#over 2000 questions survey series part 5

[lovemesomesurveys]

Thought I Couldn't Top It, Huh? OVER 2000 Questions! (Truly the Longest!) Created by distortedcognition Part 5

x__Odd Questions__x

What color is the bottom of your tongue? Pink and whiteish. Your foot? White, like the rest of my skin. Do you have any medical problems concerning feet? No. Do you secretly fantasize about George W. Bush? Uh, no... Do you chew on your homework? No... Pencils? No, I’ve never chewed on any writing utensils or school supplies. Do you read the dictionary? No, not even when I’m super bored. Encyclopedia? When I was a kid I had some that were made for kids that I liked.

Atlas? No. Road map? No, that’s what GPS is for. 

Do you memorize random facts? Sure.

Do you stalk anyone? No.

Does anyone stalk you? Not that I know of... Do you collect dust? Not purposefully, but since I don’t dust I guess I do.... :X Lint? No. Baby teeth? No. Have you ever thought of becoming a prostitute? No. Do you use lotion on your feet? Yeah. Have you ever played a kazoo? Nope. Have you ever shot someone? Uh, no. Something? A target. How many pairs of underwear do you own? Several. Jeans? A few. What ring size are you? Like a 7 or 8. Belt size? I’m not sure, I never wear belts. Have you ever gotten anything amputated? No. Do you have a calendar from 2001 hanging in your room? No. That would be quite outdated. Do you eat a lot? I wish I could eat more so I could gain some weight. Do you get excited over cameras? No. Do you have a strange obsession with pickles? No, but I l like them. Poison? Uh, no. I’d like to avoid poison, please. Knives? No. Cheese? I love cheese. Penguins? No.

Bald people? No.

Pirates? No. Corny jokes? I am a sucker for corny and punny jokes. Are you a virgin? I am. Have you ever tied your tooth to a door to lose it? No. Do you bite yourself? No. Do you get cold sores often? No, thankfully. Those hurt so bad. Do you have a cold right now? No. Do you suffer from chronic migraines? No. Do you like to touch sharp objects? Uh, no. Do you have a twitching problem? No. What do you do on the computer? I spend most of my time on it scrolling through Tumblr, doing surveys, watching YouTube, and playing The Sims. Anything your parents should know about? Not that I can think of. Are you happy with your life? :/ Is everybody else happy with your life? Uhh, probably not. Do you like 100% white grape juice? No. How big is the universe? Bigger than you can even imagine. How many hours of sleep do you get every night? A few hours at most. What do you dream about? Random shit. Do you enjoy bungee jumping? I would never go bungee jumping. Do you have AIM? Well, not anymore since it doesn’t exist. I hadn’t used it since like 2009 anyway. MSN? No, I never had MSN. YIM? Not anymore. Is that still a thing? A Neopets account? I highly doubt my account still exists out there since I haven’t been on it since the early 2000s. I don’t even know Neopets is still around. A Vampirefreaks account? No. A Quizilla account? No. A Bzoink account? No. Do you watch bugs crawl on the floor? Ew, no. Do you follow the bugs that crawl on the floor? Absolutely not. Do you get attacked by ladybugs? NO, thankfully. Are you scared of everything that breathes? Ha, I know I’m a big scardy cat but I wouldn’t say that sheesh. Are you scared of anything at all? Yeah, a lot of things. What? A lot of things. Which cardinal direction do you like best? The one that takes me in the right direction at the time. Do you have a life? Nope.

Then why are you taking this? Because I don’t have a life. Do you have a microphone on your computer? Yeah. A webcam? Yeah. A scanner? Yes. A printer? Yes. A cordless mouse? No. I have a laptop and just use the trackpad. Does your mouse light up? -- What kind of computer do you have? A MacBook Air. Were you ever physically abused? No. Verbally? No. Sexually? No. Do you wish you were a fish? Nah, I’m good. A cat? No. A dog? No. Do you have a cell phone? I do. What kind is it? It’s an iPhone 12 Pro Max. Do your teachers like you? My teachers always loved me. Do your parents like you? My parents love me. Do your siblings like you? Yes. Does karma, if it exists, love you? I don’t believe in karma. Did you have a tail when you were born? No. Do you enjoy school? I enjoyed parts of it.  Are you a packrat? I do have a hard time getting rid of stuff. Do you know HTML or CSS? I know some very basic HTML. Do you find yourself chewing on anything your fingers have touched? My food? Do you shy away from social situations? Yes. Are you obsessed with shiny things? No. Are you at least attracted to them? I do find them pretty to look at, sure. Do you smash guitars or any other type of instrument? No. I don’t understand that. Are you proud of doing so?  -- So. How bad can I make you look? Why do you want to make me look bad? Besides, I do that well enough on my own.

Do you wash your hands frequently? Yeah, especially since the start of the pandemic. Do you wet the bed? No. What age did you stop? When I was a little kid. Do you lie a lot? No. Have you lied at all in this survey? Nope. I have no reason to. Do you forget to brush your teeth frequently? No, I don’t forget to brush my teeth. Do you brush your hair? Yeah. Do you use antismelly? No. I don’t even know what that is. Are you an alcoholic? No, I don’t even drink. A druggie? Nope, I don’t do drugs. Do you drink illegally? I’m 32 I can do so if I wanted to. Do you wear underwear? Yes. Do you change it frequently? Everyday. Are you a coward? Yeah, you could say that. A loser? Yes. An idiot? Yep. Do you text talk? I use “lol”, “wtf”, “wth”, “omg”, but otherwise no I don’t like to use shorthand. Are you a bad friend? :/ Are you untrustworthy? No. Unreliable? I feel like I haven’t been the most the reliable these past few years. Do you pick your nose? No. Are you imperfect? Yes. Ugly? Yes. Do you have bad hair? Yes. A big nose? No, I don’t think so. Are you shallow? No. Greedy? No. Do you tell people you love them just to get what you want? No, definitely not. I don’t throw those words around and only say it if I mean it. Do you have any /important/ talents? I have no talents. Are you impolite? No, I don’t think so. Disrespectful? No. Do you have buck teeth? No. Acne? Not currently. Mentall illnesses? Yes. Does your breath smell? I hope not. Do you have a strong body odor? No. Do you have bad teeth? I would like to get veneers. Are you overweight? No, I’m too underweight. Anorexic? No. Bulimic? No. Do you have a piercing in an inappropriate spot on your body? No. A tattoo? Nope. Are you a wannabe? Yeah, I wannabe healthy and happy, ha. Do you get bad grades? I got A’s and B’s. Are you a bad guesser? Yeah, I suck. Just tell me what it is. Are you bad at reading people? I think I do a fairly good job at it, actually. Are you too nice for your own good? I used to be that way and got taken advantage of. Do you have a lot of friends? I have zero friends. Do you give in easily? I usually do. Are you stubborn? Very. Are you annoying? I feel like I am. Are you a necrophilliac? No. Are you incestuous? No. Is your room messy? It could use a little straightening up, but it’s not too bad. Do you make fun of other people? No. Do you respect your body? I guess you could say I don’t since there’s things I should be doing to take better care of myself that I don’t do. :/ I’ve neglected myself in a lot of ways. Are you arrogant? No. Do you have low self-esteem? Very. Are you unique? I don’t think I am. Are your hands clammy? No. Are you short? I am. Are you freakishly tall? No. Do you like Simple Plan? I liked some of their songs. It’s been awhile since I’ve listened to them, though.

[mercurygray]

The Big BOB OFC Data Dive

When I first joined this fandom in April, it was the middle of a pandemic and all I wanted was a big wish-fulfillment project to work on - and I was surprised to find that, for a 20 year old fandom, Band of Brothers is still going strong, and, perhaps more surprisingly, is representing very well for one of my favorite fandom tropes - the original female character.

After several discussions about overused tropes and pet peeves, and because I am simply odd like this, I wanted to go back through fic to see if there were any patterns over time over a) what professions OFCs are placed in in fic and b) which BoB guys get more OFC attention.

In order to answer this question, I went to two major, cross-fandom archives (AO3 and FF.net) manually scraped data, stuck it in a spreadsheet and played with it a little bit. (Pivot tables; they’re great.) I was going to try and make a graph, but this was already starting to take a little longer than I had anticipated, so I’m going to summarize in words for brevity.

I recognize this is a very small subset of a small fandom. I acknowledge my research method is faulty and would not hold up to peer review. I know that there is a lot more of what I would call 'ephemeral' on platforms like Tumblr that's been excluded from the basis of this survey.

Why not Wattpad, Merc? I chose not to survey Wattpad only because I'm unfamiliar with the platform, and because its search and indexing features make it unfriendly to the manual data collection I was using. Furthermore, as a mixed-use space, I feel the conventions vary strongly from the other two archive spaces represented in the data.

Owing to changes in tagging systems, system purges, and fandom migrations to other platforms, this may be an incomplete dataset, but  still serves to take a look at trends over time. I joked to a friend that this project started feeling a little bit like fandom archeology, going through strata of accepted norms.

AO3 Data:

2020 was the BoB Year of the OFC. In 2020 alone, 35 separate authors updated OFC fics on AO3, compared with 9 the year previous.

I trust myself to have pretty good OFCdar - as in, to be able to watch a show and know who's more likely to show up in these types of fics. When I first watched BoB ten years ago, my money was on Joe Liebgott and Lewis Nixon - and I wasn't wrong. These two have a very strong presence in the AO3 data, followed very quickly by Ron Speirs and Eugene Roe, although Don Malarkey also makes a very strong showing as well.

Lewis Nixon fans are in for the long haul. Nixon was more likely to have multi-part collections or multichapter fics dedicated to him.

There was a strong lull in OFC fandom activity in 2018 - prior to this, many OFC fics were routinely pulling 18-20 kudos. After 2018, the average drops to 10, with some outliers.

FF.net

I was surprised to find that FF.net is still a going concern for a subset of BoB fans; 17 OFC stories were published to the platform in 2020, with minimal duplication in the AO3 set. 

The oldest fic in this set is from 2005, compared with 2011 in the AO3 data. The FF.net stories have a tendency to be longer, multipart fics, written over much longer periods of time. Their summaries tend to fit the legacy format for describing OCs - "[Name] is a [occupation] whose [reason for joining up] will [change her life/finally let her fall in love.]" 

These stories ALSO have a tendency towards what I would call 'heritage tropes' - story ideas that I read a lot of in my early days as a fanfiction author but which I don't see too often in fics now.  There are 5 OCs in this dataset in time-travel fics, but there's also a couple that are magically related to a canon character, and, very interesting to me, there are also three stories where the character joins the company as a DISGUISED woman, a heritage trope if ever there was one. (Thank you, Mr. Shakespeare.)

FF.net OCs are much more likely to fit expected fandom norms in terms of their occupations; the majority are female paratroopers, nurses, or medics. The top romantic interests in this dataset? Richard Winters, Joe Liebgott, and Ronald Speirs, with Don Malarkey and Doc Roe rounding out the top five. BUT I noticed another pattern; when sorted over time, there are bands where multiple authors in the fandom are all writing for the same paraguy - and that that guy changes over time, while the authors remain the same. (You’re writing about Luz? We’re ALL writing about Luz.)

Another interesting trend in this data is the appearance of several authors who are writing what appear to be the forerunners of the now-ubiquitous tumblr reader-insert fic. These are stories in shorter, 1000-2000 word formats, unconnected to other works in a series with an unnamed protagonist whose occupation isn't mentioned in the story description.  They occur in the dataset in blocks by the same author, with three or four stories clumped around the same publish date, and their sole reason for existing seems to be to express or receive romantic interest from/in a paraguy, not tell a particular woman's story.

Takeaways:

Named But Not Appearing In Canon characters, Reader Inserts, and Original Characters are three distinct categories of fic with different target audiences. None of them are 'wrong' in any way, but I feel each should be tagged differently. Kitty Grogan, for instance, is named in the show but never appears, and while we have to speculate on what she's actually like, she's different than the characters we created out of thin air and should be tagged accordingly.

I know several fics being written by acquaintances of mine don't appear in this survey because, while the ship is tagged, they're not tagged as 'Original Female Character (s)' and several Reader Inserts found their way into the dataset because they're tagged incorrectly. (You all should FIX THIS.)

On AO3, fics with more comments were also more likely to have more bookmarks. Since comments are an entry point to beginning a relationship with the work's author, authors who engage in the comments seem to be more likely to have the type of followers who bookmark and return to a work. These works also tend to be longer, supporting the idea that continued engagement with authors over time is a good way to encourage them to keep creating.

[morlock-holmes]

You know, it is most vexing to say, "I'm really tired of people saying, 'Well, I have this, therefore it can't be rare'" and then have you respond with, essentially,

"Well I have this, so it can't be rare."

It is most vexing indeed.

As to the concrete claims, okay, let's imagine a city called Pleasantville. In 1960, Pleasantville has 5 different bridge clubs, all of which meet weekly on different days, and all of which have at least a couple dozen members.

Unfortunately, Pleasantville is a segregated town and the bridge clubs don't allow the colored people.

By 2000, Pleasantville has one bridge club, with less than a dozen members. Because the membership numbers are so low, it meets only once a month. But it is integrated, and accepts players of all races.

Which changes constitute "Atomization"?

The hypothesis that a lot of people will make, for reasons utterly beyond me, is that the two processes are linked. "Why, it's a shame that there are fewer bridge clubs, but that's the price of integration!"

What a bizarre thing to insist upon!

Atomization is the destruction of both bridge club membership and segregation, which are obviously the same process and are directly and inevitably correlated.

We can argue whether it's better to have high bridge club membership and segregation, or low bridge club membership and integration, but those are our two choices. The one causes the other, obviously, so we only have two possible outcomes.

Okay, now image that there's not a correlation between those two processes.

Say, Pleasantville integrates in 1964. Bridge club membership then climbs for the next decade, with 1979 seeing the largest number of clubs and bridge players in the city's history, followed by a decline until we reach the 2000 levels.

In our hypothetical Pleasantville, we now have two separate processes that we could call Atomization. The decline in bridge club membership, and the decline in segregation. But it's no longer plausible to view them as trade-offs which are inevitably correlated; if you want to say, "The destruction of the thick social bonds and shackles that enabled segregation also destroyed the system that let bridge clubs thrive" you have to explain that gap.

As far as I can tell, the US is much more like that second example.

The rat-adj response to Bowling Alone is that, okay, we have fewer relationships than in the mid-century, but they are much higher quality.

I'm not saying this isn't the case; it very well might be the case. But I see no reason at all why it must be the case, and I think, "I dunno, I'm doing okay." is pretty dang poor, as evidence about social trends goes.

Part of the data that Putnam looked at was time diaries.

To quote page 98 of Bowling Alone:

"In the mid-to late 1970s, according to the DDB Needham Life Style archive, the average American entertained friends at home about fourteen to fifteen times a year. By the late 1990s that figure had fallen to eight times a year, a decline of 45 percent in barely two decades. An entirely independent series of surveys from the Roper Social and Political Trends archive confirms that both going out to see friends and having them over to our home declined from the mid-1970s to the mid-90s (figure omitted)"

Suppose your hypothesis is true: People in the mid-70s had a lot of shallow, even unpleasant friendships, while people in the mid-90s were more likely to have a small number of very fulfilling friendships.

In that case, wouldn't we expect to see "Time spent visiting friends" stay roughly the same, or perhaps even increase?

After all, under your hypothesis, the pleasurability of "entertaining friends at home" actually increased over that time period, as tedious acquaintances were replaced with friends who give you genuine pleasure.

So if the activity became more pleasurable over that time-frame, why on earth did people do it less and less over that same time-frame?

This is not devastating to your position; There are potential answers to that question.

But frankly, one of the potential answers is that trade-off you're talking about simply didn't happen. That the whole dynamic you're describing simply just, didn't actually happen.

And the fact that you personally assume you are better off strikes me as just, meaningless in terms of evidence.

It's like saying, "There can't be an obesity epidemic, because I've recently lost a lot of weight!"

I would like to see real evidence of your hypothesis, not anecdotes.

I have to be honest, at this point my stereotype of rationalists is people going,

“Man, modern atomized individualism is one of the most important social achievements of modern times, and the more we accelerate it, the better. On a completely unrelated note I sure am enjoying living in this group home with twelve other close friends who help me do chores and mitigate my mental illness.”

[managementcertificationarti-blog]

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[localbizlift]

Podcasts: Your Next Great Marketing Channel, Or Just a Fad?

When it comes to reaching engaged, relevant audiences, which marketing channels truly shine? Social media? Email? Webinars?

How about podcasts?

“Podcasts?” I can hear you thinking, “you mean those radio shows that were popular in the early 2000s?” Sure, podcasts may have hit critical mass thanks to Apple iTunes and the iPod back in 2004, but new research is showing that small businesses and brands alike are taking another look at the podcast as a formidable marketing tool.

Of course the question is — why podcasts? And why has this technology suddenly re-ignited? Let’s take a closer look:

Podcasts’ Surge in Popularity

According to a recent report from Infinite Dial, 40% of respondents reported listening to a podcast at least once, with 24% doing so monthly, and 15% doing so weekly. Year over year, online radio and podcasts in particular, have shown a growth that simply can’t be ignored. What’s more, according to a separate study from Triton Digital and Edison Research, Americans tuning in to podcasts on a weekly basis has almost doubled since 2013:

Image Source

Listeners Are More Receptive to Products and Services

People are tuning in — and so are advertisers. There’s a lot for advertisers to like about podcasts, since almost two-thirds of listeners are more willing to consider products and services they learned about on a podcast. Over half of them believed that the hosts of the podcasts they listen to regularly are users of the products and services they mention on their respective shows. And those respondents reacted much more positively to products and services mentioned on the shows from the host themselves rather than a pre-recorded ad from a company or sponsor.

Just look at what actions listeners took after hearing about a product or service in a podcast:

Image Source

In addition to high levels of receptiveness, relevancy and engagement, the kinds of people listening to podcasts are the very users many advertisers want to reach: relatively young, high income and high education levels, according to a survey from Nielsen:

Image Source

Now the question becomes — how can brands and companies leverage this audience attraction?

Which Brands are Seeing Success with Podcasts?

One of the biggest points to keep in mind is that no one is going to tune in to a 20 minute commercial about your business. Take eBay, for example. Earlier this summer, Brooklyn-based audio company Gimlet Creative completed a branded podcast series for the auction company called Open for Business. It became the number one business podcast in iTunes when it released in June and talks to create a second season are already underway.

On the surface, it looks like Open for Business has very little in common with eBay itself. Topics include details on how to build a business from the ground up, including: how to hire, how an immigrant can start a business in the U.S., and so on.

Mentions of eBay itself are handled in a very light-touch manner. The podcast does, however, circle back by sharing the true story of a small business owner that found success on eBay. The last episode of the first series focused on the gig economy, which includes getting short term jobs and getting paid from gig-style platforms like Uber, Taskrabbit, Airbnb…and eBay.

The series was a hit — generating an average rating of 4.5 on iTunes and hitting 200% of its download goal.

And it’s not just how-to or curriculum-style podcasts that are getting noticed. GE leverages branded content by using its own sound technology in part of a sci-fi series known as The Message, where cryptographers attempt to decipher an alien message. GE itself isn’t mentioned anywhere in the podcast, but its technology is an integrated part of the storyline.

As part of their digital marketing, General Electric has started a podcast that works well with the audio format.

The Message currently has 5 million subscribers.

You can read more about General Electric’s foray into the digital marketing sphere in our post.

But before you get too excited about the potential of podcasts, it’s worth noting a few downsides.

Measuring Reach: Still In Its Infancy

Currently, the best way to measure how much reach a podcast has is the number of downloads and the number of subscribers to a given channel. Podcasts do not yet have the ability to tell you things like how long people listened or, for example, if someone played a podcast in their car with a group of friends.

What’s more, podcasts don’t correlate the number of downloads to the number of subscribers, so hosts don’t know what percentage of their listeners tune in on a weekly basis, or download an episode. How many people listen one time and then never listen again? No one knows.

Even Apple’s podcast app doesn’t provide statistics or analytics that show what kind of reach the podcast has. So, keep this in mind if you’re looking for measurable marketing gains with podcasts — the information you get is fairly shallow compared to the deep, insightful analytics you get with other marketing channels.

Podcasts Set a Higher Bar for Quality

If you’re looking at starting your own podcast, you can see from the examples above, as well as the top podcasts for your particular industry, that there’s a much higher bar set in terms of quality and consistency than with creating other types of content. Articles like this one may take just a few minutes to read, but with a podcast, you’re asking people to tune in for roughly 20 minutes or so per week – the approximate length and schedule for podcasts in general.

That means you have to commit to a standard of quality and a publishing schedule that’s both dedicated and deeply involved. It’s quite the challenge, to be sure, and many companies — even large ones — simply cannot afford that kind of time investment with so many other digital irons in the fire.

Small and medium-sized businesses, however, can look at podcasts as an opportunity to map out a higher grade of content that not only enthralls and engages listeners, but leaves them wanting more. And although the bar for quality is higher, the receptiveness of the audience and their eagerness to take the actions you want them to take after learning about your product or service is definitely worth it.

And although podcasts have risen and waned in popularity throughout the years, the proliferation of online radio, smartphones and home devices like Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa have made tuning into podcasts even more accessible than in a the past. If all indications are showing increasing growth and user adoption, it’s safe to say that podcasting isn’t just a fad — but like all marketing initiatives, the sooner you start, the sooner you can reap the benefits rather than falling behind and being looked at as an “also-ran” by your potential customers.

Do you use podcasts in your own marketing campaigns? What have your results been so far? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below and let us know what tips you have for fellow podcasters who are looking to get started! We can’t wait to hear from you!

About the Author: Sherice Jacob helps business owners improve website design and increase conversion rates through compelling copywriting, user-friendly design and smart analytics analysis. Learn more at iElectrify.com and download your free web copy tune-up and conversion checklist today!

[dailybail]

Podcasts: Your Next Great Marketing Channel, Or Just a Fad?

When it comes to reaching engaged, relevant audiences, which marketing channels truly shine? Social media? Email? Webinars?

How about podcasts?

“Podcasts?” I can hear you thinking, “you mean those radio shows that were popular in the early 2000s?” Sure, podcasts may have hit critical mass thanks to Apple iTunes and the iPod back in 2004, but new research is showing that small businesses and brands alike are taking another look at the podcast as a formidable marketing tool.

Of course the question is — why podcasts? And why has this technology suddenly re-ignited? Let’s take a closer look:

Podcasts’ Surge in Popularity

According to a recent report from Infinite Dial, 40% of respondents reported listening to a podcast at least once, with 24% doing so monthly, and 15% doing so weekly. Year over year, online radio and podcasts in particular, have shown a growth that simply can’t be ignored. What’s more, according to a separate study from Triton Digital and Edison Research, Americans tuning in to podcasts on a weekly basis has almost doubled since 2013:

Image Source

Listeners Are More Receptive to Products and Services

People are tuning in — and so are advertisers. There’s a lot for advertisers to like about podcasts, since almost two-thirds of listeners are more willing to consider products and services they learned about on a podcast. Over half of them believed that the hosts of the podcasts they listen to regularly are users of the products and services they mention on their respective shows. And those respondents reacted much more positively to products and services mentioned on the shows from the host themselves rather than a pre-recorded ad from a company or sponsor.

Just look at what actions listeners took after hearing about a product or service in a podcast:

Image Source

In addition to high levels of receptiveness, relevancy and engagement, the kinds of people listening to podcasts are the very users many advertisers want to reach: relatively young, high income and high education levels, according to a survey from Nielsen:

Image Source

Now the question becomes — how can brands and companies leverage this audience attraction?

Which Brands are Seeing Success with Podcasts?

One of the biggest points to keep in mind is that no one is going to tune in to a 20 minute commercial about your business. Take eBay, for example. Earlier this summer, Brooklyn-based audio company Gimlet Creative completed a branded podcast series for the auction company called Open for Business. It became the number one business podcast in iTunes when it released in June and talks to create a second season are already underway.

On the surface, it looks like Open for Business has very little in common with eBay itself. Topics include details on how to build a business from the ground up, including: how to hire, how an immigrant can start a business in the U.S., and so on.

Mentions of eBay itself are handled in a very light-touch manner. The podcast does, however, circle back by sharing the true story of a small business owner that found success on eBay. The last episode of the first series focused on the gig economy, which includes getting short term jobs and getting paid from gig-style platforms like Uber, Taskrabbit, Airbnb…and eBay.

The series was a hit — generating an average rating of 4.5 on iTunes and hitting 200% of its download goal.

And it’s not just how-to or curriculum-style podcasts that are getting noticed. GE leverages branded content by using its own sound technology in part of a sci-fi series known as The Message, where cryptographers attempt to decipher an alien message. GE itself isn’t mentioned anywhere in the podcast, but its technology is an integrated part of the storyline.

As part of their digital marketing, General Electric has started a podcast that works well with the audio format.

The Message currently has 5 million subscribers.

You can read more about General Electric’s foray into the digital marketing sphere in our post.

But before you get too excited about the potential of podcasts, it’s worth noting a few downsides.

Measuring Reach: Still In Its Infancy

Currently, the best way to measure how much reach a podcast has is the number of downloads and the number of subscribers to a given channel. Podcasts do not yet have the ability to tell you things like how long people listened or, for example, if someone played a podcast in their car with a group of friends.

What’s more, podcasts don’t correlate the number of downloads to the number of subscribers, so hosts don’t know what percentage of their listeners tune in on a weekly basis, or download an episode. How many people listen one time and then never listen again? No one knows.

Even Apple’s podcast app doesn’t provide statistics or analytics that show what kind of reach the podcast has. So, keep this in mind if you’re looking for measurable marketing gains with podcasts — the information you get is fairly shallow compared to the deep, insightful analytics you get with other marketing channels.

Podcasts Set a Higher Bar for Quality

If you’re looking at starting your own podcast, you can see from the examples above, as well as the top podcasts for your particular industry, that there’s a much higher bar set in terms of quality and consistency than with creating other types of content. Articles like this one may take just a few minutes to read, but with a podcast, you’re asking people to tune in for roughly 20 minutes or so per week – the approximate length and schedule for podcasts in general.

That means you have to commit to a standard of quality and a publishing schedule that’s both dedicated and deeply involved. It’s quite the challenge, to be sure, and many companies — even large ones — simply cannot afford that kind of time investment with so many other digital irons in the fire.

Small and medium-sized businesses, however, can look at podcasts as an opportunity to map out a higher grade of content that not only enthralls and engages listeners, but leaves them wanting more. And although the bar for quality is higher, the receptiveness of the audience and their eagerness to take the actions you want them to take after learning about your product or service is definitely worth it.

And although podcasts have risen and waned in popularity throughout the years, the proliferation of online radio, smartphones and home devices like Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa have made tuning into podcasts even more accessible than in a the past. If all indications are showing increasing growth and user adoption, it’s safe to say that podcasting isn’t just a fad — but like all marketing initiatives, the sooner you start, the sooner you can reap the benefits rather than falling behind and being looked at as an “also-ran” by your potential customers.

Do you use podcasts in your own marketing campaigns? What have your results been so far? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below and let us know what tips you have for fellow podcasters who are looking to get started! We can’t wait to hear from you!

About the Author: Sherice Jacob helps business owners improve website design and increase conversion rates through compelling copywriting, user-friendly design and smart analytics analysis. Learn more at iElectrify.com and download your free web copy tune-up and conversion checklist today!

from The Kissmetrics Marketing Blog http://ift.tt/2wvo47d via http://ift.tt/1oIgpXs

[adolphkwinter]

Podcasts: Your Next Great Marketing Channel, Or Just a Fad?

When it comes to reaching engaged, relevant audiences, which marketing channels truly shine? Social media? Email? Webinars?

How about podcasts?

“Podcasts?” I can hear you thinking, “you mean those radio shows that were popular in the early 2000s?” Sure, podcasts may have hit critical mass thanks to Apple iTunes and the iPod back in 2004, but new research is showing that small businesses and brands alike are taking another look at the podcast as a formidable marketing tool.

Of course the question is — why podcasts? And why has this technology suddenly re-ignited? Let’s take a closer look:

Podcasts’ Surge in Popularity

According to a recent report from Infinite Dial, 40% of respondents reported listening to a podcast at least once, with 24% doing so monthly, and 15% doing so weekly. Year over year, online radio and podcasts in particular, have shown a growth that simply can’t be ignored. What’s more, according to a separate study from Triton Digital and Edison Research, Americans tuning in to podcasts on a weekly basis has almost doubled since 2013:

Image Source

Listeners Are More Receptive to Products and Services

People are tuning in — and so are advertisers. There’s a lot for advertisers to like about podcasts, since almost two-thirds of listeners are more willing to consider products and services they learned about on a podcast. Over half of them believed that the hosts of the podcasts they listen to regularly are users of the products and services they mention on their respective shows. And those respondents reacted much more positively to products and services mentioned on the shows from the host themselves rather than a pre-recorded ad from a company or sponsor.

Just look at what actions listeners took after hearing about a product or service in a podcast:

Image Source

In addition to high levels of receptiveness, relevancy and engagement, the kinds of people listening to podcasts are the very users many advertisers want to reach: relatively young, high income and high education levels, according to a survey from Nielsen:

Image Source

Now the question becomes — how can brands and companies leverage this audience attraction?

Which Brands are Seeing Success with Podcasts?

One of the biggest points to keep in mind is that no one is going to tune in to a 20 minute commercial about your business. Take eBay, for example. Earlier this summer, Brooklyn-based audio company Gimlet Creative completed a branded podcast series for the auction company called Open for Business. It became the number one business podcast in iTunes when it released in June and talks to create a second season are already underway.

On the surface, it looks like Open for Business has very little in common with eBay itself. Topics include details on how to build a business from the ground up, including: how to hire, how an immigrant can start a business in the U.S., and so on.

Mentions of eBay itself are handled in a very light-touch manner. The podcast does, however, circle back by sharing the true story of a small business owner that found success on eBay. The last episode of the first series focused on the gig economy, which includes getting short term jobs and getting paid from gig-style platforms like Uber, Taskrabbit, Airbnb…and eBay.

The series was a hit — generating an average rating of 4.5 on iTunes and hitting 200% of its download goal.

And it’s not just how-to or curriculum-style podcasts that are getting noticed. GE leverages branded content by using its own sound technology in part of a sci-fi series known as The Message, where cryptographers attempt to decipher an alien message. GE itself isn’t mentioned anywhere in the podcast, but its technology is an integrated part of the storyline.

As part of their digital marketing, General Electric has started a podcast that works well with the audio format.

The Message currently has 5 million subscribers.

You can read more about General Electric’s foray into the digital marketing sphere in our post.

But before you get too excited about the potential of podcasts, it’s worth noting a few downsides.

Measuring Reach: Still In Its Infancy

Currently, the best way to measure how much reach a podcast has is the number of downloads and the number of subscribers to a given channel. Podcasts do not yet have the ability to tell you things like how long people listened or, for example, if someone played a podcast in their car with a group of friends.

What’s more, podcasts don’t correlate the number of downloads to the number of subscribers, so hosts don’t know what percentage of their listeners tune in on a weekly basis, or download an episode. How many people listen one time and then never listen again? No one knows.

Even Apple’s podcast app doesn’t provide statistics or analytics that show what kind of reach the podcast has. So, keep this in mind if you’re looking for measurable marketing gains with podcasts — the information you get is fairly shallow compared to the deep, insightful analytics you get with other marketing channels.

Podcasts Set a Higher Bar for Quality

If you’re looking at starting your own podcast, you can see from the examples above, as well as the top podcasts for your particular industry, that there’s a much higher bar set in terms of quality and consistency than with creating other types of content. Articles like this one may take just a few minutes to read, but with a podcast, you’re asking people to tune in for roughly 20 minutes or so per week – the approximate length and schedule for podcasts in general.

That means you have to commit to a standard of quality and a publishing schedule that’s both dedicated and deeply involved. It’s quite the challenge, to be sure, and many companies — even large ones — simply cannot afford that kind of time investment with so many other digital irons in the fire.

Small and medium-sized businesses, however, can look at podcasts as an opportunity to map out a higher grade of content that not only enthralls and engages listeners, but leaves them wanting more. And although the bar for quality is higher, the receptiveness of the audience and their eagerness to take the actions you want them to take after learning about your product or service is definitely worth it.

And although podcasts have risen and waned in popularity throughout the years, the proliferation of online radio, smartphones and home devices like Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa have made tuning into podcasts even more accessible than in a the past. If all indications are showing increasing growth and user adoption, it’s safe to say that podcasting isn’t just a fad — but like all marketing initiatives, the sooner you start, the sooner you can reap the benefits rather than falling behind and being looked at as an “also-ran” by your potential customers.

Do you use podcasts in your own marketing campaigns? What have your results been so far? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below and let us know what tips you have for fellow podcasters who are looking to get started! We can’t wait to hear from you!

About the Author: Sherice Jacob helps business owners improve website design and increase conversion rates through compelling copywriting, user-friendly design and smart analytics analysis. Learn more at iElectrify.com and download your free web copy tune-up and conversion checklist today!

from Online Marketing Tips https://blog.kissmetrics.com/podcasts-your-next-great-marketing-channel/

[marymosley]

Reports and Statistics of Crime in India in 20-21 century: The changes

1. Introduction

Crimes that are being reported in the past have shown a radical change. On one hand, in the 21st century, conventional crimes like murder, robbery, theft, and burglary have shown a declining phenomenon. Whilst on the other hand such crimes have been replaced by less violent crimes like counterfeiting, cheating, criminal breach of trust, bank fraud, cyber bullying, cyber pornography, etc. Such a shift in the dimension of crime from the 20th century to the 21st century is a result of a change in socio-economic phenomenon mainly due to globalization and the advancement of technology. Crimes like trafficking in narcotics, fraudulent financial deal, money laundering, Trojan attacks, cyber bullying, cyber warfare are adding new dimensions to crime set up.

2.      Change in trends of violent and property crimes.

Before the end of the 20th century, violent crimes like murder, burglary, rioting, theft, and robbery were rampant. But the beginning of the 21st century shows a sharp decline in such crimes, mainly due to a more robust policing system in the country. The UN office on Drugs and Crime stated in its 2019 report stated that the overall homicide cases in India have dropped by 10%. According to the NCRB report, during the period of 2009 to 2015, the shift in homicide cases is from 3.8 to 3.4 per 1,000,000 population. It is important to note that while cases like theft, burglary, and rioting showed a sharp decline of 74%, 54%, and 51% respectively in the period of 1971 to 2015, the murder rate decreased by only 3%. All the four crime series viz, murder, theft, burglary, and rioting, following the similar pathways initially, peaked in 1974 and troughed immediately for 1–2 years before starting an upward trend. Unexpectedly, all rates, except that of murder, declined.[1]

Almost all the categories of crime in the field of violent crimes have shown a either sharp decrease or a feasible decrease. But the crime of rape has shown inconsistency with the other set of crimes. The rape rate showed a continuously increasing trend between 1971 and 2011, with the exceptional brief of pause between 1998 and 2003 when it stabilized. According to the data of NCRB, during the period of 1971-2011, the murder rate declined by 3%, while the rape rate increased by 351%.

3.      Change in trends of crime against Children

Crime against children is considered as one of the most disastrous crimes. Efforts are made in order to afoot the exodus of such menace from the society but the crime is increasing with expedient rate and has spread larger roots in the 21st century than 20th century. Crime against children includes child rape, kidnapping, abduction, procuration of minor girls, selling and buying of girls for prostitution, abetment of suicide, exposure and abandonment, infanticide, foeticide, and child marriage restraint.[2]

In the report of NCRB of 1996, the year of 1997 showed the percentage variation of 57.8% from 1993 in child rape, kidnapping, and abduction. According to the NCRB report of 2015, kidnapping and abduction have shown the maximum number of cases within the ambit of offenses against children during the period of 2000-2015. While during the period of 1990 to 2000, child rape has shown the maximum number of cases. But still, there was an increase in the number of rape cases from 2,499 cases to 10,854 cases from 1990 to 2015. During the period of 1994 to 2015, the number of crime against children increased from 5,821 cases to 56,567 cases, showing an increase of 89%.

Children are the most vulnerable class of society and considered as the most valuable asset for a developed nation. In order to curb the menace of crime against children several legislations under Indian Penal code, as well as special and local laws, have been formulated, like, protection of Children from Sexual Offences, Child labor (Prohibition & Regulation) Act, 1986, Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956, and Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006 etc. But such legislations are unable to either slow down or diminish the rampant growth of offenses against children.[3]

  4.     Emergence of Cyber Crime

In the 21st century, it does not matter how many weapons you are carrying but instead, your efficiency with respect to technology matters the most. The increase rate of advancement in the field of technology prove to be boon as well as a bane. On one hand, it increased the efficiency of humans, while on the other hand, it resulted in the emergence of new variants of crime, viz Cyber Crime. Capacity to store data, easy accessibility, complexity, and loss of evidence are some of the factors which helped such crime to flourish in 21st century. The modes and manners of committing Cyber Crimes include unauthorized users access to computer systems like hacking to the computer, theft of information including in electronic form, email bombing, virus attacks, and salami attacks, etc.

On the basis of perpetrators and the motive crimes committed by the use of technology can be divided into four parts viz, cyber crime, cyber warfare, cyber espionage, and cyber-terrorism. During the period 2010-2018, the cases increased from 966 to 27,248 cases, showing an increase of 96%.[4] In the initial years of the formation of NCRB, the heading of cyber crime did not find its place in the annual reports of the institution. But with the advancement of technology, cybercrime has become the most prominent crime in society while increasing with an exponential rate. The report of NCRB in 2010 reported an increase of 50% cybercrimes over the previous year. While in 2017 the cyber crime increased by 77%. According to the NCRB report, cyber crime has also evolved itself to include different variants of cyber crime within itself like the circulation of nude pictures. In 2015-2016 out of 569 cases out of 5987 cyber crime cases were motivated by sexual exploitation. Such incidents of crime have increased by 107% in recent years. Apart from this, other sets of crimes in the ambit of cyber crime include, inter alia, tapering computer source document, misrepresentation, and suppression of facts, cyber stalking, cyber bullying of crimes, defamation, and morphing.

Due to such rampant increase of cyber crimes in India, lead the government to make an exclusive and separate set of legislation, viz Information Act 2000, to deal with the rampant of cyber crimes.

5.      Emergence of Economic offenses

The increase in industrialization and globalization lead to the emergence of a new set of crime, namely, white collar/blue collar crimes or simply put economic offenses. Economic offenses are the manifestation of criminal acts dine either solely or in an organized manner with or without associates or gangs with an intent to earn wealth through illegal means, and carry out illicit activities violating the laws of the land, other regulatory, statutory provisions governing the economic activities of the government and its administration.[5] In the starting of 20th century such offenses are not in large numbers and hence, the chapter of economic offenses did not find its place in NCRB annual reports for 50 years. In 1994, the chapter of “economic offenses” was incorporated in NCRB annual reports for the very first time. Crimes associated with economic offenses include smuggling, money laundering, tax evasion, export and import offenses, drug trafficking, trading in cultural property, bribery, corruption, and bank frauds.

In the 2015 report of NCRB data, the increase in the cases of economic offenses doubled in the last decade. In the 2017 report of NCRB, it was reported that the maximum number of crimes in the ambit of economic offenses are related to forgery, cheating, and fraud with 21,152 cases in 2017. In the year of 1994, the removal of government officials during the departmental proceedings for bribery and corruption was 3 and dismissal was 7. But in year 2002 removal spiked to 109. In the period of 1994 the categories of public servants involved in regular dept. The action was 1869, while in the year of 2003, it spiked to 5,888 cases.

Taking into consideration of such rampant increase of cases, several legislations were made to effectively deal with the menace of such economic offenses.

  6.      Conclusion

The cultural, social, and economic changes in society contribute to the change in the trends of the crime of the state. Apart from this, the other factors influencing crime trends are the effectiveness of aggressive law enforcement practices and science & technology. Poverty in any country affects largely the crime of any country. Newly emerged crimes are, somewhat, unable to effectively dealt by the government to the novelty associated with the crime. Hence, the unavailability of robust legislation and mechanism to effectively deal with the menace of such crimes, resulted in their expansion.[6]

Apart from this, it is also pertinent to note that such crime records are not fully reliable. The efficiency as well as the credibility of NCRB are often questioned upon due to the inconsistencies of records from several other surveys. This is mainly due to two reasons, firstly, NCRB relies on outdated population projections. Secondly, the methodology to compute crime rates is not consistent across the years, which makes a simple comparison of crime rates across years meaningless.[7] Several crimes which, prima facie, are creating a menace in the society have not been able to find its place in the reports of NHRC or any other identical reports. Lynching is one of the examples of such a discrepancy in the reports made by such institutions. Also, the statistics of such crimes are based only on the FIR registered by the police officials but it is pertinent to note that most of the cases in India went unregistered. According to the Safety Trends and Reporting of Crime survey conducted by a Mumbai based think-tank, IDFC Institute, only 6-8% of victims of theft in four major Indian cities lodged an FIR (first information report) with the police.

In conclusion, the progress of human civilization with the advancement of technology, economy, and social surrounding, did not result in the civilization of humans in true sense. But, on the contrary it resulted in the escalation of crime in the society while replacing conventional crimes.

[1] Crimes in India, NCRB report.

[2] Crimes in India, NCRB Report, 2015.

[3] Crime in India, NCRB Report, 2016.

[4] NCRB report

[5] Crimes in India, NCRB report, 1994.

[6] Lloyd E. Ohlin, Effect of Social Change on Crime and Law Enforcement, 43 Notre Dame L. Rev. 834 (1968)

[7] Priti pratishurthi Dash & Shreya Rastogi, The many Gaps in NCRB data, The Hindu, 29 Oct. 2019,

https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/the-many-gaps-in-ncrb-data/article29815998.ece

The post Reports and Statistics of Crime in India in 20-21 century: The changes appeared first on Legal Desire.

Reports and Statistics of Crime in India in 20-21 century: The changes published first on https://immigrationlawyerto.tumblr.com/

[micaramel]

Artist: Sharif Waked

Venue: CCA Tel Aviv

Exhibition Title: Sharif Waked: Balagan

Date: February 18 – June 20, 2020

Curated By: Nicola Trezzi

Click here to view slideshow

  



Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Videos:



Sharif Waked, Just A Moment No. 4 (Away From You), 2011. Video, 00:01 min (loop), 16:9 (widescreen), black and white, silent, 28:36

  

Sharif Waked, Just A Moment No. 21 (Shit), 2018. Video, 00:06 min (loop), 16:9 (widescreen), color, silent, 08:31

  

Sharif Waked, Bath Time, 2012. Video, 02:12 min, 16:9, color, sound

  

Sharif Waked, Just A Moment No. 19 (Nimrod), 2018. Video, 00:30 min (loop), 16:9 (widescreen), color, sound, 05:38

  

Sharif Waked, Just A Moment No. 17 (Smiley), 2016. Video, 02:16 min (loop), 16:9, color, silent

  

Sharif Waked, MoM – Museum of Mosul, 2017. Video, 03:30 min, 16:9 (widescreen)

  

Sharif Waked, Just A Moment No. 5 (Jericho First), 2012. Two-synchronized-channel video, 00:01 min (loop), 16:9 (widescreen), color, silent

  

Sharif Waked, Just A Moment No. 5 (Jericho First), 2012. Two-synchronized-channel video, 00:01 min (loop), 16:9 (widescreen), color, silent

  

Sharif Waked, Contribute A Better Translation No. 1, 2011. Video, 04:50 min (loop), 16:9 (widescreen), color, sound

  

Sharif Waked, Just A Moment No. 15 (Pa-Pa- Pa), 2016. Video, 02:16 min (loop), 16:9, color, sound

  

Sharif Waked, Beace Brocess No. 5, 2012. Video, 01:28 min (loop), 16:9 (widescreen), color, sound, in artist frame, 37.5 × 47 cm

Images courtesy of CCA, Tel Aviv

Press Release:

Through sustained reflection on aesthetics and politics, Sharif Waked (*1964, Nazareth; lives and works in Nazareth and Santa Barbara, California) has consistently pierced the absurdities of reality with playful and estranged encounters between various temporalities, cultural-historical products, and political events. On the occasion of his solo exhibition at CCA – Center for Contemporary Art Tel Aviv, the artist adopted the word Balagan, as its title. This word, which means chaos, disarray and confusion, originally comes from the Persian word “balchan” and it traveled across borders to other languages such as Russian, Yiddish, Lithuanian and Hebrew. Following the artist’s unique modus operandi – which is rooted in the conception of single artworks, often based on appropriated images, which are then “incarnated” (and numerated) several times through different media, formats and techniques – the exhibition includes both existing and recent pieces, linking different bodies of Waked’s work over time.

Just A Moment No. 4 (Away From You) (2011), appropriates footage featuring the Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, while she sings her iconic song Away From You, focusing on the stamping of her left foot just underneath the dress scraping her heal. While in Bath Time (2012) the artist restaged what would be the end of the day for the “zebra” – in fact a donkey disguised as a zebra – of the Zoo in Gaza, in Just A Moment No. 21 (Shit) (2018), outtakes of the aforementioned work shows its star performing the mainstays of everyday life: eating and shitting.

In Just A Moment No. 19 (Nimrod) (2018) Yitzhak Danziger’s iconic sculpture Nimrod meets the mosquito that in the Islamic narrative entered Nimrod’s ear and made their way into his brain to drive him mad, while in Just A Moment No. 17 (Smiley) (2016) an army of contemporary emojis struggle to save their smiling ancestor from destruction. Who are you? (2014) are twelve abstract figures based on Muammar Gaddafi’s outfits, titled after a fragment of the last speech of the late Libyan leader, in which he promised to hunt his opposition down to the last alley; in Tugra No. 5 (2013), the artist infiltrates Israeli soldiers’ most common directive in Hebrew-inflected Arabic – “rukh min hun!” [Get out of here!] – inside the sixteenth century calligraphic monogram (tughra) of Suleiman the Magnificent.

Crop Marks (2016) sees the artist’s self-portrait in an orange suit subjected to the print-house’s “guillotine,” cut at his neck and along the crop marks of printing and design conventions, whereas in MoM – Museum of Mosul (2017) the footage of ISIS’s destructive actions is reproduced as a promotional film for a now-rebranded museum. While in Contribute A Better Translation No. 1 (2011) an archive of slogans of the Palestinian struggle undergo mechanized translation against a backdrop of visual iconography, in Contribute A Better Translation No. 2 (2011) the Palestinian Declaration of Independence, written by Mahmoud Darwish, is transformed into Yiddish via Google Translate.

Just A Moment No. 15 (Pa-Pa-Pa) (2016) is based on the claim of Israeli criminologist and politician Anat Berko, who said there is no Palestine because there is no P in Arabic, and in Beace Brocess No. 5 (2012) a clip from the Camp David II 2000 peace talks is refracted into the era of silent film. In Just A Moment No. 5 (Jericho First) (2012), the Oslo Agreements of the 1990s meet a detail of a mosaic from the eighth century Umayyads Caliphate. Search (2016), exposes the questions haunting Google Israel, whereas in Jamal Al Mahamel (2016) the barefoot carrier lifting the weight of Jerusalem on his back depicted in Suleiman Mansour’s eponymous work is absent and the city gives to gold dots.

Balagan is also the title of a work on display in the exhibition. It is part of the series Arabesque (2016-ongoing) and in it along with the series dot.txt (2016-ongoing) – Waked disassembles the building blocks of images to reconstruct what appear as geometric abstract surfaces. In these series, Waked questions the division between the visual and the verbal, perception and deception, the visual traditions of the past and the digital manipulations of the present, to deliver in a rather formalistic fashion the questioning, breaking, and remaking of meaning. Following these premises, the exhibition offers a bird’s eye view of Waked’s art, surveying his work as a comprehensive whole.

“Sharif Waked: Balagan” is curated by Nicola Trezzi and it is accompanied by a printed matter in Hebrew, Arabic and English. The exhibition is supported by Mifal HaPais Council for the Culture and Arts. Hospitality kindly provided by OUTSET.

Link: Sharif Waked at CCA Tel Aviv

  from Contemporary Art Daily https://bit.ly/3cPmGNL

[lovemesomesurveys]

5,000 question survey series--part thirty-six

3401. How well can you read between the lines when others are talking? I don’t know. I feel like I’m pretty good at reading people and picking up on what they’re saying.

3402. Would you ever speak in front of your peers about peace and social injustice? I don’t want to speak in front of people about anything.

3403. Where does peace begin? With yourself.

3404. Does Aamerica practice the ideals it preaches? Like any of us, we don’t always practice what we preach. We have our issues as a country for sure.

If yes when and where?

If not, why not?

3405. In conversations do you assume that you know what will be said? It doesn’t usually go how I think it might.

If yes, isn't this a form of closing yourself off to new ideas? Like it said, it doesn’t usually go how I think it will. I don’t like follow or a script or anything. Conversations veer off in all kinds of directions.

3406. In what ways are you closed minded? I think I’m generally pretty open minded about a lot of things.

3407. do you prefer beans or rice? Beans and Mexican rice are good.

3408. who's a better tv dad?--dr. huxtable (bill cosby) or danny tanner? Bill Cosby is disgusting.

3409. detroit or new york? New York.

3410. What's your favourite Star Wars movie? All of ‘em.

3411. What's your favourite Star Trek movie? I don’t like Star Trek.

3412. How about Batman? Batman v Superman and the Justice League movies.

Indiana Jones? I’ve never watched them.

Lord of the rings? I never could get into those.

harry potter? Prisoner of Azkaban.

star wars? You asked this already.

3413. If you could ask one question and one question only to the following people, what would that question be:

Saddam Hussain?

George W Bush?

John Lennon?

an alien?

God?

Someone you knew who has died?

Steven Speilberg?

JD Salinger?

3414. Have you seen AI (artificial intelligence)? No.

If yes, what were the beings at the end of the movie?

Do you see this as a possible future for humanity?

What'd you think in general?

3415. If a-l-k-a-s-e-l-t-z-e-r spells 'relief' how do you spell:

love? G-O-D.

happiness? D-O-G-S.

evil? S-A-T-A-N.

sexyness? A-L-E-X-A-N-D-E-R   S-K-A-R-S-G-A-R-D

yummy? C-O-F-F-E-E

3416. Have you ever been to a Braodway show? Yes.

What one? Phantom of the Opera.

3417. Nighttime shows or matines (sp?)? Whichever.

3418. How are your family get-togethers, loud and rambunctios or quiet and formal? Maybe a bit loud, but not too wild. We have a good time.

3419. Would you be able to survive shippwrecked alone on a desert island? No.

3420. Speaking of islands, does Gilligan EVER get off his? Does he? I don’t know how it ends.

3421. What movie has the BEST soundtrack? There’s a few.

3422. Do you ever go into chat rooms? No, not since like the early 2000s.

If yes, what ones? I went into kid and teen chats.

3423. Is english your first language? Yes.

If not...How you say hello in your language:

another word in your language + english translation:

boob in your language:

3424. Make up a religion (make it up): No.

what would it believe:

3425. Create your own country-

Name of country: Sleepyland.

Ethnic background: It would be a diverse country.

Language (make it up): Zees. lol you know, like Zzz.

Other details:

3426. How would you celebrate these holidays?

Dogs in Politics day: Promote adopt not shop and banning puppy mills.

Magic circles day: Be bald and free day: National mole day: Skin cancer awareness and encouraging people to check for any suspicious moles.

Syliva plath day: Read her poetry.

Increase your psychic powers day: I don’t believe in psychics.

Waiting for the barbarians day:

Air day:

3427. -Why do you think Steve got kicked off Blue's Clues: He didn’t get kicked off, he left because he had cancer.

3428. Hooked on heroin or hooked on phonics? Uh, phonics.

3429. -Have you ever taken an insanity quiz and said, "Hay, thats a good idea!" No.

3430. - Have you ever covered yourself in blood and layed down on the side of the road to make it look like you were in an accident? Um, no.

You don't know what you're missing. Wtf.

3431. Can you flare your nostrils? Sure.

3432. -do you want to swim in a vast lake of gatorade? or, any other beverage for that matter? No thanks.

3433. -have you ever sneezed at the same time everyday, consecutively, for over 3 months? No, omg. That would be awful.

3434. -how did the first person discover that pigs feet would be so good that we call them a delicacy? I don’t know.

3435. -why did the first person to ever eat pigs feet eat them? You’d have to go back in time and ask them.

3436. -do you like the idea of 'like father, like son'? Sure? Unless the father is horrible or something.

3437. Put the following musical acts in order from best to worst by numbering them..(1 for best, 2 for 2nd best, etc... 20 for worst).

Avril:

Ashanti:

Joan Jett:

David Bowie:

the Bee Gees:

The Doors:

Tool:

DMX:

Iggy Pop:

Creed:

Weezer:

Ministry:

Thursday:

Kittie:

Adam Ant:

Rancid:

the Clash:

Led Zeppelin:

Moby:

Tom Waites:

3438. Would you rather be an evil dictator or a sitcom family member? What in the world kind of comparison is this? I would be a sitcom family member.

3439. What is the wave of the future? What.

3440. What's your favorite old movie (before 1990)? Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

3441. When someone tells you that their signifigant other lives REally Far Away..do you ever suspect that they are single and making someone up? Lol not usually, but it would depend on the person.

3442. Alaska or Hawaaii? Oooh. I’d love to visit both.

3443. Why did Kentucky Fried Chicken change their name to KFC? Convenience?

3444. What is there no place to hide from? Your mind.

3445. Which makes you happier, giving presents or getting them? I love giving presents.

3446. What can you never have just one of? Cup of coffee.

3447. What comes to mind when you think of Hulk Hogan? Wrestling.

3448. What would you be the patron saint of? I’m not a saint.

3449. Do you still look at the world with wonder like you did when you were a kid? No. Kids are so curious and easily excitable about everything. I admire that.

3450. For 5 seconds clear your mind. Good. Now write the first thing that you can think of!: Sleep. ha.

3451. When was the last time you ate too much? I don’t know. I used to be such a foodie, but over these past 3 years my issue has become not eating enough.

3452. Describe the sexiest person you can imagine: Alexander Skarsgard. Google him.

3453. What have you seen that's...bizzare? I’ve said that about things, but I can’t think of an example right now.

3454. Are there any stores or brands or products that yoou boycott? Yeah.

3455. Do you want things to REALLY get out of control? No thank you.

3456. Are you too tense? I am.

3457. Where would you be without love and bubblegum? Uhh.

3458. Why aren't comic books popular anymore? For some people it is.

3459. Think of one friend (who?): My dog.

When is the last time you saw each other? Like 30 minutes ago.

Do they smoke? No.

Do they believe in God? Dogs don’t have that kind of awareness.

When you first saw this friend what was your impression? Omg she was so small and cute, but she was really shy and nervous poor thing. When we asked the worker at the shelter if we could pet her, she like slowly crawled out. She wouldn’t stand up and at first we thought she couldn’t. Even for treats she’d just stretch her body to reach them, but wouldn’t get up. You’d never know that now because she’s very goofy, hyper, and playful and goes wild for treats. She takes her Princess name very seriously, too. She can be so demanding when she wants to go on a walk or wants a treat.

Their age? 2.

The top five things you think they think about? Treats. Toys. Playing. Sleep. The boy dogs next door. ha.

3460. Do you say what you mean? I tend to hold back a lot.

Do you mean what you say? Not always. I downplay things a lot, too.

3461. Could you eat meat if you had to hunt it yourself? Eeeek I really don’t think I could. Unless perhaps I was in a situation where I had to and survival instincts kicked in.

3462. Order from greatest to least importance: spirituality, creativity, intellect, great body, open-mindedness, magicalness, great dancer, interesting dresser, wit and cleverness, niceness, stability

3463. Complete the sentence.

When a problem comes along You must: Whip it.

3464. Pick the two most important attributes for food-- fast, cheap, tastey, healthy Tasty and healthy. Though let’s be real for me it’s fast and tasty.

3465. What do you think is the best metaphor for romantic relationships? (e.g. a car wreck, a cruise): I don’t know.

3466. Kittens or no kittens, that is the question. They are quite adorable.

3467. Is gaining 15 lbs in a night possible? That would be very concerning and should definitely be checked out.

3468. Do you get emotional watching movies? Rarely. And if I do, I’ll feel sad and maybe tear up a bit, but I’m not a crier during movies. That’s very rare.

3469. What amkes you feel nostalgic? A lot of things.

3470. Do you feel like you've been misplaced? No.

3471. Have you ever fought someone, just for fun? No. I don’t fight people at all. That’s concerning if you go around fighting people because you find it fun.

3472. What gives you an adrenaline rush? I haven’t felt that in a long time.

3473. What would you do if you loved someone more than anything else, and you could never have them? I know how it feels to be in love with someone who doesn’t feel the same and, well, it sucks to say the least.

3474. Rank these events in order of best/most exciting to boring:

drinking and dancing to your favorite music at a club:

taking a walk in the woods and a bath in a stream:

having great sex:

winning the lottery (one mil):

getting followed home by a stray animal:

meeting someone interesting to talk to:

seeing your favorite band in concert:

seeeing aa broadway show:

halloween:

3475. Can you keep a secret? Yes.

3476. Where is the tenderness? I don’t know, but I like that song.

3477. What's one song you REALLY like from the:

30's?

40's?

50's?

60's?

70's?

80's?

90's?

00's?

3478. Would you rather have a video phone, an electric scooter, or a digital camera? Well, all cell phones now take videos and pictures so I could say video phone and it would cover the digital camera, too.

3479. If a ban on all violent video games was put into effect, would you be outraged by this decision? No.

3480. In your opinion, is violence in society inescapable? Yes.

Why or why not?

3481. Have you ever mimicked a violent “action” from a video game you’ve played towards another person, whether it was to harm or just for play? Nah.

3482. Do you believe the violent content in video games influences aggressive and/or violent behavior in younger children? It can for some people.

3483. What makes life a bitter sweet symphony? “It’s a bittersweet symphony, this life.”

3484. Name four things that aare AWESOME:

3485. What's the most creative/funny answer you can come up with for this question: What are you doing? I got nothin’. I’m literally just doing this and snacking on cheesy tots from Burger King.

3486. Can you imagine this world going on without you? It would get along just fine.

3487. Are you the only person who really exists? No...

3488. Is everyone else a figment of your imagination? No.

3489. Or are YOU a figment of my imagination? Blah.

3490. Can you prove you exist? Hi, here I am.

How?

3491. What do you HAve to get off your chest? Nothing.

3492. If you cheated on someone would you confess to them? I believe I would.

3493. Is it true that at least 5 people in this world love you so much they would die for you? Maybe 3.

Who? My mom, dad, and my younger brother.

3494. Are you in therapy? No, but I definitely should be.

3495. Do you go shopping on black friday? Online.

3496. What is the bane of your existance? fjlksfkdsfls

3497. Better movie: Weird Science or Caddy Shack? Neither one interests me.

3498. Who's the big winner?

3499. What are the 3 funniest:

music videos?

Movies?

songs?

3500. Guess what? Chicken butt.

[snkpolls]

SnK Chapter 122 Poll Results

The chapter 122 poll closed with 1,472 responses. Thank you to everyone who participated!

RATE THE CHAPTER 1,428 Responses

This is one for the record books. Chapter 122 is officially the highest rated chapter since we started the poll. A whopping 85.2% of respondents gave it the top rating. The previous record holder was chapter 101 (79.8%) which featured the long awaited return of the Survey Corps.

5 out of 5 for the pig who seeks freedom! Fight For Freedom! Revolt! Revolt! Revolt!

Each chapter is becoming my favorite every time and this one isn't different. It's a fantastic read.

In a single chapter Founder Ymir became one of my top five characters in this series point blank.

I thought nothing could top chapter 100. 122 is the best one of the entire story. 

A turning point. Very well executed. Congrats, Isayama, can't wait to see what you still have on store!

Yet another mind-blowing chapter, honestly one of my favorites in the series! Honestly, this was a chapter I have been awaiting since I started getting into SnK, and those feelings increased following the basement reveal chapters where we are left to wonder which parts of Ymir's story are true and which are false.

One of the best chapters of the series! Definitely gave me a new appreciation for Attack on Titan from a story telling standpoint.

I love how many questions this answers and also creates; I’m happy that there are still many things left a mystery!

Aamazing chapter, I fucking cried. Now give me Historia, Isayama. I need her.

I'm just so happy to see it finally coming together and not be let-down

If Floch doesn't die in the Rumbling I want a refund

Worldwide genocide, taking care of kids, get you a man who can do both

LEEEEET'S GET READY TO RUUUUUUUUUUUMBLE!!!

Damn, Isayama.

WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING WAS YOUR FAVORITE MOMENT? 1,439 Responses

You guys are almost as split on this question as Ymir’s Titan Powers are. Speaking of, she also happens to directly occupy the two most common answers, with 48.7% rating their favorite moment as either her backstory, or her conversation with Eren.The fall of the walls takes third place, followed by Eren’s revival and the cliffhanger at the end of the chapter.

WHO IS MOST RESPONSIBLE FOR 'STARTING THIS STORY?' 1,419 Responses

You started this story, didn’t you: pig who got freed?  45.1% feel that the earliest in story event makes for a good starting point.  Just over ¼ of respondents felt the Founder Ymir Fritz is most responsible.  8.4% feel it’s Eren, and only 3.4% chose Grisha for whom the quote originally signified.  The most popular write-in answer, King Fritz, overtook poor Grisha at 4.2%.  Variations on King Fritz in the write-ins numbered almost 200.

People's greed. It started with the first King Fritz and it continued with the next generations

The Eldians (First Fritz)

Isayama. He started the whole story! If that wasn't him, the pigs would not run away.

Everybody has played their own part, it is not simply a matter of what single person is the most responsible.

The Attack titan

The Marleyean military higher ups that ordered Bertolt, Reiner, Annie and Marcel to breach the walls of Paradis Island

Those that blamed Ymir

The spinal fluid that was inside the three because if that wasn't there, titans would have never existed in the first place.

The cycle of violence/hatred/slavery. The King Fritz probably wasn't the first to be this way. The story has no true beginning because it's a cycle, but Eren will be the end.

King Dickz

The first King. Why isn't it an option?

WHO DO YOU THINK IS THE MOST CONNECTED TO/PARALLELS YMIR THE MOST? 1,422 Responses

Our current queen seems to resemble the first queen quite a bit, with almost half of respondents, at 46.8% saying Historia parallels original Ymir the most.  35% feel Ymir is most connected to, well, Ymir.  14.3% chose Eren, and a sliver of votes went to Zeke at 1.6%.

Though there are more parallels to  Freckled Ymir, the pregnancy of Ymir Fritz can be a connection-foreshadowment of Historia's pregnancy plan. So I'll say that there are parallels to both Freckled ymir and Historia.

Mikasa is a lot like pre freedom ymir

Anyone who has been trapped in life

Connected to: Eren. Parallels: Freckled Ymir.

both Historia and freckled Ymir, obvs. And Mikasa, to a lesser extent

A lot of the cast parallel OG Ymir

Grisha

Definitely Freckled Ymir. She took the blame of all those people in the hopes of being useful or wanted through her sacrifice and then got the power of the titans. 

Ymir has parallels to Historia, freckled Ymir and Zeke

Time will show.

I'd say both Historia and Ymir: the cult picked up Ymir, who was a homeless child, similar to how Founder Ymir was a slave without name or status; the two of them stood for their people even after they've been denounced out of cowardice and fought for someone else until their very end, out of pure selflessness. Historia parallels Founder Ymir by how she became a slave of her blood, and a tool to be used.

I was gonna say Oluo, but he never actually lost his tongue.

HAVE YOUR OPINIONS SHIFTED NEGATIVELY ON ELDIA? 1,421 Responses

In a conflict with no clear start, we get to see further back into the past!  But did the revelations change your mind?  The vast majority at 66.3% don’t give a flying fritz about who started it, they just want to see the bloodshed end.  12.7% say their outlook has changed but Marley is more in the wrong still; and only 5.3% had this chapter change their mind to the Eldians being most at fault.

All the men in power are as bad as each other

Both nations committed atrocities

Both sides are slaves to history, Eldia today is not responsible for the actions 2000 years ago. 

Eldia in the past I always figured were some tyrannical force, I mean what else would happen with an ancient civilisation discovering the Power of the Titans. But Marley's propaganda having some truth to it doesn't mean they're justified in their treatment of Eldians in the modern day who had nothing to do with the original Eldia. 

How could we know? What was the relationship between eldia and Marley before Ymir turned into a titan? Was Marley in the wrong before they were overtaken by eldia/even before king fritz took Marley people prisoner?

King Fritz is the one to blame. Not all of Eldia and ESPECIALLY not the Survey Corps.

Marley is more in wrong because they are continuing to perpetuate the conflict in the present.

The current characters we love and want to end up happy have nothing to do with the past, they just want to be free.

EVERYONE IS IN THE WRONG BUT THAT'S HOW THE WORLD WORKS

There's neither bad or right in this story "Everyone can become a god or a devil, all it takes is for someone to claim that to be the truth" 

WHO IS THE BIGGEST ASSHOLE IN THE MANGA THUS FAR? 1,433 Responses

In a story filled with lovable characters, there’s also tons of douchenozzles.  67.7% believe the original King Fritz is the worst of them all. 17.2% took the intellectual route and responded with “Yes”.

All of them are rotten, selfish and full of hatred people who only think about themselves and are ready to manipulate own children (or other people) for own benefits.

first king Fritz of Eldia and Eren 

Gabi a.k.a. Garbage

I believe king fritz and gross deserve eatch other, they are the assholes of their times

I'm surprised Zeke finally got a rival in being the worst human ever in person of King Fritz.  

No recognition for our very own Darius 'poo-chair' Zackly? 

Most have a at least some humanizing (if not redeeming) qualities, but both King Fritz and Gross are evil to the core

King Fritz, but Flock is also an big asshole (it's never a bad time to point that)

Where's Zeke? To be honest I can't decide between Fritz, Floch, and Zeke.

Who the fuck put floch here, come here and fight 

Why on earth are Karina and Alma here? They were horrid mothers to their kids; the others are guilty of murder, torture and genocide.  

Ymir Fritz because she received godlike powers and decided to stay with a power hungry king; she was free and could have done anything but because of her slave mentality she decided to stay with him for 13 years! as uncle Ben said "With great power comes great responsibility"

The 145th king is the only one who did unreasonable bad things to his people, he literally allowed his people to be enslaved all over the world and he allowed the future genocide of his people. The worst thing is this doesn't do anything. It doesn't save the world from anything. Even the paradise he created was all for himself because he couldn't deal with reality. His logic is faulty, but even so he couldn't even do the job himself. The only one that can be worst than him is Zeke who's another evil man who wants to exterminate his own people. But, unlike Karl, Zeke is willing to do the job himself.

That goddamn pig

WHAT IS THE TREE YMIR FOUND? 1,424 Responses

In a chapter with so many answers, we still have vague origins!  Starting from the start, what in the world is that tree?  Over half of you, at 55.5%, think it’s Attack on Titan’s version of the Yggdrasil tree from Norse mythology.  24.2% say it’s the source of all organic matter we’ve heard discussed.  11.3% say it just grew out of what it’s housing, and 5.9% think it’s similar to the forest of giant trees.

A connection between a human and the Earth, hence the Devil of All Earth

A wellspring or hidden primordial lake

Yggdrasil but is the source of all organic matter somehow, and I think it's somehow related to the trees on Paradis being so big.

A hideout for that Hallucigenia thing left by the devil

It appears almost as a man and women embracing. Adam and Eve??

It doesn't matter. It was never about the origin of the titans, it was about the power of the titans and the moral implications of it. How the titans came to be is irrelevant.

The Great Deku Tree dungeon

Titan tree. It is probably the same species as the trees surrounding it, but has grown unnaturally large due to the parasite in it's water source.

Tree

WHAT IS THE THING IN THE TREE YMIR FOUND? 1,421 Responses

Another layer of mystery within the mystery tree!  Two main thoughts emerged and are almost even in popularity.  46.9% believe it is the source of all organic matter; wheread 44.3% say it’s a parasite of unknown origin.  3.2% say it’s in fact the devil itself.

A connection to the earth, making her the Devil

A *Symbiote* of unknown origin

A root of the tree that connects whoever it touches with the paths realm

A root of the tree that's been soaked and absorbing the water; the water is the real source.

I've seen enough hentai to know that is an alien

It could be the very first living being on this planet, a sort of progenitor from which all genes and all variations of biodiversity came to be.

Just a spine in the water turning little girl to big girl. What's supposed to be special about that?

This world's version of Níðhöggr, the many legged dragon that eats at the roots of the Tree of Life.

The spine of the previous founder

The Great Deku Tree dungeon boss. Ymir lost.

A poorly designed shit-machine that can't get the job done

A L I E N S

DID YMIR TEMPORARILY DIE WHEN SHE FELL IN THE TREE? 1,425 Responses

When Ymir fell into the tree, did she drown?  The majority of the fanbase doesn’t feel anything like that happened, whereas over a ¼ at 26.6% feel she died and was revived.  5% believe she died, and was thereafter controlled by the parasite type thing.

Dying and being brought back to life is meant to be Zeke's thing!!

I think she was almost dying but the parasite healed her.

It revived her and created a clone within the paths dimension.

I think Ymir's body as a child is still in that tree to this day, with the parasite still attached to her. It was deep underground, thus affecting the ground shared by its roots (assuming this is Paradis), and being the reason for all the giant trees. It also explains a little Titans being creatures of the Earth, and Ymir forming them with sand.

She became a Titan seconds before dying

She probably passed out for a few seconds after she drowned, and it was during that brief state of unconsciousness that parasite attached to her.

Ymir the human died, and Ymir the Titan was born. That's why Ymir the human is in the Paths and not Ymir the Titan. Ymir the Human sculpts the titan body for her Titan self, because time is infinite and strange in Paths.

A mix of both Yes answers - it revived her but also controlled her body so that she could only watch on as an observer. It makes her more of a slave without a free will as something else is literally controlling her body from within her and she can’t do anything about it

P A T H S

WHAT IS THE BIGGEST STANDOUT TO YOU ABOUT YMIR'S TITAN DESIGN? 1,429 Responses

We finally got to see the original founding titan in the flesh!  The ribs sticking out stuck out to 39.7% the most.  29.5% of you found it interesting that the overall design was uglier than the goddess like depictions we’ve seen.  17.6% went for the skull face she has, and 11.8% simply went for the HUGE size.

All of above, just look at that atrocity

Her missing eyes

Everything, the ribs were the first thing I noticed with the face being next. It took me a 2nd read through the chapter to realize that she is bigger than the Colossal titan. Definitely one of the best titan designs from Isayama

How malnourished it looks

It's terrifying and it's the fusion of the 9 titans

The fact that it looks nothing like I expected or imagined 

Everything about it - One can see exactly why the truth about her was easily manipulated.

ON A SCALE OF 1 TO 5, HOW OFFENSIVE TO YOU IS THE FACT THAT THE ORIGINAL WARHAMMER TITAN HAD HAIR? 1,418 Responses

This question was for that one guy who absolutely could not deal with the original WHT’s hair. You’re in good company, but the results are about as polarized as global politics. 35% want Emma back immediately, 16.4% don’t really care about this egregious crime, and 32.4% are totally indifferent. Only 16% had slight feelings in either direction. The poll lawyers are telling me that I have to clarify that Emma is still only a fandom name for the previous Warhammer. Get on it Isayama.

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE DESIGNS WE SAW FOR THE ORIGINAL TITANS?

You guys liked Ymir’s Founding Titan so much that it’s literally off the charts. The original Attack Titan got some pretty mixed reviews, but the general consensus is that you guys prefer an Eren and/or a Jaeger to be driving that thing. The scourge of the hair comes back to beat down the original Warhammer’s ratings as well, but the majority remain indifferent. Speaking of indifference, more of you were indifferent about the OG Colossal Titan than had strong feelings one way or another combined. We’ll see how that result changes when it ends up CGI in Season 4. The general consensus on the original Armored Titan is, “It’s alright, I guess.” The Female Titan was the second on the list to have a majority “Love” rating, though whether this is due to the design or severe Annie Deprivation Syndrome remains to be seen.

DID YMIR MANAGE TO GRAB THE 'MOST TRAGIC BACKSTORY' AWARD? 1,422 Responses

Another tear jerking childhood to add to the list, but does it top it?  The overwhelming majority at 83.5% feel that she did earn that award of tragedy.  6.3% believe the classic sufferboi Reiner still tops the charts.  3.4% went for Levi, 1.8% for the other Ymir, 0.7% for Zeke and 0.4% for Historia.

Everyone has suffered uniquely in this series, how can I choose ?

First, I'm offended Grisha wasn't included here. Second, everyone's suffered too much. So they all win.

Her backstory definitely is the darkest and saddest one. Reiner, Historia, Ymir and the rest had their moments of happiness. They were surrounded by loving people. Ymir was always all alone; born as a slave, had full of sadness life and after death she was creating titans for 2000 years. She just wanted to be free and wanted be loved, yet she had none of that. 

Homegirl is still living her 2000-year-long tragic backstory, she definitely wins

I don't think tragic backstories should be a competition

I think you forgot about Mr Yeager :) those guys are not even close to him

Is this Suffering Olympics or something?

Ymir and Mikasa the most sad tragic backstory

Ymir is always showed as a mindless slave, even at the start of her backstory, it is too hard to empathize with someone that never acted as a human being and lived her whole life without any emotion

Grisha easily has it for me. Ymir's circumstances were worse from birth, and Reiner's dissonance and misery is tragic, but Grisha's perceived misery throughout his cycles of perpetual tragedy shows that he easily suffered the most. 

Give them all a hug.

P I G

WAS THE MURDERER OF YMIR HELOS? 1,408 Responses

Is Helos historical or completely fabricated?  10.7% believe the Marleyan who killed Ymir is in fact Helos, and 66.9% believe the character is based on him.  22.4% don’t believe the idea of Helos and this man are related in any way.

The one showing rebellion in this chapter is the figure serving as a role model for Helos. Unlike Ymir, he was powerless and only had his spear, but he took enough courage to show resistance to Eldia's domination and toss his spear at the king. He paid it with his life, but he fatally wounded Ymir in return, showing even the goddess of titans could bleed. I'm confident the myth of Helos is going to be relevant in the future chapters.

YMIR didn't die with the spear-throw..I think her conscious form was stuck in the paths before her body revived. 

Helos? Really?? Helos???

WHICH OF THESE LIKELY TO BE CENSORED SCENES WAS THE MOST GRUESOME? 1,421 Responses

In a series filled with gore, this chapter was above average with violence.  Ymir’s young daughters cannibalizing their mother was the most gruesome according to almost all of you at 89.2%.  Second place is a bit behind at 3.5%, with centipede spine Eren.

All of the above

Everything but Centipede Eren

The guy getting his tongue cut out that was even censored for the manga.

We've seen lots of people being eaten so not that, and Erentipede is going to be stunning animated so not that. Maybe head on a pike. 

The tongue cut from the beginning really horrified me, it put the chapter in a great atmosphere from the start

No mention about that slave getting his tongue cut out by those ancient Eldian soldiers? That was pretty grizzle. That panel implies that all people enslaved by the Eldians lost their tongues upon getting captured, which meant that Ymir likely lost her tongue as well. That really explains how she had no spoken dialogue in the past, and while the tongue may have regenerated following her first Titan transformation, the length of time she couldn't speak and her status most likely prevented her from speaking.

No need to be censored

WHAT DOES EREN MEAN BY 'PUT AN END TO THIS WORLD'? 1,419 Responses

Eren’s finally stated what he plans to do; but what does it mean!?  45.9% believe the world he plans to destroy is the paths realm, eldning titans that way.  25.4% think he just meant dismantling the status quo of the world.  14.4% say he’s just going to rumble enemies of Eldia, whereas 10.6% say the whole earth.

All options seem plausible

Destroy the PATHS realm and rumble the enemies invading Eldia. 

He plans to rumble all life, destroy the paths realm, AND erase all the memories of the remaining Eldians on Paradis so they completely forget about the history of the titans, thus effectively making the past 2000 years seem like they never even happened. ANDHe plans to destroy the PATHS realm, putting an end to titans

He wants to destroy the world as it is now. He wants to create a world where none of the things that happened to Ymir can ever happen again.

I think he just needs a nap

I understand that fandom wants to see Eren as good guy who will not destroy the world, but I think that everything is simple - Eren is planning to use full rumbling; destroy the whole world, kill millions of innocent people, animals and plants. 

IT ALL COMES RUMBLING DOWN RUMBLING DOWN RUMBLING DOWN

4+5

HOW DOES THIS CHAPTER RELATE TO THE SCENE OF EREN CRYING IN CHAPTER 1? 1,399 Responses

2,000 years ago, 2,000 years from now.  The titles of this and chapter one parallel, but what else?  Over half of you, at 52.7% believe Eren was sent Ymir’s feelings when she had her emotional epiphany.  33.5% say Eren was sent memories of what’s about to happen, and 11.1% don’t think anything from this chapter related to Eren crying in chapter one specifically.

1st Chapter name suggest it does, but it just make no sense as Eren at that point didn't had attack titan power, so he could not receive others memories

Eren crying will be due to the consequences of this chapter

Eren learns of Ymir's backstory

I don't think Isayama meant for it to originally mean anything this far in the story, but I think there could be some Paths tomfoolery going on.

Eren saw the memories of his death and literally everything until that moment

Eren was sent a message like a cry for help maybe? Strong, intense feelings of sadness and despair... Because in this chapter Eren says she'd been waiting for someone for 2000 years, so I am guessing 2000 years ago she started sending a message.

ON A SCALE OF "EH" TO "I NEED TO HUG HER, HOW DID YOU FEEL SEEING LITTLE YMIR TEAR UP? 1,417 Responses

Sad Girl Hours have officially been endorsed by Hajime Isayama himself. 73.7% of you guys are in full support, and an additional 15.2% of your mice slipped when answering. 6.9% of you guys kinda just wanna see something else happen, and the first one of you on Reddit to say “Nice.” about that is getting sent to Paradis. Lastly, a grand total of 60 of you defy all explanation.

I want to hug Ymir so bad :( mute babby

WHY WAS EREN THE FIRST TO OPEN YMIR'S EYES? 1,415 Responses

It took 2,000 years for Ymir to open her eyes and her heart, what about Eren got her to that point?  29.9% think he was the only person to ever empathize with her at all, 8.4% think it was simply Eren’s chadness, while 8.3% think it’s only because the previous royals viewed her as a slave.  The majority at 41.1% feel it’s a mix of all available options.

Because he was born into this world

Because he is the protagonist

He embraced her and showed her compassion- something she never felt before

Defiance of old wills. He does, after all "just keep moving forward."

Eren didn't seek to use Ymir as a slave

Eren made her realize that she isn't a slave OR a god. She was enslaved and in later years worshipped, but just like Eren: from the moment she was born, she was free

He knew/experienced everything she went through.

He manipulated her to be able to use her powers

He was the first person to tell her she could make her own choices

He was the only one that put his ideals over his personal gain to the end. Ymir is a slave, therefor Eren frees her from her slavery. /The previous royals viewed her as a slave

TALK NO JUTSU 2 GOOD; Eren is good at manipulating kids when it suits his needs best + He was the only one to ever empathize with her

WHAT IS YOUR PRIMARY THOUGHT ON THE CENTIPEDE SPINE THAT SAVED EREN? 1,417 Responses

Eren’s alive!  But what is that… thing?  IT LOOKS AWESOME!  32.9% had that as their first response.  It was nearly a three way split though, and 30.6% first thought of how it must look for those for whom only a moment has passed since his head flew off.  30.2% quickly made the connection that it looks like the parasite thingy Ymir Fritz found.  Only 3.2% thought it looked stupid as hell.

CREEPY but COOL

DO NOT WANT

100/10, better than Kaneki

Ken is hiring a lawyer for copyrights lawsuits against Eren.

I am wondering, what if this is basically Ymir's renouncing of the power she had, finally freeing herself, and thus passing it on to Eren?

I thought that Eren was becoming Níðhöggr, the literal devil that causes Ragnarok (the apocalypse). He looks really cool and frightening at the same time, I love this young man!

It cant be stopped anymore and weird for whom only a second passed

It looks less like a centipede and more like roots to me.

My thought, "The hell is that?!"

Nothing personal Eren, but burn that thing immediately.

Oh thank goodness Eren didn't split into two.

pure "why is the boss music changing to MORE intense?", and that's great

HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT EREN SURVIVING THE BEHEADING? 1,410 Responses

44.3% of you are really enthusiastic about Eren surviving his beheading, despite proclaiming that you knew it’d happen anyway. It takes the noggin for a joggin’, but I’m not here to judge. 27.1% of you guys are relatively indifferent about it, and 21.1% of you didn’t think you’d like it, but ultimately bent the knee before Isayama’s storytelling abilities.

Am I surprised? No. Are you surprised? No

Disappointed but not surprised...

Excited, but wondering how he is actually going to die.

GABI GANG BTFO

It was predictable but the revival still felt epic

It was predictable since he's the main character, c'mon anyone else would die like Porco did.

oshiete oshiete

THE WALLS HAVE FINALLY FALLEN! WHAT DID YOU THINK OF THIS MOMENT? 1,410 Responses

A moment that’s been built up so long, what feeling took over when it finally happened?  Most of the fanbase, at 68.3%, were just in awe at how well Isayama pulled it off.  14.2% were filled with hope that Eren actually made it happen.  On the opposite end of the spectrum 13.5% were filled with dread.

All of the above. This story is a rollercoaster.

Dread as the wall titans are facing into Paradis so Eren's plan may backfire! 

Everything in the manga has led to this moment

I kind of thought/hoped the rumbling would be a red herring, but oh well. it'll still be cool

I want them do the colossal dance

I was hoping this chapter won't end with cliffhanger

IT ALL COMES RUMBLING DOWN RUMBLING DOWN RUMBLING DOWN

Looks very dramatic, will be momentous animated, still not surprising since I think a lot of us knew it was gonna happen eventually

meh, I want the story to advance, but the rumbling never grabbed me as an event I was waiting for

LETS GET READY TO RUMBLE!!!!!

I peed

IN SUCH A BEAUTIFULLY DRAWN CHAPTER, WHICH WAS YOUR FAVORITE DOUBLE SPREAD? 1,412 Responses

Isayama’s art truly has improved over the years and this chapter showcased that.  The final panel left the biggest impression on 33.7% of you.  25.1% felt a deep impact from Ymir’s emotional closeup, and the walls cracking and crumbling rounds out the top 3 at 14.8%.

All of them

Original 9 titans.

the one where Ymir was building thousands of collosal titans

not so beautifully drawn but still nice

The pages with Ymir alone in the Paths realm while Fritz tells his daughters to continue the reign of Titans and Eldia 

Ymir’s children eating her

IN CHAPTER 86 GRISHA MANAGED TO QUOTE KING FRITZ WITHOUT BEING ABLE TO READ THE "HISTORICAL" DOCUMENTS. HOW WAS THIS POSSIBLE? 1,406 Responses

In this chapter King Fritz used the same line Grisha did when learning about Ymir much further down the line.  Half of the fanbase at 50.6% don’t feel that anything’s at play and it was just Grisha making assumptions based on what information he had.  Just about ¼ at 25.7% feel paths are involved but they don’t have to explain anything after that.  14.2% feel there was a chain of memory sending that led to the result we got.

Actually Grisha never deciphered the documentation. I thought it was obvious he was being portrayed as extremist at the point to show the other side of the coin. Both sides just make up facts as they want.

I suppose it being the exact wording as what the King said made people think there was memories shenanigans but Isayama does these kind of parallels all the time, with characters saying something word for word that they don’t have knowledge of.

"Grisha how did you understand this?"  "Pretty pictures."

WILL THERE BE A RUMBLING? 1,413 Responses

The walls have fallen.  What will happen next?  In a near even split, 48.1% win out saying there will be a small scale rumbling, whereas 45% say it will be worldwide.  Only 6.9% feel there won’t be any form of rumbling at all.

I WAS WAITING FOR YEARS FOR THE RUMBLING!!!!!!

AWESOME! But i really don't want a full scale rumbling

Eren is becoming more and more the last antagonist of this story and it's just scary how some people in the fandom understand and support Eren's plan. Hopefully Marley, Zeke and the SC will working together to stop the rumbling and Eren. 

i really dont think eren is gonna go full rumbling or even in a small scale, hes gonna end the word dominated by titans by taking away the titan power from eldians

The rumbling isn't a metaphor people. Eren is planning to kill billions of innocents. Can't wait for the warriors and 104th to team up and put down that mad dog.

Zeke said it himself a few chapters back: Eldia would have no chance of fighting the entire World Army; the Rumbling really seemed to be their only way out, and launching those Colossal Titans now as a pre-emptive strike would be the best way to suppress the Army before they can even attack.

I have a feeling that the rumbling will turn out to be anti- climatic. Lots of people seem to be pinning their hopes on the rumbling being the cure-all to Eldia's problems, but the world of attack on titan is not that kind.

WHAT/WHO IS THE TITAN FORMING AT THE END? 1,412 Responses

The chapter ended with a titan forming, but what will it end up being?  Barely over half, at 51.6% believe it to be Eren with a power up from Ymir Fritz.  20.5% think it’s Eren with Ymir attached in some way, and 14.1% think Eren has accessed a new form on his own.

Eren and Ymir combined, rather than attached. Could be a new Titan form, could be Attack Titan on Titan Steroids. Need to wait until 123 to maybe find out.

Eren in Warhammer, he is not in the nape

Centipide Titan that will die after getting out of energy

Eren with full power from the Founder, Attack and Warhammer

I'm thinking it's some sort of founder-unlocked version of Eren's titan. Maybe Ymir is giving him full control now.

Eren and Ymir fused. Ymen

It's Eren but I don't know how his titan will look like and I don't care about it, cause I'm more worried about Gabi. 

Eren's founding titan form. He had it all along, but he could never use it, until now.

The last two sound so lewd without context

DEATH FLAGS! WHO IN SHIGANSHINA IS GOING TO DIE AS A RESULT OF IMMINENT EVENTS? 1,340 Responses

I was gonna ask for Fs in the chat for whoever led in the results for this question, but then I saw it was Floch, so… Fs in the chat for Magath I guess, because a lot of you seem to think Hulk Hogan is going to suplex him (and Floch) through a table at Royal Rumble DCCCLIV. That’s fancy talk for “die.” Pieck and Zeke are pretty high on the list as well. There’s a lot of information here, so I won’t give you all the specifics in this written part—take a look! Armin has 92 votes, which lands him at 6.9% don’t say it Reddit, and Mikasa has 117 votes, with only 8.7% of you suspecting death in her immediate future. For a brick, she flies pretty good!

I hope no one, but I'm sure everyone

Everyone without plot armor, in other words no main or supporting characters.

I think the named characters are still safe. For Now. But soon, not so safe.

Less people than realistically possible

literally no one because Isayama is a hack

For some reason I feel like Yelena will die soon

Pieck, Niccolo, I don't want it to happen but I feel like Nikolo's gonna go down protecting the Braus family! :(

None of the above

HOW WAS YMIR STRANDED IN THE PATHS REALM AFTER DEATH, BUT NO OTHER ELDIANS SEEM TO BE? 727 Responses

Because she sort of... disassociated there

I think her younger self was "recorded" and so a version of ymir was there ever since she fell down the tree. The tree itself being the physical portal to it or sth like that. No one else fell down that hole...

in order to create the other 8 titans, she gave up her soul and became stranded there. 

Because she started it all, she's the only one who touched the whatever it was that gave the titan powers.

I think it's obvious, she was the original slave, the only one that King Fritz's evil targeted specifically. Damning her to an eternity in the hellish isolation only making titans to oppress mankind, because that was his goal.

After she came in contact with what I believe to be the silver branch from Celtic Mythology, her conscious was unknowingly split into two; one in the paths and the other in the physical word. Once Ymir finally died in the physical world, her conscious fuse with the paths conscious and became aware of it.

I think the paths realm takes place inside the mind or dimension of that worm/nidhogg/ancient god parasite and she was brought back to it after she allowed herself to die. The sand Ymir uses to build titans may be her tapping into the reservoir of liquid underneath that giant tree or something.

she's tied to it as a slave and never had the strength on her own to break free

SHE created the PATHS dimension. She is the first titan and has almost unlimited power

A combination of being the bearer of the Centispine and the long years of abuse she went through making her unable to disobey yet another order. Hers is pretty much the most heartbreaking case of learned helplessness. What keeps her obeying the commands of the royals is the fact that she doesn't even realise there is another possibility. Because nobody ever cared enough about her to show her there is one. 

Another version of herself was created, when she came in contact with the thing, so that she could create her titan etc..

As the very first Titan, she is the conduit through which PATHS flows. The parasite had now host in the beginning so PATHS couldn't be conveyed until Ymir showed up.

Because with her started everything, i believe her “burden” was to be attached forever

Maybe it's because she's the only one that's physically attached to that weird, interdimensional organism. Maybe it's because her body was dismembered and consumed by 3 different people. Other titan shifters don't get stranded there because their spirits can in some way inhabit the one person who inherits their power. Maybe there is significance to Eren having gotten 3 titans, perhaps one from each lineage: Maria, Rose, and Sina, which now somehow allows Ymir's spirit to leave Paths. He certainly did work hard to get the War Hammer, specifically.

i think paths always existed and have always been there, but there wasnt someone to be in there, because no one discovered that spine under the giant tree. so, i think that ymir's soul somehow connected with the paths at the moment she gained the titan power, and when she died, her soul converted into the "ruler" of the paths

It was always her, she's the special one. There is nothing special about eldians, other than them being biologically related to Ymir. Ymir was always the one with the power, the only one. She was only limited by her slave mentality, if she wanted to, she could've ruled the world forever and she would've been the only one with titan powers. It seems she has given her powers and special function to Eren. That means that Eren alone will be the special one and he will rule the world forever with only him having titan powers. 

She held all 9 titan powers, and as the only person in history to do so, she has the ability to view all of the other branches on the tree. Similar to how a shifter might be able to view the memories of a past shifter.... Ymir can view ALL of them, for all time. 

The devil needed a host for his dimension

That's her curse. Possibly bound by her loyalty to the King Fuck-Face-Fritz

you know PATHS, i ain't gonna explain that

THERE ARE MANY THEORIES ABOUT THE CENTISPINE'S QUALITIES—WHAT ARE YOURS? 579 Responses

A number of responses here ranging from the hilarious to the creepy; The centispine. A great many of you (We can’t tell if you’re serious or not…) are talking about Aliens, whilst others postulate that the thing results in parasitic possession, ALA Sekiro. 

A parasite thingy? Source of organic matter?

A power-bestowing parasite, hence why it needs to be eaten

Alien would be the easiest. But maybe the tree is actually Yggdrasil and its roots pass through other worlds. And the parasite is from another world.

alien/prehistoric being capable of phasing matter through dimensions

Aliens

ALIENS

Bruh its an organic life form/parasite, when bonded to a host ot provides them the titan ability

Don't think it's a biological, probably a mythical being inspired by Norse mythology

Eren will become the human centispine

For me  the most plausible is the fact that it resembles a living creature from our world who is supposed to create the whole world 300 millions ago or so

I believe its power weakens the more it divides. The power of each of the 9 current titans is nowhere near that of how powerful Ymir was after she first got the power.

I don't think we'll get any concrete explanation, but it's some creature with fifth-dimensional qualities that unwillingly merged with Ymir. I think the 9 main spines on the bottom on each side doesn't necessarily represent the amount of Titans but how divisible Ymir's power is before it becomes warped (mindless Titans). I also think of some level the idea of the parasite being connected to the Titan power is an inherent correlation that only exists because of Ymir. The idea of power = giant big monster seems like a very childlike concoction, and an antiquated one too. Since we know willpower and manifesting a goal in mind are part of the Power of the Titans I don't think it's too far-fetched that those specific powers came from Ymir herself, and the parasite merely made them possible on her physical plane of existence. This would seem to be at odds with its connection to being giant existing before Ymir made contact with it, due to the giant tree and my inferred connection with it and the giant trees on Paradis, but remember this thing exists outside time itself, it's a frankly unperceivable organism.

I don’t fucking know 

WHAT ARE YOU MOST HOPING TO SEE NEXT CHAPTER? 1,383 Responses

Next chapter starts off the the new volume, but what do you want to see in it?  28.1% want to see the full rumbling begin, 23.4% want to see how Eren’s titan transformation turns out, and 15.4% just want to see some action in Shiganshina.  For those who want the scene to change, 11.9% want to catch up with Levi and Hange, 8.2% want Annie, 4.4% want Historia, and 4.3% want even more historical info dumps.

ALL OF IT BRING IT ON ISAYAMA

Armin transforming into the colossal titan 

Death and suffering

Eren's master plan and more history hopefully

Full rumbling AND Levi and Hange.

i really look forward to see annie but what i really want to see is what is going to happen to the others (pieck, gabi, falco, reiner, etc etc)

Levi/Hange AND Annie. I feel like if Annie is going to ever return to the story, it'll be at a climax of some sort.

The hizuru lady piloting the boat-plane over Shiganshina

Lore, HISTORIA PLEASE I LOVE HER AND WANT TO SEE HER, Levi/Hange, Eren, and the immediate consequences of the Walls crashing down.

What the heck the plan actually is. For all we know, they could be uncovering the wall titans just to send the material that makes up their bodies back to Paths land. An Ymir/Eren hybrid titan could just have them hold still and spend the next years devouring them. We literally know nothing.

Somebody stopping Eren and bringing a sense of honor and morality(preferably Reiner, Armin or Gabi)

The ending Audio might be next chapter

WHERE DO YOU PRIMARILY DISCUSS THE SERIES? 1,309 Responses

Reddit continues to dominate the discussion field, comprising 52.4% of this vote alone. Tumblr, Facebook, and Youtube follow far behind, and 4 of you said Snapchat. That’s 0.3% of respondents, which is technically a low enough percentage to make sense, so maybe I should believe you guys, but I don’t.

ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS ON THE CHAPTER?

My thoughts on Eldia after reading this chapter: "Oh, so Marley really wasn't fabricating history with how ancient barbaric ancient Eldia was, especially with how ancient Eldia treated them. Can't blame Marley for putting that on the history books and using that as part of their propaganda. Considering that and what Marley is doing right now, it just adds to the moral grayness of the story.

Eyes have always told a story in SNK, whether it was the intention of a character (Zeke, Grisha, etc) or their true feelings (Levi). Eyes, and the lack thereof, in Ymir's backstory, told us that THAT was finally the real history. Until now we've always had someone else's warped perspective of history, but now we know how it actually was.

 Eren's not JUST a murderer and teenage terrorist, look, he also hugs kids! 

Ymir's backstory was a bit disappointing, I expected it to be more grey; Ymir is basically a poor girl who never did anything wrong and King Fritz is the big bad who seems to be the greatest jerk of the story; I don't think this fits with the ""the world is grey"" theme of the story at all, even Gross had at least something interesting to say

Amazing turn of events. Ymir deserves to be released from her enslavement. If the devil has to come out now that his plan is being foiled by Eren, I think Zeke can be a good host for him to incarnate as, justifying Levi killing Zeke as the final main villain of the story.

Definitely one of the best chapters of the overall series.

Annie...oh Annie... God knows how isayama is going to put her back into the plot now!

As much as I want to see Levi and Hange again, I really want to know more about Eren's plans. We still don't have a clear answer, but the part where Eren hugs Ymir makes this my favorite chapter.

Barely feels like the same series, but in a good way.

Brilliant payoff after having the action suddenly halted for multiple chapters. Shit  is finally going down. 

Eren and Ymir deserve to succeed and completely destroy the world. It’s already been corrupted too much for it to be fixed any other way at this point. This world was crafted by filthy, bloody hands and it’s about damn time for Eren & Ymir to break it down so it can be crafted by cleaner hands.

Eren and Ymir have done nothing wrong ever at all fite me

Eren best dad. I'd rumble a million worlds for him to hub me like that. Yelling right into my ear is just a bonus.

Possibly the greatest chapter. The last 3 chapters together could be the greatest side story in Attack on Titan. Isayama is just...I am at a loss for words. He's just the greatest. He just needs to finish the story on a high note and that's it. Even if he doesn't, this is one of the greatest manga and anime of all time.

People who have unquestioning trust in Eren aren't invited to my birthday party

Honestly, I loved it. It was so well executed and so goddamn interesting. I love how Isayama gives us *almost* all the information we need to piece the whole thing together and leaves just enough for us to have our own speculations. I just hope that they're all resolved at the end though considering there's probably only 4 chapters left at least. 

I cannot wait to see the last 5 pages of this chapter animated, easily one of my favorite set of pages from the whole series

I couldn’t have ever thought this was going to be the content of this chapter but I’m so glad it came out the way it did

I cried so much, I love the story

I honestly didn't care much for Ymir's backstory. But hopefully the Rumbling will make things more interesting

I think this chapter might have benefited from being two chapters.  There was so much information to absorb in a very short amount of time, I feel like a lot of questions weren't answered that probably never will be now like- why are there 9 human controlled titans?  How did the mindless titans factor in?  Why did Ymir die from the spear when Eren can have his head shot off?  Why did the other slaves turn on Ymir in the first place?  Where did she come from originally?  Was she captured? Born a slave?  There was I think a missed opportunity to develop her character a little more.  I get the idea of even the narrator not really caring about what she's experiencing but getting a little more insight into her perspective would have been really interesting.  

I read earlier that the closest creature of the devil are human beings .. but humans are more evil .. King Fritz represents the devil .. Thank you Isayama .. In our reality many demons already exist and I have one in my house .. In the corridor

I see a lot of people shitting on Zeke (even comparing him to that asshole king) for ordering Ymir around, but like.... he just heard Eren saying he will end the world (plus remember what Grisha said about Eren memories/intentions), he must be really panicking, so of course he would  desperatly shout orders to Ymir and insisting he's of royal blood, that's basically at the moment the only way he could try to stop Eren. And yes, that's not nice to Ymir, but still that doesn't put him on the same level as King Fritz at all.

I thought Gross was the epitome of evil. Then came Fritz. HOLY. FUCKING. SHIT. Don't tell me Ymir doesn't deserve a little payback after 2000 years as a slave.

So Zeke endorses genocide, but not Total World Destruction? Whatevs, man.

Sucks to be Gabi after killing Eren only for this to happen a second later.

I was kinda shocked when Eren, given the shitty way he treated Mikasa in ch 112, started comforting Ymir and telling her she's not a slave. I never realized Mikasa meant that little to him. What a fucking asshole.

I'm glad the question "is Eren going to activate the rumbling as a part of his plan?" was finally answered. I also finally made up my mind about Zeke and I now know I don't like him due to how he acted towards Ymir. I love that we finally learned about Ymir, and that both Marley's and Eldian Restorationists' versions of history were partially correct. I love that the devil was actually King Shitz and Ymir wasn't a goddess but a slave to the devil, but she still helped the Eldians develop and thrive. Also, I love how most of my theories were proven to be true this chapter. Overall I really liked it.

IT CanNoT bE sTopPeD aNymOre

What is interesting to me is that Ymir's legend seems to be the opposite of what women in history usually get: Often great women are forgotten or their agency is reduced only to that of a mother, lover, wife or daughter of some man. Whereas Ymir is remembered even after 2000 years as the Founder and forebear of Eldia, but in reality she didn't do any of those things on her free will. She was just one of the many who were enslaved and used by Eldia, yet she is celebrated by Eldian rebels as a symbol of its former greatness. Heck, even her last name, Fritz, isn't her own, but her abuser's. Chilling and fascinating.

it was fucking amazing. holy hell, i’m in TEARS after reading this latest chapter. it was so beautifully executed and drawn, and the walls crumbling deadass made me cRY OKAY-

It was incredibly tragic but the final portion somehow combined sweetness and epicness 

It's been over a week and I'm still reeling. This series gets better every month and I really don't want it to end

Ymir Fritz being presented as she is defied a couple of perceptions we've got from her: the books either implied she made a deal with the devil, or she was a benevolent goddess, when she was neither. Born as a girl from a ravaged tribe, she didn't have any voice, or agency, yet deep down she believed showing kindness was her way to make people happier after the damages of war. She accepted being fingerpointed if the other slaves could keep their eyes, she served the Eldian tribe with her newfound power, fought their wars, bore the king's children and took the final hit for him. Her spirit is then condamned to serve her line for eternity. Truly the most pitiable character of SnK so far.

 I found Ymir's story too strange to be attached to her and I was a little disappointed to see that there was basically nothing that had come from her own will. It would have been more interesting in terms of conflict to see if there had been reasons why she had done this, if there was something that prevented her from acting against the Eldians for any reason. But in fact she just let herself be guided by the flow again and again, and I do not feel it's a valid reason to let herself go for more than two thousand years.

Never thought I'd hate a character more than Floch and Sergeant Major Gross, but here we are…

The whole Ymir's backstory moved me a lot because I didn't expect it to be so sad and full of despair. Ymir is definitely the most tragic character in the whole story and one of the most tragic characters in the world of manga/anime. I hope she will finally get some love and will be surrounded by honest and loyal friends. Every tragic character in SnK deserves a hug but I think that she needs it the most. 

 this chapter's artwork really stood out to me. The way literally no eyes were present in the flashback, even the king's, and the expression of fury and agony on OG Ymir's face when Eren tells her she has a choice. Isayama just keeps getting better and better with his art, and some of his style choices really made me see the individual panels differently.

Predictable and necessary. About this poll and the fandom in general: is amazing how the mayority (or the loudest part) of this sub tends to take things in the most literal way possible while praising Isayama as a genius or something like that, or labeling as "subtle" things that scream "HELLO I'M HERE MY NAME IS BRIAN" at your face, or misread characters in the most extreme way

Ragnarok has started and I don't know if I should be excited or afraid

Read this together with Ch.121. Eren is such a well-developed complex character. You may not like him, but credit must be given to his amazing character building trip. GJ Isayama

IT'S HAPPENING! THIS MANGA MAY END IN LESS THAN A YEAR FROM NOW, AND WITH AN EPIC ENDING IF THE ENDGAME SO FAR IS ANY INDICATION. I DON'T KNOW HOW I FEEL ABOUT THIS, HELP

nothing to add, just amazing job from isayama

[lauramalchowblog]

Flipping the Stack: Can New Technology Drive Health Care’s Future?

By MATTHEW HOLT and INDU SUBAIYA

Indu & I have been talking about Flipping the Stack in health care for about 3 years. 2 years ago we wrote an article for a general hospital audience which appeared in the 2019 AHA SHSMD Futurescan magazine. I was talking about the changes in home monitoring that might come about due to COVID-19 and remembered this article. The one that got published went through a staid editing process. This is the original version that I wrote before which was rather more fun and hasn’t seen the light of day. Until now. Take a look and remember it is 2 years old–Matthew Holt

Over the past twenty-five years most businesses have been revolutionized by the easy availability of cloud and mobile-based computing systems. These technologies have placed power and access into the hands of employees and customers, which in turn has created huge shifts in how transactions get done. Now the companies with the highest market value are both the drivers of and beneficiaries of this transition, notably Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Alphabet (Google), as well as their international rivals like Samsung, Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba. Everyone uses their products every day, and the impact on our lives have been remarkable. Of course, this also impacts how businesses of all types are organized.

Underpinning this transformation has been a change from enterprise-specific software to generic cloud-based services—sometimes called SMAC (Social/Sensors/Mobile/Analytics/Cloud). Applications such as data storage, sales management, email and the hardware they ran on were put into enterprises during the 80s and 90s in the client-server era (dominated by Intel and Microsoft). These have now migrated to cloud-based, on-demand services.

Twenty years ago the web was still a curiosity for most organizations. But consumers flocked to these online services and in recent years businesses followed, using GSuite, AWS (Amazon Web Services), Salesforce, Slack and countless other services. Those technologies in turn enabled the growth of whole new types of businesses changing sectors like transportation (Uber), entertainment (Netflix), lodging (AirBnB) and more.

Figure 1. Growth in use of cloud data v s traditional data centers

What about the hospital?

Hospitals and health systems were late comers to the enterprise technology game, even to client-server. In the 2000’s and 2010’s, mostly in response to the HITECH Act, hospitals added electronic medical records to their other information systems. The majority of these were client-server based and enterprise-specific. Even if they are cloud-based, they tend to be hosted in the private cloud environment of the dominant vendors like Epic and Cerner. Of the major EMR vendors only Athenahealth had an explicit cloud-only strategy, and its influence has been largely limited to revenue cycle management on the outpatient side.

However, the hospital sector is likely to move towards the trend of using the cloud seen in other businesses.

Current technology vendors including Epic and Cerner are beginning to open their systems, and at least moving to private cloud, while another large vendor, Allscripts, has put most of its technology onto Microsoft’s public cloud (Azure). In addition, all the major EMR vendors have adopted the FHIR standard and SMART on FHIR protocols which make it much easier to move data between different applications and to give users a choice of tools, many of which are hosted on the cloud. These standards, as well as products from newer breeds of middleware brokers such as Redox and Sansoro, are allowing smaller companies to develop and sell workflow tools to providers, clinicians and patients.

FHIR (Fast Health Interoperability Resources) is a set of standardized frameworks built around the concept of standardized data elements and “resources” — modular components built using modern web programming languages. The resources define common data elements, so data can be easily moved form one system to another.

SMART on FHIR is a protocol that allows applications to be launched from within other applications (usually an EMR) so that a user (e.g. a clinician) can launch a new tool bringing the data from the EMR with them. One example we’ve shown at Health 2.0 is a pharmacist launching the Meducation app within the Cerner EMR. One hint of the business complexities SMART on FHIR might cause is that Meducation is owned by drug information company First Databank whose main rival is Multum—owned by Cerner.

How quickly is FHIR being adopted? In the SHSMD survey only 8% of hospital executives said their organizations were already using FHIR to make it easier for 3rd party applications to access their data, with 29% saying they were very likely to do so and 24% saying it’s mostly likely they would. Our guess is that these numbers understate FHIR’s impact. Bear in mind this standard is already being used by Apple to extract data for its health record from 90 top hospitals. In addition, all major EMR vendors and many major health systems are developing a series of partnerships, apps stores and innovation programs to allow those 3rd party application vendors easier access to users (clinicians, patients, administrators). And many hospitals (including Mount Sinai, Providence St Joseph and more) are of course contributing to the explosion in apps and services by encouraging their internal teams to create them.

Figure 2: The break up of tech platforms

It is early days for this transformation. Most clinical organizations are still using a single vendor, but over time the three main layers of tech functionality—data storage, transactions and user interface are starting to break apart, allowing different players and different technologies to be plugged into various parts of the enterprise. For example, there’s been dramatic growth in third-party telemedicine services like Vidyo or Aviza integrating with the EMR. Similarly a new class of tools are using APIs to plug into the EMR, like Gauss Surgical which tracks blood loss in the OR using an iPad. In addition, there’s now a layer of separate companies providing data exchange and another providing data analytics in the cloud. In other words the tech stack is itself decentralizing and breaking up.

There’s considerable debate within the health tech community as to the near-term evolution of the hospital tech environment. Most hospitals have spent huge amounts on EMR installations in recent years which would tend to argue against many of them performing a “rip and replace” on their incumbent vendors. But while the transaction layer inside the current EMR (e.g. for orders and clinical documentation) would look to be well embedded in the system, new types of interface, storage and data analytics are increasingly being trialed.

The advent of FHIR, APIs and distributed storage certainly portends a future of decentralized data and decentralized services. That has big implications for organizations like health systems that are trying to combine physical and contractual controls over their data and services.

As advancements in technology continue to revolutionize health care, leaders in the field are preparing for the next wave of change and how it will impact hospitals and health systems and the communities they serve.

At the forefront are AI), VR, AR and blockchain –  all built on the expanding capabilities of cloud computing and driven by the burgeoning Internet of Things.

Blockchain 

Blockchain is a distributed database technology in which every transaction is recorded on every node in a network, and therefore very hard to hack or alter. Blockchain also does more than just record transactions. It allows the embedding of “Smart Contracts” within the blockchain which enables permissions, allows and points access to data and performs transactions – all automatically. Closely related is the concept of “identity by consensus” which enables the authorization of identity from data gathered from  multiple sources of information.

It is extremely early days in blockchain. There are one or two industry groups forming in health care (such as the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Consortium and Hashed Health). In a recent survey 75% of health care executives say their understanding of blockchain is “excellent,” while 39% say it’s in their top 5 priorities. In the Deloitte survey 11% of health care executives reported deploying blockchain somewhere in their enterprise,  the SHSMD survey of hospital executives for this publication had a much more stringent question. When asked if “their organization would change most of its data storage and transactions tools to blockchain or other distributed computing technologies”, 6% said it was already happening, while another 24% said it was very likely.

The only thing being hyped more than blockchain is Artificial intelligence (AI). Virtually anyone who can run an Excel macro now claims to have an AI product, and at the other end of the spectrum techno-optimists are looking to merge their brains with machines and achieve the singularity. But at its core AI is enabling very quick computation of vast amounts of data looking for patterns, and making suggestions about them (i.e. in Radiology, symptom assessment) and in some cases acting on those patterns (self-driving cars, robotic surgery). Perhaps the most promising area for AI is in computations that are just far too complex for humans, such as identifying the factors behind cancer or managing and matching complex drug regimens with genomic and phenotypes.

Examples of just a few companies using AI for complex tasks in health care

Prognos –Use lab, medical and claims data to predict patient disease onset

SurveyorHealth—Personalizes complex drug regimens to lower risk and improve outcomes

Babylon Health—Chatbot front end, takes symptoms and delivers diagnoses

While the worlds of gaming and entertainment are already being changed by VR and AR, it’s a little harder to see where these fit in in health. So far, VR is being experimented with in pain management and mental health. AR seems to be finding its niche in remotely recording and supporting patient physician visits andoverlaying X-ray images on patients to aid in clinical precision.

Augmented Reality superimposes a computer-generated image or data over a view into the real world using a device that a user can see through such as Microsoft Hololens or Google glass

Virtual Reality places the user in a completely artificial world using a system of headsets, (such as Oculus Rift or the HTC Vive) controllers and gloves. (end of box)

But the biggest part of the AI, AR, and VR revolution is likely to come with the combination of these trends with the underlying technologies of sensors, analytics and on-demand computing. The early stages of this is playing out in kitchens and living rooms across the world filled with kids demanding that Alexa play some annoying teeny bop song while their parents desperately try to tell it to shut up. But voice-controlled and automatically-controlled systems will soon both be responding to human instructions and predicting them. Already some companies like Aiva are putting Alexa in hospital rooms to replace nurse call systems, which enable two way communication. Soon more and more of this will be automated, and the sensors will not only be taking instruction but also be passively tracking patient activity in the hospital and in the home, and automatically responding.

The role of the Tech Giants

It has escaped few observers’ attention that the companies with the most advanced technology in AI, voice recognition, sensors and cloud computing are the same ones which have benefitted from the SMAC revolution. Concurrently the health tech press has been abuzz with articles reading the tea leaves about what Amazon, Apple and Alphabet/Google will do in health care.

For this publication the SHSMD survey asked hospital executives if a major technology company, such as Google, Amazon, or Apple, would emerge as a significant developer of health care services that competes directly with their organization’s services. 9% said this was already happening (again that might be a surprise to the tech giants) but another 38% said it was very likely.

No one (probably including the tech giants themselves) has a really clear view of what they are doing and what adding services and applications to their massive technology reach among consumers could do. But clearly any of these companies has the balance sheet enabling them to do anything they like in health care. In addition, other major players such as CVS (which is currently buying Aetna), Walmart (rumored to be buying Humana), and United HealthGroup (which has bought several large physician groups) are not sitting still. It seems that all of them are angling in on the chronically ill consumer in the home. This is of course a patient population and location with which traditional health care systems have struggled.

Sleuthing the tech giants’ health care moves

Apple seems focused on sensors. Looking at its acquisitions, hiring and patent applications, the best guess is that Apple is focusing on tracking bodily functions related to diabetes, heart disease, sleep and using the Apple Watch as a core device. It’s also created an integration of EMRs from over 90 hospitals which can bring data into its app store, and is creating its own medical clinics.

Amazon is clearly getting into hospitals supplies, and recently bought PillPack, a pharmacy specializing in home delivery for those on multiple medications. In addition, it also has the biggest cloud service in AWS and its Alexa currently dominates the smart speaker market which is already in 20% of homes. That suggests that it’s targeting the chronically ill at home.

Alphabet also has its cloud service (Google Cloud) which has 30+ health tech companies on its app store while it has placed many bets in its Verily unit on genomics & personalized medicine. In addition it has a $500m joint venture with Sanofi called Onduo working on diabetes care, and it just bought 10% of Oscar Health, a new style insurance company.

Inverting the stack

There are several obvious scenarios in which new market entrants can change health care but the one in which they take a major role we call “Tech inverting the stack”

Figure 3: The Traditional Care Delivery Stack

Traditionally care delivery from clinicians was (and is) the basis for health care—the office visit, the hospital admission. Then services were added (think phone support from nurses). Finally, technology was deployed to track and bill for it. Facilities and organizations were designed around the processes and staff required to carry this out.

Imagine this triple layer being inverted. Starting with technology, the sensors, trackers, AI systems and processes are soon going to be in place monitoring, measuring and suggesting next steps to both providers and patients. In general, this will move health care from being an event driven system to becoming a consistent process. Theoretically “normal’ patient behavior and activity will not need any response, whereas exceptions and problems will require intervention from a combination of human and machine services. Finally, care delivery – the clinical interventions that make up health care are we know it today – will become an added extra to the top of the health care stack. In fact almost any clinical intervention could be thought of as a failure of the system, or at least a correction to “auto-pilot” mode.

Figure 4. Tech Inverts the Stack

What might this inverted stack look like? You can imagine a combination of at home delivery of medication and more (Pillpack), combined with internet of things sensors (Apple) plus technology-based services companies monitoring chronically ill patients (Livongo) or connecting them to online doctors (Doctors on Demand) or even supplying them the full hospital experience (Medically Home). In this scenario, the tech platform is the underlying system, with services and professionals on top. There’s no real reason to think it can’t be done, and there’s no reason to suppose that if it is done it won’t radically reduce doctor visits and hospital admissions, and improve patient care.

Conclusion & Implications  

As with any analysis of technology promising “disruption”, the careful reader needs to ask themselves one primary question. Is this change real? Or is this just another PowerPoint from a futurist that will be brushed off by the “mother of all adaptive systems”?

The technology trends we have described are already in motion. The question is, how big their impact will be in health care? And how long will it take? Here are a few suggestions for hospitals executives to help them understand the transition and assess the rate of change.

Get familiar with the technologies. You won’t understand VR by reading this piece. You might if you play a video game with your kids on their new Oculus headset.

Follow the pilots in your organization and other organizations using these new tools. They’re happening everywhere (we promise!). Talk to the end users, talk to the patients, ask for real data on cost and impact.

Spend time with health tech startups at conferences, volunteer as a mentor at an incubators, got to health tech meetups, seek them out online. Get to know the young cutting edge techie doctors in your AMC hiding out in their labs. They’ll be pushing the boundaries of what can be done. They may not seem realistic now but you’ll get a sense of the possible

Pay attention to both leading edge payers (like Oscar Health, or any employer who uses Grand Rounds) and CMS. The more payment for value becomes real, the more likely it is that real changes in how chronically ill patients are monitored and managed will take effect.

If you read this piece and you googled most of the company names other than Google, then hopefully it’s been helpful. If you didn’t need to, then your organization is probably putting the right environment in place to adapt to these technologies.

Matthew Holt is Founder of THCB & Co-Founder, Health 2.0. Indu Subaiya is co-founder, Health 2.0 & CEO of Catalyst @ Health 2.0

The post Flipping the Stack: Can New Technology Drive Health Care’s Future? appeared first on The Health Care Blog.

Flipping the Stack: Can New Technology Drive Health Care’s Future? published first on https://venabeahan.tumblr.com

[kristinsimmons]

Flipping the Stack: Can New Technology Drive Health Care’s Future?

By MATTHEW HOLT and INDU SUBAIYA

Indu & I have been talking about Flipping the Stack in health care for about 3 years. 2 years ago we wrote an article for a general hospital audience which appeared in the 2019 AHA SHSMD Futurescan magazine. I was talking about the changes in home monitoring that might come about due to COVID-19 and remembered this article. The one that got published went through a staid editing process. This is the original version that I wrote before which was rather more fun and hasn’t seen the light of day. Until now. Take a look and remember it is 2 years old–Matthew Holt

Over the past twenty-five years most businesses have been revolutionized by the easy availability of cloud and mobile-based computing systems. These technologies have placed power and access into the hands of employees and customers, which in turn has created huge shifts in how transactions get done. Now the companies with the highest market value are both the drivers of and beneficiaries of this transition, notably Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Alphabet (Google), as well as their international rivals like Samsung, Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba. Everyone uses their products every day, and the impact on our lives have been remarkable. Of course, this also impacts how businesses of all types are organized.

Underpinning this transformation has been a change from enterprise-specific software to generic cloud-based services—sometimes called SMAC (Social/Sensors/Mobile/Analytics/Cloud). Applications such as data storage, sales management, email and the hardware they ran on were put into enterprises during the 80s and 90s in the client-server era (dominated by Intel and Microsoft). These have now migrated to cloud-based, on-demand services.

Twenty years ago the web was still a curiosity for most organizations. But consumers flocked to these online services and in recent years businesses followed, using GSuite, AWS (Amazon Web Services), Salesforce, Slack and countless other services. Those technologies in turn enabled the growth of whole new types of businesses changing sectors like transportation (Uber), entertainment (Netflix), lodging (AirBnB) and more.

Figure 1. Growth in use of cloud data v s traditional data centers

What about the hospital?

Hospitals and health systems were late comers to the enterprise technology game, even to client-server. In the 2000’s and 2010’s, mostly in response to the HITECH Act, hospitals added electronic medical records to their other information systems. The majority of these were client-server based and enterprise-specific. Even if they are cloud-based, they tend to be hosted in the private cloud environment of the dominant vendors like Epic and Cerner. Of the major EMR vendors only Athenahealth had an explicit cloud-only strategy, and its influence has been largely limited to revenue cycle management on the outpatient side.

However, the hospital sector is likely to move towards the trend of using the cloud seen in other businesses.

Current technology vendors including Epic and Cerner are beginning to open their systems, and at least moving to private cloud, while another large vendor, Allscripts, has put most of its technology onto Microsoft’s public cloud (Azure). In addition, all the major EMR vendors have adopted the FHIR standard and SMART on FHIR protocols which make it much easier to move data between different applications and to give users a choice of tools, many of which are hosted on the cloud. These standards, as well as products from newer breeds of middleware brokers such as Redox and Sansoro, are allowing smaller companies to develop and sell workflow tools to providers, clinicians and patients.

FHIR (Fast Health Interoperability Resources) is a set of standardized frameworks built around the concept of standardized data elements and “resources” — modular components built using modern web programming languages. The resources define common data elements, so data can be easily moved form one system to another.

SMART on FHIR is a protocol that allows applications to be launched from within other applications (usually an EMR) so that a user (e.g. a clinician) can launch a new tool bringing the data from the EMR with them. One example we’ve shown at Health 2.0 is a pharmacist launching the Meducation app within the Cerner EMR. One hint of the business complexities SMART on FHIR might cause is that Meducation is owned by drug information company First Databank whose main rival is Multum—owned by Cerner.

How quickly is FHIR being adopted? In the SHSMD survey only 8% of hospital executives said their organizations were already using FHIR to make it easier for 3rd party applications to access their data, with 29% saying they were very likely to do so and 24% saying it’s mostly likely they would. Our guess is that these numbers understate FHIR’s impact. Bear in mind this standard is already being used by Apple to extract data for its health record from 90 top hospitals. In addition, all major EMR vendors and many major health systems are developing a series of partnerships, apps stores and innovation programs to allow those 3rd party application vendors easier access to users (clinicians, patients, administrators). And many hospitals (including Mount Sinai, Providence St Joseph and more) are of course contributing to the explosion in apps and services by encouraging their internal teams to create them.

Figure 2: The break up of tech platforms

It is early days for this transformation. Most clinical organizations are still using a single vendor, but over time the three main layers of tech functionality—data storage, transactions and user interface are starting to break apart, allowing different players and different technologies to be plugged into various parts of the enterprise. For example, there’s been dramatic growth in third-party telemedicine services like Vidyo or Aviza integrating with the EMR. Similarly a new class of tools are using APIs to plug into the EMR, like Gauss Surgical which tracks blood loss in the OR using an iPad. In addition, there’s now a layer of separate companies providing data exchange and another providing data analytics in the cloud. In other words the tech stack is itself decentralizing and breaking up.

There’s considerable debate within the health tech community as to the near-term evolution of the hospital tech environment. Most hospitals have spent huge amounts on EMR installations in recent years which would tend to argue against many of them performing a “rip and replace” on their incumbent vendors. But while the transaction layer inside the current EMR (e.g. for orders and clinical documentation) would look to be well embedded in the system, new types of interface, storage and data analytics are increasingly being trialed.

The advent of FHIR, APIs and distributed storage certainly portends a future of decentralized data and decentralized services. That has big implications for organizations like health systems that are trying to combine physical and contractual controls over their data and services.

As advancements in technology continue to revolutionize health care, leaders in the field are preparing for the next wave of change and how it will impact hospitals and health systems and the communities they serve.

At the forefront are AI), VR, AR and blockchain –  all built on the expanding capabilities of cloud computing and driven by the burgeoning Internet of Things.

Blockchain 

Blockchain is a distributed database technology in which every transaction is recorded on every node in a network, and therefore very hard to hack or alter. Blockchain also does more than just record transactions. It allows the embedding of “Smart Contracts” within the blockchain which enables permissions, allows and points access to data and performs transactions – all automatically. Closely related is the concept of “identity by consensus” which enables the authorization of identity from data gathered from  multiple sources of information.

It is extremely early days in blockchain. There are one or two industry groups forming in health care (such as the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Consortium and Hashed Health). In a recent survey 75% of health care executives say their understanding of blockchain is “excellent,” while 39% say it’s in their top 5 priorities. In the Deloitte survey 11% of health care executives reported deploying blockchain somewhere in their enterprise,  the SHSMD survey of hospital executives for this publication had a much more stringent question. When asked if “their organization would change most of its data storage and transactions tools to blockchain or other distributed computing technologies”, 6% said it was already happening, while another 24% said it was very likely.

The only thing being hyped more than blockchain is Artificial intelligence (AI). Virtually anyone who can run an Excel macro now claims to have an AI product, and at the other end of the spectrum techno-optimists are looking to merge their brains with machines and achieve the singularity. But at its core AI is enabling very quick computation of vast amounts of data looking for patterns, and making suggestions about them (i.e. in Radiology, symptom assessment) and in some cases acting on those patterns (self-driving cars, robotic surgery). Perhaps the most promising area for AI is in computations that are just far too complex for humans, such as identifying the factors behind cancer or managing and matching complex drug regimens with genomic and phenotypes.

Examples of just a few companies using AI for complex tasks in health care

Prognos –Use lab, medical and claims data to predict patient disease onset

SurveyorHealth—Personalizes complex drug regimens to lower risk and improve outcomes

Babylon Health—Chatbot front end, takes symptoms and delivers diagnoses

While the worlds of gaming and entertainment are already being changed by VR and AR, it’s a little harder to see where these fit in in health. So far, VR is being experimented with in pain management and mental health. AR seems to be finding its niche in remotely recording and supporting patient physician visits andoverlaying X-ray images on patients to aid in clinical precision.

Augmented Reality superimposes a computer-generated image or data over a view into the real world using a device that a user can see through such as Microsoft Hololens or Google glass

Virtual Reality places the user in a completely artificial world using a system of headsets, (such as Oculus Rift or the HTC Vive) controllers and gloves. (end of box)

But the biggest part of the AI, AR, and VR revolution is likely to come with the combination of these trends with the underlying technologies of sensors, analytics and on-demand computing. The early stages of this is playing out in kitchens and living rooms across the world filled with kids demanding that Alexa play some annoying teeny bop song while their parents desperately try to tell it to shut up. But voice-controlled and automatically-controlled systems will soon both be responding to human instructions and predicting them. Already some companies like Aiva are putting Alexa in hospital rooms to replace nurse call systems, which enable two way communication. Soon more and more of this will be automated, and the sensors will not only be taking instruction but also be passively tracking patient activity in the hospital and in the home, and automatically responding.

The role of the Tech Giants

It has escaped few observers’ attention that the companies with the most advanced technology in AI, voice recognition, sensors and cloud computing are the same ones which have benefitted from the SMAC revolution. Concurrently the health tech press has been abuzz with articles reading the tea leaves about what Amazon, Apple and Alphabet/Google will do in health care.

For this publication the SHSMD survey asked hospital executives if a major technology company, such as Google, Amazon, or Apple, would emerge as a significant developer of health care services that competes directly with their organization’s services. 9% said this was already happening (again that might be a surprise to the tech giants) but another 38% said it was very likely.

No one (probably including the tech giants themselves) has a really clear view of what they are doing and what adding services and applications to their massive technology reach among consumers could do. But clearly any of these companies has the balance sheet enabling them to do anything they like in health care. In addition, other major players such as CVS (which is currently buying Aetna), Walmart (rumored to be buying Humana), and United HealthGroup (which has bought several large physician groups) are not sitting still. It seems that all of them are angling in on the chronically ill consumer in the home. This is of course a patient population and location with which traditional health care systems have struggled.

Sleuthing the tech giants’ health care moves

Apple seems focused on sensors. Looking at its acquisitions, hiring and patent applications, the best guess is that Apple is focusing on tracking bodily functions related to diabetes, heart disease, sleep and using the Apple Watch as a core device. It’s also created an integration of EMRs from over 90 hospitals which can bring data into its app store, and is creating its own medical clinics.

Amazon is clearly getting into hospitals supplies, and recently bought PillPack, a pharmacy specializing in home delivery for those on multiple medications. In addition, it also has the biggest cloud service in AWS and its Alexa currently dominates the smart speaker market which is already in 20% of homes. That suggests that it’s targeting the chronically ill at home.

Alphabet also has its cloud service (Google Cloud) which has 30+ health tech companies on its app store while it has placed many bets in its Verily unit on genomics & personalized medicine. In addition it has a $500m joint venture with Sanofi called Onduo working on diabetes care, and it just bought 10% of Oscar Health, a new style insurance company.

Inverting the stack

There are several obvious scenarios in which new market entrants can change health care but the one in which they take a major role we call “Tech inverting the stack”

Figure 3: The Traditional Care Delivery Stack

Traditionally care delivery from clinicians was (and is) the basis for health care—the office visit, the hospital admission. Then services were added (think phone support from nurses). Finally, technology was deployed to track and bill for it. Facilities and organizations were designed around the processes and staff required to carry this out.

Imagine this triple layer being inverted. Starting with technology, the sensors, trackers, AI systems and processes are soon going to be in place monitoring, measuring and suggesting next steps to both providers and patients. In general, this will move health care from being an event driven system to becoming a consistent process. Theoretically “normal’ patient behavior and activity will not need any response, whereas exceptions and problems will require intervention from a combination of human and machine services. Finally, care delivery – the clinical interventions that make up health care are we know it today – will become an added extra to the top of the health care stack. In fact almost any clinical intervention could be thought of as a failure of the system, or at least a correction to “auto-pilot” mode.

Figure 4. Tech Inverts the Stack

What might this inverted stack look like? You can imagine a combination of at home delivery of medication and more (Pillpack), combined with internet of things sensors (Apple) plus technology-based services companies monitoring chronically ill patients (Livongo) or connecting them to online doctors (Doctors on Demand) or even supplying them the full hospital experience (Medically Home). In this scenario, the tech platform is the underlying system, with services and professionals on top. There’s no real reason to think it can’t be done, and there’s no reason to suppose that if it is done it won’t radically reduce doctor visits and hospital admissions, and improve patient care.

Conclusion & Implications  

As with any analysis of technology promising “disruption”, the careful reader needs to ask themselves one primary question. Is this change real? Or is this just another PowerPoint from a futurist that will be brushed off by the “mother of all adaptive systems”?

The technology trends we have described are already in motion. The question is, how big their impact will be in health care? And how long will it take? Here are a few suggestions for hospitals executives to help them understand the transition and assess the rate of change.

Get familiar with the technologies. You won’t understand VR by reading this piece. You might if you play a video game with your kids on their new Oculus headset.

Follow the pilots in your organization and other organizations using these new tools. They’re happening everywhere (we promise!). Talk to the end users, talk to the patients, ask for real data on cost and impact.

Spend time with health tech startups at conferences, volunteer as a mentor at an incubators, got to health tech meetups, seek them out online. Get to know the young cutting edge techie doctors in your AMC hiding out in their labs. They’ll be pushing the boundaries of what can be done. They may not seem realistic now but you’ll get a sense of the possible

Pay attention to both leading edge payers (like Oscar Health, or any employer who uses Grand Rounds) and CMS. The more payment for value becomes real, the more likely it is that real changes in how chronically ill patients are monitored and managed will take effect.

If you read this piece and you googled most of the company names other than Google, then hopefully it’s been helpful. If you didn’t need to, then your organization is probably putting the right environment in place to adapt to these technologies.

Matthew Holt is Founder of THCB & Co-Founder, Health 2.0. Indu Subaiya is co-founder, Health 2.0 & CEO of Catalyst @ Health 2.0

The post Flipping the Stack: Can New Technology Drive Health Care’s Future? appeared first on The Health Care Blog.

Flipping the Stack: Can New Technology Drive Health Care’s Future? published first on https://wittooth.tumblr.com/

[vegas-glitz]

The Coast Is Not Clear - Signs of an Impending Major Stock Market Crash

http://topicsofnote.com/?p=5522&utm_source=SocialAutoPoster&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=Tumblr

Despite the recent correction, and regardless which popular metric you use; PE, Shiller's CAPE Ratio, or Buffett's Market to GDP comparison; this is one of the most expensive markets since 1923. The other two were the 1929 and 2000 markets and we know how those turned out. Incidentally, 1923 was the year the "Composite Index" was introduced, the S&P 500's precursor.

The record shows that, while stock prices can continue at elevated levels for a long time, they eventually reverse to the mean. That can happen in one of two ways. Either the market goes sideways for a long time until earnings catch up, or there is a sharp drop to bring prices in line with historical PE ratios - a reversal to the mean. History has shown that investors are not a patient bunch. They will put up with a sideways market for a while, but eventually they will tire of meager returns and put their money to work where they believe will yield greater gain potential. Once that ball gets rolling, the market exits en masse and a severe bear market takes hold. The upshot: there is a big market drop in store.

The question is when and was this past correction a hic-up or a prelude to the big plunge. A study of major bear markets indicates the latter is more likely. Indeed, a review of 28-plus -percent market drops since 1923 reveals there is always a preamble to every major bear market. Some folks are under the mistaken impression that stock market crashes occur at market tops. That is far from the truth.

The stock market may well be fickle, but providence is kind. It always gives us advance notice of a coming crash, grabbing our attention amidst our complacency with a surprise drop and providing an opportunity to get out before it crashes in earnest. This is shown in the analysis below for each of the following major bear markets (28% decline or more): 2007, 2000, 1987, 1973, 1968, 1962, 1946, 1937, and 1929. Intraday prices and daily closes are only available for the S&P 500 from 1950 on. Therefore, Dow Jones Industrial Average closes were used for the markets before that.

2007 The initial top for the 2007 market came July 17 when the S&P 500 had an intraday high of 1555.90. The index would drop the next week and eventually settle to an intraday low of 1370.60 a month later on August 16 - a drop of 11.9%. Henceforth, all highs and lows are intraday unless otherwise stated. The market would climb for seven weeks to reach a market top for the index of 1576,09 October 11, 2007 - 1.3% higher than its previous high. An initial 5.5% dip was followed by a quick recovery to 1552.76 October 31, before succumbing and dropping 10.8% to a low of 1406.10 November 26, 2007. The index would recover to a high of 1523.57 and continue on a series of lower lows and highs until its nadir of 666.79 March 9, 2009 for a 57.7% decline.

2000 The 2000 market gave plenty of warning before the Dot.com plunge. The market faltered right after opening the New Year January 3rd. After reaching a high of 1478, the S&P 500 dropped to 1455.22 at the close. It dropped below 1400 the next three days and recovered to 1465.71 - the high January 20, 2000. From there it did a roller coaster ride down to the 1329.15 low of February 25 - a 10.1% drop from its high thus far. The market finally climaxed at 1552.87 March 24, 2000. It would drop precipitously April 14 to a low of 1339.40 - a 13.7% drop - but then slowly recovered to 1530.09 by September 1, 2000, only 1.5% below its all-time high. Thereafter it steadily went down with some sharp drops followed by rallies but only to the downtrend line. The market bottomed at 775.80 October 9, 2002 for a 50.1% decline.

1987 The 1987 bear market was a swift one. After vacillating to a high of 337.89 August 25, 1987, the S&P 500 dropped to 308.58 by September 8 - an 8.7% hit. It quickly recovered to 328.94 by October 2, only 2.6% down from its high. It wobbled to a close below 300 October 15 before crashing the next Monday to close at 224.84 - a loss of 20.5% for that day. It would close lower December 4, 1987 at 223.92 but the low point for the move came the day after the plunge, October 20, when it dipped to 216.46 for a loss of 36.0% from the August high.

1973 This, along with the 1968 bear market, were part of the mega bear market that spanned 1967 - 1982. The S&P oscillated within the 100 and 110 range for most of the year. It cleared the 110-barrier in late summer only to dip below it again before making its final surge as the year closed. It peaked at 119.79 December 12, 1972 and then dropped 4.3% to 114.63 December 21, 1972. The New Year propelled the index higher reaching a top of 121.74 January 11, 1973 - a 1.6% gain from the previous high. It quickly dropped to 111.85 by February 8 and then proceeded to careen downward over a series of bumps until hitting bottom at 60.96 October 4, 1974 - a 49.9% loss.

1968 After an initial drop to start the year, the market climbed steadily from March through November finally topping December 2, 1968 when the S&P 500 maxed out at 109.37. The index dropped to 96.63 by January 13, 1969 (an 11.6% drop), fizzled in its rally coming within 0.43 points of the low March 17, and then rallied all the way up to 106.74 May 14, 1969. After coming within 2.4% of the top it succumbed finally hitting bottom...May 26, 1970 at 68.61. That was a 37.3% haircut.

1962 The stock market steadily climbed from October 1960 to December 1962 when the S&P 500 topped out at 72.64 December 12, 1962. Then it dipped to 67.55 January 24, 1963 for a 7.0% loss. The index quickly went back to 70 the next week and eked out a small gain the next month finally peaking at 71.44 March 15, 1.7% below the high. Thereafter, the index plunged to 51.35 June 25, 1962 for a 29.3% decline.

1946 The market had been on a tear since the latter part of World War II and started 1946 the same way gaining 8% by February. Intraday highs and lows for the S&P 500 were not available for the analysis so, hereafter, Dow Jones Industrial Average closes will be used. The Dow Jones closed at 206.61 February 5, 1946. The index then plunged 10% to close at 186.02 February 26. It quickly recovered its previous high and surpassed it on a bucking horse ride up to 212.5 May 29, 1946 - a 2.9% gain from its previous high. The bumpy ride continued until August when the index reached 204.52 on August 13 and then fell in exhaustion finally closing at 163.13 October 9, 1946 for a 23.2% decline. Despite a number of rally attempts, the market would continue to struggle until February 1948 with a maximum loss of 28%.

1937 After a precipitous drop from 1929 to 1932, the market seemed to be on recovery mode until it plateaued in early 1937. The Dow Jones closed at 194.4 March 10, 1937 to mark the end of the uptrend. The index then drifted lower for three months until bottoming June 14, 1937 at 165.51 for a 14.9% loss. It spent the next two months on a steady climb eventually topping at 189.34 August 16, 2.6% below the previous high. That was its last hurrah as the market plunged 49.1% to its 98.95 March 31, 1938 Dow Jones close.

1929 Much like the 2000 market, the Big Crash of '29 gave plenty of warning. After going sideways for the first half of the year, the market went through a 10.0% correction when it swanned from a 326.16 Dow Jones close May 6 to 293.42 May 27. Thereafter, it rose undaunted until reaching the market top close of 381.17 September 3, 1929. It drifted lower, slowly at first, but then gained momentum until reaching a low point Friday, October 4 with a 325.17 Dow Jones close - a 14.7% loss. It made a mad dash effort to recover the next week but was only able to manage a 352.86 close October 10. At 7.4% lower than the September high, this was the lowest percentage close to a previous high of any of the major bear markets. Then again, this was the granddaddy of all bears. Ten trading days later, on October 24, the index closed below 300. It dived Monday, October 28 and again the next day closing at 230.07. The market continued its plummet until eventually reaching bottom July 8, 1932 when the Dow Jones closed at 41.22 for a record 89.2% decline.

Conclusion

Historical data shows that every major bear market since 1923 always provided investors with a warning. After seemingly peaking, they went through a significant decline before rising again only to plummet thereafter. In two instances, 2000 and 1929, it gave two warnings; the first a correction months before peaking, and the second after peaking.

Declines after the initial peak ranged from 14.9% to 4.3% with an average of 10.8% and a median of 11.6%. In three out of the nine cases, 2007, 1973 and 1946, the second peak was lower than the first. The range was from a loss of 7.4% to a gain of 2.9% with an average of -1.4% median of -1.7%. Taking out the 1929, 7.4% outlier, the average was -0.63% and the median -1.6%. The time between the two peaks ranged from 30 days to 5.4 months with an average of 96.7 days and a median of 93 days.

Starting from the premise we are in the beginning stages of a major bear market, and having gone through a 10% correction, what is in store for us? Surveying the data, it turns out we are average. There seemed to be no relationship between the severity of the bear market and the time lapse between the two peaks. However, five out of the six times the market went through a bonafide correction, 10% or more, it took months, between 2.9 and 5.4 months, for the market to top and begin its downturn in earnest. The notable exception was the Crash of 1929, which only took 37 days between the first and seconds peaks. Although there was no consistent pattern for depth of the initial decline and the total decline, it is notable that the four largest initial drops led to declines of 49% or more - a level only achieved by the 1973 bear market after only a 4.3% decline. There is no discernible relationship between the initial decline and second peak level, nor the total decline and second peak level.

It could be that Morgan Stanley's prediction this Monday, that a slowdown may loom starting in the second quarter, may be correct. We have already gone above the -7.4% level from 1929, so it would seem this market does not correlate all that well to that one and the wait to the next decisive peak will be measured in months. Regardless, I would caution all to watch the market's advance very carefully. If the S&P 500 gets within 2.6% of the 2872.87 January 26 top, i.e. 2798, that is your signal to exit the stock market. No sense being greedy about the last 1 or 2 percent gains and risk losing much more.

Source by Karl De Jesus

[betelhemmakonnen]

Case Study #2 “How” / “When” / “Where” / “Who” / “Why” pictures Now: Louise Lawler’s works pose the image as a question

“The situation is always part of what produces the work for me.[1]

 Lawler grew up in Bronxville, New York received her B.F.A at Cornell, before moving to Manhattan in 1969. She has been exhibiting her work since the late 1970's. An act of appropriation has always been present in her practice, from the very beginning of her career, Lawler has been interested in, "borrowing something that had a different context, different meaning."[2] Lawler’s time-based work provokes questions that make the viewer reflect upon the role of images as enforced systems of meaning production – as powerful mediators for picturing / representing / imagining a presented moment. Her works appear to function as proposal’s for self-interrogations, with Art, as the proxy subject, foregrounded interrogating itself by examining its relationship to art production, action of creating, in of the power dynamics of the Art World, as the context.

Why Pictures Now, 1981. Gelatin silver print, 3 × 6 inches.  

The title of the above work by Louise Lawler, Why Pictures Now, does not end in a question mark, yet the image resists a declarative reading. Much to the contrary, it operates in a radically interrogative space. Punctuation is not necessary, the image itself becomes a question. Furthermore, playing with the parts of speech, if one reads “pictures” as a verb rather than a noun, the image opens up the possibility that maybe Lawler is asking us to consider how “Why” would picture “Now” – meaning, what does it look like when we examine the present in relationship to questions rather than answers.

I chose Louise Lawler for my second case study similarly to why I chose Renée Green for my first. Lawler’s practice views arrested time as a nevertheless mobile, multi-layered spacio-temporal environment. In addition, her distinctive creation of thoughtfully constructed settings that rely on unexpected juxtapositions of appropriations and re-appropriations, induce the viewer to extend the margins of her visual perception beyond, “What” to “How”, “Who “, “Where”, “Why” and “When am I looking at?” Her viewfinder frames a subtle yet powerful disturbance that awakes our visual processing to an all-encompassing disorienting experience, both visual and cognitive, rather than acute “punctum which pricks us” with the specific it moment associated with “good pictures.”[3]

“I don't exactly think I am a photographer. I'm just trying to point things out. I never feel like I am answering anything.”[4]

In Camera Lucida, Barthes states that the photographic image, “is the absolute Particular, the sovereign Contingency [...] the This [...] the Real, in its indefatigable expression.”[5] The photographer, according to Barthes, says, "Look. Here it is."[6] Louise Lawler’s oblique lens avoids such impudent declaratives by prioritizing questions and relationality over answers and an idea of an Absolute. For Lawler, a picture is not the event but how we understand the event and what connections we make."[7] Her images are created through repeated cycle of auto-negotiations and considerations of parts and pieces previously used in different times and situations. “Look.” Lawler seems to say, “Here? It? Is?” For what we see may seem different but is the same or may seem different but is the same as before. 

An act of appropriation has always been present in her practice, from the very beginning of her career, Lawler has been interested in, "borrowing something that had a different context, different meaning."[8]

Installation view of Louise Lawler- WHY PICTURES NOW. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, April 30-July 30, 2017

“Why Pictures Now,” a survey exhibition spanning more than 40 years of Louise Lawler’s work opened at the MoMa in 2017. In this exhibition were featured three (re)works that Lawler referrers to as “adjusted to fit”: Pollyanna (adjusted to fit) 2007/2008/2012, Pollyanna (adjusted to fit, distorted for the times), 2007/2008/2012/2017, and Pollyanna (traced) 2007/2008/2013. She applies the distorted effect to an older work she created between 2007 and 2012. The traced version was created in collaboration with artist and children’s book illustrator Jon Buller in 2013.

An intriguing aspect of Lawler’s practice is her process of continuously re-presenting, reframing, or restaging her work in the present, a strategy through which the artist revisits her own pictures by transferring them to different formats, from photographs to paperweights, tracings, and works that she calls “adjusted to fit.” The tracings are large-format black-and-white line versions of her photographs that eliminate color and detail, functioning instead as “ghosts” of the originals. “Adjusted to fit” images are stretched or expanded to fit the location of their display, not only suggesting the idea that pictures can have more than one life, but also underpinning the intentional, relational character of Lawler’s farsighted art. Furthermore, in keeping with Lawler’s interest in each picture’s provenance and the institutional creation of values, each label in this exhibition includes the owners of the full edition of that particular work.[9]

In her seminal text, On Photography, Susan Sontag writes that "to take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged (at least for as long as it takes to get a "good" picture), to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing."[10] I don’t think that this applies to Lawler’s approach to her practice in the medium of photography.

Pollyanna (adjusted to fit, distorted for the times), 2007/2008/2012/2017 adhesive wall material, variable dimensions

The Pollyanna works enthusiastically refuse all of Sontag’s declarations. With this series, Lawler plays with auto-appropriations of appropriations and adjustments as needed, again and again to question the status quo – on the macro and micro level, the particular image and the larger world in which it circulates – from different tempo-spacial perspectives rather than picturing it as a static given. Every variable present is distorted: framing, scale, material, presentation, viewing, (…).  In contrast to what Sontag says, Lawler as a photographer has no interest in things as they are, including photography, photographs or photographing. The images she creates break the imposed history of picture regulations.

Pollyanna (adjusted to fit) 2007/2008/2012 As adjusted for the MoMA exhibition WHY PICTURES NOW, 2017 variable dimensions

Pollyanna (traced) 2007/2008/2013 Adhesive vinyl, variable dimensions in proportion to size of original artwork: 30 1/8 x 24 1/8 in. (76.5 x 61.3 cm)

As difficult as it sounds, Pollyanna allegedly saw the best of every situation. Could it be that with these titles, Louise Lawler intends to communicate the same sentiment? Or, are the titles communicating that no matter the distortions and exaggeration in the environment, endless adjustments and fittings are necessary to ideally engage with the present? Or, is the reference to the phenomenon another layer of distortion to further destabilize any reading of the images that confirms preexisting beliefs or hypotheses? Louise Lawler’s pictures leave me with questions without answers.

 [1] “Louise Lawler at MoMA.” Art Viewer, 16 July 2017, artviewer.org/louise-lawler-at-moma/. 

[2] Sontag, Susan, 1933-2004. On Photography. New York :Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.

[3] Sontag, Susan, 1933-2004. On Photography. New York :Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977

[4] “Louise Lawler: WHY PICTURES NOW.” Lee Bontecou. Untitled. 1959 | MoMA, Apr. 2017, www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1646?page=2, accessed on Nov. 10, 2018.

[5] Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981, pg.4.

[6] ibid, pg.5.

[7] "Louise Lawler by James Welling BOMB Magazine." bombmagazine.org/articles/louise-lawler/, accessed on Nov. 12, 2018.

[8]Rachel Wolff (May 1, 2011), Impressive Proportions: Louise Lawler photographs great art—then treats it like taffy New York Magazine.

[9] Lawler, Louise. An Arrangement of Pictures. Assouline Publishing. New York. 2000.

[10] Rachel Wolff (May 1, 2011), Impressive Proportions: Louise Lawler photographs great art—then treats it like taffy New York Magazine.

[theconservativebrief]

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is considering a new plan, according to the New York Times and Washington Post: Allow federal education funds to go toward putting more guns in schools.

The guns-in-schools plan would tap federal grants that are traditionally intended for academic enrichment and student services, but instead allow states to use the money to purchase firearms for teachers. The plan would take advantage of a loophole that, unlike other school safety measures, does not explicitly prohibit the use of the money for guns.

As my colleague Ella Nilsen noted, this answers a call by some Republican lawmakers and the National Rifle Association (NRA). They believe that arming more teachers will allow educators to keep students safe by defending them from a mass shooter. As the NRA often says, “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.”

Will the proposal ever become reality? We don’t know yet. Asked about the plan, a Department of Education spokesperson told the Times, “The department is constantly considering and evaluating policy issues, particularly issues related to school safety. The secretary nor the department issues opinions on hypothetical scenarios.”

The evidence suggests, however, that the guns-in-schools plan would make schools more dangerous, not safer.

While there is no good research specifically on arming teachers (which by itself should raise red flags, given that policy should be evidence-based), there is plenty of evidence on what happens where there are more guns around. It’s pretty clear: Where there are more guns, there are more gun deaths.

The logic is simple: The presence of a gun allows otherwise normal circumstances to escalate into deadly violence. If a teacher has a gun around, she or one of her students is more likely to fire it — accidentally or deliberately — than if a gun wasn’t around.

That’s not to say that no one has ever successfully defended themselves or others from an attack with a firearm. The question is whether these incidents of successful defense would outweigh the new incidents of gun violence that would crop up due to the addition of more firearms in schools.

And based on the research, the presence of more guns typically translates to much more general gun violence, while justified uses of a gun for self-defense are few and far between.

So DeVos’s potential guns-in-schools plan would likely make school violence worse.

The US is unique in two key and related ways when it comes to guns: It has way more gun deaths than other developed nations, and it has far more guns than any other country in the world.

The US has nearly six times the gun homicide rate of Canada, more than seven times that of Sweden, and nearly 16 times that of Germany, according to United Nations data compiled by the Guardian. (These gun deaths are a big reason America has a much higher overall homicide rate, which includes non-gun deaths, than other developed nations.)

Javier Zarracina/Vox

Mass shootings actually make up a small fraction of America’s gun deaths, constituting less than 2 percent of such deaths in 2013. But America does see a lot of these horrific events: According to CNN, “The US makes up less than 5% of the world’s population, but holds 31% of global mass shooters.”

The US also has by far the highest number of privately owned guns in the world. Estimated for 2017, the number of civilian-owned firearms in the US was 120.5 guns per 100 residents, meaning there were more firearms than people. The world’s second-ranked country was Yemen, a quasi-failed state torn by civil war, where there were 52.8 guns per 100 residents, according to an analysis from the Small Arms Survey.

Small Arms Survey

Another way of looking at that: Americans make up less than 5 percent of the world’s population, yet they own roughly 45 percent of all the world’s privately held firearms.

These two facts — on gun deaths and firearm ownership — are related. The research, compiled by the Harvard School of Public Health’s Injury Control Research Center, is pretty clear: After controlling for variables such as socioeconomic factors and other crime, places with more guns have more gun deaths.

“Within the United States, a wide array of empirical evidence indicates that more guns in a community leads to more homicide,” David Hemenway, the Injury Control Research Center’s director, wrote in Private Guns, Public Health.

For example, a 2013 study led by a Boston University School of Public Health researcher found that, after controlling for multiple variables, each percentage point increase in gun ownership correlated with a roughly 0.9 percent rise in the firearm homicide rate.

The correlation applies globally. This chart, based on data from GunPolicy.org, shows the correlation between the number of guns and gun deaths among wealthier nations:

Javier Zarracina/Vox

Guns are not the only contributor to violence. (Other factors include, for example, poverty, urbanization, and alcohol consumption.) But when researchers control for other confounding variables, they have found time and time again that America’s high level of gun ownership is a major reason the US is so much worse in terms of gun violence than its developed peers.

As a breakthrough analysis by UC Berkeley’s Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins in the 1990s found, it’s not even that the US has more crime than other developed countries. This chart, based on data from Jeffrey Swanson at Duke University, shows that the US is not an outlier when it comes to overall crime:

Javier Zarracina/Vox

Instead, the US appears to have more lethal violence — and that’s driven in large part by the prevalence of guns.

”A series of specific comparisons of the death rates from property crime and assault in New York City and London show how enormous differences in death risk can be explained even while general patterns are similar,” Zimring and Hawkins wrote. “A preference for crimes of personal force and the willingness and ability to use guns in robbery make similar levels of property crime 54 times as deadly in New York City as in London.”

Javier Zarracina/Vox

This is in many ways intuitive. People of every country get into arguments and fights with friends, family, and peers. But in the US, it’s much more likely that someone will get angry during an argument and be able to pull out a gun and kill someone.

Consider how this could apply to a school scenario. Some kids or teachers get into an argument. There’s a gun in the classroom. Someone reaches for that gun — and what may have otherwise been a feisty argument escalates into a fatal encounter.

This might seem ridiculous, but consider that there have been shootings over disputes about cheeseburgers and tacos. In the heat of the moment, people can do very bad things.

America does not have a monopoly on these kinds of disputes. What it does have, again, is easy access to guns, making escalation much more likely.

Increasing the presence of guns in schools, then, could actually exacerbate gun violence.

There’s another set of statistics that throws cold water on the “good guy with a gun” theory: It’s way more likely in America that someone will shoot and kill another person in the course of committing a crime than in self-defense.

Christopher Ingraham at the Washington Post ran through the statistics. He looked at how many gun homicides, suicides, and accidental shootings there were in comparison to “justifiable” homicides (“the killing of a felon, during the commission of a felony, by a private citizen”), based on the FBI’s 2012 data.

He found that for every justifiable gun homicide, there were 34 criminal gun homicides, 78 gun suicides, and two accidental gun deaths.

Data on mass shootings tells a similar story: According to the FBI’s report on active shooter events between 2000 and 2013, only about 3 percent were stopped by a civilian with a gun. Unarmed civilians actually stopped more incidents — about 13 percent. Most of the incidents — more than 56 percent — ended on the shooter’s initiative, when the shooter either killed himself or herself, simply stopped shooting, or fled the scene.

Would more of these shootings be prevented if more people had guns? It’s hard to say — since, again, there’s no good research on that question.

But America already has a lot of guns. And as the other data shows, that’s likely making its overall gun violence problem worse, not better.

In President Donald Trump’s past comments about arming teachers, he’s suggested that this would be an easy way to end mass shootings quickly. He previously tweeted, “History shows that a school shooting lasts, on average, 3 minutes. It takes police & first responders approximately 5 to 8 minutes to get to site of crime. Highly trained, gun adept, teachers/coaches would solve the problem instantly, before police arrive. GREAT DETERRENT!”

Reality, however, is more complicated: Even when people are armed, that doesn’t mean they can properly respond to a mass shooting.

Multiple simulations have demonstrated that most people, if placed in an active shooter situation while armed, will not be able to stop the situation, and may in fact do little more than get themselves killed in the process.

This video from ABC News shows one such simulation, in which people repeatedly fail to shoot an active shooter before they’re shot:

[embedded content]

As Chris Benton, a police investigator in Pennsylvania, told ABC News, “Video games and movies, they glorify gunfights. [People] get that warped sense that this is true — this video game is exactly what I can do in real life. That’s not reality.”

The Daily Show also put this theory to the test in another more comedic simulation segment. Jordan Klepper, who was a correspondent with the show at the time, trained on the basics of using a firearm and got a concealed carry permit that was valid in 30 states. Then he participated in mass shooting simulations to see how he would hold up in such a scenario.

He failed — miserably. In his final test, which simulated a school shooting, he shot an unarmed civilian, and he was shot multiple times by the active shooters and even law enforcement, who mistook him for the bad guy. He never took down the active shooters.

[embedded content]

The fundamental problem is that mass shootings are traumatizing, terrifying events. Without potentially dozens or even hundreds of hours in training, most people are not going to be able to quickly and properly respond.

“There’s never enough training,” Coby Briehn, a senior instructor at Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training, told Klepper. “You can never get enough.”

The FBI’s analysis of active shooters between 2000 and 2013 has another relevant data point: “Law enforcement suffered casualties in 21 (46.7%) of the 45 incidents where they engaged the shooter to end the threat.” These are people trained to do this kind of thing full-time, and nearly half of incidents resulted in at least one officer wounded or killed. Teachers with limited training would very likely fare much worse.

None of that is to say that a “good guy with a gun” would never be able to stop a shooter. We have seen some high-profile cases in which that happened. But the bulk of the findings, from news investigations to the FBI’s report to The Daily Show, suggest that this idea is often going to play out very differently than supporters like Trump and DeVos envision — and sometimes it could lead to more innocent people getting caught in the crossfire.

If America wants to confront its gun-violence problem, then the research suggests it should look to reducing the number of guns in circulation — not putting more armed people into schools, and certainly not paying for more armed people in schools.

Original Source -> Betsy DeVos’s reported guns-in-schools plan would make schools less safe

via The Conservative Brief