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Experts reveal hidden dangers behind supplements – Science Daily

Posted on February 7, 2017 by Danzig

Experts reveal hidden dangers behind supplements
Science Daily
Professor Burns from Queen's University, who is working to advance knowledge in this area, explained: "Our review looked at research from right across the globe and questioned the purity of herbal food supplements. We have found that these supplements ...
New study shows hidden dangers in supplements - UPI.comUPI.com
Health risk of unlicensed drugs in herbal supplementsOnMedica

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Experts reveal hidden dangers behind supplements - Science Daily

Jellyfish Memory Supplement Prevagen Is a Hoax, FTC Says – NBCNews.com

Posted on February 7, 2017 by Danzig

A bottle of Prevagen tablets on display. Matt Nighswander / NBC News

But the company pushed back hard, insisting its product is safe and calling the FTC is a "lame-duck" federal agency with heads who are about to be replaced by the incoming administration of president-elect Trump.

It's the latest battle in an ongoing war between the federal government and the Wisconsin-based Quincy Bioscience. In 2012, the Food and Drug Administration filed a warning letter to Quincy, saying it was making medical claims for a product that had not gone through the formal drug approval process.

"The Federal Trade Commission and New York State Attorney General have

"The extensive national advertising campaign for Prevagen, including TV spots on national broadcast and cable networks such as CNN, Fox News, and NBC, featured charts depicting rapid and dramatic improvement in memory for users of the product."

The capsules, which sell for anywhere between $40 and $90 for a bottle, supposedly contain a protein called apoaequorin, which is made by some jellyfish that luminesce.

The company tried, but failed, to show it can help people, the FTC says.

"Defendants primarily rely on one double-blind, placebo-controlled human clinical study using objective outcome measures of cognitive function. This study, called the Madison Memory Study, involved 218 subjects taking either 10 milligrams of Prevagen or a placebo," the charge alleges.

"The Madison Memory Study failed to show a statistically significant improvement in the treatment group over the placebo group on any of the nine computerized cognitive tasks."

The Alzheimer's Association didn't want to weigh in on Prevagen in particular but the organization's science officer Maria Carrillo noted that there's no product out there that's been proven to help memory.

"The Alzheimer's Association has serious concerns about people using dietary supplements as an alternative or in addition to physician-prescribed, FDA-approved therapies in an attempt to treat or prevent Alzheimer's disease or other dementias," she said.

"First and foremost, the effectiveness and safety are unknown. In addition, the purity of the product is unknown. Finally, dietary supplements can have serious interactions with prescribed medications."

Nonetheless, the company said the study did show the product works.

"Defendants, however, do not have studies showing that orally-administered apoaequorin can cross the human blood brain barrier and therefore do not have evidence that apoaequorin enters the human brain," according to the charge.

It doesn't actually matter, because Prevagen is marketed as a supplement.

The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA), passed in 1994, specifically exempts vitamins and supplements from FDA's pre-marketing scrutiny, although the agency can warn against products found to be dangerous.

And the FTC, as well as the Justice Department and state officials, can act against misleading marketing practices.

"The marketers of Prevagen preyed on the fears of older consumers experiencing age-related memory loss," said Jessica Rich, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection. "But one critical thing these marketers forgot is that their claims need to be backed up by real scientific evidence."

The suit seeks to fine Quincy and force it to pay back consumers who bought the pills.

However, the company said it will fight the charges.

"We vehemently disagree with these allegations made by only two FTC commissioners. This case is another example of government overreach and regulators extinguishing innovation by imposing arbitrary new rules on small businesses like ours," it said in a statement.

"There is no reason for a short-staffed and lame-duck FTC to rush this complaint through."

Members of Congress often defend companies. The FDA has frequently complained that DSHEA allows supplement makers to sell useless and often harmful products to trusting consumers, but Congress has failed to revise the legislation.

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Jellyfish Memory Supplement Prevagen Is a Hoax, FTC Says - NBCNews.com

Radical Life Extension Is Already Here, But We’re Doing it …

Posted on February 7, 2017 by Danzig

We've already tacked three decades onto the average lifespan of an American, so what's wrong with adding another few decades?

A centenarian riding his bike in Long Beach, California (Reuters).

So far as we know, the last hundred years have been the most radical period of life extension in all of human history. At the turn of the twentieth century, life expectancy for Americans was just over 49 years; by 2010, that number had risen to 78.5 years, mostly on account of improved sanitation and basic medicine. But life extension doesn't always increase our well-being, especially when all that's being extended is decrepitude. There's a reason that Ponce de Leon went searching for the fountain of youth---if it were the fountain of prolonged dementia and arthritis he may not have bothered.

Over the past twenty years, biologists have begun to set their sights on the aging process itself, in part by paying close attention to species like the American Lobster, which, despite living as long as fifty years, doesn't seem to age much at all. Though some of this research has shown promise, it's not as though we're on the brink of developing a magical youth potion. Because aging is so biologically complex, encompassing hundreds of different processes, it's unlikely that any one technique will add decades of youth to our lives. Rather, the best we can hope for is a slow, incremental lengthening of our "youth-span," the alert and active period of our lives.

Not everyone is thrilled by the prospect of radical life extension. As funding for anti-aging research has exploded, bioethicists have expressed alarm, reasoningthat extreme longevity could have disastrous social effects. Some argue that longer life spans will mean stiffer competition for resources, or a wider gap between rich and poor. Others insist that the aging process is important because it gives death a kind of time release effect, which eases us into accepting it. These concerns are well founded. Life spans of several hundred years are bound to be socially disruptive in one way or another; if we're headed in that direction, it's best to start teasing out the difficulties now.

But there is another, deeper argument against life extension---the argument from evolution. Its proponents suggest that we ought to avoid tinkering with any human trait borne of natural selection. Doing so, they argue, could have unforeseen consequences, especially given that natural selection has such a sterling engineering track record. If our bodies grow old and die, the thinking goes, then there must be a good reason, even if we don't understand it yet. Nonsense, says Bennett Foddy, a philosopher (and flash game developer!) from Oxford, who has written extensively about the ethics of life extension. "We think about aging as being a natural human trait, and it is natural, but it's not something that was selected for because it was beneficial to us." Foddy told me. "There is this misconception that everything evolution provides is beneficial to individuals and that's not correct."

Foddy has thought long and hard about the various objections to life extension and, for the most part, has found them wanting. This is our conversation about those objections, and about the exciting new biology of aging.

Foddy: The reason I present it that way, is that there's always this background moral objection in enhancement debates, where a technology is perceived to be new, and by virtue of being new, is depicted as threatening or even strange. That goes for everything from genetic engineering to steroids to cloning and on and on. I think it's always worth contextualizing these things in terms of the normal. So with human cloning it's worth remembering that it's exactly the same as twinning. With steroids, it's worth remembering that in many ways it's not that different from training and exercise, and also that people have been taking testosterone since ancient times. I think this way you can kind of resist the idea that something is wrong just because it's strange.

When you're talking about medicines that help us live longer, it's important to realize how much we've already accomplished. In the last 150 years or so, we've doubled our life span from 40 to 80 years, and that's primarily through the use of things you can characterize as being medical science. In some cases it's clear that we're talking about medical enhancement---vaccines, for instance, or surgical hygiene and sterilization. And then more broadly there are other, non-medical things like the sanitation of the water supply and the pasteurization of milk and cheese. All of these things have saved an enormous amount of life.

It used to be that people would die of an infectious disease; they'd be struck down when they were very young or when they were older and their immune system was weak. Now almost nobody in the first world dies of infectious disease; we've basically managed to completely eradicate infectious disease through medical science. If, at the outset of this process, you asked people if we should develop technologies that would make us live until we're 80 on average instead of until we're 40, people might have expressed these same kind of misgivings that you hear today. They might have said, "Oh no that would be way too long, that would be unnatural, let's not do that."

So, in a way, we shouldn't view it as being extremely strange to develop these medicines, but in another sense we're at a new stage now, because now we're at the forefront of having medicines that actually address the aging process. And that's what I'm interested in talking about---the kinds of medicines that actually slow down the aging process, or at least some of the mechanisms of aging.

Can you explain how senescence, the biological process of aging, is unevenly distributed across species?

Foddy: There are different animals that are affected differently by various processes of aging. In my paper I go into the case of the American Lobster, which lives about as long as a human being. When you dissect one of these lobsters at the end of its life, its body doesn't show much in the way of weakening or wasting like you see in a human body of advanced age. That suggests that aging can evolve differently in different species. Lobsters seem to have evolved an adaptation against the cellular lifespan. There's this phenomenon where the DNA in our cells basically unravel after they've divided a certain amount of times, but lobsters have this enzyme that helps them replenish their telomeres---the caps that hold DNA together.

That's one of the reasons why lobsters don't seem to undergo aging in the same way that we do. Other species give off an antioxidant chemical in their bodies that prevent these oxidizing free radicals in our bodies from breaking us down. That's why doctor's recommend that you have a certain amount of antioxidants---some species are really good at producing those naturally.

There is this idea that when you're evolving you make certain trade-offs. Lobsters and clams don't really move around a lot; their bodies move and grow very slowly and one of the upsides of that is that they've been able to invest their evolutionary chips, so to speak, in resisting the aging process. Human beings, on the other hand, have to move around quite a lot. We have giant brains and we have to be able to run away from saber tooth tigers. As a result we have bodies that burn a lot of calories, and so that's where our chips are invested. It's just a difference in our evolutionary environment and that's why we've evolved to live and die the way we do. But it could have easily not turned out that way---that's the point I really want to make.

What are the current biological limits on our human life span, or our human "youth span," as you call it---the time that we're able to live as young, vibrant, reproducing individuals?

Foddy: The sky is sort of the limit there. There won't be a magic pill that gives us infinite youth, but over time there will probably be different technologies that allow you a few extra years of youth. We think of aging as being a unitary thing, but it's made up of hundreds of different processes. So, one of the different things we think about, for example, is dementia, the state where your brain sort of wastes away. Now, if we discover a way of reversing that process, or slowing that process, that would be one dimension where we no longer age, where our minds will stay youthful for longer. It's also possible that we might be able to find a way of stopping people's muscles from wasting away as they get older.

Nothing is going to be super dramatic, but there will be a point where you'll look back a hundred years and notice that people used to get really kind of feeble and after awhile they weren't capable of really thinking or processing information anymore, and they had to go into a home and they had to be looked after and nursed for a time. And that will seem very old-fashioned and very barbaric, but I very much doubt it will happen at a moment in time where we suddenly realize that some magic pill has exponentially extended our youth. Part of that's because we're not exactly clear what aging is. We've identified a whole range of processes, but there ere still a whole lot of arguments in the scientific community about what is really responsible for aging, and which of the processes are subsidiary to other processes.

Have we glimpsed, even theoretically, ways that we might add to that youth-span. What are the bleeding edge technologies that might allow us to overcome aging?

Foddy: I'm not a scientist, so I don't want to weigh in too heavily on somebody's body of research. We've seen promising results looking at the lobsters and we've seen promising results with antioxidants, even aspirin, but as I said these things are going to be incremental. You meet a lot of people in the scientific community that are true believers and they're expecting a kind of a radical thing. And it's not as though we never have a radical thing in medicine, but what we have more frequently is incremental advances.

Cancer is a great example of the kind of incremental progress I'm talking about. In 1970, your odds of surviving 5 years after you've were diagnosed with certain kinds of cancer were slim; those chances have increased substantially. But we still react to the idea of getting cancer as though it were 1970 because we don't really process incremental changes. Like with chemotherapy, they just change out one or two drugs every year based on trials that show that the new drug is 2 percent more effective than the previous drug. That's constantly going on, but it really isn't announced. Instead, we get the occasional story in the news about a miracle cure for cancer, and it always turns out not to be as good as they had hoped and everyone begins to get disillusioned about science and the value of medical progress. But when you run the comparisons across decades, you see something much more dramatic.

You give an interesting account of how the aging process evolved in humans. You argue that aging is not the result of an optimizing process, but that instead it's a byproduct of an optimizing process. Can you explain why that difference is so important?

Foddy: I should say, first of all, that this is not original to me; this is very well established in evolutionary biology. We have a number of genetic traits that we developed because they were advantageous from the perspective of natural selection---that is, they helped us to survive and reproduce. People that had the gene for that trait had the ability to reproduce more than people that didn't have it. It's easy to imagine that every gene that we have is selected because it gave a positive advantage in this way, but it turns out there are trade-offs. A number of the processes of aging seem to have arisen because our bodies were not doing enough maintenance, because they were busy doing something else. The misconception that people often have is that any trade-off that we have is going to be directly beneficial, directly advantageous. But that's not right.

The second thing to say is that aging usually happens to an organism after it reaches menopause. Things that happen after menopause are much less interesting in terms of evolution, because they have much less of an effect. If I've already reached the age where I can't reproduce, then aging that takes effect at this point in my life is not going to affect whether or not I reproduce. The game is sort of already over for me. As a result, natural selection doesn't tend to weed out genes that take effect after you've reached the age of menopause. So, there is this idea that over time you can amass genes in your genome that have nothing to do with survival or not surviving, because they only activate after you reach a certain age. So, over time, some of these are going to be good genes and some of them are going to be bad. It's going to be this kind of mix, but it's certainly not going to be the case that they're on balance beneficial. We've got hundreds or thousands of genes that don't start to harm us until we reach old age, and those genes are responsible for a lot of what actually constitutes aging. So, in this sense, we think about aging as being a natural human activity or a human trait---and it is natural, but it's not something that was selected because it was beneficial to us. There is this misconception that everything evolution provides has to be beneficial to individuals and that's not correct. "There is this misconception that everything evolution provides has to be beneficial to individuals and that's not correct."

One defense of aging that your paper takes quite seriously is the argument from evolution, which was first put forth by Frances Fukuyama. Fukuyama claims that we should resist the temptation to tinker with any characteristic that we have been given through the process of natural selection. He argues that evolution can be relied upon to produce good results and that we ought not to mess with the fruit of its processes. What's wrong with this view?

Foddy: Fukuyama has this idea that evolution is very complicated, which is true. We don't always understand why we've evolved to be a certain way. Sometimes it looks like something is useful, but in fact it's performing some kind of role that we don't know much about. Fukuyama is also correct that sometimes we interfere with complicated biological systems without really understanding what the effects will be, and that then we wind up with some unwanted effect. That's all true.

The thing that I disagree with him about is his presumption that if we have a trait that's evolved, that it must be beneficial to us in some way, and that we have some good reason for allowing that trait stick around. Now he's not talking strictly about aging; his book discusses all kinds of intervention on the human organism. But, when it comes to aging, his argument can't even succeed on its own merits, because we know for a fact that aging is not the sort of thing that is produced by natural selection in the kind of positive way that he is talking about. He says it's not always easy to do nature one better, but that's not what we're doing when we're combating aging. We're not trying to do nature one better, because nature doesn't care that we grow old and die. This is neglect, evolutionary neglect. We shouldn't think about it as interfering with the sort of complex ecological balance in the way that he's worried about.

Now that's not to say that our current mode of life extension is ideal. Some of the biggest strains on our resources stem from the fact that populations are getting older as birthrate's go down, especially in the first world. Aging societies are spending more and more on nursing, and so I think that it makes sense to pursue a youth-extending medicine that would diminish the number of years that we have to spend in nursing homes. You could imagine us living more like the lobster, where we still live to be about 80-85, but we're alert and active until we drop dead. In that scenario we wouldn't have this giant burden where the state has to support and pay to nurse people that are unable to look after themselves anymore.

Now, it has to be said that the story of medicine and medical progress in the past 50 years has not been heading that way. If anything, we're extending the number of years that we spend needing nursing. We've gotten good at keeping people alive once they're fairly decrepit. And that sort of guarantees that you have the maximum drain on resources, while also producing the kind of minimum amount of human benefit. You get to be 90 years old and your hip goes out, and we give you a massively expensive hip replacement, but we don't do things to prevent your body from wasting away and becoming corroded when you're 20, 30 or 40.

There's this great Greek myth, the myth of Tithonus, that always comes to mind. Tithonus was a mortal who was in love with Eos, the goddess of the dawn. Eos didn't want Tithonus to grow old and die, so she went to Zeus to ask for eternal life, which was granted. But, she forgot to ask for eternal youth, and so Tithonus just gets older and older and more decrepit, and eventually he can't really move, and then finally he turns into a grasshopper in the end. That's sort of the course that we're on with our current approach to medicine and life extension.

Some ethicists have pointed out that death is one of the major forces for equality in the world, and that welfare disparities will be worsened if some people can afford to postpone old age, or avoid it altogether, while others are unable to. What do you say to them?

Foddy: I think that's right. I mean there are concerns whenever we develop any kind of medicine or any kind of technology---the concern that these things are going to widen welfare gaps. The story of industrialization is that the people who could afford the cars and machines and factories in Western countries were able to produce a lot more and generate a lot more wealth than people in poorer agrarian economies. That's a serious issue. It's probably true that if people in the first world were, through some sort of medical intervention, able to live to be 200 years old and people in Bangladesh were still dying at a relatively young age, that would tend to widen the distance in personal wealth.

And look this has already happened. It's already unfair that I will on average live to be 80 and yet, if I were born before some arbitrary date, or in some other place, I would live much less longer. Those things are unfair and it's worth worrying about them, but I don't think the correct response is to hold off on the science. It's better if everybody can eventually get this medicine, because living a long time is not a positional good, it's an absolute good. It would be great if everybody could live to be 150, because that would benefit every single person. It's not a good that benefits you only if other people are worse off. When you have goods like that you should try to develop them and then you should worry separately about making sure that they get delivered to people in poorer areas, whether it's through government aid or massive production.

Another objection to the elimination of aging is this idea that the aging process makes an elderly person's death less painful for the survivors around her, because it gradually forces people to stop relying on her, and forces her to gradually remove herself from society. You call this the argument from psycho-social history.

Foddy: This is Leon Kass' argument. He thinks aging is just fantastic for this reason because it helps us to let go of somebody. And of course it's true that when people grow old, they become less useful to society, and more socially difficult, which places burdens on people. And in a lot of cases we respond to this by cutting them out of our lives, essentially. People get older, they move into a nursing home, and we see them less and less, and then when they finally die everyone's like, "well it was expected." Advanced age sort of helps us prepare emotionally for letting go of people, but it seems to me that it's not good for the person who gets old.

Now, what would the world be like if people dropped dead in good health when they reach a certain age? It would be very sad, but on the upside the person would've had 20 or 30 years of additional integration into society and we would've been able to spend more time with them. I've got to say that I would've enjoyed my grandmother's presence a lot more if she'd been able to run around and to play and work and be part of society in her extremely advanced age.

Nick Bostrom has said that people have fallen victim to a kind of Stockholm syndrome when it comes to aging. The idea being that because aging has always been an insurmountable obstacle for humanity, that we have dignified it more than it deserves, that we contort ourselves logically and rhetorically to defend it precisely because it is so inescapable. Does that sound right to you?

Foddy: Yes, I think that's right, although Nick draws conclusions that are a bit more extreme than I would tend to draw. I think that we do have a tendency to kind of rationalize things that we don't think we can do anything about. This is a perfectly healthy attitude if you really can't do anything about the aging process---it's better to accept it and kind of talk about it as being a natural part of life, not something to rail against or feel bad about. It's something that everybody goes through. Now if it did so happen that we could discover a medicine that completely prevents that process from taking place, we would have to re-evaluate at that stage and realize that we've done some emotional rationalization here and the conditions for it no longer apply. We no longer need to comfort ourselves with the inevitability of death if it's not actually inevitable.

Having said that, death is, in fact, inevitable. Even if we solve every medical problem, you still have a 1 in 1,000 chance of dying every year by some sort of accident. So, on those odds you could probably expect to live to be about 1,000. I don't think it's ever going to be the case that we will live forever. It's not even going to be 1,000. We're probably talking about living to be 120 or 150 or somewhere around there, but to me the idea that we have to accept living to 80 rather than 120 is bizarre given that it's not so long ago that we lived to 40.

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Radical Life Extension Is Already Here, But We're Doing it ...

‘Orphan Black’ Final Season Premiere Date Set at BBC America – Yahoo TV (blog)

Posted on February 7, 2017 by Danzig

The next meeting of Clone Club is scheduled for Saturday, June 10 at 10/9c.

Thats whenOrphan Black will return for its fifth and final season, BBC America announced Tuesday.

VIDEOSTatiana Maslany Talks Emmy Prep and (Maybe) New Orphan Black Clones

Upcoming episodes of the Tatiana Maslany-led sci-fi series will explore prolongevity and life extension, which is a very interesting and topical science right now, co-showrunner Graeme Manson told TVLine at last years Emmys. (At that same event, Maslany took home her first Emmy for Lead Actress in a Drama Series.)

Also, as Manson previewed at San Diego Comic-Con, the fifth seasons revelation is that the founder of Neolution [P.T. Westmoreland] is somehow still alive That is part of the big mystery for next year.

Plymouth warship HMS Argyll sets sail again after 20-month refit – Plymouth Herald

Posted on February 7, 2017 by Danzig

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The Royal Navy warship HMS Argyll has set sail again following a 20-month refit at its Devonport dockyard base.

The Type 23 frigate sailed with the very latest Royal Navy sensors and equipment newly fitted, in particular the new Sea Ceptor air-defence missile system, for which she will lead the first acceptance trials for the class of warship in the Navy later in the year.

Her crew, led by the captain Commander Toby Shaughnessy, has been working hard with the MOD's industrial partner Babcock, who delivered the refit to get her ready for sea.

Recently completing the last of her pre-sailing machinery trials and a busy period of safety drills, the 171-man crew is delighted to be back at sea.

Commander Shaughnessy said: "It is always extremely challenging to re-generate our ships following their routine periodical refits.

"They are complicated machines and the vast array of equipment needs close attention when we turn them on again after such a long period in dry dock.

"I am very proud of the determination and professionalism of my crew throughout this busy period in getting the ship ready to return to sea.

"We look forward to rejoining the fleet and contributing to its global operations once again."

HMS Argyll will consolidate her safety drills at sea before a short period of post-refit trials.

She will return to full operations with her sister Devonport ships thereafter.

Babcock warship director, Mike Whalley, said: "We are delighted to play our part in returning HMS Argyll to sea in a significantly improved material state and with enhanced capability.

"This has been the most complex Type 23 upkeep ever undertaken in Devonport and the first UK warship class to have its missile system changed mid -life since the 1970s.

"Key learning gained throughout the project will enhance our ability as class lead to life extend the rest of the class.''

A Royal Navy spokesman said the latest launch of HMS Argyll represents the culmination of more than 600,000 man hours of work at the Babcock Frigate Support Centre in Devonport Royal Dockyard.

They noted that this is Babcock's completion of the first Type 23 'life-extension' upkeep, designed to extend the ship's operational life from 18 to 35 years: maintaining, updating and upgrading capability for the 21st century.

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Plymouth warship HMS Argyll sets sail again after 20-month refit - Plymouth Herald

Volm Companies’ Matt Alexander Talks Light-Blocker Half-N-Half Bags – And Now U Know

Posted on February 7, 2017 by Danzig

ANTIGO, WI - One of the many goals I have seen across the board in fresh produce, is the mission to find better ways to extend shelf-life through innovation. When it comes to the potato category, Volm Companies has retailers covered with its Light-Blocker Half-N-Half Bags.

Matt Alexander, Vice President of Sales & Marketing, joined me to discuss the highlights of Volmstechnology and what recent studies can share about the packaging product.

In an effort to gather even more data and benefits of the product, Volm recently engaged the Michigan State University School of Packaging with the objective of researching the best bag to prolong potato shelf-life during retail storage.

We have made a real impact at retail and with the end-consumer with our Light-Blocker Half-N-Half bags which MSU researchers found can extend shelf-life by 12 to 17 days over traditional poly and paper bags for Russet potatoes on the measurement of weight loss, Matt shared with me, adding that potatoes lose weight when exposed to light because their temperature rises. When measured by greening, the shelf-life extension was unlimited with the Light Blocker Half-N-Half bags versus traditional poly and paper bags for Yellow, Red, and Russet potato varieties.

The Half-N-Half bags were analyzed and evaluated by the team, measuring thickness and light transmission, while shelf-life was measured by monitoring physio-chemical changes in the potatoes, Matt noted. Yellow, Red, and Russet potato varieties were stored over a period of several weeks (four or six depending on the bag type) under controlled conditions of 22.5 C and 40% relative humidity with exposure to fluorescent light.

Light Blocker Half-N-Half bags were also found to block greater than 99.5% of all visible and ultraviolet lightan achievement that has gathered positive feedback from consumers and customers alike. While potatoes thrive more in the darkwhich slows greening, decreases potato weight loss, slows sprouting, and keeps tubers firmconsumers buying behaviors have evolved and shoppers want to see the products they are purchasing. Volms light-blocking Half-N-Half bag addresses that as a lightweight, mesh back packaging design that showcases potatoes for the consumer and allows retailers to merchandise front-and-center in potato displays.

Though light-blocking film packaging is available from multiple manufacturers, we found that no formal research had been done on how well it actually works. And this was a project we felt needed to be researched, Matt said.

Let there be light? Not for this packaging.

Volm Companies

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Volm Companies' Matt Alexander Talks Light-Blocker Half-N-Half Bags - And Now U Know

‘Recruit Rosie’: When Satire Joins the Resistance – The Atlantic

Posted on February 7, 2017 by Danzig

It went, roughly, like this: Over the weekend, Melissa McCarthy made a surprise appearance on Saturday Night Live, making sweaty, swaggery fun of Donald Trumps combative press secretary, Sean Spicer. On Monday, Politico reported that Trump had been angered by SNLs mockery of Spicernot, it contended, because of McCarthys eviscerating portrayal of him, but because of the person of McCarthy herself. More than being lampooned as a press secretary who makes up facts, Politico noted, it was Spicers portrayal by a woman that was most problematic in the presidents eyes, according to sources close to him. As a top Trump donor added, bringing another voice to an idea that has become prominent in the early days of the new presidential administration: Trump doesnt like his people to look weak.

From there it went, roughly, like this: You know, people began asking on Monday, what Trump would probably really, really hate? Say, just for instance, that SNL found a woman to play top presidential advisor Stephen Bannon. And say that they found not just any woman, but the woman Trump has sparred with more publicly, and more reliably, than any other. The one the president has referred to, over the course of their more-than-decade-long feud, as a real loser and a total trainwreck and crude, rude, obnoxious, and dumb and a fat pig and a slob.

The idea spread. Recruit Rosie! the people cried. Enlist ODonnell! Who better than Trumps so-called pig to really get his goat!

Rosie, it seems, read the tweets. And on Monday evening, jokingly-or-maybe-not-so-jokingly summoning George Washington and William Sherman and Franklin Roosevelt, the comedian gave her succinct reply: I will serve, ODonnell tweeted.

It was all, on the one hand, a low-stakes jokenot so much at the expense of Steve Bannon as it was at the expense of a president who seems to be unprecedentedly thin-skinned. But Recruit Rosie was also, despite its tempest-in-a-tweetstorm setting, much more than a joke: It operated on the premise that jokes can effect significant changes in the daily operations of the White House. It assumed that one bitODonnell playing Bannon, the real loser playing the person who seems to be, in Trumps mind, the ultimate winnercould have not just a comedic punchline, but also a political upshot. Recruit Rosie took for granted that satire can be, at this moment, and with this president, not just a distraction or an amusement, but indeed a weapon of resistance.

In one sense, certainly, thats an extremely old and bland idea. Call it the banality of comedy: Politics and satire have been intertwined since at least the earliest days of democracy. The Roman poet Juvenal, famed practitioner of the art of Satura, noted that it was hard not to write satire, living as he did within the corruption and decadence of the unjust City. Juvenal was, of course, not alone in that sentiment. Shed of the particularities of geography or generation or political system, it is a very human tendencyperhaps the human tendencyto puncture those in power. And American democracy, in particular, with its lively media culture and its hosting of Thomas Nast and Ambrose Bierce and the writers of SNL, has been a particularly eager adopter of the practice. We, the people have become, over the years, extremely adept with our side-eye.

But heres where Recruit Rosie breaks, just a little bit, with all that. Many of the most recent, and most memorable, of the presidential satiresRonald Reagan, secret genius; Gerald Ford, obvious klutz; George W. Bush, sworn enemy of the English languagehave existed not just to amuse their audiences, but also to influence the peoples perception of their targets. They have aimed at the zeitgeist, and, as such, have been less concerned with direct impact than with a softer kind of power: They have generally been concerned with shaping the public impressions that congeal into historical memory. Did George W. Bush, the person, talk about strategeryor did his SNL persona? Satire, when done well, makes it hard to remember for sure. Satire, traditionally, has played the long game.

The Genius of Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer on Saturday Night Live

Trump, however, is not a traditional president. And the satire aimed at him and his administration has been, along with so much else, adjusting accordingly. And thus: Recruit Rosiewhich is about humor, sure (ODonnell as Bannon! Can you even imagine?), but which is also, and more directly, premised on action. It sees itself, as @CaptJaneway2017 suggested, as part of #TheResistance. Its real punchline is that President Trump is so sensitive about his public image that an unflattering portrayal of his primary advisorwhich is also an unflattering portrayal of the presidentmight remove that advisor from the presidents good graces. Taken to its logical extreme it might even get Bannon fired.

The news cycle that hosted the Politico piece about Trumps SNL-driven anger with Spicer also featured another story: The New York Times reported that Trump has been spending the early evenings of his young presidency by retiring to the residence of the White House and watching cable news. It was a revelation that would surprise nobody who follows the presidents cable-driven Twitter feed (though Spicer, for the record, dismissed the entire Times story as one more instanceand, indeed, the epitomeof fake news).

Coupled with the Politico story, though, the Timess reporting suggested just how powerful television has become as a means of shaping not just the publics worldview, but also the presidents. Savvy lobbyists are now buying ads that air during the Fox News Channel and MSNBC shows the president is known to watch, on the assumption that its more efficient to buy presidential attention through ads than it is to try to obtain that most precious of commodities through more traditional means. And, now, people are suggesting that SNL and its satire can function in a similar way.

Recruit Rosie, that meme-y movement, acknowledges how protective of his public image the current occupant of the West Wing seems to be. It recognizes the extent to which President Trump, as a creature of reality TV, remains deeply concerned about his ratings, whether they be manifested through Nielsen scores or crowd sizes or polling numbers or, indeed, late-night comedy sketches. Progressivesand non-progressives along with themhave been publicly wondering how to resist the new president and his policies. Recruit Rosie hints at a tool that might have been overlooked, so far, in those discussionsone that is powerful precisely because it is so basic: Americans abilityat once cherished and time-tested and constitutionally stipulatedto laugh at their leaders.

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'Recruit Rosie': When Satire Joins the Resistance - The Atlantic

A movie of the artist as a young man: Paolozzi silent film stars in film festival – Herald Scotland

Posted on February 7, 2017 by Danzig

A rare film featuring the Scottish pop artist Eduardo Paolozzi in a leading role is to be part of Scotland's silent movie festival.

Lorenza Mazzetti's 1956 film Together features a young Paolozzi in a lead role as a deaf-mute dock worker.

The role was apparently relished by the artist, born in Leith in 1924, and he modelled his performance on Marlon Brando.

Bill Hare, honorary fellow at the Edinburgh College of Art, writes in an introduction for the film: "For those more familiar with Paolozzis brightly coloured jazzy Pop Art work from the 1960s onwardsTogethermight seem strangely different to their expectations.

"In the 1940s and 1950s however, his work was closely connected with austere angst-ridden zeitgeist of the post-war, cold war era, where the dominant avant garde movement was Art Brut."

He adds: "Paolozzi was also fascinated by the world of science in all its forms, including medicine.

"So it would not be surprising that the exclusively visual world of the deaf-mute would attract him and their artificial created system of communication."

Mr Hare said that Paolozzi may also have been influenced by the Oscar-winning classic movie On The Waterfront.

He adds: "In the previous year the film which swept the Oscar awards was one with a similar gritty dockland subject - [Elia]Kazans On the Waterfront.

"So it is possible that Paolozzi is trying his hand at a bit of method acting inTogether- though admittedly he is no Marlon Brando."

Other films in the 2017 Hippodrome Silent Film Festival include the original screen version of Chicago from 1927, The Informer, a film set in revolution-torn Dublin in 1922, and Whats The World Coming To? a 1926 film that takes place 100 years from now when men have become more like women and women more like men and was co-written by Stan Laurel.

All films in the programme feature live scores by an international line-up of musicians.

The 2017 festival includes four musical commissions, with new scores composed by Scottish Album of the Year award-winning musician RM Hubbert, for 1926 Soviet film By The Law.

Raymond MacDonald and Christian Ferlaino have created the music for Together, and Jane Gardner and others for for Festival opener The Grub Stake, from 1923.

One of the themes of the festival, known as HippFest, this year is the "pioneering but largely forgotten women of early cinema, a time when there were more women working at every level in the film industry than there are today."

The Festival opens on 22 March with The Grub Stake, a 1923 adventure created by Nell Shipman, a silent movie star who turned down a studio career to work entirely outside of the Hollywood system.

Lorenza Mazzetti was a novelist, painter and director.

Mazzetti, part of the British Free Cinema movement, is now 89 and was celebrated last year at the Venice Film Festival in a new documentary titled Because I Am a Genius!

Alison Strauss, director, said: At HippFest we are all about making cinema special engaging the best musicians to accompany rarely screened titles, presenting those films in beautiful and atmospheric settings, seeking out the best restorations from the worlds archives, and generating an atmosphere of inclusion and fun with our audience.

"Since we established the Festival in 2011, more and more people are finding out that early cinema is not clunky and out-dated, but rather is fresh and relevant, sometimes even colourful and never actually silent.

"Within our programme people will find unparalleled comedians, experimental work and revelatory new scores alongside youth projects, workshops for school children and grown-ups, a Speakeasy, walks, talks and exhibitions."

Tickets for HippFest 2017 are now on sale.

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A movie of the artist as a young man: Paolozzi silent film stars in film festival - Herald Scotland

Morguard – 2017 Real Estate Investment Trends to Watch in Canada – Canada NewsWire (press release)

Posted on February 7, 2017 by Danzig

MISSISSAUGA, ON, Feb. 2, 2017 /CNW/ -Morguard is projecting another year of stable real estate investment performance in 2017 as investors look to the Canadian market for relatively stable yields. While there is a dichotomy between the financial and technology driven economies and resource-based economies in Canada, there remains attractive opportunities for investment.

By the end of 2016, a record amount of capital, both debt and equity, was projected to flow into Canadian commercial real estate. Canadian investment transaction volume surged this past year reaching $27.4 billion in total over the first three quarters of 2016, compared with $16.9 billion over the same period in the previous year. Annual 2016 sales are projected to surpass the most recent annual peak of $32.1 billion in 2007. This immense growth in purchasing power, against a backdrop of moderately healthy Canadian economic fundamentals, was somewhat unique.

"For many domestic and foreign investors, Canada's commercial property market represents stability over the long term resulting in a willingness to place capital in this market," said Keith Reading, Director of Research at Morguard. "This sector has a solid record of performance which we anticipate will continue to drive investment decisions, against a backdrop of global political uncertainty."

The 2017 Economic Outlook and Market Fundamentals Research Report, released today by Morguard Corporation (TSX: MRC), provides a detailed analysis of the 2017 real estate investment trends to watch in Canada. The full report is available at http://www.morguard.com

Highlights - 2017 Real Estate Investment Trends

Financial and Technology Driven Sector: British Columbia and Ontario Remain Strong

While the Canadian economy as a whole has experienced relatively weak economic growth, British Columbia and Ontario continue to perform well above the national average. The Vancouver and Toronto markets have emerged and cemented themselves as the business hubs of the new Canadian economy. Both cities' financial and technology driven economies will continue to support high levels of interest from foreign and domestic investors, creating a real estate market fueled by strong competition, aggressive bidding and the potential to push prime asset values slightly higher.

Following this trend, technology companies located in the North East or along the West Coast of the U.S. are expanding or setting up offices in Canada given cost advantages. The less expensive Canadian dollar, coupled with the tremendous growth in the technology sector over the past year, has driven a significant portion of the office leasing demand in Vancouver and Toronto.

In contrast, markets supported by the resource sector continued to experience tepid economic activity in 2016, which is expected to improve gradually over the next few years with annual forecast expansion of roughly 2.0%. The commodities slump in Alberta, coupled with the weak growth in Quebec, Saskatchewan and parts of the Eastern provinces, has indicated that Canada's reliance on resources as an economic driver is decelerating in favour of the financial and technology markets in Vancouver and Toronto. However, there remains opportunity to find solid returns within these markets.Resource-driven market investors can expect continued stabilization in the retail sector. Leasing conditions will drive investment performance and draw capital back into the market. Demand is expected to increase in Winnipeg, Montreal, Edmonton and Calgary.

"Bottom line is that quality investment opportunities will be found in markets across the country," said Reading. "Low risk investors will continue to look to Vancouver and Toronto, especially at strategic locations for acquiring multi-suite residential properties. Opportunistic investors will look to markets that are depressed with the potential for longer-term success."

Investors looking to mitigate risk and increase returns are adapting to market conditions in practical ways. A significant number of larger investors continue to assess diversifying ownership of assets they already hold across regions and asset classes, against a backdrop of upward pricing pressure for the country's core assets.

About Morguard Corporation

Morguard Corporation is a major North American real estate and property management company. It has extensive retail, office, industrial, hotel and residential holdings owned directly and through its investment in Morguard REIT and Morguard North American Residential REIT. Morguard also provides real estate management services to institutional and other investors. Morguard's owned and managed portfolio of assets is valued at $20.7 billion.

For more information, please visit Morguard.com.

Forward Looking Statement Disclaimer

Statements contained herein that are not based on historical or current fact, including without limitation statements containing the words "anticipates," "believes," "may," "continue," "estimate," "expects" and "will" and words of similar expression, constitute "forward-looking statements." Such forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, events or developments to be materially different from any future results, events or developments expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors include, among others, the following: general economic and business conditions, both nationally and regionally; changes in business strategy; financing risk; existing governmental regulations and changes in, or the failure to comply with, governmental regulations; liability and other claims asserted; and other factors. Given these uncertainties, readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements. The Publisher does not assume the obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements.

SOURCE Morguard Corporation

To view this news release in HTML formatting, please use the following URL: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/February2017/02/c6042.html

For further information: K. Rai Sahi, Chairman and CEO, T 905-281-3800; Keith Reading, Director, Research, 905-271-3800

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Morguard - 2017 Real Estate Investment Trends to Watch in Canada - Canada NewsWire (press release)

Building a better model of human-automation interaction – Phys.org – Phys.Org

Posted on February 7, 2017 by Danzig

February 7, 2017

People generally make decisions using two ways of thinking: They think consciously, deliberate for a while, and try to use logic to figure out what action to takereferred to as analytical cognition. Or people unconsciously recognize patterns in certain situations, get a "gut feeling," and take action based on that feeling; in other words, they use intuitive cognition. In his February Human Factors paper, "Intuitive Cognition and Models of Human-Automation Interaction," Robert Earl Patterson found that current taxonomies used to classify systems or teams of humans and computers include only conscious, deliberation-type thinking and neglect the role of intuitive cognition. Patterson suggests that automated systems of the futuresuch as smart cars, homes, and devicesmay be improved if they incorporated both intuitive and analytical cognition. In the paper, he presents a new dual-processing taxonomy based on the work of Raja Parasuraman and colleagues in 2000.

"Intuitive cognition," Patterson states, "should be encouraged whenever automation fosters a quick grasp of the meaningful gist of information based on experience or perceptual cues, without working memory or precise analysis." For example, an individual interacting with computers that display the status of a system in pictorial form would engage intuitive cognition via those perceptual cues.

Patterson notes an advantage: "Intuitive cognition is relatively immune to time pressure and workload, unlike analytical cognition, which is slow in responding." This could be seen, for example, in a scenario in which experienced firefighters quickly extinguish a difficult fire using intuitive cognition they've developed from dealing with fires in the past.

To bring intuitive cognition into future automated systems, Patterson speculates, "the human and machine may need to train together in some fashion so the interaction can be based on learned unconscious pattern recognition."

In the long run, Patterson believes that a human-automation taxonomy that incorporates intuitive cognition will promote novel human-machine system design in the future. He and coauthor Robert Eggleston delve more into intuitive cognition in a paper to be published in the Journal of Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making in March 2017.

Explore further: Post-lunch napping tied to better cognition in elderly

More information: Robert Earl Patterson, Intuitive Cognition and Models of HumanAutomation Interaction, Human Factors (2017). DOI: 10.1177/0018720816659796

(HealthDay)Moderate post-lunch napping is tied to better cognition in older adults, according to a study published online Dec. 20 in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

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Zebras developed stripes to avoid predators.

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As the planet warms due to climate change and hot days become more common, the US electrical grid could be unable to meet peak energy needs by century's end, researchers warned Monday.

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Self-driving car prototypes appear to be getting better at negotiating California streets and highways without a human backup driver intervening, according to data made public Wednesday by California transportation regulators.

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Building a better model of human-automation interaction - Phys.org - Phys.Org

VIDEO: Going Big on Automation in a Small Footprint Facility – ENGINEERING.com

Posted on February 7, 2017 by Danzig

Creemore Springs Brewery Limited is an example of how manufacturers within the food and beverage industry are embracing automation to improve production quantity and quality.

In the video above, we take a look at how small to medium sized breweries like Creemore can maximize the impact of automation, turning a small footprint factory into a major production facility.

Our brewery had grown past the point where we were able to operate with just a limited group of people operating on tribal knowledge, said Geoff Davies, P. Eng, head of operations at Creemore Springs Brewery and National Supply Chain.

Through some process training and automation, we're able to more reliably operate the plant, with less chance of error and safety hazards. We worked with Trinamics, a local automation supplier, to install state of the art packaging equipment, Davies added.

Working together with Creemore Springs, Trinamics successfully designed and installed a uniquely customized case packer design, fitted for their smaller facility footprint.

We developed an intermittent motion case packer and tray packer system, which packages bottles at rates of up to 300 bottles a minute, with 98 to 99 percent efficiency, said Karan Sabherwal, senior mechanical project engineer at Trinamics.

The custom case packer design uses all servo drives, with more than 13 axes on each of the machines.

Electronic cams, designed to be similar to mechanical cams, are controlled through the servos and quarter feedback. This allows operators to control variables including velocity, acceleration and jerk, for smooth motion.

We're totally toolless and can do a changeover in five to 10 minutes, Sabherwal said. We use the greatest of Allen Bradley technology for our PLC controls and everything is Ethernet controlled now. Two machines in the Creemore plant talk to each other through PLCs and we have remote access modules, which in case of a break down, the customer will be alerted, they can give us a call and we can get online with the machine quickly to diagnose the problem and walk them through how to fix it.

Optical laser sensing and time of flight distance measuring are used due to the reflective surfaces of the bottles.

For more information, watch the video above and visit the Creemore Springs and Trinamics websites.

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VIDEO: Going Big on Automation in a Small Footprint Facility - ENGINEERING.com

DFLabs Launches the First Security Automation and Orchestration Platform based Upon Supervised Active Intelligence – Business Wire (press release)

Posted on February 7, 2017 by Danzig

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--DFLabs, the leader in Security Automation and Orchestration Technology, announced today the launch of a landmark release of its flagship platform, IncMan 4.0. Based upon an innovative machine learning and incident correlation engine DFLabs offers a force multiplier solution that helps security operations and incident response teams quickly orchestrate the triage, containment, reporting, and remediation of data breaches and other cyber incidents while gradually guiding them on the maturity path to full automation.

The pace of cyber attacks combined with data breach and privacy regulations are making security operations platforms mandatory for organizations of all sizes. DFLabs has conducted months of discussions with dozens of Fortune 1000 CISOs showing that taking the human completely out of security automation may be dangerous. Significant concerns with making a sudden switch to fully unattended automation include complex issues such as Trust on Input, e.g. If the input data is incorrect, the output could cause even more damage to the business than the incident itself and Proof of Evidence, e.g. An unattended full automation response computer can not be a case for a compliance violation and can leave CISOs exposed to avoidable and excessive legal liability.

With IncMan 4.0, DFLabs delivers on its vision for Supervised Active Intelligence (SAI) driven by the industrys first Dual Mode Playbooks (Machine-to-Human and/or Machine-to-Machine). IncMan includes hundreds of playbooks - based on U.S. and UE international industry regulations (including GDPR), standards and best practices. These playbooks are automatically assigned and dynamically applied to an incident to provide the Security Operations Center (SOC) and Incident Response (IR) teams full control of the situation until they are ready for the next step, at which point the machine learning algorithm takes over the process and brings the organization to the next level of automation.

"Progress of enterprise security organizations towards orchestration spanning multiple functional teams is advanced in part by deep, console-based platforms, said Dan Cummins, Senior Analyst Security, 451 Research.SOC product buyers should focus not only on acquiring programmable, process-centric expertise of current practitioners, but also on establishing an agile foundation to meet future cyber security risks as well.

IncMan 4.0 is also the only solution available with an innovative Knowledge Base that reduces the amount of time spent on the lifecycle of an incident. The Knowledge Base is managed and updated by the DFlabs dedicated research team and includes threat catalogs, frameworks, standards, regulations and more. Incident response orchestration can be enhanced with actionable intelligence to provide effective direction in assisting the SOC and IR teams in creating and executing a response plan as well as for conducting risk analysis and demonstrating compliance with state, federal and international breach regulations.

A complete and thorough orchestrated incident response plan utilizing IncMan 4.0 has shown to save many organizations significant time in mitigating security issues, resulting in up to 80% reduction in reaction time.

CISOs are under heavy scrutiny and pressure to adopt the latest innovation in security automation, yet they are not ready to suddenly and irreversibly replace humans with technology. They must have the ability for their security teams to supervise the intelligent role of the machine - at least at the beginning of their journey, said Dario Forte, Founder and CEO, DFLabs and internationally recognized ISO standards expert. This is the basis behind the design and development of our Supervised Active Intelligence paradigm that we believe is the only effective path to full automation.

IncMan 4.0 offers a single, transparent pane of glass through which organizations can automate and orchestrate their entire security operations. It is an out-of-the-box platform featuring an intuitive interface and workflow combined with flexible use cases and reporting to meet the needs of any industry. Triage, Containment and Remediation operations can be navigated through the configurable, role-based dashboard. In addition to the Dual Mode Playbooks and Knowledge Base, other innovative features include:

"Automation and machine learning are in strong demand in InfoSec. On the other hand, we should not forget that Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are still relatively new to get applied in businesses. Model design is crucial to consider social factors, human judgment on values, and sensitivity for possible bias. That's why a guided path to full automation could be advisable, especially for critical applications such as security operations," said Dr. Anastassia Lauterbach, Advisory Board Member, DFLabs.

Demo and trial of IncMan 4.0 are available immediately. DFLabs Professional Services Team is also available for Breach Readiness and IR Plans to help organizations achieve the appropriate plan, whether its guiding security teams through the process or augmenting their internal team.

About DFLabs

DFLabs is a recognized global leader in cyber incident response automation and orchestration. The company is led by a management team recognized for its experience in and contributions to the information security field including co-edited many industry standards such as ISO 27043 and ISO 30121. IncMan Cyber Incidents Under Control is the flagship product, adopted by Fortune 500 and Global 2000 organizations worldwide. DFLabs has operations in North America, Europe, Middle East, and Asia with US headquarters in Boston, MA and World headquarters in Milano, Italy. For more information visit: http://www.dflabs.com or connect with us on Twitter @DFLabs.

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DFLabs Launches the First Security Automation and Orchestration Platform based Upon Supervised Active Intelligence - Business Wire (press release)

An interesting life through the eyes of a slave driver – Irish Independent

Posted on February 7, 2017 by Danzig

Published 05/02/2017 | 06:00

An interesting life through the eyes of a slave driver

FarmIreland.ie

Books on self-help and business management have always been popular and many of them make useful reading, but one I picked up recently comes from a very different angle.

http://www.independent.ie/business/farming/rural-life/an-interesting-life-through-the-eyes-of-a-slave-driver-35409740.html

http://www.independent.ie/business/farming/article35409739.ece/4e461/AUTOCROP/h342/2017-01-31_bus_28185490_I1.JPG

Books on self-help and business management have always been popular and many of them make useful reading, but one I picked up recently comes from a very different angle.

An interesting life through the eyes of a slave driver

FarmIreland.ie

Books on self-help and business management have always been popular and many of them make useful reading, but one I picked up recently comes from a very different angle.

http://www.independent.ie/business/farming/rural-life/an-interesting-life-through-the-eyes-of-a-slave-driver-35409740.html

http://www.independent.ie/business/farming/article35409739.ece/4e461/AUTOCROP/h342/2017-01-31_bus_28185490_I1.JPG

Given its intriguing title, How To Manage Your Slaves, one feels that had it been published 2,000 years ago, it might well have topped the bestseller charts. I couldn't resist buying it and found the content both amusing and well researched, with lots of interesting historical facts concerning the ownership of slaves.

Now before you explode in anger at my purchasing and enjoying a book with such a politically incorrect title, bear in mind that it was written by Dr Jerry Toner, an Irish professor of classics at Cambridge University, using the voice of Marcus Sidonius Falx, a fictitious Roman of noble birth and a wealthy slave owner, as the narrator.

It is Falx who gives us detailed advice on purchasing slaves, how to encourage them to work harder, how to punish them and, in general, how to ensure we can get the best out of them while taking care they don't murder us in the meantime.

It even touches on the delicate matter of controlling sex among slaves, as well as with their owners, and when to set them free, which was apparently quite a common reward for being a good slave. The content gives us an insight into what life was like when people had a very different mindset to today and should be read in that context.

One wealthy Roman apparently kept a slave solely to note and remember the names of all the people they met and then remind his master of whom they were when required. Now that would have been useful. How many of us encounter embarrassing moments when we cannot recall the name of someone we know well? Politicians and auctioneers take note.

I would imagine also that anyone involved in difficult negotiations with intransigent trade union leaders might yearn for a time when you simply told your slaves what to do and if they refused or made a botch of the task, you could have them whipped or even put to death.

While the narrator is a fictional character, the book contains fascinating historical data as well as some horrific descriptions of the treatment meted out to any slave who attempted to defy his or her owner. But there were also many who gained their freedom and even went on to become wealthy Roman citizens and slave owners in their own right.

How To Manage Your Slaves deals with the period when the Roman Empire was at the height of its powers, but we must also remember that slavery was the norm in Ireland and Britain from long before that time, and continued for many centuries.

In the early fifth century, St Patrick was captured and taken as a slave by Irish raiders while St Brigid was the daughter of Brocca, a Christian Pict and a slave in Ireland. Early Irish law also makes numerous references to slaves and semi-free senclithe, and from the ninth to the 12th century, Dublin in particular was a major slave trading centre.

The King James I Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies. By the mid-1600s, thousands of Irish men and women were sold to Antigua and Montserrat and by then, 70pc of the total population of Montserrat consisted of Irish slaves.

In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2,000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers. Some will argue they were "indentured servants" but, in reality, there was no difference.

The British were not the sole perpetrators of course and on June 20, 1631, the village of Baltimore in Co Cork was attacked by Algerian pirates from the North African Barbary Coast. They killed two villagers and captured almost the whole population of over 100 people, who were put in irons and taken to a life of slavery in North Africa.

It was only by the early 19th century that the ethics and morality of enslaving people was questioned and eventually banned, although it still continues to the present day in a more limited manner and under various guises.

Throughout the 'free' world, there are domestic servants still living in slavery and immigrants kept in awful living conditions. We are told that some are often paid virtually no wages, but are afraid to speak up for fear of being deported.

Send letters to: Farming Independent, Independent House, Talbot street, Dublin 1 or email: farming@independent.ie

Slavery comes in many forms and it is said that the only man who is truly free is the man who has nothing.

Some who own their homes become slaves to maintaining it and keeping up with mortgage payments.

Then there are wage slaves who spend their lives in the pursuit of money for status and to support and educate their families without spending time with their children, later realising it is now too late and life has passed them by.

Others, as they commute to work, might at times gaze in envy at a dropout from mainstream society living a simple life in the countryside. In the past, hermits and religious solitaries shunned wealth and chose poverty.

It is a form of freedom that Jesus, for one, recommended to his followers when he said: "Cast away your earthly goods and follow me."

So what is a slave? Many are slaves to alcohol and drugs, and most of us have become slaves to consumerism.

Just ponder on the aspirations of the average family in the 1950s and what they considered adequate for comfort and compare them to the same family today. It's a sobering thought.

Indo Farming

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An interesting life through the eyes of a slave driver - Irish Independent

Justice Ginsburg Backs Abolition Of The Electoral College – Daily Caller

Posted on February 7, 2017 by Danzig

5466220

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg expressed support for abolishing the Electoral College during remarks at Stanford University Monday night.

Ginsburg gave the Rathbun Lecture on a Meaningful Life at Stanford Memorial Church withRev. Professor Jane Shaw, dean for religious life, where she was asked which constitutional provisions should evolve with the society.

Well, some things I would like to change, one is the electoral college, she said, to rapturous applause. But that would require a constitutional amendment. Amending our Constitution is powerfully hard to do, as I know from the struggle for the Equal Rights Amendment, which fell three state shy [of passage].

The justices forays into politics have troubled court-watchers in the past. Her blunt critiques of President Donald Trump during last years general election were roundly condemned, leading Ginsburg to apologize.

One intrepid student also broached the subject of Ginsburgs age. At 83, she is the oldest member of the Court. The state of Ginsburgs health, at the moment robust, has generated pronounced anxiety among liberals who fear her battle with the actuarial tables could give President Trump another appointment to the Supreme Court and hurl the balance of the bench further to the right. Ginsburg works with a yoga instructor several times per week to remain physically vital.

A lot of people have been expressing encouragement that you eat more kale so to speak so that you can continue doing the public service work that you are doing for as long as possible, the student said.I was wondering, who do you want to eat more kale in Washington?

Justice Kennedy, she replied. Rumors abound that Kennedy, 80, is considering retirement.

Ginsburg is on her way to Hawaii where she will participate in the jurist-in-residence program at the University of Hawaiis William S. Richardson School of Law. The Supreme Court will begin hearing cases again later in the month.

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Justice Ginsburg Backs Abolition Of The Electoral College - Daily Caller

Mayoral candidate calls for abolition of Cleveland Police – Hartlepool Mail

Posted on February 7, 2017 by Danzig

Coun Ben Houchen

16:42 Tuesday 07 February 2017

The announcement by Coun Ben Houchen, the Conservative candidate for the role which covers Darlington, Teesside and Hartlepool, comes after the ruling of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal that Cleveland Police acted unlawfully in using Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act to try to find the source of information leaked to a local newspaper.

The force has also been the subject of a number of legal cases in recent years.

"The last few years have been so turbulent for Cleveland Police that I have no philosophical objection to bringing the organisation to an end," said Coun Houchen.

"I have reached the decision that if elected as the Mayor for Darlington, Teesside and Hartlepool, I would establish a commission to make recommendations to ministers on finding or establishing a successor body that could adequately replace it.

"Our area needs a police structure that does justice to the hugely important work of our front line police officers, who keep our local communities safe. They need to be supported by an organisation with credibility, which enjoys the full confidence of the local community.

"This is not about the people that work for Cleveland Police, but the structure that employs them.

"The organisation was established to be co-terminous with boundaries of Cleveland County Council during a local government review in the early 1970s. The structure is more than 40 years old and local boundaries have changed since then.

"We need to find a structure that has the scale and resources needed to tackle the considerable policing challenges of an urban area covering numerous different towns.

"I dont expect the Government to take a view at the moment, but I would urge ministers not to make any long-term policy pledges that would bind them to the organisations future."

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Mayoral candidate calls for abolition of Cleveland Police - Hartlepool Mail

Exploiting black labor after the abolition of slavery – Baraboo News Republic

Posted on February 7, 2017 by Danzig

Convicts leased to harvest timber in Florida around 1915

The U.S. criminal justice system is riven by racial disparity.

The Obama administration pursued a plan to reform it. An entire news organization, The Marshall Project, was launched in late 2014 to cover it. Organizations like Black Lives Matter and The Sentencing Project are dedicated to unmaking a system that unjustly targets people of color.

But how did we get this system in the first place? Our ongoing historical research project investigates the relationship between the press and convict labor. While that story is still unfolding, we have learned what few Americans, especially white Americans, know: the dark history that produced our current criminal justice system.

If anything is to change if we are ever to end this racial nightmare, and achieve our country, as James Baldwin put it we must confront this system and the blighted history that created it.

During Reconstruction, the 12 years following the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, former slaves made meaningful political, social and economic gains. Black men voted and even held public office across the South. Biracial experiments in governance flowered. Black literacy surged, surpassing those of whites in some cities. Black schools, churches and social institutions thrived.

As the prominent historian Eric Foner writes in his masterwork on Reconstruction, Black participation in Southern public life after 1867 was the most radical development of the Reconstruction years, a massive experiment in interracial democracy without precedent in the history of this or any other country that abolished slavery in the nineteenth century.

But this moment was short-lived.

As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, the slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.

History is made by human actors and the choices they make.

According to Douglas Blackmon, author of Slavery by Another Name, the choices made by Southern white supremacists after abolition, and the rest of the countrys accommodation, explain more about the current state of American life, black and white, than the antebellum slavery that preceded.

Designed to reverse black advances, Redemption was an organized effort by white merchants, planters, businessmen and politicians that followed Reconstruction. Redeemers employed vicious racial violence and state legislation as tools to prevent black citizenship and equality promised under the 14th and 15th amendments.

By the early 1900s, nearly every southern state had barred black citizens not only from voting but also from serving in public office, on juries and in the administration of the justice system.

The Souths new racial caste system was not merely political and social. It was thoroughly economic. Slavery had made the Souths agriculture-based economy the most powerful force in the global cotton market, but the Civil War devastated this economy.

How to build a new one?

Ironically, white leaders found a solution in the 13th Amendment, which ended slavery in the United States in 1865. By exploiting the provision allowing slavery and involuntary servitude to continue as a punishment for crime, they took advantage of a penal system predating the Civil War and used even during Reconstruction.

With the help of profiteering industrialists they found yet a new way to build wealth on the bound labor of black Americans: the convict lease system.

Heres how it worked. Black men and sometimes women and children were arrested and convicted for crimes enumerated in the Black Codes, state laws criminalizing petty offenses and aimed at keeping freed people tied to their former owners plantations and farms. The most sinister crime was vagrancy the crime of being unemployed which brought a large fine that few blacks could afford to pay.

Black convicts were leased to private companies, typically industries profiteering from the regions untapped natural resources. As many as 200,000 black Americans were forced into back-breaking labor in coal mines, turpentine factories and lumber camps. They lived in squalid conditions, chained, starved, beaten, flogged and sexually violated. They died by the thousands from injury, disease and torture.

For both the state and private corporations, the opportunities for profit were enormous. For the state, convict lease generated revenue and provided a powerful tool to subjugate African-Americans and intimidate them into behaving in accordance with the new social order. It also greatly reduced state expenses in housing and caring for convicts. For the corporations, convict lease provided droves of cheap, disposable laborers who could be worked to the extremes of human cruelty.

Every southern state leased convicts, and at least nine-tenths of all leased convicts were black. In reports of the period, the terms convicts and negroes are used interchangeably.

Of those black Americans caught in the convict lease system, a few were men like Henry Nisbet, who murdered nine other black men in Georgia. But the vast majority were like Green Cottenham, the central figure in Blackmons book, who was snatched into the system after being charged with vagrancy.

A principal difference between antebellum slavery and convict leasing was that, in the latter, the laborers were only the temporary property of their masters. On one hand, this meant that after their fines had been paid off, they would potentially be let free. On the other, it meant the companies leasing convicts often absolved themselves of concerns about workers longevity. Such convicts were viewed as disposable and frequently worked beyond human endurance.

The living conditions of leased convicts are documented in dozens of detailed, firsthand reports spanning decades and covering many states. In 1883, Blackmon writes, Alabama prison inspector Reginald Dawson described leased convicts in one mine being held on trivial charges, in desperate, miserable conditions, poorly fed, clothed, and unnecessarily chained and shackled. He described the appalling number of deaths and appalling numbers of maimed and disabled men held by various forced-labor entrepreneurs spanning the entire state.

Dawsons reports had no perceptible impact on Alabamas convict leasing system.

The exploitation of black convict labor by the penal system and industrialists was central to southern politics and economics of the era. It was a carefully crafted answer to black progress during Reconstruction highly visible and widely known. The system benefited the national economy, too. The federal government passed up one opportunity after another to intervene.

Convict lease ended at different times across the early 20th century, only to be replaced in many states by another racialized and brutal method of convict labor: the chain gang.

Convict labor, debt peonage, lynching and the white supremacist ideologies of Jim Crow that supported them all produced a bleak social landscape across the South for African-Americans.

Black Americans developed multiple resistance strategies and gained major victories through the civil rights movement, including Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Jim Crow fell, and America moved closer than ever to fulfilling its democratic promise of equality and opportunity for all.

But in the decades that followed, a tough on crime politics with racist undertones produced, among other things, harsh drug and mandatory minimum sentencing laws that were applied in racially disparate ways. The mass incarceration system exploded, with the rate of imprisonment quadrupling between the 1970s and today.

Michelle Alexander famously calls it The New Jim Crow in her book of the same name.

Today, the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world, with 2.2 million behind bars, even though crime has decreased significantly since the early 1990s. And while black Americans make up only 13 percent of the U.S. population, they make up 37 percent of the incarcerated population. Forty percent of police killings of unarmed people are black men, who make up merely 6 percent of the population, according to a 2015 Washington Post report.

It doesnt have to be this way. We can choose otherwise.

Bryan Bowman received funding as a recipient of the Alan L. and Carol S. LeBovidge Undergraduate Research Scholarship in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Kathy Roberts Forde does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

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Exploiting black labor after the abolition of slavery - Baraboo News Republic

Another Voice: Land trust will empower Fruit Belt residents – Buffalo News

Posted on February 7, 2017 by Danzig

By Annette Lott

The Buffalo revival story is widespread today. While the overall economy may be rebounding, however, we continue to struggle in the Fruit Belt neighborhood. Were fighting to maintain the community and the right to live and raise our families here.

The Community First Alliance is a coalition of more than a dozen community-based organizations in Buffalo that have come together to negotiate a community benefits agreement with the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus.

In our Rising Tide document, we have designed a vision of what a benefits agreement might look like. It calls for more responsible growth of the Medical Campus, as well as the preservation and empowerment of the Fruit Belt neighborhood.

Rising Tide clearly outlines anti-gentrification tools and strategies that would help maintain affordable housing, create jobs for underemployed community members and keep longtime residents in their homes. One such tool is a community land trust.

In the Fruit Belt neighborhood, there are more than 200 vacant lots that are owned by the City of Buffalo. With the rapid growth of the nearby Medical Campus, developers from outside the community have their eyes on the Fruit Belt.

Many of those developers have already proven themselves to be untrustworthy; their final insult will be to extract the last remaining resources from our community for their own personal gain.

Thats precisely why, over the past year, our alliance has introduced the idea of creating a Fruit Belt Community Land Trust.

It will empower Fruit Belt residents to take control of the vacant lots so that its less about having a seat around the decision-making table, and more about community control of the decision-making altogether.

The Fruit Belt Community Land Trust will generate community wealth through collective ownership, a principle familiar to the African-American community. It is embodied in the spirit of Ujima and has been practiced in the Fruit Belt for generations.

I know it was in my family, at least. I come from a family of nine, and I remember my father being so happy that he could provide for us. We had a nice home with a nice backyard. I remember him saying, I cant let my home fall.

Just like now, Im saying, We cant let the neighborhood fall. This may be our last chance to make sure that it doesnt.

I hope youll join us in the fight by supporting the Fruit Belt Community Land Trust. For more information, go to our Facebook page at facebook.com/CFAbuffalo.

Annette Lott is the president of Fruit Belt United and a member of the Community First Alliance. She has been part of the Fruit Belt community her entire life.

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Another Voice: Land trust will empower Fruit Belt residents - Buffalo News

Here’s who will share a personal tale of ‘Behind the scenes’ at Coachella Valley Storytellers Project – The Desert Sun

Posted on February 7, 2017 by Danzig

COACHELLA VALLEY STORYTELLERS PROJECT STORIESKristin Scharkey tells her story | 14:13

Kristin Scharkey participates in the Coachella Valley Storyteller Project.

1 of 19

Storyteller Kelly Keiser tells her story as part of the Coachella Valley Storyteller Project at the Palm Canyon Theater.

2 of 19

Shay Moraga participates in the Coachella Valley Storyteller Project.

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Leslie Gonzalez participates in the Coachella Valley Storyteller Projectt.

4 of 19

Leanna Rodgers participates in the Coachella Valley Storyteller Project.

5 of 19

Lea Goodsell participates in the Coachella Valley Storytellers Project at the Palm Canyon Theater.

6 of 19

Rosalie Murphy speaks at The Coachella Valley Storytellers Project's 'Change and reinvention' at the Coachella Valley Art Center on Tuesday, August 30.

7 of 19

Emily Rapp Black speaks at The Coachella Valley Storytellers Project's 'Change and reinvention' at the Coachella Valley Art Center on Tuesday, August 30.

8 of 19

Amy Whelan speaks at The Coachella Valley Storytellers Project's 'Change and reinvention' at the Coachella Valley Art Center on Tuesday, August 30.

9 of 19

Francesca Amari speaks at The Coachella Valley Storytellers Project's 'Change and reinvention' at the Coachella Valley Art Center on Tuesday, August 30.

10 of 19

Storyteller Kristi Rabe Marilyn Chung, The Desert Sun

11 of 19

Storyteller Tod Goldberg Marilyn Chung, The Desert Sun

12 of 19

Storyteller Gideon Cohn Marilyn Chung, The Desert Sun

13 of 19

Storyteller Jacob Cantu shares his experiencing in finding and losing love during the Coachella Valley Storytellers event on "Matters of the Heart." Marilyn Chung/The Desert Sun

14 of 19

Nathan Brown speaks at the Coachella Valley Storytellers 'And there I was' event at the Ace Hotel on Monday, March 21 2016

15 of 19

Maggie Downs speaks at the Coachella Valley Storytellers 'And there I was' event at the Ace Hotel on Monday, March 21 2016

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Ruth Nolan speaks at the Coachella Valley Storytellers 'And there I was' event at the Ace Hotel on Monday, March 21 2016

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Storytellers Shad Powers and Xochitl Pea share the story of how they started becoming more than friends during the Coachella Valley Storytellers event on "Matters of the Heart." Marilyn Chung/The Desert Sun

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Storyteller David Kelly talks about his experience with love during the Coachella Valley Storytellers event on "Matters of the Heart." Marilyn Chung/The Desert Sun

19 of 19

Kristin Scharkey tells her story

Kelly Keiser tells her story

Shay Moraga tells her story

Leslie Gonzalez tells her story

Leanna Rodgers tells her story

Lea Goodsell tells her story

Storytellers 'Change and reinvention': Rosalie Murphy

Storytellers 'Change and reinvention': Emily Rapp Black

Storytellers 'Change and reinvention': Amy Whelan

Storytellers 'Change and reinvention': Francesca Amari

Storyteller Kristi Rabe

Storyteller Tod Goldberg

Storyteller Gideon Cohn

Storyteller Jacob Cantu

Coachella Valley Storytellers 'And there I was': Nathan Brown

Coachella Valley Storytellers 'And there I was': Maggie Downs

Coachella Valley Storytellers 'And there I was': Ruth Nolan

Storytellers Shad and Xochitl

Storyteller David Kelly

05/24/16 Taya Gray, Special to The Desert Sun People clap after hearing Hann Carr share a first-person story during The Coachella Valley Storytellers Project at the La Quinta Museum in La Quinta on Tuesday, May 25, 2016. (Photo: Taya Gray/Special to The Desert Sun)

From a celebrity interview to finding a purpose, four tellers will pull back the curtain on their lives to share stories for the first Coachella Valley Storytellers Project eventof 2017 on Wednesday night.

The storytelling night, hosted by La Quinta Museum, is sold out, but there are three more storytelling nights in the works for the year. Tickets for the May event will go on sale April 3.

The Coachella Valley Storytellers Project coordinates nights of true stories, told live, in which artists, community leaders and everyday desert residents prepare a brief, first-person story on a theme, addressing it literally or metaphorically. The Desert Sun works in partnership with University of California Riverside Palm Desert's graduate school for creative writing and writing for the performing arts tocoach storytellers to help them share their meaningful, entertaining stories in spaces through all valley cities.

Becky Kurtz(Photo: Courtesy photo)

Becky Kurtzis the executive director of Desert Forum, Inc., the nonprofit that produces Desert Town Hall, a lecture series that in the 2017 season includes notables astronaut Scott Kelly, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, CNNs Paul Begala with FOXs Tucker Carlson and best-selling author Michael Lewis.

After seeing the first speaker in 1993, Russian journalist Vladimir Pozner, she was behind the scenes, first as a volunteer, then as marketing director before being named executive director.

She is also a member of The Desert Sun's editorial board.

A longtime desert resident, she moved to the Coachella Valley in 1986 from Superior, Wisc. She is married with two grown children and two grandchildren.

READ MORE:2017 is second year for Coachella Valley Storytellers Project

Daniela Franco(Photo: Submitted)

Daniela Franco is an editor at The Desert Sun, where she oversees the storytelling team in the newsroom. A former East Coast resident, she had never been to California before she moved to the Coachella Valley about four months ago.

Daniela moved to Massachusetts from Colombia when she was 15. She owns two Tom Brady jerseys and is still celebrating the Patriots Super Bowl win. She holds a bachelors degree in journalism, sociology and Latin American studies from New York University.

Andrew Schultz,a Nebraska-born Californian who considers himself 50 percent businessmanand 50 percentyogi, is a yoga enthusiast-turned-instructor with a passion for helping others in the most meaningful, healthy and positive ways.

Andrew teaches yoga at Power Yoga Palm Springs, Ace Hotel & Swim Club, schools, and different recovery centers throughout Coachella Valley for people battling addiction while also working full-time for Lululemon Athletica in Palm Desert.

Andrew Schultz(Photo: Courtesy pho)

Prior to moving to Palm Springs in April 2015, Andrew spent the past 14 years living in San Diego working alongside senior corporate executives and leaders at top global companies in the areas of conscious leadership and marketing, sustainability, corporate social accountability, nutritional leadership, strategic planning and international supply chain management.

In his personal time, Andrew helps sponsor other men in recovery and is very active in the recovery community both locally and across the country. He is also involved with organizations such as Whispering Winds, Silverage Yoga and the Betty Ford Center.

Lanelle Gradilla(Photo: Courtesy photo)

Lanelle Gradilla has been a stylist to many, is a mother of three and a wife to one. She's also a small business owner of Raw & Local, a juice and tonic delivery service. She has worked as an alchemist for Sea Chi Organics,a skin- and hair-care line made in Palm Springs.

When asked to provide a bio, she started to notice a theme in her work. From color-stained hands, to her juice-splattered apron she identifies with the "sweaty creative."

Attendees are encouraged to arrive early (doors open at 6:00 p.m.) and tour the museum before the storytelling begins at 6:30 p.m. The La Quinta Museum will have an exhibit, "Tell Me a Story: Women in the Arts," on display. Walk through a series of artwork by 95 artists who each took a uniformly-sized canvas to create a piece of art and accompanying written statement.

La Quinta Historical Society will host wine and beer for those 21+. (Note: The storytelling series is intended for an adult audience).

Insider perks:Subscribers have access to perks, extras and deals through The Desert Sun'sInsider program. Insiders will receive a Fairytale Brownie.

Interested in sharing your story? Potential tellers work with the storytelling project coaches to shape their true, first-person story around selected themes. Future themes include: "It seemed like a good idea at the time (May 3)," "Close encounters(August)," or "Family(November)."

Each teller receives a minimum of three hours of training to develop their stories. Tellers begin working with the project coaches about two months before the event, but you may send an email for any of the themes at any anytime the earlier the better. Send an email to sarah.day.owen@desertsun.com to get started.

Past events podcasts:Subscribe, listen to our podcast on iTunes

The series is dedicated to the idea that oral storytelling and journalism have the same goals: serving, reflecting and connecting a community while fostering empathy among those people. These nights blend the authenticity and hype-free discipline of storytelling as an art form with the truthfulness, community-building and empowerment that's at the heart of great journalism.

Read or Share this story: http://desert.sn/2kKcAG7

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Here's who will share a personal tale of 'Behind the scenes' at Coachella Valley Storytellers Project - The Desert Sun

Senator announces legislation to protect seniors from fraud – WSYR

Posted on February 7, 2017 by Danzig

UTICA, N.Y. (WSYR-TV) - U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand was in Utica on Monday to announce legislation designed to protect seniors from fraud.

Gillibrand says the Senior Financial Empowerment Act would protect seniors from thieves looking to steal their money and their personal information.

"What my plan to do is to issue a bill. It's called the Senior Financial Empowerment Act. And what its going to do is a couple of things.... it's going to bring together all the local, federal, and state governments and non-for-profits who deal with this issue, so it's a one shop place, Gillibrand told WUTR-TV in Utica.

The legislation would ensure that seniors and their caregivers:

- Have critical information regarding financial abuse - Standardize and improve the ways abuse is reported - Establish a national hotline that would advise seniors on where and how to report fraud

Additional details are available on the Senators website.

Continued here:

Senator announces legislation to protect seniors from fraud - WSYR

How 3D and Self-Design Will Change Technology – Huffington Post

Posted on February 7, 2017 by Danzig

There is no doubt 3D printing is more than a temporary nourish for the world. According to some recent surveys, the worldwide 3D printing industry is now projected to reach revenues $12.8 billion by 2018 and surpass an enormous $21 billion globally by 2020.

The role of 3D cannot be undermined -- from product design in the technology industry to modeling and presentation in the real estate sector, 3D has proven its stay. Self-design, an advancement on 3D designs that allows users to create custom designs from which manufacturers can create a customer-specific product is the new trend.

Here are some ways 3D and self-design are making the world a better place.

Touchable Picture Isn't it amazing if the blind and visually weaken could feel images? 3D technology has made it achievable for the world. With the advent of cutting-edge printers, the users can print the photographs and pictures in 3D version. What's more? 3D models of even unborn babies can be created with this technology.

Owing to amazing customization features of the 3D and self-design techniques, it will be possible to design and build implants depending on the needs and requirements of the clients. It means that the technology will help to get improved body parts. Sturdier and better means of transportation

Nowadays, most transportation companies are using 3D printed parts to increase the strength and protection of the vehicles. This technology is utilized to design even planes. 3D printed components to make the plans lightweight and sturdy. When it comes to evaluating a vehicle, we always look at fuel efficiency. With 3D components, vehicles are made fuel efficient.

Comfortable plaster cast for broken bones

Traditional plaster casts are somehow uncomfortable to carry. But modern plaster cast built with 3D design are easy to wear and more hygienic. Faster medical progress

The role of 3D technology is really great in the healthcare sector. It brings various new discoveries in medicine. It saves loads of time and resources spent on surveys and researches. Owing to the advanced printers and supplementary devices, it is now easier and faster to design and craft tailor-made implants. Improve working efficiency

Various tasks related to design have become quick, simple and efficient with 3D and self-design technology. It improves the efficiency and reduces the need for manpower. Ultimately, it speeds up the production and reduces the expenses. Faster solutions

At present scenario, designs and looks of almost everything are changed very rapidly. 3D printers allow the employees to save time and let them focus on their main work. It helps to streamline the work. Creating faster and a proficient solution are easy with a smart printer.

Brian Walker, Ph.D., the co-founder, and CEO of CircutScribe says self-design will make 3D adoption rate even faster. "Due to the speed at which jobs can be completed, from the customer interaction point to the printing and manufacturing stage, a lot of previously wasted time will be cut. This means more people will adopt 3D as a way of getting things done," he said.

Improved and engaging education

The emergence of art and technology has changed the way schools offer education to the students. With the 3D and self-design technologies, students learn various subjects especially, science, technology, engineering and math with fun. Art and technology have always been interconnected, but now they are allied more than ever before to change the world.

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How 3D and Self-Design Will Change Technology - Huffington Post

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