#another perspective: the event rate seems to be low enough to go from applying for undergrad to applying for postdocs between detections | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

bigyack-com · 5 years ago

Text

As Fears of a Pandemic Mount, W.H.O. Says World Is Not Ready

BEIJING — As new cases of the coronavirus spiked on two continents, the World Health Organization warned on Monday that the world was not ready for a major outbreak, even as it praised China’s aggressive efforts to wrest the epidemic under control. After two weeks on the ground in China, a team sent by the W.H.O. concluded that the draconian measures China imposed a month ago may have saved hundreds of thousands of people from infection. Such measures — sealing off cities, shutting down businesses and schools, ordering people to remain indoors — have provoked anger in China and could be difficult to replicate in democratic countries with a greater emphasis on protecting civil liberties. “There’s no question that China’s bold approach to the rapid spread of this new respiratory pathogen has changed the course of what was a rapidly escalating and continues to be a deadly epidemic,” said Bruce Aylward, a Canadian doctor and epidemiologist who has overseen international campaigns to fight Ebola and polio and who led the W.H.O. delegation. The epidemic has already killed more than 2,500 people in China, mostly in Hubei Province, where the outbreak began in December, and infected more than 77,000 people. But the number of new infections in China has been steadily dropping, giving officials in the country confidence that the extraordinary measures have been effective in blunting the virus’s spread. There are concerns, however, that as people begin returning to work in China, the virus could flare up again. At the same time, new cases are escalating outside China. In Italy, where there has been an eruption of more than 150 cases, the authorities have locked down at least 10 towns, closed schools in major cities and canceled sporting events — all moves that are echoes of China’s tactics, if not quite as draconian. In Iran, the outbreak has killed at least 12 people as of Monday, the largest number of coronavirus-linked deaths outside China. South Korea on Monday reported 231 additional cases, bringing the nation’s total to 833 cases and seven deaths. Dr. Aylward said responding swiftly and aggressively to contain outbreaks and treat those infected was paramount. “We have all got to look at our systems because none of them work fast enough,” Dr. Aylward said. The virus that has crippled China for more than a month now threatens to become a pandemic that could touch virtually every part of the globe. Stock markets in Asia, Europe and North America plunged on Monday as investors worried that the economic disruption the outbreak has already caused in China is all but certain to have wider impact. The S & P 500 dropped nearly 3 percent in early trading on Monday, after European markets recorded their worst day since 2016, and major benchmarks in Asia closed sharply lower. The Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 900 points in the first hours of trading. Updated Feb. 10, 2020 What is a Coronavirus? It is a novel virus named for the crown-like spikes that protrude from its surface. The coronavirus can infect both animals and people, and can cause a range of respiratory illnesses from the common cold to more dangerous conditions like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS. How contagious is the virus? According to preliminary research, it seems moderately infectious, similar to SARS, and is possibly transmitted through the air. Scientists have estimated that each infected person could spread it to somewhere between 1.5 and 3.5 people without effective containment measures. How worried should I be? While the virus is a serious public health concern, the risk to most people outside China remains very low, and seasonal flu is a more immediate threat. Who is working to contain the virus? World Health Organization officials have praised China’s aggressive response to the virus by closing transportation, schools and markets. This week, a team of experts from the W.H.O. arrived in Beijing to offer assistance. What if I’m traveling? The United States and Australia are temporarily denying entry to noncitizens who recently traveled to China and several airlines have canceled flights. How do I keep myself and others safe? Washing your hands frequently is the most important thing you can do, along with staying at home when you’re sick. China, which was the source of the outbreak, might also offer solutions, according to Chinese officials and the W.H.O.’s assessment, despite the confusion and obfuscation that slowed the government’s initial efforts to respond to what was then a mysterious new illness appearing in hospitals in Wuhan, the epicenter, in December. Since late January, the Chinese government has put at least 760 million people — more than half of its population — under residential lockdowns of varying strictness, from checkpoints at building entrances to hard limits on going outdoors, according to a New York Times analysis of government announcements in provinces and major cities. While China’s reporting has been at times confused — with changes to its method of counting causing huge swings in daily tolls — the overall trend since the middle of this month has indicated a slowing in the rate of infections. On Sunday, 24 Chinese provinces reported no new cases. Six of them lowered their emergency response measures. In Hubei Province there were 398 new cases, the second consecutive day in which the number of new cases declined. “The decline we are seeing is real,” Dr. Aylward said. Even so, the death toll continues to rise, with 150 deaths reported on Sunday, the highest in nearly three weeks. In total, 2,592 people in China have been killed by the virus. Liang Wannian, a senior official with China’s National Health Commission, said China was not ready to declare victory yet. “The situation is still very grim,” he said at a news conference. “We haven’t stopped the epidemic in Wuhan yet.” Many health experts agree it is premature to celebrate given the highly contagious nature of the virus and the potential for a new surge in cases when millions of people go back to work in China or when travel restrictions are lifted. But they generally agreed with the W.H.O.’s assessment on China’s measures. “The containment definitely worked in China,” said Leo Poon, the head of the public health laboratory sciences division at the University of Hong Kong. “The question now is whether similar policies can be applied in other countries.” Clarence Tam, an assistant professor of infectious diseases at the School of Public Health at the National University of Singapore, said it was difficult to interpret the case numbers from China, particularly from Hubei. That is because the total number of infections jumped when the authorities expanded the methods used to diagnose them twice in two weeks. “Trying to look at the case numbers is very difficult,” Dr. Tam said. “We don’t really know what is influencing those case numbers.’' Adding to the confusion, Chinese media outlets reported on Monday that Wuhan would begin easing a sweeping lockdown, by allowing some people to leave. But just hours after news of the change emerged, the authorities backtracked, saying the announcement had been made in error. What is unclear to many public health experts is whether a shortage of testing kits is causing a large number of cases to remain undetected. Hospitals in China remain overstretched and many patients say they have been turned away. Health care workers are still coming down with the virus despite official pledges to protect them. Mr. Liang, the health official, said more than 3,000 health care workers have been infected. Another problem is that China does not disclose how many people are being tested. If the proportion of people being tested is really declining, it would suggest there is a downturn in the rate of transmission. “But we don’t have that yet,” Dr. Tam said. “From my perspective, it’s ‘watch and wait and see,’ ” he said. “It looks positive but it’s difficult to interpret what those numbers mean at the moment.” In a speech on Sunday, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, called the epidemic the country’s most serious public health crisis and said it was “the most difficult to prevent and control” since the founding of the People’s Republic. The epidemic has already severely disrupted life and commerce — as well as the Communist Party’s annual legislative conferences that had been scheduled to begin in Beijing in early March. The Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress announced on Monday that it had postponed the conferences indefinitely. Mr. Xi said controlling the outbreak in Wuhan and Hubei as well as preventing the epidemic from spreading to Beijing, the capital, were the country’s top two strategic goals. He pledged more pro-growth policies to help overcome the epidemic. David Heymann, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said the case numbers from China suggest that there “may be a decrease in transmission.” China was following its playbook from the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak of 2002-2003, said Dr. Heymann, a former chief of communicable diseases at the W.H.O., when it was “able to stop outbreaks outside the epicenter in Guangdong Province by meticulous outbreak containment and control.” The real test could be yet to come. As China moves to restart its economy, the coronavirus could flare up again. “There is an acute recognition here that just as we — the Chinese — forced the tail of this outbreak down, it could come back up again as people start to move again, the shops start to open, the restaurants open, the schools open,” Dr. Aylward said. “It’s a risk.” Steven Lee Myers reported from Beijing and Sui-Lee Wee from Singapore. Amber Wang and Claire Fu contributed research in Beijing. Read the full article

#fears #health #HealthNews #Mount #Pandemic #Ready #World

0 notes

enetarch-working-w-adhd · 5 years ago

Text

Can I tell if someone has ADHD?

The short answer is .. not without in depth testing. However, people with and without ADHD have to suspect in order to be tested in depth. So, what do we see externally that makes us go, “Uhrm?!? I wonder?”

ADHD affects several areas of the brain either through genetics or through physical trauma. Those areas are: working memory, short term memory, executive function, the emotional center, and the motor functions. We will look at these components separate and together. To help, I will use a Multi-Tasking GUI OS as an example .. windows, linux, apple, android, iphone .. to name a few.

The Basic Components

Working memory is used to store all current tasks. This is equivalent to a program and the memory it has been allocated by the OS. If you don’t have a lot of working memory, it gets swapped out with long term memory or a file on disk known as a swap file.

Short Term Memory is that area of the brain that manages the current tasks being performed. This is what allows you to multi-task. Your mind switches from task to task and back with ease, and most importantly, without forgetting all the tasks that are running.

Executive Function performs many different functions, least of which is determine what is important. From an OS perspective, this watches for signals from all over the computer and switches in and out different programs to handle them. For, example, when a program needs information stored in a swap file, the computer switches to a program that handles that function. Then when the swap file responds, another program is run.

The Emotional Center (Amygdala) [1] is responsible for managing a person’s emotional response to internal and external stimuli. Basic emotions of fight, flight, or stop give way to a variety of colored emotional responses depending the situation and environment. [2]

The Motor Cortex [3] controls a person’s actual arms and legs. It is where the motherboard connects to the hardware, like the mouse, printer, monitor, ... now think about this in terms of a robot or drone. Their motor cortex tells the various components that give the robot or drone the ability to move.

Their Failure

ADHD in adults is not like ADHD in children. While all the same components are affected, their responses change over time. The biggest change is in the messages from the Emotional Center through the Executive function to the Motor Cortex, which controls fidgeting. Many adults with ADHD will state that their K12 teachers told them to stop fidgeting in class; pay attention; or apply themselves. The problem is that the necessary circuitry needed to control self regulation of motor functions doesn’t exist. While they can do it for a small period of time, once their attention switches off this process they can no longer control the fidgeting. As children mature into adults, enough neurons form to help take the stress of the system.

Per Dr. B Russell, the human brain in people with ADHD vs Normal People (NeuroTypical) is 3%. It’s a significant amount of neurons lost. And, more importantly, it’s not enough for current imaging processes to be able to detect the difference. However, we can see the difference when looking at how sugar is processed in a developing brain. I have no data on whether this technique can be used in adults.

As mentioned, when a child focuses they can control their fidgeting. Fidgeting, though, is only 1 symptom that can be expressed. Children can hum, tap, rock, doodle, draw, day dream, or respond to every external stimuli around them. While this may seem typical, the question you have to ask is, “Can they stop doing it without willing themselves to do it, for long periods of time?” To give this some context, when learning to meditate, most students can only sit still for 10 minutes before they have to jump off the matt. After practicing for years, most people can sit for hours at a time. This is the difference between willing yourself to do something, and just being able to do something without effort.

Symptoms

Drive and Motivation - come from the Emotional Center. It tells the brain whether or not it likes something. And, if it doesn’t like something, it tells the brain to get away from it. If it likes something, it wants more of it. From an outward perspective, this translates into an employee’s desire to either do the work or not do the work. Or get started with a task. Once people with ADHD get started, they may hyperfocus, because the brain starts to like the challenge of working on the task. So, if you interrupt them during this time, they will lose all that energy. And, then they will be stuck waiting for the drive to kick back in.

External motivators have no effect. Forget about using Money, Write ups, or other punitive measures to motivate your employee. None of them will work. People with ADHD have a high rate of turnover because of this very problem. We don’t fit the standard managerial mold.

Switching Tasks - The next problem that people with ADHD exhibit is an inability to switch tasks easily. Or, be able to prioritize the importance of tasks. To someone with ADHD, everything is important. Thus, if they are working on something, they have to tune out everything .. email, cell phones, social media, phone calls ... you name it. Paradoxically, some people with ADHD thrive in this environment, since everything has the same weight, nothing is special, and they process every event as it arrives.

The inability to control their emotional center means that people with ADHD will have high highs and low lows based on events. This is different from people with BiPolar disorder who also have emotions that swing, but have no associated event triggering them. In ADHD, the loss of an item could cause depression, where winning a contract will cause them to be ecstatic. However, to contrast this with someone normal, the state could be maintained for multiple days or switch as quickly as a new event arrives. [4]

A mother told her son that he was going to go to the pool the night before. He was so excited, that he didn’t sleep that night. The next day his mother realized he was going to have a bad day. He wanted to go to the pool so bad. She took him. They got into the water, and then he started freaking out. The other children didn’t understand what was happening and while they tried to show him how easy it was, it only caused further embarrassment. He is a good swimmer.

What happened here is that his emotional center fried his executive function. He was so excited, his executive function couldn’t tell his motor control what to do, and thus all he could do was flail. He went home very embarrassed and disappointed that day.

A recommendation was made to not tell him that he was gong to the pool, but to spring in on it as a treat. See if he could handle the sudden change in plans, and thus swim happily. [anonymous]

Forgotten Tasks - if no task is more important than another task, and all tasks have the same priority, then tasks will fall off the mental ToDo list. This will hold especially true if an employee with ADHD finds something more interesting to do.

Recall - People have problems recalling all sorts of things. It’s not that they are absent minded, it’s that when the information is needed, they can’t access it. Not that they didn’t learn it, or don’t have it, or ignored it. They physically can’t access it. It’s akin to the deer in the headlights syndrome; or having the word you want to say stuck on the tip of your tongue, but you can’t remember it. This situation will appear during highly emotional moments.

Time Blindness - If you were to prepare for a meeting that was to happen a week or two from now, you would have a mental lists of tasks in your head on what you needed to do. A person with ADHD can’t do that. They have lists everywhere. Things to remind them of when they have to do X Y and/or Z and by when. The farther the due date is, the less likely they are to work on the project. The closer the due date, the more they are scrambling to get the project done.

Interest Based Motivation - While the Emotional Center was discussed as being the source of motivation, it has been mentioned that people with ADHD are always attracted to things they are interested in. And, if they are interested in the project, they hyper-focus on it (Or, In the Zone). If you find that your employee always wants to be part of the NEW PROJECT, even though they are on another project. This is due to the fact that they’ve lost interest in the old project. This, however, leads into the next problem.

Impulse Control - or lack of it. Most people with ADHD see something shiny, new and fun, and have to have it. They can’t get it out of their mind until they have it. This can lead to social problems as well.

Social Problems - People with ADHD usually have social problems. Take someone with who is unable to control their body during emotional Highs and Lows and put them in a social situation. They are awkward. Not knowing what to say, or saying what’s on their mind, and suddenly realizing that everyone is pissed off at them. This not only causes social rifts in the office, but everyone refuses to work with someone with ADHD because they are insensitive, or don’t have control over their thoughts.

Following Instructions - it’s not that people with ADHD can’t follow instructions, we can. But what we have a hard time doing is following instructions that are buried in paragraphs. If they are in list form, then we can check them off. (Remember that comment about lists, above. This should resonate by now.)

Tasks Take Longer - or do they? If you had a stop watch to actually measure the amount of time someone completed a task, vs someone who started and stopped a lot took to complete the task, you might find that both parties took the same amount of time to complete the task. What the difference is, is when the task is completed.

No Association between Cause and Effect in Consequences - you can scold someone with ADHD all you want. Write Ups, Reports, threats of dismissal, you name it .. none of that will work, because their brain will just keep on doing what it has always done. It’s not a coping mechanism where if they just tried harder they could fix the problem. It’s a physical problem that can’t be fixed, because their brain doesn’t contain enough neurons to managed the world like yours does.

Wrapping Up

Due to a physical failure in the brain, people with ADHD have a physical handicap that they cannot overcome. There is a lot of material concerning the topic, which resolves down to these 6 test topics:

Event Driven Emotions

Impulse Control

Interest Based Projects

Time Blindness

No Association between Cause and Effect in Consequences

Social awkwardness

It should be noted that several other abnormalities can also cause symptoms like ADHD, in part. But as a whole, ADHD is pretty much a unique grouping of symptoms.

In the next article, I’ll recommend some fixes for most of these problems, that will help you can your employee cope better and work better.

=====

References:

[1] What Parts of the Human Brain Correspond to Emotion?

https://www.livestrong.com/article/77419-parts-human-brain-correspond-emotion/

[2] Contrasting and categorization of emotions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrasting_and_categorization_of_emotions

[3] The Anatomy of Movement

https://brainconnection.brainhq.com/2013/03/05/the-anatomy-of-movement/

[4] Is It Bipolar Disorder or ADHD? Learn the Signs

https://www.healthline.com/health/bipolar-disorder/bipolar-or-adhd

0 notes

recentanimenews · 5 years ago

Text

Life Under State of Emergency: Kyoto and Sendai

A lonely Hachiko at midday (Photo: Daryl Harding)

After looking at how the State of Emergency in Japan has affected voice acting in anime, we wanted to highlight some stories from people living all over Japan, how they are coping with the current coronavirus (COVID-19) lockdown, and their thoughts on the situation.

In this two-part feature, we will focus on four people from four different areas of Japan, from Japanese citizens and foreigners living in the country, to get their perspective and feelings on how the “lockdown” is affecting them.

(Note: All answers have been edited down for clarity.)

In Japan’s Old Capital of Kyoto

Kyoto last November (Photo: Daryl Harding)

I first spoke with Matthew Li from New York, who works as a social media marketer and producer for OtakuVS, an anime streetwear brand and YouTube channel, from his home in Kyoto.

First, how are you doing in the “lockdown,” even though it’s not technically a lockdown?

I live in Kyoto, so the “rules of the lockdown” might differ from Tokyo's rules. I can say that most of the city streets have emptied out and a majority of stores and restaurants are closed temporarily. To me, it's a good thing as it gives almost no incentives for tourists to visit or for locals to hang out in large groups.

How has the quarantine affected you personally?

I'm someone who likes to eat out, shop for clothes, and go to concerts, so the quarantine has affected my social life quite a bit. I had a lot of plans to travel around Kansai and Japan before the State of Emergency, but of course, all of that has been postponed. However, staying home has helped me keep productive on my hobbies, such as writing scripts.

What about professionally?

In Japan, I'm mostly working on marketing and production for OtakuVS right now. Since most of the stuff on OtakuVS is done digitally and from home, not much of it has changed apart from some scheduling.

Was there anything you were looking forward to that has now been canceled?

So many plans have been canceled or postponed, which of course doesn't feel great. I had booked a concert for the peggies (who sang the ending theme “Stand by Me” for Sarazanmai) in May, which is canceled. I was also hoping to go to Summer Sonic in Osaka in August though that probably isn't going to happen either. I'm sure many people have had bigger life milestones they've had to cancel though, so I always remind myself that I'm relatively lucky.

Is there anything you’ve started to do because of the lockdown?

I started reading a lot of news on the coronavirus, which maybe isn't the most healthy habit to pick up ...

What are you using to cope with being forced to stay inside?

I've been spending a good amount of my time on my backlog on films and catching up on manga like The Quintessential Quintuplets and Komi Can't Communicate. As for anime, I haven't been interested in many shows recently besides KAGUYA-SAMA: LOVE IS WAR, which will always win my heart.

How has your neighborhood/town changed?

My neighborhood has always been pretty sleepy since it's residential, so it doesn't feel any different.

What are you looking forward to once everything is over?

I'm looking forward to seeing my friends, eating out, and traveling again.

How do you feel about Japan’s response to the pandemic?

I think Japan's response has been very weak thus far. It seems to me that many politicians don't want to take responsibility for an economic downturn or to force change in the work culture here, but it's come to the point where decisions are being made too late. Japan's rate of testing is terrifyingly low in comparison with its neighbors, South Korea, and Taiwan, which has allowed the virus to spread at a growing pace. I don't think Japan will become another Italy or New York, but it's definitely not going to have an easy time in the coming weeks.

Sleepy Areas of Sendai

I then spoke to Takazuki, an avid fan of the Naoko Yamada anime film Liz and the Blue Bird and an international student that has been studying in Japan for nearly 4 years in the city of Sendai in Miyagi Prefecture.

Firstly, how are you doing in the “lockdown,” even though it’s not technically a lockdown?

I live in Sendai, and each day feels like cases are getting worse after the Olympic flame was displayed in Miyagi prefecture. Although it’s not a big city, a lot of retail chains were closed.

How has the quarantine affected you personally?

It stressed me out immensely at the start due to the thoughts of it greatly affecting my career, but I’m slowly getting by. I’m fluctuating in my mental health and good physical health but slowly getting used to this quarantine lifestyle.

What about professionally?

This was my biggest worry in this pandemic. I major in STEM (research-focused); now I am unable to take samples and do research in my lab. This is my last year, so I am afraid I couldn’t graduate.

International students here start their semester in Fall instead of Spring, unlike the Japanese students. I may have to change my thesis despite being halfway done and focus on write-ups and analysis instead.

Was there anything you were looking forward to that has now been canceled?

I was planning to visit Kyoto before Spring Break ended to attend a doujin event, do an anime pilgrimage, visit the KyoAni & Do shop and simply relax. I also wanted to visit the famous Agata Festival in Uji before I graduate, but I don’t think this pandemic will end before I’m able to graduate.

I also attend a lot of anime events. I had won tickets for the Sound! Euphonium concert, AZALEA live, ReoNa tour, Sword Art Online Orchestra concert, and applied for many more, but all of those events either got canceled or postponed. I was also looking forward to going to the Akita Pride March, and this season’s fantastic TV anime and movie lineup.

Is there anything you’ve started to do because of the lockdown?

I’ve recently started playing games. It’s something I’ve not done in years because university and attending events have kept me busy. Been exercising a lot more too.

What are you using to cope with being forced to stay inside?

Liz and the Blue Bird. It’s an anime movie that’s keeping me sane. I can watch it multiple times and still have fun analyzing it. I’m not too caught up with seasonal anime (though they’re mostly postponed anyway), so I ended up watching more old anime for nostalgia. I haven’t touched JRPG in seven years because they usually take more than 80 hours, so I took this chance to play games like Tales of Vesperia.

Taka's shrine to Liz and the Blue Bird and Sound! Euphonium

How has your neighborhood/town changed?

Nothing changed much at Level 3 warning in early April [when the State of Emergency was called, though Miyagi wasn’t on the initial list]. People were still going to the lab, as usual, we were more afraid of not going to work and felt guilty for staying home due to the work culture.

[Note: The levels refer to Taka’s university internal system of ranking the pandemic. Level 4 refers to the State of Emergency declaration.]

As of writing, there are still some people out in Sendai in some areas but I’ve never seen it this empty, except during the New Year period, and when I go out for karaoke with friends until 3 or 4 AM until early in the morning, a common practice in Japan.

What are you looking forward to once everything is over?

Karaoke with friends, meeting my favorite author and voice actors, going to events again, and anime pilgrimages. I’m also working on a collaboration with Japanese fans of Sound! Euphonium for a certain event.

How do you feel about Japan’s response to the pandemic?

Definitely not pleased, they could’ve done so much better. A lot of people think Japan is a utopia, but it’s just like any other country. Perhaps that’s why everyone expected better.

Even at Level 3, some people are still doing sampling and come to the lab every day, hold meetings (not online), and conduct experiments. I was shocked at how there is no sense of urgency not just by the government, but by the citizens as well. It took Sendai to Level 4 (out of 5) to realize that this pandemic is not to be treated lightly.

Any other stories you’d like to tell?

I had to be quarantined for more than a month because I was in a certain area. When I’m finally no longer under supervision, I was able to check out the cherry blossoms around my quiet neighborhood and go downtown to finally grab some McDonald’s that I’d been craving. McDonald’s is good enough for me to survive …

Unlike Tokyo or any other countries like Indonesia, there aren’t that many delivery services like UberEats in Sendai. The Konbini is my life savior, it is my best friend.

Thank you to both Matthew and Taka for talking to us and sharing their stories in this troubling time. You can find Matthew’s work at OtakuVS, and find Taka on Twitter at @takasakinozomi, where she talks a lot about Liz and the Blue Bird.

If you or someone who know is living in Japan, coronavirus-based English resources are available at NHK World Japan.

Daryl Harding is a Japan Correspondent for Crunchyroll News. He also runs the YouTube channel about Japan stuff called TheDoctorDazza, tweets at @DoctorDazza, and posts photos of his travels on Instagram.

By: [email protected]

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

0 notes

cryptowavesxyz · 5 years ago

Text

Can Venture Success Rate Be Outraced by Crypto?

In a world where blockchain technology is rapidly breaking barriers and disrupting industries one at a time, the emergence of new models to replace classical crowdfunding ventures is just a matter of time. More than a decade after Bitcoin’s introduction, we’ve witnessed new crowdfunding models replacing the initial public offering for funding blockchain-fueled projects — the initial coin offering, decentralized autonomous organization DAO, the security token offering and the initial exchange offering.

History indicates that if you have honey, the bees will follow. However, countless illicit schemes and scam projects have caused some misguided investments. So, why have there been so many attempts to establish an ideal crowdfunding approach for the maturing technology industry, yet still, none of the introduced models can change the standard venture success rate when it comes to investments?

The blockchain impact on crowdfunding

The traditional model of third-party investment to fund private business development is considered an outdated, time consuming and complicated process. The similarity between IPOs and ICOs is that these financial models are special cases of crowdfunding.

Stock IPO is the most respectable form of crowdfunding so far, with the prospect of a financial return for its sponsors. However, the downside of this model is its high entry threshold for both the sponsors and, primarily, the organizing company. Sponsors must access the exchange through a broker, while the company undergoes a complicated listing procedure.

The advent of blockchain technologies, new projects and markets, and as a result — the emergence of initial coin offerings worldwide — has become a significant turning point in how developers can find a way to fund their perspective idea or project, significantly lowering the entry threshold.

The creation of an ICO itself is an attempt to apply exchange IPO rules in a more democratic and free environment of the cryptocurrency market. During an ICO procedure, the company does not place shares, but tokens instead, which are regarded the same as cryptocurrencies. Tokens are the new shares, but tied to a specific project and usually do not represent anything new technically.

From king of the hill to oblivion

The higher democracy of the ICO procedure means it usually involves more independent and smaller players than the more traditional IPO. When it comes to investors, no one can compare with Vanguard Group, and among the issuers — for example, with Amazon. ICOs were used not by top companies with a well-known and established reputation, but by high-tech startups and teams with a promising idea and no danger of suffering reputational damage.

Compared to 2016, the blockchain crowdfunding market was overheated with capital already, which has inevitably led to less potential benefit for possible ICO investors and almost collapsed the model a year later. ICOs were the red-hot trend, as 853 projects collected over $6.2 billion. This increased the following year, with 1253 ICOs raising $7.8 billion. However, this success was scuppered by dodgy projects and an increasing number of Ponzi schemes, making investors question whether ICOs were a genuine investment at all. Right there, the initial exchange offering stepped in. In total, token generation events during 2019 raised $3.2 billion, while ICOs raised ten times less during the same period.

Companies like Coinbase and Circle raised money from venture capitalists. By the middle of 2019, VC funding in cryptocurrency startups accounted for $822 million. Moreover, a Gartner study suggests that blockchain is estimated to generate $3.1 trillion in new business value by 2030.

Related: Venture Capital Financing in Crypto, Explained

One of the well-known cases of a successful ICO is the creation of the Ethereum (ETH) cryptocurrency. In 2014, the company issued tokens, which rose radically in price some time later. In 2014, only $16 million was collected in total for various ICO projects, and by 2016, this figure increased to $90 million, while 2017 broke all records for market capitalization. Moreover, during the period from 2015 to 2017, funding increased from $6 million in 2015 to more than $6 billion. The overall venture capital market amounted to over $76 billion in the United States that year.

Related: What is Ethereum. Guide for Beginners.

So, can decent projects be distinguished from scams? Of course it is not easy, particularly since the number of fraudulent projects increased to a whopping 80% in 2017.

The attractiveness of the ICO mechanism resulted in the global downside trend the year after the hype started and catastrophe for blockchain crowdfunding, slowing down global acceptance drastically. While it was suitable for raising funds and launching projects, a settlement mechanism for distributing dividends was absent.

The strategy of reimbursement to ICO shareholders had two significant drawbacks: a change of shares ownership upon repurchasing the tokens, which does not exist in the classical system, where shares are separated from the dividends; and the liquidity of any ICO tokens is lower than the liquidity of fiat money from the very beginning, because the coins are derived from a particular project of the company, and the real money is a derivative of the economy — that is, all companies combined.

In the latter case, the company has to pay a margin for the difference between the purchase and the sale of the ICO coin to conduct the repurchases. Due to the low liquidity of the ICO coin tied to a specific project, the margin cost will be high. Also, the liquidity of the ICO coin is lower than the liquidity of the universal coin tied to the economy or particular assets as a whole.

Deceitful new ways

The cryptocurrency environment has fundamental differences from the traditional economy, and it is hardly necessary for the state to deal with its regulations. Specific methods and solutions to bring the reliability of crypto investments closer to the standards of the classic stock market are required but with maximum democratic rules. They must and will be developed over time.

The advent of IEOs in late 2018 to early 2019 has introduced another approach to regulation over the chaotic and already infamous market, shifting the power of a token sale from the hands of unknown amateurs and third parties to exchanges.

Related: A New Trend in Crypto Funding Campaigns: Companies Resorting to IEOs

In fact, IEO fraud has become additional proof that many well-established crypto exchanges fake their trading volumes on a constant basis. Even the IEO model was intended to be a more trustworthy alternative to the more traditional ICO — an activity that became infamous due to global regulatory heat, exit scams and countless illicit actors. The concept of an exchange serving as the white knight that screens out the unworthy market participants and questionable projects had merit, though eventually compromised itself in less than a year. As IEO integrity can’t be trusted anymore, some cryptocurrency startup projects are already lamenting and showing the public how exchanges have defrauded them.

Bitwise presented a white paper to the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission, which showed the results of studies performed on cryptocurrency exchanges. It was reported that only ten exchanges show their real volume, while other cryptocurrency exchanges fake their volume. This results in the truth that 95% of all Bitcoin trading volumes are faked. The most important reason was to gain visibility on data-aggregating platforms like Coinmarketcap and also to inflate their listing fees.

Venture success rate can’t be beaten

Then again, why is the VC still at large in 2020? Venture funds have such things as venture capital power. They can capitalize on “liquidation preference,” which means gaining power on everything that an investment comes with. For example, when closing a particular project, a corporation can get its hands on everything that comes from the investment: equipment, merchandise and so on.

Initial coin offerings don’t have a mechanism for legal regulations. So, 5% of paybacks were an optimistic number in this case when it comes to returns.

Crypto projects will never be able to fight the gravity of venture success rates, especially without legal bounds. Without it and due diligence, 2% is a good number. So, we can tell that 40 out of 2000 established successful projects is not a very significant achievement, but rather a reality that comes along with mathematic calculations.

95% of VCs aren’t actually returning enough money to justify the risk, fees and illiquidity that their investors are taking on by investing in their funds.

To summarize, venture capital is a tough business. Investors struggle to get paid in excess returns for the risk, fees and illiquidity they take on for investing in venture capital. Entrepreneurs struggle to scale and grow their companies and position for great exits. It’s not natural for a founder at stage one to know how he’ll grow from zero to billion. So many things will change along the journey. VCs struggle to generate the returns they promise, and only a very few manage to deliver.

But VCs enjoy the only downside protection in the business — they can rely on fees to pay themselves when their investments are mediocre. The long feedback cycle means that VCs can raise a few funds — and lock in a few fee streams — before their less-than-stellar returns catch up with them.

Future perspectives

ICOs, STOs, IEOs and the later initial DEX offering, or IDO… We have seen and learned a lot of new abbreviations during the last few years and there is no doubt that the show, and the model list, must and will go on.

Security token offerings seem to be a new cure for the modern crypto investment market and its harsh conditions. In fact, they are now considered the next and logical evolutionary step. First of all, such models intend to issue digital assets in full compliance with securities legislation to provide a higher degree of protection for investor rights and lower regulatory risks for token issuers. In addition, STOs are guided by a different target audience — only professional (accredited) investors can participate in such a placement.

Security tokens have many pros when compared to traditional financial products. Despite lacking intermediaries such as banks and other organizations, they provide a completely different environment for investing and concluding deals — more solvent and more responsible.

Polymath, a security token protocol platform, estimates that security tokens will soon win the race with the now-dominant “utility tokens” like Bitcoin, and sees security tokens exploding to a value of $10 trillion by 2020.

Despite the rising trend for the STO model, some market players will still continue to adhere to the principles of traditional ICOs and try to fund their creative project through the infamous model. In its essence, STO is closer to a classical IPO than an initial coin offering. With their strict rules, STOs are a product of a new time, invented to avoid an “illegal” approach to fundraising. Moreover, these rules create a real investment opportunity for institutional investors, which can lead to a plentiful flow of funds into the blockchain field.

Speaking of the later model’s emergence, the forthcoming revelations may be different as market participants may envision and implement various models in the future, aimed to go toe-to-toe with strict regulations implied by the global and local watchdogs. We need a very precise and reliable system, in which tokens will ultimately fall into the capital structure. What this model may be, we’re about to see in the year to come.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Gregory Klumov is a sought-after stablecoin expert whose insights and opinions appear regularly in numerous international publications. He is the founder and CEO of STASIS, a technology provider that issues the most widely-used Euro-backed stablecoins with the highest transparency standard in the digital asset industry.

The post Can Venture Success Rate Be Outraced by Crypto? appeared first on Crypto Waves.

from Crypto Waves https://ift.tt/2TWyw0q

#IFTTT #Crypto Waves

0 notes

angryconnoisseurface · 5 years ago

Text

Can Venture Success Rate Be Outraced by Crypto?

The blockchain impact on crowdfunding

From king of the hill to oblivion

Related: Venture Capital Financing in Crypto, Explained

Related: What is Ethereum. Guide for Beginners.

So, can decent projects be distinguished from scams? Of course it is not easy, particularly since the number of fraudulent projects increased to a whopping 80% in 2017.

Deceitful new ways

Related: A New Trend in Crypto Funding Campaigns: Companies Resorting to IEOs

Venture success rate can’t be beaten

Initial coin offerings don’t have a mechanism for legal regulations. So, 5% of paybacks were an optimistic number in this case when it comes to returns.

95% of VCs aren’t actually returning enough money to justify the risk, fees and illiquidity that their investors are taking on by investing in their funds.

Future perspectives

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

The post Can Venture Success Rate Be Outraced by Crypto? appeared first on Tip Crypto.

from Tip Crypto https://ift.tt/2v2JqZQ

#Tip Crypto

0 notes

noisyunknownturtle · 5 years ago

Text

Can Venture Success Rate Be Outraced by Crypto?

The blockchain impact on crowdfunding

From king of the hill to oblivion

Related: Venture Capital Financing in Crypto, Explained

Related: What is Ethereum. Guide for Beginners.

So, can decent projects be distinguished from scams? Of course it is not easy, particularly since the number of fraudulent projects increased to a whopping 80% in 2017.

Deceitful new ways

Related: A New Trend in Crypto Funding Campaigns: Companies Resorting to IEOs

Venture success rate can’t be beaten

Initial coin offerings don’t have a mechanism for legal regulations. So, 5% of paybacks were an optimistic number in this case when it comes to returns.

95% of VCs aren’t actually returning enough money to justify the risk, fees and illiquidity that their investors are taking on by investing in their funds.

Future perspectives

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

The post Can Venture Success Rate Be Outraced by Crypto? appeared first on For Crypto.

from For Crypto https://ift.tt/334LzAI

#For Crypto

0 notes

coinretreat · 5 years ago

Text

Can Venture Success Rate Be Outraced by Crypto?

The blockchain impact on crowdfunding

From king of the hill to oblivion

Related: Venture Capital Financing in Crypto, Explained

Related: What is Ethereum. Guide for Beginners.

So, can decent projects be distinguished from scams? Of course it is not easy, particularly since the number of fraudulent projects increased to a whopping 80% in 2017.

Deceitful new ways

Related: A New Trend in Crypto Funding Campaigns: Companies Resorting to IEOs

Venture success rate can’t be beaten

Initial coin offerings don’t have a mechanism for legal regulations. So, 5% of paybacks were an optimistic number in this case when it comes to returns.

95% of VCs aren’t actually returning enough money to justify the risk, fees and illiquidity that their investors are taking on by investing in their funds.

Future perspectives

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

The post Can Venture Success Rate Be Outraced by Crypto? appeared first on CoinRetreat.

from CoinRetreat https://ift.tt/2IyEQWk

#IFTTT #CoinRetreat

0 notes

coinfirst · 5 years ago

Text

Can Venture Success Rate Be Outraced by Crypto?

The blockchain impact on crowdfunding

From king of the hill to oblivion

Related: Venture Capital Financing in Crypto, Explained

Related: What is Ethereum. Guide for Beginners.

So, can decent projects be distinguished from scams? Of course it is not easy, particularly since the number of fraudulent projects increased to a whopping 80% in 2017.

Deceitful new ways

Related: A New Trend in Crypto Funding Campaigns: Companies Resorting to IEOs

Venture success rate can’t be beaten

Initial coin offerings don’t have a mechanism for legal regulations. So, 5% of paybacks were an optimistic number in this case when it comes to returns.

95% of VCs aren’t actually returning enough money to justify the risk, fees and illiquidity that their investors are taking on by investing in their funds.

Future perspectives

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

The post Can Venture Success Rate Be Outraced by Crypto? appeared first on Coin First.

from Coin First https://ift.tt/39wBxuK

#Coin First

0 notes

terabitweb · 6 years ago

Text

Original Post from Amazon Security Author: Becca Crockett

In the weeks leading up to re:Inforce, we’ll share conversations we’ve had with people who will be presenting at the event so you can learn more about them and some of the interesting work that they’re doing.

You don’t work at AWS, but you do have deep experience with AWS Services. Can you talk about how you developed that experience and the work that you do as a “Cloud Economist?”

I see those sarcastic scare-quotes!

I’ve been using AWS for about a decade in a variety of environments. It sounds facile, but it turns out that being kinda good at something starts with being abjectly awful at it first. Once you break things enough times, you start to learn how to wield them in more constructive ways.

I have a background in SRE-style work and finance. Blending those together into a made-up thing called “Cloud Economics” made sense and focused on a business problem that I can help solve. It starts with finding low-effort cost savings opportunities in customer accounts and quickly transitions into building out costing predictions, allocating spend—and (aligned with security!) building out workable models of cloud governance that don’t get in an engineer’s way.

This all required me to be both broad and deep across AWS’s offerings. Somewhere along the way, I became something of a go-to resource for the community. I don’t pretend to understand how it happened, but I’m incredibly grateful for the faith the broader community has placed in me.

You’re known for your snarky newsletter. When you meet AWS employees, how do they tend to react to you?

This may surprise you, but the most common answer by far is that they have no idea who I am.

It turns out AWS employs an awful lot of people, most of whom have better things to do than suffer my weekly snarky slings and arrows.

Among folks who do know who I am, the response has been nearly universal appreciation. It seems that the newsletter is received in which the spirit I intend it—namely, that 90–95% of what AWS does is awesome. The gap between that and perfection offers boundless opportunities for constructive feedback—and also hilarity.

The funniest reaction I ever got was when someone at a Summit registration booth saw “Last Week in AWS” on my badge and assumed I was an employee serving out the end of his notice period.

“Senior RageQuit Engineer” at your service, I suppose.

You’ve been invited to present during the Leadership Session for the re:Inforce Foundation Track with Beetle. What have you got planned?

Ideally not leaving folks asking incredibly pointed questions about how the speaker selection process was mismanaged! If all goes well, I plan on being able to finish my talk without being dragged off the stage by AWS security!

I kid. But my theory of adult education revolves around needing to grab people’s attention before you can teach them something. For better or worse, my method for doing that has always been humor. While I’m cognizant that messaging to a large audience of security folks requires a delicate touch, I don’t subscribe to the idea that you can’t have fun with it as well.

In short: if nothing else, it’ll be entertaining!

What’s one thing that everyone should stop reading and go do RIGHT NOW to improve their security posture?

Easy. Log into the console of your organization’s master account and enable AWS CloudTrail for all regions and all accounts in your organization. Direct that trail to a locked-down S3 bucket in a completely separate, highly restricted account, and you’ve got a forensic log of all management options across your estate.

Worst case, you’ll thank me later. Best case, you’ll never need it.

It’s important, so what’s another security thing everyone should do?

Log in to your AWS accounts right now and update your security contact to your ops folks. It’s not used for marketing; it’s a point of contact for important announcements.

If you’re like many rapid-growth startups, your account is probably pointing to your founder’s personal email address— which means critical account notices are getting lost among Amazon.com sock purchase receipts.

That is not what being “SOC-compliant” means.

From a security perspective, what recent AWS release are you most excited about?

It was largely unheralded, but I was thrilled to see AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store (it’s a great service, though the name could use some work) receive higher API rate limits; it went from 40 to 1,000 requests per second.

This is great for concurrent workloads and makes it likelier that people will manage secrets properly without having to roll their own.

Yes, I know that AWS Secrets Manager is designed around secrets, but KMS-encrypted parameters in Parameter Store also get the job done. If you keep pushing I’ll go back to using Amazon Route 53 TXT records as my secrets database… (Just kidding. Please don’t do this.)

In your opinion, what’s the biggest challenge facing cloud security right now?

The same thing that’s always been the biggest challenge in security: getting people to care before a disaster happens.

We see the same thing in cloud economics. People care about monitoring and controlling cloud spend right after they weren’t being diligent and wound up with an unpleasant surprise.

Thankfully, with an unexpectedly large bill, you have a number of options. But you don’t get a do-over with a data breach.

The time to care is now—particularly if you don’t think it’s a focus area for you. One thing that excites me about re:Inforce is that it gives an opportunity to reinforce that viewpoint.

Five years from now, what changes do you think we’ll see across the cloud security landscape?

I think we’re already seeing it now. With the advent of things like AWS Security Hub and AWS Control Tower (both currently in preview), security is moving up the stack.

Instead of having to keep track of implementing a bunch of seemingly unrelated tooling and rulesets, higher-level offerings are taking a lot of the error-prone guesswork out of maintaining an effective security posture.

Customers aren’t going to magically reprioritize security on their own. So it’s imperative that AWS continue to strive to meet them where they are.

What are the comparative advantages of being a cloud economist vs. a platypus keeper?

They’re more alike than you might expect. The cloud has sharp edges, but platypodes are venomous.

Of course, large bills are a given in either space.

You sometimes rename or reimagine AWS services. How should the Security Blog rebrand itself?

I think the Security Blog suffers from a common challenge in this space.

It talks about AWS’s security features, releases, and enhancements—that’s great! But who actually identifies as its target market?

Ideally, everyone should; security is everyone’s job, after all.

Unfortunately, no matter what user persona you envision, a majority of the content on the blog isn’t written for that user. This potentially makes it less likely that folks read the important posts that apply to their use cases, which, in turn, reinforces the false narrative that cloud security is both impossibly hard and should be someone else’s job entirely.

Ultimately, I’d like to see it split into different blogs that emphasize CISOs, engineers, and business tracks. It could possibly include an emergency “this is freaking important” feed.

And as to renaming it, here you go: you’d be doing a great disservice to your customers should you name it anything other than “AWS Klaxon.”

Want more AWS Security how-to content, news, and feature announcements? Follow us on Twitter.

Corey Quinn

Corey is the Cloud Economist at the Duckbill Group. Corey specializes in helping companies fix their AWS bills by making them smaller and less horrifying. He also hosts the AWS Morning Brief and Screaming in the Cloud podcasts and curates Last Week in AWS, a weekly newsletter summarizing the latest in AWS news, blogs, and tools, sprinkled with snark.

#gallery-0-5 { margin: auto; } #gallery-0-5 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-0-5 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-0-5 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

Go to Source Author: Becca Crockett Definitely not an AWS Security Profile: Corey Quinn, a “Cloud Economist” who doesn’t work here Original Post from Amazon Security Author: Becca Crockett In the weeks leading up to re:Inforce, we’ll share conversations we’ve had with people who will be presenting at the event so you can learn more about them and some of the interesting work that they’re doing.

#Amazon Security

0 notes

zipgrowth · 6 years ago

Text

Channeling Students’ Passion for Sports Into Social Awareness and Bringing Change

How do you turn a student’s passion into a purpose that serves our global community?

That was the challenge that confronted me when I took over the Sports and Society Class at Moreau Catholic High School in Hayward, Calif. As part of our mission statement, we are committed to preparing our students through academic, social and spiritual learning experiences that form and transform them into responsible citizens of our global community.

I wanted to refocus the elective class from one that was known for having a relaxed atmosphere, where students watched “ESPN 30 for 30” documentaries, to one that more closely aligned with our mission.

While many students in the class loved sports, I wanted them to channel their passion to enact change. They were already aware of some athletes and headlines at the intersection of sports and society, such as Colin Kaepernick, Jemele Hill and the World Cup.

Don’t get me wrong, I love sports as much as anyone else. (I was a basketball coach at the high school and collegiate levels for many years.) But sports are a microcosm of our society, and issues like race, gender, sexual orientation and assault transcend both spheres of our lives. Once students realize that, then they can understand how sports can shape and change issues that plague society.

I knew it was going to be an uphill battle to get 30 students to change their mentality about this class, so they would take on a challenge as opposed to coasting through. I needed to create an environment that would allow students to figure out what was important to them, how to communicate their perspectives, how to conduct research—and most importantly—how to tackle issues that shape society.

...sports are a microcosm of our society, and issues like race, gender, sexual orientation and assault transcend both spheres of our lives.

Respect and Critical Thinking

As in sports’ matches, the opening quarter is about setting the tone and helping players figure out how they can best communicate. For this class, it was essential to create a space where students could feel open enough to share their perspectives, learn how to research facts to support their opinions and communicate in a respectful manner.

But in order to do that, we needed to establish baseline expectations for critical thinking, communication and civil discourse. After all, in order to practice open-mindedness, students need to be able to speak, debate and disagree in such a way that no one feels intimidated about expressing opinions. I challenged them to go beyond mere tolerance, and to respect and encourage different points of views. This meant students needed to be careful about using loaded words and expressions and, most of all, to avoid verbal put-downs and derisive laughter.

After establishing those norms, students were asked to analyze their own ability to think critically about statements like:

I do not simply accept conclusions; I evaluate and critique the underlying reasons.

I recognize irrelevant facts and false assumptions, and I discount them.

I am able to consider the strengths and weaknesses of my own point of view and that of opposing positions.

Understanding how to reason and debate critically allowed students to dive deeper into social issues in a way where they did not feel attacked, or felt like they had to attack someone else. These norms are key to fostering meaningful conversations where their worldviews would expand, but not necessarily change. That was an important piece to this class if we were going to tackle difficult subjects.

Exploring Tough Issues

Before learning what social issue in which they were most passionate about making a difference, they needed to learn about the facts and underlying context behind each problem. As students established a baseline for critical thinking and communication, they watched videos and led discussions about current events.

I still showed documentaries in class, but with more of a purpose. Early in the semester, we watched “Kicking It,” which follows the lives of five people from different countries who were selected to play in the Homeless World Cup. Throughout the film, there were statistics about a country’s homeless population, and students would learn the myriad reasons why someone became homeless. Another documentary, Sports Illustrated’s “Young, Gifted and Homeless” about homeless high school student-athletes, showed students how to weave facts into storylines to tell compelling stories that encouraged understanding and empathy.

Informed by documentaries, students then held debates that ranged from lighter discussions (like “What is the best sport?”) to more serious issues. We explored unequal pay between male and female athletes, rules around NCAA eligibility for student-athletes and how colleges have engaged in illegal activities to keep students eligible for team sports. (Many of the student-athletes were learning about NCAA rules for the first time in my class, and were struck by how this topic personally affected them.)

The discussion that became an eye opener for the students involved the topic of rape. Students were broken into groups and given different roles, including head football coach, women’s basketball coach, athletic director, college president and booster club president. Within their groups, they had to research their job title and how they may respond in a scenario where a women basketball player accused a football player of raping her at a college party. In those different roles, students had to think about how they might act differently to protect their jobs, or project those who they are supposed to protect. This exercise required them to research actual cases and statistics concerning rape on campus.

...it is important for students to understand that powerful catalysts for social change often come from issues that have personal connections to their own lives.

Many students realized that they felt more comfortable in roles that aligned with their existing beliefs. They learned how a job can shape an individual and can influence how one is “supposed” to respond that may not align with their values and beliefs.

Entrepreneurial Inspirations

Before the students started working on their projects, I invited The Young Vets, a nonprofit organization that aims to help student-athletes become prepared for successful careers outside of sports, to speak to the class. They shared how they created the organization to change the trajectory of young students’ lives, support their efforts to become social change agents and prepare them for college. I believe it is important for students to understand that powerful catalysts for social change often come from issues that have personal connections to their own lives.

In order for any social-impact organization to succeed—no matter how noble the goal—it needs to be sustainable. To that point, The Young Vets walked our students through its budgeting, marketing strategies, and sponsorship outreach tactics along with how the team aligns all these efforts to the organization’s mission and values.

After this visit, students were introduced to their final project: creating a new organization that focuses on fixing an issue that is important to them. Whether it involved using sports to raise money, or creating an organization to help athletes, or using athletes to raise social awareness, students were tasked to channel sports into a positive force for society.

From Ideas to Social Change

From creating a mission statement, to finding potential sponsors, to creating detailed itemized budgets and business plans, students had to apply the critical thinking and research skills they had learned.

One student wanted to create a nonprofit organization for student-athletes coming from a single-parent home, as he was raised by his mom and knew the struggles his mother went through. While doing his research, he found out that many professional athletes were raised in single-parent households, and how outside support was crucial in improving their outcomes. It helped my student understand who his target demographic was, and where he should start his nonprofit in order to have the desired impact.

Another student’s proposal involved holding a basketball tournament to raise money for breast cancer. During his research, he realized how many people were affected by breast cancer, which posed more questions including: Why isn’t there a cure yet? Why aren’t there more screenings in minority communities? Why do women in poorer neighborhoods have higher rates of dying? Would that change if they were diagnosed or treated earlier?

The passion with which he asked these questions touched his classmates. It opened their eyes to the impact that a simple basketball tournament could have in neighborhoods where early breast-cancer screenings are low and where death rates are high. What I found most inspirational was that this young man was transformed from someone who had been content hanging in the back of the class with his friends, to now sitting in the front and being fully engaged.

Another student talked about what it was like growing up with a father who suffered from alcoholism, and that he didn’t have a place to do homework nor internal access due to financial strains at home. While he shared his personal struggles, he never made himself seem like a victim, and made sure that his classmates understood that people who suffer from addiction are not bad, but rather in need of help.

The details with which he described how how he would create a safe place to support student-athletes truly made me take inventory on what students need that we, as teachers and adults, rarely think about. His presentation was the first time I had seen other students cry while someone shared his story and the why behind his organization.

I am so grateful that I had the opportunity to see how a school’s purpose could be implemented in the classroom, no matter the subject. Besides my desire for students to look at how sports can shape and transform our society, it also was important that students learn how to think, research and present information.

After hearing all the ideas the students presented, I felt inspired that they will use all that they learned—not only in this class, not only at Moreau, but also in their lives as they pursue their purpose and feel confident that they have the tools needed to become responsible citizens of our global community.

Channeling Students’ Passion for Sports Into Social Awareness and Bringing Change published first on https://medium.com/@GetNewDLBusiness

0 notes

theconservativebrief · 6 years ago

Link

Once, when I was 9, my mother and I were scouring the summer night sky for stars, meteors, and planets.

Suddenly, an object with a light that pulsed steadily from bright to dim caught my eye. It didn’t have the usual red blinkers of an aircraft and was going far too slowly to be a shooting star.

Obviously, it was aliens.

My excitement was short-lived as my mother explained it was a satellite catching the sun as it tumbled along its orbit. I went to bed disappointed: The X-files was on TV twice a week back then, and I very much wanted to believe.

Today that hope is still alive and well, in Hollywood films, the public imagination, and even among scientists. Scientists first began searching for alien signals shortly after the advent of radio technology around the turn of the 20th century, and teams of astronomers across the globe have been taking part in the formal Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) since the 1980s.

Yet the universe continues to appear devoid of life.

Now, a team of researchers at the University of Oxford brings a new perspective to this conundrum. In early June, Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler, and Toby Ord of the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) released a paper that may solve the Fermi paradox — the discrepancy between our expected existence of alien signals and the universe’s apparent lack of them — once and for all.

Using fresh statistical methods, the paper re-asks the question “Are we alone?” and draws some groundbreaking conclusions: We Earthlings are not only likely to be the sole intelligence in the Milky Way, but there is about a 50 percent chance we are alone in the entire observable universe.

While the findings are helpful for thinking about the likelihood of aliens, they may be even more important for reframing our approach to the risk of extinction that life on Earth may face in the near future.

In 1950, while working at Los Alamos National Laboratory, physicist Enrico Fermi famously exclaimed to his colleagues over lunch: “Where is everybody?”

He had been pondering the surprising lack of evidence of other life outside of our planet. In a universe that had been around for some 14 billion years, and in that time developed more than a billion trillion stars, Fermi reasoned there simply must be other intelligent civilizations out there. So where are they?

We still don’t know, and the Fermi paradox has only strengthened with time. Since the 1950s, humans have walked on the moon, sent a probe beyond our solar system, and even sent an electric sports car into orbit around the sun for fun. If we can go from rudimentary wooden tools to these feats of engineering in under a million years, surely there would have been ample opportunity in our 13.8 billion-year-old universe for other civilizations to have progressed to a similar level — and far beyond — already?

And then, surely there would be some lingering radio signals or visual clues of their expansion reaching our telescopes.

Space is a large place, and the task of accurately estimating the likelihood of little green men isn’t exactly easy.

In 1961, astronomer Frank Drake proposed a formula that multiplied seven “parameters” together to estimate N, the number of detectable civilizations we should expect within our galaxy at a given moment in time:

Ming Hsu

The Drake equation was only intended as a rough tool to stimulate scientific discussion around the probability of extraterrestrial life. However, in the absence of any reasonable alternatives, it has remained astronomers’ only method of calculating the probability of extraterrestrial intelligence. This is problematic because while some parameters, such as R* — the rate of new star formation per year — are relatively well-known, others remain hugely uncertain.

Take L, the average lifespan of a detectable civilization. If we look at the average length of the past civilizations here on Earth, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume a low value. If the Romans, Incas, or Egyptians are anything to go by, it seems hard to make it past a few hundred years. On the flip-side, you could argue that once a civilization becomes technologically advanced enough to achieve interstellar travel, it could conceivably last many billions of years.

This enormous uncertainty leaves the Drake equation ultimately vulnerable to the optimism or pessimism of whoever wields it. And this is reflected in previous scientific papers whose results give values of N ranging anywhere from 10 to many billions.

As astronomer and SETI co-founder Jill Tarter eloquently put it in an interview with National Geographic in 2000: “The Drake Equation is a wonderful way to organize our ignorance.”

Sincere attempts to overcome this vulnerability have previously been made via selecting a handful of conservative, medium, and bullish best estimates for each parameter value and then taking an average across them.

In their new paper, titled “Dissolving the Fermi Paradox,” the FHI researchers dispute this method by demonstrating how this technique typically produces a value of N far higher than it should, creating the illusion of a paradox.

This is because simply selecting a few point estimates and plugging them into the Drake Equation misrepresents the state of our knowledge. As an example, imagine three scientists who have differing opinions on the value of L:

If you take a normal, linear average of all the possible integer values from one to 1000, you would implicitly factor scientist C’s opinion 90 times more than scientist A’s because their range of belief is 90 times larger. If you use a logarithmic scale to represent the above so that each scientist’s range corresponds to one order of magnitude, all three opinions will be represented more equally.

Therefore, the researchers represented the full range of possible values on a logarithmic scale and ran millions of simulations to obtain more statistically reliable estimates for N. They then applied a technique known as a Bayesian update to those results. That means mathematically incorporating the information that we have not discovered extraterrestrial intelligence yet (because the absence of evidence of aliens is evidence itself!).

This two-stage process produced striking results: Based upon the current state of astrobiological knowledge, there’s a 53 to 99.6 percent chance we are the only civilization in this galaxy and a 39 to 85 percent chance we are the only one in the observable universe.

This implies that life as we know it is incomprehensibly rare, and if other intelligences exist, they are probably far beyond the cosmological horizon and therefore forever invisible to us.

To be clear, the paper’s authors do not appear to be making any definitive claim about whether or not aliens exist; simply, our current knowledge across the seven parameters suggests a high likelihood of us being alone. As new information becomes available, they would update that likelihood accordingly. For example, if we discover a second instance of abiogenesis — the process of rudimentary life emerging from non-living matter — on a comet or another planet, then this would narrow the uncertainty on the fl parameter significantly.

Nonetheless, their results have certainly caused a stir, especially after SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted them:

This is why we must preserve the light of consciousness by becoming a spacefaring civilization & extending life to other planets https://t.co/UDDP8I1zsS

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 25, 2018

Many reacted to the paper’s findings by calling it anthropocentric and narrow-minded, arguing that any conclusion suggesting we Earthlings are somehow special is simply human arrogance.

This is somewhat understandable because the idea that intelligent life is extremely rare in the universe feels completely counterintuitive. We exist, along with other intelligent life like dolphins and octopi, so we assume what we see must be extrapolatable beyond Earth.

But this alone is not proof that intelligent civilizations are therefore ubiquitous. Whether the true likelihood is as high as one in two, or as inconceivable as one in a trillion trillion trillion, the mere ability to consciously ask ourselves that question depends on the fact that life has already successfully originated.

This phenomenon is known as an observer selection effect — a bias that can occur when thinking about the likelihood of an event because an observer has to be there to observe the event in the first place. As we only have one data point (us), we have no reliable way to predict the true likelihood of intelligent life. The only conclusion we can confidently draw is that it can exist.

Regardless of which side you take, the idea that we might be alone in the universe raises serious scientific and philosophical questions. Is our rareness something to celebrate or be disappointed by? What would it mean for humans to be the only conscious entities in the universe?

This last question matters hugely. Not only are we depleting our environmental resources at an unsustainable pace, but for the first time in the history of mankind, we’ve reached the technological stage where we hold the entire future of our species in our own hands. Within a few years we built enough nuclear weapons to exterminate every human on earth many times over and made these weapons available to our leaders on a hair-trigger. Each decade has brought us novel technologies with ever-increasing potential for both immense good and immense destruction.

As we rang in the new year, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock to the closest it has ever been to midnight. Meanwhile, estimates from various specialists in existential risk suggest somewhere between a 5 to 19 percent chance of complete human extinction by the end of this century — an unacceptably large probability considering the stakes.

Not only does this dark gamble affect the 7 billion of us alive today; if you factor in the moral weight of the billion billions of future people who would also never get to live out their existences, it becomes clear that we urgently need to get our collective act together.

As Carl Sagan famously said in his 1990 Pale Blue Dot speech: “In all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. … the Earth is where we make our stand.”

He’s not wrong, especially in light of this paper’s findings. If humanity really is the only civilization that may ever exist in this universe, then we shoulder a responsibility on a truly astronomical scale.

Liv Boeree is a science communicator and TV host specializing in astrophysics, rationality, and poker.

Original Source -> Why haven’t we found aliens yet?

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

0 notes

infiniteinjury · 7 years ago

Text

Free Speech Slip and Slide

In the past I’ve written at length about my concern that the newly invigorated attitude that we must outlaw, or at least severely socially punish the speakers, racist/sexist/etc.. speech is a mistake. I have doubts about the efficacy of such punishments and believe that pushing racism adjacent views into a hidden underground where they fester and mutate1 creates more hate. However, the primary thrust of my concern was the usual slippery slope argument (importantly serious harms arise as soon as well-intentioned people start to fear that an epistemic mistake could land them in trouble). Unfortunately, evidence for a steep slippery plastic slope with extra soap arrived all too quickly.

Superiority of Western Culture

First we had this really stupid opinion piece that I would have guessed was written by a machine learning algorithm trained on 1980s era conservative values pieces if it had only mentioned crack (still managed a shout out to the pill for destroying our perfect 1950s society). Personally, I thought it was just as stupid this time around as I did in the late 80s and early 90s except these authors should have seen how that went and known better. However, as far as offensiveness goes it rates as a “kids these days…have no … always on their..” but somehow it has become the subject of accusations of racism and the subject of serious controversy (yes, that last article is written by a friend of the original author so take its slant with a grain of salt).

True, there is no credible effort to have the author fired from her position in the law school but it has generated enough outrage for students to get up in time to picket Wax’s class as racist and its not just some hasty people with signs. At least a non-trivial segment of the Penn campus left is willing to call this piece racist, sexist or otherwise suggest it isn’t just dumb and wrong but deserving of open moral scorn.

While one might try and charitably reconstruct some argument based on the text of the oped2 what is going on is what is always going on with accusations of racism/sexism/islamophobia etc.. Rather than parsing the literal content of a piece and asserting those claims amount to racism (or providing evidence that the author was being disingenuous) people decide to call something racist if it feels like the things racists would say. In this case there is no doubt this oped has that feel. Indeed, it hits many of the points that one would expect from a racist dog-whistle: glorification of European/western culture, suggestion that something associated with whites is superior, a nostalgic comparison to the 1950s, reference to some aspect of black culture the author disapproves of (“anti-“acting white” rap culture of inner-city blacks”) and even the obligatory focus on whites that have the traits you are criticizing.

The problem with taking this as grounds for accusations of racism is that it confuses being the sort of person whose strong affinity for traditionalism and reverence for long lived institutions and practices may make needed reform more difficult with actual racism. However, we are generally quite willing to let the earnest man who is such a strong believer in feminism that he frequently gives a piece of his mind to men who he views as pushing an aggressive male-centric approach on women and thereby does more to perpetuate the stereotype of women as unable to handle these situations than anyone he criticizes. This case is only different in that it is harder to imagine genuinely feeling that these old school conservative values are the secret to a better life and wanting to help minorities by sharing. Also in that often people who feel this way about morals and newfangled social innovations also feel this way about minorities but that’s just a stereotype.

Most importantly, it renders the standard for racism uselessly subjective. If it is no longer necessary to have overt animus or believe in some particular stereotype then it is insanely easy to apply the term to virtually anyone you want. Especially given that as the sphere of things that have been labeled racist expands fewer and fewer non-racists say anything in that sphere so just imagine the same dialog in 20 years about pieces supporting free speech. It would be something mostly racists talk about as a cover, anyone like me writing about it would explain that we believed in it for everyone (while detractors would point out that we kept focusing on the free speech of the racists as they don’t see it from the context in which that is the right place to make one’s stand), one could raise analogies to the contract rights arguments offered in the civil rights movement (yes its bad but the constitution…we just can’t do anything). The only thing this lacks is the subjective feel that comes from hearing lots of racists say something that sounds similar but we can’t cede to racists the power to decide what is and isn’t considered.

Also, as a practical matter this kind of use of the accusation of racism isn’t productive. The reason to use the term at all is to invoke our shared disapprobation of certain behaviors to change people’s behavior. Telling someone ‘suggesting that blacks only eat fried Chicken or look like Gorillas’ is racist usually results in an immediate change and the world is a better place but when you say that some vague thing about the gestalt I get from your article is racist doesn’t. If I were the author and was willing to sell out my views so I wouldn’t be racist how would I even know where to start?

Call these ideas out as stupid or even the kind of progress phobic thinking that perpetuates racism that’s great but its just not racism.

University of Tampa’s Impolitic Twitter Firing

Also, we have the University of Tampa firing a visiting professor for the following poorly considered and bumblinging inappropriate tweet

I dont believe in instant karma but this kinda feels like it for Texas. Hopefully this will help them realize the GOP doesnt care about them.

This is obviously just a case of someone not realizing how what he said would be taken in context. When he did he apologized. That should have been the end of it.

While at first glance one might feel that this isn’t really relevant to the broader picture at the moment. However, while it wasn’t exactly an academic paper this tweet is fundamentally nothing but an expression of a political sentiment. Indeed, suppose the author really believed this was some kind of divine vengeance on Texas for voting GOP. Surely that is core political-religious speech if anything is so its hard to see how this is anything but a direct attack on the idea that Professors get to comment on current events and broader social issues without fear of being fired for controversial views (assuming they don’t bear on their academic qualifications…mathematicians probably shouldn’t say $\omega$ and $2^\omega$ have the same cardinality).

Mistakes

We need room for people to make mistakes! Even mistakes about what to believe on controversial issues because only when people feel they won’t lose their jobs or be shunned if they get it wrong can they allow themselves to explore the issue and reach the right conclusions.

I know its really hard in these discussions to imagine any other perspective than your own but rarely is it the case that someone just wakes up out of the blue filled with hate and the desire to see another race suffer. Sure, sometimes the reasons are just visceral (your gang is white they are black) but in most cases there is some chain of thought and emotion that made every step they took seem reasonable so if you suspect the target of your criticism of simply reasonless hate you should probably reevaluate that view.

However, that is what makes the situation so dangerous as well. Given that even racists think they have good and sound justifications for their beliefs an atmosphere which imposes severe penalties for even minor infractions allows only one safe response: parrot back the official dogma.

But, if we are going to fix the remaining barriers and harms inflicted by problematic stereotypes and structural racism/sexism we need to find them in non-obvious places and that takes open speculation. We’ve picked all the low hanging fruit so more looking for white or male ‘perpetrators’ (if it could have been fixed easily that way we would have) we instead need to look at the less examined reservoirs of stereotypes such as members of the group themselves or the well-intentioned helper3. That means we need to walk on the edge and consider possibly offensive or unpleasant possibilities if we are going to figure out what is really going on so we can do something to fix things.

I’ve seen any number of scenarios in which the perception that certain topics can’t even be discussed doesn’t erase those ideas from people’s minds. Rather, it pushes them to form groups (the ones that go silent when a woman or minority comes by and we work so hard to eliminate) in which they feel they can comfortably express views they are sympathetic to but are too controversial for general consumption. Unfortunately, when people gather together for the purpose of feeling safe sharing controversial views creates a strong social pressure not to call anyone else’s views in that group out for sexism/racism/etc.. even in a polite friendly way. I’m constantly amazed at how quickly both such groups form and how quickly they descend to the lowest common denominator and serve as a breeding ground where hateful ideas can infect good people because there is no opportunity to apply the corrective of a good counterargument and criticism. ↩

Taking their complaints at face value would seem to suggest the problem is that suggesting WASP culture (not so named) is superior is racist or at least unacceptable and bad. While those of us immersed in liberal sensibilities naturally flinch a bit when the suggestion is made that one culture is superior to another that doesn’t make the claim wrong or racist. Indeed, we all believe that, at least in the modern context, modern western culture is superior to the violent revenge culture in some New Guinean tribes all things considered (of course cultures have so many traits surely we could cherry pick a few improvements but the original piece doesn’t deny this). Hell, the very idea of tolerance and equality that those on the left are fighting for is a rare value for a culture to have and we are right to identify it as something good and important. But I think this “can’t say one culture is better than another” line isn’t a very charitable interpretation. ↩

Everyone knows that a great deal of slut-shaming and outfit policing is done to women by women and we’ve learned recently that it is other women who do the majority of interrupting women and may very well be the ones preventing more competitive female involvement. This matches both my experience at caltech (women who had few if any female friends their whole lives were way more likely to just blunder in and shot their load on the conversation or dismiss someone else’s contribution as stupid) and what evolutionary psychology would suggest (men have little interest in policing women but each gender needs to police rivals). Of course, men aren’t on the hook they are just on the hook for something else perpetuating harmful male stereotypes which can harm women as much as they do men (say by men not being willing to become primary caregivers). ↩

Free Speech Slip and Slide was originally published on Rejecting Rationality

#academia #academic freedom #free speech #racial justice #racism

0 notes

jansegers · 7 years ago

Text

Simple English Word List

SIMPLE1540 : a simple English wikipedia word list based on the XML export of all articles related to the nine major groups: Everyday life, Geography, History, Knowledge, Language, Literature, People, Religion, and Science and retaining all word forms appearing 7 times or more in this corpus. The total number of words in this corpus is well over the 100.000 words. a A.D. ability able about above absence abstinence abstract academic academy accent accept access accord account across act action active activity actual actually ad add addition adherent adjective adult advance advice affect after again against age agnostic agnosticism ago agree agreement agriculture air alcohol all allow ally almost alone along alphabet also although always amateur amendment among amount an analysis ancient and angel animal annals anonymous another answer anthropomorphism any anyone anything aphasia appear apple apply approach archaeology architecture area argue argument around arrange art article artificial artist ask aspect associate association astronomy at atheism atheist atomic attack attempt attribute audience author authority available average avoid award away B.C. baby back background backpack bad bah balance band baptism base basic basis battle BCE be bear beautiful beauty because become bed bee before begin behavior behind being belief believe believing belong below best better between beyond bias biblical bibliography big billion biological biology birth bit black blind blood blue body book born both bottom boundary box boy brain branch bring brown buffalo build building bull burn business but by c. ca. calendar call can cancer canon capital caption car carbon card carry case cassette cat category cathedral catholic cause cell center central century cerebral certain change chapel chapter character chemical chemistry child china China choice choir choose chronicle church circumcise circumcision cite citizen city civil civilian civilization claim clan class classical cleanup clear clergy click climate close closer clothes clothing coast coauthor code codex cognitive col cold collection college colonization colony color column com come commentary commission common commonly communicate communication communion communist community companion company compare competition complete complex compose composer computer concept conception concern condition confuse confusion congregational connect connection conquer conquest consciousness consider consistent constitution construct construction contain contemporary content context continent continue contrary control convention conversation conversion convert cook cooking copy core correct could council country course court cover covered create creation credit crime critical criticism crop cross crust cultural culture current currently daily damage dark data date day dead death debt decadence decadent decide declaration decline deconstruction deep define definition deity demonstrate denomination department depth describe description design detail determinism developed development device devil diagnosis dialect dictionary die difference different difficult difficulty diphthong dipstick direct directly dirt disagree disambiguation disbelief discipline discover discovery discussion disease disorder distance distinct distinction distinguish distribution divide divine do doctor doctrine document dog don't door down Dr. dream drink drown druid due during dynasty each earlier early earth easier easily easy eat economic economics economy ed edge edit edition editor education effect eight either electric electricity electronic element elevation else emperor empire encyclopedia end energy engine engineering enlightenment enough enter entertainment environment environmental epic episode equal era error especially establish etc. etymology even event eventually ever every everyday everyone everything evidence evil evolution evolve exact exactly example except exchange exist existence expansion experience experiment expert explain explanation express expression external extinct face fact failure fair faith fall false family famous far fast father feature feel feeling female feudal few fiction field fight figure file find finding fire first fish fit five fix flow folk follow food for force foreign foreskin form formal former fortune fought foundation founded four fourth frame framework free freedom frequently friend from front fruit full function functional further future gas general generally generation genre geographer geographic geographical geography geology geometry germ get give glass global go god gold golden good government grammar great greatly green ground group grow growth guide guillotine hair half hall hand handbook handicap handle happen happens happiness happy hard have he head heading health hear heat heaven help hemisphere her here heritage hero high highly him himself his historian historical historiography history hold holy home homo hope hot hour house how however human hundred hunter hypothesis hysteresis I ice icon idea identify identity if illiteracy illiterate illusory image importance important impossible improve in inc. incense include increase indeed independence independent indigenous individual industrial industry influence information inquiry inside instead institute institution instrument instrumentation intellectual intelligence interlinear internal international internet interpretation into introduce introduction invent invention involve iron island issue it IT itself job join journal journalism judge just keep key kill kind king kingdom know knowledge la LA label lack lake lamp land landlocked landscape language large last late later law lead leader leap learn learned least leave legacy legal legend let letter level lexeme library life light lightning like likely limited line linguistic linguistics link liquid list literacy literary literature little liturgy live local location logic logical long longer look lord lore lose lot love low lower mac machine magazine magic magnetic magnum mail main mainly major make male mammal man mankind manuscript many map march March mark market mass material mathematical mathematics matter may May me mean meaning meant measure measurement meat median medical medicine medieval mediterranean medium meet member memory men mental mention mercury message metal method mid middle might migrate migration military millennium million mind minister minute misconception miss model modern modernism modernist moment money monologue monophthong month monument moon moral morality more morning most mostly mother mount mountain mouth move movement much museum music musical musicians must my myth mythology name narrative nation national nationality native natural naturalism naturally nature near nearly necessarily necessary need negative neither neologism network neurogenesis neuron neuroscience never new news newspaper next night nine no non none nor normal normally not note nothing noun novel now nuclear number object objective objectivity observation observe occupation occur ocean octane of off offer office official officially often oil old older on once one online only open opera opposite or oral orbit order org organization organize origin original originally orthography orthology other others our out outer outside over own oxygen p. pack pagan page paint palace paper paradigm parent parish park part participant particular particularly party pas pass past pasta pattern pay peace peer penguin penis people per percent percentage perception performance perhaps period peroxide persecution person personal personality perspective persuasion pet phenomenon philosopher philosophical philosophy phoneme phonetic phonetics photo phrase physic physical picture piece pilgrimage place plan planet plant plat plate play please poem poems poet poetry point pole police policy political politics polytheism polytheistic popular population position positive possession possible possibly post power powerful pp. practical practice praise pray prayer precise predict prediction prehistory present preserve press prevent priest primary principle print printing private probably problem process produce product production professional program project pronounce pronunciation proof property prophet propose prose proselytism protection protein provide province psychological psychology public publication publish publisher publishing punishment pure purpose put pyramid quantum question quickly quite quote race racial rack radiation radio rain range rate rather read reader real realism reality really reason receive recent recently reclamation recognize record recreation red ref refer reference referred reform reformation regard region reign rejection relate relation relationship relatively relativity reliable relic religion religious remain remember remove renaissance replace report republic request require research researcher resource respect response result resurrection retrieve return revelation revert review revision revival revolution rhetoric rich right rise ritual river rock role room royal rule ruled ruler run rural sacred sacrifice safe saga sage saint salad same sample satellite saw say schizophrenia scholar school science scientific scientist scope sea search second secondary section secular see seek seem selection self sense sent sentence separate sequence series service set seven several sexual shall shaman shape share she short should show shrine side sign significant silence similar simple simply since single situation six size skill skin slavery sleep slightly slow small smell smith snake so social society sociology soft soil solar soldier solid soliloquy some someone something sometimes song soon sortable sound source space speak speaker special specie specific speech speed spell spirit spiritual spirituality split sport spread square st. stage stain standard star start state statement station statistic statistical statue status stick still stone stop story strange strap strong structure struggle stub student study stutter style subject successful such sugar suggest sun sung sunlight superior superiority supernatural support suppose supreme sure surface survey surveyor sushi sustainability sustainable sweat symbol symbolic system table take talk tam tan task teach teacher teaching technique technology tectonics teeth tell temperature template temple ten term terminology territory tertiary test testament text textual than thank that the their theism them themselves then theology theoretical theory therapy there therefore thesaurus these they thick thing think third this those though thought thousand three through throughout thumb thus ticket tight time title to today together toilet tolerance toleration tongue too tool top topic total towards tower trade tradition traditional train translation transport travel treat treatment tree trench trial tribe tried trig true truth try turn twentieth twenty two type typical typically ultimate ultraviolet under understand understood union unit united universal universe university unknown unsortable until up upon upper urban urbanization usage use useful usually valley value van vandalism various vassal vegetable verb verbal verse version very video view violence virgin visit vitamin vocabulary voice vol. volume vowel vs. wale wall want war warm warmer wash waste water wave way we weak wealth wear weather web website weight well what when where whether which while white who whole whom whose why wide widely wild wilderness will window wisdom wise witch witchcraft with within without witness woman word work worker world worship would write writer writing wrong yam year yellow you young your

China, March and May made this list because china, march and may are on it and I didn't want to decide in favor of the common noun or the proper noun; all other proper nouns have been omitted (even the ten other months that met the criterium of appearing more then 6 times). #SimpleWikipedia #SimpleEnglish #wordlist #English #words #level1540 #Inli #nimi #selo1540

#SimpleWikipedia SimpleEnglish wordlist English words level1540 Inli nimi selo1540

0 notes