#Likely Integrated Science Questions & Answers

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Likely Integrated Science Questions & Answers for 2022 BECE Candidates

Likely Integrated Science Questions & Answers for 2022 BECE Candidates

Join our students and revise with our Likely Integrated Science Revision Mock Questions & Answers for 2022 BECE Candidates. We have shared in this article one of our mock papers. Study the questions and attempt them however, we can make the revision less stressful if you get our Questions and Solutions for this paper and those of English, Mathematics, Integrated Science, and Social Studies at a…

[lokiondisneyplus]

Yes, Loki series director Kate Herron knows about your fan theory about the show, the analysis you posted to social media. No, she won’t tell you what she thinks about it, or whether you were right.

“I follow all the conversations on Twitter,” Herron told Polygon in an interview shortly after Loki’s season 1 finale. “I don’t always weigh in on them, because I made the show, so they don’t want me weighing in like, ‘Actually, guys…’ I think that’s the whole point of art — it should be up for debate and discussion.”

[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for season 1 of Loki.]

Loki has been a hit for streaming service Disney Plus — episode 6 of the show, the final installment for this season, was reportedly watched by more households than any of the platform’s MCU finales to date. The series has been a popular source of fan conjecture and argument, with one particularly big rolling conversation focusing on whether the budding romantic relationship between trickster Asgardian Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and his alternate-universe counterpart Sylvie (Sophia Di Martino) is a form of incest.

Herron is willing to speak up about that one. “My interpretation of it is that they’re both Lokis, but they aren’t the same person,” she says. “I don’t see them as being like brother and sister. They have completely different backgrounds […] and I think that’s really important to her character. They sort of have the same role in terms of the universe and destiny, but they won’t make the same decisions.”

Herron says thematically, Loki falling for Sylvie is an exploration of “self-love,” but only in the sense that it’s Loki learning to understand his own motives and integrity. “[The show is] looking at the self and asking ‘What makes us us?’” Herron says. “I mean, look at all the Lokis across the show, they’re all completely different. I think there’s something beautiful about his romantic relationship with Sylvie, but they’re not interchangeable.”

Directing the final kiss between the two characters was a complicated process because it had to communicate something about each of them over the course of just a few seconds. Herron says the primary goal was creating a safe, comfortable environment for Hiddleston and Di Martino, and after that, she had to think about how to bring across Loki and Sylvie’s conflicting goals in that moment.

“It’s an interesting one, right?” she says. “Emotionally, from Sylvie’s perspective, I think it’s a goodbye. But it’s still a buildup of all these feelings. They’ve both grown through each other over the last few episodes. It was important to me that it didn’t feel like a trick, like she was deceiving him. She is obviously doing that, on one hand, but I don’t feel the kiss is any less genuine. I think she’s in a bad place, but her feelings are true.”

Herron says directing Hiddleston in the scene mostly came down to discussing the speech Loki gives Sylvie before the kiss. “That was really important, showing this new place for Loki,” Herron says. “In the first episode, he’s like, ‘I want the throne, I want to rule,’ and by episode 6, he isn’t focused on that selfish want. He just wants her to be okay.”

Loki writer and producer Eric Martin recently tweeted that he wished the show had been able to focus more time on two of its secondary characters, Owen Wilson’s Time Variance Authority agent Mobius M. Mobius, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s Ravonna Renslayer. “I wanted to explore her more deeply and really see their relationship,” he says, “But covid got in the way and we just didn’t have time.”

Asked if Loki and Sylvie’s relationship suffered from similar necessary edits, Herron says it’s true that the show’s creators and audience still don’t know everything Sylvie went through to make her so different from the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s original version of Loki. “We’ve seen her as a child, but she’s lived for thousands and thousands of years, in apocalypses on the run,” she says. “I think there’s so much more to delve into with Sylvie […] You’re filling in the blanks. You see [her on the planet] Lamentis, and it’s horrific. And you’re like, “Well, what kind of person would she be, growing up in apocalypses? What kind of personality would that give her?”

Herron says Sylvie’s backstory actually reminds her of the 1995 movie Jumanji, where a young boy is sucked into a magical board game in 1969, and emerges 26 years later as a full-grown man, played by with typical manic energy by Robin Williams. “It’s such a weird reference, but…” she says. “He’s a little boy when he ends up captive in that game, and when he comes out, it’s obviously been a life experience. With Sylvie, it’s similar. She was a child when she had to go on the run, so she’s had a very difficult life. I would love to see more of it. As Eric said, she’s a rich character, there’s so much to be explored.”

Herron says, though, that during her time on the show, material about Sylvie was added rather than cut — specifically, those scenes of her as a child, being kidnapped by the TVA. “This was before my time, but I know in the writers’ room, there were lots of avenues exploring Sylvie on the run and what her life was like,” Herron says. “I wouldn’t want to speak more to those, because I wasn’t there when they were being discussed. But something wasn’t in there that was important to me — I felt we should see her [history] in the TVA. Me and the team were talking about how it made complete sense, because episode 4 is all about twisting the idea that the TVA might be good on its head. And so that’s something that came in later, once I joined, was seeing her as a child. I think we needed to see that, not to understand her completely, but to get an idea of her motivations, why she’s so angry at this place.”

Talking more broadly about the series finale, Herron says the last few episodes weren’t as heavily referential as the first episodes, which she intended as “a love letter to sci-fi.” While early images like the TVA’s interrogation rooms had specific visual references from past science fiction, episode 6’s locations were drawn more from collaborations with the crew.

“The idea of the physical timeline being circular, our storyboard artists came up with that,” Herron says. “I had in the scripts, ‘We move through space to the end of time,” and then me and [storyboard artist Darrin Denlinger] discussed how we could play with the idea of time, while also adding MCU nods. He was like, ‘What if the timeline is circular?’ I think that’s such a striking image, like the Citadel at the End of Time is the needle on a record player. I just thought that was such a cool image, but it wasn’t necessarily taken from anything.”

Episode 6 focuses heavily on the mysterious figure He Who Remains and his citadel, a space she says was largely conceived by production designer Kasra Farahani. “I remember he brought in the art of the Citadel, and I thought it was beautiful,” Herron says. “He said, ‘The Citadel has been carved from an actual meteorite,’ which I thought was such an inspired idea. And He Who Remains’ office is the only finished portion of it.”

She says there are only a few direct homages in episode 6, including the zoom shot through space, which directly referenced a similar sequence in Robert Zemeckis’ 1997 film Contact.

“And then I have my Teletubbies reference for episode 5,” Herron says. “I wanted the Void to feel like an overgrown garden, like a kind of forgotten place. And I realized I’d pitched it as the British countryside. I remember trying to explain it to ILM, who did the visual effects, and saying, ‘Oh, you know, it’s like the Teletubbies. It’s just rolling hills, but they go on forever.’ That actually was quite a helpful reference in the end, which is funny.”

Asked for her favorite set memory from shooting the season, Herron says it comes down to Tom Hiddleston starting a mania for physical exertion before takes. “Sometimes he runs around set to get himself in the right mindset before he performs,” she says. “He does pushups. You know, you’re going into an action scene, you want to look like you’ve just been running. And it became infectious across all the cast. We’ve got so much footage of — I think Jack [Veal] ended up doing it, who plays Kid Loki. I’ve got [shots of] him and Sophia doing pushups and squats, just to get ready. It was so funny watching that echo across all the cast. I think all of them ended up doing those exercises with him at some point. It was so funny.”

“That might be my favorite set story, but it’s honestly, not a sweet one,” she adds. “I would say my favorite thing is his enthusiasm. He’s a very kind empathetic person. We were filming this in quite tough circumstances, a lot of people were far from home and isolating, and he brought this warmth and energy and joy to the set every day. And I think that made everyone feel very safe and very bonded. I’m forever grateful to him for doing that.”

[lickthemagaindeacy]

Hiii! I recently just fell in love with Queen and I think they are absolutely amazing and I love how hilarious and adorable they all are with each other. I just have one question: I can never find anything really where Brian and Deaky are being cute and talking about each other. Is there some animosity there? Just wondering. Thanks!

Oh wow this a GREAT ask. I actually feel quite honored that you came to ask me about this!

First of all, hi!! Welcome to the Royal Family!! Always great to have new Queenies on board.

So, the short answer to this is, yes. There was a bit. But allow me to elaborate.

I think from the beginning, John and Brian were never as close with each other as they were with Freddie or Roger. John was introduced to Roger and Brian at a club through a mutual friend, and John and Roger hit it off right away. They shared a lot of the same interests; cars, music, science fiction, movies. They are also the youngest, so they were immediately buddies. Once John joined Queen, Freddie felt the need to sort of be John's "band mom", for lack of a better term. John was always incredibly shy around new people and crowds, so Freddie sort of became John's voice, and tried to kind of protect him from some of the crazier aspects of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle. Now, although they got along and worked fine together professionally, and respected each other as musicians, I don't think Brian and John quite had that close of a connection.

However, when John found those old radio parts and built his home made amp in 1972, he brought it to Brian and immediately Brian started experimenting with it and various other equipment. The Deacy Amp was responsible for a lot of the layering and tone and such that became an integral part of Queen's sound. Take a listen, for example, to Brian's song "Good Company". He was able to create the illusion of a string ensemble by layering the Red Special through the Deacy Amp. There's a great article on it here. Brian still has and uses the original Deacy Amp.

As time went on, John started to become more involved in the decision making and songwriting processes. He started joining arguments. He became more confident in himself and his place in the band. With that comes more friction between these four very strong personalities. It's important to understand that the four members of Queen had vastly different songwriting styles and musical tastes. Roger is a very punk rock style drummer. Brian, for the most part, has that sound that leans from prog rock into metal, with his occasional foray into folk style. John is a funk master. He was all about funk, Motown, and disco. One of his favorite groups was Cream. Freddie loved his fantasy songs, and was very into pulling classical piano and opera sound into his songs.

The point where this all comes to a head is on their 1982 album Hot Space. You can look up critical reviews of this album, most of them will say that it was very "self indulgent" of Queen, and it strayed very far from their "usual sound" (which is saying a lot for a band whose sound had already been all over the place. For the love of cheese, their biggest album to date was called A Night At The Opera, which spanned from music hall to folk songs to seaside ditties to love ballads. I digress.) Now I've heard lots of different takes on this. Apparently the recording of Hot Space was a tense time, but it was all around a bad time in Brian's life in general, for personal and professional reasons. He and Roger were fairly opposed to the idea of a disco album. The Game had already featured a lot of funk style, and they'd broken their one rule and used synthesizers. Roger and Brian wanted to return more to their prog rock roots. Freddie and John, however, were really pushing for more exploration into these styles and genres. They wanted to move with the times. It's been said that at some point in all of this, John and Brian came to a head and had the worst fight they'd ever had. This, supposedly, was the birth of "Back Chat". I don't know that it's been confirmed, but listening to it, it's really difficult to think that Deacy wrote it about anybody but Brian and their difficulties, especially with the line, "You stand so tall, you don't frighten me at all". The song just screams frustration. It's also said that they argued about whether Brian should put a guitar solo in it (Deacy apparently didn't want one).

However, they seem to have pulled through this just fine. They went on tour shortly after the album was released, and "Staying Power", which is the first track on Hot Space, became really popular during that tour. Brian can now, it seems, look back on it with no ill will.

During recording for The Works and A Kind of Magic, and their subsequent tours, for the most part, they seemed to be back to the professional rapport they'd had before. Roger and John did a lot of the public appearances and gave interviews. Freddie, I believe, was working a lot on his solo work. Brian was dealing with the dissolution of his marriage (but that's a whole other can of worms.) But Queen as a whole was back in tip-top shape. There are even a few shared moments on stage between John and Brian. One in particular I can think of is them teaming up to harass Freddie a little at one show when he made them wait to start the next song so could get his water.

During Freddie's final years, and the making of The Miracle and Innuendo, they all seemed to really pull together after taking a small hiatus from working together. Those two albums were on a much higher level than most of the work they'd done in the 80's. They were back in the swing of things. John was even more confident snd more willing to give interviews.

Brian, as well as Freddie's long term partner Jim Hutton, said that John wasn't around all that much toward the end, as Freddie's illness was really quite difficult for him to deal with. And, supposedly, when finishing Made In Heaven, there was a bit more tension as they all argued over how to finish this album without their voice of reason. But when you've just lost your best friend to an illness that no one seems to even want to understand, you're bound to lash out even at those closest to you.

Now, Brian speaks about John with nothing but respect, appreciation and admiration. He always, I believe, had that respect and awe for Deacy as a bassist and musician. He talks often of how lyrical and melodic John was on bass, and how much of a powerhouse he and Rog were as a rhythm section. He has spoken of how John is still a part of the business side of Queen, and how he always informs John of what they are doing. He doesn't always get an answer about things, but he keeps John in the loop. And there's also a tweet floating around out there where he said that John's songs are still good!!

So in conclusion, yes, there was some tension, but not any more than there was in the rest of the band (there are some.stories there, too. They fought so hard some times they'd start throwing things), but I think the reason we don't see as much interaction between Brian and John is simply because, while they were friends and bandmates, they didn't have the same close relationship with each other as they did with Freddie or Roger, which is neither good nor bad. It just is. They still spent 20 years as half of an absolute musical power group, were able to create amazing music together and spend so much time in close quarters without killing each other or walking away from the band.

Also, have this. I think it's cute.

(Oh god I'm sorry this got so long. Also if anyone would like to add/correct any of this, please feel free. I am definitely NOT the last authority on this!)

[remotecareers]

Senior Manager Secure Remote Workforce__1333701

Cisco’s Strategic Execution Office is an organization that achieves enterprise-wide success by synchronously executing across Cisco’s 6 strategic pillars, which are: Secure, Agile Networks, Future of Work, Optimized Application Experience, Internet for the Future, End-to-end Security, and Capabilities at the Edge.

In addition to the 6 strategic pillars, we have 2 horizontal pillars driving cross-functional change, which are: Evolved GTM and RTM for Growth and Business Cadence.

The Strategic Execution Office’s mandate is to partner with the Executive Leadership Team, General Managers, and functional leaders to accelerate execution on the company’s overall strategy.The future of work has forever shifted and is top of mind for every leader in every company.

How can we empower our teams to be successful working remotely?

How can we ensure our digital business is secure as employees are working in an AirBnB?

How can our employees feel safe when they do visit the office?We believe that as Cisco, we are uniquely positioned to empower organizations to answer questions like these.

We are taking amazing pieces of technology across Collaboration, Security and Enterprise Networking and making it easy for organizations to empower their future of work.What You’ll DoAs Director for the Strategic Execution Office, you will guide and shape the Secure Remote Workforce within the Future of Work pillar.

You will work closely with key stakeholders to establish solution preferences and participate in joint working session, both internal and customer facing;* Executing on Cisco’s strategy in the Future of Work pillar* Assessing perceived market value of proposed Secure Remote Workforce solutions* Engaging Cisco’s executive leadership team and key business leaders to expose areas of improvement potential and opportunities for acceleration* Consolidating and maintaining offer artifacts (integrated roadmap, offer template)* Understanding technical requirements for Cisco’s customer base and translating them into operational requirements* Ensure quality development of offer collateral, such as presentations, white papers, design guides, and test plans for furthering internal and external knowledge* Providing visibility into alignment of all offer requirements relative to key gates and milestones* Working with across the organization to remove bottlenecks and help reprioritize as needed for successRole & ResponsibilitiesThe leader in this role will be responsible for working closely with key engineering, operations and GTM stakeholders to ensure clear product roadmaps and associated operational and GTM requirements necessary to deliver a compelling set of Secure Remote Workforce offerings to the market.This role will inform and partner with all of the functions across Cisco and report to the ELT at strategic checkpoints to support success across the company.

This is a highly visible, highly complex, and hyper-growth position with the rare opportunity to change the trajectory of the company as a whole.Who You’ll Work WithProduct management, Operations, and Go-to-Market teams, including Executive leadershipWho You Are* Dynamic, creative, adaptable, collaborative, and unafraid to make a splash* Highly cross-functional* Understand the activities involved in building impactful offers, and can also focus energy on the activities that grow sales and adoption* Intent on helping customers and partners with a desire to understand how our products and services can help improve their businesses* Passionate about the importance of the evolving the collaboration and security landscape to help develop coherent value propositions that drive key customer outcomes* Can clearly articulate critical issue status to executive staff, sales teams, and other invested parties* Possess keen judgment in risk management and problem mitigationMinimum Requirements* Understanding of Flexible remote access (Hardware, Software, BYOD) – VPN/AMP, Umbrella/Duo, Meraki/Cisco Routers, Security Choice; Flex; Cisco Designed Secure Remote Work, WebEx Meetings* Understanding of the product management function and familiarity of key product development concepts* Experience working at a successful company in the SaaS business* Strong problem-solving skills* Excellent interpersonal and influence skills* Ability to communicate well (written and verbal) to an executive audience* Driven and passionate about succeeding in a high-speed, innovative, and collaborative environment* Bachelor’s degree in a science or related technical field, or equivalent practical experienceWhy Cisco#WeAreCisco, where each person is unique, but we bring our talents to work as a team and make a difference.

Here’s how we do it.We embrace digital, and help our customers implement change in their digital businesses.

Some may think we’re “old” (30 years strong!) and only about hardware, but we’re also a software company.

And a security company.

A blockchain company.

An AI/Machine Learning company.

We even invented an intuitive network that adapts, predicts, learns and protects.

No other company can do what we do – you can’t put us in a box!But “Digital Transformation” is an empty buzz phrase without a culture that allows for innovation, creativity, and yes, even failure (if you learn from it.)Day to day, we focus on the give and take.

We give our best, we give our egos a break, and we give of ourselves (because giving back is built into our DNA.) We take accountability, we take bold steps, and we take difference to heart.

Because without diversity of thought and a dedication to equality for all, there is no moving forward.So, you have colorful hair!

Don’t care.

Tattoos?

Show off your ink.

Like polka dots?

That’s cool.#LI-WBG1

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[nsfmc]

A checklist for computer science undergrads

influenced by john regehr's 'basic toolbox' post about this topic, i thought i would throw my hat into the ring given that my experiences have been different than john's and seem to be at odds with what i have observed from working with many competent developers.

As i was leaving grad school, a friend of mine suggested to me that a winning strategy in Industrial Design had been to pick some medium that you worked well in and focus on doing all your work with that. The rationale here was that starting anew each project with a new medium invariably impacted the execution of the final deliverable distracting your prof/critic/peers from the high-level feedback you actually wanted on your work, creative vision, etc.

The advice there is to focus less on the tool and more on using a tool efficiently to communicate your ideas. In most cases it does not matter what the tool is as long as you can deploy it to solve problems in your domain.

Much of the tooling that exists in CS is directed at very specific users: working programmers. using these tools correctly as an undergrad is aspirational, but often their execution is distorted in academic contexts.

Every lab or workplace should expect to bootstrap new hires on internal tooling/workflows and almost none of them should assume prior knowledge. Depending on the aims, the only hard requirement should be ability to program in a language or framework similar to the one being used.

Core skills

A single programming language

You do not need to be ultimately proficient in every language, you just need to be able to sketch out and implement a solution to most problems you encounter in one language you enjoy working in. Which language you pick does not matter. If you are in john's classes, however, you should probably ensure that you know two languages: a compiled/systems-ey one (rust, go, c, java, swift, clojure, etc) and a scripting language (python, ruby, javascript, clojurescript, elm, mathematica, anything goes here as long as it has a repl or runtime that you can use to hammer out solutions to problems).

If you're not one of john's students, typically the scripting language will suffice (although it is generally rare to finish a cs program being exposed to only one language).

s/Text Editor/Touch Typing/i

The advice to be familiar with a text editor is largely a request from others who expect you to competently pair-program with them at their pace. The point of knowing an editor is much the same as knowing at least one language passably: it should not be something that gets in your way.

More essential than being comfortable with a specific editor (it honestly does not matter which one as long as you like using it and you are productive with it) is being comfortable touch typing. In the event that slack or other IM platforms have not made you a better touch typist, it is well worth investing time if only so that the act of writing anything is no longer a major time hinderance.

At some point, you may find yourself bored or in need of procrastination and decide you want to customize your editor: that is a perfect time to try something like sublime or atom or vi or emacs.

rough shell experience

you should be able to navigate around a filesystem, make directories, read directory listings and read the cli help documentation for most commands.

you absolutely do not need to know the details of your shell's preferences around glob expansion or how to write legible shell scripts. you can learn that, but after a certain point, all the obscure functionality ends up beng more "dev-ops" style knowledge that rarely pays any dividends except when developing commercial developer-facing internal tooling.

incidentally, getting students past the hurdle of commandline BS is almost certainly a job of an advisor (or postdoc). Ignoring it helps nobody and if a research project's documentation (q.v. below) is poor or nonexistent, the PI only has themselves to blame for this ongoing time commitment.

reading documentation

this is probably the weakest skill i have seen from folks coming out of undergrad. nobody expects you to know all of a language, all of its quirks, etc etc. what you are expected to know is how to find the answer to any reasonable question around your language or toolchain of choice.

A useful skill: you should be able to, given a stylized block of shell commands, paste those into your terminal one-by-one in order to bootstrap some project i.e. ./configure && make && make test. nobody should expect that you understand autoconf unless your research project is specifically devoted to it in some obscure way (i'm sorry if this is the case).

Specifically, you do not need to know how to parse an excel-formatted csv, but you should know where to look (or be able to find a solution) in order to do that in a reasonable amount of time. You do not need to know what an ideal runtime serialization format is for your language, you only need to call back on the terms you learned in your cs classes: marshalling, serialization, persistence, writing data, etc. although it can be useful at the extremes, be skeptical of the amount and quality of programming language trivia you know offhand.

writing documentation

no, this is not technical writing. this simply means you should be able to write a plain text file for each project that outlines

how to build some program

what its implicit dependencies are

what its arguments are

what the exposed/public api is

aside from being useful to others, in roughly six weeks or half a semester, this will invariably be of use to future-you as well.

a good acid test here is pointing a friend to the project and asking if they can build it and understand how they might use it. at some point you will embed this knowledge into a Makefile, shell script, or some other dsl, but until then it is infinitely more useful to write down the steps.

html

unless this is your job (or you intend it to be) you only need to know how to make an academic-level webpage which requires only the most basic knowledge of semantic html: h1, h2, ul/ol li, p, a, img, pre, strong, em (optionally hr, dl dd & dt). avoid css. if anyone gives you shit, you can invoke "Default Systems" giving you a perfectly valid excuse to stop devoting any more attention to design after you have mastered those tags.

reproducing errors

it is unclear when you are an undergrad or novice if you have encountered a truly exceptional case or if you simply have no idea what you're doing. Make a habit of reproducing and then writing down steps to reproduce edge cases you encounter and share them with people you ask for help from.

above and beyond, if you can identify the specific step (or code or whatever) that you invoke that (seemingly) causes the error, you will have an easier time teasing apart the nature of bug as you are telling someone else about it.

the most basic of data visualization skills

all this means is that nobody is actually good at doing this and everyone thinks that two hours peeking at ggplot2 has made them wizards at communicating the complexity of some dataset or results. it hasn't.

in many cases it suffices to be able to graph something from mathematica, R, d3, mathplotlib, or google sheets / excel. again, nobody cares how you do it as long as you do it and it doesn't take you all day. if your lab or workplace has some in-house style for doing this, they will need to train you how to do that anyway.

nonlinear spider-sense

the single reason "big o" notation is taught in school is so that at some point you can look at a performance regression and say "ha, that almost looks like a parab—o.m.g." the ability to recognize code or performance that appears nonlinear (or pathologically exponential) is probably one of the core things that i think undergrads should try to hone because during almost no other time will you be asked repeatedly, and at length, to explain the space/time complexity of arbitrary blocks of code.

computers are fast enough that you can usually be blasé about performance but eventually you'll start looking. being able to recognize something that is accidentally quadratic is often the most practical day-to-day application of cs theory—hone this spider sense.

Nice to haves

Version Control

there is a large chasm between "git for one" and "using git as a team" and that harsh valley is almost certainly due to the large amount of human communication and coordination required to work on a project as a team. Most people stress learning git, but this is largely useless advice because most of git or hg's corner cases and weirdness only come up when you're trying to integrate your work successfully among your teammates. It is good advice to perhaps become vaguely competent using git or mercurial or rcs, that experience will almost certainly pale in comparison to the massive flail when you are trying to set up multiple worktrees to create integration branches that contain the contents of multiple prs (each likely with their own rebase/merge/squash quirks).

to that end, you should learn to, say, create a commit and push your work, but everything else beyond that is almost certainly guaranteed to be complicated by whatever your team's workflow is (github prs, phabricator, gerrit, etc). i have rarely met people outside of professional or open source contexts that are capable of producing sensible chained commits or sane pull requests, it is simply not a skill that is required outside of contributing to open source or working on a commercial application. When people ask for git experience they secretly crave this flavor of professionalism that it took months to acquire at each of their prior jobs or internships.

A Presentation Tool

the baseline here is very low, you only need to be able to make a presentation and in all likelihood if you are still an undergrad, you easily have ten-plus years of doing this already. worry about fonts/design/transitions/etc once your content is solid.

most people produce terrible presentations making the needed baseline here quite low—it is more important that you know how to practice giving a presentation than it is to actually create the slides for it.

debugger knowledge

i have met many successful professional working programmers that have little to no idea how their language's debugging tools work. if you are a gdb wizard this sounds shocking on its face but lots of developers make do just fine without them. This is not to say that you should be willfully ignorant of debuggers or eschew them (especially if this is part of your curriculum), but nobody should look down on you if you learn (or are taught this) On The Job.

many of these tools are technically robust but have a ui only moderately less hostile than an opaque box of loose razorblades and chocolates. much like git, most developers internalize some form of stockholm affection for these tools despite their poor design, nonexistent editor integration, and often incomplete terminal support.

you should understand roughly what a debugger is and what it can (and can't) do, but it's almost certain that you won't need to have mastered debugger internals straight out of college.

build systems

this is honestly a "top of maslow" need. This is great knowledge if you are planning to distribute code or need it to build dependably/reliably on others' computers, it is absolutely inessential for an undergrad to understand to do this level of orchestration except as documentation for others to evaluate that your project actually builds etc etc. if your advisor or boss asks you to learn something like make or whatever, then by all means.

You should know what a make tool is for and when it is necessary, but you should not expect that to apply to the lion's share of work you do in school.

working for a period of time before asking for help

although this should be a core skill many adults are incapable of doing this effectively. there is a tradeoff between "i'm learning" and "i'm being unproductive." In an academic lab, arguably much of your experience will appear to be some quantum state that simultaneously inhabits both extremes but your goal should be attempting to independently arrive at a solution and after some time cut-off (which you should negotiate with your advisor/postdoc/pi/whatever) you should say "i tried $A, $B, and $C to accomplish $GOAL and was unable to make any progress because $ERR_A, $ERR_B, and $ERR_C."

even the act of noting down "what i am trying to accomplish, how i tried, what went wrong" may in itself lead you to a correct solution, but without having done that due dilligence and outlined those aspects, it will be difficult to receive good feedback from somebody that is trying to help you.

unit/integrated/etc testing

if you find that something like TDD is useful for you as a productivity or refactoring tool, keep doing that! most working software people cannot even agree on what the point of testing is, so it feels unfair to burden undergrads with this. in a professional context, you will be in a codebase with some established testing norms, you need only mimic those until you have determined what works for you.

there are lots of sane and sensible resources for writing tests or thinking about tests. understand that everyone does testing slightly differently so your best bet will be to figure out how testing plays a part wherever you go. in most cases, that codebase will have a specific incantation to invoke tests, your best bet is to ask how they do things there are just go from there if the setup is not obvious.

understanding scope

most academic projects are poorly managed because they have inconsistent pressure to be profitable beyond whatever funding inspired them. simultaneously, many academic advisors are not trained well to manage or lead a team (remember, most were hired to write grants and produce research papers (or possibly to teach)). management is something an advisor is literally picking up "on the job".

If you are unsure what exactly you are supposed to do, you should clarify as soon as possible what deliverable is expected and when it is due. This seems obvious, but because communication is complicated you may end up assuming you need to, for instance, resolve outstanding cli argument parsing bugs rather than only needing to add support for a new one. Understanding the scope of a project you've been assigned prevents you from doing redundant work or opening prs that will never get merged.

language idioms

If you are cozy with a programming language, the natural evolution here is to begin learning what idiomatic programming is like for it: what are common libraries, do people tend to program it functionally or imperatively, for or map?, what patterns are awkward or hard to read, what are common tools in its toolchain, how do people use it to write web services, how do people use it to avoid shell scripting, what are its peformance pathologies, etc. this is the extension to knowing how to read the documentation: it is developing intuition about the language to avoid doing counterproductive work in the future.

Many developers learn one language and become fluent in its quirks then proceed to apply those to every language they see later on. if you encounter this as a novice, it may appear that they are simply Better Programmers and not, instead, people who are speaking a pidgin-python with a heavy haskell accent.

To recap

It is something of a mistake to hope that a cs student will have the gradually developed and refined skills of a professional tradesperson. Graduating cs students often do not have strong professional software development experience (this is what internships are meant to accomplish) but are good at thinking about design/architecture. if, at the very minimum, as an undergrad you can churn out some ruby and have the runtime execute it, you're usually in great shape.

most cs programs do not train students to develop tightly crafted applications with industry-tested documentation/syntax/structure/workflows etc. bootcamps, however, do stress this sort of thing, which causes a confusing periodic wave of "college is dead, long live bootcamps."

when looking at job descriptions or other checklists, it's useful to try to gaze back at the abyss and ask "why was this listed here?"

John's research is compiler-focused, deals with undefined behavior, and often invokes llvm, c, and other "low level" toolchains. a strong undergrad cs student will be able to intern with john productively because the core of his research focus is mostly general to computer science: correctness, compiler behavior, etc. someone with deep knowledge of C, llvm, compiler design/internals, etc is almost certainly in a position to become one of his graduate students or postdocs. I think john's list is interesting, but i think it emphasizes details that are often foreign to developers at all skill levels.

finally this list is biased itself, so take it with a grain of salt: all my work experience is in design and frontend/backend web development and the skills listed here represent the qualities i've observed from successful interns and developers i have interviewed and worked with in the past ~ eight years. my experience is clearly n=1, but among the things i've noticed is that it's easy to get people to learn git, but it's hard to get somebody to internalize recursion, nonlinear growth, or canonical architecture patterns within the same time period. i'm not saying it's impossible, but if you're a cs student, this is 100% what the point of most cs programs is.

[studyingcompeng-blog]

i was wondering what sort of things you learn in your classes and what kinds of projects you do, and what kind of careers you could pursue with your degree

Hi, I’m so sorry that answering this took so long! I’ve been really tired after I get home from work, and basically just falling asleep right after dinner haha :) I guess my body hasn’t adjusted from being a student to working full-time for my internship.

So, before we start, I’d just like to point out that the information below is specific to my Computer Engineering program at Georgia Tech, and while most schools will have a similar curriculum, it will not be exactly the same as what I have written here. This is in part due to the rather loose definition of what Computer Engineering actually is, and why it’s different from Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. Also, faculty at different schools have different research interests and funding, so the topics again may vary in depth and coverage due to that as well (though typically I would assume undergrad classes are less variable than graduate programs).

WHAT IS COMPUTER ENGINEERING?

This is a common question. Many people tend to mistake Computer Engineering for Computer Science, but while the two fields are similar, they are not the same thing.

Wikipedia defines Computer Engineering in a general sense as “a discipline that integrates several fields of electrical engineering and computer science required to develop computer hardware and software.“ I would say that this is true. Computer Engineering is the practice of combining software and hardware to create complex computing systems, such as computers, cell phones, smart TVs, and more.

Thus, Computer Engineering heavily overlaps both Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, using parts from both to create something unique. I like to compare the three fields to chocolate - milk chocolate, dark chocolate, and white chocolate. They’re all chocolates, but have different flavors. Which one you prefer is really a personal choice based on your interests!

There are also subtopics within Computer Engineering that lean more heavily toward either software or hardware, and either Computer Science or Electrical Engineering. I will get into that more, further down.

CLASS TOPICS

I’m not sure how familiar you are with topics within Computer Engineering, so I’ll provide a list with some explanations.

THE BASICSEveryone in the major will start out with these topics. In fact, at my university, both Computer Engineering majors and Electrical Engineering majors must learn these topics before moving on to more specialized topics.

Programming FundamentalsThis topic covers good practices when writing code, and gives an introduction to programming. You begin to learn about some problems that arise with programming, and trade offs that you can choose between when making design choices. For example, you need to design a program that can do matrix arithmetic very fast. What is the best way to write code for this? What language should you use? How can you make your code run more efficiently (i.e. ideally you would make it run faster while minimizing the amount of computing resources you need, such as memory)?

Boolean Algebra and LogicComputers run on 0s and 1s. They don’t understand things like “2 + 2″ in the same manner as humans do. In order for you to get a computer to add 2+2, you must use the binary number system. In this example, the number 2 is represented in binary as 0010. Adding 2 + 2 yields 4, or in binary 0100. Boolean Algebra explains how to do arithmetic using the binary system, and delves into the topics of how to represent negative numbers without a negative sign, as well as boolean logic operations, like AND and OR. This is extremely useful for understanding more specialized topics, such as Computer Architecture, where you will have to design the physical devices that can execute these logic and arithmetic operations on 1s and 0s.

ElectricityThis one’s pretty self explanatory. If you’re designing a system that requires electricity to run, you’ll need to understand how electricity works. Typically you’ll learn most of what you need to know about electricity in your basic physics classes, with more information introduced as you progress into more upper-level classes in your academic career.

Circuit AnalysisCircuit Analysis is a tool that helps you understand how a circuit you are working with or designing will behave. The basic introductory class will cover similar topics as an introductory physics class on electromagnetism, but will go more in depth on circuits specifically than the physics class will. You will learn how certain devices (resistors, capacitors, and inductors) affect the input and output voltages and currents of a circuit, and be able to calculate how much power a circuit consumes over time. You also may learn about operational amplifiers (op-amps) which are used in a huge variety of things to take a small input signal and make the output signal much bigger. A good example is speakers! Personally, I loved these classes. They were lots of fun.

Basic Calculus-Based PhysicsReiterating, you will need to take a basic physics course that covers electromagnetism, especially if you are more interested in hardware than software. This will set the foundation of your understanding of how electronic devices work, and how different components interact with each other.

ADVANCED TOPICS

Algorithms (overlaps with Computer Science)An algorithm is a process or function that describes how to solve a problem. It can also be a set of steps that when followed, will lead you to the answer. In the case of Computer Science and Computer Engineering, algorithms serve the same purpose. For example, a famous algorithm is Djikstra’s Algorithm, which is used to find the shortest path between some number of points. In algorithms classes, you will learn more on what an algorithm is, when and how to use an algorithm, what some examples of widely used algorithms today are, and how to create your own algorithms. You will also learn how to write code for these algorithms, so that you can use them in your programs and projects.

Data Structures (overlaps with Computer Science) A data structure is basically a container for data that you use while programming. These classes go over more advanced programming concepts, and introduce different types of data structures. You will explore the tradeoffs and benefits to using various data structures in your programs, and when is the best occasion to use what type. You may also learn about popular algorithms used to do things like search through data inside a data structure, and how to write code for such algorithms.

Computer Architecture (overlaps with Computer Science)Have you ever taken apart a phone or laptop, and looked at the circuit boards inside? How do all the different components come together to make a device that you can interact with and use in so many different ways? That is the basis for Computer Architecture. In this topic, you will learn about system level design for a computer or other computing device. Classes will cover memory, caches, data paths, instruction set architecture, and how hardware can be unified with software at the physical machine interface to develop a working device. This is a very interesting field, and there is a lot of demand for bigger, better machines every year. Although the concepts can be complex and challenging, the reward of studying this field is high.

Embedded Systems and Low-level Programming(overlaps with Computer Science)Embedded Systems covers the interactions between physical hardware and machinery, and a programmer’s code that controls the machine. It is essentially a step up from Computer Architecture, in terms of how “low-level”, or close to the hardware, your interactions are.

Digital DesignAt a basic level, digital systems rely on only 1s and 0s, or in the case of a circuit, some “high” voltage, and a different “low” voltage. The voltages in between the high and low voltages don’t really matter, except that we consider them as “garbage values” since they’re neither 1 or 0, they’re somewhere in between. So then, Digital Design is the process of designing circuits that can use these 1 and 0 values to do computations and logical operations. Some basic examples are logic gates, adders, and shifters. Those small components are then combined to create large systems, such as microcontrollers and processors.

Digital Signal Processing (overlaps with Electrical Engineering) If you’re interested in telecommunications, like WiFi or Bluetooth or satellite TV, this is a good field to go into. Digital Signal Processing teaches you how to convert between analog (real-time) and digital (discrete) signals, as well as how signals propagate, what you can with electrical signals, how radio works, and so forth. It’s very interesting, but can be quite challenging. If you are interested in the Internet of Things or low-power energy harvesting devices, this topic will help with gaining a deeper understanding of how parts of those systems work.

Integrated Circuits(overlaps with Electrical Engineering)Integrated circuits are essentially multiple circuits and/or devices combined into one single silicon chip. This topic overlaps with Digital Design. What is unique about integrated circuits is the sheer scale of devices on one chip - you can have billions of transistors on a single, small piece of silicon. Thus it is important to understand how to combine all those devices together, and how the cost and performance of the chips are affected. You also learn how to design these kinds of chips by learning about VLSI - Very Large Scale Integration. I loved the class I took on VLSI, as it was very hands-on and we were able to create our own chips using Cadence Virtuoso, which is a design software suite that professionals use to create their integrated circuit designs.

Hardware Layout(overlaps with Electrical Engineering)Hardware Layout involves creating the physical design of the actual circuit board or other electronic product that you are designing. You will learn how to place components in such a way that you minimize area to keep costs down, and follow other design constraints. Having an understanding of physics is essential, as you will discuss power consumption vs area tradeoffs and other similar topics. You will also learn how circuit boards are manufactured, and depending on the class you may even be able to have the boards you design fabricated so that you can test them.

Microelectronics(overlaps with Electrical Engineering)Microelectronics is the study of small electronic devices such as transistors, amplifiers, and diodes. At an undergraduate level, you will learn how these devices are made, what they do, how to design your own devices, and how to analyze these in circuits. These courses are also fairly heavy in physics, and an understanding of calculus and differential equations is very beneficial. My class covered Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistors (MOSFETs), Bipolar Junction Transistors (BJTs), operational amplifiers, rectifiers, LEDs, MOS Capacitors, PN Junctions, and laser diodes. This topic is another one that I really enjoyed.

There are of course even more topics, but these are the ones I can think of off the top of my head, and that I have taken or have experience with.

OTHER TOPICS

You will also need to take a course (or multiple courses) on calculus, up to and including Multivariable Calculus, as well as a course on Differential Equations. You will also need to take a course on Statistics, as statistical analyses are needed frequently, especially when dealing with any sort of digital signal processing.

PROJECTS

So there are a variety of things you can get involved in, and I’ll list a few.

Engineering Student OrganizationsThese are great places to get involved in the community while also learning more about your chosen field and gaining team-work skills. They can also be great places to work with other engineers who aren’t in your major. For example, my school has a student organization that works together to design an eco-friendly car every year and enters it in competitions. Many students are involved in this and it looks great on your resume as well! There are also professional organizations that help you learn valuable skills and connect you with employers, but also provide technical workshops and projects. IEEE (Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers) is an organization like this. The student branch on campus not only sponsors companies to visit campus, but also has three teams of students who work on various projects for competitions, such as building robots, designing a drone, etc. You could also find a volunteering opportunity with a student club - at Georgia Tech, there is a group that goes to high schools and middle schools in the area and teaches young students how to code and build small electronics.

Laboratory AssignmentsDuring your laboratory classes, you will have a project every week or so. These are great ways to learn more in a hands-on way. You are often exposed to equipment that you will later see in your career, such as function generators (used to put out electrical signals), oscilloscopes (can measure signals), power sources (they provide power to your circuits), multimeters (used to measure current, voltage, resistance), and so forth. You build your own circuits or devices, and test them, then record the data you measure, and draw conclusions from there. One cool project I had as part of a lab class was to create a breadboard game controller and program a small game for it using C++. The controller had a speaker, push buttons, a small LCD screen, and an accelerometer on it, all controlled by a microcontroller that I programmed. Another project I had a lot of fun with was programming a robot using assembly language and VHDL (VHSIC Hardware Description Language), to make the robot reach several destinations most efficiently. This one was a team project where we were required to give a presentation at the end.

Personal ProjectsWith a personal project, you can do basically anything you want to. There are a lot of ideas on the internet, where people use Raspberry Pis or Arduinos to make cool things, like little robots, Internet of Things devices, gamepads, etc. I don’t really tend to do personal projects, but the things you can do are really endless. I have a friend who was working on designing a door lock for his dorm room so that he didn’t have to use a key, but could just swipe his school ID to open the door. Another friend of mine was working on some machine learning algorithms to create a poetry bot that would generate a random poem in the style of a poet you told it to imitate.

ResearchIf you’re interested in learning about cutting edge technology and solving current problems, a research project is a great way to get involved. The opportunities and programs at your school may vary, but emailing a professor directly and asking if you can work for them is something that will always be common across schools. In the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Georgia Tech, there are also two programs that will put you on a team of students that work with a professor and a graduate student mentor to solve some sort of research problem. You can even get paid to do this! I work with a research team on developing a method for cheap, efficient renewable energy - solar power from space, which is beamed down to Earth and then converted into usable electric power. Essentially, you could power all sorts of electronics wirelessly - no more need for those pesky charging cables!

CAREERS

With a degree in Computer Engineering, you can do practically anything. Here are some possible career paths, but you could do something outside of these, like starting your own company!

Academia/Professorship If you like doing research at a school, and think you might also like to teach, this is a good path. You’ll need a PhD, and possibly a Master’s degree, depending on whether that’s a requirement for your chosen PhD program. After you get your PhD, you’ll need to find a post-doctoral position somewhere, and from there apply for instructor or assistant professor positions. You can work your way up from an assistant professor, to an associate professor, to finally a professor, hopefully with tenure.According to GlassDoor, the average salary of an assistant professor in Computer Engineering currently is $101,464/year. Payscale, however, notes that the average salary for an associate professor is $88,853/year, so your salary will of course vary greatly with which institution you teach at, and what your specific position is. At Georgia Tech, there are several professors who make over $300,000/year, but they are also typically chairs of the department or some other high-ranking position within the school.

Research & Development EngineerIf you like doing research, but don’t want to have to teach, or the idea of being a professor doesn’t appeal to you, going into R&D at a company might be your cup of tea. R&D engineers typically work on advancing the front edge of technology, and developing the next generation of products. An example would be how smartphones get more powerful every year - a team of R&D engineers is the one behind making the hardware changes that enable better performance and powerful processing. We’ve come a long way since the era of the flip phone.The national average salary for a R&D Engineer in the U.S. is $86,927 per year, according to GlassDoor. For a Senior R&D Engineer, the national average is $97,465/year. This, again, will vary based on which company you work for.

Hardware EngineerHardware engineers typically will design and develop new systems, such as processors, networks, routers, memory systems, and so on, for computer systems. Circuit board design and modeling and simulations comprise a large part of the job. Average salary for a Hardware Engineer is $95,550/year.

Verification EngineerVerification engineers are in charge of checking that a hardware system will run properly under a set of certain operating conditions. Knowledge of VHDL and/or Verilog is required, as is experience with working on FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) systems. Tests are typically done either in simulations and models, or with an FPGA. Average salary for a Verification Engineer is $92,012/year in the U.S.

Software EngineerSoftware engineering positions come in a wide variety of flavors, but all  will require knowledge of good programming practices, and contemporary programming knowledge. Typically, someone who has done a Computer Engineering degree will have knowledge of lower level languages, such as C, C++, and assembly, though it is also good to learn Java and Python, as those are popular in industry. Computer Engineering students with exposure to such languages typically choose to go into Software Engineering roles that are closer to the hardware, such as operating systems, networks, or back-end development. Average salary for a Software Engineer in the U.S. is $95,175/year.

Patent LawBecoming a lawyer after getting an engineering degree may seem strange to you, but patent law is actually an area in which it is more beneficial to have technical knowledge as well! Patent lawyers help companies and inventors register patents with the U.S. Patent Office, and make sure that one patent doesn’t infringe on another, or that manufacturers are not infringing on patent rights that are in effect. After getting a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering, you should work in a related industry for a few years, then apply to law school. Getting a job as a patent assistant or getting certified by the U.S. Patent Office will also help with pursuing this career. The average salary for a patent lawyer is $148,000/year.

I hope that helps!! If you have any more questions please don’t hesitate to ask, and I promise I’ll get to them as soon as I possibly can!

Also I forgot to mention, doing an internship over a summer, in between your school years is a great way to figure out what kind of career you’d be interested in. Schools tend to have a lot a career fairs in the fall, when companies visit campus so students can talk to them. Prepare your resume and a list of questions you want to ask about each company, and after the career fairs, make sure to apply to the position you want on the company website! This is a great way to make professional connections and meet people who work in your chosen field. 

[brandufo]

Top 10 Techniques Reduce Bounce Rate Website

In this article we willl discuss Top 10 Techniques Reduce Bounce Rate Website. What exactly is the bounce rate? The bounce rate is specified by Google as the percentage of single-page sessions. The bounce rate is significant since it indicates how visitors communicate with your website, whether they are involved in your material, and whether your website is properly configured. The number of users who exit your web after just visiting one page is known as the bounce rate. Setting up Google Analytics on your website is the perfect way to track the bounce rate. Techniques for reducing bounce rate When it comes to operating a good website, one of the most significant barometers of the digital marketing output is bounce rate. A critical consideration that many website operators, creators, and advertisers lack. If you have a high bounce rate, there is most definitely a reason for it, such as your website being sluggish, having poor navigation, HTTPS mixed-content alerts, being unusable on mobile, and so on, which are causing users to abandon your website. A high bounce rate will jeopardise your prospects of success, so it's important that you investigate the various areas of the web to determine what's triggering the issue. Lowering this figure usually indicates that the website is more suited for quality traffic and visibility.

1. Increase the speed of the website

Implementing a content distribution network is one of the most effective ways to speed up your website (CDN). A CDN can store copies of your properties on edge servers around the world and distribute them to your consumers at lightning-fast rates. When it comes to physical distance, no matter how fast the web host is, they will never be able to overcome the latency problem.

2. Eliminate HTTPS mixed-content alerts

When a server that is supposed to be operating over HTTPS is still serving properties over HTTP, mixed-content alerts emerge. Website owners can always search their pages in both browsers to ensure that they do not get HTTPS mixed-content alerts.

3. Improve the readability of the material

A popular cause for your visitors bouncing is a failure of legibility in your content. It's challenging for people to look through broad chunks of text to see if it's something they'd want to learn all about. Don't publish posts that imitate the high school science textbooks. Your guests can quickly lose concentration and interest and go on to the next item on their to-do list. This results in a failed session and no conversion on your platform. Instead, publish material with readability in mind, so that readers can browse the documents and extract the most relevant information in seconds.

4. Using goal keywords to reach the correct audience

One of the key explanations for a high bounce rate is that you might not be approaching the correct crowd. You could get a lot of guests, but if they are low-quality visitors, you won't get any interaction, let alone converts. As a consequence, the bounce rate is a valuable signal that may mean that your whole targeting plan is off. And if you have the greatest marketing and customer interface, if you approach the wrong people, you would not get a favourable answer. You want to target high-quality traffic, and the only approach to do that is to use high-value keywords. Find out what phrases the target demographic uses to scan the internet. The most valuable keywords have a strong propensity for traffic and transaction - based consumer intent. High-value keywords will help you create in-depth material and power pages that your users will like to learn. And the more they stay on your website, the more interest they will have in you and the more probable they will convert. Creating compelling content around premium keywords, on the other hand, would draw more backlinks, raise your web authority, and improve your online visibility. Choose high-value keywords to base the content on, and you'll be able to draw the same kind of users. Those that are involved in converting and are willing to do so in the coming.

5. Produce meaningful content based on consumer intent

If you're reaching the correct, high-quality audience but also have a high bounce rate, the issue may be the relevance of the material. Your sites and material must be incredibly important to the users' questions (or ad) that took them to your web in the first place. Users are almost likely to quit if there is no appropriate material.

6. Make the website mobile-friendly

Mobile traffic is incredibly critical! In reality, mobile devices accounted for more than 57 percent of all internet traffic. And the figures are increasing. If you see a strong bounce rate from mobile device users in GA, this might be a warning flag that your web isn't mobile-friendly. Using Google's Mobile-Friendly Evaluation method to prove this is the problem. If your website isn't user-friendly, you can consider optimising it for mobile devices. Fortunately, if you use WordPress, this isn't that difficult. Check if you're using a sensitive WordPress style. Consider utilising AMP, which stands for “accelerated mobile pages” and will greatly improve your smartphone efficiency.

7. Enhance the functionality of your website

Your website's design is essential. Your material and architecture should be appealing in order to help reach the demographic you're looking for. People should not waste time on websites that are unappealing or difficult to use. If you run your website on a popular CMS like WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla, there are thousands of premium themes available.

8. Current material - Hold it up to date

When it comes to lowering the bounce rate, keeping your material up to date is critical. Here's an illustration of your "new score," as well as how it degrades over time. When Googlebot first indexes a text or finds a connection to it, the inception date is also when Google becomes conscious of it. And, if you take the time to refresh the site with important and relevant material, have a "updated on" date to let users know you invested time updating it.

9. Use caution when it comes to ad positioning

Ads should not be placed in areas where users are searching for content, such as the menu bar or search box, as this will irritate them.Find out all about poorly positioned ads.

10. Demonstrate integrity by displaying confidence and security symbols

Use confidence marks and badges to improve the site's reputation. Trusted logos can make the guests even more assured that they are making the correct choice by ordering from you, reducing unwanted bounces. Using an SSL credential is another way to increase legitimacy. It can assist you in obtaining the HTTPS badge that appears next to the website's URL. It denotes that all contact between your site and the user's browser is encrypted, implying that it is safe. Recent articles - Top 10 Techniques Reduce Bounce Rate Website - The Top 10 Most Rewatched Action Movie Scenes Ever in Hollywood- Click here - The Top 10 Hardest Monsters to Kill in Movies in Hollywood- Click here - One of Top 10 movies related to 21st-century software technology you must watch- Click here - Top 10 best American Tv Series you must watch 2021 - Click here - Future Trending Tech 2021 to 2025 Next 5 Years- Click here - Top 10 Startup Ideas Entrepreneurs become Billionaires- Click here - Penny Stocks buy in 2021 - ReactJS Not Recommend Building Enterprise Applications- Click here - Famous Indian celebrities enter Tech startups- Click here - Top 6 Digital Marketing Agencies San Francisco- Click here - Top 5 Backend Programming Languages Higher Growth 2025 - Click here Read the full article

[marymosley]

Concept of Humanitarian Forensics in Legal System

ABSTRACT – The term “forensic science” refers to a systematic & coherent study of traces to address the question of Authentication, Identification, Classification & Reconstruction. It can also be explained as the amalgamation of various branches of science and application of scientific methods & techniques to matters under investigation and present an opinion in the court of law.

But forensic science can have a humanitarian role as well. Humanitarian forensic action is the application of forensic science to humanitarian action. During conflicts, disasters, other situations of violence and consequences of migration there are victims of violence including deceased or missing individuals. A priority of forensic science in the humanitarian space is the respectable management of the deceased and the resolution of missing cases. The identification of the individuals in a priority as families has a right to know whereabouts and fate of their relatives and the deceased have a right to the restoration of their identity after death. When people die during any natural calamities or during migration as stated earlier, their corpses must be dealt with respect and with dignity; and the remains for an unidentified individual must be looked for, revering and identification. Humanitarian functions in a way that it includes these tasks, for which the expertise and proficiency of forensic science come into play.

INTRODUCTION- Since the 1980s, the detailed scientific knowledge and application of forensics for disinterring and identification of the deceased have been introduced in a wide-scale investigation. For instance, the Argentina team of Forensic Anthropology (EAAF, Equipo Argentino de Antropologia Forense) is one of the precursors in this field and is currently operational globally. Following the probe after the conflict of the Balkans, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) focused on the library of evidence for war crime trials. Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) is another example of usage of forensics in relation to humanitarian work, and they have a similar focus on the documentation and collection of evidence for judicial prosecution in the hopefulness of accountability and answerability for the human rights violations.

Regarding the deceased, humanitarian priorities should not be looked independently from the judicial aspects of international humanitarian, human rights, or criminal laws. The investigation in mass fatalities, whether they aim at the prosecution of perpetrators, the identification of the victims, or both, depends on the collection of the same type of related data [e.g. excavation data, biological profile (approximate age, gender, stature), pathology and trauma analyses, etc.]. The International Criminal Court (ICC) is using forensic professionals for field scrutiny as part of their court lawsuits. Then the connoisseur of the respective discipline may impart expert opinion or instruction to the court of law for trials of genocide, war crimes or any crime against humankind. The angle of approach (judicial versus humanitarian) will depend on the mandate of the corporation, and influences which disciplines and specialities of forensic sciences will be used in such operations.

Since 2003, the International Committee for the red cross (ICRC) have been actively functioning with the local authorities and forensic practitioners in order to construct standardized techniques and practices and to enhance communication & cooperation arrangement, for dealing with all aspects of forensic humanitarian demands. The neutrality, independence and impartiality of the ICRC assist its work in the forensic humanitarian deed which is grounded in International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and guided by humanitarian standards.  Now active in more than 80 countries worldwide with a well-distinguished team (anthropologists, archaeologists, pathologist, odontologists, geneticists, etc), the forensic unit of ICRC helps in ensuring and making sure the smooth conduction of search and identification procedure.

The ICRC’s forensic provisions are revised to demands and establish a part of an integrated methodology to humanitarian action that looks into matter such as safety conditioning, lawful supervision, psychosocial sustenance, health care services, financial assistance, availability to potable water and apposite habitation, and lessening the humanitarian impact of weapon contamination. Let’s look deeper into some of the fields ICRC’s forensic expertise comes into play for legal aspect-

ARMED CONFLICT & WAR SURVIVORS- Under the guidance of international humanitarian act, the remnants of people who have deceased during armed disaccord must be moved with respect and needs to be properly managed. However, in a situation of dispute, it is often not likely to reacquire or decently manage the remnants of those who have succumbed to death, both inhabitants and soldiers. In many occasions, individuals have been detached from their peoples, have vanished or have expired without being recognized, and the whereabouts of their residues are unidentified. The survivor of the war may be reluctant to express anything about gone companion due to fear retaliation from the concerned authority. There is an increasing demand for forensic expertise, including ICRC, among State establishments and local practitioners, who need it to accomplish their commitments under humanitarian law with regards to managing dead bodies and the provision of reports and findings45 to bereaved families. Using a variety of forensic specialities – such as anthropology, archaeology, pathology, odontology (dental testing), trichology, forensic onychology and DNA analysis among the many other fields, the scientist tries to identify the unidentified.

CASE STUDY – In the Caucasus, the ICRC helps the families of missing persons in fulfilling their legal, economic and psychosocial needs.  At the same time, the ICRC coordinates with the concerned authorities to encourage the obligatory forensic capacity and develop mechanisms in order to improve communication, collaboration and coordination between the involved personnel mandated to clarify the fate of missing persons.

DISASTERS – After a disaster, natural or man-made, the remains of the deceased must be assembled in a timely manner, properly managed and, ideally, recognized. This is vital the families and communities affected. When local infrastructure has disintegrated, it can be particularly challenging. The ICRC stipulates material aid, as well as guidance and training, to local authorities and first responders for these details. The training and advice provided by the ICRC enables first responders to collect and record information that will increase the likelihood of recognizing the dead.

CASE STUDY – In Nepal, the ICRC works with first-aiders, the Nepalese Red Cross and national authorities to enhance disaster response and develop sustainable capacity, including in the management of human remains.

MIGRATION – Migrants who perish along migratory routes often remain anonymous and the task of managing their remnants & establishing their identities can overwhelm local forensic facilities. The ICRC co-ordinates with local authorities and forensic practitioners in order to develop standardized techniques and protocols, and to advance communication and cooperation strategies, for dealing with this issue.

CASE STUDY – In Mexico, the ICRC and the Mexican Red Cross make arrangements for protection and assistance – basic medical services, access to basic amenities such as potable water and sanitation, and services for reuniting families – to migrants originating in or crossing through that country. The ICRC also functions with Mexico’s national medico-legal services to design domestic procedures and protocols to improve the whole process concerned with the management and identification & documentation of remains, including those of migrants, in order to assist answers to their families.

CONCLUSION – Humanitarian forensic offers us an endless variety of tools and expertise in order to locate, search and identify the unidentified. But the humanitarian forensic scientists don’t always succeed in their ventures. Sometimes their exploration never attains any conclusion or say reaches a dead end. The fate and place of those missing always remains a mystery, an unresolved case. People inspite having a name given by their loved one’s called anonymous. In the best-case scenario, though, the difficult & tedious work that these scientists do, brings closure to families so they can start mourning over their loss and gone peoples.

REFERENCES

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/forensic-archaeology-and- anthropology/0/steps/67917

https://theconversation.com/amp/humaitarian-forensic-scientists-trace-the-missing-identify-the-dead-and-comfort-the-living-115623

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781119482062

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31110447/

https://ift.tt/38hrnOM Humanitarian Forensic-IOSR Journal

Author – APARNA DUBEY

(Intern, Department of Forensic Science and Criminal Investigation, Legal Desire Media & Insights)

The post Concept of Humanitarian Forensics in Legal System appeared first on Legal Desire.

Concept of Humanitarian Forensics in Legal System published first on https://immigrationlawyerto.tumblr.com/

[theconservativebrief]

What would it take to really tackle climate change? No delays, no gimmicks, no loopholes, no shirking of responsibility — the real thing. What would it look like?

To answer that question, it helps to understand the upper threshold of climate ambition. The target agreed upon by the world’s nations in Paris in 2015 is global warming of “well below” 2 degrees Celsius, with good-faith efforts to hold temperature rise to 1.5 degrees.

Countries are not moving anywhere near fast enough to hit those targets, so we are currently on track for somewhere around 3 degrees. It is generally agreed that hitting 2 degrees would be quite ambitious, while hitting 1.5 would be nothing short of miraculous. Yet the scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in their latest report, are pleading with the world to go for it, because at this point, every fraction of a degree of warming matters.

While there is nothing like a real-world plan in place for hitting those targets yet, climate modelers have come up with many scenarios for how we might do so. However, as I wrote recently, most of those scenarios rely heavily on “negative emissions” — ways of pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. If negative emissions technologies can be scaled up later in the century, the reasoning goes, it gives us room to emit more earlier in the century.

And that’s what most current 2- or 1.5-degree scenarios show: Global carbon emissions rise in the short term, then plunge rapidly to become net negative around 2060, with gigatons of carbon subsequently captured and buried over the remainder of the century. The oil giant Shell released a scenario along those lines a few weeks ago.

Shell’s use of negative emissions, compared to other scenarios. Glen Peters

The primary instrument of negative emissions is expected to be BECCS: bioenergy (burning plants to generate electricity) with carbon capture and sequestration. The idea is that plants absorb carbon as they grow; when we burn them, we can capture and bury that carbon. The result is electricity generated as carbon is removed from the cycle — net-negative carbon electricity.

Most current scenarios bank on a lot of BECCS later in the century to make up for the carbon sins of the near past and near future.

BECCS. Sanchez 2015

One small complication in all this: There is currently no commercial BECCS industry. Neither the BE nor the CCS part has been demonstrated at any serious scale, much less at the scale necessary. (The land area needed to grow all that biomass for BECCS in these models is estimated to be around one to three times the size of India.)

Maybe we could pull off a massive BECCS industry quickly. But banking on negative emissions later in the century is, at the very least, an enormous, fateful gamble. It bets the lives and welfare of millions of future people on an industry that, for all intents and purposes, doesn’t yet exist.

Plenty of people reasonably conclude that’s a bad idea, but alternatives have been difficult to come by. There hasn’t been much scenario-building around truly ambitious goals: to zero out carbon as fast as possible, to hold temperature rise as close to 1.5 degrees as possible, and, most significantly, to do so while minimizing the need for negative emissions. That is the upper end of what’s possible.

In May, I looked at three publications that help fill that gap:

“Global Energy Transformation: A Roadmap to 2050,” by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), is a plan that targets a 66 percent chance of staying below 2 degrees, primarily through renewable energy.

The analysts at Ecofys recently released a scenario for zeroing out global emissions by 2050, thus limiting temperature to 1.5 degrees and eliminating (most of) the need for negative emissions.

A group of scholars led by Detlef van Vuuren of the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency published a paper in Nature Climate Change investigating how to hit the 1.5 degree target while minimizing the need for negative emissions.

This graph will be very meaningful once you read the paper. Nature Climate Change

Here’s how this post (first published in May) is going to go: First, we’ll have a quick look at why targeting 1.5 degrees is so urgent; second, we’ll look at a few things these scenarios have in common, the baseline for serious ambition; third, we’ll look more closely at the third paper, as it offers some interesting alternatives (like, oh, mass vegetarianism) to typical carbon thinking; and finally, I’ll conclude.

Americans can’t make much sense out of Celsius temperatures, and half a degree of temperature doesn’t sound like much regardless. But the difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees of global warming is a very big deal. (Read the IPCC’s new science review here.)

Another recent paper in Nature Climate Change makes the point vividly: Bumping ambition up from 2 to 1.5 degrees would prevent 150 million premature deaths through 2100, 90 million through reduced exposure to particulates, 60 million due to reduced ozone.

“More than a million premature deaths would be prevented in many metropolitan areas in Asia and Africa,” the researchers write, “and [more than] 200,000 in individual urban areas on every inhabited continent except Australia.”

That’s not nothing! And of course, the difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees could mean the difference between life and death for low-lying islands.

The Marshall Islands, for now. Shutterstock

There’s no time to waste. In fact, there may be, uh, negative time. Limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees is possible, even in theory, only if the “carbon budget” for that target is at the high end of current estimates.

Again: 1.5 is only possible if we get started, with boosters on, immediately, and we get lucky. Time is not running out — it’s out.

The three scenarios I mentioned are different in a number of ways. The first two project through 2050, but the Nature Climate Change paper goes out to 2100. They target different things and use different tools. But they share a few big action items — features that any ambitious climate plan will inevitably involve.

1) Radically increase energy efficiency.

Just how much energy will be needed through 2050? That depends on population and economic growth, obviously, but it also depends on the energy intensity of the world’s economies — how much primary energy they require to produce a unit of GDP.

Increasing energy efficiency (which, all else being equal, reduces emissions) is in a race with population and economic growth (which, all else being equal, increases them). To radically decarbonize with minimal negative emissions, efficiency will need to outrun growth. (Notably, Shell’s scenario shows much higher global energy demand in coming decades; growth outruns efficiency.)

IRENA’s scenario reduces global energy-related emissions 90 percent by 2050. Of that 90 percent, 40 comes from energy efficiency.

IRENA

To do this, IRENA says, the energy intensity of the global economy must fall two-thirds by 2050. Improvements in energy intensity will have to accelerate from an average of 1.8 percent a year from 2010 to 2015 to an average of 2.8 percent a year through 2050.

In the Ecofys scenario, energy efficiency is so amped up that total global energy demand is lower in 2050 than today, despite a much larger population and a global economy three times larger than today’s.

The Nature Climate Change paper summarizes the necessary approach to efficiency this way: “Rapid application of the best available technologies for energy and material efficiency in all relevant sectors in all regions.”

“All relevant sectors in all regions” means electricity, transportation, buildings, and industry, all bumped up to the most efficient available materials and technologies, everywhere in the world, starting immediately. Cool, cool, cool.

2) Radically increase renewable energy.

All the scenarios envision renewables (primarily wind and solar) rapidly coming to dominate electricity. In the IRENA scenario, renewables grow sixfold faster than they are currently, supplying 85 percent of global electricity by 2050.

Ecofys has them supplying 100 percent of global electricity — with that sector completely decarbonized — by 2040, even as global demand for electricity triples.

Ecofys

The Nature Climate Change paper notes that the vision of rapid renewables dominance all these scenarios have in common involves “optimistic assumptions on the integration of variable renewables and on costs of transmission, distribution and storage,” which, yeah.

3) Electrify everything!

Notably, all three scenarios heavily involve electrification of sectors and applications that currently run on fossil fuels. In the IRENA case, electricity rises from 21 percent of total global energy consumption today to 40 percent by 2050.

In the Ecofys scenario, it rises to a whopping 70 percent. In the Nature Climate Change study, it rises to 46 percent (compared to 31 percent in the reference case).

I have made the case for electrification before, and it’s not complicated. We know how to radically increase the supply of zero-carbon electricity; increasing the supply of zero-carbon liquid fuels is much more difficult. So it makes sense to move as much energy use as possible over to electricity, particularly vehicles, home heating and cooling, and lower-temperature industrial applications.

The Ecofys scenario makes it particularly clear: If renewable energy and energy efficiency are to be your primary decarbonization tools (more on that in a second), full decarbonization requires going all out on electrification.

The rising yellow wedge at the bottom left — that’s electricity. IRENA

4) And still maybe do a little negative emissions.

Even though the intentions, of the Ecofys and Nature researchers particularly, was to minimize the need for negative emissions, neither was able to completely eliminate it.

“Regardless of the rapid decarbonisation” in the scenario, Ecofys researchers write, “the 1.5°C carbon budget is most likely still exceeded.” The only way to hold at 1.5 is to mop up that excess carbon with negative emissions. Ecofys thinks CCS applications will mostly be confined to industry and the rest can be taken care of by “afforestation, reforestation, and soil carbon sequestration,” i.e., non-CCS methods of negative emissions. And, it notes, this remaining excess carbon “is significantly less than most other low carbon scenarios.”

In the Nature Climate Change study, the need for BECCS can be completely eliminated only if every single one of the other strategies is maximized (see the next section).

Here’s what those researchers conclude about negative emissions:

[W]hile this study shows that alternative options can greatly reduce the volume of CDR [carbon dioxide removal] to achieve the 1.5°C goal, nearly all scenarios still rely on BECCS and/or reforestation (even the hypothetical combination of all alternative options still captured 400 GtCO2 by reforestation). Therefore, investment in the development of CDR options remains an important strategy if the international community intends to implement the Paris target.

They advise policymakers (wisely, it seems to me) to pursue negative emissions strategies but to think of alternative scenarios as insurance against the possibility that those strategies run up against unanticipated social or economic barriers.

The Kemper Project, meant to capture carbon from coal emissions, died a painful death. Wikipedia

The IRENA and Ecofys scenarios, like most rapid decarbonization scenarios, rely overwhelmingly on renewable energy and energy efficiency. But as environmentalist Paul Hawken reminds us with his Drawdown Project, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in most climate policy. (For instance, we’re going to talk about fake meat here in a minute.)

Like most climate-economic modelers, the Nature Climate Change researchers use integrated assessment models (IAMs) to generate their scenarios. They tested their decarbonization strategies against the second of five shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs), which are the modeling community’s set of different visions for the future — different mixes of population, economic growth, oil prices, technology development, etc. SSP2 contains roughly median predictions. (If you’re curious about SSPs, here’s an explainer.)

But they also challenge some of the limitations in how IAMs have typically been used:

As IAMs select technologies on the basis of relative costs, they normally concentrate on reduction measures for which reasonable estimates of future performance and costs can be made. This implies that some possible response strategies receive less attention, as their future performance is more speculative or their introduction would be based on drivers other than cost, such as lifestyle change or more rapid electrification.

The Nature Climate Change paper attempts to model some of these more ambitious, uncertain, or non-cost-driven strategies, assembling a whole suite of decarbonization scenarios in different combinations.

Several of them are familiar: There’s a “uniform carbon tax in all regions and sectors,” along with maximized energy efficiency and renewable energy. But others are more novel in these modeling contexts.

Agricultural intensification: “High agricultural yields and application of intensified animal husbandry globally.”

Low non-CO2: “Implementation of the best available technologies for reducing non-CO2 emissions and full adoption of cultured meat in 2050.” (Non-CO2 greenhouse gases include methane, nitrous oxide, black carbon, fluorocarbons, aerosols, and tropospheric ozone. Cattle are a big source of methane, thus the cultured meat.)

Lifestyle change: “Consumers change their habits towards a lifestyle that leads to lower GHG emissions. This includes a less meat-intensive diet (conforming to health recommendations), less CO2-intensive transport modes (following the current modal split in Japan), less intensive use of heating and cooling (change of 1°C in heating and cooling reference levels) and a reduction in the use of several domestic appliances.” Though they don’t call it out specifically, this would very much involve less flying, one of the most carbon-intensive habits of the affluent.

Low population: “Scenario based on SSP1, projecting low population growth.” Population growth can be curbed most effectively through access to family planning and education of girls (which, notably, have many other benefits as well).

Good climate policy. (Drawdown)

You can decide for yourself how likely you find any of these changes. The researchers say they are modeling “ambitious, but not unrealistic implementation.”

Reducing non-CO2 GHGs and widespread lifestyle changes have the most short-term impact on emissions. However, “by 2100,” they write, “the strongest reductions are found in the renewable electrification and low population scenarios.” This echoes what the Drawdown Project found, which is that educating girls and making family planning widely available (thus reducing population growth) is the most potent long-term climate policy.

Needless to say, accomplishing any one of these goals — a global carbon tax, maximized efficiency, an explosion of renewable energy, a wholesale revolution in agriculture, rapid reduction of non-CO2 GHGs, a rapid shift in global lifestyle choices, and successful measures to curb population growth — would be an enormous achievement.

To completely avoid BECCS while still hitting the 1.5 degree target, we would have to accomplish all of them.

That is highly unlikely. Still, the important point of the Nature Climate Change research remains: “alternative pathways exist allowing for more moderate use and postponement of BECCS.” Given the substantial and uncharted difficulties facing BECCS, policymakers owe those alternative pathways a look.

Obviously these strategies face all kinds of social and economic barriers. (I’m trying to envision what it would take to rapidly shift Americans from beef to cultured meat … trying and failing.) But they also come with co-benefits. Reducing fossil fuels reduces local air pollution and its health impacts. Energy efficiency reduces energy bills. Eating less meat and driving less are healthy.

Overall, a radical energy transition would mean a net boost in global GDP (relative to the reference case) in every year through 2050.

IRENA

An energy transition would also create millions of net jobs. But that doesn’t mean it will be easy.

Engineering any of these shifts, the Nature Climate Change researchers write with some understatement, “requires not only insights from IAMs, but also in-depth knowledge of social transitions.” They suggest (and I heartily endorse) that subsequent research focus on social and political barriers and strategies.

In the end, perhaps the most important conclusion in the Nature Climate Change paper is the simplest and the one that we already knew: “a rapid transformation in energy consumption and land use is needed in all scenarios.”

At this point, whether it’s possible to hit various targets is almost beside the point. All the science and modeling are saying the same thing, which is that humanity faces serious danger and needs to reduce carbon emissions to zero as quickly as possible.

The chances of us getting our collective shit together and accomplishing what these scenarios describe are … slim. There are so many vested interests and so much public aversion to rapid change, so many governments to be coordinated, so many economic and technology trends that must fall just the right way. It’s daunting.

Conversely, the chances of us overdoing it — trying too hard, spending too much money, reducing emissions too much or too fast — are effectively nil.

So the only rule of climate policy that really matters is: go as hard and fast as possible, forever and ever, amen.

Original Source -> What genuine, no-bullshit ambition on climate change would look like

via The Conservative Brief

[usajobsite]

Summer Associate SC Level- Technology, MBA, Consulting – New York with Deloitte

The position listed below is not with New York Interviews but with DeloitteNew York Interviews is a private organization that works in collaboration with government agencies to promote emerging careers. Our goal is to connect you with supportive resources to supplement your skills in order to attain your dream career. New York Interviews has also partnered with industry leading consultants & training providers that can assist during your career transition. We look forward to helping you reach your career goals! If you any questions please visit our contact page to connect with us directlyDeloitte is one of the leading professional services organizations in the United States, specializing in audit, tax, consulting and financial advisory services with clients in more than 20 industries. We provide powerful business solutions to some of the world s most well-known and respected companies, including more than 75 percent of the Fortune 100.At Deloitte, you can have a rewarding career on every level. In addition to challenging and meaningful work, you ll have the chance to give back to your community, make a positive impact on the environment, participate in a range of diversity and inclusion initiatives, and find the support, coaching, and training it takes to advance your career. Our commitment to individual choice lets you customize aspects of your career path, your educational opportunities and your benefits. And our culture of innovation means your ideas on how to improve our business and your clients will be heard.Have a passion for technology? We re looking for a sharp analytical thinker, who is curious and eager to learn in a team environment. As a member of our Technology Consulting team, you ll further your knowledge, work on real-world client assignments, and understand the most critical technology challenges facing businesses today. Join us, and contribute to developing and implementing clients IT strategy, effectively plan for the future, and enhance their current business capabilities.Work you ll do (RECRUITER TO UPDATE BASED ON SCHOOL PROFILE GOALS)System Integrations - You ll work with clients across a broad spectrum of commercial clients and government (Federal, State and local) to propose, plan and deliver transformative technology projects. You will utilize your business-to-technology skills and communication skills to support our clients in achieving their strategic goals, by delivering on our key offerings, including enterprise architecture, program management, system implementation, testing and solution integration. As a trusted client advisor and team lead, you will also drive innovation by bringing your perspective on new and disruptive technologies (like IoT, Cloud, Analytics), which can transform our clients business and yield significant competitive advantages.Deloitte Digital Serve as an integrator between business needs and technology solutions, helping to create technology solutions to meet clients business needs. Defining systems strategy, developing system requirements, designing and prototyping, testing, training, defining support procedures and implementation. Perform accurate analysis and effective diagnosis of client issues and manage day-to-day client relationships at peer client levels. Lead teams within an engagement.Analytics Information ManagementoOur Data Management & Architecture practice helps clients solve their toughest data management issues by designing and implementing holistic solutions that include process, data, people and technology. This will improve how clients create, manage, governance and consume data, enabling their capability to manage data as a critical asset for the organization. You ll use your excellent communication skills to engage with clients in these discussion and leverage your technical skills to design and build data management solutions.oAdvanced Analytics Enablement leads technical delivery work stream as part of an Advanced Analytics, Big Data or Cognitive client project. It is expected that you will be able to lead client discussion, prepare for workshops, manage a team of 5 to 10 junior staff and be on a path to be a technical architect on anyone of the topics above.oJoining either our Commercial or Federal practice in Performance Management you ll help clients optimize their enterprise performance management strategies improving business partnering capabilities. Taking a business lead approach, you ll use your excellent finance and communication skills and transform our client s financial information into a strategic asset through the application of technology.Technology Strategy & Architecture TS&A advises CIOs, CTOs and business leaders to develop IT strategies for business outcomes, drive efficient IT operations, evolve key IT capabilities to meet changing market dynamics and deliver IT-enabled business transformation. We bring strategies, services and tools to manage Information Technology investments, portfolios and operations, including creating, leveraging, and applying innovative technologies to optimize business performance. Our expertise spans the entire technology stack, from applications to infrastructure. We design architectures and build IT solutions to translate strategic business decisions into an organization s technology foundation. We identify emerging technology trends that are relevant to business and shape end-to-end solutions through key strategic partnerships. We lead clients thorough the complex transitions that come with M&A transactions and the transformations that are part of that journey including: target identification and pre-deal due diligence, M&A roadmaps, strategies, and synergy targets, developing Day 1 projects and plans and post Day 1 planning and execution.The teamTechnology and your talent can answer many complex business questions. Our Technology Consulting team plays a major role in directly linking technology insights to our clients organizational goals. At Deloitte, our technology consultants create sharply-focused solutions within a business full operating model, accounting for its people, intellectual capital, technology, and processes.Learn more about our Technology Consulting practice.QualificationsRequiredA technical background via an undergraduate degree or work experienceEnrollment in a Master s of Business Administration programA Bachelor s degree in following or related area(s): Computer Science, Computer Information System, Management Information Systems, Data Analytics, Math, Accounting, Business, Finance, Marketing, Operations, Statistics, Supply Chain, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Engineering Management, or Industrial EngineeringStrong academic track record (minimum GPA of 3.5)Three to seven years experience, with one to two years experience in roles that have used technology as a business enablerTravel up to 80% may be required, dependent on project role and locationU.S. Citizenship and ability to obtain U.S. Security Clearance (Federal Practice candidates only)How you ll growThroughout your internship, you ll gain first-hand insights into technical skills, critical professional behaviors, standards, and mindsets needed to be effective/achieve results as technology consultant. You ll work with a wide variety of talented strategic leaders and learn how to leverage and analyze data, tackle real-world technology challenges, and experience what it s like to be a part of our organization.Deloitte s cultureOur positive and supportive culture encourages our people to do their best work every day. We celebrate individuals by recognizing their uniqueness and offering them the flexibility to make daily choices that can help them to be healthy, centered, confident, and aware. We offer well-being programs and are continuously looking for new ways to maintain a culture where our people excel and lead healthy, happy lives.Learn more about Life at Deloitte.Corporate citizenshipDeloitte is led by a purpose: to make an impact that matters. This purpose defines who we are and extends to relationships with our clients, our people and our communities. We believe that business has the power to inspire and transform. We focus on education, giving, skill-based volunteerism, and leadership to help drive positive social impact in our communities.Learn more about Deloitte s impact on the world.Recruiter tipsWe want job seekers exploring opportunities at Deloitte to feel prepared and confident. To help you with your interview, we suggest that you do your research: know some background about the organization and the business area you re applying to. We also suggest that you brush up on your behavioral and case interviewing skills and practice discussing your experience and job history with a family member, friend, or mentor.Check out recruiting tips from Deloitte professionals.About DeloitteAs used in this document, Deloitte means Deloitte LLP and its subsidiaries. Please see www.deloitte.com/us/about for a detailed description of the legal structure of Deloitte LLP and its subsidiaries. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability or protected veteran status, or any other legally protected basis, in accordance with applicable law.Disclaimer: If you are not reviewing this job posting on our Careers site (careers.deloitte.com) or one of our approved job boards we cannot guarantee the validity of this posting. For a list of our current postings, please visit us at careers.deloitte.com.Category: Management Consulting Associated topics: business, business advisory, business analysis, business analyst, business systems analyst, client, customer, market, marketing, sales  SummerAssociate(SCLevel)-Technology,MBA,Consulting–NewYorkwithDeloitte from Job Portal http://www.jobisite.com/extrJobView.htm?id=91172

[jobisite11]

Summer Associate SC Level- Technology, MBA, Consulting – New York with Deloitte

The position listed below is not with New York Interviews but with DeloitteNew York Interviews is a private organization that works in collaboration with government agencies to promote emerging careers. Our goal is to connect you with supportive resources to supplement your skills in order to attain your dream career. New York Interviews has also partnered with industry leading consultants & training providers that can assist during your career transition. We look forward to helping you reach your career goals! If you any questions please visit our contact page to connect with us directlyDeloitte is one of the leading professional services organizations in the United States, specializing in audit, tax, consulting and financial advisory services with clients in more than 20 industries. We provide powerful business solutions to some of the world s most well-known and respected companies, including more than 75 percent of the Fortune 100.At Deloitte, you can have a rewarding career on every level. In addition to challenging and meaningful work, you ll have the chance to give back to your community, make a positive impact on the environment, participate in a range of diversity and inclusion initiatives, and find the support, coaching, and training it takes to advance your career. Our commitment to individual choice lets you customize aspects of your career path, your educational opportunities and your benefits. And our culture of innovation means your ideas on how to improve our business and your clients will be heard.Have a passion for technology? We re looking for a sharp analytical thinker, who is curious and eager to learn in a team environment. As a member of our Technology Consulting team, you ll further your knowledge, work on real-world client assignments, and understand the most critical technology challenges facing businesses today. Join us, and contribute to developing and implementing clients IT strategy, effectively plan for the future, and enhance their current business capabilities.Work you ll do (RECRUITER TO UPDATE BASED ON SCHOOL PROFILE GOALS)System Integrations - You ll work with clients across a broad spectrum of commercial clients and government (Federal, State and local) to propose, plan and deliver transformative technology projects. You will utilize your business-to-technology skills and communication skills to support our clients in achieving their strategic goals, by delivering on our key offerings, including enterprise architecture, program management, system implementation, testing and solution integration. As a trusted client advisor and team lead, you will also drive innovation by bringing your perspective on new and disruptive technologies (like IoT, Cloud, Analytics), which can transform our clients business and yield significant competitive advantages.Deloitte Digital Serve as an integrator between business needs and technology solutions, helping to create technology solutions to meet clients business needs. Defining systems strategy, developing system requirements, designing and prototyping, testing, training, defining support procedures and implementation. Perform accurate analysis and effective diagnosis of client issues and manage day-to-day client relationships at peer client levels. Lead teams within an engagement.Analytics Information ManagementoOur Data Management & Architecture practice helps clients solve their toughest data management issues by designing and implementing holistic solutions that include process, data, people and technology. This will improve how clients create, manage, governance and consume data, enabling their capability to manage data as a critical asset for the organization. You ll use your excellent communication skills to engage with clients in these discussion and leverage your technical skills to design and build data management solutions.oAdvanced Analytics Enablement leads technical delivery work stream as part of an Advanced Analytics, Big Data or Cognitive client project. It is expected that you will be able to lead client discussion, prepare for workshops, manage a team of 5 to 10 junior staff and be on a path to be a technical architect on anyone of the topics above.oJoining either our Commercial or Federal practice in Performance Management you ll help clients optimize their enterprise performance management strategies improving business partnering capabilities. Taking a business lead approach, you ll use your excellent finance and communication skills and transform our client s financial information into a strategic asset through the application of technology.Technology Strategy & Architecture TS&A advises CIOs, CTOs and business leaders to develop IT strategies for business outcomes, drive efficient IT operations, evolve key IT capabilities to meet changing market dynamics and deliver IT-enabled business transformation. We bring strategies, services and tools to manage Information Technology investments, portfolios and operations, including creating, leveraging, and applying innovative technologies to optimize business performance. Our expertise spans the entire technology stack, from applications to infrastructure. We design architectures and build IT solutions to translate strategic business decisions into an organization s technology foundation. We identify emerging technology trends that are relevant to business and shape end-to-end solutions through key strategic partnerships. We lead clients thorough the complex transitions that come with M&A transactions and the transformations that are part of that journey including: target identification and pre-deal due diligence, M&A roadmaps, strategies, and synergy targets, developing Day 1 projects and plans and post Day 1 planning and execution.The teamTechnology and your talent can answer many complex business questions. Our Technology Consulting team plays a major role in directly linking technology insights to our clients organizational goals. At Deloitte, our technology consultants create sharply-focused solutions within a business full operating model, accounting for its people, intellectual capital, technology, and processes.Learn more about our Technology Consulting practice.QualificationsRequiredA technical background via an undergraduate degree or work experienceEnrollment in a Master s of Business Administration programA Bachelor s degree in following or related area(s): Computer Science, Computer Information System, Management Information Systems, Data Analytics, Math, Accounting, Business, Finance, Marketing, Operations, Statistics, Supply Chain, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Engineering Management, or Industrial EngineeringStrong academic track record (minimum GPA of 3.5)Three to seven years experience, with one to two years experience in roles that have used technology as a business enablerTravel up to 80% may be required, dependent on project role and locationU.S. Citizenship and ability to obtain U.S. Security Clearance (Federal Practice candidates only)How you ll growThroughout your internship, you ll gain first-hand insights into technical skills, critical professional behaviors, standards, and mindsets needed to be effective/achieve results as technology consultant. You ll work with a wide variety of talented strategic leaders and learn how to leverage and analyze data, tackle real-world technology challenges, and experience what it s like to be a part of our organization.Deloitte s cultureOur positive and supportive culture encourages our people to do their best work every day. We celebrate individuals by recognizing their uniqueness and offering them the flexibility to make daily choices that can help them to be healthy, centered, confident, and aware. We offer well-being programs and are continuously looking for new ways to maintain a culture where our people excel and lead healthy, happy lives.Learn more about Life at Deloitte.Corporate citizenshipDeloitte is led by a purpose: to make an impact that matters. This purpose defines who we are and extends to relationships with our clients, our people and our communities. We believe that business has the power to inspire and transform. We focus on education, giving, skill-based volunteerism, and leadership to help drive positive social impact in our communities.Learn more about Deloitte s impact on the world.Recruiter tipsWe want job seekers exploring opportunities at Deloitte to feel prepared and confident. To help you with your interview, we suggest that you do your research: know some background about the organization and the business area you re applying to. We also suggest that you brush up on your behavioral and case interviewing skills and practice discussing your experience and job history with a family member, friend, or mentor.Check out recruiting tips from Deloitte professionals.About DeloitteAs used in this document, Deloitte means Deloitte LLP and its subsidiaries. Please see www.deloitte.com/us/about for a detailed description of the legal structure of Deloitte LLP and its subsidiaries. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability or protected veteran status, or any other legally protected basis, in accordance with applicable law.Disclaimer: If you are not reviewing this job posting on our Careers site (careers.deloitte.com) or one of our approved job boards we cannot guarantee the validity of this posting. For a list of our current postings, please visit us at careers.deloitte.com.Category: Management Consulting Associated topics: business, business advisory, business analysis, business analyst, business systems analyst, client, customer, market, marketing, sales  SummerAssociate(SCLevel)-Technology,MBA,Consulting–NewYorkwithDeloitte from Job Portal http://www.jobisite.com/extrJobView.htm?id=91172

[h3-digital-cinema-audio-lights]

Building Your Own Home Cinema Business

I was recently approached by Roland from SimpleHomeCinema.com and asked a few questions about setting up a Home Cinema business and how we did it, here in Thailand.  Here is the interview, link is at the bottom.

"Ben Hobbs, Managing Director of H3 Digital kindly offered to do an interview for SimpleHomeCinema. I welcomed the idea as I believe in supporting each other in this line of business and our readers who may be passionate about starting their own business might well take encouragement to do the same. The interview has been printed below. Should you have any other questions for Ben, please use the comments area below the post and I’ll see if we can get Ben to help us answer them.

Roland: Ben, please tell us a bit about yourself so our readers can get to know you. Where are you from originally? Where did you grow up? 

Ben: I’m from the UK originally, I was born in Brighton and then moved to Milton Keynes when I was young.  I moved to Thailand when I was 26 years old. 

Roland: What made you move to Thailand at 26? Is there much of an English community where you are?

Ben: I’m into technology and after the dotcom crash it just felt like there wasn’t going to be much growth in that sector in the UK for a while. Yes there is quite a big expat community of people from all over the world here,  Thailand is a great place to live or holiday.

Roland: It does sound like an great place to live and work. Was audio-visual science and home cinema a passion for you from a young age or did you fall into it – so to speak – later on?

Ben: Yes, very much so.  I keenly remember applying for a Student Loan when I was at University and spending more time, and being more excited by planning what HiFfi gear I was going to buy, than on my college work.  (Sherwood CD Player, Sony Amp and Mission 732 speakers if anyone is curious).  It was then that I knew I had the bug.

Roland: How and when did the idea of making a business out of it come to you?

Ben: It was always a hobby of mine, I had always had a very special interest in Home Cinema and Music – It wasn’t so much that I listened to music a lot or even saw a lot of movies, instead it was piecing it together that I enjoyed, planning it and hearing and seeing what amazing setups I could build.  It never occurred to me that I could do this as a living.

Roland: That’s really awesome, Ben. It sounds like you share the same passion as me and some of our readers. How did you find your first paying client?

Ben: After the dot com bust in the UK I had a choice to make, either stay in the IT industry – I was in recruitment, pays well but not particularly fun – Or come to Asia, Thailand in particular.  My Father lived in HK and some of his friends were building holiday homes in Phuket, the problem was there wasn’t any Technology expertise.  My Brother and I came over and helped design intelligent cabling and systems into those holiday homes.

Roland: So it sounds like you kind of fell into it through connections that you had?

Ben: Going into business for yourself is a big life decision. We saw an opportunity and grabbed it with both hands, the safe thing would have been to stay back in the UK.  Moving abroad and starting a company at the same time is fairly risky for anyone – it was useful that we had some insight into prospective work.

Roland: Were you successful straight away or did the business grow slowly?

Ben: We were always busy, that doesn’t necessarily mean success. We have had our ups and downs.  So we grew slowly, then quickly, then shrank after the Global Financial Crisis and then grew again in a slower more measured manner.

 Roland: What were some of the challenges you faced as you were growing the business? 

Ben: At first when you start a company there is so much to do to get the ball rolling, then once you come up with the processes, products and have staff it’s all too easy to become complacent. You have to make sure you keep busy. Constantly find new ways to make yourself useful and relevant in such a fast moving industry.

 Roland: Did you have to have much of a capital investment initially?

Ben: There was some outlay to get the company up and running, mainly involving getting the company started, work permits, vehicle, etc. We’ve always tried to keep it as organic as possible though.  My advice here: be as sparing as possible with startup money – if you start with a big lump of cash it’s more than likely going to get wasted.

 Roland: What were the critical success factors in getting the business where it is today?

Ben: Not giving up.  Running your own business can be really tough at times, sometimes you just want to roll over and give up – You can’t, so you make sure to fight through the hard times and you learn constantly through the whole process.  We’ve tried to keep it as much fun as we can, I didn’t get into this industry to get rich, I do this job because I love it.  That helps.

Roland: That is a great attitude to have, Ben. What is your business model? Do you charge clients for the man hours / consultancy or can you also make money on the equipment by getting wholesale prices? Did the business model change over the years?

Ben: We make some money on equipment and some on the installation, it’s probably around 50/50.  Initially we started out by billing labour as a percentage of the equipment cost but later we moved over to a per unit install cost, where we charge a set integration price on equipment install, That way our customers are fairly charged according to our time rather on how expensive their equipment is.

Roland: How do you make sure the business can be sustained? How do you get new clients coming on board?

Ben: Easier to keep your current and past clients coming back than advertise and market for new ones constantly.  We’ve done two or more properties for more than half of our clients now, sometimes the same property twice! When we first started iPhones weren’t even around so many customers have used us many times to keep their properties up to date.

To do that you must give good service, never cheat people and do your best to make your customers happy.  As a company there has been quite a few times that we’ve ended up losing money on jobs, through no fault of our own – perhaps a supplier let us down or raised their prices.  The customer though is our client, he is dealing with us and we have always been fair.

Roland: What are your plans for the business in the near and mid-term? How do you intend to grow it?

Ben: We are currently building a brand new office which will feature better demo facilities, a coffee shop, better staff facilities and more room for us to stock products.  In addition to designing and installing home cinema, audio and lighting systems ourselves we also distribute some audio and cinema products to other companies.  We hope to include great training facilities and warehousing for those products.

Going forward we are making sure we keep it fun, make sure our clients are happy and look forward to all the great new technology that will be coming out in the future.

Roland: Finally, is there any advice you’d like to give to our readers who would like to get into the business?

Ben: Do it!  If you like home cinema and audio as a hobby, you will more than likely enjoy setting up big systems for others.  Look into if there is a CEDIA in your country and try to get some certified training. Even if you don’t have experience, I think if you know your stuff and have a CEDIA qualification you could probably walk into a junior position in the industry.

I’d like to thank Ben for his time to answer my questions and I’d like to wish him – on behalf of all our readers – good luck with his business."

https://simplehomecinema.com/2017/08/15/building-your-own-home-cinema-business-interview-with-ben-hobbs/

[nathanjhill]

Are you salt?

Isaiah 58:1-9 & Matthew 5:13-20

Last month, my family and I crowded into the Old Greenbelt Theater to watch Hidden Figures, the new hit movie about the untold stories of three African American women mathematicians who worked for NASA at a critical time when America was trying to put their first astronaut into space.

This movie hit all of my buttons - it’s a story about space, science, math, courage, strong women, and strong faith.

One of the main characters, Katherine Goble, a so-called “human computer” with incredible math skills, was more than just equipped with an incredible brain - she also had determination, guts, grit, and a little saltiness. In the movie, she gets assigned to help the team working on the right rocket and trajectory to get the Apollo space capsule into orbit. Her task is to simply check the math, but she does more - and gets herself into a little trouble.

Let’s watch a clip from the movie.

Hidden Figures - "Russian Spy"

Disciples pastor Rev. Dr. Alvin Jackson posted on Facebook after he saw the film, and he couldn’t help but preach. He said the movie about three strong, courageous black women who just went and did their job each day, reminded him that, “CHANGING THE WORLD OFTEN HAPPENS NOT BY THE HEADLINERS, PEOPLE OUT FRONT, BUT BY HIDDEN FIGURES, PEOPLE IN THE BACKGROUND WHO JUST DO THEIR JOBS, DOING ANOTHER'S DAY'S WORK.”

In these past two weeks, when we have been bombarded with daily executive orders from our new White House administration, as anxiety continues to rise like a flood, as protesters have gathered at airports while refugee families have been turned away, as our Facebook feeds have lit up with partisan arguments, I am so thankful for the hidden figures who have continued to quietly go about their jobs and make sure most things keep running while the nation experiences a little turbulence.

Yes, while our attention is focused on the very vocal leaders of our nation and world and their 140 character missives to the masses, so often, it is the people in the background, the stories you may overlook, the people who don’t get book deals who end up keeping this broken world from exploding into flames and mayhem, who hold up our mess to the light.

And so this morning, I ask, are you salt?

Can you turn to your neighbor and ask them, “are you salt?”

To get scientific here for a minute, the truth is every human being can answer that question with a “YES”. Biologists tell us that every human being is roughly .15% salt, sodium chloride, spread throughout our bodies, captured in our cells, part of the fragile mixture our bodies need to survive.

But when Jesus stood on the mountain that day and spoke his famous sermon in the Gospel of Matthew, he was not talking about the chemical balance of your body - instead, he was saying something important about who his disciples were to be in the world.

“You are the salt of the earth.”

Salt had a lot of uses in ancient Palestine, just as it does today, so his followers were intrigued. What did Jesus mean?

Salt was a food preserver, important in a time with no refrigeration, as a way to keep your groceries from going bad.

There are stories of special kinds of rocks with salt deposits that were cherished in Jesus’ time as places to store perishables.

Salt was also a spice, a way to season a dish, turning something bland into something delicious.

I fondly remember a trip to Thailand with my wife to visit my uncle and my aunt, and one day as we enjoyed a gorgeous morning at a hotel, we were brought trays of fresh pineapple, just so tender and ripe. And next to the fruit were these little bowls with a mixture of salt and red pepper flakes to dip the fruit into. And WOW - the flavor and sweetness of the fruit came alive. That’s the power of a little salt!

Salt was also valuable in the ancient world.

There are legends that Roman soldiers got part of their pay not just in coin but in salt, which then becomes a sort of root word for “salary” which we still use today.

Salt could even be used as a weapon of war.

Ancient stories telling of conquering armies sowing salt into the fields of their enemies to prevent them from growing crops, including Abimelech, a judge in Israel, who sowed salt after there was an uprising against him.

The question for Jesus’ disciples - and for us today - is what kind of salt are we supposed to be in this world. Are we the kind of salt that helps prevent things from going bad or prevent bad things from growing? Are we the kind of salt to bring some goodness and flavor to the world, to help others see the worth of Jesus?

Christians for a long time have wrestled with this.

I grew up in rural Oklahoma, a conservative part of the country, where a lot of Christians were committed to creating a separate kind of culture - Christian schools, Christian radio stations, Christian stores, Christian newspapers, Christian tv channels, even Christian chewing gum - all in a bid to be the kind of salt that preserved their values and the things they cared about. And no doubt, there is some good in that strategy, because, as Jesus asked his disciples, if salt loses its saltiness, what good is it? Sometimes, we Christians have to huddle together and be together when times are tough.

But then Jesus shifts his teaching in the next few verses and begins to describe his followers as light - “You are the light of the world.” Light, like salt, enhances life. Because of salt, our food tastes better. Because of light, we can experience the beauty of the world all around on a bright day and witness the dazzling mystery of stars overhead at night. And when our lights shine, when our saltiness brings out the best in others and in our world, the glory of God shines through us.

Like that image from the clip of the top secret material being held up to the light, when God’s light shines, the evil and hatred of humanity cannot be redacted or hidden or covered up.

In this scripture, Jesus is issuing his followers irrevocable VISAs that give them permission to be engaged in this world, bringing flavor and zest and illumination to a dry and weary human family.

”Are you salt?”

Here’s the thing I love about salt — most of the time, you look down at your food, and you don’t even necessarily know it’s there. You have to read the label or recipe to find out how much is in a serving.

But you always know when it’s missing.

Sometimes, as Jesus followers, we are called to be at the forefront - to organize, to preach, to teach, to stand out on the corner and shout for justice, to put our bodies on the line. Rev. William Barber, a fellow Disciples pastor, said this week in an sermon, “I can’t trust a pastor that isn’t willing to go to jail.” He’s right - our faith doesn’t do anyone a bit of good if we are so quickly willing to lose our saltiness when the going gets tough.

I couldn’t help but think of my friend and colleague, Rev. Brian Adams, who was willing to put his faith, his saltiness, on the line for the poor, the sick, and the outcast. With the excitement of these last couple of weeks, I know if Brian was still with us he would be marching everyday, letting his feet and body be his prayer that God’s glory may shine through. A couple of weeks back, when I went down with other clergy to pray at one of the Senate buildings, I asked God to give me the same courage God gave Brian, the same kind of salt and light. Maybe that should be all of our prayer.

But most of the time and for most of us, we are called to be the kind of salt that people may not even see at first glance, like those courageous, faithful women in Hidden Figures, going about our daily work and doing it with integrity, compassion, and persistence to enliven this fragile world with home cooking. We become the quiet but courageous vessels for change to come to our broken world.

For those dismayed by the travel ban, the vitriol among friends, the anxiety and nervousness of this time, and the anger and hate spewed about, our mission to join with God starts small.

I heard some speaker say once, “A Christian’s first mission field begins at home.” How we treat our spouses, our partners, our children, and our neighbors says everything about whether or not we are indeed salt of the earth. This week, your mission project may begin there, to sow some peace in fractured relationships at home.

But if not there, this image of “salt” challenges us to continue to rid ourselves of this notion that church is what we do on Sunday mornings or when we come to this church building.

We are salt when we are out there beyond those walls, when we are in our work places, when we are crunching numbers to put a man on the moon, when we are turning the other cheek after someone slings a racial slur in our direction, when we speak out for the child who deserves a second chance, when we dare to voice a generous welcome to a refugee family or an international student who doesn’t know if they are welcome here, when we eat less so others may eat more, when we scrub a shower bathroom so our next homeless guest can get cleaned up, when we write letters and make phone calls demanding more integrity and more compassion from our leaders, when we choose to step away from Facebook and engage with love over coffee and prayer, when shine light on hatred at our doorstep, and especially when we proclaim that Jesus came not to tear down but fulfill all of God’s law, a law that means love.

Brothers and sisters, are you salt?

The prophet Isaiah tells us what salt looks like in the world - not a fickle, bland religion that dwells in meaningless rituals and worship - but a faith that is bursting with life and light and generosity and love and courage for those who hurting, cast out, and afraid. What kind of faith does God want from us?

From the Message translation, the prophet says, speaking God’s words to us:

to break the chains of injustice,

get rid of exploitation in the workplace, free the oppressed, cancel debts. What I’m interested in seeing you do is: sharing your food with the hungry, inviting the homeless poor into your homes, putting clothes on the shivering ill-clad, being available to your own families. Do this and the lights will turn on, and your lives will turn around at once. Your righteousness will pave your way. The God of glory will secure your passage. Then when you pray, God will answer. You’ll call out for help and I’ll say, ‘Here I am.’

“Are you salt?”

Thanks be to God.

[awesomewrld]

Experts Are Seriously Worried About Trump's Science Information Blackout. Here's Why

Early last week, news broke that the Trump administration had issued an information blackout for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The agency was directed to stop issuing press releases, posting to their social media pages, and speaking to members of the press or directly to the public.

The Boston Globe reported on Tuesday that EPA transition-team member Doug Ericksen expected the communications ban to be lifted by the end of last week. “We’re just trying to get a handle on everything and make sure what goes out reflects the priorities of the new administration,” he said.   

On Thursday, however, USA Today reported that—although a temporary freeze on EPA research grants had been lifted—the “tight control on how the agency communicates with the public through social media and news outlets will remain in place for now.” The EPA has not published any press releases, or updated its Facebook or Twitter pages, since January 20. Calls and emails from Health to the agency’s press office were not immediately returned.

The EPA’s not the only science agency that’s been in the news, either: The Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture were both given temporary gag orders last week, which have since been lifted. It also came to light last week that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had canceled or postponed two conferences planned around the topics of climate change and LGBT youth. (These decisions were made before President Trump took office, the agency says.) 

So what does this mean for our day-to-day health and safety?

RELATED: What Trump's Presidency Might Really Mean for Public Health

The answer isn’t entirely clear, but public health experts are concerned about the messages being sent to the scientific community—and to American citizens—so far.

“The worry is generated by the administration’s willingness to censor information for what appears to be political purposes,” says Arthur Caplan, PhD, professor of bioethics at NYU Langone Medical Center. “There’s hinting that there could be requirements to clear things through political operatives before they get released to the public, and this type of thing hasn’t really been done before.” 

Experts have serious concerns about the EPA’s uncertain future, and its policies regarding clean air, clean water, and climate change—all things that inevitably affect human health. But in addition to its research and environmental clean-up efforts, the EPA also communicates with the public about issues directly related to health and safety. For example, its Facebook page includes posts (pre-January 20) about the dangers of wood-smoke inhalation, carbon monoxide poisoning, and radon—a gas that’s present in many homes and causes lung cancer.

If these types of media bans were to extend to other science agencies, the impacts on our health would likely be even greater. The CDC, for example, monitors the spread of illness and disease all over the world. “But this information really only matters to the extent that they are able to communicate it,” says Tara McKay, PhD, assistant professor of medicine, health, and society at Vanderbilt University.

RELATED: 6 Surprising Things That May Disappear With an Obamacare Repeal

“If the CDC notices a big spike in flu hospitalizations, but isn’t able to provide any public messaging or prevention around this because of a gag order, then some people will die from infections that might have been avoided,” she says. “Resources will not be directed to the appropriate prevention, identification, and treatment activities.”

The CDC also plays an important role in decreasing panic around issues that really aren’t as scary as they seem. When Ebola virus was diagnosed in the United States in 2014, for example, the agency provided reassurance that treatment and prevention of transmission were top priorities.

At that time, Donald Trump criticized the government’s approach to the Ebola scare, advocating on Twitter for quarantines and travel bans not supported by scientific research. It's not outlandish to think that, as President, he might similarly go against—or try to change—the CDC’s recommendations in the event of another major health scare, says Caplan.

“If these agencies are seen as untrustworthy or censored, or they can’t get in a fast enough response, it can lead to widespread panic,” he says. That could mean unfair treatment of  people seen as disease risks, he adds, or to a misallocation of resources that would make the situation worse.

“Nobody ever called up Steve Bannon or Sean Spicer or Kellyanne Conway to find out what to do about Zika; they want to know what the CDC says and they want to know fast,” Caplan continues. “These agencies shouldn’t have to wait to find out what the administration thinks in order to answer factual questions.”

RELATED: Thinking of Getting an IUD? Here's What to Expect

Similar concerns would apply to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which is tasked with warning the public about dangers posed by foods and medicines currently on store shelves. “We don’t want to worry about whether an E. coli outbreak is being covered up because you don’t want to see certain businesses being damaged, or exaggerated because it comes from a country you don’t like, like Mexico,” says Caplan. 

The good news is, the CDC and FDA still appear to be functioning normally; both organizations are updating their social media sites, and the FDA put out a press release just Friday. And not everyone thinks the existing blackouts are cause for alarm: Last week the New York Times quoted several agency staff members who viewed the Trump directives as a normal part of a presidential transition.

Vox.com also points out that these agencies are protected by scientific integrity policies put in place by the Obama administration. The FDA’s policy, for example, states that staff is allowed to “communicate their personal scientific or policy views to the public, even when those views differ from official Agency opinions.” (As FiveThirtyEight reports, however, there’s also no legal consequence for violating these protections.) 

With the exception of the EPA, there’s been no indication that government agencies won’t be able to continue studying and monitoring imminent health threats, including disease outbreaks and foodborne illnesses. (The EPA's research projects will reportedly be approved by the administration on a case-by-case basis.)

McKay is more concerned about the second part of both the FDA's and CDC's mission: to inform decision-makers about how to address these health concerns, and provide people with information so they can take responsibility for their own health.

“That second part is just as important, if not more so, than the first,” she says. “It does the agency little to know these things are happening and not be able to do or say anything about them.” 

from Tinnitus Treatment http://ift.tt/2kkvZNC via redirected here

[painsofbeingperf]

Experts Are Seriously Worried About Trump's Science Information Blackout. Here's Why

Early last week, news broke that the Trump administration had issued an information blackout for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The agency was directed to stop issuing press releases, posting to their social media pages, and speaking to members of the press or directly to the public.

The Boston Globe reported on Tuesday that EPA transition-team member Doug Ericksen expected the communications ban to be lifted by the end of last week. “We’re just trying to get a handle on everything and make sure what goes out reflects the priorities of the new administration,” he said.   

On Thursday, however, USA Today reported that—although a temporary freeze on EPA research grants had been lifted—the “tight control on how the agency communicates with the public through social media and news outlets will remain in place for now.” The EPA has not published any press releases, or updated its Facebook or Twitter pages, since January 20. Calls and emails from Health to the agency’s press office were not immediately returned.

The EPA’s not the only science agency that’s been in the news, either: The Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture were both given temporary gag orders last week, which have since been lifted. It also came to light last week that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had canceled or postponed two conferences planned around the topics of climate change and LGBT youth. (These decisions were made before President Trump took office, the agency says.) 

So what does this mean for our day-to-day health and safety?

RELATED: What Trump's Presidency Might Really Mean for Public Health

The answer isn’t entirely clear, but public health experts are concerned about the messages being sent to the scientific community—and to American citizens—so far.

“The worry is generated by the administration’s willingness to censor information for what appears to be political purposes,” says Arthur Caplan, PhD, professor of bioethics at NYU Langone Medical Center. “There’s hinting that there could be requirements to clear things through political operatives before they get released to the public, and this type of thing hasn’t really been done before.” 

Experts have serious concerns about the EPA’s uncertain future, and its policies regarding clean air, clean water, and climate change—all things that inevitably affect human health. But in addition to its research and environmental clean-up efforts, the EPA also communicates with the public about issues directly related to health and safety. For example, its Facebook page includes posts (pre-January 20) about the dangers of wood-smoke inhalation, carbon monoxide poisoning, and radon—a gas that’s present in many homes and causes lung cancer.

If these types of media bans were to extend to other science agencies, the impacts on our health would likely be even greater. The CDC, for example, monitors the spread of illness and disease all over the world. “But this information really only matters to the extent that they are able to communicate it,” says Tara McKay, PhD, assistant professor of medicine, health, and society at Vanderbilt University.

RELATED: 6 Surprising Things That May Disappear With an Obamacare Repeal

“If the CDC notices a big spike in flu hospitalizations, but isn’t able to provide any public messaging or prevention around this because of a gag order, then some people will die from infections that might have been avoided,” she says. “Resources will not be directed to the appropriate prevention, identification, and treatment activities.”

The CDC also plays an important role in decreasing panic around issues that really aren’t as scary as they seem. When Ebola virus was diagnosed in the United States in 2014, for example, the agency provided reassurance that treatment and prevention of transmission were top priorities.

At that time, Donald Trump criticized the government’s approach to the Ebola scare, advocating on Twitter for quarantines and travel bans not supported by scientific research. It's not outlandish to think that, as President, he might similarly go against—or try to change—the CDC’s recommendations in the event of another major health scare, says Caplan.

“If these agencies are seen as untrustworthy or censored, or they can’t get in a fast enough response, it can lead to widespread panic,” he says. That could mean unfair treatment of  people seen as disease risks, he adds, or to a misallocation of resources that would make the situation worse.

“Nobody ever called up Steve Bannon or Sean Spicer or Kellyanne Conway to find out what to do about Zika; they want to know what the CDC says and they want to know fast,” Caplan continues. “These agencies shouldn’t have to wait to find out what the administration thinks in order to answer factual questions.”

RELATED: Thinking of Getting an IUD? Here's What to Expect

Similar concerns would apply to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which is tasked with warning the public about dangers posed by foods and medicines currently on store shelves. “We don’t want to worry about whether an E. coli outbreak is being covered up because you don’t want to see certain businesses being damaged, or exaggerated because it comes from a country you don’t like, like Mexico,” says Caplan. 

The good news is, the CDC and FDA still appear to be functioning normally; both organizations are updating their social media sites, and the FDA put out a press release just Friday. And not everyone thinks the existing blackouts are cause for alarm: Last week the New York Times quoted several agency staff members who viewed the Trump directives as a normal part of a presidential transition.

Vox.com also points out that these agencies are protected by scientific integrity policies put in place by the Obama administration. The FDA’s policy, for example, states that staff is allowed to “communicate their personal scientific or policy views to the public, even when those views differ from official Agency opinions.” (As FiveThirtyEight reports, however, there’s also no legal consequence for violating these protections.) 

With the exception of the EPA, there’s been no indication that government agencies won’t be able to continue studying and monitoring imminent health threats, including disease outbreaks and foodborne illnesses. (The EPA's research projects will reportedly be approved by the administration on a case-by-case basis.)

McKay is more concerned about the second part of both the FDA's and CDC's mission: to inform decision-makers about how to address these health concerns, and provide people with information so they can take responsibility for their own health.

“That second part is just as important, if not more so, than the first,” she says. “It does the agency little to know these things are happening and not be able to do or say anything about them.” 

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Experts Are Seriously Worried About Trump's Science Information Blackout. Here's Why

Early last week, news broke that the Trump administration had issued an information blackout for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The agency was directed to stop issuing press releases, posting to their social media pages, and speaking to members of the press or directly to the public.

The Boston Globe reported on Tuesday that EPA transition-team member Doug Ericksen expected the communications ban to be lifted by the end of last week. “We’re just trying to get a handle on everything and make sure what goes out reflects the priorities of the new administration,” he said.   

On Thursday, however, USA Today reported that—although a temporary freeze on EPA research grants had been lifted—the “tight control on how the agency communicates with the public through social media and news outlets will remain in place for now.” The EPA has not published any press releases, or updated its Facebook or Twitter pages, since January 20. Calls and emails from Health to the agency’s press office were not immediately returned.

The EPA’s not the only science agency that’s been in the news, either: The Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture were both given temporary gag orders last week, which have since been lifted. It also came to light last week that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had canceled or postponed two conferences planned around the topics of climate change and LGBT youth. (These decisions were made before President Trump took office, the agency says.) 

So what does this mean for our day-to-day health and safety?

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The answer isn’t entirely clear, but public health experts are concerned about the messages being sent to the scientific community—and to American citizens—so far.

“The worry is generated by the administration’s willingness to censor information for what appears to be political purposes,” says Arthur Caplan, PhD, professor of bioethics at NYU Langone Medical Center. “There’s hinting that there could be requirements to clear things through political operatives before they get released to the public, and this type of thing hasn’t really been done before.” 

Experts have serious concerns about the EPA’s uncertain future, and its policies regarding clean air, clean water, and climate change—all things that inevitably affect human health. But in addition to its research and environmental clean-up efforts, the EPA also communicates with the public about issues directly related to health and safety. For example, its Facebook page includes posts (pre-January 20) about the dangers of wood-smoke inhalation, carbon monoxide poisoning, and radon—a gas that’s present in many homes and causes lung cancer.

If these types of media bans were to extend to other science agencies, the impacts on our health would likely be even greater. The CDC, for example, monitors the spread of illness and disease all over the world. “But this information really only matters to the extent that they are able to communicate it,” says Tara McKay, PhD, assistant professor of medicine, health, and society at Vanderbilt University.

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“If the CDC notices a big spike in flu hospitalizations, but isn’t able to provide any public messaging or prevention around this because of a gag order, then some people will die from infections that might have been avoided,” she says. “Resources will not be directed to the appropriate prevention, identification, and treatment activities.”

The CDC also plays an important role in decreasing panic around issues that really aren’t as scary as they seem. When Ebola virus was diagnosed in the United States in 2014, for example, the agency provided reassurance that treatment and prevention of transmission were top priorities.

At that time, Donald Trump criticized the government’s approach to the Ebola scare, advocating on Twitter for quarantines and travel bans not supported by scientific research. It's not outlandish to think that, as President, he might similarly go against—or try to change—the CDC’s recommendations in the event of another major health scare, says Caplan.

“If these agencies are seen as untrustworthy or censored, or they can’t get in a fast enough response, it can lead to widespread panic,” he says. That could mean unfair treatment of  people seen as disease risks, he adds, or to a misallocation of resources that would make the situation worse.

“Nobody ever called up Steve Bannon or Sean Spicer or Kellyanne Conway to find out what to do about Zika; they want to know what the CDC says and they want to know fast,” Caplan continues. “These agencies shouldn’t have to wait to find out what the administration thinks in order to answer factual questions.”

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Similar concerns would apply to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which is tasked with warning the public about dangers posed by foods and medicines currently on store shelves. “We don’t want to worry about whether an E. coli outbreak is being covered up because you don’t want to see certain businesses being damaged, or exaggerated because it comes from a country you don’t like, like Mexico,” says Caplan. 

The good news is, the CDC and FDA still appear to be functioning normally; both organizations are updating their social media sites, and the FDA put out a press release just Friday. And not everyone thinks the existing blackouts are cause for alarm: Last week the New York Times quoted several agency staff members who viewed the Trump directives as a normal part of a presidential transition.

Vox.com also points out that these agencies are protected by scientific integrity policies put in place by the Obama administration. The FDA’s policy, for example, states that staff is allowed to “communicate their personal scientific or policy views to the public, even when those views differ from official Agency opinions.” (As FiveThirtyEight reports, however, there’s also no legal consequence for violating these protections.) 

With the exception of the EPA, there’s been no indication that government agencies won’t be able to continue studying and monitoring imminent health threats, including disease outbreaks and foodborne illnesses. (The EPA's research projects will reportedly be approved by the administration on a case-by-case basis.)

McKay is more concerned about the second part of both the FDA's and CDC's mission: to inform decision-makers about how to address these health concerns, and provide people with information so they can take responsibility for their own health.

“That second part is just as important, if not more so, than the first,” she says. “It does the agency little to know these things are happening and not be able to do or say anything about them.” 

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