Why is virtual reality taking so long to take off? – The Washington Post – Washington Post

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LOS ANGELES At the Electronic Entertainment Expo, all seemed right for virtual reality. Players were waiting in snaking lines some for up to seven hours for a chance to step into fantasy worlds. Crowds watched as players wearing VR headsets over their eyes reached out to pick up objects or shoot enemies that only they could see.

More than 125 VR exhibitors were at E3 this year, up 130 percent from last year. Yet adoption of VR among consumers hasnt really taken off in the three years since it captured buzz in the wider world. An estimated 6.3 million headsets have sold worldwide indicating that, even among the worlds 2.6 billion gamers, few have picked one up.

Experts point to several reasons behind the slow adoption the technology can cause motion sickness and it is costly. Its also been hard getting people to try it, developers said. And showing virtual reality experiences on flat screens doesnt give people a good enough taste of how different the experience really is.

How do you advertise a color TV on black-and-white televisions? It requires people walking down to main street and seeing it for themselves, said Steve Bowler, president and co-founder at VR game developer CloudGate Studio.

What virtual reality needs, experts say, is a killer app. And firms are pushing to find it, building up their own platforms and funding developers to bring games to their own headsets exclusively. But this kind of fragmentation has resulted in a confusing market and fewer games for players, thus giving them fewer reasons to spend their dollars on this young trend.

Mike Fischer, chairman and co-founder of VR game developer CloudGate Studio, told a panel last year that platform fragmentation keeps me up at night after so many new companies jumped into the VR market although he says that things have improved a little since then.

Devoting extra resources to creating games for different devices can be particularly difficult for smaller studios, whose creativity drive much of the virtual reality market. In fact some developers, such as Jeff Pobst from Hidden Path Entertainment, say they rely on funding from platforms such as Oculus to get their games made at all.

These exclusive deals between developers and VR companies make it hard for consumers to know which expensive headset will get the game that they want to play leading them to put off their decision, analysts said.

A monopoly, while simple for consumers, wouldnt be perfect either, experts said. Competition is important, and different headsets characteristics inspire different types of games. HTCs technology is designed for larger, room-sized experiences that often require gamers to stand. Sonys experiences are largely seated. Oculus provides a mix of the two.

Even big players in the virtual reality market acknowledge that locking any game to a single device could be problematic.

We actually think that content in the VR space makes a lot of space for developers and publishers to look at the market from a platform agnostic standpoint, said Joel Breton, vice president of Global VR Content for HTC. While HTC helps developers create games for its own platform, Breton said it doesnt hold them to any sort of exclusivity deal.

More companies are also beginning to work on cross-platform solutions.

Developer tools such as Unity and Unreal are streamlining the process for developers who want to port their games between headsets. Ubisoft, one of the worlds largest game publishers, has committed to releasing virtual reality games that work the major three high-end headsets, allowing people who own different headsets to play with each other. Sony spokeswoman Jennifer Hallett said the PlayStation VR has several titles that also work on other platforms, including Ubisofts Star Trek: Bridge Crew and Eve: Valkyrie which started as an Oculus-exclusive title.

The VR companies are also trying to do more to work together. Jason Rubin, vice president of content at Oculus, said in an email interview that he doesnt think that there is harmful fragmentation in the market for consumers or developers. But his firm tries to work with competitors to push the whole industry forward, he added.

But other major publishers seem to be waiting to see how the market plays out before revealing their plans for virtual reality.

We believe VR will be a major opportunity, but widespread adoption will take time, said Electronic Arts in an emailed statement.

For consumers eager to try virtual reality, however, that may mean waiting at least another development cycle to let the market fill out.

The more content out there across different platforms and price points, the more likely consumers are to try VR, and the more likely they are to become true believers in the medium, Rubinsaid.

Correction: A previous version of this story misattributed the last quote from Jason Rubin. This version has been corrected.

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Virtual reality run: SeaWorld unleashes Kraken roller-coaster revamp today – Orlando Sentinel (blog)

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SeaWorld Orlando didnt build a new roller coaster this year, but it felt like it to Alex Moreno.

Ive been on Kraken tons and tons of times, and that didnt feel like Kraken, he said Friday. Its better much better.

Moreno and his friend Chloe Spencer of Orlando were among the first to ride the rebooted coaster rechristened Kraken Unleashed with its new virtual-reality component in place.

Riders have the option of wearing a headset that presents a movie to make it seem as if theyre going underwater and encountering sea life, both real and mythological. In reality, theyre on the same rail thats been in place since the ride opened 17 years ago.

When you first go into the water its so crazy, Moreno said.

Friday also marked the debut of SeaWorlds Spot Saver system, which allows visitors in the park to reserve ride times on the new coaster. A Spot Saver kiosk was set up near the Kraken Unleashed entrance, and the service could also be accessed by mobile devices at spotsaver.com.

By noon, all reservation slots had been taken. The park closes at 7 p.m.

Spot Saver was established, in part, because the turnaround time between rides has increased. Theres a learning curve for folks donning the virtual-reality headsets for the first time, plus the equipment is cleaned between each run.

Rudi Stern, who lives near Munich, Germany, said he liked the ride but was frustrated by the wait time in the station.

It was a great ride, but it all took too long, he said. When we put on the glasses and then the riding time and the waiting time and the time when you are sitting, it was about 7 minutes, which is very long.

But, once they got rolling, he said the virtual-reality aspect was a winner and superior to stationary simulators.

Its not like the virtual reality where you only sit, Stern said.

The rides film is synchronized with the movement of the coaster, which still goes 65 mph and turns upside-down seven times, said Brian Morrow, vice president of theme-park experience design.

We take advantage of the real inversions, but sometimes we disguise them as other maneuvers, which makes it really unusual, he said. So you cant count the seven inversions anymore.

All the in-your-face movement didnt make Regina Johnston queasy, she said. She usually avoids coasters but wanted to check out the VR on Kraken, she said.

I think it makes it easier, said Johnston, who lives near Dallas. When Im on a regular coaster, I want to shut my eyes or hold my breath. This one, I could keep my eyes open.

dbevil@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5477

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The confounding world of Cryonics, and the Kiwi scientists trying to … – Stuff.co.nz

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NICOLE LAWTON

Last updated05:00, June 18 2017

CHRIS MCKEEN/FAIRFAX NZ

Stem cells, skin, red blood cells and platelets are all frozen in liquid nitrogen freezer at the New Zealand Blood Service for later use - but not whole bodies.

Cryonics, the practice of deep-freezing bodies, remains a controversial area of research with many scientists in New Zealand reluctant to wade into the freezer.

Not surprisingly, the art of filling the deceased with antifreeze, suspending them in liquid nitrogen in the vain hopes that scientific break-throughs will one day reanimate them and cure them isnot an accepted academic discipline New Zealand, and therefore isn't pursued in any official capacity.

But that hasn't stopped a few individuals from trying.

CHRIS MCKEEN/FAIRFAX NZ

Dr Richard Charlewood, is the medical director of the national tissue bank, run by the New Zealand Blood Service.

Two New Zealand foundations -The Foundation for Anti-aging Research and the Foundation for Reversal of Solid State Hypothermia - were given the cold shoulder in 2013 when applying to be considered a charity from the Charities Registration Boards (CRB).

READ MORE: Kiwi'sbody hangs upside-down in a -196C vat

The board rejected the foundations on the basis that cryonics was not an accepted academic discipline based on the lack, in mainstream science, of feasibility and benefits of the research.

This decision was then successfully appealed in october 2016 - when Justice Rebecca Ellis found cryonics research to fall squarely under the 'advancement of education' heading and therefore had 'charitable purpose'.

She said there was evidence that the proposed research was likely to lead to advances in areas such as organ transplant medicine, stem cell research, and treating a range of diseases and disorders.

The listed officers and trustees for both foundations have addresses Monaco, Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

Others, Saul Kent and William Faloon bought an old church in downtown Hollywood in 2013 for $880,000 and founded the Church of Perpetual Life.

The pair are big were the cryonics world and both personally signed up for their shot at eternal life.

Nothing has been heard from the foundations since the CRB appeal and all attempts to contact the trustees were unsuccessful.

The closet thing that happens to freezing humans in New Zealand is cryogenically freezing tissue through the tissue banks of the New Zealand Blood Service.

Stem cells, skin, red blood cells and platelets are all submerged in a cryoprotectant and frozen to liquid nitrogen temperatures of around negative 196 degrees Celsius - for later human use.

"The skin cells last for up to 5 years, and stem cells up to ten years," said Richard Charlewood, the national tissue bank's medical director.

"We don't like keeping it for any longer than that because most of the studies only go up as far as ten years.

"At liquid nitrogen temperatures very little is actually happening at molecular level. So it's possible that they would be fine well beyond ten years, we just don't know for sure."

Charlewood said when cryo-preserving, the key thing is to get the cryoprotectant into all the cells that you want to keep alive, otherwise the formation of ice crystals can burst the cells and kill them.

"In terms of whole body freezing, my understanding is that you have to get the cryo-protectant to all the cells in the body, so you'd have to pump it around the body really thoroughly."

Fertility specialists in New Zealand also offer cryogenic preservation of eggs, ovarian tissue, sperm and embryos for reproductively-challenged patients who wish to conceive later.

Otago University's associate professor in botany, David Burritt, also regularly employs cryopreservation in his line of study.

Ina 2016 research paper he said cryopreservation was a great method for long-term storage ofreproductive plant material - such as seeds, pollen, dormant buds, shoot tips, embryos, or isolated plant cells or tissues.

"Plant material is first preconditioned, using chemical and physical treatments, so that it remains viable when it is frozen and during ultra-low temperature storage."

"Following re-warming, seeds and embryos can germinate, buds or shoot tips can be induced to grow, and whole plants can be regenerated from cryopreserved cells or tissues."

He said the samples could, in theory, be conserved indefinitely as "no metabolic activity occurs at these ultra-low temperatures."

'Cryobanking' enables large numbers of important crops, such as wheat, potato and various fruit and forest trees, to be cryopreserved, rewarmed and then allowed to grow into complete plants.

In March, scientists in the UK succeeded in cryogenically freezing and rewarming sections of heart tissue for the first time, in an advance that could pave the way for organs to be stored for months or years.

-Sunday Star Times

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The Most Intimate Symbol: Jan Swafford on Classical Music – lareviewofbooks

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JUNE 17, 2017

THE MASSACHUSETTS-BASED writer, teacher, and composer Jan Swafford is famed for his biographies of Beethoven, Brahms, and Charles Ives, as well as his beloved Vintage Guide to Classical Music. Basic Books has just published Language of the Spirit: An Introduction to Classical Music, a clear and lively book that does exactly what it promises, in a series of chapters built on historical periods and individual composers.

The following interview was conducted over email, shortly after Language of the Spirit was released.

SCOTT TIMBERG: There have been, over the decades, numerous tomes on classical music. What kind of gap does yours fill?

JAN SWAFFORD: My old Vintage Guide was aimed at adult music lovers or potential ones, and also at schools. Language of the Spirit is mainly aimed at schools, secondly at adults. I imagine there have always been books for music classes the old Joseph Machlis book, The Enjoyment of Music, went through several editions and, modified by other hands, is still around. Aaron Copland did his bit with What to Listen for in Music. I wanted to write a similarkind of thing in a more lively, humanistic, and entertaining way. At the same time, the book is written by a practicing musician and composer who looks at the profession from the inside. My basic assumption is that this music is not some grand abstraction, not an adjunct to a lifestyle, but a special and profound kind of communication among people; its main impact is not intellectual but emotional. If the book has a central message, I suppose thats it.

Decades ago, books, courses, and television programs on serious music, visual art, and the like were plentiful Leonard Bernsteins Young Peoples Concerts, Kenneth Clarks Civilisation, and so on. Has that approach dropped out of the mainstream in a world of postmodern niches, the demotion of high culture, and constant digital connection?

Ill reply with a story. My mother was a high school English teacher much involved with poetry and literature. When I was cleaning out the house after she died, I found stacks of articles on major literary figures Eliot, Frost, et al that were mostly torn out of Life and Time magazines, which, at the time, were enormously popular, omnipresent. Every week Time had a classical music piece. People like Hemingway and Eliot were regularly on the cover. Whats on the coverof magazines in print and online these days? Rock stars and movie stars. TV began in the 50s with vastly ambitious ideas about public education featuring people like Bernstein on the networks, before public television. Clark was later, on the BBC and PBS, but PBS doesnt really do things of that scope anymore. The reasons are obvious, all having to do with money.

So yeah, theres been a gigantic dumbing-down of the culture. In the United States, its moving toward the point where pop culture may be the only culture left, with everything else having to suck up to it. I think thats a bad situation, obviously. On the other side of the coin, orchestras still exist, even if they arent exactly thriving (partly because the players are getting paid better). But theyre still there. Mozart still sells out Boston Symphony Hall, there are hundreds of chamber concerts, and millions are listening to classical music on Spotify and YouTube, in unpredictable ways. Classical music is a lousy profession, but it always has been. And it has always needed some kind of subsidy to exist just like railroads.

Can you tell us about a composer who demonstrated not just a long, but a protean, multichaptered career, on the order of a Miles Davis or Bob Dylan? What personal talents and social conditions made that possible?

Somebody who had a long, strongcareer, from beginning to end Certainly Ives was multichaptered and protean, but he was largely felled by illness in his 40s. Saint-Sans was a prodigy who had a gigantic career born in 1835 and died in 1921 and I think he wrote books on science, but he was basically a brilliant second-rater. I guess the best answer is Schoenberg and Stravinsky, who both got started early, were prolific through long lives, and went through significant evolutions within them. And they both wrote first-rate stuff into old age. But maybe the champ was Bach, brilliant from his teens, writing lasting work from his early 20s, and ending with his most profound music the B-minor Mass and Art of Fugue.

By contrast, is there a major composer with a very brief heyday not someone who died young like Schubert, but someone whose genius seemed to come and go quite quickly? What happened to him?

I wonder whether the answer here isnt Mendelssohn, who wrote some of his best music in his teens and, from that point, gradually ran out of inspiration until his death, mostly from overwork, at 38.

From your perch amid the ancient forests and verdant river valleys of New England, how vital does the classical music in Southern California and on the West Coast seem in the 21st century?

Dont know much about the SoCal scene, except that I had a gig with the LA Phil last year and they sounded splendid. I dont actually, as it were, like Disney Hall, or any other Gehry, but the Halls acoustics are fabulous. And there were good crowds for the all-Beethoven series. Besides that, Disney Hall began a massive upscaling of the neighborhood around it, which Im told was a dump but now has museums, schools, restaurants, et cetera.

Your writing is known for the parallels you draw between classical music and other fields, especially art, architecture, and intellectual history. Why do you find these metaphors useful?

Theyre not metaphors to me theyre direct connections. I believe theres such a thing as a zeitgeist, which is a matter of something in the air that affects everybody, and artists in whatever discipline are part of the zeitgeist. Im not particularly mystical about it, but a time has a character. Freud influenced everything, helped create the Austro-German fin-de-sicle zeitgeist, even for the people who never read him. I think Faulkner was influenced by Einsteinian relativity, though he could not have read Einstein, and by Freud, though he never read Freud.

In my early 20s, I imagined a choral piece based on vowels and their connection to the names of gods which came to pass, not in a piece of mine but in Karlheinz Stockhausens Stimmung, which Id never heard. It was an idea in the air. So again, the connections between the arts and intellectual and political and religious history are real, not metaphorical. Art comes from life and returns to life, and music is no exception.

In your teaching and dealing with civilians, does there seem to be a composer or historical period that serves as a gateway drug to the larger world of classical music?

No. I tend to pick out irresistible works from any period and play those everything from Carissimis Jephte to Bachs Sheep May Safely Graze to Mozarts Elvira Madigan slow movement to Mussorgskys Great Gate of Kiev to The Rite of Spring to Ivess Psalm 67.

What writers on music, or on the arts in general, do you admire and suspect may have shaped your style and approach?

When I was first doing music journalism I primed myself with G. B. Shaws music criticism, which is the best inspiration I know. Hes the main reason I cant call myself the best music writer in English. (There are other reasons.) At the moment I cant think of much else. And when Id developed a voice as a writer, I didnt need to read Shaw anymore.

I read a lot of James Agees film criticism, too, which helped: The picture deserves, like four out of five other movies, to walk alone, tinkle a little bell, and cry Unclean, Unclean. Agee showed me the value of a zinger line. Likewise, Anthony Lane. The best zinger I know is from Thoreau: The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. That line went through some eight drafts, all of which said the same thing, but only of them said it for the ages.

Is there a composer or piece that, rather than growing stale or familiar over the decades, retains and deepens its fascination?

My first choice is Bachs B-minor Mass, because, for about 50 years, Ive found it incomparable from beginning to end. Meanwhile, as these things do, its changed for me as Ive changed. Also the Beethoven Missa solemnis, which I first got to know in high school (maybe the first score I ever owned), and is enormously complex and multifaceted, hard to take in at first, but sublime when youve managed to get a handle on it. Ivess Fourth Symphony fascinated me from the beginning and has only grown since (while Ive burned out on some other Ives pieces).

Lets start where it all began, with the origins of music: What does it tell us that every human society, past and present, East and West, has some kind of music? (And most, I think, use something resembling the pentatonic scale.) Do you have any hunches as to why this practice, which has no clear evolutionary or territorial benefit, would arise and persist?

As Ive said in print, I think humans are innately musical, and that music evolved with us, alongside language and at first there may have been little difference between music and words and religion. But as I also write, single-celled animals respond to sound, so the idea that sound in itself is meaningful begins at the cellular level, and, from there, goes up to the highest brain functions. And also heart and soul functions. Its built into us.

If Susanne Langer is right, symbolic responses are built into us too, so we innately respond to all sound, including music, as if it were a symbol of something. That means, among other things, that instrumental music, without words, is the most intimate and personal kind of symbol, because what you bring to it is what you, in particular, are. Thats true of all art, but I think more so of abstract music, which we dont perceive as abstract at all.

Scott Timberg is the editor of The Misread City: New Literary Los Angeles and author of Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class.

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Take Your Business to the Next Level with Marketing Automation Software – Small Business Trends

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Marketing your small business, whether online or off, is a time intensive process. As your business grows, managinglead capture, nurturing, converting and relationship management become too big to handle manually, which is why small business owners turn to marketing automation software to managethe load.

In general, automationbrings many benefits to your small business including:

However, because the promotion, selling, and relationship management processes involve so many steps, manyof which arerepeated for each customer, marketing isparticularly suited to automation. And thats where marketing automation software comes in.

Happily, there are many marketing automation software options for small businesses. These solutionscan handle a few, or alltypes, ofautomated marketing techniques. In other words, they include various automation features such as:

Note:Not all solutions offer every feature.

While you may be hesitantto try one becauseofeither cost orlearning curve, you should be aware that many marketing automation software vendors:

Are you considering marketing automation for your small business? If so, heres a list of marketing automation software solutions to consider.

GetResponsecalls itself the all-in-one online marketing platform to grow your business and a look down the features on their home page shows just how complete the software is.

While its oneof the most affordable solutions on this list,GetResponse brings the same, if not more,of the features and functionalityoffered by the more expensive solutions on this list. That said, the price doesincrease with use, but a small business should be able to handle the increase as it grows.

Another affordable solution, ActiveCampaign,offers everything a small business needs to automate its marketing efforts including a robust, built-in CRM system.

Calling itself a small business CRM, GreenRope is almost a small business management suite. Starting withmarketing automation, youll find website tracking, landing pages and more in this affordably-pricedsolution.

GreenRopealso offers sales and operations functionality setting the tool apart.

One of the more well-known marketing automation software options, Infusionsoftoffers everything your small business needs at a reasonable price.One feature that shows off the power of this solution is the flexibility of the campaign builder. This tool enables you to create elaborate workflows one timeand then implement them again and again. These workflows can include many types of steps including eCommerce, appointments, behaviors and actions, webinar attendance and many more.

Additional Resources

The only tool on the list to offer a website builder, HubSpot aims to integrateyour entire marketing effort in one place. One of the more powerful features of the tool is the ability to personalize your website with smart content based on a number of factors:

Additional Resources

Act-Onoffers arobust marketing automation platform.The software offers automation workflows and triggers as well as website behavior tracking, integration with many popular CRM platforms, and more.

One of the moreinteresting, and useful, featuresof Act-On is its funnel reporting. By setting up a sales funnel, you can track the effectiveness of your overall marketing efforts. Heres a sample:

AdditionalResources

Marketo offers a powerful solution with many features. One thing that stood out however was theircustomizedproduct bundling, an approach that may makethe tool attractive for small businesses that want to dip their toe in the water.

One of the most interestingaspects of Autopilot is the number of integrations it enables you to use as part of your marketing automation workflows. For example, below you can seethat the bottom right step sends an automated Slack message:

In addition, the vendor offers multi-channel marketing via emails, headsups (little pop-upnotifications) SMS messages, and even postcards. Finally, the pricing for this solution is low and scales as your business grows.

Salesfusion is a heavily-loaded marketing automation toolthat can help you take your small business to a new level. One standout feature? Its SEO audit featurethat helps improve your search engine rankings.

In addition to its marketing automation features, SharpSpring offers additional features includinga blog builderandVisitorID tool which attempts to identify anonymous visitors to your website.

Also, the vendor enables you to use your buyer personas to automatically offer unique, targeted content by segmenting your customers based on how closely their profiles match.

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While a look at SALESmanagos home page may make you run, dont let the complexity of the vendors offerings chase you away. This solution literally has it all and, if thats what you need, then its certainly worth a look.

No matter whichmarketing automation software solution you select, make sure youre getting the most out of the tool. And remember, you can automate processes beyond marketing, too, so besure to consider how leveraging other tools can helpstreamline your small business.

Automated Marketing Photo via Shutterstock

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Spain: The Municipal Network against Illegitimate Debt held a second successful meeting in Cadiz – CADTM.org

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The Municipal Network Against Illegitimate Debt and Fiscal Cuts is expanding to the level of the autonomous regions [the Spanish State consists of 12 autonomous communities, among which Andalusia, Catalonia, the Basque country, the Madrid community] stated Carmen Lizrraga, a Podemos member of the Parliament of Andalusia, at the opening press conference of the second meeting of the Network, which brought together in Cadiz, on 2, 3 and 4 June 2017, over 150 participants representing 77 municipalities from all over Spain. Members of the Parliaments of the autonomous Communities of Andalusia, Navarre, the Baleares, Estremadura and Galicia had a separate meeting that resulted in the decision to meet more frequently and in a more structured way after the summer recess.

Doing away with the illegitimate debt at the municipal, regional and national levels is part and parcel of the Network. The Oviedo Manifesto, which was signed by over one thousand elected representatives (among whom municipal councillors, MPs and MEPs, joined by social activists and international key figures) who committed to support the establishment of a Spanish association of municipalities, autonomous communities and nationalities that question illegitimate debt and work towards its abolition. The meeting in Cadiz was a step in that direction.

Thirteen municipalities and two autonomous parliaments subscribe to motions demanding remunicipalization

Over the last weeks, 13 municipalities that are members of the Network (Gijn, Laviana, Torres de la Alameda, Morn de la Frontera, Getxo, Vilassar de Mar, Santa Coloma de Gramanet, Loeches, Valdemoro, Amurrio, Jerez, Petrer and Leioa) voted motions against the Additional Provisions in the General State Budgets as presented by Finance Minister, Cristbal Montoro that prevent remunicipalization of services. A motion voted by the Parliament of Navarre and a proposal by the Parliament of Aragan were added to the municipalities protests.

Eric Toussaint, spokesperson for the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debts (CADTM), who took part in the meeting, said it was essential to now reach the level of involving autonomous Communities. If the network should stay at the municipal level without reaching out to the regions both in terms of political parties and of social movements, we would soon be in a dead-end. To achieve a solution we have to be able, and willing, to face up to the Central Government.

Similarly during the press conference Carlos Snchez Mato, in charge of economy and Finance for the city of Madrid, expressed the need to work together in a coordinated way otherwise there is no hope of winning.

Mato recalled the ground that had been covered between the Indignados movement in 2011 and the establishment of municipal governments aiming at change in about a hundred municipalities thanks to victories in the municipal elections in May 2015 and pointed out the difference between Cadiz run by Tefila Martnez (former PP mayoress) or by Kichi (the nickname given to the current Podemos party mayor - Por Cdiz S Se Puede), and indeed between Madrid run by Manuela Carmena (of the progressive coalition Ahora Madrid) or by Esperanza Aguirre (PP) the previous mayor. Wherever we are in positions of power we have to go beyond the legal framework. Madrid is fighting a hard battle against Montoro. We have to fight it and we shall win it. Because their unfair laws are ineffective to enforce their absurd measures.

Eric Toussaint underlined the significance of the Network, which is unprecedented whether in Spain or on the international scene. He added that the current challenge is to achieve the alchemy through which social movements and elected representatives join forces. Many of those representatives used to be active in the social movements. Another challenge he mentioned is for the front to tip the balance Balance End of year statement of a companys assets (what the company possesses) and liabilities (what it owes). In other words, the assets provide information about how the funds collected by the company have been used; and the liabilities, about the origins of those funds. of power with the government. It is one thing to be in the Madrid town hall confronting Montoro and another to be in one of the small municipalities under the threat of cuts such as in Puerto Real or Cadiz. Hence the need for a solidarity front.

In the opening session Ftima Pontones, in charge of the finance department for Puerto Real, a municipality currently caught in the vice of debt, exposed the perversion of a system that forbids direct employment but supports privatization of services. She called for disobedience on the part of citizens. She also criticized the ICO loans that turned a commercial debt into a financial debt and the obligation, through the modified article 135 of the Constitution to give payments to banks the first priority.

Maria Rozas, who is in charge of the Finance department for Santiago de Compostela, exposed the Montoro law as being more concerned with investors security than with the 26,000 people threatened by poverty in her city. She concluded on the necessity of standing up against the law and the investors.

Kichi launched a citizen audit of the debt in Cadiz

Other good news marked the beginning of this meeting in Cadiz, held in the wake of the meeting in Oviedo last November. The mayor of Cadiz, Jos Mara Gonzlez Kichi, announced that a citizen audit of the debt in Cadiz would start in September. One of its objectives is to show how public money is used. There is less waste when things are monitored he said. He was confident that collective learning is essential to avoid the mistakes of the past. Let us remember that in 2013, like many other municipalities, Cadiz contracted loans at 5.95% interest Interest An amount paid in remuneration of an investment or received by a lender. Interest is calculated on the amount of the capital invested or borrowed, the duration of the operation and the rate that has been set. rate while the banks granting those loans received the funds from the ECB ECB European Central Bank The European Central Bank is a European institution based in Frankfurt, founded in 1998, to which the countries of the Eurozone have transferred their monetary powers. Its official role is to ensure price stability by combating inflation within that Zone. Its three decision-making organs (the Executive Board, the Governing Council and the General Council) are composed of governors of the central banks of the member states and/or recognized specialists. According to its statutes, it is politically independent but it is directly influenced by the world of finance.

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/ecb/html/index.en.html at 0.25%.

The mayor of Cadiz gave another evidence of this commitment to citizen participation when he left the opening panel to join in a sit-in, in his childrens school, to defend public education. A clear wish to carry on this kind of networking resulted in the decision to hold a third meeting in Rivas Vaciamadrid, 15 kilometers from Madrid next November.

Translated by Mike Krolikowski and Christine Pagnoulle

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Spain: The Municipal Network against Illegitimate Debt held a second successful meeting in Cadiz - CADTM.org

Humanising hell – New Statesman

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This essay is based upon the One People Oration I delivered at Westminster Abbey in October 2014. I have made hundreds of speeches in the House of Commons as a Member of Parliament for 25 years, but this was the only one I had given in Westminster Abbey. In its early days, in the early1300s, Parliament actually sat there, in the Chapter House and then in the Refectory of the Abbey. So as an MP I felt very at home, but there were important differences.

The Commons is a scene of noisy disagreement, while in the Abbey we were surrounded by a thousand years of reflection and calm. In the Commons I would be cut off mid-flow if I went a minute over my allotted time, but in the Abbey I spoke for as long as I needed to and had some hope the audience might actually have been listening. When I spoke in the House of Commons I was just yards from where my hero William Pitt the Younger (Hague 2005) debated with Fox and Burke and Sheridan, but he was actually buried in the Abbey, with his father, in what I believe is the only grave in our country to contain two prime ministers.

People often comment that politicians are becoming younger, but Pitt was prime minister at the age of 24. There has never been a younger occupant of Number 10 before or since, and I doubt there will ever be one again or one as peculiarly gifted as a parliamentary orator. Pitt was prime minister for 18 years and 11 months, and for half that time Britain was at war with France and frequently at risk of invasion.

Another hero of mine, WilliamWilberforce(Hague 2008), is also buried in the Abbey, thanks to his family and friends countermanding his wish to be buried elsewhere. His house, Number 4 Palace Yard, stood just over the wall and was by every account a veritable pandemonium of books, pets, visitors and hapless servants he never had the heart to let go. From amid that ferment of ideas and activity he spent 20 years converting the people and entire political establishment of Britain to the cause of abolition. Year after year he moved motions in the House of Commons that were defeated. But in 1807, two decades after he began, he finally succeeded in turning our country from a slave-trading nation into one that bullied, harassed and bribed other countries into giving up their own detestable traffic in humans. And he did this without ever holding any office in any government.

Although I am not an intensely religious person, in writing my book onWilberforceI came to admire the unquenchable determination to succeed in a cause that religion in his case evangelical Christianity inspired in him. Because he believed he was accounting to God for how he spent his time, he actually recorded what he did with it. His papers include tables detailing each quarter hour of the day. One typical entry describes seven and a half hours of Commons business, eight and a quarter hours in bed, five and a half hours of requisite company &c visits &c, threequarters of an hour of serious reading and meditation, 15 minutes unaccounted for or dressing and one hour described as squandered.

While few in his age had his gift with words and his obsessive drive,Wilberforcewas not alone in being inspired by his faith. He was part of theClaphamsect, a small group of politicians, lawyers, merchants, churchmen and bankers based aroundClaphamCommon, who were responsible for one of the greatest varieties and volumes of charitable activity ever launched by any group of people in any age.

Their primary goal was the abolition of the slave trade and the founding of Sierra Leone, but on top of this they set up a staggering array of charitable causes: the London Missionary Society; the Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor; the Church Missionary Society; the Religious Tract Society; the Society for Promoting the Religious Instruction of Youth; the Society for the Relief of the Industrious Poor; the British National Endeavour for the Orphans of Soldiers and Sailors; the Institution for the Protection of Young Girls; the Society for the Suppression of Vice; the Sunday School Union; the Society forSupercedingthe Necessity for Climbing Boys in Cleansing Chimneys; the British and Foreign Bible Society; and two with particularly wonderful names: The Asylum House of Refuge for the Reception of Orphaned Girls the Settlements of whose Parents Cannot be Found and, finally, the Friendly Female Society, for the Relief of Poor, Infirm, Aged Widows, and Single Women of Good Character, Who Have Seen Better Days. And we thinkwelive in an age of activism.

***

I know that for many people today religious faith of all kinds remains a great inspiration and channel for charity and altruism. And whatever faith or creed we live by, inherent in our democracy is the idea that our freedoms and rights are universal. Oppression or conflict or poverty or injustice anywhere in the world has stirred our consciences, as individuals and collectively, throughout our history. I want to argue that maintaining and building on that national tradition is absolutely vital in the twenty-first century, both as a moral obligation and in order to prevent wars at a time of growing international instability.

The year 2014, when I delivered my lecture in Westminster Abbey, saw us marking 100 years since the First World War, in which so many of our countrymen perished because conflict was not averted. Remembering that dreadful conflict should inspire us to maintain our restless conscience as a nation and be determined to do whatever we can to improve the condition of humanity. We should have faith in the broadest sense in our ideas and our ideals as a country, and in our ability to have a positive impact on the development of other nations and the future of our world.

One of the most moving sights I have seen in some time was the sea of poppies encircling the Tower of London, commemorating each and every British and Commonwealth military fatality in the First World War. It was a silent exhortation to remember, to be grateful for what we have and to learn the lessons of those times when peace had to be restored at so great a price to humanity. So too is the revered Grave of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey, buried among Kings, as his gravestone says, as one of the many who gave the most that man can give, life itself, for God, for King and Country, for Loved Ones and Empire, for the Sacred Cause of Justice and the Freedom of the World. The remains of 15 British soldiers from the War were reburied in Belgium in October 2014, 100 years after they were killed in battle, reminding us that we are still counting the cost of that terrible conflagration.

As Foreign Secretary, for four years I occupied the office used by Sir Edward Grey, with its windows overlookingHorseguardsand St Jamess Park. Standing at those windows, as he contemplated the catastrophe about to engulf the world, he famously said, the lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime. The failure of diplomacy on the eve of the War ushered in greater suffering than Grey and his contemporaries could ever have imagined: war on an industrial scale, the butchery of the unknown by the unseen, in the words of one war correspondent, in which 10 million soldiers died on all sides, 20 million were severely wounded and eight million were permanently disabled; in which appalling massacres, rapes and other atrocities were committed against thousands of civilians and millions of refugees were created; and which was all to be followed by the Second World War, the massacres in Poland, the gas chambers and extermination camps of the Holocaust, pogroms in the Soviet Union and the slaughter of war and revolution in China.

It is tempting to look back on the horrors and evils of the past and to think that these things could not happen again. It would be comforting to imagine that we have reached such a level of education and enlightenment that ideologies like Nazism, Fascism and Communism that led to mass slaughter, and the nationalism that leads states to attack theirneighboursor groups within states to massacre their fellow citizens, have all seen an end. Sadly, I believe this is an illusion.

There is an additional illusion that sometimes takes hold, as it did before the First World War, that a permanent peace has arrived. Then, Europe had enjoyed 99 years without widespread war. The Great Powers had found a way back from the brink of conflict several times, and Grey and his colleagues can be forgiven for thinking that crises would always be resolved by diplomacy, when in fact they were on the edge of the two greatest cataclysms in history.

History shows that while circumstances change, human nature is immutable. However educated, advanced or technologically skilled we become, we are still highly prone to errors ofjudgement, to greed and thus to conflict. There is no irreversible progress towards democracy, human rights and greater freedoms just as there is unlikely to be any such thing as a state of permanent peace. Unless each generation acts to preserve the gains it inherits and to build upon them for the future, then peace, democracy and freedom can easily be eroded, and conflict can readily break out.

***

It is true that there is more education, welfare, charitableendeavourand kindness in our world than ever before, that we have reached extraordinary diplomatic milestones like the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and that we have a United Nations (UN) system carrying out responsibilities from peacekeeping to the protection of our environment. We should never lose faith in the positive side of human nature and always retain our optimism and belief in our ability to shape our destiny. But my argument is that it is also true that the capacity of human beings to inflict unspeakable violence upon others, of ideologies that are pure evil to rise up or for states that are badly led to wade into new forms of conflict are all as present as ever.

We often read about massacres as if such barbaric things are only to be found in the pages of history. But the short span of our own lifetimes tells a different story, from Europe to the Middle East, to Africa and Asia. Only in 1995, in Europe, 8000 men and boys were massacred inSrebrenicain a single week. Over five million people have been killed in the Congo in the two decades up to 2014.

In April 2014, when I attended the20thanniversary of the Rwandan massacres, I and the other international representatives were standing where nearly a third of a million people are buried in a single grave, a third of the million women, men and children slain in cold blood within 100 days. Also in 2014, two of Pol Pots henchmen, part of the Khmer Rouge regime that killed more than a million people, were convicted and given life sentences. In Iraq and Syria, in a perversion of religion,ISIL(Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) is currently terrorizing communities with beheadings and crucifixions. And think of the barrel bombs that have rained down on schools in Syria from theAssadregime and the pitiless desperation to hold on to power needed to produce such utter inhumanity.

Aggressive ideology, despotism and fanaticism live on, despite all our other advances and achievements. This is the human condition. Our optimism and faith in human nature will always have to contend with this harsh truth, at the same time as being essential to overcoming such evils. That is why it is so important for us to have a strong sense of history so that we never lose sight of how fragile peace and security can be. And so we understand that diplomacy and the peaceful resolution of conflicts is not an abstract concept but our greatest responsibility.

In our information-rich, media-saturated world, history can be caricatured as a luxury, not least for those who have their hands full running the country. But I could not imagine having been Foreign Secretary without drawing on the advice of the Foreign Office historians, who were able to offer historical precedents for every conceivable revolution, insurgency, treaty or crisis, and who produced maps and papers that shed light on the most intractable of modern problems. It is as important to consult the lessons of history in foreign policy as it is to seek the advice of our embassies, our intelligence agencies, our military and our allies. History is not set in stone and is open to endless reinterpretation. But the habit of deep and searching thought rooted in history must be cultivated: not toparalyseus or make us excessively pessimistic, but to help us make sound decisions and guide our actions.

It remains as true today as it was when Edmund Burke first expressed it that the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men and women to do nothing. We cannot in our generation coast along or think it is not our responsibility or that it is too difficult to tackle conflict and injustice that bring misery to millions. However pressing the crises of the day, we have to address the fundamental conditions that lead to armed conflict and reduce the human suffering it causes. This means not only maintaining Britains global role living up to our responsibilities, protecting our interests internationally and being able to project military power where necessary but also consciously encouraging and developing the ideas, concepts and strategies needed to address poverty, conflict and injustice.

All our advances start with an idea. Powerful ideas can then become unstoppable movements as indeed the abolition of the slave trade did in the eighteenth century. For that to happen governments have to adopt the best of these ideas, and leaders have to be prepared to be open and radical.

***

The title of my essay is taken from a remark by Admiral John Fisher, First Sea Lord in the early nineteenth century and commander of the Royal Navy at the start of the First World War. In 1899, he was sent as Britains representative to the first Hague Peace Conference, called by Russia, to discuss the growing arms race and place curbs on the use of certain weapons in war. As these proposals were discussed at the negotiating table, he is said to have remarked with some passion that one could sooner talk of humanising hell than of humanising war. While he was, of course, right about the hell of war, in actual fact the traumatic experience of conflict and great idealism have often gone together. It has frequently been the very experience of war that has spurred mankinds greatest advances in international relations, based on ideas that were radical when first presented.

When HenryDunantobserved the agonizing deaths of thousands of injured men at the battle ofSolferinoin 1859, his outrage and activism led to the 1864 Geneva Convention, the founding text of contemporary international humanitarian law, which laid the foundation for the treatment of prisoners in war. After the First World War, there was a vast and intensive period of institution building, leading to the League of Nations, InternationalLabourOrganization, the prohibition on use of chemical weapons and the creation of the High Commissioner for Refugees to find a way of returning millions of European refugees to their homes, which supports over 50 million refugees and displaced people worldwide today.

While the Second World War was raging, Roosevelt and Churchill spent hours discussing the creation of a new international body to prevent conflict in the future, which led to the United Nations itself, the Security Council and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. More recently, in our lifetime, the outrage at atrocities in Cambodia, Rwanda, Liberia and Bosnia led to the creation of the International Criminal Court and the concept of the Responsibility to Protect. Since 1990 our country has played a leading role in securing international bans on the use of cluster munitions andlandmines, and I was proud to sign on Britains behalf the ratification of the International Arms Trade Treaty, the culmination of ten years of advocacy begun here in Britain.

The humanising of the hell of war is a continual process. While our goal must always be to avert conflict in the first place, except as a last resort as provided in the UN charter, it is also essential to establish norms ofbehaviourabout what is unacceptable even in times of war. This is vital so that if conflict breaks out despite our best efforts, governments feel restrained by the threat of accountability for any crimes that are committed, we have mechanisms to protect civilians and peace agreements take account of the need for reconciliation and the punishment of crimes against humanity. The crucial point is that while the international bodies we have are the result of diplomacy, they do not simply arise on their own. They are the product of ideas generated by individuals, groups or governments refusing to accept thestatus quo, such that then, with enough momentum, public support and political commitment became reality.

I think of this restless conscience, as I call it, as an enduring and admirable British characteristic. Our nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), lawyers, academics and Crown servants have had an extraordinary impact internationally. In my time in the Foreign Office I found our diplomats a powerful part of this tradition, from their work on the abolition of the death penalty, to improving the lot of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) communities worldwide, to helping negotiations as far away as the nowsuccessful Mindanao Peace Process in the Philippines. This is part of our countrys distinctive contribution to the world, and it involves the power of our ideas as much as the skill of our diplomats. We must always cherish and encourage that flow of ideas and idealism and those rivers of soft power and influence that form such a large part of our role in the world.

It is also true that diplomatic negotiations for peace do not simply arise automatically. They require extraordinary effort by individuals. US former Secretary of State, John Kerry, for example, deserves praise for his tireless work on the IsraeliPalestinian conflict. He chose to devote weeks on end trying to restart and conclude those negotiations, rather than taking the easy route of not attempting such a difficult task. Individuals and the choices they make have an immense impact. Sometimes the individual is someone in high office, like William Pitt, who did his utmost in the early1790sto avoid war with France and whose State Paper of 1805 was the basis for European peace for most of the nineteenth century. Or it is someone likeWilberforce, who was never a government minister, but whose ideas and energy brought relief, an end of suffering and ultimately freedom for millions of people.

Choices are motivated differently. The coalition to end the British slave trade was driven not just by moral considerations, but also by political and economic factors. Adam Smith argued against slavery because he saw it as an inefficient allocation of resources. British naval supremacy in the world meant that in simple political terms, abolition was possible because we had the diplomatic and military muscle to enforce it. AndWilberforcewas outraged that slaves had no opportunity to embrace Christianity, so their souls were being lost. So his key argument against the trade was neither economic nor political, it was religious. It is inevitable that in this way governments, like individuals, are motivated by a number of different factors. But we must pursue the issues today that bring together the moral interest and the national interest, using the combination of powerful ideas, our strong institutions and our global role.

***

We should be proud that, so far, our country has kept its promise to spend 0.7 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) on international development, not just because it is morally right, but also because it is profoundly in our national interest to help other nations lift their citizens out of poverty. We have to continue to lead global efforts to stop the illegal wildlife trade, which destroys the natural heritage of African nations, undermines economic development and creates instability. It is vital that we promote a rules-based international system, because it nourishes the commerce, trade and stability that are the lifeblood of our own economy as well as strengthening human rights internationally. And it is essential that we support political reform, civil society, womens rights and economic progress in the Middle East, because it is vital to our long-term security that that region becomes more free, more stable and more prosperous.

The pursuit of policies that bring stability in the world, and the moral authority for them, are inseparable. Any idea that we should retrench, withdraw or turn away from these issues is misguided and wrong for two reasons. First, the world is becoming systemically less stable. This is due to many different factors: the dispersal of power amongst a wider group of nations, many of whom do not fully share our values and our objectives in foreign policy; the diffusion of power away from governments, accelerated by technology; the globalization of ideas and ability of people to organize themselves into leaderless movements and spread ideas around the world within minutes; our interconnectedness, a boon for development but also a major vulnerability to threats, from terrorism and cyber crime to the spread of diseases like Ebola; the growing global middle class, which is driving demand for greater accountability and more freedom within states designed to suppress such instincts; and the rise of religious intolerance in the Middle East.

Global institutions are struggling to deal with these trends. It is not enough to ensure there is no conflict on our own continent, although sadly the crisis in Ukraine has shown, once again, that even Europe is not immune. Conflict anywhere in the world affects us through refugee flows, the crimes and terrorism that conflict fuels and the billions of pounds needed in humanitarian assistance, so we have to address these issues.

Second, the pursuit of sound development, inclusive politics and the rule of law are essential to our moral standing in the world, which is in turn an important factor in our international influence. As I pointed out in 2006, the US and UK suffered a loss of moral authority as a result of aspects of the War on Terror, which affected the standing of our foreign policy and the willingness of other countries to work with us, and which both President Obamas administration and our own government worked hard to address. We are strongest when we act with moral authority, and that means being the strongest champions of our values.

Thus, neither as a matter of wise policy nor as a matter of conscience can Britain ever afford to turn aside from a global role. We have to continue to be restless advocates for improving the condition of humanity. This means continuing to forge new alliances, reforming the UN and other global institutions and enforcing the rules that govern international relations. But that will never be enough by itself, so we also have to retain the ambition to influence not just the resolutions that are passed and the treaties that are signed up to, but also the beliefs in the world about what is acceptable and what is not.

A powerful example of an issue on which we need to apply such leadership is the use of rape and sexual violence as weapons of war. I have been surprised by how deeply engrained and passive attitudes to this subject often are. Because history is full of accounts of the mass abuse of women and captives, and because there is so much domestic violence in all societies, it is a widely held view that violence against women and girls is inevitable in peacetime and in conflict.

But when we seeISILforeign fighters in Iraq and Syria selling women as slaves and glorifying rape and sexual slavery; when we hear of refugees, who have already lost everything, being raped in camps for want of basic protections; when we see leaders exhorting their fighters to go out and rape their opponents, specifically to inflict terror, to make women pregnant, to force people to flee their homes and to destroy their families and communities; or peace agreements giving amnesty to men who have ordered and carried out rape or deliberately turned a blind eye to it; or soldiers and even peacekeepers committing rape due to lack of discipline, proper training, no accountability and a culture that treats women as the spoils of war, a commodity to be exploited with impunity, then we are clearly dealing with injustice on a scale that is simply intolerable, as well as damaging to the stability of those countries and the peace of the wider world.

It is often said to me that without war there would be nowarzonerape, as if that is the only way to address the problem. While of course our goal is always to prevent conflict, we cannot simply consign millions of women, men, girls and boys to the suffering of rape while we seek a way to put an end to all conflict, since, as I have argued, this goal is one we should always strive for but may often not attain.

***

We have shown that we can put restraints on the way war is conducted. We have put beyond the pale the use of poison gas or torture and devised the Arms Trade Treaty for the trade in illegal weapons. It is time to address this aspect of conflict and to treat sexual violence as an issue of global peace and security. The biggest obstacle we face in this campaign is the idea you cannot do anything about it that you cannot humanise hell, that there is nothing we can do to endwarzonerape. But there is hope, and we must dispel this pessimism. Over the last two years, working with NGOs, the UN and faith groups, we have brought the weight and influence of Britain to bear globally as no country ever has done before on this subject.

Over 150 countries have joined our campaign and endorsed a global declaration of commitment to end sexual violence in conflict. We brought together over 120 governments and thousands of people at a Global Summit in London in June 2014, the first of its kind. And in countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and Colombia we are seeing signs of governments being prepared to address this issue by passing laws and reforming their militaries.

What would it say about our commitment to human rights in our own society if we knew about such abuses but did nothing about them? And how could we be at the forefront of preventing conflict in the world if we did not act to prevent something that causes conflict in the future? Sexual violence is often designed to make peace impossible to achieve and create the bitterness and incentive for future conflict. Dealing with it is not a luxury to be added on, it is an integral part of conflict prevention, a crucial part of breaking a cycle of war. And it has to go hand in hand with seeking the full political, social and economic empowerment of women everywhere, the greatest strategic prize of all for our century.

In 2014 we commemorated those who died in the First World War and their suffering. There is no more fitting thing we can do for the sake of that memory than to face up to the hell of conflict in our lifetimes. We have never had to mobilize our population to fight in the way their generation did, and so we have been spared their painful burdens. But how much more incumbent does that make it on all of us to fight with the peaceful tools at our disposal on behalf of those who are denied, through no fault of their own, the security we consider our birthright.

Just as inWilberforces day, it will always be necessary for Britain to be at the forefront of efforts to improve the condition of humanity. The search for peace and an end to conflict requires powerful ideas and the relentlessdefenceof our values, as much it does negotiations and summits between nations. We could be heading for such turbulent times that it will be easy for some people to say we should not bother with development or tackling sexual violence in conflict or other such issues. There will always be the pressing crisis of the day that risks drowning out such longterm causes. But, in fact, addressing these issues is crucial to overcoming crises now and in the future and it will be an increasingly important part of our moral authority and standing in the world that we are seen to do this.

Just because there are economic crises and major social changes does not mean we or our partners can squander any day or any year in producing the ideas as well as the laws that prevent conflict and deal with some of the greatest scourges of the twenty-first century, and we must do so with confidence: for it remains the case that free and democratic societies are the only places where the ideas and the moral force we need can be found. Our times call for a renewal of that effort for just and equitable solutions to conflict, the driving down of global inequalities and the confronting of injustices.

Every day we have to start again: there is not going to be a day in our lifetimes when we can wake up and say this work is complete. We have to overcome the sense of helplessness that says that vast problems cannot be tackled. We have to awaken the conscience of nations and stir the actions of governments. In an age of mass communication this is a task for every one of us. Whether we are in government, are diplomats, journalists, members of the armed forces, members of the public, students, faith groups or civil servants, every one of us is part of that effort.

In Britain, our restless conscience should never allow us to withdraw behind our fortifications and turn away from the world but should always inspire us to strive for peace and security, to maintain our responsibilities, seek new ways of addressing the worst aspects of humanbehaviourand live up to our greatest traditions.

This essay is taken from The Moral Heart of Public Service, edited by Claire Foster-Gilbert and published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers, priced 15.99, on 21 June 2017.

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Humanising hell - New Statesman

Celebrate freedom: New organizer takes reins of Juneteenth – The State Journal-Register

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Tamara Browning Staff Writer @tambrowningSJR

The 24th annual Juneteenth Celebration on Saturday at Comer Cox Park represented a new era in planning that the former hosts hope takes it through many years.

Shawn Gregory, 33, took over organizing this years event, which runs through Sunday, after learning in April that Mike and Doris Williams of the nonprofit One in a Million were stepping away after 23 years of hosting it.

Juneteenth, also known as Juneteenth Independence Day or Freedom Day, commemorates the June 19, 1865, announcement of the abolition of slavery in Texas.

I want to take the time to thank Mike and Doris Williams for 23 years. When I received an email that they werent going to be doing this, I took about 5-10 minutes. I probably should have taken longer, knowing how much work that they put into this, said Gregory, who ran the basketball portion of Juneteenth for the past three years.

I can only dream of trying to do this 23 years. Im definitely going to try my best, but theres so many parts of this that has to be done. To do it for 23 years is amazing.

Saturdays Juneteenth Celebration included a dunk tank, bounce house, music and informational tables from such groups as Faith Coalition for the Common Good and Central Counties Health Centers.

The celebration began with a parade that proceeded north on Martin Luther King Drive to Comer Cox Park.

Maurice Renfro, a member of American Legion Post 809, located at 1800 E. Capitol Ave., was among those watching the parade.

We were inside. We come here early every morning. We knew the parade was coming, so we came outside to watch it, Renfro said. Its decent. Its nice. Everybodys conducting themselves well.

Pray, keep going

Concerns about safety due to a rash of shootings last month, including one at Comer Cox Park, resulted in extra security during Juneteenth.

Andre Booker III, 19, was shot and killed while playing basketball May 31 at the park. A Sangamon County grand jury indicted four Springfield men on first-degree murder charges in connection with the fatal shooting.

Springfield Mayor Jim Langfelder, who walked in the parade, said afterward that he appreciated everybody working to make Springfield the best it can be.

Juneteenth is all about freedom, and with violence going on, if people are afraid to come out of their houses, theres not freedom, Langfelder said. Were working with the community to make sure that everybody has a safe place to live that theyd like to thrive and grow up in.

Parade participant Patricia Johnson, 53, grew up on 16th Street, and her mother still lives on South 16th Street. Participating in Juneteenth as an employee of City Water, Light and Power, Johnson said previous violence at Comer Cox Park didnt deter their participation in the celebration.

The DFG -- Diversity Focus Group -- we participate every year. This is our fourth year, said Johnson, who pointed out the table where people received information on CWLP and issues such as how to be safe around electricity. We just come out and try to have a good time in the community.

Johnson said regarding the recent shootings in Springfield, We just have to pray and keep going.

Sometimes things are just random, and I dont think its intentional. Its what you do outside of where you live is what happens. It brings something back in the community, Johnson said.

Its the life that you live. Its choices that you make, and then theres good and bad choices. If you come and do what youre supposed to do, and youre not starting trouble, looking for trouble, I think things will be OK. Maybe Im nave. I dont know, but I havent had any problems.

Parade participants Aaron Pearl, 48, and Annie Brooks, 47, agreed that people need to support Gregory in presenting the Juneteenth event, getting help from all organizations.

This is our way of giving back to the community because I grew up over on this side of town, said Pearl, who is chairman of the Diversity Focus Group for Public Works, City of Springfield.

Why I wanted to do it is because, this year, we (Public Works) adopted three classrooms and gave out school supplies, school clothes to three classrooms (two at Matheny-Withrow Elementary School and one at Washington Middle School), and were going to do the same thing next year.

Pearl said that with all the violence that has been happening in Springfield this is our time to come together, and for everybody to heal.

Juneteenth will continue from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Sunday with a theme of Soulful Sunday. It will feature gospel and jazz artists.

-- Contact Tamara Browning: tamara.browning@sj-r.com, 788-1534, twitter.com/tambrowningSJR.

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Celebrate freedom: New organizer takes reins of Juneteenth - The State Journal-Register

UAPB alumna promotes self-confidence through NY fashion design – Pine Bluff Commercial

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By Will Hehemann Special to The Commercial

Themes of self-identity are at the heart of the fashion designs produced by K. RaSha, the luxury womens wear fashion brand founded in New York City by Kalisha Hall, a 2011 alumna of the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff.

The companys product line, which includes a diverse range of garments that emphasize texture, volume and bold patterns, asserts confidence, determination and individuality, according to the designer.

I call it purpose-driven design, said Hall. The inspiration for the garments I create comes from an emotional standpoint and a desire to help others, especially women and young girls.

Expressing themes

Hall said when creating a particular design she considers the message it can send to others. She uses her creativity and desire to experiment with design to express themes of personal empowerment and self-confidence.

My designs are based on the premise of being true to yourself and embracing the characteristics that make you who you are, she said. Each of us is unique and has a different purpose in this world. I want to inspire other women to have a positive outlook on themselves and the accomplishments they are capable of achieving.

After developing an interest in clothes and fashion at an early age, her true journey began when she decided to major in fashion merchandising at UAPB.

Hall said many of the themes of her work arose from her own experiences in overcoming personal boundaries and reaching for new opportunities, which eventually led her from her hometown of Pine Bluff to New York City.

Though I have always loved redesigning outfits and playing with clothes, I assumed I would eventually seek a career as a fashion buyer because I lacked the background in the creative aspects of fashion design, she said. However, I took a class in sewing and design during my senior year that I absolutely loved. My advisor, Kalari Turner, who was then an instructor of merchandising, textiles and design, said I should seriously consider redirecting my focus toward the creative and design aspects of fashion rather than the business side of the industry.

Hones natural design skills

After graduation, Hall was hired as a sales representative at Fashion Industry Gallery in Dallas, Texas. Though her job was primarily sales-focused, she used her creative talents to piece together garments in original combinations during presentations with buyers. When Halls manager noticed her knack for innovation, she encouraged her to go back to school to hone her natural design skills, and suggested that she apply to institutions in New York City.

Acting on the encouragement, Hall applied to Parsons School of Design, a private art and design college located in Greenwich Village in Manhattan. When she received a letter of acceptance and a scholarship to major in fashion design, she knew she had to take the chance of a lifetime.

At first it was intimidating to move to New York, she said. I wondered what the experience would be like, considering my upbringing in a small town and the fact that I would speak a bit differently from everyone else in the classroom.

Hall quickly realized there was no time to worry about apprehensions, as she became absorbed by the colleges fast-paced, demanding schedule. In addition to regular coursework, she interned at House of Z, the womens apparel company owned by designer Zac Posen. For her senior thesis, she had to conceptualize and design a complete clothing collection and present it in front of a pool of actual clothing buyers.

The rigorous schedule at Parsons taught me how to make efficient timelines and meet tight deadlines, she said. I spent many late nights in the classroom sewing.

After graduating with honors, Hall sought hands-on experience at a startup bridal company to complement her experience as an intern at a large company.

I wanted to experience first-hand every step and challenge involved in starting your own fashion company, she said. In addition to designing and draping, I was also responsible for maintaining the companys social media presence. It was a fantastic opportunity to watch a business grow from the ground up.

Hall was hired in her first salaried position in the digital visual merchandising department for the menswear company JackThreads. Later, however, she was incidentally part of a layoff following the hire of a new creative director. The setback turned out to be the push Hall needed to refocus the direction of her career.

The tragedy of losing my job turned into a blessing when I started using the connections I had made over the years to figure out how to start my own fashion brand, she said. Contrary to what one might think about New York stereotypes, my colleagues were always gracious in offering their support, resources and advice as I set out to start my own company.

Hall said things quickly went into full throttle as she started building a folder of contacts and setting up appointments with fabric vendors. Seamstresses she had formerly worked with helped sew some of her original designs, while her fianc, Terrance Price, used his career experience in advertising to help her create a logo and branding, as well as a portfolio of stylish promotional materials.

K. RaSha begins

After months of hard work, K. RaSha was officially founded. Since its inception, the company has released two product lines that embrace the mantra Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, which is meant to encourage women to embrace their individuality.

Halls designs have been featured in Sports Illustrated, CBS Watch Magazine, Womens Wear Daily, California Apparel News, LA Travel Magazine and Fashion 360 Magazine. Some of her garments were also recently featured in the Fox musical television series Star. In March 2017, she presented her most recent fashion collection at Paris Fashion Week after receiving an invitation from the Oxford Fashion Studio.

When she is not crunching sales numbers and marketing new designs to retailers, Hall enjoys focusing on the artistic parts of the job that allow her to express her creativity. She tries to share the joy she derives from creative expression by regularly speaking to groups of girls and young women at educational and church camps.

I want to motivate other young women by letting them know they are capable of anything they put their mind to, she said. I tell them that you dont have to look at your past or where you are from to judge where you are going. We all have the ability to shape our destiny if we believe in ourselves.

Hall said she received similar messages of inspiration and support from her professors at UAPB.

My advisor, Ms. Turner, saw more potential in me than I saw in myself at the time, she said. She challenged me to step out of my comfort zone and consider the things I was capable of achieving.

Hall aims to impart a similar message to others as she continues a journey based on inner strength that began in Pine Bluff, Arkansas.

Will Hehemann is with the UAPB School of Agriculture, Fisheries and Human Sciences.

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UAPB alumna promotes self-confidence through NY fashion design - Pine Bluff Commercial

Highlighting the power of peer support in mental illness recovery – Connacht Tribune Group

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Peer support can play a crucial part in recovery from mental illness thats according to a Galway native who is one of the countrys most respected voices in this field.

Trinity College Professor in Mental Health, Agnes Higgins, reported her findings after carrying out in-depth interviews with 26 people who went through just such a peer support programme with mental health charity GROW.

Those interviewed had

mental health difficulties including bi-polar disorder, schizophrenia, anxiety and depression.

The research carried out with Dr Mike Watts shows that, although medical treatment and mental health professionals can be a vital start to recovery, mental health problems can also be resolved through peer and community support as well as everyday social interactions.

The study showed that while peer support has long been valued in recovery from various addictions it remains an under used strategy within a mental health system that is currently under serious resource pressures.

The research findings and stories have been published as a book entitled Narratives of Recovery from Mental Illness.

Research in mental health has been something Agnes has been involved in for a number of years.

She met her co-author Mike Watts, when he was national coordinator for GROW and he was interested in doing a PhD.

Given my interest and passion for mental health and the absence of research evidence in the area peer support, we decided that the focus of the PhD should be in this area, she explained.

And because of the importance of the subject matter, the pair then decided to craft their findings into a book.

Participants in the study described how life experiences such as bullying, abuse, bereavement, isolation or family disharmony led to a slow build-up of distress leading to emotional chaos.

Agnes explains that without someone to listen to and deal with the resultant trauma powerful emotions of terror, rage and despair impacted on each persons thinking and behaviour so they began to mistrust life and became trapped in a spiral of personal isolation and what was termed dialogues of terror.

The non-hierarchical culture of a peer support group within GROW resulted in people immersing in dialogues of healing.

They found themselves developing trust, becoming hopeful, experiencing a sense of personal value and belonging, and the nurturing of the beginnings of personal empowerment, she said.

She sees the book as offering an alternative way of looking at mental illness and demonstrates many unexplored avenues and paths to recovery that need to be considered.

The narratives of recovery should also be a source of hope to people struggling with mental illness and emotional distress, she said.

Part of the challenge in transforming mental health services is the lack of evidence-based studies focussing on the process and outcomes of peer support services.

We hope that it will encourage practitioners to include peer support within the menu of recovery options offered to people with a mental health problem, Agnes declares.

Agnes Higgins grew up on a farm in Kilmurry, Dunmore, the middle child of seven. She went to national school in Ballinlass and finished secondary school in 1978. Her father, Mick, passed away in 1986 and her mother, Mary, still lives in Kilmurry.

Agnes wanted to be a teacher but she explains that in those days you applied for lots of things and she was accepted for the first student nurse position she applied for.

The people who interviewed me were so welcoming, warm, and kind that I didnt hesitate for a minute in my decision, says Agnes. Her nurse training began in 1978 at St Vincents Hospital in Dublin and she qualified as a mental health nurse in 1981.

Later, Agnes trained as a general nurse and qualified in 1986. From 1990 1993 she trained and qualified as a nurse teacher and then went on to do a masters in Dublin City University and a PhD in Trinity College.

In 2000 Agnes was offered a position in the School of Nursing and Midwifery in TCD. Her first role was to develop a postgraduate diploma in clinical health sciences education, this programme was to educate nurse and midwifery teachers, she explained.

This work led to Agnes receiving the Provost Award for Teaching Excellence within the college; now, as Professor in Mental Health, she lectures on the subject to Trinity undergraduate and postgraduate students.

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Technology and logistics, not fashion, makes today’s apparel CEOs – San Francisco Chronicle

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Mickey Drexler wasnt just any retail executive. He was a merchant prince, a man whose fashion instincts helped rescue Gap Inc. in the 1990s when the San Francisco apparel chain was struggling to find relevance.

But Drexlers recent decision to resign as J. Crew CEO is perhaps the most stark reminder that fashion and marketing expertise alone cant rescue an industry besot by rapid demographic and technological change. Other big names in fashion, including Ron Johnson (J.C. Penney), Terry Lundgren (Macys), and Sharen Jester Turney (Victorias Secret), have vacated their posts in recent years. Kathryn Bufano (Bon-Ton Stores) and Linda Heasley (Lane Bryant) also resigned this year.

It might be tempting to say that Drexler lost his fashion touch and that people just dont want to buy J. Crew clothing. But the industry has been rapidly transforming.

Model Connor Keith (left) works with photographer Mark Fore and stylist Ronald Gravesande during a fashion shoot at the offices of Touch of Modern in San Francisco. The company offers men well-fitting, limited assortment clothes in the most convenient way possible.

Model Connor Keith (left) works with photographer Mark Fore and...

The populism we have witnessed in politics seems to be sweeping through the fashion industry as well. Whereas merchant princes and princesses once told us what to wear a year from now, Millennial shoppers look to the more fickle and unpredictable trendsetters on social media.

Drexler was the guy that everyone thought had the magic touch, said Chicago retail consultant Brian Kelly. But retailers today should be using data ... rather than attending last years fashion show.

The next generation of retail apparel leaders will not be experts in fashion. They will focus more on data and supply chains.

Walmart, which is known more for logistics prowess than for fashion, said Friday that it will buy online mens retailer Bonobos for $310 million.

Theres more to retail right now than just making nice clothes, said Mark Lovas, a former top executive at Bonobos who is now CEO of Trumaker in San Francisco, another online mens clothing shop. Apparel retailers must craft business models that deliver merchandise to customers and remove unsold clothing from inventory in the quickest, most cost-efficient way possible, he said.

Those skills seem at odds with the merchandisers and marketers who have traditionally run apparel chains.

In the first half of the 20th century, big family-owned department stores dominated the U.S. fashion industry. Customers would trek to a downtown Bloomingdales, Marshall Fields or Daytons to find the latest look.

A CEO typically would have started at the company as a buyer, traveling across the country and eventually around the world to meet designers and attend fashion shows. Drexler came from a fashion background: He was merchandising vice president at Abraham & Straus in New York and later worked at Ann Taylor, Bloomingdales and Macys. After his stint at Gap, he led J. Crew as CEO for 14 years.

But the world of merchant princes has been upended. The Internet has allowed shoppers to quickly find a wide range of information prices, styles, opinions beyond catalogs, magazines or Sunday newspaper circulars.

Most retailers enjoyed opportunistic time periods, said Alicia Hare, a former strategy executive at Target Corp. who is now a regional president for SYPartners, a consulting firm in San Francisco. But they had no sense of purpose. Why do they exist? During challenging times, if you cant fall back on some kind of North Star, its difficult to find a path through.

Some emerging e-commerce companies like Bonobos and Touch of Modern in San Francisco, by contrast, have a laser focus. Both offer limited assortments of well-fitting mens clothing in the most convenient way possible.

Jerry Hum, co-founder and CEO of Touch of Modern, said he and his friends created the startup partly because they hated shopping at malls. Whereas women will try out several outfits at a physical store, men will buy several colors of the same shirt they like, he said.

And though Hum and his employees had no previous experience in design or merchandising, they now feel confident enough to create their own brand of clothing lines.

These e-commerce startups enjoy a distinct advantage over chains like Gap and J. Crew: The chains must spend a lot of money operating physical stores. Thats why retail leaders must mind every penny and root out waste, especially in stores and the supply chain.

Retail chains require a lot of labor, said Ash Fontana, a managing director with Zetta Venture Partners in San Francisco. Reducing labor costs requires using artificial intelligence systems and data analysis, he said.

For all of his talent on the runway, Drexler isnt particularly known for his expertise in technology and logistics.

Its an uncomfortable truth about apparel retailers: Clothes may make the man, but they no longer make the CEO.

Thomas Lee is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. He is author of Rebuilding Empires (St. Martins Press) on how big-box retailers will adapt to the digital age. Email: tlee@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ByTomLee

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Technology and logistics, not fashion, makes today's apparel CEOs - San Francisco Chronicle

Technology stocks shaken, but US market not stirred – The Hindu

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The Hindu
Technology stocks shaken, but US market not stirred
The Hindu
The five largest U.S. technology companies may have lost enough market capitalisation over the past week to buy plane maker Boeing, but the benchmark S&P 500 stock index has managed to remain within a stone's throw of its record high. Apple, Alphabet ...

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We need more investments in technology – Daily Nation

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Sunday June 18 2017

A prototype of the Sea Bubbles Flying River Taxi is pictured during the Viva Technology event dedicated to start-up development, innovation and digital technology, on June 16, 2017, in Paris. PHOTO | GEOFFROY VAN DER HASSELT | AFP

In recent times, we have witnessed a trend of copycat business models.

One company adopts a strategy for growth and many others follow suit.

Before long, the strategy comes a cropper. None of these models are technology-driven.

Here are some examples. Uchumi supermarkets main undoing was expansion at a pace that wasnt sustainable.

Its competitor, Nakumatt, seems to have fallen into the same trap that doesnt bring projected returns.

Universities have followed the same path. In the past few years, many opened campuses at nearly every town.

Some towns have several campuses of the same university.

Just like the supermarkets, universities are now realising that rapid expansion of brick and mortar classes is not sustainable.

The overheads are way too high to sustain these schools.

Expecting to run them on fees paid by a dwindling number of students is to build a business on quick sand.

It doesnt require the skills of a business analyst to see that the many malls sprouting on every road and street will be unsustainable.

One wonders who these malls are meant for, at a time when many businesses are taking smaller spaces and going digital.

In the property market, there is a spirited dash to buying and subdividing land.

Looking at the insane amount of money being spent on land and buildings, one wonders whether this is the best investment option, at personal and country level.

At the moment, the country is grappling with basic survival issues such as food.

Maize flour, the countrys staple food, is scarce.

The reasons why we cant feed ourselves are many, but one of them is because we have severely damaged the environment.

Over the years, the forest cover has been dwindling and the effect has been clear and dire less rain, low food production and high cost of living.

The question is, if we continue subdividing the land and erecting buildings, where will food come from?

Whats the comfort of erecting malls and apartments costing billions yet we cant grow food?

Around the world, the most profitable technology-based ventures have little dent on environment.

Think of Uber, Facebook, Google, Instagram, Twitter and Safaricom.

Cant business leaders and government educate Kenyans to invest in these lasting ventures?

Instead of building malls and supermarkets where others already exist, think about online retailing options.

You will not have to pay for licences and hefty fees required to start businesses.

Through technology solutions, you will connect your services and products to consumers and make money from anywhere.

There are many case studies of how simple technology solutions such as M-Pesa, online car track, messaging applications and on-line retailing have become big businesses.

We have also seen how technology is changing nearly every sector.

Online trading is gradually pushing out brick and mortar malls.

E-learning is getting more and more attractive in this era of traffic jams and rising cost of education.

Smartphones and tablets are becoming powerful and cheaper every year.

Internet connection is getting more and more affordable, and wider in coverage. An army of tech-savvy young people is growing.

The population is also gradually warming up to transacting online.

All these create an enabling environment for investments in technology.

Its about time we think, train and encourage people to invest in technology with the same zeal they have portrayed in the property industry.

Technology is the profitable property for this century. We are only limited by our imagination.

Cartels in Kenyas financial sector are not happy with his firm stand on graft.

President Kenyatta and William Ruto take their hunt for votes to Kakamega County.

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We need more investments in technology - Daily Nation

How a Fast From Technology can Trigger Discussions on Influences and Addiction – The Good Men Project (blog)

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A few months ago, a friend of mine decide for Lent that he was going to give up watching all forms of entertainment and limit his technology usage for work only. He said it was actually incredibly refreshing not feeling that he had to jump online and check Facebook or watch the latest Netflixs special. Intrigued, I tried it for myself and my family for a week and decided to share our experiences.

My children were understandably less excited about this experiment than I was. Luckily only my teenage son had a smartphone to be convinced to give up for the week. My wife and I also gave up our phones. Everyones device sat on the kitchen table unless we received a phone call.

It only took a day for my teenage son to become frustrated. We had to sit down and have a conversation about just what was so hard about giving up his phone.

Our son brought up that he was frustrated because he couldnt hang out with his friends. But when I suggested he actually go and physically hang out with friends, he got irritated and defensive, and it turned out the friends he was referring to were on on social media like Snapchat and he didnt actually know where they lived.

We then had a long discussion about smartphone safety while being clear that even though places like Snapchat were marketed to disappear and have no consequences, the truth is that social media doesnt go away.

During the technology fast, I never thought My Little Pony would be the starting point of an addiction conversation for my family.

To be fair, it does sound silly, because it is silly for now anyway. But after I endured a huge temper tantrum from my daughter during our technology fast, I really started to wonder when we start forming patterns of addiction. My daughter had replaced most of her old playtime activities for opportunities to watch shows like My Little Pony and Adventure Time. While that may be a light form of addiction, it did leave me an opening to talk about addiction with her and my other two children.

I realized as we talked that my children believed a lot of addiction myths, such as addictions only apply to hard drugs and its easy to recognize an addict. This is dangerous, because the more they believed in the false representation of addiction, the less on guard they would be when it came to actual addiction.

This conversation likely would have never come up if we hadnt had our technology fast, and it has provided a way to continually talk about who and what our children are interacting with on their devices.

My week-long technology fast was informative on my end as well. As I work from home with some traveling, I normally have a lot of opportunities to get distracted from my work. From my fast, I gained:

At times it felt like much longer than a week-long technology fast, but I am glad my family joined me on it. Having all of us work together and recognize the addictive patterns we all engaged in has helped as we have had to discuss other types of addictions.

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Photo Credit: Getty Images

Tyler Jacobson is a freelance writer, with past experience in content writing and outreach for parent and teen advocate organizations. His areas of focus include: parenting, education, social media, addiction, and issues facing teenagers today.

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How a Fast From Technology can Trigger Discussions on Influences and Addiction - The Good Men Project (blog)

Crown Point’s new ambulance provides latest technology – nwitimes.com

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CROWN POINT The Crown Point Fire & Rescue Department's new ambulance is equipped with the latest in patient care technology.

The ambulance is equipped with an electronic arm that will lift a cot holding a patient into the ambulance.

The power load system eliminates back issues with firefighters from lifting the cot and also eliminates potential drops off the ambulance. The system will unload a patient as well.

"It is cool," Fire Chief Dave Crane said. "It also secures the cot in the truck a lot better than our standard mounting brackets. The cot stays intact during an accident."

Crane said the system will soon be a required safety standard.

"We wanted to get ahead of it," he said. "I hope to take our other ambulances and upgrade them."

The ambulance itself is custom-made for the department, with cabinets arranged how the department wanted them.

"It makes it a little more user-friendly," Crane said.

The department also recently received new cardiac monitors and CPR machines called the LUCAS 3 Chest Compression System. According to the LUCAS 3 website, experimental studies show that the mechanically controlled LUCAS compressions are able to sustain a higher blood flow to the brain and heart compared to manual compressions.

Although the department has not had them long enough to gather good data Crane said other departments nationwide said seen an increase of about 38 percent of return of spontaneous circulation where the heart "actually starts back again and gives you pulses back."

Crane said in order to get return of spontaneous circulation there has to be good quality CPR with few interruptions. One example is issues with performing good quality CPR when off-loading patients from a multiple story structure.

"This machine allows that to continue even while going downstairs," he said.

The department has five of the machines on four ambulances and one fire engine that is also a life support engine.

"We have paramedics on everything," Crane said. "So if all of our ambulances are busy or whatever happens we have all the advanced life support equipment on the fire truck. There is no delay in starting patient care."

Crane said the only reason the department is able to acquire new technology is "the city takes good care of us and supports us."

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Crown Point's new ambulance provides latest technology - nwitimes.com

How technology helped the America’s Cup hit the mainstream – CNN International

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The 2013 event also marked the competition's coming of age, the moment it went from a race for sailing enthusiasts to an occasion that momentarily captured the attention of sport fans across the world.

That was due to Team USA's unprecedented comeback as well as the awe-inspiring spectacle of these boats on the water.

But television also played its part -- a sometimes unfathomable race suddenly became a whole lot easier to understand thanks to onscreen graphics.

Lines were painted across the water to mark the start, likewise for the racing position between the two boats and the boundary they cannot cross.

Other technological twists included a boat's "FlyTime" in a race, in effect how much time it spends gliding out of the water in a race. The target obviously being 100%.

As Mark Sheffield, the head of technology for the America's Cup puts it in the days leading up to the this year's match, "What it's done is make something hard to understand that much easier to understand."

But Honey has also made an impact inside American homes with his work on graphics for sports broadcasts. Notably the onscreen line put into a hockey puck to better see its movement, to the first down line in the NFL.

Events such as Nascar and the Olympics have benefited from Honey's pioneering innovations.

"I was a navigator for Larry on Syonara back in 1995, and at the time I was head of technology of Newscorp," he explains having sold his first company Etak to Rupert Murdoch in 1989 for $35 million.

"And Larry said 'what could you do for sailing?' I explained it had more to gain than other sports in technology terms because it's hard to understand and see.

"Translate the first-down line in NFL into sailing and you can see the boats' position in a race. He understood it straight away."

Ellison appeared to store the idea in his head for 15 years. Honey was sailing the Southern Ocean when he got a message from his wife Sally to tell him something could be in the offing.

Ellison credited Honey's work in the NFL and said he needed his computer technology to help transform the America's Cup.

Honey warned the American billionaire the technology was probably too expensive but Ellison isn't a man to take no for an answers. Neither Honey nor the America's Cup will divulge the cost in question but it is likely to run into the millions of dollars.

Within months of hearing his name, Honey had "got the band back together."

He reunited with his cohorts Ken Milnes, Time Heidmann, Graeme Winn and Alistair Green, as well as bringing in Sheffield, who would later replace him as head of technology for this year's America's Cup.

"This was dream come true stuff for me," explains Honey. "My two passions are the engineering side of things and the sailing side of things and this brought them together as one.

"And since we were all older and wiser, this proved the perfect project. We were on budget, and on time. It worked like a dream."

And the results have been truly eye catching, with tracking, telemetry and augmented reality systems all now developed.

Along came automatic tracking systems on the boat, computer controlled cameras on the helicopters, and measurements accurate to within two centimeters.

Honey and his team had helped turn the oldest sporting trophy in the world into arguably the most technologically advanced.

So every gibe is registered, the average speed collated and the flight time and the positioning of the boats measured. But in addition, such technology has enabled the umpires to make more accurate calls.

Honey has now taken a step back but he is almost childlike in his enthusiasm -- especially when people initially fail to understand his work.

"You still get those conversations you overhear of people saying 'they shouldn't pollute the water like that painting on it'," he says. "It's always funny to hear those stories.

"The whole project is dream come true stuff as I said. Don't tell Larry and the others but I expect we all would have done it for free!

"I remember when we did it thinking, this is going to make a huge difference for sailing and the audience, especially the Americans. Now a lot more people understand sailing."

Honey's successor Sheffield is continuing to innovate.

He and his team are housed in a temporary container on race day, with Sheffield admitting "the hairs on the back of my neck go up when I enter that container."

"Of course, we sometimes have crazy ideas and there's a bucket list of things I want to do," he adds. "We just have to wait and see if that's possible."

For this year's America's Cup match, thermal imaging cameras on the sailors will be one of the new innovations.

For Sheffield, who describes the job as "perpetual plate spinning," it is all about "trying for perfection, and there's no reason not to try to be better."

Like Honey, Sheffield comes from an engineering and sailing background having competed in the America's Cup previously.

"The way the technology has changed in the America's Cup reflects the way the world has changed, with its high pace," he says.

"We're all dialed into 11 now and people want that excitement, to be on the edge. That's what we're trying to provide with every broadcast."

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Technology is Killing Us – East Boston Times-Free Press

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It often is said that technology is a two-edged sword. While it certainly is true that advances in technology bring many benefits, those benefits often find themselves subject to the law of unintended consequences.

The dramatic rise in cell phone use represents a clear example of how technology can have an adverse impact on our society.

According to a 2016 study published by Harvard Medical School researchers, an estimated 40,200 people were killed in motor vehicle accidents in 2015, marking not only the highest number of traffic fatalities in nearly a decade, but also the sharpest rise after years of decline in more than five decades.

And the chief culprit implicated for the dramatic increase was cellphone use more than a quarter of car accidents are caused by phone distraction, according to the National Safety Council (NSC).

According to a recent article in the New York Times,there is overwhelming evidence that even hands-free phone use is just as cognitively distracting as holding the phone. In some cases, such as when issuing voice commands, it may be even more distracting.

The article in the Times continues, According to a University of Utah study, using a phone, whether hand-held or not, impairs driver performance as much as, or more than, drinking. And many safety advocates hope that distracted driving soon carries the same behavior-altering stigma.

At least 32 countries across the globe have laws targeting hand-held phone use while driving, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In Portugal, all phone use while driving, including hands-free, is illegal. The U.K. has recently doubled the fines drivers may face for using a mobile device behind the wheel, and British lawmakers recently proposed life sentences for drivers who kill when using their phones.

And there is this eye-opening conclusion, Taking your eyes off the road at 55 mph for the five seconds it takes to send or read a text is similar to driving the length of a football field with your eyes shut.

All of us talk and drive these days and many (if not most) of us text while driving (even though the latter is now against the law in Massachusetts, even if stopped at a red light).

So, as our parochial school nuns might say, A word to the wise is sufficient.

We urge all of our readers to understand the dangers inherent in cellphone use while operating a motor vehicle and we encourage our readers to curtail, and even eliminate, what truly can be described as risky behavior.

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Why Obama’s presidency didn’t lead to black progress – New York Post

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Since the 1960s, black leaders have placed a heavy emphasis on gaining political power, and Barack Obamas presidency represented the apex of those efforts. The assumption rarely challenged is that black political clout must come before black social and economic advancement. But as JASON L. RILEY argues in this excerpt from his new book, False Black Power (Templeton Press), political success has not been a major factor in the rise of racial and ethnic groups from poverty to prosperity.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was followed by large increases in black elected officials. In the Deep South, black officeholders grew from 100 in 1964 to 4,300 in 1978. By the early 1980s, major US cities with large black populations, such as Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Washington and Philadelphia, had elected black mayors. Between 1970 and 2010, the number of black elected officials nationwide increased from fewer than 1,500 to more than 10,000.

Yet the socioeconomic progress that was supposed to follow in the wake of these political gains never materialized. During an era of growing black political influence, blacks as a group progressed at a slower rate than whites, and the black poor actually lost ground.

In a 1991 book, social scientist Gary Orfield and his co-author, journalist Carole Ashkinaze, assessed the progress of blacks in the 1970s and 80s following the sharp increase in black officeholders. The thinking, then and now, was that the problems of the cities were basically the result of the racism of white officials and that many could be solved by black mayors, school superintendents, policemen and teachers who were displacing white ones. The expectation, they added, was that black political and education leaders would be able to make large moves toward racial equity simply by devising policies and practices reflecting their understanding of the background and needs of black people.

But the integration of these institutions proved to be insufficient. Many blacks have reached positions of local power, such as mayor, county commission chairman or superintendent of schools, positions undreamed of 30 years ago, they wrote. Their findings, however, showed that these achievements do not necessarily produce success for blacks as a whole. The empirical evidence, they said, indicates that there may be little relationship between the success of local black leaders and the opportunities of typical black families.

When Michael Brown was shot dead after assaulting a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, a large fuss was made over the racial composition of the police department and city leaders, which supposedly explained the subsequent civil unrest.

A Justice Department report responding to the incident noted that although the citys population was 67 percent black, just four of its 54 police officers fit that description.

While a diverse police department does not guarantee a constitutional one, it is nonetheless critically important for law-enforcement agencies, and the Ferguson Police Department in particular, to strive for broad diversity among officers and civilian staff, said Justice.

But if racial diversity among law enforcement and city officials is so critically important, what explains the rioting in Baltimore the following year after a black suspect there died in police custody?

At the time, 63 percent of Baltimores residents and 40 percent of its police officers were black. The Baltimore police commissioner also was black, along with the mayor and a majority of the city council.

Contentious relations between the police and ghetto communities are driven mainly by high crime rates in those areas, something that the political left doesnt like to acknowledge. The sharp rise in violent crime in our inner cities coincides with the increase of black leaders in many of those very same cities, which makes it hard to argue that racist or indifferent authorities are to blame.

What can be said of Baltimore is also true of Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta, New Orleans and Washington, where black mayors and police chiefs and city councilmen and school superintendents have held sway for decades.

In her 1995 book, Facing Up to the American Dream, political scientist Jennifer Hochschild examined data from the late-1950s to the early-1990s an era that covers not only growing black political clout but also the implementation of the War on Poverty and two full decades of affirmative-action policies in hiring and college admissions.

Hochschild reported that between 1959 and 1992, poverty fell from 55 percent to 33 percent for blacks and from 18 percent to 12 percent for whites, which means that the ratio of black to white poverty has remained at 3 hardly a victory in the war on racially disproportionate poverty.

The absolute numbers, she added, tell the same story: there are now about 4 million fewer poor whites than 30 years ago, but 686,000 more poor blacks.

Germans, Jews, Italians and Asians saw economic gains precede political gains in America.

Moreover, low-income blacks lost ground to low-income whites over the same period. Between 1967 and 1992, incomes for the poorest fifth of blacks declined at more than double the rate of comparable whites.

This history should have served to temper expectations for the first black president. Without taking away anything from Barack Obamas historic accomplishment, or the countrys widespread sense of pride in the racial progress that his election symbolized, the reality is that there was little reason to believe that a black president was the answer to racial inequities or the problems of the black poor.

The proliferation of black politicians in recent decades which now includes a twice-elected black president has done little to narrow racial gaps in employment, income, homeownership, academic achievement and other areas.

Most groups in America and elsewhere who have risen economically have done so with little or no political influence, and groups that have enjoyed early political success have tended to rise more slowly.

Group cohesion, expressed in political pressure and bloc voting, is often regarded as axiomatically the most effective method of promoting group progress, explains the economist Thomas Sowell.

But historically, the relationship between political success and economic success has been more nearly inverse than direct. Germans, Jews, Italians and Asians are among those who saw economic gains precede political gains in America.

Similarly, the ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia, the English in Argentina and Jews in Britain, among many other examples, all prospered economically while mostly shunning politics.

A counterexample is the Irish, whose rise from poverty was especially slow even though Irish-run political organizations in places like Boston and Philadelphia dominated local government. The Irish had more political success than any other ethnic group historically, according to Sowell. Yet the Irish were the slowest rising of all European immigrants to America. The wealth and power of a relatively few Irish political bosses had little impact on the progress of masses of Irish Americans.

Even if a group has the ability to wield political influence, they dont always choose to do so.

German immigrants to the US in colonial times were not lacking in numbers. In Pennsylvania they were one-third of the population, a situation that was not lost on non-Germans. Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of aliens, who will shorty become so numerous as to Germanize us instead of us Anglifying them? wrote Benjamin Franklin in 1751.

Nevertheless, Germans, many of whom arrived as indentured servants and focused initially on paying off the cost of their voyage, had other priorities and were well known for avoiding politics. Germans began entering politics only after they had already risen economically.

Viewed against this history, many blacks were expecting Obamas presidency to deliver more prosperity than political clout tends to deliver for a group in the US or anywhere else.

The black experience in America is of course different from the Irish experience, which in turn is different from the Chinese or German or Jewish experience. Indeed, we cant even generalize about all blacks in the US, since the experience of black natives is different from the experience of black immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa. But that doesnt mean group cultural traits that show patterns of success or failure should be ignored.

Even if we cant make perfect apples-to-apples comparisons, it doesnt mean we cant make any comparisons or draw any conclusions. Many different racial and ethnic minority groups have experienced various degrees of hardship in the US and in other countries all over the world. How those groups have dealt with those circumstances is something to study closely and draw lessons from going forward even if the only lesson is to manage expectations.

One of the clear lessons from this history is that human capital has proven to be far more important than political capital in getting ahead. And that reality helps to explain why blacks fared the way they did not only in the Obama era but also in the preceding decades.

Obamas election was the end product of a civil-rights strategy that prioritized political power to advance blacks, and eight years later we once again learned the limitations of that strategy.

Reprinted with permission from False Black Power by Jason L. Riley (Templeton Press), 2017.

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Why Obama's presidency didn't lead to black progress - New York Post

Cuba Blasts Trump’s Policy Speech as ‘Hostile Rhetoric’ That ‘Reverts’ Progress – NBCNews.com

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Cuba's government slammed President Donald Trump for his "hostile rhetoric" during a speech Friday that it said took "a backward step in the relationship between the two countries."

Trump's address in Miami announced changes in the United States' policy toward Cuba after the Obama administration decided to normalize relations with the island nation following a decades-long freeze of diplomatic ties.

But the Raul Castro-led government didn't care for Trump touting his desire to partially reverse course from the "last administration's completely one-sided deal."

The Castro government said in a statement that Trump's speech "reminded the times of open confrontation with our country, announced the policy of his government towards Cuba which reverts the progress achieved in the past two years."

The Trump administration says it is changing the policy of the U.S. toward Cuba by limiting the amount of money that might go toward the Cuban military, restricting American tourism there and reaffirming the 56-year-old trade embargo. The policy memorandum directs the Treasury and Commerce departments to create new regulations within 30 days, although they wouldn't be in place for several months.

Related: Freely Wandering in Cuba Gets Harder to Do Under Trump

Trump has stopped short of completely resetting relations with Cuba again: He isn't ending diplomatic ties, or closing the U.S. Embassy in Havana or placing restrictions on cigars, rum and other items that Americans can schlep home.

But the changes would ultimately meet four objectives, according to the White House: Ensure compliance with U.S. law, hold the Cuban government accountable for alleged human rights abuses, further the interests of the U.S. and the Cuban people, and "empower the Cuban people to develop greater economic and political liberty."

The Cuban government argued that it would only be a retread of the past, and that the Trump administration is not in a position to lecture.

Its statement takes a swipe at the United States under Trump by noting issues that negatively affect Americans, including racial discrimination and gun violence, and controversial policies on immigration, a border wall and abandoning the Paris Agreement on climate change.

The Cuban government maintained that the new policies would not work, comparing it to the economic embargo that never ushered the Castro regime out of power as the U.S. had hoped.

"The Government of Cuba denounces the new measures for strengthening the blockade, which are destined to fail as proven repeatedly in the past," the statement said. "They will not achieve their purpose of debilitating the Revolution or submitting the Cuban people, whose resistance to the aggressions of any kind and origin has been proven throughout six decades."

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Cuba Blasts Trump's Policy Speech as 'Hostile Rhetoric' That 'Reverts' Progress - NBCNews.com