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Which Role Saved Brandy Norwood’s Life? – Parade

Posted on August 21, 2017 by Danzig

August 21, 2017 10:46 AM ByJeryl Brunner Parade @jerylbrunner More by Jeryl

Just last week, Brandy Norwood came back to Broadway for a special engagement to play Roxie Hart in the razzle dazzle musical Chicago. The Grammy Award-winning, multi-Platinum selling artist credits the role for saving her life. A year before I got the call to do Roxie, I was very depressed. I wasnt dreaming. I was heartbroken. And I got tired of feeling like that, Norwood explains. I started writing in my journal, working out, changing the way I was eating and began affirming that I am here for a reason. I finally decided I was getting getting ready for something big.

At that moment she got the call about Chicago. When she got the part, everything changed for her. When I walked on stage everything I felt before went completely away. She saved me, she shares. In fact, the part was the gift that kept giving. In 2015, after playing Roxie with a four month extension, Norwood went on to reprise the role in Los Angeles and Washington D.C.

Norwood continues to cherish revisiting Roxies vaudevillian jazzy world. Roxie is every kind of emotion. Shes up and down. Shes crazy. Shes passionate. She funny. Shes bubbly and sexy. She wants to dance and sing and do it all. She wants to be a star and make all of her dreams come true, says Norwood. I cant relate to all the stuff she does, but I can relate to her dreaming and wanting her dreams to come true.

Norwood shared more with Parade.com.

What is exciting about coming back to play Roxie?

Brandy Norwood:The joy is that it never gets old. Its new every night. I just love this team of people. I was so embraced and welcomed by the company. They made me better because they have been on Broadway for years. They were really supportive of trying to bring me up to where they were. So thats amazing. Also, all my teachers are great.

Was there a moment you knew you had to be a performer?

Norwood: From the time I was around seven, I knew I wanted to be a singer. When I was young, I went to a Little Richard concert. He called all these kids onto the stage. He sang with all of them. But I veered off, started waving to the crowd, blowing kisses and bowing. I saw myself as a star. I felt that was my crowd out there, even though it was Little Richards crowd.

Do you have other dream roles?

Norwood: Annie Oakley in Annie Get your Gun. I love the songs. I love the choreography. I just love the story. I want to feel how I sound singing those songs. I especially love, Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better.

How proud is your daughter of you?

Norwood:My daughter is so proud because she has never seen me in this light. When she first saw me as Roxie, she cried. She said, Mom, you were phenomenal! It was the first time she said that word about me. Phenomenal is my favorite word to this day, because she said it.

What was the first Broadway show you ever saw?

Norwood:Actually, Chicago was the first Broadway show I ever saw. It was unbelievable. I thought, I have to do this one day. But I was too frightened. It was ten years ago. At the time I wasnt ready because I was so afraid. I knew it would take a lot of discipline. I knew it was going to be a lot to do eight shows a week. So I was always afraid of it. But then I couldnt turn it down, especially ten years later. I kept saying Im getting ready for something big.

If somebody had said to you ten years ago, when you first saw Chicago, that you would be Roxie one day, what would you tell them?

Norwood:I wouldnt believe it. Roz Ryan [who has played Matron Mama Morton in Chicago for many years] says, Do you understand that you came backstage ten years ago and told us that you wanted to play Roxie? Then it happened ten years later. So you just never know.

What advice would you give to your younger self?

Norwood:Be patient. Everything is working in divine order. Youre fine. Everythings going to be okay. Stay away from boys. And stay focused.

Brandy says hello to Parade.com below.

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Which Role Saved Brandy Norwood's Life? - Parade

Acquisition could boost NWSV life extension case | Business News – Business News

Posted on August 21, 2017 by Danzig

Some of the North West Shelf Venture partners might either sell their stake in the operation or take an equity interest in potential projects such as Browse as one potential solution to find backfill liquids for Karratha gas plant in the next decade, according to a report by Wood Mackenzie.

The venture, which has been shipping liquefied natural gas for 28 years, will have an excess capacity of around 5 million tonnes per annum by 2025 as existing reserves are drained, Wood Mackenzie projected.

Wood analyst Saul Kavonic toldBusiness Newsthat there had never been a better time for the Woodside Petroleum-led venture to commence work on a solution, with a number of options competitive with other global projects.

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Acquisition could boost NWSV life extension case | Business News - Business News

Is Australia’s far-right creeping into the mainstream? – The Week UK

Posted on August 21, 2017 by Danzig

Australia's nationalist movement was thrown into the international spotlight last week when a far-right senator wore a burka in parliament and called for a ban on the Islamic garment.

Pauline Hanson, leader of the One Nation party, entered the Senate in a floor-length black gown and face veil to gasps from stunned colleagues, who were vocal in their condemnation of what one senator called an "appalling" stunt.

Hanson was unapologetic. "I would not change a thing; I am not embarrassed by what I did," she told local broadcaster Seven News, adding that wearing the burka is "not an Australian way of life".

It was the latest publicity coup by Australia's emboldened far-right, which has seen an astonishing resurgence in popularity after teetering on the verge of extinction a few years ago.

Founded and fuelled on the virulent anti-Asian immigration sentiment of the 1990s, One Nation has followed the trend of Marine Le Pen's Front National and Ukip by training their sights on a new target Muslims.

As with France's Front National, it has proven a winning strategy for One Nation. "After almost two decades in the political wilderness, Hanson is back and more powerful than ever," says Quartz.

In the early 1990s, Australia plunged into a deep recession at its peak, unemployment rose to almost 11 per cent.

With "traditional" working class manufacturing jobs moving overseas, often to Asian countries, Asian newcomers who, in 1986, outstripped Britons as the largest group immigrating to Australia were a visible target for angry and frustrated white Australians.

"People started wearing printed yellow T-shirts, the word 'full' emblazoned across a map of Australia," Alice Pung, an Asian-Australian who grew up in the 1990s, wrote in the New York Times.

Enter Pauline Hanson. The nationalist politician cut her teeth on the Asian immigration panic of the 1990s. Her maiden speech to parliament in 1996 included broadsides aimed at everything from subsidies for Aboriginal communities to multiculturalism. The most controversial and memorable portion of her speech took aim at Asian immigrants.

"I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians," she said, a phrase now embedded in Australian political memory. "They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate."

If the rhetoric employed against Asians in 1996 sounds familiar to the rhetoric used by nationalist and far-right groups to describe Muslims, that's no coincidence it's a winning strategy.

When Hanson founded the One Nation party in 1997, she may have imagined she was capturing the zeitgeist. In reality, anti-Asian sentiment had already passed its peak.

A slowdown in the influx of immigrants from Asia, combined with increasing acceptance of those already in Australia, meant that anti-Asian rabble-rousing ceased to be a vote winner.

Hanson lost her seat in the 1998 federal elections, leaving Queensland senator Len Harris as the only One Nation member in either house of parliament. In the 2004 federal elections, he too lost his seat. One Nation were officially out in the cold.

Although One Nation maintained a regional presence in Hanson's native Queensland, not a single One Nation representative was elected to parliament from 2005 to 2016.

Yet, in the 2016 elections, four One Nation senators were elected to the upper house. In one fell swoop, the party had more parliamentarians than in their 19 years of existence combined. So what changed?

Hanson and her One Nation colleagues have followed the lead of far-right movements such as Le Pen's Front National by moving away from "traditional" targets racial and sexual minorities and focussing their ire on Muslims.

"She's doing today what she did in the 1990s," Professor Duncan McDonnell of Griffith University told Quartz. "You can basically take the word 'Asian' and replace it with 'Muslim'."

One Nation's manifesto reflects the shift, with an entire subsection devoted to the subject of "Islam".

While some policies a ban on halal food certification, for instance are unlikely to prove big vote winners, One Nation's call for a freeze on Muslim migration does appear to have struck a chord in a nation that has been the target of six Islamic State terror attacks over the past three years.

A poll released in September 2016 found that half of Australians were in favour of halting Muslim migration, although a second poll published a month later put the figure at one in three, Huffington Post reports.

The ruling Liberal Party and previous Labor government have been accused of pandering to this populist, anti-Muslim sentiment in their attitude towards Australian refugees and migrants, the vast majority of them Muslim.

In 2013, then-prime minister Kevin Rudd announced that any refugee caught attempting to enter Australia by boat without a valid visa would not be permitted to settle in Australia.

Offshore detention centres for asylum seekers, closed in 2007 under pressure from human rights groups, were reopened in 2012. The remote island-holding centres in Nauru and Papua New Guinea, where some refugees have been held for upwards of two years, were described by Amnesty International as "Australia's Shame".

Leaked reports from inside the Nauru detention centre, published in The Guardian last year, paint a horrifying portrait of detainees, some of them children, starving and mutilating themselves, in addition to suicide attempts, medical neglect and sexual abuse by employees.

Despite widespread condemnation from global human rights groups and protests within Australia, as of 30 June 2017 more than 1,000 people were living in the offshore detention centres, according to Australian border agency statistics.

If the refugees were white Christians, writes Robert Manne in The Monthly, "it's improbable, or so it seems to me, that public opinion would have tolerated their detention behind razor wire or their transportation to the hellhole on Nauru".

Islamophobia has turned illegal immigration into a dominant political issue, he writes: "Australian politics is being moulded by resentment of the tiny handful of asylum seekers who arrive uninvited on our shore."

In December 2016, the United Nations' special rapporteur on racism Mutuma Ruteere highlighted the "alarming" role of the media in "reinforcing the negative perception of migrants, particularly Muslims and persons of African descent".

Ruteere warned that mainstream politicians were not doing enough to prevent the normalisation of the kind of rhetoric espoused by the One Nation party and urged them to step up their efforts or risk letting the fringe become the mainstream: "It's much harder to clear out the political space once it's infected by racists."

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Is Australia's far-right creeping into the mainstream? - The Week UK

Can Mozzy’s Sacramento Street Rap Translate Beyond the West Coast? – The Ringer (blog)

Posted on August 21, 2017 by Danzig

California rappers live in their own, sovereign hip-hop republic, one thatsave for the occasional Kendrick Lamar or YGcan seem as foreign to the rest of the United States as the U.K.s grime music. In California, the songs are bouncier, and yet the rappers are far more intimidating; gangs have a real hold over the music. To a mainstream rap fans ears, the lingo and geography of California hip-hop songwriting is, at times, indecipherable.

But Mozzy, a 30-year-old street rapper from Sacramento, is making a particularly difficult translation into hip-hops mainstream. His hometown plays host to one of the most varied and exciting rap scenes in the country today, and Mozzy has built a modest national fan base on the strength of hyperactive output and a deadly way with words. His new album, 1 Up Top Ahka term for shooting someone once in the head, neck, and throat with precise aimout Friday, missed its previous, shaky release dates for the past couple of years, lost in a flurry of great mixtapes that spared no quality. There was a point when Mozzy was dropping four mixtapes per year without spreading himself thin. Mozzys tough talks duets mixtape, Dreadlocks and Headshots, recorded with South Florida rapper Gunplay and released in May, marked a second phase of his national come-up; three months later, 1 Up Top Ahk is his solo confirmation.

Still, Mozzy continues to work mostly with his local crew of rappers such as Philthy Rich, E Mozzy (Mozzys brother), Celly Ru, and Show Banga; and his longtime producer JuneOnnaBeat, who, since 2012, has helped craft Mozzys dark and quarrelsome sound. Indeed, Mozzy carries himself with the knuckleheaded disposition of your typical legit gangsterturned-rapper. On his home turf, he has fought with the incarcerated Sacramento rapper Lavish D. and regional godfathers C-Bo and Brotha Lynch Hung. Beyond Northern California, Mozzy has faced some difficulty achieving the crossover appeal of, say, 21 Savagean Atlanta street rapper whose subdued, zonked-out delivery is more in line with hip-hops zeitgeist than Mozzys full-throated barking, and whose trap production is an easier mainstream sell than Mozzys dark Sactown bounce. Mozzy doesnt sing. He doesnt mosh. He doesnt dye his dreads, nor is he a particularly fashionable dresser. He doesnt spill romantic confessions and catharsis left and right. Mozzy is too tightly wound for all that.

And Mozzy doesnt take too kindly to these trends among his Eastern contemporaries. In June, XXL published its 2017 freshman class magazine cover, featuring 21 Savage, Lil Yachty, and a few other stars of the so-called mumble rap movement. Two months before the cover had even dropped, Mozzy anticipated his exclusion from the list with the release of a song called Dear XXL, in which he made the case that shady record-label politics blocked the rap magazine from celebrating his independent success. I see progression when I look at the mirror, Mozzy raps. Look at your magazine and all the freshmen is queers. In a year when Mozzy finally seems destined to achieve real national traction, hes chosen alienation, instead of assimilation, as his manner of distinction.

Mozzy fits awkwardly into conversations about modern hip-hop. He is a traditionalist in some ways, but hardly a reactionary. Hes as quick to disparage C-Bo as Lil Yachty is to discount the Notorious B.I.G. And his fondness for codeine, shaky cams, and laser sights is pure millennial hip-hop aesthetic. But he also comes across, on Dear XXL and on 1 Up Top Ahk, as a young man who is too old for this shit. Mind you, Mozzy and Meek Mill are the same age, but where Meek is quick to balance his power rapping with R&B hooks, and his clear 2000s musical influences with Young Thug verses, Mozzy resists slipping into a continental sound. He is so thoroughly West Coast that his even being on the verge of national recognition, despite a lack of YG-sized hit singles, is a small miracle for the genre. His insults aside, XXL may well tap him for the freshman cover next year. (By then, who knows: Mozzy may well be hip-hops future.)

As hyped as its been in the mainstream rap press, 1 Up Top Ahk is the closest thing Mozzy has to a properly nationalized hip-hop record. For a year now, hes collaborated with an expanded cast of guest rappers, which awkwardly but inevitably includes the Bays white boy pop rapper G-Eazy. 1 Up Top Ahk includes significantly stronger and more appropriate cameos from Boosie, Lil Durk, Jay Rock, and Dave Eastall offering dense, hardbody flows over Mozzys whistling, high-noon beats.

Typically, tough rappers will soften themselves, in some form or another, on their retail releases. Meek Mill made his biggest record, All Eyez on You, with Chris Brown and Nicki Minaj. Future made the leap from trap mixtape supremacy to superdom only after a year of singing duets with Drake. Where most of these guys opt for R&B, though, Mozzy sings the blues and channels the late the Jacka, his rap idol, through beautiful groans and aching recollections of violence. On 1 Up Top Ahk, the blues is the sound of a piano at a gospel choir rehearsal on Cant Take It (Ima Gangsta) and Afraid. Its the sheer number of times Mozzy and Celly Ru say cry, or some variation of it, on Take It Up With God. Mozzy isnt repenting, exactly; this isnt his come-to-Jesus album. He still issues threats with utmost slickness. But hes cleaned himself up a bit. Save for a posthumously released, rags-to-riches verse from the Jacka, theres hardly any drug talk from a rapper who has previously dedicated much of his songs to celebrating feats of codeine consumption, and who still frequently features double cups in his Instagram posts. In 2017, Mozzy is a relatively sober gangster rapper who could not be any more out of touch with the zeitgeist than he already is if he tried. His iconoclasm is his strengtheven if it renders him unintelligible to the Hot 100.

Can Mozzy's Sacramento Street Rap Translate Beyond the West Coast? - The Ringer (blog)

PNG encouraged to end dependence on gas, oil and gold – Radio New Zealand

Posted on August 21, 2017 by Danzig

Transcript

PAUL FLANAGAN: Arguably for too long PNG has placed too much emphasis on getting the resource part of its economy going well. So focussing on large LNG projects, or copper and gold projects. But that really hasn't delivered improvements in well being for the vast majority of people in PNG. An alternative approach is to take a more people focussed development line which would try and build on its extraordinary cultural diversity, the strength of its ecosystems, and use that as a path to tap into the incredible potential of its people to have a different development to what PNG has faced previously.

DON WISEMAN: Why is it that there has been so little return from oil, gas and minerals?

PL: A long term feature of countries that go down a path of resource dependence is the somewhat well known Resource Curse. And the Resource Curse comes through in a few different ways. In some ways it is the focus in development towards those big projects rather than those that are more inclusive. It comes through because there is more opportunity for corruption and graft that can come through those big projects. But a more hidden and sinister one is that it tends to lead to overvalued exchange rates. It pushes up the exchange rate which means it's good for people importing in urban areas but it means a large part of the economy that could be otherwise exporting things that might be tapping into more local, cultural traditions. You know local PNG fashions and things like that - they're priced out of the international market just because that country is exporting some much LNG and gold and other produce. So dealing with the exchange rate is going to be a very credible and one of the simplest tools one can take to try and improve development outcomes.

DW: You've talked about how the effect of this focus on developing mineral resources and oil and gas, has been the creation of dual economies in a sense.

PL: Very much dual economies and it tends to be there is not much linkage between the traditional economy and the resource-based economy. Now PNG could have a really strong agricultural sector, one would think, in terms of exporting things such as coffee and cocoa to much greater levels. But they face price competition and the incentives for people who front up to sell coffee at the local factory, they don't actually get that much kina for each US dollar, once again because of this overvalued exchange rate that can sort of really hinder development. What can really build up the linkages between those parts of the economy is if the tax regime is taking enough tax out of the resource sector and distributing that back into the local economy through improved infrastructure or through improved health and education outcomes. We know PNG is actually taxing its resource sector quite lightly, relative to that faced by most other countries. So once again that is an area that can be looked at. But that will take probably 5-10 years to put into effect because of binding agreements already with existing projects.

DW: So in the current circumstances, the economy is a grim state, how do you get the exchange rate down?

PL: In some ways that can be a straight decision from the Bank of Papua New Guinea, just in the same way as when it appreciated the currency by nearly 20 percent back in June 2014, it could decide overnight to depreciate the currency once again by 20 percent. One has to be careful with that because there would be potentially imported inflationary impacts and one needs to ensure that staples such as rice and that don't jump through the roof immediately. And there can be some action taken to try and bring those price increases through time. Any of these sort of adjustments are difficult in terms of their impacts but in terms of putting them into place, fixing up the exchange rate is much, much easier than trying to do something such as Budget repair, which would involve other difficult things. Such as looking at tax increases on consumers or wage earners. Bringing more targets as to where you cut expenditure, more options there, but once again some pretty difficult choices because of some capacity and other limits that PNG faces. So it is always a world of hard choices given how far PNG has gone down this slippery economic slopes, but there are mechanisms to pick things up again and one of the best and easiest of those is improving the exchange rate, making it more competitive, allowing PNG to really enter into the Asia-Pacific century.

PNG encouraged to end dependence on gas, oil and gold - Radio New Zealand

China’s ‘sharing economy’ pulls in a flood of investment – The … – Washington Post

Posted on August 21, 2017 by Danzig

BEIJING Sometimes, when considering the orgy of spending that is Chinas start-up scene, its fun to imagine the pitch meetings.

Its like Uber, but for beds.

Bed sharing?

I know it sounds funny but

Take my cash.

That exact exchange did not happen. But it may not be far off. Chinese authorities recently shuttered a service that let people pay to sleep in windowless pods. There were questions about hygiene, according to local reports.

Perhaps there should be more questions. Flush with cash and buoyed by a billion-dollar boom in bike sharing, Chinas venture capitalists have gone sharing mad, funding companies that allow users to share items including washing machines, basketballs and umbrellas.

In some ways, the enthusiasm makes sense. Chinas vibrant but tightly regulated tech sector has been booming, with sharing leading the way. Chinese ride-hailing (and -sharing) giant Didi bought out Uber China. Airbnb is fighting Chinese rivals to win a piece of the home-share market.

The countrys top leaders know they must shift from manufacturing and resource extraction to a service-based economy powered, in part, by the Web.

To help things along, the state has thrown money into the start-up scene and nurtured homegrown tech companies, in part by keeping others out. (Sorry, Google.) It has also used its vast propaganda apparatus to cheerlead for local start-ups, waxing poetic about umbrella sharing, for example.

In April, a commentary in the Peoples Daily, a Communist Party-controlled newspaper, calleda Chinese umbrella sharing start-up a sign of progress in public service and a show of human care, releasing the warmth of the city. The company later made headlines when nearly all of its 300,000 umbrellas went missing.

At a 2016 tech conference, Robin Li, chief executive of the search engine Baidu, suggestedthat the sharing economy is in tune with Chinas socialist ethos. Both, he said, focus on distribution according to need.

The new, government-run Sharing Economy Research Centerestimates that the sector grew 103 percent in 2016, with deals close to $500 billion. The researchers predicted an annual growth rate of 40 percent in the years ahead. By 2020, the sharing economy will account for 10 percent of the countrys gross domestic product, the center said.

And yet, nobody seems sure what sharing economy means.

Gao Shen, a partner at Phoenix Tree Capital Partners, said there are two things going on.

Companies such as Didi and Tujia, a Chinese house-sharing firm, took existing resources cars, homes and made them available to others for a fee. Many of the new, self-described sharing start-ups do not useidle resources, he said.

If a company orders a bunch of new bikes or umbrellas and lets people rent them with their phone, is that sharing? Or is it renting with your phone?

A Chinese government newswire recently covered the launch of a shared washing machine service. Theres also a shared drying service. Anywhere else, they would be called laundromats. Or, perhaps, laundromats where you pay with your phone.

Along the same lines, is a phone-activated, two-person karaoke booth in a mall a karaoke share, or just a smaller and louder version of the status quo, plus phone?

Whats more, not everyone seems to understand the meaning of rent.

Like the umbrella company, Chinese bike-sharing start-ups have struggled to keep up with theft and vandalism, with one company, Wukong, reportedly losing 90 percent of its bikes in about six months.

In some cases, companies are launching products that seem like less convenient versions of things that already exist a fact that does not seem to stop the funding.

Andy Xie, an independent economist in Shanghai, said the rush of investment feels a lot like a bubble. In the past four, five years, every year there is something different to speculate on, he said.

Beijing, a city with free workout machines in public parks, now has shared gyms, a.k.a, outhouse-size workout pods activated by your phone. Investors are betting that people will pay for the chance to sweat and jiggle in a small glass box on the street.

A recent Peoples Daily write-up described the opening of the worlds first shared bookstore. Again, you can imagine the pitch.

Shared bookstore? ... That sounds a lot like a library.

Better, its a library where you pay with

Sold.

Yang Liu and Shirley Feng reported from Beijing.

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Study: Retail automation market worth $18.9B by 2023 – Retail Dive

Posted on August 21, 2017 by Danzig

Dive Brief:

The retail automation market is expected to be worth more than $18.9 billion by 2023, expanding at a compound annual growth rate of more than 10.9% between this year and 2023, according to new market research from Research and Markets.

The new report states that the imminent market growth is being "propelled by the growing deployment of self-automated technologies" such as RFID and others by retailers like supermarkets, hypermarkets and single item stores.

Asia-Pacific is expected to be the international region with the highest CAGR during the forecast period. The retail automation market in APAC is expected to grow significantly there, especially in China, India and Japan,because of factors such as rising employee wages and overall growth in employment, the research states. These factors drive the consumption of retail products, which is ultimately expected to boost the retail automation market in this region.

This research suggests that supermarkets are leading the way in adopting self-automated technologies to enhance customer experience, improve inventory management and modernize other processes. Of course, we didn't need to hear that from the number crunchers to believe it, as large grocery retailers are already racing one another to see who can be the first to widely adopt technologies that allow them to accomplish things like eliminating checkout lines.

Walmart may have just jumped ahead of Amazon in that race by installing a mobile barcode scanning capabilityinto several of its stores. Even last year, Panasonic unveiled what it described as a completely automated checkout machine. The research covers much more than just self-automated checkout, though, including store solutions like Tally, theSimbe Robotics robot that scans store shelves to monitor inventory levels and trends to help stores track inventory more accurately.

On the technology side, a variety of companies not just Panasonic and Simbe are working to enable further automation of retail processes. The Research and Market press release describes the efforts of one such company Datalogic but companies such as Zebra Technologies, Honeywell Scanning and Mobility, NCR and many others are also contributing to various types of efficiency-enabling automation technologies.

That doesn't mean the technology will transition without friction. A few months ago, a different research report raised concerns over the retail automation trend, saying that it could replace up to 7.5 million retail jobsin the coming years. Indeed, the new Research and Markets report acknowledges that the "balance between retail automation and employment" is a "burning issue."

Even as retailers maintain that automation is meant to enhance and assist store associates and other personnel, there is no getting around the notion that more automation in most cases means fewer jobs. That being said, if retailers are to position their brick-and-mortar stores to survive in a changed retail landscape, it's a transition they might need to make.

Top image credit: SoftBank Robotics

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Study: Retail automation market worth $18.9B by 2023 - Retail Dive

Want to cut healthcare costs? Try automation – The Hill (blog)

Posted on August 21, 2017 by Danzig

In the intense and ongoing debate over federal healthcarepolicy, the cost of prescription drugs has been a central and constant issue. Lawmakers from both parties have put forward dizzyingly diverse range of plans that aim to reducecostsand respond to constituent's demands.

But theres one straightforward technical tool for reducing drugcoststhat hasnt appeared in the high-profile debate.

When it comes to manufacturing pharmaceuticals, Americans should consider investing inautomation.

Its no secret:automationcan be a dirty word in U.S. politics. Its often synonymous with computers or robots taking jobs and shuttering factories. Theres some truth to this. The U.S. lost at least 5 million domestic manufacturing jobs over the past two decades,in large part due toautomation.

Still, a great deal ofautomationis inevitable. And, if we make the right investments ahead of our global competitors,automationcan work to our advantage including in terms job creation and reductions in consumer prices.

Consider howautomationis poised to change pharma manufacturing. The standard analog method of making drugs,batch manufacturing, is now more than 100 years old. This process requires numerousstops and starts, takes a lot of time, and involves serious risks of contamination or error.

In contrast, the newautomatedmanufacturing method calledcontinuousmanufacturing makes it possible to producemedicines more quickly and efficiently,without interruption and with a great deal more real-time control.Continuous manufacturing can lower the cost of drugs significantly, by decreasing the unit cost, by accelerating product development, and by improving quality.

This kind ofautomationisunquestionablythe future of pharmaceutical manufacturing.But, in this future,it'squestionable whether the United States will lead and, in turn, reap the rewards of new high-skilled jobs and reduced consumer prices.

While U.S. researchers including those at Rutgers University'sCenter for Structured Organic Particulate Systems(C-SOPS),which I direct have led the development of Continuous Manufacturing technologies, U.S.-based firms face challenges in making the transitionto commercial practice.

In particular, small and medium sized manufacturers struggle with the upfront technologicalcostsrequired to incorporate these new technologies into operations. And, yes, some stakeholders mayfearthe loss of old jobsassociated withatransition fromthe previous system of pharmaceutical manufacturing.

Drug making is a microcosm of the broader manufacturing economy asautomationand digitization take hold.

If we areserious aboutsucceeding in manufacturing and taking advantage of digitization andautomation, wewillneed to ensure that new transformativeinnovationsare anchored in America and that we do more informed cost-benefit assessments when thinking about employment.

While automationeliminatesthe need for some operator positions, itsimultaneouslymeans the creation ofbetteropportunities at multiple levels of skill from engineering and programming to design, assembly,optimization,maintenance, and monitoring.

Government, industry, and universities should work together tostandardize the technology processes and product development methods that can ensure the new methodstakehold herefirst.Different sectors should also cooperate to incentivize and invest in education, workforce training, and technology adoption.

Automationisnt the enemy. It simply means thatmanufacturing jobs follow real knowhow, not cheap labor.

This is a reality that we can turn to our advantage.

In todays political arena, we should see proactive investments in advanced manufacturing not only as a tool to create high-value, high-skill jobs but also to address other overarching challenges including the cost and quality ofhealthcare.

In a competitive world of constant innovation, these investments aren't optional.

Fernando J. Muzzio is Director, NSF ERC on Structured Organic Particulate Systems, and Distinguished Professor, Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, Rutgers University.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.

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Want to cut healthcare costs? Try automation - The Hill (blog)

PLAN WELL & EXECUTE: Automation won’t stop, so humans must … – New Haven Register

Posted on August 21, 2017 by Danzig

Photo: Contributed Photo / Cornell Wright

Automated bartenders on the Las Vegas Strip mix up your favorite cocktails.

PLAN WELL & EXECUTE: Automation wont stop, so humans must adapt and prepare

Automation is a competitor you do not wish to face in the world of economic competition, while at the same time expecting to win with a human solution.

I was reminded of this during a recent trip to Las Vegas. In one of the countless bars on the famous Las Vegas strip was an automated bartender. The automated bartender had a rack of bottles above the working surface and the technology, by robotic standards, was relatively straightforward. The drink, when completed, was delivered to the end of the preparation area by a short conveyor belt, where a human waitress delivered the drink to the customers table.

News headlines across the country are reporting of the advances being made with driverless cars. The reports often center on the features and benefits of driverless passenger cars. However, the big economic driver and job eliminator potentially will be the driverless trucks that currently deliver all of the goods we consume on a daily basis.

I say currently because some companies are attempting to leapfrog the vehicles and deliver small packages by drone.

It was not that long ago that the first automated teller machines (ATMs) appeared. During those early days of the ATM, very similar concerns were aired about safety of use and security of the transactions. Today most of us use ATMs without a second thought.

Remember when the Internet was scary because we did not want our credit card information moving electronically across the country and around the world? Additionally, I remember hearing concerns about buying clothes and food online because people believed that if they could not touch the items, they could not make the best selections.

If the various cyber-shopping days are any indication, we have moved past those concerns. Additionally, brick-and-mortar and salespeople are exposed to significant reductions in numbers. And as for food, we not only accept delivery from grocery stores, but there also is a growing business of pre-prepared food plans brought to us by meal plan companies.

The concern that I want to bring to your attention is not that automation is bad or that it can be stopped. The issue is, what do we do for human jobs when the robotics capabilities continue to improve with lower costs? What happens to people when the computers artificial intelligence capabilities increase to near-human levels?

To those who say that there will be new positions that will arise for those displaced workers, I say they are partially correct. There is a new team of developers who wrote the applications for the automated bartender. However, they were perhaps a team of 10 who by their labor could displace hundreds of bartenders. Also the application development team shrinks to four because it does not take as many people to maintain the application as it did to originally develop the code.

To my knowledge, there is increased automation in nearly every occupational field except politicians. We need our politicians to address real job issues because we know that retraining, if possible, takes time and money. Lets have a real debate with real numbers about jobs.

I, for one, liked the world of George Jetson; but I also remember the story of John Henry, the steel driving man. The drumbeat of automation continues. Lets be prepared.

Cornell Wright is the lead consultant and an Executive Coach at The Parker Wright Group Inc. in Stratford. The firm assists clients to increase their market share by improved customer service. He can be reached at 203-377-4226 or cornell@parkerwrightgroup.com.

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PLAN WELL & EXECUTE: Automation won't stop, so humans must ... - New Haven Register

Fran works six days a week in fast food, and yet she’s homeless: ‘It’s … – The Guardian

Posted on August 21, 2017 by Danzig

Once a customer has barked their order into the microphone at the Popeyes drive-thru on Prospect Avenue, Kansas City, the clock starts. Staff have a company-mandated 180 seconds to take the order, cook the order, bag the order and deliver it to the drive-thru window.

The restaurant is on short shift at the moment, which means it has about half the usual staff, so Fran Marion often has to do all those jobs herself. On the day we met, she estimates she processed 187 orders roughly one every two minutes. Those orders grossed about $950 for the company. Marion went home with $76.

Despite working six days a week, Marion, 37, a single mother of two, cant make ends meet on the $9.50 an hour she gets at Popeyes (no apostrophe founder Al Copeland joked he was too poor to afford one). A fast food worker for 22 years, Marion has almost always had a second job. Until recently, she had been working 9am-4pm at Popeyes, without a break, then crossing town to a janitorial job at Bartle Hall, the convention center, where she would work from 5pm- to 1.30am for $11 an hour. She didnt take breaks there either, although they were allowed.

I was so tired, she says. If I took a break I would go to sleep, so I would work straight through, she says.

Even with those two jobs, Marion was unable to save and when disaster struck she found it impossible to cope financially. Last month, the city condemned the house she rented the landlord had refused to fix faulty wiring and the leaking roof and she was made homeless.

Her children, Ravyn, 15, and Rashad, 14, are now living with a friend, two bus rides away. Because of the time and distance, Marion hasnt seen them in a week. She and her dog Hershey, a goofy milk-chocolate colored pitbull, are sleeping at the apartment of fellow fast food worker, Bridget Hughes: Marion on the sofa, Hershey on the balcony.

Its a downtrodden two-bedroom apartment in a sketchy neighborhood. Sex workers stake out the busier street corners; many of the houses are boarded up or burnt out. The detritus of drug addiction litters the streets.

While she tries to save for a deposit on a new home, Marion is sharing with Bridgets husband, Demetrius, and their four children. Not having a home, honestly, you guys, it makes me feel like I am a failure. Like I have let my kids down, says Marion, sitting among the plastic bags that hold her life. The rest of her familys belongings are stored in a van downstairs, a van she cant drive because she hasnt got the money to get it insured.

After she quit her janitorial job, hoping to find something more flexible so she could see more of her children, Marion started interviewing for a second job in fast food. I have always needed two jobs. You basically need two jobs to survive working on low wages, she says. Working so hard for so little security makes her feel like I am getting nowhere, she says. My family is not benefiting. Im working so hard to come home, and still I have to decide whether I am going to put food on the table or am I going to pay the light bill, or pay rent.

It makes me feel like a peasant. In a way its slavery. Its economic slavery.

Unsurprisingly, Marion seems depressed. She looks down when she talks, raising her big, sad eyes only when she has finished. But her whole face lights up when she talks about her kids. They are my world, she says. [They] brighten up my soul. She worries that all this pressure is bad for her self-diagnosed high blood pressure. Like 28 million other Americans, she doesnt have health insurance. She hasnt seen a doctor in her adult working life.

Bridget and Demetrius are hardly doing better. She earns $9 an hour at Wendys, Demetrius makes $9.50 an hour working at a gas station. Rent and bills, including childcare, come to about $800 a month, and they are barely scraping by, living paycheck to paycheck. Hughes says she has missed her childrens graduations, doctors appointments. She tears up as she explains how economic necessity meant she was forced to return to work two weeks after she last gave birth, and had to give up breastfeeding.

But Marion and Hughes are fighters, figureheads in what some see as the next wave of the civil rights movement. The pair are leading voices in Stand Up Kansas City, the local chapter of the union-backed Fight for $15 movement, which is campaigning for a nationwide increase in the minimum wage. And they are determined to make a difference.

The Fight for $15 movement is probably the most high profile, and successful, labor movement in the US, and has successfully pushed for local raises in the minimum wage across the country, mostly in Democratic strongholds. Trump comfortably won Missouri in 2016, although the major cities Kansas City, St Louis and Columbia voted Democrat. But the pair are confident that by coming together, the millions of Americans working low wage jobs can effect change even now.

Its not just us, its all across America, says Hughes. She says she felt invisible before the Fight for $15 movement.

On 14 April 2015, campaigners held what was then the largest ever protest by low-wage workers in US history. About 60,000 workers took to the streets in cities across the country calling for an increase in the minimum wage.

When protesters came to Marions restaurant, she says most of the staff moved to the back of the restaurant to distance themselves from the activists while her corporate boss smirked and laughed as they read their demands and said what they needed. I looked at him and I thought, You dont have these worries, she says. How can you laugh at someone elses pain? And I am going through the same thing. Thats when I joined the Fight for $15.

There is wave. There is momentum. I think that with all of working together, we will win $15 in the end, she says.

Its been almost a decade since the Great Recession, and America has witnessed a record 82 months of month-on-month jobs growth. The national unemployment rate now stands at a 4.3%, a 16-year low. But month after month, it is the low-wage sectors fast food, retail, healthcare that have added new jobs. Wage growth has barely kept pace with inflation. The national minimum wage ($7.25) was last raised in 2009.

Across the US, 58 million people earn less than $15 an hour; 41 million earn less than $12. In Missouri, Kansas City and St Louis councils recently passed local ordinances that would have increased the minimum wage to $13 an hour by 2023 in Kansas Citys case.

But backed by local and national business interests, Missouris governor, Eric Greitens a bestselling author, former Navy Seal and a rising Republican star has moved to roll back the increases, arguing businesses cant afford raises and will leave. Liberals say these laws help people, Greitens said in a statement. They dont. They hurt them.

Not so, says David Cooper, senior economic analyst at the Economics Policy Institute. We have decades of research on this and it all concludes that increases in the minimum wage have had negligible impact on jobs growth, he says. The academic debate is currently about whether that impact is a small gain in growth or a small drop. Either way, he says, a small rise in the minimum wage has an outsized impact on low wage workers. A $1 an hour rise from the current minimum of $7.25 would give the average low wage worker $2,000 more a year, says Cooper. That is a huge injection of income, he says.

The intense lobbying against an increase is simply a device to keep wages as low as possible so that employers can capture as much profit as they can, he says. Polls show that the majority of Americans are in favor of an increase. At least 40 cities and states around the country will raise their minimum wages in 2017, thanks largely to ballot measures. Those measures will deliver raises of around $4,000 a year for more than one-third of the workforce in states like New York and California, according to the National Employment Law Project.

But Greitens is not alone in fighting back, helped by a study of the impact of Seattles minimum wage hike by the University of Washington, which seemed to suggest higher wages had translated to fewer jobs. That the methodology of that study has been heavily criticized (utter BS, according to Josh Hoxie, director of the Project on Opportunity and Taxation at the Institute for Policy Studies ) and stands in contrast to piles of studies that found the opposite hasnt negated its popularity with anti-wage hikers.

Marion isnt in it for the politics. She is in it for the money, money that means one thing for her: getting her family back together and giving them a secure life. We pick her up at Popeyes and drive to a pleasant Kansas City suburb. Cicadas thrum as she beams strolling from the car to hug her daughter Rayven and goddaughter Shi Ann.

Shi Ann, in her rainbow hued LOVE T-shirt (the O is a butterfly), plays with princess flip-flops and squirms, giggling in Marions arms. Princesses dont put their fingers in their mouths, laughs Marion. I ask Rayven how it is living without her mum. The idyll is over. Tears fill her eyes. Marion goes inside so we cant see her cry.

Later, Marion says Rayven wants to leave school at 16 and get a job in fast food to help out. Ideally, her mum wants her to go to college but nothing is ideal for the Marion family at present.

After the visit, we drive back into the city to All Souls Unitarian church where Marion and Hughes are set to address a panel of academics, union leaders and others. The neighborhood is a world away from their own. A giant Louise Bourgeois spider menaces a manicured lawn at the Kemper art museum close by. The two women are unintimidated. They hold the room with ease as they talk about their fight with humor and a confidence that things will change.

Guests ask why they dont go back to school, get higher paid jobs. Hughes has a college degree but as the daughter of a low wage worker said she could only afford community college. Employers saw her degree as worthless, and she ended up $13,000 in debt. She did have a job in a tax office but lost it only to find that thanks to Missouris business-friendly rules, she was barred from working for another tax office by a non-compete agreement. (Fast food franchisor Jimmy Johns imposed a similar agreement on its workers but dropped it last year after a public backlash.)

Barred from tax office work, Hughes said fast food was all she could find.

Marion says the argument that fast food workers should leave for other, better paid, jobs misses the point. People like fast food. The companies that make it make fortunes. We are the foot soldiers for these billion-dollar companies. We are the ones doing the work and bringing the money, she says.

At the top of America, when it comes to Trump and them, their goal is to keep us down, she says. Between these billion-dollar companies and Trump, its a power trip.

They can afford to pay more and, she believes, eventually they will. We are still coming. No war has been won over night and we are not giving up.

More than that, she likes working in fast food. I love it. Im good at it. Just like Martin Luther King said, If you are going to be a road sweeper, be the best damn sweeper there is, she says. I dont know. Its just this society is all messed up.

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The difference between George Washington and Robert E. Lee – Chicago Tribune

Posted on August 21, 2017 by Danzig

In his third - and most appalling - set of remarks on a violent white supremacist rally, Donald Trump not only engaged in moral equivalence between neo-Nazis and anti-racist counter-protesters, he went so far as to defend the grudge that brought the white supremacists to Charlottesville in the first place.

"Many of those people were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee," the president said. "So this week, it is Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?" The next day, Trump doubled down on this message via Twitter, suggesting that his defense of Confederate monuments is no passing whim but a deeply held conviction. Even the president's outside attorney, John Dowd, got into the act, circulating an email claiming: "You cannot be against General Lee and be for General Washington, there literally is no difference between the two men."

This is moral sophistry of a high order. At the most basic level, the difference between George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, on the one hand, and Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, on the other, comes down to this: The former helped created the United States of America; the latter fought against it. It's as simple as that. And it doesn't take a lot of knowledge of history - which the president plainly does not possess - to grasp that basic distinction.

This helps to explain why there are, in fact, no calls to raze the Washington Monument or the Jefferson Memorial even from those who believe that the United States should pay reparations for slavery. True, Washington and Jefferson were slaveholders, and they were acutely conscious that this shameful practice contradicted the soaring ideals of the Declaration of Independence. That is why Washington in his will freed his slaves after his death (although his widow continued to own her own slaves). Jefferson, for his part, freed five slaves in his will and the other 130 were sold by his estate to cover his substantial debts.

But Washington and Jefferson also created a system of government that, while stained by the original sin of slavery, nevertheless established certain "unalienable rights" that would finally be vindicated after the struggles of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. That Jefferson and Washington were flawed human beings does not negate their greatness or the debt that we owe them for creating our country.

By contrast, what is it that we are supposed to be grateful to the Confederates for? For seceding from the Union? For, in the case of former U.S. Army officers such as Lee and Jackson, violating their oaths to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic"? For triggering the most bloody conflict in American history? For fighting to keep their fellow citizens in bondage?

There is nothing praiseworthy about any of this even if, like all soldiers, many Confederates showed considerable prowess and bravery in battle. But then so did Nazi German generals such as Erwin Rommel and Heinz Guderian. The same could be said of Japanese Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, who planned the attack on Pearl Harbor. Heck, even the 9/11 hijackers were undoubtedly courageous if also deeply twisted. Why not honor them while we're at it? The cause in which bravery is displayed matters a lot, and the cause of the Confederacy, to maintain and preserve slavery, was evil. Therefore we should not pay tribute to its leaders. Full stop.

Attempts to suggest that Robert E. Lee was somehow different - that he was a glorious cavalier who embodied a noble "Lost Cause" - are founded on little more than ahistorical mythology. As noted by Adam Serwer in the Atlantic, while Lee was troubled by slavery, he was not an advocate of emancipation. He was, in fact, a cruel taskmaster as both a slave-owner and a general. "During his invasion of Pennsylvania," Serwer notes, "Lee's Army of Northern Virginia enslaved free blacks and brought them back to the South as property." Moreover: "Soldiers under Lee's command at the Battle of the Crater in 1864 massacred black Union soldiers who tried to surrender." After the war, Lee opposed giving the vote to freed slaves.

The most praise-worthy thing that Lee did was to conclude the peace at Appomattox in April 1865 and reject calls to wage guerrilla warfare against the Union. But his motives were only partly altruistic - he feared that an insurgency would destroy the social system dominated by the South's plantation class. The fact that Lee, like German and Japanese leaders, was willing to accept defeat after being soundly beaten does not obviate his fundamental crime in waging war on a country he had pledged to serve.

If there is any Confederate worthy of special recognition it isn't Lee but his subordinate, Gen. James Longstreet, who after the war battled white supremacist militias in New Orleans who were seeking to deprive freedmen of their rights. But it is precisely for this reason that Longstreet became anathema to his fellow Confederates. No statues to Longstreet were erected until one finally went up at the Gettysburg battlefield in 1998.

And, no, it isn't rewriting history, as Trump claims, to take down statues honoring Confederates. The real attempt to rewrite history was undertaken by white supremacists who made a fetish of honoring the Confederacy so as to preserve segregation - the oppression of freed slaves and their descendants - when it was under challenge from the 1860s to the 1960s. Mainstream historiography has already been revised to dispel the myth of the "Lost Cause" that was created by white supremacists after the Confederacy's defeat. Taking down the statues is simply allowing the statuary to catch up with the history.

There is still a place for Confederate statues and even Confederate flags. But that place is on battlefields and museums where history can be recounted in an even-handed and accurate fashion. It is not in public squares where such monuments serve as rallying symbols for neo-Nazis. The very fact that white supremacists are so bent on preserving Confederate statues, by force if need be, tells you all you need to know about why the president of the United States should not be defending them.

---

Boot is a fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

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Secrets of slavery at your local car wash: Workers paid little or nothing for 11-hour shift and forced to live in … – Mirror.co.uk

Posted on August 21, 2017 by Danzig

Thousands of workers in hand car washes are thought to be victims of modern slavery , paid little or nothing for an 11-hour shift and forced to live in squalid accommodation.

Many are trafficked into the UK on the promise of paid work before becoming trapped in debt bondage, owing money to their bosses which they stand no chance of ever repaying.

Mirror investigators working with the anti-slavery watchdog found evidence to suggest thousands of mainly Eastern European people could be trapped working on forecourts and car parks.

Unable to speak English, they can work for up to 11 hours a day for little or no pay, and when their shift is done go home to makeshift accommodation, made from shipping containers.

Those who try to quit are threatened with violence or even deportation.

The Government believes up to 13,000 people are victims of modern slavery, which PM Theresa May dubbed the great human rights issue of our time.

The Daily Mirror visited 10 hand car washes and found all displayed at least two of the five tell-tale signs of modern slavery.

Kevin Hyland, the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, whose office drafted the five signs, said: These findings are really powerful.

People think this is something happening on distant shores, on different continents, but actually they need to realise slavery is happening in our cities, towns and villages.

This is something many people will unwittingly see every day without realising whats behind it. These people washing our cars up and down our high streets are potentially victims of modern slavery.

Campaigners say many washers are trafficked into Britain before being told their travel here has cost more than expected.

They can be paid around 40 for 11 hours work, but wages are docked to cover accommodation. Washers are told to work off the debt, but the pay never covers it.

Many do not have immigration papers and bosses threaten to report them if they try to quit.

Only one of the 10 facilities we visited had equipped workers with waterproofs and full protective clothing. At seven out of the 10 staff were unfamiliar with the English language.

Nine of the 10 lacked professional facilities, often with dangerous electrical wiring.

At all 10, we saw three or more workers washing one car, and we witnessed up to seven to a vehicle.

At two out of 10 sites, we found evidence to suggest washers were being housed on-site. We saw metal shipping containers equipped with satellite dishes, surrounded by barbed wire and rubbish bags. Workers were reluctant to have conversations with the public and when approached repeatedly pointed us to a boss.

A car wash service could cost from just 2.99, with a valet service starting at 9.99.

The Car Wash Advisory Service said around 1,000 of the estimated 16,000 hand car washes observe any regulatory requirements and many staff get below the minimum wage, usually cash in hand.

Mr Hyland added: Decent hard working Brits are using these car washes and they arent aware what they are seeing. Sometimes you have six to nine people washing a car.

By the time they have paid for all the other costs and insurances how are they ever going to pay the minimum wage?

We talk about modern slavery being a hidden crime. Sometimes its actually hidden in plain sight.

The National Crime Agency said it was helping in 300 police operations targeting modern slavery, with victims as young as 12.

Last week 11 members of the Rooney family in Lincolnshire were convicted of running a modern slavery ring.

If you suspect someone is being exploited, call the police, or the Modern Slavery Helpline on 0800 0121 700.

5 tell-tale signs of exploitation

1: Lack of protective clothing suitable for contact with industrial cleaning chemicals - workers often wear tracksuits or jeans with trainers or flip flops.

2: Unprofessional facilities - no water drainage, no appropriate electrical wiring, temporary signage only, no public liability indemnity insurance and no visible first aid equipment.

3: Three or more people washing a single car despite low prices of around 5 - this cannot add up to cover the minimum wage, let alone other overheads.

4: Staff unfamiliar with the English language and showing signs of coercion - indicators of control include signs of anxiety and exhaustion in workers and a "supervisor" who is usually polite to customers, yet controls staff.

5: Signs that people both live and work on site - unsuitable metal containers near toilet facilities and hanging laundry.

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Secrets of slavery at your local car wash: Workers paid little or nothing for 11-hour shift and forced to live in ... - Mirror.co.uk

Uzbekistan To Abolish Exit Visa System In 2019 – Radio Free Europe – RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty

Posted on August 21, 2017 by Danzig

Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoev has signed a decree that will enable citizens to travel abroad from the state without permission as of January 1, 2019.

The decree, published by state media outlets on August 16, orders the introduction of biometric passports and the abolition of the exit visa requirement.

The decree says the new rules for foreign travel are designed to "rule out bureaucratic hurdles and instances of corruption" linked to the system under which Uzbeks must seek government approval to leave the country.

A draft decree posted on a government website in January included a clause scrapping the long-standing exit-visa requirement, but officials at the time suggested the change was not imminent.

The system inherited from the Soviet era has been a major barrier for Uzbeks seeking to leave the country, and a source of illegal income for officials who expedite the process in exchange for bribes.

Many people in the Central Asian country of some 30 million travel to Russia to find work and send remittances home.

Mirziyoev has taken steps to decrease Uzbekistan's isolation since he came to power in September 2016, after the death of autocratic longtime leader Islam Karimov.

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Uzbekistan To Abolish Exit Visa System In 2019 - Radio Free Europe - RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty

The Root 100 No. 1s: Ben Jealous, a Supreme Builder of Bridges Between Right and Left – The Root

Posted on August 21, 2017 by Danzig

Former NAACP Chairman Ben Jealous announces his campaign for governor of Maryland during a rally in Baltimore on May 31, 2017. (Brian Witte/AP Images)

Benjamin Todd Jealous first made a national name for himself in 2008 when, at age 35, he became the youngest leader of one of Americas oldest and most esteemed civil rights bodies, the NAACP.

Before Jealous began his five-year tenure of the then-99-year-old organization, it was clear that the NAACP had calcified into a shell of its former self. Its enrollment numbers were down, its membership skewed older, its finances were in shambles, and by many accounts, it had abdicated its position as a formidable leader in the fight for black advancement.

While at the NAACP, Jealous was able to leverage technology so that its online membership increased by more than half a million people, from 175,000 to 675,000; its donor base increased more than eightfold; and it registered hundreds of thousands of new voters and mobilized 1.3 million people to turn out to the polls in 2012a significant factor in getting Barack Obama re-elected. Most presciently, the organization also began to build coalitions with other civil rights, labor and environmental groups, also finding common ground with staunch conservatives and even the Tea Party, especially around issues such as mass incarceration and criminal-justice reform.

As head of the NAACP, Jealous was most astute in recognizing the fact that the game had changed since the days of de jure segregation and open racial terror. Under his steady guidance, the outfit took on more contemporary issues such as the abolition of the death penalty, gay-marriage equality, black economic empowerment and police malfeasance such as New York Citys stop-and-frisk policy. The kicker is that the NAACP didnt just raise awareness about such issues but lobbied and fought so that real change occurred. For all of this, Jealous was named to the No. 1 spot on The Root 100 in 2013.

In May, Jealous announced that he was seeking the governorship of Maryland in 2018. He and his family have a long history in the Old Line State. His grandparents came to Baltimore from southern Virginia in the 1930s, and his parents met in the state as well but eventually moved to California, where Ben was born, because interracial marriage was still illegal in Maryland in the late 1960s.

Jealous says that his work as both president and CEO of the NAACP, as well as his years as a community activist and, most recently, as a principal in a venture capital investment firm that funds socially conscious startups, have prepared him for this moment in time.

Ive been a community organizer my entire adult life. Ive spent my life pulling people together to hold government accountable and get things done, he told The Root. As national president of the NAACP, I led several victorieshere in Maryland, that included abolishing the death penalty, passing the DREAM Act, and passing marriage equality and voting rights in the same year.

His strategy for victory includes making the most of partnerships between traditional civil rights organizations and progressive groups he was able to court during his tenure as the co-chair of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign in the state.

Thats my approach to this campaign, he says. My campaign is rooted in the civil rights networks that I and my family has been a part of for decades in Maryland and in the networks we created in the Bernie campaign. You put those two things together, and thats a decided advantage over every other candidate in this field.

He continues, The Holy Grail of American politics is always get working families of every color on the same side of the table confronting the problems we have in common, as opposed to working against each other across lines of race, religion and region, where those problems just get bigger and bigger. If we dont, well be facing more incarceration, discrimination, and stagnation.

The 44-year-old has presented a truly progressive platform, including free-to-low-cost higher education, a $15 minimum wage, better school systems and dignity for working families. He says he plans to make those plans a reality by closing corporate tax loopholes, cutting waste and abuse and making sure our money is managed better.

Jealous promises to roll out a bunch of endorsements in the next months, including those from the national Democratic Party leadership (he already has Bernie Sanders backing), unions, progressives, religious leaders and business and environmental groups.

Ive spent my life building big robust coalitions to make real change in real time for real people, says Jealous. Its the same way we are approaching this campaign.

The Root 100 2017 will be announced Sept. 18.

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Africa’s second liberation will be women’s empowerment | News … – Mail & Guardian

Posted on August 21, 2017 by Danzig

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tanzanian vice-president Samia Suluhu Hassan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reporting by Suzgo Chitete, images by Gare Amadou

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This Bay Area startup is arming retailers with the technology to take on Amazon Go – GeekWire

Posted on August 21, 2017 by Danzig

Amazon is still tinkering with the checkout-free technology behind its Amazon Go retailer concept, but Palo Alto, Calif. startup Standard Cognition is moving to the front of the line, releasing an alternative technology with a similar goal of eliminating the checkout process that it will supply to retailers.

The startup, part of Y Combinators Summer 2017 batch, today embarked on the initial launch of its artificial intelligence-based system that lets consumers shop and pay without stopping to check out. The company bills its technology as a way for retailers to cut labor costs by eliminating cashiers, better use store space, track inventory and protect against theft.

The company said it is in advanced talks to set up pilots of its technology with several retailers. The technology uses machine vision and artificial intelligence to identify each item and detect when items are picked up, put back or left somewhere else in the store.

It works with a pair of apps, one for the shopper and one for the store. All shoppers have to do is open the app, check in, grab their stuff and leave. The bill will be charged to the app. Those without the app will be directed by store staff to automated kiosks, similar to self-checkout stations, where they can pay with cash or credit.

The store app tells staff where customers are in the store and what they are buying. The system tracks shoppers, so if someone is trying to pocket items and walk out without paying, the technology uses predictive path finding technology to alert store employees.

The checkout-free Amazon Go concept, using similar technology to that of driverless cars, made waves when the company announced it last year. It has been in beta testing since then, with a planned public launch of early 2017. Reports indicate that Amazon has had some trouble with the technology, delaying its public debut.

We saw the need in the market for a bettercommerce solutionfor brick-and-mortar retailers that would leverage the latest AI technology to help them dramatically cut costs, get better analytics, get insight into inventory and shrinkage, and improve the checkout experience for their customers, Michael Suswal, co-founder and chief operating officer of Standard Cognition, said in a statement. It seems other companies have delayed their launches because of technical glitches caused by using out-of-date machine-learning techniques.

Amazon isnt the only retail giant looking at automating the checkout process, a move that could fundamentally shift the retail industry and have a significant impact on jobs. Walmart earlier this month debuted its Scan & Go app, which resembles a manual version of Amazon Go.

Amazon Go and Scan & Go are, at least for now, in-house technologies whereas Standard Cognition is offering its tech for retailers of all kinds.

For 99 percent of retailers who dont have the resources to deal with lost profit margins from cashier overhead, product theft and shrinkage, they are going to go out of business, Suswal said. We want to help retailers both small and large thrive and eliminate the cumbersome, expensive checkout experience as it exists today.

Suswal, the companys COO, and CEO Jordan Fisher both did stints at the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission. Several of the co-founders worked together at Pwnee Studios, a New York computer game studio.

5 Ways Technology Can Improve Your Home, and its Value. – Inc.com

Posted on August 21, 2017 by Danzig

Upping your tech game at home can be fun - before you know it, you'll feel like you're living in "The Jetsons." But creating a smart house is about more than your own entertainment; it's also about saving cash and time. Many tech products are easy to install on your own, while others require a professional. Either way, technology can change your home for the better. Here are five ways it can improve your life:

Leaving a light on overnight doesn't seem like a big deal, but if you do it often enough, you're bound to burn through bulbs and notice a difference in your electric bill. With smart lighting, you can dim your lights using an app on your smartphone from another room or even another city. So, if you forget to turn off the hallway light as you leave for vacation, it won't burn the entire time you're gone. You'll just turn it off with a few taps on your phone and then sleep easy. You can also set a timer for your smart lights, ensuring they always dim or turn off at bedtime.

Sitting comfortably in your armchair and feeling too lazy to get up and turn down the heat? This is not a problem when you have a smart thermostat. Like smart lighting, this easy-to-use gadget can be controlled manually, but you can also access it from your smartphone. Some products, including Nest, are even able to sense when you're home, versus when you're away, and adjust the temperature as needed.

Smart lighting and a smart thermostat can cut your electric bill in half, but there are ways to save even more. Invest in solar panels and you may save more than $1,000 per year on utilities. While there is a significant cost associated with installing solar panels (around $10,000), tax credits are available to help you reduce your out-of-pocket expenses. Whether you're going to be in your home for the long haul or you just care about reducing your home's carbon footprint, solar panels are a great alternative to remaining on the grid.

Popular systems like Amazon Echo and Alexa add unprecedented convenience to your home. Want to find out the weather? Just ask out loud and get a response. Want to play your favorite song over an in-home speaker? These systems can be voice activated to play music. You can even Google a random factoid that escapes your memory just by asking your Amazon system to do it.

Creating a smart home may do more than make your life easier and your utilities more bearable. It can also increase the value of your home. More permanent solutions like solar panels can lead to a five-figure value increase, and smart thermostats are appealing to potential buyers. Given how easy many tech upgrades are to install and implement, using smart technology is certainly worth the effort.

Adding technology to your home is a surefire way to create a more comfortable and convenient living experience. Better yet, your pocket book may thank you. With tech advancements ever-evolving, it's becoming less and less expensive to make meaningful changes to your abode.

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Avi Savar is CEO and Managing Partner of Dreamit, a top venture accelerator and early stage investment fund. He is the author of Content to Commerce and consults globally on trends in digital media, disruptive technologies and corporate innovation. He has been featured on Fox News, Forbes, Mashable, Business Insider, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, the New York Times and is a contributing editor for Inc.

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http://www.designyourway.net/blog/inspiration/30-cool-high-tech-gadgets-to-give-your-home-a-futuristic-look/

7 Smart Home Technology Upgrades That Increase the Value of Your Home

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/best-smart-home-gadgets,review-2008.html

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5 Ways Technology Can Improve Your Home, and its Value. - Inc.com

The very dirty history of on-demand video technology – Ars Technica

Posted on August 21, 2017 by Danzig

Enlarge / It's the Sony U-Matic in all its analog glory. This device was used in the early 1970s to stream X-rated video to hotel rooms, often using a closed-circuit broadcasting device on the hotel roof.

Wikimedia

In 1973, a young Roger Ebert reviewed the movie Deep Throat. He was not yet a household name or a Pulitzer Prize winner, but he was a respected film critic. The fact that he and his peers regularly reviewed pornographic films suggested that wed entered a new era in filman era in which pornography might be viewed as art.

Turns out that wasnt the case. More than 40 years later, people are still arguing about whether porn can be art. But that doesnt mean the early '70s werent a turning point for porn. The year before Roger Ebert saw Deep Throat, the Hotel Commodore in New York City shocked the nation by announcing that it had installed a system which would let viewers watch X-rated titles in their hotel rooms. It might not be art, but porn had become a testing bed for new kinds of on-demand video technologies.

The United States was not the nation to lead the world into this new era. Japan got there first. Technology-friendly Osaka had hotels built specifically for many different combinations of sex and video. Some hotel rooms came equipped with video cameras, as well as, presumably, both an overworked technical staff and an overworked cleaning staff. Other rooms simply had a television that picked up the signal of a closed-circuit broadcasting device on the roof, creating an early form of streaming video. In 1971, one hotel's device made contact with a steel safety railing. This considerably increased the broadcast range and gave surrounding houses a glimpse of movies that not everyone appreciated.

Scandalized reports about Osakas hotels made their way across the Pacific to Los Angeles. There, groups of entrepreneurs snapped up Japanese technologynamely the Sony U-matic machineand made their own dirty little hotels with dirty little porn channels. This turned out to be a good deal both for the hotels and for Sony. The U-matic machines, which used cartridges to play different films, were too expensive for the consumer market. But they were worth it for motels, which could show the same few films over and over.

The motels, meanwhile, were explicit about what separated them from a generic family motor lodge. Advertisements encouraged patrons to rent rooms for a few days or for a few hours. Guests could unwind in luxury and privacy, watching X-rated films in their own rooms rather than going to theaters, peep shows, or arcades. That being said, a person spotted checking into an adult motel could no more argue their innocence than they could if they were spotted going into a peep show or an adult movie theater. Police raided the hotels regularly, prostitutes strolled outside, and no amount of repetition of the word luxury could make the hotels into something swank.

Museum of the City of New York

Thats why the Hotel Commodore made headlines. This was a legitimate hotel, for ordinary guests (the historic hotel was later torn down by Donald Trump, who turned it into the Grand Hyatt). Papers across the nation picked up the Commodore story, focusing on the technology as much as the films themselves. The Waukesha Daily Freeman, in Waukesha, Wisconsin, wrote about the hotel's alliance with a company called Player's Cinema Systems to deliver unedited X-rated films to its guests' hotel rooms. The films, the paper notes, are popular with businessmen. (You don't say.)

New York Magazine went further in depth on the technology behind the films: The Player's system, called The Movie Box, uses playback units with cartridges containing twelve tracks of twelve minutes each. Thus movies of up to two hours and twenty-four minutes can be put on one cartridge. The Movie Box, with the desired cartridge already installed, was delivered by a bellman to a room upon request. Guests would play it via a projection system made by Zeiss-Ikon. This, representatives of the hotel stressed, would allow responsible hotel employees to make sure that no children saw Russ Meyer's Vixen. It was custom content, delivered to your door.

The X-rated titles outsold the family fare, at least according to the hotel's general manager. This, in hindsight, was not remarkable. What was remarkable was that the hotel sold both. A family could watch Beware the Blob in one room, while a businessman watched something far less family friendlyin the next. Player's Cinema Systems could offer X-rated filmsto anyone over eighteen years old. The only problem was space: if they showed The Godfather, half an hour of running time would have to be edited out in order for the movie to fit on the cartridge.

Before the 1970s, when any movie was by necessity a public show, adult entertainment was segregated from the mainstream. It had its own theaters and sometimes its own section of town. Technology, and the promise of a great deal of money, made it just another thing to watch in a hotel roomand not the kind of hotel that gets raided by the police. What began in hotel rooms in the 1970s wound up on VCRs in the 1980s, and on the Web in the '90s and beyond. Today, a lot of adult entertainment is being streamed again. Only now it's streamed live, with performers who interact with viewers, rather than broadcast to hotel rooms from a cartridge in a U-matic. In a round-up of his porn reviews, Ebert writes, The huge cultural change since the 1970s is that now its consumed at home on video and the Web, not in steamy movie theaters and dank peep-show booths.

This was a cultural change brought about almost entirely by scientists, programmers, and engineers. In a sense, technology was what allowed respectable people to watch pornographynot by making porn into art, but by making it something we could watch in private.

Monday Sector Laggards: Energy, Technology & Communications – Nasdaq

Posted on August 21, 2017 by Danzig

Looking at the sectors faring worst as of midday Monday, shares of Energy companies are underperforming other sectors, showing a 0.9% loss. Within the sector, Chesapeake Energy Corp. (Symbol: CHK) and Newfield Exploration Co (Symbol: NFX) are two large stocks that are lagging, showing a loss of 4.7% and 3.1%, respectively. Among energy ETFs , one ETF following the sector is the Energy Select Sector SPDR ETF (Symbol: XLE), which is down 0.7% on the day, and down 16.72% year-to-date. Chesapeake Energy Corp., meanwhile, is down 46.23% year-to-date, and Newfield Exploration Co, is down 39.46% year-to-date. Combined, CHK and NFX make up approximately 0.9% of the underlying holdings of XLE.

The next worst performing sector is the Technology & Communications sector, showing a 0.3% loss. Among large Technology & Communications stocks, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (Symbol: AMD) and Micron Technology Inc. (Symbol: MU) are the most notable, showing a loss of 3.4% and 2.5%, respectively. One ETF closely tracking Technology & Communications stocks is the Technology Select Sector SPDR ETF ( XLK ), which is down 0.2% in midday trading, and up 18.71% on a year-to-date basis. Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., meanwhile, is up 5.34% year-to-date, and Micron Technology Inc. is up 35.15% year-to-date. Combined, AMD and MU make up approximately 0.8% of the underlying holdings of XLK.

25 Dividend Giants Widely Held By ETFs

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.

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Monday Sector Laggards: Energy, Technology & Communications - Nasdaq

A few things that may surprise you about seniors and technology – Dayton Daily News

Posted on August 21, 2017 by Danzig

A few years ago when I wrote about technology of benefit to elders, there was limited interest and adoption by much of the older adult population.

Take, for example, the smartphone. According to the Pew Research Center, four in 10 seniors own smartphones, which is more than double the number of users than in 2013. In these past few years, more elders have been going online with an estimated 67 percent of adults over 65, plus adults regularly logging on. Younger seniors are also using social media with increased frequency. Social media platforms such as Facebook and Skype are very effective in helping to stay in touch with both local and

Younger seniors are also using social media with increased frequency. Social media platforms such as Facebook and Skype are very effective in helping to stay in touch with both local and long-distance friends and family and provide many with the opportunity to reconnect with old acquaintances. This can be very beneficial in helping many to feel less isolated. As elders continue to embrace this new world, technology companies are focusing much of their energies toward addressing interests and preferences of this population.

When conducting a very informal Internet search on technology and older adults, I was presented with pages of results. Furthermore, as reported in Tech Crunch (a leading technology website) when the App Store debuted in 2008, it grew to 5,000 apps by the end of its first year, and that growth has continued to be explosive ever since. By the end of 2015, it reached 1.75 million apps, and today hosts 2 million apps worldwide.

One particular area that seems to be of great interest is the technology focused on helping older adults who may be experiencing some memory challenges. There are now, for example, a number of smart pill boxes and apps to help remind people about their medication regimen. This might include visual and auditory reminders. This supportive assistance extends beyond the user and can be programmed to alert a family member if a loved one may have forgotten to take prescribed medication. There are now activity sensors that can be placed around the home to provide a family member a snapshot of a loved ones daily routine. Should something seem off such as a suspected fall, or little activity in the home emergency contacts will be alerted. Although likely somewhat intrusive for the elder, there are now indoor video cameras that enable a loved ones activity to be monitored on a family member or caregivers smartphone.

A recent online posting from the website Aging in Place Technology Watch highlighted some exciting new innovations. As seen in a recent episode of the television series Saturday Night Live, voice activated technologies can function as a virtual assistant. Among countless other applications, these devices can adjust the thermostat, help to stay informed about current events, provide weather reports, answer questions, create personalized music play lists, and provide reminders of upcoming appointments. It is not too far in the future that these devices will become more interactive with additional capabilities directed toward keeping elders engaged and self-reliant.

Please feel free to email me if you would like additional information on this topic. It is important to note that if there is an understanding that an elder requires supportive assistance, even the most sophisticated technology cannot take the place of a human caregiver.

Marci Vandersluis is a licensed social worker and has a masters degree in gerontology. She is employed as a care manager assisting older adults in the community connect with needed services. Email: marcirobinvandersluis@gmail.com.

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