#Honestly even at the time based only on what was being reported in British media the reaction seemed bizarre

[niccirobertson]

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve made a concerted effort to distance myself from just about every news feed and platform that has nothing better to do than report the latest covid statistics. The reason for this is quite honestly, like many people I have had enough. Despite my best efforts, the media bombardment is so pervasive that an update got through, and instead of deleting it, I did the math.

In South Africa at the time of receiving that update there were supposedly 1 039 161 positive cases counted, with 20 033 deaths. I am no maths genius but it wasn’t a stretch to figure out that this was around 2%. I then looked for the data for the United States which is also around 2% and the UK which is around 3%. On average this virus has a mortality rate of 2.5% with the majority of those deaths affecting the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions, otherwise known as co-morbidities. Except that the data reflected is questionable. 


When you sift through the conspiracy theories and start talking to credible professionals in the medical industry you begin to see a pattern emerging. Looking at the data of years gone by, pneumonia and flu viruses year on year have also resulted in between a 1% and 2% death rate. So why the hysteria? 


According to the WHO: A pandemic is defined as “an epidemic occurring worldwide, or over a very wide area, crossing international boundaries and usually affecting a large number of people”. The classical definition includes nothing about population immunity, virology or disease severity. By this definition, pandemics can be said to occur annually in each of the temperate southern and northern hemispheres, given that seasonal epidemics cross international boundaries and affect a large number of people. This happens every year but the world doesn’t come to a grinding halt because of it. 


According to the British Medical Journal the PCR test is inaccurate, picking up dead and ineffective virus particles that may be found on most people, most of the time. It states that the PCR test, never designed for this kind of testing has an error margin of 97%. That’s insanity no matter how you want to spin it. If the widely accepted method for determining whether or not a person is infected is fundamentally flawed, the resulting data is completely inaccurate. 

Added to which, the death statistics are also questionable. They do not define who died because of the virus or with the virus. For example, a colleague’s mother passed away from pancreatic cancer in July, yet the death certificate states covid19 as cause of death. This is not an isolated incident. 

The World Health Organisation guidelines state that “COVID-19 should be recorded on the medical certificate of cause of death for ALL decedents where the disease, or is assumed to have caused, or contributed to death, i.e. COVID-19 is the underlying cause of death”. This means no one really knows how many have died directly from a covid infection.
The Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine has shown that one in thirteen (7.8%) deaths with COVID-19 on the death certificate did not have the disease as the underlying cause of death, further distorting the data. 

The decisions directly related to our lives and livelihoods are based on inaccurate or distorted data and no one is doing anything about it. 

Enough about the deliberate distortion of the facts. The question is why is this happening?
There is a frenetic urgency to get the world vaccinated. Bill Gates began pushing the vaccination agenda way back in 2013 if not earlier. And naturally people, at least people who can still think for themselves are extremely wary of this vaccine. At the time of writing this, the vaccine has only been available for a couple of weeks, and in this short window the significant adverse effects in those already having received the vaccination is 3% based on recent published information. Higher than the death rate of the virus. If you were to go by statistics alone, the vaccine will kill more people than the virus. 

The pharmaceutical companies and their stakeholders are naturally elated that the powers that be are enforcing and coercing people into having to accept this vaccine, creating the illusion that their freedom lies on the other side of a needle. And further perpetuating the myth that drugs are going to save you. Bearing in mind that the manufacturers of this technology are free of any kind of liability arising from death or damage caused by a substance that is being trialed simultaneously on millions of people. In simple terms, if the vaccine harms you or renders you infertile you have no recourse. 

Recently a second strain of the virus has emerged, This is nothing new - viruses mutate. This is why there is a different flu strain each season. It has been a year since the first strain emerged and as viruses seem to be excellent timekeepers, its right on schedule for an upgrade. This is further going to throw a spanner into the vaccine works. Will the current vaccine work with the new strain or create other complications? If people have indeed contracted the original virus, will taking the vaccine have immune suppressing effects rendering them more vulnerable to other strains? Pregnant women and women of “child bearing age” have been warned by the NHS  not to take the vaccine because it may render them sterile or have deleterious effects on the foetus. But its ok to give this unknown quantity to the elderly or your child? I think not. 

What happened to freedom of choice? What happened to autonomy? What happened to informed consent? What happened to common sense? 
For me personally, the most disturbing part of this experience is how people I thought of as free thinking, intelligent individuals are simply kowtowing, going with the flow because they don’t want to be seen as outliers. It baffles me how so many people are afraid of voicing an opinion. It wasn’t so long ago that the Nazis used this kind of brainwashing and propaganda to commit genocide. And we are going down this path again with our eyes wide open. 


Back in early 2020 governments the world over were advised by the WHO to impose widespread lockdown measures in order to curb the spread of the virus. The media were so distracted with whether or not the virus came from a bat or a pangolin that no one thought to ask if these counter measures at controlling people was the best option for the economies of the world in the first place. No one gave any thought to the destruction that would ensue. How many people would lose their jobs, livelihoods and minds in the process. Because we trusted the people we vote for to do what is in our best interest.


The second-largest funder of the WHO is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which provides 9.8% of the WHO’s funds, effectively calling the shots! After Trump pulled funding, The World Health Organisation is now effectively owned by Microsoft and China. Bloody terrifying thought that is!


It is now too late to put the genie back in the bottle. For governments to admit that they acted without a full understanding of the facts or unable to foresee the chaos and destruction that would ensue, going back and admitting they were wrong will result in chaos, crippling class actions and people in power being forced to step down. There will be anarchy. Confidence in governments the world over has been severely compromised not to mention the unstable public option of giant pharmaceutical companies. 

The puppet masters at the WHO (Gates) is also a major shareholder in Pfizer. Incidentally the Gates foundation funded the development of the Pfizer owned sterilisation contraceptive Sayana, targeting specifically third world countries. At the risk of joining the ranks of the conspiracy theorists, it seems that the company who gave birth to computer viruses has also given birth to a means of enforced sterilisation. 

Getting rid of the elderly and ill, controlling those who are young and able though fear and ensuring that those who can have children are stopped in their tracks. The facts really do speak for themselves, but you can connect the dots?

Perhaps people do nothing and say nothing because they feel that their opinions don’t count? They they won’t be heard amongst the noise created by the media and the hysteria? People don’t speak up because they are afraid of what there peers may think of them. And this is why the greatest tragedies throughout human history happen. People who do nothing. People who say nothing. In the face of glaring evidence that the emperor is wearing no clothes, the average person waits for someone else to take action.  We are in a mess and in the hands of people who do not have anyones best interest at heart except for themselves and their own agendas. 


So what good can possibly come from this situation? Thankfully some have realised that their health is in their own hands and no one can save them except for themselves. If you take the steps to stay healthy - eat real food, get decent sleep, surround yourself with positive people and exercise - preferably in the sunlight, chances are you won’t even know if you catch a virus because your body is innately geared towards protecting you from getting seriously ill.


It has hopefully brought to light the logical realisation that if you aren’t feeling well, stay at home. Wash your hands and don’t sneeze on people.


With luck, more of us will wake up and realise that no vaccine or drug can save you from bad decisions. Giant corporations are not creating vaccines because they care about you, they care about their profits. If they engineered medicine for altruistic purposes they would be non-profits not multibillion dollar organisations. And perhaps more people will realise that governments and government institutions are controlled by the private sector who are the giants they are, because we, the public created them. 

We buy their products, whether the product is software, insurance, junk food or drugs. We created these organisations who are controlling the governments who are controlling us - with fear.  With hope more people we will start to see the self perpetuating, destructive cycle that we have come to think of as normal, or maybe not.


My greatest wish for you in 2021 who ever you are, wherever you are, is to wake up and take responsibility for you own health, your own choices and your own autonomy. Speak up when something doesn’t add up and stop feeding the fear.


https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4916

https://www.icd10monitor.com/false-positives-in-pcr-tests-for-covid-19

https://www.chiropractic.org/informed-consent-and-freedom-of-choice-on-vaccination-issues/
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/death-certificate-data-covid-19-as-the-underlying-cause-of-death/

https://sif.gatesfoundation.org/investments/pfizer/

https://www.devex.com/news/big-concerns-over-gates-foundation-s-potential-to-become-largest-who-donor-97377

#dontfeedthefear #covid #bill gates #microsoft #vaccine #pfizer #freedom #yourbodyyourchoice #think

[incarnateirony]

Hey dude! Do you have any recommendations for LGBTQ+ movies in the romance genre that have like a happy ending. I really don't care how old they are. I'm feeling the Gay™ hence I need the Gay™. You feel me?

HIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII NONNIE

First sorry for taking so long, not only did I have to timeline this :) but :) my computer :) froze :) after writing like :) 2 pages :) and I had to do it again :)

So anyway let it be said, the LGBT dialogue is one of osmosis and shared growth and awareness. Some of these films will be very poorly dated, but as you (thankfully) mentioned that them being old wasn’t a *problem*, expect a lot of old stuff. Because one of the most important things to have under your belt when talking about the LGBT media representation battle is the actual journey from A to B – be that incrementalization, subtextual inclusion, text-breeching features, outright evocative and groundbreaking films at the time (which is what MOST of this list will be) and an improvement in our dialogue; let us never forget that while tr*nss*xual is considered a slur and transgender is proper, tr*nss*xual was at one point the politically correct way to speak it – things like that breach in our growing understanding of the spectrum of human sexuality. 

I *WILL* disclaimer these aren’t all romance, so if you explicitly want romance, google them and take a look if it sounds to appeal, but I’m taking this as a general cinema history plug considering what a confused mess fandom conversation about LGBT history in film or modern text as applicable, accepted or not.

Wonder Bar (1936) (I wouldn’t really call this queer cinema, but if you have the time to watch it too, I think it was the first explicit mention of homosexual engagement even if it was fleetingly brief. You might even call it Last Call style. A blink and you’ll miss it plug that was still decades ahead of its time)

Sylvia Scarlet (1936) (Again, I wouldn’t call this queer cinema, but a lot of the community takes it as the first potential trans representation on TV due to the lead literally swapping gender presentation, even if the presentation is… not what we would modernly call representation IMO)

Un Chant d'Amour (1950) (Worth it for the sheer fact that it pissed off fundies so bad they took it all the way to the US supreme court to get it declared obscene.)

The Children’s Hour (1961) (also known as the 1961 lesson to “don’t be a gossipy, outting bitch”)

Victim (1961) (The first english film to use the word “homosexual” and to focus explicitly on gay sexuality. People might look on it disdainfully from modern lenses, but it really helped progress british understanding of homosexuality)

Scorpio Rising (1964) (Lmao this one deadass got taken to court when it pissed people off and California had to rule that it didn’t count as obscene bc it had social value, worth it for the history if nothing else)

Theorem (1968) (Because who doesn’t wanna watch a 60s flick about a bisexual angel, modern issues and associations be damned)

The Killing of Sister George (1968) (by the makers of What Ever Happened To Baby Jane)

Midnight Cowboy (1969) (…have I had sassy contagonists in RP make a Dean joke off of this more than once, maybe)

Fellini-Satyricon (1969) (AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA THIS)

The Boys in the Band (1970) (This… this… this made a lot of fuss. Just remember leather)

Pink Narcissus (1971) (a labor of love shot on someone’s personal camera)

Death in Venice (1971) (This is basically a T&S prequel but whatever, based on a much older book)

Cabaret (1972) 

Pink Flamingos (1972) (SHIT’S WILD)

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) (The title doesn’t lie, be warned)

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) [god I hope you’ve at least seen this]

Fox and His Friends (1975) (some really hard lessons that are still viable today, that just because someone acknowledges your sexuality doesn’t mean they give a shit about you as a person, and that some will even abuse the knowledge for gain)

The Terence Davies Trilogy (1983) (REALLY interesting history look it up, it’s sort of one of those “drawn from own experience” story short sets)

The Times of Harvey Milk (1984) (Documentary)

Desert Hearts (1985) (Pretty much the first film to put lesbianism into a good light as a true focus based on a novel from the sixties)

Parting Glances (1986) (the only film its creator got out before his death from the aids epidemic)

Law of Desire (1987) (two men and a trans woman in a love triangle, kinda ahead of its time)

Maurice (1987) (This one’s really interesting, cuz it was based on a book made about 15 years before it, but the book itself had been written half a century earlier and wasn’t published until after the guy died, he just thought it’d never get published Cuz Gay, so basically it’s based on a story written in like, the 20s finally getting screen time. It has a bittersweet but positive-leaning-ish ending without disregarding the cost that can come with it and even addresses class issues at the same time 100% DO RECOMMEND)

Tongues Untied (1989) (a documentary to give voices to LGBT black men) 

Longtime Companion (1990) (This one’s title alone is history, based on a NYT phrasing for how they talked about people’s partners dying, eg longtime companion, during the AIDS epidemic)

Paris Is Burning (1990) (Drag culture and related sexual and gender identity exploration as it intersected with class issues and other privileges explored in a documentary)

The Crying Game (1992)( I should correct this that I guess it’s more, 1992 considered, “SURPRISE, DIL HAS A DILL!” – I guess I really didn’t do that summary justice by modern language and dialogue as much as how people in the 90s were talking about that and that’s a my bad. LIKE. SEE, EVEN I CAN FUCK UP MY LANGUAGE I’M SORRY CAN I BLAME THE STRAIGHTS T_T) #90skidproblems – I guess I should call it a trans film. And this alone tells me I should go watch it again to recode it in my brain modernly rather than like circa de la 2000 understanding.

The Bird Cage (1996) (So you mix drag culture, otherwise heterosexually connected lovebirds, and then realize the girl comes from an alt-rightish house and the guy comes from a Two Dads Home and does cabaret, how to deal with the issues OF this conflict when it’s between you and your happiness, even if the fight isn’t even your own as much as it is that of the person you love. The answer is PROBABLY NOT to dress in drag and pretend to be straight, but what are you going to do? – while played for laughs we’d consider modernly crude, the fact that they even dared to approach this narrative was pretty loud)

The Celluloid Closet (1996) (Ever heard of the Vito Russo test for LGBT representation? This is based on a book by Vito Russo.)

Happy Together (1997) (Ain’t this shit an ironic name; a mutual narrative, via chinese flick, of hong kong ceding to china and an irrevocably tangled MLM pairing as a giant mirrored metaphor)

Boys Don’t Cry (1999) (one of the most groundbreaking films about trans identity at the time)

Stranger Inside (2001) (As easy as it is to recoil to the idea of “black gays in jail”, the film makers actually went and consulted prisoners and put a great deal of focus into intersectional african american issues that really weren’t around even in straight films at the time)

Transamerica (2005) (While it made a bit of a fuss for not casting an actual trans actor, it was one of the first times a big budget studio really tried to tackle it which really pushed us forward)

Call Me by Your Name (2017) (since I’ve apparently leaned really heavy old cinema throw in a modern one lmaooooo)

Also honorable The Kids Are All Right (2010) mention for the sake of the fucking title alone. 

And to any incarnation of “On the Road” by Kerouac, which

Was originally a book

Released a sanitized de-gayed edition because of the times

Later released the full homo manuscript

had a few film adaptations

Was one of Kripke’s founding inspirations for Supernatural once he left behind “Some reporter guy chases stories” and took the formula of Sal and Dean (and tbh later, Carlo) in a beat generation vibe gone modern as we know it today.

Reading both versions of this can actually help some folks currently understand that when you get confused over some shit (WHY IS CARLO SO UPSET? WHY IS HE ACTING LIKE AN UPSET GIRLFRIEND??? WHY IS HE SO JEALOUS AND SAD WHEN DEAN IS AROUND GIRLS???? WE JUST DONT KNOWWWWWWWWWWWWW) it’s because some big money asshat bleached the content, and sometimes, it takes a while for the full script to come out and again, surprise, it’s been GAY, they just didn’t want to OFFEND anybody. *jazz hands*

Now if you wanna go WAY WAY BACK, during 191X years, a bunch of gender role flicks came out like Charley’s Aunt, Mabel’s Blunder and the Florida Enchantment.

Also where is @thecoffeebrain-blog to yell about the necessity of watching Oz, for the next few hours? But no, seriously, just look into the entire LGBT *HISTORY* of Oz.

Beyond that though I’m gonna stop here cuz hi that’s a lot. I really don’t know how much counts as “happy ending” but if I had to give an LGBT cinema rec list, that’s it as a sum. I don’t really have like, a big portfolio of UWU HAPPY ENDING GAYS because 1. there aren’t a lot of those but 2. to me, it’s not about the ending, it’s about the journey. Be that in flick or through culture and history itself.

If you want more happy ending stuff, you definitely have to look at 2010+, but it’s not like we’re in a rich and fertile landscape yet so honestly just googling that would probably serve you better since I don’t explicitly explore romance genre or happy endings to really have a collection. LGBT life is hard and film often reflects that if we’re making genuine statements about it and really representing it, and we’re just now getting to a point of reliably having the chance at a happy ending. That or maybe someone can add like “Explicit happy endings” lists after this that has more experience in that subgenre.

Also, I can’t emphasize ENOUGH to remember what was progressive then is not what is progressive now, and frankly, what some people think is progressive now they’ll probably look back on what they said and feel really fuckin’ embarrassed. See: “It’s not text because by alt right homophobic dialogue, M/M sex isn’t gay if you do the secret handshake” MGTOW kinda crazy ass dialogue or parallel narratives they inspire that encourage self-closeting and denial based on the pure idea that being gay makes you somehow lesser, so It’s Not That. Like. I am. 99% sure. At least half of the people talking in this fandom. Are going to regret that the internet is forever. And maybe hope hosting servers end in the inevitable nuclear war that will annihilate this planet.

Also, edit: Speaking of mistaken dialogues and words aging poorly, I’d like to apologize from the poor description I rendered “The Crying Game” with, but that really goes to show how deep-seated the issue is we can so casually fuck up identifying a trans narrative as SURPRISE DICK IS GAY when we were all absorbing the content like 20+ years ago and HOW HARD it can be to de-code yourself from that kind of programming because here I am, writing a giant assed rep post and fucking it up because my brain hadn’t soaked that movie since Y2K. Guess what, time for me to go watch the Crying Game again.

#lgbtqia #representation #media #cinema history

[chicachicfashion-blog]

What Does Modest Fashion Really Look Like?

Pinterest UK tells me that searches for "modest style" are up 500% considering the start of this year. The worldwide modest style marketplace is already reportedly really well worth loads of billions and is about to scale up with the aid of using gargantuan proportions over the following 5 years. A professional on line save known as The Modist has simply launched—complete of certainly modest portions from an brilliant roll name of emblem names, and each form of lady is buying from the site, whether or not they discover as "modest" or now no longer.

When you step out of doors of this particular realm, it is simple to look that runways, cool manufacturers, and road fashion stars alike also are extraordinarily embracing huge shapes, covered-up silhouettes, and innovative layering. Modest style is everywhere. But what precisely is it? As a whole, this motion has been choosing up the tempo for nigh on a decade, however there is nevertheless a fogginess approximately what it manner to be a modest dresser, what it seems like, and the way it is affecting fashion-aware ladies proper now. Keep studying to find out extra.

So what does "modest style" honestly mean?

If there is one element all the ladies I spoke to agree on, it is this: There isn't anyt any one definition of what modest style manner, however it basically pertains to having a diploma of cognizance in terms of protecting up elements of your body. This chasm of statistics we can not categorize and pigeonhole contributes significantly to the mass marketplace's uncertainty of a way to talk with and deliver to ladies who need modest style. It also can make anybody who isn't always individually versed withinside the idea sense ill-ready to speak approximately it, however possibly confirming its ambiguity can assist to push the idea forward.

The fact is that everybody has their personal concept of what modest style manner to them.

"Modest style as a term, as a marketplace term, got here to occurrence withinside the mid-2000s, and this changed into partially due to the fact some of the manufacturers that first commenced up got here from designers and innovative marketers who have been themselves religiously motivated," says Reina Lewis, professor of cultural research at London College of Fashion, UAL. She defined to me that the net made it viable for savvy, underserved religio-ethnic people and companies to begin imparting each the goods and content material that they have been missing.

As Hana Tajima—the British-Japanese Muslim style fashion dressmaker who these days collaborated with Uniqlo on various modest-pleasant style—tells me, "The fact is that everybody has their personal concept of what modest style manner to them. And that runs along peoples' private alternatives of shadeation and fashion. It's one of these extensive concept that receives very slender inner the ones words."

So, in brief, modest style can describe various stages of protecting up on purpose. The selection may be because of religio-ethnic achievement or to gain a positive aesthetic and stage of ease as it isn't only a fashion this is tied to spirituality.

Why is the mainstream style enterprise speakme approximately it now?

First up, let's examine the number one stat that receives referenced time and again. According to the Global Islamic Economy Report, the Muslim style spend on my own withinside the UK is envisioned to reach $467 billion with the aid of using 2020. This is, in part, because of increasingly more millennial Muslim ladies—or Generation M—who've large quantities of disposable income, way to their new positions withinside the place of business in preference to the home.

Outside of records and figures, take a 2nd to reflect onconsideration on in which style is headed proper now: Social media has induced variety to come to be a mainstay—now no longer a gimmick—in the enterprise. It's additionally shone a mild on the (obvious) records that ladies of various shapes, faiths, colors, sizes, and backgrounds may be simply as elegant and may be similarly treasured customers.

The worldwide reaction on every occasion the modest style marketplace is addressed highlights simply how tons this faction desires to be spoken and catered to. When DKNY advertised a Ramadan series of present portions that have been appropriate for modest dressers in 2014, the click insurance changed into phenomenal. The equal is going for whilst H&M decided on Mariah Idrissi to function in a video in 2015. She have become the primary hijab-sporting version to function in one of the megalith's campaigns. She tells me her life "modified overnight. I changed into scouted in a shopping mall quickly after graduating college and [had been] making plans on running for myself in a innovative field, however I by no means predicted to be a version."

"That went viral inside minutes," Lewis says of the high-road campaign. "I assume the manufacturers worried have not found out the urge for food for this … how tons it'd get taken up. I assume Mariah were given extra traction and insurance than the alternative human beings worried in it, however the video changed into revolutionary in some of approaches in phrases of the way it offered social variety for style."

If I'm now no longer spiritual, can I be part of the movement?

Lewis explains that whilst the modest style marketplace is predominantly developing withinside the Abrahamic faiths (it truly is Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), consistent with census data, an increasing number of younger humans are figuring out as "spiritual, now no longer spiritual." With that during mind, it is pretty feasible that piety and modest dressing is a through-product, however yes, anybody can get dressed modestly—to any degree—in the event that they need to.

"I might make the factor that girls interpret necessities to get dressed modestly in lots of specific ways, and the manner they interpret it could extrade over their life. Within anyone spiritual denomination, there could be some of specific interpretations and practices," Lewis says.

"Interestingly there are a variety of non-Muslim girls who're interested in this aesthetic," Tajima says. "There appears to be an overlap of subcultures and girls redefining what femininity approach to them. It allows that the garments are inherently comfortable. Japan has been fairly receptive to my collaboration with Uniqlo. I suppose a variety of girls are not always conscious that the garments can be visible as 'modest style.' It's only a fashion that resonates with them."

Women interpret modest get dressed necessities in lots of specific ways, and the manner they interpret them can extrade over their life.

Is it a accident that the outsized silhouettes—just like the super-huge trousers or announcement sleeves—we are into are so widespread at the runways and in shops proper now? Fashion is usually a mirrored image of the cultural conversation, and nowadays there are extra alternatives than ever for dressing modestly. Lyst, the data-crunching style seek engine, has visible an boom in associated phrases such as "excessive neck" or "lengthy sleeve" growing through 40% and 52%, respectively, during the last six months. Meanwhile, the logo notes that even extra precise categories, such as "modest bikinis," are triumphing out over skimpier styles.

What's the largest false impression approximately modest style?

Once you placed apart the false impression that modest style is most effective tied to spiritual and religo-ethnic desires, among the professionals I tapped for data have been short to pressure that masking up would not need to equate to searching uninteresting or keeping off trends. Anum Bashir, a Dubai-primarily based totally influencer regarded for advocating modest style on her blog, Desert Mannequin, absolutely debunks the parable that modest style "cannot be on trend, or that designers do not layout for the modest dresser. … I love having a laugh with garments as of late: colors, prints, layers, etc. What I do not have a tendency to do is display an excessive amount of skin."

London is so multicultural and one of the style capitals of the world; the modest style scene right here is so colourful and alive.

Does Bashir's system sound acquainted to you? It's one which I share, but I've by no means purposefully sought out or aimed to take part withinside the modest style movement. The concept is some distance from restrictive, is of the same opinion Lisa Bridgett of The Modist, a newly released e-trade platform focusing on a luxurious amassing of the maximum modest-pleasant portions.

"Modest dressing is set choice, approximately fantastically styled portions that resonate with the wearer and offer an exceedingly style-ahead method to being in-season. At The Modist, we're loving the tremendous and enlightened responses to our style proposition that we've had from modest clothing for women , girls throughout faiths who put on garments to marry with their values. … In many ways, modest dressing presents extra possibilities for girls to get dressed stylishly."

Who have to you appearance to for modest fashion inspiration?

There's no person metropolis or platform that policies the modest style kingdom—and through now it is simple to look that is a lot extra than burqas and maxi dresses—however Idrissi explains that London is a quite satisfactory vicinity to start: "As London is so multicultural and one of the style capitals of the world, the scene right here is so colourful and alive. I sense we take style pretty seriously. However, I will say even though we've a few adventurous dressers, I sense a lot of us [modest dressers] have a tendency to get dressed as an alternative in addition however with our very own little cultural or non-public twist."

#modest clothing for women #modest dresses for women #modest clothing websites

[liam-93-productions]

Liam Payne, before the return of One Direction: music, fashion ... and Peaky Blinders?

All roads lead to the reunion of One Direction, the ‘boyband’ of the millennium. But when your solo parenthesis is joined by colleagues like Ed Sheeran or J Balvin, or when a firm like HUGO invites you to dump your creativity in their workshops, the rush evaporates, and between the success of the past and the success of the future appears The real success. And you go out on the cover of Esquire.

One day you believe something to write in Esquire and the other you finish an interview asking a 26-year-old person for his phobia of spoons. "To dirty spoons," they clarify. It is the type of previous information that you handle when you face a youth pop icon. Divided, like the arm of a starfish, from one of those boybands that simultaneously ignites and satisfies the adolescent fury of a generation at the planetary level. A nature documentary also evokes the way in which each part of that whole comes to life and dances across the media as far as possible from the other fractions, but always with an inertia like a universe that, however much it expands, irremediably it will contract in the future. “If we talk about getting back together, the question is not if it will happen, but when. And I don't know the answer,”confirms Liam Payne (Wolverhampton, United Kingdom, 1993), former member of One Direction and a spoon-hater. And he does it with more optimism than resignation. If both internal forces are not the same.

ESQUIRE: Do you have a WhatsApp group?

LIAM PAYNE: No, not really.

There is something fascinating in that intermediate time. Seeing round-trip groups such as Backstreet Boys, Take That or Jonas Brothers, this tendency to rise and fall is perceived, as if the solo success of one component leads to the failure of another. Call it quantum exchange of subatomic particles, call it bad generalized follá. But we could be before the exception. “We are the only band in history that has managed to get all its members to enter as soloists in the top 10 of the Billboard. If you think about it, it's a phenomenon.”

Liam fulfilled his portion of the milestone since his first single, Strip That Down, written by Ed Sheeran, whom he has known since he was 17. And now they repeat the formula (catchy pop + rapper) with Stack it up, their latest theme. “Ed has fun writing for me because he can throw messages that he doesn't get hit [in this case, the title refers to‘ stack ’money], and that’s cool. The best thing that can happen to you in life is for him to write for you, because he is literally the best lyricist in the world right now.” Between two songs another two collaborations were marked, one with Rita Ora for Fifty Shades of Grey and another with JBalvin, the Latin king Midas.

ESQ: Do you know who Rosalia is?

LP: No, not really.

Even without a full record in his five years of musical independence - he has just announced that it will finally go on sale on December 6 under the title LP1 - the singer has managed to maintain the idol status. With all that entails. The photo shoot comes with bodyguards and a generous troupe whose functions are perceived to underline a position in the industry that everyone knows elusive. Fragile. That can be reinforced or wobble depending on how certain controversies are surfed. (...) In fact, beyond the appalling professional parapet, he gives the feeling that he dominates his career with a very healthy tranquility and humor.

ESQ: Haven't you suffered in that transition? Because there are many artists who hit bottom when leaving their bands ...

LP: It was more difficult the first time the group took time, because it is hard to be accustomed to working so much, being, in addition, so young, and stopping suddenly. That is why there are many people who go through very difficult times when they have to retire.

ESQ: Has your perception of success changed since you were a soloist?

LP: Honestly, today I believe that success is based more on the idea of balance. Because there are times that you put too much focus on professional life and not enough on personal, and I had that inner struggle for a long time. Now they are balanced and I think I have never been so happy.

To that well-being contributes his capacity to sow the nebulous parenthesis of other experiences. Especially in fashion, thanks to his long-term collaboration with HUGO. Many of the garments worn in this report are from his own collection, whose design has been supported by great personalities. “One of the first friends I made in this world was Edward Enninful, the fashion editor of Vogue, and he takes great care of me. Another great friend is Kim Jones, the designer of Dior. He gave me the best advice: "This is like music: once you've had a success, you know what people want from you and everything becomes easier."

ESQ: You are also an image of HUGO's underwear. Is it more of a challenge for your physique or for your self-confidence?

LP: In 2019 it is not so much about showing off your body as it is about promoting that each one is as you wish. But I also did not want anyone to think that I am not posing in underwear, so I have worked hard. The gym is 90% of my work lately! The first photos with two fashion gods like Mert & Marcus have already come out and soon there will be more.

In addition to testosterone, Liam distills genuinely British irony and also a telegeny that brings him closer to another field to explore, the interpretation: “It requires that you focus entirely on it and I'm still too busy with music and fashion, but it's gone phenomenal in many castings and I feel that it is something good that is approaching.” In fact, as he explains in the header video, he was about to play a character in Peaky Blinders: "I had a meeting with the author of the series and I would have loved to do it, but it had to be someone a little older than me by the nature of the character, who was from my hometown, Wolverhampton." In this way, when the eternal return finishes closing the circle, this star will come to reunification with a round baggage. 360º, which Paquita Salas would say. Like the reflection of your face on both sides of a spoon. If possible, clean.

#liam payne #esquire spain #liam's interviews #hugoxliampayne #lp1 #22.10.2019

[ginnyzero]

Retelling Old Stories

I've written a book based on old fairy tales and legends and am currently reviewing the Shrek movies in Action Movie Friday. (Shrek 2 post coming next, I hope.) I thought I'd talk about retelling fairy tales, myths and legends.

Myths, fairytales, legends, these are the stories that are near and dear to our hearts. And let's face it, they're familiar, comforting and popular. Fairy tales such as The Sleeping Princess, The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast have been told over and over to young children for generations. These stories are oral traditions passed down from generation to generation and have strayed quite a bit from their horrific and sexist roots. So much, that outside of a few key points their original creators may not recognize them anymore.

These oral traditions form the basis of the hero's journey which can be found in high fantasy stories such as Lord of the Rings and Science Fiction stories, such as Star Wars. They've been satirized (Ella Enchanted, the movie), parodied (Shrek) and outright made fun of (Mirror, Mirror) and also taken far too seriously (Snow White & The Huntsman.) Just as much as they've been played straight (see the Elemental Master Series of Mercedes Lackey.) And they've been mixed together until almost unrecognizable. (The Princess & The Frog, Frozen, Once Upon a Time, the 500 Kingdoms also by Mercedes Lackey.)

The great thing about fairy tales and myths and legends is that they have a very low risk level. People are far more likely to pick up something to read of watch that is relatively familiar to them and that they know they already enjoy rather than a brand new concept they don't understand and aren't sure they'll like. Fairy tales are comfort food. People know they like them. And given a choice between a concept they aren't sure of and a fairy tale based media, they're more than likely to choose a fairy tale based media.

So, how do you go about retelling these fairy tales and making them fresh and new for your audience? This was a question I (sort of) asked myself when I started to write the Dawn Warrior. (Available in Ebook & Paperback.) How do I take Sleeping Beauty and make her different without relying on, say, what we know of her through Disney or from Grimm, not the TV Show. (Which honestly, isn't much in either case.) And make them partly relevant without losing making a good story?

Change the Roles:

What if the Princess really isn't the Princess? What if she's the bodyguard in disguise that's protecting the real princess from assassins? (The Decoy Princess, Dawn Cook) What if the Princess is also a spy? (The Princess Series Jim C. Hines) Maybe Prince Charming is actually an actor!

I mean, come on, in real life unless your Prince William and Harry and work for the British Royal Navy, royals don't really have adventures. (I wouldn't want to get on the bad side of Queen Elizabeth either.)

Or, maybe the Princess and Prince aren't really the good guys after all. Maybe it's the Big Bad Wolf or the evil stepmother or even the sea witch. (Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, Gregory Maguire) Or, to borrow from Hoodwinked, the Big Bad Wolf is really an investigative reporter trying to do an expose on Red Riding Hood. (I mean, she can't be all that sweet and innocent.)

A good example of this was a recent Sleeping Beauty movie that was in the horror genre. (Unfortunately I heard it was a really bad horror movie.) The Sleeping Beauty in the movie was supposed to be the damsel in distress and ended up being both the trap and the villain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdEo_t-iVbM

(I'll just leave this here.)

Change the Setting:

Fairy tales in SPACE!!! (Lunar Chronicles, Marissa Meyer) Okay, there aren't a lot of fairy tales in space. I think I saw another example on instafreebie the other day. In fact, there aren't many romances in space either. (I was listening to a podcast about an indie author who was doing this and she was the first writing romances set in the backdrops of aliens?) But, this is like Star Wars. Greek Myths in SPACE!!!! (Seriously, Star Wars is built around the classical hero's journey. The franchise even freely admits it in their authorized literature. I've got a book by Bantam called Star Wars: The Magic of Myth that goes through it step by step.)

This is one of the easier ways to make fairy tales seem more relevant and seems to be currently the most popular. Grimm the TV Show, Once Upon a Time (in Wonderland), The Harry Dresden Files, and Fables, all take fairy tales and legends and drop them into the middle of the modern world. I include Harry Dresden, not because he's playing out a fairy tale so to speak, but he's some sort of misguided Prince Charming type on his own hero's journey. The book Charming by James  Eliot, takes the character of "Prince Charming" plays it straight, and makes it a bloodline that is involved in some sort of knighthood charged with keeping the mundane world safe from the evil things that go bump in the night set in modern times.

Mercedes Lackey took a slightly different approach with her Elemental Masters series. She took fairy tales, played them straight, but set them in Edwardian times right up through the First World War. By doing so, she was able to show how the beginnings of the modern world like industrialization and rail roads and wars fought with machine guns instead of swords were effecting the world of magic and the magical creatures. (For instance, all the pollution made it easier for evil or nasty type elementals and creatures to thrive and good elementals and creatures that couldn't abide cold iron were dying off or going into hiding.)

Change the Genders:

Let's face it. Fairy tales are pretty sexist, no matter what your gender is. I had in the first draft of the Dawn Princess an entire rant by Roxana, who is a 'Beauty Asleep' about the differences between how a female Princess who is cursed to sleep and a male Prince is cursed to sleep and how neither tale does royalty any justice whatsoever.(Seriously, in the male version, when the Princess who had been sitting by his bedside took a nap, the clock should have reset, the Prince shouldn't still have sneezed and been woken by the maid.)

Maybe it's really Prince Charming asleep in the Castle and well, Beauty has to belt on her sword and gird her courage to get through the hedge and kill the dragon. Or, the tower bound male Rapunzel is intruded upon by a Pirate Princess who is looking for gold, not love. Maybe it isn't a brave little tailor but a brave seamstress! Or it is a male who is captured by a bunch of cannibalistic female bandits.

...

Okay, there is taking some things too far. (That story is terrible no matter what.)

Apply some Common Sense:

In fairy tales, things don't always make sense. I read them and go "why? why would they do that?" A lot of times Princes don't get punished for their ill deeds. Another Prince comes along, "saves" them and they go about their adventures without showing any sort of remorse for what they did in the first place. Princes don't become goose boys or shepherds or kitchen tweenies.(Or at least, not very often, I think Faithful John/Hans is about the only one I can think of.)

No, those punishments are reserved for Princesses who have been tricked into changing places with their maids and end up being goose girls or in the kitchen. (I can think of half a dozen variations of that tale.) And the Princess, instead of finding a nice baker or farmer to settle down with who appreciates her, instead figures out how to reveal her plight to the Prince who actually married her uppity maid/sister and seems happy with the maid/sister and once the maid/sister is out of the way, marries the Prince. (The Prince was tricked, happy to be tricked and the Princess took him anyways? That makes no sense.)

A really good example of this is the original and horrific Beauty Asleep tale. In the original tale, the King comes upon Beauty Asleep in her tower and rapes her, while she's asleep, repeatedly. In fact, he gets her pregnant with twins. The babes are born and he doesn't even take them with him! No. He leaves them with their sleeping mother. One of the babes gets hungry, as babies do! And sucks the thorn out of her finger that was keeping her asleep. Beauty wakes up. The Queen finds out about her existence. Tries to kill her. The King kills the Queen in turn and ends up marrying Beauty and bringing her and his twins to the castle.

Just what the ever loving hell?

It's good to be king?

No, really, the Queen should have taken Beauty's side. They could have killed the King for being an adulterer and ruled the kingdom together setting up the twins as the heirs. Female solidarity. Because the story as written is insane.

There's a post wandering about tumblr about swan maidens and selkies. And how awful the stories are about the men who take the swan maiden's cloaks and the selkies' skins to force these women to be their brides. One of the reblogs adds the caveat that it feels like these stories don't take into account the actual nature of swans and seals. Swans are pretty. They look graceful.

Swans are mean, they hiss, they bite, they're incredibly aggressive and they can break bones. Approach with caution. Don't try to steal from them. Don't try to pet them. Aggressive swan is aggressive. Okay. Anyone who steals a swan maiden's cloak deserves the punch in the face!

And seals, seals aren't all that nice either! Zefrank1 hasn't done a true facts about seals, but maybe he should. Male seals are called bulls for a reason! Elephant Seal bulls charge at each other when they fight. Leopard Seals are considered one of the ocean's more dangerous predators and take on whales and sharks. Seals train well to do tricks. Look,  just, don't mess with them because not only are they cute and have sharp teeth and claws, they're smart. Do you really want to mess with the woman who can steal all your nets and drive the fish away and beat you to a bloody pulp? Seal fights involve mud wrestling.

Add some reality to the stories. Give the actions of those involved real consequences. Change the personalities to actually reflect the animals they are sharing their bodies with.

Mash things together:

This is another popular tactic and TV Tropes calls it the "Fractured" Fairy Tale. Think how in Once Upon a Time, (spoiler alert) Rumpelstiltskin is also the Beast of Beauty and the  Beast and his father is Peter Pan. And he's the grandfather of the Truest Believer and thus the "father in law" of Emma Swan the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming. And that barely dips a toe into the confusing of Once Upon a Time Family relationships.

Mercedes Lackey also did a version of mixing up of fairy tales in her 500 Kingdoms. In the 500 Kingdoms, The Tradition is a form of magic that ties to make fairy tales happen no matter what type of tale they are and no matter if all the pieces are actually 100% correct. Fairy Godmothers are there to steer the tradition so that disaster doesn't strike constantly. (Because what if the Prince of the Cinderella tale was actually a Princess or well, a Prince who was too young, too old, or just liked other Princes.)

Fables does this as well. Prince Charming is the same Prince across Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. Sleeping Beauty ends up marrying the Beast in her second marriage. (Prince Charming is good at wooing, not staying.) The Gingerbread witch of Hansel and Gretel ends up being the witch who puts most of the tales in action across the Enchanted Forest. The last arc I read, Rose Red was making her own version of Camelot (and there was much trepidation about how that was going to turn out, probably badly.)

Grab a bunch of different stories that seem to work well together, stitch them together in a way that makes sense or seems fun. It's okay not to always tell the exact same tale.

Add Real People's stories:

Look, if you're going for a more empowered woman in your stories. There are plenty of women in history that were actually pretty awesome. And I'm not just talking about Esther from the Bible or Rahab. (Both pretty awesome ladies.) There were female pirates and female queens who outwitted and beat their male counterparts to be on the throne and to keep themselves out of jail. There are female scientists, female snipers and well, I'm sure if you look hard enough you can find something a woman did in real life that men get praised for more often.

In fact, one person go so fed up with the way fairy tale princesses are praised at places such as Disney, they created a site/book for girls about such heroines at Rejectedprincesses.com.

Youtube has videos labelled things like Top Ten Badass women from History you probably don't know about. (But if you'd read Rejected Princesses you actually might!)

So, don't be afraid to use some real world inspiration to give you ideas about how awesome your female characters can be.

And these are just a few ideas on how to take something old and make it something "new."

In the Dawn Warrior, I took a bunch of these. I applied some common sense. Changed the Princess' role. And really mashed some things together. But, I kept a medieval fairy tale like setting because I wanted to keep this series different from my other series, Heaven's Heathens MC, which is a light science fantasy that could read urban fantasy if you squint at it. (Or maybe it's the other way around.) Two series set in the modern/future world seemed a bit silly to me.

Mostly, my advice is if you want to retell a fairy tale or myth or legend, have fun with it. Take your ingredients, mix them up as needed and don't sacrifice your story for message. (Because really, that gets old very quickly.)

Whelp, now if you like fairy tales there are plenty of pieces of media in this post to check out. Happy reading/watching/researching!

#writblr #wrtblr #writing advice #writing tips #fairy tales #myths

[jjohnsonwriter]

Soft Targets

“Soft Targets and Crowded Places (ST-CPs), such as sports venues, shopping venues, schools, and transportation systems, are locations that are easily accessible to large numbers of people and that have limited security or protective measures in place making them vulnerable to attack.” - Department of Homeland Security (Securing 1).

The new film Joker came out October 4th in American theaters, and already there’s a shitstorm of controversy surrounding the film. For you math nerds, October 4th was Friday of last week, and I post these blogs on a Monday (the 7th). But the most opinionated articles from Vox and Vulture were both published on the 3rd (Lee 1). At least NBC had the decency to wait until the film had actually come out, publishing their article on the 5th (Bundel 1).

Before we go any further, I’d like to say now that this blog wont have any spoilers, but it will deal with the reaction and backlash to the film, and may talk speak very vaguely on the themes of the film.

But here’s my problem with this whole debate.

The movie is about a guy who’s (don’t worry no spoilers) let’s just say ‘struggling’. Someone who’s ‘fallen through the cracks’. Why are we more worried about the movie ‘creating’ more of these people and encouraging the worst of human behaviors than we are about what the film has to say? Maybe, instead of getting outraged about a movie, we could actually help people? No, that’s too crazy! That might actually make a difference!

Basically, in case you’ve been too busy living your life to sit around on the internet all day and follow the controversy, the film depicts (and I’ve seen it, so I’m not just talking out my ass here) a guy who’s got a lot in common with an ‘Incel’, or, an involuntarily celibate man who is part of a very loosely affiliated internet culture, and claims amongst its ranks terrorists such as Alek Minassian (A man who is accused of killing 10 people in Toronto on April 23rd, 2018), and Elliot Rodger, who killed six people before committing suicide in Isla Vista, California in May of 2014 (Elliot 1).

Basically ‘Incels’ blame the world (and mostly women) for their problems, chief among those problems, not getting laid, but other problems sometimes include financial problems, general social awkwardness and/or anxiety, and a lot of the time, not having any money (Louie 2). You know, money? That thing that pays for stuff? Like clothes, dates, a car, a place to fuck that isn’t your parent’s basement, and the fact that being unemployed or financially struggling can really cut into your confidence in the dating and/or hookup arena. Scientific evidence in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior also claims that on average women care a lot more about how much money a potential partner has than men do (Henderson 1). And yeah, I’m trans, and I acknowledge gay people are a thing, but this is a debate which centers around almost entirely cisgender heterosexual men.

Another big issue with the argument that I have with the people who’ve taken a stand against Joker is that I don’t think most of them have seen it. This is purely based on my own opinion, and the logic of the negative reaction that happened around the film before it was even released. But think about it: who would take to the internet, rave against the movie non stop, be part of a huge uproar, and then fork over the outrageous cost of a movie ticket to commercially support something they’re so outspoken against? 

The film had a very vocal fanbase, mostly young men. Surprise: an r-rated movie about a comic book villain has a mostly cis-male fanbase, which honestly my feeling is: good for them. I’m happy for people who get to feel happiness and joy. What kind of asshole is ‘anti-fun’? Well, in short, the most ‘woke’ among us, that’s who. And also, no, I’m not saying everyone in that group is an incel, because incels are probably like white nationalists: there really aren’t that many, they just know how to push the right buttons to get their message repeated over and over by a media system which really cares more about wagging the dog than following a story which will inform the public, so incels probably always look like a much larger group of people than they actually are.

Here’s a quote from a Vox article about the story written by Alissa Wilkinson who did actually see the film:

“the kinds of threats around this movie match, in a non-accidental way, a message that could be taken away from the movie — that violence is the logical answer to feelings of loneliness and despair” Wilkinson 1.

Ok, but are we going to ban or censor everything that ‘could’ be possibly taken the wrong way? I’m aware of the fact that this echoes the common argument we hear against gun control which goes something like ‘are we to ban everything that could be used as a weapon?’, but Wilkinson’s Vox review goes on to say: “By contrast, Joker is about a man who’s convinced that society has gone entirely mad, who explicitly believes in nothing and no moral code, and who becomes a folk hero for turning to violence as a result.” Wilkinson 1.

So why do we have to follow the man in this film as an example of moral decency, and how we should live our lives? It’s an ‘R’ rated film, meaning that anyone under the age of 17 must be accompanied by a parent or adult guardian (Moyses 3). The only people who should be capable of seeing the film are either those who are less than one year from being an adult, or someone who’s parent has decided they are mature enough to handle anything that happens in the film, and yeah, I’m sure some amount of unaccompanied minors sneak into the movie, but it’s a two hour movie, not a weekend at the Branch Davidians’.

Works Cited

Bundel, Ani. “ ‘Joker,’ starring Joaquin Phoenix, sparked an incel controversy because it’s hopelessly hollow.” Nbcnews.com. National Broadcasting Company,  5 Oct. 2019.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/joker-starring-joaquin-phoenix-sparked-incel-controversy-because-it-s-ncna1062656. Accessed 6 Oct. 2019.

“Elliot Rodger: How misogynist killer became ‘incel hero.” BBC.com, British Broadcasting Company, 26 Apr. 2018. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43892189. Accessed 6 Oct. 2019.

Henderson, Callum. “Science has proven that women care more about money when dating than men.” Vt.com, Jungle Creations, 16 Feb. 2018. https://vt.co/lifestyle/relationships/science-proven-women-care-money-dating-men/. Accessed 6 Oct. 2019.

Lee, Chris. “How Joker Became the Most Hated, Loved, Obsessed-Over Movie of 2019.” Vulture.com, New York Magazine, 3 Oct. 2019. https://www.vulture.com/2019/10/all-the-joker-controversy-and-threats-explained.html. Accessed 6 Oct. 2019.

Louie, Sam. “The Incel (Involuntarily Celibacy) Problem.” Psychologytoday.com, Sussex Publishers, 24 Apr. 2018. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/minority-report/201804/the-incel-involuntary-celibacy-problem. Accessed 6 Oct. 2019.

Moyses, Kendra. “What do movie ratings mean?” canr.msu.edu, Michigan State University, 27 Sept. 2017. https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/what_do_movie_ratings_mean. Accessed 6 Oct. 2019.

“Securing Soft Targets and Crowded Places Resources.” DHS.Gov. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 28 Jun. 2019. https://www.dhs.gov/publication/securing-soft-targets-and-crowded-places-resources. Accessed 6 Oct. 2019.

“Trial date set for Toronto van attack suspect.” theglobeandmail.com. The Globe and Mail Inc., 4 Dec. 2018. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-trial-date-set-for-toronto-van-attack-suspect/. Accessed 6 Oct. 2019.

#joker #joaquin phoenix #blog #controversy #controvercial #incel #mental illness #journalism #writersofinstagram #writers on tumblr

[psychologyforeveryone-blog]

The effects of improving sleep on mental health (OASIS): a randomised controlled trial with mediation analysis

Fun fact: This article is currently free for anyone on The Lancet! If you want to read it for yourself, you can get it here: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(17)30328-0/fulltext?elsca1=tlpr

TL; DR Version[i]

·      Researchers gave college students with insomnia a validated treatment, assessing rates of symptoms of mental illnesses throughout treatment and 12 weeks after treatment ended.

·      The authors focused on hallucinations and paranoia, but they also tested for symptoms of anxiety, depression, psychological well-being, and other symptoms of psychotic disorders (i.e. mental illnesses that involve a break from reality, such as hallucinations and delusions.)

·      Increased sleep was found to explain a large percent of decreased hallucinations and paranoia following treatment; participants in the treatment condition were also found to have better mental well-being and fewer symptoms of mood and anxiety disorders. This provides evidence that insomnia may be a causal factor in mental illnesses, not simply a symptom.

·      It is important to note that the authors did not provide evidence that this study can generalize to people without insomnia.

·      It is also critical to remember that the treatment used in this study is very close to treatments used to combat depression and anxiety—therefore, these changes could have been because of the treatment itself, not because of the increased sleep.

Media Analysis:

Reuters: Treating insomnia can ease depression and paranoia, study finds[ii]

I’m nervous about how much this article focuses on depression, over the issues the study treated as central. Depression was much more of a side symptom in this study, with the authors focusing mostly on psychotic disorders. Most of the analysis was done on hallucinations and paranoia, with only minor tests run on depression and anxiety scores. However, for the most part, this article is accurate.

LiveScience: Lack of Sleep May Be a Cause, Not a Symptom, of Mental Health Conditions[iii]

I wish the headline had been specific to insomnia, because this feels like an overgeneralization, but honestly this is one of the best articles on psychology that I’ve read. It was clear, concise, but didn’t leave anything out—if you’re going to read one article about this study, this is probably the one to read!

Daily Mail: Lack of sleep is linked to depression and anxiety: Rates of the condition fell by a fifth among insomniacs given therapy to help them rest[iv]

Oh boy. This article is exactly what you’d expect from a tabloid—it’s extreme, overstates results, and is a pretty clear example of bad science writing. First of all, nothing was diagnosed in this study, so there are no “rates of the condition” to fall. What the authors found was that the scores for anxiety and depression were around 20% lower in the treatment group. Also, about two lines under the headline, they write, “a study now shows it is probably the lack of sleep causing these issues and not the other way around.” First of all, “probably” is a big word to use following one study. Second, even if you were to take this study as gospel truth without replication or follow-up research, all this study could have found was that insomnia can cause some symptoms of mental illnesses. There are plenty of people without insomnia who suffer from mental illnesses (depression, in fact, can be diagnosed by either too little sleep or too much), so that sentence overextends the findings to the point where it’s basically a lie. The Daily Mail also doesn’t cite its sources, so it makes claims (e.g. “On any given night one in three people are struggling to get to sleep, and this is believed to get them ‘stuck’ on repetitive negative and mistrustful thoughts”) that could be true, but without a citation I can’t check what exactly they’re referencing. I could go on, but in essence, the Daily Mail is not an accurate source of science writing. Remember, even though it’s British, it’s still just a tabloid.

Full Summary:

Hypothesis: The authors were examining a long-standing debate in psychology, namely whether insomnia was the cause of other mental illnesses, or a symptom of them. The authors expected to find that decreasing insomnia would decrease symptoms of mental illnesses, providing evidence that insomnia is a driving factor in these disorders.

Methods: Participants were university students in the UK, age 18+, who showed strong signs of insomnia based on pretest screening. They were randomly assigned to one of two groups: treatment as usual [a] or an online Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) [b] for insomnia intervention. This was a 6-session intervention that included behavioral changes, such as relaxation training and increasing the amount of sleep at one time by restricting how many hours a person spent trying to fall asleep; it also included cognitive treatments, such as mindfulness [c] and restructuring unreasonable and maladaptive belief systems (such as expecting to get excellent sleep immediately.) The CBT was given through online videos, where participants also had access to tools such as sleep diaries and recordings aimed at relaxation. Participants were assessed before the study began, three weeks in, at the end of the intervention (ten weeks), and 12 weeks after the study ended (22 weeks).

The authors were primarily interested in measuring insomnia (using two scales), paranoid thoughts, and hallucinations. In addition, they measured number and intensity of nightmares, prodromal psychotic symptoms [d], mania, depression, anxiety, and mental well-being. Participants were also asked if they had a history of mental illness, if they used any mental health services, if they were in therapy, or if they took medication.

Results: This study had a high dropout rate, with approximately 50% of participants failing to complete the study. More participants dropped out in the intervention group than the control; 603 participants completed the final assessment in the intervention group, versus 971 in the control group. Most participants in the intervention group did not complete all of the videos either—while the authors did not specify how this broke down in the participants who were tested, only 18% of people in the intervention condition went through all six videos, while only 69% even watched one.

Despite these dropouts, the authors still found strong results. The treatment was effective, with 62% of individuals in the treatment group scoring below the cutoff for insomnia used for the study (in comparison, 29% of participants in the control group were below the cutoff after ten weeks—so some people certainly get better just based on time, but it is extremely unlikely that would explain all the improvement.)

However, the point of the study was not to validate the intervention—that has already been done. When examining the signs of mental illness tested, the authors found that based on the 10-week analysis, 58% of the change in paranoia and 39% of the change in hallucinations were explained by the participants’ increased sleep. In addition, while changes in sleep explained a large percentage of the changes in psychotic symptoms, changes in psychotic symptoms did not explain a large percentage of the change in sleep. Therefore, it appears that the increased sleep caused the decrease in symptoms.

While the authors did fewer in-depth analyses, they did find that participants who went through the full treatment had lower scores in depression, anxiety, prodromal psychotic symptoms, had fewer nightmares, and higher psychological wellbeing. In addition, these increases remained 12 weeks after the study ended. However, there was evidence that participants were more likely to meet criteria for a manic episode.

Concerns and Important Issues: To pick up right where we left off, the authors made the point that increased risk of mania based on self-reports does not necessarily mean the participants were more likely to be suffering from a manic disorder following treatment. Measures of mania include decreased need to sleep (which, if interpreted as “sleepiness,” would make sense if the participants were sleeping better), increased talkativeness and cheerfulness, and self-confidence. All of those could, in fact, reflect that the participants were simply in a better mental state following treatment—or it could be evidence of something dangerous. To be certain, more research would be necessary.

However, there was one issue the authors did not address—CBT, the form of treatment used for insomnia, is also the current standard treatment for depression and anxiety. To be fair, the CBT used here was aimed at insomnia, not other illnesses, but it’s possible that the lessons learned while working on insomnia were generalized to other issues the participants were struggling with. Mindfulness especially has been shown to decrease mood and anxiety issues,[v] suggesting that the increase in mental health following the treatment may not have been because of increased sleep but instead because of the treatment itself. It is also important to remember that the authors specifically excluded anyone who did not have insomnia, so we have to be careful generalizing these results to the population as a whole. The only thing this study shows is that sleep disorders contribute to mental illnesses—it does not necessarily provide evidence that increased sleep for people who are not suffering from insomnia would increase mental health.

That doesn’t mean this study isn’t valuable, even to a layperson. First of all, it suggests that people suffering from insomnia would likely benefit from CBT, even beyond their sleep disorder (I know it seems small, but having 62% of people improve following a treatment is pretty standard in current psychological interventions.) It also suggests that increased sleep might help people, even those without insomnia. Full disclosure, I am personally firmly in the camp that sleep is helpful to people who are struggling with mental illnesses, and there’s no harm in sleeping longer (to a point—I’m not advocating spending 12 hours in bed, and that could be a sign of depression in and of itself.) This is an important study, albeit perhaps not one as generalizable as popular media has made it out to be.

Jargon Definitions:

a.     Treatment as usual: a control group often used in studies surrounding debilitating mental illnesses, where the participants are not offered any new treatments but are allowed to continue using their previous treatments. It would be unethical, the reasoning goes, to force people to go off necessary treatments just for a study. Therefore, the researchers hope that random assignment to groups will do away with any systematic differences in pre-study treatment, therefore allowing people to continue their routines without that treatment affecting the results of the study.

b.     Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: a form of therapy in which issues are addressed through a mix of behavioral and cognitive changes (cognition is, in essence, mental activities—such as learning and processing information.) This sort of therapy has become the standard for anxiety and mood disorders, as well as many other mental illnesses.

c.      Mindfulness: nonjudgmental acknowledgement of thoughts, feelings and physical sensations. Often included in meditation.

d.     Prodromal psychotic symptoms: symptoms found before a psychotic disorder becomes diagnosable. As a note, “psychotic disorder” is the standard technical term for disorders involving a break with reality such as schizophrenia—I know it’s a loaded term, but that’s the language the field uses.

References

[i] Freeman, D., Sheaves, B., Goodwin, G. M., Yu, L.-M., Nickless, A., Harrison, P. J., . . . Espie, C. A. The effects of improving sleep on mental health (OASIS): a randomised controlled trial with mediation analysis. The Lancet Psychiatry.

[ii] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-insomnia/treating-insomnia-can-ease-depression-and-paranoia-study-finds-idUSKCN1BH379

[iii] https://www.livescience.com/60329-online-insomnia-therapy-mental-health-symptoms.html

[iv] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-4860076/Lack-sleep-linked-depression-anxiety.html

[v] Bluth, K., Gaylord, S. A., Campo, R. A., Mullarkey, M. C., & Hobbs, L. (2016). Making Friends with Yourself: A Mixed Methods Pilot Study of a Mindful Self-Compassion Program for Adolescents. Mindfulness, 7(2), 479-492. doi:10.1007/s12671-015-0476-6

#psychology #mental health #mental illness #mental disorder #popular psychology #insomnia #sleep #science #therapy #p4e

[mastcomm]

Your Thursday Briefing – The New York Times

Coronavirus deaths near 500 in China

The monthlong outbreak showed no sign of letting up. Chinese health officials raised the death toll to 490, while Hong Kong said it would now quarantine all arrivals from the mainland. Here are the latest updates.

The Chinese government has faced intense public criticism over its response to the outbreak. Its solution: renewed censorship, and directives to the media to be upbeat. Meanwhile, it has told doctors to consider treating the virus by mixing Western antiviral drugs with traditional Chinese remedies.

Further developments: Ten coronavirus cases were identified on a Japanese cruise ship, whose 3,700 passengers are now struggling with cabin fever under a two-week quarantine. Another cruise ship was being screened in Hong Kong because a few people on an earlier trip carried the virus.

Closer look: Chris Buckley, our chief China correspondent, surveyed Wuhan, the metropolis at the heart of the outbreak. Two weeks into a state-imposed lockdown, its empty streets echo with soothing messages from government loudspeakers. Dogs roam expressways, and the only crowds are in packed hospitals. Our drone footage captured the desolation.

Impeachment trial ends in acquittal

The Republican-controlled Senate acquitted President Trump of charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, concluding the third impeachment trial of a president in American history. Here is our live coverage.

Senator Mitt Romney was the only Republican to vote to remove Mr. Trump, saying the president committed “as egregious an assault on the Constitution as can be made.” No Democrats voted for acquittal.

What’s next? Democrats are already planning to continue their investigations, starting with a possible subpoena of John Bolton, whom the Senate did not call to testify. The former national security adviser claimed in a book manuscript that Mr. Trump conditioned security aid on Ukraine’s willingness to investigate the president’s Democratic rivals.

Big picture: Regardless of the acquittal, the impeachment inquiry and Mr. Trump’s own words produced a set of facts that is largely beyond dispute: The president pressured a foreign government to take actions aimed at his political opponents.

Trump makes his case for re-election

To Republican chants of “four more years,” Mr. Trump took credit for the robust economy and a “great American comeback” during his State of the Union address on Tuesday.

“In just three short years, we have shattered the mentality of American decline and we have rejected the downsizing of America’s destiny,” Mr. Trump said. Here are six takeaways from the 78-minute speech.

Bad blood between the president and Speaker Nancy Pelosi was on display all evening — including the moment she ripped up a copy of his speech.

In the decades after World War II, large areas of Europe went from being cropland to forest. That also means it’s ripe for wildfires. Above, hillsides scorched last year near the Spanish town of Cuevas del Valle.

Our reporter traveled to Catalonia to learn more about managing woodlands in a hotter, drier climate. “Climate change is changing everything,” a fire analyst said. “We’re trying to build some vaccination into the landscape.”

Here’s what else is happening

Iowa caucuses: The state’s Democratic Party released another tranche of results from its presidential nominating caucus. Here’s our live briefing, and the results so far. Pete Buttigieg is in the lead, with Joe Biden in a distant and potentially damaging fourth.

Turkey: Two avalanches, the second burying rescuers responding to the first, killed at least 38 people, with an estimated 10 to 15 still unaccounted for.

Snapshot: Above, a Sydney zookeeper with a platypus rescued after a dog attack. The shy, venomous, egg-laying mammal, found mainly along the east coast of Australia, is under threat from drought and wildfires wrought by climate change.

Math: A mathematician has rediscovered an ancient Babylonian trick for solving quadratic equations, among math’s biggest hassles.

What we’re reading: Two features on this history of vaping, one from New York Magazine and one from California Sunday. “They range from the early days, when vaping was a disruptive alternative to cigarettes, to the outbreak of a deadly lung disease,” says our briefings teammate Adam Pasick. “Both pieces serve to separate hysteria from fact, and examine how a lack of regulation led to disastrous unforeseen consequences.”

Now, a break from the news

And now for the Back Story on …

Fashion Week

New York’s Fashion Week is about to begin, to be followed by events in London, Milan and Paris. Our chief fashion critic, Vanessa Friedman, will be tweeting and writing from them all, until she returns from France on March 4. She sat down with Andrea Kannapell, the briefings editor, to talk about what the next month will be like.

Which week do you like best?

Traditionally the fashion flock hates Milan. But I actually quite enjoy Milan. I really like the food, the weather tends to be better and the schedule is usually more human. But for just the sheer material, it’s Paris, hands down.

Remember, you’re reviewing four to 10 shows a day for weeks. So I’m really happy to have something to think about, something of substance that I can agree or disagree with.

The really hard thing is when you get a commercial collection, and really, it’s just a great skirt. And that’s just four words, and you have 800 words to go.

What kind of substance are you looking for?

The shows are the only pure expression of the designers’ idea of their own clothes. They control the hair, clothes, makeup, music.

That means that they have to have an idea about women, their lives and what’s happening in the world — the problems this designer is solving for them.

What effect is the coronavirus having?

We just got an email from a young, new British designer who’s Asian, who produces his clothes in Shanghai. China just closed down his factory, and he can’t get his collection. So he’s not going to be able to have a show this season.

We’re going to be watching if Chinese models can come, if the Chinese clients who usually come do. And then what this means for supply chains and sales. The Chinese consumer is an enormously important part of these brands’ customer base. And if they’re not moving and they’re not shopping, it’s going to be a real issue.

Do you have a fitness plan before the shows start?

[Laughter]. Oh, no! Beforehand, I try to be “normal,” but once it starts, it all goes out the window. I have a terrible diet and literally zero physical fitness. Honestly, my diet is coffee, soda, champagne, bread, chocolate, and occasionally a green juice. Then I think, good, you’re doing something for yourself.

That’s it for this briefing. See you next time.

— Penn

Thank you To Mark Josephson and Eleanor Stanford for the break from the news. You can reach the team at [email protected].

P.S. • We’re listening to “The Daily.” Our latest episode is about President Trump’s State of the Union address. • Theo Balcomb, the executive producer of “The Daily,” has been named one of the 29 power players of podcasting by Business Insider. • Here’s our Mini Crossword, and a clue: Whale-obsessed captain (four letters). You can find all our puzzles here.

from WordPress https://mastcomm.com/your-thursday-briefing-the-new-york-times-12/

#Event

[euroman1945-blog]

The Daily Tulip

The Daily Tulip – News From Around The World

Thursday 28th June 2018

Good Morning Gentle Reader….  What a beautiful morning, crystal clear skies and a myriad of stars gracing the heavens, Ah! The joys of living in paradise... Bella and I elected to go a different route this morning.. or should I say a cat made it for us.. honestly, no matter which direction I take so long as I have Bella by my side I don't care.. we enjoyed the highways and byways of Estepona, seeing the lights of ships waiting to get into Gibraltar...the flashing lights of planes en-route to somewhere, it really doesn't matter, it all makes the panoply of life.. and as we walk back to the house and coffee I am reminded that the land I walk upon has been trod by Greeks, Romans, Moors, Jews, Phoenicians, Huguenots and Neanderthal man long before our feet touched the land...

THE SHORT HISTORY OF MOUNTAINEERING’S HOT YOUNG STAR…. He’d reached the summit. By the time he was 25, Canadian Marc-André Leclerc had quietly established a reputation as a climber who took the most perilous routes up mountains often known only to climbers because of their difficulty. But in March, he and American climber Ryan Johnson sent photos from the top of the sheer-faced Mendenhall Towers near Juneau, Alaska, and were never heard from again. Only their equipment was found, and it’s thought that an avalanche struck them, demonstrating that even the best mountaineers aren’t immune to nature’s fury.

'DON'T SWIM WITH WILD DOLPHINS' WARNING …. People have been warned to keep their distance from wild dolphins after a woman was photographed swimming with a cow and its calf. Boat skipper Jonathan Evans witnessed the incident at Ynys Lochtyn off the coast of Cardigan Bay in Ceredigion last month. He described the woman's behaviour as "selfish" and "unsympathetic". Ceredigion council said people should enjoy coastal activities but not disturb special wildlife and habitats. Mr Evans, from Dolphin Spotting Boat Trips, took photographs of the incident before intervening. He said: "It was a family with two kayaks - a mum, dad, little boy and little girl... they were within feet of the dolphins. "The mum was in the water and was pursuing the dolphin repeatedly." He was concerned the young girl was also going to enter the water so shouted over to the kayakers. "We needed to explain they were in a conservation area and it was against the law to swim with dolphins," he said. He later reported the incident to the marine protected area officer. "I have sympathy for the need for people feel to get close to these animals," he said. "I'm not the person to be lecturing about visiting dolphins when we run a boat trip business but they probably don't know the rules and it's worth going over to them and explaining the rules. " The Ceredigion Marine Code of Conduct asks water users to stay 100 metres away from dolphins and porpoises encountered at sea. Under the Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations 2017 it is an offence to deliberately disturb cetaceans. A spokeswoman for Sea Watch Foundation urged people not to closely approach bottlenose dolphin.

LOST CAT REUNITED WITH OWNER AFTER 10 YEARS…. A cat which went missing a decade ago has been reunited with its owner. Harry disappeared from Mark Salisbury's former home in Ipswich, Suffolk, in 2008 but last month he turned up at the Ipswich branch of the Blue Cross. The charity was told his elderly owner had died but after scanning the cat's microchip Harry was traced back to Mr Salisbury, who now lives in Gloucestershire. Mr Salisbury said he "could never quite bring myself to cancel the microchip". The ginger and white kitten was one of two Mr Salisbury got from a farm near Great Yarmouth when he was in his early 30s. "He didn't turn up one day when I was calling the pair of them in," he said. "His brother, who was always a hooligan, his behaviour changed markedly - he was very shy, wasn't keen on going out and became very clingy." After searching for the lost kitten for more than a year, Mr Salisbury almost gave up hope when he moved out of the area but could never bring himself to cancel the microchip. "Every time I moved home I would email the firm and update them," he said. "But after 10 years, you think that's it and you make peace with that." Mr Salisbury said he was "surprised" and "so happy" to find out his cat had been found in May.

ANTARCTICA LOSES THREE TRILLION TONNES OF ICE IN 25 YEARS…. Antarctica is shedding ice at an accelerating rate. Satellites monitoring the state of the White Continent indicate some 200 billion tonnes a year are now being lost to the ocean as a result of melting. This is pushing up global sea levels by 0.6mm annually - a three-fold increase since 2012 when the last such assessment was undertaken. Scientists report the new numbers in the journal Nature. Governments will need to take account of the information and its accelerating trend as they plan future defences to protect low-lying coastal communities. The researchers say the losses are occurring predominantly in the West of the continent, where warm waters are getting under and melting the fronts of glaciers that terminate in the ocean. "We can't say when it started - we didn't collect measurements in the sea back then," explained Prof Andrew Shepherd, who leads the Ice sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise (Imbie). "But what we can say is that it's too warm for Antarctica today. It's about half a degree Celsius warmer than the continent can withstand and it's melting about five metres of ice from its base each year, and that's what's triggering the sea-level contribution that we're seeing," he told The Daily Tulip.

FRENCH JOGGER DETAINED AFTER CROSSING US-CANADA BORDER…. A young French woman who went for an evening jog along a Canadian beach spent two weeks in US immigration detention after straying across the border. Cedella Roman, 19, who was visiting her mother in British Columbia, decided to run along the beach that leads to Canada's border with the United States on 21 May.Ms Roman told Canadian media she turned on to a dirt path for a few metres as the tide rose, and stopped to take a picture before retracing her steps. She was then confronted by two US border patrol agents who arrested her for crossing into Blaine, Washington. "He started telling me that I had crossed the border illegally and I told him I really did not do it on purpose," Ms Roman told Radio-Canada (in French). The French national thought that she might be given a warning or, at worst, be fined. "I did not think they would put me in jail," she said. But to jail she did go, as the officers took her more than 220km (136 miles) south to the Tacoma Northwest Detention Center, a privately run immigration prison in Washington state. With no identification on her and just the clothes she was wearing, Ms Roman started to realise the gravity of her situation. "They asked me to remove all my personal belongings with my jewellery, they searched me everywhere," Ms Roman told the Canadian broadcaster CBC. "Then I understood it was getting very serious, and I started to cry a bit." She said she was held in a room with about 100 other people. "We were locked up all the time and in the yard there was barbed wire and dogs," she told French news agency AFP. "We tried to help each other, there was a good atmosphere. "Seeing people who had come from Africa and elsewhere locked up for trying to cross the border, it put my experience into perspective." She was allowed to contact her mother, Christiane Ferne, who came to the detention facility with Ms Roman's passport and work permit. But US officials would not let her leave until Canadian immigration authorities first confirmed she was allowed back into the country. Both sides eventually agreed she could return to Canada, but only 15 days after Ms Roman first set off on her jog.

Well Gentle Reader I hope you enjoyed our look at the news from around the world this, Thursday morning… …

Our Tulips today is rich and royal…

A Sincere Thank You for your company and Thank You for your likes and comments I love them and always try to reply, so please keep them coming, it's always good fun, As is my custom, I will go and get myself another mug of "Colombian" Coffee and wish you a safe Thursday 28th June 2018 from my home on the southern coast of Spain, where the blue waters of the Alboran Sea washes the coast of Africa and Europe and the smell of the night blooming Jasmine and Honeysuckle fills the air…and a crazy old guy and his dog Bella go out for a walk at 4:00 am…on the streets of Estepona…

All good stuff....But remember it’s a dangerous world we live in

Be safe out there…

Robert McAngus #travel #news #blog #love #immigration #Spain

#robertmcangus #robert mcangus #news #blog #travel #love #spain

[vrheadsets]

VR vs. Agitos & Agitation

Hello VR vs. readers, November is here and now that we’ve hit the 6th (at the time of writing) and the UK’s annual excuse to set things on fire and shoot off things that go boom is over and done with for another year, we’ve all got to realise time is running out on 2017. If you had planned anything to be done by the end of the year, it’s time to go up several gears.

For a number of industries that means crunch time and then some, if you want to ship your new product in time for the festive rush. You can’t sell a present if it’s not present – if you see what I mean. For us at VRFocus we’ve a number of things on our minds ourselves. Plans that need to be enacted, various irons in fires that we should probably check on, etc. All manner of bits and bobs really, and that’s not including the usual daily flood of news stories and features to keep you up to date and informed.

Personally, I’ve three things on my mind at the moment as we move into the final part of the year. The first is my houseguest I have with me for the next month, frankly I’ve forgotten what living with someone is like. Your schedule is no longer entirely your own for a start. Things need to be shared and time suddenly becomes a priority. Secondly, as you know, we (that is the VRFocus staff) aren’t all in the same place and speaking from personal experience it seems as soon as November came along the tens digit in the Celsius value decided to fly south for the winter. My poor little bedroom office is not exactly the best heated thing in the world and I’m now in multiple layers with the tendons in my fingers hurting from the sheer chill.

The third thing is the topic of today’s column, and something I referred to at the end of last week’s piece. Much as people don’t entirely know what augmented reality (AR) – or virtual reality (VR) too for that matter – is by definition, those that profess an interest sometimes aren’t particularly well informed about the reality of what it can or could do either.

One of my jobs at VRFocus is to keep a watching brief on everything being discussed to do with VR and AR on Twitter, and as such I’ve got a feed dedicated to each. A lot of the time it is not the happiest of tasks. But there are the odd golden nuggets of info that get dredged up in the search once you’ve sifted through all the bot posts and porn updates. No, I really did not want to know you could insert device A into socket B. Especially when socket B is in person Z. (Oh god, it’s a GIF, make it stop someone!)

It was through this that I came across a tweet last week that actually stopped me in my tracks for several minutes whilst I tried to get my head around what they were suggesting and all the things intrinsically wrong with it. It was, quite simply, the stupidest thing I’d read on Twitter that week. And considering the ground that usually covers, boy, that’s quite something.

The tweet came from one Patrick Nally, described on Wikipedia as “British entrepreneur and specialist consultant, widely acknowledged as the ‘founding father’ of modern sports marketing”, who has previously been involved in the International Olympic Committee and FIFA. He has some opinions on how ‘new media’ will transform things and has talked before about how it can, and will, change the way people will watch sporting events. Or “how the end user consumes the product” as a marketer would probably say.

Mr. Nally was responding to another tweet, one from Nick Butler of insidethegames.biz, about the lack of ticket sales for the 2018 Winter Olympic Games which is being held in PyeongChang in South Korea, 30 years on from South Korea’s last Olympics, the Summer Games held in Seoul. Only 0.2% of tickets have been sold for the event, according to the report, and it may not have Russian participation either.

“Could it be cancelled for lack of interest, and save money?” Mr. Nally mused. “Create through augmented reality an eSports equivalent and get a bigger audience.”

First of all… what? Second of all….what? And I’m quite prepared to have “what” be third through fifth or sixth of all as well. I honestly could not believe what I was reading at the time, and I’ve had to read it again a few times here before writing about it just to make absolutely sure I’m not getting the wrong end of the stick. We should apparently cancel the Paralympics to make way for an AR based eSports games. Because money.

Just what is this man blathering about? Firstly, no you don’t cancel the Paralympics just because it isn’t maximising the monetisation. What in the blue hell kind of suggestion is that? Secondly, you do not replace it with something in eSports – how is that replacing it at all? (If you are even open to replacing it with something equivalent for those with disabilities.) Make something new for eSports if you like, but I’d imagine even eSports most diligent supporters would say it wasn’t ready for something at the level of the Olympics. Then we get to AR and oh boy where do we start?

Well, unfortunately as great as AR and VR are they still require the ability to see.  We’ve discussed this before but you want to replace something that celebrates disability that would be discriminatory against those with a disability relating to their eyesight? The Paralympics is a global event, when they talk about the Olympics they talk about “the Olympic family” because it’s all nations together. eSports is not anywhere near that level yet, but neither is AR – the AR platform is still being developed. Especially as a broadcast platform. Google may have showcased some of the capabilities of ARCore by showing off League of Legends but that does not equate to something that will be carriable in all markets. It’s just not ready. Especially not for what Mr. Nally thinks it can do.

Both AR and VR will have their roles in major sports events going forward, don’t you worry about that, but it will be as a platform and not the platform. In fact, immersive technology is already part of the Olympics, with mixed reality (MR) being used at the PyeongChang event! But it cannot do everything and to be perfectly frank nor should it. VR and AR are not a technological catch-all solution, nor are they something you can throw out to make yourself look like you’re being cutting edge. (FYI nor is the word ‘blockchain’ for that matter.) Something AR cannot replace the Paralympics. You cannot replace the Paralympics with an AR anything; just like you cannot replace it with a VR anything. Moreover, you shouldn’t even be considering the idea of replacing the Paralympic Games with anything in the first place because what the heck is wrong with you if you are!?

Mr. Nally, you may know sports marketing but you do not know technology – or apparently what the spirit of the Olympics is, which alone is disconcerting considering your involvement in it.  It’s not uncommon for us to look at the developing world of immersive technology going on around us and think, well let’s have a degree of common sense about this.

This is the first time I’ve had to couple that notion with ‘come on, have a heart’.

  from VRFocus http://ift.tt/2zl51Nq

#VRFocus #vr #virtual reality #canada

[newstfionline]

For foreign reporters, hints of ‘House of Cards’ in ‘Trump Show’

Linda Feldmann, CS Monitor, July 14, 2017

WASHINGTON--Sean Spicer, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller--all are players in the palace intrigue known as the Trump White House. And they’re all household names ... in China.

Chinese TV viewers can’t get enough of the “Trump Show,” and coverage of America in general, says Ching-Yi Chang, White House correspondent for Shanghai Media Group.

“They’re interested in everything--your entertainment, your politics, how your system functions,” Mr. Chang says. Chinese people “very much enjoy ‘House of Cards,’” he adds, by way of explanation.

But if any parallels between the Netflix drama and real life are a bit overdrawn--even in a week of stark revelations in the Trump-Russia saga--there’s no doubt that the Trump presidency has gripped the imagination of a global audience.

And as with their American counterparts, foreign correspondents who cover the White House call it the story of a lifetime--profound in its implications for their home countries, and a fascinating window into the experiment called American democracy.

The story isn’t just about a flamboyant businessman who improbably winds up in the White House, and sends a legion of investigative reporters into high gear, however. It’s also about the small towns and cultural diversity of a vast nation.

Like France’s Alexis de Tocqueville and Ilf and Petrov of the old Soviet Union, international observers have long found America an endlessly fascinating subject for study and exploration. When Akiyoshi Mitsuzawa, a reporter for the Japanese newspaper Seikyo Shimbun, came to the US recently on a two-week reporting trip, he spent only a day in Washington and more time in the middle of the country.

Probe more deeply, and members of the foreign press corps in Washington marvel at Americans’ abiding sense of patriotism as they salute the flag, sing the national anthem at ballgames, and thank military veterans for their service.

Branka Slavica, US correspondent for Croatian TV, says her countrymen are impressed that, after 241 years, America “still celebrates its birthday in such a beautiful way.” She went to the National Mall on July 4 to interview Americans who had come from all over the country to watch the parade and the fireworks.

“People were really, honestly excited about the Fourth of July,” says Ms. Slavica, who has been based in the US for 12 years. “They are every year. It doesn’t matter who is the president.”

Among the foreign correspondents based in Washington, many escape the capital when they can--out of their own curiosity and their bosses’ desire for coverage that captures the richness of America.

“We try to look at the world and America from a bit more of a helicopter perspective” than the beat reporters in Washington, says Jorgen Ullerup, US correspondent for the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. “We go to a lot of places where people are crazy about Trump.”

Mr. Ullerup and his wife just spent a week in Kentucky looking into the opioid epidemic. Ullerup has also spent time with a fundamentalist snake handler in Tennessee, and visited the Nevada ranch of the rebellious Cliven Bundy (who, Ullerup discovered, has Danish ancestry).

But Trump is like a magnet, says Ullerup. “I travel the country to do other stories, but somehow it always comes back to Trump.”

“Today I did a correspondent’s letter about staying at the Trump hotel in Las Vegas,” he explains. “I’ve done a whole lot of Russia stories. Yesterday I wrote about the GOP and health care... The other day I wrote about Spicer.”

Not that he much minds. President Obama had gotten kind of boring. When Ullerup first arrived seven years ago--long before a President Trump was on anyone’s radar--he was struck by how divided America was. In Europe, Mr. Obama was seen as a superstar, but here, Ullerup found “everybody was blocking him.”

“In Europe, people are a little bit surprised that there’s so much negativity about Obama, because it looked like he had gotten America out of the economic crisis much faster than Europe,” Ullerup says.

“What we didn’t focus on was that people had felt forgotten, that their wages didn’t rise,” he says. “People were talking about the unemployment rate going down, but paying less attention to the people who were leaving the labor market.”

Today, he says, America seems more divided than ever. Trump’s campaign talk of NATO as “obsolete” only added to Danish (and European) anxiety about US dedication to the alliance. Ullerup speaks of a recent trip to Virginia Beach for Warrior Week, in which 35 Danish veterans from the Afghan and Iraq wars participated.

“When they came into a restaurant, people would clap or say, ‘Thank you for your service,’” he says. “That never happens in Denmark.”

Ullerup rarely makes it to the White House briefing room. But for other foreign correspondents, being on scene is where it’s at.

“In the first few months, it was a bit chaotic,” especially compared with the orderly and opaque Obama White House, says Philip Crowther, White House correspondent for France 24 TV since 2011.

Mr. Crowther says he’ll never forget the first full day of Trump’s presidency, when Mr. Spicer came out and “literally shouted at us” about the crowd size at the inauguration.

“The podium was way too big for him,” Crowther says. “The next day, I saw them wheeling it out of the West Wing, and replacing it with one that would suit him better.”

During the campaign, foreign reporters were shut out of Trump campaign events, and they feared their White House press passes would be deactivated after Trump took office. That didn’t happen.

Crowther just finished a year as president of the White House Foreign Press Group, a group of about two dozen foreign correspondents from all over the world committed to maintaining a daily presence in the White House.

“You basically have to remind the White House that you’re there,” says Crowther, a native of Luxembourg with British and German citizenship.

Today, foreign reporters get called on at briefings, as they did under Obama. Though with only one seat in the briefing room reserved for foreign press, most are left standing cheek-by-jowl in the cramped space. But they’ll take what they can get.

German radio correspondent Sabrina Fritz is packing up to leave after six years in Washington. And like her foreign colleagues, she is struck by the evolution she has witnessed.

When she first arrived in the US, Ms. Fritz says, the country seemed “very open to everything”--gay marriage, people of other religions, fighting climate change, more vegetables at schools.

“I liked this spirit--all those very, let’s say, European values,” she says. “You have to pay here for your plastic bags, and I thought, wow, a lot of things are changing.”

Over time, Fritz saw that nothing is as simple as it seems. She has traveled the country, talking to workers involved in fracking in North Dakota and cowboys in Wyoming. Like many reporters, she read “Hillbilly Elegy,” the J.D. Vance memoir that offers a window into the lives of the white underclass.

Fritz also made multiple trips to Detroit, and saw a once-great city begin to revive. For her, Detroit’s nascent comeback reflects a glass-half-full attitude that is quintessentially American. “You are a nation of survivors,” she says.

Still, she worries about the future of US-European trade, and about Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate accord. “There’s a danger that the US will fall behind, and become more isolated.”

Is America still a beacon of democracy, as it likes to see itself? TV reporter Chang smiles and quotes “House of Cards” character Frank Underwood: “Democracy is so overrated.”

Chang grew up in Taiwan, “a very vibrant democracy,” he says. “But there are always drawbacks to democracy.”

Sometimes “the people” make the wrong decision, he says, pointing to UK citizens’ decision to leave the European Union. In Washington, expansion of the metro system has been chugging along slowly for years. In China, a project like that would be finished in six months, he says.

Others point to the transparency of the American system as admirable. Slavica of Croatia marvels at the televised open hearing last month of James Comey, the fired FBI director.

“I also love confirmation hearings,” she says. “Whoever the president chooses has to go through a public hearing. That’s a nice test.”

#Trump #Trump administration #foreign correspondents in US #foreign reporters

[workreveal-blog]

UK gamers: more women play games than men, report finds

New Post has been published on https://workreveal.biz/uk-gamers-more-women-play-games-than-men-report-finds/

UK gamers: more women play games than men, report finds

A brand new look at into British gaming behaviour has confirmed what many industry watchers were staring at for years: the stereotype of the teenage boy gambling on my own in his bedroom is well and honestly lifeless.

Based on interviews with four,000 United Kingdom citizens, the studies asserts that women now account for fifty two% of the gaming target market, up from forty nine% three years ago. The study, which turned into commissioned by using the Internet Advertising Bureau, also revealed there at the moment are greater human beings over forty-four years old playing games (27% of the audience) than children or teenagers (22%). The gamer audience reportedly stands at 33.5 million Britons – 69% of the populace.

women

So there are more women gamers than men players who play gamesThe surge in gaming among new areas of the populace is intently associated with the rise of the telephone, which has made games available to a much wider audience than committed consoles or Pcs. Cellular puzzlers like Candy Crush Saga and Angry Birds are unfastened, intuitive and on hand, requiring neither the mastering time, nor the rate, of conventional “center” games reports. The file claims that 56% of lady interviewees over forty-four have played Cellular puzzle games, which emerged as the maximum famous gaming genre overall, ahead of conventional action adventures and shooters.

Furthermore, 54% of survey respondents referred to their cell phone as their preferred gaming platform – 25% of whom admitted to gambling games on it every day. Smartphones were accompanied by way of computers (fifty-one%), consoles (45%) and drugs (44%).

“The Net and Mobile devices have modified the gaming landscape forever,” said Steve Chester, Director of Facts and enterprise Programmes at the Internet Advertising Bureau. “They’ve brought down the barriers to access, making gaming a ways more accessible and opened it up to a whole new audience. In the past you had to go out and purchase an expensive console and the discs on top to get a first rate enjoy, now you may only download a loose app.”

However, the stereotype that lady gamers are fascinated almost entirely in free telephone titles is examined by using the Statistics. Forty-seven% of girl gamers polled had played a disc-Primarily based game In the remaining six months, and sixty eight% had played a web game. Fifty-six% of lady game enthusiasts have played on a console.

In phrases of gaming time, 8-15-yr-olds play for longest, racking up 20 hours of gaming a week. However, the average Briton spends six hours consistent with week gambling video games, which, in keeping with the document, is “directly over 11% in their 52 hours of media consumption every week – the identical percentage accounted for via social media and barely much less than being attentive to music (14%)“. The hours among six and eight In the night are the maximum famous for gaming.

Even though the general public are playing on smartphones, game enthusiasts are apparently still playing for longer on conventional structures. in line with the observer, the everyday gamer makes use of 3 one-of-a-kind gadgets, and searching at share of gaming time, consoles account for 30%, accompanied by using computers (24%), smartphones (21%) and capsules (18%). The most time ingesting forms of recreation are on-line-focused titles like Global of Warcraft and make contact with of Obligation – those take up 47% of gaming hours, in comparison to smartphone apps (23%) and disc-Based video games (22%).

gamer

In spite of a well-known pass Inside the enterprise towards digitally allotted games – commonly via telephone, Pc or console app shops – disc-Based entirely video games are nevertheless selling. 29% of adults brought A new sports disc Inside the closing six months, and 21% had bought a second-hand recreation.

The survey, entitled “Gaming Revolution” and finished with the aid of independent research agency Populus, also regarded into in-recreation Advertising. Regularly a difficult proposition in console video games, where onscreen ads are often visible as invasive, the brand new technology of unfastened-to-play video games has changed attitudes. sixty one% of respondents said they may be glad to peer advertisements in games if it makes them free; they regularly occurring 1.7 commercials every 30 minutes in a free play – two times as excessive as in paid games.

Even as “hardcore” gaming is sincerely nonetheless rooted in its conventional person base (gambling video games is considered the maximum entertaining media amongst men aged sixteen-24), what the examine suggests is a widening audience who are exploring video games via new platforms, thanks to the proliferation of new structures. The notion that a quarter of all game enthusiasts are now over forty-five-years-old may also nicely have interesting ramifications for game layout going forward.

But in line with the IAB, one of the most thrilling discoveries via the 4,000 surveys and 20 in-depth interviews that contributed to the findings, turned into the immersive nature of the medium. Researchers determined that whilst Uk game enthusiasts are gambling, they provide their full interest.

“We have been just amazed by how captivated consumers are via the gaming surroundings; as soon as they’re gambling, they are completely ‘Inside the sector,’” said Chester. “We listen loads approximately how all and sundry is Always multi-tasking however the study suggests that games are a completely unique and engaging environment which requires human beings’s complete and utter attention.”

A take a look at published on Wednesday by way of the Internet Advertising and marketing Bureau famous that 52% of the gaming target market is made of girls. That’s right – the general public of people gambling games are women.

Does this marvel you? It shouldn’t. Three years in the past that determine turned into forty-nine%, which is hardly ever an unfortunate minority. Girls have Usually performed games, and in current years the growth of the Mobile video games industry mainly has been driven by a woman consumer base.

The stereotype that games are an interest for adolescent boys is a long-lasting one and one that is perpetuated with the aid of the aggressive advertising and marketing of many massive-finances games.

What will we suppose while we think about a video game? most probably a multimillion dollar console name dripping with machismo and bristling with weaponry. Yet the reality is that the most famous gaming device today is the phone, and the most prominent genres are puzzle, trivialities and word games. less Name of Duty and greater Words With Pals.

Now, there might be many that reply to this shift In the marketplace with the objection “But those aren’t proper video games”. Mobile video games, unfastened-to-play games, social video games – all video games which, surprisingly enough, appeal to ladies in droves – are considered one way or the other lesser via many Within the “conventional” gaming Global.

play

Look at the dismissive responses to the wildly worthwhile Cell sport Kim Kardashian: Hollywood – it’s hard to separate judgments of the game itself from experiences of the kind of person that performs it. It’s no mistake that the Telegraph put its evaluate of the sport Within the “ladies’s Existence” section rather than “Tech”.

Whether or not you believe you studied it’s any right or now not, the sport appeals to a large range of games. I can’t help However sense that part of its appeal lies in allowing players to pick to be male or female, gay or directly. In that sense, it’s more welcoming and progressive than the vast majority of games. Inside the beyond few years, the very belief of what a game is has broadened to include a diffusion of studies which are on hand to a wider target audience than the typical blockbuster console identify, and that could only be an excellent aspect of an industry which has struggled to place itself in mainstream lifestyle. Whilst hardcore game enthusiasts and the enterprise argue about Whether these video games are “proper” or no longer, absolutely everyone else is gambling them.

Which begs a broader query: are new women playing Cell games because ladies are more interested in Mobile games? Or is it because they were instructed, over and over again, that “right” games aren’t for them? That, more extensively, video games aren’t for them?

Video games with girl protagonists are nonetheless Inside the minority, or even being able to play as a woman is regularly nevertheless considered an non-obligatory more by using builders and publishers. (And allow’s no longer even get into how games underserve human beings of color, LGBTQ people and other minorities.) Notwithstanding the fact that girls make up the general public of the gaming audience, the quantity of ladies running Within the video games industry stays shockingly low – most effective 12% of game designers in Britain, and 3% of all programmers are girls. The number of girls speaking at industry conferences and press activities is minuscule. And it isn’t due to the fact women don’t want to paintings in games.

Whilst gaming is now undeniably a part of the cultural mainstream, a lot of the games enterprise still doesn’t act like it. now not best do video games fail to represent that 52% of players identify as girls, the truth is that women in video games – as characters, and as creators – are still barely visible.

However we exist, and we are making video games and gambling them and speaking about them – and the wider video games industry is slowly taking observe. From a in simple terms commercial enterprise standpoint, it makes feel for the video games plan to make the effort to be more consultant of its target audience. Growing video games that enchantment to a broader target market calls for a full range of views.

I suppose, and I desire, that for the video games industry and for individuals who play games, the great is But to come back. Because the records are in: video games are for every person.

[viralhottopics]

Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media

With links to Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage, the rightwing American computer scientist is at the heart of a multimillion-dollar propaganda network

Just over a week ago, Donald Trump gathered members of the worlds press before him and told them they were liars. The press, honestly, is out of control, he said. The public doesnt believe you any more. CNN was described as very fake news story after story is bad. The BBC was another beauty.

That night I did two things. First, I typed Trump in the search box of Twitter. My feed was reporting that he was crazy, a lunatic, a raving madman. But that wasnt how it was playing out elsewhere. The results produced a stream of Go Donald!!!!, and You show em!!! There were star-spangled banner emojis and thumbs-up emojis and clips of Trump laying into the FAKE news MSM liars!

Trump had spoken, and his audience had heard him. Then I did what Ive been doing for two and a half months now. I Googled mainstream media is And there it was. Googles autocomplete suggestions: mainstream media is dead, dying, fake news, fake, finished. Is it dead, I wonder? Has FAKE news won? Are we now the FAKE news? Is the mainstream media we, us, I dying?

I click Googles first suggested link. It leads to a website called CNSnews.com and an article: The Mainstream media are dead. Theyre dead, I learn, because they we, I cannot be trusted. How had it, an obscure site Id never heard of, dominated Googles search algorithm on the topic? In the About us tab, I learn CNSnews is owned by the Media Research Center, which a click later I learn is Americas media watchdog, an organisation that claims an unwavering commitment to neutralising leftwing bias in the news, media and popular culture.

Another couple of clicks and I discover that it receives a large bulk of its funding more than $10m in the past decade from a single source, the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer. If you follow US politics you may recognise the name. Robert Mercer is the money behind Donald Trump. But then, I will come to learn, Robert Mercer is the money behind an awful lot of things. He was Trumps single biggest donor. Mercer started backing Ted Cruz, but when he fell out of the presidential race he threw his money $13.5m of it behind the Trump campaign.

Its money hes made as a result of his career as a brilliant but reclusive computer scientist. He started his career at IBM, where he made what the Association for Computational Linguistics called revolutionary breakthroughs in language processing a science that went on to be key in developing todays AI and later became joint CEO of Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund that makes its money by using algorithms to model and trade on the financial markets.

One of its funds, Medallion, which manages only its employees money, is the most successful in the world generating $55bn so far. And since 2010, Mercer has donated $45m to different political campaigns all Republican and another $50m to non-profits all rightwing, ultra-conservative. This is a billionaire who is, as billionaires are wont, trying to reshape the world according to his personal beliefs.

Donald Trumps presidential campaigned received $13.5m from Robert Mercer. Photograph: Timothy A Clary/AFP/Getty Images

Robert Mercer very rarely speaks in public and never to journalists, so to gauge his beliefs you have to look at where he channels his money: a series of yachts, all called Sea Owl; a $2.9m model train set; climate change denial (he funds a climate change denial thinktank, the Heartland Institute); and what is maybe the ultimate rich mans plaything the disruption of the mainstream media. In this he is helped by his close associate Steve Bannon, Trumps campaign manager and now chief strategist. The money he gives to the Media Research Center, with its mission of correcting liberal bias is just one of his media plays. There are other bigger, and even more deliberate strategies, and shining brightly, the star at the centre of the Mercer media galaxy, is Breitbart.

It was $10m of Mercers money that enabled Bannon to fund Breitbart a rightwing news site, set up with the express intention of being a Huffington Post for the right. It has launched the careers of Milo Yiannopoulos and his like, regularly hosts antisemitic and Islamophobic views, and is currently being boycotted by more than 1,000 brands after an activist campaign. It has been phenomenally successful: the 29th most popular site in America with 2bn page views a year. Its bigger than its inspiration, the Huffington Post, bigger, even, than PornHub. Its the biggest political site on Facebook. The biggest on Twitter.

Prominent rightwing journalist Andrew Breitbart, who founded the site but died in 2012, told Bannon that they had to take back the culture. And, arguably, they have, though American culture is only the start of it. In 2014, Bannon launched Breitbart London, telling the New York Times it was specifically timed ahead of the UKs forthcoming election. It was, he said, the latest front in our current cultural and political war. France and Germany are next.

But there was another reason why I recognised Robert Mercers name: because of his connection to Cambridge Analytica, a small data analytics company. He is reported to have a $10m stake in the company, which was spun out of a bigger British company called SCL Group. It specialises in election management strategies and messaging and information operations, refined over 25 years in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. In military circles this is known as psyops psychological operations. (Mass propaganda that works by acting on peoples emotions.)

Cambridge Analytica worked for the Trump campaign and, so Id read, the Leave campaign. When Mercer supported Cruz, Cambridge Analytica worked with Cruz. When Robert Mercer started supporting Trump, Cambridge Analytica came too. And where Mercers money is, Steve Bannon is usually close by: it was reported that until recently he had a seat on the board.

Last December, I wrote about Cambridge Analytica in a piece about how Googles search results on certain subjects were being dominated by rightwing and extremist sites. Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina, who had mapped the news ecosystem and found millions of links between rightwing sites strangling the mainstream media, told me that trackers from sites like Breitbart could also be used by companies like Cambridge Analytica to follow people around the web and then, via Facebook, target them with ads.

On its website, Cambridge Analytica makes the astonishing boast that it has psychological profiles based on 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters its USP is to use this data to understand peoples deepest emotions and then target them accordingly. The system, according to Albright, amounted to a propaganda machine.

A few weeks later, the Observer received a letter. Cambridge Analytica was not employed by the Leave campaign, it said. Cambridge Analytica is a US company based in the US. It hasnt worked in British politics.

Which is how, earlier this week, I ended up in a Pret a Manger near Westminster with Andy Wigmore, Leave.EUs affable communications director, looking at snapshots of Donald Trump on his phone. It was Wigmore who orchestrated Nigel Farages trip to Trump Tower the PR coup that saw him become the first foreign politician to meet the president elect.

Wigmore scrolls through the snaps on his phone. Thats the one I took, he says pointing at the now globally famous photo of Farage and Trump in front of his golden elevator door giving the thumbs-up sign. Wigmore was one of the bad boys of Brexit a term coined by Arron Banks, the Bristol-based businessman who was Leave.EUs co-founder.

Cambridge Analytica had worked for them, he said. It had taught them how to build profiles, how to target people and how to scoop up masses of data from peoples Facebook profiles. A video on YouTube shows one of Cambridge Analyticas and SCLs employees, Brittany Kaiser, sitting on the panel at Leave.EUs launch event.

Facebook was the key to the entire campaign, Wigmore explained. A Facebook like, he said, was their most potent weapon. Because using artificial intelligence, as we did, tells you all sorts of things about that individual and how to convince them with what sort of advert. And you knew there would also be other people in their network who liked what they liked, so you could spread. And then you follow them. The computer never stops learning and it never stops monitoring.

Steve Bannon, Donald Trumps chief strategist, is an associate of Robert Mercer. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

It sounds creepy, I say.

It is creepy! Its really creepy! Its why Im not on Facebook! I tried it on myself to see what information it had on me and I was like, Oh my God! Whats scary is that my kids had put things on Instagram and it picked that up. It knew where my kids went to school.

They hadnt employed Cambridge Analytica, he said. No money changed hands. They were happy to help.

Why?

Because Nigel is a good friend of the Mercers. And Robert Mercer introduced them to us. He said, Heres this company we think may be useful to you. What they were trying to do in the US and what we were trying to do had massive parallels. We shared a lot of information. Why wouldnt you? Behind Trumps campaign and Cambridge Analytica, he said, were the same people. Its the same family.

There were already a lot of questions swirling around Cambridge Analytica, and Andy Wigmore has opened up a whole lot more. Such as: are you supposed to declare services-in-kind as some sort of donation? The Electoral Commission says yes, if it was more than 7,500. And was it declared? The Electoral Commission says no. Does that mean a foreign billionaire had possibly influenced the referendum without that influence being apparent? Its certainly a question worth asking.

In the last month or so, articles in first the Swiss and the US press have asked exactly what Cambridge Analytica is doing with US voters data. In a statement to the Observer, the Information Commissioners Office said: Any business collecting and using personal data in the UK must do so fairly and lawfully. We will be contacting Cambridge Analytica and asking questions to find out how the company is operating in the UK and whether the law is being followed.

Cambridge Analytica said last Friday they are in touch with the ICO and are completely compliant with UK and EU data laws. It did not answer other questions the Observer put to it this week about how it built its psychometric model, which owes its origins to original research carried out by scientists at Cambridge Universitys Psychometric Centre, research based on a personality quiz on Facebook that went viral. More than 6 million people ended up doing it, producing an astonishing treasure trove of data.

These Facebook profiles especially peoples likes could be correlated across millions of others to produce uncannily accurate results. Michal Kosinski, the centres lead scientist, found that with knowledge of 150 likes, their model could predict someones personality better than their spouse. With 300, it understood you better than yourself. Computers see us in a more robust way than we see ourselves, says Kosinski.

But there are strict ethical regulations regarding what you can do with this data. Did SCL Group have access to the universitys model or data, I ask Professor Jonathan Rust, the centres director? Certainly not from us, he says. We have very strict rules around this.

A scientist, Aleksandr Kogan, from the centre was contracted to build a model for SCL, and says he collected his own data. Professor Rust says he doesnt know where Kogans data came from. The evidence was contrary. I reported it. An independent adjudicator was appointed by the university. But then Kogan said hed signed a non-disclosure agreement with SCL and he couldnt continue [answering questions].

Kogan disputes this and says SCL satisfied the universitys inquiries. But perhaps more than anyone, Professor Rust understands how the kind of information people freely give up to social media sites could be used.

Former Ukip leader Nigel Farage is a friend of the Mercers. Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images

The danger of not having regulation around the sort of data you can get from Facebook and elsewhere is clear. With this, a computer can actually do psychology, it can predict and potentially control human behaviour. Its what the scientologists try to do but much more powerful. Its how you brainwash someone. Its incredibly dangerous.

Its no exaggeration to say that minds can be changed. Behaviour can be predicted and controlled. I find it incredibly scary. I really do. Because nobody has really followed through on the possible consequences of all this. People dont know its happening to them. Their attitudes are being changed behind their backs.

Mercer invested in Cambridge Analytica, the Washington Post reported, driven in part by an assessment that the right was lacking sophisticated technology capabilities. But in many ways, its what Cambridge Analyticas parent company does that raises even more questions.

Emma Briant, a propaganda specialist at the University of Sheffield, wrote about SCL Group in her 2015 book, Propaganda and Counter-Terrorism: Strategies for Global Change. Cambridge Analytica has the technological tools to effect behavioural and psychological change, she said, but its SCL that strategises it. It has specialised, at the highest level for Nato, the MoD, the US state department and others in changing the behaviour of large groups. It models mass populations and then it changes their beliefs.

SCL was founded by someone called Nigel Oakes, who worked for Saatchi & Saatchi on Margaret Thatchers image, says Briant, and the company had been making money out of the propaganda side of the war on terrorism over a long period of time. There are different arms of SCL but its all about reach and the ability to shape the discourse. They are trying to amplify particular political narratives. And they are selective in who they go for: they are not doing this for the left.

In the course of the US election, Cambridge Analytica amassed a database, as it claims on its website, of almost the entire US voting population 220 million people and the Washington Post reported last week that SCL was increasing staffing at its Washington office and competing for lucrative new contracts with Trumps administration. It seems significant that a company involved in engineering a political outcome profits from what follows. Particularly if its the manipulation, and then resolution, of fear, says Briant.

Its the database, and what may happen to it, that particularly exercises Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a Swiss mathematician and data activist who has been investigating Cambridge Analytica and SCL for more than a year. How is it going to be used? he says. Is it going to be used to try and manipulate people around domestic policies? Or to ferment conflict between different communities? It is potentially very scary. People just dont understand the power of this data and how it can be used against them.

There are two things, potentially, going on simultaneously: the manipulation of information on a mass level, and the manipulation of information at a very individual level. Both based on the latest understandings in science about how people work, and enabled by technological platforms built to bring us together.

Are we living in a new era of propaganda, I ask Emma Briant? One we cant see, and that is working on us in ways we cant understand? Where we can only react, emotionally, to its messages? Definitely. The way that surveillance through technology is so pervasive, the collection and use of our data is so much more sophisticated. Its totally covert. And people dont realise what is going on.

Public mood and politics goes through cycles. You dont have to subscribe to any conspiracy theory, Briant says, to see that a mass change in public sentiment is happening. Or that some of the tools in action are straight out of the militarys or SCLs playbook.

But then theres increasing evidence that our public arenas the social media sites where we post our holiday snaps or make comments about the news are a new battlefield where international geopolitics is playing out in real time. Its a new age of propaganda. But whose? This week, Russia announced the formation of a new branch of the military: information warfare troops.

Sam Woolley of the Oxford Internet Institutes computational propaganda institute tells me that one third of all traffic on Twitter before the EU referendum was automated bots accounts that are programmed to look like people, to act like people, and to change the conversation, to make topics trend. And they were all for Leave. Before the US election, they were five-to-one in favour of Trump many of them Russian. Last week they have been in action in the Stoke byelection Russian bots, organised by who? attacking Paul Nuttall.

Politics is war, said Steve Bannon last year in the Wall Street Journal. And increasingly this looks to be true.

Theres nothing accidental about Trumps behaviour, Andy Wigmore tells me. That press conference. It was absolutely brilliant. I could see exactly what he was doing. Theres feedback going on constantly. Thats what you can do with artificial intelligence. You can measure ever reaction to every word. He has a word room, where you fix key words. We did it. So with immigration, there are actually key words within that subject matter which people are concerned about. So when you are going to make a speech, its all about how can you use these trending words.

Wigmore met with Trumps team right at the start of the Leave campaign. And they said the holy grail was artificial intelligence.

Who did?

Jared Kushner and Jason Miller.

Later, when Trump picked up Mercer and Cambridge Analytica, the game changed again. Its all about the emotions. This is the big difference with what we did. They call it bio-psycho-social profiling. It takes your physical, mental and lifestyle attributes and works out how people work, how they react emotionally.

Bio-psycho-social profiling, I read later, is one offensive in what is called cognitive warfare. Though there are many others: recoding the mass consciousness to turn patriotism into collaborationism, explains a Nato briefing document on countering Russian disinformation written by an SCL employee. Time-sensitive professional use of media to propagate narratives, says one US state department white paper. Of particular importance to psyop personnel may be publicly and commercially available data from social media platforms.

Yet another details the power of a cognitive casualty a moral shock that has a disabling effect on empathy and higher processes such as moral reasoning and critical thinking. Something like immigration, perhaps. Or fake news. Or as it has now become: FAKE news!!!!

How do you change the way a nation thinks? You could start by creating a mainstream media to replace the existing one with a site such as Breitbart. You could set up other websites that displace mainstream sources of news and information with your own definitions of concepts like liberal media bias, like CNSnews.com. And you could give the rump mainstream media, papers like the failing New York Times! what it wants: stories. Because the third prong of Mercer and Bannons media empire is the Government Accountability Institute.

Bannon co-founded it with $2m of Mercers money. Mercers daughter, Rebekah, was appointed to the board. Then they invested in expensive, long-term investigative journalism. The modern economics of the newsroom dont support big investigative reporting staffs, Bannon told Forbes magazine. You wouldnt get a Watergate, a Pentagon Papers today, because nobody can afford to let a reporter spend seven months on a story. We can. Were working as a support function.

Welcome to the future of journalism in the age of platform capitalism. News organisations have to do a better job of creating new financial models. But in the gaps in between, a determined plutocrat and a brilliant media strategist can, and have, found a way to mould journalism to their own ends.

In 2015, Steve Bannon described to Forbes how the GAI operated, employing a data scientist to trawl the dark web (in the article he boasts of having access to $1.3bn worth of supercomputers) to dig up the kind of source material Google cant find. One result has been a New York Times bestseller, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, written by GAIs president, Peter Schweizer and later turned into a film produced by Rebekah Mercer and Steve Bannon.

This, Bannon explained, is how you weaponise the narrative you want. With hard researched facts. With those, you can launch it straight on to the front page of the New York Times, as the story of Hillary Clintons cash did. Like Hillarys emails it turned the news agenda, and, most crucially, it diverted the attention of the news cycle. Another classic psyops approach. Strategic drowning of other messages.

This is a strategic, long-term and really quite brilliant play. In the 1990s, Bannon explained, conservative media couldnt take Bill Clinton down becausethey wound up talking to themselves in an echo chamber.

As, it turns out, the liberal media is now. We are scattered, separate, squabbling among ourselves and being picked off like targets in a shooting gallery. Increasingly, theres a sense that we are talking to ourselves. And whether its Mercers millions or other factors, Jonathan Albrights map of the news and information ecosystem shows how rightwing sites are dominating sites like YouTube and Google, bound tightly together by millions of links.

Is there a central intelligence to that, I ask Albright? There has to be. There has to be some type of coordination. You can see from looking at the map, from the architecture of the system, that this is not accidental. Its clearly being led by money and politics.

Theres been a lot of talk in the echo chamber about Bannon in the last few months, but its Mercer who provided the money to remake parts of the media landscape. And while Bannon understands the media, Mercer understands big data. He understands the structure of the internet. He knows how algorithms work.

Robert Mercer did not respond to a request for comment for this piece. NickPatterson, a British cryptographer, who worked at Renaissance Technologies in the 80s and is now a computational geneticist at MIT, described to me how he was the one who talent-spotted Mercer. There was an elite group working at IBM in the 1980s doing speech research, speech recognition, and when I joined Renaissance I judged that the mathematics we were trying to apply to financial markets were very similar.

Bannon scorns media in rare public appearance at CPAC

He describes Mercer as very, very conservative. He truly did not like the Clintons. He thought Bill Clinton was a criminal. And his basic politics, I think, was that hes a rightwing libertarian, he wants the government out of things.

He suspects that Mercer is bringing the brilliant computational skills he brought to finance to bear on another very different sphere. We make mathematical models of the financial markets which are probability models, and from those we try and make predictions. What I suspect Cambridge Analytica do is that they build probability models of how people vote. And then they look at what they can do to influence that.

Finding the edge is what quants do. They build quantitative models that automate the process of buying and selling shares and then they chase tiny gaps in knowledge to create huge wins. Renaissance Technologies was one of the first hedge funds to invest in AI. But what it does with it, how its been programmed to do it, is completely unknown. It is, Bloomberg reports, the blackest box in finance.

Johan Bollen, associate professor at Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing, tells me how he discovered one possible edge: hes done research that shows you can predict stock market moves from Twitter. You can measure public sentiment and then model it. Society is driven by emotions, which its always been difficult to measure, collectively. But there are now programmes that can read text and measure it and give us a window into those collective emotions.

The research caused a huge ripple among two different constituencies. We had a lot attention from hedge funds. They are looking for signals everywhere and this is a hugely interesting signal. My impression is hedge funds do have these algorithms that are scanning social feeds. The flash crashes weve had sudden huge drops in stock prices indicates these algorithms are being used at large scale. And they are engaged in something of an arms race.

The other people interested in Bollens work are those who want not only to measure public sentiment, but to change it. Bollens research shows how its possible. Could you reverse engineer the national, or even the global, mood? Model it, and then change it?

It does seem possible. And it does worry me. There are quite a few pieces of research that show if you repeat something often enough, people start involuntarily to believe it. And that could be leveraged, or weaponised for propaganda. We know there are thousands of automated bots out there that are trying to do just that.

THE war of the bots is one of the wilder and weirder aspects of the elections of 2016. At the Oxford Internet Institutes Unit for Computational Propaganda, its director, Phil Howard, and director of research, Sam Woolley, show me all the ways public opinion can be massaged and manipulated. But is there a smoking gun, I ask them, evidence of who is doing this? Theres not a smoking gun, says Howard. There are smoking machine guns. There are multiple pieces of evidence.

Look at this, he says and shows me how, before the US election, hundreds upon hundreds of websites were set up to blast out just a few links, articles that were all pro-Trump. This is being done by people who understand information structure, who are bulk buying domain names and then using automation to blast out a certain message. To make Trump look like hes a consensus.

And that requires money?

That requires organisation and money. And if you use enough of them, of bots and people, and cleverly link them together, you are whats legitimate. You are creating truth.

You can take an existing trending topic, such as fake news, and then weaponise it. You can turn it against the very media that uncovered it. Viewed in a certain light, fake news is a suicide bomb at the heart of our information system. Strapped to the live body of us the mainstream media.

One of the things that concerns Howard most is the hundreds of thousands of sleeper bots theyve found. Twitter accounts that have tweeted only once or twice and are now sitting quietly waiting for a trigger: some sort of crisis where they will rise up and come together to drown out all other sources of information.

Like zombies?

Like zombies.

Many of the techniques were refined in Russia, he says, and then exported everywhere else. You have these incredible propaganda tools developed in an authoritarian regime moving into a free market economy with a complete regulatory vacuum. What you get is a firestorm.

This is the world we enter every day, on our laptops and our smartphones. It has become a battleground where the ambitions of nation states and ideologues are being fought using us. We are the bounty: our social media feeds; our conversations; our hearts and minds. Our votes. Bots influence trending topics and trending topics have a powerful effect on algorithms, Woolley, explains, on Twitter, on Google, on Facebook. Know how to manipulate information structure and you can manipulate reality.

Were not quite in the alternative reality where the actual news has become FAKE news!!! But were almost there. Out on Twitter, the new transnational battleground for the future, someone I follow tweets a quote by Marshall McLuhan, the great information theorist of the 60s. World War III will be a guerrilla information war, it says. With no divisions between military and civilian participation.

By that definition were already there.

Additional reporting by Paul-Olivier Dehaye

Carole Cadwalladr will be hosting a discussion on technologys disruption of democracy at the bluedot festival, Jodrell Bank, Cheshire, 7-9 July

Read more: http://ift.tt/2kYVK79

from Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media

#Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media

[grimurfjeldsted-blog]

Quick Guide to Digital Tech: Big Data

Overview

We do our shopping, our financial transactions and insurances policies online. We stream music and movies online and chat with our friends through social networks. Everyone of us leaves permanent data traces that can be analysed.

The term Big Data describes not only the data itself, but the ability to use it and mine insights from it. These insights we are able use to identify trends and patterns in previous and current behaviours, as well as to predict and thereby influence the future. The preferred outcome is an understanding of the world around us.

And we produce a lot of data. That much, that 90% of all data created since the dawn of mankind was created in the last two years alone. The amount every day should be around 58 million DVD’s if that picture helps us getting any closer. With the exponential growth curve that applies, we will have 45 zettabytes (ZB) of data in 2020 - well, you got it - much data.

The concept of analysing huge amounts of data is not new, but the speed at which this is done has changed dramatically. Johannes Kepler, the german astronomer found the three laws of planetary motion by analysing massive amounts of data. Data he inherited from his teacher Tycho Brahe and later laid the foundation to Newtons theory of universal gravitation. What we might call big data of the 17th century took the great scientist Kepler 9 years to compute.

Kepler had volumes and variety of data and had to question the veracity of his data, but the velocity was pretty manageable. Now imagine the velocity of Facebook and Twitter. When analysing data for insight discovery, we in terms of big data define it by the four V’s, which are:

Volume - the amount of data

Velocity - the speed at which data is generated

Variety - the kind of data available, and

Veracity - the trustworthiness of data

From these element we hope to be better at making decisions and optimise processes. Corporations have been early adapters of big data with Facebook, Netflix, Google and Amazon up in front seats. Real-time social media data, movie streaming behaviour, web search and shopping data, as well the fast growth of sensor data from smart connected devices and objects hold tremendous value for companies.

Innovations in artificial intelligence and machine learning accelerates the development even further. The ability to use big data to better understand customers, their behaviours, preferences and current use is used to create predictive models and optimise processes and experiences. Maintenance, supply chain and stock management, even human resource management can be optimised and marketing does already or will have to love it in the coming years. In the end all areas of the business can be optimised with big data and business leaders hoping to get help through data-driven decision making, and to get a tool to increase business results.

There are certainly some concerns with big data. First of all it can be very difficult to get insights out a constantly growing pool of data and many companies simply lack skilled people being able to do the analysis. If you job description today is data scientist or analyst, you will have a pretty safe job situation for years to come.

Second, interpretation of data can be inaccurate or victim of misinterpretation. There are examples like that of orange painted cars that have only half as many defects as average. That insight is an example of one that probably should be let alone.

Last but not least there are concerns in terms of security and privacy. Also when not intended for abuse or malicious use, companies, organisations and governments also hold a big responsibility storing peoples data and keep it safe from security breaches. People though seem increasingly willing to hand over their personal data in return for products and services that makes their lives easier. And honestly. When is the last time you read the terms and conditions of that online service before clicking the accept button? I for myself just did that on the 56-page long wall of text from iTunes - again.

The following examples will give a few ideas of data-driven decision making, insight discovery and process optimisation. There are endless possibilities, that make it difficult to categorise - here just a few:

Examples

Healthcare

Google Flu Report: initiated in 2009. People with the flu will probably go online to find information about treatments, so Google decided to track that behaviour, hoping it might be able to predict influenza outbreaks faster than conventional methods. These Google Flu Trends are often used as an example of big data done wrong, since the predictions proved to be anything but accurate. It still works as an early-warning signal, rather than a substitute for traditional data collection methods used.

Government / Law Enforcement

Modern day elections have catapulted the term big data up to front pages of non-tech media. The use both in terms of predictions and its role in the campaigns of political parties have been discussed intensively especially in recent months, but if you have the urge to refresh yourself I recommend this article by Wired Magazine.

Some police departments in the USA manage neighbourhood patrols based on big data for predictive policing.

Sports & Entertainment

Elite sports clubs: have embraced big data, by analysing the performance of competition and individual players. Top soccer clubs like Manchester City or Bayern Munich employ entire data analyst teams. Every running path, every tactical shift, and every freekick variant is tracked and analysed for coaches to be used for match-day preparations.

Netflix Series House of Cards: was an example of the use of big data to determine what viewers like to see, before the series was recorded. Netflix knew that the director David Fincher was popular among its audience, the actor Kevin Spacey had always done well on the platform, as had the British version of House of Cards. In the intersection of these three elements, Netflix’s decision to outbid their TV network competition was based on a ready-made audience for the show and showcases a great example of a company excelling at data-driven decision making.

Online Shopping

Amazon’s recommendations engine. Amazon found out that the best recommendations were not made by comparing customers to other customers, but to analyse the relationships between products customers previously bought or intensively engaged with on the Amazon platform. It is said that about 30% of all sales at Amazon are related to these recommendations, and if I look at my own history book section in my book shelf, I am guilty as charged.

Technology in general

IBM Watson: is fuelled by big data and algorithms and uses artificial intelligence and machine learning across industries, like health care, insurance, and manufacturing. IBM Watson came to fame for winning the TV quiz show Jeopardy in 2011. Cognitive computing is a big bet for IBM, with the Watson business unit having more than 10.000 workers and heavy investments. I recommend a NYT article to dig into that story or of you need more information on the term artificial intelligence, see a previous edition of this series about AI and machine learning.

The concept of Internet of Things (IoT): aims to take things and turn them into connected smart objects - anything from watches, to coffeemakers, cars and buildings. These sensor enabled objects gather huge amounts of data, that need big data analytics to allow us to gain insights. With the amount of IoT devises exploding in the coming years, big data will be essentials for hardware producers and platform providers a like, as well as for our experiences as consumers and co-creators. More on the Internet of Things in the quick guide series.

State of the technology and future outlook

Big data can seem like a somewhat abstract term that companies, people and business leaders struggle to get their heads around. What we see currently is expectations to gain value from big data is growing at a very fast pace, as are investment levels and complexity. As the tools and skill-sets to collect and analyse data becomes less expensive and more accessible, even better uses will be developed. Everything from healthcare, natural and social science to criminal prevention is possible. Marketing and advertising automation reminds us of the concerns, but hold tremendous value and opportunities for businesses, as do innovations in robotics, artificial intelligence, sensor technologies and micro computing.

It is often said that data is the new oil, and it is hard to argue against that. The difference though is still that we know exactly how to turn oil into fuel, and that is not the case yet for big data. But big data is here to stay, nothing will remain untouched. Potential is tremendous and will influence all parts of business, society and science. Businesses who excel at it will without doubt gains significant competitive advantages. They do together with organisations and governments also hold ethical responsibilities of keeping the data safe and use it in a sensible manner.

If we do that, we can master big data and with its help create a better world (or a better business if that is what you came for). If not big data will dominate us.

#big data #artificial intelligence #ai #machine learning #Digital Transformation