Daily Archives: February 27, 2020

The use and abuse of ethnic minorities – Spiked

Posted: February 27, 2020 at 1:26 am

The largest national minority group in the United Kingdom today is Polish. More than 900,000 Polish citizens currently live in the UK, accounting for more than 1.3 per cent of the population. Many other Britons can claim Polish descent, as the plethora of Polish surnames in British national life attests. Actual Polish citizens are more common in England and Wales than people claiming Bangladeshi, Afro-Caribbean or even Irish descent (Scotland and Northern Ireland publish less detailed summary statistics). Poles are everywhere you look.

But you wont find them in the national statistics. Unlike many other national statistical agencies, the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) does not try to collect comprehensive data on population by national origin. Instead, it collects data only for 18 recommended ethnic groups. Recommended by whom? By government agencies and interest groups. In other words, the squeaky wheels get the data, while the quiet go uncounted.

The ONS and other UK statistical agencies produce detailed data on Black Caribbeans, Black Africans, Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and a complex web of mixed identities, while ignoring other groups that, frankly, dont attract the attention of people in power. And where the ONS leads, organisational checklists follow. Thus the BBC has successfully pushed its on-air Black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) on-screen representation up to more than one-quarter of total TV time, despite the fact that these groups make up just 14 per cent of the England and Wales population (even when including mixed-race people as BAME). British Poles are hardly visible.

It can be (and often is) argued that members of racial minority groups require special intervention because of the historical burden of poverty and discrimination. But at a time when by far the highest earning ethnicity in the UK is Indian, and White British people actually earn slightly below the national average, this hardly holds water. It can also be argued that racial minority groups have been treated unfairly because their ancestors were forcibly removed from their home countries, but this doesnt really apply to the UK in the same way it does to the US. Nor does the UK host minority indigenous populations of the kinds found in the settler colonies of the old dominions.

The real reason why particular minority groups are marked out and counted is that they are useful useful to elites, useful to those who would be their leaders, and useful in ways that other, less visible minority groups are not. No one particularly benefits from identifying and enumerating hundreds of thousands of hard-working, well-assimilated Poles. But theres a lot of money (and even more political capital) to be earned on the backs of BAMEs. And so, in Britain, BAMEs the game. Look abroad, and it becomes clear that BAME is just a name that British elites give to the people they want to groom for long-term dependence.

History is full of terrors and tragedies, but if one minority ethnic group has a special claim to restorative justice, it is the Jews. And for a brief period in British history, roughly corresponding to the second half of the 20th century, there was a distinctively Jewish claim to anti-defamation. Overt anti-Semitism was beyond the pale of polite society. No longer. Elite sympathy for the plight of the Jewish people is now waning, and as the troubling rhetoric of todays Labour Party demonstrates, tacit anti-Semitism is once again becoming (sadly and strangely) acceptable among otherwise respectable people. Overt anti-Semitism is only a tweet away.

British Jews, who have completed the full arc from social exclusion to protected group to assimilated whiteness, illustrate well the phenomenon of the sympathetic minority. Sympathetic minorities are distinct groups in society that receive the protection and sponsorship of societys elites. Before the Second World War, anti-Semitism was a routine reflex of British elites, but after the horrors of the Holocaust became widely known, the vilification of Jews became a social anathema. For a while, Jews continued to be excluded from full participation in White British society, but as the ONS statistical category demonstrates, that social exclusion has now largely disappeared. The days when gentile parents were shocked by the idea of their children marrying Jews are long gone.

With social inclusion came the loss of the special status of Jews in British society. Jews no longer needed the sponsorship of elite patrons and protectors. As a result, they no longer constituted a distinct political constituency, and no longer voted as a united bloc. Community leaders could no longer credibly claim to speak on behalf of all Jews. In effect, the Jewish community as such has disappeared: today, there are only individual Jews and the organisations to which they personally belong. They are still the members of an identifiable minority group, and they are still the targets of anti-Semitic vitriol, but they do not constitute a single, controllable, politically operational minority constituency.

Now that they are independent and assimilated, Jews no longer elicit the sympathies of political elites, because they are no longer useful to them. Some minority groups, like Australian Catholics and American Mormons, have never elicited elite sympathy, despite severe and well-documented historical discrimination. Others, like indigenous Canadians, have flipped in one generation from being unsympathetic to sympathetic. And it all has to do with the society, not the minority. A sympathetic British Indian becomes, on immigration to the US, a boring Indian-American. There is a clear minority pecking order in every society, but minorities themselves have little say in where they stand in it.

In the US, the legacy of slavery has made African-Americans the archetypical case of the sympathetic minority. Even though African-Americans no longer have legal impairments imposed on them by the majority white population, they remain sympathetic in the sense that white elites still find it possible to override majority opinion in the name of racial justice for African-Americans. Racism and racial discrimination certainly persist in the US (as they do everywhere), but these do not explain the special, sympathetic status of African-Americans. What makes African-Americans a sympathetic minority is their usefulness to white American elites.

To see this, consider the plight of Chinese-Americans. Though never literally enslaved, Chinese-Americans once faced similar levels of repression in California as those suffered by African-Americans in the South. But Chinese-Americans are no longer so socially excluded as to be ghettoised into a manageable political constituency. Thus, although Californians voted in a binding referendum in 1996 to ban all forms of discrimination on the basis of race, sex, colour, ethnicity, or national origin in public education, University of California administrators persist in looking for ways to boost African-American student numbers at the expense of Chinese-American students. Not being particularly useful to political elites, Chinese-Americans simply arent a sympathetic minority.

It is deeply politically incorrect to admit it, but we all have a general idea of the minority pecking orders in our own societies. For example, in the US, where race outranks indigeneity, Native Americans have long lobbied unsuccessfully to convince the Washington Redskins football team to change its offensive name. But in Australia, where indigeneity is the crucial minority identifier, it is impossible to imagine a major commercial sports franchise calling itself something like the Blackfellas. In most developed countries, the disabled are a sympathetic minority, while the obese are not. Women are not literally a minority, but feminists are. Yet in the emerging battle between feminists and transgender activists, transgender minority status outranks feminist. Thus the feminist tennis star Martina Navratilova has been vilified for arguing that trans-women should not be allowed to compete in womens sports.

Vilified by whom? Its difficult to say. Not by the majority, thats for sure. The professions of the pen exercise an outsized influence: academics, journalists, lawyers, lobbyists and the like. The expert class as a whole tends to arrogate to itself the authority to decide which minorities matter and when. Political elites dont sit as a body to judge the status of minority groups, but individual members of the political elite do see similar opportunities and incentives. When a minority group is easily identified and socially excluded, it can be politically activated and used through coopting a small number of community leaders. That makes it useful, and nothing elicits sympathy so much as usefulness. When the same minority group goes mainstream (as Jews have done and feminists are doing), it loses its utility. You cant get much political leverage out of promoting women when other women are just as likely to support your opponents as they are to support you.

So BAMEs are in, Jews are out, and Poles never stood a chance. At least, thats the situation in the UK. In the US, blacks are still in, Hispanics are on their way out, and the Chinese never stood a chance. Down under, its Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians (to use their formal label) who form the only genuinely sympathetic minority, so sympathetic that there is strong (white) elite pressure to give them a constitutionally enshrined voice in parliament. What all of the sympathetic minorities share is their political usefulness to white elites in their own societies both via their votes and (more importantly) through the moral claims that white elites can make in the names of marginalised others. Dont like Donald Trump or Boris Johnson? Just label them racists on behalf of blacks or BAMEs.

As Boris and the UK Conservatives have discovered, despite the election victory, clearly demonstrable charges of anti-Semitism no longer pack the same political punch as vaguely argued charges of racism. For that matter, the US Democrats discovered the declining power of feminism in 2016, when Trumps sexist personal history was overlooked by the majority of (white) American women. Jews and (feminist) women are no longer socially excluded groups. By joining the mainstream, they lost their political usefulness. They are still minorities, but they are no longer sympathetic minorities or at least, they no longer excite the sympathies of those in positions of power.

Homosexuals are fast following feminists on the road to normalisation and political irrelevance. Gay and lesbian activists are desperately trying to hold their place in the ever-expanding LGBTQ+ alliance, but these days mere homosexuality is old hat. With gay-marriage rights widely embraced in developed democracies, and a gay prime minister in Ireland (of all places), it is becoming more and more difficult to characterise homosexuals as a socially excluded minority in countries like the UK, the US and Australia. Thats why transsexuals, despite their vanishingly small numbers, have become the sexual minority du jour. Despite their increasingly high profile, transsexuals remain profoundly socially excluded, and that makes them useful. Political elites now routinely use the threat of transgender suicides to push through their preferred education and healthcare policy agendas.

In the UK, look for the BAME category to disintegrate as British Indians increasingly prioritise assimilation over grievance politics. And when Brexit happens, look for a new category to emerge: British Europeans. British Poles may not be eager to relocate into a 21st-century ideological ghetto, but many other British Europeans are. And when they do, theyll find a large segment of the British political establishment chafing at the bit to take up their cause: the Remainer elite. The supposed rights of British Europeans have already been used as a parliamentary bludgeon by the Remainer resistance. Demands for policies to alleviate their post-Brexit suffering have the potential to drive politics for decades to come.

Salvatore Babones is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Sydney, and the author of The New Authoritarianism: Trump, Populism and the Tyranny of Experts, published by Polity Press. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)

Pictures by: Getty.

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Toby Young launches 50-a-year ‘Free Speech Union’ – The National

Posted: at 1:26 am

Do you frequentlyneed someone to defend you because you've made "politically incorrect" (racist, sexist or homophobic) jokes online and your children are threatening to emancipate themselves?

Are you afraid of what "cancel culture" means for you - a person who is unlikely to ever be "cancelled" due to not actually being a public figure?

Well we've got just the thing for you.

Journalist and professional contrarian Toby Young has announced he is now the general secretary of something he calls the Free Speech Union and he's charging near 50 a year for the privilege of joining it.

Unfortunately we cannot tell you how the union describes itself, because our work computers think its official website is a security risk.

But the general idea is that the Free Speech Union will defend you from no-platforming, cancellation - all that fancy modern stuff.

Announcing the scheme with a Twitter video, Young says: "We can't continue to appease the enemies of free speech.

"As Churchill said, an appeaser is someone who keeps feeding the crocodile in the hope it will eat them last.

"Many good men and women died fighting for our right to speak our mind and exchange our ideas without being persecuted by the enforcers of intellectual conformity and moral dogma.

"This is our precious inheritance and we owe it to them as well as our children to come to its defence."

Given Young's immediate defence of Andrew Sabisky, the former Downing Street adviser caught in a eugenics row, last week, it seems he is willing to overlook anything to stand up for your right to free speech!

READ MORE:Andrew Sabisky made vile claims about women and sex on Reddit

Though of course the people who criticised Sabisky's claims and called for his sacking were also using their free speech to say he was unsuited to a government position. But he did not see it that way. They were the "enforcers of intellectual conformity", to use Young's own words.

The reality is nobody needs to spend 49.95 to protect free speech (or even 24.95 for students and retirees).

And you definitely don't need to give it to Toby Young to do it for you.

If you're in a situation where you feel your free speech is truly under threat? Perhaps it's time to call a lawyer, not a journalist who is best known for slagging off a teenage climate activist.

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Couple in car runs two Trump-supporting boys off the road – The Post Millennial

Posted: at 1:26 am

It seems counter-intuitive to claim that the re-election of the free-speech champion, the notorious politically incorrect jackhammer, Donald Trump, would pave the way to greater censorship rather than greener pastures.

Let me be clear: Im saying if a Democrat wins in 2020, the first wave of censorship would have proven to be not only an effective political strategy, but it would achieve what Project Veritas has exposed as Silicon Valleys desire to change the way people think. The digital book burners, modern-day tyrants, and behavioral re-educators, could take pause, needing only to tweak the successful model to be re-deployed in future elections, and set on autopilot.

What happens when the king senses his power is fading, and control is slipping from his grasp? Typically, they double-down on the very behavior that makes him the tyrant in the first place. If the past is prologue, then the re-election of Donald Trump will be the breaking point in 2020. The first wave of censorship would be deemed a failure, requiring retaliation and a second wave of expurgation. Unfortunately, what is even more chilling is that the political excommunication will worsen, and Donald Trump will do nothing about it.

According to a recent press pool report, the president applauded the so-called MAGA club. For 144 days, we set a record stock market. It means 401Ks, it means jobs. Four trillion-dollar companies: Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft. You have MAGA. The trillion-dollar club. Perhaps, he may be more concerned with the flattering numbers of financial success rather than the staggering numbers of banned or demonetized patriots: Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, Gavin McInnes, Steven Crowder, Laura Loomer, and the list is literally endless.

Within minutes at the Social Media Summit, intended to highlight big tech censorship and biases, the president began to compliment the stock market and skyrocketing 401(k)s. Great, slow hand clap.Unfortunately, Trumps showmanship on censorship wont repair the harm done to those banned online, many of which depended on their conservative activism for a living, and ultimately assisted the president in his electoral success.

Is it financial success if the next 50+ years are consumed by technological oppression? None of the major players banned were in attendance even though they are widely credited for the presidents election. Why, are they too controversial? Would it detract from the summits purpose? On the contrary, it would have reinforced its objective. But, we as conservatives have allowed the left to designate what is considered fringe within our own party; meanwhile, the radical left runs rampant with no guardrails or moderators, only having drunken cheerleaders on the sidelines.

The left has lost the battle through the judicial system, and they have been unable to materialize hate speech as a legal definition. Consequently, leftist technology companies are embracing the concept of hate speech by creating community guidelines and banishing violators from their platforms.

Recently reported byThe Post Millennial, Censored.TV, founded by Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes, has been banned on Facebook and Instagram and it is literally impossible to send links to his channel through private communication or DMs. The leftist behavioral re-educators not only want to control what you post in public and in private, they seek to control how you think about issues through conditioning and intimidation.

According toStatista, 59 percent of the earths population is plugged into the world wide web, approximately 4.54 billion people. More than ever these social media platforms and applications are an essential component in our social environment and establishing itself as the modern public square. Ignoring the phenomena of digital gulags would hinder controversial, provocative, and inquisitive thinkers from ever reaching an audience, and without radicals, we wouldnt have Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, Jr., or the other Martin Luther.

Out of fear of violating conservative orthodoxy and the idolization of free-market absolutism, we are afraid to take meaningful steps in reigning in the political targeting and digital assassination exhibited by those who control information. YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, is the second largest search engine, and many of the conservative firebrands have been de-platformed and deprived of access to a market that many leftist radicals continue to reach and enjoy.

If the right doesnt take action on censorship in fear of advancing the tentacles of big government, then the Trump phenomenon will fade; meanwhile, the burgeoning tentacles of big tech will strangle conservatism into a slow death, and there are only so many missteps one can make before the fall becomes fatal. Behold America, a new tyranny is amongst us. A citizen-tyranny where fellow Americans report you not to the government, but to a soy-pounding drone tech employee, sifting through content and complaints made for your improper and impure thoughts (posts).

How would the great architects of Western civilization see todays frenzy of censorship? We have inherited the worlds greatest tradition and we are squandering it to pathological political knuckle-draggers. Aristotle famously said, Man is by nature a political animal with the gift of contemplation and the power of morality. It is indisputable that those who have been targeted for censorship are not the hate-mongers theyve been falsely accused of being. The real hatemongers are hiding in plain sight, like David Duke, Richard Spencer and radical Islamic terrorists. Strangely, they all have been graced with the privilege of maintaining Twitter along with other various social media accounts. Perhaps, it serves the lefts purpose to raise certain individuals to prominence while degrading true conservatives into obscurity.

Aristotle would have probably agreed, to deny a man his political voice, is to deny him his humanity.

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EXCLUSIVE: ‘Culture of censorship’ as arts workers fear backlash – ArtsProfessional

Posted: at 1:26 am

A culture of self-censorship and fear of backlash from funders, colleagues and the public is convincing arts and cultural workers to stay silent on important issues, according to new research from ArtsProfessional.

APs Freedom of Expression survey has uncovered pressures on arts workers ability to speak out ranging from the fear of harassment and humiliation to more overt measures like non-disclosure agreements. More than 500 artists and arts workers contributed some 60,000 words on questions about their experiences navigating controversy and coercion.

The research indicates the openness, risk and rebellion that many believe characterises the sector is being eroded. While about 90% of respondents agreed that the arts and cultural sector has a responsibility to use its unique talents to speak out about things that matter, regardless of the potential consequences, more than 80% thought that workers in the arts and cultural sector who share controversial opinions risk being professionally ostracised.

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While much of the sectors censorship is self-imposed, one in six respondents said they had been offered a financial settlement in exchange for their silence on circumstances an organisation wanted to keep private.ArtsProfessional Editor Amanda Parker said the research reveals a deep division between public perception and the reality of working in the arts and cultural sector.

Our survey shines a damning light on the coercion, bullying, intimidation and intolerance that is active among a community that thinks of itself as liberal, open minded and equitable.

We are very aware that this research doesnt reflect all views, but its a sad and timely indication of the suppressed hurt and anger felt by many, despite the loud and growing conversations about collaboration and inclusiveness.

The sector is biting its tongue for fear of biting the hand that feeds, the survey shows.

Nearly 70% of respondents said they would not criticise a funder for fear of jeopardising future investment and 40% said they had been subject to pressure from funders for speaking out.

There was a sense that funders are immune from scrutiny, with respondents citing times they kept quiet about waste and cronyism, among other issues. One described the relationships with funders as being like a parent and child: Its hard to challenge or open up a dialogue with them even if there are genuine concerns.

Criticising a funders decision to award or turn down a grant or their continued support of elitist organisations would be a problem for many. Responses on this issue largely fell into two camps: those who felt the sector was only paying lip service to diversity and those who thought it attracted too much attention but neither group felt able to speak their minds.

Pressure to keep quiet was most likely to come from colleagues, according to two-thirds of respondents. However, the survey also revealed examples of retribution from organisations against arts workers who spoke their minds, from marginalisation and isolation to lost commissions, cancelled contracts and being screamed, shouted at [and] bullied by my ex-boss.

Some workplaces censor their employees online activity while others actively gag them: One in six respondents said they had been offered money if they signed a non-disclosure agreement.

One person said they had been offered money to keep quiet about corrupt practices in arts funding at the EU level; a whistleblower who told top management about mostly male bosses bullying their female subordinates was paid off and invited to leave the organisation. Another respondent accepted a redundancy package when the redundancy wasn't wholly legal; and one person reported a gagging order regarding a colleagues sexual harassment case and a boards illegal processes.

The research indicates the arts and cultural sector is intolerant of viewpoints outside of the dominant norms. Anything that might be considered politically incorrect to the liberal-leaning sector including expressing support or sympathy for Brexit, the Conservatives or other right-wing political parties was felt to be risky territory.

Religion, gender and sexuality were also considered a minefield and no-go areas for many: Anything to do with gender issues, especially trans issues, will get a lot of flak for either not being on message enough, or being off message, or too on message, one person said.

More than three-quarters of respondents said workers who share controversial opinions risk being professionally ostracised. One person commented that people working in the sector are nowhere near as open as they pretend to be, there is a lot of hiding and backstabbing.

Only 40% of respondents agreed that personal views and opinions are met with respect by others working in the arts & cultural sector, and 42% said they feel free to speak publicly whether in person or online about their personal views on issues affecting the arts sector.

One person commented that it wouldnt be advisable to point out that the arts tend to do well under the Tories.

The dangers of this culture of self-censorship was summarised by another respondent:

Our arts, culture, and indeed education sectors are supposed to be fearlessly free-thinking and open to a wide range of challenging views. However, they are now dominated by a monolithic politically correct class (mostly of privileged white middle class people, by the way), who impose their intolerant views across those sectors.

This is driving people who disagree away, risks increasing support for the very things this culturally dominant class professes to stand against, and is slowly destroying our society and culture from the inside.

This culture of censorship is also affecting artistic expression and programming decisions. While four in five respondents agreed that organisations that wont risk controversy wont deliver the most exciting creative work, they also recognised the pressure on organisations. Only a third felt their boards were being unduly cautious about potentially controversial work.

But 45% had been pressurised, intimidated, ostracised, coerced, trolled, harassed or bullied, either in person or on digital media over their artistic and creative activities. Of that group, 44% had changed their product, programming or plans due to this pressure.

Negative public reaction can shut down free speech there is a culture of inviting and then overreacting to complaints when in fact they represent a tiny proportion of views, one person commented and cause artists to self-censor, the survey shows. Artists fear damaging their reputations or those of their organisations.

One person explained it as a matter of picking battles.

I sometimes have to weigh whether what I really need to say requires the element that will turn others away. If it is important to me, I will stick to my plan, but sometimes, it is not the most important thing and I choose to tame my ideas. I have felt like a traitor to my own self-expression, but I have to ask if anyone needs to hear from me at all.

Read theFreedom of Expression report, including over 1,000 comments and personal testimonies relating to freedom of expression in the arts and cultural sector.

Next week AP will launch an anonymous platform where you will be able to:

We won't share your identity anywhere.

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Scotland to become the first country to provide free sanitary products to women – The Post Millennial

Posted: at 1:26 am

Britains National Health Service (NHS) has been a vocal and active advocate for trans affirmative medical care. Their latest foray into making sure male-bodied trans persons feel comfortable is to allow them access to medical care on womens hospital wards. If a female patient has a problem with it, she will be removed.

Women patients who complain about having a biological male in the next bed risk being kicked off the ward under new NHS transgender guidelines. Medical staff will be expected to deal with those who object to trans patients on single-sex wards as if the complainant is a racist or homophobe, the guidance states. Rather than relocate the trans patient, such as to a single room, it will be the person who makes the complaint who will be moved, according to the policy.

Womens groups complained about this change but were rebuffed. In fact, if a woman complains at being roomed with a male-bodied person, hospital staff is instructed to protect the trans person from the woman. The duty of care extends to protect patients from harassment and should the woman continue to make demands about the removal of the transgender patient and be vocal in the ward it would be appropriate to remind her of this Ultimately it may be the complainant who is required to be removed.

The NHS argument uses racism as a means to bolster the argument, claiming that If a white woman complained to a nurse about sharing a ward with a black patient or a heterosexual male complained about being in a ward with a gay man, we would expect our staff to act in a manner that deals with the expressed behaviour immediately. Of course, these are completely different things. Race has no bearing on gender, as both sexes exist within every race on earth. The same goes for sexual orientation, the fact of who a person is attracted to has nothing to do with their anatomy.

Under the guise of medical care, the NHS has encouraged hormone treatment, breast binding, and packing in minors. Before removing via surgery or chemical childrens reproductive capability, they may pay for the freezing of eggs and sperm, so that after the children undergo sterilization they will have access post-transition. At least one mother was threatened with the removal of her child by child services after she balked when NHS referred her 14-year-old daughter for gender reassignment hormones.

Grade school children are asked if they are comfortable in their own gender, while the NHS refers to children as young as 4 to gender reassignment doctors for assessment. There was even an NHS doctor who was fired for stating that gender is not assigned at birth, but is an innate condition. Women have pushed back against both the placing of male-bodied trans persons into womens prisons and refuges. One woman was appalled to receive care from a trans nurse when a female nurse was requested.

Over and over, womens spaces are being opened to male-bodied trans persons, children are being encouraged to assess their own bodies for correctness, young people are given life-altering drugs and surgeries before their brains are finished forming, and women are told to put up or shut up. Its bad enough to house men in womens prisons, or in battered womens shelters, both of which see women at their most vulnerable. But allowing men into womens hospital wards seems barbaric and cruel.

Anyone with a brain can agree that, despite gendery feelings, the difference between those with male bodies and those with female bodies are their bodies. Every time I write this it seems more and more absurd to say that men and women have different bodies or to try and justify just how bodies are relevant to medical care. But men and women have different bodies, the differences in those bodies are even more apparent when both take off their dresses and stand naked before medical professionals. The kind of medical care that men and women receive is different precisely because their bodies are different.

Rape victims should not arrive for hospital care only to be roomed with a male-bodied person. Male bodied persons need different care for their reproductive systems because they have different reproductive systems. Its frankly insane that we have to keep saying this. Male bodied persons do not need gynecologists, no matter how much silicone theyve been fitted with.

Gynecological patients should not have to undergo vaginal exams with a male-bodied person in the bed next to them, or be fitted with a catheter, or worry about their hospital gowns slipping, or showing too much skin when they carry themselves to the bathroom or fear intimate conversations about their anatomy being overheard.

This continued push against women having private spaces has so much to with mens needs being put first. In medical circles, it has come to light that the understood symptoms for heart attack were male-centric, and that there have been biases against womens pain. Women are less likely to be given CPR, to be properly treated for dementia, and often have their concerns overlooked. Now, even in womens hospital wards, women will have a harder time getting noticed, having their concerns heard, or even finding privacy.

Trans advocacy that puts men in womens spaces reflects the demand that women submit to mens wishes, desires, and delusions. The NHS should recognize this as the gaslighting it is, and give women back their medical autonomy. Medical services should be more aware of womens needs, not less. When women speak up for themselves, they should be heard, not silenced, shuttled off to some locale where they will get even worse medical care than that which they already access.

Most women who are housed with males on a womens hospital ward will not speak up, they will instead suck it up, for fear that their lives will be put at even more risk. Its up to the NHS, legislators, and womens groups to stand for womens rights, and not throw them under the proverbial gurney.

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How to Structure a PPC Campaign in the Age of Automation – Search Engine Journal

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Over the years, much has been written about how to structure a PPC campaign for maximum performance.

When I was recently asked to lead a panel on the topic, I covered some of the classic structures like single keyword ad groups, single product ad groups, etc.

But now that automation in PPC is much more prevalent, what are some new considerations for the perfect structure?

Maintaining a consistent structure has always been important to:

But where humans can usually figure out where to find things in an inconsistent structure, the machines may have a much harder time.

Heres an example.

One of our clients was using a combination of a few automations:

One day, they noticed their budgets had been exceeded for Nissan vehicles.

After investigating, we found that the feed with inventory was sometimes putting the word Nissan in all caps and sometimes not.

As a result, the automation that created the campaigns had started creating two Nissan campaigns as you can see in the image below.

Automation can be broken when there are inconsistencies in account structure, like in this example where words are sometimes capitalized in different ways.

The automation that checks budgets had been set up to expect the brand to be proper cased: Nissan and so the campaign with upper casing NISSAN was causing extra budget to be spent.

Fixing this wasnt rocket science but the issue could have been prevented if naming conventions had been more consistent.

When things are automated, the risk is that humans pay less attention and dont catch simple mistakes like this before they cause an issue.

In other words, the problem is more likely to be discovered after it has caused overspend.

Whereas, in the past when campaigns were manually built, this issue would probably have been noticed by a person while they were creating the campaign by hand.

Taking a small detour from account structure, the previous example highlights another interesting aspect of modern PPC.

Multiple automations are necessary to get the best results.

While I described the three automations that worked hand in hand to turn product data into a budget controlled set of campaigns, I didnt cover the fourth automation, the one that flagged the issue.

This automation monitors anomalies in costs. When a secondary campaign for Nissan vehicles was created with its own budget, costs rose dramatically from one day to the next.

This can be flagged automatically by an alert or script so that the human account manager can investigate what may be amiss.

As we deploy more automations that manage our PPC, its important to also have more automations that monitor what is happening and keep us abreast of the status.

This concept of automation layering is also evident in the following example of an automation that Google doesnt allow advertisers to turn off: close variants.

As we all know, close variants mean that exact match keywords may now trigger ads for queries that are different from the keyword, so long as Googles machine learning brain deems them to mean more or less the same thing.

While this can be helpful to discover new traffic and build more volume, its dangerous to run an account on autopilot in a world of close variants.

We either need to spend our time manually reviewing and vetting close variants or we should deploy automations that ensure they dont drag down our performance.

Human management of close variant queries basically just means more time doing query management. One of my previous scripts can help you more quickly see the performance of the keyword and its related close variants side by side.

Staying on top of close variants in an automated fashion can take one of many forms.

For instance, we can rely on Smart Bidding to ensure that if there is a lower-performing close variant, it will automatically get a lower bid so we still meet our target CPA or ROAS.

As an example, if the more commercially oriented keyword floral arrangement all of a sudden starts to trigger ads for the close variant arranging flowers which is less commercial in nature (and may be used by someone looking to learn how to arrange flowers), then Smart Bidding would set a lower bid.

Some of the close variants may have a similar meaning but have a different level of commerciality, requiring different bids to perform at the needed level.

In another form of automation layering with close variants, we could:

Getting back to account structure, there is a misconception that warrants addressing.

Advertisers sometimes change their account structure in the hopes of getting better performance after enabling automated bidding.

The idea is that Googles machine learning will learn faster if the account structure is made less complex (i.e., keywords are combined into fewer ad groups and fewer campaigns).

It turns out that this restructuring is entirely unnecessary.

The simple explanation is that Googles machine learning learns from every single query.

It uses the many signals (like time of day, device, user signals, etc.) to help it predict the likelihood that a particular query will lead to a specific conversion.

As you can probably guess, its the way youve set up conversions that matters much more.

It shouldnt be surprising to advertisers that Google even uses data from campaigns where you dont have automated bidding enabled to help its system learn.

Thats why its possible to turn Smart Bidding on and instantly get decent results because the machine has already learned what to expect from historical performance.

Theres nothing inherent in changing the account structure that helps the machine learn so if you see better performance after simplifying account structure, consider it may actually be due to another reason, such as:

On the point of seeing better results because your data is less granular, this points to a common human error in analyzing data.

When you have one ad group that used to get three conversions in a month and then goes to two conversions the next month, thats a big jump that will cause a big shift in the CPA.

But if you blend those numbers into all the data of the account where you have hundreds of conversions, that small change of 1 conversion in one ad group wont show up as quite such a significant change.

Google knows that advertisers sometimes assign too much weight to these small absolute changes that are actually small relative changes to the broader account.

But smart advertisers shouldnt need to put on blinders and create a simpler structure when all it takes to see the real results is to

So if you dont have to restructure things to make automated bidding work better, then what is the right structure?

Just as its always been, this depends on your business.

For example, your budgets may dictate that you have to run different campaigns for different business lines. Or your profitability goals may require you to have several campaigns, each with a different target ROAS.

If you need a refresher on the right tROAS to hit break-even on a Google Ads campaign, heres a graphic that shows how to calculate it.

So if you sell many products or have multiple services with different levels of profitability, youll need multiple campaigns, each with their own targets.

Even if you run Smart Shopping campaigns, Googles fully automated shopping ads, it still makes sense to have a few campaigns with different targets.

I see many accounts where advertisers split campaigns by match type, device, region, etc.

These strategies all have their merits and the key point is that if its worked for you so far, you dont need to change it just because you want to start automating bids with Smart Bidding.

And this leads us into a final point related to structure.

If were going to have different campaigns for different target CPA or ROAS, why is it that Google says we shouldnt change the target more than 20% at a time?

If the point of our structure is to support business goals, and if our business goal all of a sudden requires a drastically different target, perhaps due to a big sale, why shouldnt we set the values we need.

To me, this didnt make sense for a long time because Googles machine learning works to predict conversion rates or conversion values for each click.

Why would changing the tCPA all of a sudden interfere with that?

The answer is that it doesnt.

However, what does happen is that a new target changes the CPCs that go into the auction.

And when an advertiser starts to bid more, they become eligible to show ads for queries that they may not have shown up for before.

The query mix changes!

And changes in query mix can be really difficult to analyze.

The specific problem in the case of a different query mix as a result of a big change in tCPA or tROAS is that new queries may perform very differently from the ones youve always appeared for.

This can change the overall result of the campaign and cause advertisers to perceive the system as being broken.

Its not actually broken, because if you analyze the queries you already appeared on before, those will most likely still be performing consistently.

Its the new queries that have shifted the averages and make it seem like the systems performance is different.

Aggressive query management through automation layering as described before can provide the answer in this case.

You can set the new target CPA your business really needs while using automated query management to keep the query mix relatively close to what it was before.

Advertisers need to be aware of some of the pitfalls of automation so that they dont make decisions based on incomplete information.

Automation has caused account managers to be more likely to see mistakes in consistent structures after something has gone wrong rather than at the time the structure was created and before it caused an issue.

This can be fixed with better alerting, monitoring and auditing.

Automation doesnt require simpler account structures. We still need to run the structures that make sense for our business.

If anything, we should devote more time to measuring conversions correctly rather than wrangling account structures into some weird shape we think will help the machines.

And finally, as we need to do more work to keep automation from the engines in check, we should consider how scripts, tools, and other automations that we control can help us offload some of that manual work so we can remain most active in what we do best being strategic.

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Global Industrial Wireless Automation Market 2020-2024 | Evolving Opportunities with ABB Ltd. and Cisco Systems Inc. | Technavio – Yahoo Finance

Posted: at 1:23 am

The global industrial wireless automation market is poised to grow by USD 2.03 billion during 2020-2024, progressing at a CAGR of over 7% during the forecast period. Request free sample pages

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200226005353/en/

Technavio has announced its latest market research report titled Global Industrial Wireless Automation Market2020-2024 (Graphic: Business Wire)

Read the 120-page report with TOC on "Industrial Wireless Automation Market Analysis Report by Solution (Field instrument and Communication network), End-user (Process industry and Discrete industry), Geographic segmentation (North America, APAC, Europe, South America, and MEA), and the Segment Forecasts, 2020-2024".

https://www.technavio.com/report/industrial-wireless-automation-market-industry-analysis

The market is driven by the growing adoption of high-speed communication network solutions for fast data transfer in the industrial sector. In addition, the increasing focus on predictive maintenance is anticipated to boost the growth of the industrial wireless automation market.

The evolution phase of communication protocols has led to an increase in bandwidth and advancements in related devices such as connectors and cables. Some of the major wireless communication network solutions used to transfer data include wireless highway addressable remote transducer (HART) protocol, ISA100.11a, WLAN, RFID, and Bluetooth. These wireless solutions are gaining prominence because they offer varied advantages. For instance, an industrial wireless automation solution such as Wireless HART not only supports energy management, process monitoring, regulatory compliance, and environmental monitoring but also ensures data protection. Thus, the growing adoption of high-speed communication network solutions for fast data transfer in the industrial sector is expected to drive market growth during the forecast period.

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Major Five Industrial Wireless Automation Market Companies:

ABB Ltd.

ABB Ltd. is headquartered in Ireland and operates the business under various segments such as Electrification Products, Robotics and Motion, and Industrial Automation. The company offers Industrial wireless automation solutions.

Cisco Systems Inc.

Cisco Systems Inc. offers products through the following business units: Product and Service. The company offers Cisco Connected Factory Wireless, which enables plantwide communications between machines, databases, and people on the plant floor.

Emerson Electric Co.

Emerson Electric Co. operates under various business segments, namely Automation Solutions, Climate Technologies, and Tools & Home Products. The company offers Wireless Network, Wireless Analytics, Wireless Power, and Others.

General Electric Co.

General Electric Co. offers products through the following business segments: Power, Renewable Energy, Aviation, Oil & Gas, Healthcare, and Others. The company offers industrial wireless automation solutions that include wireless radios for unlicensed and licensed narrowband communication, industrial 2G, 3G, and 4G LTE cellular routers and gateways.

Honeywell International Inc.

Honeywell International Inc. offers products through the following business segments: Aerospace, Honeywell Building Technologies, Performance Materials and Technologies, and Safety and Productivity Solutions. The company offers industrial wireless automation solutions called OneWireless Solutions.

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Industrial Wireless Automation Market Solution Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2020-2024)

Field instrument

Communication network

Industrial Wireless Automation Market End-user Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2020-2024)

Process industry

Discrete industry

Industrial Wireless Automation Market Geographic Outlook (Revenue, USD Billion, 2020-2024)

North America

APAC

Europe

South America

MEA

Technavios sample reports are free of charge and contain multiple sections of the report, such as the market size and forecast, drivers, challenges, trends, and more. Request a free sample report

Related Reports on Industrials Include:

Distribution Automation Solutions Market Global Distribution Automation Solutions Market by solution (field devices, communication systems, and software and services), deployment (system-level and customer-level), and geography (APAC, Europe, MEA, North America, and South America).

Industrial Automation Services Market Global Industrial Automation Services Market by geography (APAC, Europe, MEA, North America, and South America), service (PE, M&S, OS, and consulting), and end-users (process industries and discrete industries).

About Technavio

Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focus on emerging market trends and provides actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions.

With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavios report library consists of more than 17,000 reports and counting, covering 800 technologies, spanning across 50 countries. Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavios comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios.

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Global Industrial Wireless Automation Market 2020-2024 | Evolving Opportunities with ABB Ltd. and Cisco Systems Inc. | Technavio - Yahoo Finance

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How To Choose Automation That’s Best For Your Business – Forbes

Posted: at 1:23 am

Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation are terms that are frequently and incorrectly used interchangeably. Automation is a system of operating or controlling a process to accomplish tasks with little or no need for human intervention. AI is a horizontal technology that learns and mimics human intelligence over time by analyzing patterns in data. Sometimes the rules that drive automation are preprogrammed, and other times those rules are deduced by AI.

This muddying of the waters can have the negative effect of deterring many small and medium businesses from implementing automation (the importance of which I discussed in my previous article) because they believe their operations arent quite ready for this level of technology. They may be right, but only partially. While they may not be ready for AI, there are few businesses that would not benefit from some type of automation.

In my experience, the two most common types of automation found in enterprise IT environments are robotic process automation (RPA) and workload automation (WLA). RPA is software programmed to do basic tasks that mimic human users across applications. It is installed on the desktop and is operated directly by business users. WLA is software used to design, schedule, monitor and manage scripts and executables across the enterprise. It is installed on a companys servers and largely operated by IT users.

They are complementary solutions with distinctly different use cases, which means that depending on the need, many organizations might benefit from both. At their core, RPA and WLA enable businesses to focus on highest-value work, so if you are considering automation as part of your organizations digital transformation, there are several important factors to consider.

Identify exactly what headaches automation will solve for you.

Is your organization inundated with a large quantity of data that is time-intensive to organize and input? Is it eating up man-hours that could be better allocated elsewhere? If you answered yes, and there is no way to get this data programmatically, then RPA might be the appropriate remedy to your data-deluge-induced headache because data entry is what it does best. In addition to mimicking user inputs into the application user interface, RPA can also automatically download files from websites and autoformat documents.

Perhaps your organizations needs are slightly more complicated, and in addition to being inundated by data that requires filing, there are dozens, or maybe even hundreds, of processes that must be accomplished each day, often simultaneously, in order to simply function. Examples of such tasks include data processing, file transfers, service level agreement (SLA) monitoring, complex reporting, business day closing/opening process and many more. If your needs fall somewhere in this realm, WLA may be the ideal choice, potentially in addition to RPA.

Evaluate the risks.

Every process in place resists change and makes further adaptations challenging. But not all resist changes equally. Consider:

1. Manual processes resist change because people dont like to change. And the actual process being followed can be difficult to even know because the knowledge is spread among many individuals, often with no one person knowing the whole process. However, small changes tend to be adapted to easily.

2. RPA can automate the repetitive tasks of some of those people. But the specifics of what is being done continue to be hidden from the owner of the whole process. And worse than in the manual case, the RPA may fail when a small change is introduced to a website or screen that the RPA interacts with (e.g., the addition of a confirmation pop-up). Conversely, people can often easily adapt to these types of changes and recognize what needs to be done differently to keep the process working.

3. WLA resists change simply because it takes time and energy to redo steps of automation. However, in the case of WLA, the automation itself is self-documented such that you have a complete road map of your process. This makes adapting to change understandable and the timeline for doing so predictable much more so than processes run by people or robots.

I believe this distinction in risks makes WLA the compelling choice whenever possible, with RPA used for those steps that simply resist programmatic automation. When done this way, the WLA process documentation helps keep track of the RPA in use and minimizes the risk of using RPA.

Consider your budget.

Because installation and implementation are quick and easy, RPA is typically the least expensive upfront, especially if your needs are simple and you have a limited number of users. However, you will find that as your workforce and needs grow, so can the cost of RPA this in addition to the risks discussed above.

Conversely, WLA typically has a higher upfront cost due to the amount of work required to install and implement it. However, depending on the use case, WLA can end up being the least expensive option in the long run, due to its ease of scale and maintainability as your business evolves.

At the end of the day, its important to remember that automation isnt synonymous with artificial intelligence. Just because your business may not be ready for AI (and all of the expenses and intricacies that come with it), doesnt mean it isnt ready for RPA, WLA or maybe even both.

Each step you take toward automation preps more of your business to benefit from AI in the future. And by taking a proactive approach to automation, not only do you move your business forward; you can help keep it from sliding further into the traps of unknown and hidden processes.

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How To Choose Automation That's Best For Your Business - Forbes

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6 tips to avoid automation disaster – CIO

Posted: at 1:23 am

In 2015, senior software engineer Benjamin Willenbring was excited when his employer, Autodesk, introduced automated software testing. That excitement didn't last long. The small automation team didn't communicate much with his division. And when the tests reached production, they weren't what anyone hoped for.

"My teammates were talking about tests failing non-deterministically, and not really having a lot of confidence in the test," Willenbring says. He found that "to get to actually run the test was very, very difficult. It wasn't documented. You had to talk to someone. And there were an enormous amount of files and I didn't really understand why."

Automation was supposed to make Willenbring's work easier. Instead, the problems it created came to dominate much of his energy for the next several years.

Willenbrings experience isnt uncommon. And with automation rapidly spreading through IT, cautionary tales provide valuable lessons.

From the automated workflows of DevOps to robotic process automation (RPA), automated processes aim to reduce scut work and free skilled employees for higher-level tasks. But flawed premises or botched rollouts can turn the dream of automation into a nightmare. We spoke to several IT pros about automation horror stories they've heard about or endured, and distilled out six commandments to help your automation initiatives avoid such fates.

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6 tips to avoid automation disaster - CIO

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As Factories Struggle With How To Automate, Ready Robotics, Spun Out Of Johns Hopkins, Raises $23 Million For Robotic O/S – Forbes

Posted: at 1:23 am

Ready Robotics cofounders Kel Guerin (left) and Ben Gibbs

Ben Gibbs was working in Johns Hopkins Universitys office for licensing and commercialization of intellectual property when he teamed up with Ph.D. robotics researcher Kel Guerin on the technology that became Ready Robotics in 2016. Their idea: Software that could power industrial robots, with an easy-to-use dashboard, enabling even small- and mid-size manufacturers to get the productivity benefit of robotic arms.

Today, the Columbus, Ohio-based company said that it had raised $23 million, led by Canaan, to expand its robotic O/S. The startup counts major manufacturers like Stanley Black & Decker and Smith+Nephew as customers, as well as smaller shops that would not otherwise be able to automate. The new funding brings Ready Robotics total investment to $42 million at a valuation that Forbes estimates at $70 million, up from $32.5 million after its last round, according to venture-capital database PitchBook.

Factories are hungry for robotic automation, but there are only 32,000 robotics engineers employed in U.S. manufacturing today and there are not enough systems integrators, Gibbs, the companys 37-year-old CEO, told Forbes. Where we are at with robotic automation today is like making you write 10,000 lines of code before you can write an article in Word. These bottlenecks are a major problem for factories that are desperate to enable automation to remain competitive.

Readys operating system, called Forge O/S, allows workers without any robotics background or coding experience to easily program the robots their plant uses. Forge O/S can plug and play with the variety of robot manufacturers. That allows plants that have a mix of, say, Kuka and Universal Robots, for different jobs to operate them through one dashboard. Forge O/S is the first operating system that allows you to operate any robot from any brand, and it does that by fixing all the complex back-end work, says Guerin, 35. The system starts at a price around $10,000 a year, and goes up from there depending on complexity and the number of robots and factories integrated.

The entire market for robots as a service, including affiliated software, is less than $1 billion out of a total robotics market around $50 billion, according to ABI Research analyst Rian Whitton. But by 2030, he figures, it could grow to more than 30% of a $521 billion market. Its quite a nascent space, he says. The hardware manufacturers like Kuka and Fanuc have their own control platforms so they dont have interoperability. What Ready Robotics is trying to do is create a common platform so it doesnt matter what robots you are using, and anyone can use the platform not just an engineer from CalTech.

The idea for Ready Robotics grew out of Guerins Ph.D. research. I was preoccupied with the idea of usability, he says. Before he finished school, he approached Johns Hopkins tech transfer office, where he met Gibbs. The two decided to team up to create their own company. I was itching to get back out into the startup world, says Gibbs, who had previously founded a company that licensed technology developed by the U.S. Navy. As is common in university spinouts, Johns Hopkins owns a small stake in the business.

Gibbs and Guerin moved operations from Baltimore to Ohio after an investment by Drive Capital, a venture firm based in Columbus thats managed by former partners of Sequoia Capital, in 2018. Sixty percent of the factories in the United States are located in the Midwest, and they buy the vast majority of the robot arms, Gibbs says.

Later that year, Ready began speaking with tools giant Stanley Black & Decker, which has built a team to scour for high-tech startups and innovations to improve operations at its 122 factories worldwide. Sudhi Bangalore, Stanley Black & Deckers vice president of Industry 4.0, says that when he began looking at ways to scale cobots, or collaborative robots, he discovered that Ready Robotics was already doing a small project with one of the companys Oregon factories. We fast-tracked the paperwork to see how they could engage with us on a few sites, Bangalore says.

In mid-December, Bangalore gave Ready the okay to launch in its Ohio factory, which makes fastening systems, telling the startup it hoped to do so in a tight timetable of four weeks, including the Christmas holidays. I was quite skeptical about how they would pull everything together, Bangalore says. Thats where they proved me wrong. When the launch proved more difficult than expected due to the plants aging infrastructure, he says, Kel came over and started designing things.

Since then, Bangalore says, Stanley Black & Decker has expanded its partnership with Ready Robotics to other factories, including a power-tools plant in Greenfield, Indiana, and is considering rolling out further among its 60-or-so U.S. factories. But big companies like Stanley test products all the time, and as the emerging robots-as-a-service field heats up, a key question for that expansion will be whether Ready can scale up at a lower cost. We pay a premium for this interface they are building, Bangalore says. It looks like the industry is catching on. So how can they evolve their value proposition?

Gibbs and Guerin believe that the emergence of inexpensive robotics and the software with which to operate them would enable automation in factories where it previously had been too costly. A McKinsey studyfound that 88% of manufacturers and other companies in heavy industry have either increased their spending on robotic automation or plan to do so. Yet getting benefit out of spending on automation has not been easy: The same McKinsey study found that only 4% of those manufacturers showed significant bottom-line improvements.

There have been all these investments in computer vision and machine learning, yet you are not seeing it live up to the hype in the industrial setting out of a few use cases, says Canaans Rayfe Gaspar-Asaoka, who led the investment in Ready. What we learned is that the software programmability of the robots is just broken.

For Canaan, the deal follows an earlier investment in retail robotics firm Berkshire Grey, which raised a whopping $263 million from investors that include SoftBank and Khosla Ventures in January.

Other investors in the Ready Robotics deal include RRE Ventures, Eniac Ventures and Drive Capital.

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As Factories Struggle With How To Automate, Ready Robotics, Spun Out Of Johns Hopkins, Raises $23 Million For Robotic O/S - Forbes

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