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How to ditch the cloud and move to do-it-yourself NAS instead – The Age

Posted on November 21, 2019 by Danzig

What is NAS?

NAS is essentially a bunch of hard drives that connects to your home network, powered and housed by a small computer, enabling a centralised file storage system you can access from anywhere.

Traditionally a NAS box required a bit of know-how to get running, but manufacturers have made great strides in this area to the point that almost anyone can set up a powerful network storage solution that is more capable and flexible than a cloud storage service.

Synology's DS218J is a powerful two-bay NAS box at an entry level price of around $230.

Since you're buying the NAS box and requisite hard drives outright, there's more of an upfront investment. But it works out cheaper in the long run as there are no ongoing monthly fees. Cloud storage is akin to renting a place for your data to live, whereas NAS is more like owning your own home, giving you complete control and ownership. Boxes are designed to run 24/7, but generally don't consume a lot of power.

A two-bay NAS box can be picked up from as low as $200. Filling those slots with two 1TB hard drives will set you back another $100, so in total you're looking at $300. By comparison, a Google One plan with 2TB storage will set you back $125 a year. I invested in a more expensive five bay Synology DS1019+, and filled up the hard drive slots as and when I needed more storage over time. More drive bays also give you better redundancy, as you can mirror data so you won't lose any if one or two drives fail.

Keep in mind that NAS boxes can do more than just store and share your photos. The likes of Synology and QNAP have an extensive app ecosystem that extends the functionality well beyond the bounds of traditional network storage.

I use mine as a media server so the family can easily stream movies and music stored on the NAS to any connected smartphone, tablet, PC or streaming box, in addition to serving as a PVR for recording major sporting events on free-to-air television. I also use it to drive and monitor my home security cameras.

There are a number of companies that make NAS boxes, including QNAP, Western Digital and Seagate, but Synology's DiskStation line is far and away the best in the industry when it comes to ease of use, stability and features.

For example making your NAS accessible from outside of your home network usually involves setting up port forwarding rules or other complicated network settings. But Synology's QuickConnect feature bypasses this by allowing you to assign a simple URL or ID for access.

The DS1019+ is a five-bay NAS box that supports 4K transcoding expansion bays for even more storage, at around $1000.

It's also the only NAS system that can match Google Photos in terms of smarts. Synology's Moments app, which runs on top of the company's Diskstation Manager operating system, analyses all your photos and puts them into sensible albums for you, making it much easier to find the photo you're looking for.

It uses facial recognition to group photos with similar faces, and scene recognition so you can search based on things that are in the picture.

Unlike Google Photos, Synology does all this without ever collecting any user data or sending a single photo to the public cloud.

You can also set the app to automatically upload any new photos from your phone to your NAS.

Another strong point for NAS compared to cloud storage services is speed. Cloud services are limited by your internet speeds and the bandwidth of their servers, whereas NAS utilises the speed of your local home network which is significantly faster.

Of course it's always wise to keep a backup offsite of all your important files in case there's a fire or burglary. Synology has multiple options for doing this, backing up data stored on the NAS to a public cloud service like Google Drive, OneDrive or Dropbox.

The benefit here is that Synology will encrypt your data before it is uploaded, so your data can't be trawled and won't be compromised if the cloud service is hacked or breached.

Some NAS boxes allow you to sync an encrypted backup of your storage to the cloud.

Synology also offers its own private cloud option called Synology C2 Backup, with the basic plan costing between $16 and $100 a year depending on your needs.

Another option is to invest in a secondary Synology NAS offsite and have files synchronise over the internet. I personally go the manual route; plugging a USB drive into the NAS on a monthly basis to back up my most precious data, namely my collection of family photos and videos.

Krishan is a multi-award-winning Australian technology journalist.

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How to ditch the cloud and move to do-it-yourself NAS instead - The Age

Ecosystem | Definition of Ecosystem by Merriam-Webster

Posted on November 21, 2019 by Danzig

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1 : the complex of a community of organisms and its environment functioning as an ecological unit That influx of fresh water alters the ocean's salinity near the seafloor, a factor that influences the makeup of the ecosystems in those places. Sid Perkins Global warming, if it proceeds as many scientists predict, threatens to undo decades of conservation work and could mean the destruction of the monarch butterfly, the edelweiss, the polar bear and innumerable other species living in fragile ecosystems, an emerging body of scientific evidence suggests. William K. Stevens

2 : something (such as a network of businesses) considered to resemble an ecological ecosystem especially because of its complex interdependent parts Newspaper layoffs have ripple effects for the entire local news ecosystem because, as the Congressional Research Service noted, television, radio and online outlets often "piggyback on reporting done by much larger newspaper staffs." David Sirota Lots of Walmart customers are underserved by banks and other financial institutions, [Daniel] Eckert says; the company's experiments with finance-related products and services help customers "not only save money but also have access to a financial ecosystem they were crowded out from." Rob Walker

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Ecosystem | Definition of Ecosystem by Merriam-Webster

Has Arm Discovered the Ecosystem Keys? – The Next Platform

Posted on November 21, 2019 by Danzig

Arm server development is a reality and a growing one at that. Not just from a performance point of view but also, perhaps more important, from an ecosystem view.

Be it the Marvell ThunderX2 processor or the Ampere eMAG Skylark processor, the hyperscale, cloud, enterprise ecosystems are willing to adopt these new processors to further improve their TCO or dollars/core.

The all-important ecosystem is catching up with Arm, which is key to the momentum necessary to make the Arm servers a sustainable reality. With AWS launching their version of Arm instances i.e. Graviton processors, theres the much needed push to make the software ecosystem more widely acceptable in the industry. Not just that, AWS even announced bare-metal offerinings for EC2 A1 instances.

Slowly but steadily, Arm has also made a mark for itself in high performance computing, something we expect to see in full force at this years Supercomputing Conference. Arm has the most traction in terms of deployments and software development in HPC in the United States, Europe and Japan with each region leading the way along different trajectories to deploy systems based on the Arm architecture for their supercomputers.

All of this has taken time and extended development, of course. The first wave of Arm based servers came in 2010 until 2014 and were more experimental in nature than real production systems.

The first 64-bit Arm design i.e. the ARMv8-A was introduced in 2011 and since then the Arm server ecosystem have seen lots of ups and downs. ZTSystems, in November 2010 had launched a 1U Data Center Arm server based on Cortex-A9 cores (32-bit) which was supposed to be energy efficient and a denser solution compared to Intel Servers. Then came Calxeda with their version of 32-bit Arm servers i.e. the EnergyCore-ECX-1000 which did not see adoption and Calxeda eventually went defunct in 2013. In 2011 AppliedMicro launched the X-Gene 1 processor followed by X-Gene 2 in 2014. Samsung, Cavium (now Marvell) and AMD came up with their versions of Arm processors which tried to penetrate the server market but could not generate tangible interest among the end-users to adopt these technologies.

Arm servers have undergone a transformation in terms of development and early signs of this were seen in a semi-secret project within Broadcom which was taking shape in the form of Project Vulcan. The idea was to develop a world class 64-bit serious Arm server to take on Intel in the HPC and cloud market.

In late 2016, when Avago gave up on Broadcoms ambitions to develop a first class Arm server, Cavium jumped in and brought the Vulcan IP and Team on-board and fully funded the Vulcan project, re-christened as Cavium ThunderX2 now, Marvell ThunderX2. In more ways than one, the ThunderX2 is a serious contender to Intel and AMD in the HPC, hyperscale and cloud businesses.

To make things better for the Arm ecosystem, in 2017, a brand new company, Ampere Computing bought the X-Gene assets and re-introduced the X-Gene processor as the Ampere eMAG processor. It needs to be mentioned that Qualcomm tried its hand at building a true Data Center Arm Server Centriq based on the Falkor Architecture and given Qualcomms standing, with time, it could have made their data center server project a success. However, for reasons unknown to many, they chose to significantly disinvest and many personnel from Qualcomms Centriq project were hired by Ampere Computing in Raleigh. Huawei has a very compelling Arm Server offering in the Kunpeng 920, which is a 7-nm, 64 core CPU.

Figure 1: Diverse Arm architectures (source)

The question many have is whether the Arm server ecosystem is mature enough to be excited about?

The ecosystem has come a long way to become a stable one. However, it has many miles to go to reach the same level as x86. Given this momentum, it would not be surprising if the likes of Google, Facebook, Tencent etc. are actively experimenting with Arm platforms. Amazon and Microsoft have already invested in Arm platforms in their respective clouds i.e. AWS & Azure.

Figure 2: Commits to Linux GitHub repository for x86 vs. arm64 as of 13th November, 2019

The contributions towards enabling aarch64 for Linux operating system have steadily increased since 2012 while the growth rate for x86 has not been as consistent. These are good indications that the Arm ecosystem is here to stay and growing.

An ongoing debate among software engineers is whether to implement a business logic in a monolithic architecture or take the same logic and break it down into multiple pieces. There is a growing trend of organizations moving to a Microservices architecture for various reasons be it unit testing, ease of deployment, server performance among many others. Also, microservices based architecture are relatively easy to scale compared to a monolith. Linaro, Arm and Arm Server Manufacturers are leading this charge. Also, Packet is providing the developer community a platform to develop and sustain the ecosystem.

If theres one area where Arm servers have taken the biggest strides, it is definitely be High Performance Computing (HPC). The Arm ecosystem for HPC is also the most developed compared to Arms progress in cloud datacenters.

The momentum for Arm in HPC was driven by many centers, but Dr. Simon McIntosh-Smith and the University of Bristol and Cray hosting the 1st Isambard Hackathon to optimize HPC applications for ThunderX2 based servers back in November 2017 at Bristol. This was promptly followed up by a 2nd Isambard Hackathon in March 2018.

Most of the HPC applications compile and run out of the box for Arm based servers with Arm compilers, GCC, OpenMPI, OpenMP support.

I participated in both representing Cavium Inc, assisting developers, architects and engineers optimize their codes/applications for ThunderX2 Processors. Collectively, we optimized key HPC applications like NAMD, UM-NEMO, OpenFOAM, NWCHEM, CASTEP, etc. and compared to Intel CPU Architectures like Broadwell and Skylake. Prof Smith and team did a detailed study identifying the opportunities and benefits of Arm Servers with regards to the incumbent Intel servers with compelling performance per dollar for the Arm-based servers.

Figure 3: Cray-Isambard performance comparison on mini-apps

Figure 4: Cray-Isambard performance comparison on key Archer applications

Figure 5: Cavium Inc. published HPC Performance comparison vs. Intel Skylake CPUs (2017)

This was a significant movement that Arm servers needed in the HPC space. The two Isambard hackathons also fast-tracked the Arm HPC development with Arm optimizing their compilers as well as Math libraries in collaboration with Arm server manufacturers like Cavium Inc (now Marvell Semiconductors). There is tremendous movement in the Arm HPC Performance Libraries optimization world. Arm has invested in optimizing GEMM, SVE, spMM, spMV and FFT libraries in collaboration with developers and Silicon manufacturers like Marvell. The Arm Allinea Studio has successfully established itself as a go-to tool for Arm server Workload Analysis, similar to what VTune would be for Intel.

Another major milestone was the Vanguard Astra Arm based supercomputer at Sandia National Laboratories powered by DoE, Cavium and HPE. This is the first Arm based supercomputer to make the TOP500 list at 156th position as of June 2019 and 198th rank in the November 2019 rankings. The building blocks are HPE Apollo 70 platforms, Marvell ThunderX2 CPUs with 4xEDR Infiniband interconnect. The Astra Supercomputer is made up of 2592 compute servers i.e. 145k cores and 663 TB memory. US DoE is making a concerted effort to invest in diverse as well as future proof technologies such as Arm, in its path towards achieving exascale computing.

Figure 6: Astra, the Arm based supercomputer debuted on the TOP500 list in November 2018

Europe and Asia are taking huge strides in deploying Arm based clusters and systems for HPC and Research. Be it Monte-Carlo, Isambard or CINECA-E4 projects in Europe or Japans Arm based Fugaku supercomputer, its just the beginning of a new era of Arm in HPC. Cray is betting big with the A64FX Arm chip built by Fujitsu. The A64FX prototype is number one on the Green500 list and 160th on the Top500 list..

HPC workloads tend to be highly parallelizable in nature, and Arm CPUs provide an opportunity to leverage lots of cores at reasonable price points. Further, having competition in the CPU market benefits all buyers, not just HPC shops, to negotiate the best resources for their workloads.

Marvell is a pioneer in more ways than one in introducing the Arm server ecosystem to the hyperscale world with Marvell and Microsoft partnering on ThunderX2 platforms for Azure. Oracle has invested $40 Million in Ampere Computing, which is home to the ARMv8 eMAG processor. Oracle also has plans to massively expand their datacenter footprint in the coming months and this investment in Ampere could mean potential deployment of eMAG processors in Oracle Data Centers.

In the recent past, theres been a slew of announcements regarding enhancements to the Arm ecosystem. VMware announced 64-bit support Arm Support. In an official announcement, DDN announced professional support for Lustre on Arm servers in 2018 In mid 2019 at ISC, AMI announced firmware support for the Marvell ThunderX2 Arm based servers in March 2019.

NVIDIA announced CUDA support for Arm at ISC19 and backed it up with a major announcement of introducing a reference design to enable organizations to build GPU-accelerated Arm based servers, which is a big shift towards enabling Arm to be successful in the HPC and accelerated computing segment. Imagine a system with power efficient Arm based CPUs with GPUs for training and AI ASICs for inference. Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence pose interesting opportunities & the collaboration with NVIDIA will enable this segment for Arm based solutions.

Like Intel, AMD and Arm, Ampere Computing too has created a developer program for developers to build and expand their Cloud Ecosystem. This will enable further and faster integration of Arm servers in the hyperscale and datacenter world in a much more open and collaborative way.

While the ecosystem still needs more time to grow and mature, it is steadily moving towards that nirvana of It just works. With the emergence of Arm in the computer architecture world along with RISC-V and many other semiconductor start-ups, its only a matter of time until aarch64 is the new normal like x86. That is what the community is all striving towards.

Once the developers are convinced that their software stack just works on Arm Servers, it would be a big win for the Arm Server ecosystem, and I for one am willing to make the bold claim that for many workloads especially HPC It just works

About the Author

Indraneil Gokhale is a Performance Engineer and leads the Hardware Engineering team at Box Inc. Indraneil has previously worked at Cavium (now Marvell), Uber and Intel. Indraneil has experience in optimizing HPC applications and workloads for x86 and aarch64 architectures. He has published white papers, book chapters on optimizing the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) application. Indraneil holds a Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering from Auburn University, USA and a Bachelors Degree in EEE from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Hyderabad, India.

Has Arm Discovered the Ecosystem Keys? - The Next Platform

Integrating Global Seagrass and Mangrove Ecosystem Observations – Eos

Posted on November 21, 2019 by Danzig

In many nearshore waters around the world, seagrasses and mangroves (coastal saltwater forests) provide habitat and food for diverse organisms and valuable ecosystem services to people. Although human activities threaten these habitats, assessing their status and trends is made difficult by a lack of coordination, standardization, and integration between in situ and remotely sensed observations.

To advance coordinated international observations of these ecosystems, including observations of essential ocean variables (EOVs) and essential biodiversity variables (EBVs), multidisciplinary experts recently convened at a workshop jointly sponsored by the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) and the Marine Biodiversity Observation Network (MBON). Participants focused on current in situ and remote sensing observing capabilities, the technological innovations required to overcome the limitations of these two approaches, and how to promote data accessibility for use by a range of stakeholders.

Most seagrass monitoring is done in situ. Global monitoring networks (e.g., SeagrassNet, Seagrass-Watch) use similar low-cost protocols, such as visual surveys, offering promise for efforts to standardize best practices and interoperability. Remote sensing tools that generate high spatial resolution multispectral and hyperspectral images based on reflectance signatures provide data on seagrass spatial coverage at larger scales, but in situ verification is needed for species identification and plant health assessment.

The Global Mangrove Watch has documented a nearly 6% decline in global mangrove extent since 1996 using satellite data and available in situ observations.The Global Mangrove Watch (GMW) has documented a nearly 6% decline in global mangrove extent since 1996 using satellite data and available in situ observations. In situ sampling efforts are essential for validating maps derived from such satellite data and for assessing species composition, but at present these efforts are very limited and are not coordinated with each other. Thus, extracting similar data fields from existing data sets is resource intensive.

Workshop participants made recommendations for future seagrass observing, including integrating remote sensing and in situ data, linking existing in situ capacity across nations and networks, and leveraging these capabilities with promising technologies such as photo and video transects, including those produced using autonomous underwater vehicles. Participants agreed that advances in artificial intelligence applications for image processing will be needed to improve and speed up transformation of images into data products.

Participants also offered recommendations to improve mangrove observations, including linking in situ data (e.g., species composition surveys) to satellite data to validate maps and identifying existing in situ and drone sampling capacities and gaps.

For both seagrass and mangrove ecosystems, workshop participants agreed that coordinated observations will benefit from standardizing which plant parameters are measured as indicators of ecosystem health and condition; adopting data management practices based on findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) principles; organizing disparate data; and linking data systems to the Ocean Biogeographic Information System and the World Conservation Monitoring Centre. Standard operating procedures for OceanBestPractices could be developed from the Blue Carbon Manual (mangroves) and the protocols of SeagrassNet and Seagrass-Watch. Training and capacity development will be critical to expanding global coverage and ensuring continuity of observations.

The success of coordinated global seagrass and mangrove observations will require strengthening engagement between the field observation and remote sensing communities and nurturing partnerships.Overall, workshop attendees concluded that the success of coordinated global seagrass and mangrove observations will require strengthening engagement between the field observation and remote sensing communities and nurturing partnerships, including those with developing countries. Coordination and governance can be facilitated by system-specific groups such as the International Seagrass Experts Network and GMW and by GOOS and the MBON, which are working to implement observations of essential ocean variables to strengthen global observing, conservation, and sustainable development.

The participant list and presentations are available at the workshop website. We acknowledge support from NASA, GOOS, and the Consortium for Ocean Leadership, and we thank the participants for their contributions.

Emmett Duffy, Tennenbaum Marine Observatories Network and Marine Global Earth Observatory, Smithsonian Institution, Edgewater, Md.; Lisa Maria Rebelo, International Water Management Institute, Vientiane, Laos; and Patricia Miloslavich ([emailprotected]), Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia; also at Oceans and Atmosphere, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Hobart, Australia, and Universidad Simn Bolvar, Caracas, Venezuela

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Integrating Global Seagrass and Mangrove Ecosystem Observations - Eos

The collapse of the information ecosystem poses profound risks for humanity – The Guardian

Posted on November 21, 2019 by Danzig

For the last few years, scientists have argued that were living through a distinctly new geological age. They call it the Anthropocene: a new age characterized by humanitys profound impact on Earth itself as evidenced by pollution, mass extinction and climate change.

We are currently facing a new systemic collapse, one that has built far more swiftly but poses potent risks for all of humanity: the collapse of the information ecosystem. We see it play out every day with the viral spread of misinformation, widening news deserts and the proliferation of fake news. This collapse has much in common with the environmental collapse of the planet that were only now beginning to grasp, and its consequences for life as we know it are shaping up to be just as profound.

The digital revolution greatly expanded human knowledge and wealth much as the industrial revolution did 150 years earlier when new technologies, notably the combustion engine, brought about extraordinary economic growth. And much like the building of great railways and interstate highways allowed people to connect, the creation of tools that allow anyone to be their own publisher has made it possible for new voices to reach large audiences around the world.

The collapse of the information ecosystem has already wreaked havoc on our political systems

But if the price of the industrial revolution was planetary destruction on an unimaginable scale, the digital revolution may be costly in a different but similarly destructive way. William Randolph Hearst owned the means of production and was free to publish made up stories to sell papers and stoke the Spanish-American war. Today, everyone is free to be their own propagandist.

The scale of the threat is hard to overstate.

When the scientists behind the Doomsday clock published their yearly assessment of how close we are to planetary doom, they added a new dimension to the dual threats of nuclear proliferation and climate change, namely the intentional corruption of the information ecosystem on which modern civilization depends.

What weve seen in recent years isnt just the collapse of informational authority. It is the destruction of the pact between the purveyors of quality information and the businesses that wanted to reach the consumers of that information.

In 2018, Facebook, Google and Amazon have sucked up nearly 70% of all digital advertising dollars, effectively taking the place of the old monopolies.

Some news organizations have become profitable by persuading their audience to pay for the journalism once heavily subsidized by advertisers. Others, such as the Guardian and HuffPost, have created membership programs that ask audiences to support journalism once heavily subsidized by advertisers. Still others now rely on foundations or wealthy patrons, with people such as Jeff Bezos taking the place of Pulitzer or Hearst.

But this is not enough to make the provision of high-quality and affordable information sustainable. Since 2008, at least 28,000 journalists have lost their jobs. Today, we get much less foreign news as news organizations close their bureaus, and local news may go the way of the dodo as newspapers across the country fold.

The scale of the threat is hard to overstate

The collapse of the information ecosystem has already wreaked havoc on our political systems. It has undermined democratic elections. It has shaken basic trust in institutions. It has left us with a world in which anyone is free to choose their own facts. It threatens to fundamentally destabilize the existing world order.

That world is a very dangerous one for humans in general, but it poses special and serious risks for businesses. Without facts, what are contracts? Without facts, what are laws? A world without facts is as dangerous for companies as it is for citizens.

Most major corporations have sustainability policies and seek to limit, as much as possible, the harm caused to the environment by their products. This is partly due to consumer pressure. But its also because companies have realized that climate change carries catastrophic business risks.

Just as companies decarbonize their businesses, they should think carefully about how they contribute to the destruction of our information ecosystem and choose to reach consumers on platforms that slow rather than increase the pace of information ecosystem collapse.

I am not suggesting anyone must immediately abandon Facebook or Google advertising platforms. But I do propose an experiment. What if the chief marketing officer of every major corporation set aside a substantial chunk of their marketing budget and devoted it to high-quality news? Of the $130bn devoted to digital advertising, set $50bn aside for news.

Indeed, the withdrawal of advertising dollars would be the single most powerful way to change the practices of companies that contribute most powerfully to the information ecosystem crisis. It dwarfs anything a regulatory body could do to alter the behavior of these platforms. When the FTC slapped a $5bnn fine on Facebook this summer, investors sent its shares soaring.

Advertisers love these platforms for the same reason industrialists love carbon-based energy: it provides powerful, measurable fuel for their businesses. But increasingly they are becoming wary of these platforms because they are full of disinformation, fraud and abuse. Just as companies are weaning themselves from substances that pollute our air, water and lands, companies should wean themselves from platforms that are destroying our information ecosystem. Its just good business.

The Doomsday clock stands at two minutes to midnight. But this new normal is not normal. As the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists put it earlier this year:

Nuclear war and climate change threaten the physical infrastructure that provides the food, energy, and other necessities required for human life. But to thrive, prosper, and advance, people also need reliable information about their world factual information, in abundance.

Dreamforce 2019: Salesforce Outlines Initiatives To Ignite Ecosystem Growth – CRN: The Biggest Tech News For Partners And The IT Channel

Posted on November 21, 2019 by Danzig

Soon after founding Salesforce, CTO Parker Harris forcefully argued to CEO Marc Benioff that the new company should avoid building a channel.

"Marc, whatever you do, we do not want consultants," Harris said he told his co-founder twenty years ago.

Harris wanted the innovative cloud-based CRM to be a no-code platform, and systems integrators and consultants would ruin that vision, "because people are going to write code."

Thankfully, Benioff rejected his bad advice, Salesforce's CTO told thousands of ecosystem partners attending a keynote Tuesday at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.

[Related: Salesforce Dreamforce Keynote: AI, Integration, Alicia Keys And Protestors]

"We need you," Harris told those consultants he once hoped to shun.

Harris now sees partners who "speak the language of the customer" as vital to the company's strategy of extending into industry verticals. And Salesforce especially needs SIs as it leverages its MuleSoft platform to bring in data from Oracle and SAP ERPs, enabling implementation of a "single source of truth" concept presented through the Customer Truth 360 tooling unveiled earlier that day.

As the CRM leader chases Benioff's ambitious goal to double the business over the next few years, recruiting new partners, enabling existing ones to scale, and encouraging startups to form is a larger priority than ever before. The company has previously said it's aiming to build a channel of 250,000 services partners.

To that end, Salesforce channel leaders outlined specific initiatives Tuesday around enhanced advisory services, a new Architect Certification Program, expanded partner learning, and new resources to help customers identify implementation partners best-suited to their aims.

Tyler Prince, Salesforce's executive vice president of industries, innovation and partners, told representatives of the consultancies, digital agencies and ISVs attending the partner keynote that Salesforce is focused on helping them meet the increasing demands of customers in an era of rapid disruption.

"Salesforce is a different kind of company. I hope we're a different kind of partner to you as well," Prince said.

The opportunity for Salesforce's channel is massive, Prince noted, citing an IDC report that predicts by 2024 the Salesforce ecosystem will generate six times more revenue than Salesforce itself.

"Most of that is represented by solutions and services you provide," Prince told partners.

Kai Hsiung, chief growth officer at Silverline, was one of those in attendance, as he's been for every Dreamforce partner keynote.

To eventually enable the 250,000 partners needed to support Benioff's $28 billion revenue target, "the partner program will have to grow and adjust based on the different partner types out there," Hsiung told CRN.

Salesforce is making a valiant effort to that, Hsiung said.

"The next step is to figure out how to rightsize the enablement based on partner size, industry focus, product focus, geographic focus," Hsiung said. And "they are very much in tune with the feedback partners like Silverline are providing them."

That's why this year Salesforce has introduced so many new partner programs and initiatives, while also ending programs that became less relevant, he added.

Lori Steele, Salesforce's executive vice president for global customer success and professional services, earned a round of applause when telling the keynote's attendees: "our purpose as an organization is not to compete with the partner ecosystem, but to work together, to collaborate and bring the best of Salesforce to our customers."

Currently, half of Salesforce professional services are delivered through partners. "That's good, but it's not good enough," Steele said.

Customers are "really looking for us to come together with shared goals, shared measures," she said.

To deliver more value through its channel, Salesforce is implementing a new engagement model through which Salesforce's advisory services arm looks to collaborate closer with the channel. Salesforce will bring partners into engagements at critical junctures in the customer lifecycle and work closely with them to ensure challenging integration projects are successful, Steele said.

Salesforce wants to leverage the capabilities of partners and complement their skills, while "doing the right thing for customers at the right time," she told Dreamforce attendees.

Enablement is another important component of that vision, she said, and the company is doing "brilliant things with Trailhead."

That Salesforce learning platform isn't just about training, but also bringing best practices to partners and offering them opportunities to shadow Salesforce engineers in the field.

Randy Davis, a partner at Chicago-based Salesforce consultancy Sikich, said Salesforce execs delivered "an inspiring message to the whole partner community" at the keynote.

That message is reflected in an increased investment in partner programs, Davis told CRN.

"As they grow, they need to rely on partners more," Davis said. "It's extremely important partners are enabled with the right training and resources to make customers successful."

Earlier this year, Salesforce launched Trailhead for Partners, a learning system aiming to help consultants develop the talent they need to fuel their growth. Building upon that, a Partner Learning Camp was introduced at this year's Dreamforce, powered by the customized myTrailhead platform.

Prince also suggested to partners they familiarize themselves with innovations on the AppExchange marketplace.

"At a rapid rate, customers are going on the AppExchange not only to find cool apps, but to find a consultant," Prince said. "Use this to your advantage."

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Dreamforce 2019: Salesforce Outlines Initiatives To Ignite Ecosystem Growth - CRN: The Biggest Tech News For Partners And The IT Channel

Ten Predictions On The Future Of Work, VC And The Tech Ecosystem For 2020 And Beyond – Forbes

Posted on November 21, 2019 by Danzig

What are YOUR tech, VC and future of work predictions for the year ahead?

Its that time of year. Not just for holiday shopping, expensive, crowded flights, and hopefully the creation of happy memories surrounded by loved ones. Its also that time when futurists ranging from academics and journalists to VCs like me get asked to contemplate all the ways in which budding trends will accelerate to a point that they begin to change the way we live, work and play. As an investor who focuses largely on the future of work, I spend a lot of time assessing how technological advances and economic and social change coalesce to impact the workforces of today and decades to come. So, here are my predictions for the year and decade about to begin.

Prediction 1: Direct listings will become the norm, not the exception. However, this is such a major change that it wont happen overnight. In 2019 we saw Pinterest and Slack both successfully direct list. In 2020 not only will more consumer brands direct list, but so will additional enterprise companies inspired by Slacks example. Slowly but surely over the next few years direct listings will emerge as the new best practice to capture value for founders, employees and investors. Wall Street will find new ways to extract value from this changing tide.

Prediction 2: Silicon Valley will fall a bit further from its perch at the pinnacle of tech innovation. Im not a Silicon Valley doomsayer. I believe that the nucleus of the worlds most mature tech ecosystem will continue to cultivate and nurture numerous innovative, game-changing startups to come. But I also believe that talent exists everywhere, and increasingly so does opportunity, so smaller tech hubs are giving Silicon Valley the fiercest competition of its existence. Outside of the US, Im excited about the continued growth of Indias vibrant tech ecosystem. Within the US, Im particularly bullish about the Pacific Northwest, which I believe will continue to gain ground on its larger, southern cousin as the third generation of spinoffs from Amazon and Microsoft and then newly minted unicorns like Auth0 and Outreach create a new tidal storm of B2B innovation.

Prediction 3: A significantly greater share of the professional workforce will shift from full-time to gig employees. Companies are always seeking to reduce costs and liabilities, but during a recession these efforts reach a fever pitch. Today many people think of Uber and Lyft drivers, Instacart and Postmates delivery workers and hair stylists when they think of gig employees, but the reality is that the gig economy is already far more wide-reaching. According to Deloitte, more than 40% of workers are currently employed in alternative work arrangements, such as gig and contract work. Over the next decade, that number will increase dramatically.

Prediction 4: The workforce will become dramatically more geographically distributed. Most experts agree that a recession is coming. The question isnt really about whether itll happen but when. When it does arrive, the recession will accelerate a number of trends already unrolling, the first of which is the rapid distribution of the enterprise workforce. Today geographically distributed teams are the exception. Within the next few years, theyll become the norm. Expect companies with 1 or 2 main offices to split into 4 or 5 smaller ones, and I expect a greater share of employees to work remotely several days a week or even permanently.

Prediction 5: The talent wars will remain fierce-- even during the recession. Even in a weak economy, businesses must hire and retain exceptional talent. This isnt to say that compensation and benefits will hold steady--they wont, but sought-after skills will remain in high-demand. To retain and develop employees while keeping their costs in check, enterprises will look to talent management tools that are both efficient and scalable. Expect to see more AI-based tools and fewer high-priced, in-person consultants.

Prediction 6: Any high-growth, low-margin company will face public scrutiny. In fact, we dont have to wait for 2020 for this to occur. The market pendulum is swinging away from growth at all costs towards efficiency and profitability-- especially among consumer goods firms where many of the unit economics are currently upside down. As my colleague Patricia Nakache told the New York Times, A lot of these highly valued companies have run into the buzz saw of Wall Streetreminding us that profitability matters.

Prediction 7: New KPIs will emerge as each companys north star. As SaaS becomes more ubiquitous and touches every industry vertical, net revenue retention, sales and marketing efficiency (for enterprise) and unit economics (for consumer) will become the north star metrics towards which all management teams and boards will manage and optimize.

Prediction 8: The next generation of VCs will finally assume the service role theyre paid to do. Venture capital still flows like water for especially talented entrepreneurs and promising startups. While for years VCs could rest on their wallets, the new guard of investors--the more service-oriented, extension-of-your-team sort--will overtake the old guard due to their willingness to serve their environment rather than assuming that everyone will adapt to them simply because they always have. As part of this transformation, the brands of VC firms will increasingly take a backseat to the brands of the individual partners who will come to be known among entrepreneurs not just for their savvy bets, but, equally importantly, for their service and value-add to entrepreneurs. The VCs who win will have the people skills to authentically connect with and win over founders, the go-to-market skills to help founding teams scale their businesses, and the work ethic to be known as a partner who doesnt just pick winners, but actually helps nurture and grow them.

Prediction 9: The fight to own the developer heart, mind and wallet will continue unabated. More than a decade ago, Steve Ballmer famously brought his developer-centric business strategy into the Internet mainstream with his classic, albeit cringe-worthy, developers, developers, developers chant. In proof that sometimes the best strategies have the most staying power, his mantra is still true today, even if the technologies the developers are building upon have long since evolved. In 2020, well see even more companies fight for the hearts and minds of developers--not just the major platform plays like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Oracle and Salesforce, but also a newer generation of tech giants like Zoom and Slack hoping to bring much-needed agility into the workplace. Developers should expect a lot of appreciation--and even more free t-shirts--to come their way.

Prediction 10: Software will continue to eat every vertical at a faster pace than ever before. It has been almost a decade since Marc Andreessen famously wrote in the Wall Street Journal that software is eating the world. His prediction proved to be sage because its just as true today as its ever been and will remain so in the decade to come. Even non-technology companies like WeWork pitched themselves as software companies in order to increase their value. Over the next decade, well see software devour the few remaining legacy verticals that have managed thus far to avoid digital transformation.

What do you think? What are YOUR tech, VC and future of work predictions for the year ahead? Share them with me on Twitter @kmehandru #FOWpredictions2020.

Galt Earth Day: Lucero Farms partners with the ecosystem – The Galt Herald

Posted on November 21, 2019 by Danzig

Editors note: This article is part of an ongoing series of articles that features local businesses that use clean, healthy and sustainable practices and are doing their part to help keep our earth beautiful. The series will lead up to the Galt Earth Day Celebration in April 2020 presented by the Galt Beautification Committee and the Galt Community of Character Coalition.

Curt and Pricella Lucero love the rolling hills and natural waterways that take water to their pond. They respect and protect the ecosystem of their organic farm. There is an amazing variety of birds that call their pond home.

When Curt was asked if the birds eat his crops, he said they actually help by eating the insects.

How do they handle the insects that eat their leafy vegetables, Curt said he grows enough for everybody. They are partners in the ecosystem.

They took land that had been used for grazing and now grow fields of vegetables and fruits to feed people locally and in the Bay Area.

After serving in the Army for 20 years, he came back to the family business of farming. It is a more peaceful life, but still challenging.

It takes patience to deal with the unpredictable weather. He grows the seeds in his greenhouse, plants the plants and if hail comes, he has to start over.

Lucero Organic Farms is an example of how the agricultural industry respects the earth.

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Galt Earth Day: Lucero Farms partners with the ecosystem - The Galt Herald

Why Your Organization Needs an Innovation Ecosystem – Harvard Business Review

Posted on November 21, 2019 by Danzig

Executive Summary

To ensure their companies stay innovative, leaders need to create an ecosystem that allows winning ideas to consistently emerge. In two decades of strategy consulting and research, the authors have learned that building such an ecosystem requires developing capabilities for exploring new ideas, experimentation, accepting failure, and working with external partners.

Ecosystems have become an important topic for business leaders. The pace of change in contemporary business environments means that the creation of value and decision making cannot be centralized. This is particularly true when it comes to innovation. Leaders need to accept that they dont always have the winning ideas and focus on creating an ecosystem that allows winning ideas to consistently emerge. In two decades of strategy consulting and research with over 100 companies, we have learned that building such an ecosystem requires developing capabilities for exploring new ideas, experimentation, accepting failure, and working with external partners.

The first step is for leaders to focus on how they manage their internal innovation teams. These teams should be managed using the same principles that are used to manage external startups. For example, instead of only selecting ideas that come from business plans and roadmaps, companies should take a portfolio approach that involves making multiple small bets on projects, tracking progress via key metrics, such as customer willingness to pay, and increasing investments only in those ideas that show evidence of traction. For this process to work, leaders have to accept that not all projects will work some will fail.

Our research and consulting work with Bosch provides an example of how to set up and manage an innovation pipeline with internal startups. The Bosch Accelerator Program provides a structured way for internal innovation teams to systematically validate the viability of their business ideas. Leaders and innovation managers select cohorts of 25-30 teams from all over the world that work together for 6-12 months. Teams receive an initial funding of approximately 120,000 and get three months to test whether their business-model ideas could scale. Depending on the results, teams can obtain an additional budget of 300,000 or more.

Since 2017, Bosch has invested in more than 169 teams. From these teams, 70% stopped their projects after the first investment and 72% of the remaining teams stopped after the second investment. With this process Bosch has discovered 14 teams that have successfully taken their projects to scale with follow-on funding.

Of course, even with the best in-house talent and innovation process, companies cannot come up with the best ideas on their own. Thats why a complete innovation ecosystem requires collaboration with external innovators. Just look at successful tech companies Tencent and Alibaba: according to the Financial Times, they generate over a third of their revenues from investments in external startups.

The banking industry is one arena in which incumbents have found it useful to work with external startups. Given the high number of emerging startups and technologies (in 2018 global venture capital investments in fintech startups set an annual record of $39.6 billion, with 1,463 companies raising funding), corporate leaders cant predict which fintech startups will eventually win the market. The best way to find out is to work with these startups by providing a collaborative platform that allows the best ideas to gain traction.

Several Nordic financial institutions we have interviewed and worked with recognized this challenge. Institutions such as Nordea, Spar Nord and Danske Bank co-funded and sponsored the creation of Copenhagen Fintech, an institution that gives large financial institutions access to invest in and collaborate with the startups. In our interviews with Thomas Krogh Jensen, the CEO of Copenhagen Fintech, he noted how collaborating with startups has provided companies with accelerated market validation and global scale.

We also conducted interviews with another member of the Copenhagen Fintech board, Ole Madsen, who is Senior Vice President of Spar Nord bank. Madsen and his team created an open platform on which fintech startups could build and test their applications. The aim was to give innovative startups access to a platform with a banking license and a large customer base. In return, Spar Nord gets access to the latest fintech innovations. So far, Madsen told us, the bank has invested in a dozen startup ideas, six of which have been successfully integrated onto the Spar Nord banking platform.

This ecosystem approach to innovation, leveraging talent both inside and outside of the company, is the best way to respond to a competitive, ever-changing environment. If leaders want to build a sustainable growth engine for the company, they need to create the right conditions for the best ideas to get picked up.

This article is part of a series connected to the 11th Global Peter Drucker Forum.

Ecosystem Kickstarter is a cardboard structure that fights soil erosion – Dezeen

Posted on November 21, 2019 by Danzig

Dutch designer Thom Bindels has developed Ecosystem Kickstarter, a honeycomb-shaped cardboard frame that can help small-scale farmers grow crops in degraded soil.

The simple, modular, cardboard system, which was first presented at Dutch Design Week, is embedded in a slope of degraded earth and filled with local soil.

This forms a terracing structure to prevent the runoff of seeds and nutrients in rainwater.

Ecosystem Kickstarter (Ecokick) biodegrades, and when it does it will grow a strip of "perennial terracing vegetation" because the cardboard is enriched with seeds and nutrients.

The resulting terraced crops fulfil the same stabilising function the cardboard originally served. In between these organic fortifications, food crops are protected from erosion and able to flourish.

Ultimately, this could break the vicious cycle of soil erosion, which is exacerbated by climate change as long periods of drought followed by brief, torrential rainfall mean that fertile top soil and seeds are flushed away before they get a chance to germinate.

This leads to a lack of vegetation, which in turn makes it even harder for water to penetrate into the baked soil in the future.

"When this process continues for too long, the ecosystem can no longer restore itself," Bindels told Dezeen. "A negative spiral of erosion causes a lack of nutrients in the soil, a lack of soil activity and a lack of groundwater."

"The point where an ecosystem is no longer able to restore itself is called the ecological threshold. But once the ecosystem is kickstarted back on top of this threshold, it will be able to maintain itself again," he continued.

To achieve this, the prototypes combine a number of existing anti-erosion practices used by farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa into one low-cost product for mass-production.

The manufacturing process starts in the project's workshop in Amsterdam, with thecardboard being folded into the double-layered honeycomb structure.

"After this we add six holes in the side and smaller ones at the top of the fold, to enable the germinating seeds to grow their roots and sprout through the top before the cardboard is decomposed," said Bindels, who studied at the Design Academy Eindhoven.

In the latest prototype, a solution of fertiliser is applied to the bottom of the cardboard strip and the seeds are added in a prepared strip that's slipped between the cardboard layers.

The structure is then closed with a paper fastener which connects the folds without adding extra material.

Once planted into the ground, the Ecokick protects the rooting system of the growing vegetation while in its most vulnerable stage. And as the cardboard finally decomposes, it gives carbon back into the soil.

"By building up carbon in the soil you not only store CO2 but together with the other nutrients, it can facilitate a good start for a fertile landscape," explained Bindels.

"Soil in areas that suffer from erosion often lacks organic matter, which is important for water retention and a healthy soil system full of fungi and bacteria."

In allowing the permanent system of terraced vegetation to put down roots, Ecokick improves the soil structure to enable farmers to grow their crops and push the ecosystem over that ecological threshold.

"By using the rooting structures of vegetation to stabilise the soil of the terraces, water can infiltrate and farmers can harvest the perennial vegetation to feed cattle while leaving the root structures intact and the plants alive," he said.

The team behind Ecokick has been testing the product on site in Uganda since last September, in order to develop the prototypes. And eventually, Bindels wants to create a simple, low-tech production line so that the product can be made locally, anywhere in the world.

This would not only embolden the local economy and make it more self-sufficient but also eliminate the carbon emissions associated with transporting the product.

"We want to set up collaborations with small-scale paper makers in Uganda to research possibilities on the usage of local fibres such as banana stem, papyrus or agricultural waste materials such as sugar cane," said Bindels.

By stipulating that the fibres used in the project can only come from sustainably managed lands, he hopes to give an added incentive to local farmers to adopt eco-friendly production methods.

Elsewhere, designers have been working to replace the plastic and cotton in our clothing with materials made from organisms such as algae, which rather than emitting carbon are capable of sequestering it.

In architecture, vertical farms have been explored as a way to bring nature back into our cities and offer a more sustainable alternative to current agricultural practices, as for example in a modular residential tower cum urban farm by Austrian studio Precht.

Photography is by Lou van Reemst and Thom Bindels.

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Ecosystem Kickstarter is a cardboard structure that fights soil erosion - Dezeen

Sapiens Expands Its Partnership Ecosystem With Lightico to Enhance Digital Customer Interactions for the Insurance Market – MarTech Series

Posted on November 21, 2019 by Danzig

Sapiens partners with Lightico to streamline the last mile of the insurance customer journey

Sapiens International Corporation, a leading global provider of software solutions for the insurance industry, announced it has expanded its growing ecosystem by partnering with Lightico, an industry leader that offers a next generation platform for digital customer interactions for the insurance market.

Todays consumers have been trained by companies like Amazon, Uber, Apple and Netflix to expect instant experiences anywhere, especially on their mobile phones. Lightico helps insurers and other businesses accelerate and simplify complex processes during the critical last mile of the customer journey, said Zviki Ben-Ishay, co-founder and CEO, Lightico. Our technology empowers businesses to deliver the instant digital experiences consumers demand by eliminating the ping-pong of paperwork, endless emails and redundant phone calls that plague sales and service processes.

Marketing Technology News: Accenture Interactive Completes Acquisition of French Data Marketing Firm Sutter Mills

Lightico was built to address the need to connect the front-end customer experience to back-end systems, and its technology aims to transform how businesses complete customer-facing processes. It has received more than 10 awards and recognitions for its innovative technology, including Amdocs Best Partner in the Digital Domain and Genesys App of the Year. The company was also recently a 2019 finalist for a CCW Excellence Award for Disruptive Technology of the Year.

Marketing Technology News: SAP and Mercedes-Benz EQ Formula E Team Power Up Their Business Performance Partnership

To help its clients speed sales, improve customer satisfaction and reduce claims cycle times, Sapiens will offer its relevant solutions, includingSapiens core P&C and life, pension and annuities offerings, with Lighticos industry-leading platform. This combined offering will free up agents to focus on their core business.

Sapiens is constantly analyzing new insurtech offerings, so that we can continue to enhance our product and services portfolio, and help our customers grow their business, said Roni Al-Dor, Sapiens president and CEO. Sapiens is excited about this partnership, which we believe will shift paperwork to digital processes, empowering insurers to close more sales and offer a premium customer experience to their customers.

Marketing Technology News: HP Introduces New 3D Printing Subscriptions, Services, and Partnerships to Accelerate Customers Digital Manufacturing Journey

How human and animal excrement harm the planet’s ecosystem – Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Posted on November 21, 2019 by Danzig

Cows emit potent greenhouse gases as they digest food. The vast amount of manure they produce is also contributing to the spread of antibiotic resistance. Credit: Feliciano Guimares. (Creative Commons.)

As Taro Gomis famous childrens book says, All living things eat, so everyone poops. Indeed, 7.6 billion humans and their domesticated animals are estimated to produce at least 4 trillion kilograms of poop each yearenough to fill approximately 1.6 million Olympic-sized swimming pools. The massive amount of human and animal excrement that we and our domesticated animals produce is changing the ecosystem of our planet in dangerous ways.

All this poop has to go somewhere, and much of it gets spread on agricultural fields as fertilizer. Soils need the microbes and nutrients in manure to be healthy, but were not managing manure properly, and the mismanagement is causing serious environmental and health problems. Current methods for managing and using agricultural manuredomesticated animals account for about 85 percent of the feces produced in a yearspread antimicrobial resistance genes, contaminate crops and waterways with microbes, and produce potent greenhouse gas emissions such as methane and nitrous oxide.

Poop is spreading antimicrobial resistance. Excessive antibiotic use in humans and animals has resulted in an increase in the number of resistant bacteria in the environment. Those bacteria can be found in the vast quantities of human and animal feces modern civilization and agriculture producea waste stream that, when it mixes with soil, helps to spread antibiotic resistance to other microbes at alarming speed. Research on DNA in the soil is shedding light on the scope of the problem.

For decades, nobody knew what microbes existed in the soil, because most soil microbes couldnt be cultured in laboratories. This changed once scientists began using a new technology called metagenomics to extract DNA directly from the soil. Metagenomics can assess the genetic material present in environments. While the technique doesnt allow researchers to identify individual microbes, the DNA soil findings were nonetheless astounding. Antibiotic resistance genes were everywhere, including in soils from the Arctic, the Antarctic, and other areas that had never received anthropogenic antibiotic exposure. These antibiotic resistance genes appeared to be ancient and to pre-date human antibiotic use.

Microbes appear to use antibiotics as a form of communication. To handle these antibiotics, microbes have evolved resistance genes. To describe the spread of these genes, scientists have coined a term: the global resistome. Excessive use of antibiotics in medicine and agriculture have affected this world wide web of resistance genes. By inundating the planet with manureexposing soils to antibiotics and to antibiotic resistance geneswe are changing its microbial ecology. As a result, microbes are sharing antibiotic resistance genes with each other. And they are doing this much faster than pharmaceutical companies can develop new antibiotics.

Cattle, manure, and climate change. Of course, animal manure is doing more than just helping spread antibiotic resistance; its also contributing to climate change. Massive amounts of manure emit methane and nitrous oxide, which are much more potent greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide. Ruminant animals like cows also produce emissions when they belch or pass gas. These manure and digestive emissions account for 7 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The chief offenders responsible for this alarming figure are beef and dairy cattle, which produce about 62 percent of such emissions. The amount of methane produced during the process by which cows and other ruminants digest food, which is called enteric fermentation, varies depending upon feed quality and composition.

Policies to reduce livestock emissions must focus on three areas: enteric fermentation, manure management, and feed management. The good news is there are some methods that can help. High feed quality and feed additives such as bromoform, an organic compound found in seaweed, may reduce methane emissions from enteric fermentation by 50 to 90 percent, but the compounds still require more testing. Storing manure in liquid form in ponds or lagoons emits more methane than storing it in solid form. Methane digesters, meanwhile, can capture the gas emitted from manure and convert it to renewable energy. However, these technologies are not cheap and require financial incentives if they are to be widely adopted; Europe has embraced such incentives more effectively than the United States has.

The massive amounts of human and animal feces produced each year require improved national and international policies and state-of-the-art technologies to address the impacts it has on global health, the planets biome, and the atmosphere. If we want to live sustainably in our microbial world, we need to address poop.

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How human and animal excrement harm the planet's ecosystem - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Working in Partnership to Power the News Ecosystem – Reuters

Posted on November 21, 2019 by Danzig

As the worlds largest news provider, Reuters has a unique place in the industry. Reuters Connect sits at the heart of our business; an award-winning digital platform that powers the news ecosystem, bringing content and customers together.

Reuters Connect News Agency Partners

Today, we are excited to announce that Reuters Connect is growing, as we move to make it the most comprehensive collection of real-time, multimedia news content anywhere in the world, offering our customers an unrivaled breadth and depth of content.

Let me explain how.

Reuters works with news organizations and publishers of all sizes around the world. With a birds eye view of the industry, we can see how digital transformation is affecting our customers. For example, we know its more important than ever for news providers to reach beyond traditional borders. Our data tells us that news which once would have been considered domestic or local, now has global appeal, as the world is getting smaller; Brexit is a topic of conversation in Birmingham, Alabama, as well as Birmingham in the UK.

We are addressing that opportunity through strategic partnerships with the news agencies that fuel our industry. Reuters has both a world-class newsroom and a powerful global distribution network. Now we are opening up our distribution network to provide agencies of all sizes with truly global reach.

Through our new partnerships, we will offer customers the best global news agency content in one place, with contributions from all parts of the world, alongside Reuters own outstanding journalism.

Were delighted to announce seven new agencies are joining the Reuters Connect platform today, in addition to the eight already there. By leveraging Reuters global distribution network, all our partners can better monetize their content and elevate their brands.

This new partner content complements the vast output from our own world-class newsroom of around 2,500 journalists in 200 locations worldwide. Combining the output from Reuters news with our 60-plus content partners, we currently offer more than 20 million pieces of news content; videos, pictures and text stories. A staggering total that only grows with each passing day.

Importantly, customers can access this incredible array of content through Connect Points, which gives them the freedom to choose the content that suits their needs.

As the news ecosystem gets bigger and more complex, Reuters Connect provides a single destination that brings buyers and sellers together on a simple, digital platform. Our latest partnerships will help us create the most comprehensive news platform available. We hope youll join us.

Media Contact:

joel.ivory-harte@thomsonreuters.com

[Reuters PR Blog Post]

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Working in Partnership to Power the News Ecosystem - Reuters

Mellanox, JVP To Develop Haifa’s Tech And Innovation Ecosystem With $14M Investment | Technology News – NoCamels – Israeli Innovation News

Posted on November 21, 2019 by Danzig

Israels Mellanox Technologies and Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP) are part of a group that won a tender this week by the Israeli Innovation Authority to develop Haifas technology and innovation ecosystem with an investment of NIS 50 million ($14 million) over the next four years.

Mellanox and JVP are joined by Mati Haifa, an innovation center that nurtures Haifa-based startups in development, and the Israel Initiative 2020, an NGO led by JVP founder Dr. Erel Margalit that works to bridge socio-economic gaps in Israel, to form the ILAB group.

ILAB will receive a NIS 25 million ($7.22 million) grant from the Israel Innovation Authority and will match that amount to promote and integrate extensive entrepreneurial activity in the city.

SEE ALSO: M&Ms, Snickers Maker Inks R&D Deal With JVP For Israeli Food Tech Solutions

The goal is to turn Haifa into a major innovation center in the areas of digital health, energy environment, advanced industry 4.0, and smart transport, the group said in a statement. ILAB has had a similar goal over the past three decades to transform the downtown area of Haifa into a vibrant entrepreneurial, social, and cultural district while creating an affinity for Haifas ecosystem, leveraging the citys human capital, hospital, research institutions, and companies, and encouraging entrepreneurship and prosperity of the citys diverse population.

ILAB plans to support 150 startups by establishing dedicated workspaces and launching unique acceleration programs across the city. The group will also set up an innovation and entrepreneurship center in the downtown area for startups.

Haifa is not only the capital of the north but also the first city from which Israeli high-tech emerged, Dr. Margalit said in a statement. We will bring Haifa back to the forefront of the global high-tech scene and position the city as one of Israels innovation capitals.

The connection between investors and companies JVP, Mellanox, Mati Haifa, and academic institutions such as the Technion and the University of Haifa, will not only bring investment and startups to Haifa, but also breathe life into downtown Haifa and make it a place that young people not only want to work in but stay and create the next big thing. We are proud to be the first venture capital fund to launch investment activities in Haifa.

Mellanox Technologies started 20 years ago as a startup company and still maintains that spirit. We appreciate the vision, courage and entrepreneurial spirit that underpins technology ventures in their early stages, said Eyal Waldman, CEO and founder of Mellanox, which is set to be acquired by Nvidia for close to $7 billion in a deal announced earlier this year.

SEE ALSO: Nvidia To Acquire Israels Mellanox Technologies For $6.9 Billion

We believe that through ILAB, Mellanox will help realize Haifa and northern Israels technological potential by contributing from its experience as a startup and through its extensive global network, Waldman said.

The combination of the Innovation Authoritys budgets along with the capital coming from leading businesses and efficient resource management is what is needed for local startups in Haifa to prevent negative immigration of young people and spur unprecedented technological entrepreneurship, said Eran Alfonte, CEO of Mati Haifa.

Entrepreneurs and startups involved in the initiative will be able to tap intoJVPs and Mellanoxs international business relationships as well as benefit from their investment abilities, tech platforms, and experience with regional branding and development.

Last year, JVP inaugurated a new, international digital health center in Haifas downtown area.

JVP has also been pursuing food tech innovation in northern Israel, opening a food tech accelerator in Kiryat Shmona in the Galilee last year.

The food tech center is also part of Margalits Israel Initiative 2020 economic development plan to create tech hubs in seven regions in Israel that are remote to Tel Aviv, in hopes of bringing more families and young professionals to live in those areas and upping the standard of living.

Read this article:

Mellanox, JVP To Develop Haifa's Tech And Innovation Ecosystem With $14M Investment | Technology News - NoCamels - Israeli Innovation News

Oracle’s Aubrey Hawes on Open Banking and ecosystem building – Tearsheet

Posted on November 21, 2019 by Danzig

Podcasts

Zack Miller | November 14, 2019

Todays guest is Aubrey Hawes who leads Oracles sales consulting team around its banking products, including open banking and core banking monetization. The software provider began early, thinking about the move to open banking and charting a path to open APIs. The company today has 2000 APIs used by hundreds of the largest banks in the world. Oracle also encourages ecosystem building on its platform, including some of the top fintech firms as well as emerging new players.

We discuss Oracles work in financial services and the challenges and opportunities its clients face. Aubrey describes the tech firms approach to open banking and the various initiatives Oracle undertakes to drive the growth and depth of its fintech ecosystem.

Subscribe:Apple PodcastsISoundCloudISpotifyIGoogle PodcastsThe following excerpts were edited for clarity.

Oracles been in the banking vertical software space for over ten years. We made several acquisitions the largest was i-flex that built core banking applications it deployed around the globe. Based on that deep understanding of financial services, we started to see the opening up of the banking ecosystem and a reduction in costs in the move to the cloud. Not everyone needs to buy a Sun Microsystem server. Now, you can create creative solutions with low-cost cloud computing.

We saw an opportunity to define APIs that allow new startups to co-exist and integrate with banks. Theres a symbiotic relationship between banks and fintechs that help institutions reach new markets and new customers. They are complementary. That drove us to develop a robust set of APIs.

We started our work around open APIs around five years ago. When we launched, we probably had about 250 APIs. Now, we have over 1600 APIs and expanded our capabilities beyond consumer retail to the corporate side of the bank. As we released the APIs, weve shared them with our existing installed base.

Weve also run hackathons where we brought in fintechs to build on top of these APIs to help their fintech ideas come to life with real banking data. The most recent one we did was at SIBOS in the UK where we started to pull in some unique companies. One was Bankifi, which gives microbusinesses the ability to do accounts payable and payments as a value-added service on top of a deposit account at the bank. Personetics is an AI chatbot engine which requires a robust set of services it can call to get answers.

Oracle for Startups is our program which gives startups resources to develop on Oracle. Were seeing an explosion of smaller startups and our program incentivizes them to develop on our platform in a cost-effective way. In fintech, we work to nurture startups in our industry. Why wouldnt fintechs want to partner with us? We have over 500 core banking deployments around the globe.

The largest banks typically have their own innovation programs and curate their own sets of fintech companies they want to collaborate with. If youre not a large bank, you probably dont have the resources to do that. The fact that Oracle has a set of fintechs that work with our open APIs gives these banks a ready set of technologies that they can plug in around chatbots or identity verification or KYC. Weve mapped the different functional types of fintechs we can work with so we could go provide these to our banking clients around their needs.

A good example of our work in the space is KeyBank. Its a top 20 US bank, a super-regional headquartered out of Cleveland. We started with digitization of their self service strategy. The bank is also branding its work in financial wellness, the same way we care about our physical health. To do that, they needed to modernize their experiences which included a couple of acquisitions, including HelloWallet.

Charlotte is the number two banking hub in the U.S. Bank of America is headquartered here and Truist, the merged entity of SunTrust and BB&T, will be based here as well. Fifth Third, Wells Fargo, Ally, MetLife, Aflac Ventures, AIG all have large presences here to access the local talent.

Charlotte launched the non-profit Carolina Fintech Hub which has the backing of banks, EY, and Oracle. Theres a community effort to look at attracting more fintech to Charlotte we already have a few like Avid Exchange and LendingTree. We want to attract talent to the area. Weve also launched a workforce initiative to address economic mobility in the city. The fintech hub is looking at getting talent that has aptitude and giving them formal training to get work in the industry.

Link:

Oracle's Aubrey Hawes on Open Banking and ecosystem building - Tearsheet

Britain’s Liberal Democrats party drops candidate over posts on Jews – The Times of Israel

Posted on November 21, 2019 by Danzig

The Liberal Democrats party in Britain suspended a candidate for parliament over social media posts it deemed anti-Semitic.

Waheed Rafiq, a candidate from Birmingham, posted on Facebook in 2010: shocking to see how the Jewish government call them self Jews when they are wiping out all the people of Gaza, The Guardian reported Wednesday.

In a post from 2014, Rafiq called on his Facebook friends to boycott WhatsApp because he claimed it was Zionist backed, and promoted a trope about the Rothschilds family of bankers, who are Jewish.

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Please note Jeff Rothschild is the Vice President of Infrastructure software and thus also a share holder in Facebook, he wrote. There are other non Zionist apps such as the Telegram Messaging App. Its available on both android and apple users created by two brothers in Berlin. Its better encrypted, much safer and thus better than WhatsApp.

A screen capture of a caricature that Waheed Rafiq shared on Twitter in 2012.

Never forget WhatsApp is Zionist backed so all we do and say is monitored and can leave us vulnerable to be exploited later.

In 2012, he tweeted a picture of a snarling man with a large hooked nose and sharp teeth and a helmet with a Star of David licking a popsicle bearing the colors of the Palestinian flag.

It is utterly inexcusable to share a hideously antisemitic cartoon of a hook-nosed, bloodthirsty Jew or to rant about people using Zionist websites, Board of Deputies President Marie van der Zyl wrote in a statement calling for Rafiqs expulsion from the party.

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Britain's Liberal Democrats party drops candidate over posts on Jews - The Times of Israel

The crisis of liberalism: why centrist politics can no longer explain the world – The Guardian

Posted on November 21, 2019 by Danzig

We know were living through a period of crisis, but its sometimes hard to know of what kind. The financial crash of 2007-8 seemed to mark the beginning of the most recent crisis of capitalism; 2016 brought news of a crisis of democracy, and the political and constitutional crisis created by Brexit marks its second act. Every day the climate crisis heats up. Crisis has become the new normal.

Its often said that we are also witnessing a crisis of liberalism: liberal norms are being eroded, institutions are under threat, and across Europe, parties of the centre are haemorrhaging votes. Meanwhile, the critics of centrism are louder than they have been for years. Even many in the mainstream of British politics have begun to acknowledge that in the past decade centrists have been neoliberalisms willing bedfellows, supporting policies to shrink the welfare state and crush unions. Liberal centrism has left people behind, and in its support for free markets and globalisation, created new forms of exclusion. More damning critiques are also gaining currency: that the liberal way of running politics was always bound up with imperialism and colonialism, sceptical of democracy and workers and a cover for capitalist exploitation. Even the Financial Times the pinnacle of economic liberalism recently argued that the capitalist model needs to be reset .

So liberal centrists arent wrong that their institutions, parties and ideas are being challenged. But the problem may be a deeper one: that the categories of mainstream politics as we know it can no longer explain the world.

As an ideology, liberalism can be hard to pin down. Its capacious and it has adapted throughout history. From John Locke to John Maynard Keynes, liberals have prioritised the values of liberty and equality (though theyve disagreed about how much the latter matters to the former and what those values mean in everyday politics). They have supported the rule of law, rights and representation, as well as private property, markets and, for the most part, capitalism against socialism. During the cold war, liberals often defended the status quo, seeing a slide into totalitarianism behind every scheme for political change. There is a long liberal tradition of attacking the left to defend the centre. In the 1980s, a faction of Labour MPs left the party to found the SDP. In the 90s, as New Labour disciplined the partys left wing, liberalism took the form of the Third Way. Today, many liberal centrists paint Jeremy Corbyn as an extremist on a par with Boris Johnson, and draw false equivalence between left and right.

At the end of the 1990s, there was one thing that many liberals shared: an optimism about the direction of history

Yet in many countries, Britain included, liberals also helped to build the welfare state and have used the machinery of central government to enact progressive reforms and benefit the poor defending the NHS, civil and human rights, social equality, migration. Often, they aimed not to liberate workers but compromise with them, in order to minimise the risks individuals face. Social liberals have sometimes opposed economic liberals: the concern to limit inequality has trumped the defence of laissez-faire and capital markets. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown enshrined minimum wage laws but encouraged the privatisation of public services; they founded Sure Start but helped sell off the NHS.

At the end of the 1990s, there was one thing that many liberals shared: an optimism about the direction of history and about the fate of liberalism. Famously many agreed that history had ended, following the end of the cold war. All that was needed was steady incremental reform of the status quo. These 90s assumptions survived well into the new century. We now know that such declarations were hugely complacent. The biggest mistake of liberalism was thinking it was all over.

Today, few have properly come to terms with that mistake. Many are on the back foot, insisting that any move away from their ideas marks a step backwards into a far nastier history. Such defensiveness is not novel: liberalism has often been a negative sort of politics a politics of second best that protects against worse scenarios. Liberals have been the first to prophesy new end times the demise of democracy and the Pax Americana and see in Brexit and Trump a slippery slope to war and fascism. Where conservatives look to restore a lost past, liberals defend the gradual reform of an established order and respond aggressively to any threat to it, whether real or imagined.

All this worry about values and norms makes it possible to miss the fact that liberalism as an ideology still dominates how we see the world. It does not just occupy a place between left and right; it cuts across both.

The liberal worldview frames politics as something that happens mostly in Westminster, and about which most voters care little, so it downplays the politics of everyday life in the home and workplace. On this view, the political realm is inhabited by powerful individuals whose decisions make a difference, and who operate in institutions that are neutral. Values conflict, but compromise is the aim except where liberal values are deemed to be threatened; it can sometimes seem that liberals believe in the possibility of consensus, but only if the other side accept the basic facts that liberals hold as true. This can mean touting virtues in principle but refusing them in practice: the Liberal Democrats demanding compromise and cooperation while they reject a Corbyn-led coalition is a case in point.

For liberal remainers, Brexit is either a giant misunderstanding or a mistake: it has been brought about by voters lack of knowledge, or by party misjudgments and the rightwing media; it has been prolonged by Rasputin-like advisers (whether Dominic Cummings or Seumas Milne). Undoubtedly, centrist thinkers, with their focus on institutions and those who control them, can provide answers to important questions: how the common law relates to the constitution; how EU regulations and the referendum dilute parliamentary sovereignty. At a time when we are meant to have had enough of experts, it is ironic that expert knowledge is in extremely high demand in public institutions in the civil service, parliament, the courts, and the press. But its easy to mistake symptoms for causes. Though Brexit will surely have disastrous consequences hurtling us towards a neoliberal, deregulated and depressed Britain with an empowered right on the rise that doesnt mean the liberal diagnosis tells the full story.

Hampered by the need to defend the EU as a site of cosmopolitanism in the name of stopping Brexit, many remainers have framed any opposition as a threat to a political order that has no need for change. The rightward drift of the Lib Dems as they look to rebuild their vote by becoming the party of remain illustrates this bias to the status quo. For all its references to history (particularly to the totalitarian threats of the 1930s), the current liberal vision is often quite ahistorical: we dont hear much about Britain before the referendum. Even the most radical version of liberal centrism has only a partial diagnosis: it points to rising inequality and a growing generational and educational gap. Liberals may focus on defending norms, but norms themselves are only how particular political settlements are made legitimate. They dont tell us much about the limits of the settlement itself.

The view of Brexit and Trump as a crisis of institutions, norms or civility, and the focus on the narcissism or hubris of political personalities, is too limited. The alternative is not merely to accept the narratives of the right that Brexit is about a defence of sovereignty or kicking it to liberal elites. Both of these inhabit the conventional terms of debate. By slipping into a kneejerk defence of the status quo, we risk not understanding where the threats come from and how they can be fought. By focusing on individuals, we ignore how classes are changing. By looking to reason and forgetting ideology, we miss the pleasures of resentment and commitment, and how new political forces have developed to capitalise on those pleasures in particular how the Conservative party has reinvigorated itself by building new class alliances and using a heady mix of Thatcherite, nationalist and colonial tropes (a strategy that is haphazard but may well prove successful).

If we define politics too narrowly and dwell on historical parallels, we miss our own history and the social and economic changes that have paved the way to where we are now a situation where the institutions and infrastructure of British public life are dysfunctional, where productivity, investment and wages are low, where the public sector has been hollowed out and the steady job all but disappeared. If we worry only about the breakdown of parliamentary checks-and-balances, we miss that this gives the lie to the liberal dream that certain institutions are neutral and beyond politics. When we see the rise of the right in terms of a crisis of civility, we fail to ask what resentments the veneer of civility masks, as well as who it benefits and harms. When we focus on constitutional crisis, we risk forgetting how Brexit manifests deeper disruptions and social instability and that the coming election is also about our prospects for fixing these.

We risk forgetting how Brexit manifests deeper disruptions and social instability

These alternative diagnoses have major implications. The end of the liberal dream of neutrality opens up a view of the world where politics is found in new places the courts, the market, the workplace, the home and where political analysts take seriously arguments that have long been made by those outside mainstream politics, who have been marginalised by class, race, gender, geography, immigration status and age. This may be unsettling, but it can point us away from the old divisions of parliament versus the people, so easily deployed by the right and point to new battle lines: not between norms and their violation, or Brexit and its reversal, but to what we want for the future of the UK.

Crucially, these diagnoses can also show us where the deeper political crisis lies. The lasting damage to Britain may not be caused only by the constitutional chaos, but by the long-term collapse, defunding and decay of our public institutions the NHS, legal aid, our underfunded schools. Paradoxically, it was the stability of such institutions that made liberal centrism make sense as a way of thinking about politics. With public institutions dysfunctional and liberal democracy hollowed out, liberalism no longer looks like an ideology that can explain the world: its basis falls away. Liberal political thinking is stuck. It can no longer give a convincing account of politics, except to describe whats happening as an assault on itself. What would help liberalism make sense again is the rebuilding of those public institutions. It is an irony for liberals that this is precisely what the Labour party today is proposing.

What is needed is a longer and wider view than the liberal vision of politics allows one that enables us to see how social, economic and ideological changes intersect with and shape personality and procedure. This is why elements in the press have started to listen to the left once again, discussing resetting capitalism in the context of inequality and climate crisis, and engaging with talk of interests, class and ideology that has for so long been labelled as irrelevant. Now liberals also have to choose: to stay where they are and try to squeeze new developments into old paradigms, or to recognise these limits. Instead of a revival of liberalism, we might need a reckoning with it.

Katrina Forresters In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy is published by Princeton.

Originally posted here:

The crisis of liberalism: why centrist politics can no longer explain the world - The Guardian

mile Durkheim and the Religion of Liberal Democracy – Tablet Magazine

Posted on November 21, 2019 by Danzig

The end of the 19th century, as the Dreyfus affair shook France and anti-Semitism surfaced as a political force, was not an obvious moment for a French Jew to rediscover optimism. mile Durkheim (1858-1917), the countrys foremost sociologist, was an especially unlikely candidate for hope. He had spent the last decade in a state of well-informed anxiety. His research seemed to show that economic tensions and cultural fragmentation were unraveling the conditions for collective existence in France and throughout the world.

The 1894 condemnation of Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus by a French military tribunal on false evidence, and the ensuing partisan, virulently anti-Semitic efforts to prevent a retrial, might have confirmed Durkheims despair. Instead it revitalized his faith in France and its liberal democracy. This faith was not metaphorical. Durkheim insisted, to the chagrin of allies and opponents ever since, that democracy was a religion, and the rights-bearing individual its god. A century later, as individual rights and popular sovereignty are increasingly embattled, Durkheims intellectual legacy challenges defenders of liberalism to embrace emotion, community, and faith.

A rabbis son, Durkheim left the religion of his childhood to study philosophy in Paris. At 29, he began to teach, offering courses on political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. These forebears, he found, had made a fatal error. Basing their theories on the notion that individuals, naturally endowed with liberty, had been brought together in an artificial social contract, they saw society as something extrinsic to human nature, and philosophical speculation as something prior to empirical research. They devised ideal constitutions in which a general will, embodied by a monarch or a majority opinion, would dominate the selfish desires of individuals. Yet these philosophers seemed to know little about individuals, society, and the state as we find them in the world. If we want to know about the nature of things or the rules for living, Durkheim chided, we must go back to things themselves, and thus to science.

Durkheim became one of the founders of sociology, a budding discipline meant to provide scientific knowledge about topics that had long been the preserve of speculation and belief. In the following decade of the 1890s, he wrote a manifesto, The Rules of Sociological Method (1894), that called for empirical research into human behavior and the evolution of social structuresonly after this kind of study, he argued, could political and ethical theorizing proceed on a sound basis. However Durkheims research for The Division of Labor (1893) and Suicide (1897) brought him to a precipice of despair.

Inspired by biology, Durkheim tried to explain why people in capitalist societies, bound by complex networks of exchange, seemed to be drifting ever further apart. Think, he asked readers, of the finches Charles Darwin had studied in the Galapagos Islands. Under the pressure of competition for resources, the members of a single species separated into a variety of new ones, each with physical features adapted to different sources of food. In what seemed to be an impeccably scientific analogy, Durkheim argued that people and societies evolve in just the same way. Members of traditional, pre-modern societies, like the original finches, are more or less identical to each other. The pressure of capitalist competition introduces a principle of differentiation, as people divide themselves into increasingly specialized economic roles, with finely tailored lifestyles, identities, and values to match.

In its economic form, as the division of labor, this growing specialization permits a vast increase in societys productive powersbut with dire social and psychological consequences. Traditional bonds of religion and family collapse, and individuals, ironically isolated by the economic forces that overwhelm them all, take refuge in illusory communities, which are too frail to bear the weight of human fate. The anarchist, the aesthete, the mystic and the socialist revolutionary, he warned, all hasten societys demise.

Durkheim saw little remedy for this crisis. Modern capitalist societies like France were losing the shared sets of values and points of reference that make life bearable, breaking down into fleeting, fragmentary tribes whose members were aggressively narcissistic and desperately lonesome. Even if by some incomprehensible miracle there appeared a moral code to reunite society, the competitive logic of the capitalist system would drive its members again into self-centeredness and division.

***

While Durkheim was researching his way into hopelessness, the 1894 condemnation of Dreyfus was transforming French politics. By 1898, many of the countrys most eminent writers, artists and scholars had come to Dreyfus defense. The more politically savvy of Dreyfus defenders, the Dreyfusards, saw his unjust sentence as an opportunity to defend the principles of human rights and to weaken the army, a bastion of conservatives who seemed to be waiting for their own chance to sabotage the Third Republic, Frances liberal democratic regime. But the republics enemies also sensed an opportunity.

Founded in 1870 after decades of authoritarian rule and frequent coups, the republic appeared to many French observers as a creation of Jews, Protestants and nonbelievers. These minorities were accused of using the forms of liberal democracy, such as an emphasis on individual rights, to protect themselves fromand indeed to oppressFrances Catholic majority.

The grain of truth in the anti-republic perspective was that minorities did have good reason to see the republic as their best defense against intolerance. The Dreyfus affair offered anti-republicans a chance to exploit anti-Semitic prejudice, charging that Dreyfus defenders treacherously insisted on the rights of the accused in order to undermine Frances national defense. If Dreyfus name were cleared, conservatives warned, military morale would plummet, leaving the nation vulnerable to a rising Germany. The rights of a single individualespecially a Jewcould not be allowed to imperil the needs of the entire country. This argument, bruited by many anti-Dreyfusards, was delivered with particular flair by literary editor Ferdinand Brunetire in an 1898 article, After the Trial.

Brunetire argued that the affair had revealed a fundamental conflict within the Third Republic between responsible people who accepted that the needs of the community must overrun individual rights, and the anarchists, socialists and radical individualists who were willing to risk the very existence of France for the sake of a single persons freedom. This was an argument that Durkheim could understand, one that might have appealed to his own concern about the pernicious individualizing forces of modern society. But Durkheim had changed his mind. In a series of essays written in 1898 and 1899, he answered Brunetire, defended the Dreyfusards, and outlined a vision of society and politics that shattered his earlier pessimism.

Durkheims thinking was transformed by an empathetic and critical engagement with the anti-Dreyfusards. In an essay on anti-Semitism, he dismissed the idea that Dreyfus opponents were motivated by hatred and prejudice. Anti-Semitism, he insisted, was an expression of capitalist societies economic troubles and moral distress, phenomena he had documented himself. Ordinary people, no less than sociologists, seek explanations for the bewilderments of modernity and, too often, find scapegoats.

In Suicide, written only a few years earlier, Durkheim saw the ideologies that arose in response to contemporary capitalism as mere continuations of its atomizing tendencies. Now, reflecting on the French response to Dreyfus convinction in 1894, Durkheim recalled a surge of joy on the boulevards. The French crowds had been delighted, Durkheim suggested, not because they had an excuse to persecute a member of a despised minority, but because they had been relieved to find themselves gathered together before an explanation and an answer to their sufferings. The structure of anti-Semitism suggested a way out of the troubles and distress of modern society: a shared longing for a comprehensible world.

The anarchist, the aesthete, the mystic and the socialist revolutionary, mile Durkheim warned, all hasten societys demise.

In a companion essay on militarism, Durkheim deepened his analysis of the anti-Dreyfus camp. Like anti-Semitism, militarism now appeared to him as a distorted form of a vital social imperative. He argued that the French people, seeing the army as their defense against Germany, had made it the object of a cult something untouchable and sacred. By sacrificing the innocent Dreyfus, they were trying to appease their god.

Durkheim could have lingered on the cruelty and irrationality of this sacrifice. Instead, he suggested that the task of liberals was to find a better cult. The French needed other ideas in which they can commune with each other, other ends to pursue in common. The Dreyfusards would have to offer not only political principles, such as individual rights, but also a sense of belonging, a form of collectivity organized around transcendent values and directed toward the realization of concrete ends. Dreyfus would be saved not by mere appeals to due process, but by a cult of justice, a collective passion for individual rights.

Such a religion of individual rights could hardly be whipped together for the occasion, Durkheim noted. But in an 1898 essay, Individualism and the Intellectuals, he argued that this religion was in fact already the common faith of France.

In another paradoxical argument, a match for his claims that the anti-Dreyfusards were motivated by a misguided love of truth and community, Durkheim set out to prove that the Dreyfusards insistence on the rights of a single person was an act of worship that united the members of the French nation to their countrymen and to a shared past. In doing so, Durkheim confronted Brunetires critique of individualism, which so resembled his own earlier assessments of modern society. Brunetire had argued that liberal democracy weakened the nation by emphasizing individual rights over the needs of the group: Countering Brunetire, Durkheim paradoxically traced the history of these rights, beginning with the Enlightenment philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau who first conceived of them.

***

The Dreyfus affair had given Durkheim a new, ironic perspective on the Enlightenment project. Years before, the theories of Rousseau and his colleagues had struck Durkheim as shallow and idealistic. They had suggested that society was only a kind of contract to protect the rights of the individuals who composed it, but, as Durkheim the sociologist had showed, it was society that created individuals, not the other way around. The philosophers had been wrong about human nature and the relationship between individuals and societyyet, however mistaken, their ideas had entered into the repertoire of beliefs and prejudices shared by most French people, and so in the process attained an unexpected kind of truth.

The key ideas of liberalismthat society is founded by and composed of originally isolated rights-bearing individuals, and that the legitimacy of the state is based on its offering protection to individuals rightsare false from a scientific or philosophic point of view, Durkheim argued, in that they are unable to stand up to critical scrutiny. But they have become, as it were, effectively true, or true enough. French people believe in the existence of the liberal individual and see their history as the story of his triumph.

It was the religious fervor of the Dreyfusards that seems to have set Durkheim on this path of thought. After all, Durkheim observed, it should surprise us that thousands of people could be so committed to the defense of a single stranger. What mere individual can be worth risking the safety of a whole country? Something more than scientific or philosophical rationality must be at work. When we are horrified by violations of someones rights, Durkheim argued, we are experiencing the disgust and fear that religious believers feel when something sacred and inviolable is being transgressedthough we are not much concerned about the actual person whose rights are being violated, the particular being that constitutes himself and carries his name.

Thus it was not really Dreyfus whom the Dreyfusards wanted to defend, but an impersonal and anonymous individual, an abstract humanity in which all members of liberal democracies share. As Durkheim said: man has become a god to man each individual mind has within it something of the divine, marked by a characteristic which renders it sacred and inviolable.

Liberal democracy, Durkheim argued, is therefore best understood not as an accurate or even rational set of claims about the proper relationship between individuals and society, but rather as a religion that enshrines and celebrates the rights of the ideal, abstract individual, who is its god.

Against Brunetires charges that an exaggerated respect for individual rights was endangering the French nation, Durkheim countered that it was this religion that was its very soul. For this reason, Durkheim warned, the goal of a cosmopolitan order in which the nation-state might disappear was an illusionliberal norms can only be sustained by a community of believers rooted in shared patterns of life and circuits of feeling. Until the end of his life, despite the growing influence of international socialist movements, Durkheim hoped that French socialists would return to French traditions and abandon the dream of a global revolution; liberal democracy is a religion, but it is a national, not a universal belief system.

***

After the deceptions of his fathers Judaism, Enlightenment philosophy, and the scientific study of society, Durkheim had found what he recognized to be a new faith. For the next two decades, until his death in 1917, he would devote himself to proving that all societies have a religious basis (in his Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1913) and to providing French teachers with the courage to embrace their role as priests of the republic. They must instill in children a democratic morality, built of respect for individual rights and love for the nation. History, for example, should be taught as the achievement of the former by the latter: the child, and later the adult, will learn that the rights that are granted to them, the freedom that they enjoy, the moral dignity that they believe themselves to possess, all of these are the creation of that personal but impersonal being we call France. Only by confronting rigidly enforced rules will children learn to respect something greater than themselvesthe basic attitude required for all religions, including that of liberal democracy.

While he did not argue that the state should limit religious freedom, Durkheim did not imagine that it could be possible to separate church and state in the sense usually understood by defenders of Frances particular form of secularism, lacit. Religion is the foundation of politics, he insisted. The Third Republic could only thrive if its defenders accepted it for what it was: the true church of the French, the institution through which they worshipped the rights-bearing individual.

Durkheims idiosyncratic calls for the state to shape individuals on societys behalf, and to manage their education as a religious enterprise, alienated potential allies, like liberal Jewish and Protestant intellectuals, who fought for a public sphere that could accommodate many forms of religious practice. Anti-Semites didnt care for Durkheim, either. In 1911, the nephew of Gabriel Tarde, a rival sociologist, co-authored a pamphlet suggesting that Durkheims conception of society was a Jewish God, a tyrannical entity ruling humanity through a caste of priests.

Later generations of French Jewish intellectuals, including Durkheims own nephew, Marcel Mauss, have not been much kinder. In the 1930s, as they watched the Nazi party take power in Germany through quasi-religious public rituals, it seemed to Mauss and Durkheims former colleague Lon Brunschvig that the sort of collective faith Durkheim celebrated was serving fascism, not democracy.

But the dangers posed by the Third Reichanti-Semitism, militarism, contempt for individual rightswere dangers Durkheim knew. It had been precisely by meditating on their social and psychological causes that he had found his controversial faith in liberal democracy. And indeed, the case of Germany, seen through Durkheims eyes, shows that what threatens democracy most is too little, rather than too much, faith in the individual.

In a 1915 pamphlet, The German Mentality and the War, Durkheim laid blame for the outbreak of World War I on German thinkers such as Heinrich von Treitschke who had doubted the capacity of individuals for moral collective action. Taking to heart the philosophical sketch of individuals offered by the Enlightenment tradition, and by social scientists like Durkheim, Treitschke saw them as essentially self-interested, isolated beings unable to form authentic social bonds that could transcend their egoism. He reasoned accordingly that instead of worshipping an ideal individual, who is never actually found anywhere, German thinkers rightly worshipped the statewhich had the advantage of actually existing. The German state, thus worshipped, was given free rein to oppress its subjects and invade its neighbors. Germanys authoritarianism and aggression were the consequences of its thinkers faith in a visible godthe state.

It might seem that by endorsing a religion of the ideal individual, Durkheim was inviting readers to embrace a noble lie about individuals, who can be dreadful. Yet far from choosing to ignore the darker aspects of human nature, Durkheim in his post-Dreyfus perspective appears to have become a more sensitive observer of its paradoxes.

Days after his son was killed in action on the Balkan front of WWI, Durkheim wrote to his nephew Mauss, life triumphs over death. He told Mauss that his grandmother, after her son had died, spent a week mourning, but on the eighth day couldnt stop herself from asking about neighborhood gossip. She had not forgotten her griefbut to be alive is ever to be pulled away from reckoning ones own pains and pleasures and to be drawn into the lives of others. What seem like the hardest things religion can demandthe overcoming of self-interestedness and of the terror of deathare in fact sublimely ordinary.

Every feature of human nature that might inspire hope, Durkheim knew, can be put to evil use. Our desire to stand together in a comprehensible world, our longing for community, and our readiness to project idealized visions over unsatisfactory realities may lead us to commit horrible deeds. But it is these enduring emotional structures that also lead us to connection with other people and offer the only possible foundation for a decent political order.

***

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Blake Smith is a Harper Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago, where he works on cultural ties between France and India.

Original post:

mile Durkheim and the Religion of Liberal Democracy - Tablet Magazine

Why Are Liberal Democrats Leading the Constitutional Campaign Against the Wealth Tax? – The American Prospect

Posted on November 21, 2019 by Danzig

For constitutional originalists, its crucial to get your history right. This is especially important when little-known provisions of the Constitution are invoked to resolve hot-button issues of contemporary importance.

The perils of bad history are on vivid display in recent high-visibility critiques of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren for their proposed wealth taxes on the super-rich. In a recent New York Times op-ed, Professors Daniel Hemel and Rebecca Kysar assert that these wealth tax initiatives violate a constitutional provision that was part the founders notorious compromise on slavery.

To seduce the South into the Union, the Philadelphia Convention authorized the Southerners to add three-fifths of their slaves when reapportioning their representation in the House and Electoral College after each census. That concession meant that the North would have the House and presidency stacked against it, making it very tough to restrict slavery for many generations to come.

In exchange for these devastating concessions, the convention offered the North a consolation prize. They could use their limited political leverage to get Congress to pass a tax package that would require the South to pay a bigger share of the total bill. While other taxes had to be uniform throughout the United States, the founders added a special provision authorizing the government to impose a head tax that would hit each slave at the same rate as each free citizen. Since slaves represented 30 to 40 percent of the population in the South but only a small share in the North, these head taxes would have a disproportionate impact on Southern whites.

This part of the deal only took final form at the conventions mop-up session of September 14, as the delegates were heading toward the exit. While the terms of the capitation tax on slaves had been up for grabs during the preceding weeks, it was only then thatGeorge Read of Delaware moved to add the three words Capitation and other direct, taxes to the final draft, explaining that [h]e was afraid that some liberty might otherwise be taken to manipulate the terms of the deal. Since the convention had lots of other compromises to make as they rushed out the door, Reads last-minute addition was accepted without further debate. Yet it is precisely these three wordsother direct taxeswhich Hemel and Kysar propose to weaponize in their constitutional campaign against the wealth tax.

Yet the original understanding of this provision refutes their interpretation of this formula. The meaning of other direct taxes was the very first high-visibility question presented to the Supreme Court in 1796. Newspaper coverage was intense, as the country considered how the Court would handle its constitutional responsibilities. (This was seven years before John Marshall handed down his famous opinion in Marbury v. Madison, the first case in which the Court asserted the power of judicial review.)

The justices responded in Hylton v. United States by unanimously rejecting an expansionary reading of the other-clause, with the principal opinion by Justice Chase insisting that the rule of apportionment [by population] is only to be adopted in such cases where it can reasonably apply.

Although Hemel and Kysar reluctantly recognize this point, they try to trivialize its significance by recruiting Alexander Hamilton to their side. To assess their maneuver, here are a few facts. Hylton involved a direct tax that Congress had imposed on luxury carriages. Since these expensive vehicles were concentrated in a few commercial centers, treating this tax as if it were a direct tax would not have imposed a disproportionate burden on the slave states, as originally intended. Instead, turning it into a direct tax would have hit the relatively poor states, both North and South, where luxury vehicles were rarely to be found.

In response to this obvious injustice, Congress followed the rule of reason and invoked its broad constitutional power to impose all indirect taxes on a national basis, requiring carriage-owners to pay the same amount without regard to their particular state of residence.

Alexander Hamilton served as the principal lawyer defending this congressional decision when it was challenged before the Court. In making his case, however, he engaged in a characteristic lawyerly maneuver. Rather than inviting the justices to announce broad principles in their maiden constitutional voyage, he urged them to stick to the particular problem at hand. He emphasized that the carriage tax did not involve general assessments on the whole property of individuals, but only targeted a single asset. As a consequence, the Court could uphold Congresss decision in this particular case without definitively resolving the larger question whether a more comprehensive impost might qualify as a direct tax.

Hemel and Kysar seize upon Hamiltons lawyerly maneuver and use it as decisive evidence that the founders believed that a general assessment on overall wealth required state-by-state apportionment. They fail to mention, however, that none of the justices unequivocally endorsed Hamiltons position in their opinions. Moreover, the Court included two leading members of the Constitutional Convention and one signer of the Declaration of Independence. Indeed, their self-conscious refusal to sign on to Hamiltons position argues against, not for,the Hemel-Kysar effort to make Hamiltons extreme view central to the original understanding. Perhaps Lin-Manuel Miranda should consider making the justices dramatic rejection of Hamilton into a sequel to his Broadway success.

Nevertheless, the critics might be able to salvage their position if Hyltons rule of reason had provoked intense opposition throughout the country. Instead, the decision generated a wave of popular support. Only one year passed before Congress enacted the nation's first wealth tax, imposing progressive rates on recipients of legacies and owners of shares in insurance companies and banks.

Given the Courts recent decision in Hylton, these taxes did not provoke litigation, since they were sure losers. But over the course of the 19th century, nationwide taxes on both income and wealth repeatedly drove taxpayers to the courts, only to find the justices consistently upholding their constitutionality. As a consequence, the drafters of the 14th and 15th Amendments saw no need to repeal the apportionment requirement for other direct taxes when they swept away every other textual expression of the founding compromise with slavery during Reconstruction.

In 1881, the justices upheld the decision by Congress to continue imposing income taxes even after the Civil War emergency had passed. It unanimously rejected the inevitable complaint that they involved direct taxation. Relying explicitly on Hylton,the Court could not have been more explicit: Our conclusions are, that direct taxes, within the meaning of the Constitution, are only capitation taxes, as expressed in that instrument, and taxes on real estateand nothing else.

Yet 14 years later, five of the justices defied a century of precedent in their 1895 decision in Pollack v. Farmers Loan and Trust, striking down a new congressionally enacted income tax. By the narrowest majority, they dramatically expanded the scope of the direct tax provision. As in the contemporaneous case of Plessy v. Ferguson, Justice John Marshall Harlan issued an emphatic dissent denouncing the majority for reinvigorating the nations constitutional legacy of slavery. But while his great dissent in Plessy was ignored, his eloquent opinion in Pollock helped provoke a broad-based movement demanding a return to Hyltons rule of reason.

Within three years, Congress responded to this popular groundswell by defying the Court and enacting another wealth tax on inheritance. This forced the justices to confront a moment of truth. If the conservatives continued to insist on their precedent-shattering expansion of the direct tax provision, they would trigger an escalating confrontation with the political branches that threatened to destroy the legitimacy of the entire enterprise of judicial review.

When faced with this prospect, the conservatives retreated in disarray. In its 1900 decision of Knowlton v. Moore, the Court unanimously upheld the new wealth tax. While different justices explained their dramatic U-turn in different ways, there was no mistaking the Courts return to the narrow reading of direct taxation that had prevailed since Hylton was decided in 1796.

Yet the Courts humiliating turnaround wasnt enough to satisfy the Progressive political movement once it gained a decisive victory in the elections of 1908. The new congressional leadership immediately moved to pass another income tax statute and force the conservatives on the Court publicly to declare that Pollock was wrong from the moment it was decided.

Their initiative, however, met with resistance from the newly elected William Howard Taft, who would later become the only president to ascend to the chief justiceship. When campaigning for the White House, Taft had explicitly supported the Progressives plan: [I]t is not free from debate how the Supreme Court, with changed membership, would view a new income tax law.But once installed in the White House, he refused to take the risk that the reactionary Court of the Lochner era would hold its ground and strike down the income tax yet againdramatically damaging its legitimacy before the public. Instead, he wanted Congress to do it, by proposing a constitutional amendment repudiating, once and for all, Pollocks precedent-shattering reading. But this required the Progressives in Congress to win two-thirds majorities in both House and Senate before their initiative could be sent to the states for ratification.

Building these supermajorities would be a tough for the congressional leadership. Nevertheless, they went along with Tafts request and made a good-faith try. Since Knowlton had already upheld wealth taxes, the leaders on Capitol Hill made coalition-building easier for themselves. They framed the 16th Amendment to make it a symbol of the widespread popular demand to repudiate Pollock once and for all. Their text focused on the imperative need to grant the national government the power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived.

Their strategy was remarkably successful. Within a year, supermajorities in both houses backed their initiative. Once Congress sent its proposal to the states in 1909, it took only four years for 42 out of 48 of them to say yesmaking the 16th Amendments enactment one of the most remarkable achievements of popular sovereignty in the 20th century.

Yet Professors Hemel and Kysar entirely fail to confront the original understanding of the voters and their representatives in speaking in the name of We the People of the United States. Rather than recognizing the 16th Amendment as a self-conscious decision by Americans to return to the founders rule of reason, they are urging us to rehabilitate Pollocks discredited effort to breathe new life into the Philadelphia Conventions compromise with slavery.

Senators Sanders and Warren should not let such a maneuver deflect them from their efforts to confront the escalating inequalities of the Second Gilded Age.

The Roberts Court should also reject their invitation to strike down a wealth tax if Democrats manage to win the coming election and enact it into law. If the current conservative majority is to remain true to its professed commitment to originalism, it has no choice but to recognize that the American people have addressed the precise issue in the 18th and the 20th centuriesand resolved it both timesin a fashion that clears the way for a wealth tax.

Their fidelity to originalism would also permit the justices to avoid a constitutional crisis of the first magnitude. Given the political furor surrounding the appointments of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, it is imperative for the reconstituted Court to demonstrate that its originalism is not merely a pretext for exercising a right-wing veto on the voters decision to elect Democrats to govern the House, Senate, and presidency. If a majority strikes down the wealth tax, it would provoke a legitimacy crisis on a scale not seen since Roosevelt tried to pack the Court in 1937.

Nobody can say how such a confrontation will turn out this time around. There can be doubt, however, that Chief Justice John Roberts is well aware of the dangers involved. Recall the way he was the swing vote in upholding Obamacare in June 2012, despite his own very grave reservations as to its constitutionality. Nevertheless, he recognized that a 5-to-4 veto of the presidents signature initiative would have provoked a Democratic counterattack on the conservative justices during Obamas re-election campaignand that such an onslaught would grievously damage the Courts legitimacy for a long time to come.

I have no doubt that Roberts would once again try his hand at judicial statesmanship if the Democrats emerge victorious in 2020. Only this time around, he is no longer the swing vote who can mediate the divide between conservative and liberal judicial factions. It remains to be seen whether he will be able to convince Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to recognize that prudence, as well as principle, requires them to uphold the wealth tax, and avoid a shattering crisis to the Courts legitimacy.

Sorry, but my crystal ball clouds over at this point. But if the new appointees resist, we will be witnessing a tragedy in the classic Greek sense.

Professor Ackerman has provided advice to Elizabeth Warren about the constitutionality of the wealth tax.

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Why Are Liberal Democrats Leading the Constitutional Campaign Against the Wealth Tax? - The American Prospect

Infant Baptism and the Logic of Liberalism | Brandon McGinley – First Things

Posted on November 21, 2019 by Danzig

My family goes to a lot of baptisms these days. With several of our Catholic friends raising young children, rarely do a few months go by without fifteen minutes spent peeking over shoulders into the baptistery.

One tradition that surprised me the first time I witnessed a baptism in the Extraordinary Form is that the parents are basically spectators: Its the godparents who hold the child and accept the Faith and its obligations on his or her behalf. The rite beautifully symbolizes how the Christian community takes responsibility for the relationship with the Lord established by the sacrament. It communicates the resolution to one of infant baptisms apparent paradoxes: The sacrament is necessary for salvation, and yet children can neither understand nor fulfill the duties this implies on their own.

In its ritual and theology, infant baptism makes it clear thatthe nature of our relationship with God and his Church is incomprehensible on the individualist and voluntarist assumptions of modern liberalism. Former president of Ireland Mary McAleese recently had the bad manners to point this out:

The newly-minted doctor of canon lawshe was, unaccountably, awarded the degree for her thesis on this topic by the Pontifical Gregorian Universityadds that the Church has never considered the ethical, legal and moral implications of imposing lifelong membership of the Church and a body of obligations on a baby who is not in a position to weigh the implications.

This is, of course, nonsense: There are few things the Church has considered more deeply than the theory and practice of forming Christians to recognize and embrace their eternal destiny. What McAleese really means is that the Church hasnt brought her understanding of baptism and membership in the Body of Christ in line with the modern liberal understanding of autonomy.

Here, McAleese gets at something deeper than she realizes. The Church has spent the last several decades (and even longer in America) bringing her public face broadly in alignment with liberal principles, including doing things like giving Mary McAleese a doctorate in canon law. At the same time, the Church has attempted to cordon off the distinctively religious aspects of her mission from interference. Thus we end up with the Vatican enthusiastically signing up for the 1989 U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Childthen balking when the oversight committee asked, 25 years later, to have a look under the hood of canon law.

Of course Rome was right to object. The question is: What did they expect? The truth of baptism, and the duties it imposes, clearly violates the rights of children (and of adults for that matter), so far as liberalism can perceive those rights. The indelible mark of baptism brands our souls for God first and forever; in light of this, every liberal notion of rights and privileges and autonomy either loses its coherence or must be comprehensively dismantled and reconstructed. The salvific order of the cosmos is inescapably illiberal.

The Churchs gambit has been that she can embrace liberalism exteriorly while remaining interiorly true to the illiberality of Gods order. Challenges like McAleeses threaten to puncture this arrangement, and so Catholics first defensive impulse is generally to adopt the rhetorical conventions of liberalism and claim bias or bigotry.

This strategy only makes sense, though, if we believe the Church has successfully positioned herself within the liberal order while maintaining her integrity. But she has not. The logic of liberalism has seeped into the faithfuls understanding of God and his Church through every imaginable pore.

Just look at baptism: Catholic parents now routinely wait months or years to have their children baptized, and the role of godparents has been reduced to a one-time honorific. Catechists will tell you about how parents send their kids to class, but not to Mass. The sacraments are commonly seen as rites of passage and nothing more, the Church as one voluntary association among many, and God as a cheerful but invasive grandfather against whom we have certain rights, like the right not to be bothered with or by him.

Rather than lash out at Mary McAleese, we should thank her. She dares to clarify, saying what too many in the Church have trembled to say for generations: The sacramental order cannot be reconciled with liberal notions of liberty and autonomy. In these signs of heightening contradictions we should find hope and a refreshing freedom to build families, communities, and societies that take our baptismal promises at their word.

Brandon McGinley is a writer and editor in Pittsburgh.

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Infant Baptism and the Logic of Liberalism | Brandon McGinley - First Things

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