#now I have access to multiple university libraries close by and also The Internet

[cookinguptales]

getting back into my greek mythology phase as an adult is so weird because like the stories are such a dear and a familiar part of my childhood (and honestly part of what helped me extricate myself from an abusive evangelical environment) but I've also grown a lot as a person since then so I can't help but view them through different lenses, y'know?

such as:

the lens of a religious studies scholar who can't help but be fascinated with vernacular religion, apotropaic magic, cultural variation in ritual, and hints that these stories might be signs of clashing religions from different regions

the lens of a feminist who's a lot less willing to accept some of the ideas that I accepted as a child who'd been raised in a very religious environment

the lens of a grown-ass adult who could probably save enough money to go see these places that were so unreachable as to be near-fictional to me when I was a child

[zeldahime]

Zelda Liveblogs a Lancet Paper

Following this post, I am now going to liveblog reading the Lancet paper cited by the Economist article to predict worldwide fertility to drop by 3/4s of its current position if current demographic trends continue. It is an Open Access article, so the entire thing is open for anyone on the internet to read.

Citation:

GBD 2021 Fertility and Forecasting Collaborators (March 20, 2024). Global fertility in 204 countries and territories, 1950–2021, with forecasts to 2100: a comprehensive demographic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021. The Lancet, 403(10440), 2057-2099. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(24)00550-6.

I refuse to use Chicago style. This is mostly because I memorized APA and don't want to learn a new one.

First, my background: I am not a demographer; I am not trained as a demographer; I have studied it auxiliarily to my other academic pursuits. I fall in a sort of educated in-between. I am currently a Master's student in library and information sciences, and my undergraduate degree was in political science, both at USAmerican universities. However, the field of economics is also very close to my heart, and I would have double-majored in it if the opportunity and financial costs had not been too high to justify it. During the five years I was a college drop-out, I studied economics independently, reading broadly within the field and taking non-certificate courses online. I've been taking non-certificate courses in economics through correspondence or online since I was about nine. I'm not an expert! I do, however, think I'm a fairly well-informed amateur.

And a note on language. This paper refers to birthing parents as mothers and to the demographic that gives birth interchangeably as female and women. I acknowledge that this is a cissexist patriarchical viewpoint that erases transmen, nonbinary and intersex people, and probably others I'm not thinking of. For consistency between my reflections and the paper and ease of reading, I will do the same. I'm conscious I'm part of the problem here, but don't see a way around it without making my bits harder to understand than they have to be.

With that out of the way, here we go:

Methodology (Summary)

This is where me not being a demographer is an important thing to know. I neither know nor normally care about the statistical methods used to determine demography, just that the demographers aren't retracting papers over it. However, I do know that in general the CCF50 (total cohort fertility before the age of 50) is a neater and more accurate measurement to build projections on than the TFR (total fertility rate by year) and that's the methodology the paper's authors went with. This is good and promising. TFR for known years and CCF50 projections sounds like a solid method. 👍

We additionally produced forecasts for multiple alternative scenarios in each location: the UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) for education is achieved by 2030; the contraceptive met need SDG is achieved by 2030; pro-natal policies are enacted to create supportive environments for those who give birth; and the previous three scenarios combined.

I'm very hopeful about these forecasts! They'll show a few different hopeful scenarios.

To evaluate the forecasting performance of our model and others, we computed skill values—a metric assessing gain in forecasting accuracy—by comparing predicted versus observed ASFRs from the past 15 years (2007–21). A positive skill metric indicates that the model being evaluated performs better than the baseline model (here, a simplified model holding 2007 values constant in the future), and a negative metric indicates that the evaluated model performs worse than baseline.

This is a very responsible thing for the authors to have done, and I am interested to see how this is reflected in the models.

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Findings (Summary)

During the period from 1950 to 2021, global TFR more than halved, from 4·84 (95% UI 4·63–5·06) to 2·23 (2·09–2·38). Global annual livebirths peaked in 2016 at 142 million (95% UI 137–147), declining to 129 million (121–138) in 2021. Fertility rates declined in all countries and territories since 1950,

(Emphasis mine. The numbers in parentheses are the confidence interval.) I think this is the most important takeaway from the whole damn paper. Makes sense, since it's the first line of the findings. If you read nothing else, read these three sentences. Global birthrates are barely above replacement (which, if you recall from my other essay, is generally considered to be ~2.1). To me, this implies lot of problems that traditionally have been considered solvable with population redistribution (meaning, mostly, immigration) may not be solvable that way even if fertility were to stop declining today and hold constant for the rest of the century.

Future fertility rates were projected to continue to decline worldwide, reaching a global TFR of 1·83 (1·59–2·08) in 2050 and 1·59 (1·25–1·96) in 2100 under the reference scenario. The number of countries and territories with fertility rates remaining above replacement was forecast to be 49 (24·0%) in 2050 and only six (2·9%) in 2100, with three of these six countries included in the 2021 World Bank-defined low-income group, all located in the GBD super-region of sub-Saharan Africa.

Holy shit. I cannot emphasize enough how low a TFR of 1.59 is. This is approximately the current TFR of the United Kingdom, and they're beginning to freak out even though they have relatively easy sources of additional replacement recruitment through the Commonwealth. Imagine that for the whole Earth. With only six countries as a potential source of surplus population to be redistributed.

Funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Makes sense. This is the kind of thing that foundation funds.

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Introduction

Low levels of fertility have the potential over time to result in inverted population pyramids with growing numbers of older people and declining working-age populations. These changes are likely to place increasing burdens on health care and social systems, transform labour and consumer markets, and alter patterns of resource use.

Oh man, I wish I'd gone through this paper earlier, I could have just quoted this bit and been done instead of trying to explain it from scratch! 😂

The UN Population Division estimates of past fertility are not compliant with the Guidelines on Accurate and Transparent Health Estimates Reporting (GATHER) statement in important respects; notably, they do not provide all code for statistical models or explicit details on criteria for exclusion or adjustment of primary data sources. Furthermore, the validity of UN Population Division projections has been questioned due to the assumptions applied in countries experiencing low post-transition fertility dropping below replacement level.

YES GO OFF 👏 The UN Population Division is so much more cagey about their data than the World Bank, it's so annoying, and they keep predicting increases that don't happen. I thought it was so weird as an undergrad but figured it was because of ~bureaucracy~ or privacy laws or whatever. It's nice to be vindicated [redacted] years later.

Our forecasts also suggest that, by 2100, the largest concentrations of livebirths will shift to low-income settings, particularly a subset of countries and territories in sub-Saharan Africa, which are among the most vulnerable to economic and environmental challenges. Extreme shifts in the global distribution of livebirths can be partially ameliorated by improved female education and met need for modern contraception. Outside of this subset of low-income areas, most of the world's countries will experience the repercussions of low fertility, with ageing populations, declining workforces, and inverted population pyramids, which are likely to lead to profound fiscal, economic, and social consequences. National policy makers and the global health community must plan to address these divided sets of demographic challenges emerging worldwide.

This is such an important point for them to make. Demography isn't a vacuum; it has significant real-world effects. By 2100, most babies born will be born in Africa, and we need to plan for that now. By 2100, most countries will not have enough workers, and we need to plan for that now. 2100 is not that far into the future. I, personally, will live to see the beginnings of the effects of this demographic shift, and I'm an adult who pays taxes and has a college degree and shit.

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The Data Sources and Processing section is pretty standard and unremarkable. Good job.

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Fertility Forecasting

We produced forecasts of fertility using an updated modelling framework (appendix 1 section 3) that improved on the methods in the 2020 study by Vollset and colleagues. In our updated methods, we used not only estimates of female educational attainment and contraceptive met need as covariates, but also estimates of under-5 mortality and population density in habitable areas to account for a larger variation in CCF50 across all countries in the sub-models (appendix 1 section 3.1, appendix 2 figure S2). Similar to Vollset and colleagues, we continued to forecast fertility with CCF50 rather than TFR, because modelling in cohort space is more stable than in period space.

Niiiiice. Covariates are things that, well, vary, alongside the thing you're trying to measure. For fertility, the most obvious one might be age of the mother at first birth; if someone is 16 at first birth, she probably will have more kids than someone who is 30 at first birth, for example. This model also includes how much schooling the mother gets, whether she has contraception, the mortality rate (that is, how many of them die) of children under five, and population density! That's a lot of statistical crunching and their model will be more precise for it. Precise isn't the same as accurate, but I think that with the variables they selected, they will travel in the same direction.

What a pretty equation. I don't understand it, but it's got a certain je ne sais quois.

For the education SDG scenario, the forecasts assume that by 2030, all people will have 12 years or more of education by the age of 25 years and then maintains the same rate of change as the reference scenario up to 2100. For the contraceptive met need scenario, to reflect the SDG scenario of universal access, the forecasts assumed a linear increase in contraceptive coverage to reach 100% by 2030 and then stay constant up to 2100.

I love how optimistic these scenarios are 😂 This truly is the best-case scenario for both the education forecast and the contraceptive forecast! I do hope everybody has 12+ years of education and 100% contraceptive coverage by 2030. Make it happen, António!!!!

(Joke explained: António Guterres is the current Secretary-General of the United Nations, and these goals are absolutely not going to be met by 2030.)

In the pro-natal scenario, we assumed a country will introduce pro-natal policies, such as childcare subsidies, extended parental leave, insurance coverage expansion for infertility treatment, 33 and other forms of support for parents to afford high-quality child-care services, once TFR decreases to less than 1·75. We then made three assumptions on the effects of such policies. First, we assumed the full effect of pro-natal policies will be to increase TFR by 0·2. Second, it will take 5 years after the policy is introduced for the full increase in TFR to occur, and TFR will rise linearly over that time span. Last, we assumed that both the policies and the increase in TFR by 0·2 will endure for the remainder of the century.

The pro-natal scenario is also incredibly optimistic. This kind of response simply hasn't happened in any country that's tried pro-natal policies as envisioned by the authors (my reference cases, just off the top of my head: Japan and France).

The optimism makes sense. They represent extreme cases, in order to contrast possible outcomes versus the reference case. This is good practice! It's just also funny.

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Results

The Reference Case

I hate the embedded tables. They have the confidence interval in the same cell as the estimate. How very dare they, that's incredibly inconvenient for me personally.

The chart in Figure 1, however, I think speaks volumes:

It speaks so many volumes that I'm gonna go up and put it above the cut, brb. This chart shows the reference case; that is, it shows the fertility rate if the fertility trends of 1950-2021 continue into the future.

At the national level, estimates of TFR in 2021 ranged from 0·82 (95% UI 0·75–0·89) in South Korea to 6·99 (6·75–7·24) in Chad, with below-replacement levels of fertility (TFR <2·1) in 110 of 204 countries and territories (table 1, figures 2A, 3).

I think this range is neat and goes to show that while the trend is world-wide, it's still not even. Chadian women still give birth to about 7ish kids on average. That's more than 3x replacement, and more than 8.5x the average fertility of South Korea. South Korea is going to have different problems than Chad; Chad probably doesn't have to worry as much about their workforce being unable to sustain a large elderly population. (Don't look so cheerful about it. They've got lots of other stuff to worry about. 😬)

These charts are fascinating to look at to me. I think this really showcases just how dramatic the projected decline is. It's not just the Europe, it's not just wealthy post-industrialized countries, but everywhere. It's in Eswanti, it's in Indonesia, it's in Burkina Faso, it's in China. It really shows just how much Chad is an outlier (adn should still be counted, btw, just because it's an outlier doesn't mean we should discard it; it's dependent on study structure and you can't just throw out entire countries because they have high birth rates on a study of birth rates).

Our estimates indicate that there is approximately a 30-year gap between the time when TFR falls below 2·1 and when the natural rate of population increase turns negative. We forecast that 155 (76·0%) countries and territories will have fertility rates below replacement level in 2050; by 2100, we project this number will increase to 198 (97·1%), with 178 (87·3%) having a negative natural rate of increase (figure 3).

A 30-year gap sounds reasonable. That's about how long it takes for people to have/not have kids, and for their own parents to potentially die, in about equalish numbers (on a global scale, anyway). I do think this gap number is likely to increase as healthcare improves in places that are worse today and as fertility technology increases the age at which people can become pregnant, but 30 is a perfectly respectable number with actual statistical backing.

Alternative scenario fertility forecasts

This is the part I'm really excited about!!!

The first scenario, which assumes meeting the SDG education target by 2030, is estimated to result in global TFRs of 1·65 (95% UI 1·40–1·92) in 2050 and 1·56 (1·26–1·92) in 2100 (table 2). The second scenario, which assumes meeting the SDG contraceptive met need target by 2030, will produce global TFRs of 1·64 (1·39–1·89) in 2050 and 1·52 (1·21–1·87) in 2100. The third scenario, which incorporates pro-natal policy implementation, is forecast to yield global TFRs of 1·93 (1·69–2·19) in 2050 and 1·68 (1·36–2·04) in 2100. The combined scenario, in which all three other alternative scenarios are applied, is projected to result in a global TFR of 1·65 (1·40–1·92) in 2050 and 1·62 (1·35–1·95) in 2100.

So recall the reference scenario projections: 1·83 (1·59–2·08) in 2050 and 1·59 (1·25–1·96) in 2100.

I find it interesting that all cases are so incredibly close to reference, with overlapping confidence intervals. Functionally, there's not a lot of difference between a TFR of 1.68 and 1.52. They're both still well below replacement. It's about the difference between Sweden (1.67) and Russia (1.51). Russia, you may have noticed, is waging war about it.*

*This is not a stated goal of the Russian Federation in the Ukraine War. This is me personally making an assertion that the shifting demographics of the Russian population, including the below-replacement birthrate beginning to put pressure on their lacking social safety networks, has contributed to the many complicated and interconnected reasons why the Russian Federation invaded Ukraine, but please do not take me to be the final authority on the matter or interpret this statement as implying that demography of all things is the sole or primary reason for the war.

Discussion

The aforementioned changes in fertility over the coming century will have profound effects on populations, economies, geopolitics, food security, health, and the environment, with a clear demographic divide between the impacts on many middle-to-high-income locations versus many low-income locations. For nearly all countries and territories outside of sub-Saharan Africa, sustained low fertility will produce a contracting population with fewer young people relative to older people before the end of the 21st century. These changes in age structure are likely to present considerable economic challenges caused by a growing dependency ratio of older to working-age population and a shrinking labour force. 42 Unless governments identify unforeseen innovations or funding sources that address the challenges of population ageing, this demographic shift will put increasing pressure on national health insurance, social security programmes, and health-care infrastructure. These same programmes will receive less funding as working-age, tax-paying populations decline, further exacerbating the problem.

This is why the Economist article talks about birthrates the way it does. It's not about white babies or whatever people in the notes are sarcastically ascribing to an article they haven't read. It's about the whole world. There are 150 countries outside of the Sub-Saharan Africa region, and 44 of the 46 countries within Sub-Saharan Africa are projected to feel the many or all of the same effects as well.

It's about the way social security nets are structured and how they're going to fail. It's about the way that elderly people are going to be treated by our societies. It's about me, and it's about you, and it's about making sure that there are enough humans to take care of the other humans that need taking care of.

If we don't increase global fertility rates above replacement, which it increasingly looks like we won't, we need other solutions. The fertility one is easy fuckin' pickings compared to a complete overhaul of society, and you saw how little difference it actually makes. So did the authors:

To date, one strategy to reverse declining fertility in low-fertility settings has been to implement pro-natal policies, such as child-related cash transfers and tax incentives, childcare subsidies, extended parental leave, re-employment rights, and other forms of support for parents to care and pay for their children.49, 50 Yet there are few data to show that such policies have led to strong, sustained rebounds in fertility, with empirical evidence suggesting an effect size of no more than 0·2 additional livebirths per female. [...] Moreover, although pro-natal policies primarily aim to increase births, they also offer additional benefits to society, including better quality of life, greater household gender equality (ie, more equal division of household labour),53 higher rates of female labour force participation,54 lower child-care costs,55 and better maternal health outcomes,56 depending on policy design and contextual factors. In the future, it will be beneficial to perform an in-depth analysis on varying impacts of pro-natal policies in selected countries that have a meaningful impact on population. [...] Importantly, low fertility rates and the modest effects that pro-natal policies might have on them should not be used to justify more draconian measures that limit reproductive rights, such as restricting access to modern contraceptives or abortions.

I just want to highlight that the study authors explicitly argue for certain pro-natal policies that increase quality of life and caution against pro-natal policies that limit rights. These people aren't heartless.

They also discuss at some length the implications of the changing distribution of live births, where by the end of the century most live births will take place in the poorest nations, which are also the ones that will be hardest-hit by climate change. These nations already face famines, military rule, civil wars, terrorism, and climate changed-caused severe heatwaves, droughts, and floods. They advise politicians to take this into account when making policy decisions but don't go into what policy decisions should be made, which is wise since they're demographers and not political scientists, but disappointed me, the political scientist reading the demography paper and hoping to find something to criticize.

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My takeaway:

Incredibly interesting paper. As a non-demographer, I think it's very convincing and hope that it sparks a serious conversation about the paths we need to take forward, in our own countries and as a global community. I especially hope that it inspires us to take bold action to drastically change our systems of elder care, which are already being pushed to the limit and will simply break under pressure if fertility rates continue to fall.

[eunoiamaybe]

my “sort-of-complete” online classes and exams tips

This is a longer-than-usual post with tips for the 3 stages of online classes: focusing during an online class session, reviewing/studying for online classes, and preparing for online exams/ quizzes. So I decided to insert the “Read More” link to (a) not take up too much space on your dash, and (b) feel more confident in adding more tips as time goes on.

These are tips that I’ve compiled from my experience of taking online classes during my last 1.5 years at university. But having all of your courses moved online is so much more complicated. Since I’m currently doing an internship, I have tried my best to produce this post based on the comments of my friends IRL and on Tumblr (hence the “my”). However, I hope it can still be useful for you and many who were all abruptly put in this same situation.

So feel free to share your own tips and experience! I will probably go back to this once in a while to make some changes to it and add your tips. Good luck to everyone who is currently/ about to take online classes. You are almost there! 🍀 I believe in every single one of you!

~  Click away for them tips   ~

💻 DURING ONLINE CLASS SESSIONS:

- try to treat online classes the same as an in-person class, especially time-wise (set a specific time for each class and plan your own class schedule. even better, study for your classes at the same time they used to be held. this will create a sense of routine and trigger the brain's normal reactions to your usual class - which is to study)

- don’t be afraid to fix your plan/ schedule (aka don’t force yourself into one if it doesn’t work for you) (trials and errors, my friend. this applies to plans too. there’s no shame in not being able to keep up with the schedule you’ve made. if you’ve tried or if it hurts you mentally or physically, then that schedule is just not the one for you. everybody has their unique strengths and weaknesses. one’s perfect system might not suit another. finding a system that works for you takes time, patience, and courage. but it will be absolutely worth it)

- find a good spot with enough light and stable wifi (if you have multiple options, select the one that would make you most comfortable, most focused, and confident enough to take online tests/quizzes/exams at - create your “exam space” in advance to reduce the anxiety of tests and unfamiliarity)

- study at a desk, if possible (studying at a desk, with good posture, mimics the feeling of being in a classroom or the library. thus, it will create a sense of routine and help you focus better)  

- accommodate yourself (I’m all about making the best out of a bad situation, and this is one way to do it.  accommodate yourself, not just with comfort, but also with actual necessities that you cannot usually get in your usual classroom/library due to whatever reason. stress balls, stim toys, positivity cards, calming music/candles. comforting plushies. chewing gum. as long as it helps you focus better, it's on the table)

- get dressed (this will bring out that sense of structure and routine that you need. put on your normal outfits, uniforms and even perfume. trick your mind into being focused)

- minimize distractions (declutter your study space. put your phone out of reach. turn off notifications. close all other tabs on your browser. select non-distracting music/ sounds. don’t spam or pay attention to spams in your classes’ chatboxes. only bring along items that are absolutely vital to your focus)

- take notes, even if you can record your lessons and/or access the lessons later (it can either be digital notes or handwritten notes on paper - your call. this will force you to focus and prevent you from zoning out/ being distracted)

- be actively engaged in the lecture (if there are technical problems or if you have questions, chatbox away. this is also good practice for people with social anxiety too: the fact that you are in your home and behind the screen can make it easier for you to ask for help)

- if possible, put your teachers/profs on the big screen to create the illusion of being in a lecture (if your study spot has a TV/projector that can connect to your laptop and quality speakers, do it. it's more fun than you'd think. also super stimulating and kicks the boredom out of you too)

- if not, use headphones/ earphones (speakers can create a feeling of distance between the lecture and yourself. combined with unstable internet and/or monotonous voices of some instructors, this may result in your brain classifying your lecture as background noises and zone out. so use headphones or earphones with the appropriate volume for that optimal focus mode)

- give yourself breaks between classes (don't cram all your classes in one morning. but don't procrastinate either. time your breaks. look at something else besides a computer or phone screen while you’re on break too. maybe brew some tea/coffee for your next class or rearrange your notes from the previous one)

💻 REVIEWING FOR ONLINE CLASSES:

- make a schedule/ system - and be ready to change them (this is an elaboration of an earlier tip. your system doesn’t have to work perfectly right away. most of the time, you will have to make some kind of adjustments to it anyway. so take it easy. pay attention to how well you react/ adapt to the new schedule so that you can make necessary changes. and give yourself - especially your mind - some time to adapt to the schedule. don’t rush yourself or put too much pressure on being productive. remember to take care of your well-being too)

- it’s okay to give yourself some off-days (that’s the beauty of not having any physical or even abstract structure that forces you into an inescapable routine. Yes, I know this lack of structure sucks for a lot of us, especially for those who rely on external forces to keep themselves focused. But look on the bright side: now you don’t have to worry about missing classes or losing participation marks when you are unwell physically and mentally anymore)

- textbooks are your friends now (especially when your classes’ live-streams are just chaotic and hard to follow. or when the pre-recorded lectures aren’t loading properly and keeps lagging. practice speed reading. look for keywords and crucial information. take notes rather than highlighting everything. compare them to your lecture notes, your syllabus, or your friends’)

- take advantage of the online format’s availability + other resources (availability is here, baby! revisit lecture videos and podcasts as many times as you need to. check your email classes’ forums regularly for questions or announcements. re-listen to your lecture when you're cleaning or exercising. watch videos of Khan Academy or CrashCourse. look for online tutors. study at your own pace and in your own style. basically anything you wish you could do when your class was in-person)

- there’s no need to submit assignments early if it’s anxiety-inducing. but make a schedule/ tracking system/ set alarms to avoid forgetting to turn them in (take your time to double-check or edit your work - as long as the submission box is still open, of course. set aside about an hour or two before the deadline for submission to avoid any technical difficulties. and remember to start working on them early so that you don’t have to shorten that window of time and have more time for double-checking)

- don't be afraid to email the profs/teachers (if possible, compile your questions into a list. be as specific as you can about your concerns. put a subject for your email to reduces the chance of your email getting lost in your instructors' inbox.)

- reward yourself (don't stress yourself out by rewarding big accomplishments. reward small victories. reward baby steps. reward effort. you'll get things done eventually)

- take time to know your learning style (when are you most focused? do you like taking digital notes or do you prefer pen and paper? are you a visual or an auditory learner? do you like moving around while studying? what drinks or scents or sounds keep you going? you don't have to stick to your usual study methods or an online/paperless one now that you are studying in your own room)

- listen to your mind and body (it’s okay to feel a bit lost) (from my own experience, times that are without structure like nowadays is when most of us fall into this spiraling downfall of unhealthy sleep schedules, lethargy, and loss of purpose. so please take care of your mental and physical well-being during this very, very weird time. keep yourself active. re-ignite old interests/ hobbies. connect with people you love. give yourself some love)

- and more tips on productivity at home in my last post right here

💻 PREPARING FOR ONLINE EXAMS / QUIZZES:

- make a list of all the online exams and final assignment due dates (this will help you keep track of and stay on top of them due dates. from that list, trace backward to make a review or study plan to prepare for the tests and work on the assignments. if there are any time conflicts, especially for those who are now living in a different timezone from their schools or colleges, email the instructors to seek solutions or alternative options)

- again, find a good spot with good wifi, good lighting, and a desk (if possible, try to recreate your ideal exam environment as closely as you can while studying and reviewing for the exams. this can reduce the anxiety of tests and/or unfamiliarity)

- be prepared for technical difficulties (especially mentally, so that you don’t plan out a course of action to take if they ever arise. draft an email template. research in advance the contacts of people whom you can report to - IT personnel, your instructors, student office, etc.)

- bring everything you need to the exams - but no distractions (like mentioned earlier, if you need any special accommodations that are considered "unacceptable" in an in-person exam/quiz, now it's the time to bring them along - you’re in charge of your test space now, so make it as comfortable and accomodating as you want)

- plan your desk set-up prior to your exams (so many extra items. still so little desk space. therefore, plan ahead so your desk does not turn into a mess when you take your exams. plan where you want to put your notes, textbooks, calculators or scrap paper. think about how much use you’re gonna get out of each item and place them within or slightly-out-of reach accordingly. charge your laptop. sharpen your pencils. have your backup stationery handy. lay out everything you need onto your desk the night before your tests. this can create a feeling of preparedness and thus, reduce anxiety as well)

- make cheatsheets (the goals when making them are simple: (1) get you to rewrite your notes for that good memorization; (2) condense your information and find a connection between them for a thorough understanding of the materials; (3) reduce the time you use to flip through your notebooks or textbooks or google for information during the actual tests)

- time yourself with mock exams (if you are given mock exams to practice with, do them, with a timer. this will help you familiarize yourself with the stress of being timed, thus reducing your anxiety during the actual tests)

- get enough sleep and eat properly (even if the exams or quizzes are online, they are still, at their core, tests. and tests are always stressful and energy-consuming. so take care of both your physical and mental health, especially during the week leading up to your exams)

[stockdinner5-blog]

Watch Live Local Newsanytime, Anywhere

In addition to utilizing BritBox's net interface, you'll be able to obtain the BritBox app on media streaming units and mobile platforms . It doesn't offer apps for gaming consoles, such as the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. BritBox lets customers stream on as much as 5 devices simultaneously, which is impressive, however the service is simply obtainable in the US and Canada presently. For worldwide sports activities, you get channels from the beIN community and Univision. Fubo just lately announced that it's going to quickly embrace Disney-owned channels , but will not cater WarnerMedia channels corresponding to CNN. Prime Video is notable in that it supports 4K and HDR streaming as well as downloads for offline viewing. Amazon's video service works on an online browser, in addition to Android and iOS units, Fire gadgets , sport consoles , Smart TVs, and set-top boxes , although it does not natively support Chromecast units. You can also stream choose content material from different sources within the larger WarnerMedia universe, including from DC Comics, CNN, Crunchyroll, and Looney Tunes. HBO Max promises to keep the library contemporary with new Max Originals. Read our feature on everything coming to HBO Max this month to find out what you can watch. And some of the most important channels are locals, particularly ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC. This membership provides you access to greater than 45 completely different channels, including Lifetime, E! , Bravo, Cartoon Network, the Travel Channel, the Discovery Channel and more. It also allows for three simultaneous streams, so you possibly can watch your favourite reality TV present at the similar time that your infant is watching his or her Saturday morning cartoons from one other room. It is unclear how many Thursday night video games Sling TV will lose, however we are going to replace this part as we study extra. Sling TV splits channels between its $30-per-month Orange plan, which supports one simultaneous stream, and Sling Blue, which helps three simultaneous streams and likewise prices $30 per 30 days. http://premiumtv.biz Check our characteristic on Sling Orange and Sling Blue to search out out all their variations. The combined Sling Orange & Blue plan presents one of the best number of channels for $forty five per thirty days and permits you to stream on up to four gadgets simultaneously. If you’re looking for breaking information, you possibly can choose from an assortment of main network’s news channels which are stay streaming. A cheap service with no sports or local channels, Philo presents bread-and-butter cable channels like AMC, Comedy Channel, Nickelodeon and BBC America. We assume most people are better off paying one other $10 for Sling TV's superior channel choice, but when Philo has every channel you need, it's a great deal. Each of the providers above presents a special mix of channels, so your first step must be choosing one that carries your "can't miss" cable channels and reveals. Note that Sling TV recently misplaced all its Fox content, together with affiliate channels, FS1, and FS2. This is concerning for sports activities fans, especially since Sling does not stream CBS associates either; in order to watch NFL games on Sunday afternoon now, you have to use an antenna. This change additionally impacts Thursday Night Football games, as Sling won't stream any games that are initially broadcast on Fox and simulcast on NFL Network. Most other anime streaming providers offer far better platform help. In testing, we couldn’t affirm RetroCrush’s precise streaming resolution, however the image quality was crisp, despite the grainer look of older anime series. Although RetroCrush lacks any neighborhood options , its advertisements usually are not overwhelming. Mubi helps 1080p streaming and lets you obtain titles for offline viewing on mobile devices at several resolutions. The service lets you check in on five units on the same time, however solely supports two simultaneous streams. Mubi ought to think about adding extra closed captioning options in addition to the ability to set up multiple viewing profiles per account. You can download Mubi's apps on mobile platforms , media streaming units , Smart TVs , and on the PlayStation 4 . In testing, all of HBO Now's apps look fashionable and streaming efficiency is superb across the board. In addition to the online, HBO Now is on the market on Android, Chromecast, Apple TV, iOS, PS4, Roku, and the Xbox One, just to call a few. Both providers supply all four of the main native channels -- ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC -- in most areas of the nation, and both also carry native associates from The CW and MyTV. Only YouTube TV carries PBS local stations; you'll be able to't watch your native PBS affiliate reside on Hulu. Like Pluto, you can select from an assortment of main community’s news channels which might be reside streaming. Almost all the networks and cable TV channels have their own free apps for you to download — though many charge you to really watch present content material. I put them together into the big chart above, exhibiting local streaming coverage from Miami to Anchorage and in all places in between. Amazon is trying to add 24/7 live programming to its Prime Video service, based on multiple job listings posted over the past a number of weeks. The new channels may embrace reside information, music and sports activities in addition to scheduled films and TV show showings. To top all of it off, fuboTV presents excellent DVR capabilities and Lookback, a function that lets you watch something you could have missed as much as seventy two hours after it first aired. fuboTV additionally just lately launched Startover, which enables viewers to look at at present airing events from the start no matter once they tune in. Enjoy stable streaming efficiency by way of its internet interface or devoted apps for Android, iOS, Apple TV, Fire TV, Chromecast, and Roku units. Its base subscription plan, referred to as fubo Standard, costs $60 per month and grants you entry to over ninety channels, with the precise number depending in your location. For the nationwide sports activities events, there's NBC, CBS, FOX, NFL Network and NBA.TV. Sling recently increased the price of its plans, together with the price of some channel add-ons. Sling TV is a dependable and price-effective streaming video service for replacing cable, nevertheless it falters in the native programming division and isn't as intuitive as opponents. RetroCrush is only obtainable on Android and iOS units proper now, so we wish to see it broaden to other platforms such as gaming consoles, media streaming units, and the online. Still, HBO's service prices greater than many opponents with out being as technically advanced. For example, HBO Now doesn't characteristic any 4K or HDR content material, nor does it let subscribers watch exhibits offline. The service acquired the streaming rights to several different popular shows corresponding to Friends, Rick and Morty, South Park, and The Big Bang Theory, too.

[ucflibrary]

Women’s History Month began as a week-long celebration by in Sonoma, California in 1978 which was centered around International Women’s Day on March 8. A year later during a women’s history conference at Sarah Lawrence College, participants learned how successful the week was and decided to initiate similar in their own areas. President Carter issued the first proclamation for a national Women’s History Week in 1980. In 1987, Congress (after being petitioned by the National Women’s History Project) passed Pub. L. 100-9 designating March as Women’s History Month. U.S. Presidents have issued proclamations on Women’s History Month since 1988.

 The University of Central Florida community joins together to celebrate Women’s History Month across the multiple campuses with a wide variety of activities including workshops, film screenings, and WomanFest2019. Visit the Office of Diversity and Inclusion’s #visionarywomen page to learn more about the scheduled events, and stop by the library to view the display wall, Portraits of Empowerment: Womanhood & Activism, which includes bras decorated at our Honor, Remember & Support workshop. UCF Libraries is featuring a faculty author talk by Dr. Kimberly Voss called Women's Page History in Florida in the 1950s and 1960s on Friday, March 8 at 10:30 am in John C. Hitt Library 223.

 Here at the UCF Libraries, we have created a list of suggested, and favorite, books about women in both history and fiction. Please click on the read more link below to see the full book list with descriptions and catalog links. And don’t forget to stop by the John C. Hitt Library to browse the featured bookshelf on the 2nd (main) floor near the bank of two elevators for additional Women’s History Month books and DVDs.

Becoming by Michelle Obama

When she was a little girl, Michelle Robinson's world was the South Side of Chicago, where she and her brother, Craig, shared a bedroom in their family's upstairs apartment and played catch in the park, and where her parents, Fraser and Marian Robinson, raised her to be outspoken and unafraid. But life soon took her much further afield, from the halls of Princeton, where she learned for the first time what if felt like to be the only black woman in a room, to the glassy office tower where she worked as a high-powered corporate lawyer--and where, one summer morning, a law student named Barack Obama appeared in her office and upended all her carefully made plans. Here, for the first time, Michelle Obama describes the early years of her marriage as she struggles to balance her work and family with her husband's fast-moving political career. She takes us inside their private debate over whether he should make a run for the presidency and her subsequent role as a popular but oft-criticized figure during his campaign. Narrating with grace, good humor, and uncommon candor, she provides a vivid, behind-the-scenes account of her family's history-making launch into the global limelight as well as their life inside the White House over eight momentous years--as she comes to know her country and her country comes to know her.

Suggested by Richard Harrison, Research & Information Services

 Berenice Abbott: a life in photography by Julia Van Haaften

The comprehensive biography of the iconic twentieth-century American photographer Berenice Abbott, a trailblazing documentary modernist, author, and inventor. Berenice Abbott is to American photography as Georgia O'Keeffe is to painting or Willa Cather to letters. She was a photographer of astounding innovation and artistry, a pioneer in both her personal and professional life. Abbott's sixty-year career established her not only as a master of American photography, but also as a teacher, writer, archivist, and inventor. Famously reticent in public, Abbott's fascinating life has long remained a mystery―until now.

Suggested by Christina Wray, Teaching & Engagement

 Broad Band: the untold story of the women who made the Internet by Claire L. Evans

Join the ranks of the pioneers who defied social convention to become database poets, information-wranglers, hypertext dreamers, and glass ceiling-shattering dot com-era entrepreneurs. This inspiring call to action shines a light on the bright minds whom history forgot, and shows us how they will continue to shape our world in ways we can no longer ignore.

Suggested by Dawn Tripp, Research & Information Services

 Eleanor Roosevelt by Blanche Wiesen Cook

Eleanor Roosevelt was born into the privileges and prejudices of American aristocracy and into a family ravaged by alcoholism. She overcame debilitating roots: in her public life, fighting against racism and injustice and advancing the rights of women; and in her private life, forming lasting intimate friendships with some of the great men and women of her times. This volume covers ER's family and birth, her childhood, education, and marriage, and ends with FDR's election to the Presidency--the years of ER's youth and coming of age. Celebrated by feminists, historians, politicians, and reviewers everywhere, Cook's trilogy is an unprecedented portrait of a brave, fierce, passionate political leader of our century.

Suggested by Larry Cooperman, Research & Information Services

 Miss Ella of Commander's Palace: "I Don't Want a Restaurant Where a Jazz Band Can't Come Marching Through" by Ella Brennan & Ti Adelaide Martin

Meet Ella Brennan: mother, mentor, blunt-talking fireball, and matriarch of a New Orleans restaurant empire, famous for bringing national attention to Creole cuisine. In this candid autobiography, she shares her life. From childhood in the Great Depression to opening esteemed eateries, it’s quite a story to tell. When she and her family launched Commander’s Palace, it became the city’s most popular restaurant, where famous chefs such as Paul Prudhomme, Emeril Lagasse, and James Beard Award winner Troy McPhail got their start. Miss Ella of Commander’s Palace describes the drama, the disasters, and the abundance of love, sweat, and grit it takes to become the matriarch of New Orleans’ finest restaurant empire.

Suggested by Richard Harrison, Research & Information Services

 My American Dream: a life of love, family, and food by Lidia Matticchio Bastianich

For decades, beloved chef Lidia Bastianich has introduced Americans to Italian food through her cookbooks, TV shows, and restaurants. Now, in My American Dream, she tells her own story for the very first time. Born in Pula, on the Istrian peninsula, Lidia grew up surrounded by love and security, learning the art of Italian cooking from her beloved grandmother. But when Istria was annexed by a communist regime, Lidia’s family fled to Trieste, where they spent two years in a refugee camp waiting for visas to enter the United States. When she finally arrived in New York, Lidia soon began working in restaurants, the first step on a path that led to her becoming one of the most revered chefs and businesswomen in the country. Heartwarming, deeply personal, and powerfully inspiring, My American Dream is the story of Lidia’s close-knit family and her dedication and endless passion for food.

Suggested by Richard Harrison, Research & Information Services

 Notorious RBG by Irin Carmon

Notorious RBG, inspired by the Tumblr that amused the Justice herself and brought to you by its founder and an award-winning feminist journalist, is more than just a love letter. It draws on intimate access to Ginsburg's family members, close friends, colleagues, and clerks, as well an interview with the Justice herself. An original hybrid of reported narrative, annotated dissents, rare archival photos and documents, and illustrations, the book tells a never-before-told story of an unusual and transformative woman who transcends generational divides. As the country struggles with the unfinished business of gender equality and civil rights, Ginsburg stands as a testament to how far we can come with a little chutzpah.

Suggested by Peter Spyers-Duran, Cataloging

 Re-evaluating Women's Page Journalism in the Post-World War II Era: celebrating soft news by Kimberly Wilmot Voss

Re-Evaluating Women’s Page Journalism in the Post-World War II Era tells the stories of significant women’s page journalists who contributed to the women’s liberation movement and the journalism community. Previous versions of journalism history had reduced the role these women played at their newspapers and in their communities—if they were mentioned at all. For decades, the only place for women in newspapers was the women’s pages. While often dismissed as fluff by management, these sections in fact documented social changes in communities. These women were smart, feisty and ahead of their times. They left a great legacy for today’s women journalists. This book brings these individual women together and allows for a broader understanding of women’s page journalism in the 1950s and 1960s. It details the significant roles they played in the post-World War II years, laying the foundation for a changing role for women.

Suggested by Megan Haught, Teaching & Engagement/Research & Information Services

 She Persisted: 13 American women who changed the world by Chelsea Clinton

Chelsea Clinton introduces tiny feminists, mini activists and little kids who are ready to take on the world to thirteen inspirational women who never took no for an answer, and who always, inevitably and without fail, persisted. She Persisted is for everyone who has ever wanted to speak up but has been told to quiet down, for everyone who has ever tried to reach for the stars but was told to sit down, and for everyone who has ever been made to feel unworthy or unimportant or small.

Suggested by Megan Haught, Teaching & Engagement/Research & Information Services

 The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor black tobacco farmer whose cells—taken without her knowledge in 1951—became one of the most important tools in medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, and more. Henrietta's cells have been bought and sold by the billions, yet she remains virtually unknown, and her family can't afford health insurance. This phenomenal New York Times bestseller tells a riveting story of the collision between ethics, race, and medicine; of scientific discovery and faith healing; and of a daughter consumed with questions about the mother she never knew.

Suggested by Rachel Edford, Teaching & Engagement

 The Only Woman in the Room: why science is still a boy’s club by Eileen Pollack

A bracingly honest exploration of why there are still so few women in the hard sciences, mathematics, engineering, and computer science. Based on six years interviewing her former teachers and classmates, as well as dozens of other women who had dropped out before completing their degrees in science or found their careers less rewarding than they had hoped, The Only Woman in the Room is a bracingly honest, no-holds-barred examination of the social, interpersonal, and institutional barriers confronting women—and minorities—in the STEM fields. This frankly personal and informed book reflects on women’s experiences in a way that simple data can’t, documenting not only the more blatant bias of another era but all the subtle disincentives women in the sciences still face. The Only Woman in the Room shows us the struggles women in the sciences have been hesitant to admit, and provides hope for changing attitudes and behaviors in ways that could bring far more women into fields in which even today they remain seriously underrepresented.

Suggested by Sandy Avila, Research & Information Services

 The Radium Girls: the dark story of America's shining women by Kate Moore

The Curies' newly discovered element of radium makes gleaming headlines across the nation as the fresh face of beauty, and wonder drug of the medical community. From body lotion to tonic water, the popular new element shines bright in the otherwise dark years of the First World War. Meanwhile, hundreds of girls toil amidst the glowing dust of the radium-dial factories. The glittering chemical covers their bodies from head to toe; they light up the night like industrious fireflies. With such a coveted job, these "shining girls" are the luckiest alive ― until they begin to fall mysteriously ill. But the factories that once offered golden opportunities are now ignoring all claims of the gruesome side effects, and the women's cries of corruption. And as the fatal poison of the radium takes hold, the brave shining girls find themselves embroiled in one of the biggest scandals of America's early 20th century, and in a groundbreaking battle for workers' rights that will echo for centuries to come.

Suggested by Megan Haught, Teaching & Engagement/Research & Information Services

 The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

The Secret History of Wonder Woman is a tour de force of intellectual and cultural history. Wonder Woman, Lepore argues, is the missing link in the history of the struggle for women’s rights—a chain of events that begins with the women’s suffrage campaigns of the early 1900s and ends with the troubled place of feminism a century later. This edition includes a new afterword with fresh revelations based on never before seen letters and photographs from the Marston family’s papers.

Suggested by Rachel Edford, Teaching & Engagement

 The Woman Who Smashed Codes: a true story of love, spies, and the unlikely heroine who outwitted America's enemies by Jason Fagone

In The Woman Who Smashed Codes, Jason Fagone chronicles the life of this extraordinary woman, who played an integral role in our nation’s history for forty years. After World War I, Smith used her talents to catch gangsters and smugglers during Prohibition, then accepted a covert mission to discover and expose Nazi spy rings that were spreading like wildfire across South America, advancing ever closer to the United States. As World War II raged, Elizebeth fought a highly classified battle of wits against Hitler’s Reich, cracking multiple versions of the Enigma machine used by German spies.

Suggested by Sandy Avila, Research & Information Services

 Visionary Women: how Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall, and Alice Waters changed our world by Andrea Barnet

This is the story of four visionaries who profoundly shaped the world we live in today. Together, these women—linked not by friendship or field, but by their choice to break with convention—showed what one person speaking truth to power can do. Jane Jacobs fought for livable cities and strong communities; Rachel Carson warned us about poisoning the environment; Jane Goodall demonstrated the indelible kinship between humans and animals; and Alice Waters urged us to reconsider what and how we eat. With a keen eye for historical detail, Andrea Barnet traces the arc of each woman’s career and explores how their work collectively changed the course of history. All told, their efforts ignited a transformative progressive movement while offering people a new way to think about the world and a more positive way of living in it.

Suggested by Christina Wray, Teaching & Engagement

[orbemnews]

Federal Aid to Renters Moves Slowly, Leaving Many at Risk WASHINGTON — Four months after Congress approved tens of billions of dollars in emergency rental aid, only a small portion has reached landlords and tenants, and in many places it is impossible even to file an application. The program requires hundreds of state and local governments to devise and carry out their own plans, and some have been slow to begin. But the pace is hindered mostly by the sheer complexity of the task: starting a huge pop-up program that reaches millions of tenants, verifies their debts and wins over landlords whose interests are not always the same as their renters’. The money at stake is vast. Congress approved $25 billion in December and added more than $20 billion in March. The sum the federal government now has for emergency rental aid, $46.5 billion, rivals the annual budget of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Experts say careful preparation may improve results; it takes time to find the neediest tenants and ensure payment accuracy. But with 1 in 7 renters reporting that they are behind on payments, the longer it takes to distribute the money, the more landlords suffer destabilizing losses, and tenants risk eviction. Millions of tenants are protected from eviction only by a tenuous federal moratorium that faces multiple court challenges, omits many households and is scheduled to expire in June. “I’m impressed with the amount of work that unsung public servants are doing to set up these programs, but it is problematic that more money isn’t getting out the door,” said Ingrid Gould Ellen, a professor at New York University who is studying the effort. “There are downstream effects if small landlords can’t keep up their buildings, and you want to reach families when they first hit a crisis so their problems don’t compound.” Estimates of unpaid rents vary greatly, from $8 billion to $53 billion, with the sums that Congress has approved at the high end of the range. The situation illustrates the patchwork nature of the American safety net. Food, cash, health care and other types of aid flow through separate programs. Each has its own mix of federal, state and local control, leading to great geographic variation. While some pandemic aid has flowed through established programs, the rental help is both decentralized and new, making the variation especially pronounced. Among those seeking help is Saundra Broughton, 48, a logistics worker outside Charleston, S.C., who considered herself safely middle class in the fall, when she rented an apartment with a fitness center and saltwater pool. To her shock, she was soon laid off; after her jobless benefits were delayed, she received an eviction notice. “I’ve always worked and taken care of myself,” she said. “I’ve never been on public assistance.” A judge gave Ms. Broughton 10 days to leave her apartment. Only a last-minute call to legal aid brought word of the federal moratorium, which requires tenants to apply. She rushed to the library to print the form with 24 hours to spare. “But I still owe the money,” she said, about $4,600 and counting. If Ms. Broughton lived in nearby Berkeley County, she could have sought help as early as March 29. In Charleston County, a few miles away, she could have applied on April 12. But as a resident of Dorchester County, she must apply through the state, which has $272 million in federal money but is not yet taking applications. “Why are they holding the money?” she said. “I have thousands of dollars of debt and could be kicked out at any moment. It’s a very frightening feeling.” The huge aid measures passed during the early stages of the pandemic did not include specific provisions to help renters, though they did give most households cash. But hundreds of state and local governments started programs with discretionary money from the CARES Act, passed in March 2020. These efforts disbursed $4.5 billion in what amounted to a practice run for the effort now underway with 10 times the money. Lessons cited include the need to reach out to the poorest tenants to let them know aid is available. Technology often posed barriers: Renters had to apply online, and many lacked computers or internet access. The demand for documentation also thwarted aid, as many people without proof of leases or lost income could not finish applications. Some landlords declined to participate, perhaps preferring to seek new tenants. Despite rising need, programs in Florida and New York, financed by the CARES Act, returned tens of millions of unspent dollars to the states. By the time Congress passed the new program in December, nearly 1 renter household in 5 reported being behind on payments. The national effort, the Emergency Rental Assistance Program, is run by the Treasury Department. It allocates money to states and also to cities and counties with populations of at least 200,000 that want to run their own programs. About 110 cities and 227 counties have chosen to do so. The program offers up to 12 months of rent and utilities to low-income tenants economically harmed by the pandemic, with priority on households with less than half the area’s median income — typically about $34,000 a year. Federal law does not deny the aid to undocumented immigrants, though a few states and counties do. Modern assistance seems to demand a mix of Jacob Riis and Bill Gates — outreach to the marginalized and help with software. Progress slowed for a month when the Biden administration canceled guidance issued under President Donald J. Trump and developed rules that require less documentation. Other reasons for slow starts vary. Progressive state legislators in New York spent months debating the best way to protect the neediest tenants. Conservatives legislators in South Carolina were less focused on the issue. But the result was largely the same: Neither legislature passed its program until April, and neither state is yet accepting applications. “I just don’t know why there hasn’t been more of a sense of urgency,” said Sue Berkowitz, the director of the South Carolina Appleseed Legal Justice Center. “We’ve been hearing nonstop from people worried about eviction.” There is no complete data on how many tenants have been helped. But of the $17.6 billion awarded to state governments, 20 percent is going to states not yet taking applications, though some local programs in those states are. Florida (which has $871 million), Illinois ($566 million) and North Carolina ($547 million) are among those that have yet to start. “The pace is slow,” said Greg Brown of the National Apartment Association, who emphasized that landlords have mortgages, taxes and maintenance to pay. In a recent talk at the Brookings Institution, Erika Poethig, a housing expert on the White House Domestic Policy Council, praised the “unprecedented amount of rental assistance” and said “the federal government only has so much ability” to encourage faster action. Accepting applications is only the beginning. With $1.5 billion to spend, California has attracted 150,000 requests for help. But of the $355 million requested, only $20 million has been approved and $1 million paid. Texas, with $1.3 billion to spend, started quickly, but the company it hired to run the program had software failures and staffing shortages. A committee in the state House of Representatives found that after 45 days, the program had paid just 250 households. By contrast, a program jointly run by the city of Houston and Harris County had spent about a quarter of its money and assisted nearly 10,000 households. Not everyone is troubled by the pace. “Getting the money out fast isn’t necessarily the goal here, especially when we focus on making sure the money reaches the most vulnerable people,” said Diane Yentel, the director of the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Given the challenge, she said, “I think it’s going OK.” She points toward a program in Santa Clara County, Calif., that won praise for its outreach last year. Many of the people it served spoke little English or lacked formal leases to submit. Now, with $36 million to spend under the new program, it opted for weeks of additional planning to train 50 nonprofit groups to find the poorest households “Giving away money is actually quite hard,” said Jen Loving, who runs Destination: Home, a housing group leading the campaign. “All the money in the world isn’t going matter if it doesn’t get to the people who need it.” In Charleston, S.C., housing became a subject of concern after a 2018 study found the area had the country’s highest eviction rate. Charleston County ran three rounds of rental relief with CARES Act money, and the state ran two. The second state program, started with $25 million in February, drew so many applications that it closed in six days. But South Carolina is still processing those requests as it decides how to distribute the new federal funds. Antonette Worke is among the applicants awaiting an answer. She moved to Charleston from Denver last year, drawn by cheaper rents, warmer weather and a job offer. But the job fell through, and her landlord filed for eviction. Ms. Worke, who has kidney and liver disease, is temporarily protected by the federal eviction moratorium. But it does not cover tenants whose leases expire, as hers will at the end of next month. Her landlord said he would force her to move, even if the state paid the $5,000 in overdue rent. Still, she said the help was important: A clean slate would make it easier to rent a new apartment and relieve her of an impossible debt. “I’m stressing over it to the point where I’ve made myself sicker,” she said. Moving faster than the state, Charleston County started its $12 million program two weeks ago, and workers have taken computers to farmers’ markers, community centers and a mall parking lot. Christine DuRant, a deputy county administrator, said the aid was needed to prevent foreclosures that could reduce the housing stock. But critics would pounce if the program sent payments to people who do not qualify, she said: “We will be audited,” possibly three times. Latoya Green is caught where the desire for speed and accounting collide. A clerk who lost hours in the pandemic, she owes $3,700 in rent and utilities and is protected by the eviction moratorium only until her lease expires next month. She applied for help on the day the county program started but has not completed the application. She said she is unsettled by the emails requesting her lease, which she lacks, and proof of lost income. Still, Ms. Green does not criticize Charleston County officials. “I think they’re trying their best,” she said. “A lot of people run scams.” With time running short, she added: “I just hope and pray to God they’ll be able to assist me.” Source link Orbem News #Aid #Federal #Leaving #Moves #renters #risk #slowly

[eremji]

Thoughts on Infinity War, and Thanos' Motivation

Disclaimer: I'm not a Marvel expert. Some of my information on comic plots was collected from wikis and secondary articles, due to a lack of access to a primary source or the simple inaccuracy of my own memory. I also mostly enjoyed Infinity War, and any criticism herein should not be taken as decrying the whole.

Spoilers behind the cut. Please close your eyes and scroll super fast, block tags, duck and cover, etc. if you’re on mobile, because, seriously, spoilers.

An extremely simplified version of movie production:

From a production standpoint, Iron Man was a huge risk for the studios fronting the money for it. After critical and box office flops from 90s Batman films and other various superhero action flicks, studios typically found comic book movies to underperform in comparison to budgetary requirements for good visuals, making them unattractive. Marvel has taken a large step away from making comic book movies, to making comic book adaptations, because what works on the page doesn’t work in a moving picture.

Marvel Studios’ cinematic success has almost nothing to do with how compelling the source material is – because some of Marvel’s library is pretty much slush pile garbage. This was before your average artist or consumer realized you can get pretty literary while still having cool pictures on a page. They’re valuable because they propelled the comic industry to widespread success, but the source is best examined with a critical eye towards tone deaf and anachronistic viewpoints on race, sexuality, gender, and pretty much everything else. Marvel Studios has done a fairly consistent job of divorcing the cinematic canon from the original medium’s baggage, to which I attribute a large portion of the films’ success in comparison to very lukewarm iterations of DC or X-Men.

As media consumers, we’re accustomed to having a finished product to hold and analyze. When considering story, in terms of plotting and pacing, I personally believe it’s most helpful to compare the scope of the MCU production to be similar to that of a television show, rather than a traditional movie or movie series. It may be startling to know that even very successful television shows, like Breaking Bad or Stranger Things, often don’t even have all the episodes completely written out prior to beginning filming of a season.

Marvel Studios’ movies have been in production for ten years, with many, many different hands in the pot, and earlier scripts don’t always set up the best planting and payoff of character or plot elements later in the continuity. (For visual learners, Lindsay Ellis has a very layman-friendly example using clips from Mad Max: Fury Road.)

You can see where this might start to cause some consistency issues.

Crossover event comics and the necessary sacrifice of emotional development:

For anyone walking in to expecting Avengers: Infinity War to have a lot of character development, I’m very sorry for your loss.

There was never going to be a grand emotional reunion for Steve and Bucky, and there was never going to be whole hours dedicated to bonding and witty bickering and new friendships that weren’t absolutely vital to the plot. That we got things like the Steve-and-Bucky hug, the jealous Star-Lord vs. Thor moments, and Steve introducing himself politely to Groot were for the benefit of the audience more than advancing the plot, which is a huge victory in terms of crushing as much as possible into a theatrical cut.

A film production has a finite amount of screen time to allocate before a movie becomes bloated. When people joke about Infinity War being the most ambitious crossover event, I don’t think some of them realize how on the mark that is from a production standpoint. Hard decisions have to be made between what isn’t vital to advancing plot in a compelling way and what was retained to meet audience expectations. Infinity War often felt like it tried to recapture that Joss Whedon-ish sassy-but-kinda-flat comedy from the first Avengers, and that meant punchlines for jokes sometimes land at emotionally inappropriate times because characters just don’t have cinematic space for witty banter between shooting aliens and losing everyone they ever cared about.

There’s a difference in author-audience expectations of what’s important in these team-up movies, and also gaps between fans actively participating in fandom because they love the characters and casual moviegoers looking for a blockbuster. It all comes down to how much each party in the creative transaction is willing to settle for. Traditionally, Marvel has set up the character-driven plots and subplots in individual comics with occasional crossover cameos for a few issues when another character or baddie is relevant to the plot. The large crossover events, like Civil War, Contest of Champions, or Infinity are almost always plot-heavy and character-light.

This is so much easier in comic book format, where multiple series can be coordinated in regular, paced releases, and different comic issues may happen parallel or directly before/after the event crossovers. Movies take a significantly larger amount of time to produce, through pre-production, filming, post-production, marketing, and distribution.

A brief (I’m serious, they’ve been making comics since the 1939) explication of source material:

One of the largest disconnects for me, as a fan of both the comics and the movies, was the change in Thanos’ motivation, but not his mission. For those who aren't aware of the origins of his character, he essentially wants to murder people to impress a girl – Mistress Death, to be specific. He wants to kill half of all life in the universe so that he can be her equal and win her affection. 

Dorkly did a pretty solid breakdown of some of Thanos’ Infinity Gauntlet story and the innate misogynistic slant of his character, including comic panels from the original source material, that paints comic!Thanos an internet Nice Guy™. (Feel free to skim the article; it's a bit slow to get to the point.) Perusing the comic panels, you can see Thanos is hella into negging and is spiteful when Mistress Death shows interest in another dude (spoilers: it’s Deadpool). He clearly believes love is possession, and if he can’t have what he wants, then, good golly, no one can.

He’s also really off the rails – dubbed the Mad Titan even before his objectification mega crush on a badass corpse with a wicked bod – and is personally responsible for destroying Titan. He’s not a villain that believes he’s the hero, and this shift away from his motivation being dangerous-and-horrible to dangerous-and-misguided casts the first shadow on the premise.

My (very personal) opinion on the execution:

MCU essentially played keep away with some of the more supernatural elements of the source material, at least until introducing Dr. Strange. In doing so they had to construct Thanos’ motivation for a comic-book-inspired task out of whole cloth. There is no Mistress Death. Secondary characters that were discrete entities are often pulling double duty*.

(*Or triple. See also: Bucky Barnes, who is wearing the backstory of Captain America's gay best friend Arnie Roth and now White Wolf. If you were previously unaware of this factoid, please enjoy the irony that Marvel’s biggest pro-American propaganda piece had an openly gay best friend circa early 80s but Civil War ham-fistedly had to work in that awkward-as-fuck smooch between Steve and Peggy Carter’s hot young romantic surrogate niece.)

So, okay, they have to reinvent Thanos, who we've only seen in a handful of post-credit scenes and vicariously learned, through Loki in the first Avengers movie and then Gamora in Guardians, is a conqueror and also really Bad News™.

I buy everything so far. And why not? Black Panther made me love Killmonger and his rage, and the parallels to contemporary issues made him fairly empathetic without highlighting that his perspective was necessarily the ‘correct’ one. Similarly, Spider-Man: Homecoming’s villain, Vulture, was believable in the sort of suffering everyman-turned-desperate way, highlighting the fallout of the Space Invaders vs. Avengers destruction without suggesting the audience should root for Vulture.

In general, I am on board for these movies going straight for the throat on the big baddies of the comic universe because movie production is lengthy, expensive, and time-consuming. Dear Marvel Studios, Give me Avengers vs. Dr. Doom. Love, Me.

A villain can be built up over the course of a single movie (or two). Armed with this optimism, and heartened by recent Marvel Studios successes in characterization, I walked into Infinity War expecting as much gratuitous violence, universe-cleansing genocide, and genuine fear of Thanos as I could possibly expect from something Disney-adjacent.

I knew people were going to die. Let me say – there was no way to spoil this for me. The Infinity Gauntlet comic series starts with half the universe dying. I expected there to be ‘casualties’ and even though the Russo bros said that this wasn’t two parts of the same movie, it’s certainly serial. At minimum, I was expecting Thanos bent on conquering the cosmos, worshiping at the altar of death in the abstract, if not groveling for an inevitable-cosmic-force-turned unattainable woman.

And yet. And yet.

We got the purple version of the Kool-Aid man with some seriously unaddressed parent-child issues (mirrored in Tony Stark’s loss of Peter Parker) and a wholly unimaginative motivation. I won’t go too far much into the movie’s alarming efforts at framing Thanos as a sympathetic character despite his genocidal and horribly abusive tendencies, because I am A) not an expert at identifying film technique and B) the push for Thanos to be an empathetic villain has been analyzed elsewhere.

Phenomenal, limitless cosmic power and all you want to do is break shit? For all the immaturity of it, Thanos’ comic book motivation was more believable.

To those arguing that the his motivations in the movie are predicated off of him being the Mad Titan and therefore not rooted in logic: The film did not explicitly plant the idea – except in the way that we know genocide is bad due to an innate sense of morality – that he was unhinged and power-mad, nor did they really give the audience any payoff.

Instead, we get, ‘I don’t really want to do this, but I must.’

There was a point where I started wondering why the hell he wasn’t just being steadily roasted by the Avengers for not receiving some sort of basic education in the evils of wealth disparity and resource distribution.

As an audience member, was I meant to believe this incredibly powerful entity at the center of a massive fleet, accompanied by a group of talented and sycophantic followers, couldn’t think of a better way to bring ‘balance’ to the universe?

Perhaps Thanos’ justification is simply the conceit of the way the universe operates, required to propel a plot forward. However, this is also poorly explained. There are many unanswered questions: Why is it a given that killing half the universe will create balance? What does balance look like? Is this state permanent or is it a routine, necessary evil in order to stop entropy? Is balance a socioeconomic state, or does it have some greater cosmological significance? We know that Titan fell after rejecting Thanos’ extreme solution, but would the population have actually endured and flourished if his plan had been carried out?

For a movie that did so well at handling a cast so phenomenally large as the one involved in its production, Infinity War really didn’t go in very hard on selling Thanos. I would have been perfectly happy if Marvel Studios had taken the risk to lean in hard on making the movie Thanos-centric, given Thanos even more screen time to develop his character, motives, and the rules of the universe – and then make Avengers 4 about, you know, the actual avenging.

Parting notes:

What are we left with?

Infinity War gifted us with some badass action clips, a fairly jarring death performance by Tom Holland, Cheerful Goatherd Bucky Barnes, and emotionally traumatizing bubbles. It never really sells the conundrum it sets up via Thanos. You'll never hear me insist a peice of art or entertainment is required to carry some sort of social commentary or moral message, but I feel like this could have been, tonally, a vastly different film had it considered the core of Thanos' motivations the same way it considered Vulture's or Killmonger's.

Also, where the hell is Adam Warlock (set up at the end of GotG: Vol. 2; revisit planting and payoff) to shit talk Thanos’ lack of villainous veracity when we need him?

[shirlleycoyle]

Why Are Résumés Still a Thing?

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

Is there anything more nerve-wracking than having to sell yourself to a prospective employer?

They don’t know you. You don’t know them. And much of the pressure of making sure that connection makes sense too often falls on the individual rather than the potential employer.

At the center of this is the résumé, a document sent to potential employers, often with a customized cover letter, that explains who you are, what you’re doing, and the references you’ve gained over the years.

But where did this approach come from, and why are job applicants seemingly slaves to this dog and pony show?

Let’s look into the history of the résumé—and analyze whether they even make sense anymore.

“Having now sufficiently seen and considered the achievements of all those who count themselves masters and artificers of instruments of war, and having noted that the invention and performance of the said instruments is in no way different from that in common usage, I shall endeavour, while intending no discredit to anyone else, to make myself understood to Your Excellency for the purpose of unfolding to you my secrets, and thereafter offering them at your complete disposal, and when the time is right bringing into effective operation all those things which are in part briefly listed below.”

— Leonardo da Vinci, in a famous letter to Ludovico Sforza, then the duke of Milan and also known as Ludovico il Moro, offering his services to the Lord. This letter, featured in full on the excellent site Letters of Note, is often cited as the first résumé or cover letter. (Some, however, cite the letters sent to guilds in the Middle Ages.) While not as sharply structured as a modern résumé, it shares much in common with the application letter, a common structural element used for job applications hundreds of years later.

Typewriters, with their ability to indent, helped formalize the application letter. Image: Laura Chouette/Unsplash

Before the world of employment became obsessed with the résumé, we called them application letters

The business world is defined by its ever-changing terminology, and one sign of this is that we used to rely on a far more straightforward term to describe what a résumé effectively does.

For decades, we called them “letters of application,” or “application letters.” Written about in business correspondence books of different kinds throughout the late 19th and early 20th century, the documents slowly evolved in level of formality, and were reliant on recommendation letters from prior employers. In the 1883 book The Universal Self-Instructor, a general reference manual, it’s portrayed as serving a similar role to a simple cover letter. An example from the book, for an apprenticeship:

GEORGE S. GORDON, Esq.:

Sir :—

I beg to apply for the situation mentioned in the above advertisement, clipped from today’s Morning Post. I have been employed for the last four months in the foundry of Wheeler & Co., where I was bound apprentice. The recent failure of that concern and closing of the foundry has caused the canceling of my articles, and I am now anxious to obtain work elsewhere. I am permitted to refer to Mr. Charles Wheeler and Mr. Edwin Hoyt.

Hoping that you will be willing to take me on trial, I remain,

Very respectfully,

SAMUEL HENDERSON, 220 Main Street.

This type of letter would appear in books about “business correspondence,” which were a form of reference book for their day. While many books of this nature appeared throughout the first half of the 20th century, they were not written around the résumé, as many later books were.

This type of cover letter-like thing, once handwritten, eventually became more formalized with the addition of the typewriter, which allowed for some rudimentary organizing through the use of indents and tab stops. The approach became more rigid over time, the realm of bullet points and horizontal lines.

As the 1930 book A Course in English for Engineers puts it:

The application letter is essentially a sales letter. It is the means by which a person seeking employment attempts to market his training, his experience, and his personality. He who is successful in selling his services by letter is usually the one who has thoroughly analyzed every essential detail that goes into the writing of an application.

But the interesting thing is that the résumé, as the application letter came to be called, eventually evolved into a much more important form of business correspondence than anything else … at least for a while.

“While a résumé alone almost never earns a job for a person, a good one often serves as the deciding factor in obtaining the all-important interview.”

— Jill Smolowe, a The New York Times contributor, discussing the nature of the résumé in a 1979 article for the paper, written as part of a “Careers in the ’80s” insert, that in many ways seems to be written to introduce the concept to readers.

How the application letter evolved into the résumé

If you walk into any bookstore or library in the world, you’re going to see dozens, possibly even hundreds of books about how to write a good résumé, how to structure it in a way that maximizes what you do best—complete with a great cover letter and a minimal number of typos. Many will tell you to keep things under a page if you’re not above a certain age range; others will tell you that there’s nothing worse for making a first impression than a misplaced comma or repeated word.

But one thing that you likely will not find is a book that explains how to make a résumé that dates before 1970 or so. (Probably the first book on the topic with any long-lasting authority is Richard Bolles’ long-running What Color is Your Parachute? series, a self-help book that discourages the use of spray-and-pray tactics.) Most of them will date to 1980 or beyond, in fact.

While both the résumé and the curriculum vitae existed before then and were frequently asked for in want ads as early as the late 1940s in some professional fields, something appears to have changed in their role starting in the late 1970s and early 1980s—around the time when many service-oriented fields first gained prominence—in which the résumé, particularly in North America, turned into a de facto requirement when applying for most new jobs.

Companies started treating humans as resources around this time, and many workers traded in their blue collars for white ones. It was a big shift, and the résumé was in the middle of it.

Why the name change, though? There are a lot of reasons why “résumé” won out over “application letter,” but I think one of the biggest might come from the education field of the era. The U.S. Department of Education’s Education Resources Information Center launched in 1965, and early in its life, relied on the terminology “document resume” to refer to its bibliographic entries. This information reached schools through documents produced by the Education Department, and my theory is that the influence of this material on educators might just have touched the business world, too.

The shifting nature of work also made the need for more personalized applications more necessary. A 1962 book, Analyzing the Application for Employment, noted the overly complex nature of fill-in-the-blank application forms, and that they would often take hours for prospective employees to fill out. In the book, author Irwin Smalheiser of Personnel Associates highlights an example of one such person stuck dealing with complex application processes:

One man we know, who perpetually seems to be looking for work, has devised a neat system for coping with the application blanks he encounters. He has taken the time to complete a detailed summary of his work history which he carries in his wallet. When he is asked to fill out the company application form, he simply copies the pertinent dates and names of the companies for which he worked.

In many ways, a résumé solves this problem. While some level of modification comes with each specific job, you often can reuse it again and again without having to repeat your work—no need to repeat your references for every job opening, but a cover letter refresh might be helpful. Sure, job applications stuck around for lower-end jobs, like fast food, but the résumé stuck around nearly everywhere else.

In a slower world, it was the best tool we had for applying for a new job. The problem is, the world got faster—and the model began to show its flaws.

This 1995 book, from the Princeton Review, is a good example of a job search advice book.

Five factors that made the résumé a more prominent part of workplace life in the ’80s and ’90s

Culture. With a growing number of companies able to compete on a regional, national, or even global scale, this created additional complexity that facilitated the need for new types of hiring and employee management practices. Starting in the late 1970s, the field of personnel administration took on the name human resources management (HRM), and the role became a more significant element of many companies.

Regulations. The 1965 creation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in the U.S.—part of a general movement against workplace discrimination—along with regulations on issues such as safety, created a need for a more objective approach to hiring. This played into the need for human resources departments to ensure that the company was an equal opportunity employer.

Technology. Sure, typewriters were nothing new, but access to them, along with the then-new computer and the growing ubiquity of the copying machine, made it easier for people to apply for multiple jobs at once. It was simply easier to apply for a job through the mail than it was to fill out an application form. (And when we got the internet, some of the earliest digital hubs, such as the free web host Tripod, offered résumé writing and job-hunting services to their users. And that was years before LinkedIn.) And when graphical interfaces and word processors became a thing, the first experience many people got with word processing software such as Microsoft Word was in modifying a cover letter template.

Economy. In many ways, the rise of the résumé reflected a shifting role of the employee in an economy built around white collar work. “Indeed—a point to be stressed—HRM in most companies was and is primarily concerned with managers and white-collar employees, not blue-collar workers,” George Strauss, of UC Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, wrote in 1991. The résumé, for better or for worse, shifted the burden of hiring onto the employee in most cases, particularly during economic dry spells.

Publishing. I wouldn’t put it in the same category as “going viral,” but the business press had a major surge in presence during the 1980s and 1990s, with the nearly century-old Harvard Business Review being rethought for general audiences, old-guard magazines like BusinessWeek and Fortune reaching the peak of their influence, and newer players like Inc. and Fast Company gaining readership. Likewise, reference and resource books targeting business audiences—especially those about how to get a job—had a real moment around this time. The combined result likely helped reinforce the résumé’s role in the business world.

Does the résumé really work anymore? Maybe not.

When I wrote about my desire to research the history of the résumé on Twitter the other day, something interesting and surprising happened: The result attracted a few business types that complained about the ineffectiveness of this tool and the problems it surfaced along the way.

Initially, this bothered me, because it seemed like it was getting away from my main reason for researching this history. But having thought about it some, it makes sense—it hints at the fact that we’re stuck with this outdated research tool, that nobody seems to be happy with, because it fails in a lot of subtle ways.

For all its success in the 1980s and 1990s, the rise of the résumé creates brand new issues.

While they generally do not include photographs, they can allow for latent discrimination, as prospective employers can judge a worker’s eligibility not on the quality of their work or their potential for success, but their implied background. Even a name is enough to throw off a potential employer.

Then there’s the ease of being able to make stuff up, something that has caught up some big-name companies over the years—most famously Yahoo, who lost a CEO, Scott Thompson, after it was revealed he lied about his education.

There’s also the factor of investment: It's often a game of who has the most polished result, not who has the most qualifications. Around 1988, Reagan administration White House staffers ran to professional resume-writing firms to get a layer of slick polish to their job history in an effort to get hired on with then-President George H.W. Bush. Good for them, and anyone else who can pay a lot of money for a professional resume rewrite—but what about people who don’t have the resources to play that game?

And as with things like standardized testing, they put a focus on surface issues that will not correctly tell the story of a person’s true potential. In many ways, work experience matters less in a world where modern technical skills won’t stay the same even five years after the fact.

Too often, many experts note, they focus on the wrong things. Speaking to Fast Company, Carisa Miklusak of the algorithmic hiring firm tilr notes that prior experience matters far less than current abilities and skill set. As a result, results have been pushed off to the side quite often.

“Employers are interested in skills and the results someone can generate, rather than titles or previous employment,” Miklusak told the magazine. “Focusing on skills provides a fuller understanding of the candidate’s experience and capabilities, and opens up more opportunities.”

Some of the most recent startups in the employment space largely eschew the résumé approach entirely. Triplebyte, for example, offers a really challenging quiz intended to find the best technical employees out there for equally technical jobs, leaning on a skill-based referral over a good cover letter in helping to fill a potential dream job. Likewise, other parts of the tech economy are leaning on abilities over degrees.. Likewise, other parts of the tech economy are leaning on abilities over degrees.

Is that strategy going to play out long-term? Who knows. But let’s just say that the CV, or whatever you call it, is really starting to show its age.

Building a good résumé is often a challenge, because the rules keep changing.

As a designer, it was only one part of my portfolio, and I had to combine everything together, cover letter and all, while making it look well-designed and clever. That often meant it was a little less straightforward, because that was the field I was competing in. (No templates here.) As the web came into play, that portfolio needed a digital element. And it also needed to live in other contexts.

As a job seeker I had a pretty decent track record, barring that time I interviewed at a newspaper on the day Pope John Paul II died. (That’s not made up. It was an odd situation that probably cost me a job, but one I don’t blame on the newspaper itself. Plus, it earned me an opportunity at an equally good job a couple of months later.)

For a while, I would update my résumé and portfolio every year, even if I wasn’t looking for a new job, just to keep in the habit, because the ground is always changing. But increasingly, I sort of feel like the approach had grown out of date—it especially doesn’t hold up well to career changes. For the last job I legitimately applied for, roughly eight years ago, I sent over a design portfolio and a one-sheeter about a website I ran. My current position didn’t even have very much to do with graphic design, but it was what I had been doing, so that was what I sent along.

I feel challenged to explain what I do today in this form. I feel like, if you care, you’ll find me—because that’s what the “gig economy” is all about.

In a way, this philosophy isn’t all that far off from the thinking of one of the earliest innovators in resume writing, an English land surveyor named Ralph Agas. During the 16th and 17th centuries, he used a variety of methods to market his relevant skills to the public, and one of those was by creating flyers that told the public of his sizable skills as a surveyor. He was advertising at a time few other people were, and it stood out.

Often, this is cited as one of the first cover letters, but I think it’s something else: This might be the first Facebook Page, and he might be the first influence marketer, beating out Bob Vila by 400 years. (Sorry, Bob.)

Maybe that’s the problem: Getting a job means standing out—and because the résumé has gotten so old and staid, it’s not doing that anymore.

Why Are Résumés Still a Thing? syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[therapy101]

How to Find & Read Academic Articles

How to Find Academic Articles

1. Identify potential academic search engines or databases, and then identify the ones that are most likely to serve your needs.

There are many, many academic search engines (here’s wikipedia’s list, which is not exhaustive). I tend to use Google Scholar, ProQuest, EBSCO, and PubMed the most. These capture nearly all psychology, psychiatry, and mental health journals, so if that’s your area you could start with those. People in other disciplines will have different database needs- for example, PubMed specifically covers medicine and related disciplines, so if you are a historian you are unlikely to find what you need there. JSTOR, on the other hand, might be a perfect fit for a historian, but rarely has what I need.

 Many of these search engines require a subscription for access. It’ll be easiest for you to be able to use these search engines and download papers if you have access through an institution- like your university. If you don’t, most college and university libraries, as well as many local libraries, offer access if you use their computers or access their internet.

Identify what you’re looking for when you search.

You’ve got some kind of goals when you are looking for a paper or a set of papers, and here’s the time to identify them. Think about a literature search as a balance between breadth versus depth. If you want to find several papers, including reviews, meta-analyses, and seminal papers, all about a general topic (“health disparities in schizophrenia”), then you’re doing a breadth search. If you want to find information about a very specific thing (“what percentage of Latinos with schizophrenia have access to quality care”), then you’re doing a depth search. 

Use #2 to come up with a set of search words.

The more “depth” you’re looking for, the more specific your search terms should be. If you’re doing a breadth search, putting “health disparities schizophrenia” will get you a number of helpful results. If you’re doing a depth search, you need to add enough information to get more specific results, without using so many specific terms that no paper meets your search terms. In this case, the search “health disparities schizophrenia Latinos access USA” works really well.

Get to know the terms most commonly used in your field to improve your search terms. If you are using uncommon or nonscientific search terms, then it’s less likely you’ll get the papers you’re looking for. For example, switching out “health disparities schizophrenia Latinos access USA” with “health disparities schizophrenia Latinx access USA” gets to a completely different set of results, and in this case, using “Latinos” is a better choice.

 Scan the results list, keeping in mind what you’re looking for. Don’t even read an abstract unless you think that paper might help you.

Be willing to look through several pages of results to find a good paper, particularly if you’re doing a breadth search. However, if the first 20 or so results don’t have anything close to what you’re looking for, you probably need to revise your search terms.

Modify those search words as needed & keep trucking.

How to Read Academic Articles

Identify what you want to get out of the article.

Remember what your goals are. Are you interested in a breadth view of a topic? Do you need to know something specific? Do you want to understand a methodological or analytic approach better? Are you interested in understanding a theoretical argument?

Prioritize what to read based on your goals.

Don’t try to read every article you’re interested front to back. It’ll take way too long. As you get more practice reading academic articles, you’ll get faster, but even now, I read maybe 1/10 articles thoroughly. Prioritize which articles you really want to read thoroughly based on your goals, and for the others pick a different strategy (see #3).

Pick a strategy:

The get-in-get-out method: Read the abstract, only. This fits for times when you’re trying to get a sense of a body of literature without going too deep with any one paper or topic, or when you’re trying to decide whether a paper is worth saving for later (for example, when you’re collecting papers to use for something you’re working on).

The skim method: Read the whole paper, but only skim it unless something strikes your interest. When I do this I typically read the first sentence of each paragraph and only keep reading that paragraph if I am really interested in it or if I think reading the rest will help answer my question. This fits when you’re trying to understand the study and topic area at a surface level, but don’t need to know too much about historical context or methodological approaches.

The depth method: Read the whole paper, front to back. When I do this I skip the abstract, but read everything else thoroughly. I take notes and do an unnecessary amount of highlighting. This fits for times when you want to get thorough knowledge on a specific topic or when you need to really understand an issue so you can apply it in your own work (for example, a clinical technique or a statistical technique).

The big picture method: Read just the introduction and the discussion. When I do this I am trying to get an understanding of the topic area and the author’s primary arguments and perspective on it, rather than specifically trying to understand the current study. This fits for times when you want to get the big picture (heh) of the topic, for example with seminal papers or expert authors, but you don’t need to deeply understand the specific study.

 The nuts-and-bolts method: Read just the hypotheses, methods and results. When I do this I read the “current study” section which is usually the last paragraph of the introduction before the methods, so I understand the study goals. Then I closely read the methods and results to make sure I understand the study well. This fits for times _

 The focused method: Read only the section or sections that are critical to the questions you have. For example, if you’re looking for validation of a specific measure, you don’t need to read the introduction. You need to read the methods to identify if the authors used the measure you’re looking for, and then find validation information, either in the methods (if the measure was previously validated) or in the results (if the paper you’re reading did the validation). This method fits when you’ve got a very focused question and will know what it looks like when you find it.

Be willing to come back to articles over time. I often find that the same paper can help me with multiple things depending on what I’m looking for. Use some kind of organizing method to help you keep track of articles so you can keep going back to them as needed.

Should I annotate all my articles?

               I don’t, but some people do. My perspective (as a non-annotator) is that a person should only use annotation if they really have to, either for their own learning or in order to organize a specific set of articles- for example, in preparation for comprehensive exams. Otherwise it seems like a waste of time.

What organizing program or method should I use?

               I use Zotero. It’s free and really easy to use. I’ve heard great things about EndNote and Mendelay. Some people also do their own organizing system, sometimes incorporating annotation or another file, and sometimes just really well-organized file folders.

[dinafbrownil]

Many Schools Have Closed ― But Not All. What Parents Need To Know About That Tough Call.

In the face of a global pandemic, thousands of K-12 school districts from Los Angeles to New York City and many cities in between announced closures in recent days. Every state is experiencing at least some school closures; in nearly three dozen states so far, governors have closed all public schools statewide. On Monday, President Donald Trump signaled even more closures may happen soon, saying children should “engage in schooling from home whenever possible.”

The closures are part of a broad strategy to limit public interactions and slow the spread of COVID-19 cases. But the decision is far from easy, with conflicting science about how effective such closures are in containing epidemics weighed against the massive disruption to families’ lives.

Here’s help understanding how school and public health authorities made the decisions to close, what kids should do in districts that have shut down and what to consider if your schools have not closed.

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Q: When should schools close?

In a more perfect world, schools wouldn’t be closing on a mass scale or for long periods of time. To prevent the spread of illness, closing schools isn’t generally believed to be as effective as hand-washing and home isolation of the sick. Guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say schools should close for cleaning and contact tracing if a person in the school community is infected.

Such a closure typically would last only a few days. But there’s a problem with that strategy in this pandemic: It’s unknown how many cases of fever and cough present in many school communities are actually COVID-19 because widespread testing of children with possible symptoms is not happening.

“We don’t have a precise trigger point to know when to close schools,” said Dr. Howard Markel, a pediatrician and medical historian at the University of Michigan. Markel pointed to lessons learned from the 1918 flu pandemic and said if you’re going to close schools, it’s important to do it early. One hundred years ago, cities that enacted multiple changes (like quarantine of the sick, bans on large gatherings and school closures) at the same time saw less transmission than those that adopted changes slowly, according to his research.

Given the lack of testing availability, it’s hard to know who has the virus. So, many public health experts believe it’s time to take an aggressive approach.

The concerns for an overburdened health system have left us with a series of unappetizing choices, said Dr. Ashish Jha, an internist and professor of global health at Harvard University. “It gives me a lot of hesitation to say this, but I’m going to say it: We should close all the schools,” he said in an interview on Friday.

Q: What is the rationale not to close schools?

Jha’s hesitation reflects the myriad serious consequences of closing schools. Besides the potentially negative effect on kids’ academic outcomes, schools play vital roles in their communities.

They are an important source of nutrition for a lot of kids. “If you’re talking about kids being without adequate nutrition for weeks or months, that’s awful,” said Jha. He worries that once they begin, the closures could last weeks (others fear this as well).

Some districts are designating sites where kids can pick up food while schools are closed. New Mexico closed its schools but is leaving cafeterias open.

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom was asked Sunday why he hadn’t issued a broad order to close schools in his state, where the virus is circulating in several counties. He pointed out that some parts of the state have been largely unaffected so far, but also noted that some school districts that had closed didn’t yet have plans for delivering food, carrying out education plans or providing for homeless students. “I’m deeply concerned about their health and I’m deeply concerned about their safety,” he said.

Closing schools also presents a challenge for the workforce. Parents who are first responders, medical professionals and firefighters are desperately needed right now at their jobs, Newsom said. Many also work for hourly wages, and it will be difficult for them to cope economically if they have to miss work to be with their kids.

Some school closings are likely unnecessary, said Markel. But the public has begun pushing officials to do something, and schools sometimes oblige. “Sometimes for theatrical reasons. You want people to feel safe,” Markel said. “On the other hand, you don’t want to do stuff that’s going to inconvenience people and cost a fortune.”

And when schools close, kids may end up in places that put more people at risk. Many families rely on older relatives for child care, and they are the most at risk when it comes to COVID-19, said Dr. Alan Melnick, the health officer for Clark County, Washington. “That’s certainly not a good outcome,” he said.

While there’s broad agreement that we should enact social distancing, work from home where possible, wash our hands more and travel less, whether to close schools is a thorny issue among public health experts. Most agree, however, that closing schools is likely to have a disproportionate impact on folks with low incomes and parents who can’t supplement their children’s education.

Q: If my school isn’t closed, how do I decide whether to send my kid?

This is a question to take up with your pediatrician and your child’s teacher. Kids with compromised immune systems or particular health needs might have reasons to consider staying home, even if classes are meeting. Some schools have made clear to parents that, even if they are open, absences will be counted differently during these difficult times.

Q: If my kid’s school is closed, what is it OK for them to do?

Some schools, including many in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area, are turning to online education, hoping to continue classes and provide students with a structured day. But that option relies on having a student body with reliable access to home computers and the internet. In many areas, libraries and other places with public computers are also closed, limiting student access.

Some states, like New Mexico and Ohio, have ordered extended spring breaks, calling for a temporary two- to three-week shutdown.

So what should kids do with all that free time? Though it may be tempting to let them hang out with their friends during this period, experts advise against it. Young kids have “poor respiratory hygiene,” Markel said. They slobber, drool and sneeze on people. Older kids aren’t always much better. If it turns out children are good at spreading the disease even if they don’t get particularly ill, it’s likely to travel fast.

Since the goal is to narrow the social circles we all travel in and stop the disease from spreading, it’s important to avoid play dates and gatherings, particularly in these first weeks. Playing outdoors is important, Jha said, but it’s best done with other household members. Those household members, though, should not be elderly relatives.

And it may be unrealistic to isolate families completely, due to work or even your sanity, said Jha. If your kids must be around other children, use good judgment, he said. If somebody is sick, don’t hang out with them. Work on hand hygiene and choose a small circle of people — who are also distancing from others — to spend time with.

Q: So how long do schools need to be closed to slow the spread of the disease?

According to the CDC, a short closure of two to four weeks is recommended if a significant number of teachers or students have become ill. And a longer closure of four to eight weeks is suggested in communities where the virus is circulating broadly, affecting health care facilities.

While closing to clean or because students are missing class can be important, it may not do much to curb the spread of disease. To do that, kids should be out of class much longer ― eight to 20 weeks — according to the CDC.

If schools are being closed in order to flatten the curve, then they will probably remain closed for weeks. Jha said he is working on the assumption that, in many places, in-person classes will be suspended through the end of the school year. “Whatever school districts say, they are going to be closed for weeks, maybe even months,” Jha said.

This KHN story first published on California Healthline, a service of the California Health Care Foundation.

from Updates By Dina https://khn.org/news/many-schools-have-closed-%e2%80%95-but-not-all-what-parents-need-to-know-about-that-tough-call/

[gordonwilliamsweb]

Many Schools Have Closed ― But Not All. What Parents Need To Know About That Tough Call.

In the face of a global pandemic, thousands of K-12 school districts from Los Angeles to New York City and many cities in between announced closures in recent days. Every state is experiencing at least some school closures; in nearly three dozen states so far, governors have closed all public schools statewide. On Monday, President Donald Trump signaled even more closures may happen soon, saying children should “engage in schooling from home whenever possible.”

The closures are part of a broad strategy to limit public interactions and slow the spread of COVID-19 cases. But the decision is far from easy, with conflicting science about how effective such closures are in containing epidemics weighed against the massive disruption to families’ lives.

Here’s help understanding how school and public health authorities made the decisions to close, what kids should do in districts that have shut down and what to consider if your schools have not closed.

Email Sign-Up

Subscribe to KHN’s free Morning Briefing.

Sign Up

Please confirm your email address below:

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Q: When should schools close?

In a more perfect world, schools wouldn’t be closing on a mass scale or for long periods of time. To prevent the spread of illness, closing schools isn’t generally believed to be as effective as hand-washing and home isolation of the sick. Guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say schools should close for cleaning and contact tracing if a person in the school community is infected.

Such a closure typically would last only a few days. But there’s a problem with that strategy in this pandemic: It’s unknown how many cases of fever and cough present in many school communities are actually COVID-19 because widespread testing of children with possible symptoms is not happening.

“We don’t have a precise trigger point to know when to close schools,” said Dr. Howard Markel, a pediatrician and medical historian at the University of Michigan. Markel pointed to lessons learned from the 1918 flu pandemic and said if you’re going to close schools, it’s important to do it early. One hundred years ago, cities that enacted multiple changes (like quarantine of the sick, bans on large gatherings and school closures) at the same time saw less transmission than those that adopted changes slowly, according to his research.

Given the lack of testing availability, it’s hard to know who has the virus. So, many public health experts believe it’s time to take an aggressive approach.

The concerns for an overburdened health system have left us with a series of unappetizing choices, said Dr. Ashish Jha, an internist and professor of global health at Harvard University. “It gives me a lot of hesitation to say this, but I’m going to say it: We should close all the schools,” he said in an interview on Friday.

Q: What is the rationale not to close schools?

Jha’s hesitation reflects the myriad serious consequences of closing schools. Besides the potentially negative effect on kids’ academic outcomes, schools play vital roles in their communities.

They are an important source of nutrition for a lot of kids. “If you’re talking about kids being without adequate nutrition for weeks or months, that’s awful,” said Jha. He worries that once they begin, the closures could last weeks (others fear this as well).

Some districts are designating sites where kids can pick up food while schools are closed. New Mexico closed its schools but is leaving cafeterias open.

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom was asked Sunday why he hadn’t issued a broad order to close schools in his state, where the virus is circulating in several counties. He pointed out that some parts of the state have been largely unaffected so far, but also noted that some school districts that had closed didn’t yet have plans for delivering food, carrying out education plans or providing for homeless students. “I’m deeply concerned about their health and I’m deeply concerned about their safety,” he said.

Closing schools also presents a challenge for the workforce. Parents who are first responders, medical professionals and firefighters are desperately needed right now at their jobs, Newsom said. Many also work for hourly wages, and it will be difficult for them to cope economically if they have to miss work to be with their kids.

Some school closings are likely unnecessary, said Markel. But the public has begun pushing officials to do something, and schools sometimes oblige. “Sometimes for theatrical reasons. You want people to feel safe,” Markel said. “On the other hand, you don’t want to do stuff that’s going to inconvenience people and cost a fortune.”

And when schools close, kids may end up in places that put more people at risk. Many families rely on older relatives for child care, and they are the most at risk when it comes to COVID-19, said Dr. Alan Melnick, the health officer for Clark County, Washington. “That’s certainly not a good outcome,” he said.

While there’s broad agreement that we should enact social distancing, work from home where possible, wash our hands more and travel less, whether to close schools is a thorny issue among public health experts. Most agree, however, that closing schools is likely to have a disproportionate impact on folks with low incomes and parents who can’t supplement their children’s education.

Q: If my school isn’t closed, how do I decide whether to send my kid?

This is a question to take up with your pediatrician and your child’s teacher. Kids with compromised immune systems or particular health needs might have reasons to consider staying home, even if classes are meeting. Some schools have made clear to parents that, even if they are open, absences will be counted differently during these difficult times.

Q: If my kid’s school is closed, what is it OK for them to do?

Some schools, including many in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area, are turning to online education, hoping to continue classes and provide students with a structured day. But that option relies on having a student body with reliable access to home computers and the internet. In many areas, libraries and other places with public computers are also closed, limiting student access.

Some states, like New Mexico and Ohio, have ordered extended spring breaks, calling for a temporary two- to three-week shutdown.

So what should kids do with all that free time? Though it may be tempting to let them hang out with their friends during this period, experts advise against it. Young kids have “poor respiratory hygiene,” Markel said. They slobber, drool and sneeze on people. Older kids aren’t always much better. If it turns out children are good at spreading the disease even if they don’t get particularly ill, it’s likely to travel fast.

Since the goal is to narrow the social circles we all travel in and stop the disease from spreading, it’s important to avoid play dates and gatherings, particularly in these first weeks. Playing outdoors is important, Jha said, but it’s best done with other household members. Those household members, though, should not be elderly relatives.

And it may be unrealistic to isolate families completely, due to work or even your sanity, said Jha. If your kids must be around other children, use good judgment, he said. If somebody is sick, don’t hang out with them. Work on hand hygiene and choose a small circle of people — who are also distancing from others — to spend time with.

Q: So how long do schools need to be closed to slow the spread of the disease?

According to the CDC, a short closure of two to four weeks is recommended if a significant number of teachers or students have become ill. And a longer closure of four to eight weeks is suggested in communities where the virus is circulating broadly, affecting health care facilities.

While closing to clean or because students are missing class can be important, it may not do much to curb the spread of disease. To do that, kids should be out of class much longer ― eight to 20 weeks — according to the CDC.

If schools are being closed in order to flatten the curve, then they will probably remain closed for weeks. Jha said he is working on the assumption that, in many places, in-person classes will be suspended through the end of the school year. “Whatever school districts say, they are going to be closed for weeks, maybe even months,” Jha said.

This KHN story first published on California Healthline, a service of the California Health Care Foundation.

Many Schools Have Closed ― But Not All. What Parents Need To Know About That Tough Call. published first on https://nootropicspowdersupplier.tumblr.com/

[stephenmccull]

Many Schools Have Closed ― But Not All. What Parents Need To Know About That Tough Call.

In the face of a global pandemic, thousands of K-12 school districts from Los Angeles to New York City and many cities in between announced closures in recent days. Every state is experiencing at least some school closures; in nearly three dozen states so far, governors have closed all public schools statewide. On Monday, President Donald Trump signaled even more closures may happen soon, saying children should “engage in schooling from home whenever possible.”

The closures are part of a broad strategy to limit public interactions and slow the spread of COVID-19 cases. But the decision is far from easy, with conflicting science about how effective such closures are in containing epidemics weighed against the massive disruption to families’ lives.

Here’s help understanding how school and public health authorities made the decisions to close, what kids should do in districts that have shut down and what to consider if your schools have not closed.

Email Sign-Up

Subscribe to KHN’s free Morning Briefing.

Sign Up

Please confirm your email address below:

Sign Up

Q: When should schools close?

In a more perfect world, schools wouldn’t be closing on a mass scale or for long periods of time. To prevent the spread of illness, closing schools isn’t generally believed to be as effective as hand-washing and home isolation of the sick. Guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say schools should close for cleaning and contact tracing if a person in the school community is infected.

Such a closure typically would last only a few days. But there’s a problem with that strategy in this pandemic: It’s unknown how many cases of fever and cough present in many school communities are actually COVID-19 because widespread testing of children with possible symptoms is not happening.

“We don’t have a precise trigger point to know when to close schools,” said Dr. Howard Markel, a pediatrician and medical historian at the University of Michigan. Markel pointed to lessons learned from the 1918 flu pandemic and said if you’re going to close schools, it’s important to do it early. One hundred years ago, cities that enacted multiple changes (like quarantine of the sick, bans on large gatherings and school closures) at the same time saw less transmission than those that adopted changes slowly, according to his research.

Given the lack of testing availability, it’s hard to know who has the virus. So, many public health experts believe it’s time to take an aggressive approach.

The concerns for an overburdened health system have left us with a series of unappetizing choices, said Dr. Ashish Jha, an internist and professor of global health at Harvard University. “It gives me a lot of hesitation to say this, but I’m going to say it: We should close all the schools,” he said in an interview on Friday.

Q: What is the rationale not to close schools?

Jha’s hesitation reflects the myriad serious consequences of closing schools. Besides the potentially negative effect on kids’ academic outcomes, schools play vital roles in their communities.

They are an important source of nutrition for a lot of kids. “If you’re talking about kids being without adequate nutrition for weeks or months, that’s awful,” said Jha. He worries that once they begin, the closures could last weeks (others fear this as well).

Some districts are designating sites where kids can pick up food while schools are closed. New Mexico closed its schools but is leaving cafeterias open.

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom was asked Sunday why he hadn’t issued a broad order to close schools in his state, where the virus is circulating in several counties. He pointed out that some parts of the state have been largely unaffected so far, but also noted that some school districts that had closed didn’t yet have plans for delivering food, carrying out education plans or providing for homeless students. “I’m deeply concerned about their health and I’m deeply concerned about their safety,” he said.

Closing schools also presents a challenge for the workforce. Parents who are first responders, medical professionals and firefighters are desperately needed right now at their jobs, Newsom said. Many also work for hourly wages, and it will be difficult for them to cope economically if they have to miss work to be with their kids.

Some school closings are likely unnecessary, said Markel. But the public has begun pushing officials to do something, and schools sometimes oblige. “Sometimes for theatrical reasons. You want people to feel safe,” Markel said. “On the other hand, you don’t want to do stuff that’s going to inconvenience people and cost a fortune.”

And when schools close, kids may end up in places that put more people at risk. Many families rely on older relatives for child care, and they are the most at risk when it comes to COVID-19, said Dr. Alan Melnick, the health officer for Clark County, Washington. “That’s certainly not a good outcome,” he said.

While there’s broad agreement that we should enact social distancing, work from home where possible, wash our hands more and travel less, whether to close schools is a thorny issue among public health experts. Most agree, however, that closing schools is likely to have a disproportionate impact on folks with low incomes and parents who can’t supplement their children’s education.

Q: If my school isn’t closed, how do I decide whether to send my kid?

This is a question to take up with your pediatrician and your child’s teacher. Kids with compromised immune systems or particular health needs might have reasons to consider staying home, even if classes are meeting. Some schools have made clear to parents that, even if they are open, absences will be counted differently during these difficult times.

Q: If my kid’s school is closed, what is it OK for them to do?

Some schools, including many in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area, are turning to online education, hoping to continue classes and provide students with a structured day. But that option relies on having a student body with reliable access to home computers and the internet. In many areas, libraries and other places with public computers are also closed, limiting student access.

Some states, like New Mexico and Ohio, have ordered extended spring breaks, calling for a temporary two- to three-week shutdown.

So what should kids do with all that free time? Though it may be tempting to let them hang out with their friends during this period, experts advise against it. Young kids have “poor respiratory hygiene,” Markel said. They slobber, drool and sneeze on people. Older kids aren’t always much better. If it turns out children are good at spreading the disease even if they don’t get particularly ill, it’s likely to travel fast.

Since the goal is to narrow the social circles we all travel in and stop the disease from spreading, it’s important to avoid play dates and gatherings, particularly in these first weeks. Playing outdoors is important, Jha said, but it’s best done with other household members. Those household members, though, should not be elderly relatives.

And it may be unrealistic to isolate families completely, due to work or even your sanity, said Jha. If your kids must be around other children, use good judgment, he said. If somebody is sick, don’t hang out with them. Work on hand hygiene and choose a small circle of people — who are also distancing from others — to spend time with.

Q: So how long do schools need to be closed to slow the spread of the disease?

According to the CDC, a short closure of two to four weeks is recommended if a significant number of teachers or students have become ill. And a longer closure of four to eight weeks is suggested in communities where the virus is circulating broadly, affecting health care facilities.

While closing to clean or because students are missing class can be important, it may not do much to curb the spread of disease. To do that, kids should be out of class much longer ― eight to 20 weeks — according to the CDC.

If schools are being closed in order to flatten the curve, then they will probably remain closed for weeks. Jha said he is working on the assumption that, in many places, in-person classes will be suspended through the end of the school year. “Whatever school districts say, they are going to be closed for weeks, maybe even months,” Jha said.

This KHN story first published on California Healthline, a service of the California Health Care Foundation.

Many Schools Have Closed ― But Not All. What Parents Need To Know About That Tough Call. published first on https://smartdrinkingweb.weebly.com/

[kansascityhappenings]

‘It can happen to anybody’: Yale grad, former Wall Street banker now homeless in Los Angeles

https://newsource-embed-prd.ns.cnn.com/videos/newsource-video-embed.js

LOS ANGELES – Shawn Pleasants has the kind of resume that would attract the attention of any job recruiter: high school valedictorian, economics major from Yale University, Wall Street banking jobs, small business entrepreneur.

But a few wrong turns in life 10 years ago left him homeless, and today he’s living underneath a tarp in the Koreatown section of Los Angeles.

He’s been told before that a smart and capable person like him should not be in this situation.

“But I’m like, should anybody be here? Who should, then?” Pleasants said.

Last week, Trump administration officials came to Los Angeles to examine the homelessness crisis. The President, who clashes with California politicians on a number of issues, has made frequent reference to the state’s failure to solve the problem.

Trump is visiting the West Coast this week, amid reports that his administration is about to launch a crackdown on homelessness — potentially involving dismantling encampments and moving the homeless en masse into a government facility, according to the Washington Post. (It’s not clear how this would work or whether the President has the authority to order this kind of action.)

Against that backdrop, Pleasants’ story is a reminder of how complex the problem of homelessness can be. “It means it can happen to anybody. It’s a problem we all could face,” Pleasants said, standing on a sidewalk in front of his weathered belongings. A couple of unopened cereal boxes that he just collected from a food pantry sit atop his things.

“I am responsible for my own choices. I own all my decisions,” he said plainly before telling his story.

Pleasants, 52, is one of 60,000 people living on the streets of Los Angeles County. The situation has been worsening in recent years — between 2018 and 2019, the number of homeless people went up 12% in the county and 16% in the city, according to the Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count. Along LA’s skid row downtown, tents line entire blocks, and encampments in other neighborhoods have been growing.

Mike Dickerson, an organizer for the homeless advocacy group Ktown for All, says the stories of many people living on the streets might surprise you.

“I think a lot of people have this perception that danger lurks in the encampments,” he said. “And for myself and for other volunteers, what we found is people who are just people like everyone else, who have fallen into hard times, whether that’s because of their own personal issues of because their landlord evicted them or because the rent rose in a way they could no longer pay.”

One man’s journey into homelessness

Pleasants grew up in San Antonio, Texas, the product of a stable, loving family who always excelled in school, according to his younger brother, Michael.

Their mother was a teacher, while their father made a career in the Air Force.

“He was always as a young child taking things apart and putting them back together,” said Michael Pleasants, who followed his brother’s footsteps to Yale. “He was a whiz kid.”

“He (Shawn) played trombone and won several civic awards around the city.”

Pleasants also overcame a physical disability. He was born with a club foot and wore leg braces throughout his childhood, his brother said. His doctor joked he would never run a marathon. In fact, his brother said, he’s run several, and was in peak physical condition through his 20s.

Pleasants was a high school valedictorian, who had offers from multiple colleges, according to his brother.

Shawn chose Yale and said he received grants and several academic scholarships, which covered most of his tuition. CNN has verified that he graduated from the university.

He majored in economics, and after a few years toiling on Wall Street, including jobs at Morgan Stanley, he landed in California. Trying to fulfill a Hollywood dream, he started a photography and filmmaking company.

It was the mid-’90s, and as the DVD industry soon exploded, his company got involved in the then-lucrative world of the adult film industry. They made so much money that Pleasants wound up buying a large home in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles.

“It was a beautiful house, something you’d see on MTV,” said his brother.

But amid squabbles with his co-founders, the income dried up.

“By the time it was all sorted out, there was no business,” Shawn Pleasants said.

About 10 years ago, around the same time, he also lost his mother to cancer, and her death sent him into an emotional and physical tailspin.

He went from living one place to another, eventually living out of his car before he lost that as well, his brother said.

Pleasants is gay, and considers himself to be married to another homeless man he’s been with for 10 years, since before they were on the streets.

They live on the streets together, acting as a sort of team. They’ve held court on the same Koreatown sidewalks for six years.

“We’re actually in the middle of a move,” he said, explaining that some of their things are few blocks away.

He grimaced at the notion of ever going to a shelter.

“They’re always set up with such rigid protocols. I would leave the place immediately,” he said.

Pleasants believes a shelter would restrict his freedom and is concerned he wouldn’t be able to keep all of his things due to a lack of space.

“I would prefer to be somewhere where I can still go to the library and do the things I need to do when I need to do them.”

Like many of the nation’s homeless, drugs, specifically meth, are a part of Pleasants’ life.

He said he began using the drug before he became homeless, but insists it’s not what led him to the streets.

His brother says his path toward addiction began while he was recovering from a back injury before he was homeless. “It started with pain killers, and then when they were too expensive or not accessible he medicated with other things.”

Shawn Pleasants said he takes meth a few times a week as both an escape and to help him stay awake at night.

“Every time you sleep, that’s when you lose and when people come and take your things,” he said.

“I’m a heavy sleeper. I lose a lot.”

Surviving on the streets

Pleasants has both a laptop and a cell phone. The phone and its service are free under an Obama-era program. He spends a lot of time at the library, accessing the internet and staying on top of current events.

He has sustained himself by understanding the schedule of where and when to get free meals — using his natural intelligence to develop an efficient schedule.

“There’s certain churches (that provide meals), certain food pantries — you learn those schedules,” he explained.

When asked whether Pleasants suffers from mental illness, his brother said, “I think he has episodic depression. He can go through periods of extreme depression where he will self-medicate, but then he can go through periods of being equally upbeat, resilient, and energetic.”

The family has tried repeatedly to get him help, his brother said. There is a standing offer for him to move in with his 86-year-old father in San Antonio. Long-term, they would like to see him find an affordable option close to them — perhaps through a government assistance program.

But Pleasants is defiant.

“I am not trying to bring another family member down,” he said.

“I fell into it. I have to climb my way out of it.”

The fact that he graduated from an Ivy League school, owned a house and made a nice living, he said, should not come as a shock.

Gesturing to a nearby tent encampment, he said, “You’ll find musicians, there’s a photographer, you’ve got all different types of people.”

Dickerson says that to get people off the streets, more affordable housing needs to be created.

“I think people point to things like mental illness or like drug abuse, which do exist in this population, but they aren’t the primary problem,” he said.

“The idea that we’re going to force people into a facility that’s probably located in a very remote area is not a solution. That’s not going to connect people to jobs, to housing, to services (like) mental health and addiction treatment.”

“And more importantly, putting thousands of people into a giant building isn’t going to get them housed if there’s nowhere for them to permanently live that they can afford,” he added.

Pleasants said more practical measures such as bathing facilities are desperately needed.

“We need places to shower, if you don’t want us to have hygiene issues,” he said. “And in order to get a job, we need to have clean clothes. Where do I iron? How do I keep them pressed?”

When asked how he’ll eventually find his way out of this life, Pleasants expressed the kind of confidence that originally made him a standout.

“I’m gonna start a small business again,” he said, flashing a smile.

from FOX 4 Kansas City WDAF-TV | News, Weather, Sports https://fox4kc.com/2019/09/18/it-can-happen-to-anybody-yale-grad-former-wall-street-banker-now-homeless-in-los-angeles/

from Kansas City Happenings https://kansascityhappenings.wordpress.com/2019/09/18/it-can-happen-to-anybody-yale-grad-former-wall-street-banker-now-homeless-in-los-angeles/

[lordsrivenkateswaraswamy]

Protecting your privacy online may seem like a battle you’ve already lost, but take heart. There are steps you can take to minimize harm.

Google knows you better than you know yourself, and Facebook uses the data it’s gathered on people to carry out psychological experiments on them. The Russian app that everyone’s having fun morphing their faces has terms of service that say it basically retains the right to use your data forever (and this iPrs common for most social media apps!). Though some companies like Apple (and even Google) are now trying to make privacy a selling point, the sheer scale of the internet means that everyone is tracking you, from the government, to the police, to most tech companies, often without admitting to this.

With all this, it’s tempting to just throw up our hands and accept that we live in a post-privacy world, but there are some basic steps that we can all take to make our presence on the Internet a little more secure. Some of it is just very basic stuff, like turning your GPS and Wi-Fi off when you’re not using them, and the others involve a little more work, but are still easy enough to do. These are not high-security solutions, and aren’t really going to keep you invisible on the Internet. Instead, these are basic steps we should all simply make a habit of following, no matter what we’re using the Web for, to bring in some basic levels of privacy.

We spoke to a number of people who are not in the tech industry but rely heavily on the Internet to do their jobs, and found that most of them weren’t doing anything in particular to protect their privacy online, because they just weren’t aware of what they should be doing. So we looked at what some experts are saying online about this, and gathered the most easy-to-implement steps in one place.

1. Use burner emails to sign up for services

One common issue that people brought up was being bombarded by spam. Anita Verma, a dentist based in Bengaluru, said she has begun to miss important mails because there is so much spam. “Gmail removes a lot of spam but even then, every day I’m getting mails from brands I’ve never even heard of, and you keep marking things as spam but they don’t go away.” Part of the problem here is that we’re too used to giving our email IDs whenever asked for it, both online and offline.

There are a lot of times when you need to enter an email ID to sign up for a service which you might only use once, and don’t actually need to connect to your real inbox. Your email ID is a valuable piece of data, along with your phone number, and whenever you’re giving this out, think about whether you actually need to do so. A number of sites such as Guerrilla Mail, Maildrop and Burner Mail allow you to create temporary email IDs for forms.

Another useful thing to do is to see which platforms are misusing your email. Gmail, and some other email platforms, allow you to create a ‘new’ email using the plus sign—essentially, if your email is darthvader@gmail.com, you can sign up for services using IDs like darthvader+facebook@gmail.com, darthvader+paytm@gmail.com, or darthvader+flipkart@gmail.com and so on, and all of these emails will come to your inbox. Then, the next time you look at spam and see it’s addressed to, say, darthvader+paytm@gmail.com, you know who is leaking your data.

2. Use a VPN

A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is a secure gateway to the Internet. This means that anyone snooping on your connection can see that there’s data moving between you and your VPN, but not what is coming in and out of the VPN. You can run a VPN on your computer or smartphone, and in both cases, it’s as simple as signing up, installing an application and just running that before you start to use the Web.

There are free VPNs, which are either very slow, or have very limited data allowances, so it’s advisable to sign up for a paid VPN from a well-known provider like NordVPN or TunnelBear. “If you’re using a free VPN, you’re either going to have a bad experience with the speed or data limit, or worse, you’ve now put all of your data in the hands of someone who is giving you an expensive service for free,” said Saravanan K, a Bengaluru-based consultant working on security solutions for businesses. “I’m not saying all free VPNs are bad. But I will say that it’s worth spending the money, and a year-long subscription can often be just a few hundred bucks a month.”

3. Change your passwords from defaults

This is a really obvious tip, and yet most people reading this have probably put themselves at risk by not changing the default passwords on their Wi-Fi routers and other Internet-connected devices. Did you know that the Wi-Fi router that your Internet provider gave you comes with a password which you can use to change the Wi-Fi settings? Having access to your router means having access to all your data, so it’s pretty important to know this—if someone connects to your Wi-Fi, and you’re still using default passwords? Then you’ve basically handed over control of your network.

Most home Wi-Fi routers have been compromised, according to research by Banbreach, a Kolkata-based cybersecurity firm. According to Banbreach, cryptojacking—where attackers use your network and computing resources to mine Bitcoin, wearing out your devices and using up your data, in order to make money—is a huge problem in India.

Worse, many people using Internet-connected smart devices don’t think of changing these passwords either. You need only head over to Insecam, which is a listing of non-secure Internet connected cameras around the world to see live feeds from around the country. The good news is that in India, these are mostly in offices; the bad news is that this makes it harder for us as individuals to change the settings on the cameras.

On a related note, invest in a password manager. Password requirements are nuts, and it’s becoming impossible to keep track of all the passwords you’ll need. Either you’ll end up with a lot of weak passwords, or a strong password that you use everywhere, including on insecure sites, making it useless.

4. It’s Fine To Use WhatsApp

SMS is convenient, and it is universal. That’s a big plus. But it’s also possible to be hijacked, and there are reports of multiple police departments and scammers both doing just that, so encrypted communications are a better option.

Although WhatsApp offers end-to-end encryption and hasn’t given into government pressure to trace users yet, the Facebook-owned platform is, owing to its huge reach, a tempting target for any attacker. A recent report showed that media files aren’t secure once they reach your phone, and if you’re using cloud backup for your chats, those aren’t encrypted either.

This doesn’t mean you should stop using WhatsApp. Telegram is an excellent alternative, but WhatsApp conversations are encrypted by default, while you have to opt-in to start a Secret chat on Telegram. This added step is going to be a stumbling block for most people (see above re: passwords). Signal is another alternative, which some would say is more secure.

However, it depends on how much risk each user faces — only a few people need to be at maximum security levels. For the rest of us, basic steps like WhatsApp’s standard choice of end-to-end encryption make sense. Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, at the School of Information and Library Science, explained here: “WhatsApp’s behavior increases reliability for the user. This is a real concern, as ordinary people consistently switch away from unreliable but secure apps to more reliable and insecure apps.

“Signal is well-designed.  Many in the security community use and consistently recommend it. However, the very thing that makes Signal a recommendation for people at high risk—that it drops messages at any sign of hiccup—prevents a large number of ordinary people from adopting it. Our community has used Signal for a long time, and have been trying to convert people to it, but its inevitable delivery failures (some by design, to keep users safer, and some due to bandwidth or other issues) mean that we often cannot convince people to use it despite spending a lot of effort trying to convince them—even people who have a lot at stake.“

5. Make sure all your software is up to date

A lot of people are also very lax about updating their software, using old versions for months (or more) after updates have been released. “My phone kept showing me this message about updating the Android version. I kind of ignored it because who has the time to reboot your phone in the middle of work, which is when the pop-up would show up,” said Akhil Yadav, who works in the marketing division of a technology company.

“Then one day, one of our tech guys saw what I was doing and he gave me a real lecture about it.”

Either you do the same thing Yadav did, or you know people like him. It can be annoying to take out the time to update software in the middle of a busy day, many companies don’t clearly articulate why you should do it, and sometimes an update can cause new problems. Waiting a couple of days after an update comes out to make sure that nothing major is going wrong is not a bad idea—but ignoring updates for weeks, months, and even longer is definitely not recommended.

“Nearly all updates include things called security patches: they close holes in the software that make it easy for someone to hack into your software—and once they do they can often get access to everything on your phone or computer. Software can be very complex and security holes are discovered all the time, so keep an eye on those updates,” notes Amnesty International.

6. Use two-factor authentication

Amnesty also recommends using two-factor authentication (2FA), which is an important step. Two-factor authentication means that you need two different modes of access: something you know (like a password) and something you get (like an OTP). That’s right, all online payments in India require 2FA, and use the SMS OTP as the second factor.

Although this is a good step, it’s even better if the second factor isn’t an SMS-based system. Although SMS 2FA is a very convenient way to control access, this might not work if you’re traveling abroad and don’t have roaming on (for example), and researchers have shown that SMS can be hijacked.

Don’t get us wrong, SMS-based 2FA is still much better than no 2FA. But when you have the option, an authenticator app is a better choice. For example, you can set up 2FA on your Google account so that access to your account is only possible by unlocking an associated phone, and tapping the ‘Yes’ button there. Twitter and Facebook also have similar authenticators. In fact, most popular social media apps and email apps support this feature.

7. Turn off the GPS, limit app permissions, and opt out of tracking where possible

If an app has access to your location data, they’re tracking it as much as possible to understand your habits and behaviors. You’re being watched wherever you go, and often completely unnecessarily. There are a few things you can do to reduce this, and the first step is to turn off your GPS when you don’t need it. Switch it on before calling an Uber or using maps to find your way around—and leave it off the rest of the time.

More importantly, look at what information is being used by which apps. “There can be genuine reasons for asking for this information,” said Saravanan. “For example, many apps ask for SMS inbox access — just so they can read an OTP, and that’s not a bad thing. Some apps might want location access so they can offer information or deals based on where you are.” However, if you’ve got (for example) an alarm clock that wants to know your location, that’s not good.

Some apps that track your information also let you opt out. If you visit myactivity.google.com, you’ll see a list of every website you’ve opened in Chrome, details about your contacts, calendars, and apps from your Android phone, details on your voice records with Google from when you’ve used the Assistant, and all the videos you’ve searched for or watched on YouTube. It’s an unsettling insight into how visible you are. 

The good news is that it’s very easy to opt out. Just go to the settings on the same page and go to Activity Controls, and you can pause all your activity history. On all your apps, check the settings to find out what tracking is being done, and what you can opt out of, in order to increase your chances of privacy just a little.

8. Browse in private mode, and disable trackers

Almost all browsers have an incognito or private mode, where they’re not tracking your history and other data. Make this your default browsing environment to keep your data more secure. An easy way to do this is to switch to a browser like Firefox Focus on your phone, since it is designed to block trackers, and delete all history when you exit the app.

You can use apps like Ghostery on your computer to help disable trackers—this browser plug-in works with Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Edge. It’s one of the most famous apps of this kind, but there are other options as well. Its built-in ad-blocker strips away the ads on websites you visit, and also blocks the trackers that they’re using to follow you around the Internet.

Not only does this increase your privacy, but it also significantly speeds up your browsing because as it turns out, trackers and ads also use up a lot of your data. In a 2016 conversation with this writer, Opera’s CTO had said that 54% of the data that gets used when you load a webpage is due to ads. He added that the ads made up only 9% of the content on the page, but because multiple third-parties track users through ads, this ends up being a huge drain on your data.

9. Don’t use Google

Ah, now we come to this. Using Google is so common that it’s become a verb for ‘searching on the internet’. But Google searches are also giving the company an enormous trove of user data to analyse and use for advertising. Gabriel Weinberg, the founder and CEO of privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo, has written a long post about the different ways in which Google tracks you, which is worth reading in its entirety.

“Basically, Google tries to track too much. It’s creepy and simply just more information than one company should have on anyone,” Weinberg noted. “For starters, just switching the search engine for all your searches goes a long way. After all, you share your most intimate questions with your search engine; at the very least, shouldn’t those be kept private? If you switch to the DuckDuckGo app and extension you will not only make your searches anonymous, but also block Google’s most widespread and invasive trackers as you navigate the web.”

Duck Duck Go’s search engine is good and fast, but since it doesn’t track you, the results are not as personalised as Google’s. This is a trade-off that you’ll have to consider, but it isn’t as apparent like some of the other examples we’ve talked about, so you should consider at least trying out Duck Duck Go for a few weeks before deciding. #MohnishAhluwaliaNotes

[orbemnews]

That Spotty Wi-Fi? There’s $100 Billion to Fix It. WASHINGTON — Kimberly Vasquez, a high school senior in Baltimore, faced a tough problem when the pandemic began. She had no fast internet service in her home, but all her classes were online. Marigold Lewi, a sophomore at the same school, was regularly booted off Zoom classes because of her slow home connection. Ms. Lewi spent a lot of time explaining Zoom absences to teachers. Ms. Vasquez sat outside local libraries to use their internet access and at times used her phone. The two of them helped push a successful public campaign for better and free service to low-income families in the city. “It was very chaotic,” Ms. Vasquez said. “We had to do this because no one else was going to change things.” A year after the pandemic turned the nation’s digital divide into an education emergency, President Biden, inheriting the problem, is making affordable broadband a top priority, comparing it to the effort to spread electricity across the country. His $2 trillion infrastructure plan, announced on Wednesday, includes $100 billion to extend fast internet access to every home. The money is meant to improve the economy by enabling all Americans to work, get medical care and take classes from wherever they live. Although the government has spent billions on the digital divide in the past, the efforts have failed to close it partly because people in different areas have different problems. Affordability is the main culprit in urban and suburban areas. In many rural areas, internet service isn’t available at all because of the high costs of installation. “We’ll make sure every single American has access to high-quality, affordable, high speed internet,” Mr. Biden said in a speech on Wednesday. “And when I say affordable, I mean it. Americans pay too much for internet. We will drive down the price for families who have service now. We will make it easier for families who don’t have affordable service to be able to get it now.” Longtime advocates of universal broadband say the plan, which requires congressional approval, may finally come close to fixing the digital divide, a stubborn problem first identified and named by regulators during the Clinton administration. The plight of unconnected students during the pandemic added urgency. “This is a vision document that says every American needs access and should have access to affordable broadband,” said Blair Levin, who directed the 2010 National Broadband Plan at the Federal Communications Commission. “And I haven’t heard that before from a White House to date.” Some advocates for expanded broadband access cautioned that Mr. Biden’s plan might not entirely solve the divide between the digital haves and have-nots. The plan promises to give priority to municipal and nonprofit broadband providers but would still rely on private companies to install cables and erect cell towers to far reaches of the country. One concern is that the companies won’t consider the effort worth their time, even with all the money earmarked for those projects. During the electrification boom of the 1920s, private providers were reluctant to install poles and string lines hundreds of miles into sparsely populated areas. There are also many questions about how the administration plans to address affordability. It is one thing to extend service to homes; it is another to make it inexpensive enough for people once it gets there. The White House was scant on details on Wednesday, though it stressed that subsidies alone were not a long-term solution. In addition, the money would arrive more than a year after the pandemic closed schools and as many were starting to reopen their doors. As a result, many students without good internet connections have already fallen a full year behind. About 25 percent of students don’t have adequate broadband at home, with Native American, Black and Latino children hardest hit, said Becky Pringle, the president the National Education Association, the teachers’ union. Mr. Biden’s plan would be tested in places like Chinle, a school district in the Navajo Nation in northeast Arizona. As with electrification, the most remote homes — particularly on Native land — got service last. Today, many homes in that isolated corner of the state have no access to broadband or speeds that are so slow even one device on a Zoom conference takes up most of the bandwidth. Cellular phone service is nonexistent or spotty in many parts. School is slowly beginning to return to the classroom. But until last week, 31 buses were sent out daily with packets of printouts for homework and flash drives with videos of lessons for math, science, history and English. The graduation rate is expected to be near 60 percent this year, down from 77 percent last year, said Quincy Natay, the superintendent of the Chinle Unified School District. “It has been a tough and challenging year,” Mr. Natay said. “A lot of learning loss has occurred for this group.” Congress has approved more than $10 billion in the past few months to help make broadband more affordable and to put more laptops and other devices in students’ hands. Of those funds, the F.C.C. is working to figure out how to distribute $7.2 billion for broadband service, devices, and potentially routers and other equipment for households with school-age children. In February, the F.C.C. announced $50 to $75 broadband subsidies for low-income families from $3.2 billion granted by Congress in December for emergency digital divide funding. Both programs involve one-time emergency funding to address broadband access problems exacerbated by the pandemic. The administration’s $100 billion plan aims to connect even the most isolated residents: the 35 percent of rural homes without access. In those areas, the White House said, it would focus on “future-proof” technology, which analysts take to mean fiber and other high-bandwidth technology. The administration highlighted its support for networks run and owned by municipalities, nonprofits and rural electrical cooperatives. Several states have banned municipal broadband networks, and the F.C.C. failed in its attempts to overturn those bans in court during the Obama administration. The Biden infrastructure plan faces a tough path in Congress. Republicans have pushed back on the cost. They even argue about definitions of broadband. Republicans balk at some proposals to require faster broadband standards — such as 25 megabits for downloads and as much as 25 megabits for uploads, which they say is a bar too high for providers in rural areas. Those speeds would allow multiple family members to be on videoconferencing, for example. “I believe that this would make it harder to serve those communities that don’t have broadband today,” Michael O’Rielly, a former F.C.C. commissioner, told the House commerce committee last month. Educators lobbied Congress throughout the pandemic to extend broadband in the country. When little relief was in sight, some took matters into their own hands. Last April and through the summer, administrators at the Brockton School District in Massachusetts bought more than 4,000 hot spots with their own funding and a federal loan. They were able to reduce the percentage of students without high-speed internet or a device to about 5 to 10 percent, from about 30 percent. Superintendent Mike Thomas said the district was starting to go back to classrooms and would most likely be fully in person by the fall. But he plans to retain many aspects of distance learning, he said, particularly after-school tutoring. In Baltimore, where an estimated 40 percent of households lack high-speed internet, students and community activists fought to raise awareness of their circumstances. Ms. Vasquez and Ms. Lewi held protests against Comcast, the dominant provider, for better speeds and lower costs for its much-publicized low-income program. Their group, Students Organizing a Multicultural and Open Society, also lobbied the Maryland legislature and the city to put a priority on affordable broadband for low-income households. “We didn’t have options, and we deserved better,” Ms. Vasquez said. Adam Bouhmad and some community activists began to install antenna “mesh” networks tapping into the hot spots of closed Baltimore schools to connect surrounding homes. Through a jury-rigged system of antennas and routers, Mr. Bouhmad’s group, Waves, got cheap or free internet service to 120 low-income families. Mr. Biden’s promise to support alternative broadband providers could include projects like the one led by Mr. Bouhmad, who said the past year had shown how scant broadband options had left residents in Baltimore in the lurch. “Investment upfront to build out infrastructure and support internet providers is fantastic,” Mr. Bouhmad said. He added that residents in places like Baltimore would continue to need federal subsidies and that the administration should focus on the costs of broadband as a major hurdle. “Availability doesn’t equal accessibility in terms of price and user experience,” he said. Source link Orbem News #Billion #Fix #Spotty #WiFi

[bloggingmind]

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Openvas

Open the vulnerability assessment system. Ethical hacking around in a long time, but the vulnerability analysis tools so that you can access to potential evidence, as well as open source. Openvas Vulnerability Assessment System (Open) is a system, network audit of the advanced platform framework, in addition, the web page is displayed. The fully automatic and it's a lot, but the process itself is to make learning the one a thing or 2. How much online piracy to learn, but sometimes you can find a means of openvas is can be used as a good starting point. Plug-in and is available on the web vulnerability in the library to use the legitimate search, the success of the improved ease of use.

The Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer

The Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer To easily evaluate the security state of windows machines, Microsoft's free MBSA scan tools. The MBSA graphical interface and a command-line interface or distance from the local windows system can perform the analysis is included. When it comes to online copyright infringement, the technical aspects of things, or in this case the operating software for people who want to capture tool. This is the official tool from Microsoft for your products. The first is very basic as that may seem, you learn something new that can be used as a basis for the interior of the corrected, can lead to an inspection to more closely. It is about the exploration of all of the web page, but not always! ;)

Secunia PSI)

Secunia PSI) Our list at the end of the instrument is free of computer viruses, vulnerability analysis, and other types of malicious programs. The fun in order to support universities and your friends along the way, the use of the Internet, you can click here for more information about the security. The Secunia PSI in the default installation is detected within the unique platform, you can assign it to malware, but I have to really understand the art of online piracy, and to learn more about the individual error is recommended. Use the Secunia PSI is software that is installed on the system, the collector can be used to evaluate the state of security. valuable tool. Vulnerability in order to install the software continuously monitors the system, the application is installed, if you are in danger, when available, to update the application for detailed instructions are now available.

Do you want to learn online piracy?

I have a plan to understand and easy-to-use tool, if not, I am glad that there is no doubt in my mind. I have my own process, I do not remember that is included in the hacking of each site and are willing to learn, but I will, ethical hacking, the best option is to provide very interesting career opportunities. There are many of these tools, but many of them are paid and premium, to allow you to do all kinds of things up to $ 1000 per month, even at any site There may be a possibility to enter them, but keep in mind that those people may exist and do we want to know the certainty about him?