Monthly Archives: April 2021

Conversations around AI and ethics may have started as a preoccupation of activists and academics, but now prompted by the increasing frequency of headlines of biased algorithms, black box models, and privacy violations boards, C-suites, and data and AI leaders have realized its an issue for which they need a strategic approach.

A solution is hiding in plain sight. Other industries have already found ways to deal with complex ethical quandaries quickly, effectively, and in a way that can be easily replicated. Instead of trying to reinvent this process, companies need to adopt and customize one of health cares greatest inventions: the Institutional Review Board, or IRB.

Most discussions of AI ethics follow the same flawed formula,consisting of three moves, each of which is problematic from the perspective of an organization that wants to mitigate the ethical risks associated with AI.

Heres how these conversations tend to go.

First, companies move to identify AI ethics with fairness in AI, or sometimes more generally, fairness, equity, and inclusion. This certainly resonates with the zeitgeist the rise of BLM, the anti-racist movement, and corporate support for diversity and inclusion measures.

Second, they move from the language of fairness to the language of bias: biased algorithms, as popular media puts it, or biased models as engineers (more accurately) call it. The examples of (allegedly) biased models are well-know, including those from Amazon, Optum Health, and Goldman Sachs.

Finally, they look for ways to address the problem as theyve defined it. They discuss technical tools (whether open source, or sold by Big Tech or a startup) for bias identification, which standardly compare a models outputs against dozens of quantitative metrics or definitions of fairness found in the burgeoning academic research area of machine learning (ML) ethics. They may also consider engaging stakeholders, especially those that comprise historically marginalized populations.

While some recent AI ethics discussions go beyond this, many of the most prominent dont. And the most common set of actions that practitioners actually undertake flows from these three moves: Most companies adopt a risk-mitigation strategy that utilizes one of the aforementioned technical tools, if theyre doing anything at all.

All of this should keep the stewards of brand reputation up at night, because this process has barely scratched the surface of the ethical risks that AI introduces. To understand why this is, lets take each of these moves in turn.

The first move sends you off in the wrong direction, because it immediately narrows the scope. Defining AI ethics as fairness in AI is problematic for the simple reason that fairness issues are just a subset of ethical issues youve just decided to ignore giant swaths of ethical risk. Most obviously there are issues relating to privacy violations (given that most of current AI is ML, which is often powered by peoples data), and unexplainable outputs/black-box algorithms. But there are more. For example, the primary ethical risk related to AI-powered self-driving cars isnt bias or privacy, but killing and maiming. The ethical risk of facial recognition technology doesnt end when bias has been weeded out from the model (of which there are a number of examples); a non-biased facial recognition software still enables surveillance by corporations and (fascist) governments. AI also requires vast amounts of energy to power the computers that are training the algorithms, which entails a shocking degree of damage to the environment. The list of ways a company can meet with ethical disaster is endless, and so reducing AI ethics to issues involving fairness is a recipe for disaster.

The second move further reduces your remit: Issues of bias are a subset of issues of fairness. More specifically, issues of bias in the context of AI are issues of how different subpopulations are treated relative to others whether goods, services, and opportunities are distributed fairly and justly. Are the job ads placed in such a way that they are just as likely to be seen by the African-American population as by the white population? Are women applying for a job just as likely to have their resumes lead to an interview as a mans resume? The problem with this approach is that issues of fairness extend beyond issues of fair distributions of goods to various subpopulations.

Most obviously, there are issues about what any individual deserves independently of how others are treated. If Im torturing you, and you protest, it would hardly justify my actions to say, Dont worry, Im torturing other subpopulations at equal rates to the population of which youre a member. The entire category of human rights is about what every person deserves, independently of how others are being treated. Fairness crucially involves issues of individual desert, and a discussion, let alone a risk-mitigation strategy, that leaves this out is the more perilous for it.

The final trouble for organizations arrives in the third move identifying and adopting bias-mitigation strategies and technical tools. Organizations often lean on technical tools, in particular, as their go-to (or only) meaningful instrument to ferret out bias, as measured by quantitative definitions of fairness found in recent computer science literature. Here, we run into a raft of failures at ethical risk mitigation.

First, those two-dozen-plus quantitative metrics for fairness are not compatible with each other. You simply cannot be fair according to all of them at the same time. That means that an ethical judgment needs to be made: Which, if any, of these quantitative metrics of fairness are the ethical/appropriate ones to use? Instead of bringing in lawyers, political theorists, or ethicists all of whom have training in these kinds of complex ethical questions these decisions are left to data scientists and engineers. But if the experts arent in the room, you cannot expect your due diligence to have been responsibly discharged.

Second, these tools standardly only kick in well into the development lifecycle. Because they measure the output of AI models, theyre used after data sets have been chosen and models have been trained and a good deal of resources have been devoted to the product. It is then inefficient, not to mention unpopular, to go back to the drawing board if a bias problem is detected that cannot be solved in a fairly straightforward way.

Third, while the search for a technical, quantitative solution to AI ethics is understandable, the truth is that many ethical issues are not reducible to quantitative metrics or KPIs. Surveillance is a problem because it destroys trust, causes anxiety, alters peoples behavior, and ultimately erodes autonomy. Questions about whether people are being treated respectfully, whether a product design is manipulative or merely giving reasonable incentives, whether a decision places a burden on people that is too great to reasonably expect of them, these all require qualitative assessments.

Fourth, these technical tools do not cover all types of bias. They do not, for instance, ferret out whether your search engine has labeled Black people gorillas. These are cases of bias for which no technical tool exists.

Fifth, the way these tools measure for bias are often not compatible with existing anti-discrimination law. For example, anti-discrimination law forbids companies from using variables like race and gender in their decision-making process. But what if that needs to be done in order to test their models for bias and thus influences the changes they make to the model in an effort to mitigate bias? That looks to be not only ethically permissible, but plausibly ethically required as well.

Finally, as regards engaging stakeholders, that is generally a good thing to do. However, aside from the logistical issues to which it gives rise, it does not by itself mitigate any ethical risks; it leaves them right in place, unless one knows how to think through stakeholder feedback. For instance, suppose your stakeholders are racist. Suppose the norms that are local to where you will deploy your AI encourage gender discrimination. Suppose your stakeholders disagree with each other because, in part, they have conflicting interests; stakeholders are not a monolithic group with a single perspective, after all. Stakeholder input is valuable, but you cannot programmatically derive an ethical decision from stakeholder input.

My point here isnt that technical tools and stakeholder outreach should not be avoided; they are indeed quite useful. But we need more comprehensive ways to deal with ethical risk. Ideally, this will involve building a comprehensive AI ethical risk-mitigation program that is implemented throughout an organization admittedly a heavy lift. If a company is looking for something to do in relatively short order that can have a big impact (and will later dovetail well with the bigger risk-mitigation program), they should take their cues on ethical risk mitigation from health care and create an IRB.

In the United States, IRBs in medicine were introduced to mitigate the ethical risks that arose and were commonly realized in research on human subjects. Some of that unethical conduct was particularly horrific, including the Tuskegee experiments, in which doctors refrained from treating Black men with syphilis, despite penicillin being available, so they could study the diseases unmitigated progression. More generally, the goals of an IRB include upholding the core ethical principles of respect for persons, beneficence, and justice. IRBs carry out their function by approving, denying, and suggesting changes to proposed research projects.

Comparing the kinds of ethical risks present in medicine to the kinds present in AI is useful for a number of reasons. First, in both instances there is the potential for harming individuals and groups of people (e.g. members of a particular race or gender). Second, there exists a vast array of ethical risks that can be realized in both fields, ranging from physical harm and mental distress to discriminating against protected classes, invading peoples privacy, and undermining peoples autonomy. Third, many of the ethical risks in both instances arise from the particular applications of the technology at hand.

Applied to AI, the IRB can have the capacity to systematically and exhaustively identify ethical risks across the board. Just as in medical research, an AI IRB can not only play the role of approving and rejecting various proposals, but should also make ethical risk-mitigation recommendations to researchers and product developers. Moreover, a well-constituted IRB more on this in a moment can perform the functions that the current approach cannot.

When it comes to building and maintaining an IRB, three issues loom large: membership of the board, jurisdiction, and articulating the values it will strive to achieve (or at least the nightmares it strives to avoid).

To systematically and exhaustively identify and mitigate AI ethical risks, an AI IRB requires a diverse team of experts. You will want to place an engineer that understands the technical underpinnings of the research and/or product so the committee can understand what is being done and what can be done from a technical perspective. Similarly, someone deeply familiar with product design is important. They speak the language of the product developers, understand customer journeys, and can help shape ethical risk-mitigation strategies in a way that doesnt undermine the essential functions of the products under consideration.

Youll also want to include ethics-adjacent members, like attorneys and privacy officers. Their knowledge of current and potential regulations, anti-discrimination law, and privacy practices are important places to look when vetting for ethical risks.

Insofar as the AI IRB has as its function the identification and mitigation of ethical risks, it would be wise of you to include an ethicist, e.g. someone with a Ph.D. in philosophy who specializes in ethics, or, say, someone with a masters degree in medical ethics. The ethicist isnt there to act as kind of priest with superior ethical views. Theyre there because they have training, knowledge, and experience related to understanding and spotting a vast array of ethical risks, familiarity with important concepts and distinctions that aid in clear-eyed ethical deliberation, and the skill of helping groups of people objectively assess ethical issues. Importantly, this kind of risk assessment is distinct from the risks one finds in the model risk assessments created by data scientists and engineers, which tend to focus on issues relating to accuracy and data quality.

You may also find it useful to include various subject-matter experts depending on the research or product at hand. If the product is to be deployed in universities, someone deeply familiar with their operations, goals, and constituencies should be included. If it is a product to be deployed in Japan, including an expert in Japanese culture may be important.

Lastly, as part of an effort to maintain independence and the absence of conflict of interests (e.g. members looking for approval from their bosses), having at least one member unaffiliated with your organization is important (and is, incidentally, required for medical IRBs). At the same time, all members should have a sense of the business goals and necessities.

When should an AI IRB be consulted, how much power should it have, and where should it be situated in product development? In the medical community, IRBs are consulted prior to the start of research. The reason there is obvious: The IRB is consulted when testing on human subjects will be performed, and one needs approval before that testing begins. When it comes to authority, medical IRBs are the ultimate authority. They can approve and reject proposals, as well as suggest changes to the proposal, and their decisions are final. Once an IRB has denied a proposal, another IRB cannot approve it, and the decision cant be appealed.

The same rule should apply for an AI IRB.

Even though the harm typically occurs during deployment of the AI, not research and product development, theres a strong case for having an AI IRB before research and/or product development begins. The primary reason for this is that its much easier and therefore more inexpensive and efficient to change projects and products that do not yet exist. If, for instance, you only realize a significant ethical risk from a potential or probable unintended consequence of how the product was designed, you will either have to go to market with a product you know to be ethically risky or you will have to go through the costly process of reengineering the product.

While medical IRBs are granted their authority by the law, there is at least one strong reason you should consider voluntarily granting that degree of power to an AI IRB: It is a tool by which great trust can be built with employees, clients, and consumers. That is particularly true if your organization is transparent about the operations even if not the exact decisions of the IRB. If being an ethically sound company is at the top of the pyramid of your companys values, then granting an AI IRB the independence and power to veto proposals without the possibility of an appeal (to a member of your executive team, for instance) is a good idea.

Of course, that is often (sadly) not the case. Most companies will see the AI IRB as a tool of risk mitigation, not elimination, and one should admit at least the possibility if not the probability of cases in which a company can pursue a project that is ethically risky while also highly profitable. For companies with that kind of ethical risk appetite, either an appeals process will have to be created or, if they are only minorly concerned with ethical risk mitigation, they may make the pronouncements of the board advisory instead of required. At that point, though, they should not expect the board to be particularly effective at systematically mitigating ethical risks.

Youve assembled your AI IRB and defined its jurisdiction. Now youll need to articulate the values by which it should be guided. The standard way of doing this is to articulate a set of principles and then seek to apply those principles to the case at hand. This is notoriously difficult, given the vast array of ways in which principles can be interpreted and applied; just think about the various and incompatible ways sincere politicians interpret and apply the principle of fairness.

In medical ethics and in the law, for that matter decision-making is usually not guided by principles alone. Instead, they rely on case studies and precedent, comparing any given case under investigation to previous cases that are similar. This allows your IRB to leverage the insights brought to bear on the previous case to the present case. It also increases the probability of consistency in the application of principles across cases.

Progress can be made here by articulating previous decisions senior leadership made on ethical grounds prior to the existence of the IRB. Suppose, for instance, the IRB knows senior leaders rejected a contract with a certain government due to particular ethical concerns about how the government operates generally or how they anticipated that government would use their product. The reasoning that led to the decision can reveal how future cases ought to be decided. In the event that no such cases exist and/or no such cases have been disclosed, it can be useful to entertain fictional examples, preferably ones that are not unlikely to become real examples in the future, and for the IRB to deliberate and decide on those cases. Doing that will ensure readiness for the real case when it arrives on their doorstep. It also encourages the cool objectivity with which fictional cases can be considered when no money is on the line, for instance to transfer to the real cases to which theyll be compared.

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We all know that adopting an AI strategy is becoming a necessity to stay competitive. In a remarkable bit of good news, board members and data leaders see AI ethical risk mitigation as an essential component of that strategy. But current approaches are grossly inadequate and many leaders are uncertain how to develop this part of their strategy.

In the absence of the ideal a widespread commitment to creating a robust AI ethical-risk program from day one building, maintaining, and empowering an AI IRB can serve as a strong foundation for achieving that ideal. It can be created in relatively short order, it can be piloted fairly easily, it can be built on and expanded to cover all product teams and even all departments, and it creates and communicates a culture of ethics. Thats a powerful punch not only for AI ethics, but for the ethics of the organization more generally.

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If Your Company Uses AI, It Needs an Internal Review Board - Harvard Business Review

Image: Shutterstock At Ambit, we spend a lot of time reading articles that cover a wide gamut of topics, ranging from zeitgeist to futuristic, and encapsulate them in our weekly Ten Interesting Things product. Some of the most fascinating topics covered this week are: Capitalism (Do billionaires destroy democracy?), Science (Antiscience movement is going global; Will my cat eat me if I die?), Technology (Why bitcoin wont become like money) and Book Review (Kazuo Ishiguro sees what the future is doing to us).

Here are the ten most interesting pieces that we read this week, ended April 2, 2021.

1) Are billionaires really destroying democracy and capitalism? [Source: evonomics.com] Everywhere in the world, majority think that billionaires need to be taxed heavily. But, is it the right thing to do? This article shows how billionaires can be a force for good, especially if their resources were used for the common good. There are three ways this can happen: 1) The billionaires suddenly realize that the common good of the planet is an important goal for them, so they join forces to save humanity and nature; 2) Our governments make billionaires pay their fair share of taxes, or; 3) Society decides that billionaires shouldnt exist, and our governments simply tax them out of existence.

We should start by asking where do billionaires come from? Do they just spring out of the fertile digital soil of Silicon Valley? Can anyone with enough hard work become a billionaire? The task should be how to create a better education and better skills in people so that they can create value for others and get paid for the value they create. In 1996 there were 423 billionaires spotted in the wild. In 2019, that number rose to 2,153. Billionaires constitute just 0.00003% of the world population, but they currently own the equivalent of 12% of the gross world product (GWP) and a much larger percentage of the total wealth of the world.

Instead of pushing billionaires, they need to come in front just like Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett. They signed the giving pledge, to make this world a better place to live. The Giving Pledge is a commitment by the world's wealthiest individuals and families to dedicate the majority of their wealth to giving back. Imagine how many low-income persons would benefit if 2,000 billionaires, not just 211 would implement a giving pledge. If youre a billionaire, ask yourself: what kind of world do I want to leave to my children? The rest should also ask this question. Our time as humans on this planet is almost up. Who will lead us?

2) The antiscience is killing thousands globally [Source: Scientific America] Antiscience has emerged as a dominant and highly lethal force, and one that threatens global security, as much as do terrorism and nuclear proliferation. We must mount a counteroffensive and build new infrastructure to combat antiscience, just as we have for these other more widely recognized and established threats. Antiscience is the rejection of mainstream scientific views and methods or their replacement with unproven or deliberately misleading theories, often for nefarious and political gains. It targets prominent scientists and attempts to discredit them.

Beginning in the spring of 2020, the Trump White House launched a coordinated disinformation campaign that dismissed the severity of the epidemic in the United States, attributed COVID deaths to other causes, claimed hospital admissions were due to a catch-up in elective surgeries, and asserted that ultimately that the epidemic would spontaneously evaporate. It also promoted hydroxychloroquine as a spectacular cure, while downplaying the importance of masks. Other authoritarian or populist regimes in Brazil, Mexico, Nicaragua, Philippines and Tanzania adopted some or all of these elements. In the summer of 2020, the language of the antiscience political right in America was front and center at antimask and antivaccine rallies in Berlin, London and Paris. In the Berlin rally, news outlets reported ties to QAnon and extremist groups.

Adding to this toxic mix are emerging reports from U.S. and British intelligence that the Putin-led Russian government is working to destabilize democracies through elaborate programs of COVID-19 antivaccine and antiscience disinformation. Public refusal of COVID-19 vaccines now extends to India, Brazil, South Africa and many low- and middle-income countries. Thousands of deaths have so far resulted from antiscience, and this may only be the beginning as we are now seeing the impact on vaccine refusal across the U.S., Europe and the low- and middle-income countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Containing antiscience will require work and an interdisciplinary approach. The stakes are high given the high death toll that is already accelerating from the one-two punch of SARS CoV2 and antiscience. Antiscience is now a large and formidable security issue.

3) A deep history of work, from the stone age to the age of robots [Source: nextbigideaclub.com] In this article, James Suzman, a social anthropologist based in Cambridge, England, shares 5 key insights from his new book, Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots. I. We work a lot harder than our hunter-gatherer ancestors: A century ago, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by 2030, our workweek would be only 15 hours long. What happened? Weve crossed all the technological thresholds Keynes identified, so why arent we living in the economic promised land? Well, if Keynes were here today, hed probably blame our unshakeable instinct to work. He believed that human beings are cursed, that we have infinite desires, but there arent enough resources to satisfy them. As a result, everything is, by definition, scarce. Today, economists refer to this paradox as the fundamental economic problem, and they believe it explains our constant will to work.II. All living organisms are born to work: Every living organism worksit seeks out and captures energy so it can grow, reproduce, and capture even more energy. But, humans are versatilewe can learn skills, develop tools, and deploy different tactics to secure our energy needs. Also, the possible motivations are endless, and they all play out simultaneously. III. Were all farmers at heart: The idea that hard work is a virtue and idleness a vice can be traced back to the agricultural revolution some 10,000 years ago. The practical demands of making a living from the soil upended the existing equation between effort and reward. Hunter-gatherers had relished immediate rewardsslaughter an animal, chow down right away. Farmers, on the other hand, developed delayed return economies. They invested their labor in the land for the promise of a reward in the future. This, of course, is the basis of our economy today.IV. Country work aint city work: Even in the most sophisticated agricultural civilizations, like ancient Rome, four out of five people still lived in the countryside and worked the land. But the urbanites who managed to unshackle themselves from the challenges of food production were able to pioneer new ways of living and working. They invented a wide range of professions, setting up shop as lawyers and scribes, secretaries and accountants, poets and prostitutes. And these werent just careersthey were social identities. V. Changes to work today are as profound as the agricultural revolution: Our economic norms and institutions, not to mention our work ethic, evolved in an age when scarcity was real and visceral, an age when people made a living from the land because food was their principal source of energy. But things have changed. Our productivity has surged, courtesy of improvements in technology and our routine exploitation of fossil fuels.

4) Book review: The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World, by Bruce Campbell [Source: inference-review.com] Bruce Campbells The Great Transition chronicles an important and gloomy historical moment. The two centuries between the 1260s and 1470s witnessed the collapse of international networks of exchange, multiple wars, economic contraction, repeated famines, and demographic decline. The single most profound event was what is still considered the most devastating pandemic of human history: the Black Death of the middle of the fourteenth century. Campbells book has twelve tables, seventy-eight figures, most of them graphs, and a bibliography running forty-six pages. Campbell has always favored data-heavy analyses; his many decades of study on English agriculture were based on massive compilations of data on crop yields, and he has recently coauthored a comprehensive survey of the British economy from the thirteenth to nineteenth centuries.

The issue of how one tells time with genetic evidence is crucial. In the one map Campbell gives showing the path of the Black Death, he overlays data from different sources. This is usually a powerful technique by which to show the larger patterns in tree-ring data or climate and crop data. Here, Campbell is collapsing two kinds of evidence for the plagues geography. Plague is not a human disease. We should expect gaps in our documentary evidence, because outbreaks passing solely through wild animal populations would be unlikely to elicit human notice. Campbell is right that the fluctuating climate of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries could have contributed to epizootics of plague. But there were already multiple plague strains in existence by that point, more than we can document now, and they were already scattered in various niches across the terrain of central Asia.

Campbell does not use the term Anthropocene in The Great Transition. Nevertheless, our own very modern dilemma haunts this book, for we, too, live with the specter of a Great Transition. If sudden climatic shifts could cause such devastation in the fourteenth century, when cities were smaller, travel was slower, and human contamination of air, water, and land was minimal, what hope do we have for today, when germs can travel around the world in less than two days, and more than half the worlds population of seven billion people live in cities? Does it matter whether our climate change is human induced? We are no more able to undo climate change than the people of the fourteenth century.

5) Review: The enigma of reason [Source: scotthyoung.com] Scott H. Young, author of Ultralearning, in this blog talks about his last years favourite book, Dan Sperber and Hugo Merciers The Enigma of Reason. He says, the basic puzzle is: I. If reason is so useful, why do human beings seem to be the only animals to possess it? II. If reason is so powerful, why are we so bad at it? Why do we have tons of cognitive biases? The answer to both of these puzzles, which has far-reaching implications for how we think and make decisions, is that weve misunderstood what reason actually is. The classic view of reason is that it is simply better thinking. Reasoned thinking is better than unreasoned thinking.

Sperber and Mercier argue that reason is actually a very specialized cognitive adaptation. The reason other animals do not possess reason is because they dont have the unique environment human beings exist in, and thus never needed to evolve the adaptation. According to Sperber and Mercier, the purpose of reason, as a faculty, is for generating and evaluating reasons. A few of the most important implications of this theory, if it is true are: I. Reasoning isnt a big part of intelligence or (potentially) consciousness; II. Its possible to have smart decisions, but not be able to have reasons for them; III. We are smarter when we argue than when we think alone; IV. Feedback loops may explain the role of classical reason; and V. You will reason better if reasons are harder to provide.

In the end, our minds are not separated into a war between a ruling, but often frail and feeble, reason, and a willful unconscious. Instead, it is split between many, many different unconscious processes, each with their own domains and specialized functions, with reason standing alongside them. In some senses, this is a demotion of reason, from being a godlike faculty that separates us from animals, to being just one of many tools in our mental toolkits. But in another sense, this is a restoration of reason, since instead of appearing like sloppy, feeble and poorly-functioning faculty, it appears as if reason does exactly what it was designed to do, and it does so very well.

6) Reimagining the laptop for a work-from-home era [Source: The Wall Street Journal] Almost all have been working remotely since the pandemic stuck last year. And remote working environment is here to stay. A lot of focus has turned toward the key work-from-home technology tool: the laptop. But relying so heavily on the laptop has raised all sorts of issuesfrom camera and sound quality to security and privacy. Heres what a variety of experts had to say about future of remote working. I. Improve the way we look on camera: The better we get at videoconferencing, the more we notice bad videoconferencing and poor camera angles. Innovation in software will make us all look better on camera.

II. Better wireless connections: For most people the main form of connectivity for their laptop is wireless. Various forms of wireless connectivity are being substantially improved. The latest generation of Wi-Fi (Wi-Fi 6) hit the market in 2019. Looking forward, work has already begun on Wi-Fi 7. Each of these brings further performance improvements in speed and latency. III. More, and better, screens: Screen sizes of individual devices are unlikely to get bigger, but the total amount of screen real estate will increase. People will prefer using multiple monitors for better multitaskingto access other applications while videoconferencing, for example. IV. Nix the noise: All sorts of audio issues arise with work-from-home use of laptops. Roommates quarreling, pets barking, etc. But, algorithms on laptops will soon be able to separate out background noises, and do so fast enough that the disturbances get continuously filtered out before leaving the laptop.V. Sharpening the background: Virtual backgrounds are on their way to being a necessary part of the online meeting experience. As a host, dynamic background images can go a long way in differentiating your 10 a.m. Zoom meeting from the 3:30 p.m. meeting. VI. Security inside and outside the laptop: Working from home creates a number of security concerns for companies, which will lead to enhancements for laptops that you can and cant see. Similarly, laptop manufacturers may adopt facial recognition or other biometric unlocking software similar to what we have grown accustomed to on cellphones. VII. Keeping the laptop safe (from kids and others): Individuals/companies are focusing on how to protect work laptops now that they are being used more often from the home. There are a number of basic security hygiene rules that can be put in place to protect a device. These include screen-lock timers, so kids cant access a device when the employee has left the room.

7) Bitcoin: Why governments will continue their monoply over money [Source: Livemint] The entire idea behind creating bitcoin was to give the world an option to the paper or fiat money system. The paper money system is run by central banks and governments; they can manipulate it at will. In the aftermath of the financial crisis of September 2008, the Western central banks printed trillions of units of paper money in the hope of getting their economies back on track. Nakamoto looked at this as an abuse of the trust people had in paper money. And bitcoin was supposed to be a solution for this breach of trust; a cryptocurrency which did not use banks or any third party as a medium and the code for which has been written in such a way that only 21 million units can be created.

Also, unlike the paper money system which is ultimately run by individuals, the bitcoin system is decentralised and has no owner. In fact, these are the main reasons offered by those who believe bitcoin is money or at least the future of money. But, bitcoin also has its own share of issues. Any form of money needs to have a relatively stable value. Between 21 January and 16 February, the price of a bitcoin went up 59.4% to $49,225. This made bitcoin investors more wealthy. Nevertheless, the question that one needs to ask here is what does a huge increase in value of any form of money actually mean. It means that the price of goods and services that money can buy have fallen massively.

Due to the overall limit of 21 million, bitcoin is often compared to gold, the argument being, like gold, bitcoin cannot be created out of thin air. This is true, but it comes with a corollary. While supply of bitcoin is limited, the same cannot be said about the supply of cryptocurrency on the whole. Bitcoin is the most popular cryptocurrency, but its not the only game in town. Hence, the number of bitcoins may not go up, but the number of bitcoin-like assets will continue to go up in the years to come, as newer cryptocurrencies get launched. Its one thing to have competition in soaps and mobile phones, its another thing to have different forms of money compete. Also, bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are attracting the attention of governments. Many countries are setting up committees to look into the matter.

8) Why finance gurus switched their bait from millions to thousands of dollars [Source: The New York Times Magazine] The Southern California real estate broker Kevin Paffrath uploaded a video to his Meet Kevin YouTube channel, updating viewers on the status of the stimulus. Mark your calendar, theres a big day coming! he put this up on Jan. 9, with the dream of $2,000 stimulus checks not yet deflated. This video would be just one of dozens about potential stimulus packages posted that day, even that evening many of them from finance influencers like Paffrath, whose pitches normally involve real estate, stocks or airline points. A year ago, they were promising to share their proprietary secrets for achieving wealth, staging monologues in the drivers seats of luxury cars and poolside on cruise ships.

A CNBC profile reported that Paffrath actually makes most of his money not from the industry he built his status on, not from investing or even from buying rental properties, but via his audience itself, from his YouTube channels advertising revenue and affiliate programs. Stimulus-check updates began doubling Paffraths other videos in view counts; one update became the most popular video on his channel, with 1.1 million views. Viewer demand didnt come from upward-bound entrepreneurs after all, it seemed, but rather from those enduring the kind of precarity where the precise timing of a $2,000 deposit could mean keeping the lights on or the difference between housing and eviction. Every hour, a glut of new videos provided the latest on whether relief was coming and how many dollars of it were likely to arrive. Paffrath typically uploaded two videos each day.

In the days leading up to the relief bill becoming law, Paffraths stimulus content remained his most popular product; soon he was posting videos calming those members of his audience for whom the $1,400 deposit had not yet arrived. Can the path forward for someone like Paffrath really lead back to making videos from the drivers seat of a Tesla, promising to make viewers rich? Or will what he has seen during this stint months of tending to a public desperate for news of a couple thousand dollars open his eyes to the possibility of being just another rich person hustling the poor? 9) Kazuo Ishiguro sees what the future is doing to us [Source: The New York Times Magazine] Ishiguros new book, Klara and the Sun, is his first since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. The novel is set in a near-future America, where the social divisions of the present have only widened and liberal-humanist values appear to be in terminal retreat. The book addresses itself to an urgent but neglected set of questions arising from a paradigm shift in human self-conception. If it one day becomes possible to replicate consciousness in a machine, will it still make sense to speak of an irreducible self, or will our ideas about our own exceptionalism go the way of the transistor radio?

Ishiguro is not the kind of writer who takes dictation from his characters. He has never been able to sit down at his desk and improvise, to launch into a novel from a standing start. He is a planner, patient and meticulous. Before he begins the writing proper, he will spend years in a sort of open-ended conversation with himself, jotting down ideas about tone, setting, point of view, motivation, the ins and outs of the world he is trying to build. Only once he has drawn up detailed blueprints for the entire novel does he set about the business of composing actual sentences and paragraphs.

In this, too, he follows a set of carefully honed procedures. First, writing very quickly and without pausing to make revisions, hell draft a chapter in longhand. He then reads it through, dividing the text into numbered sections. Klara and the Sun isnt Ishiguros finest novel, but it provides a vision of where we are headed if we fail to move beyond this constraining view of freedom. Whats most unsettling about the future it imagines isnt that machines like Klara are coming more and more to resemble human beings; its that human beings are coming more and more to resemble machines.

10) Will my cat eat me if I die? Science holds the delicious answer [Source: inverse.com] This article answers four questions about cat aggression, our feline relationships, and ultimately, consumption: 1) Why does my cat bite me? Cats are hunters. Their strong bite, in turn, comes in handy whether its gripping a dead mouse or nibbling on your finger. Vanessa Spano is an associate veterinarian at Behavior Vets NYC and a resident at the American College of Veterinary Behaviorists. Many cat owners come to the veterinarians with perfectly natural concerns about their cats bite, Spano tells. However, while being bit is never fun, its not exactly a sign of your cats hidden desire to consume your flesh. Instead, your cats probably just playing with you, Spano says. This biting behavior, known as mouthing, mimics the play of young kittens.

2) Is it normal to wonder if Ill be eaten by a cat? Its worth unpacking the psychology behind this question. What does it tell us about the tenuous relationships that humans have with their pets? There is certainly an ethological, biological rationale behind a human questioning another animal's desire to eat him [or] her, Spano says. She does admit the fear is not irrational. Domestic pets can, on rare occasions, become aggressive towards their human housemates. But its far more likely that a cat would chow down on wild prey rather than its human companions, Spano says. 3) Would a cat eat its owner? Mikel Delgado, a cat expert at Feline Minds, tells cats wont typically chow on their living owners. But, imagine this scenario: a human dies, leaving its cat without food for days or even weeks. You can predict how the scenario might naturally unfold.

4) What type of cat is most likely to eat its owner? Feral cats are often used to hunting and finding their own food, but their dietary needs are basically the same, Delgado says. If a cat is starving, there is no reason to think they would not eat available meat, even if that was human flesh, Delgado says. Melissa Connor, a co-author of the 2020 feral cats study and director of the Forensic Investigation Station at Colorado Mesa University, ultimately agrees with Delgado. Feral and domestic cats do seem to have different scavenging patterns, Connor says. However, these different eating habits arent the result of domestic cats forming bonds with humans. Instead, the habits relate to the condition of the body at the time of scavenging or the cats experience in consumption of whole animal carcasses.

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Ten Interesting Things We Read This Week - Forbes India

Few things are as satisfying in the life of a Catholic journalist as to be on the receiving end of the kindness of scholars and clergy who help us in the media get to the bottom of something. There is, if you will, a fraternity of people who work with words the way others work with their hands. This fraternity is especially strong when the people involved are grouped around a shared love of someone or something. On top of all that, it allows me to say, with Blanche DuBois, that I've always relied on the kindness of strangers!

In March, the chairman of the board of directors of NCR, Jim Purcell, sent me an email asking if I would be interested in seeing a monograph he discovered. It was written by my great mentor Msgr. John Tracy Ellis. I said "Of course!" and Purcell put it in the mail. The essay ran to 20 pages, with an additional two pages of endnotes. It was not dated, but it identified Ellis as a professor at the University of San Francisco, so it was written before 1976 when he returned to Washington, D.C. but after the close of the Second Vatican Council in 1965.

The title "On the Selection of Bishops for the United States" did not indicate if this was a lecture or the draft of a magazine article. I asked Purcell if he knew to what purpose the monograph had been put, and he checked with a priest in San Francisco who instructed me to reach out to Fr. Tom Shelley, a priest of the New York Archdiocese, who is working on a biography of Ellis. I did so, and Shelley let me know that Ellis had published two articles on the subject, one for Commonweal and the other for The Critic. I took a photograph of the first page and sent it to Shelley. He replied that the monograph was identical to the opening of the article in the July, 1969 issue of The Critic.

The mystery of the mongraph's origin was solved. What of the essay's content?

First, the monsignor begins with the tale of Antonio Rosmini's 1847 book Concerning the Five Wounds of the Holy Church, which strongly criticized the pressure placed on the church through the role of secular governments in the selection of bishops, and that the Vatican placed the volume on the Index of Forbidden Books at the request of the Austrian government. Rosmini reminded his readers that for the first thousand years of the church's history, both laity and clergy had been involved in selecting their bishops.

By the end of Ellis' first few paragraph, you are reminded of his elegant writing style, straightforward but willing to take a slight detour for literary reasons or to introduce an analogy. For example, after detailing contemporary resistance to the idea of widening the consultation process in selecting bishops, he writes:

In that regard it should first be stated with absolute clarity that no right thinking Catholic, clerical or lay, entertains any disposition to wrest from the hands of the sovereign pontiff his centuries-old right to name in the final reckoning the successors of the apostles. It is rather that this movement, if movement it can be called, is only one more manifestation of the Zeitgeist of the 1960s in the Catholic community of the world and of the United States.

No one writes like that anymore, and it is a shame.

Ellis then traced the history of how bishops were selected over the years, starting with the patristic era and through the Middle Ages with its nepotism and, later, the politically devised solution of granting the right to nominate bishops to particular sovereigns. He comes to the founding of the American episcopate and records the well-known fact that, in a nod to local sensibilities, the Holy See allowed the clergy of the young United States to gather and select one of their own to be the first bishop. On May 18, 1789, the clergy gathered in the Chapel of the Sacred Heart at White Marsh, which can still be visited in Bowie, Maryland. They selected John Carroll, and by year's end, Rome had confirmed the selection. Over the next 40-odd years, until the Second Provincial Council in Baltimore in 1833, six methods for choosing bishops emerged in different situations.

From 1833 until the meeting of the First Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1852, the metropolitan and each of his suffragans drew up a list of three names, a terna, for each vacant see, and the ternas were sent to both the metropolitan and the Propaganda Fide office in Rome, as the United States was still considered mission territory. The bishops included their reasons for the names given, but the ternas were only recommendations, and the final terna to be brought to the pope was drawn up by the cardinal members of Propaganda Fide.

Things remained in flux for several decades. At the Second Plenary Council of Baltimore, held in 1866, the apostolic delegate, Archbishop Martin Spalding, wanted legislation that would give a role to the consultors of a diocese in the drawing up of ternas, but no legislation was adopted on this point until the Third Plenary Council in 1884. Finally, diocesan consultors and irremovable rectors were given the right to draw up a terna for a vacancy in their diocese, which was then supplemented by a terna from the bishops of the province. In the case of a vacant metropolitan see, the other metropolitan archbishops would add a third terna of their own, drawn up at their now annual meetings.

Two other developments affected the selection of bishops in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The most significant was that in January 1893, Pope Leo XIII named an apostolic delegate to the United States, mostly to resolve conflicts between clergy and their bishops, but the delegate's influence in relating the situation on the ground to Rome gave him enormous influence in the process. Secondly, in 1859, the North American College opened in Rome.

Between 1884 and 1916, when the right of priests to draw up a terna was abrogated, 22% of the new bishops had received some or all of their training in Rome. From 1916 until 1966 when the National Conference of Catholic Bishops was formally commenced, 40% of new bishops had Roman training. Seventy percent of all cardinals had Roman training.

Ellis documented some post-conciliar efforts in other countries to increase the role of the clergy, religious and laity in the selection of episcopal candidates. He notes that the bishops in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, especially his beloved Cardinal James Gibbons, were more keen to better conform the church to the democratic tenor of the country. He notes the words of Bishop Richard Gilmour of Cleveland and Bishop John Moore of St. Augustine, Florida, in a memorandum to the Propaganda Fide cardinals in 1885:

Owing to the democratic form of government in the United States, the people must be taken into consideration, and their good will cultivated. Without their hearty and constant cooperation, neither Church nor Schools nor Institutions can exist or be created

Ellis writes of the efforts of Bishop Ernest Primeau of Manchester, New Hampshire, to introduce greater consultation with his clergy in the selection of names he, in turn, shared with his brother bishops at their annual provincial meeting. But only a minority of the priests even bothered to respond to Primeau's request for names to be put forward for nomination as bishops. Ellis does not mince words in rendering his verdict, writing:

The Manchester experience should not, I think, be passed over without attention being drawn to the disappointment occasioned by the priests' failure to take their new responsibility seriously, formutatis mutandithere is not a diocese in this country that has not undergone similar frustrations by reason of the priests' refusing to open their minds to new ideas and to manifest the courage to face up to the need for change in this revolutionary age. In all too many cases they have displayed a paranoid reaction which, even where it was strenuously opposed by some of their number, was strong enough to paralyze the general clerical body and nullify the talent that is latent in so many priests.

Ellis records other examples of attempts to include priests in the consultation process, even noting the rudeness of the apostolic delegate in failing to respond to a group of priests in Albany and a resulting editorial in NCR on the subject! (See "Washington double-talk," National Catholic Reporter, Vol. 5, No. 22.)

Ellis finishes his essay with some lovely quotes from John Henry Newman. I remember as if it was yesterday when he told our class that after the Lord Jesus and his mother, no person had had a greater influence on his life and ideas than Cardinal Newman. I remember sitting in that room thinking: How cultured must be the mind that can say such a thing, identifying with a person he had never met but whose writings had made such a profound impression

The two great churchmen were cut from the same cloth I came to realize. Brilliant, erudite, liberal in the best sense of the word.

I also recall the day when the monsignor spoke to a rally called to protest the removal of Fr. Charles Curran from the theology faculty at Catholic University. Monsignor, whose age required him to hold up his own eyebrows, made his way to the microphone and, looking at Fr. Curran, said something like: "Father, I disagree with you on every point of moral teaching on which you diverge from the teaching of the magisterium, but I strongly defend your right to teach your ideas at a modern Catholic university, free from ecclesiastical interference." Monsignor's sojourn in San Francisco had been occasioned by a similar interference.

I wonder if Ellis would still hold to the ideas he held then. So much has changed. Democracy has lost some of its luster in the age of Donald Trump and Matteo Salvini and Viktor Orbn. The polarization in the church was emerging when he wrote this article, but even when he died in 1992, the full extent of that polarization was not evident. It is a fool's errand to predict how someone who died almost 30 years ago would view the same issue today.

His knowledge of church history, however, would prevent him from becoming despondent about the situation of the church in 2021. The collapse of Christianity in revolutionary France was followed by the flowering of spirituality and then theology in that country throughout the 19th and into the 20th centuries. The long suppression of Catholicism in England was part of the cultural inheritance that produced Ellis' hero John Henry Newman as well as a host of other great Catholic thinkers and writers.

He would often quote the words of the Master to Nicodemus at John 3:8, to us, his students: "The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit."

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Msgr. John Tracy Ellis on selecting bishops in the US - National Catholic Reporter

The recent murderous attack against Asian-owned businesses in Georgia, the deaths of six women of Asian descent, and the dramatic increase in assaults on Asian Americans in communities across the country once again shine a harsh light on the historical breadth of bigotry in America.

According to the initiative Stop AAPI Hate, between March 2020 and February 2021, there were 3,800 anti-Asian hate incidents in the United States, incidents that included being spat upon and verbally and physically attacked. The report noted that with the onset of the pandemic, Asian Americans have increasingly become targets of xenophobic attacks, much like Muslims after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

Make no mistake: Americas earliest history is crowded with the subjugation of one nationality after another. The indigenous people whose land we stole, then settled; the Africans we bought to support an economic system that depended upon their enslavement; the demonization of Asians who fled wars and famine and on whose backs we built our railroads and revolutionized the fishing industry: all have been and continue to be human collateral in the development of a country that prides itself on the high ideals of freedom, liberty and equality.

Midway through my undergraduate history-degree-seeking career, I had an opportunity to take a few courses in Asian American history. At the time, I was living at the edge of Monterey Bay, a section of California with a long and storied history of Asian migration. The classes were an eye-opener.

The discovery of gold in California in 1848 drew thousands of Chinese emigres to the U.S. fleeing their own country that was wracked by war and famine. By the 1850s, nearly 25,000 Chinese immigrants were making their way in the West. They helped build the transcontinental railroad, contributed to the growth of agriculture and commercialized abalone and calamari fishing along Monterey Bay.

Xenophobia, however, was on the rise. Chinese men were demonized as lazy and listless opium smokers; Chinese women as exotic and promiscuous. To protect Americans from these influences, Congress passed the Page Exclusion Act of 1875, the first restrictive piece of immigration legislation that prohibited recruitment to the United States of unfree laborers, and women for immoral purposes, but was enforced primarily against Chinese. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act that ended Chinese immigration for a decade and prohibited them from becoming naturalized citizens.

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelts Executive Order 9066 authorized the evacuation of all persons deemed to be a national threat. This included 112,000 persons of Japanese descent, many American citizens, and their subsequent detention at internment camps further inland.

Bigotry of all forms has woven itself into the fabric of Old Glory. Violence aimed at people of color remains a basic tenet of the American zeitgeist and continues unabated. No matter what laws are passed, who is in the White House, or how loudly we tout our freedoms, the relentless acts of violence against Americas own citizens based solely on the color of their skin, their national origins or religious beliefs, must stop.

Years ago in graduate school, I had the amazing good fortune of taking a class from Professor Raymond Arsenault, an impressive historian of Americas South and author of Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice. The class focused on the racial injustices highlighted by Jim Crow South, and the Civil Rights movement under the leadership of Martin Luther King. Once, after a particularly spirited discussion, I asked Dr. Arsenault if he thought the country would ever recover from our countrys Civil War. He could not say.

The hard truth is this: Its probably time the bandages came off exposing the festering racism that has been held in the hearts of too many Americans, a hatred that has, apparently, been given nascent approval to exist.

Addiction counselors and mental health professionals tell us consistently that the only way one ever recovers from self-destructive behavior is by admitting they have a problem. And boy-howdy, does America have a problem.

According to a February 2021 report by Statista, 55% of Americans feel white nationalist groups pose a serious threat to the U.S. This is 2021, and were still dealing with issues of equality that Americans died for 160 years ago. History is filled with civilizations that have held so much promise of bettering the human condition, but missed the opportunity because they stumbled on ignorance. Pettiness, jealousy, a sense of entitlement have doomed even the most powerful.

What do we need to do to facilitate the change so desperately needed in our country?

The time is ripe for a national discussion on some form of truth and reconciliation hearings, the kind that enabled South Africa to heal and aided Canada in giving voice to its indigenous population. Im not at all sure how we make that happen, but I do believe, like many others, that unless we face our biased and intolerant past, we have little hope of healing our countrys wounds.

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Now is the time | Reporters... - Journal of the San Juan Islands

This week Im mulling over Northern Lives, a local group exhibition showcasing contributions from artists of the Peace River Chapter of the Federation of Canadian Artists, as well as works by renowned printmakers Charlie and Mary Parslow, realist painter Gary Lowe, and landscape painters Mimi Zhang-Mackie and Payge Fortier, among several others.

Having covered local artists and events for a while now, I am beginning to connect a network of threads between many artists in the region, the most prominent similarity being an emphasis on and celebration of the land on which we reside and work. Whether it be Barbara Swails Bank Series, kit fasts earthworks, Kristy Augers floral prints, Miep Burgerjons use of natural materials, Garry Okers outdoor art exhibits, or Sandy Troudts loving portraits of the Peace River a considerable number of established artists in this area engage with the land in their work.

The Peace Rivers hypnotizing poplar forests, open skies, and local fauna have long been staples of the art scene here. While each artists approach and art practice is unique, this homogeny of motif and subject is significant and worth acknowledging. It goes without saying that everyone has a relationship with the land, whether they realize it or not. The difference lies in the level of importance that relationship holds in that individuals life and community. As evidenced by their work, artists of the Peace hold that relationship in high regard.

Every artist and their work is a product of their place and time, and the same is true for our regional artists. It figures that our artists fascination with the local landscape stems from our proximity to nature, ease of access to wilderness, and the central role activities on the land, such as berry-picking, hunting, fishing, and camping, hold in our culture. This, in turn, may connect to the relatively delayed colonization of this area, and the rise of the pioneer lifestyle, portrayed in the works of Gary Lowe, Karl Musgrove, and Suzanne Sandboe, which many living artists have personally experienced.

Of course, the elephant in the room is the oil and gas industry and other resource-extraction-based activities. While individual artists have different opinions on the subject, its constant presence and transformation of the landscape continually brings the issue front of mind in the zeitgeist of the area, resulting in a plethora of land-related artworks.

Worth considering too is the influence of the Federation of Canadian Artists itself, through which many artists seek legitimacy. The FCAs comparatively conservative ideals of what classifies as art put an emphasis on representational painting that is evident in the Northern Lives exhibition. Combined with the factors above is the geographic isolation of our region, which leaves us disconnected from trends, topical issues, and movements taking place in urban centres or other regions.

All these influences, as well as many more, are largely indirect and reinterpreted in a myriad of ways. However, the result is an overall commonality and unique art movement that has been brewing in the Peace region for decades. I believe this movement is our contribution to the arts and cultural landscape of B.C. and Canada. It is a voice that speaks to our issues, history and values. It is something to celebrate, cultivate and push forward with the innovation and support of our many gifted artists.

You can catch Northern Lives until April 3at the Dawson Creek Art Gallery, or experience the show virtually on the PRFCAwebsite.

P.S. - Dont forget to register for this years Regional Juried Art Exhibition. The deadline is April 26. You can find the registration page at the Peace Liard Regional Arts Councils website.

Do you have an artistic endeavour you would like to promote? Is there a topic you would like me to discuss? I would love to hear from you! Please email me at programs@dcartgallery.ca.

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A reflection on our northern lives - Alaska Highway News

(JTA) They hid revolvers in teddy bears and dynamite in their underwear. They learned how to make lethal Molotov cocktails and fling them at German supply trains. The girls with Aryan features who could pass as non-Jews flirted with Nazis plying them with wine, whiskey and pastry before shooting them dead.

When the Nazis occupied their native Poland, Jewish women, some barely into their teens, joined the resistance and risked their young lives to sabotage the regime.

That crucial but often overlooked story of defiance and resistance is told by Judy Batalion in her new book, The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitlers Ghettos (William Morrow). Its the result of her 12-year odyssey digging through archives and interviewing descendants of the women. The research skills she honed while earning a doctorate in the history of art from the University of London helped her navigate the daunting challenges of crafting a cohesive, factually accurate narrative out of history shrouded in myth and neglect.

The book and a companion edition targeting 10- to 14-year-olds are both due out on April 6 in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day. Director Steven Spielberg has optioned the book for a motion picture and signed Batalion to co-write the screenplay.

I was slow with this book because it was so challenging emotionally, intellectually and practically. I had to deal with reading incredibly difficult memoirs and testimonies on my own, she said in a phone interview from her New York City home.

Batalion, who spent her mid-20s in London working as an art historian by day and stand-up comedian at night, is not a Holocaust scholar accustomed to reading graphic primary sources. She felt weighed down by the womens accounts of being sexually assaulted by Nazis, of soldiers stomping on Jewish babies and of mass murder committed before their eyes.

Their stories seeped into my system. I worked on it in dribs and drabs when I could, Batalion said of her years of off-again, on-again research and writing.

Niuta Teitelbaum as a schoolgirl in od, 1936. During the war, she became known as Little Wanda with the Braids. (Courtesy of Ghetto Fighters House Museum Photo Archive)

Donald Trumps election as president, with the misogyny and anti-Semitism that she saw churned up in its wake, pushed Batalion to go all in and craft the ghetto girls stories into a work of narrative nonfiction.

I felt a shift in the zeitgeist. The importance of telling honest stories about women in the Holocaust and womens empowerment felt urgent, she said. I dashed off a book proposal and committed to diving into two years of intensive, focused research.

At the heart of the project is an obscure Yiddish book published in 1946 titled Freuen in di Ghettos (Women in the Ghettos) chronicling these young womens tales of resistance and derring-do. Batalion discovered the dusty tome by chance in Londons British Library while researching strong Jewish women. Why, despite her years of education at a Montreal Jewish day school, where she learned Yiddish and Hebrew, and as the granddaughter of Polish Holocaust survivors, had she never heard of these ghetto girls?

My research was very complex and strangely time consuming. I had to work in multiple languages, she said. The womens names and the place names had so many confusing iterations Yiddish, Polish, Hebrew, English.

Her research missions took her to Poland for two weeks and Israel for 10 days. She visited the places that her heroines wrote and spoke about.

I wanted to understand what the ride from Krakow to Warsaw looked like from the train window and experience a taste of what they did, she said.

Batalion hit the research jackpot at Warsaws new Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, where an archivist directed her to thousands of pages of information about Jewish resistance fighters. She snapped photos of the documents to share with a Polish translator in New York.

Renia Kukieka in Budapest, 1944. (Courtesy of Merav Waldman)

The Light of Days highlights the incredible tenacity of Renia Kukielka, one of the youngest ghetto girls. As a 15-year-old, Renia saw her parents deported from the Bdzin ghetto to Auschwitz. Fueled by outrage, she and her older sister, Sarah, joined the ghettos resistance movement.

Renias youthful charm, fluent Polish and soft features made her an ideal courier. The Jewish underground obtained expensive fake papers that established Renias identity as a Catholic Pole. She successfully ran multiple missions, smuggling weapons, correspondence and money from Bdzin to Warsaw until the Gestapo discovered her papers were forged and threw her into prison. Despite repeated beatings that left her bloodied and unconscious, she clung to her cover story and never revealed her Jewish identity.

Sarah and her underground comrades bribed a guard with whiskey and cigarettes to rescue her from prison. Weak and feverish from starvation and physical abuse, Renia mustered the strength to run through forests and over snow-capped mountains. She survived a tortuous journey through hidden bunkers in Slovakia, then on to Hungary, Turkey and the ultimate destination Palestine.

Against terrifying, oppressive odds, Renia lived to tell her story in a memoir she began writing at 19. When Batalion read Renias memoir she felt as if shed discovered a kindred spirit a thoughtful writer processing her experiences.

Batalions favorite research and writing involved the surviving ghetto girls postwar lives.

I wanted to know how they reconstructed their lives after going through everything they did. I so wanted to talk to their children and find out who these women became, she said.

She achieved this level of intimacy with her subjects on her trip to Israel, when she met with their descendants. Batalion was overjoyed to meet Renias adult children, who described their mothers zest for family, fashion and world travel.

This brought home on such a personal level that I was writing about real people, she said.

Judy Batalion: I was slow with this book because it was so challenging emotionally, intellectually and practically. (Beowulf Sheehan)

Batalion hopes the stories of female heroism she resurrected serve to inspire future generations of all faiths, especially her own two daughters, both in elementary school.

These were women who saw and acknowledged the truth, had the courage to act on their convictions and fought with their lives for what was fair and right, she said.

She feels a deep sense of connection to the ghetto girls who died fighting and believes they sacrificed themselves for the future dignity of the Jewish people. Their stories serve as a timeless call to action to women to empower themselves to resist all forms of oppression.

During this difficult COVID year, Batalion drew personal inspiration from her subjects life stories.

Thinking back to their stories of courage and bravery really helped me, she said. I thought if they could get through the horrific challenges they faced, I can definitely get through this.

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'Their stories seeped into my system': How Judy Batalion found the stories of overlooked female Polish WWII resistance fighters - JTA News - Jewish...

The NAACP rose to the occasion allowing their combined creativity to shine. When we are tossed lemons we create lemonade so sweet, it sparks the cultural zeitgeist.

In that spirit, the non-televised awards program included a pre-awards show hosted by Entertainment Tonights Nischelle Turner and celebrity presenters Nicole Beharie, the cast of BETs Bigger, Tamar Braxton, Damson Idris, Daymond John, Leslie Jones, Javicia Leslie, Madalen Mills, MAJOR., Method Man, Retta & Reno Wilson (from Good Girls), Marcus Scribner, J.B. Smoove, Terrence Terrell, Susan Kelechi Watson, and CeCe Winans. Award shows are about fashion, glitz, glamour, and style, and to that end, the virtual red carpet was hosted by Tanika Ray.

Keeping issues in the forefront was a priority and a conversation and panel series with the NAACP Hollywood Bureau featuring Miles Brown and President Derrick Johnson included the Our Stories series A Conversation With presented by Ford Motor Company which paid homage to Essential Workers as well as a web series called Fashion Pull-Up hosted by celebrity wardrobe stylists, GooGoo Atkins and Apuje Kalu which explored the most-notable fashion moments from the NAACP Image Awards red carpet.

The NAACP Theatre featured past Image Awards performances and speeches, and this content aired in the Virtual Experience during a week of celebration, made available on-demand the next day in the theatre.

They even set up a virtual photo booth and selfie station, where fans took photos with their devices and posted them on their social media platforms.

The gala parties thrown by the NAACP are legendary and they didnt let COVID-19 stop the party, the post-gala Afterparty immediately followed the live broadcast on BET which featured classic cuts by DJ Questlove, current cuts by DJ Kiss, and a Jazz Lounge performance by Robert Glasper and Lalah Hathaway.

Before the ceremony honors were bestowed to NAACP Image Awards Co-Founder, Toni Vaz, winning the Founders Award to spotlight her work at creating the nations preeminent multicultural award show. Toni Vaz co-founded the NAACP Image Awards in 1967 as a way to change the perception of Black people in Hollywood.

MARCH 27: In this screengrab, Eddie Murphy accepts the Hall of Fame Award during the 52nd NAACP Image Awards on March 27, 2021. (Photo by NAACP via Getty Images)

Civil Rights Movement icon Rev. James Lawson receivedthe prestigious NAACP Chairmans Award. Past honorees of the Chairmans Award include Tyler Perry, then-Senator Barack Obama, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Former Surgeon General Regina Benjamin, Ruby Dee, The Neville Brothers, Bono, Danny Glover, and last years recipient the late U.S. Congressman John Lewis.

The NAACP inducted legendary entertainer, film icon, and two-time Image Award recipient Eddie Murphy into the NAACP Image Awards Hall of Fame. The award was presented by Murphys collaborator and long-time friend Arsenio Hall.

Presenters for the LIVE show included Alicia Keys, Andra Day, Arsenio Hall, Cynthia Erivo, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Michelle Obama, Misty Copeland, Regina King, Samuel L. Jackson, the cast of Tyler Perrys Sistas, Swizz Beatz, and Tracy Morgan.

The non-televised award categories presenters included the cast of BETs Bigger (Tanisha Long, Angell Conwell, Rasheda Crockett, Tristen J. Winger, and Chase Anthony,) CeCe Winans, Damson Idris, Daymond John, Javicia Leslie, JB Smoove, Leslie Jones, Madalen Mills, MAJOR., Marcus Scribner, Method Man, Nicole Beharie, Retta, Reno Wilson, Susan Kelechi Watson, Tamar Braxton, and Terrence Terrell.

Reg-Jean Page(Getty Images for NAACP Image Awards)

The 52nd NAACP Image Awards is presented by Wells Fargo, and sponsored by AT&T, FedEx, Nike, Bank of America, Alaska Airlines. The NAACP Image Awards honors the accomplishments of people of color in the fields of television, music, literature, and film and also recognizes individuals or groups who promote social justice through creative endeavors.

The NAACP was founded in 1909 in response to the ongoing violence against Black people around the country, the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) is the largest and most pre-eminent civil rights organization in the nation. We have over 2,200 units and branches across the nation, along with well over 2M activists. Our mission is to secure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights to eliminate race-based discrimination and ensure the health and well-being of all persons.

The 52nd NAACP Image Awards is presented by Wells Fargo, and sponsored by AT&T, FedEx, Nike, Bank of America, American Airlines, Airbnb, Ford, and Alaska Airlines.

The NAACP Image Awards honors the accomplishments of people of color in the fields of television, music, literature, and film and also recognizes individuals or groups who promote social justice through creative endeavors.

MARCH 27: In this screengrab, Regina King presents the Outstanding Actor in a Motion Picture Award during the 52nd NAACP Image Awards on March 27, 2021. (Photo by NAACP via Getty Images)

The full list of winners from the show can be found below:

Outstanding Writing in a Comedy Series

Michaela Coel I May Destroy You Ep. 112 Ego Death

Outstanding Writing in a Drama Series

Attica Locke Little Fires Everywhere Ep. 104 The Spider Web

Outstanding Writing in a Television Movie or Special

Geri Cole The Power of We: A Sesame Street Special

Outstanding Writing in a Motion Picture

Radha Blank The Forty-Year-Old Version

Outstanding Directing in a Comedy Series

Anya Adams black-ish Ep. 611 Hair Day

Outstanding Directing in a Drama Series

Hanelle Culpepper Star Trek: Picard Ep. 101 Remembrance

Outstanding Directing in a Television Movie or Special

Eugene Ashe Sylvies Love

Outstanding Directing in a Motion Picture

Gina Prince-Bythewood The Old Guard

Outstanding Short Form Series Comedy or Drama

#FreeRayshawn

Outstanding Performance in a Short Form

Laurence Fishburne #FreeRayshawn

Outstanding Short Form Series Reality/Nonfiction

Between The Scenes The Daily Show with Trevor Noah

Outstanding Short-Film (Live Action)

Black Boy Joy

Outstanding Short-Film (Animated)

Canvas

Special Award Spingarn Medal

Misty Copeland

For all information and the latest news, please follow NAACP Image Awards on Instagram @NAACPImageAwards.

Link:

NAACP ROSE TO THE OCCASSION VIRTUALLY WITH THE 2021 NAACP IMAGE AWARDS - Lasentinel

As Violent Femmes celebrate their 40th year together, Craft Recordings is pleased to honor the band's enduring catalog of cult classics with the long out-of-print vinyl reissue of Add It Up (1981-1993). In stores May 21st and available for pre-order today, the popular 1993 collection will also make its return to digital and streaming platforms, while fans can listen to the instant grat track "Add It Up (Live)" now (listen here).

The 23-track compilation features Violent Femmes' biggest hits, including "Blister in the Sun," "American Music," and "Gone Daddy Gone," plus live recordings of favorites like "Add It Up," and "Kiss Off," alongside a trove of demos, B-sides, interstitial voice recordings, and rarities. Housed in a gatefold jacket, the 2-LP set was pressed at Memphis Records Pressing, with lacquers cut by George Horn at Fantasy Studios. In addition to the standard black 2-LP, a special "Blister Red Marble" edition will be available exclusively via the Violent Femmes and Craft Recordings webstores (limited 500 worldwide). Meanwhile, Indie Retailers will offer an exclusive "Aqua" pressing, and Urban Outfitters will offer a "Violet" variant.

Formed in 1981 by Gordon Gano (vocals, guitar), Brian Ritchie (bass), and Victor DeLorenzo (percussion), Violent Femmes caught the ears of America's underground with their special blend of teenage angst, jittery folk-rock, and punk sensibilities. The Milwaukee group had their first big break later that year while busking outside of the city's Oriental Theatre, where new wave stars The Pretenders were set to play that evening. The latter band's guitarist, James Honeyman-Scott, took a liking to the young group and invited them on stage. A year later, New York Times music critic Robert Palmer wrote a glowing review of the band's live show, comparing Gano to Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, and Jonathan Richman. Amid the growing buzz, Violent Femmes signed to legendary punk label Slash Records (home to The Germs, X, and The Blasters) and, in 1983, released their self-titled debut.

Primarily written while Gano was still in high school, Violent Femmes would become the band's most iconic album, with Gen X anthems like "Blister in the Sun," "Please Do Not Go," "Gone Daddy Gone," and the urgent "Add It Up." Although Violent Femmes failed to chart upon its release, it was a steady seller, eventually becoming the group's most successful and critically lauded title. Nearly a decade later, it hit the Billboard 200 (landing at No.171 in 1991) and was certified Platinum by the RIAA.

The band followed with 1984's Hallowed Ground. While most material on Hallowed Ground is contemporaneous with the first album songs-all recorded by the Milwaukee-based producer and composer Mark Van Hecke-the tone of these songs was vastly different from their pop-forward predecessors. Instead, Hallowed Ground took an experimental turn and found Gano particularly inspired by his Christian upbringing. The band also incorporated country and American roots influences into songs like "Jesus Walking on the Water" and the unnerving "Country Death Song," and added unexpected instrumentation into such tracks as "Black Girls," which featured the avant-garde saxophonist, John Zorn. Although the album initially divided fans and critics, Hallowed Ground has since been recognized by a variety of outlets, including the Phoenix New Times, which declared the record to be "the Femmes finest musical effort, and Gano's definitive moment as a lyricist" in 2014.

1986's The Blind Leading the Naked found the band taking yet another sharp turn-this time towards both mainstream pop and avant garde. Produced by the Talking Heads' Jerry Harrison, the album featured a variety of high-profile guests, including guitarist Leo Kottke, the Stooges' Steve Mackay, and the acclaimed experimental artist, Fred Frith. Featuring the breakneck protest song "Old Mother Reagan" and the lively "I Held Her in My Arms," The Blind Leading the Naked brought Violent Femmes wider commercial success-both at home (where it peaked at No.84 on the Billboard 200) and abroad (landing at No.81 in the UK and No.31 in Australia).

Following a brief hiatus, the trio reunited in 1989, returning to their stripped-down roots with the acoustic 3, which featured such jaunty tracks as "Lies" and "Nightmares." Meanwhile, 1991's Why Do Birds Sing?, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, marked the Femmes' final album with DeLorenzo. Co-produced with Michael Beinhorn (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Hole, Soundgarden), the LP included one of the group's most commercially successful singles, "American Music," which hit No.2 on Billboard's Modern Rock chart.

Add It Up (1981-1993) draws from these first five albums-documenting the trailblazing band's stylistic development as they rose to become one of alt-rock's most commercially-successful acts. Offering fans more than just a compilation of hits, Add It Up also spotlights Violent Femmes' energetic live performances-captured at the height of their career. Additionally, nearly half of the collection is devoted to rarities, including demos, B-sides, and imports that were previously unavailable in the US, at the time of Add It Up's release. These include "I Hate the TV," "Gimme The Car," and "Dance, M.F., Dance!"

For the remainder of the '90s, Violent Femmes continued to record new material, while their earliest songs remained in the zeitgeist, thanks to popular shows and films like My So-Called Life, Reality Bites, and Grosse Pointe Blank. After taking an extended hiatus in the late aughts, the band's original members briefly reunited for a handful of live appearances, including a highly anticipated set at the 2013 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. This led to extensive touring and one of the Femmes' most productive recording eras, which yielded EP Happy New Year, full LP We Can Do Anything, and radical live double LP 2 Mics and the Truth (recorded at radio station sessions and in-store performances). Most recently, Gano, Ritchie, and newcomers John Sparrow and Blaise Garza released Violent Femmes' tenth studio album, Hotel Last Resort, in 2019.

40 years on, Violent Femmes' legacy remains strong, while their influence can be heard across multiple genres-from the anti-folk movement of the early 2000s to the chart-topping hits of Barenaked Ladies, and the indie-pop of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. In 2014, Popmatters declared that the folk-punk pioneers "may have very quietly been one of the most important rock bands of the 1980s, if not the past quarter-century...[They] celebrated the simplicity of pop music from the fringes, attacking convention with a mix of humor and violence." Pitchfork argued that "The Femmes don't signify an era so much as a time of life," adding that "for young people growing up in the internet age" their music "is part of a shared language."

Click here to pre-order/pre-save Add It Up (1981-1993) now.

Read the rest here:

Violent Femmes Celebrate 40th Anniversary With Reissue for 'Add It Up' - Broadway World

SPIEGEL: Mr. Heine, you will be 80 years old on Easter Sunday, how are you?

Heine: thanks good. We have a nice day in late summer and we were just swimming.

Gisela von Radwitz: 23 locusts.

Heine: Yes, its 23 degrees here.

SPIEGEL Ah, your wife is here too?

Radwitz: Yes, I am in charge of the Internet.

SPIEGEL: Are you looking back or only looking forward?

Heine: I tend to look forward, but of course I am a little back too. And I think I lived a very interesting life. Basically because we lived in Africa for more than twelve years, then in Ireland and Japan. But we have been living here for the longest time.

picture:

Photo by Stefan Gorlich / Imago

Heine helmetsBorn April 4, 1941 in Berlin, he studied business administration, worked and traveled before becoming a childrens book author. He had accomplished his accomplishments in 1982 with the picture book Friends and in 1983 he developed the Dragon Character for Peter Mafais musical Tabaluga. He lived in South Africa for more than ten years, also for a few years in Ireland and Japan, and since 1990 in New Zealand. He also writes novels for adults with his wife, Gisela von Radwitz. To this day, Helm Heine writes and illustrates comic books and is active in various artistic fields.

SPIEGEL: How do you celebrate your birthday?

Radwitz: Everyone is invited.

Heine: Yes, we celebrate a few hours in the park with about 30 Russell friends. Theres a little finger food, champagne, and some speeches made.

SPIEGEL: What lows and highs do you see when you look back?

Heine: They were all in Africa. Because there I mutated from a business economist to an artist. In 1965, she emigrated to South Africa. I worked for an advertising agency, met friends there and discovered my artistic side through them.

SPIEGEL: Was this transformation the most prominent thing in your life?

Heine: Yes and at the same time the poorest time. I was robbed eight times and of course there was hate. I bought a gun and said Im going to shoot the next robber. I almost shot the milkman.

SPIEGEL: Was this the low point?

Heine: Yeah. But there wasnt as much laughter and dancing there as in the poorest neighborhoods and in Africa in general. This made me strong. I was poor too, and I came up with nothing. How to gain power through positive thinking is what impressed me about Africans.

SPIEGEL: There are many countries where the sun shines. Why did you go to South Africa of all places, a country with an apartheid system?

Heine: I wanted to see for myself how it is there. It was also easy to migrate to South Africa. Going to the US or Canada was complicated, and in the US you risked enlisting in the Vietnam War with a green card. Immigration to Africa then cost 100 marks by ship from Trieste via Venice via the Suez Canal to Africa.

picture:

Peter Stephen / Dr.

Helm Heine: Picture Book Career

14 photos

SPIEGEL: Was it not known how the Boers ruled in Germany at that time?

Heine: Yes, thats why we set out and tried to change things. I founded a political-literary cabaret. We were the only ones in South Africa to deal with apartheid.

SPIEGEL: Were blacks in the group, too?

Heine: It was impossible. But we played Jane Genets maids, for example. If you see the maids in the play, everyone knows what is meant by it. It was a balancing act. We have received calls from the German embassy saying: Heine, please take it slow. Not only were we living there and using it positively, but we also tried to think about this country politically.

SPIEGEL: How do you deal with apartheid in everyday life?

Heine: Treat black people like everyone else in the world.

SPIEGEL: Did you pay them better?

Heine: Sure, they lived better for more food, as much as I could in my humble circumstances. Trust me, we havent made it easy for us.

SPIEGEL: Its best known for the picture book Friends since 1982. To this day, people think about it primarily when they hear your name.

Heine: Yes, thats a classic.

SPIEGEL: Rooster, mouse and pig take on harmless adventures in the countryside, and theres a call to cohesion.

Heine: Well not quite. My books differ from most picture books because they contain an initial story. I wonder: What is friendship? how many people are there? Theyd be normal friends, so Ill have three because I want the problem, too. Then I write to children who cannot read. It is not enough to say that the three are friends. I have to clarify that. This is how I came up with the bike, which only three of them can ride as a tricycle. It is about friendship, not friends.

SPIEGEL: Want to convey a message and not tell an interesting story much?

Heine: both of them.

SPIEGEL: The characters operate in isolation from the outside world, the three move into a sterile universe.

HeineWell, one can present more difficulties. However, only one page of text and twelve double pages of images are available.

SPIEGEL: What is a good childrens book for you?

Heine: It is not a story in the childish language of bla-bla-bla, but more like film than literature. It should also be of interest to adults. Otherwise it is not a good picture book.

SPIEGEL: Have you ever thought about making storyboards?

Heine: No, this is too poor for me. I have never liked reading comics. I think Peanuts are good, they have a philosophy.

SPIEGEL: Ive written so many friends and other animal books that it sounds like a scam.

HeineI have written many books with people, but books with animals are more successful. On The Wonderful Journey Through the Night I thought about how to film jazz. Or Saturday in Heaven: I tried to tell the story of evolution.

SPIEGEL: Friends fit the zeitgeist of the 1980s at the time of the peace movement. Will it still be such a success today?

Heine: Im still selling well today. In my first book, The Elephant Once, it was said that kids wouldnt understand it was a success. Then when you wake up someone says again Oh, so cute, but its over. I do not believe that. Elementary stories always find their readers. In Germany it may be one at a time.

SPIEGEL: Janusz wrote similar books.

Heine: Oh, How Beautiful is Panama is one of the few books that stands out because it contains an initial story. Lots of other things were just too skinny for me. And Im sorry that I love Janusz in his own way. Then marketing! There have been over 1000 articles, you spoil yourself with that. I always avoided that.

SPIEGEL: But they also promote on your website.

Heine: Yes, but much less.

SPIEGELWhy write for children?

Heine: For me, it is not about the target group, it is about my own creativity. What fascinates me is the staging images. It is a myth that you have to keep a child awake to write to children. For me, this is the biggest nonsense. Great childrens book author Beatrix Potter hated the kids so much that she would move across the street when they approached her. She also interviews authors who say: I would like to write a novel, but first and foremost I will write for children. I can hardly see red.

SPIEGEL: Author Enid Blyton once said coldly of Verrisse: Im not interested in criticism from people over the age of twelve.

Heine: The child is a ruthless critic. If the book is not impressive, it gets up and goes. To become a great childrens book author you have to be a writer and illustrator. The two are fire and water. The author thinks about the words and takes time to develop something. A painter who lives in the present time. We think a picture on the spot. If the author describes this, he will need ten pages.

SPIEGEL: Did you intend to make the world a better place with childrens books?

Heine: No, no one can make the world a better place. I did this myself.

SPIEGEL: Do you have life-long friends?

Heine: Yeah. I have few friends, but theyve always been this way. If we met earlier, everyone should have brought a story and told. I learned that in Africa, there is a wonderful tradition of storytelling there. My wife and I write a letter to all of our friends every Sunday. Sure, the contact is missing. But here I have a great garden and twelve months of great light. This is very important for a painter.

SPIEGEL: What repeatedly drove you to move away from Germany?

Heine: I will not let anything come from Germany. Its a wonderful country but so narrow, everything needs to be planned down to the smallest detail. In particular, I like the Germans more than the herd.

SPIEGEL: Together with singer Peter Maffai, you invented the little green kite tabalog. This musical figure is now terribly nervous for many people. Have you already experienced such reactions?

Heine: No, I didnt notice that. It disappeared behind this dragon. He died to death a little. I have mine there Participate I got, but I dont want to mention.

SPIEGEL: Are you good at participating?

Heine: Yes, very good. My wife always says Im so reckless. I find money only interesting when I can share it with friends. Im also very good at getting rid of it. The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation contacted me because they were interested in my property. What made me so happy was that the kids dont have to throw it away.

SPIEGEL: Is it okay to talk about your death?

Heine: Not bad at all. How are you supposed to be 80 and not think about death? Everyone in my family died a wonderful death. My father died while walking in the woods. My mother slept and never woke up.

SPIEGEL: Are you really close to Heinrich Heine?

Heine: Unfortunately no. I love his poems and I just memorized a great one from him:

Happiness is an easy whoreHe does not like to be in the same place;Hold your hair by your foreheadAnd he kisses you quickly and flaps away.On the contrary, Frau Misfortune has itBring you close to the heart.She says she is in no hurryIt sits beside your bed and knits.

Excerpt from:

Helmy Heine is 80 years old: "I almost shot milk" - theinformant.co.nz