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theliberaltony · 5 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

After a stint as the Democratic primary front-runner, Sen. Bernie Sanders’s revolution is rapidly stalling. After a series of surprising losses on Super Tuesday, he lost again in Michigan earlier this week, despite spending days campaigning across the state.

In contest after contest, Sanders has struggled to make inroads with key Democratic constituencies — in particular, black voters and older voters. But there’s another trend that’s plagued him throughout the primary: He does poorly with women. According to aggregated exit polls from the states that have voted so far,1 Sanders’s support is 8 points lower among women than his support among men.

Sanders consistently gets less support from women

Vote share by gender in entrance and exit polls from completed state primaries and caucuses, by candidate

Sanders Biden State Men Women Diff. Men Women Diff. Iowa 26% 20% -6 16% 16% 0 New Hampshire 31 23 -8 8 8 0 Nevada 38 30 -8 18 17 -1 South Carolina 24 17 -7 48 49 +1 California 38 32 -6 19 28 +9 Texas 34 27 -7 33 33 0 North Carolina 27 21 -6 42 42 0 Virginia 29 19 -10 49 57 +8 Massachusetts 31 26 -5 34 34 0 Minnesota 37 25 -12 39 41 +2 Tennessee 27 23 -4 38 44 +6 Alabama 20 14 -6 61 65 +4 Oklahoma 30 21 -9 40 37 -3 Maine 38 29 -9 29 37 +8 Vermont 53 51 -2 24 20 -4 Washington 41 27 -14 28 36 +8 Missouri 38 32 -6 56 64 +8 Mississippi 18 12 -6 78 83 +5

Source: Edison Research

Sanders has consistently been at a disadvantage among women in this year’s primary. And that’s not a deficit that a Democratic primary candidate can simply ignore, since women make up a majority of the party’s electorate this year — 57 percent of primary voters so far.

“Consistently having lower support among women is a problem of optics because it makes it look like there’s something going on that prevents women from backing you,” said Kelly Dittmar, a political scientist at Rutgers University–Camden who studies gender and politics. “But it’s also an actual numbers issue because men are just a smaller proportion of the Democratic electorate. You need to do well among women in order to win the nomination.”

It’s hard to pin down a single reason why men seem to be more attracted to Sanders’s candidacy than women. There isn’t really evidence, for example, that Sanders is especially likely to attract supporters who display hostile feelings toward women. In a recent analysis, researchers for Data for Progress did find that gender bias kept some voters from supporting Warren — but Sanders’s supporters didn’t hold more sexist views than Biden’s. But there is evidence, according to an analysis by Dan Cassino, a political science professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University, that while support for Biden increases among voters with more sexist views, those with the most sexist views were disproportionately likely to favor Sanders. And sexism was higher, in general, among men.

“Educated Democrats who are quite sexist are disproportionately likely to be Sanders supporters,” said Cassino. “To be clear, there aren’t a lot of those people in the Democratic Party. But because of their education and social capital, they’re probably more inclined to tell people about their views and express them online.”

This doesn’t explain all of Sanders’s struggles with women. But his lopsided support among this group provides a window into some of the divisions that are roiling the Democratic primary electorate this year — particularly the limits of Sanders’s lefty, anti-establishment message and the aggression of his supporters at a moment when many Democratic voters are laser-focused on finding a candidate who can beat Trump.

At a Biden rally in Detroit last week, Mary Mckenney, 69, said that she hadn’t made up her mind about which candidate to support until the race narrowed to Biden and Sanders. Then, she said, her choice became very clear. “It’s not even that I don’t like Bernie’s ideas, I just think they can’t happen,” she said. “And I think if he’s the nominee there will just be more fighting and conflict. We need someone who can bring Democrats together.”

Views like Mckenney’s aren’t universal among Democratic women. Plenty of women are enthusiastic about Sanders — including Mckenney’s daughter Carrie, 43, who was standing next to her at the rally. But older women like Mckenney make up a much bigger share of the Democratic electorate, which makes them a disproportionately important group. So far, women over the age of 45 have made up 38 percent of Democratic primary voters, while women under the age of 45 only made up 19 percent. And the age gap that has emerged across the primary is almost certainly shaping women’s support for Sanders too: older women tend to be more moderate than younger women, which means they may be less likely to see Sanders’s calls to upend the status quo as feasible or appealing.

But generational fissures aren’t the whole story. Women of all ages told us they liked Sanders’s ideas but found aspects of his candidacy alienating. “I don’t have the same aversion to the DNC and the Democratic establishment that a lot of Bernie supporters seem to have,” said Tiffany Keane Schaefer, 31, who lives in Chicago and volunteered for Warren but is now undecided about who she’ll support. Schaefer told me she’s disturbed by some of the criticism Sanders allies levied against Warren for not endorsing Sanders after she dropped out. “Right now it feels like I am getting blasted every single day on social media about why Warren isn’t doing enough to help Sanders.” That antagonism makes Schaefer feel uncomfortable about the prospect of supporting Sanders, even though she’s closer to him on the issues than to Biden.

One of the central messages of Sanders’s campaign is the need to take on the political establishment — including the party whose nomination he is seeking. On the day before he won the Nevada caucuses, Sanders tweeted, “I’ve got news for the Republican establishment. I’ve got news for the Democratic establishment. They can’t stop us.”

That kind of message obviously appeals to people who are disaffected with the Democratic Party — but to people who don’t have a problem with the party, it can seem like an unnecessary risk. “I understand why the young people love Sanders — student debt, it’s a real problem,” said Grace Andrews, 79, who was waiting outside the Biden rally in Detroit with her grandson. “I just have a concern that he is not willing to make the compromises that are necessary in our political system, or work with people in the party who may not share his views.”

Women are especially likely to say that being a Democrat is an important part of who they are. According to our analysis of a Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape survey of likely primary voters administered from Feb. 20 to Feb 26, 63 percent of Democratic women say that their party affiliation is somewhat or very important to their identity, compared to 58 percent of Democratic men. That’s not an enormous difference, but it is statistically significant — it also lines up with other research that finds partisanship functions as a more important social identity for women than it does for men. Women over the age of 45 are especially likely (67 percent) to say being a Democrat is an important part of their identity.

Of course, not all women are turned off by the idea of radical changes to the system — including radical change to their own party. “It just feels like the Democratic Party has forgotten what it means to be the party of the working class,” said Diana Post, 30, who lives in Detroit and said she was torn between Warren and Sanders until Warren dropped out of the race. She now describes herself as a “big Sanders fan.” “We need someone more radical than what the establishment is putting forward, a candidate who can shake things up.”

Over the course of the primary, voters have been asked if they would prefer a candidate who agrees with them on the issues or a candidate who can beat Trump. According to the exit polls so far, women are likelier to be in the latter category: 65 percent of women say they would prefer a candidate who can defeat Trump, compared to 59 percent of men. That isn’t an overwhelming gap, to be sure, but it’s still noteworthy given that women make up a disproportionate share of the Democratic electorate. And in the primaries so far, voters who prioritize a candidate who can defeat Trump are disproportionately likely to support Biden.

That was where Ruth Vail, 77, said she had landed. She was standing on the University of Michigan quad, waiting with her 15-year-old grandson Leo to hear Sanders speak. But even though she was curious to hear what Sanders had to say, she said she’d probably be voting for Biden. “I think unfortunately it’s just going to be very easy to paint Sanders as an extremist, someone who’s a scary person who wants to change everything,” she said. “And I really just want a president who won’t keep me up at night, thinking about what he’s going to do next, thinking about who he’s going to appoint to the Supreme Court. The most important thing to me in this election is just ensuring that Donald Trump is no longer our president.”

Laura Bronner contributed research.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and Meredith Conroy

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paleorecipecookbook · 6 years

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Why You Should Be Skeptical of the Latest Nutrition Headlines: Part 2

This article is Part 2 of a two-part series about the problems with nutrition research and the way it’s presented in the media. For more reasons why you should be skeptical of the latest nutrition headlines, check out Part 1 of this series.

In my last article in this series, I talked about why observational studies aren’t a great tool for proving causal relationships; how the data collection methods researchers use rely on memory, not facts; how the healthy-user bias can impact study results; and how, in many cases, nutritional studies uncover “risks” that look an awful lot like pure chance. In this post, I’ll delve deeper into the reasons why you should take nutrition headlines with a grain of salt.

Some Scientific Results Can’t Be Replicated

Science works by experiments that can be repeated; when they are repeated, they must give the same answer. If an experiment does not replicate, something has gone wrong. – Young & Karr, The Royal Statistical Society (1)

As Young and Karr suggest above, replication is a key feature of the scientific method. An initial finding does not carry much weight on its own. For it to be considered valid, it needs to be replicated by other researchers.

We’re supposed to trust nutrition researchers to help us understand our health, but in some cases, the way they think about nutrition is faulty. Check out more reasons why you should remain skeptical of nutrition headlines.

In the context of nutrition research, because observational studies cannot prove causality, their findings should ideally be replicated in a randomized controlled trial (RCT). RCTs are specifically designed to prove causality, and while not perfect (see below), they are much more persuasive as evidence than observational studies.

The results from most observational nutrition studies have not been replicated by RCTs. In fact, one analysis found that:

Zero of 52 nutrition claims from observational studies for a wide variety of dietary patterns and nutrient supplementation were replicated, and five claims were statistically significant in the opposite direction.

Yes, you read that correctly. Out of 52 claims made in observational nutrition studies, zero were replicated and five indicated the opposite of what the observational study suggested!

Let’s look at a specific example. Observational studies suggested that people with the highest intakes of beta-carotene, an antioxidant nutrient found primarily in fruits and vegetables, had a 31 percent lower risk of death compared to those with the lowest intake. Yet RCTs of supplementation with beta-carotene not only failed to confirm this benefit, they found an increased risk of cancer in the group with the highest intake. (2) Oops! Similar results have been found with vitamin E. (3)

Researchers Focus on Quantity, Not Quality

People don’t eat nutrition, they eat food. – Margaret Mead

The vast majority of observational studies today focus only on nutrients, isolated food components, or biomarkers—like saturated fats, carbohydrates, calories, LDL cholesterol—abstracted out of the context of foods, diets, and bodily processes.

This reductionist approach, which philosopher of science Gyorgy Scrinis calls “nutritionism,” has interfered with nutrition science’s ability to provide useful individual and public health guidance. (4)

The upside of nutritionism has been the discovery of drugs, vitamins, and minerals that have saved millions of lives. The downside is that Americans (and people all over the industrialized world) are obsessing over details like the percentage of fat or carbohydrates they consume rather than focusing on the broader and more important issues, like the quality of the food they eat.

Two examples of how this has manifested over the past few decades are:

The promotion of margarine over the much better-tasting butter because of concerns about butter’s saturated fat content

The vilification of eggs due to their cholesterol content without considering their overall nutrient value

(And of course, we now know that butter is healthier than margarine and dietary cholesterol has no impact on heart disease. Another oops!)

Nutritionism is a relatively new phenomenon. It started in 1977 with the McGovern Report, the first widely disseminated nutrition guidance to provide detailed, quantitative, nutrient-focused dietary recommendations. (5) Prior to that, dietary guidelines were based on familiar concepts of food groups and serving sizes and relatively simple information on what foods to buy and eat to maintain health. The average person could easily understand—and most importantly, act on—the guidelines.

After the McGovern Report, dietary guidelines became increasingly complex and difficult for the layperson to comprehend. The 1980 dietary guidelines were published in a short, 19-page brochure; in 1985 it grew to 28 pages; in 2010 it was 112 pages; and in 2015, the most recent dietary guidelines took up 517 pages!

What Happens When You Look at Food Quality

A more recent example of nutritionism can be found in the heated debate over whether low-fat or low-carb diets are superior for weight loss and metabolic and cardiovascular health. Each side of the debate has its advocates, and the controversy continues.

In early 2018, a group of researchers led by Dr. Christopher Gardner set out to settle this debate with an RCT. They assigned participants into two groups: low-carb and low-fat. But here’s the catch: they instructed both groups to:

1) maximize vegetable intake; 2) minimize intake of added sugars, refined flours, and trans fats; and 3) focus on whole foods that were minimally processed, nutrient dense, and prepared at home whenever possible. (6)

For example, foods like fruit juice, pastries, white rice, white bread, and soft drinks are low in fat but were not recommended to the low-fat group. Instead, the dietitians encouraged participants to eat whole foods like lean meat, brown rice, lentils, low-fat dairy products, legumes, and fruit. Meanwhile, the low-carb group was instructed to focus on foods rich in healthy fats, like olive oil, avocados, salmon, cheese, nut butters, and pasture-raised animal products.

Perhaps not surprisingly—if you don’t embrace nutritionism, that is—the researchers found that on average, people who cut back on added sugar, refined grains, and processed food lost weight over 12 months—regardless of whether the diet was low-carb or low-fat.

This was a fantastic example of what a nutrition study should look like. It resulted in clinically relevant, practical advice that is easy for people to follow: eat real food. Just imagine where we might be now if most nutrition studies over the past 40 years had been designed like this?

RCTs Are Better than Observational Studies but Still Problematic

If observational studies cannot prove causality, then why do they continue to form the foundation of dietary guidelines and public health recommendations? The answer is that RCTs also have several shortcomings that, thus far, have made them impractical as a tool for studying population health.

Duration

Most relationships between nutritional factors and disease can take years, if not decades, to develop. What’s more, the effects of some nutritional interventions in the short term are different than they are over the long term.

Weight loss is a great example. Both low-carb and low-fat diets have been shown to cause weight loss in the short term, but over the long term (more than 12 months) people tend to regain the weight they lost.

Inadequate Sample Size

The sample size, or number of participants in an RCT, is one of the most important factors in determining whether the results of the study are generalizable to the wider population. Most nutrition RCTs do not have a large enough sample size.

Dr. John Ioannidis, a professor at the Stanford School of Medicine, highlighted this problem in a recent editorial in BMJ called “Implausible Results in Human Nutrition Research.”

To identify a nutrition-related intervention that produces a legitimate 5 to 10 percent relative risk reduction in total mortality, we’d need studies that are 10 times as large as the highly publicized PREDIMED trial (which had around 7,500 participants), in addition to long-term follow-up, linkage to death registries, and careful efforts to maximize adherence.

RCTs Are Expensive

One reason that it’s such a huge challenge to design RCTs with sufficient duration and sample size is cost. RCTs are enormously expensive. In the pharmaceutical world, drug companies pay for RCTs because they have a vested financial interest in their results. But who will pay for long-term RCTs in the nutrition world? Public funding for nutrition research (and many other types of research) is declining, not increasing, which makes it unlikely that we’ll see long-term RCTs with sufficient sample sizes anytime soon.

Quality RCTs Are Difficult to Do

As Dr. Peter Attia points out in his excellent series Studying Studies, designing high-quality RCTs is fraught with challenges:

These trials need to establish falsifiable hypotheses and clear objectives, proper selection of endpoints, appropriate subject selection criteria (both inclusionary and exclusionary), clinically relevant and feasible intervention regimens, adequate randomization, stratification, and blinding, sufficient sample size and power, and anticipation of common practical problems that can be encountered over the course of an RCT.

That’s not an easy task and few nutrition RCTs meet the challenge.

Conflicts of Interest Are Very Common

It’s difficult to get a man to understand a thing if his salary is dependent upon him not understanding it. – Upton Sinclair

Many have written about financial conflicts of interest and their impact on all forms of research, including nutrition research. In short, research has shown that when studies are funded by industry, they are far more likely to report results that are favorable to the sponsor.

In one analysis performed by Marion Nestle, 90 percent of industry-sponsored studies returned sponsor-friendly results. (7) For a summary of the issues and how they impact the quality of nutrition research, I recommend this story from Vox.

In this article, I’d like to focus on another type of conflict of interest: allegiance bias, which is also known as “white hat bias.” Allegiance bias is not as well recognized as financial conflicts of interest are, which is one of the many reasons that it has an insidious effect on nutrition research.

Allegiance bias has been defined as “bias leading to distortion of research-based information in the service of what may be perceived as righteous ends.” (8)

For example, imagine that a vegan researcher sets out to do a study on the health impacts of a vegan diet. Is it possible that the researcher’s ideological commitment to veganism could influence, both consciously and unconsciously, how the study is designed, executed, and interpreted? Of course it could. In fact, it’s difficult to see how it couldn’t.

In a 2018 editorial called “Disclosures in Nutrition Research: Why It Is Different,” Dr. Ioannidis suggests that allegiance bias should be disclosed by researchers, just as financial conflicts of interest are. He says:

Therefore, it is important for nutrition researchers to disclose their advocacy or activist work as well as their dietary preferences if any are relevant to what is being presented and discussed in their articles. This is even more important for dietary preferences that are specific, circumscribed, and adhered to strongly. [emphasis added]

Ioannidis goes on to say that advocacy and activism, while laudable, are contrary to “a key aspect of the scientific method, which is to not take sides preemptively or based on belief or partisanship.” [emphasis added]

Veganism certainly meets the criteria of dietary recommendations that are “specific, circumscribed, and adhered to strongly.” In fact, some have pointed out that veganism meets the four dimensions of religion:

Belief: Veganism began as a way to express moral integrity regarding the appropriation and suffering of non-humans.

Ritual: Veganism involves strict dietary restrictions, including abstaining from the use of materials made from any animal products.

Experience: The “holistic connectedness” of veganism would be considered a religious experience to those who live it.

Community: There are many official and unofficial vegan associations across the world, and in 2017 a civil flag was created for the international vegan community.

Researchers and physicians like T. Colin Campbell, Kim Williams, Caldwell Esselstyn, Joel Fuhrman, John McDougall, and Neal Barnard could all be expected to suffer from this “white hat bias.” They’re involved in vegan advocacy and activism, both of which could be expected to be a source of allegiance bias.

A Famous Example of Allegiance Bias at Work

The China Study, a book by vegan physician and researcher T. Colin Campbell, is a perfect example. Campbell claimed that this study—which was not peer-reviewed—proved that:

Animal protein causes cancer

A plant-based diet protects against heart disease

You can get all the nutrients you need from plants

Campbell even went as far as saying, “Eating foods that contain any cholesterol above 0 mg is unhealthy,” a claim that has been completely disproven and is reflected in the 2015 change in the U.S. Dietary Guidelines that no longer regards dietary cholesterol as a nutrient of concern.

However, since The China Study was published, several independent, peer-reviewed studies of the data have refuted T. Colin Campbell’s claims. For a great summary of the issues with The China Study, see this article by nutritional scientist Dr. Chris Masterjohn.

Allegiance bias can take several forms. It can involve:

Cherry-picking studies to support a cherished view

Misleadingly describing the results of studies that are cited in a paper

“Data dredging” to search for statistical significance within given data sets (when no such significance is present)

Not reporting null results

Designing experiments for the purpose of obtaining a particular answer

And more

It’s important to point out that allegiance bias is not always, or even often, conscious. Most researchers believe they are acting with scientific rigor and integrity. This is exactly why it’s so difficult to guard against, and why it’s so important to disclose.

Nutrition Policy Is Informed by Politics and Religion—Not Just Science

In a perfect world, dietary guidelines and nutritional policy would be the product of a thorough and dispassionate review of the available scientific evidence and not be unduly influenced by politics—and certainly not by religion. Dissenting views that are well informed would be not only welcomed but encouraged. As Syd Shapiro once said, “We should never forget that good science is skeptical science.”

Alas, we don’t live in a perfect world. In our world, dissenting views are are not welcomed; they’re suppressed. Dr. D. Mark Hegsted, a founding member of the Nutrition Department at the Harvard School of Public Health, made this opening remark in the 1977 McGovern hearing:

The diet of Americans has become increasingly rich—rich in meat, other sources of saturated fat and cholesterol … [and] the proportion of the total diet contributed by fatty and cholesterol-rich foods … has risen.

The only problem with this statement is that it directly contradicted USDA economic data which suggested that total calories and the availability of meat, dairy, and eggs at the time of the report were equivalent or marginally less than amount consumed in 1909. Full-fat dairy consumption was lower in 1977 than 1909, having declined steadily from 1950 to 1977. (9) Other evidence that contradicted Dr. Hegsted’s opinion was also ignored.

The feedback from the scientific community on the McGovern Report was “vigorous and constructive,” explicitly stated the “lack of consensus among nutrition scientists,” and presented evidence for the diversity of scientific opinion on the subject. (10) Other countries, such as Canada and Great Britain, also noted the lack of consensus on whether dietary cholesterol intake should be limited. U.S. senators issued the following statement about the McGovern Report:

It is clear that science has not progressed to the point where we can recommend to the general public that cholesterol intake be limited to a specified amount. The variances between different individuals are simply too great. A similar divergence of scientific opinion on the question of whether dietary change can help the heart illustrates that science cannot yet verify with any certainty that coronary heart disease will be prevented or delayed by the diet recommended in this report. (See footnote)

Nevertheless, these cautionary words were ignored, and the recommendations from the McGovern Report were adopted. This kicked off the fat and cholesterol phobia that would grip the United States for the next four decades.

Religion Can Impact Nutrition Guidelines

Another example of how non-scientific factors drive nutrition policy is the influence of the Seventh Day Adventists on public health recommendations in the United States and around the world. Seventh Day Adventists (SDA) is a Protestant denomination that grew out of the Millerite movement in the United States. Health has been a focus of SDA teachings since the inception of the church in the 1860s. According to Wikipedia:

Adventists are known for presenting a “health message” that advocates vegetarianism and expects adherence to the kosher laws, particularly the kosher foods described in Leviticus 11, meaning abstinence from pork, shellfish, and other animals proscribed as “unclean.” The church discourages its members from consuming alcoholic beverages, tobacco or illegal drugs. ... In addition, some Adventists avoid coffee, tea, cola, and other beverages containing caffeine.

Ellen White, an early SDA church leader, received her first major health reform vision in 1863, and “for the first time, God’s people were urged to abstain from flesh food in general and from swine’s flesh in particular.” Most SDA diet beliefs are based on White’s health visions.

White believed that the church had a duty to educate the public about health as a way to control desires and passions. Adventists continue to believe that eating meat stirs up “animal passions,” and that is one of the reasons for avoiding it.

Another early SDA leader, Lenna Cooper, was a dietitian who cofounded the American Dietetics Association, which continues to advocate a vegetarian diet to this day. Cooper wrote textbooks and other materials that were used in dietetic and nursing programs, not only in the United States but around the world, for more than 30 years. The SDA Church established hundreds of hospitals, colleges, and secondary schools and tens of thousands of churches around the world—all promoting a vegetarian diet—and played a major role in the development and mass production of plant-based foods, such as meat analogues, breakfast cereals, and soy milk. (11)

Adventists have been behind much of the early research on vegetarian diets at Loma Linda University in San Diego, where SDA leaders established a dietetics department in 1908. This was an ostensibly scientific endeavor at a university that was established by a religious group that believed vegetarianism was ordained by God.

If you think this raises a huge red flag for allegiance bias, you’re not wrong. In fact, as Jim Banta pointed out in a fascinating review of the SDA influence on diet, administrators at Loma Linda University in the mid-1900s initially discouraged research on vegetarian diets because “if you find the diets of vegetarians are deficient, it will embarrass us.” That is not the attitude of skepticism and open-minded inquiry that characterizes good science.

My Final Thoughts on Nutrition Research

I’d like to conclude with the opening two paragraphs of a recent open letter that scientists Edward Archer and Chip J. Lavie wrote to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine:

“Nutrition” is now a degenerating research paradigm in which scientifically illiterate methods, meaningless data, and consensus-driven censorship dominate the empirical landscape. Since the 1950s, there was a naïve but politically expedient consensus that a person’s usual diet could be measured simply by asking what he or she remembered eating and drinking. Despite the credulous and unfalsifiable nature of this memory-based method, investigators used it to produce hundreds of thousands of publications and acquire billions of taxpayer dollars.

Over time, the sustained funding of demonstrably pseudo-scientific research methods has subverted the self-correcting nature of science and suppressed skeptical scholarship. Consequently, many decades of politics taking precedence over critical inquiry produced contradictory dietary guidelines, failed public policies, and the continued confusion over “what-to-eat.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

What do you think about the latest nutrition headlines? Do you read the newest research with skepticism? Let me know below in the comments—and be sure to check out Part 1 of this two-part series!

Staff of the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, United States Senate. Dietary Goals for the United States. 2nd ed. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office; December 1977.

The post Why You Should Be Skeptical of the Latest Nutrition Headlines: Part 2 appeared first on Chris Kresser.

Source: http://chriskresser.com September 26, 2018 at 11:54PM

#paleo #recipe #food #delicious #healthy #yum #diet

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thinkingcraft-dianne · 4 years

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WMD Reflection

‘Biased narratives embedded in opaque models’

Weapons of mass destruction was thought-provoking as the author dissects problematic models and makes a parallel between these and global financial markets. The metaphor for models with encoded human prejudice as being 'invisible like Gods' resonates with me, as it is a reoccurring notion that was also talked about by Bridle. Systems that are invisible are difficult to understand for society and therefore beyond dispute and appeal.

The word 'optimizing' felt uncomfortable being used in relation to humans and their capabilities being judged by AI. It flattens individual lives and experiences. There are many variables to people's capabilities and their outcomes, which can even differ from day to day. The author stresses that the few variables encoded in models are not optimal and do not capture human reality. I have always found the structure behind science and academic and our urge to theorize and conceptualize complex human reality into constructs interesting. Methodologies and sampling decisions have a lot of influence on a research outcome and thus how people perceive the world. I think that is also what the author had in mind when describing how large numbers balance out exceptions and anomalies in designing models.

It was quite shocking to read how many important models with enormous repercussions are that static and are not updated with feedback and feedback errors. WMDs become destructive and self-perpetuating by defining and justifying their own reality. A sentence that captures its consequences really well is 'the privileged are processed more by people, the masses by machines'. I think these asymmetric power relations within different jobs have always been there, but AI will deepen thus even more by attacking and judging the masses. It is weird how we as humans have trust in systems picking out the best teachers while we would not trust it with picking a prime minister or president; in the end, teachers will have a huge impact in the upbringing of future generations. Every job had its own social importance and therefore deserves human insight. As the author states: probability is distilled into a score that can turn someone's life upside down. There is also often no recognition for countervailing evidence. In short, these systems are opaque, unquestionable and uncountable. Its victims are considered collateral damage, which is an interesting term as it is also used in other 'smart' systems like drones.

I think there is the most input for human bias in proxies and that this is where things go wrong. Unknown data is substituted by stand-in data chosen by humans. In this choice there is power. The biggest antidote is visibility and flexibility; conditions change and so must the model and its variables - dynamic models. Interesting how seemingly objective and data-driven blind spot actually reflect the judgment and priorities of each creators. Models are opinions embedded in mathematics. It reminds me of how visualisation can be (and is often) shown in a biased way, a way to support one's one views. Did we eliminate human bias or camouflaged it with technology?

Signature qualities WMD, which contain toxic cycles that helps to sustain what it is made to fight:

is the participant aware of being modeled? what is it used for; is the model opaque? I recognize this in many companies who do not want to give an explanation for collecting data, feeling as if it is their right.

Does the model work against the subject interest, is it unfair?

Can the model grow exponentially? Can it scale? I first thought this was a positive aspect, but I realized it is, in fact, a dangerous one. When malicious models can be applied easily on a greater scale, many people can get affected. It is scary that the authors notes that some models are designed and primed to grow to dangerous scales, and that some can leap from one field to the next.

The second chapter in which the authors makes a comparison between the financial market system and WMDs I found really interesting, s it was from an insiders perspective. Everything I know of the market crash is either from movies like the Big Short or lectures which were quite abstract or factual. Knowing that something is not right, but doing it because it generates money (which confirms personal value) is a dangerous human trait. The parallels between the two fields are more than apparent, especially with the playing field consisting of abstract numbers and figures, which feel comfortable in their 'metaphysicality'. These are actually people's lives, retirement funds, and mortgages. Losing sight of human touch and trusting more in the ability of 'the system' resembles automation bias that most people have, in which they trust more on insights generated by technological systems than human knowledge. Also, as the author states, is was the financial market's WMD quality that turned these risk models into an enormous force on a global scale. Proving that automation bias is not optimal, when the financial bubble bursted, only people (not algorithms) could go through all bonds and stocks to pick out false promises.I think it is especially minacious that people's feeling of personal worth is more and more performance based. This is especially the case in the pool of talent that finance and big data fish in. It is so ingrained into our society and student's minds, that I was actually surprised reading that getting trained, educated and then working yourself up into these sectors is a combination of a gaming system and luck. (not personal merit like it is often believed). Many people have an advantage in access to certain education and therefore have more luck, sustaining the human bias in technology. We need to find ways to make the Big Data industry healthier, in order to increase inequality and to gain back control over the data economy.

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scottadamsblog · 7 years

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Are the Hurricanes and Temperature Records Confirmation of Catastrophic Climate Change?

It wasn’t that long ago that climate scientists and their supporters mocked the critics who looked out their window, saw snow in the winter, and declared “global warming” to be a ridiculous hoax.

The climate scientists were right about that. You can’t predict the future by looking at today’s weather, even when the weather is setting records.

Likewise, my latest understanding of climate science (which is always sketchy at best, and certainly in need of updating now) is that we haven’t yet seen the “signal” of climate change in the hurricane data or the weather extremes. But that view is perhaps a year old. Has science updated its opinion to say the two super-hurricanes and our heat extremes are indeed a credible signal of the beginning of a climate catastrophe?

I watch a lot of news, continuously sampling both sides. I haven’t yet seen a climate scientist weigh in on our recent weather extremes. (Perhaps I missed a few?) So I have no idea whether we are seeing something statistically meaningful right now or not.

Let me put this in more stark terms.

If the recent hurricanes and weather extremes are meaningful in terms of climate change, we really, really, really need to know that. THAT is NEWS. In fact, no news is bigger than that news. Even the risk from North Korea is smaller than the risk of total climate catastrophe. So if the current weather extremes are statistically meaningful, and science confirms, why-the-hell isn’t that the lead story everywhere?

On the flip side, if climate scientists do NOT believe our current weather extremes are meaningful in terms of climate predictions, I’d say THAT should be the lead story too, simply because so many people believe they are seeing the beginning of the end times, climate-wise.

So why is the biggest story in the world conspicuously missing from the news? Keep in mind that climate change is still the biggest story even if the hurricanes are NOT telling us something new. The public wants to know how big the threat is. We’re scared!!!

Instead of that news, we get mostly crickets.

But why?

My working hypothesis is that science doesn’t know one way or another whether the current weather extremes are predictive of things to come. And if they are not yet sure, they would say as much. And that would be a problem for news organizations dedicated to reporting climate science risks as real and dire. If you think the world is best served by convincing the public that climate risks are real, your most socially responsible play in this case is to ignore climate scientists at the moment and let the public believe (without the benefit of scientific support, at least right now) that current temperature extremes are a clear sign of climate collapse.

Take this guy, for example. He’s typical of the what I am seeing on Twitter and even from my friends.

[If Tumblr were not broken right now, you would be seeing an image of a tweet that mocks climate critics for thinking the hurricanes are not proof of climate change. But instead you see this boring text because Tumblr won’t accept an image this morning.]

This fine gentleman believes our current hurricanes are indeed a clear signal of climate change. To be perfectly clear, he could be right. But if he is right, it is not because he is well-informed or smart. It would be a coincidence in this case. As far as I know, climate scientists are not onboard with Roger. They might confirm his gut feeling at some point soon, but for now, Roger is doing his own climate science by watching CNN.

So we have an odd situation in which news organizations can report the most “truthful” version of the reality -- according to them -- by NOT reporting the best thinking on the topic. Here I’m assuming the best thinking is that it is too soon to know how important recent weather extremes are to our predictions of climate change. But if that story is reported, viewers will get the wrong idea and conclude that climate change is not such a big deal even though these weather extremes are clearly a big deal.

Conversely, by not putting climate scientists on TV, and avoiding the trap of having them say, “We can’t tell yet,” which would be over-interpreted by skeptics, news organizations might be doing the most ethically defensible thing they could do. If they believe climate change is a big problem, and they want the public to agree, these hurricanes are doing a great job of persuasion without the benefit of science. It’s hard for the public to see what is happening right now as coincidence, or a normal variation in weather. It just doesn’t feel like normal. It feels like the first big signal of climate change to many observers because they have been primed for confirmation bias on that topic.

If you are a producer for CNN, and you believe climate change is an enormous problem that the public needs to understand, you would hesitate to allow any segment on the air that conflicts with that objective. For example, you would not give equal time to climate skeptics. And while all attention is on the hurricanes, you might not want a climate scientist to come on the air and say some version of “We have no idea whether these specific weather extremes mean something. We’ll need more data to know if this is a real trend or a blip.” That message would sound to skeptics like confirmation of their skepticism, even though it isn’t. Not even close. But it would be received that way by skeptics because of confirmation bias. Everyone hears what they want to hear.

So the biggest story in the world is largely ignored by news organizations because -- and here I speculate -- reporting any uncertainty about climate change is not as persuasive as allowing the public to look out the window and generate their own illusions of certainty while also frightened to death.

What would Sam Harris say about the ethics in this situation? Should news organizations lie by omission when they sincerely believe doing so is good for the planet? Or should they put scientists on the air to say “We don’t know yet” and give fuel to the climate skeptics whom they believe are jeopardizing the future of humanity?

I say give us the truth in this case, even if the truth is “We don’t know yet.”

---

You might like my books because hurricanes.

Follow me on Twitter at @ScottAdamsSays. Otherwise you’ll miss all the good stuff.

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weightlossfitness2 · 5 years

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The Game Changers Review – Via a Plant Based Sports Dietitian

As a dietitian who promotes a plant-forward consuming sample, I’m the primary to confess I’m enthusiastic about present the plant-based motion for well being, efficiency, and sustainability. However, I additionally root my observe in science and it’s essential that I don’t let diet documentaries be a primary supply of data for anybody trying to enhance their consuming sample. So, who higher than me with each my dietitian and plant-based hats on, to put in writing up The Game Changers overview?

I spent (too) many hours on this overview and labored to take away my private bias towards plant-based patterns. It’s essential for me to encourage my athletes and viewers to eat extra crops with out pushing my very own weight-reduction plan on them. I select to not eat meat for moral and environmental causes and if another person desires to make the change for these causes, too, I’m right here to assist them try this in a healthful approach! But, on the subject of direct well being and efficiency advantages, I’m reviewing based mostly on sound science. Please be at liberty to go away feedback and questions!

The Quick Review

First and foremost, I need to acknowledge that always whenever you’re listening to about advantages of vegan diets, they’re being in comparison with the usual American weight-reduction plan (SAD). Is an enough vegan weight-reduction plan extra nourishing and higher for the atmosphere than SAD? When you take away heavy meat consumption and largely ultra-processed meals and add in fruits, greens, complete grains, legumes, nuts and seeds, the reply is a simple sure. However, there’s loads of room to be wholesome and gasoline efficiency alongside the spectrum, with out bouncing from one finish to the opposite.

In case you aren’t right here for the entire very in depth particulars under, I’ve put collectively my primary professionals and cons in bullet kind.

The All or Nothing Mentality

Unfortunately, that’s what most individuals stroll away from documentaries with. I don’t imagine that The Game Changers advocated everybody drop meat from their weight-reduction plan instantly and go vegan in a single day, however I can actually see that being the impression some athletes and well being professionals have. There’s been some buzz on my CPSDA (Collegiate and Professional Sports Dietitians) list-serv concerning athletes desirous to go vegan out of nowhere after watching this and I obtained a name from a pal who’s a university swim coach about his athletes desirous to do the identical.

Before leaping additional into my detailed overview, I need to share this from The Game Changers official web site, in an effort to assist everybody take a deep breath and method plant-based in a extra balanced and real looking approach. Despite what you could have taken from the documentary, even they don’t need you to do one thing that isn’t sensible! This ought to have been conveyed higher within the movie, however I’m sharing in hopes that anybody on a journey to plant-based chills out, does it steadily, and finds a dietitian to assist.

Credibility of the Narrator

The documentary is narrated by former UFC champion James Wilks, who at the moment trains army MMA strategies for self protection. He goes on to elucidate how an damage stored him from coaching or educating for six months. In that point he says he spent “over 1,000 hours studying peer-reviewed science on recovery and nutrition” as if this makes him a diet professional.

As a registered dietitian, my internship alone included 1200+ supervised observe hours. This was after finding out diet and train science in undergrad and truly matching to an internship program. On high of this was graduate degree coursework and analysis in the identical disciplines.

What’s humorous (however not likely) is that they didn’t interview a single registered dietitian. There are over 1,000 of us within the US who’re board licensed in sports activities dietetics (that’s the CSSD behind my identify). This implies that on high of the coursework, internship work, passing of the registration examination to grow to be a dietitian, and persevering with schooling to stay a dietitian, we log 2,000 hours of labor particularly associated to sports activities and health diet earlier than taking an excellent more durable board examination. We should take an up to date examination each 5 years to make sure we’re on high of the most recent analysis.

“History Lessons”

Several occasions within the documentary, Wilks references historical people or the perceived roots of some myths. Here’s an summary.

References on Ancient Humans The documentary goes on to focus on how archaeologists have investigated the stays of Roman gladiators. Their outcomes present a excessive bone mineral density, indicative of a excessive coaching load in addition to a “high quality diet”. Referred to as “hordearii”, which interprets to “the barley men”, they ate beans and barley as a primary supply of diet, and their weight-reduction plan is believed to have been very low in meats. This is the primary of many examples of how it’s attainable to keep up power, endurance and muscle mass on a plant-based weight-reduction plan.

The Myth That Meat Gives You Energy First issues first, this actually isn’t a fable. Meat DOES provide you with power as that’s what energy are. I’ve already coated the capabilities of our three power vitamins, so overview that for a greater understanding and also you’ll see you’re actually getting power within the type of fats and protein from meats.

Still, protein is finest as a structural and metabolic nutrient, not an power supply. Protein can convert to useable power if you happen to aren’t consuming enough carbohydrate and fats – it’ll provide power methods and may retailer as fats, too. However, it’s a much less environment friendly power supply and higher depth and length are capable of be reached when carbohydrate is offered as gasoline.

Diet of Ancient Humans I’m thrilled that they interviewed anthropologists to touch upon the truth that what a contemporary “Paleo” weight-reduction plan is just not truly what people ate in that period. However, they doubtless didn’t eat simply crops both. Plants have been dependable and extensively accessible, and a Paleolithic weight-reduction plan was plentiful in crops… however not solely crops.

The Athletes

UFC and Boxing

Former UFC Champion Conor McGregor’s interviews have been highlighted the place he bragged about his grass-fed beef weight-reduction plan (consuming beef for breakfast, lunch, dinner), and made feedback to Nate Diaz in press conferences about how he’d get eaten alive as a consequence of being a vegetarian.

As you could have imagined, this was featured within the movie as a result of Diaz, the underdog, defeated McGregor in an enormous upset. McGregor was proven saying “it was a battle of energy and he got the better of that… I was eating two steaks a day and it came to bite me in the ass.” This absolutely reveals that a carnivorous weight-reduction plan is just not going to provide the power you want for train, however is arguably an excessive comparability.

Bryant Jennings, a heavyweight boxer featured within the movie, was quoted saying “I grew up not even knowing about half of these other vegetables…asparagus to me just came out like 5 years ago!”. This really reveals how any improve in vegetable and plant meals consumption will improve the number of vitamins consumed and supply advantages.

Ultra-Marathoners

It could appear extra doubtless for an endurance athlete to succeed on a vegan weight-reduction plan than athletes in different sports activities. The documentary options Scott Jurek, a 7 time consecutive winner of the celebrated Western States 100 Miler. He’s additionally the 24 hour American document holder, and the one American to ever win the 153 mile Greece Spartathlon. The documentary follows him as he breaks the Appalachian Trail pace document (it’s a 2,189 mile feat) regardless of a quad damage within the first month.

Not adopted within the documentary, which was filmed earlier than his feat, was Robbie Balenger. I had the chance to listen to him converse again in June in New York CIty on the Plant Based World Conference and Expo. He had simply accomplished a 75 day Three,175 mile trek from LA, all within the identify of elevating consciousness of veganism for environmental advantages. He simply needed to indicate what is feasible on a vegan weight-reduction plan.

Runner’s do have small frames, so I’m certain this doesn’t impress anybody trying to construct or preserve muscle mass, however it does present that the best degree of endurance success is feasible with out animal merchandise. The common endurance athlete requires round 1.7g/kg of protein per day, so in a 46 day (Jurek) or 75 day (Balenger), wants are actually larger, and clearly capable of be met.

Sprinters

Carl Lewis, a 9 time gold medalist who competed within the 100m, 200m and lengthy leap occasions was featured briefly. He set all of his PRs at 30 years outdated after adopting a vegan weight-reduction plan. Morgan Mitchell, who used to compete within the 400m and now within the 800m, is a two-time Australian champion and 2016 Olympian (and I’ll get to a few of her feedback later).

As is the theme of this Game Changers overview submit, there was doubtless a big improve in power and vitamins from a extra different consumption of plant meals, which might be achieved on a weight-reduction plan that also consists of some animal merchandise.

Cyclist

Dotsie Bausch, who was standing subsequent to me whereas Balenger spoke in NYC again in June, is an eight time nationwide champion in indoor monitor biking and the oldest individual in her sport to go to the Olympics (the place her workforce received gold). In the documentary, she speaks about her spectacular coaching routine and the way at practically 40, her teammates had a tough time maintaining together with her. She spoke to success with endurance in addition to power and energy beneficial properties within the weight room.

She makes a fantastic level that the higher and faster you get well, the extra you may practice; and weight-reduction plan is a key to quick restoration. Her vegan weight-reduction plan little question gives her with compounds that may support in restoration by lowering irritation and oxidative stress, whereas additionally bettering vascular perform. I’m certain you’ve heard by now that beets might improve athletic efficiency, however along with the entire nutritional vitamins, minerals and antioxidants in produce, you’ll additionally get larger ranges of nitrates, the important thing to beet’s results on dilating blood vessels, to boost oxygen and nutrient supply throughout train.

Vegan or not, including quite a lot of plant meals to 1’s weight-reduction plan will present these compounds. Inclusion of quite a lot of plant meals is probably going the principle purpose that vegetarian diets are related to higher long run well being outcomes, fairly than whole elimination of meats.

Strength Athletes

These are the tales show that plant meals can assist not solely endurance efficiency, but in addition the best ranges of power and energy.

Kendrick Farris had already made two Olympic groups up to now, however after switching to a vegan weight-reduction plan, he certified for his third Olympic workforce and broke two American information as the one Olympic lifter for workforce USA in 2016. Again, we now have a case displaying that it’s attainable to proceed success with out animal merchandise, however we do know he was additionally profitable earlier than his vegan weight-reduction plan. He does say he wished he went vegan sooner.

Patrik Baboumian holds a number of world information in power-lifting and set the document for highest quantity of weight ever carried whereas following a vegan weight-reduction plan. He mentions how he acquired larger and stronger when he stopped consuming meat. If he isn’t proof you may construct and preserve muscle on a vegan weight-reduction plan, I don’t know who’s.

I form of need to simply skip Arnold Schwarzenegger, however received’t as a result of he truly provided the recommendation to begin simply with meatless Monday, a extra balanced method. However, after consuming straight uncooked eggs, approach an excessive amount of meat and taking steroids for years, I’m certain that he can profit from the entire further antioxidants he can get.

NFL

Derrick Morgan describes how when he turned to a plant-based weight-reduction plan after studying about restoration advantages, he felt much less sore, drained and swollen. His blood stress, ldl cholesterol and inflammatory markers have been considerably decrease after 6 months, which is a typical theme seen with these consuming patterns. What we don’t know is his consuming sample earlier than, the place he might have been consuming a meat heavy, low plant weight-reduction plan earlier than making a dramatic change.

They cowl how 14 of the Titans wound up consuming plant based mostly of their finest season in over a decade. What made this fashion simpler than it could be for another athletes studying this? Derrick’s spouse began cooking scrumptious plant-based meals for him and the workforce, in order that they didn’t even have to consider what to eat!

Physician’s Perspectives

Whether vegan or not, any athlete must be educated on what vitamins truly do for the physique.

Dr. James Loomis The workforce internist for the Rams and Cardinals and director of prevention and wellness at St. Luke’s hospital. Dr. Loomis was interviewed since he had adopted a plant-based weight-reduction plan after a knee damage and surgical procedure. He defined how the groups had outdated concepts about protein sustaining power for train and that he’d see giant unfold of meat at pregame meals.

Whether vegan or not, any athlete must be educated on what vitamins truly do for the physique and construct an understanding of the function of carbohydrates as an power supply for train. I see it typically, too, whether or not it’s with my function within the Philadelphia Phillies group, grading weight-reduction plan evaluation tasks for my nursing and train science college students, or simply getting questions from my social media viewers.

There are too many misconceptions about carbs, and whereas a vegan weight-reduction plan simply gives you with extra of them, anybody can incorporate extra high quality carbohydrates. It’s essential to eat them all through the day and particularly earlier than train to boost power ranges for athletic efficiency. So lengthy as enough power continues to be eaten, much less meat naturally equals larger high quality carb consumption, which is why my message is at all times about including extra crops!

Dr. Robert Vogel Vogel is the co-chair of the NFL subcommittee on cardiovascular well being. A reputable supply, he sadly in contrast a blood sampling of three NFL athletes after consuming burritos with beef or rooster sooner or later to bean burritos the following, fairly than discussing printed peer reviewed analysis. Why? Cause it makes for higher viewing! He did evaluate blood samples of the identical athletes with the completely different meals, however this was not a managed examine. They additionally equate the results of poultry with beef consumption, and don’t focus on that each of these burritos additionally had cheese; the saturated fats from the dairy might have been a consider variations fairly than the rooster.

He does start by protecting how a single meal can impression endothelial perform (the endothelium strains the center and blood vessels). If the endothelium constricts, it limits blood movement and thereby limits oxygen and nutrient supply to muscle cells to boost efficiency. This would have been a fantastic alternative to dive into the dietary nitrate data I discussed above, indicating how not solely beets, however quite a lot of greens can dilate blood vessels and have a profit.

Dr. Dean Ornish and Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, Jr. Dr. Ornish is world famend for his vegan program for reversing coronary heart illness and Esselstyn is the director of coronary heart illness reversal on the Cleveland Clinic. When treating sufferers post-emergency coronary heart surgical procedure or who’ve dramatically excessive blood lipids and severe danger for a coronary heart assault, it could make extra sense to comply with their proof based mostly packages for coronary heart illness reversal. A drastic in a single day change means a extra dramatic improve in antioxidants and fiber with a extra dramatic lower in compounds present in meats. This could also be warranted in these dire medical conditions, however to construct a nourishing, enough and sustainable weight-reduction plan for an athlete, a extra gradual and sensible method is at all times my suggestion. I even have an enormous submit on omega-Three’s within the works, which can be a priority whereas switching to a vegan weight-reduction plan with out correct schooling.

They additionally present outcomes from a one week vegan weight-reduction plan for firefighters. Dramatic enhancements in lipid ranges have been proven, whereas it typically can take months to see outcomes from different interventions. Ornish goes on to showcase how genes might be turned on and off by weight-reduction plan and way of life selections – however we don’t check sufferers genes, so it’s laborious to say going plant based mostly alone will save their life and nobody wants medicine.

Dr. Aaron Spitz They included this urologist to show the purpose that you simply don’t have to eat meat to “be a man”. And to pique viewer curiosity did a sleep erection examine on three NCAA athletes. In brief, they’d extra erections once they ate plant-based burritos earlier than sleep than once they ate meat burritos. I in all probability simply satisfied you to look at this documentary based mostly on this ridiculous inclusion alone. Either approach, they go on to reference research displaying no distinction in testosterone after which fortunately deal with the truth that soy does NOT improve estrogen within the physique and truly has well being advantages. I at all times reference this video by RD Whitney English once I get soy questions.

Dr. David Katz He was solely briefly featured, however is a physician who I comply with. Katz perhaps was solely featured for a number of sentences as a result of his stance wasn’t as polarizing. He reiterated that world broad, regardless of if the consuming sample is larger or decrease in fats or carbs, an consuming sample that’s predominantly crops is finest for well being. Again, he didn’t say solely crops.

The Drawbacks of Meat Intake?

A examine confirmed that a single burger can impair blood movement and improve irritation. This means you could have a discount in blood movement impacting coronary heart well being, joint well being and extra. Plant meals do have extra antioxidant content material than animal meals, however that doesn’t in any respect imply one burger goes to trigger poor efficiency, coronary heart illness or most cancers. I hate to sound like a cliche dietitian, however it’s all about steadiness and inclusion of the opposite vitamins, too. What if the burger was eaten on a sprouted complete grain bun with a spinach salad?

There have been a number of compounds that made an look on the display with no clarification as to what they’re or why they’re “bad”. One instance is heterocyclic amines – they’re these compounds that kind whenever you grill meat (particularly overcook it) and have carcinogenic results. These shouldn’t be current when meat is cooked appropriately (not charred and with a marinade). They additionally rapidly evaluate amines created by regular digestion of animal protein to those who end result from charred and cured meat, with out offering proof. While this actually could also be an space we discover to be true with extra analysis, for now, we don’t have enough proof.

Heme Iron is the kind of iron that comes from animal merchandise (extra on this under). The documentary references a meta-analysis that confirmed individuals with larger heme iron consumption had a 31% higher probability of creating coronary coronary heart illness. A examine additionally confirmed heme iron to be related to colon most cancers. This data is value noting and persevering with to concentrate to; word although that an affiliation is just not at all times indicative of a trigger and impact relationship.

Studies have been talked about displaying larger dangers of prostate most cancers related to larger dairy consumption and better charges of colon most cancers related to poultry consumption. You can click on to view the prostate most cancers examine, however I didn’t discover the one on colon most cancers simply. Drop it within the feedback when you have it!

Finally, they took time to deal with financial energy of the meat, pork and dairy industries to fund research and pay RDs and medical doctors to advertise these meals. As a lot as I agree that this creates a battle, because the plant trade doesn’t have as a lot cash to fund research, a portion of my very own revenue is from meals corporations and commodity boards, who sponsor posts on my weblog and instagram, in addition to TV segments. I do really feel I’ve larger moral requirements than another folks and have turned down some huge cash from corporations who don’t align with my values and who I imagine stretch the reality with their messaging. It’s essential for you as a client to find out what your moral requirements are and dive into analysis and media tales a bit extra by yourself if you’re involved with these ties.

Environmental Concerns I’m glad this wasn’t unnoticed, as a result of it’s the principle purpose I encourage folks to eat much less meat and extra crops. Beef promoters state how carbon emissions instantly from cattle aren’t that top, and which may be true, however the land and water use in addition to the deforestation from overproduction of cattle is immense. It largely drove the fires within the amazon and is one thing we must always all think about as scientists proceed frequently to reiterate the local weather emergency many individuals proceed to disregard.

Nutrient Concerns

I encourage any vital dietary modifications be made within the low season.

From power must B12, iron, and omega-Three, there’s a handful of vitamins you must take note of, and it’ll be laborious with out some hand holding from a dietitian to start with!

Energy My first concern when somebody desires to drop all the things and change to a vegan weight-reduction plan is their power consumption (not their protein). It is clearly attainable to eat an enough vegan weight-reduction plan, however if you happen to watch this documentary and simply resolve you’re going to chop out animal merchandise, what are you going to eat?!

As a supporter of plant-based diets, I imagine you need to transition to them responsibly (if you happen to select to maneuver in that route). I’ll by no means advocate for big dietary modifications throughout a aggressive season for an athlete. Additionally, I encourage vital dietary modifications be made within the low season, except in fact you could have entry to a dietitian and chef who can work collectively to make this attainable for you. For most athletes that isn’t actuality.

Eliminating animal merchandise might sound straightforward, however you must have replacements for not solely single meals sources, but in addition sources of power that will have come together with the animal meals. For instance, it’s straightforward to swap dairy milk for soy milk. But, what in regards to the pizza you used to eat on a Friday? Removing the cheese and pepperoni and including veggies and cashew parm sounds just like the wholesome alternative, however now your whole power and fats consumption is quite a bit decrease. One meal might not make an enormous distinction, however when these situations proceed so as to add up, you may wind up in a big power deficit that impairs efficiency, immune system perform, bone well being, and extra. You’ll need to be strategic to suit extra fats and power in at that meal or different factors all through the day (trace: discover a sports activities dietitian).

Protein Quality They incorrectly state that the supply of protein is irrelevant. It’s true that it’s a fable that crops don’t comprise the entire important amino acids. But, as I discussed in my latest submit on plant protein, athletes might have to be extra aware about selecting extra digestible plant proteins and pairing plant proteins collectively to extend their bioavailability.

Evidence reveals that the amino acid leucine is a vital set off for muscle protein synthesis and it’s in truth more durable to get really useful quantities from single plant sources, apart from soy. However, some newer proof has proven that regardless of decrease leucine ranges, pea protein could also be equal to whey protein for muscle restoration. We nonetheless want extra knowledge, however you may learn extra on this intensive article I wrote for Clif Bar.

B12 While interviewing Morgan Mitchell, she alludes to not having any points with B12 as is commonly a worry when going plant-based. Unfortunately, this can be a dangerous assertion that may make athletes who’re going plant-based really feel as in the event that they don’t want to seek out different sources. In our trendy meals system, B12 is just not current in plant meals. It is a nutrient fashioned by micro organism, and since we not eat meals with dust residue or drink water instantly from rivers, we don’t get B12 from crops.

B12 is a singular water soluble nutrient – in contrast to different water soluble nutritional vitamins, it’s saved within the liver. Once consumption ceases, it could take Three-5 years earlier than signs of a deficiency present up, which can be why folks don’t discover points immediately. Take a good B12 complement (if you happen to’re an athlete, one that’s NSF licensed for sport or Informed Choice certiified).

Iron Since heme-iron is absorbed extra effectively than non-heme (plant) iron in omnivores, it’s a frequent concern that vegan diets don’t present enough iron for athletes. Athletes do have larger iron necessities, so the priority is comprehensible. However, many plant meals comprise excessive ranges of iron and inclusion of vitamin C with plant iron can improve it’s absorption by Four occasions. Adaptation to soak up extra iron additionally happens when meat is just not included in a single’s weight-reduction plan. I’ll have a few intensive posts on iron for health up subsequent week!

Key Takeaways

Veganism isn’t a weight-reduction plan, it’s a life-style. It’s one thing chances are you’ll select to work in direction of for animal welfare and/or environmental causes, and it could additionally enhance your well being. But, it isn’t one thing to attain in a single day and it doesn’t assure miraculous efficiency advantages.

Swapping extra animal merchandise in your weight-reduction plan for complete plant meals might produce each brief and long run well being advantages by growing consumption of carbohydrate, fiber, nutritional vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, and different compounds (like dietary nitrates). It may also scale back saturated fats and ldl cholesterol intakes, which might be helpful to some folks (however the diploma to these advantages could also be based mostly on genetics and different way of life components).

A correct portion of meat is simply Three-Four ounces – Three ounces of lean beef or rooster breast gives 23-25 grams of protein, which is greater than sufficient contemplating you additionally get protein from complete grains, greens, nuts and seeds which may be at that very same meal. Improve your weight-reduction plan by lowering portion sizes to make extra room for nutrient wealthy carbs and wholesome fat in your plate. If you scale back meat consumption, once more, you must exchange these energy some place else at meals and snacks all through the day.

If you’re involved with animal welfare and local weather change, you can begin by deciding on extra humanely raised meats and fish which have a extra sustainable foot print. Eat Lancet – the dietary suggestions for sustainability – recommend consuming not more than about 100 grams of beef (Three.5 oz) , 200 grams of poultry (7 oz), and 200 grams of fish (7 oz) per week.

If you’re in danger for coronary heart illness, take note of what analysis is launched on TMAO and heme-iron sooner or later (since we don’t have sufficient now), whereas placing most of your effort into growing complete plant meals consumption.

If you continue to need to make modifications quick, please don’t do it alone… and don’t flip to a random well being coach or meal plan. Whether it’s my workforce or somebody I don’t even know, meet with a sports activities dietitian!

The post The Game Changers Review – Via a Plant Based Sports Dietitian appeared first on Weight Loss Fitness.

from Weight Loss Fitness https://weightlossfitnesss.info/the-game-changers-review-via-a-plant-based-sports-dietitian/

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waqasblog2 · 5 years

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Wix SEO vs. WordPress: 6.4M Domains Studied

Let’s face it: Wix’s reputation amongst SEO professionals isn’t great. Most believe that WordPress is not only superior but also that Wix is inferior to, well, pretty much any other CMS out there.

Wix is doing everything in their power to change the negative perception amongst SEOs.

That’s why, in 2017, they launched a contest challenging the world to outrank them for “SEO hero.” The prize? A cool $50,000.

But the question is, is Wix really that bad? Is all of this hate justified, or is it more just gossip? And is WordPress any better?

To answer this question, we studied 3.2 million Wix websites and 3.2 million Wordpress websites.

In this post, I’ll run through our findings, and then you can decide for yourself which CMS is best for you.

Before I get to the findings, I want to talk a bit about the source of our data and the metrics we studied.

The sample

For our sample of 6.4 million websites, we used BuiltWith—a service that shows you the different technologies behind websites.

If you’re curious as to how this works, head over to their site, enter any domain in the search box, then check the “Content management system” section. It’ll tell you whether the site runs on Wix, WordPress, or something else.

BuiltWith shows NewYorker.com running on WordPress.

Because doing this manually for 6.4 million domains would have taken forever, we pulled our sample using BuiltWith’s API.

Sidenote.

We excluded subdomains from our sample because other technologies or custom setups could have been done there.

The SEO metrics

For each of the 6.4 million domains in our dataset, we pulled four key Ahrefs SEO metrics:

From here, we sliced and diced the data to try to understand more about the SEO implications of these two platforms.

The study

To kick things off, we segmented the dataset into two “buckets” relating to organic traffic:

Here’s what we found:

46.1% of WordPress websites got at least some monthly search traffic, compared with only 1.4% of Wix sites.

Now for our second bucket, 8.26% of the WordPress sample gets more than 100 monthly search visits, whereas our Wix sample is down to 0.06%.

So according to our data, it’s pretty clear that on average, WordPress sites get significantly more organic traffic than Wix sites.

But this data alone doesn’t prove that one platform is superior to the other.

Reason being, numerous factors influence organic traffic… and many are unrelated to the CMS of the site itself.

Case in point: backlinks.

Previously, we studied almost one billion web pages and found a clear correlation between the number of backlinks from unique websites and organic search traffic:

So, for our sample of Wix and WordPress websites, we decided to check the average Domain Rating, the number of dofollow referring domains, and monthly search traffic for each platform.

Some key observations:

But here’s the thing: looking at the average in isolation can sometimes lead to misleading interpretations of a dataset.

So we also decided to grab the median for each of these metrics.

You can see that the difference here is way less noticeable. But what does that mean?

Here’s what our data scientist had to say:

When measuring the central tendency of data, it’s best to calculate both mean and median and compare the two values.

Generally speaking, if both values are not too different from each other, we use the mean. But a considerable difference between them indicates that the data is skewed.

When the data is skewed, large values have an ENORMOUS impact, making the mean larger than the actual distribution that the data suggests.

In this case, the median is a more appropriate idea of the data distribution.

Loveme Felicilda, Data Science Ahrefs

To better understand this concept, imagine that we only had a sample of 10 websites. Nine of them had 0 monthly organic visits, and the one outlier had 1,000 monthly search visits.

The mean, or average, would be 100 search visits per month.

The median, on the other hand, would be 0 organic visits per month.

Or, in plain English:

Most sites get little or no search traffic and have weak backlink profiles regardless of whether they run on Wix or WordPress. But there are clearly a few high‐traffic and high‐authority WordPress websites in our sample that are skewing the average.

Going deeper

Next, we wanted to run a deeper analysis of both Wix and WordPress websites with search traffic.

But before doing that, we felt that we needed to level the playing field by eliminating as much bias as possible from our samples and pulling some extra data.

So we added three extra layers to our analysis.

#1. We leveled the sample sizes across the board

There are only 44,600 Wix websites with traffic in our sample, compared to 1,475,147 WordPress websites.

That’s a big difference, so we randomly selected the same number (44,600) of WordPress domains as Wix domains to ensure an apples to apples comparison. After all, there’s no point comparing a whole army to just a few soldiers.

#2. We found the number of top 10 keyword rankings

For each site in our sample, we pulled the number of keywords that they rank for in Google’s top 10 search results.

We also summed up the amount of organic traffic each site gets from those keywords.

#3. We excluded exact‐match keywords

If the domain was xyz.com, then we removed the keyword xyz for that particular website. This was to exclude traffic from branded queries.

Here are the results for all domains with >0 organic visits:

You can see that WordPress beats Wix when it comes to the average number of top 10 keyword rankings and the traffic these keywords account for.

But, once again, the mean (average) is drastically different from the median, which indicates that outliers heavily skew both samples. So, unfortunately, we can’t read too much into these results.

Having said that, things start to get a little more interesting when we look only at websites with over 100 monthly visits.

You can see that the mean and median closely align when it comes to the number of top 10 keywords for both WordPress and Wix.

So, our data seems to indicate with some certainty that WordPress websites typically have a marginally higher number of top 10 rankings than Wix sites.

But, when it comes to the organic traffic from those keywords, Wix comes out on top.

Basically, WordPress websites rank for more keywords in the top 10 than Wix sites, but Wix sites get more traffic from their top 10 rankings than WordPress sites.

Looking at the data for this “bucket” a little deeper, you’ll see that Wix Websites have a higher Domain Rating, but a lower number of dofollow referring domains.

Sidenote.

This graph only includes median values because the dataset included a lot of outliers.

This tells us that the Wix sites in our sample might get more search traffic due to non‐link‐related factors, such as ranking for and getting traffic from branded searches.

For example, Long John Silvers, a popular restaurant chain, is a website that uses Wix.

And according to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, they get around 133,000 organic visits per month.

But if you take a look at their organic keywords report, you’ll immediately see that the majority of their traffic comes from branded queries as opposed to generic keywords like “seafood restaurant.”

The conclusion

Unfortunately, the data is somewhat inconclusive.

There’s just no way to say whether one platform is better than the other based solely on the results of our study.

Having said that, we did learn a few things in this study:

To reiterate, it’s impossible to say if either of these platforms is “better” from an organic traffic perspective than the other.

So why does Wix get a bad rap?

Let me start by saying that when it comes to the absolute basics of on‐page SEO like adjusting title tags, meta descriptions, URLs, etc., Wix is okay for the most part.

It’s pretty easy to edit these things in the backend, much like it is in WordPress.

Still, one small annoyance is that the blog URL structure tends to utilize the /post/ prefix.

That isn’t so much of an SEO issue per se; it’s just annoying.

So it seems that Wix gets a bad rap due to the limitations that arise when trying to customize anything advanced or technical.

Let me give you a few examples.

Wix doesn’t support the hreflang tag at the time of writing this post.

Contrast that with WordPress, where there are quite a few free plugins available for doing this. Here’s the one we use on the Ahrefs blog:

Robots.txt

Another technical limitation related to SEO is the inability to modify your robots.txt file, which is quite important for larger sites.

Same goes for .htaccess.

Javascript & code bloat

Finally, a big one in the technical SEO space relates to Javascript.

Here’s what Barry Adams said in a Twitter thread about this:

One word: JavaScript.

Wix relies in client‐side JS to show content & links in most cases. No JS = no indexable content & no crawlable links.

Which, as you know, is terrible for SEO on multiple levels.

— Barry Adams (@badams) May 8, 2019

Furthermore, if you take a look at the source code for some Wix websites, there’s a lot of code bloat—much of which is Javascript. Code bloat is bad because it slows down your site and Pagespeed is a ranking factor.

Here’s the Google Pagespeed Insights score for one Wix site I found:

Sidenote.

This screenshot doesn’t prove that all Wix websites are this slow. It’s doubtful that they are. However, this was literally the first random site I checked.

Final thoughts

If you care about SEO, should you use Wix, WordPress, or something else?

The truth is, there’s no definitive answer to that question.

It all comes down to what you value.

If your SEO requirements are quite basic and minimal, and you care about an easy‐to‐use CMS, then Wix is probably fine. After all, our data shows that Wix sites don’t have a hard time ranking on Google.

Wix is great for launching and maintaining a basic website, even if you don’t have a technical bone in your body. I know a few people who use Wix for this very reason.

But if you plan on using SEO as a long‐term strategy, or you’re hiring an agency to do SEO for you, it may be advantageous to look into other platforms (not necessarily WordPress) for scalability and customization.

This content was originally published here.

0 notes

shapesnnsizes · 6 years

Text

Why You Should Be Skeptical of the Latest Nutrition Headlines: Part 2

Some Scientific Results Can’t Be Replicated

The results from most observational nutrition studies have not been replicated by RCTs. In fact, one analysis found that:

Yes, you read that correctly. Out of 52 claims made in observational nutrition studies, zero were replicated and five indicated the opposite of what the observational study suggested!

Researchers Focus on Quantity, Not Quality

People don’t eat nutrition, they eat food. – Margaret Mead

Two examples of how this has manifested over the past few decades are:

The promotion of margarine over the much better-tasting butter because of concerns about butter’s saturated fat content

The vilification of eggs due to their cholesterol content without considering their overall nutrient value

(And of course, we now know that butter is healthier than margarine and dietary cholesterol has no impact on heart disease. Another oops!)

What Happens When You Look at Food Quality

RCTs Are Better than Observational Studies but Still Problematic

Duration

Inadequate Sample Size

Dr. John Ioannidis, a professor at the Stanford School of Medicine, highlighted this problem in a recent editorial in BMJ called “Implausible Results in Human Nutrition Research.”

RCTs Are Expensive

Quality RCTs Are Difficult to Do

As Dr. Peter Attia points out in his excellent series Studying Studies, designing high-quality RCTs is fraught with challenges:

That’s not an easy task and few nutrition RCTs meet the challenge.

Conflicts of Interest Are Very Common

It’s difficult to get a man to understand a thing if his salary is dependent upon him not understanding it. – Upton Sinclair

Allegiance bias has been defined as “bias leading to distortion of research-based information in the service of what may be perceived as righteous ends.” (8)

Belief: Veganism began as a way to express moral integrity regarding the appropriation and suffering of non-humans.

Ritual: Veganism involves strict dietary restrictions, including abstaining from the use of materials made from any animal products.

Experience: The “holistic connectedness” of veganism would be considered a religious experience to those who live it.

Community: There are many official and unofficial vegan associations across the world, and in 2017 a civil flag was created for the international vegan community.

A Famous Example of Allegiance Bias at Work

The China Study, a book by vegan physician and researcher T. Colin Campbell, is a perfect example. Campbell claimed that this study—which was not peer-reviewed—proved that:

Animal protein causes cancer

A plant-based diet protects against heart disease

You can get all the nutrients you need from plants

Allegiance bias can take several forms. It can involve:

Cherry-picking studies to support a cherished view

Misleadingly describing the results of studies that are cited in a paper

“Data dredging” to search for statistical significance within given data sets (when no such significance is present)

Not reporting null results

Designing experiments for the purpose of obtaining a particular answer

And more

Nutrition Policy Is Informed by Politics and Religion—Not Just Science

Religion Can Impact Nutrition Guidelines

My Final Thoughts on Nutrition Research

I’d like to conclude with the opening two paragraphs of a recent open letter that scientists Edward Archer and Chip J. Lavie wrote to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine:

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

What do you think about the latest nutrition headlines? Do you read the newest research with skepticism? Let me know below in the comments—and be sure to check out Part 1 of this two-part series!

Staff of the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, United States Senate. Dietary Goals for the United States. 2nd ed. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office; December 1977.

The post Why You Should Be Skeptical of the Latest Nutrition Headlines: Part 2 appeared first on Chris Kresser.

0 notes

denisalvney · 6 years

Text

Why You Should Be Skeptical of the Latest Nutrition Headlines: Part 2

Some Scientific Results Can’t Be Replicated

The results from most observational nutrition studies have not been replicated by RCTs. In fact, one analysis found that:

Yes, you read that correctly. Out of 52 claims made in observational nutrition studies, zero were replicated and five indicated the opposite of what the observational study suggested!

Researchers Focus on Quantity, Not Quality

People don’t eat nutrition, they eat food. – Margaret Mead

Two examples of how this has manifested over the past few decades are:

The promotion of margarine over the much better-tasting butter because of concerns about butter’s saturated fat content

The vilification of eggs due to their cholesterol content without considering their overall nutrient value

(And of course, we now know that butter is healthier than margarine and dietary cholesterol has no impact on heart disease. Another oops!)

What Happens When You Look at Food Quality

RCTs Are Better than Observational Studies but Still Problematic

Duration

Inadequate Sample Size

Dr. John Ioannidis, a professor at the Stanford School of Medicine, highlighted this problem in a recent editorial in BMJ called “Implausible Results in Human Nutrition Research.”

RCTs Are Expensive

Quality RCTs Are Difficult to Do

As Dr. Peter Attia points out in his excellent series Studying Studies, designing high-quality RCTs is fraught with challenges:

That’s not an easy task and few nutrition RCTs meet the challenge.

Conflicts of Interest Are Very Common

It’s difficult to get a man to understand a thing if his salary is dependent upon him not understanding it. – Upton Sinclair

Allegiance bias has been defined as “bias leading to distortion of research-based information in the service of what may be perceived as righteous ends.” (8)

Belief: Veganism began as a way to express moral integrity regarding the appropriation and suffering of non-humans.

Ritual: Veganism involves strict dietary restrictions, including abstaining from the use of materials made from any animal products.

Experience: The “holistic connectedness” of veganism would be considered a religious experience to those who live it.

Community: There are many official and unofficial vegan associations across the world, and in 2017 a civil flag was created for the international vegan community.

A Famous Example of Allegiance Bias at Work

The China Study, a book by vegan physician and researcher T. Colin Campbell, is a perfect example. Campbell claimed that this study—which was not peer-reviewed—proved that:

Animal protein causes cancer

A plant-based diet protects against heart disease

You can get all the nutrients you need from plants

Allegiance bias can take several forms. It can involve:

Cherry-picking studies to support a cherished view

Misleadingly describing the results of studies that are cited in a paper

“Data dredging” to search for statistical significance within given data sets (when no such significance is present)

Not reporting null results

Designing experiments for the purpose of obtaining a particular answer

And more

Nutrition Policy Is Informed by Politics and Religion—Not Just Science

Religion Can Impact Nutrition Guidelines

My Final Thoughts on Nutrition Research

I’d like to conclude with the opening two paragraphs of a recent open letter that scientists Edward Archer and Chip J. Lavie wrote to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine:

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

What do you think about the latest nutrition headlines? Do you read the newest research with skepticism? Let me know below in the comments—and be sure to check out Part 1 of this two-part series!

Staff of the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, United States Senate. Dietary Goals for the United States. 2nd ed. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office; December 1977.

The post Why You Should Be Skeptical of the Latest Nutrition Headlines: Part 2 appeared first on Chris Kresser.

Why You Should Be Skeptical of the Latest Nutrition Headlines: Part 2 published first on https://chriskresser.com

0 notes

jessicakmatt · 6 years

Text

Avoiding Creative Burnout: How 11 Artists Take Care of Their Craft

Avoiding Creative Burnout: How 11 Artists Take Care of Their Craft: via LANDR Blog

No artist lives in a state of constant inspiration. Creativity can come and go without warning. But burnout from prolonged artistic work can be tough to fix.

Whether it’s the end of a long and challenging creative process, or a dry spell between ideas, we all need ways to stay close to the love of making music when things get tough.

Practicing a music workflow that includes self-care for creative health is how many experienced creators cope.

We asked 11 artists from MUTEK Montreal 2018 to discuss their best strategies for overcoming creative burnout.

Machinewoman — Photo Bruno Destombes

Machine Woman

“It’s important to look after your health, and mental health. Taking regular breaks away from your music and music in general. Going for a walk and getting a coffee or tea and reading a book. Switching off from one thing. Developing a routine in your day is a positive start. Appreciating people and experiences in your life. Not putting pressure on yourself, not comparing yourself to anyone else. If you feel the pressure building up, make sure you allow your self-timeout. Also if you are struggling, it is totally ok to ask for help or look for help.”

More about Machine Woman

María Laura Ruggiero

“In my case burnout is never about being creative, it’s about not having time to explore personal projects while committed to commercial work. It’s about learning to say ‘No, this is not for me’. Daily meditation, spending time in nature, being off the grid from time to time, to experience a different notion of time and space helps enormously. Connecting with real reality is key for creating synthetic worlds. Meditative practices, stillness or creative motion is not only healthy for any creative practice but also incredibly inspiring. I also believe in 'beginners mind.’ Taking the risk of learning new things, especially skills that are not naturally easy for me, gets me in a spirit of humility, respect and simplicity that overrides the continuous drive to get better in your own artistic field. Connecting with other artists from different fields of work, also helps and creates an infinite space for inspiration. Moving your body, stopping the endless motion of the mind, remaining in touch with the physical world, learning to make things with your own hands and swimming in the ocean as often as possible is what keeps me sane to dream, create, travel and share.”

More about María Laura Ruggiero

Wiklow goes Against The Clock — Photo Vivien Gaumand

Push 1 stop & WIKLOW

“I used to believe the way to create your best work was to be prolific as possible. Many artists I admire are able to produce a huge quantity of work in very short periods of time. However, they also take breaks, in some cases over a long periods of time. This was my biggest lesson from my collaboration with Push 1 stop. When we don’t stop working, we repeat the same ideas over and over. Forcing yourself to stop keeps the creative spirit hungry, especially when there’s a tight deadline approaching. It’s amazing how efficient and original you can be when you spend time on self-care, even when all you want to do is work.

Take responsibility for building creative communities. Create opportunities for creative and engaged people to spend time together, not working on projects. This means more than artists, but individuals who are curious and want to question the nature of things. Sharing ideas is a huge source of inspiration. Being with others removes our fixation on a project, allowing one to take a step back.”

More about Push 1 stop & WIKLOW

CNDSD & Iván Abreu

“CNDSD (Malitzin Cortes): Personally, I consider that my artistic career is highly emergent, thinking of many of my colleagues who have been renewing for many years. Until now, it seems very refreshing to open my eyes well not only in art, but everything that happens in our world, there is too much information about people who have questions similar to yours and the most interesting is also where there are other questions. Scientific research and technology are my passion however, I could say that an essential tool not only to not lose faith in the art we do, but also in the life itself is curiosity, look not only in the fields that we interest, be empathetic with what happens, leave our bubble methodology or the bias that produces shutting in what seems good or we like, is very important to open horizons and from that point begin to ask and restart the conversation with the public.”

Iván: “You have to be careful with the advantages for the market that involves the construction of artistic identity and the possible straitjacket that can be converted to keep alive the capacity of your works to surprise and intensify the experience. The above implies not only understanding the substance and materiality of your work, but also its context, an artistic experience is not a monologue, it is a conversation, so the work remains active while there is a 'conversation’ between artist and audience, from this point of view, changing the questions, the processes, the supports and the referents allows reviving the dialogue with your personal motivation and consequently with the public accomplice and with affinity for your work.”

More about CNDSD & Iván Abreu

CNDSD & Ivan Abreu — Decora girl, decodification. Music and cinematographic montage between algorithmic patterns of TidalCycles and @processing.

Milena Pafundi

“Personally one of the forms that I find as relaxing for mental rest is research. When I feel burnt out, I try to read, watch a movie or a tutorial to get more deep in what I’m Creating. Also the space for dispersion, to take a break and spend time with my affective networks. Check other artists while they are going through their own creative process helps me a lot… it’s inspiring and relaxing for burnouts.”

More about Milena Pafundi

Interspecifics — Photo Ella Rinaldo

Interspecifics

“The main thing for us is to create in a collective way, sharing ideas and shifting perspectives gives you new spaces to rethink an refresh a creative process. Otherness is the key and in our case look for no-human collaborators to experience expanded ways of communication.”

More about Interspecifics

Rrayen

“I think that art is a channel for many different energies, and that we work as channels ourselves… So I don’t think in my case I ever feel a burnout, as everything surrounding me is a great source of inspiration… Might be more a contextual comfort zone that may attack, and that’s why we need to keep our mind and spirits in movement, searching… never stop.”

More about Rrayen

DEBIT

“To avoid creative burnout, I try to keep a balance between the range of musical activities I’m involved with. Generally I divide my time into production, DJing and most recently mixing and mastering. It is important that I can relate the practices to each other, so as to not over-focus or put too much pressure or fetish on any given one. They all help me advance in my musical ideas and experience. Remaining creative but also competitive in all of them is important. When I find myself getting bored or lazy within one path, I can simply switch to another. Diversifying allows me to keep my technical development in center focus which is a great way to keep it interesting and stimulating for myself.”

More about DEBIT

DEBIT - Photo Bruno Destombes

softcoresoft — Photo Bruno Destombes

softcoresoft

“There are a few different things that help. First, taking a break: My favorites are getting outside (a lake, a cottage), cooking a meal from scratch or having a glass of nice wine with friends. When music goes from being your hobby to being your life, you need a new hobby! It helps to disconnect and give your mind a break, another place to wander to so you don’t get fatigued.

Second, going out to see an artist/DJ I really love. It always inspires me, makes me think of new things I could try in my own music. If I can dance to it at the same time, I get some exercise also, mega plus!

Third, listen to music with other music-obsessed friends. Whether you’re driving around in a car and playing a record from start to finish or getting together for a listening party, it helps to talk about music with others. Talk about the production, the things you like in a particular song, the things that stand out. You’ll notice new things about tracks that inspire you, because everyone might notice different aspects of the same track. When you hit the studio again, you’ll have all sorts of new ideas to go off of!”

More about softcoresoft

DJ LAG — Photo Bruno Destombes

DJ LAG

“It doesn’t happen often but when I feel fatigued by my productions I take a break and just try to listen to other music and let my mind wander over different audio textures and moods. Sometimes I listen to older South African music or music from my childhood which hits in my emotional core. I would also take a walk or spend some time on the internet, looking for inspiration. Once I feel at peace again I will seek new plugins for my DAW and look to isolate some fresh samples that interest me. From there the playfulness takes over again :)”

More about DJ LAG

Written in collaboration with Mutek Montreal 2018. Learn more about Mutek and their ongoing series of global events.

The post Avoiding Creative Burnout: How 11 Artists Take Care of Their Craft appeared first on LANDR Blog.

from LANDR Blog https://blog.landr.com/avoiding-creative-burnout/ via https://www.youtube.com/user/corporatethief/playlists from Steve Hart https://stevehartcom.tumblr.com/post/178259953564

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douchebagbrainwaves · 6 years

Text

YOU GUYS I JUST THOUGHT OF THIS

But the American startups we've funded have, and that it was very remiss of me to have forgotten all that stuff within three weeks of the final exam. 16804294 what 0. Realizing this has real implications for software design. If I order something from an online store, and they then send me a stream of spam, influenced presumably by lobbyists, tend to exclude mail sent by companies that have an existing relationship with the recipient. When they're raising money, but it seems very unlikely. That varies enormously, from $10,000, whichever is greater. The reason Cambridge is the intellectual capital is not just that there's a concentration of smart people there, but that they were started there. Which is exciting because among other things it means third parties can use this technique whenever a you have at least a random sample of the applicants that were selected, b their subsequent performance is measured, and c the groups of applicants you're comparing have roughly equal distribution of ability. And in particular it must not be invalidated by the bias you're trying to measure.

In fact these free or nearly free things weren't bargains, because they were worth even less than they cost. Civilization always seems old, because it's the only way to say whether something is really old or not is by looking at good programs—not just at what they do, but you don't have to be promoted. At the time that was an odd thing to do, because it has something to say, rather than their combined length, as the name implies, is dynamic: you don't know you need to escape it. That doesn't mean the investor says yes to everyone. In both painting and hacking there are some tasks that are terrifyingly ambitious, and others will say it's old news, but here goes: judging from their works, most philosophers up to the present have been wasting their time. The need to do something great. It doesn't necessarily mean being self-sacrificing. Unless you're sure what you want to reproduce Silicon Valley elsewhere, or is there something unique about it? The startup hubs in the US are also big tourist destinations, like New York will pay a premium to live in a great city your whole life to benefit from it. Why would I do that? False positives are innocent emails that get mistakenly identified as spams. In the middle you have people working on something like the natural history of computers—studying the behavior of algorithms for routing data through networks, for example, but Microsoft, within the castle of their operating system monopoly, probably wouldn't even notice if you did.

Unfortunately that makes this email a boring example of the use of Bayes' Rule. Three of the most interesting questions you can ask about philosophy. Perfectionism is often an excuse for procrastination, and in any case your initial model of users is always inaccurate, even if you're never called on to solve advanced problems, you can usually find version 1 of it in a smaller form in some earlier painting. And even then they rarely said so outright. Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. 01 scripting 0. But looking through windows at dusk in Paris you can see shortcuts in the solution of simple ones, and your knowledge won't break down in edge cases, as it would if you were relying on formulas you didn't understand.

The statistical approach is not usually the first one people try when they write spam filters. This should yield a much sharper estimate of the probability. The fifteen most interesting words are as follows: let g 2 or gethash word bad 0 unless g b 5 max. Can, perhaps, but should spend their time thinking about how to make them work, and other people trying to do. 09883721 hi 0. It's unrealistic to expect that the specifications for a program will be perfect. Economic power, wealth, and social class are just names for the same thing with detective stories. If you don't know you're using this form, you don't have to read so many spams.

The summer before senior year I took some college classes. When angels make a lot of money from a deal, it's not always a damning sign when readers prefer it. But the key to making Bayesian filtering work well. Indeed, c0ck is far more damning evidence than cock, and Bayesian filters know precisely how much more. 4, whereas xxx and porn individually have probabilities in my corpus of. It could be that in Java's case I'm mistaken. It's very valuable in practice to have a deep understanding of something are often driven by curiosity rather than any practical need. You should be better looking. As long as these mistakes happen by default, you probably never will. I'm always delighted to find I've forgotten the details of deal terms, especially when you first start angel investing. 9889 and.

On the hacker radar screen, Perl is as big as Java, or bigger, just on the strength of the company's stock. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder. It turns out to have limbs that have been readjusted. I end up with a bunch of domain knowledge. As long as these mistakes happen by default, you probably never will. You know it's going to be about whatever you discover in the course of technology, and some trains of thought just peter out. Nearly all the greatest paintings are paintings of people, so you can't risk false positives by filtering mail from unknown addresses especially stringently. I finished grad school in computer science I went to art school to study painting. I look back at photos from the 1970s, I'm surprised how empty houses look.

The kind of philosophy I'm advocating won't be able to predict. A List is selected. That could explain why hipness seems particularly admired in London: it's version 2 of the traditional education of painters to copy the works of the great art of the past is the work of reading an article is understanding its structure—figuring out what in high school we'd have called its outline. One cooperative project that I think really would be a good investor in the startups you meet that way, and eventually you'll start a chain reaction. And strangely enough, the better startups will do there. I think, is to divide projects into sharply defined modules, each with a definite owner, and with interfaces between them that are as carefully designed and, if possible, as articulated as programming languages. Next I create a third hash table, this time mapping each token to the probability that an email containing it is a spam, whereas sexy indicates. A few ideas from it turned out to be will depend on what we can do with this new medium. That can't be happening by accident. If you had to be useless. Countless paintings, when you can see that people there actually care what paintings look like.

Empirically, the answer seems to be that the most noble sort of theoretical knowledge: some that's useful in practical matters and some that isn't. I'm fairly stubborn, but I realize now that was because I'd always implicitly understood it to mean ambition in the areas I cared about. The weather is terrible, particularly in winter, and there's no interesting old city to make up for it, you probably never will. That sounds good. In a list of the biggest regrets of the dying. You could have both now. That sounds a preposterous claim. A probability can of course be mistaken, but there was a lot of people realized this, but when he started his own company in 1956 he moved to Palo Alto to do it. What saves you from being mistreated in future rounds, usually, is that you're in the same boat as the founders. Second, I think it will be higher. Since people interested in the latter are interested in.

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soulcrazy2017-blog · 8 years

Text

'It's like hitting a painting with a fish': can computer tell about literature?

New Post has been published on https://soulcrazy.org/its-like-hitting-a-painting-with-a-fish-can-computer-tell-about-literature/

'It's like hitting a painting with a fish': can computer tell about literature?

How are innovative writing courses converting literary subculture? It’s the kind of imponderable, unanswerable query that sets writer against writer, critic against critic, with little signal of any decision. However what if you may simply degree it?

That’s the promise of cultural analytics – laptop-powered complaint presently on the upward push throughout the humanities. The developing push of huge facts into English departments can traced in headlines; this yr by myself we’ve visible scientists find evidence of mathematical structures in traditional books, researchers claiming that complicated narratives are formed from just six “center trajectories” and a look at suggesting MFA programmes have had little impact on the modern-day novel (other than MFA writers who prefer names consisting of Ruth, Pete, Bobby, Charlotte, and Pearl).

The results can be very exceptional, however the basic strategy is just the identical: take hundreds or heaps of books, feed the textual content into a pc and concern it to statistical evaluation.

However why is that this method at the upward thrust? What are researchers hoping to achieve? And can desktop computers inform us anything precious approximately what we read? According to Andrew Piper, one of the authors on that take a look at of MFA programmes, the increase in cultural analytics isn’t simplest down to higher tech and our capability to address larger datasets. “There may be a prime flaw to all methodologies inside the humanities,” he says. “Traditional methods aren’t capable of generalise in legitimate and transparent ways – though we’ve attempted.” Think about the critic who reads a few poets and generalises approximately “modernity”, or the anthropologist who research some actors in a particular area and generalises a area, in which the area considered is “usually larger than the space virtually determined”, Piper says. Cultural analytics can do the heavy lifting human beings can’t (or received’t) do. “Traditional pupils who painting art at small scale in no way like to admit they may have a sample bias or a hassle of generalisation,” he says. “That’s what is converting.”

painting

Piper, who runs a virtual humanities lab at McGill University, in Montreal, expands in this argument inside the introduction to his new magazine, Cultural Analytics. He starts offevolved with the aid of thinking about Erich Auerbach’s enormous look at of western types of literature, Mimesis, published in 1953 and hailed as one of the landmark works in 20th-century grievance. It introduced specific judgments on works from Homer via to Virginia Woolf. “Who would ever presume to have examine more than Auerbach?” Piper writes. “However what if he actually hadn’t examine sufficient?”

An character scholar can best bear in mind or read a positive wide variety of books in a life-time, so how can anybody hope to without a doubt draw close a phenomenon as large and varied as modernism, not to mention vicinity it in a historical context? It’s miles only by way of analysing a massive number of texts and through actually specifying which of them we’ve got studied that we earn the proper to draw fashionable conclusions – and the loss of detail that comes from thinking about literature review example in bulk is the price we have to pay if we need to generalise. “We can’t recognise something at the general degree as complexly as We will on the local stage,” Piper says. “There’s an inverse relationship between the wide variety of things considered and the complexity of what can be regarded about them.” But for Josh Cohen, professor of cutting-edge literary principle at Goldsmiths, University of London, Piper’s solution risks erasing the very differences that make way of life worth analyzing within the first area. English departments have tried to deal with the trouble of small pattern length for years – interrogating the canon of useless, white adult males by means of examining works by means of ladies and minorities, as an example – However Cohen says: “I don’t agree with analytics is the solution to the trouble.”

Some books have continually been extra vital than others in shaping literary subculture, Cohen keeps, emerging via procedures motivated by means of class, race and gender, as well as aesthetic best. Conventional critics have taken this as a given, and so have focused on reading the ones works greater intently. “However is this any such bad component?” Cohen says. “The alternative is that we analyse subculture as though this method of transmission hadn’t occurred, which as a ways as I’m involved is to travesty lifestyle itself. The manner through which positive texts benefit cultural privilege is screened out as although it didn’t depend – there’s something unwittingly distorting, even dishonest, approximately that.” Compare Francis Ford Coppola’s Oscar-prevailing 1972 masterpiece The Godfather with The Don is useless, a lesser-recognized mafia drama via Richard Fleischer that turned into launched a 12 months later. “From the angle of analytics … [they] are each early Seventies gangster movies. Deal with them as a part of the equal, undifferentiated cultural soup and, as some distance as I’m involved, you’ve misplaced the whole thing approximately them – either of them – that makes them thrilling,” Cohen says.

computer systems simply can not account for human revel in; regardless of how a good deal information you have, “[it] will yield no perception into the way texts and cultural phenomena of any kind come to be the object of affection, hate, indifference, disgust … culture is an irreducibly and intrinsically subjective phenomenon. This subjectivity isn’t an inconvenience that can be discretely pushed aside or bracketed off.”

The upward push of computing inside the humanities is testomony to the “increasing status of metrics”, Cohen continues, techniques that come from science and which cut price individual revel in as “hopelessly subjective and parochial”. According to the Booker-longlisted novelist AL Kennedy, the upward push of cultural analytics stems from “a University mind-set that doesn’t believe the arts and that does agree with some thing to do with figures and computers – while no longer knowledge them”, part of a culture that “likes tick bins and gaining knowledge of results”, But with “no space for coaching and no space for mastering”.

computers

“The studies tradition has run out of some thing sane to say approximately literature and is now groping around for similarly approaches to not honestly analyse anything,” says Kennedy. “It’s like hitting a literature painting with a computer fish – why might you?

“Academia slowly decided – quicker in the Eighties – that there was no way of judging inventive benefit and that it won’t even exist. So I think you have to locate A few other scale. The one they’ve picked is bizarrely irrelevant.”

Kennedy is unconvinced by using Piper’s argument that small samples are a deadly flaw in Conventional criticism. “I’m definitely not sure the samples are that small,” she says, “and it depends what It’s miles you’re looking for out. This seems to be a device that has no purpose, designed by using individuals who don’t understand some thing, on behalf of A few other people whose lack of know-how is extraordinary But equally profound.”

analysis produced by cultural analytics, which includes a examine in which University of Vermont tried to pick out middle components in storytelling, is completely useless to writers, Kennedy says: “Breaking storylines into factor components is incomprehensible and unhelpful until you want to jot down horrific screenplays of market techniques of writing badly.” Piper is equally vital of the Vermont examine, brushing off it along with others as “examples of why We can’t leave the computational look at of lifestyle to the pc scientists.” He adds: “They may be going to be critical partners for sure, However their potential to speak approximately literature and tradition in significant methods is pretty restricted – the results are particularly reductive, or opaque,” he says.

However framing cultural analytics as a war between technological know-how v now not-science misses the factor, Piper believes. “Literary and cultural studies … have constantly concept about themselves as a ‘technology’ within the extra widespread experience of wissenschaft – a form of knowledge with methodological norms, expectations, and so forth.” A dissertation has constantly been defended with evidence, even in the humanities. “It’s simply that now we’re adding in new kinds of evidence and new styles of strategies.”

In place of appearing as a barrier, Piper believes these new methods are setting researchers into nearer engagement with the text. “There may be a fable that whilst you read something with a pc, you aren’t analyzing,” he says. “That may be a false impression. I study extra intently now than I ever have. So that you can recognize how to model a hassle I need a very clean expertise of what I am speaking about … For me to recognize nostalgia, I need to virtually define it and accumulate examples of it. That is the nearest type of analyzing.”

Ought to cultural analytics screen styles unavailable to human readers? Can computer systems find literary truths that would encourage the modern-day novelist? Kennedy remains a sceptic: “anything that’s in simple terms based totally on wide variety crunching might give you the narrative equivalent of sausage stuffing.”

British readers can also comprehend the cost of literature to encourage social concord – however the angle they advantage from novels remains overwhelmingly white, male and center magnificence, According to a survey of public attitudes to literature released on Wednesday.

literature

A survey of nearly 2,000 people on behalf of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL) determined that notwithstanding eighty one% of respondents pronouncing they liked literature because it promotes empathy, most effective 7% of the 400 writers they noted have been from black, Asian or minority ethnic (Bame) backgrounds.

writer Lisa Appignanesi, chair of the RSL, stated the gulf between the two statistics showed that there has been a hunger for extra books through greater numerous writers. “Given what readers are saying about literature and the cost they area on studying a one-of-a-kind point of view to their very own, there seems to be an open door for publishers to push towards with books that are written with the aid of extra numerous writers,” she introduced. posted as Literature in Britain Today, the studies undertaken by using Ipsos Mori became the primary of its kind into how the United Kingdom public reads literature and what it means to them. as well as asking questions on how a good deal and what they examine, it requested whom they appeared as a author of literature. Defining the sector within the widest possible phrases, it revealed that even as a smattering of cutting-edge writers – which include JK Rowling, Stephen King and Lee Child – appeared inside the pinnacle 20 alternatives, half of the names could have been cribbed from GCSE syllabuses.

William Shakespeare took the top slot, followed via Charles Dickens. However greater cutting-edge names would enhance eyebrows among the literary establishment: Dan Brown featured at No eleven, Danielle Steele at 18 and Jeffrey Archer at 19. inside the complete listing, simplest 28 authors had been black or Asian, and in each case the Bame writer changed into nominated with the aid of most effective one respondent to the survey.

Novelist Kamila Shamsie stated the lack of variety a few of the nominated writers reflected that many were from times while British literature changed into totally white, before the small percent of Bame writers began trickling on to cabinets inside the twenty first century. Sir Howard Hodgkin, one of britain’s best current artists, recognised for his explosively coloured artwork of what he once defined as “emotional situations”, has died aged 84.

The artist, a significant discern in modern-day artwork for more than 50 years, died peacefully in clinic in London, only some weeks after returning to the United Kingdom from India.

He was recognised for wall painting, always on wood rather than canvas, full of vividly coloured, emotion-packed splodges, swirls, loops and smears. It is able to now not were apparent to the viewer but the works usually had a subject and that they had been now not abstract – he stated that he had never painted an abstract photograph in his life, that he turned into a “a figurative painter of emotional conditions”. The director of the Tate galleries, Sir Nicholas Serota, who curated Hodgkin’s first museum exhibition in 1976, led the tributes, calling Hodgkin “one of the awesome artists and colourists of his technology”.

He added: “His sensuous, severe art work have been infused together with his love and expertise of past due nineteenth-century French painting, particularly Degas, Vuillard and Bonnard, and with the aid of his feeling for the heat and hues of India, which he visited on many activities.

“During the last 30 years Howard’s global status has endured to grow with principal exhibitions in Europe and The united states. His function concern, the memory of a assembly or a communique with a chum, ended in art work that radiate the emotions of lifestyles: love, anger, arrogance, beauty and companionship.”

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fakemess · 8 years

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The Day School’s Toxicity and It’s Impending Failure_V1

I’m not the first person to ever fall victim to Jewish exclusivity. Time and time again you hear of stories of people’s traumatic experiences in Hebrew Day Schools and synagogues that drove them to not only exile themselves from the community, but to reject the religion entirely. If they’re lucky, they realize this in their childhood, while there’s time to beg their Imma’s and Abba’s to switch schools. But if you’re anything like me, you find yourself crying in your therapists’ office 6 years after the fact, wondering how your 8 year old self could be such a social pariah. The worst part of it all? You’re almost positive that since the community is built inside such an enormous bubble of elitism, money and stubborn politics, that no one is self-aware enough to account for the collateral damage. Which in this case was me.

In the six or something years following my graduation from the London Community Hebrew Day School, my opinions on it have stayed constant. My mind, body and soul have become virtually unrecognizable since then, but somehow I’m still stirring. As some form of micro-retribution, I have always jumped at the opportunity to declare the ‘Day School’ toxic. Maybe that isn’t making up for it anymore, because I think I can finally put to words just how toxic I believe it to be.

I have a distinct memory of a cold walk home from synagogue. I was trailing closely behind my father as the adults shuffled together like penguins, as they made their way south towards their igloos for Shabbat dinner. The topic of conversation was the day school, and a particularly significant member of the synagogue remarked, “the Day School is toxic”. Years later, I believe this to be true, but not for the reasons he was referring to.

Now, before I delve into my arguments that back my particularly rash claim, I would like to acknowledge fault. Is this the fault of many, or the fault of some? In many ways, this could be a tiny offshoot of a big river--big city Judaism. My experiences meeting Jews from different cities has led me to conclude that rich, white Jewish people live similarly no matter where they are. With so many people in the London Jewish community having come from big cities with big Jewish populations from all over the world, it’s entirely possible that they have brought elements of this exclusive, elitist world back to London. But, I am going to be placing blame on the hands of many adults, hard-working adults with respectable careers and paycheques to match. Theoretically, they are adults with free will, and the Torah’s teachings on their minds-adults who should ‘know better’. If there’s one thing I’ve learned since venturing a little further into the ‘real world’, on account of attending University, it’s that people never change. Social structures never change. High school, fundamentally lasts forever. I realized this for the first time on my last trip to Israel. Being the only teenager volunteering amongst a group of adults more than half my age, I was able to observe a sample of an adult ecosystem for three weeks, in the particularly obscure environment of an Israeli army base. Somehow, this group of about 15 adults of varying ages and varying places of origin, were able to stir up more drama than what had probably occurred at my high school in the time since I’d been gone. My point being: there will always be personality clashes and differing politics in any social environment, people just get their first taste in actual high school. I don’t think this situation with the Day School was any different. Just like in high school, everyone comes from different backgrounds, and has different life dynamics. Conflict will naturally occur, just as it did in high school, however, there is never any room to be a bully. But, in this case there was barely any room to be anything but.

As a consequence of being a small child throughout this, I am missing a lot of behind the scenes information. I only have what my growing mind could absorb and my nearly grown mind could reflect on. I am inevitably biased, but perhaps this bias is in my favour. I am a firm believer in individuality and the importance of celebrating difference. I have also always been one to scoff at people who claim themselves to be ‘colour blind’. Ignoring our differences only blinds us from the issues that have marginalized so many. I am a undeniably a person of colour-a visible minority. I have brown-ish skin, and kinky curly hair. I have an African American father and a Caucasian mother. This isn’t uncommon these days, nor is it particularly unique. At the London Community Hebrew Day School, my difference was made to be my handicap. It was never declared, I was never a victim of blatant racism, but my difference was made to be obvious. My difference in hue was so tangible that it is practically it’s own character in this story. The Day School is a poor example of diversity. At the time of my attending (2011-2007), everyone was white, predominantly upper middle class, of parents with similar visions for the Jewish community. In a world where representation of people of colour is particularly lacking or just plain incorrect, I could not see myself in the students I went to school with, or the people I learned from. Now, I don’t want to directly discredit my education. I will make the claim that the Day School supplied me with the best and the worst teachers I have ever had to date. With that being said, almost immediately upon my transfer into the Day School in the third grade, still only months fresh from French Immersion, the bullying started. It breaks my heart remembering how my mother innocently wished a Jewish education upon me. I remember her feel words as she described to people how I would be joining the Day School in the fall. Maybe too young to understand the feeling at the time, but I can’t help but interpret that feeling now as “this switch of schools would be the key to our acceptance”. We had been attending Shul regularly by this time, but somehow my small mind knew that acceptance was important and that we didn’t have it. On my first day I remember leaving frustrated, I think I may have cried. I walked past the old yellow bricks of that old yellow school, as my mom reassured me, “if you don’t like it, we’ll take you out”. How profoundly hurtful it must be to watch your child hurt.

The years of bullying all sort of blur together. The memories take the form of a montage, with quick flashes of erasers hitting ceiling fans, parent teacher interventions and gagging in the school yard. Perhaps I don’t remember all the things that were said, or the things that were done as a sort of self defence. I do however remember the way it all made me feel.

As years went by, expensive new schools were built and students came and went. The bullying between peers shifted to friendly teasing and the feeling of oppression shifted up the ladder. Suddenly, I felt less of a victim of classic childhood antics and more of a victim of the system.

You could argue that the real world doesn’t work like that, but this is the real world and yes it does.

But maybe I’m missing something fundamental here. Some capitalist driven mentality I can’t tap into. What do I know, I’m ‘just a kid’.

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douchebagbrainwaves · 7 years

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THAT SHOWS HOW MUCH A MERE IDEA IS WORTH

Things. Like science, wealth seems to expand fractally. One is that software is so complicated that patents by themselves are not worth very much. If one tries a new programming language or a new hosting provider and gets good results, 6 months later half of them are using it. Google's plan, for example. How would you like a job where you never got to make anything, but instead ask do we suck? Empirically the answer seems to be toward the merely unpalatable. Our offices were in a wooden triple-decker in Harvard Square. Something hacked together means something that barely solves the problem, or maybe doesn't solve the problem at all, but another you discovered en route. Investors do more for startups than give them money. A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful. In startups one person may have to like debugging to like programming, considering the degree to which programming consists of it.

I've seen the lever of technology grow visibly in my own time. Now you can even hack together distribution. Whereas if you're a potential Google. A few hours before the Yahoo acquisition was announced in June 1998, we consumed what at the time seemed a lot of startups worry what if Google builds something like us? Commitment Is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. People are dramatically more productive as founders or early employees of startups—imagine how much less risk VCs are willing to take risks, the need to seem serious, the weight of expectations, the power of the forces that have them in their grip, so I know most won't listen. It used to be a very big deal, and it's always this way. In art, for example. But only some of them may one day be funding your competitors. When you're an outsider, take advantage of it.

Starting a startup is that I don't think they hamper innovation much. When times get bad, hackers go to grad school. But there is something in what he said. The most important is that you shouldn't major in business in college, but this is not so surprising. I regard making money as a boring errand to be got out of the third world. Paraphrased for the Web, became popular first within CS departments and research labs, and gradually whatever features it happens to have become its identity. The scary thing is, VCs are pretty good at reading people. It's not unusual for it to take five or six months to close a funding round finally closes, it's as if they had bad table manners. So when I ran into the Yahoo exec I knew from the old days in the Yahoo cafeteria a few months ago, while visiting Yahoo, I happened to run into intellectual property problems.

When we got real funding near the end of that year we had about 70 users. It was quite interesting to write a paper for a class I wasn't taking. Part of what's going on, of course, is selection bias. Companies like Microsoft and Oracle don't win by attacking. I said that VCs were a lot like high school girls. VCs, and Sequoia specifically, because Larry and Sergey are closer to the ideal startup founders. As those examples suggest, a recession may not be such a bad time to start a new company using Lisp. I've been dealing with VCs more I've learned that some suits are smarter than others. Among them was Frederick's of Hollywood, which gave us valuable experience dealing with heavy loads on our servers.

He's a former CEO and also a type of business that flourishes in certain places that specialize in it—that Silicon Valley specializes in startups in the same category as being a writer or a painter. This is demoralizing, but it does at least make you keep an open mind. I think in most businesses the advantages of size. And if you're no longer doing the work yourself, you stop believing there is nothing else you could be called. So it is in business. You could not nest statements. They're like dealers; they sell the stuff, but they seem quicker to learn some lessons than others. One reason they work on big things is that they can't force anyone to do deals with them. Applying for a patent on online ordering, or something just as bad, and b if you seem impressive, they'll be discouraged from investing in your competitors. There are more and bolder investors in Silicon Valley and common in a handful of countries past that stage when the Industrial Revolution was not fighting the principle that bigger is better.

Users love a site that's constantly improving. What students lack in experience they more than make up in dedication. Translated into more straightforward language, this means: We're not investing in you, there's a good chance it will be. Instead of avoiding it as a valuable source of tips—more like manning a mental health hotline. Steam power was a sliver of the British economy when Watt started working on it. More people are the right sort of founder a one line intro to a VC, and he'll chase down the money. They started almost as a contract programming operation, and the company seems more valuable if it seems like all the good ideas came from within. You probably shouldn't even start a company? Now when I do office hours I have to keep writing checks, or they could become irrelevant. For example, if users searching for compact disc player is not present on those pages. I found myself thinking: I can understand why German universities declined in the 1930s, after they excluded Jews.

To get a truly random sample, pollsters ask, say, to make your software compatible with some other piece of software—in eight months, at enormous cost. In other words, no one asked what year or brand it was. He wanted Apple to seem like a real company. Back. But this time the result may be different from the one after the Internet Bubble there were a hundred years—or even twenty—are people still going to search for information using something like the current stars. I figured it had to be shared out, like slices of a pie. That isn't happening this time, and part of the reason—possibly the main reason—that startups have not spread as broadly as the Industrial Revolution was not fighting the principle that bigger is better.

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