in an epidemic, and in isolation. The plague arrived with the Spartan invasion, but it mostly hit the civilian populations of the area in and around Athens, and so the plague brought by invaders became an unintentional ally in the fight. Estimates of deaths from the five-year period that the disease ravaged Athens sit between 75,000 to 100,000, or nearly a quarter of the city-states population at the time.

The specific disease that hit Athens during the siege remains a subject of medical debate. What is known is that the disease originated in Ethiopia, and then it spread through the Mediterranean. Its persistence and lethality are unusual features, even among the ancient world, with candidates including both the plague and smallpox.

For an epidemic to become an epidemic it has to remain deadly while traveling with humans, rather than just killing them outright. It takes a particular kind of connected world, and a particular kind of violence in that connection, to make such a disease stick around and fester, a wound in the body politic.

History is rich with the plagues that followed war. The movement of people and armies and the whole long trail of food and supplies that entails can serve as a vector for diseases that, left to their own locality and without interconnection, might simply have become a local tragedy. Disease spreads through the people doing the fighting, and it spreads among the civilians displaced.

It takes a particular kind of connected world, and a particular kind of violence in that connection, to make such a disease stick around and fester, a wound in the body politic.

When in Revelations John describes the biblical apocalypse as preceded by war, famine, pestilence, and death, he is merely casting the realities of armed conflict into, well, biblical proportions.

Germ theory is too modern a phenomenon to have been reliably incorporated into the strategies of ancient besieging forces, but disease has long been an incidental weapon of war. The most historically famous example is the Mongolian siege of the Genoese-settled city of Caffa on the Black Sea.

As the Mongols retreated in the face of an assault by a relieving force, a contemporary account recorded that the Mongols used their siege weapons to hurl diseased corpses over the city walls, spreading black death.

What seemed like mountains of dead were thrown into the city, and the Christians could not hide or flee or escape from them, although they dumped as many of the bodies as they could in the sea, wrote the Italian notary Gabriele de Mussi, likely based on eyewitness accounts. And soon the rotting corpses tainted the air and poisoned the water supply, and the stench was so overwhelming that hardly one in several thousand was in a position to flee the remains of the [Mongolian] army.

Mussis account of the end of the Siege of Caffa has long been cited as both an early incidence of deliberate biological warfare and a clue as to the route through which the black death made it to Europe, though both claims are contested. Regardless, the nature of a siege is to combine deprivation with density, and for the besiegers to trust that, on a long enough timeline, the people trapped inside, even if supplied by the sea, will succumb to the pressure.

Sieges, with defenders surrounded by hostile armed forces intending to wait them out, still happen in the modern world, much as they seem a fixture of a past era. These sieges, like those in antiquity, come with the diseases of deprivation, and the diseases that pass through populations thrown into violent conflict.

What is structurally different about sieges in modernity is that humans now have a scientific understanding of disease itself, and at least according to the conventions and treaties signed by nations, a humanitarian obligation to treat it. It was easy to see, in 2017 and 2018, an international condemnation of the siege tactics used by Bashar al Assad in Syria, tactics that brought deliberate suffering on civilian populations as a means of consolidating military rule.

It is somewhat harder, in the face of the international COVID-19 pandemic, to see where siege conditions are enforced to siege-like ends by means other than bullets and bombs.

International sanctions regimes, designed to allow primarily the United States to withhold access to the dollar as an international reserve currency from nations it views as acting against American interests, enable a sort of invisible siege. Enforcing second-order sanctions, whereby companies risk losing access to the US dollar if they also engage in business with the targeted country, serves as a way to effectively sever the targeted country from the vast majority of the international market.

By design, these sanctions inflict suffering primarily on civilians within the targeted country. As a coercive tool, the logic is that deliberately depriving the people in a country will make those same deprived people pressure their leaders. The ultimate end state is that, either from pressure below or to relieve suffering, the leaders of a sanctioned state change behavior more in line with US interest.

In a pandemic, these sanctions exacerbate deprivation into full-on crisis. While humanitarian goods nominally are allowed through sanctions, many banks refuse to process those transactions, afraid that doing so would expose them to penalties under second-order sanctions. The Geneva Conventions explicitly permit safe passage for food and medical supplies to physically besieged populations, but those rules do not apply to economic sanctions. While not formally cut off from aid, a global refusal to sell medical supplies under penalty of second-order sanctions can cause deprivation, much the same as an army camped outside the gates did in antiquity.

As reported by the New York Times on March 21st, Secretary of State Pompeo and Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell have made the case for exactly this ancient military application of disease and siege to the President.

Irans leaders have been harder hit by the coronavirus than almost any other country, and they have been hiding their infection from colleagues, according to intelligence reports heightening distrust and divisions in the government, reports the Times. Trump administration officials who advocate aggressive action have used those reports to press the case for escalating American military action against Iran.

What is happening in Iran is just one example of a multitude of economic sieges across the globe, maintained in the face of a truly international pandemic. To treat this crisis as wholly a public health event without acknowledging the context in which it takes place is to ignore the interrelated histories of war and disease. It is to treat the afflictions, as the ancient Athenians did, as a supernatural occurrence beyond anyones control.

To keep the siege in place is to look at the way it ravages thousands across the globe, and to turn away. It is a cold declaration on the side of cruelty. It is to say, simply, that epidemics are war by other means.

Kelsey D. Atherton is a defense technology journalist based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His reporting has appeared in Popular Science, C4ISRNET, and The New York Times.

Go here to read the rest:

The Plague and the Long War - Inkstick

Coronavirus: How Orania has been affected by the disease – The South African

Posted on by

As we sit within the confines of our homes, lockdown is making us yearn for the gift of time travel. What wed give to go back just by a few months before our fears and anxieties regarding coronavirus manifested themselves. Well, the folks of Orania have managed it because theyre living outside of the 21st century.

The whites-only Afrikaner enclave in the Northern Cape acts as its own entity. Turning its back on South Africas democratic project as apartheid came to an end, the clutch of citizens who still live in the town an estimated 2 000 to 3 000 still pay homage to the system that was labelled a crime against humanity.

But where, exactly, do they stand on the current coronavirus crisis? Are they following the rule of the land which engulfs and dwarfs their humble landscape, or do they simply follow their own advice? Well, in contrast to certain other policies in Orania, its not actually that black and white.

We know that they are observing social distancing, and theyve been taking quarantine measures since the middle of March. Local sewing groups have stitched together masks that people are being asked to wear during the coronavirus crisis. They may have self-isolated from South Africa since the early 1990s, but theyre leaving nothing to chance in the face of a global pandemic.

Not many people leave Orania, and even fewer visit. Their base in the Northern Cape is one of the most remote in the land. But, playing it safe is very much the mantra here. They have even manufactured some of their own hand sanitizers, treating the gravity of the situation with the respect it deserves.

They have published their own set of hygiene guidelines, very similar to those issued by the South African government. An emergency command centre made up of the town board provides regular updates on their preparedness to deal with coronavirus, and how the situation outside of their compound is developing. Gawie Snyman, Ronald Bain, Harry Theron and Frans de Klerk are named as the information-givers.

Those who have shut themselves away on ideological grounds, fearing an outside threat, perhaps never thought the biggest battle of their lives would be related to germ warfare. The communities within communities such as elderly care facilities also receive visits from singers and performers to lift their spirits during times of isolation.

Virtual braais and radio-streamed concerts make up for the lack of open-air activities on offer to the inhabitants of Orania. It hasnt been all fun and games, though. The idyllic image this settlement likes to portray against the backdrop of its controversial origins suffered a slight wobble last week.

A statement shared on the towns official Facebook page stated that one resident of Orania was showing symptoms of coronavirus. Its claimed that they were privately tested while receiving medical treatment. The test came back negative. But the fear factor of COVID-19 remains in place.

An image showing a warehouse full of toilet paper unapologetically boasts about having one of South Africas most treasured commodoties by the pallet-full. Indeed, this desperation to prove something to the rest of the country runs deep.

A local community group posted this message on their social media channels over the weekend Kim Jong-Un would be proud of this purposeful propaganda:

The SAPS came to visit in Orania yesterday to check that everything is in order. Thanks to Oranians discipline, they found nothing that upset them. After the visit, Colonel Jooste said: Thank you to the residents of Hopetown and Orania for your obedience. It goes bad in other towns and cities in the country. I love you all and I dont want you to die.

Work continues in the town: Binmen are seen wearing full hazmat suits and masks, whereas families are now learning how to cope with homeschooling. Pieter Krige, a community leader in this enclave, posts a photo of his two children beavering away at their studies.

It still remains anyones guess as to when normal life resumes both within the gates of Orania and beyond despite our tentative end-of-lockdown date of Thursday 16 April.

Social distancing has always been Oranias thing but they are now faced with keeping themselves apart from each other, without having a say in the matter. Its not business as usual here, nor is it anywhere in the world. And thats perhaps a source of great humility for this unique, often-maligned town.

As much as Orania has tried to isolate itself, the world is too big of a place to stay shut-off from. Society isnt exactly something you can opt in or out of. The looming threat of coronavirus casts a shadow over this region, and although it may only strengthen their resolve to hunker down and keep themselves in exile, one fact is inescapable: The enemy is not, and never will be, your fellow South African.

See the rest here:

Coronavirus: How Orania has been affected by the disease - The South African

REVEALED: Millions of Brits were in SECRET germ war tests between 1940 and 1979 – Politicalite

Posted on by

MILLIONS were unwitting Guinea Pigs in biological weapon trials between 1940 and 1979 in which germs were released into the air, according to bombshell reports.

In 2002, amid the SARS outbreak, top-secret documents released revealed that the Ministry of Defence turned large parts of Britain in laboratories during WW2 up to 1979.

The government report revealed for the first time that the British Government conducted trials on its own people releasing toxic chemicals and micro-organisms into the air.

The Guardain reported: Many of these tests involved releasing potentially dangerous chemicals and micro-organisms over vast swaths of the population without the public being told.

While details of some secret trials have emerged in recent years, the 60-page report reveals new information about more than 100 covert experiments.

The report reveals that military personnel were briefed to tell any inquisitive inquirer the trials were part of research projects into weather and air pollution.

The tests, carried out by government scientists at Porton Down, were designed to help the MoD assess Britains vulnerability if the Russians were to have released clouds of deadly germs over the country.

In most cases, the trials did not use biological weapons but alternatives which scientists believed would mimic germ warfare and which the MoD claimed were harmless.

But families in certain areas of the country who have children with birth defects are demanding a public inquiry.

One chapter of the report, The Fluorescent Particle Trials, reveals how between 1955 and 1963 planes flew from north-east England to the tip of Cornwall along the south and west coasts, dropping huge amounts of zinc cadmium sulphide on the population.

The chemical drifted miles inland, its fluorescence allowing the spread to be monitored. In another trial using zinc cadmium sulphide, a generator was towed along a road near Frome in Somerset where it spewed the chemical for an hour.

Read more from the original source:

REVEALED: Millions of Brits were in SECRET germ war tests between 1940 and 1979 - Politicalite

Experts Assess Pandemic’s Damage to the Economy – New Ideal

Posted on by

The COVID-19 pandemic is having a negative impact on all aspects of human life, and the U.S. economy is no exception. The virus outbreak and governmental reactions to it have sent the stock market crashing and dealt a major economic blow.

In a special installment of our webinar series Philosophy for Living on Earth, the Ayn Rand Institutes chief philosophy officer, Onkar Ghate, sat down with finance and economics specialists Yaron Brook and Rob Tarr to talk about the effects of the virus and government intervention on the markets and the economy. The discussion covered many aspects of the ongoing financial crisis and approached the topic from a perspective informed by the philosophy of Objectivism.

Some of the questions covered in the discussion include:

Stay tuned for future installments of our webinar series, where we willcontinue to analyze the effects of the pandemic from the principled perspectiveof Ayn Rands philosophy. And please consider donating to ARI if you value ourunique and rational evaluation of this crisis.

Watch the full discussion between Ghate, Brook and Tarr, below.

Audio only:

Subscribe to New Ideal to receive the latest in-depth content from ARI.

Share this article:

See more here:

Experts Assess Pandemic's Damage to the Economy - New Ideal

Sen. Rand Paul’s reply to why he risked exposing people, or Selfish is as selfish does – Louisville Eccentric Observer

Posted on by

We make fun of U.S. Sen. Rand Paul a lot. OK, more than a lot. Going waayy back.

But who deserves it more? Befitting his status as Kentuckys junior senator, only our senior senator Mitch McConnell suffers more scorn and bad-natured roasting from us at LEO.

Now, in The Time of Corona, Paul, a doctor and obstructionist of virus relief bills, gets a special poke with a hot stick for reportedly getting tested and going to the gym and consorting with colleagues before he got back the result.

And guess what?

He tested positive.

Paul released a statement this week defending his decision to not self-quarantine, saying he shouldnt have been tested at all. Whaat? Read this convoluted reasoning and let us know what kind of byzantine map of logic we would need to understand it.

Paul should have known better than to risk the health of other people. But we must understand that Rand Paul, who might as well have been named after the purposely selfish, libertarian, wack-job Ayn Rand, would be thinking about himself only.

Here is what he had to say:

Given that my wife and I had traveled extensively during the weeks prior to COVID-19 social distancing practices, and that I am at a higher risk for serious complications from the virus due to having part of my lung removed seven months ago, I took a COVID-19 test when I arrived in D.C. last Monday. I felt that it was highly unlikely that I was positive since I have had no symptoms of the illness, nor have I had contact with anyone who has either tested positive for the virus or been sick.

Since nearly every member of the U.S. Senate travels by plane across the country multiple times per week and attends lots of large gatherings, I believed my risk factor for exposure to the virus to be similar to that of my colleagues, especially since multiple congressional staffers on the Hill had already tested positive weeks ago.

As for my attendance at the Speed Art Museum fundraiser on March 7, unlike the other Kentucky government officials there, I had zero contact or proximity with either of the two individuals who later announced they were positive for COVID-19. The event was a large affair of hundreds of people spread throughout the museum.

There was an announcement by the Museum and Metro Louisville Communicable Disease department that those who public health officials consider at higher risk from possible exposure are being notified. Louisvilles health director put out a statement in The Courier Journal that most of the people at the Speed Ball were at very minimal risk. I was not considered to be at risk since I never interacted with the two individuals even from a distance and was not recommended for testing by health officials.

I believe we need more testing immediately, even among those without symptoms. The nature of COVID-19 put me and us all in a Catch-22 situation. I didnt fit the criteria for testing or quarantine. I had no symptoms and no specific encounter with a COVID-19 positive person. I had, however, traveled extensively in the U.S. and was required to continue doing so to vote in the Senate. That, together with the fact that I have a compromised lung, led me to seek testing. Despite my positive test result, I remain asymptomatic for COVID-19.

For those who want to criticize me for lack of quarantine, realize that if the rules on testing had been followed to a tee, I would never have been tested and would still be walking around the halls of the Capitol. The current guidelines would not have called for me to get tested nor quarantined. It was my extra precaution, out of concern for my damaged lung, that led me to get tested.

Perhaps it is too much to ask that we simply have compassion for our fellow Americans who are sick or fearful of becoming so. Thousands of people want testing. Many, like Daniel Newman of The Walking Dead, are sick with flu symptoms and are being denied testing. This makes no sense.

The broader the testing and the less finger-pointing we have, the better. America is strong. We are a resilient people, but were stronger when we stand together.

Here is what one person tweeted in response to his statement:

You did not need to go to the gym. Americans all over this country cannot go to theirs, or do much of anything else. You felt you could do as you pleased and risked others. I hope you recover well, but you are not excused from being entirely selfish and overly privileged.

And, our favorite: Atlas Coughed.

Excerpt from:

Sen. Rand Paul's reply to why he risked exposing people, or Selfish is as selfish does - Louisville Eccentric Observer

Yaron Brook Talks Ayn Rand’s ATLAS SHRUGGED, FOUNTAINHEAD & Covid-19 On Tom Needham’s SOUNDS OF FILM – Broadway World

Posted on by

Author Yaron Brook is Tom Needham's special guest this Thursday at 6 pm on WUSB's SOUNDS OF FILM. He will be discussing what one can learn from Ayn Rand's ATLAS SHRUGGED and FOUNTAINHEAD during the virus Crisis.

Yaron Brook is the host of the Yaron Brook Show, renowned best-selling author, and world class speaker. Brook's podcast can be heard on the Yaron Brook Show at BlogTalk Radio, Spreaker, Spotify and YouTube.

Brook was the Executive Director of The Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) for 17 years (2000-2017). He remains Chairman of the Board of ARI and its primary spokesperson.

Brook, an internationally sought speaker, travels extensively promoting Ayn Rand and her philosophy, objectivism.

THE SOUNDS OF FILM is the nation's longest running film and music themed radio show. For the past 30 years, the program has delivered a popular mix of interviews and music to listeners all over Long Island, parts of Connecticut and streaming live worldwide on the internet. Past people interviewed for the show include Rob Reiner, Alec Baldwin, Dionne Warwick, Chuck D, Alexander Payne, Michael Moore, William H. Macy, Billy Joel and Howard Shore.

Read the original:

Yaron Brook Talks Ayn Rand's ATLAS SHRUGGED, FOUNTAINHEAD & Covid-19 On Tom Needham's SOUNDS OF FILM - Broadway World

The Social-Distancing Culture War Has Begun – The Atlantic

Posted on by

When I asked whether the virus had interfered with his lifestyle, Bret laughed. Oh, Im going to the shooting range tomorrow, he replied.

Was he worried that his friends might disapprove if they found out?

No, he told me, around here, I get much more of people saying, Why dont you go Saturday so I can go, too?

Terry Trahan, a manager at a cutlery store in Lubbock, Texas, acknowledged that a certain toxic tribalism was informing peoples attitudes toward the pandemic. If someones a Democrat, theyre gonna say its worse, he told me, and if someones a Republican, theyre gonna say its bad, but its getting better.

As an immunocompromised cancer survivor, Trahan said hes familiar with commonsense social-distancing practices. But as a conservative, hes become convinced that many Democrats are so invested in the idea that the virus will be disastrous that theyre pushing for prolonged, unnecessary shutdowns in pursuit of vindication.

Among experts, there is a firm consensus that social distancing is essential to containing the spread of the virusand they warn that politicizing the practice could have dangerous ramifications. This is a pandemic, and shouldnt be played out as a skirmish on a neighborhood playground, Dina Borzekowski, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Health, recently told Stat. (For the moment, at least, the scientists seem to have brought the president around: Yesterday, Trump announced he was extending social-distancing guidance until the end of April.)

Read: The four possible timelines for life returning to normal

Of course, not everyone who flouts social distancing is making a political statement. Many have to work because they cant afford not to; others are acting out of ignorance or wishful thinking. Beyond personal behavior, there is a legitimate debate to be had about how to balance economic demands while combatting a global pandemic.

Still, the polarization around public health seems to be accelerating: In recent days, Republican governors in Alabama and Mississippi have resisted calls to enact more forceful mitigation policies. Polling data suggest that Republicans throughout the U.S. are much less concerned about the coronavirus than Democrats are. According to a recent analysis by The New York Times, Trump won 23 of the 25 states where people have reduced personal travel the least.

Some of this is likely shaped by the fact that the most serious outbreaks so far in the U.S. have been concentrated in urban centers on the coasts (a pattern that may not hold for long). But there are real ideological forces at work as well.

Katherine Vincent-Crowson, a 35-year-old self-defense instructor from Slidell, Louisiana, has watched in horror this month as businesses around her city were forced to close by state decree. A devotee of Ayn Rand, Vincent-Crowson told me Louisianas shelter-in-place order was a frightening example of government overreach.

It feels very militaristic, she said. Im just like, What the hell, is this 1940s Germany?

But when we spoke, she seemed even more aggravated by the self-righteous people on social media who spend their time publicly shaming anyone who isnt staying locked in their house. It really reminds me of my kids who tattle on their siblings when they do something bad, she said. Im a libertarian I dont really like being told what to do.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

See the original post here:

The Social-Distancing Culture War Has Begun - The Atlantic

Social Distancing recommendations: Best books to read during the lockdown – Devdiscourse

Posted on by

To imbibe the courage and not allowing the anxiety of quarantine take over, books are the best escape to dwell upon in the days of social distancing. When many would find it tough to make a choice of stepping out due to the crisis, staying indoors and reading a book can actually soothe one's mind. Correctly said by E.A. Bucchianeri, "free time is a terrible thing to waste", so here's is a list of books based on atypical interests to exhilarate peace through the magical enigma of books.

A long petal of the sea, by Isabel Allende

In the time of social distancing, 'A long petal of the sea' is a loving flair in times of chaos by Isabel Allende. With a touch of Spanish and Chilean history from back in 1939, the book is an experience of historical and political exposition. A story that glides from the Spanish civil war to rise and fall of Pinochet. A journey of survival through partnership, even when clashed with cultural dive, it is not only a historical memoir but purgation of writer's understanding of survival and readers catharsis with hope, exile, and belonging. It is a promise made to oneself and a capacity to surprise one with wonders of living in the time of acute crisis and blessing hope to self. The book is full of ambition and humanity.

The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand

Penned by Ayn Rand, 'The Fountainhead' is about people of New York in their 20s-30s, and the five main characters. Howard Roark, an individualistic young architect struggles to keep his ideology in times of contrasting opinions. He is the one who opposes "second-handers", those who comply with conformity over integrity. Rand's faith in her character imbibes the reader with a charismatic writing narrative. The book advocates a free creative mind as well as a celebration of individualism against the common opinion of others incubating "rational selfishness", it endorses "no man can live for another". In times of social distancing, the book is a warm philosophical comfort.

God Is A River: A Story of Faith, by Mona Verma

This is a story of "disbelief and disappointment", revived through a three-year-old Noor's journey, and "restoration of faith in humanity and destiny". Mona Verma set the plot in the times of India's partition, focusing on how it wasn't only a partition of two nations, but it forever changed the meaning of family, faith, death, and inspiration for many people. 'God Is A River' is a tale of violence, betrayal, and death of humanity in the era of hatred. It doesn't revolve around one plot but is a mix of sub-plots celebrating family, culture, religion, past, and present throughout. Questioning the importance of actions, the ghost of the past is always ready to catch up with the present and yelling for the existence of Karma. The book's childlike essence lies when Noor asks Kabir, a Sufi saint, "what is religion?", and attempted with an answer, "God is a river", summarises the gist of reader's restlessness in one innocent expression.

In times when people are under lockdown for the foreseeable time, one such book is a great choice to read by an Indian author.

Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson

For people with savors in science fiction, 'Snow Crash' by Neal Stephenson is a cyberpunk, funny, witty and highly intelligent reading. Hiro Protagonist is the protagonist himself, despite being a pizza delivery guy, he is freelancer hacker and best swordsman of reality and Metaverse. The book coined the term "avatar" in cyberspace terms. Since it's an influence on the World Wide Web and computing the book stands out to scramble minds in Metaverse.

Norwegian Wood, by Haruki Murakami

Murakami is a plump pillow to relax with utmost dedication while reading and so is 'Norwegian Wood'. Set in the 1960s in Japan, it is a melancholic peaceful read. A dark-age-romance knit in all emotions of a grown-up in those times, Murakami brought out the intense passion in his characters. Told from the first-person perspective of Toru Watanabe, the book is a tale of loss and love, grief and causal sex, or the decisions caught by desire and the "ideal world". Well, the only reason to not read Norwegian Wood would be a dislike for dark romance, else the enthralling read is worth one's space in bookshelf.

Wonder, by R.J. Palacio

"I won't describe what I look like. Whatever you're thinking, It's probably worse.", these words sound heart-wrenching when said by a 5th-grade kid. Born with physical deformities Auggie Pullman has undergone many facial surgeries. Pullman is a "not-so-ordinary kid", in fact, a kid with a face that makes people staring awfully. The main character of the book is 8-12 years old, yet it celebrates the inquisitiveness of reading and an impromptu self-check of an individual. A kind of story that makes you flip through the pages and make it a one read. The essence lies in a straight forward approach with a non-sentimental but practical genre called life when she says, "you can't blend in when you were born to stand out".

Gabriel's Inferno, by Sylvain Reynard

An erotic novel by anonymous Canadian author penned as Sylvain Reynard, Gabriel's Inferno is a Trilogy. An intriguing love affair between a professor and his student are baked by passion in this book. A journey of one's escape, and sinful explorations, forbidden love and redemption Gabriel's Inferno is the first book of the sensual trilogy, followed by Gabriel's Rapture and Gabriels Redemption to ease one's interest in the genre of romance and erotic novel.

Download The Devdiscourse News App for Latest News.

Read more:

Social Distancing recommendations: Best books to read during the lockdown - Devdiscourse

How Coronavirus is shaking up the moral universe – Economic Times

Posted on by

By John Authers

The coronavirus pandemic is a test. Its a test of medical capacity and political will. Its a test of endurance and forbearance, for believers a test of religious faith. Its a test, too, of a different kind of faith, in the strength of the ideas humans choose to help them form moral judgments and guide personal and social behavior.

The epidemic forces everyone to confront deep questions of human existence, questions so profound that they have previously been answered, in many different ways, by the greatest philosophers. Its a test of where all humans stand.

What is right and what is wrong? What can individuals expect from society, and what can society expect of them? Should others make sacrifices for me, and vice versa? Is it just to set economic limits to fighting a deadly disease?

The lieutenant governor of Texas thinks that those over 70 shouldnt sacrifice the country by shutting down economic activity, but should instead be ready to sacrifice themselves. A 22-year-old partying on Spring break in Florida becomes a social media sensation with a different critique of social distancing, saying, If I get corona, I get corona. Consciously or not, both men are placing themselves in distinct moral traditions.

Several philosophies of social justice have claimed wide adherence in the modern world. They do not line up neatly with party political labels, and most people have sympathy for more than one. Here is a guide to some of the leading idea systems undergirding competing conceptions of right and wrong. Each is being put to the test. As you are put to the test, which do you choose?

RawlsiansMany westerners are Rawlsians without knowing it. Fifty years ago, the Harvard philosopher John Rawls tried to work out how people would construct their society if the choice had to be made behind what he called a veil of ignorance about whether they will be rich, poor or somewhere in-between. Faced with the risk of being the worst off, Rawls posited, humans would not demand total equality, but would need to be assured of the trappings of a modern welfare state. The assurance of basic necessities and the opportunity to do better would form the foundation for social and political justice and provide the ability for people to assert themselves.

Rawlss monumental 1971 book, A Theory of Justice, is now regarded as the clearest moral and intellectual justification for modern center-left mixed economies. But the idea comes from somewhere deeper. Rawls was not religious, but his philosophy is essentially in line with the golden rule handed down by the Old Testament prophets and by Jesus, that we should do as we would want to be done by. Some religious leaders have approached the awful dilemmas presented by the coronavirus just as Rawls would, by taking treatment of the worst off as the criterion for social action.

I hope the lessons we take from our countrys experience with Covid-19 arent about food or avoiding the spread of germs, wrote Russell Moore, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention in the New York Times, but about how we treat the most vulnerable among us. A pandemic is no time to turn our eyes away from the sanctity of human life.

Pope Francis also invoked sympathy for the most afflicted as he addressed a prayer to an empty St. Peters Square. "We have realized that we are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented, but at the same time important and needed, all of us called to row together, each of us in need of comforting the other," he said.

Perhaps because of their religious resonance, Rawlsian ideas have guided the approach to the pandemic chosen by authorities in the western world. Societies are mobilizing, and governments are taking extra powers to mandate claustrophobic lockdowns in a bid to minimize the death and suffering of the weakest.

Even those who arent religious tend to accept the logic of the veil of ignorance. If a person is unwilling to be abandoned, governments are not entitled to give up on them; they must do their best to protect everyone, particularly the weakest.

UtilitariansOther philosophies produce very different ways of dealing with the epidemic. Under utilitarianism, most associated with the 19th-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill, rulers must be guided to the total happiness, or utility, of all the people, and should aim to secure the greatest good for the greatest number.

In Victorian Britain, this was a radical creed, and the first utilitarians were passionate liberal reformers. But the utilitarian calculus opens up a new possibility that in situations such as a pandemic, some people might justly be sacrificed for the greater good. It would benefit society to accept casualties, the argument goes, to minimize disruption.

Explicit utilitarian thinking still seems beyond the pale. Last weekend, Britains Sunday Times reported that Dominic Cummings, chief adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, had advocated in private meetings a policy of letting enough people get sick to establish nationwide herd immunity, protect the economy, and if that means some pensioners die, too bad. It caused an outcry and met with an immediate and impassioned denial by Downing Street. Even Cummings, an iconoclast, refused to be attached to such brutally utilitarian ideas.

Mill himself would not have advocated putting money ahead of peoples lives, but a utilitarian calculus is not about balancing money and life. If a recession could lead to shorter lives and widespread misery, it is possible that making less of an attempt to save every last life from the pandemic now could lead to greater total happiness.

In the U.K., a paper by an academic at the University of Bristol used mathematical techniques developed to measure the cost-efficiency of safety measures in the nuclear power industry to calculate the likely savings of human life by different approaches to the virus, and found that a 12-month lockdown followed by vaccinations would be best. But it cautioned that this would only create a net saving of life if the reduction in gross domestic product could be kept to 6.4% or less.

That paper, broadcast on the BBC, provoked a fiery response from economists, and some research suggests counterintuitively that recessions lengthen lives. Most people find the mere attempt at such an exercise callous, but its difficult to dismiss it. Governments and insurers do indeed put a notional price on a human life when setting policy. Must every last patient be given the utmost care if this plan of action causes greater suffering in the long run? Or, as President Donald Trump put it: We cant have the cure be worse than the problem.

Its intuitive to view moral problems through a utilitarian lens and then to find outcomes like this distasteful, and to reject them because they conflict with the golden rule. If the lockdowns drag on for months, utilitarian ideas may bubble back to the surface.

LibertariansThe libertarian place in American thought is long and distinguished. Its lineage goes back at least to the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke and the founding fathers, and in its modern incarnation gains inspiration from the author Ayn Rand, who outlined her ideas in novels and essays. For her, man had a right to live for himself and an individuals happiness cannot be prescribed by another man or any number of other men.

The most famous libertarian thought experiment was conducted by another Harvard philosopher, Robert Nozick, in a riposte to Rawls. He imagined what kind of political state would be built, and how much personal liberty citizens would surrender, if everyone were dropped into a utopian landscape with no social structures. The novelist William Golding gave one answer in The Lord of the Flies. To avoid the descent into violence that the schoolboys of Goldings novel endure, Nozick, in Anarchy, State and Utopia, reckoned that people would set up a very limited state dedicated to self-defense and the protection of individual rights but nothing more.

The western coronavirus response has hugely expanded state powers and limited individual rights with little debate, and to date populations have consented to privations that Rand and Nozick argued they should never accept.

But wait. There have been objections to lockdowns on the libertarian basis that they infringe on rights. Critiques are appearing saying that politicians havent proven that such drastic measures are necessary. Before the coronavirus, the U.S. suffered a measles epidemic as the result of anti-vaccination activism, a libertarian cause that put parents right to choose not to vaccinate their children above the states attempt to defend other parents right to expect that their own children wouldnt have to mix with unvaccinated peers. Panic buying, and hoarding of medical equipment also show that many people are following Rands idea of self-determination and putting themselves first. Such ideas may grow more appealing after a few more weeks of self-isolation.

In public spaces around the world, libertarians are in conflict with the state. Social media is full of images of big social gatherings, often in luxurious social settings. If I get corona, I get corona, as the 22-year-old said on video in Florida. At the end of the day, Im not gonna let it stop me from partying. Oklahomas governor even felt the need to tweet that he was at a packed restaurant.

Libertarians are not only found on the political right. As the crisis began to unfold, the American Civil Liberties Union made a statement accepting that civil liberties must sometimes give way when it comes to fighting a communicable disease but only in ways that are scientifically justified. It said, The evidence is clear that travel bans and quarantines are not the solution.

The right to walk in a park looks like a flash point. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was furious to see crowds expressing libertarian sympathies whether they saw it that way or not by gathering in parks. Its arrogant, Cuomo said. Its self-destructive. Its disrespectful to other people. And it has to stop and it has to stop now!

New Yorkers are organizing to keep the parks open.

In these conditions, individual choices become freighted with moral significance. How, for example, will society eventually judge behavior like that of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul? Arguably the most prominent libertarian in the U.S., he continued to socialize as normal for a week after being told that he had had contact with someone who tested positive for the coronavirus. He had no symptoms. Recall that there are many elderly members of the Senate. Last weekend, after a workout in the Senate gym, he discovered that he had himself tested positive.

CommunitariansYet another approach is based on the notion that everyone derives their identify from the broader community. Individual rights count, but not more than community norms. These notions go back to the Greeks, but in modern times, the philosophy is most widely connected to the sociologist Amitai Etzioni and philosopher Michael Sandel. Sandels Liberalism and the Limits of Justice is another riposte to Rawls, arguing that justice cannot be determined in a vacuum or behind a veil of ignorance, but must be rooted in society. He sets out a theory of justice based on the common good.

Speaking last week to Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, Sandel said: The common good is about how we live together in community. Its about the ethical ideals we strive for together, the benefits and burdens we share, the sacrifices we make for one another. Its about the lessons we learn from one another about how to live a good and decent life.

The virus has attacked in exactly this place, depriving everyone of life in a community. And communitarian ideas are showing themselves. Across Europe, people on lockdown have arranged to go to their windows and balconies to applaud their national health services. These are seen as bedrocks of society. At Londons Olympic opening ceremony in 2012, a pageant of Britishness, the organizers celebrated the National Health Service with dancing nurses wheeling hospital beds. For many countries with a modern welfare state, celebrating and supporting the workers of their public-health service is seen as a communitarian duty.

This is a critical point of difference with the U.S., where the expansion of medical care is a hugely contentious issue. Communitarians like Princetons Michael Walzer argue that any system of medical provision requires the constraint of the guild of physicians. The coronavirus promises to bring this debate to a head.

Communitarianism also underlies much social conservative thought. When the very conservative Republican Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick said on Fox News that the rest of the country should not sacrifice itself for the elderly, he was making a communitarian argument, not a utilitarian one.

No one reached out to me and said, As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren? Patrick, who is 63, told the host Tucker Carlson. And if thats the exchange, Im all in.

In this telling, it is the patriotic duty of the elderly not to force privations on their country, and make life worse for their grandchildren. Such a communitarian ethic has always resonated within the U.S. (just read Alexis de Tocqueville), and it provoked an outcry on social media.

China practiced another kind of communitarianism after the coronavirus first appeared in Wuhan in January. The people of that city were told to lock themselves in, and often forcibly quarantined, for the good of the community and the state, largely identified with the Communist Party. Under Xi Jinping, the Party has rehabilitated the Confucian thought that long justified obedience to a hierarchical and authoritarian but benevolent state. That the notion of social solidarity remains strong showed in the spectacular discipline with which China and other Asian nations dealt with the problem.

We Are All Rawlsians NowFor now, the approach being adopted across the West is Rawlsian. Politicians are working on the assumption that they have a duty to protect everyone as they themselves would wish to be protected, while people are also applying the golden rule as they decide that they should self-isolate for the sake of others. We are all Rawlsians now.

How long will we stay that way? All the other theories of justice have an appeal, and may test the resolve to follow the golden rule. But I suspect that Rawls and the golden rule will win out. That is partly because religion even if it is in decline in the West has hard-wired it into our consciousness. And as the epidemic grows worse and brings the disease within fewer degrees of separation for everyone, we may well find that the notion of loving thy neighbor as thyself becomes far more potent.

Original post:

How Coronavirus is shaking up the moral universe - Economic Times

Society’s ‘invisible bonds’ come into the light – Newsroom

Posted on by

MARCH 30, 2020 Updated March 30, 2020

Dr Neal Curtis is Associate Professor of Media and Communication at the University of Auckland.

Ideasroom

Dr Neal Curtis looks at all the points of implicit trust within society, and how Covid-19 is revealing how important this trust is

As I stood in the queue to get into our local supermarket it was encouraging to see how carefully people were engaging in social distancing to minimise the spread of coronavirus. Admittedly, it was a beautiful sunny morning and we are still only a few days into the lockdown, but everyone seemed to be stoically accepting the inconvenience, with many in decidedly good spirits.

Speaking to the woman stood two metres behind me, it dawned on me just how much more aware of her I was than if this were a normal visit under usual conditions. My awareness of her did not stem from any sense of threat or danger, but from the recognition that as I was thinking about her,she was thinking about me. Curiously, our practice of distancing had actually brought us closer, not physically, of course, but in terms of being mindful.

Ordinarily I would get through the shopping as quickly as possible. I would no doubt need to exercise some form of etiquette to let another shopper pass in a crowded aisle, but awareness of being connected to that person would be minimal, if non-existent. That seems quite different now.

In a 1987 interview for Womans Own, Margaret Thatcher famously declared "theres no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and their families". In saying this, she was drawing together words from two of her favourite thinkers, Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman. Her claim was, of course, just another way for her to justifyrolling back the state, depleting public services and embarking on widespread asset sales and privatisation, but she was also making a more significant moral claim about an absence of both dependency on and responsibility for others.

I am struck that if there were only self-reproducing and self-sufficient individuals and their families, the current situation would be much less of a problem. Wouldnt we all just be carrying on, untouched by what is going on around us? The crisis, aside from the very grave dangers of the virus and the risk to life, is in fact heightened precisely because we are all interconnected and dependent on each other. This is not just to do with the corporate sector continuing to function, but a whole set of social institutions relating to health, education, transport, and communication (official and interpersonal) that support the complex functioning of our daily lives.

We have also become increasingly aware of jobs that are done in the background, the importance of which we regularly fail to register. It is different now. Consequently, Ive been thinking about a little book by Geoffrey Hosking called Trust: Money, Markets and Society. This is a book whose brevity and diminutive size belies the importance of its argument. What I believe the current crisis has brought into relief or revealed like lemon juice on invisible ink is what Hosking calls "unreflective trust". By this he means the amount that we do in fact dependon others without consciously acknowledging it.

Talking about travelling by air, he writes: "Which of us before boarding an aircraft, demands to see the pilots qualification to fly it, or checks every rivet, joint and fuel duct in it? Or even the competence of the engineers responsible for maintaining and repairing those parts. Obviously we do not. Yet our lives depend on the impeccable working order of every one of those parts, and on the skill and conscientiousness of the engineers. The fact is we take them on trust because everyone else does so and because aeroplanes very seldom crash. Besides, to do otherwise would require us to have time and skills we dont possess. We dont 'decide'to board an aircraftwe just do it."

In this process, we rely on and trust the workings of society in all its complex, manifold, and interlacing facets. We trust symbolic systems such as the sciences of aeronautics, mechanics, and metallurgy; we trust institutions of regulation and oversight, of teaching and training; we trust corporate health and safety standards; and we trust the media to accurately report risk. Now imagine for a moment just driving through a busy city in the morning and all the points at which your unreflective trust is implicit but absolutely necessary.

"Trust", Hosking argues, "especially unreflective trust is part of the deep grammar of any society. It generates the templates within which people relate to each other, and within which they think and feel about how to face the future". These are societys "invisible bonds", and while there remains a constituency that wants to belittle and decry the actions of the government, I really hope that something good can come from so many of us beginning to see these bonds.

Go here to read the rest:

Society's 'invisible bonds' come into the light - Newsroom

Quantum Computing strikes technology partnership with Splunk – Proactive Investors USA & Canada

Posted on by

Initial efforts with San Franciscos Splunk will focus on three key challenges: network security, dynamic logistics and scheduling

Quantum Computing Inc (OTC:QUBT), an advanced technology company developing quantum-ready applications and tools, said Tuesday that it has struck a technology alliance partnership with ().

San Francisco, California-based Splunk creates software for searching, monitoring, and analyzing machine-generated big data via a web-style interface.

Meanwhile, staffed by experts in mathematics, quantum physics, supercomputing, financing and cryptography, Leesburg, Virginia-based Quantum Computing is developing an array of applications to allow companies to exploit the power of quantum computing to their advantage. It is a leader in the development of quantum ready software with deep experience developing applications and tools for early quantum computers.

Splunk brings a leading big-data-analytics platform to the partnership, notably existing capabilities in its Machine/Deep Learning Toolkit in current use by Splunk customers, said the company.

Implementation of quantum computing applications will be significantly accelerated by tools that allow the development and execution of applications independent of any particular quantum computing architecture.

We are excited about this partnership opportunity, said Quantum Computing CEO Robert Liscouski. Splunk is a proven technology leader with over 17,500 customers world-wide, that has the potential to provide great opportunities for QCIs quantum ready software technologies.

Both the companies will partner to do fundamental and applied research and develop analytics that exploit conventional large-data cybersecurity stores and data-analytics workflows, combined with quantum-ready graph and constrained-optimization algorithms.

The company explained that these algorithms will initially be developed using Quantums Mukai software platform, which enables quantum-ready algorithms to execute on classical hardware and also to run without modification on quantum computing hardware when ready.

Once proofs of concept are completed, QCI and Splunk will develop new analytics with these algorithms in the Splunk data-analytics platform, to evaluate quantum analytics readiness on real-world data, noted the company.

The Splunk platform/toolkits help customers address challenging analytical problems via neural nets or custom algorithms, extensible to Deep Learning frameworks through an open source approach that incorporates existing and custom libraries.

The initial efforts of our partnership with Splunk will focus on three key challenges: network security, dynamic logistics and scheduling, said Quantum Computing.

Contact the author Uttara Choudhury at[emailprotected]

Follow her onTwitter:@UttaraProactive

Read more:

Quantum Computing strikes technology partnership with Splunk - Proactive Investors USA & Canada

Faster, better, stronger: The next stage of global communications networks – Siliconrepublic.com

Posted on by

Prof Bogdan Staszewski from UCDs IoE2 Lab looks at the future of global communications, from faster networks and more powerful computing to the challenges of energy and cybersecurity.

I am an engineer and an engineers job is to design new solutions for building and making things. Engineers concern ourselves with what goes on below the surface, with the building blocks that make up the world in which we live and work, which is constantly evolving.

As electrical and electronics engineers, my colleagues and I work in a microscopic world of integrated circuits the hardware at the deepest level of the networks with which we interact every day and on which we have come to rely.

From global communications to the movement of money, we rely on the fast and secure transmission of quintillions of bits of data every day

Life today revolves around these networks. From global communications to the movement of money, we rely on the fast and secure transmission of quintillions of bits of data every day. And as technological and economic progress is made, there are ever more demands for capacity in these networks, and for ever greater speed, efficiency and security.

The possibilities created by increased connectedness has led to simple but profound challenges. In network terms, how to send the greatest amount of data in the shortest time while reducing the power requirement and cost, is chief among them.

Internet of things (IoT) networks are helping to address major societal challenges. Water regulation in agriculture in drought regions such as California, and dyke and canal infrastructure management in the Netherlands are just two examples. The systems underpinned by networks of sensors and microprocessors, capable of wireless connectivity and energy scavenging have vastly improved efficiency and delivered numerous benefits.

We are looking to even more advanced applications of these technologies, such as autonomously driven vehicles and robotic surgery. We are designing technology that could either completely replace humans or watch and take over when the driver or surgeon gets too tired or distracted.

We are envisaging vehicles that can communicate among themselves and a traffic coordinator to ensure smooth traffic flow with no need for traffic lights. We are preparing for autonomous operating rooms where robotic surgeons can be directed remotely by human surgeons in another country.

This is technology that could deliver superior and safer performance than error-prone human operation, but which is entirely dependent on unimpeachable network speed, efficiency and security that has not yet been achieved.

It is predicted that connected autonomously driven vehicles will eliminate traffic and accidents. We can imagine insurance premiums going down substantially. Of course, we can also imagine an utter disaster if a hacker was able to sneak into these networks, or if an uplink failed at the wrong moment while crucial information was being transmitted.

Hence, the network must be super fast, super secure and have enough bandwidth.

The view from the core of this technology offers a unique perspective on these challenges. Like physicists and geneticists, electrical and electronics engineers look for answers in ever smaller parts inside our networks.

Energy supply and consumption is at the heart of big societal challenges and so too is it one of the most critical considerations for IoT applications. My colleagues and I in the IoE2 Lab at University College Dublin are currently tackling this problem using the latest nanoscale CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) technologies, in pursuit of a common ultra-low-power system-on-chip hardware platform.

This means an integrated computer and electronics system containing a CPU, memory, and digital, analog, mixed-signal and radio frequency signal processing functions all on one microchip.

Prof Bogdan Staszewski. Image: UCD

As an aside, theres a lot of interest in radio frequency integrated circuits (RFIC) research now because it offers a huge cost benefit for system-on-chip solutions and this will only grow along with the pervasiveness of wireless capabilities in electronics.

Success in this research knows no pinnacle, it is just constantly evolving. We started with 1G and 2G wireless communication. Then came 3G and 4G. Nowadays the carriers are installing 5G networks, but researchers are working on 6G even though there is no agreement about what it will be. Thats the journey that makes us all excited.

The focus will remain on reducing power consumption and increasing performance, so that we can move towards IoT network applications that can perform more and more complex tasks. Power and capacity are key.

The need to economise power consumption is well understood, for a variety of practical, environmental and socio-economic reasons. Data, however, is a less familiar commodity in our world, in spite of the volume we generate on a daily basis, almost universally. And IoT is also greatly accelerating the demands for bandwidth in our networks, which in turn creates issues around equality of access and the enabling of future technology.

At IoE2, were looking at the problem of so many wireless devices coexisting in extremely congested networks, and the solution is cooperative wireless.

Like physicists and geneticists, electrical and electronics engineers look for answers in ever smaller parts inside our networks

Cooperative networks are at the foundation of IoT. At the system level, this means algorithms, components and software needed to make them energy and bandwidth-efficient. But at the physical layer beneath, we need hugely flexible nodes that can operate in an intelligent and cooperative manner.

To put this in context, a single ant cannot possibly do anything useful but the whole colony of ants are physically able to lift an elephant if they work in collaboration. Even a simple IoT node can do wonders if connected to a large network.

For instance, Swarms constellation of nanosatellites has helped harness the potential of IoT networks and their thousands of devices and billions of bits of data. Each nanosatellite is small and rather dumb but, in collaboration with others, they can execute quite sophisticated tasks and at a fraction of the cost of existing networks linked to broadband internet satellites.

Of course, enhancing capacity and enabling technology also requires enhanced security, especially as our networks become capable of storing more and more data.

We have found ways to increase security at the sub-system level, by creating tamper-proof ROM (read-only memory) and microchips that cannot be reverse engineered. We make increasingly sophisticated chips and memory that are perfected to be error-free and operable throughout their lifetime without updates or patches.

But the journey to advance and secure our networks has passed beyond the world of microelectronics, into the quantum world a world of the sub-atomically small. It would be fair to say this is the next real game-changer for ICT and will even surpass the invention of the integrated circuit itself.

While quantum computing will probably remain aloof from most people, the technology arising from its development will have major implications for society and for the evolution of communications and future networks.

The eventual growing use of quantum computing will render normal encryption virtually useless, creating the need for a global rewrite of our networks security

In simple terms, by exploiting quantum mechanics, a quantum computer takes mere seconds or minutes to crack an algorithm that classical computers would take lifetimes to crack. The power of this technology is transformational. It underpins the only form of communication that is provably unhackable and uninterceptable, heralding a new age of data security.

However, the development of quantum technologies will drive quantum communication and destabilise traditional networks. While only the military and proverbial Swiss banks have the need of these super secure communications for now, the eventual growing use of quantum computing will render normal encryption virtually useless, creating the need for a global rewrite of our networks security.

This technology is only a few years away. And even though the major hype of research remains on quantum computing rather than its application in other fields such as communications, its arrival will profoundly change the world as we know it.

Until then, all the possibilities of our future networks will rely on us building upon current technologies to make the communication pipe bigger and cheaper making our networks better, faster, with less power.

By Prof Bogdan Staszewski

Prof Bogdan Staszewski is a professor of electronic circuits at the UCD School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. He is part of the IoE2 Lab within the UCD Centre for Internet of Things Engineering and co-founder of Equal1 Labs, conducting research to build the worlds first practical single-chip CMOS quantum computer.

View post:

Faster, better, stronger: The next stage of global communications networks - Siliconrepublic.com

Regenerative Business, Part 4: Singularity and Why It Matters – Sustainable Brands

Posted on by

In anticipation of her upcoming keynote at SB'20 Long Beach, we revisit this groundbreaking blog series from renowned author and regenerative business expert Carol Sanford. This is part 4 of 6.

This is the fourth blog in a series on the seven First Principles of regeneration, drawing from living systems sciences. Read parts one, two and three.

A current, prevailing worldview is that everything and everyone can be categorized as a particular type. Each of us plant, animal, or human can be classified within a system of limited possibilities. Based on this belief, all of us humans are hungry to know who we are and how we fit into our time and place. We so eagerly want to know what types of lovers, wives, parents, or people we are that when magazines promise us quizzes to sort ourselves out they quickly disappear from newsstands. This helps us identify ourselves, and it may seem to help us understand nature and other beings. But despite its allure, by itself it cannot give us real knowledge.

On the other hand, we hate it when we are compared to a specific other person or when our situation is described as a generic example of things as they are. We love the idea that no two snowflakes are alike. We know from genetic science that there are no combinations that repeat. Nature does not create exact duplicates. From microbe to baby deer to human brain, every particular example of each life form is unique.

To overcome confusion about the degree or quality of likeness and difference among living beings requires discernment developed over time. It is true that based on surface characteristics, a person, a tiger, or a watershed is not unique and can be identified and categorized according to rating scales similar to the ones we enjoy reading about in magazines. Personality characteristics and personal strengths are easily organized into typologies. Nevertheless, at our cores each of us is singular, and every whole, living being has an essence that is permanent not an accident of birth, and not the result of socialization. This irreducible reality is captured in the root meaning of essence, which is not to become something, but to be something.

Hear from Janine Benyus and Biomimicry 3.8 about the latest innovations in biomimetic design being implemented by forward-thinking companies and practitioners at SB'20 Long Beach.

In the business world, we have a firm grasp of differentiation, which is often the basis of branding. A truly great business one with a long and consistently creative life goes beyond differentiation to essence or singularity. It becomes aware of its unique identity early on and adheres tenaciously to it over the long term; it hires to preserve it, develops products and services that express it, and makes it the basis for orientation and development. Singularity is the source of disruptive innovation, and a wise business jealously guards it. Yet even so, a great business often does not express equal understanding of singularity with regard to people and natural systems.

In a living system, the only lasting and precise way to augment health and wellbeing is to work with the essence of a particular whole the same way we work when were raising a child, governing a city, or growing a brand. For example, when we mistakenly set out to make a child more like an idealized someone else, she quickly loses her identity, which is the source of her intelligence and vitality. The best way to set a child on the wrong track is to tell her to be more like your father or more like your sister.

Advocating or advising from ideals of any kind interrupts essence expression. Ideals arise from societal or cultural aggregations of assumed truths. We form them in order to corral people who seem to be wandering beyond the bounds of accepted society. In other words, we use them to standardize norms, to make people all alike so that we can predict and control their behaviors. The imposition of ideals for the purpose of dominating is not only characteristic of our relationships with children, we extend it to everything alive. John Mohawk, a tribal elder and a professor at New York University, has said ideals are how one culture eradicates another, as the Europeans have come close to doing with the Native Peoples of North America. Within the context of standardized identity, people learn to normalize themselves by mimicking others.

In the business world, this can show up as the imitation of products or approaches that belong to other brands, a symptom of the failure to identify and adhere to singularity. And because we have spent so much time collecting and organizing ideals, standards, best practices, competencies, and categories, most of us havent learned to recognize and value singularity in any aspect of our own businesses.

In a regenerative process, we look for singularity not in existence, but in potential. I love to suggest that the essence of the IRS is not collecting taxes - that is only the surface. At its founding, the IRS was intended to increase the wealth-producing capacity of citizens and fund the agreed-upon costs of existing as a nation. How would our relationship with the IRS change if we were able to see through to that essence? How would the IRS work with us if they were able to hold in mind their unique identity? Would the nation ever experience a shortage of revenue? I suggest that every one of us living in the United States would be wealthier and probably happier.

It isnt easy to see the essences of people around us because they are often obscured by the challenges of family, school, and work life. When people are persuaded to conform, their essences are overtaken by personality traits, and the characters they play take center stage, nudging out their true selves. In order to develop the capability to recognize and engage with essence our own and others we must hold it in mind and pursue its living expression in all of our efforts.

Every watershed, community, and business has an essence. No two businesses are alike, although at a functional or object level (as with personality in humans), they may share many traits. We may classify types of employee, natures of raw material, categories of business plan, but until we take the time to know people, materials, and systems as their singular selves, we are failing to know and nurture them in the same way we fail to know and nurture a child when we exhort her to be like her father.

A regenerative view of the world sees phenomena not only as dynamic, but as singular.

That is, instead of categorizing, identifying, and grouping according to what things have in common, a regenerative business always seeks to discern the essence that makes each thing distinctly itself. It accepts and welcomes the realization that each expression of being is one of a kind.

This ability to appreciate singularity becomes the basis for deep creativity and motivation, a diametric opposite of the deflating belief that everything has already been seen and done by others before us. It requires constant resistance of the tendency to categorize and pigeonhole. Instead it seeks to see each phenomenon, each customer or retail location or product, as unique and new and deserving of our full presence and attention.

Looking to existence, writing down our observations or collecting facts, will not reveal singularity. In order to sniff out essence, we must become trackers and look for it in the same way that native peoples follow the traces of animals who have passed by. Essence becomes apparent in the patterns that are specific to a person, those that reveal how they engage with the world, their purpose in life, the unique value they create as the result of their endeavors. The same is true for the essence of any natural system, community, or organization.

Published Mar 23, 2020 10am EDT / 7am PDT / 2pm GMT / 3pm CET

Carol Sanford has four decades of experience working side by side with Fortune 500 and new economy executives, in designing and leading systemic business change and design. Through her university and in-house educational offerings, global speaking platforms, award-winning books and human development work, Carol works with executive leaders who see the possibility to change the nature of work through developing people and work systems that ignite motivation everywhere.

Here is the original post:

Regenerative Business, Part 4: Singularity and Why It Matters - Sustainable Brands

Do We Have to Give Up Our Personal Freedoms to Beat Coronavirus? – Singularity Hub

Posted on by

In late December 2019 Dr. Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, sent a WeChat message to his medical school alumni group telling them that seven people with severe respiratory and flu-like symptoms had recently been admitted to the hospital. One thing they had in common, besides their symptoms, was that theyd all visited a local wet market at some point in the previous week.

The illness bore an uncanny resemblance to SARS, but with a novel aspect as well; could it be an outbreak of a new disease? If so, what should be done?

But before any of the doctors could take action or alert local media outlets, the chat thread was shut down by the Wuhan police and Li was accused of spreading rumors. Mind you, the chat wasnt in a public forum; it was a closed group exchange. But the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is able to monitor, intercept, and censor any and all activity on WeChat; for the Chinese people, theres no such thing as a private conversation.

The police gave Li an affidavit stating hed spread false information and disturbed public order. He was instructed to sign this document retracting his warning about the virus and to stop telling people it existed, otherwise hed be put in jail.

So he did. A little over a month later, on February 7, Li died of the novel coronavirus in the same hospital where hed workedhed been infected with the virus while trying to treat sick patients, whod continued pouring into the hospital throughout the month of January.

By this time the CCP had leapt into action, unable to deny the existence of the virus as hundreds then thousands of people started getting sick. Travel restrictions and quarantines went into effectbut it was already far too late. As of this writing, the virus has spread to 168 countries and killed almost 21,000 people. Schools and businesses are closed. Were in lockdown mode in our homes. And the economy is taking a massive hit that could lead to a depression.

How different might our current situation be if the CCP had heeded Lis warning instead of silencing itor if the virus had first been discovered in a country with a free press?

People are arguing that China has done a good job of handling the virus. I disagree, said Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer at the Human Rights Foundation. The reason we have this global pandemic right now is because of Chinese censorship and the governments totalitarian nature.

Last week at Singularity Universitys virtual summit on COVID-19, Gladstein pointed out what we can learn from various governments responses to this pandemicand urged us to keep a close eye on our freedoms as this crisis continues to unfold.

The rate at which this disease has spread in different countries has varied wildly, as have the numbers of deaths vs. recoveries. Western Europe houses some of the wealthier and more powerful countries on Earth, but now isnt a great time to be living there (and were not doing so hot in the US, either). And though Singapore is known for its rigidity, it was a good place to be when the virus hit.

Given a half-century of research, the correlation is strong: democracies handle public health disasters much better than dictatorships, Gladstein said, citing a February 18th article in The Economist that examines deaths from epidemics compared to GDP per person in democracies and non-democracies.

Taiwan has also fared well, as has South Korea, though their systems of government function quite differently than Singapores. So what factors may have contributed to how fast the virus has spread and how hard the economys been hit in these nations?

There are two axes that are relevant, Gladstein said. One is the openness of a society and the other is its competency. An open but less competent government is likely to perform poorly in a public health crisis (or any crisis), as is a competent but closed government.

Long-term, some of the best-performing societies are open, competent democracies like Korea and Taiwan, Gladstein said. Taiwan is a somewhat striking example given its proximity to China and the amount of travel between the two.

With a population of 23 million people and the first case confirmed on January 21, as of this writing Taiwan has had 235 cases and 2 deaths. They immediately started screening people coming from China and halted almost all incoming travel from China within weeks of the outbreak, creating a risk-level alert system by integrating data from the national health insurance database with the immigration and customs databases (this did involve a degree of privacy infringement that we probably wouldnt be comfortable with in the US; more on that later). High-risk people were quarantined at home, and the government quickly requisitioned the manufacture of millions of masks. There was less panic and more belief in the government, and this paints a picture of what we should all aspire to, Gladstein said.

Iran is on the opposite end of the spectrum in both competency and openness; theyve recorded over 27,000 cases and over 2,000 deaths. Thousands have died in Iran, but well never know the truth because theres no free press there, said Gladstein.

Then theres China. In addition to lockdowns enforced by neighborhood leaders and police, the government upped its already-heavy citizen surveillance, tracking peoples locations with apps like AliPay and WeChat. A color-coding system indicating peoples health status and risk level was implemented, and their movement restricted accordingly.

Theyve now used the full power of the state to curtail the virus, and from what we know, theyve been relatively effective, Gladstein said. But, he added, this comes with two caveats: one, the measures China has taken would be unthinkable in a democracy; and two, we cant take their data at face value due to the countrys lack of a free press or independent watchdogs (in fact, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post were expelled from China on March 17; this may have been a sort of retaliation for the US State Departments recent move to cap the number of Chinese journalists allowed to work in the US for a handful of Chinese state media outlets).

South Korea and Singapore, the worlds other two containment success stories, both used some form of surveillance to fight the virus. In Korea, the 2015 MERS outbreak resulted in a law that lets the government use smartphone and credit card data to see where people have been then share that information (stripped of identifying details) on apps so that people they may have infected know to go get tested.

In Singapore, besides launching a contact tracing app called TraceTogether, the government sent text messages to people whod been ordered to stay at home and required them to respond with their live GPS location. As of this writing, Singapore had reported 631 cases and 2 deaths.

Does the success of these countries and their use of surveillance mean we need to give up some of our privacy to fight this disease? Would Americans and Europeans be willing to do so if it meant this terrible ordeal would be over sooner? And how do we know where to draw the line?

To Gladstein, the answer is simple. We dont need a police state to fight public health disasters, he said. We should be very wary about governments telling us they need to take our liberties away to keep us safe, and that theyll only take those liberties away for a limited amount of time.

A lot of personal data is already being collected about each of us, every day: which ads we click on, how long we spend on different websites, which terms we search for, and even where we go and how long were there for. Would it be so terrible to apply all that data to stemming the spread of a disease thats caused our economy to grind to a halt?

One significant issue with security measures adopted during trying times is that those measures are often not scaled back when society returns to normal. During the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, the government said the new security measures were temporary, but they turned out to be permanent, Gladstein said.

Similarly, writes Yuval Noah Harari in a Financial Times piece (which you should read immediately in its entirety if you havent already), Temporary measures have a nasty habit of outlasting emergencies, especially as there is always a new emergency lurking on the horizon. Many of the emergency measures enacted during Israels War of Independence in 1948, he adds, were never lifted.

This is key: though surveillance was a critical part of Taiwan, Korea, and Singapores success, widespread testing, consistent messaging, transparency, and trust were all equally critical. In an excellent piece in Wired, Andrew Leonard writes, In the United States, the Trump administration ordered federal health authorities to treat high-level discussions on the coronavirus as classified material. In Taiwan, the government has gone to great lengths to keep citizens well informed on every aspect of the outbreak.

In South Korea, President Moon Jae-in minimized his own communications with the public, ceding the sharing of information to those who actually knew it: health officials updated the public on the state of the pandemic twice a day. Singapores government provided consistent, clear updates on the number and source of cases in the country.

Gladstein re-emphasized that democracies are better suited than dictatorships at handling public health crises because people need to be able to innovate and collaborate without fear.

But despite a high level of openness that includes democratic elections, some of the heaviest emphasis on individual rights and freedoms in the world, and a free press, the US response to coronavirus has been dismal. As of this writing, more than 25 US states have ordered residents to be on lockdown. But testing, trust, and transparency are all sorely lacking. As more people start to fall seriously ill in the coming days and weeks, what will the US do to stem Covid-19s spread?

Secrecy, lies, and censorship only help the virus, Gladstein said. We want open societies. This open society is about to be put to the testbig-time.

For more from Gladstein on this topic, read his recent opinion piece in Wired.

Image Credit: Brian McGowanonUnsplash

See the rest here:

Do We Have to Give Up Our Personal Freedoms to Beat Coronavirus? - Singularity Hub

‘Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045’: Release date, plot, cast, music, trailer and all you need to know about anime – MEAWW

Posted on by

'Ghost in the Shell' and 'Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex' are both fan-favorite properties with massive followings and now a new installment to the saga is on the way. Netflix is all set to debut 'Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045', a 3-D CGI animated original net anime sequel to 'Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex'.

The title is believed to be a reference to Ray Kurzweil's 'The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology', which predicts that human and machine intelligence would merge into a Singularity by the year 2045.

Heres everything you need to know about the project:

'Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045' will be dropping on Netflix on April 23.

Picking up fifteen years after the beginning of 'Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex', the new series looks at a world where Artificial Intelligence is beginning to threaten humanity's continuation as a species. However, the public at large hasn't realized this threat yet. But when mysterious beings called "post-humans" begin to appear, the former members of Public Security Section 9, the protagonists of 'Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex', are called back into action to protect humanity from its impending doom.

Here's the official synopsis for the new ONA series: "In 2045, the world has been thrown into a state of systematic 'sustainable war', but the threat of human extinction at the hands of AI hasn't yet pervaded the public consciousness. Former members of Public Security Section 9, including full-body cyborg Major Motoko Kusanagi, are working as hired mercenaries when mysterious beings known as 'post-humans' begin to emerge. The worlds superpowers are trying to come to grips with the threat, and so Section 9 is reorganized."

Atsuko Tanaka

Atsuko Tanaka has been the voice of Major Motoko Kusanagi in all anime adaptations of the 'Ghost in the Shell' manga except 'Ghost in the Shell: Arise'. The voice actor will be reprising her role as Major for the upcoming Netflix anime alongside other returning cast members Akio Ohtsuka as Batou, Kichi Yamadera as Togusa, Yutaka Nakano as Ishikawa, Toru Ohkawa as Saito, Takashi Onozuka as Paz, Tar Yamaguchi as Borma, and Sakiko Tamagawa as Tachikoma. Osamu Saka will also be returning from the 'Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex' anime as Daisuke Aramaki.

The music for the series is being composed by Nobuko Toda ('Sweetness & Lightning') and Kazuma Jinnouchi ('Busou Shinki: Moon Angel). Toda was also the composer for the 'Metal Gear Solid' series alongside Harry Gregson-Williams. The duo has previously collaborated on the 'Ultraman' anime, as well as the soundtracks for the 'Halo 4' and 'Halo 5' games.

The show's opening song is titled 'Fly With Me' and it is performed by Millennium Parade, a creative team led by King Gnu member Daiki Tsuneta. According to Anime News Network, other vocalists on the track include ermhoi, HIMI, Cota Mori, and Kento Nagatsuka (WONK)

Shinji Aramaki and Kenji Kamiyama

The project is being directed by Shinji Aramaki and Kenji Kamiyama for Sola Digital Arts and Production I.G. Kenji Kamiyama has previously worked on all the 'Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex' projects.

'Ghost in the Shell' is based on the highly successful manga series by Masamune Shirow. The character designs for 'Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045' were completed by Russian illustrator Ilya Kuvshinov. According to Production I.G. USA president Maki Terashima-Furuta, the first 12-episode season will be directed by Kamiyama and the second by Aramaki.

The first teaser for the new series was released on October 22, 2019. The short clip showcases the photorealistic artwork of the show and introduces Major's new look as a mercenary.

The first proper trailer for the series was released on January 27 and it features the rest of Major's team. The clip also gives us our first look at a post-human, a being with massive physical and technological abilities which threatens humanity as a whole.

The series' final trailer was dropped on March 20 and it builds on the previous trailer by revealing that post-humans are a direct result of the "Sustainable Wars" that countries have been fighting with each other in the aftermath of the fall of global capitalism. The clip also reveals that the purpose of post-humans is to overthrow the existing social structure and bring about the age of post-humanity.

'Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex'

'Code Geass'

'Mobile Suit Gundam SEED'

'Cowboy Bebop'

'Neon Genesis Evangelion'

Continued here:

'Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045': Release date, plot, cast, music, trailer and all you need to know about anime - MEAWW

To fight the coronavirus spread, give artificial intelligence a chance – Livemint

Posted on by

The classic hockey stick curveits what investors and entrepreneurs desire but what medics despise. In the past week, Italy has seen that kind of curve in its coronavirus case numbers, leaving people and systems overwhelmed. German chancellor Angela Merkel has described coronavirus as Germanys greatest challenge since World War II.

This pandemic is the biggest black swan" event we have witnessed in our lives so far. A black swan event is characterized by a very low probability but extremely high impact. The last one was 9/11 in the US, which some still saw coming. But Covid-19 has taken us all by surprise.

Cases and deaths have had a geometric rise, which defeats understanding, because our minds tend to think in terms of linear progression. Were not programmed to fathom something that multiplies. India hasnt yet seen the ugly tipping point, and I hope we dont. This piece is not about hope against hope, but an earnest call for widespread adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) to counter such unpredictable events.

The initial, and by far most successful, application of AI is on the warfront. Thanks to the deployment of drones, unmanned craft, intelligent machines, humanoid robots and the like, the US has managed to drastically cut its casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq compared to the Vietnam and the Gulf wars. AI has not only lowered collateral damage but also radically increased the accuracy of assault.

But AIs applications can be far greater and more useful in humanitarian and disaster relief, conservation, disease control and waste management, among others. Machines have been shown to outperform humans in terms of labour, memory, intelligence and, in some cases even creativity.

At a time when citizens have been advised to practise social distancing, and we are fearfully confined to our homes, who will run the essentials? Someone will have to weather the storm, or perhaps something? We already have so much power offered by the brute force of machines that its up to us to tame it in meaningful ways, and Covid-19 could offer a precise opportunity.

At the time of writing this piece, Summit, the worlds most powerful supercomputer, housed at the US Department of Energys Oak Ridge National Laboratory, had identified 77 drug compounds that might stop coronavirus from infecting cells, a significant step in vaccine development. We are getting to know more about the spread of disease, hotspots and mortality rates on an almost real-time basis, thanks to affordable computing and communication networks. Can we up the ante further by relinquishing more control to machines?

Winston Churchill famously said, Never let a good crisis go to waste", and I think we have a great opportunity at hand. We can make machines take on the more hazardous tasks, while we watch and survive from the sidelines. This is the time for tech startups to leverage the power of general purpose technologies and conceive radical new solutions to address pandemics.

Private Kit: Safe Paths is an app developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard. With help from Facebook and Uber, it lets you know if you have crossed paths with someone who is infected while protecting privacy. Its a first step, and like most technologies, it will improve with adoption. OneBreath, a Palo Alto-based medtech startup, has been working on an affordable, reliable ventilator for over a decade now, and should be ready to meet Covid-19.

As geography becomes history, we have become one large family. Our more robust, fast-learning cousins, the machines, must be deployed on the frontlines faster. We are truly at the inflection point towards singularity, and its a choice between speed and accuracy. A useful ethos for the times could be from Mark Twain who reminded us, Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection."

Pavan Soni is the founder of Inflexion Point, an innovation and strategy consultancy.

Read more here:

To fight the coronavirus spread, give artificial intelligence a chance - Livemint

Crime thrillers and cannabis cooking competition among April streaming picks – CityNews

Posted on by

With Canadians spending most of their time indoors amid the COVID-19 pandemic, its fortunate that streaming services were already rampingup a busy month of programming for April.

Netflix is set to feed reality-series buffsanother conversation starter on April 17 withToo Hot to Handle, whichgathers a group of beautiful people at a resort before revealing they could win a pot of$100,000 by holding off on sex for the duration of their stay. Spoiler: things get complicated very quickly.

And on Disney Plus, two wildlife docs debut on April 3: Elephant, narrated by Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, and Dolphin Reef with Natalie Portman.

Meanwhile, newcomer streaming service Quibi gets off the ground on April 6 with a selection of 50 short-form programsthat can only be watched on mobile devices. Among the highlights are a refresh onprank series Punkd with Chance the Rapper, home renovationshow Murder House Flip andReese Witherspoons animal doc series Fierce Queens. The platform offersa 90-day free trial for viewers who sign up before the launch date.

Heres a roundup of whats worth streamingin April:

Defending Jacob

An assistant district attorney, played by Chris Evans,confronts the ultimate moral and ethical dilemma when his son is accused of murdering one of his schoolmates and leaving his body in a forest. First assigned to investigate the case, hes pulled offitwhen details emerge of his sons potential involvement. But that onlypushes his resolve to prove his sons innocence. Based on the 2012 novel,this eight-episode limited seriesgives Evans the sort of meaty role that could land him in contention at the Emmy Awards. Hes backed up by a stellar supporting cast that includes Michelle Dockery as his shell-shocked wife. (Apple TV Plus, April 24)

Run

Scene-stealing Merritt Wever, who played Scarlett Johanssons kooky sister in last years Oscar-nominated Marriage Story,has thespotlightin thiseight-episode dramedy on HBO. Wever plays Ruby, a suburban mother who drops her comfortable life the instant she gets a text from her old college flame that simply reads: Run. She meets up with Billy (played by Domhnall Gleeson from Ex Machina) at Grand Central Stationand together they embark on a cross-country train ride that spirals fast. Co-created by Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Fleabag)and Vicky Jones (Killing Eve), theseries takes a few episodes to really find its footing, but once it does, the twists are delicious. (Crave/HBO, April 12, weekly episodes)

Cooked with Cannabis

R&B singer Kelis brought all the boys to the yard with her hit Milkshake, but these days shes doubling as a professional chef serving up cannabis dishes. This new competition series pairs her withPortland chef Leather Storrs as they oversee experienced culinary artists who are racing against the clockto make the best tasting cannabis-infused dishes. A rotating lineup ofcelebrity judges stop by, including Ricki Lake, Elle King and NBA player John Salley. But what makes Cooked with Cannabis stand out from other cannabis cooking shows is its spirited effort to explain theintricacies of cooking with marijuana to newcomers.(Netflix, April 17)

Outer Banks

After a hurricane sweeps through their town, agroup of mischievous teenagers discover a sunken ship filled with a boatload of secrets one of whichcould answerwhat happened to the ringleaders missing father.Set against the backdrop of the Outer Banks of North Carolina, this modern pulp mystery is packed with chiselled bodies and steamy locales, and should finda strong following withfans of Riverdale who like their drama with a side of youthful angst.(Netflix, April 15)

Bad Education

High school can be so dramatic, and especially so within the upper ranks of the Roslyn School District where Long Island superintendent Frank Tassone (Hugh Jackman) is doubling as mentor and embezzler alongside his colleague Pam Gluckin (Allison Janney). But when he encourages a young student reporter to start looking deeper into a story, he winds up sending her on a path that winds all the way back to his own shady dealings. Acquired by HBO at last years Toronto International Film Festival, this sharp-witted comedy is based ona real scandal that rocked aNew York school district.(Crave/HBO, April 25)

In Case You Missed It (titles already streaming):

The Other Two

When their little brother rockets to fame as a teenage pop star on social media, two adult siblings ride his coattails in hopes of reigniting their own failedshowbiz aspirations. Thats the starting point for this sometimes cringeworthy but often hilarious take on the power struggle of a family hypnotized by celebrity culture. Molly Shannon plays the single mom whos turned her sons popularity into her own road to success, one shes dubbed her Year of Yes. Created by Saturday Night Live writers Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider, this underappreciated episodic seriessets a fire underneath the YouTube era. (Crave)

Scoresby Quincy Jones

Unmistakable in his singularity, 28-time Grammy winner Quincy Jones is often described as a purveyor of popular music production but hesan influential film composer in his own right, too. Criterion Channel has brought together many of his best works in this collection that pays tribute to his unique cinematic sound, a blend of blues, funk, bossa nova and pop. Start with a Sidney Poitier double bill of In the Heat of the Night and They Call Me Mister Tibbs! before moving along to Truman CapotesIn Cold Blood, and then round it out with the decidedly lighter psychedelic flair of Cactus Flower and 1970 comedy-adventure The Out-of-Towners. (Criterion Channel)

Unorthodox

A young Brooklyn woman flees the world shes known in a strict Hasidic community to start anew in Berlin, splitting from an arranged marriage with the help of a friend. But her disappearance doesnt go unnoticed, with her husband trailing closely behind her as she attempts to escape a past of limitations and find her own identity. Inspired by Deborah Feldmans memoir of the same name, this four-part series could position Israeli actress Shira Haas as one to watch for her nuanced turn as the lead character. (Netflix)

Follow @dfriend on Twitter.

David Friend, The Canadian Press

Follow this link:

Crime thrillers and cannabis cooking competition among April streaming picks - CityNews

News Watch Jon Hopkins perform to no one at The Sydney Opera House – Stoney Roads

Posted on by

Most Jon Hopkins fans already know what an incredibly talented producer he is and that reflects in a lifelong career and an impressive discography of emotive and substantive electronica.

His last album Singularity, released in 2018 was one of his best in many peoples eyes and earned a solid year-plus of touring that led him around the world and coincidently, to the stage of The Sydney Opera House.

From all reports, it was a spectacular not be missed with towering visuals coupled with Hopkins consistent blows and breaks of electronica that shook the place and included unreleased music that looks to be paving the way for a new album.

While the public was treated to that, he also recorded a special, intimate performance for a tiny audience of videographers which captured a piano rendition of one of his latest singles Scene Suspended.

The performance was filmed on the 28th March, which for those not in the know was global Piano Day and who better to flex it than talented player Jon Hopkins himself?

Bask in the exclusive video below, hint; Nils Frahm makes a cameo as well.

Link:

News Watch Jon Hopkins perform to no one at The Sydney Opera House - Stoney Roads

Explained: Can alternative medicine work against the coronavirus? – The Indian Express

Posted on by

By: Express News Service | New Delhi | Updated: March 28, 2020 4:43:41 pm An Indonesian local health service personnel extracts blood from an individual on self-quarantine, as they conduct a COVID-19 rapid test in Jakarta, Indonesia. (Andy Saputra via AP)

There have been multiple advisories from the AYUSH Ministry on COVID-19. Its long list of recommendations include Unani concoctions Sharbat Unnab and Tiryaq Arba, and the homeopathic medicine Arsenicum Album 30 for post-exposure prophylaxis for doctors and caregivers.

In the absence of a scientifically proven cure or preventive for novel coronavirus infection, should one use alternative medicine?

This is what the World Health Organization has to say: While some western, traditional or home remedies may provide comfort and alleviate symptoms of COVID-19, there is no evidence that current medicine can prevent or cure the disease. WHO does not recommend self-medication with any medicines, including antibiotics, as a prevention or cure for COVID-19. However, there are several ongoing clinical trials that include both western and traditional medicines.

Doctors are discouraging use of drugs recommended by practitioners of alternative medicine because a drug has to be developed keeping in mind its safety and efficacy.

For hydroxychloroquine pushed by the Health Ministry, the efficacy is still being investigated but its safety has been documented through years. No such data are available for any of the traditional remedies on social media.

The virus that causes COVID-19 is new and its nature is still being studied by scientists.

Heres a quick Coronavirus guide from Express Explained to keep you updated: Are smokers at high risk form coronavirus? | Can Vitamin-C prevent or cure coronavirus infection? | What exactly is community spread of coronavirus? | How long can the Covid-19 virus survive on a surface? | Amid the lockdown, what is allowed, what is prohibited?

The Indian Express is now on Telegram. Click here to join our channel (@indianexpress) and stay updated with the latest headlines

For all the latest Explained News, download Indian Express App.

IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd

See the original post:

Explained: Can alternative medicine work against the coronavirus? - The Indian Express