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As NASA slowly inches towards the day when it can finally send human travelers to Mars, scientists are doing their best to make sure those first adventurers are ready for the journey. One of the greatest challenges is to ensure that astronauts who spend the better part of their year on their way to the Red Planet are in good shape when they arrive, and a new study suggests that the red wine may hold the key
, which was published in Frontiers in Physiology focuses on resveratrol, a compound that is found in the skin of some berries, including grapes.
As the study of how resveratrol affects the muscle mass during long periods of reduced muscle use,
As space travelers leave Earth and head for Mars they will spend up to nine months in a very low-gravity environment. When the reach of Mars, which has only 40 percent of the gravitational pull of Earth, their muscles will not be given the same kind of strain as they would experience on Earth, potentially leaving them weak and impacting their endurance
For the test, the team used two dozen male rats split into four groups. 1
Rats who were subjected to reduced loading without supplementation showed significant muscle loss and reduced grip strength, as anticipated. However, the "Mars" rats that received the resveratrol supplement showed dramatic improved grip strength as well as less muscle mass loss, while not affecting the overall body weight. | https://hotinfonow.com/red-wine-may-hold-a-secret-that-will-keep-mars-travelers-fit-bgr/ |
As President Obama continues his tour through Asia this week, including Monday’s remarks in India, foreign policy-watchers have suggested a number of ways to improve and revitalize the India-U.S. relationship – including our very own CNAS colleagues. Importantly, President Obama himself emphasized the interplay between technology, new energy, and greater security during his address to the Indian Parliament. The final frontier – outer space – is one arena where some experts see potential collaboration between the United States and India.
A November report issued by the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA) in India, The Sky’s No Limit laid out the potential for U.S.-Indian efforts on space based solar power (SBSP). If such technology can be developed, SBSP could be a remarkable future source of clean energy. The concept centers on placing satellites in geosynchronous orbit, capturing solar rays before their energy is diluted by the Earth’s atmosphere, turning this captured energy into microwave energy, and literally beaming it down to Earth-based receivers that could transform it into electricity.
The IDSA report outlines, on page 67, four reasons why promoting India-U.S. cooperation on space based solar power makes sense at this juncture:
Firstly, India is the only major state where a Head of State has not only suggested space solar power as a goal for its space agency, but also expressed an interest in international cooperation. Second, as already noted above, there is considerable momentum in the Indo-US strategic partnership, with key components–space, energy, climate change, high tech, aviation, and dual use strategic technologies and defence cooperation–already in place with vibrant dialogue. Third, India’s need for power and development is acute, likely considerably more acute than other potential partners which makes it potentially a more motivated partner, and a linked effort also promises a tremendous ultimate market potential. Fourthly, the success of space solar power will depend partly on low-cost manufacture. In the time frame when space solar power will come of age, perhaps 15 years in the future, even as other manufacturing and labour markets age and face decline, India is projected to be in the midst of its demographic dividend, with the largest working age population of any country on earth.
Despite real concerns over cost and feasibility, as well as a noted lack of legal frameworks surrounding potential international cooperation, a report advising the U.S. Department of Defense in 2007 regarded India as a potential partner for future development of SBSP alongside Japan and the European Space Agency.
Beyond this, encouraging India to play a leading role in the development of space technology can arguably help better define and enshrine norms surrounding the use of outer space. Potentially, such a leadership role could include encouraging stewardship of free access in outer space – minimizing orbital debris that could threaten the placement of future satellites and discouraging behaviors in space that contribute to orbital debris creation.
For India’s part, its former president and space pioneer A.P.J. Kalam endorsed an initiative between the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) and the Washington-based National Space Society – a nonprofit organization dedicated to peaceful uses of outer space led by notable members such as former astronaut Buzz Aldrin – to pursue advanced research on SBSP, and particularly to accomplish “the work necessary to field a system of large satellites that would collect solar energy and beam it safely to the surface.” The Kalam-National Space Society Energy Initiative also includes John Mankins, a former chief technologist at NASA. Optimistic estimates from Manknis indicate a “10-10-10 rule” for an initial prototype that could be the goal for a bilateral initiative telling Aviation Weekly:
Such a system would deliver 10 megawatts of power, cost less than $10 billion to build and launch, and be ready in less than 10 years. The system would consist of a large satellite to collect the Sun’s energy and convert it into microwaves, which would be beamed to an antenna on Earth that would collect the microwaves for conversion to electricity and transmission through the existing power grid.
While the results of any cooperation are at least decades off, these efforts show that increased concerns over energy – a source of potential conflict – also provide opportunities for revitalized cooperation. Finding ways to combine resources and niche technological advantages internationally can help distribute the costs, risks, and potential benefits of developing and proving the potential of emerging technologies.
Jessica Glover is a Joseph S. Nye, Jr. Research Intern at the Center for a New American Security. She holds an M.A. in Middle East Studies from the George Washington University Elliot School of International Affairs. | https://www.cnas.org/publications/blog/for-u-s-india-cooperation-space-is-the-next-frontier |
If only space travel were as easy as depicted in Star Wars or Star Trek! Traveling a few thousand times the speed of light onboard the Enterprise or a hundred times faster by jumping to lightspeed enables these fictional ships to traverse stellar distances in fractions of a day. Unfortunately, the real world poses much greater constraints. Even cruising at one-tenth the speed of light (well beyond our current or imaginary technology), the trip to star system Alpha Centauri, our nearest neighbor, would take nearly 45 years. Some of the latest research reveals the damage even a few months in space causes to the human body. By contrast, Earth’s environment seems ideally suited for humans.
Perhaps the most well-known peril of long periods of time in space relates to bone density loss and kidney stones. NASA implements a strenuous exercise regimen, supplemented by medication, to combat these risks. Not surprisingly, muscle degeneration also occurs in the weightless environment of space. According to a recent study of zero gravity on the muscles supporting the back, staying aboard the International Space Station for 6 months resulted in a 5–10% decrease in muscle mass. Back on Earth, the astronauts’ muscle mass returned to normal values within a year or so. However, muscle density also decreased by similar amounts while in space. For some muscles, the effects of this density decrease were measurable 2–4 years later.1
Perhaps exercise and nutrient intake can counteract the effects of long-term space travel, but research also reveals human immune system problems. Another team of scientists investigated the levels of “natural killer cells” (NK cells) for astronauts spending six months or more in space. These NK cells are white blood cells that kill cancerous cells and prevent viral cells within the body from reactivating. The team drew blood samples before launch, during flight, and after return for the astronauts, as well as a control sample of people who remained on Earth. The study showed that the level of NK cells on the long spaceflights decreased by 50%.2 If such an effect grows with flight duration, the consequences would result in most (if not all) space travelers developing cancer or succumbing to previous viral infections that immune systems on Earth naturally keep in check. Such problems become more severe considering that long-duration spaceflights induce a condition called HALS—hydrocephalus associated with long-duration spaceflight. The buildup of fluid in the brain causes increased brain pressure in the part of the brain responsible for body movement and higher executive function.
These problems result from spaceflights near Earth. Longer trips, like going to Mars, bring another, more severe problem. Flights to Mars require more than six months outside the protective confines of Earth’s magnetic field. Consequently, space travelers are exposed to cosmic radiation that the magnetic field deflects from Earth’s inhabitants. Mice provide a good proxy for the human physiology, so a team of researchers exposed mice to radiation doses similar to those encountered on a trip to Mars. The study showed that cosmic radiation dosage severely damaged the intestinal lining of the mice. Specifically, the gastrointestinal (GI) tract has a 3- to 5-day self-renewing mechanism that keeps the top layers of the tract healthy. The cosmic rays disrupted this renewing mechanism, which dramatically affects nutrient absorption and leads to cancerous growth.3 Additionally, signs of the damage remain at least one year after the radiation exposure ends.
Taken together, these studies demonstrate two points. First, space travel may capture the human imagination, but the physiological toll of traveling anywhere beyond the Moon may destroy any hope to journey beyond our home planet. Second, the environment of space exposes humanity to seriously detrimental effects. However, our well-designed Earth provides an incredible environment for humanity (and an abundant array of diverse life) to not only survive but to truly thrive.
BIO
Since my earliest memories, science and the Christian faith have featured prominently in my life - but I struggled when my scientific studies seemed to collide with my early biblical training. My f…
Read more about Jeff Zweerink.
How would you respond to video footage of Richard Dawkins professing faith in Christ? Or one about Hugh Ross advocating for young-Earth creationism? Either situation would be shocking and the confusion would grow when deeper investigation reveals it was a misquote or deceptive editing. Welcome to the world of deepfakes. What can we do to minimize harm?
Continue Reading »
One of the most common inquiries posed to Reasons to Believe scholars can be expressed by this pair of questions:
When did humanity originate?
Can you be precise?
According to Pew Research, if current trends continue then by 2050 there will be nine billion people living on the planet. Approximately three billion will be Christians, three billion will be Muslims, and three billion others will represent various beliefs (both religious and secular).1
More Education Opportunities »
Get the latest delivered directly to you by subscribing to the RTB Weekly Digest. | https://reasons.org/explore/blogs/impact-events/read/impact-events/2019/02/15/the-perils-of-space-travel |
Our sun has gone into lockdown, which could cause freezing weather, earthquakes and famine, scientists say.
The sun is currently in a period of “solar minimum,” meaning activity on its surface has fallen dramatically.
Experts believe we are about to enter the deepest period of sunshine “recession” ever recorded as sunspots have virtually disappeared.
Astronomer Dr. Tony Phillips said: “Solar Minimum is underway and it’s a deep one.”
“Sunspot counts suggest it is one of the deepest of the past century. The sun’s magnetic field has become weak, allowing extra cosmic rays into the solar system.”
“Excess cosmic rays pose a health hazard to astronauts and polar air travelers, affect the electro-chemistry of Earth’s upper atmosphere and may help trigger lightning.”
NASA scientists fear it could be a repeat of the Dalton Minimum, which happened between 1790 and 1830 — leading to periods of brutal cold, crop loss, famine and powerful volcanic eruptions.
Temperatures plummeted by up to 2 degrees Celsius (35.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over 20 years, devastating the world’s food production. Read More
Solar Minimum is Coming
From NASA SCIENCE
High up in the clear blue noontime sky, the sun appears to be much the same day-in, day-out, year after year.
But astronomers have long known that this is not true. The sun does change. Properly-filtered telescopes reveal a fiery disk often speckled with dark sunspots. Sunspots are strongly magnetized, and they crackle with solar flares—magnetic explosions that illuminate Earth with flashes of X-rays and extreme ultraviolet radiation. The sun is a seething mass of activity.
Until it’s not. Every 11 years or so, sunspots fade away, bringing a period of relative calm.
“This is called solar minimum,” says Dean Pesnell of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD. “And it’s a regular part of the sunspot cycle.”
The sun is heading toward solar minimum now. Sunspot counts were relatively high in 2014, and now they are sliding toward a low point expected in 2019-2020.
While intense activity such as sunspots and solar flares subside during solar minimum, that doesn’t mean the sun becomes dull. Solar activity simply changes form.
For instance, says Pesnell, “during solar minimum we can see the development of long-lived coronal holes.”
Coronal holes are vast regions in the sun’s atmosphere where the sun’s magnetic field opens up and allows streams of solar particles to escape the sun as the fast solar wind.
Pesnell says “We see these holes throughout the solar cycle, but during solar minimum, they can last for a long time - six months or more.” Streams of solar wind flowing from coronal holes can cause space weather effects near Earth when they hit Earth’s magnetic field. These effects can include temporary disturbances of the Earth’s magnetosphere, called geomagnetic storms, auroras, and disruptions to communications and navigation systems.
During solar minimum, the effects of Earth’s upper atmosphere on satellites in low Earth orbit changes too.
Normally Earth’s upper atmosphere is heated and puffed up by ultraviolet radiation from the sun. Satellites in low Earth orbit experience friction as they skim through the outskirts of our atmosphere. This friction creates drag, causing satellites to lose speed over time and eventually fall back to Earth. Drag is a good thing, for space junk; natural and man-made particles floating in orbit around Earth. Drag helps keep low Earth orbit clear of debris.
But during solar minimum, this natural heating mechanism subsides. Earth’s upper atmosphere cools and, to some degree, can collapse. Without a normal amount of drag, space junk tends to hang around.
There are unique space weather effects that get stronger during solar minimum. For example, the number of galactic cosmic rays that reach Earth’s upper atmosphere increases during solar minimum. Galactic cosmic rays are high energy particles accelerated toward the solar system by distant supernova explosions and other violent events in the galaxy.
Pesnell says that “During solar minimum, the sun’s magnetic field weakens and provides less shielding from these cosmic rays. This can pose an increased threat to astronauts traveling through space.”
Solar minimum brings about many changes to our sun, but less solar activity doesn’t make the sun and our space environment any less interesting.
Ethnobotanist Terence McKenna took Timothy Learys advice back in the 60s to 'turn on, tune in and drop out' and he believes that eons ago some of our ape-like ancestors did just the same thing.
McKenna authored 'Food of the Gods ', an exploration of humanities harmonious history with plants, and their chemical properties. One of his theories was that Homo erectus ingested the same magic mushrooms while on their evolutionary journey, that enabled them to evolve into Modern Homo-Sapiens.
Gurkha flying in his swift and powerful Vimana hurled against the three cities of the Vrishis and Andhakas a single projectile Charged with all the power of the Universe. ...An incandescent column of smoke and flame As bright as the thousand suns Rose in all its splendor..a perpendicular explosion with its billowing smoke clouds... ...the cloud of smoke rising after its first explosion formed into expanding round circles... like the opening of giant parasols... In the early 1900s, archaeologists uncovered the ruins of a this large ancient town of which the ancient Vedas speak. Nuclear ruins from pre-history. | https://enigmose.com/enigmose_political/solar-minimum.html |
“I never thought I’d ever do a project in space,” said Paul H. Chung, assistant professor of urology at Sidney Kimmel Medical College, who is involved in one of the space studies. “Most people don’t even know the logistics of how someone would do a project in space.” The eight-day mission is the first of its kind to be approved by NASA. Organized by Axiom Space, on Jan. 22, 2022, a SpaceX rocket will ferry four paying passengers to the International Space Station along with 44 scientific experiments commissioned by the Ramon Foundation and the Israel Space Agency. So far one passenger, former Israeli fighter pilot Eytan Stibbe, has volunteered to participate in the studies.
Dicker, professor and chair of radiation oncology at Jefferson, said the immune system in particular takes a beating in both astronauts and people undergoing cancer treatment. For cancer patients, Dicker said this could shed light on how the immune system responds to the stressors of treatment, which mirror an astronaut’s experience in space: physical stress, emotional stress, gastrointestinal problems, disturbed sleep.
He’s hoping to see patterns in groups of immune proteins that rise or fall while the astronauts are in space, which could point to ways to improve immune function for astronauts and Earth-dwellers alike. Chung is counting on space to help him study the microbiome, the trillions of microscopic organisms living inside the human body. There’s a myth that urine is sterile, but as a urologist, Chung knows better; it’s actually full of microbes like bacteria and fungi. The microbiome is better studied in the digestive system, where the more friendly varieties of bacteria can help digestion while others can cause discomfort. But the urinary microbiome is murkier, and scientists still don’t know how it changes, Chung said.
Astronauts who have previously returned from space missions have become easy targets for viruses that were lying dormant in their bodies for years, like the herpes virus that causes shingles. To figure out how space might weaken the immune system, Dicker’s team will collect blood from the participating space travelers before and after their journey and measure more than 7,000 proteins. Previous studies have measured changes to DNA, but measuring proteins — which are made based on DNA and carry out tasks in the body — gets closer to what matters, Dicker said. “Astronauts aren’t as immunosuppressed as cancer patients, but thematically we saw a linkage,” Dicker said. “No one has really studied the immune system in a comprehensive way with astronauts.”
Urine is also no laughing matter in space: Being unable to urinate warrants a NASA rescue mission, and astronauts are at high risk of developing kidney stones or urinary tract infections. “Putting someone in space and studying the microbiome is kind of the most extreme thing that you could potentially do in regards to diet and gravity,” Chung said. “If we can see changes in the microbiome in space, then that will help us to better understand how changes in the microbiome may occur on Earth.”
In a third study, Jefferson brain scientists will continue their ongoing investigation into how the stress of space travel affects sleep and health. Astronauts will use a mess-free apparatus — similar to toilets on board the shuttle — to collect and freeze urine. Back on Earth, scientists will sequence the genetic material in the urine to figure out what types of microbes it contains. It’s trickier to collect human samples in outer space than in Philadelphia. Dicker decided not to collect blood samples while the astronauts were in space because of the risk of making them anemic and the weight — and cost — the equipment would add to the delicately balanced space shuttle.
News Highlights Space
- Headline: Jefferson’s research looks to outer space to learn about human health on Earth
- Check all news and articles from the Space news information updates. | https://www.bollyinside.com/news/jeffersons-research-looks-to-outer-space-to-learn-about-human-health-on-earth |
ST. JOHN'S, NEWFOUNDLAND—Older patients who have coronary angiography and then experience acute kidney injury (AKI) are significantly less likely to receive cardiovascular medications than their counterparts who do not develop AKI, a new study shows.
An analysis of Alberta residents over age 65 who received coronary angiography for an acute coronary syndrome between November 1, 2002 and March 31, 2008 demonstrated that those who developed AKI during their hospitalization were 23% less likely than those without AKI to receive an ACE inhibitor or angiotensin receptor blocker (ARB). They were also 22% less likely to receive anti-platelet medication, 19% less likely to receive a statin, and 15% less likely to be prescribed a beta-blocker.
The results are independent of baseline renal function and whether the patients had received the medications prior to hospitalization, according to findings presented at the Canadian Society of Nephrology's 2012 annual meeting.
“A possible explanation for this could be concern that use of the cardiovascular medications could affect renal function and worsen outcomes. The patients were substituted to other classes of medications—but were not switched back prior to discharge,” investigator Kelvin Leung, MD, a nephrology fellow at the University of Calgary, told Renal & Urology News.
Dr. Leung and other members of the Alberta Provincial Project for Outcome Assessment in Coronary Heart Disease and the Alberta Kidney Disease Network excluded from their database analysis individuals who were on dialysis or who had received a kidney transplant. They included 5,991 patients who did not develop AKI and another 898 who did.
The team also determined that AKI patients had a significantly lower cumulative incidence of the use of statins, beta-blockers, ACE inhibitors/ARBs, and anti-platelet agents.
An analysis of cardiovascular-medication-naïve patients who developed AKI showed that they also were significantly less likely than their medication-naïve non-AKI counterparts to receive the potentially life-saving agents.
Additionally, the investigators found that the lower rates of heart medication use among AKI patients generally was not related to the presence of diabetes, heart failure, baseline estimated glomerular filtration rate, or overall medication use. The only exception was a significantly decreased use of ACE inhibitors among patients with preexisting heart failure who developed AKI.
Dr. Leung said he and his co-investigators are “unsure if this translates into an effect on mortality,” and that this should be elucidated in future research. | https://www.renalandurologynews.com/acute-kidney-injury/post-angiography-aki-may-deter-heart-drug-use/article/238247/ |
Chandrayaan 2: NASA attempts to set up contact with Vikram lander with its profound space arrange (DSN). Not just Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA) is...
Water found for the first time on a potentially habitable exoplanet
K2-18b, which is multiple times the mass of Earth
Gaganyaan 2022: What the mission is about l 10 points
The Gaganyaan program, an indigenous mission that would take Indian space travelers to space, was declared by the head administrator during his Independence Day discourse this year. HIGHLIGHTS The shuttle...
Teens use apps to keep secrets?
Secret apps are like ordinary functions such as a calculator but when password is entered, teens can access hidden files Teens use apps to keep secrets? discover how and why... | https://www.ways2rock.com/category/news/page/3/ |
If humans ever journey to Mars, they will face an array of challenges: assault by cosmic rays, the erosion of bone mass and more subtle problems that could disrupt a mission’s success. Now experiments from an audacious, 17-month-long simulation of a trip to Mars and back show that the ability to concentrate and work together may decay unless preventive steps are taken to maintain sleep quality.
Six men agreed to hole up in a pressurized, spaceship-like environment in Moscow from June 2010 to November 2011 to help scientists lay the groundwork for an interplanetary mission. During that time, the pseudo-astronauts — three selected by the Russian Federation, two from the European Space Agency and one from the China National Space Administration — communicated with faux mission controllers (including delays to reflect the time it would take for radio transmissions to travel millions of miles) and performed mission-like activities. They even exited onto rocky, Mars-like terrain clad in heavy spacesuits to perform drills before simulating a return to Earth.
Scores of experiments were conducted during the mission. For the sleep study, a team led by scientists at the University of Pennsylvania and Baylor College of Medicine in Houston measured when crew members were active or at rest using devices called actigraphs. Worn on the wrist, the gadgets contained accelerometers that gauged crew members’ movement intensity at one-minute intervals. The devices also recorded the strength of light the wearer was exposed to at any given time.
The scientists also conducted attention assessments in which participants pressed the space bar of a computer keyboard every time a red dot appeared on the screen. Alertness was scored based on the response time and the number of times the space bar was pressed when no dot was present.
The data were loaded onto memory cards that were periodically ejected from the fake spacecraft along with the trash.
Three to four weeks after the spacecraft hatch was closed, the astronauts as a group became less and less active, the scientists reported Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “The crew members increased their sleep time and even while awake, decreased their activity levels,” said Dr. Mathias Basner, a sleep researcher at Penn who worked on the study.
Sleep quality
However, sleep quality varied strikingly among the six men, the scientists found. One man, isolated from the normal cues of light and dark experienced on Earth, abandoned the 24-hour day and adopted a 25-hour version, slowly moving in and out of sync with the sleep-wake cycles of his crewmates.
Other crew members retained their 24-hour cycles, but one started sleeping at odd times of the day as well as at night. Another man slept less and less as the mission continued, unlike his peers. In total, four of the six crew members experienced some kind of sleep problem.
Though the mission was an overall success — nobody dropped out of the simulation and all survived to its end without incident — the variety of sleep disturbances among this small group was striking, said Josephine Arendt, a chronobiologist at the University of Surrey in England who studies circadian rhythm disturbances among people living through dark Antarctic winters. (Such over-winterers have long been studied as the best Earth-based analog to space travelers.)
Some of the sleep problems observed on the fake Mars mission could likely be traced to the absence of light at the right time of day or with the right intensity or spectrum, Arendt said. Most of the time, the crew members were in low or moderate light, the authors found, and the light was depleted in the blue spectrum that scientists know is important for keeping the human body clock on a 24-hour day.
Scientists know that some people are more vulnerable to sleep loss when they’re jet-lagged or working on night shifts, said study co-author David Dinges, director of the Division of Sleep and Chronobiology at Penn. The next step is to figure out whether training or other accommodations can allow such sleep problems to be overcome during a long mission, he said.
(EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE)
One intervention that may work is well-timed pulses of light that are enriched in blue wavelengths, said Dr Charles Czeisler, a sleep specialist at Harvard Medical School who has conducted studies on a shorter simulation of Mars missions at the Russian facility.
Such “entrainment” by light would be even more important on a real Mars mission, he said, because the Martian day is slightly longer than an Earth day and without countermeasures the biological clocks of space travelers are even more likely to drift.
(EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE)
The study authors also conducted surveys of the six crew members’ state of mind. The results of those tests aren’t yet available, but if they’re anything like those of Antarctica, mood disturbances will be present, said Lawrence A. Palinkas, a medical anthropologist at the University of Southern California. | http://thedailyworld.com/sections/newswire/nation-world/simulated-mars-mission-sleep-quality-becomes-crucial.html |
The figurative style of Oscar Piovosi continues to be his favorite form of expression so far. He paints, with a predominance of blue, interesting human figures inserted in very current contexts, outlining the shapes with a dark “neorealist” line that makes them emerge from the background. The composition and layout evoke the work of photojournalists, the figures are interpreted with respect for chiaroscuro, volume and painting techniques and with a realism that describes the common moments of today’s existence, re-proposing the contents of the American, representative one in a contemporary key of incommunicability (see “Phone and… / Informal”) where virtual communication isolates, but virtually aggregates. With the “fleeting” brushstroke, very expressive, a knowledge of anatomy and good graphic and a chromatic and overall stylistic approach, he gives a congenial sense of Pop plasticity to the finished product. In Piovosi’s paintings, drawing and color are not distinct, in fact while he paints, he draws. The more harmonious the color becomes, the more precise the drawing becomes. Color has the power to directly influence his style, the artist captures the harmony between multiple relationships and transports them into his own range, developing them according to a new and original logic.
The informal. Over a period of about two to three years, Piovosi also produced informal works, with excellent results. In this pictorial series he eliminates the old contents that may be in common with painters, journalists, writers, storytellers… to try his hand at the transmission of pure, purely pictorial emotions in which it is the form that makes the difference. Here Oscar does not reproduce what is visible, but makes his unconscious visible and demonstrates that the artist’s supreme touch is to understand when the finished work is finished. | https://www.oscarpiovosi.it/en/marco-cagnolati-en/ |
For those who missed the latest reception, we have a recap and some photos to share with you.
First of all, we have a few photos of the exhibit. Fair warning: these were taken before a few final adjustments and tags:
AWARDS:
From Suzanne Barnes, Exhibits Chair:
“Greg Pai’s comments on AHA Prize winners:
First Place:
Joe Palmieri: Polo: Very strong composition, dynamic openness and good articulation of shapes. Good values and edges showing spatial dimensionality and good treatment of values and chroma to show foreground and background elements.
Second Place:
David Kingston: Abstract: Strong composition of shapes, lines and values creating a dynamic sense of dimensional movement. Use of color temperature and line evoke a strong sense of spatial depth and movement. Seemingly random strokes and shapes evoke a coherent sense of remnants of the unconscious rising to the surface. Reminiscent of Kandinsky, Chagall and Miro. Very powerful, creative, unique and personal imagery.
Third Place:
Kelly Kimura: Shades of Green: Excellent use of values to show depth and spatial perspective. Strong use of lines and shapes to create a dynamic composition and design. Beautiful sense of the light filtering through the leaves. Excellently executed watercolor.
Honorable Mention:
Edd Harnas: Anamolies of the 20th Century: Powerful portrayal of existential angst
over the paradox of modernism. The composition of the face over a flag-like pattern of shapes and colors suggest a sense of disillusionment with ideology and polemics, resulting in a sense of confusion, anxiety, and anguish bordering on insanity; Very simple but evocative portrait.
Honorable Mention:
Sara Sakakibara: A Village in May: Beautiful composition of shapes and values
denoting a sense of spatial dimensionality. Despite the title, the image evokes a sense of a snow covered village in Winter. Light and whimsical treatment of
surfaces, edges and lines represent a Chagall-esque dreamlike quality that is
very powerful. Contrast of color temperatures and values creates a complex interplay of shapes and spatial complexity.
Honorable Mention:
Brennan Simcock: Birds Sing… Elegant interplay of lines, shapes and colors to create a dynamic sense of movement and flight. Contrasts in hue and values also create a strong sense of spatial dimensionality and movement. Very poetic use of line and color to evoke a feeling of freedom and movement.
First Place: Three Dimensional
Christina Ubelein: Chaos.Ladder: Evokes a strong sense of the paradox of contemporary existence living in a world of facade and propriety, which is in fact a cage that
masks a sense of escalating chaos inside. Very Escherian quality. evokes a sense of contradiction, confusion and paradox. Placement of what look like small clocks on the floor of the piece create a sense of the pressure of time, escalating the sense of anxiety and anguish with the passing of life. Very skillfully executed piece of sculpture.
Second Place: Three Dimensional
Scott Osborn: Pinao in Space: Just a very beautiful, skillfully crafted, piece of sculpture. Beautiful openness of form and delicacy of technique in the wings and legs. Beautifully executed sculpture. | https://associationhawaiiartists.com/aha-contemporary-show/ |
Martina Sestakova is a native of the Czech Republic and the owner at RADOST (est. 2016). The name of her company means ‘joy’ in Czech. Martina holds a BFA in Communication from the University of Maryland (College Park, MD) and an MFA in Fashion Design from the Academy of Arts University (San Francisco, CA).
Martina engages in three areas of creative exploration: textile design, painting, and art education. As a textile designer, Martina invokes short stories from life experiences: they inspire her paintings turned into textiles. She gives specific names to the patterns as they are visual manifestation of actual moments. Her scarves have been featured on Voice of America, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens (Washington, DC), the American Horticultural Society (Alexandria, VA),the National Czech and Slovak Museum and Library (Cedar Rapids, IO), and an array of shops across the United States.
Martina’s design practice intertwines with her paintings in watercolors on yupo. In the series, “Visual Insights into Life’s Beauty,” she communicates words (as components of stories) and their associated emotions through colors, shapes, and textures. Her artworks have been exhibited at a variety of venues, such as the BlackRock Center for the Arts (German town, MD), Adah Rose Gallery (Kensington, MD),Art Works Gallery (Richmond, VA), Latela Curatorial (Washington, DC), and Emerge Gallery (New York, NY). Martina has co-curated three art exhibitions at the Adah Rose Gallery. She is a board member of Montgomery Art Association and a member of Capitol Hill Art League and Washington Water Color Association.
As an art educator, Martina connects with her students through exploratory workshops. Her healthcare background allows her to share her education and elder care expertise in art classes in independent and assisted living communities and with individuals in adult care day programs. Martina also brings creative projects to communities with limited access to the arts, such as individuals in correctional institutions and non-English speaking communities. Currently, she offers a variety of online art sessions through her small business.
Martina Sestakova resides in Kensington, MD. She continues to expand her practice through engaging in the textile design industry, sharing her artworks in exhibitions, and building a supportive community through her meditative workshops.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My paintings in the “Visual Insights into Life’s Beauty” series celebrate life and how we choose to honor it with our words.
Words are powerful expressions of the human experience. Words are transcendent – building bridges between color, shape, and texture and telling stories that translate into all languages. Poetry, literature, and words inspire my artworks. When words move me, I close my eyes and let my intuition drive my creativity, helping me to discover how a word or several words look and feel. I use vibrant colors to form shapes and create texture by dabbing materials into the surface or by removing paint. Meditation allows me to physically pause and process my mind’s movements to capture them intuitively with a brush in hand. The small format of my paintings prompts the viewer to lean into a colorful world– creating a sense of intimacy. Abstract art, just like language, offers endless opportunities for self-discovery and connection.
Working in watercolors on yupo – a non-absorbent medium – fascinates me. It’s like the most exciting chemistry class I have ever taken turned into pure delight in my studio. Exploring the relationship between my paints, brush, and water brings me joy. Water evaporation on yupo affects textures and color brightness. On any given day, you may find me creating in a cold studio to extend the drying process or in my garden in bright light watching water disappear before my eyes. These aspects of the painting process bring me back to the power of our words: sometimes they note fleeting moments, other times they stick with us for years. | https://www.studiokcollective.shop/blogs/artists/martina-sestakova |
Continuity, contentment and calmness : museum design + art
Swartz, Haley
Advisor:
Phillips, Natalie
Date:
2015-05
CardCat URL:
http://liblink.bsu.edu/catkey/1778673
Type:
Undergraduate senior honors thesis.
Archival ID:
A-366
Degree:
Thesis (B.?)
Department:
Honors College
Abstract:
Art museums may contain many different pieces of art that evoke emotional responses from their viewers, but the museums themselves also possess this ability. The relaxing atmosphere is made capable by decisions made by the interior designer. Through the use of various design principles relating to psychology, the form and function of the museum interior is one that allows the visitor to feel calm and content. After researching how the interior design of these spaces affects its visitors, artworks were created to represent the emotions that the spaces evoked.
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Undergraduate Honors Theses
Honors theses submitted to the Honors College by Ball State University undergraduate students in partial fulfillment of degree requirements. | http://cardinalscholar.bsu.edu/handle/123456789/199940 |
Melissa Hirsch is an environmental artist based in Byron Bay, Australia. She uses both organic and man - made materials such as metal, fishing line and glass to create her installations. Taking inspiration from nature, Hirsch conveys a notion of fragility and intricacy in her artworks. Their sense of transience is heightened by the constant play of shadows, negative space and movement inherent in the works.
Hirsch is also interested in the interaction between the aesthetic form and its environment. In 2004 she organised the group 'Efemera', which produced collaborative, ephermeral artworks at Byron Bay beaches. In 2005 she formed the group 'Beach Happenings/Ephemeral Art Installations', which has since created transient artworks on various Australian beaches. | http://collection.lismoregallery.org/artists/detail/melhir |
She who was once a bride.
I was inspired by Robert A Heinlein's quote.
Though I'm nowhere near as accomplished as Rodin, I thought it was an incredibly interesting psychological vignette and I wanted to portray it as best I could.
Thursday, 21 June 2012
Studying Composition
I've been studying some of the old masters to get a sense of how they arranged multiple figures to create a sense of mood,atmosphere or indeed add to the narrative. Here are some of studies. I've been looking up Gustave Dore, Gerome, Russian Socialist painters, Repin, Shishkin and a few others.
The following is a breakdown of some of the studies. I find it really helpful to do this. Studying the shapes and the implied lines helps me to see how the eye is guided around the painting.
I also find it a really good exercise to experiment with abstract shapes. Designing big, medium and small shapes, contrasting the soft curvy shapes with the hard ones. Soft, round shapes and big S curves evoke emotions of calmness,stability whereas the harder, sharp ones bring out anger, unrest or danger. Molly Bang talks more about this in her wonderful book on composition. If you're working digitally, the lasoo, marquee tool comes in handy to quickly build up compositions. Later on, you can possibly use some of the more interesting arrangements and build environments or figures. | https://www.kabirshah.com/2012/06/ |
Why Do Women with Mesothelioma Survive Longer than Men?
- by Tim Povtak
- Research & Clinical Trials
- May 11, 2016
A recent study from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston has pinpointed for the first time gender-specific genetic mutations in mesothelioma patients that could lead to future treatment advances.
Women with mesothelioma typically have a survival advantage over men with the same disease, as numerous studies have currently shown.
But now, scientists are beginning to understand why that advantage exists, and how it could lead to more effective treatment for everyone.
“We were trying to identify genetic differences to help provide targets for specific therapies,” Dr. Assunta De Rienzo, co-director of the Thoracic Surgery Laboratory at Brigham and Women’s, told Asbestos.com. “If you can really understand why women do better, you can do something to help the men.”
De Rienzo led the study titled “Gender-Specific Molecular and Clinical Features Underlie Malignant Pleural Mesothelioma.” Dr. Raphael Bueno, chief of the thoracic surgery division at Brigham and Women, and Dr. David Sugarbaker, director of the Lung Institute at Baylor College of Medicine, also participated in the research.
As an instructor in surgery at Harvard Medical School, De Rienzo focused her research on the genetics and genomics of mesothelioma, using her background in molecular biology and cancer genetics.
Finding Molecular Pathways in Mesothelioma Patients
“The idea is identifying specific groups of patients who will be helped by specific drugs,” De Rienzo said. “You can try and do that at the molecular level.”
Researchers examined the gene profile of mesothelioma tumors by gender through whole-genome sequencing, measuring those against normal tissue from the same patient to identify mutations.
They found different genetic mutations based upon mesothelioma subtypes and gender:
- There were twice as many mutations of the TP53 gene in female mesothelioma patients compared to male patients.
- Results showed much higher levels of the BAP1 gene expression among non-epithelioid tumors.
- The CDKN2A protein coding gene was mutated more frequently among men with non-epithelioid subtypes.
Their findings illustrated the mechanisms related to gender and histology drive mesothelioma.
“The goal is finding specific therapies according to the molecular characteristics of the tumor,” she said. “This will help apply personalized medicine for mesothelioma patients.”
Women with Mesothelioma Survive Longer than Men
The gender differences in molecular structure of the tumors are important because of the significant differences in mesothelioma survival between men and women.
Researchers from Mount Sinai Health System and Hofstra School of Medicine in New York analyzed the national Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) database and documented startling variations in survival time. Their review included 14,228 cases of mesothelioma — the largest gender-specific mesothelioma study conducted.
The five-year survival for women with mesothelioma was 13.4 percent, compared to just 4.5 percent for men. For those 50 or younger, the five-year survival for women was 38.6 percent, compared to just 17.3 percent for men.
Survival effects of gender, according to the study, differed upon treatment received, but it was consistent across most categories, including race, age and stage of disease. The percentage of women opting for surgery was higher.
Women have a much lower incidence rate of mesothelioma, primarily because they have less occupational exposure to asbestos, the primary cause of the disease. The condition is often associated with blue-collar professions, which historically employed men.
“For the first time, we have started seeing molecular differences between the men and the women,” she said. “If we can get a better understanding of the genetic advantage women have, it will help everyone.”
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The sources on all content featured in The Mesothelioma Center at Asbestos.com include medical and scientific studies, peer-reviewed studies and other research documents from reputable organizations. | https://www.asbestos.com/news/2016/05/11/women-with-mesothelioma-survive-longer-than-men/ |
New research from Indiana University has identified “hotspots” in DNA where the risk for genetic mutations is significantly elevated.
Scientists have discovered a naturally occurring disease in monkeys that mimics a deadly childhood neurodegenerative disorder in people — a finding that holds promise for developing new gene therapies to treat Batten disease.
A new gene associated with disease severity in models of rheumatoid arthritis has been identified by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
By identifying and characterizing specific types of mutations in individual cell lines, using a combination of whole genome sequencing and multi-omic approaches, researchers hope to improve stem cells’ therapeutic uses and potential.
The National Institute on Aging Genetics of Alzheimer’s Disease Data Storage Site (NIAGADS) will begin making large-scale DNA sequence data available to investigators.
UNIGE researchers have identified the gene responsible for a recessive genetic disorder that causes degeneration of the eye and blindness. | http://www.frontlinegenomics.com/topic/genetics/page/9/ |
A new study has determined the variations in the gene called KIF3A that cause atopic dermatitis or eczema. This discovery could be the key to identifying and protecting the infants that are at risk of developing the skin condition.
Eczema is an inflammatory skin disease characterized by the drying of the skin. It is an itchy condition, so most people who have it tend to scratch their skin. Aggressive scratching could cause irritated skin to release clear fluid. Although non-contagious, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases reported that about 30% of the U.S. population struggle with atopic dermatitis.
To this day, the cause of eczema is still unknown. But medical scientists have resolved that a combination of genetic and environmental factors is responsible for the development of the condition. Between the two, genetics has more weight since children whose parents have history of asthma and allergies tend to develop the skin disease.
In the new study published in the journal Nature Communications, researchers revealed that they have found and delineated the two variations of the gene KIF3A that are responsible for the impairment of the skin barrier, which regulates water loss, causing atopic dermatitis to develop.
The variations, or single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), that the team led by Mariana L. Stevens observed were said to have been altered through a process called methylation. The increase in methylation activity caused the production of the KIF3A protein to dip and the regulating sites in the skin and nasal-lining cells to not function properly. As such, higher levels of water loss in the skin became inevitable.
Stevens, who is associated with the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center’s Division of Asthma Research, and her colleagues conducted an experiment on mice to find out if the lower levels of the mouse equivalent of the KIF3A protein would really cause a problem in the skin barrier. They found out that the mice who had more SNPs did manifest increased water loss from the skin.
The findings of the study could propel scientists to come up with genetic tests that could be used in screening infants that are at higher risk of developing atopic dermatitis. Therapies targeting water loss from the skin due to the SNPs to prevent eczema in early childhood could also be developed from here on out, according to the National Institutes of Health. | https://www.ibtimes.com/eczema-genetic-testing-risk-infants-could-be-possible-soon-3029083 |
There are about 78 different organs in the body which vary according to size, functions, and actions. An organ can be defined as a collection of millions of cells which group together to keep it functioning. These cells are building blocks of human life. Our body contains approximately 100 trillion cells. The scientific study of human body and organs is known as human anatomy. The basic parts of the human body are the head, neck, torso, arms, and legs. Skin is the largest organ in our body. There are a number of biological systems that carry out specific bodily functions.
Quick Facts: –
- Major organs in the body are brain, heart, skin, lungs, liver, stomach, and kidneys etc.
- Some organs that have an empty pouch or tube are called hollow organs.
- Some scientists believe that the human liver performs as many as 500 different functions.
- It is both the largest internal organ and the largest gland in the human body. It generally weighs 1.44-1.66 kg.
- Approximately 96% of this weight is water.
- The human eye can distinguish about 10 million different colors.
- The right kidney is positioned slightly lower than the left kidney.
- The human brain uses more than a quarter of the oxygen used by the human body.
- The gluteus maximus is the biggest muscle in the body which is located in the buttock.
- A red blood cell takes about 20 seconds to circle the whole body.
- The tongue is the strongest muscle in the body.
- A total of 14 different bones make up the human face.
- Human tooth is the only body part that cannot repair itself.
- Our ears and nose do not stop growing through the lifetime.
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The digestive system includes the alimentary canal or gastrointestinal tract, a tubular, muscle-lined passageway that extends from the mouth to the anus.
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Hello and welcome to Battling Heart and Stroke.
I deem it best that we get to know a little bit about our body and body organs before we move on to topics of battling heart diseases and stroke.
For today’s post, I’ve collected a few facts and trivia about the human heart and the vascular system. Some of these might not be news to you anymore. However, you might find some of these interesting and learn something new in the process. So please bear with me and read on.
The human adult heart
The human heart is slightly bigger than the size of your clenched fist and weighs between 7 and 15 ounces (about 200 to 425 grams). A man’s heart is usually slightly bigger than a woman’s heart of the same age [1, 2].
The heart consists almost exclusively of muscle tissue. The heart muscle tissue or myocardium is quite unique because it can be found nowhere else in our body except the heart.
The human heart beats about 75 to 80 times per minute, 100,000 times each day. It pumps about 2000 gallons (about 7600 liters) of blood every day. By the time a person reaches his or her 70th birthday, his or her heart would have beaten 2.5 billion times .
The human embryonic heart
The heart beat is one of the very first signs of life in a mother’s womb as seen by ultrasound. The embryonic heart starts beating about 3 weeks after fertilization. Initially, the embryonic heart beats at almost the same rate as that of the mother’s heart. The embryonic heart rate, however, increases as the embryo grows. The rate is highest (165 to 185 beats per minute) around the 9th week of pregnancy but slows down again on the 15th week. At full term, the baby’s heart beats about 145 beats per minute. Heart beat rates are said to be able to predict the gender of a fetus. However, there isn’t enough evidence to show that male and female fetuses have different heart rates .
The human vascular system
The human blood is 78 % water and accounts for 7% of our body weight. Blood is only just slightly thicker than water, with a density of about 1060 kg/m3 (pure water’s density is1000 kg/m3)
The human vascular system in its entirety (veins, arteries, and capillaries) is over 60,000 miles (96,000 kilometers) long. Twenty seconds is how long it takes for our blood to circulate through our entire body .
Sources: | https://battlingforhealth.com/2008/05/know-your-heart-and-vascular-system/ |
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The Human Digestive System. The digestive system of the human body comprises a group of organs working together to convert food into energy for the body. | https://www.reference.com/web?q=Human%20Digestive%20System&qo=pagination&o=600605&l=dir&sga=1&qsrc=998&page=2 |
What Is the Purpose of Bones in Human Body?
What Is the Purpose of Bones in Human Body? We have bones to give us shape and support the body, to protect and contain the body’s delicate vital organs, and to help us move about, often stereotyped as simply a protective and supportive framework for the body. Though they do perform these functions, bones constantly remodel and change shape to adapt to the daily forces placed upon it.
Moreover, bone stores crucial nutrients, minerals, and lipids and produces blood cells that nourish the body and play a vital role in protecting the body against infection. All these functions make the approximately 206 bones of the human body an organ that is essential to our daily existence.
Bones are made from living tissue, composed of special cells which secrete around themselves hard material rich in calcium salts. In a child the bones are soft and cartilaginous (cartilage is gristle, the elastic substance of the ear or nose). Bone-making, or ossification, is a gradual process.
A baby has as many as 270 bones, but an adult only 206, for some bones grow together as they get older. All bones have a middle cavity filled with a yellow or red fatty substance called bone marrow, the blood-making factory of the body, which also keeps bones light without reducing their strength.
The basic part of the skeleton is the spine, which has 33 bones or vertebrae. The spine carries the weight of the body, is extremely flexible and contains and protects the delicate spinal cord. The skull shelters the brain while the ribs protect the heart and lungs. Bones fit together at the joints and are held firm by ligaments, which are made of tough tissue like cords or straps. Inside each joint is a thin membraneous bag which secretes a lubricant to make the joint move smoothly.
Some glide on one another, as the lower jaw slides on the upper. Some, such as the elbow and the knee, hinge on each other and others, like the hip, make a ball and socket joint. Bones are sometimes fused together and immovable, as in the five large, lower vertebrae called the sacrum.
The skeletal system consists of bones, cartilage, and the membranes that line the bones. Each bone is an organ that includes nervous tissue, epithelial tissue (within the blood vessels), and connective tissue (blood, bone, cartilage, adipose, and fibrous connective tissue).
Bones have many functions, including the following:
- Support: Bones provide a framework for the attachment of muscles and other tissues.
- Protection: Bones such as the skull and rib cage protect internal organs from injury.
- Movement: Bones enable body movements by acting as levers and points of attachment for muscles.
- Mineral storage: Bones serve as a reservoir for calcium and phosphorus, essential minerals for various cellular activities throughout the body.
- Blood cell production: The production of blood cells, or hematopoiesis, occurs in the red marrow found within the cavities of certain bones.
- Energy storage: Lipids, such as fats, stored in adipose cells of the yellow marrow serve as an energy reservoir. | https://www.juniorsbook.com/tell-me-why/what-is-the-purpose-of-bones-in-human-body/ |
Breathing is one of those many aspects of life that we all take completely for granted for the vast majority of our time on planet Earth.
It represents not only a magnificent means of providing our bodies with oxygen, but also disposing of waste.
Recently researchers have attempted to see if there are any components in the waste part of our exhaled breath that could be useful in terms of diagnosing, stratifying and monitoring Parkinson’s.
In today’s post, we will discuss what breath is made up of, what this new research found, and explore what the potential implications of the findings are.
# # # #
Source: Wired
“Breath is the finest gift of nature. Be grateful for this wonderful gift.”
―
On any given day, the average person takes 17,000 breaths (the normal rate for an adult at rest is 12 to 20 breaths per minute).
When we breath in, the inhaled air – made up of approximately 16% oxygen, 4% carbon dioxide, and 79% nitrogen – is taken down to a pair of organs we know of as the lungs. Most of us have two lungs, but they are not exactly alike. The lung on the left side of your body is divided into two lobes, while the lung on your right side is divided into three. And the left lung is also slightly smaller, making room for your heart.
Combined, your lungs contain approximately 2,400 kilometres (1,500 miles) of airways and 300 to 500 million air sacs (called alveoli – Source). Through the thin walls of the alveoli, oxygen from the inhaled air passes into your blood in the surrounding capillaries. At the same time that this is occurring, carbon dioxide moves from your blood and out into the air sacs.
When you breathe out (exhale), your diaphragm and rib muscles relax, reducing the space in your chest. As the chest cavity gets smaller, your deflating lungs push the carbon dioxide-rich air up your windpipe and then out of your nose or mouth.
Exhaled air consists of 78% nitrogen, 16% oxygen, and 4% carbon dioxide. In addition to this, there are also trace amounts of “other stuff”.
And it’s that “other stuff”, where our post starts today.
Ok, I’ll bite: What do you mean by “other stuff”? | https://scienceofparkinsons.com/tag/compounds/ |
»How Much Does the Human Head Weigh?
The human body is one of the most outstanding creations of nature. It is an amazing, self-regulating mechanism. The human body is comprised of different kinds of tissues. These tissues form groups to build the different organs, which in turn are connected together and create organ systems.
Even though people around the world vary in their weight, height, skin and hair color, they are anatomically identical. Externally, the human body consists of the head, neck, torso, including the chest, stomach and pelvic area, arms and legs.
Every human body is made up of different kinds of tissue - connective, muscle, nervous and epithelial. This also explains the varied overall weight of different parts of the body. One of the major parts of the human body is water. It makes up about 70-75% of our bodies.
The total weight of all organs and parts of a person's body is called body mass. The weight of the separate body parts depends on the total body mass of a person, so it's difficult to talk about average numbers separately.
For example, the torso makes up 43% of our body mass, a hand is 1%, a forearm - 2%, a foot - 2% and so on. The human head normally weighs about 4-7% of our body mass. This means that the head of an adult of average weight weighs about 8 lb (3.6 kg).
How Long Does Light Travel from the Sun to the Earth? | http://mysteries24.com/tips/a-1908-How_Much_Does_the_Human_Head_Weigh |
# Sariraka Upanishad
The Sariraka Upanishad (Sanskrit: शारीरक उपनिषत्, IAST: Śārīraka Upaniṣad) is one of the minor Upanishads and is listed at 62 (in the serial order in the Muktika enumerated by Rama to Hanuman) in the modern era anthology of 108 Upanishads. Composed in Sanskrit, it is one of the 32 Upanishads that belongs to the Krishna Yajurveda, and is classified as one of the Samanya (general), and is one of several dedicated mystical physiology Upanishads.
The Upanishad, along with Garbha Upanishad, focuses on what is the relation between human body and human soul, where and how one relates to the other, and what happens to each at birth and after death. These questions and various theories are mentioned in the earliest Upanishads of Hinduism, the theories evolve, but Sariraka and other mystical physiology Upanishads are dedicated to this discussion. The texts, states Paul Deussen have been revised in later era and their corrupted content is inconsistent across known manuscripts.
The text asserts that the human body is a composite of elements from earth, water, air, space (akash), and energy (agni, fire); and that the human soul (jīva) is "the lord of the body". It then describes how human sensory organs arise from these, how functions such as human will, doubt, memory, intellect, copulation, speech, anger, fear, delusion, right conduct, compassion, modesty, non-violence, dharma and other aspects of life arise. The Sariraka Upanishad states that Prakriti (inert but always changing nature) consists of eight native forms, fifteen functional modifications, for a total of twenty-three tattva. It adds that the twenty fourth tattva in human body is avyakta (undifferentiated cosmic matter), asserting the individual soul functions as Kshetrajna ("the lord of the body") and the Purusha (indestructible universal principle, unchanging cosmic soul) is different and greater than the twenty four tattvas.
## Etymology
The term śārīraka literally means "relating to the constitution of body and its parts" and "doctrine about the body and soul". The text is also called Sharirakopanishad (Sanskrit: शारीरकोपनिषत्).
## Structure
The text consists of one chapter, which begins with a long prose prologue presenting a theory of human physiology, followed by eight verses. Verses 1 through 4, as well as 6 through 7 are metric, while the 5th verse is longer and presents the theory of three Guṇas and four states of consciousness. The last verse asserts that Purusha is supreme.
## Contents
### What constitutes the body?
The Upanishad opens with the declaration that a body is a composite of pṛiṭhvī or earth and four primordial elements (mahābhūṭas) – agni or fire, vayu or air, apas or water, and akasha or cosmic space. It asserts that whatever is hard in any living body is the essence of earth; that which is fluid part is the essence of water; the hot in a body is the essence of fire; that which moves is essence of air; and the openings or pores in the body is of the essence of cosmic space.
### Jñānenḍriyas: the sensory organs
Shariraka Upanishad refers to the sensory organs as jñānenḍriyas (organs to know). It links them to the elements as follows: the ear is attributed to space and both as essential to the sense of sound; the skin as essence of vayu, for touch; the eye is associated with fire with characteristics to know form; the tongue as essence of water, for taste; and nose as essence of earth, for smell.
### Karmenḍriyas: the organs of action
The text refers to the functional organs as karmenḍriyas (organs of action). These are of two types, external and internal, suggests the text. The external organs of action include the mouth as the organ of speech; the hands to lift; the legs to walk, the organs of excretion to remove bodily waste, and the organs of procreation to enjoy.
The internal organs of action are called Anṭaḥkaraṇa, comprising four types namely: Manas or mind for Sankalpa-vikalpa (free will and doubt); Buddhi or intellect for discernment and understanding; Ahamkara or ego for sense of self (egoism); and chitta or mental faculty for memory. The body parts where these four antahkaranas reside, asserts the text, are as follows: mind is at the end of the throat; intellect behind the face; ego in the heart; and chitta emanates from the navel.
### Physiology of the body
The Sariraka Upanishad maps the various empirical physiology and sensory functions to its theory of constitutional elements as follows:
### Psyche and character
The Upanishad adopts the Samkhya theory of three Guṇas or innate qualities, as being present in all beings. These three gunas are called: sattva (goodness, constructive, harmonious), rajas (passion, active, confused), and tamas (darkness, destructive, chaotic).
अहिंसा सत्यमस्तेयब्रह्मचर्यापरिग्रहाः । अक्रोधो गुरुशुश्रुषा शौचं सन्तोष आर्जवम् ॥ १॥ अमानित्वमदम्भित्वमास्तिकत्वमहिंस्रता । एते सर्वे गुणा ज्ञेयाः सात्त्विकस्य विशेषतः ॥ २॥ Non-violence, truthfulness, non-stealing, Brahmacharya, Aparigraha, non-anger, serving the Guru, shaucha (purity in mind and body), santosha (contentment), Arjava, abstinence from arrogance, simplicity (non-pompousness), astika (faith in Self, belief in God), and avoiding being cause of injury to others – these Guṇa (qualities, character, psyche) are generally known in particular as Sattvic. — Sariraka Upanishad, 1.1–1.2
The focus on "I", without consideration of its effect on other living beings, such as "I am the actor, I am the enjoyer" are considered Rajasic guna by those who have realized Brahman knowledge, states the text. The Tamasic guna are those related to the psyche that continues sloth, theft, craving, delusion and destruction. Those with preponderance of Sattvic nature seek spirituality, divine and self-knowledge, asserts the Sariraka Upanishad in verse 1.5, while those with dominating Rajas psyche seek knowledge of dharma, while those who seek destructive knowledge are Tamasic.
### Four states of consciousness
The text posits the same four states of consciousness or avasthas as found in Mandukya Upanishad and Buddhist texts. It defines the four states as Jāgraṭa (waking state), Svapna (dreaming state), Sushupṭi (dreamless sleeping state), and Turiya (pure consciousness). The text then attempts to link its physiology theory to explain these four states of consciousness as follows: in the Jāgraṭa state the 14 organs of the body which come into play are five organs of sense, five organs of action, and the four internal organs. Svapna or dreaming state shuts off all ten external organs, and only the four internal organs are operative states the Upanishad. In Sushupṭi, everything is silent, except chiṭṭa or mind only. Ṭuriya avastha is exclusively about jiva (life force, soul immersed in itself).
### Soul and Purusha
The liberated person is one, states the Sariraka Upanishad, who is aware of Turiya-state jiva (soul), while awake, or while dreaming, or while dreamless sleeping. This is the Jīvāṭmā and Paramāṭmā state of a person. The Upanishad state that soul is the Ksheṭrajña, or "the lord of the body". The subtle elements of a body are seventeen, eight are Prakritis, fifteen are functional modifications of the eight Prakritis. The Upanishad summarises the 24 tattvas which includes Avyakta (the "undifferentiated matter"), as five organs of sense, and eight pertaining to prakriti or nature which further includes 15 modified forms. In verse 1.8, the text states that the Purusha is different and above than the twenty four tattvas. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sariraka_Upanishad |
5 Functions of the Skin and How to Maintain Skin Health
Skin is one of the most important organs of the human body and we must treat it. To maximize skin function, health conditions need to be maintained. The skin consists of various components including water, proteins, lipids, several types of minerals, and chemical compounds. On average, a person's skin weighs around 2.7 kilograms in adults. There are three main layers of skin, namely the epidermis, dermis, and hypodermis.
Here are some important skin functions for the body:
Protect the body
The skin has several ectodermal layers (the outermost layer of skin that is directly related to the surrounding environment) with the function of protecting muscles, bones, ligaments, and organs in the body. The skin also plays a role in the body's resistance to protect itself from harmful germs.
Maintain body temperature
The skin can respond to the rise or fall of body temperature sent by signals from the brain. To cool the hot body, sweat glands will make the body sweat through the skin.
Save and carry out the synthesis process
The skin functions as a center for storing water and fat. Then it is possible to do the synthesis of vitamin D obtained from sunlight.
Become a sense of taste
The skin has a variety of nerve endings that function as the human sense of heat or cold, touch, pressure, vibration, and tissue injury.
Supports appearance
The skin is the organ that was first seen by others. Skin can support appearance, attractiveness, and mood in someone.
Tips for Maintaining Skin Health
Along with age, the skin will change. The skin is no longer as soft or firm as at a young age. In addition, the skin is also more likely to dry, thin, and prone to interference. Proper skin care is needed to maintain skin health and vitality. Although the skin will naturally regenerate itself approximately every 27 days.
Some ways you can do to maintain skin health, namely:
- First, cleanse the skin twice a day. Before going to bed at night, erase the entire make up that is still attached to the face. It is recommended to use soap without fragrances. Always maintain a balanced consumption of nutrients.
- Use a moisturizer every day. For those of you who have oily skin, choose a moisturizer with an oil-free label on the packaging.
- Ultraviolet light from sunlight and smoking are two things that can affect the aging process on the skin. Smokers are known to have more wrinkles than nonsmokers at the same age and skin color.
- Always use sunscreen when doing outdoor activities, including during cloudy or rainy weather. Take advantage of sunscreen products with SPF 30 or more, which protect from UVA and UVB. Limit sun exposure from 10 am to 2 pm Complete with long-sleeved clothes, trousers, hats, or other protectors
Very important, to maintain skin condition to stay healthy. If you experience complaints, immediately consult the condition with the dermatologist around you. | https://www.bodyhealthmagz.com/2019/02/5-functions-of-skin-and-how-to-maintain.html |
We all know that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, but how is strong is your body of trivia knowledge? Try to remember which bone is connected to which for these questions.
What is the scientific name for the wind pipe?
The Trachea
What ‘BP’ is an infection called Toxaemia or Septicaemia?
Blood Poisoning
What parts of the human body are first to liquefy in the third stage of decomposition?
Digestive organs, the brain and lungs
Approximately how many miles/ km of arteries, veins and capillaries are in the average human body?
60,000 miles (96,000 km).
What are the only self-cleaning organs on both men and women?
The eyes
What physical symptom is exhibited by those who suffer from blepharospasms?
Uncontrollable winking.
What makes up 60-70% of human body weight?
Water.
What’s the hardest substance in the human body?
Tooth enamel
How many bones are there in the human wrist?
Eight. | https://triviabliss.com/categories/human-body/ |
Medical University of the Americas offers a Gateway Medical Program (GMP) on its Nevis campus that is specifically designed to bolster student’s pre-medical coursework and help ensure a smooth transition into the Doctor of Medicine program. GMP students work with the same faculty and in the same facilities as our medical students. The program is designed to provide students with: exposure to critical elements of the Basic Sciences; assimilation to medical school life; and an introduction to the study skills and habits necessary to succeed in medical school. In fact, graduates of the GMP are often among the top graduates of MUA’s medical program.
An incoming GMP class includes approximately 25-30 students, and students may enter in the September, January or May semester.
This is a lecture and laboratory course where students will acquire a basic knowledge of both the gross structure and functional anatomy of organs and systems of the adult human body and how these relate to clinical disease. Concurrent with lecture and small group work, students participate in laboratory sessions and study a variety of imaging techniques (including X-rays, CT, and MRI scans). Emphasis is on the identification of normal gross structures with lectures and demonstrations to illustrate clinically relevant normal and abnormal findings. The classroom lectures, small group session, and laboratory sessions are integrated with Medical Physiology to provide a sound foundation for understanding human structure and function.
During this course students learn the normal functions and regulation of cells, organs and organ systems and physiological integration of the systems to maintain homeostasis—with emphasis on clinically relevant concepts. Lectures cover the neural and humoral homeostatic mechanisms and understanding of the physiology of muscular, cardiovascular, respiratory, endocrine, reproductive, gastrointestinal and renal systems. In addition, the pathophysiology of selected disease states are also explored. Students get a chance to experience what they have learned in the laboratory component of this course. The classroom lectures, small group session, and laboratory sessions are integrated with Clinical Anatomy to provide a sound foundation for understanding human structure and function.
In this course, students will gain an understanding of cellular functions as they relate to medicine. These concepts are central to understanding how the human body functions and in disease states, how these functions are compromised. Topics include: macromolecular function and regulation, mechanisms of gene expression and inheritance, cell structure and function and diagnostic biotechnology. This course will serve as a strong foundation upon which to build more detailed information necessary as a component of the knowledge required to pursue a career in medicine.
This course consists of two integrated components: advanced learning methods; and medical terminology. Advanced learning methods will help students preparing to enter medical school develop the study, learning, and test-taking skills they will need to successfully deal with the volume and complexity of information involved in the medical school curriculum. Medical terminology prepares pre-medical students for the complex language of medicine. Students will become familiar with the vocabulary for accurately describing the human body and associated components, conditions, and processes in a scientific manner. This course will also help students understand unfamiliar medical terms and appreciate their clinical applications.
The tuition for the Gateway Medical Program can be found on the Financial Information page.
To learn about housing options click here. | https://www.mua.edu/curriculum/gmp |
Endovascular Aortic Surgery is one of the best inventions in Cardiovascular Surgery during recent years. It reduced surg...
A healthy heart contracts 70-80 times in a minute and approximately 100.000 times in a day. In this way, 300 lt. of bloo...
Case Presentation: Age 78, severe aortic stenosis, cardiac left ventricular ejection fraction (cardiac pumping capacity)...
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Coronary Bypass Surgery (Cardiac Bypass Surgery) is to make vessel bridges with veins taken from other parts of the body...
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Loading... | https://en-gb.hastane.etu.edu.tr/site/related/63?type=keyword |
We believe that a firm compliance setup will benefit both our customers’ and our own business performances by streamlining processes covering Quality, Health & Safety and Environment (QHSE).
At DSV, we offer our customers the same high compliance standards across markets based on our global Integrated Management System.
We empower the management in each country to decide if there’s a need for them to be ISO certified. We support this through our global ISO multisite certification which controls key management functions with maximum efficiency and minimum bureaucracy while reducing the overall cost for our customers.
Our firm compliance setup enables us to gather comprehensive data throughout the value chain covering processes within Quality (ISO 9001), Health & Safety (ISO 45001) and Environment (ISO 14001). This way, the compliance framework offers a solid fact-based decision-making tool to support continual improvements, increased efficiencies, reduction in errors and improved overall business performance.
The framework creates value by generating:
- Operating efficiency: DSV can reduce costs by following industry best-practice and by focusing on quality.
- Improved decision-making: DSV can detect and identify problems in due time, which means that DSV can quickly take steps to avoid the same mistakes in the future.
- Process integration: By examining process interactions, DSV can improve efficiency, reduce errors and our customers can benefit from cost savings.
- Continual improvement: Continual improvement is a core principle of the ISO standards. We utilise the framework as a systematic approach to identifying and exploiting opportunities to improve.
- Credibility: The ISO standards are internationally agreed upon by experts and considered a formula that describes the best practice to ensuring high quality in our operations.
Any questions? | https://www.dsv.com/en/sustainability-esg/governance/policies/management-systems |
A combination of business acumen, technical expertise, proven processes, and disciplined project management enables us to lower overall project risk while delivering value, early and often.
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Operational
The applications we build for clients form a foundational platform of integrated business processes that represent the core of scalable business operations for growing organizations.
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A frequent request from clients, we’re tasked to design and build custom software applications that streamline workflows. Leveraging our client’s knowledge of their business processes, our team of specialists dissect objectives, analyze obstacles, and design software solutions that substantially impact our client’s bottom line.
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Intelliware designs and builds software applications to improve workflow and productivity. We re-engineer and modernize client systems to add value by streamlining processes, improving productivity, and reducing errors—all while reducing maintenance demands.
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Need to transform the way you plan, build, and support digital solutions?
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We have the most advanced technology in human history yet are currently mired in the longest and most sustained period of declining people productivity since measurement began in the early 20th century.
This is not just in the West but is the case around the world and across industries – organisations large and small. The decline began in 2010, while we were in the throes of the “Great Recession” and has continued ever since. Surely the coronavirus pandemic has not helped this, right? Well, probably not, however it may have lit the fuse under a solution. That may be People Engagement, Innovation and Performance.
This conundrum is something that has caught my attention and is something that I have been researching to better understand. When I sat down to mull over the challenges impacting productivity, I asked myself: are we measuring productivity correctly? Why doesn’t all our new technology help solve the problem? Not every organization has issues with productivity, what do they do differently than others?
Which led me to draw on my rather long career as an HR management consultant at large enterprises such as Accenture and IBM, as well as my time as the Managing Director of a medium sized organisation of just over 300 people. As I went back through the many companies (big and small) that I worked with, I kept coming back to the things I observed that top performing companies do very well:
- They are exceptionally good at getting the right people, in the right place, with the right skills, at the right time, with the right motivation
- They are very adept at aligning people to increasingly intelligent technology
These organisations have this mindset embedded in the management ranks and put in place the processes and technology to take advantage of this capability. First, because they create highly engaged workforces, second because it is very clear what work there is to be done and who will do it, and lastly, they have the tools and processes to work effectively no matter where the work is being done.
This capability is summarised in an “equation” I call PEIP – People Engagement, Innovation and Performance
It is this kind of “working smarter” that I believe is going to reverse the productivity decline trend. I think the current crisis is going to put a real focus on thinking and doing differently and therefore a fuse has been lit to help us solve the challenge. With more and more people working from home in a distributed manner, it is requiring organizations to change the mindset, change processes and implement human-centric technologies that will help, not hinder, workers to be successful.
Which brings us to the second aspect of the solution. If we take PEIP, as above, and turbo-charge it with emerging AI and machine learning, to augment humans, we create the potential for a quantum leap in our ability produce more (creating a bigger pie to divided up) and create a healthier and wealthier society for our children and grandchildren.
AI and machine learning are enormous opportunities to improve people productivity. Smart technology isn’t about replacing humans; quite the opposite. It should wrap around and augment humans, making them better at their jobs. Like how cars evolved from slow moving, uncomfortable horse-less carriages to what will soon be semi or completely autonomous vehicles. Cars have become an extension of human beings initially allowing them to go farther and faster than before and now becoming increasingly comfortable and intelligent making them more efficient and safer, by reducing human effort and potential for error.
This new way of working is not always dependent on size of organisation or industry. In my experience organisations with 150 or more employees are not that different in requirements from large enterprises. Once your organisation gets above the size of “everyone knows everybody else” you need to consider implementing PEIP, turbo-charged with smart technologies to take the next leap in performance and growth.
Certainly the shock of the coronavirus pandemic has had a negative impact on our job performance, and on overall productivity however, the enforced working at a distance, using technology to help us just may be the revelation we need to think and do differently. We could be on the cusp of something truly revolutionary. Sometimes a crisis comes along and knocks us on to a new and better path. Which may be towards People Engagement, Innovation and Performance. Is this one of those moments and what will you do about it? | https://www.talk-business.co.uk/2021/01/15/people-engagement-solving-the-productivity-puzzle/ |
Remember the old adage, “Garbage in, garbage out”?
We can’t expect an algorithm to provide accurate insights if it’s fed bad data. However, all too often, poor data quality is not recognised until the algorithm begins to produce clearly flawed results. The vast majority of businesses are content to live with incomplete, inaccurate, duplicate, or otherwise low-quality data, which manifests itself in a variety of ways: a minor inconvenience here, a sluggish system there, and a reliance on guesswork, workarounds, and manual processes.
However, when it comes to the true impact of bad data, this is only the tip of the iceberg.
The Hidden Cost of Poor-Quality Data
Strong data governance enables businesses to gain control of their data, generate better insights, and improve compliance. It reduces risk and allows them to adapt more quickly to market changes. As a result, the UK government estimates that businesses spend 10-30% of their revenue dealing with data quality issues, which is an inherently fixable problem.
Data quality is another issue that is unlikely to go away anytime soon. According to Gartner, one-third of businesses are heavily investing in data-driven initiatives such as AI, which streamline processes, enable faster decision-making, and provide a competitive advantage. However, poor data quality could seriously stymie these efforts. Poor quality insights – or a lack of trust in those insights – result in lower revenues, lower productivity, inefficient operations, missed business opportunities, and increased exposure to regulatory, security, and compliance risks.
Furthermore, with some industries undergoing several years’ worth of digital transformation in a matter of months during the pandemic, many businesses are now more reliant on data but less capable of handling it.
Raising Data Standards
The path to good data governance begins with a targeted overhaul of data practises to identify outdated methods and ensure data standardisation. A longer-term approach, in the form of a data governance strategy, is also required. When confronted with a large volume of various data types, a comprehensive data governance framework considers context, requirements, and the data’s business value. Furthermore, it establishes clear lines of accountability for maintaining accurate, consistent, and timely data that complies with all applicable regulations.
Everyone’s Responsible for Good Data
Given that the consequences of poor data quality can be felt throughout the enterprise, data quality should be an enterprise-wide priority. As a result, data governance necessitates a cross-functional approach. Senior executives are capable of driving change across business functions, so this should start at the top. Then, educate employees on how the data they touch is used more broadly. Tracking and resolving data quality issues as soon as possible is also important: seeing data quality taken seriously encourages everyone in the organisation to be more accountable.
AI Loves the Jobs You Hate
AI has transformed big data projects, and it can now provide a much-needed boost to data standards reform. Data cleaning bots are used (optimising, de-duping, cataloguing, metadata handling and so on). These tools aid in ensuring quick ROI by drastically reducing the time required to transform unruly data. | https://cioindepth.com/why-poor-data-quality-is-holding-back-big-data/ |
The government is planning a reform of the planning system in England, which includes a digital overhaul and an open data approach.
The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) has published a proposal on the reforms, which aims to move the planning system “into the 21st century” and away from “notices on lampposts to an interactive and accessible map-based online system – placing planning at the fingertips of people”.
The proposal said current planning systems were reliant on legacy software, and that the user experience “discourages engagement” with “almost no use of interactive digitals services and tools”.
Instead, the government wants a planning system that focuses on an open data approach, and “unlocks the data needed by property developers and the emerging property technology [proptech] sector, to help them make more informed decisions on what to build and where”, according to the government’s plan.
“We will take a radical, digital-first approach to modernise the planning process. This means moving from a process based on documents to a process driven by data,” it added.
The government wants to boost the proptech sector as well, enabling it to transform housing, land and planning industries with innovative products that are interoperable with others.
As previously reported by Computer Weekly, the government estimates the sector is worth over £6bn, and it wants to provide local data to technology companies working in the property and development space to “drive a digital revolution” in the sector.
In 2019, the government announced the launch of a proptech innovation council to help the sector boost productivity and ensure government data and decisions “support the sector’s growth in the UK and internationally”.
The proposals set out by the government for the planning system said it wants a reformed system “that is based on data, rather than documents, and will help to provide the data that innovators and entrepreneurs, including the burgeoning proptech sector, need to build new technology to help improve citizen engagement and planning processes”.
One of the key proposals is for decision-making to be made faster, and with greater use of digital technology.
“For all types of planning application, regardless of the category of land, we want to see a much more streamlined and digitally enabled end-to-end process which is proportionate to the scale and nature of the development proposed, to ensure decisions are made faster,” the plan said.
This includes digitising the application process, creating a national data standard for smaller applications and allowing for a “new, more modular software landscape to encourage digital innovation and provide access to underlying data”.
“This will help automate routine processes, such as knowing whether new applications are within the rules, which will support faster and more certain decision-making,” the plan said. “We will work with tech companies and local planning authorities to modernise the software used for case-managing a planning application to improve the user experience for those applying and reduce the errors and costs currently experienced by planning authorities.”
Read more about technology in property development
- Minister announces creation of a national index of brownfield site data and other initiatives to allow startups and property development companies to use public data to generate business.
- Local authorities received more than £750,000 in the second round of the Local Digital Fund, aimed at improving citizen offerings in areas such as housing and payment.
- FutureBricks is offering savers better rates through lending to the SME building industry. | https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252487264/Planning-system-to-get-digital-overhaul |
Seed production of farmers preferred improved maize varieties under community based seed production(CBSP) group initiated in the hills of Nepal under Hill Maize Research Project in 2000. Trained members of the community group produce improved seeds identified through participatory varietal selection procedures. Despite quantum jump in maize seed production, 14 tons by 7 CBSP groups in 2000 to 1,036 tons by 207 groups in 2012, seed marketing remained one of the challenges in HMRP districts. Main objective of this study was to analyze maize seed production trend and presowing seed contracts in hill districts under HMRP. Linear regression model showed seed production trend over the period 2000 to 2012 highly significant. Annual compounded growth rate of seed during the same period was estimated to be 34.36%. Pre-sowing seed contract in cereal crops in the hills of Nepal is a new initiative of HMRP IV. Analysis showed 63 formal contracts were signed for 170.45 tons of improved maize seed between 50 CBSP groups and 24 private seed buyers/traders. | https://www.nepjol.info/index.php/AJN/article/view/9017 |
Abstract: A quantum system driven by a weak deterministic force while under strong continuous energy measurement exhibits quantum jumps between its energy levels (Nagourney et al., 1986, Sauter et al., 1986, Bergquist et al., 1986). This celebrated phenomenon is emblematic of the special nature of randomness in quantum physics. The times at which the jumps occur are reputed to be fundamentally unpredictable. However, certain classical phenomena, like tsunamis, while unpredictable in the long term, may possess a degree of predictability in the short term, and in some cases it may be possible to prevent a disaster by detecting an advance warning signal. Can there be, despite the indeterminism of quantum physics, a possibility to know if a quantum jump is about to occur or not? In this dissertation, we answer this question affirmatively by experimentally demonstrating that the completed jump from the ground to an excited state of a superconducting artificial atom can be tracked, as it follows its predictable "flight," by monitoring the population of an auxiliary level coupled to the ground state. Furthermore, the experimental results demonstrate that the jump when completed is continuous, coherent, and deterministic. Exploiting these features, we catch and reverse a quantum jump mid-flight, thus deterministically preventing its completion. This real-time intervention is based on a particular lull period in the population of the auxiliary level, which serves as our advance warning signal. Our results, which agree with theoretical predictions essentially without adjustable parameters, support the modern quantum trajectory theory and provide new ground for the exploration of real-time intervention techniques in the control of quantum systems, such as early detection of error syndromes.
Submission historyFrom: Zlatko Minev [view email]
[v1] Wed, 27 Feb 2019 06:39:57 UTC (6,975 KB)
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June moves us into a new perspective. Throughout this month Saturn will be retrograde through Sagittarius. During its regression, there will be key points and times that will activate personal choices and outcomes. These choices are part of a larger picture that we are creating for 2016, and aligns us in a particular direction for 2017. The aspect with the greatest impact during this time period is the Square (challenge) of Saturn (Karma), Neptune (Dreams, Destiny), and Athena (Strategy).
Neptune in Pisces is about removing the veil between realities, and opening up new possibilities for one to develop both spiritually and emotionally. This is an important time for people to understand themselves at multiple levels, while embracing the true meaning of self. Neptune causes challenges (confusing issues, not setting boundaries, and even adding a glamour) during this time. Neptune, who can often be the obfuscator, depending on your frame of mind, will either allow for the illusions to be removed or add to the disillusion that may exist. During this period, the goddess Athena will be in Pisces. She will be working as the divine wisdom and light moving towards a new future. This is an aspect of merging and creating a strategy of oneness on a larger scale.
Both Neptune and Athena will be starting the month direct, then moving to a retrograde position which will change the energetics of what you decide as your destiny. When they move retrograde, this represents the turning points in our lives, making the changes we desire, embracing the understanding of unconditional love, and allowing us to feel unbounded to this existence. It is a very powerful time, as Athena rules divine wisdom and strategy. She assists in identifying and conquering the emotional blockages that exist within. Saturn’s involvement in this cosmic picture allows for one to break down structures and create a new state of consciousness where one is aligning and prevailing with their emotional blockages. It also brings up the past and how you are going to deal with situations in the future.
Questions to ask yourself at this time:
- Am I allowing emotions to guide my moves and repeat past patterns?
- How am I working to create and live the reality I dream?
- What am I manifesting into my existence that allows me to feel completely safe and loved?
- Where do I go when I need to remove the excess drama and baggage that weighs me down?
- Where is my release point to allow for me to express my deeper emotions?
Affirmations to Use.
- I allow the divine will to guide me through challenges to gain greater knowledge.
- This is a time of understanding without judgment to enable me to seek my higher potential.
- I have learned from the past and use this information to guide me clearly. | http://stephenjarvisastrology.com/2016/06/growth-and-understanding/ |
Chinese Communist Party’s recent move to introduce Three Child Policy aligns with its worry about future national demography. Will introducing the policy cover up the hazards of the previous One Child Policy? Will raising three children resolve the problem of ageing and meet the equilibrium in the labour market? How will this policy affect the Chinese population across different age bars and genders? Let’s see.
Author: centreforneweconomicstudies
Tamil Nadu Elections: The Period between the 1980s and early 2000s
Dravidianism has been at the helm of Tamil Nadu state politics since the 1940s. It capitalizes on promising development to its masses, and relative to the other states in India, it has largely been economically successful. However, one needs to inquire what happened when the economy liberalized in the 1990s and more importantly, whether or not the Dravidian ideology stayed true to its core tenets. This question becomes important because the two parties, the DMK and ADMK consecutively allied with the BJP in the early 1990s. Two parties that rejected and continue to reject everything that the BJP stands for, what explains their coalitional alliance? More importantly, how did that affect the economic policies that the two parties instituted? This article attempts to analyze these important questions.
How social exclusion continues to prolong the caste system in India
Despite the continued attempts since the 1950s, why has India not made significant improvement in eradicating the caste system? In this article, Ashika attempts to answer this question by observing two spaces of social exclusion which have existed since pre-independence times.
Bimonthly MPC meeting review
This article talks about the bi-monthly MPC(Monetary policy committee) meeting which concluded on the 4th of June. In the article, I analyze the importance of policy rates on the economy and the effects of keeping them constant in the Covid stricken economy. Further, this article also discusses the implication for the economy’s future.
Is 21st Century democracy in trouble?
The 21st century has ushered in a period of democratic backsliding putting everyone at risk. With all kinds of leaders and countries entering the ‘dark side’, no one is safe. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic only exacerbated this. The condition of fledgling democracies is even more at risk: why?
Fetal Heartbeat Bill & Story of De Facto ban on Abortion in the U.S
This article discusses the constitutionality of the Fetal Heartbeat Bill or the anti abortion law recently passed in Texas by comparatively analysing the overall abortion laws in the United States and controlling constitutional position.
The Land of Missed Opportunities: Dissecting Consumption Choices of the Rural Poor
While interviewing Oucha Mbarbk, a man in a remote village in Morocco, the authors of Poor Economics asked him- without enough to eat, why do you have gadgets in the house? ‘But television is more important than food!’ was Oucha’s response. There is widespread evidence for such behavior being exhibited in typical poor households in India as well. We repeatedly find that poor people tend to invest in tastier foods & recreational goods, even before fully satisfying their caloric & energy needs. In this article, I attempt to explore the key factors that are driving this behavior. In doing so, I briefly explore the Scarcity Theory & the Relative Deprivation Hypothesis. At the end, I put forth an information asymmetry perspective to the problem of nutrition in rural India.
Caste Hypervisibility and Invisibility
This article explores how lower caste identities in India are curiously invisible and hypervisible at the same time, by looking at Dalit, Bahujan, Adivasi and Upper Caste identities in the context of reservations, bollywood and feminism.
Localization in the face of Globalization
Globalization is how the rich perceive the environment and use it to work the economy to their advantage. Localization is how the poor perceive the environment. With globalization becoming the norm of the world, the poor are struggling to keep up. With such an unbalanced binary, how will equality be achieved?
Bharat & Bhutan: Bonhomie in the face of the Pandemic
This article talks about the friendship between India and Bhutan, and how it has remained the same if not become stronger even in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic.
Cryptocurrency ‘with Chinese characteristics’: What China’s rapid adoption of blockchain means for the world
Today, blockchain technology is ubiquitous in China. The country’s rapid research initiatives towards the adoption of the nascent technology has put it in a favorable position to amass much more power on the international stage and upend the current global order. This article argues that a ‘strategic’ pattern of regulation of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin has allowed the Chinese state to assume a position of dominance in blockchain technology. It specifically examines China’s intentions to use its domestic blockchain to promote its own digital currency, the Digital Yuan, and the impact it would have on the current world order.
Book Review: The Lover by Marguerite Duras
This review considers the subversion of the racial hierarchy in 1920s colonial Saigon in Marguerite Duras’ The Lover as well as the novel’s portrayal of gender dynamics in colonial Indo-China. | https://nickledanddimed.com/author/centreforneweconomicstudies/page/3/ |
The annual 8:8 Lionsgate occurs on August 8th during the time of Leo, the Lion. It is the time of year when our planet aligns with Blue Star Sirius and the Galactic Center, creating a harmonious portal that unites “matter and antimatter”. It is a special galactic event that enhances your ability to fully embody the divine self in physical form. The powerful energies of the Lionsgate portal are assisting Gaia through the Gateways of Time and into higher dimensions that are guarded by the Royal Sirian Lions of yesterday and tomorrow.
During this event a stargate is fully open streaming intense photonic light waves from the Great Central Sun, through our Sun, The Star Sirius, the Earth Grid Point of the Sphinx and The Great Pyramid of Giza. When the Sun is conjunct Star Sirius it creates a Solar Stargate (Lionsgate) that amplifies Star Codes for mastery and ascension.
Prepare to quantum leap to the next level of your Soul’s Ascension Plan! The planetary shift is accelerating into 5th Dimension as the old Time Matrix dissolves. Are you ready to jump into the next phase of your personal Ascension? Travel to the Great Central Sun and step into the Crystal Stargate with Starseeds all around the world, as Meg channels Metatron’s sacred geometry Activations. Tapping into the ancient knowledge of Zep Tepi Mystery Schools and Quantum Access™ modality, Meg will guide you through the steps to open your Portal to the Quantum Field.
If you are new to the Quantum Access technique, Meg created a visual guide on how to apply the activation steps with Metatron’s Cube sacred geometry. This short video is available to prepare for the global webcast.
About Meg Benedicte: | https://www.acoustichealth.com/mastery-empowerment/8-8-lionsgate-global-activations-with-meg-benedicte/ |
Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative and connotative meanings; analyze the impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone, including analogies or allusions to other texts.
Reading for All Purposes
Analyze and evaluate literary elements and an author’s choices to understand literary text.
Use Craft and Structure to: | https://sharemylesson.com/standards/colorado-doe/rw.8.2.1.b.i |
The text’s grade band recommendation is based on a text complexity analysis of a quantitative measure, qualitative rubric, and reader and task considerations.
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In this lesson, students will analyze an informational text that describes the impact that local ibises have on their environment and the impact that humans have on the birds. The study examines how humans are changing the lifestyles of white ibises, which in turn causes the interactions between birds and humans to lead to a greater spread of disease. The author analyzes the positive and negative effects of interactions between organisms in an ecosystem. The lesson plan includes a text coding strategy, text-dependent questions, a writing prompt, sample answer keys, and a writing rubric. Numerous options to extend the lesson are also included.
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Taylor analysed the job and broke it down into components i. Are your employees recruited, trained and managed in a way that ensures they perform consistently at their best for your business.
Originally conceived to handle personnel hiring and payment, the function now aligns closely with a company's strategic plan. Therefore, in order to improve the productivity, it is necessary to improve, conditions of employees by removing them from an adverse environment or by changing the environment with the provisions of more satisfactory living and working conditions.
Organizations now realize that the effectiveness of their HR functions has an important impact not only on top managers, but on all other employees as well. This strategic and philosophical context of human resource management makes it more purposeful, relevant, and more effective compared to the personnel management approach.
Taylor stated that scientific observation of employees would reveal one best way to do any task.
There was a clear shift from welfare approach to efficiency one. During the s, this function evolved to ensure legal compliance. Job enrichment would be ideal for that organisation where there are abundant skilled labour forces.
As earlier defined by different writers, HRM is the set of organizational activities directed at attracting, developing, and maintaining an effective workforce. Time study to analyze and measure the time taken in doing the various elements of a job and to standardize the operations of a job.
To avoid the mistakes of the past, you must ask yourself what Human Resource strategies do you have in your business. The above solutions may be suitable to different situations.
By nature, people do not dislike work.
Factory owners forced employees to work long hours under difficult conditions with little pay. In the upper-right quadrant, organizational design and workforce planning experts work with business managers. Materials, information and energy that flow into the organization are inputs and products and services offered by an organization are outputs.
Fayol was the first to identify the common managerial functions of planning, organizing, leading and controlling. A particular approach may yield fruitful results in one situation but may drastically fail in other situations.
The main findings of the Hawthorne Experiments were as follows: The thrust of human resource management now lies in trying to align individual goals and objectives with corporate goals and objectives, and rather than enforce rules or dictate terms, act as a facilitator and promotes a participative approach.
Using his own management experience he tried to systematize the practice of management to provide guidance and directions to other mangers. These unions used strikes, slowdowns walkouts picketing, boycotts, and sabotage as Industrial revolution human resource management for the acceptance of their problems.
Taylor also emphasized the importance of choosing the general type of management best suited to a particular case. The First World War further worsened their conditions. This is the modem recent approach in management and for that matter in HRM as well.
How Has It Evolved? By now, this concept has blossomed into a matured subject and profession. Three areas were added to it: So we must answer the question — What does it mean?
Human Resources In the s, human resource management included the application of new theories related to change management, motivation and team building.
Roadmap to Strategic HR: Personnel management was viewed as a department that carried out rules and regulations of the employee welfare. Employee relations experts appear in the lower-right quadrant. This period saw the USA shifting from Agricultural economy to an industrial economy. Owen also appealed to other industrialists to introduce the similar facilities in their factories.The human resource management profession continues to evolve.
Originally conceived to handle personnel hiring and payment, the function now aligns closely with a company's strategic plan. The latter decades of the 20th century witnessed the evolution of human resource management, as distinct from personnel management.
Personnel management was an administrative oriented function basing itself of Taylors scientific management approach. However, the origins of human resource management dates to the industrial revolution.
Post Industrial revolution – The term Human resource Management saw a major evolution after Various studies were released and many experiments were conducted during this period which gave HRM altogether a new meaning and importance. The Evolution of Human Resource Management (HRM) Many people, outside the profession, do not have a real understanding of what ‘Human Resource Management (HRM)’ means aside from ‘hiring and firing’.
In this lesson, we'll explore the history of human resource management from before the Industrial Revolution up to the human relations movement. | https://qeteven.currclickblog.com/industrial-revolution-human-resource-management-21157ll.html |
This informational text resource is designed to support reading in the content area. The text explains how extreme cooling of an ancient pigment comprised of metallic compounds, as well as exposure to strong magnetic fields, converts the matter into a state called a Bose-Einstein condensate. In this state, the behavior of electrons within the pigment's atoms shifts and they form a single magnetic three dimensional structure. When the condensate is cooled even further in this case, the magnetic structure loses a dimension.
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In this lesson, students will analyze an informational text designed to support reading in the content area. An ancient coloring pigment is leading to new research in magnetic fields and superconductivity. Will this lead to new technologies involving quantum computers? The lesson plan includes a note-taking guide, text-dependent questions, a writing prompt, answer keys, and a writing rubric. Options to extend the lesson are also included.
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A Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of self-configurable mobile node connected through wireless links. Absence of central controller it is difficult to determine the reliable & secure communication in Mobile Ad hoc network. Worm hole attack that are work as to established path in between sender and receiver but if the sender has start data transmission then in that case the worm hole attacker has create a direct link, referred to as a wormhole tunnel between them, it means more of the number of trusted nodes it means higher successful data communication process rates may well expected. In this desertion we proposed detection as well as prevention technique against wormhole attack, for detection we use profile base detection technique and get attacker node information like node number, number of attack packet, attack time etc. after that we prevent wormhole attack using neighbor trust worthy base technique and secure the mobile ad-hoc network communication, through our proposal we provide secure as well as reliable communication and simulate through network simulator-2 and analyze the network behavior in attack and prevention case.
References
- Pallavi Sharma, Prof. Aditya Trivedi "An Approach to Defend Against Wormhole Attack in Ad Hoc Network Using Digital Signature", 3rd IEEE International Conference on Communication Software and Networks (ICCSN), pp. 307 – 311, 2011.
- Husain. Shahnawaz, Gupta S. C. , Chand Mukesh "Denial of Service Attack in AODV & Friend Features Extraction to Design Detection Engine for Intrusion Detection System in Mobile Ad-hoc Network", International Conference on Computer & Communication Technology (ICCCT-2011), pp. 292- 297, 2011.
- Jing-Wei Huang, Isaac Woungang, Han-Chieh Chao, Mohammad S. Obaidat, Ting-Yun Chi, Sanjay K. Dhurandher "Multi-Path Trust-Based Secure AOMDV Routing in Ad Hoc Networks", proceedings of IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference (GLOBECOM 2011), pp. 1-5, 2011.
- Dr. N. Sreenath, A. Amuthan, & P. Selvigirija "Countermeasures against Multicast Attacks on Enhanced-On Demand Multicast Routing Protocol in MANETs", International Conference on Computer Communication and Informatics (ICCCI -2012), pp. 1-7, 2012.
- K. S. Sujatha, Vydeki Dharmar, R. S. Bhuvaneswaran "Design of Genetic Algorithm based IDS for MANET", International Conference on Recent Trends in Information Technology (ICRTIT), pp. 28-33, 2012.
- Dr Karim KONATE, GAYE Abdourahime "Attacks Analysis in mobile ad hoc networks: Modeling and Simulation", 2011 Second International Conference on Intelligent Systems, Modelling and Simulation, pp. 367 – 372, 2011.
- Gandhewar, N. , Patel, R. "Detection and Prevention of Sinkhole Attack on AODV Protocol in Mobile Adhoc Network", Fourth International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Communication Networks (CICN), pp. 714 – 718, 2012.
- Singh, P. K. Sharma, G. "An Efficient Prevention of Black Hole Problem in AODV Routing Protocol in MANET", IEEE 11th International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom), pp. 902 – 906, 2012.
- Jian-Ming Chang, Po-Chun Tsou ; Han-Chieh Chao ; Jiann-Liang Chen "CBDS: A Cooperative Bait Detection Scheme to prevent malicious node for MANET based on hybrid defense architecture", 2nd International Conference on Wireless Communication, Vehicular Technology, Information Theory and Aerospace & Electronics Systems Technology (Wireless VITAE), pp. 1-5, 2011.
- http://www. isi. edu/nsnam/ns/. | https://www.ijcaonline.org/archives/volume95/number7/16610-6447 |
Handbook of Information and Communication Security [electronic resource] / edited by Peter Stavroulakis, Mark Stamp.Material type: TextLanguage: English Publisher: Berlin, Heidelberg : Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2010Description: online resourceContent type: text Media type: computer Carrier type: online resourceISBN: 9783642041174Subject(s): Engineering | Data protection | Data structures (Computer science) | Telecommunication | Engineering | Communications Engineering, Networks | Data Structures, Cryptology and Information Theory | Systems and Data SecurityAdditional physical formats: Printed edition:: No titleDDC classification: 621.382 LOC classification: TK1-9971Online resources: Click here to access online
Fundamentals and Cryptography -- A Framework for System Security -- Public-Key Cryptography -- Elliptic Curve Cryptography -- Cryptographic Hash Functions -- Block Cipher Cryptanalysis -- Chaos-Based Information Security -- Bio-Cryptography -- Quantum Cryptography -- Intrusion Detection and Access Control -- Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems -- Intrusion Detection Systems -- Intranet Security via Firewalls -- Distributed Port Scan Detection -- Host-Based Anomaly Intrusion Detection -- Security in Relational Databases -- Anti-bot Strategies Based on Human Interactive Proofs -- Access and Usage Control in Grid Systems -- ECG-Based Authentication -- Networking -- Peer-to-Peer Botnets -- Security of Service Networks -- Network Traffic Analysis and SCADA Security -- Mobile Ad Hoc Network Routing -- Security for Ad Hoc Networks -- Phishing Attacks and Countermeasures -- Optical Networking -- Chaos-Based Secure Optical Communications Using Semiconductor Lasers -- Chaos Applications in Optical Communications -- Wireless Networking -- Security in Wireless Sensor Networks -- Secure Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks -- Security via Surveillance and Monitoring -- Security and Quality of Service in Wireless Networks -- Software -- Low-Level Software Security by Example -- Software Reverse Engineering -- Trusted Computing -- Security via Trusted Communications -- Viruses and Malware -- Designing a Secure Programming Language -- Forensics and Legal Issues -- Fundamentals of Digital Forensic Evidence -- Multimedia Forensics for Detecting Forgeries -- Technological and Legal Aspects of CIS.
At its core, information security deals with the secure and accurate transfer of information. While information security has long been important, it was, perhaps, brought more clearly into mainstream focus with the so-called “Y2K” issue. Te Y2K scare was the fear that c- puter networks and the systems that are controlled or operated by sofware would fail with the turn of the millennium, since their clocks could lose synchronization by not recognizing a number (instruction) with three zeros. A positive outcome of this scare was the creation of several Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) around the world that now work - operatively to exchange expertise and information, and to coordinate in case major problems should arise in the modern IT environment. Te terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 raised security concerns to a new level. Te - ternational community responded on at least two fronts; one front being the transfer of reliable information via secure networks and the other being the collection of information about - tential terrorists. As a sign of this new emphasis on security, since 2001, all major academic publishers have started technical journals focused on security, and every major communi- tions conference (for example, Globecom and ICC) has organized workshops and sessions on security issues. In addition, the IEEE has created a technical committee on Communication and Information Security. Te ?rst editor was intimately involved with security for the Athens Olympic Games of 2004.
There are no comments on this title. | https://opac.nitrkl.ac.in/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber=3708 |
development of a unified architecture to provide location information to apps in indoor scenarios.
Funding: BMWi/ZIM
Project time: 07/2020-06/2022
AvaRange - Particle Tracking in Snow Avalanches
sensor network-based particle tracking using inertial measurements combined with radio telemetry
Funding: DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft)
Project time: 06/2020-05/2023
SPP 1914 Cyber-Physical Networking
NICCI^2 - Network-Informed Control – Control-Informed network: towards multi techNology dynamICally ChangIng networksAvalanches
networked control systems as a fundamental basis for cyber physical networks
Funding: DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft)
Project time: 01/2020-12/2022
PANDA - Precise Attack Detection for Network Domains by Application Classification
next generation high speed monitoring concepts for large administrative domains with VLAN and VM support
Funding: DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft)
Project time: 12/2019-11/2022
OTB-5G+ - Open Testbed Berlin - 5G and Beyond
experimental validation of 5G wireless communication technologies and development of a testbed for new transmission concepts
Funding: BMBF
Project time: 09/2019-08/2022
Hy-Nets4all - Simulation Platform for Optimized Electric Driving
holistic development and validation platform for optimizing electric driving in urban environments
Funding: EU/EFRE.NRW
Project time: 08/2019-07/2022
EWI - Energy efficient WLAN for IoT
low power and low delay WLAN using wake-up receivers
Funding: BMBF
Project time: 11/2018-04/2021
MAMOKO - Macroscopic Molecular Communication
molecular communication principles for industrial applications
Funding: BMBF
Project time: 11/2018-10/2021
VCE - Virtual Cycling Environment
characterizing and modeling cyclists behavior for developing next generation safety assistance systems
Funding: internal CCS project
Project time: since 10/2018
RADCOM-HETNET - Integration of Radar-based Communication in Heterogeneous Vehicular Networks for Cooperatively Interacting Cars
combination of Radar-based mmWave communication with IEEE 802.11p for reliable platooning applications
Funding: DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft)
Project time: 10/2018-09/2020
VisIoN - Visible light based Interoperability and Networking
research on Li-Fi (Light Fidelity), which is a Visible Light Communication (VLC) system running wireless communications that uses LEDs for data transmission
Funding: EU H2020
Project time: 09/2017-09/2021
Car2DC - Hierarchical Vehicular Cloud Computing
connecting clusters of cars to backend data centers
Funding: Toyota InfoTechnology Center, USA
Project time: 04/2017-03/2020
V-VLC - Visible Light based Vehicular Communication
comprehensive research on the utilization of visible light for communication between vehicles (V2V) and with infrastructure (V2I)
Funding: funded in part by E-Lab (HELLA Group)
Project time: since 12/2016
Previous Projects
Safety4Bikes - Safety assistance system for cycling kids
development of assistance system functionalities to improve the safety of kids on bicycles using behavior prediction and wireless communication technologies
Funding: BMBF
Project time: 01/2017-06/2020
SPEAR - Smart Prognosis of Energy with Allocation of Resources
development of a flexible optimization platform for improving a broad range of industrial production processes regarding energy related aspects
Funding: BMBF (ITEA3)
Project time: 09/2017-08/2020
APPSTACLE - open standard APplication Platform for carS and TrAnsportation vehiCLEs
open and secure cloud platform that interconnects a wide range of vehicles to the cloud via open in-car and Internet connection and is supported by an integrated open source software development ecosystem
Funding: BMBF (ITEA3)
Project time: 01/2017-12/2019
DFG FOR 1508 BATS - Dynamically Adaptable Positioning of Bats Using Embedded Communicating Sensor Systems
TP4: E2SO - Energy Efficient Management and Self-organized Operation in Sensor Networks
tracking of bats in their natural environment using sensor networking technology; key focus is on energy efficient communication of extremely lightweight sensor nodes
Funding: DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft)
Project time: 12/2012-11/2019
Wireless Tractors
modeling crop fields in an agricultural context for vehicular network simulation.
Funding: CLAAS E-Systems GmbH
Project time: 07/2019-09/2019
Offloading Strategies for Energy Efficient Smartphone
energy measurement and estimations for off-loading of computationally expensive tasks from mobile systems into the cloud
Funding: VIED (Vietnam International Education Development)
Project time: 03/2015-02/2019
Hy-Nets - Efficient Hybrid Propulsion using Vehicular Networks
holistic investigation of hybrid propulsion in large scale cities for optimizing emissions and travel times using vehicular networking
Funding: EU/EFRE.NRW
Project time: 04/2016-01/2019
RESIBES - Disaster-resilience by helper networks for emergency response
mobile ad hoc networking for supporting the efficient coordination of human and material resource for first responders
Funding: BMBF
Project time: 02/2016-04/2019
CarParkComm
exploring communication limits in a multi-store car park solution through a signal propagation focused measurement study
Funding: Lödige Systems GmbH
Project time: 01/2018-12/2018
AgriculturalV2V
cooperative driving for agricultural vehicles through wireless communication
Funding: Agricultural Industry Electronics Foundation (AEF)
Project time: 01/2018-05/2018
Heterogeneous Vehicular Networking
research how to unify, and make efficient use of, short range wireless radio communication and cellular communication for vehicular networking
Funding: collaboration with University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
Project time: 06/2012-12/2017
LTE 4 V2X
V2X Standardization for 4G Networks and its Application in Industry Automations
Funding: Siemens AG, Germany
Project time: 07/2017 - 09/2017
WiME - Wireless Measurement and Experimentation
SDR-based wireless measurement and experimentation framework for wireless networks including IEEE 802.11[a/g/p] and IEEE 802.15.4
Funding: internal CCS project
Project time: 10/2011-03/2017
C3 - Cloud Connected Cars
using cars to establish decentralized connected information clouds based on heterogeneous vehicular networks
Funding: DENSO AUTOMOTIVE Deutschland GmbH
Project time: 04/2016-03/2017
Car4ICT - Cars enable future information and communication technologies
research investigating vehicles as a main ICT resource
Funding: Toyota InfoTechnology Center, Japan and USA
Project time: 04/2014-03/2017
Performance Limits of IEEE 802.11p in Highly Dynamic Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks
PHY receive algorithms for IEEE 801.11p
Funding: DAAD
Project time: 09/2015-03/2016
Next Generation Real-Time Ethernet Networks for Industrial Applications
future reliable industrial networks based on the next generation of Ethernet, results from the IEEE 802.1 Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) and Interworking (IWK) working groups.
Funding: SIEMENS AG
Project time: 09/2014-08/2015
Smart Communications for Intelligent Transportation Systems
smart communication primitives for ITS; channel modeling and protocol design for multi-service applications
Funding: BIT PhD School
Project time: 04/2012-03/2015
Cooperative Inter-Vehicle Communication
cooperative communication primitives for ITS; protocol design for vehicle safety applications
Funding: Endeavour Research Fellowship, Australia
Project time: 05/2014-10/2014
ENergy-Aware CompuTing
energy measurement and estimations for off-loading of computationally expensive tasks from mobile systems into the cloud
Funding: EU/INTERREG
Project time: 09/2012-06/2014
ML-IVC - Multi-Layer Inter-Vehicle Communication
adaptive and self-organizing inter-vehicle communication based on short range radio broadcast; protocol design, simulation techniques, and experimental field tests
Funding: internal CCS project
Project time: 09/2011-03/2014
Privacy in Vehicular Networks
understanding the potential very negative impact of vehicular networking technologies on users' privacy; quantification of this impact and mitigation of this impact
Funding: collaboration with University of Erlangen
Project time: 09/2009-03/2014
MultiPAN - Cooperative Access in Overlapping Wireless Networks
cooperation and adaptive management of overlapping wireless networks, methods for interferer detection and adaptive reconfiguration
Funding: Malaysian Government
Project time: 10/2008-12/2013
Padiofire - Parallelized Application Detection in Overlay Networks for Firewalls
monitoring, analysis, and firewalling Web 2.0 overlay network protocols; the key objective is to go beyond application layer firewalls to identify overlay services as used in the Web 2.0 context
Funding: BMBF (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung)
Project time: 07/2011-06/2013
monkit 2 - Distributed Monitoring and Attack Detection in 10 GBit/s Networks
adaptive network monitoring in high-speed networks, coordination between monitoring probes and detection processes, event correlation for automated response
Funding: BSI (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik)
Project time: 12/2011-12/2012
RDSP - Resource constrained Distributed Stream Processing
investigation of an integrated approach for supporting in-network sensor data processing in highly dynamic and heterogeneous sensor networks
Funding: preparational project for a DFG research group
Project time: 01/2008-06/2012
Support for inter-domain routing and data replication in virtual coordinate based networks
The collaborative study aims to provide novel insights into the applicability of virtual coordinate based network protocols in the case of mobile multi-domain environments
Funding: BaCaTec, collaboration with UCLA
Project time: 01/2010-12/2011
DSMS Study - Study on Real-time Stream Processing Engines
concept study on the applicability of data stream management systems (DSMS) on real-time tracking in an airport scenario
Funding: Siemens AG
Project time: 07/2011-09/2011
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February 24, 2021
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Connecting to Wireless Networks in Windows
In this lesson we look at connecting to a standard wireless network in Windows.
To access the internet you must be connected to a network. Often nowadays these networks are wireless, also sometimes called WiFi.
Use the buttons below to navigate through the lesson
When you connect to a wireless network you are connected to a nearby box called a router. These routers have limited wireless range so you often have to be close to the router and not have too many obstacles between your computer and the router.
Once you are connected to the router it acts as a gateway to the internet for your computer.
In order to connect, you look for the Wireless Network icon. This is usually in the bottom right tray of your computer near the clock, and usually looks something like this:
When you click your wireless network icon it shows you a list of available networks. This looks different in every version of Windows but always shows the network name and how strong the connection is to it:
You can choose a network to connect to from the list.
If it is a secure network it will ask you for a password.
If it is unsecured it will simply connect. The unsecure networks are shown with warning symbols, often an exclamation mark “!”.
If in doubt you should avoid using unsecure networks. This is because someone may have maliciously set up the router to spy on your internet usage, and you cannot tell for sure. You should only connect to wireless networks that you trust! | https://www.free-online-training-courses.com/connecting-to-wireless-networks-in-windows/ |
The Homeland Security Department's planned wireless network of high-tech towers to watch for illegal immigrants crossing the border from Mexico into the United States is vulnerable to cyberattacks that could shut the system down, according to security experts.
The Secure Border Initiative Network (SBInet) surveillance system, a network of 1,800 towers housing infrared cameras, radar and communication equipment along the U.S.-Mexican border that DHS just began testing, will use commercial wi-fi systems to connect the towers to command-and-control centers operated by U.S. Customs and Border Protection and to computers in vehicles operated by border agents. (See “Vast Expanse,” Government Executive, April 1.)
In September, DHS awarded Boeing the SBInet contract, which is worth an estimated $2.5 billion. Last month, the company initiated a pilot project to test nine 98-foot towers spanning 28 miles of the border southwest of Tucson, Ariz. But shortly after the towers went up in mid-June, they started knocking out wireless Internet service in Arivaca, Ariz., a town of about 1,500 residents located 12 miles north of the Mexican border.
Allan Wallen, who runs a wireless Internet service provider cooperative serving Arivaca, sent Boeing a series of e-mails about the problem. He said the company confirmed it was using the 5.8 gigahertz wi-fi band (also known as industry standard 802.11a) for communications on the SBInet towers — the same frequency the ISP used to provide Internet service.
Using standard commercial 5.8 gigahertz wi-fi equipment could leave SBInet open to intentional interference. “A drug dealer could buy a laptop with built-in 5.8 gigahertz wireless and could launch a denial of service attack against SBInet,” Wallen said.
He said he could detect that the SBInet wireless network used a strong form of encryption, Wi-Fi Protected Access. But the encryption would not be useful in stopping denial of service attacks, said Wade Williamson, director of product engineering for AirMagnet, which sells wireless intrusion detection systems.
Williamson said mounting a denial of service attack against a wi-fi network is a “trivial exercise” because even on an encrypted network, the address of an end user device or wi-fi access point — known as a media access control address — is clearly broadcast and retrievable. Anyone who wants to knock out the transmissions from the SBInet towers could capture that address, spoof it and then flood a tower or end user with data packets, Williamson said. He added that SBInet communications also could be jammed by inexpensive signal generators that could knock out the signal from the towers.
An intrusion detection system would help DHS and Boeing detect such cyberattacks and zero in on the location of intruders by triangulation, Williamson said. DHS and Boeing could also “fight fire with fire” by launching reverse denial of service attacks, he said.
George Teas, director of field engineering for Fortress Technologies, which sells wi-fi systems hardened with multiple layers of security for government users, said his company provides multifactor authentication systems that include a unique device identifier, which insures that even if hackers spoof a media access control address, they will not be able to get into a network. An attacker would not be able to take down all of the SBInet with a denial of service attack, Teas said, but just one node with traffic routed around that node.
Boeing referred all questions to Customs and Border Protection. CBP officials did not respond to a query on the security of the SBInet wireless system.
Boeing evidently is looking to increase security for the next phase of SBInet. Teas said Fortress just responded to a request for proposals from Boeing for a secure wireless network. Boeing wants jam resistant wi-fi equipment that also has low probability of detection and interception, according to a data sheet on Boeing's SBInet business opportunities Web page.
As for Arivaca's Internet service, Boeing told Wallen in an e-mail that it had stopped using frequencies used by the ISP cooperative to eliminate interference. Wallen said he has less interference than when Boeing first turned on the Arivaca tower, but he said his network still experiences interference if the SBInet wireless network periodically switches frequency channels. | https://immigrationwatchcanada.org/2007/07/06/high-tech-border-network-could-fall-prey-to-cyber-attacks/ |
Copyright © 2013 Malik N. Ahmed et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Received February 17, 2013; revised March 18, 2013; accepted April 8, 2013
Keywords: MANET; Survivability; Routing Techniques
ABSTRACT
Mobile ad hoc networks have a wide range of application usage today, due to its great services, easy installation and configuration, and its other distinctive characteristics. In contrast, the attackers also have developed their own way to disrupt MANET normal operations. Many techniques, approaches and protocols have proposed to support Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) survivability in adversarial environment. Survivable of routing operations is the key aspects of the challenge in MANETs because most of destructive attacks classified as active attacks and all are intent to attack MANET routing operation to prevent it from providing it services in a right time. In this paper, we will discuss the most effective and practical initiatives have designed to keep MANET survive in an adversarial environment and how it supporting MANET availability.
1. Introduction
In some situations when there is an urgent need for network communication between collection of hosts but centralized administrator and fixed infrastructure are unavailable or difficult to deploy that means it is time for mobile ad hoc network. MANET has many characteristic which make it suitable for some important applications and it can provide services well in such cases.
Mobile ad hoc network have become an important part of our life due to its vital services which provided to the population and society. It used at home, work, emergency situation, and natural disaster. On the other hand, the threats of MANET have flourished too. There are several types of attacks and intrusions targeting wireless networks as general especially mobile ad hoc network because of the nature of its work [1-3]. These attacks directly affect the performance and the survivability of MANETs. There are many efforts have done to surviving MANETs and keep them to provide services even in the presence of intrusion and DoS attacks.
Routing is essential service for end-to-end communication in MANET, attacks on routing protocol disrupt the reliability and performance of MANET. It can be divided into two categories, first is routing disruption attack which the attacker trying to change the course of packets. Second resource consumption attack, the attacker inserts packet into the network to consume resources .
Attacks on MANET are classified as Active and Passive attacks , passive attacks are not dangerous if the delivering data is important than its security, because it does not affects the normal operation of MANET, while active attacks affecting the normal operation of MANET In several ways. This survey focusing on initiatives which make MANET survives against active attacks including Denial of Service (DoS).
The contribution of this survey are: 1) investigation of the most valuable techniques and approaches which support MANET routing survivability; 2) identification the requirement of routing survivability; 3) investigation of main DoS which violate availability; 4) the classification of routing survivability in initiatives in three groups: authentication, path selection, and attack detection. The rest of this survey is organized as follows: Section 2, MANET survivability requirement; Section 3, DoS attacks and its classification in Section 4. In Section 5, discussed the routing survivability initiatives. Section 6, General discussion and open points, and conclusion in Section 7.
2. Requirements for MANET Routing Survivability
Survivable network must adapt nodes transmit powers to ensures the continuation of mobility operations and it must be able to change addressing and service recovery dynamically. When system is under attack nodes must use power and other resources efficiently.
Survivability requirement specified by two fundamental requirements, establishing a connection between nodes at any time and guarantees continuous connection until a specific amount of data is completely transferred between two nodes . Essential service requirements to keep up routing survivability For MANET are Integrity, confidentiality and authenticity principles. Protection of wireless communication at the physical layer and access control of each node is important for routing survivability .
A number of researchers [7-9] agreed about four survivability requirements for MANET: 1) load balancing between nodes; 2) to be able to discover services and configure connection parameters; 3) to be able to adaptive node power to ensure uninterrupted services as long as possible; 4) efficient use of energy when the node is exposed to attack.
3. DoS MANET Attacks
DoS is one of the devastating attacks which aims to violate the availability of MANET, it increases its capacity causing only one hop communication and preventing packets to arrive to the destination node. DoS attacks intend to violate the important survivability goal, availability. It is trying to disrupt MANET from continuing to provide services in a timely manner. Most of DoS attacks in MANET are attacking routing protocols in the network layer to achieve their goals: Absorption of network traffic, inserts itself between source and destination to control the network traffic flow.
Flooding Attack: This type of attack intends to consumption node resources significantly such as bandwidth and battery power, or disrupting the normal routing operation. Flooding attack can happened when a malicious node send a large number of Route-Request (RREQ) packets in a very short time to a none existent node and there will not be Route-Replay (RREP), so the (RREQs) will flood network. As a result the throughput decreasing significantly; or flooding the destination node with a large number of unnecessary packets, it cannot receive all packets therefore all packets will discard .
Wormhole Attack: This type of attack occur when an attacker tunnel the routing control message to another location using a high speed communication link to prevent the completion of routing discovery process. This attack is one of the most sever attacks encounter mobile ad hoc network, it can overcome the authenticity and confidentiality communication, this shows the seriousness of this attack.
Rushing Attack: Rushing attack is a special type of wormhole attack occurred if a fast channel dedicated between two wormhole nodes, it intend to attack on-demand routing protocols that use duplicate suppression at each node used by many wireless routing protocols. In rushing attack, the adversary node floods the RREQ packet faster than other nodes which make legitimate nodes receive the same packets twice it assume these legitimate RREQs are duplicate packets and it is simply discard. Source node considers that adversary node as normal intermediate node, therefore source node could not find the route path that do not including adversary node.
The most dangerous attacks against MANET routing protocols which results in Denial of service is rushing attack, because the shared high speed transmission path between two end wormhole nodes which called rushing attack prevent current secure routing protocols from discovering route more than two hops. The other thing makes rushing attack dangerous that it can perform also by week attackers.
Black Hole Attack: In this attack, the malicious node pretend that it is a legitimate node and it has a valid route to the destination node, therefore the source node will select it, although it does not has a valid route. Black hole attack intends to damage or prevent some of forwarded packets while leaving some packets undamaged.
Byzantine Attack: A malicious intermediate nodes works alone or colluding to perform routing problems such as selecting a non-optimal path to forwarding packets or creating routing loops for packets or dropping a selected packets which results in significantly of throughput degradation or routing disruption.
4. Classification of DoS Attacks
Many researchers have done to define and classify DoS attacks [11,12] to help for more analysis and investigation about it. Attacks on MANETs are categorized into passive attacks and active attacks depending on the target of the attack.
Another classification of attacks by as external attacks and internal attacks, external attacks is the attacks comes from outside, while internal attacks from inside the networks. Attacks can be classified according to the OSI model.
Most of research groups classify attacks in two main groups, but we suggested a new line of classification considering the behavior of different attacks appeared in the recent researches as shown in Figure 1.
4.1. Active Attacks
Active attack intends to objection the normal activity by fabrication, interruption or modification . Active attacks are more dangerous because it is preventing
Figure 1. The new classification line of MANET attacks.
MANET from providing its service, but it is easy to detect than the passive attacks. presented a common DoS attacks on network layer and they have more effects on MANET than other attacks, these attacks are wormhole attack, black hole attack and gray-hole attack. A wormhole attack is happen when two malicious nodes connected through a high speed link and cooperative with each other forming one of the very dangerous tunneling attacks. The two malicious nodes are placed at a very powerful position in the network, therefore most of the traffic in the network is going through these nodes, so they falsify the route length and drop delivered messages. Wormhole is invisible in the route, so it is difficult to discover.
Black hole exploit the principle of selecting shortest path by routing protocol to introduce itself that it has a shortest path after it selected by the source node to send packets it drop them. Most of the proposed approaches to detect or prevent black hole are analyzing or calculating distance between source and destination to discover malicious nodes; or using more than one node to receive RREP; or using common neighbor listening .
Gray-hole attack sometimes acting as normal node and sometimes acting as malicious node, due to this behavior it is difficult to deal with and it is degrades the networks performance.
All approaches and mechanisms proposed to detect or prevent gray hole attacks are uses different analytical process to analyze acknowledgement and RREP that received from the destination to discover if there is any suspicious behavior of malicious nodes in the network.
4.2. Passive Attacks
A passive attack intends to obtain data transmitted without objection the communication or altering data packets by electronic eavesdropping (wiretapping), traffic analysis, or monitoring data traffic. In eavesdropping attacker try to obtain sensitive information such as public and private key or location information. Detection of passive attacks is not easy because the normal operations of data routing are not affected. The useful way to protect data against passive attack is to encrypt transmitted data using encryption mechanism to prevent attacker from getting useful information from it.
4.3. Hybrid Attacks
Some attacks that are classified as active, sometime works as passive, and vice versa, for example DoS attacks are classify as active attacks, but found that some DoS attacks are passive attacks; black hole considered as active as well as passive attacks. Some other passive attacks works as active attack by discards packets silently or hiding partial routing information; so these attacks are classified as hybrid effect.
5. MANET Routing Survivability Initiatives
Mobile ad hoc networks are susceptible to a broad range of attacks and intrusions; Denial of Services attack occurs when ad hoc routing function is completely subjected to vandalism, it is one of the affected attacks to the MANET operations. Many initiatives have proposed to keep MANET free of DoS attacks and survive in adversarial environments, in this section the most important and valuable of these initiatives and has a good improvement to MANET availability will be discussed. By studying initiatives we found that it’s followed different ways to achieve MANET survivability. On these bases we classified it into three main groups: Initiatives based on authentication, Initiatives based on path selection, and Initiatives based on attack location and detection, as described in Figure 2.
5.1. Initiatives Based on Authentication
Impersonation is one of the main problems in MANET that results is many communication problems and violate security and survivability properties, so authentication is one of the prime rib of the survivable system. The main goals of discussed techniques and approaches are using authentication techniques to support MANET survivability.
The first technique proposed to improve MANET survivability using authentication is the Techniques for Intrusion-resistant Ad Hoc Routing Algorithms (TIARA), it is a group of techniques work together to mitigate the impact of (DoS) attacks, also it can defend against route
Figure 2. Classification of MANET survivable techniques.
hijacking, flow disruption, and resource depletion attacks. TIARA based on a five design techniques, flow-based route access control (FRAC), flow monitoring, sourceinitiated router switching, fast authentication, and referral based resource allocation. For countering different type of threats, TIARA uses a set of mentioned techniques .
Flow-based Route Access Control (FRAC), this technique makes a control to a flow sequence of packets between the source and destination node. Each intermediate node should retain a general route policy for the whole network to define authorized flow of each intermediate node, authorized flows are only forwarded. The routing algorithm should be modified in order to implement FRAC with the existing routing protocols and to ensure that the packet forwarding decisions are made by the flow-id. Because of the most of current routing algorithm are unable to maintain more than one route, so multipath routing enable to discover and maintain all legitimate routes. On-demand routing algorithm should be modified to enable them to multipath routing information. Routing algorithm should be modified to incorporate multi-path routing. This technique used to detect path failure and inform source node about the detected failure, so that the source node can select another route to complete sending the rest of the packets. In order to perform flow monitoring, the flow status massage is encrypted by digital signature and sent by the routing function, from the source and the destination node including sequence number. Source node uses this technique to determine the best route to select when there are multiple routes exist between source and destination node. To enable intermediate node select the best route, the source label each packet with information of the best path. To implement this technique, intermediate node should be implemented with technique to read the label of the packet. Fast authentication is a light mechanism used instead of traditional packet authentication techniques to authenticate data packets. Such a mechanism based on the notion of label of a packet, each packet place with path label at a specific secret location and it moves to each node in the route. To avoid traffic analysis attack, fast authentication should change the secret location in the packet periodically. Resource depletion attack will be severe when two colluding attacker cooperating with each other through a direct link. To defend against this attack, each node should define initially the threshold of the maximum required number of network resource. If there are more required to additional resources referral based resource allocation can grantee the required resource if source node present referrals from other trusted node. These techniques are incorporated in the existing routing protocols for building intrusion tolerant routing Ad Hoc networks that can provide services at a suitable level in the presence of mentioned DoS attacks.
Another algorithm Works on the principle of authenticcation is the Best effort Fault Tolerant Routing algorithm (BFTR), it is a source routing algorithm developed by . It intends to deliver packets in high ratio regardless of the presence of adversaries. It selects the most shortest and feasible path by using statistics and DSR flooding, if the path is becoming infeasible at any time, the algorithm will discard it. The criterion used by BFTR to select path is end-to-end performance measured using the data packet transmission ratio and acknowledgement. BFTR can ensure correct end-to-end packet delivery under different misbehaving attacks, dropping, corruption, misrouting, tampering, delaying, fabrication and replaying.
Based on end-to-end verification and path diversity, an approach is presented to increase reliability and survivability of MANET. The approach is applied to Secure routing though Diversity and Verification (SRDV) protocol. Path diversity is a solution to both problem malicious behavior and shortage of connection. The proposed protocol uses digital signature and hash chain to perform secure communications. The idea of SRDV protocol is using some security primitives such as digital certificate to get authentication between source node and target, it detects attack by using end-to-end delay and feedback on the number of data packet . The proposed protocol uses the combination of techniques: path diversity, endto-end verification, hash chain and digital signature to defend against individual or colluding attackers.
Discussion
Previous discussed initiatives are using authentication techniques such as: end-to-end verification, acknowledgement, digital signature, and hash chain to support MANET routing survivability, but their performance are affected by some deficiencies; for instance, TIARA efficiency reduced is in some cases. In the path failure a compromised node could not be specifically identified and the flow status message can cause additional traffic. Finally, the author did not explain precisely the way of implementing TIARA with routing protocols or how to make changes to the routing algorithm in order to incurporate the technique with the current on-demand routing protocols such as AODV or DSR. Also, BFTR will not perform well when misbehaving nodes are increased and when network become heavy loaded. Therefore, there is a need in another algorithm to handle much more misbehaving nodes.
5.2. Initiatives Based on Path Selection
If an attacker or malicious node placed itself in a path between source and destination node, that path will become un-selectable when source node initiates a routing discovery process in order to avoid transmission problems. Techniques uses path selection to support MANET survivability have discussed in more details.
Byzantine attacks such as a wormhole, black-hole, flood-rushing and overlay network wormhole can be mitigated by another technique called On the Survivability of Routing Protocols in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks (ODSBR). It is an on-demand source routing protocol provides service in the presence of Byzantine attacks and it uses all available paths to deliver data to the destination node. The secure on-demand routing protocols are assumes that only authenticated nodes can be trusted are always fails to standoff such attack. ODSBR assumes that source and destination are only full trusted and other nodes can be compromised . The protocol work using three phases, each phase performs a specific task, these phases are:
Routing discovery: This phase based on a metric used to capture the history of link weight to locate the reliability of the link, where the high weights denote low reliability. Each node in the network maintains a list of link weight, when fault detected the list updated dynamically. In the route discovery, the source node always finds the lowest link weight using double flooding, per node flooding verification, and forwarding rules. The link with high weight will not be selected until it gets free of faults.
Fault localization: A secure acknowledgment sent from intermediate node along the route to verify that packets have successfully delivered to the destination without corruption. Adaptive Probing Technique (APT) used by the source node to identify faulty link and increase the link weight in the list. Link with highest weight will be avoided in the next routing selection. In APT the intermediate node sends a secure acknowledgement back to the source node beeline the route; it is a cryptographic proof for packet successfully delivering. The structure of APT helps to localize the malicious node when it causes a fault.
Link weight management: The weight of faulty links increased until sufficient numbers of acknowledgments are received, If the weight of the link is increased due to faults, this weight is maintained until destination sends enough number of correct acknowledgments [17,18].
A new strategy based on AODV protocol proposed by to mitigate the impact of link-discontinuing and reduce packet delay. The idea of proposed mechanism Survivable Routing Strategy (SRS) is used optimal exploring theory to find a new available next hop to establish a new connection if the next hop was malicious.
When establishing a new connection through an optimal exploring equation there is a node shared in both old and new link called survivable node it becomes the current node where the route to the destination node through the new link will restart from it. The vector angle between survivable node and destination will be calculated by the proposed new strategy. Vertex angle is used to increase the successful exploring probability. The proposed strategy significantly improves the performance of MANET; it increases successfully the delivery route, lower overhead, reduction end-to-end delay than traditional AODV and improves survivability of MANET. To support MANET routing survivability through a combination of preventive, reactive, and tolerant defense lines, each defense line provide security criteria and fuzzy logic correlate between them, a new scheme have proposed by . The proposed scheme based on fuzzy logic to reduce routing protocol security limitations to select the most survival path. Different criteria such as path characteristics and interaction with the data link layer are used for better path selection. To achieve path selection using fuzzy logic three phases will be involved data collection, fuzzy inference and adaptive path selection. In the first phase, check packet will collect data periodically to find node-disjoint multipath route between source and destination and collect information of the survivability level. The survivability level of each path will calculate by fuzzy logic in the fuzzy inference phase. The path with high survivability level will be selected in the path selection phase. In every time the most survival path will be selected if the path broken or if the new data collection phase occurs, this process make routing more responsive to network changes. Long-living path between source and destination is leading to MANET availability properties; it is required by many of MANET's applications today. Three different path selection algorithms have proposed by to select the best path from a set of available paths. The proposed algorithms are takes into its account for selection decision the mobility-induced impact and path lifetime. The path will be selected if its Residual Path Lifetime (RPL) long or meat its requirement. Two of the three proposed algorithm needs to compute Full link Lifetime (FLL) statistics at each node until a sufficient number of statistics collected. FLL statistics is the time length beacon takes from node A to node B, FLL histogram obtained by repeating by repeating the process. To evaluate the ability of the proposed algorithms to find the best path, two performance metrics have introduces, the first performance metric evaluate the ability of the algorithm to meet the RPL requirement. The second one evaluates the ability of the algorithm to select the path with the longest residual lifetime. The limitation of the proposed algorithms is that they are perform better in a high mobility environment only, but in low mobility environment the performance degrades significantly.
wang#title3_4:spDiscussion
Current multipath routing protocols has some limitations, it does not take into account different selection parameters. It considers only two or three number of selection criteria and a few of them considers about security issue. Due to MANET characteristics depending on security criteria only, it is not enough to supporting survivability using path selection. ODSBR has some overhead represented in the presence of Byzantine attacks it requires bidirectional flooding to guarantee correct route. When comparing to AODV, ODSBR transmit more packets than AODV which it is transmitted route request and route replay while AODV transmit only route request. When the number of adversaries increasing, the overhead of ODSBR increase while the overhead of AODV decrease. Also, the performance decrease when need to handle with a large number of faulty links.
5.3. Initiatives Based on Attack Detection & Location
Detection and localization of adversarial nodes in the network are the important aspects in the most of the survivability initiatives. After detection of malicious node or suspicious activity in MANET, it is important to locate it to avoid the path contains that suspicious activity. The following discussed initiatives are using detection and location to support MANET routing survivability. There are two effective methods have done to prevent rushing attacks, one have done in 2003 by and the other one in 2011 by Al-shahrani . A component based on route discovery called Rushing Attack Prevention (RAP) proposed to detect rushing attack . It can be integrated with the existing on-demand routing protocols (AODV and DSR). The proposed prevention technique RAP consist of three techniques works together to defend against rushing attack, these techniques are:
1) Secure Neighbor Detection (SND);
2) Secure Route Delegation (SRD);
3) Randomized Route Request Forwarding (RRRF).
This technique discussed and solved a special type of rushing attack when the attacker forwards a route request beyond the normal range of transmission using higher power level; in this case the first technique of the presented protocol, SND allows both sender and target nodes to verify that they are in the normal range. The on-demand routing protocols included implicitly a neighbor detection but it does not preventing attacker from simply replaying it. SND prevent attacker from introducing any nodes that are out of normal transmission range from introducing themselves as neighbors and preventing attacker from claiming that it is a neighbor. SRD technique used to verify that SND steps performed between adjacent pairs of nodes. The third technique RRRF used to complement the two mentioned techniques to completely prevent rushing attack is Randomized Message Forwarding which preventing attacker from dominate all routes. New approaches for wireless ad hoc network have proposed to become more tolerant against flooding attacks and other intrusions launched by attacker. The approach depends on taking advantage of existing application capability to handle intruders. The approach suggested a Resource Allocation Mechanism (RAM) implemented with the wireless router through a suggested component . The approach assumes that MANET is divided into two virtual sets, resource domain and user domain. It is built of a multilevel of trust and network mechanism for resource recovery and allocation. Each activity in the network has a trust level assigned by resources. To maximize the use and minimize the costapplications can allocate resources using a distributed scheme and based on the activity and trust level. At each node only a portion of resources is allocated for each application. Each node maintains a firewall table, each table consist of a list of packets passing through it whether they delivered successfully or not. After handshake between source node and destination node the firewall table of each node updated automatically if packets delivery failed. The MANET is protected against flooding attack though a distributed firewall. The proposed scheme uses wireless ad hoc routing and wireless GRID computing and based on managing a multi trust levels in a real time it offers fault and intrusion tolerant services. In order to support MANET routing protocol survivability to mitigate different types of routing attacks including (DoS), Geng and Zou proposes a new routing mechanism based on Common Neighbor Listening (CNL). The mechanism assumes that in MANET any two different nodes have the same neighbor called common neighbor and changing of the neighbor not much. To evaluate nodes and classifies them whether they are malicious or legitimate, each node has a trust_value and maintains a list of trust_values of other nodes; this value increases quickly and decreases slowly depending on its behavior. The node which has bigger trust_value is the first one has a higher priority to listen. If the route to the destination is lost the common neighbor node search for another route to continue delivering the packets . Al-Shahrani proposes two mechanisms to help MANET to survive in the presence of rushing attacks by reducing the overhead and delaying time in SDSR routing protocol. He supposes two problems countering SDSR and proposes their solutions. The first supposed problem is that there are three positions of attackers in the network causing rushing attack. The first problem, the impact of the attacker is differ depending on their position, if the attacker is near the source or destination, the impact will be highly harmful, otherwise the impact will reduced. In this case, Al-Shahrani proposes a solution called safe neighbor, this solution depend on blacklist technique, the source node sends request packet which the source and destination has the address of this packet, so neighbor node of the sender node which deliver the requested packet in a required time will be listed in a whitelist; if there is some delay the node will be listed in a gray list, otherwise it will be listed in a blacklist.
The second problem, if there are many senders node to many destinations node at the same time, this will lead to collision or significant delay then rushing attack. The suggested solution to solve this problem is a new algorithm to prevent nodes from holding more packets in its queue to prevent packet delay. The proposed algorithm will reduce time required by SDSR by half and reduce the overhead in the network .
wang#title3_4:spDiscussion
Detection and localization of malicious node and suspicious activities by previous discussed initiatives are implemented using different techniques: SND, SRD, RRRF, RAM, CNL, and blacklist.
Some shortages related to some proposed techniques; for RAP technique it is defends against special type of rushing attack as mentioned above; also it incurs higher overhead than other route discovery techniques, but it provides a usable route discovery than other do.
The mechanism proposed by Geng and Zou, has no overhead to the normal operation of MANET, but it has some deficiencies, if all the common neighbors are under the hold_value of being trusted then there will be no trusted route to the destination.
6. Discussion and Open Points
As we can see, all the presented initiatives are aimed to mitigate the impact of DoS attacks and keep MANET survivable and continue providing its services in the presence of attacks. All proposed techniques are implemented in the existing routing protocols and consist of set of techniques works together, each technique perform specific function. By studying these initiatives we found that all proposed solutions are based on one or more of previous discussed techniques, these techniques are: authentication, resource allocation, neighbor detection, route discovery, fault localization, link weight management, trust level, exploring theory, and blacklist technique. All mentioned techniques can be classified into three main categories: authentication, path selection, and attack location and detection.
All proposed approaches and techniques are aims to mitigate the impact of DoS attacks or detecting it, it has some deficiencies which make them fail in some cases such as in strong and colluding attacks, or when MANET exposed to heavy load, which make MANET still in problem. Table 1 summarizes all previous discussed techniques. Table 2 summarizes the above-mentioned approaches and which attacks defend against.
All discussed initiatives are using a set of existing techniques to perform survivability goals for MANET which causes some of main deficiencies. Deficiencies can be summarized for more investigation as open points:
Overhead reduction: Most initiatives cause additional overhead in MANET because of using a set of existing techniques. Reducing of overhead can be accessed by efficient use of these techniques depending on current MANET status.
Security features: Most of proposed techniques are implemented with AODV routing protocols which is not supporting security features such as SAODV. Taking the
Table 1. Summarize of MANET survivability initiatives.
security into account can provide better performance for used techniques.
Hybrid attacks consideration: as discussed in Section 4.3, there are passive attacks sometimes work as active attacks, for better support to MANET survivability, this type of attack should be taken into consideration in the future survivability solutions.
7. Conclusion
Because of the widespread use of MANET applications
Table 2. Approaches and attacks.
today’s, different types of attacks have developed as well. The traditional defenses techniques are not enough to defend against all types of attacks mentioned above, so this survey have discussed a group of techniques that can help MANET to defend against these new types of attacks. We have discussed the most important and valuable initiatives techniques and approaches that proposed to keep MANET survive and provide its services in the existence of active attacks, also we highlight the deficiencies of these initiatives and attacks which it can defend against.
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- B. Awerbuch, D. Holmer, C. Nita-Rotaru and H. Rubens, “An On-Demand Secure Routing Protocol Resilient to Byzantine Failures,” ACM Workshop on Wireless Security, 2002.
- D.-Y. Qin, L. Ma, X.-J. Sha and Y.-B. Xu, “An Effective Survivable Routing Strategy for MANET,” Tamkang Journal of Science and Engineering, Vol. 14, No. 1, 2011, pp. 71-80.
- M. N. Lima, H. W. da Silva, et al., “Survival Multipath Routing for MANETs,” IEEE of Network Operations and Management Symposium, Salvador, 7-11 April 2008, pp. 425-432. doi:10.1109/NOMS.2008.4575164
- E. Y. Hua and Z. J. Haas, “Path Selection Algorithms in Homogeneous Mobile Ad Hoc Networks,” Proceedings of the 2006 International Conference on Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing, New York, 2006, pp. 275-280.
- Y.-C. Hu, A. Perrig, et al., “Rushing Attacks and Defense in Wireless Ad Hoc Network Routing Protocols,” Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Workshop on Wireless Security, San Diego, 2003, pp. 30-40.
- A. S. Al Shahrani, “Rushing Attack in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks,” 3rd International Conference on Intelligent Networking and Collaborative Systems, Fukuoka, 30 November-2 December 2011, pp. 752-758. doi:10.1109/INCoS.2011.145
- N. A. Boudriga and M. S. Obaidat, “Fault and Intrusion Tolerance in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks,” IEEE of Wireless Communications and Networking Conference, Vol. 4, 2005, pp. 2281-2286. doi:10.1109/WCNC.2005.1424871
- P. Geng and C. Zou, “Routing Attacks and Solutions in Mobile Ad hoc Networks,” International Conference on Communication Technology, Guilin, 27-30 November 2006, pp. 1-4. | https://file.scirp.org/Html/3-9701740_29848.htm |
FINANCE Minister Mthuli Ncube has urged banks to relax their stringent lending requirements in order to improve access to financial services.
Kuda Chideme
Ncube was speaking at the Zimbabwe Independent’s Banks and Banking Survey, which was launched last Thursday.
The survey, whose analysis focussed on key ratios as well as balance sheet size and profitability, was held under the theme Financial Inclusion: Banking the Unbanked.
Ncube said government in collaboration with financial sector regulators would continue to promote an enabling environment that allows financial institutions to be innovative, while ensuring that the financial system remains safe and sound.
“Financial inclusion serves as a critical pathway for uplifting the lives of under-served and marginalised people in our country, through unlocking opportunities for stakeholders that include women and youth by expanding access to savings, credit, insurance, capital markets and payment systems,” Ncube said.
“An inclusive financial sector has the catalytic effect of helping the nation to diversify the economy and boost sectors such as agriculture, tourism and manufacturing. When more people save and transact through formal financial institutions, the country will have more resources to invest in various sectors of the economy and, in turn, create the much-needed jobs as well as reduce poverty. Access to financial services is often the first step in allowing the poor and marginalised to flourish”.
The survey revealed that the banking sector was in rude health, as most institutions registered growth in loans, deposits and assets
During the period under review all but just one bank reported strong profits in the interim.
The total number of bank accounts has continued to increase on the back of an increase in low-cost accounts, as banks heed calls by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) to open low-cost accounts with light Know Your Customer requirements.
“Government further complemented implementation of the Financial Inclusion Strategy through various reforms including access to credit by the majority of the population through the establishment of a collateral registry for movable assets, streamlining processes involved in starting a business, obtaining construction permits and trading across borders among others,” Ncube said.
“Furthermore, government, through the RBZ, has also rolled out production and empowerment facilities to the tune of US$238,30 million and US$451,51 million respectively as at August 31, 2018, targeted at women and youth.”
CABS emerged the top-performing bank with CBZ coming second, followed by First Capital Bank. NMB was voted the people’s choice in a poll conducted online.
Ecobank won the award for the most cost-efficient bank. | https://www.theindependent.co.zw/2018/12/07/ncube-tells-banks-to-relax-lending-policies/ |
Discussion Focus Area:
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Risk-based pricing in banking
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Industry initiatives to de-risk borrowers, enhance access to credit
Overview:
According to KIPPRA, domestic trade which includes wholesale and retail activities contributes about 10 per cent to Kenya’s GDP. The sector is a significant source of job creation, accounting for approximately 16 per cent and 60 per cent of the country’s formal and informal employment, respectively. Externally, Kenya has been dominant in the export of agricultural commodities, textiles and apparel. Through enabling policies and increased investment to expand domestic, regional and international trade, there are opportunities to sustain growth of the sector.The banking industry, through the Kenya Bankers Association, has continued to champion initiatives geared towards promoting financial inclusion by facilitating access to credit for all sectors of the economy. The initiatives include the Inuka Enterprise Programme, which has continued to build capacity among MSMEs. Launched in 2018, the free-of-charge programme features modules designed to enable participants to run their businesses more efficiently, enhancing credit levels of access to formal credit. Online platform https://inukasme.co.ke/
Meanwhile, the industry has been on the forefront in creating products customised for MSME clients, inspired by the unique needs of the enterprises. It is the ambition of the banking industry to continue facilitating enterprise development because thriving businesses are the building blocks of a vibrant economy.
The aim of these interventions is to address both the cost and access to credit. From 2016 to 2019, the industry grappled with the limitations induced by interest rate caps, particularly in the area of risk-based pricing. With the removal of interest rate controls, the industry has continued to champion risk-based pricing. This means that banks can price loans in line with a borrowers’ risk profiles, enhancing access to credit.
A component of risk-based pricing models and the credit information sharing mechanism, credit scoring is a key focus area for borrowers from both the perspective of pricing and access to the various products offered by banks.
|Kihara Maina|
|CEO|
|I & M|
Mr Kihara Maina joined I&M Bank as the Chief Executive Officer and Board member in May 2016. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Moi University and an Executive MBA from the University of Chicago – Booth School of Business. Mr Maina, began his banking career in June 1993 at Stanbic Bank Kenya then moved to Barclays Bank Kenya in 1997 where he served extensively over the years ultimately taking up senior leadership positions. Prior to joining I&M Bank, Kihara was the Managing Director of Barclays Bank Tanzania. | https://chat.kba.co.ke/index.php?r=chat/details&id=52 |
The Ministry of Finance is the financial sector policymaker. Lesotho’s regulatory system hinges on the Central Bank of Lesotho (CBL), which is responsible for regulating banks and non-banking financial institutions (NBFIs), including credit-only and deposit-taking microfinance institutions (MFIs), financial leasing institutions, insurers, money lenders, money transfer operators, the credit bureau and others. NBFIs are supervised and regulated within the Non-Banks Supervision Division (NBSD), which is also charged with implementing projects aimed at building financial infrastructure, fostering financial inclusion and improving access to finance.
The primary instrument of regulatory legislation is the Financial Institutions Act (FIA) of 2012, which establishes the CBL as the regulator of banks and a wide range of NBFIs. The Payments Systems Act (2014) enabled the CBL to exercise oversight of the payment systems and provide modernised methods of payment, covering interbank payment systems, clearing houses and securities settlement systems, as well as collateral and netting arrangements.
Since its launch in 2006, the Lesotho Wire (LSW) has been the backbone of the payment and settlement system in the country. In 2016, this system continued to process and settle significant interbank transactions – a total of 23 917 transactions valued at approximately M34.26 billion compared with 27 683 transactions to the tune of M28.06 billion processed and settled in 2015. While this represents a decline in terms of transaction volumes, at the same time transaction values have grown by 22 percent.
Three of Lesotho’s commercial banks – Standard Lesotho Bank, Nedbank and First National Bank – are foreign-owned, being subsidiaries of South African banks and serving the formal sector, mainly medium and large corporate enterprises and salaried employees in urban and peri-urban areas. Most bank credit to households takes the form of personal loans related to salaries, but mortgage finance is also growing. The local, state-owned Lesotho PostBank is more development-focused and concentrates its activities in rural areas.
Commercial banks are concentrated in the capital city of Maseru, and while the distribution of ATMs is improving, they are mainly found in urban centres and the Lesotho lowlands. Despite the small size of the banking industry, the number of branches has increased significantly, from 44 in 2013 to 76 in 2016. Furthermore, the number of ATMs has risen to 194, while the number of Point of Sale (POS) terminals now stands at 1 339.
Economic and financial cooperation in the region is vital, and Lesotho is actively involved in the activities of various regional and international organisations. This includes, among others, the Common Monetary Area (CMA), along with Namibia, Swaziland and South Africa, and also the Southern African Customs Union (SACU), Southern African Development Community (SADC), International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank.
Bilateral and multilateral monetary agreements exist between Lesotho and South Africa. Lesotho’s national currency, the Loti, is fixed at par with the South African Rand, which is also legal tender in Lesotho. Benefits arising from the CMA arrangement include macroeconomic stability and the elimination of exchange rate risk between Lesotho and South Africa. However, it also poses some challenges for Lesotho, particularly with regard to synchronising fiscal and monetary policies.
The Central Bank expects financial and insurance activities to register an average growth rate of 6.5 percent over the 2016-2018 period, as it reaps the rewards of ongoing financial sector reforms geared towards improving access to credit and financial inclusion.
According to the FinMark Trust report ‘Making Access Possible’, financial inclusion in Lesotho is relatively high, largely due to the coverage and operation of the informal sector which is used by 62.4 percent of the adult population. The most common financial service providers include non-bank credit institutions, registered money lenders, NGOs, Savings and Credit Cooperatives (SACCOs), Village Savings and Loan Associations, Rural Savings and Credit Groups, and unregistered money lenders (Machonisas). This high level of inclusion is also driven by very high usage of insurance, primarily funeral insurance (formal as well as informal), which covers 62 percent of adults, with a further 23 percent having another form of formal financial service.
As a result, Lesotho’s financial exclusion was just 19.1 percent of adult Basotho at the end of 2016. This figure compares favourably with 27 percent for South Africa, 31 percent in Namibia, and 33 percent for Botswana. However, the report also shows that Lesotho ranks the lowest amongst SACU member state on access to banking services at 38 percent.
Financial inclusion and literacy are known to be catalysts for financial education and stability in both developed and developing countries. The objective of enhancing financial inclusion is to reduce vulnerability and increase income in the wider economy, thereby enhancing poverty reduction, employment and growth. Lack of access to credit and savings, and poor payment mechanisms from formal service providers, have been identified as some of the main challenges in Lesotho’s financial sector.
In an effort to achieve greater national financial inclusion, the CBL has received technical assistance from the World Bank FIRST initiative in addressing issues related to MFIs, SACCOs, mobile financial services, and partial credit guarantee programmes. According to the World Bank, Lesotho lacks adequate regulatory and supervisory frameworks for MFIs. Similarly, SACCOs are highly fragmented and inadequately managed and supervised because the CBL has limited supervisory capacity and no legal foundation for oversight. The legal requirements for banks that use agents are much stricter and more inconsistent than are regulations for mobile network operators that provide mobile money services.
Consumer protection is an area of particular concern, especially because Lesotho lacks the appropriate legal framework. In addition, the country’s partial credit guarantee programmes, which are intended to serve small and medium enterprises, have not had sufficient impact because of deficiencies in the programmes’ design, lack of institutional capacity to implement the schemes, and ineffective governance.
With lack of access to financing being one of the most limiting constraints faced by the private sector, Government committed in the 2017/18 budget speech to implement the Financial Inclusion Strategy. This seeks to: increase access to financial products and services in the rural areas by bringing access points closer; deepen the usage of financial products across a wide spectrum of instruments; and increase the take-up and effective use of mobile money and digital finance products and services, especially where such products and services are more affordable.
The CBL, with the assistance of the World Bank under the FIRST Initiative, has been reviewing the Deposit Taking and Credit Only MFIs Regulations with the aim of creating an appropriate legal and regulatory framework.
In the coming months, Government plans to set up a committee to develop proposals on lending to start-ups and small businesses. This committee will also review the two government partial risk guarantee schemes which have to date fallen short of expectations.
The Financial Leasing Regulations were enacted into law in 2013. However, no players have yet entered the industry. The CBL is pursuing the development of the leasing market by undertaking market research and reviewing the legal framework with a view to identifying and reducing barriers to entry.
The Bank is also implementing a Financial Education and Literacy programme, working in collaboration with major stakeholders in the financial sector. This involves activities such as the Annual Money Month Event which promotes knowledge and understanding among Basotho on financial matters.
In September 2017 the CBL launched its new website, which has an enhanced look and feel and makes it easier for clients to access information as well as providing additional opportunities for interaction and communication between the bank and its strategic stakeholders.
In 2016, Shoprite Lesotho in collaboration with Standard Lesotho Bank launched the Shoprite Domestic Money Transfer Service in Lesotho. This was after witnessing the successful launch of Shoprite cross-border Money Transfer Service for inbound remittances in the previous year, and its significant uptake by Basotho working and residing in South Africa.
In addition, the transaction volumes and values of mobile money in Lesotho have grown significantly over the years since the service was launched in 2012. In 2016, these systems collectively processed a total of 29.69 million transactions worth about M4.21 billion compared with 16.76 million transactions valued at approximately M1.95 billion in 2015. This represents growth of approximately 77.0 percent in transaction volumes and 116 percent in transaction values.
The CBL’s credit bureau project has seen the promulgation of the Data Protection Act (2011) and the Credit Reporting Act (2012), with the Credit Reporting Regulations of 2014 laying the foundation for the establishment of the credit bureau, which commenced operations in August 2014. During 2016 the focus was directed at improving data coverage in the Bureau and building supervisory and regulatory frameworks within the Central Bank.
The SADC Credit Information Sharing (CIS) project, initiated and supported by FinMark Trust, also began in 2014. This saw a partnership between the Ministry of Finance as the policy maker and project custodian on the ground, the CBL, the credit bureau and the credit providers themselves, who have been working together to improve the credit information sharing environment in the country.
The ease of ‘Getting Credit’ in Lesotho has improved tremendously in the World Bank’s ‘Doing Business’ rankings, rising from 152nd place in 2016 to 82nd in 2017 and 77th in 2018, thanks to the establishment of the country’s first credit bureau and its subsequent expansion in coverage.
Under the CMA arrangement, the CBL is involved in maintaining the peg between the Loti and the Rand. The Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meets to consider global and domestic economic conditions, global financial market conditions, net international reserves (NIR) developments and outlook in order to determine the NIR target floor (the level of NIR below which the parity of the Loti and the Rand would be compromised) and the CBL Rate.
The introduction of the CBL Rate in December 2015 was the first pillar of the three-pillar monetary policy framework improvement project. The rate, which was introduced at 6.25 percent, is meant to serve as a reference and anchor for domestic interest rates, ensuring that the cost of borrowing is aligned with domestic developments and thus helping the bank to maintain price stability.
The second pillar of the project, which entailed development of an active liquidity management model, was completed in 2016. The model uses the autonomous components of the Bank’s balance sheet that influence the liquidity of the banking sector. In-sample tests and dry runs of the model were conducted, and its performance was satisfactory. The model data requirements were finalised and the full roll-out of active liquidity management began in 2017.
At the meeting of the Central Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee on 29 November 2017 it was decided to increase the NIR target floor from US $700 million to US $745 million and maintain the CBL rate at 6.75 percent per annum.
Interest rates in Lesotho follow the same trend as those in South Africa. The prime lending rate has remained stable and was set at 7 percent in mid-2017, in line with that of South Africa, dropping to 6.75 percent in November 2017. The commercial bank prime lending rate averaged 11.7 percent from June to December 2016, while the deposit rate has remained unchanged at 3.5 percent. The large margin between the lending and the deposit rates implies low lending by commercial banks, despite high demand for start-up and working capital. By the end of 2016 the 91 day Treasury Bill rate had increased to 6.58 percent.
4.3 months in September 2017.
Money supply increased by 8.5 percent in September 2017, compared with an increase of 0.7 percent realised in June 2017. The rise in money supply was due to a 13.3 percent surge in domestic claims, coupled with a 4.2 percent increase in net foreign assets. Credit to the private sector grew by 3.8 percent during the third quarter of 2017, up from the 1.3 percent recorded in the second quarter. This follows an improvement in credit extended to households that offset a fall in credit to business enterprises.
By mid-2017, total private sector credit by commercial banks in Lesotho was approximately M5.6 billion, which is about 23.7 percent of GDP. The equivalent in Botswana is 32.3 percent of GDP, while Swaziland is about 21.6 percent of GDP. However, M5.6 billion is not enough to drive private sector growth, and there are viable businesses with strong growth potential which are unable to borrow from banks any further because they are highly leveraged.
The industry’s total assets amounted to M13.2 billion in December 2016, with the sector largely dominated by foreign subsidiaries, which accounted for 97 percent of assets. Four-fifth of total banking sector assets are concentrated in the top two banks. The first half of 2016 saw the industry’s total assets increasing due to growth in financial intermediation, while total assets dropped in the second half of the year due to a decline in balances with South African banks and investment securities.
According to the CBL in its 2016 Annual Report, the banking industry remained profitable during the year, with banks utilising their resources efficiently to generate income. Return of Equity (ROE) increased significantly, by 20.67 percentage points to 61.5 percent. The increase in the ratio was as a result of a rise in net income across the industry. However, Return of Assets (ROA) remained relatively unchanged. The ratio of net interest margin to gross income was 58.0 percent in 2016 – a marginal decrease compared with 2015. The ratio of non-interest expense to gross income rose from 52.2 percent in 2015 to 54.7 percent 2016. This shows that administration expenses relative to income increased during the year, although this was offset by growth in gross income.
In respect of asset quality, Non-Performing Loans (NPLs) management improved during 2016, as the ratio of NPLs to total gross loans declined by 0.3 percentage points to 3.6 percent and the ratio of large exposures to capital decreased by 26.4 percentage points to 124.5 percent. The ratio of liquid assets to short-term liabilities dropped from 63.5 percent in 2015 to 52.4 percent in 2016, while the ratio of liquid assets to total assets declined by 9.0 percentage points from to 31.4 percent recorded in 2015.
The customer deposit to total (non-interbank) loans ratio is a measure of liquidity that compares the stable deposit base with gross loans, excluding interbank activity. In 2016, the ratio was 149.4 percent, reflecting a drop of 13.9 percentage points from the ratio observed in 2015. This was due to a decline in customer deposits during the year.
The banks’ exposure to foreign risk, measured by the net open position in foreign exchange to capital, increased in 2016 to 42.0 percent against 18.6 percent in 2015 as a result of an increase in assets denominated in foreign currencies.
Standard Lesotho Bank is proud to have been in the country for 24 years and still continuing to be the leading financial service provider for many individuals, organisations and the Government of Lesotho. The bank’s relationship with the Government is founded on a strong heritage that has been largely underpinned by mutual trust and cooperation, with the common goal of providing value for Basotho. Standard Lesotho Bank was born of the merger of Standard Bank and Lesotho Bank (1999) back in 2006, and Standard Bank Group is the majority shareholder, with the Government of Lesotho and Lesotho Unit Trust owning the remaining shares.
Standard Lesotho Bank prides itself on being not just a bank but a financial partner that continues to change the game of banking to Lesotho’s advantage. It continuously engages clients with the aim of understanding their needs and hearing their voice. With the feedback received, the bank has heeded the clarion call from Basotho to refocus its efforts and add more impetus on developing entrepreneurship, which is widely regarded as a golden key for unlocking the way towards the economic emancipation of every Mosotho. The bank has thus opened another chapter to take entrepreneurship to the next level. Understanding the economy and appreciating the fact that Lesotho’s growth trajectory largely depends on the pioneering spirit of its own entrepreneurs, the bank has not only partnered with Basotho to make entrepreneurship real, but has also carved out a roadmap that is set to take local businesses to greater heights.
His Majesty King Letsie III with the winner of the Nedbank Mohokare Golf Classic 2017, Ms. Motselisi Ramakoae, the first lady winner ever. With her are previous years’ winners.
During 2017, the bank opened its doors to the new Enterprise Banking facility, situated at Maseru Mall. Bigger and better, the facility also accommodates an ever increasing number of entrepreneurs, who visit the bank for an array of financial services as well as expert advice from a team of seasoned business bankers who are dependable and reliable.
Enterprise Banking features Enterprise Direct, which provides Business Banking via the telephone or email. Enterprise Banking is all about convenience, and its operating model is premised on the understanding that time is a valuable commodity in the world of entrepreneurship. Instead of spending time at the bank, entrepreneurs are now able to spend more time on their shop floors or closing deals, whilst their day-to-day financial services are handled by banking professionals over the phone or via email.
Housed within Enterprise Banking there is another innovation aptly called the Enterprise Hub, which provides the requisite resources for budding entrepreneurs in order to help them realise their dreams. It is a meeting venue, a research hub and a networking area, fully equipped with workstations that have free internet and WiFi. The Enterprise Hub is there to bridge the gap for start-up businesses and new ventures that do not have office facilities and meeting rooms.
When it comes to changing the game in the lives of unemployed youth, the bank continues to grow the Bacha Entrepreneurship Project, which is undertaken in collaboration with BEDCO and the Lesotho Revenue Authority (LRA). The project targets unemployed graduates with the aim of transforming them into entrepreneurs that can bring value to Lesotho’s economy and employ other youths. Now in its third year of operation, the project has so far established about nine youth companies that have shared around M1.5 million to invest in their new business ventures which are currently in operation.
These are just glimpses of the many game changing initiatives that demonstrate Standard Lesotho Bank’s commitment to the entrepreneurial drive that is needed to grow Lesotho’s economy and improve the welfare of its citizens. The bank is prepared to invest handsomely in developing entrepreneurship going into the future. This commitment is demonstrated in the investment of more than M3 million in charitable courses and life-changing sponsorships that instil the spirit of hope in Lesotho’s people. This is because, as the largest bank in Lesotho and with a footprint encompassing all ten districts, more than a business the bank also sees itself as a local and community bank that understands the challenges of the people. Standard Lesotho Bank fully appreciates the value of its brand as a leading financial services provider and leverages on this to grow and partner with Basotho as they build their own legacies.
Nedbank continues to strengthen its innovation drive to cater for clients’ specific needs through a variety of banking and financial solutions. It offers a range of personal, SME, business and corporate banking and financial services, including: transactional and current accounts; electronic and mobile banking; private banking; savings and investments; and short-term and long term finance such as overdrafts, personal loans, vehicle finance, home loans and business loans.
The bank’s specialised expertise in business and property finance allows it to be a partner to business and corporate clients and offer specialised financial advice, which results in business growth and success. For corporates, the bank also offers unique solutions in trade finance, money market, foreign exchange trade and sales, and funding. For servicing of SMEs, Nedbank holds the pioneering position of being the first bank to create a full SME unit, which still operates today from Maseru branches and the Northern and Southern regions to meet the unique needs of local enterprises.
In its bid to continue to bring better value banking, Nedbank Lesotho has significantly expanded its offerings and simplified banking for its clients, with innovations that also bring more convenient electronic and self-service banking channels, including the new Nedbank Mobile Banking App, as well as a wide network of ATMs, POS terminals at key retailers, strategically located branches, and unique Sunday banking services at Pioneer Mall for more convenient around-the-clock banking.
The large investment in the bank’s new core banking system has enabled Nedbank to expand its product and services portfolio for the local market, and offer improved value propositions to existing and prospective clients. This has facilitated simplified and transparent pricing with the implementation of real-time billing on transactions, thereby helping to improve clients’ banking and financial management; new bundled products and value adds for entry level, middle income and working professionals, and private banking clients; as well as new mobile banking with value added services, including airtime and electricity purchases.
The bank’s upgraded electronic banking service allows registered clients to transfer funds and make payments, get electronic account statements (e-statements) and do LRA tax payments with convenience and security, anywhere at any time. This enhancement has been further expanded to corporate and business clients to enable efficient business account management. Nedbank remains the only bank that offers a local credit card for personal, business and corporate clients.
A phantom share scheme (Seshoai) for Nedbank Lesotho staff to create a constructive workplace and empower staff members to become and deliver their best.
Key corporate social investment (CSI) initiatives and sponsorships that include – the Royal Education Development Fund, Queens’ National Trust Fund, Hlokomela Banana ‘Care for Girls’ Project, youth and career days for high school and tertiary students, the annual Menkhoaneng Moshoeshoe Walk, the annual Nedbank Mohokare Golf Classic, support to the Red Cross and Rotary International in Lesotho, and initiatives by other corporate partners. Nedbank has embedded efforts that go towards the development of education, promotion and protection of heritage, the arts, sports development, entrepreneurship, and improved health delivery and social development projects for key beneficiaries and target groups.
First National Bank of Lesotho (FNBL) has an array of digital banking platforms – FNB Banking App, FNB Online, eWallet and Cellphone banking platforms, as well as cross-border payments which enable real time transacting 24/7 – all adding convenience, time-saving and effectiveness. While increasing FNB Lesotho’s footprint beyond branch banking, the bank’s strategy remains to heighten the use of innovation and technology by being available, visible and locally relevant.
FNB Lesotho is available via branches in Maseru, Mafeteng, Teyateyaneng (TY), Hlotse, Maputsoe, Botha-Bothe and Mokhotlong. It also has ATMs countrywide to support its digital strategy to bring banking solutions closer to communities. FNBL continues to expand the availability of fully functional ATMs throughout Lesotho, along with the new Slimline Mini ATMs which can be placed at retail merchants across the country. Its latest offerings are an ATM with cash deposit-taking technology, and the Cash Deposita: an interactive safe that enables businesses to safely make deposits which automatically reflect in their bank accounts without the need to travel to FNB.
The different FNBL personal bank accounts encompass a broader product offering, from the future-forward account for the toddler to the Private Wealth account for the elite. Beyond the strong Retail Banking offerings, FNBL offers Home Loans, Premier Banking Suite, Business Banking Suite, as well as Corporate and Investment Banking based at Pioneer Mall, Maseru. Vehicle and Asset Finance is another major offering. WesBank, which is well known for financing machinery ranging from farming to office equipment, also has the know-how to finance anything with a serial number, thus enabling businesses to run and operate without hindrances.
The Lesotho PostBank (LPB) was incorporated in 2014, is 100 percent owned by the Lesotho Government and prides itself on being an indigenous bank managed wholly by Basotho. It was founded to provide banking services to under-banked and unbanked Basotho in both rural and urban areas, and remains committed to its mandate of answering the challenge of financial exclusion in the country.
It is licensed by the Central Bank of Lesotho and commenced operations by offering mainly savings products. In 2010, it diversified into lending; in 2012 electronic transacting services were introduced, and by 2014 it had started to be profitable. To date, the PostBank has rolled out 14 branches and 10 ATMs, and utilised both book-based and card modes for transacting.
Since beginning operations, LPB has attracted a substantial diverse client base, and has segmented products to meet those distinct portfolios. Other services include mobile top-up and local and regional money transfers, to mention but a few.
In 2017, LPB took a giant leap in fulfilling its mission to provide modern banking services to its customers at affordable rates by upgrading its core banking system. The upgrade commenced in September 2016 and was launched in May 2017. The upgraded system will enable the bank to offer improved and new products, SMS notifications and security features to give the customer peace of mind and more.
Due to the upgraded system, the bank will introduce other banking platforms such as Europay MasterCard and Visa (EMV), Internet and Mobile Banking as well as Agency Banking. These platforms will enable LPB to provide its existing and potential customers with advanced and diverse banking capabilities.
The insurance sector in Lesotho is small but growing rapidly. Its penetration is relatively high and substantially above the African average (excluding South Africa). This is mainly because of the popularity of funeral policies, with funeral insurance a major financial inclusion driver. Although the industry is expanding compared with the rest of the economy, its regulatory framework and supervision are still weak and have some gaps.
The insurance industry deals with both long-term and short-term insurance, and is the most-consumed financial service in Lesotho for nearly all target groups, contributing significantly to financial inclusion. Around 62 percent of the adult population has some form of insurance. Usage is significantly higher in urban areas, where formal penetration is 48.1 percent as compared with 31.8 percent in rural areas. In turn, informal-only is much higher in the rural areas (30 percent) than for urban dwellers (11.4 percent).
Total assets of the general insurance business in Lesotho were approaching M500 million by the second quarter of 2017 from just under M400 million in the corresponding quarter of 2016.
The Insurance Act of 2014 provides for the consolidation, administration, supervision, regulation, protection and development of the insurance business in Lesotho. It was developed with the aim of meeting the demands of the economy for risk-management and stimulation of growth in the investment sector. It also tackled the development of the micro-insurance subsector to improve upon the previous Insurance Act (1976) which was marked by excessive rigidities. An applicable regulatory framework was drawn up to promote participation and new entrants, as well as facilitate supervision.
One of the CBL’s areas of focus in 2016 was the reform of insurance sector regulations, and the Bank began a review of the Insurance Act of 2014. A central feature of this review process is to strengthen the governance framework for insurance companies and help to accommodate risk-based supervision. Amendments will be made in the areas of: corporate governance; solvency; risk management; consumer protection; inclusion of annuities as a class of long-term insurance and micro-insurance; and the introduction of a crisis management regime. In order to support the current regulatory regime, seven sets of Insurance Regulations were published in 2016. These include, among others, regulations on solvency, and financial reporting good practice for insurers and intermediaries.
Metropolitan is the leading provider of life insurance and healthcare solutions in Lesotho, and has over 50 years of experience in providing Basotho with affordable and innovative insurance cover and investment solutions. A subsidiary company of MMI Holdings Limited, which is listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and boasts more than a century of life assurance experience, Metropolitan Lesotho represents a consolidation of the previous business operations of Metropolitan Life in the Kingdom of Lesotho.
A keen contributor to the social and economic development of Lesotho, Metropolitan is a socially responsible citizen helping Basotho improve their lives and the lives of future generations. Its client base is as diverse as the colourful people of this beautiful country, and Metropolitan is proud to be the primary provider of life and health insurance to the following sectors: teaching, essential and protection services, the mining industry, the civil service, construction and agriculture.
Metropolitan believes financial literacy and the right advice is key when it comes to making decisions about money, and it strives to service customers with a suite of innovative, appropriate and affordable financial solutions. Whether clients are buying their first home, saving for their child’s education, planning their retirement or needing funeral cover for a loved one, Metropolitan has a financial solution to meet their unique needs. A team of dedicated representatives is committed to guiding clients in understanding each aspect and benefit of their policy, as well as finding the best solution to suit their pocket.
Alliance Insurance Company takes pride in operating in the remarkable country of Lesotho. Alliance opened its doors in 1993, operating out of a small two-roomed rented office, and from these humble beginnings has grown to be the company of note it is today. With branches in all ten districts of Lesotho, as well as other satellite branches in busy areas such as Maputsoe, Kingsway Thola-Tu and Pioneer mall, Alliance can boast about being the most accessible insurance company in Lesotho.
Furthermore, Alliance has invested in Lesotho’s infrastructural development, with buildings that have contributed towards making Maseru into an attractive business district with the requisite facilities needed by the private sector, parastatals, NGOs and other institutions. Lately the company has branched out to leave its footprint in other districts as well, opening the Ha Makhakhe Shopping Centre in Mokhotlong, which is the first of its kind in the district. This brings long awaited services to the people of this district that was once considered too remote. Job creation goes hand in hand with this kind of development, and hundreds of Basotho in Mokhotlong have benefited directly, either during the building process or through attaining more permanent jobs when the facility became operational. The next project on Alliance’s agenda is the construction of Mohale’s Hoek Shopping Centre.
The inaugural Alliance Sports Media Awards, the first of its kind in Lesotho, was held at Thaba Bosiu Cultural village on 4 November 2017, with the support of Alliance in collaboration with the Lesotho Sports Reporters’ Association. Alliance is intensely involved in sporting activities, and recognises the importance of acknowledging the men and women who work to deliver sports updates and news. In addition, Alliance believes that sport plays a very important role in bringing people together, and thus has a vital role to play in Lesotho’s future.
Thaba-Bosiu Risk Solutions (Pty) Ltd is one of the leading insurance brokers in Lesotho. The company has 100 percent local shareholding. Established in April 2006, it offers a wide array of insurance products that are tailor-made to meet clients’ needs. Some of the products the company offers include motor vehicle insurance, accident insurance, construction insurance, travel insurance, workmen’s insurance, professional indemnity schemes and goods in transit insurance. The company also offers group funeral schemes, retirement (pension and provident fund) schemes, group schemes (death and disability) as well as students’ medical aid.
In its mission statement, Thaba-Bosiu Risk Solutions (Pty) Ltd says it seeks to provide clients with superb coverage and claims handling through careful and diligent underwriting of risks and the provision of business-friendly solutions. The company’s excellent reputation in the market has not gone unnoticed, and it has over the last 11 years been the recipient of several awards for excellence. The company was awarded first prize in the PMR Awards that seek to reward excellence in the insurance broking sector in Lesotho, for the years 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016.
Yet it is Thaba-Bosiu Risk Solutions (Pty) Ltd’s ambitious programme to give back to the community that has set it apart from its peers. Since 2012, the company’s managing director, Matokelo Seturumane, has spearheaded a programme to give back to the community, and two rural schools in Leribe District – Boribeng Primary and Boribeng High School – have been adopted. Every September, the company gives out prizes to outstanding students, with the top student being awarded the coveted ‘white blazer’. It also gives out school shoes and food parcels to vulnerable students.
Seturumane, who grew up in Boribeng about 120 kilometres north of Maseru, says the idea is to motivate the students who come from very poor backgrounds to dream beyond their rural upbringing. For decades, children who were raised in Boribeng had very limited choices – they would either get married in their mid-teens, go to initiation school or make the long trip to work in the gold mines in South Africa. It was very rare for students, particularly girls, to break through these barriers. While much has changed in terms of infrastructure in Boribeng over the decades, the problem of girls getting married at a young age remains. Girls, some as young as 15, are still dropping out of school to get married, to the dismay of educationists and community leaders.
To counter this negative trend, in April 2017 Thaba-Bosiu Risk Solutions (Pty) Ltd launched the ‘She Heroes’ movement, a programme that seeks to discourage young girls from getting married at an early age. Every two weeks, the company’s female staff meets with girls at the school to see how best they can help them. The idea behind the She Heroes movement is to inspire young girls to become tomorrow’s leaders, snub early marriages and pursue non-traditional careers.
As part of its programmes, the company invites successful women in the business sector who are seen as role models to speak to the girls in an effort to persuade them to change tack. It is a programme that is slowly having a profound impact in shaping the thinking of female students who remain vulnerable to social pressures to get married when they are in their teens. Seturumane says their mission is to change society, one child at a time.
It is a battle that Thaba-Bosiu Risk Solutions (Pty) Ltd says it is determined to win. For instance, in early September 2017, the company in partnership with Beautiful Dreams Society (BDS), managed to ‘rescue’ a girl who had been forced into an early marriage. At the time of writing, the girl was at a BDS shelter where she was receiving counselling before being placed back in school.
The company’s phenomenal growth over the last 11 years can be attributed to its strong leadership, dedicated staff and excellent customer service.
Liberty Life Lesotho is a specialist life insurance company that provides group and individual risk insurance solutions and comprehensive health cover, offering an extensive range of products and services to help Basotho build and protect long-term wealth. The company puts the customer’s needs first by creating solutions that are simple, affordable, relevant, flexible, easily accessible and innovative, and has experience in working with and understanding the needs of customers and partners – whether individuals, small businesses, corporates or affinity groups with many members. Liberty Life Lesotho also partners with employers to enhance the lives of their most valuable assets: their employees. They believe that in times of unfortunate events, the last thing customers should worry about is finances.
Liberty Life Lesotho is a subsidiary of Liberty Holdings, founded 60 years ago by Sir Donald Gordon, who watched his father work hard all his life yet reap little financial reward for his efforts. This struggle ignited in him the overwhelming belief that all people should have the opportunity to grow their wealth and leave a proud legacy for their family. This belief is captured in the company’s name and its flame, taken from the Statue of Liberty and imbued with the same meaning of freedom and opportunity. Liberty has a presence in more than 18 African countries, offering asset management, investment, long and short-term insurance and health products to millions of people across the continent. It is also one of the biggest listed long-term insurers on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange by market capitalisation. Liberty is an organisation that understands the value of knowledge and its power to change realities. This is why it has invested over M480 million in supporting various educational initiatives and projects.
Liberty continues to roll up its sleeves and work with Government, the Regulator and other stakeholders to further develop the insurance industry and contribute significantly to the growth of the economy. The company believes that through financial education and guidance, this can be achieved. Through understanding the power of knowledge, Liberty strives to pioneer new ways to guide people towards financial freedom, with a purpose – and passion – to make a difference in people’s lives.
Lesotho currently has over M10 billion in contractual savings; that is, in collective investment schemes, pension and provident funds, insurance companies, and medical aid schemes. With the introduction of new regulations, a large portion of these funds are expected to be invested in local instruments, with the Central Bank having created demand for securities that needs to be met with the supply of securities. As such, companies from different sectors can issue medium to long-term financial securities to finance their activities.
Lesotho’s pension sector is relatively small and underdeveloped. There is a major divergence between coverage in the public (government/parastatal) sector, where it is very high, and the private sector, where is quite low. However, many companies simply enrol employees in the pension funds of their South African parent company, and the extent to which this takes place is unknown.
The main pension fund in Lesotho is the Public Officers’ Defined Contribution Pension Fund (PODCPF), which was established in 2008 and has its own Act. The PODCPF is a contributory, defined pension fund, covering most government employees, with both employer and employee contributions. At present, there is no legislation in place that deals with the establishment and regulation of private pension funds; the only relevant legislation is the Act establishing the PODCPF and elements of the Income Tax Act.
There is a need to develop an overall policy framework for the pension sector in Lesotho to specify the roles of public (statutory) and private pension schemes. Moreover, pension fund members are vulnerable to fraud and mismanagement because there is no regulation of occupational and private pension funds. The Insurance and Pension Regulation and Supervision Project, which is a World Bank FIRST initiative, has been working to strengthen the legal, regulatory and supervisory frameworks of Lesotho’s private pensions schemes, among others.
Government has, with the assistance of the ILO, proposed the establishment of a national statutory contributory pension scheme as part of broader social security reforms. This is particularly aimed at employees of the many textile and garment firms in Lesotho. In principle, all those in formal employment would be compelled to join the new scheme.
Outcomes expected in long term from the World Bank FIRST initiative include: expanding risk coverage and long-term savings provided by insurance products, securing and sustaining a pension system that includes an increase in the coverage of private pensions, and mobilising long-term savings for the productive investment and development of the capital market.
Cultivating money and capital markets has been a financial sector priority for more than two decades, with phased development being implemented. The first phase, introduced in 2008, focused on developing money markets (Treasury bills) by increasing the frequency of auctions and the number of tenors. This was followed by the introduction of Government bonds in 2010, with the objective of cultivating domestic sources of financing as a means of reducing the country’s vulnerability to external sources and financing the budget deficit. Traditionally, when the market for Government securities flourishes, it magnifies the ability of the corporate securities market to prosper.
Following the successful implementation of a Treasury securities market, the CBL embarked on yet another important phase in its efforts to develop domestic capital markets – the drive to establish an organised market for trading stocks. This saw the establishment of an Over-the-Counter (OTC) market, which is a market where stocks which are said not to meet the listing requirements of the major exchanges are traded. This provided private enterprises with a platform to make public offerings of their shares to raise capital for their business needs in a more organised and regulated manner.
Launched in January 2016, the Maseru Securities Market (MSM) was set up to further the development of equities and the corporate bonds market while also addressing the illiquidity problem of Government securities. The MSM establishes a central location for Basotho to buy and sell local companies’ stocks and bonds, and for trading in the secondary market, thus providing companies that participate in the stock exchange with alternative sources of capital and the public with diversified investment opportunities. Operating in line with international best practices, the MSM is expected to benefit the economy through facilitating the mobilisation and efficient allocation of capital to finance investment.
The establishment of the securities market is governed by the Central Bank of Lesotho Act of 2000, Section 6 (i) and (j), which mandates the CBL to promote the development of a safe and sound financial system as well as to monitor and regulate the capital market. It is supported by the Capital Markets Regulations (2014), which provides for the orderly, secure, fair and transparent operation of the MSM. The exchange is currently operated by the Central Bank, but preparations are being made to have it stand on its own.
Government’s efforts to develop the capital market have proven quite successful, and in the 2017/18 budget speech, the Minister of Finance proposed that an additional M450 million be raised through bonds.
Provision of Capital – Stock markets facilitate the raising of capital for companies through the issuance of new stock (selling shares) or by borrowing through bonds and other debt instruments. Thus the MSM’s role is to provide much needed financing for investment within the country. It will also provide an alternative avenue to raise funds for investment instead of depending only on borrowing from commercial banks. This will remove the bottleneck to investment which emanates from the fact that the banks are generally risk averse.
Increased Savings – Domestic savings are expected to increase as the securities market provides opportunities and profitable options for people to invest in and increase their savings. It provides incentives to defer consumption in favour of investment. If efficient, capital markets also enable savings to be allocated to investment projects with higher returns. As the rate of return to savers increases, savings become more attractive. This encourages the growth of overall savings and investment within the economy.
Efficient allocation of capital – Investing in the stock market leads to a more rational allocation of resources. Funds which could have been consumed or kept as idle deposits with banks could be mobilised and redirected to finance business activity in the more productive and profitable sectors of the economy.
Provision of liquidity – The MSM provides a ready market for the sale and purchase of securities. This gives assurance to investors that their investment could be converted into cash at any time if needed.
Improved corporate governance – Capital market development necessitates the creation of a legal and regulatory framework incorporating increased transparency and information dissemination. These monitoring systems reinforce corporate governance practices, improve transparency and enhance investor confidence. Industry-level data from various studies has shown a positive relationship between market-based governance and improvements in industry efficiency.
Economic growth – The MSM aims to accelerate economic growth by providing a boost to domestic savings and increasing the quantity and the quality of investment. In particular, it can encourage economic growth by providing an avenue for new and growing companies to raise capital at a lower cost.
and equitable environment. Milestones achieved by the LRA in the past decade include the introduction of Value Added Tax (VAT) at 14 percent, which has been instrumental in broadening the tax base, as well as the establishment of the self-assessment system.
The LRA’s Strategic Plan for the 2014-2019 period focuses on the urgent need to provide the funding required to develop the economy while minimising the cost of compliance to the client and the cost of collecting that revenue. The plan builds on the solid foundation established in 2007 when the authority began to emphasise ‘taxpayer-centricity’.
In implementing its strategic plan, the LRA has set out to address medium and long-term issues through specific action programmes. In the medium term, this will see the modernisation of the LRA’s processes and systems. In line with its Customs Modernisation Programme, the authority is redesigning and automating customs procedures through the implementation of the Asycuda customs border control system. Another area is the automation of tax processes through the Oracle Tax system. Long-term objectives include working to ensure that relevant policies and legislation are updated in line with changing times, the development and implementation of an integrated border management strategy, as well as the development of a strategy for new markets and for the informal sector, among others.
The LRA intends introducing an electronic tax-filing system during 2017/18 in order to make the process easier for taxpayers.
As a means of improving Lesotho’s competitiveness in the region, the company tax rate was reduced from 35 to 25 percent in 2006, while the preferential tax rate of 15 percent enjoyed by manufacturing and farming was lowered to 10 percent. To promote textile manufacturing, Government introduced a zero tax rate on proceeds from exports destined outside SACU in 2006/07. This tax exemption was abolished in 2014/15 and replaced with the standard 10 percent rate as it was felt to be inconsistent with Lesotho’s commitment under international and regional agreements.
Over the years, Lesotho’s effective tax rate on personal incomes has remained one of the highest in Sub-Saharan Africa. To reduce the tax burden and encourage tax compliance, the 2014/15 budget reduced both the lower and upper personal income tax rates, from 22 to 20 percent and 35 to 30 percent, respectively. This is applicable for resident individuals, sole traders and employees under the pay-as-you-earn (PAYE) system.
Best practice as regards VAT dictates that a single rate be used to avoid distortions, ensure tax efficiency and reduce administration and compliance costs. As a result, Lesotho’s four VAT rates have been simplified. All items, with the exception of the zero-rated items, electricity and telecommunications, are taxed at the standard rate of 14 percent. At the same time, an additional levy of 4 percent has been added to alcohol and tobacco products to curb abuse of these substances. Technical assistance from the World Bank will support Government in fostering and implementing tobacco and alcohol tax reforms to reduce their affordability and consumption, as well as to control illicit trade on these items. | http://www.lesothoreview.com/contents/financial-services-insurance-investment/ |
Press Release: Solomon Islands Reforms Making Banking Easier and Increasing Access to Affordable Digital Services.
In Suva:
Elenoa Baselala
Phone: +679 9986303/+679 7239616
Email: [email protected]
In Honiara:
CBSI
Uriel Matanani
Ph: +677 7515700 / +677 21791
Email: [email protected]
Honiara, Solomon Islands, October 3, 2022 –Small businesses and individuals across Solomon Islands stand to benefit from national payment systems reform that will help modernize the country’s financial architecture, in turn driving inclusive economic development and making everyday banking transactions easier.
In a move which is expected to enable the increased use of electronic payments, the Solomon Islands Government has enacted the National Payment Systems Act 2022. This is a key step in a reform process, undertaken in consultation with the Central Bank of Solomon Islands (CBSI), which is set to increase access to affordable digital payment services, reduce reliance on cash and drive broad-based financial inclusion across this Pacific Islands nation where many adults do not have access to a bank account.
“We are pleased to bring in this important reform. Updating payment systems is a key step forward for the economy, unlocking the benefits of increased use of electronic payments,” said Harry Kuma, Solomon Islands Minister for Finance and Treasury. “These new measures help create the conditions for sustainable, broad-based economic growth, benefitting businesses and individuals.”
The reform paves the way for Solomon Islands to adopt an electronic funds settlement process, replacing a system by which transfers between banks are done manually using cheques. The current manual system is highly inefficient and can result in significant delays in clearing funds which hampers everyday commerce and economic activity.
“This crucial legislation will enable Solomon Islands to benefit from a modern, resilient financial system, with a more efficient, safe and transparent approach. It will enable the Central Bank to better protect consumers, and it will enable Solomon Islands’ banks and financial institutions to offer better products and services,” said Dr Luke Forau, Governor, CBSI. “The next step in this important program will be to develop regulations and modern electronic payment system infrastructure which will in turn help us enhance our capacity to monitor systemic risk and increase access to improved financial services for businesses and households.”
IFC, a member of the World Bank Group, with the support of the governments of Australia and New Zealand as well as the World Bank, has provided technical expertise to the CBSI in relation to this landmark reform. This latest development follows similar reforms undertaken by central banks in Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Samoa and Vanuatu that promote responsible and inclusive digital financial services in the Pacific.
“Our payment systems work in Solomon Islands will help increase access to electronic payment services for people who have simply been missing out on the offerings by banks and other financial providers. It helps strengthen the legal framework for the national payment system and will enable modern payment systems infrastructure that delivers safe, and reliable digital payment and remittance transactions at lower cost,” said Judith Green, IFC Country Manager for Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and the Pacific Islands. “At a time when Solomon Islands has been hit hard by the pandemic and is on the global frontline of climate change, these crucial building blocks of financial inclusion will enable people throughout the nation to benefit.”
The ongoing reform program, overseen by the CBSI, will see further regulations and policies developed and an Automated Fund Transfer system established to enable digital payments.
Pacific Partnership
IFC’s work in Solomon Islands is guided by the Pacific Partnership. Australia, New Zealand and IFC are working together through the Partnership to stimulate private sector investment and reduce poverty in the Pacific.
About the Ministry of Finance and Treasury
The Ministry of Finance and Treasury has the responsibility to provide strategic advice, leadership and reporting on economic reforms, monetary, budget and fiscal policy to the Solomon Islands Government. Across the public service, the Ministry is responsible for financial reporting, and preparing and managing the annual recurrent budget.
About CBSI
The Central Bank of Solomon Islands (CBSI) is the premier financial institution in the country and is at the center of the banking and financial system, performing a number of essential functions, including the formulation and implementation of the country’s monetary policies. CBSI is the only authority that exercises discretionary control over the Country’s entire monetary system.
About IFC
IFC—a member of the World Bank Group—is the largest global development institution focused on the private sector in emerging markets. We work in more than 100 countries, using our capital, expertise, and influence to create markets and opportunities in developing countries. In fiscal year 2022, IFC committed a record $32.8 billion to private companies and financial institutions in developing countries, leveraging the power of the private sector to end extreme poverty and boost shared prosperity as economies grapple with the impacts of global compounding crises. For more information, visit www.ifc.org. | https://www.cbsi.com.sb/press-release-solomon-islands-reforms-making-banking-easier-and-increasing-access-to-affordable-digital-services/ |
The workshop brought together policymakers and microfinance practitioners to share best practices and build capacity among APEC member economies, particularly developing economies, in this vital area.
Some 2.7 billion adults are “unbanked,” according to the World Bank. That means they do not have the opportunity to save, get loans, manage their finances and grow their businesses through formal or secure financial services.
The workshop covers harnessing new technologies to increase access to financial services, particularly mobile banking, diversifying financial products and services, risk management and consumer protection in microfinance and gender equity.
The workshop is part of a multi-year APEC program that aims to showcase best practices in microfinance in the region. APEC recently completed a case study on Viet Nam with the aim of providing recommendations to policymakers in promoting sustainable, market-based microfinance. The case study will also inform other economies in the region on the key issues for commercially sustainable microfinance.
As part of this program, APEC has also produced a list of best practices specifically relating to women-owned micro-enterprises. Women face numerous and unique challenges, such as gender discrimination, as they try to enhance their businesses and would benefit from greater access to financial services and markets.
The list of 23 practices, including possible affirmative action policies for women, such as special financial funding services and dedicated lines of credit, aims to guide government policymakers in APEC member economies in determining support to women’s micro-enterprises.
The program is just one of the APEC initiatives aimed at improving financial inclusion in the region. APEC, the US Treasury and the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank organised a seminar in February in San Francisco that gathered financial policy makers and other experts to further work in this area.
Econonomica Vietnam contributed to the workshop with a country case study which it co-authored with Nathan Inc. and by presentating the case study at the plenary of the workshop.
Please visit our Resource Centre for the Vietnam Country Case Study and the Presentations at the workshop. | http://economica.vn/news/detail/economica-contributes-to-an-apec-workshop-on-enhancing-access-to-financial-services/296 |
Mobile banking to improve penetration rate in Myanmar's unbanked population
After several years of rapid expansion and double-digit credit growth, Myanmar’s banking sector underwent several necessary reforms in 2017 and 2018, as the Central Bank of Myanmar (CBM) moved to introduce new prudential regulations and reduce overdraft lending. Although foreign banks remain prohibited from participating in retail activities, a spate of recent directives have made promising strides towards liberalisation, with foreign entities now permitted to provide import and export financing, as well as lend to local businesses – a major step forward for the development of the sector.
Financial inclusion has benefitted from rapid mobile adoption and supportive policy-making, with the country exceeding earlier inclusion targets as its large population embraced new products such as mobile money transfer services.
However, the country’s first licensed credit bureau was not yet operational as of December 2018, and the limited availability of data regarding non-performing loans (NPLs), combined with a CBM-mandated interest rate cap, continue to constrain growth. Nevertheless, reforms are progressing and the outlook remains positive, buoyed by ongoing liberalisation, growth in microfinance, business lending and planned credit-monitoring activities.
Sector History
Although Myanmar’s banking system developed through investment and foreign involvement in the decades leading up to 1962, the beginning of socialist military rule that year saw the sector nationalised, and barriers to foreign and private sector participation put in place.
Liberalisation efforts did not begin again until 1990, with the promulgation of the Financial Institutions Law (FIL), which permitted the re-entrance of commercial, investment and development banks, as well as finance companies and credit societies. Two years later private banks were allowed to re-enter the market. The sector underwent a series of significant setbacks in the 2000s, however, which began in 2003 when a number of informal lenders and financial institutions collapsed; the effects spread to the formal sector and led to a severe liquidity crisis. Three banks were closed and other institutions had their licences revoked, with the CBM responding by imposing tough collateral requirements and strict regulations that have weighed heavily on the ability of banks to lend in the years since. The global financial crisis of 2008 also delayed plans to open up the sector and accelerate its development.
Liberalisation and reforms began in earnest in 2011, when the government allowed private banks to undertake foreign exchange transactions and operate ATMs, under the Foreign Exchange Management Law promulgated in 2012, which repealed legislation from 1947 and removed restrictions on foreign currency transactions. Political changes in 2015 came with signals that the country would further open itself up to the world, though some remain critical of the speed of progress in this direction.
Structure & Oversight
In 2013, with the passing of the CBM Law, the central bank was given a mandate to license and regulate all banking institutions in the country. In 2014 the CBM approved provisional licences for nine successful foreign bank bidders, allowing them to establish representative offices and carry out limited business activities. According to international media, the inclusion of these institutions, which came to a total of 13 after four more were added in 2016, added over MMK1.6trn ($1.1bn) of combined regulatory capital to the system, nearly tripling government revenue.
Until recently CBM-licensed foreign banks could only lend to foreign or local-foreign joint-venture firms, as well as domestic banks. They were permitted to partner with local banks to do business with local corporations, but access to most lending activities was limited. However, in November 2018 the CBM began opening certain high-potential business lines, such as trade credit, to foreign institutions.
As of December 2018 there were 13 international banks – from China, Japan, Singapore, India, Malaysia and Vietnam – operating branches in the country, as well as 49 foreign banks with representative offices and 26 private domestic banks. In May 2018 local media reported the CBM would imminently license four new private banks – Mandalay Farmer Development Bank, Sagaing Farmer Development Bank, Mineral Development Bank and Tourism Bank – although only the Mineral Development Bank had been officially approved as of November 2018.
State-owned institutions continue to exert considerable influence over the banking landscape: three private banks are owned by municipalities, while government ministries hold stakes in another three and a further two are controlled by military conglomerates. According to a 2018 report from Yangon-based consultancy FMR Research & Advisory, the three largest private banks in the country – Kanbawza Bank, Co-operative Bank and Ayeyarwady Bank – accounted for 58% of private bank assets, 64% of loans and 66% of deposits as of March 2017.
Performance
The same report cited strong recent growth in the banking sector, with the combined assets of the three largest banks rising by 34% over the course of FY 2016/17. Their combined loan portfolios, meanwhile, were up 30% and deposits increased by approximately 40%.
Lending has recorded sharp growth in the years since 2011. According to CBM data, loans to the private sector rose from MMK3.25trn ($2.3bn) in FY 2011/12 to hit MMK4.9trn ($3.5bn) in FY 2012/13, and subsequently grew to MMK7.47trn ($5.3bn), MMK10.18trn ($7.2bn) and MMK13.66trn ($9.7bn), respectively, over the following three fiscal years. This trend accelerated in the years since, with the total private sector loan portfolio jumping by around 28.25% to MMK17.52trn ($12.4bn) in 2016 and by a further 25.2% to reach some MMK21.93trn ($15.5bn) as of December 2017, the most recent month for which statistics are available.
Deposit growth among the country’s banks has been equally impressive, with total deposits nearly quadrupling between FY 2011/12 and FY 2015/16, from MMK7.01trn ($5bn) to MMK25.88trn ($18.3bn). Total deposits rose by 15.96% to MMK30.01trn ($21.2bn) at the end of 2016 and by 24.46% to reach MMK37.35trn ($26.4bn) in December 2017.
As of October 2017 agriculture, trade and service activities accounted for 59% of outstanding loans in Myanmar, against 10% for manufacturing.
Credit & Loans
Despite rapid credit accumulation in recent years, lending when measured as a percentage of total GDP remains low relative to Myanmar’s neighbours in ASEAN. World Bank data shows that total domestic credit provided by the broader financial sector rose from 20.2% of GDP in 2007 to 27.64% in 2011, and then fluctuated from 22.72% to 41.15% between 2012 and 2017.
In Vietnam, comparatively, domestic credit provided by the financial services sector rose from 88.24% of GDP in 2007 to 141.8% in 2017, while Cambodia saw domestic credit increase from 12.9% to 74.44% of GDP over the same period.
Domestic credit to the private sector by banks shows a similar trend. In Myanmar, banks’ private sector credit rose from 3.42% of GDP in 2007 to 4.77% in 2010, 6.75% in 2011, 12.84% in 2013, 18.09% in 2015 and 23.46% in 2017. Cambodian banks’ private sector credit, meanwhile, was up from 18.18% in 2007 to 86.5% in 2017, while Vietnam’s increased from 85.64% to 130.67% over the same period.
General credit access in the country therefore remains a significant impediment to broader economic growth. The World Bank’s “Doing Business 2019” report, which surveyed 190 global economies, found that Myanmar ranked 178th overall for accessing credit, largely as a result of delays in launching a planned credit bureau (see analysis).
The World Bank reports Myanmar scored 2 out of 12 on its 2017 strength of legal rights index, while the East Asia and Pacific region as a whole averaged 7.2. 0% of adults in the country were covered by either a credit registry or credit bureau, compared to regional averages of 16% and 22.3%, respectively. In the survey’s distance-to-frontier ranking – which scores countries on their credit performance, from the worst at 0 to the best at 100 – Myanmar received a score of 10 for accessing credit.
Moving Forward
As of December 2018 Myanmar was the only country in South-east Asia, apart from Laos, that did not have an operational public or private sector credit bureau; however, stakeholders are confident that the launch of this much-needed body is moving steadily forward as the necessary changes are put into place. “The delay in the implementation of the Myanmar Credit Bureau is not a matter of logistics, but about trust and customers’ security,” U Thein Zaw Tun, managing director of CB Bank, told OBG. “Once the legal framework ensuring our customers’ rights has been set up, the transfer of information will be quick and easy.”
At the policy level, CBM’s Directive No. 7 of 2017 allows banks to issue loans with a maximum maturity of three years; however, the majority of loans issued in the country are for one year, with three-year loans remaining rare despite the recent change in regulations. This is largely a result of a CBM-mandated cap on interest rates, which is set at 13% and often cited as the biggest regulatory challenge to sector growth.
The directive also encourages institutions to develop new lending products with “repayment terms that consider the business cycle and cash flow pattern of the borrower”. However, FMR Research & Advisory has noted that the 13% cap on interest rates, as well as stringent collateral requirements and limited availability of data pertaining to NPLs, makes this challenging to do.
Another major recent reform involved changes to the CBM’s policy on overdraft lending. With loan maturities capped at one year, and strict collateral requirements and interest rate ceilings in place, banks and borrowers frequently used overdrafts to circumvent lending restrictions. Instead of using traditional loans, borrowers have taken out overdrafts using collateral, with the overdraft rolled over yearly. According to FMR Research & Advisory, between 75% and 80% of the sector’s total loan portfolio is estimated to be overdrafts, raising concerns that these systems have been used to offer loans without a maturity date, allowing borrowers to avoid interest but obscuring visibility of loan delinquencies.
As part of the FIL legislation issued in July 2017, the CBM announced that as of January 2018 banks would be required to clear overdraft facilities for at least two full weeks of every year, and that any facilities that cannot be cleared be classified as an NPL.
Stakeholders responded with warnings that many borrowers would be unable to clear their overdrafts and that the new regulations, combined with other requirements, would weigh heavily on lending growth and pull significant amounts of credit from the economy. The ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office reported that credit growth slowed to 23.4% in March 2018, compared to 33.5% one year earlier.
A follow-up directive issued in November 2017 delivered the reforms in phases. Banks are now able to convert their overdraft facilities into three-year loans, with a mandate to reduce overdrafts to 50% of their loan portfolio by July 2018, 30% by July 2019 and 20% by July 2020. Banks were also given until March 2018 to submit a list of their largest overdraft facilities, as well as a restructuring plan, to the CBM.
Policy
The government has intensified its focus on banking sector reforms in recent months, with the country’s long-term economic development agenda, the Myanmar Sustainable Development Plan (MSDP) 2018-30, identifying a number of strategies aimed at boosting liberalisation and financial inclusion.
Noting that Myanmar benefits from a “latecomer advantage”, evidenced by the rapid uptake of mobile phone-based financial services catering to both the banked and unbanked populations, the MSDP targets financial stability through a system that can support the sustainable long-term development of households, farmers and businesses.
The plan also identifies banking sector reforms as an important support mechanism for its third of five broad policy goals: job creation and private sector-led growth. Among the many strategies highlighted as critical to achieving these goals, the MSDP lists financial inclusion, with a mandate to increase broad-based access to financial services and strengthen the financial system overall.
Specific action plans that make up the strategy’s goals for the banking sector focus on strengthening the capacity of domestic institutions by developing a robust network of commercial banks, including foreign-owned banks, as well as improvements to the legal and regulatory environment to support non-bank financial institutions. Importantly for foreign investors, the MSDP aims to increase the ability of foreign banks to participate in domestic banking activities through the continued liberalisation of market access, as well as by allowing them to take equity positions in domestic banks. The development strategy also aims to expand mobile and financial technology (fintech) services through domestic and foreign firms, further bolstering the sector.
Inclusion
In addition to the MSDP’s financial reform strategies, the government has launched several roadmaps to increase financial inclusion in Myanmar, focusing efforts on using rapid smartphone uptake to improve access.
In January 2013 the UN Capital Development Fund, the multi-donor Livelihoods and Food Securities Trust Fund, and the Myanmar government formed Making Access Possible, a multi-country initiative that later launched the Myanmar Financial Inclusion Roadmap (MFIR) 2014-20. Noting that just 30% of the population had formal access to a financial product, and just 6% had access to more than one product, the plan targeted boosting these rates to 40% and 15%, respectively, by 2020. Much of the plan focused on addressing market barriers as a strategy to expand formal intermediation, with an emphasis on three priority segments: agriculture, micro-, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), and low-income households. The MFIR identified 20 developments to be implemented by 2020, most focused on education, corporate reform and modernisation, as well as long-term infrastructure such as electronic payment systems and an automated credit bureau.
In light of the transformation of the economic and technological landscape in the years since 2013, when a SIM card cost $260, the MFIR was recently updated to reflect new digital realities, and in August 2018 the authorities announced the drafting of an updated MFIR running from 2018 to 2022.
In formulating the new roadmap, stakeholders surveyed 5500 households to determine shifts in financial inclusion, reporting largely positive development. According to the new MFIR, the ratio of adults with access to at least one formal financial product rose from 30% in 2013 to 48% in 2018, exceeding the previous MFIR’s target of 40%. This means an estimated 6m adults in the country are now able to access formal financial services, while 17% of the adult population has accessed more than one formal financial product. Reliance on informal financial services fell by 30%, from 10m people to 7m.
Fintech
The country’s rapid expansion in smartphone penetration has prompted a shift in focus towards mobile financial services products. Emphasising digital-driven financial inclusion, the new MFIR targets low-income farmers and individuals, women, the self-employed and small and medium-sized enterprises. It also seeks to expand financial literacy and customer protection. As part of the plan, the CBM created the Financial Regulatory Department (FRD), a digital services working group.
Speaking in August 2018, U Zaw Naing, director-general of the FRD, told local media that working group members would be sourced from the private sector, including private insurance companies, banks and microfinance institutions (MFIs). Their intention is to develop new digital finance products and a cashless financial market. U Zaw Naing noted that while 74% of the country’s working population uses a mobile phone, just 8% have accessed digital financial services via mobile devices, creating significant growth opportunities for products such as mobile money transfers and microinsurance. “Technology will play a big role in the future of Myanmar’s banking sector,” U Maung Maung Nyunt, senior executive officer of Global Treasure Bank, told OBG. “The CBM is encouraging banks to embrace technology.”
Microfinance
Under the supervision of the FRD, MFIs are an area undergoing continued development. According to a report published by the Mekong Business Initiative – a development partnership between the Asian Development Bank and Australia aimed at fostering growth in the region – 168 MFIs serving 1.45m clients were operational in Myanmar as of October 2016, with a total loan portfolio of around $200m. The sector is dominated by NGOs and commercial MFIs, as well as 75 financial cooperatives that have been re-licensed as MFIs.
“MFIs are very well run, and tend to have bilateral and multilateral support,” Hal Bosher, special advisor to the chairman and CEO at Yoma Bank, told OBG. “The CBM has capped interest rates at 13%, and because we have to lend on a secure basis, this has historically constrained retail lending. MFIs have more wiggle room because they can lend at up to 30% interest,” Bosher added.
Basel Standards
The FIL of 2016 is one of the most important pieces of regulatory legislation governing the sector. It was designed to bring Myanmar’s banking regulations in line with the international Basel Committee on Banking Supervision regulations, although the CBM’s latest prudential legal changes, issued in July 2017, are consistent with Basel I, the original legislation from 1988. Most banks around the world, including many of those in developing markets, now aim to meet Basel III standards.
Under the CBM’s regulatory framework, as of early 2019 banks must hold core capital of 4% of risk-weighted assets – Basel III guidelines require 7% – and domestic banks must maintain minimum capital of MMK20bn ($14.1m). Banks are also required to hold 5% of their deposits at the CBM as a cash reserve. According to FMR Research & Advisory, data on compliance in Myanmar is not available, but there is evidence that smaller lenders are struggling to meet these regulatory standards.
In July 2017 the CBM issued its first set of modern prudential regulations, drafted with support from the IMF. The regulatory changes replaced previous legislation from nearly 30 years earlier and set new standards: a minimum Tier-1 capital adequacy ratio (CAR) of 4%, a regulatory CAR of 8% and increased risk weights on assets, along with a 100% risk weight on fixed assets. Tier-2, or supplementary, capital may also be included in a bank’s CAR, subject to approval by the CBM and up to a maximum of 100% of Tier-1 or core capital. However, FMR Research & Advisory notes that many instruments that would normally form Tier-2 capital do not yet exist in Myanmar.
New liquidity requirements stipulate that 20% of assets must be in cash or easily convertible assets such as Treasury bonds with less than one-year maturities, current accounts held at the CBM or loans to other banks. Significantly, banks are now required to classify loans as non-performing earlier and hold more capital against various NPL classifications.
International Banks
Perhaps the most promising recent reforms have been the CBM’s moves to open new lines of business to foreign banks.
In December 2017 the CBM announced that seven foreign banks would be permitted to provide export finance. According to international media reports, this change put foreign banks on a par with local lenders, while also providing new options for local businesses to access credit at more competitive rates. This was followed by the August 2018 announcement that all 13 foreign banks would be allowed to expand their services to include import finance – a move expected to facilitate trade and contain rising import costs.
U Win Thaw, director-general of the CBM, told local media that there are also plans in the pipeline to allow importers to open accounts at foreign banks, marking another important step towards retail banking liberalisation.
A further notable change came in November 2018. The CBM issued Notification No. 6 of 2018, permitting branches of foreign banks to provide financing and other services to local businesses. Some stakeholders suggest this development is likely a response to recent currency depreciation (see Economy chapter); foreign currency inflows from foreign banks to local businesses are expected to ease demand for dollars and help stabilise the exchange rate.
Days after the announcement, U Bo Bo Nge, vice-governor of the CBM, told local media that more foreign branches would be permitted in the country in 2019, and that foreign banks would also be allowed to provide domestic business credit in both kyat and foreign currencies. Importantly, loans in foreign currencies will be free from interest rate caps.
Outlook
Although recent reforms have been extremely promising for stakeholders who have long-awaited full sector liberalisation, foreign banks have thus far been prohibited from offering savings accounts in the country, conducting local money transfers and local currency lending.
A long-planned credit bureau was licensed but still not operational as of December 2018 and the full extent of NPLs is not yet clear, leaving the sector vulnerable to a number of shocks.
Despite these challenges, however, the banking sector’s development has been broadly positive in recent years. Much-needed reforms and new prudential standards may cause short-term pain but they should ensure more sustainable long-term growth. Additionally, adoption of fintech-friendly policies at the national level has already significantly boosted financial inclusion and should drive adoption of new financial services. As such, Myanmar’s banking sector continues to hold significant potential for foreign investors, with ongoing liberalisation to support further growth in 2019 and in the years to come.
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Tilt, Toxicity, and The Trench
The Trench refers to a phenomenon in team based games where a player feels the outcome of matches is often highly influenced by poor player behavior. This phenomenon manifests mainly in games with ranked matchmaking, and has the effect of making players feel they are unable to affect the outcome of matches. In this post I explain this phenomenon and its causes with a simple mathematical model. I investigate this issue in the context of Dota 2, but I hope this post will give insight into the Trench for games with a similar match making system such as League of Legends, Overwatch, and others.
This post is meant to be descriptive rather than prescriptive, i.e. I’m not going to give a list of tips one can utilize to climb through the Trench, but rather explain why it feels like the Trench exists, why many players of varying skill will argue that it doesn’t exist, and why it gets reported at all skill levels.
As opposed to just asserting my opinion and what the Trench is, I’m going to justify by reasoning with some simple models and computation. Maybe in the future I’ll follow it up with some simulations, but for now I’ll get into my hypothesis.
Player Model
In order to explain my analysis outside of a purely qualitative domain, I’m going to create a model for how we should think about players and matches in Dota 2.
Let’s say that when a Dota match occurs, each player contributes a numerical amount of skill to their team. The skill a player contributes is randomly sampled from the player’s skill probability distribution. So every match they randomly contribute skill based on some constraints specific to the player. We’ll get into what these distributions look like for a player later.
The skill is summed for each team, whichever has a higher skill sum wins.
This is a very simplistic model, and ignores a variety of possible factors, such as synergies or anti-synergies between teammates’ dominant play styles (like getting a team where each player is most comfortable in a laning position unique from their teammates’ preferences), or how opponents’ play styles may counter each other (like one player being incredibly mechanically strong, but lacking the decision making skills to handle rat strategies).
One important aspect that the model does capture is if a player’s skill probability distribution’s mean is greater than that of the aggregate skill distribution mean of the other players at his current MMR, then when he queues and before he is matched with a team, his expectation of winning is greater than 50%. In other words, if he is better than the average player at his MMR, then he is more likely to win than lose his next match when he queues.
The purpose of this model isn’t to perfectly simulate a matchmaking ecosystem, but rather to illustrate my argument about the Trench.
Player Skill Probability Distribution
The player skill probability distribution is a curve that describes the likelihood of a player contributing any amount of skill to a match. Player ’s probability density function (pdf) is . The probability that player contributes between and skill in a match is given by the integral of their probability function from to .
Tracing this probability function will give a player’s skill probability distribution.
This curve shows the likelihood of any skill contribution in a match. Thus by viewing this we can get an idea of how much skill a player generally contributes to a match.
We can assume that the mean of a player’s skill probability distribution is their “true” skill. The reason we assume this, is that if they are queueing in a pool of players who similarly have the same mean, then their expectation of winning the match is 50%.
We are going to make skill numbers roughly correspond to MMR (This is the numerical representation of a player’s ranking of in Dota 2). This means players whose most accurate MMR is 8K will have a skill distribution mean of 8K, and the amount of skill they are expected to contribute to a match is 8K. Having skill numbers correspond to ranking will just help me clean up the numbers and make arguments more intuitive later. For instance, when I say a player contributes 2K skill to a match, they are playing with the same mean efficacy of a 2K ranked player.
What is The Trench
There are two effects that mainly contribute to people feeling like they are in the Trench. The first effect is instances where the difference between one’s team and the opponents’ team skill sum excluding the player is greater than the upper bound of the player’s skill probability distribution. Thus the player is unable to affect the outcome of the match. I’ll refer to this as the True Trench.
The second phenomenon that causes people to feel that they are in the Trench are when players have a MMR near their mean skill. Their MMR may be oscillating, making them believe that they are gaining MMR as they should be, then losing it due to factors out of their control, but in reality they are within the band of MMR that we would expect them to sit in according to the variance of their skill probability distribution. I’ll refer to this as the Virtual Trench.
The True Trench
The True Trench refers to when players systematically encounter dice-rolly matches. Dice-roll matches are situations where, regardless of how well a player performs, they can’t be expected affect the outcome of a match. They don’t lose these games, but the outcome is decided almost purely by which team has more toxic or tilted players.
These situations are due to difference between the teams’ skill sums, excluding the player in question, is greater than the player’s upper bound of their skill probability distribution (or greater than the range of skill that they could reasonably expect to contribute).
Constructing Better Player Skill Probability Distributions
If we assumed every player’s skill probability distributions are normal distributions, True Trench situations will still occur, but they would be extremely unlikely. But what we are interested in are cases where people systematically report this phenomenon, causing them to believe they are in the Trench. Thus we are particularly interested in player behavior that makes True Trench instances common in team games like Dota 2.
It’s likely that players’ don’t have a normal distribution for their skill probability distribution. Rather their distribution is skewed right.
The skew is due to that fact that there is a skill level they generally achieve in a game, and they tend to perform around it unless they are being affected by adverse factors. We could think of the apex of their curve as how good they are at the game in the vacuum of behavioral factors. Players likely don’t randomly over perform this range, and they don’t randomly play at a level mechanically worse than they usually play. We don’t live in an anime where 2K players remember their dead friend, unlock secret hidden potential, then play with 8K skill. So our normal 4K player tends to play in the upper range of their set of possible skill outputs around 4K, and there isn’t a small percentage of games where they suddenly play like a 10K player.
I still haven’t explained why this relates to the True Trench, further this model doesn’t seem like a particularly accurate representation of a Dota 2 player’s skill probability distribution. So we’ll introduce a new part of the curve, how they play when on tilt. Tilt describes a player underperforming mechanically and strategically due to being emotionally upset.
When the player is tilted they perform worse by a fixed amount of skill specific to them, we’ll call this amount the player’s tilt delta. Tilt delta represents that when a player is tilted they don’t suffer from a spectrum of being tilted, it’s a binary. People tend to have a breaking point where they suddenly are on tilt. You don’t sit around and feel that you are 50% tilted and your ability is getting continuously worse as things that tilt you occur more, rather it is discrete.
We are going to use this simple model that considers there to be a binary between being tilted and not being tilted, and there is some probability that they play any game on tilt. It is probably more accurate to use a system where each player has a discrete tertiary (like a binary, but with more than two states) of tilts and tilt deltas. In other words, there are a couple different levels of tilt for them, sometimes they might be pissed off, and other times they’ll be outright furious.
The number of levels and tilt delta for each level would be unique for each player, but for the sake of simplicity, we are going to stick with our binary model.
The last piece I’m going to add to this model is how the player’s skill distribution is affected by how toxic they are. We are going to consider toxicity to be similar to tilt, it’s a binary where some games players are toxic and others they are not, and there is some probability as to whether they will be toxic in any given game. When they are toxic, it lowers their skill probability distribution by a toxicity delta. In reality, they are actually lowering the skill probability distributions of their teammates in the game, but we isolate the effect to their skill probability distribution to show that they are directly lowering their team’s skill sum in a game by being toxic.
At this point, many probably think there is an issue with the cause and effect of this model, or the lack of it. In reality there aren’t simple probabilities governing whether one is on tilt or toxic in a game. I could make a much more complex model, where players have thresholds. If the team’s skill sum is below a threshold or a single player’s skill contribution is below a different threshold, they become toxic. Also when toxic, instead of applying a toxicity delta, they should instead activate other players’ tilt and cause them to lower their skill contributions by their tilt delta.
I didn’t use a more complex model like this for two reasons. Firstly, because it’s just very complicated. Secondly, I want to factor in toxicity as something that alters the toxic player’s skill probability distribution. Being toxic in a percentage of their games, whatever the cause, will lower the amount of games they are expected to win, thus they should have a lower mean skill and a lower true MMR, due to this. This is a simple way to capture this, instead of making the amount they lower their true MMR dependent upon other players susceptibility to toxicity (complicated).
Now I will redraw how we think their skill probability distribution curve looks when we combine all these different curves.
How Does This Cause The True Trench
Let’s work through an experiment. We are going to assume that all players with a specific MMR have a mean skill near that MMR (within a +/- 100 range), except for Liam, the specific player we are following. Let’s say Liam is currently sitting at 3500 MMR, but his mean skill is actually 3800, and he has a very low chance of being tilted or toxic (we are assuming it is 0 here). So we expect Liam to win any match he queues into, as he is expected to contribute more skill to his team than every other player in the match.
Unfortunately all the other players in the match actually have a pure skill rating of around 3700, but their mean skill is 3500 MMR because their tilt delta is 1000 MMR, and their toxicity delta is 1500 MMR. So they have the following skill probability distributions.
This means that the outcome of the game is impacted by a player being tilted or toxic more often than Liam’s high skill mean. For Liam, the game becomes a dice-roll as to whether his team or the opponents’ team will have more toxic and tilted players.
If we assume that each player has a 5% chance of being tilted and a 5% chance of being toxic, then there is a 56% chance that the match will be purely decided by which team has less toxic or tilted players (this is assuming that the difference in skill sums of both teams is less than 500 when excluding the effects of tilted and toxic players).
The other 44% of the time, they have a “normal” Dota 2 match, determined by who plays better rather than who is tilted or toxic (though in some of these matches there are players that are tilted or toxic, but both teams have an equal negative impact on their skill sums from tilted or toxic players). The chances of there being a match where no player is tilted or toxic is 40%, which isn’t terrible, but also probably doesn’t fill anyone with great confidence (the great news is that there is only a 3.44e-20 chance that all nine other players are both tilted *and toxic, but this is just a model, Dota 2 players will know that this grossly underestimates reality).
The dice rolling nature of games due to tilted and toxic players is what causes the Trench to manifest. It’s obviously very upsetting to queue into games which you should win, but are decided by random chance more than 50% of the time.
This also helps explain why players of differing ranks might report the Trench being at different MMR ranges. It’s possible that the chances of players tilting or being toxic doesn’t change very much as MMR rises, but tilt deltas and toxicity deltas grow as games are played at a higher level. It makes sense that lack of communication or inability to work together due to tilt would have a greater impact when it is a greater necessity at higher MMR.
A 5K player playing in the 3.5K bracket will encounter less game states which they cannot affect. But as they get closer to 5000 MMR, and their relative advantage over opponents shrinks, as well as the effect of tilt and toxicity rises, they are likely to experience the same dice-rolly situation Liam is currently having trouble with.
A Few Notes
There are a few things to note before we move on. First is that neither Liam nor the 5K player are actually capped in how much skill they can add to games. The skill probability distribution we present is from one snapshot in time, it doesn’t imply that Liam will never get better than his current upper bound. Liam could overcome the Trench to some degree by becoming a better player rather than focusing on MMR, this would cause less of his games to be dice rolls similar to the 5K player in 3.5K games.
Second, as I mentioned before, tilt and toxicity are highly causal. Not only is the 5K player going to be able to affect a greater number of matches in the 3K bracket, but he is also less likely to trigger toxicity from 3K teammates in the first place. If we consider the more accurate model I posited before, where players become toxic if their team or an individual player perform below a threshold, having a 5K player will easily keep the team above this threshold reducing the number of players being toxic in the 5K player experiences in his 3.5K games (but it doesn’t reduce the number of toxic players). Further players are less likely to become frustrated and toxic when they feel they are going to win due to being carried to victory.
There is probably also a toxicity domino effect, where one player being toxic causes more players in the match to be toxic (because it totally increases your chances of winning).
Third thing I want to talk about is that even if Liam is unable to affect the game state of 56% of games, that doesn’t mean he loses the other 44%, some he still wins due to his team having less tilted or toxic players, in fact he wins the majority of these games. The reason for this is because in our model Liam is never tilted or toxic (something I can assure you is not true). Thus his opponents’ team’s expected lost MMR due to tilt and toxicity is less than Liam’s team. In fact Liam has a 56% chance of winning matches which come down to tilt and toxicity dice rolls (with the numbers I used it was coincidental that the chance to win a dice roll game is similar to the chance to get a dice roll game (so he’s winning 56% of the 56% of matches that are dice-rolly (I’m sorry that this happened))).
A 56% win rate is exceptional in Dota 2, where most players’ winrate sit within 3% of 50% (I actually made up that statistic, but I’d be willing to bet a fair amount that this is accurate), and this was achieved for 56% of all games by simply changing a feature that Liam is completely in control of: his behavior.
With this fact, any rational player who is in a Trench is advantaged by choosing not to get tilted or be toxic. So yeah, be less toxic in your matches.
The Virtual Trench
The Virtual Trench has less of a mathematical explanation, and instead requires more psychological assumptions. Because the idea that players’ MMR have variance isn’t a crazy or particularly interesting idea, but there seem to be various factors that cause players to reject the idea that their fluctuations in MMR is simply variance, and instead it’s the effect of the Trench.
This section is based on my observations and assumptions about how players tend to think, so I have to add a disclaimer that this isn’t nearly as concretely reasoned as the previous section, and I haven’t collected any data to back this up. This is just my take on the phenomenon.
The first thing I want to talk about is the strange belief of some players that, over time, playing more matches will slowly narrow down their MMR to exactly their true MMR according to their mean skill. This isn’t the case, because of variance. Even if a player’s skill level was perfectly stagnant and they weren’t improving at all, we don’t expect them to eventually hit an MMR, and if they win a match they will immediately then lose the next one, or vice versa. Clearly there is variance even if you are currently sitting at your true MMR.
If at a MMR all players had zero chance for tilt or toxicity, so they have simple right skewed skill probability distributions, it still presents a distribution and a variety of outcomes that could occur with different probabilities. So you will have players oscillate around their true MMR, and we simply expect their mean MMR over time to be their true MMR (expecting this does not mean that it will be the case, just that it is the expectation).
I’m sure at this point, anyone reading with a rudimentary grasp of probability are tired of me trying to convince you that variance is a thing. And even if you don’t believe me still that it is a thing, just trust me. And everyone else. Variance is a thing.
So likely a large amount of players are mis-attributing their gained MMR to their playing well and blaming the games they lose to Trench dynamics, when in reality they sit in a range around their mean that we would expect from their variance. That being said, if they are around their correct MMR then they are most likely to experience Trench effects, but ignoring cases that come down to dice rolls right now.
There are a bunch of reasons players don’t recognize that they are sitting where they should be, and just admit that they are experiencing MMR volatility. The most obvious reason is that players generally feel they are a higher MMR than the one they are currently at. This is probably partially due to the fact that it would be somewhat depressing if you just believed you were where you should be, and didn’t believe you could get any higher. If a player did feel like this, their main motivation for playing ranked matchmaking, raising one’s MMR, would disappear. We would expect these players to then play much less or not at all, at which point they fall out of the matchmaking environment. With this being the case, we can assume most players in ranked matchmaking are playing because they believe when they queue that the next match is more likely to increase their MMR than decrease it (otherwise we don’t expect them to queue), thus they must necessarily believe their MMR is higher than whatever their current one is.
This perception is probably reinforced by the nature of snowballing team based games like Dota 2. Every once in awhile you will stomp a game due to a mix of factors, such as picks, the other team having players on tilt, or just random chance throughout the game. If a player ends up being the main beneficiary of the stomp, by having the most kills or by playing a core at the time, they might attribute this success to their play. The set of games that are stomps reinforces in the player’s mind that they are a higher MMR player. Conversely, whenever they lose, due to the fact that Dota 2 is often more a game of which team makes less mistakes than which team has better execution, they are offered a slew of excuses for blaming teammates for the loss in order to shield their ego.
Now literally everyone thinks they are better than their MMR. If they aren’t they can use the Trench as a nice excuse to rationalize why their MMR sits around 3.3K generally, instead of 4.5K (something I used to do) (I’m not 4.5K now, I’m just, more realistic).
Prescriptive Advice
I know I said this post was going to be descriptive rather than prescriptive, but I lied. Hopefully this section doesn’t seem to long or preachy. Most importantly hopefully it doesn’t take away at all from the earlier better argued processes.
1. Don’t Go on Tilt or be Toxic
This is something everyone understands they shouldn’t do from a moral and social perspective, and many people already understand that it has an adverse effect on their MMR. Those who didn’t previously believe that it negatively impacted their win rate, I hope what I wrote in the post has convinced you.
Another issue is that people don’t really always understand what it means to be toxic. I think we should investigate two scenarios. The first one is when you still believe the game is winnable, but your teammates are making mistakes. Many people start pointing out mistakes, or dwell on them after they happen. Before you do this, you should consider, will my communication right now cause my teammate to be a better player for the rest of the match? If not, then doing this just carries a chance that you tilt them, so doing this is literally lowering your chances of winning. So don’t do it, unless you are really into playing ranked match making to explain to your teammates what they are doing wrong instead of winning.
The other scenario is when you think there is no chance to win, so you start flaming or carrying out other toxic behaviour. This may get me some flak from Reddit, but if a player knew with 100% certainty the game was going to be a loss, it makes alot of sense that they should engage in behavior to end the game faster, and flaming teammates doesn’t have a negative impact on them. Even if they knew there was a 90% chance the game would be a loss, it still seems pretty logical to just scrap the game and move onto the next one.
This issue with actually doing this is that there is a difference between knowing it is a 100% chance a game will result in a loss, and being a player who thinks there is a 100% chance that a game is a loss. No one truly knows the probability that a game will be a loss. They probably don’t have an accurate assessment of what the end of the game will be unless they are in an extremely severe situation (like being down 31-1 and a barracks at 15 minutes). Especially because people are really bad at factoring how comeback mechanics can affect the rest of the game. So in situations where the game seems highly unlikely to win, I would suggest continuing to attempt to maximize your chances of winning, because your assessment of probability of winning may be just wildly wrong, and also you should be more focused on improving your actual skill through practice than your MMR anyways.
I will say that I don’t think it’s that unreasonable when high level pro players give up on games mid way through and start doing things to speed up their opponent’s win. I think they probably have pretty accurate assessments of their probability winning, and so ending the match sooner improves their experience as well as their teammates as they can get to their next match faster. The issue is that this fosters the mentality in their stream viewers that this is a reasonable action, who as I described before, probably have a really poor understanding of when they should do this, and will likely just end up harming their own MMR and ruining games for other people. So I really wish pros wouldn’t do this. Not because they shouldn’t, but because it makes my pubs worse.
2. Focus on Raising Your Mean Skill, Not Your MMR
This is weird, because your MMR is a proxy for your mean skill, and the reason we want high MMR is because it communicates to others that we have high mean skill. So wanting to raise your MMR should be the same action as wanting to raise your mean skill.
In reality, this isn’t the case. The fact that people purchase accounts is evidence enough. Also there is an effective difference between focusing on whether your MMR is rising, and focusing on whether your game impact is rising. Any game you perform poorly, but you are carried to victory should be an equally poor signal as losing a match, because your game impact had low influence. Further reveling in MMR increases probably isn’t a good use of your time. It is hard for one to tell whether they actually are moving towards their true MMR when their MMR goes up, or if they are just experiencing MMR volatility.
So alternatively it’s much more productive to really focus on getting better in each match, and analyzing how to improve personal play and how your game impact could turn a loss into a victory, rather than analyzing your team as a whole and how a player who isn’t you could have possibly had more impact and changed the loss into a victory.
Afterward
Last thing I want to note pertains to the example players I had Liam play with. I assumed their mean skill and true MMR was 3.5K. Anyone can quickly use the numbers I gave for their player skill probability distribution and see that 3.5K number was wrong. Let’s find out what their mean skill actually is:
This actually doesn’t affect the above argument at all, since it is based solely on difference of tilt and toxicity deltas, but it’s worth noting all the same (One could even ask why I don’t edit the above paragraphs to reflect this (That’s a good question friend)).
This post ended up being much longer that I expected it to be. I think I spent much more time explaining basic probability concepts than I necessarily needed to, but I guess increasing accessibility isn’t a terrible thing (though it directly trades off against people deciding not to read the post due to the entirety of it being too long (I guess maybe it is a terrible thing (rough))). I plan to post a follow up in the near future where I create simulated matchmaking environments using a model for players and matches similar to the one in the post. Hopefully the simulations will generally agree with what I outlined here, otherwise I’ll look pretty stupid won’t I.
If you have any questions or disagreements send me a message to my email or any other service on my contacts page, and I’ll either respond or talk about it in a follow-up post. | https://oliver-hare.com/dota2/esports/trench/statistics/2017/10/02/tilt-toxicity-and-the-trench.html |
In November, ESPN.com's Bill Simmons - affectionately known as the "Sports Guy" - published *The Book of Basketball* with one goal in mind: to answer every question that could ever be posed about the NBA. One of those questions deals with what Simmons calls "The Secret." Simmons learns of the "secret" on the deck of a Vegas topless pool, where he and Isaiah Thomas (the Hall of Fame point guard and former GM who was a longtime object of barbs in Simmons's columns) are hashing out their differences. After each gets over an initial stage of awkwardness, they begin discussing Thomas's playing career, leading to the former Pistons star dropping some knowledge on the "Sports Guy":
"The secret of basketball is that it's not about basketball."
Thomas's point is that basketball is about chemistry and how teammates get along (not really much of a secret there...). The same could be said of soccer. In both sports, short-term success can be achieved through individual brilliance (see a free kick goal or a player scoring 50 points in a game) but more than that is needed in the long run. Simmons elaborates: > These teams were loaded with talented players, yes, but that's not the only reason they won. They won because they liked each other, knew their roles, ignored statistics, and valued winning over everything else. They won because their best players sacrificed to make everyone else happy. They won as long as everyone remained on the same page. By that same token, they lost if any of those factors weren't in place.
> -Bill Simmons in his book, *The Book of Basketball*
After reading that passage, I began to think about whether or not the 2009 Fire possessed Simmons's prerequisites for winning. Did the players like each other? Did they know (and willingly perform) their roles? Did they ignore stats? The short answer is of course no. Though last year's version of the Fire seemed to get along fine with one another (for the most part anyway...) I thought that there was a lack of understanding of each player's role. Much of this had to do with Cuauhtemoc Blanco.
Blanco, who is now with Mexican club Veracruz, was somewhat of a square peg in a round hole for the Fire last season. Don't get me wrong, Blanco put up great numbers (five goals and eight assists in 21 league games), it was just his that his style of play never really meshed with the team. Specifically, Blanco was too much of an individual player. His consistent dalliances on the ball (which slowed the attack and allowed opposing defenses time to track back and get in position) didn't fit with the rest of the style of the rest of the team which - for the most part - was to attack with passes. Blanco's style of play did work well from time to time (after all, even at the age of 36 Blanco still has tremendous skill) but the fact that it was a different style than the one the rest of the team employed directly prohibited the Fire from establishing an offensive identity - something that a team needs if it wants to win a championship.
In terms of what I'll call Simmons's "qualifications for winning," the individuals of the 2009 Chicago Fire didn't seem to understand their roles all that well. Maybe those roles were never clearly defined. Maybe they were. Regardless, the Fire needs to create a system where every player knows their role. Without such a system in place, a championship in 2010 would be impossible to achieve. And that's no secret. | http://www.chicagonow.com/fire-confidential/2010/01/the-secret/ |
Baseball teams are faced with an interesting problem everyday: arranging nine players in an order in such a way that the highest number of potential runs is met. Effective optimization can increase a team’s win total by 3 or more per year, which is enough for some teams to make or miss the playoffs. Now let it be known, there is no one perfect lineup. Perfect optimization of a lineup is not robust, or consistent. Out of 200 attempts, the most optimal lineup only holds 17 times when put through a regression system. But near-optimization is very robust when regarding runs scored, because near-optimization is easily duplicated. However, with the hundreds of combinations for batting orders, there are plenty of very bad ones. But the overall goal should be to find as close as optimal order as one could derive from data.
But how does one go about the finding an near-optimal or optimal lineup? Joel S. Sokol of the Georgia Insitiute of Technology published a paper in 1998 that goes into heavy detail regarding the subject, often using equations and assumptions that even myself I do not understand. However, his findings seem to be very rock solid, although his methods being very unorthodox. The findings in this article can be referenced here: http://www2.isye.gatech.edu/~jsokol/boouu.pdf
While Sokol’s data is from 1998, the number of runs each event (such as a single) is very unlikely to change over time, especially since he used the entire 1998 season as a dataset.
Sokol begins his paper stating:
“An important question for the batting order problem is how a player’s skills interact with those of other players. There are many ways by which players can contribute offensively to their team, and we show that an appropriately-designed two-dimensional measure based on interactions with other players gives a much more complete view of player value and player utility.”
Or in laymen’s terms, players affect themselves and also the batters who follow them. If we measure both of those situations, we can effectively create a lineup that generates the most number of runs.
Therefore, I used the information derived by Sokol to determine two values for each Indians’ player: a “realization value” (how many runs per plate appearance that person will create for themselves) and a “potential value” (how many runs per plate appearance that batter will generate for the following hitters).
I added every single event a player performed and divided it by number of plate appearances to find each the realization (R) and potential (P) values for every player. Here are the coefficients used, or more or less how many runs on average each event creates. Omitted from the model are situational factors such as clutch hitting and batting order protection, which have been proven to be chance/myth.
The statistics I used were usually from the player’s most recent seasons (I usually used the past 4 or 5 years). I believe that using only this season’s statistics would be much too small of a sample size; it would be best to have a sample of over 1000 plate appearances. Here are the values for every Indians’ batter.
|Player||Realization Value||Potential Value|
|Aviles (2010-2013)||.116||-.141|
|Bourn (2009-2013)||.095||-.086|
|Brantley (career)||.100||-.113|
|Cabrera (2011-2013)||.129||-.130|
|Giambi (2009-2013)||.123||-.118|
|Gomes (career)||.195||-.170|
|Kipnis (career)||.118||-.117|
|Raburn (2009-2013)||.130||-.160|
|Reynolds (career)||.125||-.134|
|Santana (career)||.127||-.111|
|Stubbs (2011-2013)||.100||-.124|
|Swisher (2009-2013)||.137||-.113|
Red donating the player is poor at a specific area, Green denoting that a player is good at a specific area.
(R-, P+) Table-setters: Michael Bourn, Michael Brantley
(R+, P+) All-around contributors: Nick Swisher, Carlos Santana, Jason Giambi
(R+, P-) Run producers: Asdrubal Cabrera, Mark Reynolds, Ryan Raburn, Yan Gomes
(R-, R-) Weak hitters: Mike Aviles, Drew Stubbs
Jason Kipnis is the odd man out; he does not really fit into any of the categories above. He is neither a run producer, nor not really a table setter either. He is not good at both to become all-around, but he surely is not a weak hitter.
Yan Gomes’ sample size is much too small, i.e. why his values are so high. Therefore, we will stick him lower in the order, because a manager should not change his lineup based on “hot streaks”, which actually do not exist in the first place.
Optimally, you want the players with high potential values batting at the top, followed by all around hitters, then your run producers, and finally your weak hitters at the bottom. Therefore, we can come up with the following as our optimal batting order:
1. CF Michael Bourn – high potential hitter, gets on-base at a high rate and does not hit home runs. Speed is a plus.
2. LF Michael Brantley – second highest potential hitter, speed is a plus.
3. 1B Carlos Santana – provides both power and the ability to get on base.
4. DH Nick Swisher – provides both power and the ability to get on base.
5. SS Asdrubal Cabrera – good run producer.
6. 3B Mark Reynolds – good run producer.
7. 2B Jason Kipnis – best of the weaker hitters.
8. C Yan Gomes – too small of a sample size.
9. RF Drew Stubbs – worst hitter in the starting lineup.
Terry Francona errors in placing hitters such as Michael Brantley and Carlos Santana so low in the order. Santana is great at getting on-base, and Brantley is not a run producer, he is a singles hitter. Therefore, those two should be batting at the top of the order. Players like Asdrubal Cabrera and Jason Kipnis are run producers, and there are more optimal hitters to hit two and three.
Asdrubal Cabrera is in line for many more RBI opportunities with this lineup, and he must be ready for it. So far this season he is batting .224 with RISP with 0 HR and 15 RBI, poor numbers for a run producer. Asdrubal has shown his ability to hit for power since 2011, and he would be a solid five hitter if he could go for extra-bases more often.
The Indians lineup is robust when you can bat a player like Jason Kipnis 7th. He probably would not like the change too much, but he is not getting it done at number two spot, especially with an OBP of .314 this season. Compare that to Michael Brantley’s .350 OBP. I have no idea why Terry is batting Michael Brantley 7th. One reason could be that Terry is very loyal to his players and knows Brantley will move around the lineup without problem.
Many may say “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” However, that is a bogus argument. Whenever the opportunity to increase the potential numbers of run this team could score arises itself, it should be taken. Using the model described above, the Indians could create a more-optimal batting order that could possibly win them a game or two more per season. | http://itspronouncedlajaway.com/2013/06/02/optimizing-the-indians-batting-order-using-mathematical-modeling/ |
This is a review of the basketball research conducted by Brian Skinner, applying networks and Braess’s paradox.
A basketball game can be seen as a series of intertwined networks. Each possession has a starting point, a path to follow, and an ending point. Each possession, or pathway, would have its own unique probability of scoring points. A pathway that is used more regularly would naturally have a lower probability as the more often one type of play is used the easier it is for the opponent to be prepared. In order to describe the entire offense of a team in a basketball game as a network, every possible pathway would need to be created along with its unique efficiency, a process that is impossible in practical terms.
However, a network can provide useful information regarding a basketball offense, especially in looking at the difference between a team’s efficiency and maximum possible points. In this case, a basketball game is compared to a simplified traffic network.
The difference between a team’s efficiency and maximum possible points can be described as the price of anarchy, which measures how the efficiency of any system degrades due to selfish behavior.
Braess’s paradox is a proposed explanation for the situation where an alteration to a road network to improve traffic flow actually has the reverse effect and impedes traffic through it.
In basketball, a possession is like a car on the road and the different plays are different roads that can be chosen to reach the destination. The more often a play, or road, is used the lower its efficiency. If all cars take the fastest route, the route will be clogged and time increases. However, if some cars take a slower route the average speed for all cars increases. This is the difference between selfish and unselfish behavior. Likewise, in basketball, always implementing the play with the highest probability of scoring can lead to an overall decrease in efficiency.
A simplified network can be created for a basketball offense with each line in the network connecting the beginning of a possession to the shot attempt. Each player is assigned a scoring efficiency dependent on how often that particular play is used. In this network the efficiency of a player is defined as the player’s true shooting percentage as a function of the fraction of the team’s shots he takes while he is on the court.
The optimal strategy for a team would be the one that maximizes the team’s overall efficiency. This optimal strategy can be calculated using Lagrange multipliers for constrained optimization.
Coaches and analysts could take this information to determine how often each player should take possession of the ball and how often a particular play should be utilized in order to maximize the overall team’s efficiency. This may indicate that star players should not be given the ball as often as they currently are as such ‘selfish’ behavior may actually decrease the team’s overall scoring potential. If a star player makes fewer plays, he will receive less defensive attention, leaving him more open to make the points when he does have the ball.
In fact, in a traffic network removing a road can actually increase efficiency, indicating that removing a player could also increase efficiency. This obviously is not logical and is referred to as Braess’s Paradox.
Analytics Used: Price of Anarchy, Network, Braess’s Paradox.
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Learn all about sports analytics in Victor Holman’s Sports Analytics Blog. | https://www.agilesportsanalytics.com/sports-analytics-braesss-paradox/ |
Last week, Chad Finn of the Boston Globe wrote a column on his high school daughter wrapping up her final season of sports. It was a wonderful tribute to his daughter but the angle he took was toward the impact that high school sports makes on parents.
As you can imagine, he dug into the highs and lows of watching your child compete in sports. You love watching them play and succeed, and feel for them when they come up short and are disappointed. You not only grow closer in your relationship with your child, but you also encounter hundreds of other people along the way and make friendships that last forever, whether it is with other kids, parents, coaches.
I find the topic to be interesting and one that is not covered enough. The student-athletes deserve the attention, but sometimes the parents get lost in the shuffle. These are the ones that make it happen from the youth level on up. Parents ensure that their kids can play, the coaches help facilitate, and the students must hold up their end of the bargain.
For anyone that has not read this column, I’d highly suggest doing so. It was a moving piece that really resonated with me, and I am not a parent.
I guess this also leads me to sharing some personal news, but my wife and I are expecting our first child in June. I have told the people around me that I have spoken to but have yet to reveal it in my column, so here it is. We are having a boy and are looking forward to it every second of the day.
Reading Finn’s column made me even more excited. My boy will be a few years away from hitting the field, but I feel blessed that my life as a sports dad is just beginning, and I am thrilled to know that I will be experiencing all of those feelings that Finn touched on.
Moving forward, I will absolutely keep this topic in mind in my coverage. I think that it is important to give parents their due and I feel like it could open the door for some great content, especially at the end of the school year when the seniors are wrapping things up. There is nothing like a family story in the sport world, and Finn’s column was a terrific piece with some great insight. Definitely worth a read.
Now that spring sports are finally underway, I can start giving you some takes and opinions. My first one has to do with Toll Gate sophomore lacrosse player Adeline Areson.
As a freshman, Areson was an impact player in both basketball and lacrosse. It was clear right off the bat that the Titans had a special player that they would be able to build around in each sport.
This past winter, Areson broke out in basketball and became arguably the top player in Division III and one of the premier athletes in the state. She played multiple positions for Toll Gate and flat out carried the Titans for portions of the winter.
Last weekend, Toll Gate traveled to Cranston Stadium to participate in the lacrosse Injury Fund contests, and my biggest takeaway was how dominant she was again.
Every few years, you’ll see a high schooler who just stands out. You can’t explain why, or how, but you know a special talent when you see it. That is how Areson appeared on Saturday afternoon.
It was an exhibition, but when Areson had the ball, there was no stopping her. She always found a way to the cage and always got a shot off. When playing defense, she was always in the right place at the right time, she was vocal and communicating, it was hard to miss her.
It was really impressive to see the jump she took on the basketball court this winter and it looks like she is on track to do the same thing on the lacrosse field. It’s staggering seeing a player be so dominant, but then to realize that she is only a sophomore was insane.
Areson is a special talent whose ceiling is incredibly high. When she hits her peak, the state will be in for something special that only comes around every so often. Toll Gate will be right back in the mix this spring as well, much thanks to her.
Lastly, I will give you my Boston Red Sox outlook for the season as things get started this week.
The Sox had a solid campaign in 2021, reaching the playoffs and making it to the ALCS. All things considered, I believe that the team is about the same as it was last year and will have similar results.
In terms of the lineup, Boston’s is elite. Xander Bogaerts, Rafael Devers, JD Martinez, Trevor Story, that is a ton of firepower. The Red Sox should easily be a top-five offensive unit this year.
Like last year though, I have some serious concerns about the team’s pitching both in terms of the starting rotation and bullpen.
Chris Sale is out for the first two months, and he did not appear to be fully rejuvenated when he returned from Tommy John surgery last summer. From there, your only sure thing is Nathan Eovaldi, and even he is more of a middle-of-the-rotation type of guy. Like last year, it also seems like the bullpen will be organized on the fly with no real hierarchy.
Due to the team’s fantastic lineup, it will always have a chance to win and should be a top-five team in the American League. However, there are just too many factors for me to say anything more. I think a playoff appearance is in the cards, but from there, their chances are modest at best if you ask me. | https://johnstonsunrise.net/stories/giving-parents-their-due,172762? |
Based on the gift they have received, everyone should use it to serve others, as good managers of the varied grace of God. If anyone speaks, [his speech should be] like the oracles of God; if anyone serves, [his service should be] from the strength God provides, so that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To Him belong the glory and the power forever and ever. Amen.
-1 Peter 4:10-11
As I was recruiting this past winter and helping our staff assemble a basketball team for this upcoming season, I was struck by the thought of how a basketball team has distinct similarities to our churches and communities. In order to be successful, our basketball team must be made up of athletes with diverse talents. If we put a team of all post players or point guards on the court, we would have a tough time winning.
And in addition to having a variety of talents, it is also important for the team to be made up of athletes who understand their roles on the floor. It will not do our 5-10 point guard much good to play the post, nor will it serve our team well if our 6-7 post player decides to handle the ball and shoot three-pointers.
As coaches, we need our players to accept their roles, but we also need them to perform with the desire to compete at their best. And that goes for coaches, too. If I prepare a team for a game with less than my best effort, the chances of winning or successfully competing will not be very good.
Like a sports team, for our churches to successfully serve Christ in our communities, we must have people with diverse talents serving in roles in which they can be successful. As much as I love to sing, I cannot carry a tune. It would better serve Christ if I were to be a teacher, serve on a custodial staff or serve on the staff that prepares meals for our workers on Wednesdays. In the New Testament, Peter tells us that we have each been given gifts from the Lord’s great variety of spiritual gifts. We should use these gifts to serve others. Just as team members accept their roles so their teams can be successful, we need to be willing to accept our roles and places of service in order to serve Christ successfully.
Wherever or however we serve, wherever our niche might be, we must serve with all the strength and energy we would expect from our teams. If we do this with an attitude of glorifying God in all that we do, we will surely have a better chance of serving successfully.
- Are you utilizing your talent properly?
- Are you being faithful with your talent?
- Have you been called to serve? How did you respond?
- Are you involved in a ministry? | http://fcaresources.com/devotional/utilizing-talent |
By Ross Moore
We know plenty of people who have talked about how beautiful their new house is, with all the amenities and rooms and flooring, but how many have heard, “I love the house because it has such a solid foundation”? Foundations are covered up by everything else, would be unsightly if in view, and, yet, are the very substance that allows for a safe building. In this article, we’ll review the foundations of developing a first-class cybersecurity team.
Team
We’ll review the word “team” first because that’s what we’re building. It’s all about People. We’ve all seen the triad of People, Processes, and Technology. Team skills and abilities can be supplemented by Processes and Technology, but those can’t supplant People.
Get to know the team by just getting together and talking. There must be some kind of proper ratio between talking, working on projects, and developing the product, but getting to know each other – even just on a working relationship level – is a cornerstone of team development. Share information freely, even if it doesn’t necessarily relate directly to work – make it more than just about threat intel or talking shop.
Because building a team is all about focusing on people, a mentor is needed. If the team has a seasoned professional, that person could fit the bill. On the other end of the spectrum, if the whole company, including leadership, is new (a common occurrence), then an external trusted advisor is an appropriate role to seek out.
Also, working together to solve issues makes work more fulfilling. When each team member accomplishes or is encouraged to accomplish, appropriate goals, and as each person is included throughout various projects, the team grows together.
Cybersecurity
What is “cybersecurity”? Today’s “cybersecurity” is what used to be called “information assurance.” There are some somewhat recent and growing aspects of cybersecurity, such as Cloud Security and working in a Security Operations Center. But there are numerous domains that have always been a part of Information Assurance, Information Security, and IT Operations, such as data classification, access control, capacity planning, patch management, and vulnerability management.
In his 2015 book, “Cybersecurity Leadership,” Dr. Mansur Hasib (who references the conflation of the terms cybersecurity and information assurance) defines cybersecurity as, “…the mission-focused and risk optimized management of information which maximizes confidentiality, integrity, and availability using a balanced mix of people, policy and technology while perennially improving over time.”
Dr. Hasib then gives more background: “The meaning of the words cybersecurity and information assurance are coalescing into one comprehensive modern meaning.” At this time, the terms have all but completed their association. Understanding what Information Security, Information Assurance, and Cybersecurity roles a company needs is necessary for training employees, and defining those roles is incumbent on corporate security leaders.
For team roles that aren’t typically considered “cybersecurity,” such as risk management and compliance, there’s technical potential due to the technology that can be leveraged. A couple of examples are programming (e.g., Python script to push to Jira) and mobile apps reverse engineering (e.g., ensuring key secrets aren’t leaked).
First-Class Cybersecurity Players
Unicorns. Rock Stars. These and other glamorous terms are used to describe the type of employees many companies are either looking for or what’s lauded in their corporate posts. It’s fine to praise these people and to look for them, but that makes the search much harder and can show unnoticed employees that their contributions are not worthy of public mention.
It doesn’t take a rock star to review permissions or configure a firewall, nor is a unicorn necessary to fill out RFPs, fill in and assign tickets, and update a server. Many positions only need someone willing and able to perform the work. Remember the foundation. Many employees, while not rock stars are the reason the department and the company remain stable.
Upskilling current IT and Security staff may provide a much quicker route to skills training than considering hiring new talent. Hiring new talent without assessing and potentially training current talent is also a recipe for current talent to feel pushed to leave.
Coherence and Cohesion
Coherence (intradepartmental) and Cohesion (interdepartmental) are factors in creating training pathways. An ad hoc approach to training can easily increase feel-good skills that cannot be used regularly or even are detrimental to company progress. If a company is entirely a Microsoft shop, there may be little to no business value in learning Linux (and vice versa); though this doesn’t discount a certification path. Training must make sense within the department (coherence) and fit with the rest of the business (cohesion).
Look for the right soft skills and train the technical ones. Soft skills include problem-solving, analytical and critical thinking, the ability to work independently and in a team, and creativity.
One training option for increasing cohesion is creating a corporate university. It’s a daunting task but getting multiple departments on board increases the chances of success because the idea gets more buy-in and promotion.
Being able to promote what training will be provided training will help with recruiting, interviewing, and hiring. Delivering on the promise of training will help with employee retention, making everyone happier, and creating a solid, functional team.
Resource pain points
Budget is a chief influence in selection. All training takes resources, which cover more than the financial budget and include time, effort, and increased tech specs. A department may not have much corporate financial support, so finding inexpensive or free avenues takes some deliberation.
Here are some training options that are easy on the finances and give technical training and experience:
- Hack The Box
- RangeForce
- Portswigger’s Web Academy
- OWASP – Juice Shop
Today’s cybersecurity team must have the training, and the training needs to have business relevance, provide career advancement, and instill hope.
There’s no universal and comprehensive training program. The head of security (whatever the actual title) needs to determine the various skills needed for the whole team and the individuals. The requirements for a security consulting company are different from a pen-testing company are different from a professional working with developers is different from a practitioner in the healthcare industry, etc.
Build Development Pathways in Cybersecurity
Whether called pathways, roadmap, or career development, a relevant training path should be presented to each team member. Upon hire, have a basic training path ready to roll out, have a 30-60-90 day plan, and follow up on them. There’s almost nothing so demoralizing as being given some goals, attaining them, and then receiving no feedback from one’s manager.
Factors and Final words
2 factors stand out as one develops training plans: each solution should be based on 1) business needs and 2) handling risk. What risks are faced by the business? It’s oddly humbling to think that a nation-state would want to target us, but perhaps a more likely risk that materializes is that an employee has excess permissions and can steal ePHI. Or perhaps a former employee still has Production access and could delete resources. Focusing on business-relevant risks and goals will help develop a much better development pathway.
Critical and analytical thinking is a skill also required of leaders. Knowing the mission and vision of the business, and knowing the risks of the business, will produce a better alignment of the roles and skills necessary to protect and advance.
If you liked this blog, check out our other pieces here. | https://www.welcometobora.com/blog/developing-a-first-class-cybersecurity-team/ |
Colorado Rockies: Could Ian Desmond really be part of a trade package?
Another day and another article with a proposed trade involving the Colorado Rockies. This one is certainly interesting … and involves Colorado’s biggest offseason signing from two offseasons ago.
In this MLB.com article exploring five wild trades that just might work, Mark Feinsand put together a trade that would send Ian Desmond and prospect Grant Lavigne to the Houston Astros in exchange for Josh Reddick. The trade assumes that the Astros won’t resign Marwin Gonzalez (who has been linked to the Colorado Rockies and almost every other Major League team) and that the Astros and Desmond would OK the fact that he has a “no trade clause” that kicks in if the Rockies were to trade him. That means he would be in Houston for the rest of his contract.
That could be a sticking point for any team interested in obtaining Desmond. He has $38 million left on his contract he signed before the 2017 campaign along with a $15 million club option for the 2022 season. There is plenty of money left on the table for a player who will turn 34 during the upcoming season and has put together a slash line of .251/.314/.404 in his two seasons in a Rockies uniform.
For his part, Reddick had a down season last year, logging a .242/.318/.400 slash line. The soon-to-be-32-year-old is being pushed by a prospect (Kyle Tucker) at his position, just like Desmond is being pushed by Ryan McMahon at first base.
Regarding Desmond, the problem is this: We know manager Bud Black likes having Desmond’s versatility in the lineup and likes to put veteran players in positions to impact his team’s chances of winning. We also know that sending Desmond to another team not even halfway through his contract would signal that the five-year, $70 million deal was truly a mistake by Colorado general manager Jeff Bridich. It’s unlikely either Black or Bridich would budge on this deal.
While Rockies fans may not love Desmond (and let him know that at times last season), it would be an absolute shocker if he left Denver before the end of his contract. Desmond changing uniforms would signal failure and, at a time when the Rockies are looking for their third consecutive postseason appearance, keeping the status quo is much easier and less complicated.
When Desmond inked that contract, there was little doubt he wouldn’t see the end of it in a Rockies uniform. That won’t change this offseason, no matter how much some Rockies fans may want it or how tempting a trade package might be on paper. | https://roxpile.com/2018/11/29/colorado-rockies-could-ian-desmond-really-be-part-of-a-trade-package/ |
Japers' Rink Player Card (click for a hi-res version, and a glossary of terms used in this post can be found here; data via NHL.com, war-on-ice.com, General Fanager and Stats.HockeyAnalysis.com):
Orpik's Season, Game-by-Game (via HockeyViz, explained here):
Orpik's HERO Chart (via Own The Puck):
Orpik and His Defensive Partners:
Orpik's 5v5 Teammates and Competition (via HockeyViz, explained here):
Orpik's 5v5 Usage:
Orpik's With-or-Without You (via HockeyViz, explained here):
Orpik's Rolling Shot-Attempt (Corsi) -For Percentage:
Orpik's Last Nine Seasons (via Stats.HockeyAnalysis.com):
Key Stat: Brooks Orpik's regular season Score-Adjusted-Corsi-For % (SACF%) of 52.2 was the highest of any Caps' defenseman that played at least 100 minutes of five-on-five hockey.
Interesting Stat: Orpik scored more goals (three) in his 41 games this year than he scored over the previous three seasons combined (two goals in 196 games).
The Good: As mentioned in the "Key Stat" section, Orpik was a solid puck possession player during the regular season and he also looked good in a few other important percentage metrics: Shots For, Fenwick For, Scoring Chances For, and Goals For (despite getting not-so-great .907 goaltending behind him). Orpik's greatest value continues to be that when he is in the lineup the rest of the roster is able to play in their intended positions; and that's evident in the team's numbers with and without him in the lineup.
Orpik continues to be one of the team leaders on the penalty kill and is an important leader for the team as a whole. It's also important to note that while his impact isn't always quantifiable, it's largely reported from within the Capitals' locker room.
The Bad: In his second season of a five-year deal Orpik was limited to just 41 games due to a break in his femur. And while a freak injury like that likely has nothing to due with age, at 35-years-old it wouldn't be unexpected to see both play and health begin to deteriorate for a guy like Orpik - there are a lot of hard miles on those tires, and time eventually catches up with everyone, even a notorious fitness nut like Orpik.
We stated above that his underlying numbers were pretty good, and they were, but a large part of that may be due to when he was playing during the season. The Capitals played their best hockey at the bookends of the season, which happens to be when Orpik was healthy so there might some chicken-or-the-egg stuff going on here. Orpik was a (slightly) negative relative possession player, and while the team did have better numbers when he was in the lineup, that probably has more to do with roster construction (allowing everyone on the blueline to slot into roles for which they're best-suited) than Orpik's actual play.
Then came the postseason. No Capitals defenseman had a worse SACF%, was on the ice for a higher rate of shot attempts against, nor goals against than Brooks Orpik. Just like in the regular season, Orpik was limited to just half of Washington's appearances, playing in just 6 of the team's 12 games during the playoffs - Orpik suffered an "upper body injury" against the Flyers and lost three additional games to suspension after an egregious hit on the Penguins' Olli Maatta in Game 2 of the second round. Unfortunately for Orpik and the team, his hit on Maatta wasn't the most detrimental penalty that he took in the Capitals' second round loss - already trailing 1-0 in the second period of Game 6, Orpik took a double-minor for high sticking Patric Hornqvist. By the time the Caps returned to even-strength, the deficit had grown to three.
All in all it appears that Orpik's age may be catching up to him, as Brian MacLellan indicated that Orpik's role will likely be reduced moving forward.
The GIF/Video:
Orpik goal pic.twitter.com/ZtrAdKHyRx— Stephanie (@myregularface) February 21, 2016
The Vote: Rate Orpik below on a scale of 1-10 (10 being the best) based on his performance relative to his potential and your expectations for the season - if he had the best year you could have imagined him having, give him a 10; if he more or less played as you expected he would, give him a 5 or a 6; if he had the worst year you could have imagined him having, give him a 1.
The Discussion: Does Orpik still have the ability to play top-four4 minutes? Do the Capitals need another left-handed defenseman? What would it take for you to give him a "10" next year? | https://www.japersrink.com/2016/6/7/11682676/2015-16-season-review-brooks-orpik-washington-capitals |
The importance of sprinting speed in many sports, including contact sports such as rugby, football, and ice hockey, is undeniable. However, there is another variable called sprinting momentum that is often overlooked. It’s unfortunate because the value of sprinting momentum in contact sports can very well mean the difference between scoring and not scoring. In a study this month in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, the usefulness of momentum was compared to that of speed.
Sprint momentum is a derived value, which means it is the product of two or more other values - in this case, speed and bodyweight. When you combine the velocity of the object with its mass, you will get a number that represents the force required to stop that object from moving. A higher momentum has clear applications to sports in which players make contact with one another. It’s no wonder positions requiring more contact tend to have larger players.
There is an optimum interplay between speed and weight that maximizes momentum. To some extent, they antagonize one another. At some point getting heavier means your top speed will diminish, but your momentum may still increase, so long as you are gaining more weight than you are losing speed. Since both speed and momentum are important in contact sports, the question becomes which one should athletes focus on maximizing?
In this study the researchers looked at national rugby players in the junior (under twenty years old) and senior (over twenty years old) levels. They examined the interplay between positions and levels, and then followed some of the athletes for two years to see how speed and momentum changed and affected performance.
The first part of the results - the difference between speed and movement amongst various players - was specific to rugby, although it can be extrapolated to other sports. Speed was roughly the same between the junior and senior level players. By contrast, momentum changed significantly between levels. Further, backs were faster than forwards, but forwards had greater momentum, indicating a higher demand for contact. So speed and momentum can be used to determine position and skill or age level, at least for rugby.
The second part was the examination of changes over time. This one takes less imagination to deduce the ramifications for other contact sports. The juniors, who transitioned to senior level players over the two years, experienced greater physical changes, which was no surprise. There seemed to be a peak in speed around the time of this transition, which took place at age twenty, but momentum continued to improve. In other words, the athletes got heavier without getting any faster or slower as they transitioned to the senior level. This was an important difference between the two levels, and likely made the senior players better, especially as forwards.
For contact sports like rugby, momentum may be a better single determinant of performance than either speed or weight alone. This becomes especially true in positions with a lot of contact. Fortunately, it’s also a stat that is easy for the average coach to test, and can help inform decisions as players transition into different levels or positions.
References
1. Matt Barr, et. al., “Long-term training induced changes in sprinting speed and sprint momentum in elite rugby union players,” Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, DOI: 10.1519/JSC.0000000000000364
Photo courtesy of Shutterstock. | https://breakingmuscle.com/uk/fitness/the-importance-of-sprint-momentum-for-contact-sports |
The irregular distribution and uncertainty of water resources, as well as the need to produce food in Mexico, has led to the opening of large irrigated areas in arid and semi-arid regions (Ojeda-Bustamante, Hernández-Barrios, & Sánchez-Cohén, 2008), since approximately 50 % of national agricultural production comes from irrigated areas (Ojeda-Bustamante et al., 2008). Most of the infrastructure built in Mexico's irrigation districts was sized under the criteria of the former Secretaría de Recursos Hidráulicos (SRH, 1973). The design method traditionally used to determine the capacity of canals was proposed by that Ministry; however, in other countries, different methods are used that generate more efficiency (Íñiguez-Covarrubias, de León-Mojarro, Prado-Hernández, & Rendón-Pimentel, 2007; Íñiguez-Covarrubias, Ojeda-Bustamante, & Rojano-Aguilar, 2011). It should be noted that, in recent years, the Irrigation District (ID) Management division of Mexico's Comisión Nacional del Agua (CONAGUA) has conducted several studies in the IDs called "Master Plans," in order to determine the need for and plan investments (Instituto Mexicano de Tecnología del Agua [IMTA], 2007).
The dominant water distribution method in Mexico’s irrigation areas is by weekly controlled demand, and consists of planning the volume of water withdrawal from the supply source by the distribution network for delivery to users within a period of seven days, this according to the irrigation requests received from users in the previous week (Arista-Cortes, González-Camacho, & Ojeda-Bustamante, 2009). According to the classification of distribution methods, the responsibility for controlling the distribution of dominant irrigation in Mexico is shared (User-Authority [CONAGUA]), and is known as controlled demand (Íñiguez-Covarrubias et al., 2007).
In the irrigation service delivery process, the average efficiencies of the water distribution system must be known. These efficiencies should be considered when planning water allocation. Consequently, it is vital to implement robust irrigation scheduling schemes, preferably in "near real time," to achieve efficient use of resources and operate, hydraulically, the canal network satisfactorily (Spare, Wang, & Hagan, 1980).
To obtain the reference evapotranspiration (ETo) of the crop, in order to determine the capacity of the canal, it is recommended that irrigation area designers estimate it based on robust methods such as the Penman-Monteith method modified by FAO (Allen, Pereira, Raes, & Smith, 2006), as well as use the concept of growing degree days (°D), since it is an adequate tool to predict the phenology and development of the crops, which will help to better adjust the irrigation supply to the water needs of crops. Íñiguez-Covarrubias et al. (2011) used this methodology to determine canal capacity. To do this, they estimated evapotranspiration in an irrigation area (ETia) in five steps. Additionally, it is important to consider that the calculation of irrigation depths corresponds to the useful storage capacity of the soil within the root depth (SRH, 1973).
Currently, with the innovation and application of computer tools, which facilitate the handling of large volumes of information on different useful variables, it is possible to perform laborious numerical calculations. An example of this is the estimation of the irrigation requirements that are important to match the water demands of the crops with the application of irrigation through the hydraulic infrastructure (Ojeda-Bustamante, Sifuentes-Ibarra, Íñiguez-Covarrubias, & Montero-Martínez, 2011). However, the current conservative idea of operation limits the natural evolution of irrigation areas and the updated information of the variables of interest, which prevents improving the service and generates large water losses due to deficient operation in periods of peak irrigation demand (Íñiguez-Covarrubias et al., 2007, 2011).
Today, one of the main challenges for researchers related to the management of large irrigation areas, divided into several irrigation modules or sections, is to efficiently perform the calculations and generate accurate and timely recommendations. With this, there is no doubt that large irrigation systems can be designed and operated more efficiently (Ojeda-Bustamante, Sifuentes-Ibarra, & Unland-Weiss, 2006; Ojeda-Bustamante et al., 2008).
Based on the bibliographical review carried out for the development of this paper, and on the works carried out by the authors in several IDs, for the Irrigation User’s Civil Associations (ACURs), the ACUR federations called SRLs and CONAGUA, it is known that there is no explicit, integrated procedure to implement hydrosystemic management with application in complex irrigation systems that have different crops, varieties, soils, planting dates and agricultural seasons. A Mexican ID may have one or more SRLs, which are responsible for executing the works and activities that are common to two or more ACURs.
Therefore, the objective of this work was to propose and analyze a function in which three variables converge: crop evapotranspiration (ET), water distribution planning, and canal capacity. Subsequently, the aim was to develop a proposal for hydrosystemic management in which the variables are combined with the greatest degree of flexibility to satisfy the user and meet the expectations for the use of water resources. To this end, it is important to consider the agronomic, soil and climatic conditions and the type of irrigation infrastructure.
Materials and methods
Study area
The study was conducted in the “Santa Rosa”, module which is part of the ID-075, located in Valle del Fuerte, Sinaloa, Mexico. In this region, the rainy season is concentrated mainly in the months of September and October, often of cyclonic origin. The evaluated irrigation module covers an area of 34 316 ha, has a crop repetition factor in the spring-summer (S-S) season of up to 27 % and stands out as the largest module of ID-075.
The procedure for the allocation of irrigation (delivery-receipt) in the “Santa Rosa” module is based on a weekly irrigation schedule. The operation of the headworks (storage dam) is the responsibility of the federal authority (CONAGUA). Irrigation frequency is scheduled in each ACUR and the duration is agreed upon by the User-ACUR binomial. The delivered flow is limited by the farm's intake capacity (120 L·s-1 on average). With these operating conditions, the irrigation module reports an overall annual operating efficiency of 51.4 %, a value that reflects the water distribution method used in ID-075.
It is important to point out that in ID-075 there is a culture of systematization of agricultural and hydrometric information. The "Santa Rosa" module has a very complete database with information from the last 17 agricultural years, which has been generated with the "Spriter" real-time irrigation forecast system developed by Ojeda-Bustamante (1999). The historical weather information used corresponds to the monthly average values of the 1961-1990 period of the “Los Mochis” weather station, located in the center of the irrigation district. Because the study area is in a semi-arid region, precipitation was not considered, since the period of maximum irrigation demand occurs in the dry periods of the year.
Crop plan
The standard irrigation plan of the irrigated area was considered, which includes planting dates and areas per crop. The most important crops in ID-075 are corn, sorghum, bean, fruit trees, sugar cane, fodder (mainly alfalfa) and vegetables (tomato and potato). The net depths were considered at the farm intake level (where ACUR delivers water to the users) and the gross is at the control point level (where ACUR receives water from the ID's SRL).
Crop water demands were established for annual planning purposes. For this, data were taken from the study conducted by Mendoza-Robles and Macías-Cervantes (2003) on corn, one of the main crops of the "Santa Rosa" module. These authors indicate the optimal planting date in relation to the probable yield loss in final production (kg·ha-1), as well as the planting date, season length (days), ETo (mm), potential evapotranspiration (ETp) (mm) and number of irrigations.
The determination of canal hydraulic capacity was carried out using the Clement method (Íñiguez-Covarrubias et al., 2011). For design purposes, farm application efficiency (η) was 70 % for gravity irrigation, as well as for conduction and distribution in earth-lined canals (SRH, 1973). The overall efficiency for design is estimated as ηoverall = ηconduction x ηapplication, which is 49 % for the earthen canals, as reported for the “Emilio Grivel” canal. In addition, for serving large cultivated areas, the time of the irrigation service is considered to be 24 hours a day.
The development of the methodological proposal for hydrosystemic management is summarized in the following six stages:
Stage 1. The ETo is estimated and the ETp is calculated by crop and planting date. The concept of accumulation of °D is used as an alternate criterion to express the duration of the phenological cycle of crops and thus estimate the crop coefficient based on the °D according to the equations of Ojeda-Bustamante et al. (2006 and 2008). In this case, an ETp curve is constructed for each planting date, which integrates the planting period, in the irrigation area. The ETp of a crop (assumed as the maximum ET without water, nutritional, thermal or phytosanitary stress problems), from the planting date (PD) to the harvest date (HD), is given by the following equation:
where
To estimate the ETp, the historical climatology and a cropping plan that includes the proposed crops with dates, planting areas and agricultural season are required. Since rainfall during the period of peak demand is minimal in Mexico’s irrigation districts, it is assumed that the ET is equivalent to the crop's irrigation requirements. In the case where effective precipitation is important during a crop’s period of peak demand, it should be subtracted from the daily ET. For more information on the methodology used, consult the work of Íñiguez-Covarrubias et al. (2011).
Stage 2. Irrigation is scheduled for each planting date of each crop. To determine the irrigation depth, it is necessary to know the type of soil, bulk density, field capacity, permanent wilting point, depth of the roots of the crops (for different stages of development) and the irrigation practice used for each crop.
Stage 3. Based on the results of applying Equation 1, the cumulative ET curve (ETc) is constructed for each crop, which will be referred to as ET1c to indicate an integrated curve of several planting dates of a crop in an agricultural season: autumn-winter (A-W), spring-summer (S-S) and perennial crops. Irrigations are specified according to each crop, until obtaining the ET1c in cm for the established multicrop area. At this stage, partial results are obtained for the number of hectares established, irrigation schedules, and the flow required to satisfy demand is compared with the flow available in the canal for each delivery point. Ojeda-Bustamante and Flores-Velázquez (2015) point out that ETc ≈ ETp for minimum stress conditions. It should be noted that, for each day i, ET 1C = f j x ET c-i , where fj is the weight of each planting date j (Íñiguez-Covarrubias et al., 2011).
Stage 4. At this stage, the unique curve of hectares established for the crop (in this case corn) per season is constructed, which is composed of the hectares of the different planting dates. It should begin with the first ten days of the agricultural year (in this case on Julian day 281), until reaching the total planting of the crop; the cropping area per planting date is taken into account. In this part of the process, the number of hectares with scheduled irrigations for each ten-day period (irrigated hectares) is obtained.
Stage 5. The area and the ET are integrated for each agricultural season (ETseason), considering the per-crop occupation of each season (S-S, A-W and perennial). In this way, the ETseason, the quantity and the specific location of hectares with irrigations scheduled for each ten days are partially obtained, which facilitates the estimation of the necessary and available flow in the canal at the specific water delivery points.
Stage 6. The joint general function of the three seasons (S-S, A-W, and perennial) for the agricultural year is obtained, thus obtaining the area variable with the total irrigation requirement in the zone and for ten-day periods. The information matrix obtained based on Table 1 has n columns. The filling in of the matrix begins in column n(i=1), season and the initial day (Julian day: Day), which is from the planting date per crop until the last day of the phenological stage. The “Crop” column is filled with the result in tabular form of the ETp per day for each planting date of stage 1, the area (number of hectares) and, finally, the corresponding irrigation dates for the crop. Column n(i=2) is for crop 2, and the filling in is repeated as in column n(i=1), only that the results are placed as the beginning on the subsequent days that separate the planting from the beginning of crop 1. In this way, column n(i=3) is for crop 3, and the filling in is repeated as in columns n(i=1) and n(i=2), placed on the Julian days subsequent to the Julian start of the planting date of crop n, and so on until all the crops are completed with their planting dates of the A-W, S-S and perennial seasons. There will be as many columns n(i) as the number of crop planting dates. Each line of column 6(a) lists the area with crop every day of the year, which is the sum of the areas of each crop by planting date, and column 6(b) lists the areas per ten days with irrigation, at the end of each day of the ten.
Table 1.
|1||2||3||4||5||6||7|
|Day||Crop n(i=1)||Crop n(i=2)||Crop n(i=3)||Crop n(i=2)||Area (ha)||Volume demanded (1 000 m3)|
|(mm)||Area (A) (ha)||Irrigation date (I)||ETp, A, I||….||…||(a)||(b)||(a)||(b)|
|Established||Ten-day irrigation||Daily||Ten-day period|
The complete matrix provides the number of hectares with water requirement, the irrigation depths, which when multiplied by the hectares yields the daily ten-day volume (includes total efficiencies), and the flow needed to satisfy the water demand with the available flow in the distribution canal for each delivery point. As can be seen, at this stage the irrigation demand, irrigation distribution planning, and hydraulic capacity of the canals are integrated into a joint function.
Due to the large number of calculations involved, the algorithms for estimating the ET of the crops in an irrigation area, according to the methodology proposed by Íñiguez-Covarrubias et al. (2011), were coded in Java language, in a program developed by the authors called IntegraRR, based on the CROPWAT program (Clarke, Smith, & El-Askari, 1998), but which uses the concept of growing degree days. This program was also used to integrate the functional matrix in Table 1 for each crop, by season and by agricultural year.
Results and discussion
The results are presented on the basis of the development of the six stages of the methodological proposal for hydrosystemic management. In this way, the ETo was estimated and the ETp per crop and the planting date were obtained according to Equation 1. Figures 1 and 2 show the distribution of the cropped area established per Julian day (%) for each crop in the A-W and S-S seasons, respectively, in ID-075 (IMTA, 2007). In the curve of each crop, the planting date considered to generate the curves is indicated with a dot.
The irrigation depths are applied per crop according to the irrigation policy and where the number of irrigations is variable, since the following irrigation is applied when the maximum allowed water depletion is consumed according to the crop and the phenological stage. The net depth applied to the crops is of the order of 10 cm for relief irrigation, except for tomato, which requires a net depth of the order of 8 cm. For its part, the gross depth is affected by the efficiency reported by the “Santa Rosa” module for the A-W, S-S and perennial seasons.
Figure 1 shows that the planting period for corn is from the first days of October to the end of December, for bean from the end of September to mid-November, for potato from the end of September to the end of December and for tomato from the beginning of September to the end of December. In addition, it can be seen that the tomato crop does not have any period with all the established area, as it has a long planting period, so the first harvests are presented in the overall planting period considered. In the case of bean, potato and corn, planting ends before the first harvests, so they have a period where the established area is 100 %.
Since corn is the most representative crop in the area, the results of applying Equation 1 are shown for this crop (stage 1). Figure 3 shows the daily ETp curve of corn for a planting date (Julian day 350, ten-day planting 8), in which five irrigations with accumulated ETp of 50.62 cm were supplied. The area established in the ten days was 1 135.51 ha, which represented 10.4 % of the corn planting in the A-W season.
The irrigation distribution system in this proposal is a ten-day period; the first irrigation takes place on day 1, and subsequent irrigations on days 67, 87, 107 and 125. The irrigation depth is 10 cm per event and the minimum irrigation interval is 17 days. The canal flow is 1.87 m3·s-1, which is necessary due to the conditions of the canal with 49 % efficiency.
Figure 4 (stage 4) shows the curve of the established cumulative area of corn for the A-W season, as well as the irrigation hectares for the ten-day periods, starting with the first period on Julian day 281 until reaching the last period to have a total established area of 10 918 ha. The maximum volume required for corn in the A-W season was estimated at 557 134.56 m³·day-1, which is demanded on Julian day 99 (April 9, 2005), corresponding to the maximum ET1c of 5.3 mm·day-1 and an established area of 10 383.36 ha (Figure 4). The programmed ten-day area is 7 129.8 ha, with a design capacity flow in the canal of 8.18 m3·s-1, required flow of 8.17 m3·s-1 and a 16-day interval, this for a weekly irrigation distribution system with delivery on Monday or Thursday, and overall efficiency of 63 %. By increasing conduction efficiency from 70 to 90 %, a 10-day interval is achieved.
Figure 5 shows the process of integrating ET curves, first by planting dates for a crop (ET1C), then by agricultural season (ETseason), which corresponds to the ET of each season analyzed (ETA-W, ETS-S and ETPER), and finally the integrated curve for the irrigation zone (ETIZ) (Íñiguez-Covarrubias et al., 2011).
Figure 6 (corresponding to stage 5) integrates the ET 1C-i curves of all the crops in the A-W season to obtain the ETA-W. The values for the A-W season are highlighted with the peak volume required for Julian day 105 (April 15, 2005), with a maximum volume demanded of 672 200.7 m3·day-1, ETA-W of 5.172 mm·day-1, area of 11 643.0 ha established (potato with 1 051.33 ha, corn with 10 383.36 ha and tomato with 208.42 ha), 10-day programmed area of 7 416.8 ha, capacity flow in the canal of 8.18 m3·s-1, required flow of 8.17 m3·s-1 and a 16-day interval, this for a weekly irrigation distribution with delivery on Monday or Thursday, and an overall efficiency of 63 %. In this case, the capacity of the entire canal is already available; that is, there is no capacity restriction.
Finally, upon completion of the methodology proposed in stage 6, the integrated general matrix of the three seasons (S-S, A-W and perennial) for the agricultural year is obtained. Figure 7 shows the relationship of the hectares established for each day for the entire irrigation area, in addition to the hectares with 10-day irrigation requirements for all ten-day periods of the year. The highest value occurs on Julian day 105 (April 15, 2005), with a maximum volume of 918 487.63 (m3·day-1), peak ETIZ of 4.07892 mm·day-1 and an area of 22 518.0 ha established. For the ten days from 105 to 115, with an overall design efficiency of 51.3 %, a flow of 21.70 m3·s-1. would be required.
The ten-day period with maximum demand on the irrigation system is from Julian day 101 to 111 (April 11 to 21, 2005), with an area of 13 548 ha, of which 1 985 ha are of the S-S season, 7 416 ha of the A-W season and 4 146 ha of the perennial season. Here again, the full capacity of the canal is available, so there are no restrictions and the flow of 27.185 m3·s-1 is available. The flow in the design of the canal with Clement's method is 27.86 m3·s-1, which is greater than the flow required for the maximum ten-day period.
With respect to the planned irrigation volume to be used under the crop plan, ACUR reports a gross planned volume (without efficiency at the control point at the beginning of the module) of 226 480 thousand m3, and the volume estimated by integrating the curve in Figure 7 is 154 544.00 thousand m3, which is 47 % less than that the irrigation volume planned for delivery to the users. The above is a real indicator of the overall efficiency of the hydrosystem, that is, of the ID under the hydrosystem management proposal.
Conclusions
The ten-day systematization of crop water demand facilitates knowledge of the area associated with the irrigation requirement from the beginning of the first planting of each crop and for each season until the last irrigation demanded in an irrigation area. With the temporal knowledge of the hectares with irrigation requirements, the weekly distribution of water through the network is adjusted; it also estimates the required daily flow to apply for all seasons, this when knowing the date and required irrigation in the ten-day period.
In this case, it is concluded that the capacity of the canal, in any irrigation section, is not a limitation for applying the irrigation plan. This implies that for any other irrigation plan, the proposed hydrosystemic management methodology would have to be repeated, in which the three main variables of the large irrigation areas concur; that is, the water demand of the crops, the water distribution planning and the determination of the hydraulic capacity of the canals.
Regarding the irrigation service, it can be said that full user satisfaction depends solely on the proper management of the Irrigation User’s Association, since for the infrastructure and for the conditions of the irrigation plan there are no limitations as long as the irrigations are programmed, on the basis of a mutual agreement between the Authorities and Users.
Based on the results obtained, implementing a hydrosystemic management system, such as the one proposed herein, is widely recommended for any ID, according to the technological advances in computing, measurement, communication and control. Therefore, support programs and trained personnel are required for water management in complex, large-scale irrigation systems with different crops, planting dates, types of irrigation application systems, agricultural seasons and different irrigation modules or sections. | https://revistas.chapingo.mx/inagbi/?section=articles&subsec=issues&numero=283&articulo=2661 |
David Lyle is a New York based artist who was born in Okinawa, Japan. He earned a B.A. in studio painting from the College of Creative Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
David acts as both curator and painter, sifting through a vast array of lost snapshots from the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s found at thrift stores, garage sales, flea markets and eBay auctions. His oil on panel paintings mimic their found-photo authenticity, achieving a sense of nostalgia, memories and time passed. There is a harmonious blend of both curator and painter in Lyle that allows him to create a formidable sense of familiarity with his interesting subjects. His paintings are compelling because he selects a wide array of images with dense and varied themes. He chooses purely American moments for our psyches to reflect upon. | https://www.1xrun.com/artists/david-lyle |
"Landscape painting, at its heart, is the embodiment of a Romantic notion of nature that can only exist in our minds. In fact, it was not until people achieved sufficient removal from daily experience and confrontation with the harsh realities of the outside world that they began to idealize and conceptualize it into a place of spiritual fulfillment. The painting of landscape, of “Nature”, is about making manifest that unattainable ideal.
I embrace this search for the ideal, and find it in some ways more genuine than paintings which purport to portray nature in an objective or purely perceptual manner. I strive for a heroic approach to landscape painting, making the depicted world more magical, more Homeric, and more monumental than our own.
These worlds depicted in my paintings are clearly chimeric fictions, but are possessed of their own inner logic- a storybook logic, with a storybook’s sense of grandeur. My landscapes are rendered with a hard-edged specificity that lends an aura of artificiality to the painting, but clearly delineates its respective elements. The rendering is unambiguous- believable, but not realistic in a perceptual sense.
A product of our current age of environmental uncertainty, as well as my own nostalgia for my childhood spent on the coast of Maine (another idealized fantasy), these paintings depict unattainable utopias. Evoking a sense of loss and yearning, these landscapes represent an attempted return to Arcadia, even if only through paint." | https://www.elizabethmossgalleries.com/artists/38-nathaniel-meyer/overview/ |
In 2008, Liu Weijian depicted some of the most common scenes by resorting to a kind of extremely pristine and realistic art language. What he depicted at that time included: a pile of minerals, some industrial components, a substation in some remote little village, a small wharf, a shabby petroleum exchange, some rusty door, a public payphone on the wall, several LPG (liquefied petroleum gas) bottles on the ground, and cow dung scattered on the road, etc. For the work teeming with strong rustic characteristics, Liu gave it a somewhat industrialized title: Molecular theory.
By juxtaposing minerals with their derivatives, works such as Minerals, Metal components, and Residual soil imbued the inorganic, which was supposed to be lifeless and insensible, with a kind of sentimental power. In his work, minerals appeared to be lambs waiting to be slaughtered, soil left on the ground seemed like ashes burned to the end, and newly-forged metal components, too, looked quite daunting. The cold sunshine, thick shadow, smudgy ground, and chaotic state all seemed to be indications of future destiny.
The petroleum contained in a used plastic kettle in a shabby exchange; the roughly-made iron lock hung on the rusty door; the once-gorgeous-now-dilapidated lamp standing at the gate of the culture center where walls were already moldy, and roof and iron-barred door were black; and the LPG bottles lying on the smudgy ground... all of these depressive and broken scenes and coarse, rusty and smudgy industrial products constituted the foundation of Liu Weijian's world. The somewhat contemporary title may mislead people to think his world featured pompous urban civilization and modern industry. However, as a matter of fact, Molecular theory featured life in the country where nature and tradition were barbarically invaded by modern civilization. It cast light on the primitive and coarse aspects of industrialization.
Cow dung on the road conveyed "my" modernistic sentiment in a more euphemistic way. The collision between road and cow dung represented the collision between industrial civilization and agricultural civilization. Here, filth such as cow dung was used as a symbol of agricultural civilization. The gloomy and yet sensitive light in the picture and the vulgar appearance of cow dung revealed "my" deep concern towards the decline of the natural and warm agricultural society.
Surrounded by a kind of melancholic atmosphere, the pristine scene, objective shots and mechanical paintings were the exact representation of the real world in "my" eye. The pristine state and the seeming objectivity as well as the use of the partial color effect in photos displayed shocking facts of the coarseness and deterioration of the world to the maximum and implied the subtleties of "my" melancholy and deep concerns.
Ⅱ
In 2009, Liu Weijian presented a new series of works named Nostalgia. Different from Molecular theory, which laid an emphasis on a high sense of social responsibility and modernistic melancholy, Nostalgia highlighted "my" hometown complex. The shift from hometown complex to nostalgia was quite intriguing and thought-provoking. In the context of modernism featuring industrialization, for wanderers who left the villages where they grew up and chose to live in metropolises totally strange to them, hometown was not only some cozy memory but also a kind of lingering inner anguish due to the irreversible invasion of urbanization. Under such circumstances, the grand perspective and deep concern for the society in Molecular theory were transformed into a more powerful emotional investment: nostalgia.
Vanished factories, Brick kiln, and Personal complex depicted some abandoned country factories built during the heyday of country development. Warehouse of the Station and The Dock featured some desolate places which used to play an important role in social activities. The SARS hospital focused on the heritage from a special social event. All these places were ruthlessly eliminated by the dramatic development of the society and therefore, to some extend, functioned as an epitome of the changing country world.
Cow Leg and Cotton Wool chose to depict life in the country from some of the most common scenes. But excessively depressive tones deprived the works of the warmness and vitality of life there. Scavengers and Peculiar Implication depicted beautiful rural scenery on the surface. Nevertheless, in "my" sad eyes, the beautiful rural scenery could also appear to be an alarming reality and an ominous sign. Ideal in the garden and The concept of sectarianism looked back upon the social ideology once prevailing "hometown" and the heyday that had passed away.
Nostalgia was the result of an emotional crash between "me" and "hometown". Compared with Molecular theory, which had a more rigorous internal structure, Nostalgia appeared to be more casual. It was more like a casual record "I" made of the once familiar but now strange and somewhat sentimental scenes in "my" hometown. Teeming with a kind of sentimental emotion, Nostalgia no longer emphasized reality or subtlety. A visual effect similar to poor-quality photos was intentionally created. With the scenery on the background keeping receding, two vague images slowly turned up: one was a vivid and warm image of the hometown, showcasing the hilarity of those country factories, the glory of state-owned companies, and the enthusiasm of life in the country and the purity of people's faith in simple things. The other was the image of the metropolis "I" now lived in, featuring the achievements gained by modern industrialization. The sharp contrast between the two images sheds light on the depressing and worrying status quo of the country world.
Ⅲ
A funny machine refitted from an old tractor with two pumps, four wheels, and a long tube was shown in the gloomy light. The machine was not drawn meticulously and thick strokes were used from time to time. However, it precisely manifested the simplicity and reliability of such a machine. Dim light, heavy shadow, and faint halo made the work both realistic and imaginary at the same time. Entitled On the street, the work revealed a new theme of Liu Weijian's creation—"Antenna".
The antenna was a new achievement of Liu's journey. Compared with the bleak scenes shown in Nostalgia, Antenna was immersed in a kind of ambiguous atmosphere. During the spiritual dialogue with the depressing reality of the country, the inner feelings of "mine" turned to be more complicated, subtle, and unspeakable.
From the statue of Wang Zhaojun, one of the Four Beauties in ancient China, "I" perceived the desire for exile that prevailed in the country world. From the old street lamps, "I" saw the imagination, admiration and flattery of one world to another luxurious world. From the heritage of the previous era and the sculpture representing the faith of the current era, a sense of anachronism was felt. A kind of ridiculous passion was hidden in the self-made missile models. "I" saw the craving for recruitment from the discarded large coil and huge wooden boxes wrapped in plastic cloth. To "me", though all of these were existing reality, they also contradicted the reality "I" lived in. How could "I" deal with it? It's hard to say. Everything was tangled together.
Antenna, apparently, embodied a further exploration "I" made towards the spiritual state of the county world. However, Liu Weijian's Antenna was fundamentally a lyric piece. The increasing ambiguous attitudes didn't lead to the counteraction of passion. On the contrary, with the deepening of reason, the increasingly elusive emotions of "mine" gave rise to a kind of deeper emotional experience.
Ⅳ
From Molecular Theory to Nostalgia, and then to Antenna, what Liu Weijian explored was more than the country world. During his spiritual dialogue with the increasingly declined country world, he also further explored himself. In his opinion, these everyday changes would not be recorded into history, since "History is just a result of public culture and attention. The stories of oneself are not called history. They are the past. The past is a secret movement and will disappear in confidence. Even if it is revealed to the public, it will still become a secret". In this sense, his work could be paraphrased as the representation of the secret movement which was launched by "me", who was "neither important nor indispensable to the society", and would be doomed to vanish. Even if such a movement was revealed to the public, it would still remain a secret. | https://www.shanghartgallery.com/galleryarchive/texts/id/1911 |
The debate about the concept of Renaissance is certainly old, but has met for some years now a certain revival with questions relating to its temporality, particularly in France, following questions from Patrick Boucheron on the duration of a "short long medieval period" beginning in the 12th-13th centuries and ending in the 16th century. One can also point to Jacques Le Goff’s essay entitled Faut-il vraiment découper l’histoire en tranches? (Paris, Seuil, 2014) who defended the thesis that the Renaissance would not represent a particular period, but that it would be the last rebirth of a long medieval period that would end in the mid-18th century. Regardless of whether or not one adheres to this demonstration, the great medievalist nevertheless has the merit of questioning the relevance of the concept of periodization of history and, more specifically, that of the Renaissance chrononym.
With the Lost in Renaissance symposium, we would like to explore this period by reversing the paradigm that defines it. Indeed, if the scientific community agrees to characterize the Renaissance as the time of rediscovery of Antiquity, we would like to explore it through the prism of disappearance. The aim is not to draw up a list of the different points of rupture with previous times, but rather to concentrate on the losses encountered by Europe's intellectual, literary, artistic and material heritage during the 15th-17th centuries as a result of the great religious, political, cultural and technical upheavals that affected this territory. The angle of approach chosen for this colloquium is that of the book, considered in its materiality or for its content as a witness, victim or vector of the offenses made against the heritage during the Renaissance. | https://cesr.univ-tours.fr/centre-detudes-superieures-de-la-renaissance/actualites/archives/conferences-le-studium-lost-in-renaissance |
Looking back at the deadliest pandemic in human history – the Black Death plague – and how it was followed by the Renaissance period that ushered in the modern age, IBAD MUSHTAQ tries to find the silver lining in the present COVID crisis. He hopes that the conclusion of the existential churn caused by the present death and destruction will lead to the next paradigm shift in human progress.
—-
THIS perhaps may not be the best of times to ponder upon the question of hope. Engulfed by death, disease and desolation, India, and along with it the entire world, is going through a time unparalleled and not witnessed by most of us alive.
Scenes of hospitals with patients awaiting a bed, of attendants running around in teary eyes for oxygen and medicines for their loved ones, queues of bodies lining up at crematoriums and graveyards with the families and friends of the deceased only able to watch the departed soul from a distance, are certainly not suitable for inspiring hope, preaching patience or tolerance.
We are broken and forlorn.
Almost every one of us has lost someone close.
We are witnessing death an inch away, every day. Harrowing tales of people losing their dear ones, while being minutes away from arranging essential medicines, oxygen, or a hospital bed, are common today.
Also read: COVID-19: Epidemic of Grief
In my own village on the outskirts of Lucknow, I am aware of the local tailor holding his head in despair two weeks ago when he ran out of cloth for kafan (shroud) for one whole day, not being able to keep up with the number of bodies piling up.
Another friend informed how he was late by just fifteen minutes in finding a refill for an oxygen cylinder he required for his ailing father’s survival. Yet another lost his entire family of four in this pandemic, while himself being hospitalised.
Yet I still question myself: is there hope? And if so, in what form?
The existential rumination ushered in by the pandemic
The frail nature of human existence is perhaps best marked by our ignorance of the world as it has been before, and our repeated failure to learn from the lessons that history holds. If nothing else, this pandemic is changing that.
The pandemic is making people stop and think of not only who they are and how uncertain their existence is, but also reflect on what they are doing and if it is what they want to be doing.
Shortage of medicines and oxygen has resulted in losses to people across all social groups. More than ever, it is now that people are realising how useless even abundant wealth can be, when one cannot find an oxygen cylinder in time.
Death does distinguish between the rich or the poor.
Also read: The Pandemic Blues and Mental Health
In that light, it is also necessary to reflect back and be ready for the consequences that will follow in the post-pandemic world.
Looking back at the Black Death plague
This is certainly not the worst pandemic in world history. It is historical fact, albeit not in any way a matter of comparison, that far greater death and destruction have been witnessed by the world on multiple instances prior to the present coronavirus pandemic, most notably during the 14th century pandemic of Europe: the Black Death. This was caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which combined within it not only the bubonic plague but also the pneumonic plague and septicemic plague.
The Black Death Plague claimed the lives of more than 25 million people in Europe, by the most recent estimates. To put things into perspective, this amounted to almost a third of the population of Europe at that time.
So complete was the destruction from this plague that the Florentine chronicler Marchionne di Coppo Stefani noted, “All the citizens did little else except to carry the dead bodies to be buried … At every church they dug deep pits down to the water level; and thus those who were poor who died during the night were bundled up quickly and thrown into the pit. In the morning when a large number of bodies were found in the pit, they took some earth and shovelled it down on top of them; and later others were placed on top of them and then another layer of earth, just as one makes lasagne with layers of pasta and cheese”.
Giving way to the golden age of Renaissance
However, what followed this near-total destruction of Europe, would change the world forever and is known today as the famous period of Renaissance: the epoch that thrust the world forward from what was known as the Dark Ages, a period of intellectual stagnation and regression, to the Modern Age.
The term Renaissance itself means rebirth and implicit within it, is the pre-condition to rebirth – Death.
Though scholars would attribute several other factors contributing to the period of Renaissance, most agree that the onslaught of the Black Death remained one of the most important factors that acted as a catalyst in this transition from the Middle Ages to the modern time.
Importantly, this transitory period was marked by not only human death but also the death of the ways of the old – the authority of the church, regressive laws, wage freezes, the tax rises entailed by fighting a 100-year war with France.
All in all, this was a period of a complete paradigm shift, when individuals started reflecting back and questioning those in authority as well as the very foundation of the society they lived in for centuries. People in the late middle ages started reflecting upon who they were and what they were doing, constantly looking towards the better periods of the past to help make an even better future – a new beginning.
As put best by Stephen West, host of the podcast ‘Philosophize This!’, “this bacterial plague had just spread across Europe and killed hundreds of millions of people and now an intellectual plague was spreading in response to it.”
Such overhaul of thought during this period is perhaps best reflected in a quote from the celebrated philosopher and humanist Erasmus, who, in a letter dated 12th April, 1500, wrote, “I have turned my entire attention to Greek. The first thing I shall do, as soon as the money arrives, is to buy some Greek authors; after that, I shall buy clothes.”
Periods of chaos and churning provide fertile ground for progress
This “intellectual plague” had started questioning the way things stood and demanded an overhaul, a rebirth, a renaissance, according to West. In sum and substance, what this period held was a push towards greater human progress. West explains that the calamity and death caused by the Black Death had resulted in an awakening of the masses, who had so far been happy with moral and intellectual stagnation, so long as their basic needs were met. It was only through a catastrophe and political unrest that humanity rose to the occasion and made progress.
Also read: An accidental, anecdotal year appears like a planned sequence with majoritarianism as prelude and chorus
Currently, we may hope for instant relief in the present crisis through the timely and adequate availability of healthcare facilities for every patient, alongside more long-term solutions, such as the vaccination of a large enough chunk of the population.
However, the death and destruction that has already occurred, we must also be hopeful, will mark another paradigm shift and give rise to greater human progress, both scientifically and intellectually.
What the present time is showing us is simmering unrest and heightened compassion amongst the citizenry for a large part, if not for all.
From individuals coming together to bridge the gaps where there has been a State-deficit in saving lives to courts pulling up authorities for their mismanagement and seeking accountability – questions are rising, and so is human compassion and solidarity.
What is also on the rise is a demand for accountability, and most importantly, reflection on one’s own material existence.
In one manner, like the “intellectual plague” of the Renaissance, one could dream of another “intellectual viral” that may spread in the times to come.
What we hold dear, who we are and what we will become are certainly the questions that are going to be asked more often than ever, and may give rise to a 21st century-renaissance. Until then, we can only remain hopeful – a luxury that we still can afford. | https://theleaflet.in/is-there-hope-in-this-pandemic/ |
Reading like a Writer
Being able to recognize certain genres as a reader also involves recognizing the “moves” that writers typically make within those genres. Just like when you’re in a conversation with a new person, and you pick up on their nonverbal cues, mannerisms, and conventions, reading like a writer involves picking up on the language choices, audience, purpose and main message of the writer, as well as the way in which the writer presents those moves within a particular structure, style, and set of conventions. In the Supplemental Reading below, Thomas Deans describes the concept of Discourse Communities to refer to the way we recognize writer’s moves (and eventually make our own intentional moves as conscious, informed writers) within various different genres, cultures, and academic disciplines, all thought of as “communities of practice” that continually shape, and are shaped by, the Discourse created by you.
It is important to note, for discussion and your development as a writer, that while advanced readers recognize standards and constraints of various genres, and advanced writers make choices and moves within the expectations of the genre, that genres are also continually changing. As the academic community and the pop culture community become more inclusive, open-minded, and transformed by writers, speakers, and performers of the world, various genres, including standard English itself, are being reimagined and redefined, as new academic genres (like Spoken Word, for example), are emerging in the mainstream.
Supplemental Reading # 8:
Writing in Academic Communities by Thomas Deans
Asking Questions Like a Writer
One way to focus your active reading and annotation is to ask questions about what the writer is doing, in addition to what the writer is saying in various parts of the text. Reading in this way positions you as a critical reader who is not only engaged dialogue with the author, but is now learning from how this author writes. This is described by Ellen Carillo (2019) in the context of “rhetorical reading,” where active readers benefit from recognizing what the text (and writer) says and does, and reading like a writer to analyze how the writer uses ethos, pathos, and logos.
- Ethos: How credible is the author to their intended audience? How credible are they to you? What do they do to establish trust or authority?
- Pathos: How does the author make moves to appeal to your emotions as a reader? How does the author appeal to the emotions of other intended audiences?
- Logos: How does the author make a logical argument? Why do they make sense?
Supplemental Reading #9:
Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of our Nation by John Lewis
Supplemental Reading #10: | https://readingandwritingyour.world/ch2-page14/ |
Three weeks ago, I wrote in part one of Writing Genre Fiction that all genres, including my favourite genre of cosy mysteries, have conventions. And what is a convention? The Oxford English Dictionary defines convention as: ‘a) general agreement, esp agreement on social behaviour etc by implicit consent of the majority; or b) a custom or customary practice, esp an artificial or formal one.’
Here is a quick recap of the main conventions of books in the cosy mystery genre:
- No excessive gore or violence, no realistic trauma, bad language is mild, no sex scenes.
- Usually feature a small cast of characters in an idealised setting, often a country house or a village.
- There must be clues and red herrings.
- The emphasis is on the puzzle of the crime and readers solving that alongside the sleuth.
- The sleuth is usually an amateur, not a police professional, and is often female. Though of course, not always.
- The ending is (generally) cut-and-dried and is often resolved with a gathering of all the main suspects and other players of the story so that the sleuth can reveal the truth behind the crime(s). There may be ongoing storylines that are not resolved, but the crime itself should be resolved at the end of the book.
(I’d be the first to say, my own books don’t always adhere to these guidelines. Sorry.)
Very often authors will strive to write something ‘new’ and may feel that it has all been done before, or that the conventions are ‘old hat’. But for readers who enjoy reading mysteries, doing something different just for the sake of it is not always a good way to win their approval – they love the conventions and expect the author to stick by them at least to a greater extent.
No reader will be happy if you kill off someone’s pet. And it goes without saying that if you bump off your main character’s love interest or a close relation or friend, you will be vilified forever. Likewise if you allow your character to – well – act out of character, readers will notice and be unhappy. Reader expectations are high once you have set out to create a series, and you absolutely have to do what you can to respect the reader’s investment of emotion as well as time and money into your work.
But in actual fact, the range of options available to the author is limited, because as we know, ‘There is nothing new under the sun’ (the Bible: Ecclesiastes 1:9! See, I can do research!) and also, ‘Is there a case where one can say, “Look, this is new”? It has already existed in the ages before us.’ (the Bible: Ecclesiastes 1:10)
And if it had already all been done in Biblical times…
But just because you are constrained by generic convention does not mean you can’t be creative or original. This is where the twists and turns of the plot become the essential ingredient to muddy the waters and cover your tracks . Sorry about the mixed metaphors.
Writing unique or ‘different’ genre fiction can seem difficult – you only have 26 letters to play with, and everyone uses them, right? And if all these conventions and tropes have been used before, if there’s nothing new under the sun, how can we find our unique voice? How can we say something new or fresh? Again this is where plot twists and devices and your own unique way of using those 26 letters comes into play.
Like writing, music is another creative art that has genres and stylistic conventions. And whilst I am not a musician, I am passionate about music. And guess what? Composers of music can be every bit in need of all their ingenuity as writers when it comes to creating something fresh and ‘original’. Just to give you an extremely simple illustration: all these songs are in the key of C Major.
Ain’t No Sunshine by Bill Withers
Stairway To Heaven by Led Zeppelin
Hallelujah by Jeff Buckley
Bad Romance by Lady Gaga
But they are not the same, are they? I was actually a teeny bit surprised to realise they are all in the same key. And of course, there are other keys than just C Major – and all the keys are made up of notes, which when combined in conventional ways, create chords. Chords are grouped together one after the other (called progression, ie moving forward) to create a tune. (Or for the writer, these would compare to scenes or chapters). Here’s another set of examples:
These four songs all heavily feature the same chord progressions. It is the I-V-vi-VI Progression/C-G-Am-F known as the Optimistic chord progression for its uplifting sound. (I think these chords are for guitar – sorry, now I am really revealing my technical ignorance.)
No Woman No Cry by Bob Marley
Right Here Waiting by Richard Marx
Run by Snow Patrol
Let It Be by The Beatles
But again, they are so different, aren’t they? I could go on: these are G Major works:
Another One Bites The Dust by Queen
Wake Me Up When September Ends by Green Day
Brown-Eyed Girl by Van Morrison
You Shook Me All Night Long by AC/DC
Or other chord progressions. If the previous ones are termed the ‘optimistic’ progression, these are the ‘pessimistic’ chord progressions: these are the same chords, just reshuffled to give a different effect. The I-V-vi-VI Progression/C-G-Am-F becomes vi-VI-I-V or Am-F-C-G, and these can create a sense of sadness that ranges from the merely plaintive to downright Throwing Myself Off A Cliff:
The Sun Always Shines On TV by A-Ha (a bit plaintive here and there)
Hurt by Johnny Cash (definitely a cliff moment… but sad songs can be beautiful, and uplifting too – giving catharsis.)
Angels by Robbie Williams
or one of my favourites, Wake Me Up by Avicii
Can you see how different these are though they are using, at least in part, the same conventions?
Coming back to writing, with a small cast of characters, it can be really hard to conceal the guilty party from the avid reader who will often have read hundreds of mystery books and have an excellent working knowledge of the generic style. Enter the trope – a recognisable kind of set plot idea that is often in use in certain genres. In romance, you have tropes such as ‘fake romance’, where the main couple pretend to be in love, often to appease persistent match-making relatives and end up falling in love for real; or you can have ‘enemies to lovers’ (think Elizabeth and Mr Darcy) where the couple begin by hating the very sight of one another but end up by loving the person once they get to know one another better.
In cosy mystery writing, a common trope might be the country house mystery – a closed community, a small number of suspects, a specific set of relationships, and the stage is set for murder in a kind of extremely popular notion but very idealised version of a pre-WWII English country house. The country house could be something other than a country house. For example your story could be set, not in a house but on a train, in a submarine, on a space station, on an island, in a bomb shelter. almost anywhere, in fact, so long as the setting is enclosed in some way. Or you might use any one of the countless other tropes, the locked room trope, or you might use the disappearing corpse trope, or the gaslighting/I think I’m going insane trope…
Just because you are bound by conventions, doesn’t mean you can’t find your own voice, and your own style, and using the generic conventions means you can increase the readers pleasure as they can anticipate and understand what you are doing. If anything, sticking to the rules of your genre can give you greater freedom with a good, solid framework to build upon. | https://caronallanfiction.com/2022/04/20/writing-genre-fiction-part-two/?noamp=mobile |
In “Backpacks vs. Briefcases: Steps Toward Rhetorical Analysis,” Laura Bilin Carroll writes,
“Think of all the media you see and hear every day: Twitter, television shows, web pages,
billboards, text messages, podcasts…. Media is constantly asking you to buy something, act
in some way, believe something to be true, or interact with others in a specific manner.
Understanding rhetorical messages is essential to help us to become informed consumers,
but it also helps evaluate the ethics of messages, how they affect us personally, and how
they affect society.
….
Because media rhetoric surrounds us, it is important to understand how rhetoric works. If we
refuse to stop and think about how and why it persuades us, we can become mindless
consumers who buy into arguments about what makes us value ourselves and what makes
us happy.
…
Our worlds are full of … social influences. We are continually creating and interpreting
rhetoric. In the same way that you decide how to process, analyze or ignore these
messages, you create them.”
(46-47)
In this paper, you will unpack how one composer — in one text, one instance of storytelling
— creates meaning. The ultimate goal is to examine this text using what we know about
rhetoric, employing key terms like the following: purpose, audience, context, and text/genre.
Task
In ~1000 words, analyze the purpose and overarching message of your chosen text; how it
achieves and/or does not achieve its purpose (given its context, audience, and genre);
and why this text and its purpose/message matter. That is, what story is this text telling?
What ideas about self and/or society is it challenging, re-writing, celebrating, and/or
enforcing? How? And so what? Who might care? What’s at stake?
Steps
On the next page are the steps we will follow to compose this essay. Some we will do in
class and some you will complete on your own and submit as homework.
1
STEP ONE: Choose your text
Pick a text that we have engaged with in/for class that stands out to you as interesting,
strange, or revealing. Pick a text that you are curious about. You do not need to pick a text
that presents a message you agree with; you can pick one that you find problematic or one
that you are uncertain about. What’s most important is that you feel the text is meaty, that it
has layers you can unwrap. Below is a list of texts that you can choose from. If you have
another text in mind that you’d like to analyze which is not on this list, I’m open to it, but please
run it by me to ensure that it will work for this assignment.
“As the World Burns” (Healy, Snap Judgment LIVE)
Disclosure (Feder)
Lead Me Home (Kos and Shenk)
“How to Tame a Wild Tongue” (Anzaldúa)
“The Power of Reclaiming My Asian Name” (Liu)
Homecoming King (Minhaj)
STEP TWO: Use PACT to unpack your text
If you have already completed a PACT chart for this text, return to it. Review your notes —
are they as full and thoughtful as they could be? Add more notes — possible threads to
explore in your paper. If you did not complete a PACT chart for this text, create one. Use the
PACT aspects to generate ideas.
STEP THREE: Generate ideas by composing a shitty first draft
1
Freewrite on the text you have chosen by writing freely for ~30 minutes. To get started, at
the top of a blank page type the questions I have posed in the “task” box on the first page of
this assignment sheet. Then, begin writing wherever you like – that is, there is no
introduction, no thesis. You can start with your first impressions, what you see as the
different possible purposes or messages of the text, why you think the text matters, who you
think the intended audiences are and how the composer has attempted to address them in
different ways, why the context is influential, or somewhere else. You can jump right into
concrete examples from the text that you find compelling or explore the possibilities and
constraints of the genre. You can also write by answering the “task” questions in the order in
which they are posed.
This “down draft” will most likely contain moments of summary, but keep asking yourself
2
questions like the following: So What? Why do the examples/details/ideas I have
mentioned matter? What do they reveal about stories and storytelling? And about how this
composer engages in storytelling? These questions will hopefully allow you to delve into
analytical insights, even if they are underdeveloped and muddled. It is also useful to pose
your own questions throughout this stage of the writing process: in asking them, you can
answer them (or not) and come to conclusions that you have not come to already.
2 Lammott: “A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft – you just get it [your ideas] down.”
1 This “shitty first draft” step is influenced by Anne Lamott’s essay by a similar name.
2
NOTE:
A shitty first draft is an exploratory stage of the writing process. It is a strategy for getting
all of your ideas down on paper before organizing and polishing them. This draft can and
should be messy. While writing it, silence your inner critic. Do not stop writing at any point
to tinker with small edits or delete shaky ideas. When you do so, you might halt the
idea-generating process and possibly miss an opportunity to write your way into a
compelling idea, claim, or argument. In fact, why not try using an additional strategy to
stop you from editing? You can either cover your computer screen with a piece of paper
so that you cannot see what you are typing or you can try speaking your ideas, using the
“voice typing” tool in Google docs.
STEP FOUR: Compose a complete rough draft for workshop
Bring all of your ideas together into a cohesive whole, with a clear beginning, middle, and
end (i.e. this should not be a stream-of-consciousness draft). If you find outlining to be a
helpful step, then complete one to help you structure your complete raft. If you prefer
another approach to organizing and drafting your ideas, use it! The ultimate goal here is to
compose a draft that comes as close as it can to meeting the criteria for success outlined
below before receiving feedback.
Audience
You are writing to someone who is unfamiliar with your text but who is interested in rhetoric.
Criteria for Success
❏ Clear purpose: Provide your audience with a clear introduction to your text — its title,
its genre, its composer, and its focus/purpose. Help your audience understand the
“what” and the “why” of this text: what is the composer’s story and why have they told
it this way? Then make your purpose in discussing it clear. Your goal is NOT to
agree/disagree with the composer (to make an argument about the topic), but rather
to analyze and assess HOW the composer has told their story (refer back to the “task”
questions on the first page of this assignment packet).
NOTE: I have not required a thesis for this paper. If including one helps ground
and direct your purpose, then feel free to include one at the end of the
introduction. However, you might instead find it useful to build up to your
overarching conclusion(s) on the text. Choose an approach that makes sense
given your purpose.
❏ Ample rhetorical analyses. Examine how your text does what it does, making
effective use of key concepts (e.g. purpose, audience, context, and text/genre). In
doing so, thoughtfully unpack specific details from the text so as to illustrate
3
how/why you have come to the conclusions that you have. That is, SHOW your
audience your thinking (back up your claims with evidence).
NOTE: Evidence for this type of analysis can come in the form of direct
quotations from the text (SHOW the composer’s words or the words of someone
who has been interviewed) and descriptions of part icular examples and scenes.
❏ Thoughtful exigence. Make your analyses meaningful to your audience. Show them
why this text and its message/purpose matter, whom it might matter to, and why it
might matter right now. That is, be direct in guiding your audience through the stakes
of the text and the value of them gaining a deeper understanding of this text.
❏ Purposeful organization. Do not constrain yourself to the 5-paragraph essay. Let
your purpose, ideas, and audience guide the form. Organize your ideas in an
audience-friendly manner – consider what they need first, second, third, etc.
❏ Clear and ethical source use. Avoid the annoyances discussed by Stedman (i.e., this
is about clearly framing and integrating textual material so that your audience can
understand how and why you\’re using the source material). Attribute all ideas, words,
and images to their source using signal phrases and in-text parenthetical citations
along with a works cited page (I am not concerned with the formatting of the works
cited right now – just do your best to create it).
❏ Editing. The paper should be easy to read, demonstrating that you have read over
and edited it with an audience beyond the self in mind. I’m especially looking for
clear signal phrases (voice markers) that distinguish between what you think and
what those you have quoted/paraphrased think. This includes using strong signal
verbs.
Suggestions & Tips
In order to determine if your composer is effective in achieving their purpose/message,
return to the questions I pose on your PACT charts: given your text’s audience, context, and
genre, have they done enough to meet audience expectations and influence change (in
action or thinking)? Keep in mind the following:
↠You may not be the intended audience. So, in thinking through the success of a
text, make sure to not only rely on your feelings/perspectives as the measure of
success. Also, feel free to explore the possibility that your text has more than one
intended audience. A complex analysis could certainly take into consideration how
the text works and/or does not work for its different audiences.
↠Different genres allow for and are limited by different features/components, modes
of engagement, and audience expectations. Be careful with assuming that all texts
should contain or do the same thing. For instance, not all texts need a specific type of
4
evidence (e.g. statistics) to be convincing. Carefully consider what makes your genre
unique/distinct. You also might find it generative to examine how your text meets or
does not meet genre expectations and how doing so (or not doing so) might impact
audience engagement.
↠When addressing the purpose of your text, consider what the central
conflict/tensions are and if and/or how they are resolved. In class, folks have made
some really interesting points in this regard, distinguishing between social resolution
and internal resolution. In doing so, they have identified the complexities of the issue
at hand. I encourage you also to think about what different types of conflicts and
resolutions may be present in your text and why they matter and who they matter to.
↠Pay attention to the multimodal features — visual, linguistic, spatial, aural, and
gestural — when considering how a text creates meaning. Consider how these
components aid and/or hinder meaning.
↠The PACT elements work together to create meaning. After you have generated
ideas in your PACT chart regarding these aspects separately, think about how they
interact with or depend upon one another. For instance, how might context impact
who the audience is or how the audience might respond to the text? Or how does the
genre influence the purpose? Etc. | https://essay-gurus.com/rhetorical-analysis/ |
During high school, you might have written short responses and essays. Now going into college and in your careers, and even in your daily life as an adult, you will be writing many other genres of writing: emails, lab reports, marketing plans, article reviews… the list is endless. While all of these might have some similarities, each has different expectations and rules.
So what do you do when you are assigned to write a type of paper you have never heard of before? If you follow these quick tips, you should be able to adjust your writing format and style to effectively write anything.
The first thing you need to do is determine exactly why you are writing. Are you arguing a point? Reporting on what you have done? Requesting additional funding? Sharing research?
It helps to write down the purpose of your paper. You should then make a list of what you will have to do in your paper to accomplish that purpose. Then while you are drafting your paper, refer back to this to keep on track with the goal for your writing project. Each section of your final product should support the purpose.
Next, determine exactly who you are writing your paper for. Is it intended just for your professor, or are your classmates also part of the audience? Does your audience include people who are not in your class? What age and education level do you expect your readers to have?
We almost never are writing just for ourselves, so you should always write to an intended reader, making sure that they will gain something by reading your paper and they will not be overly confused by your use of terminology, references, or the way you organized your thoughts.
You should also consider how you want to come across to your audience. Do you want to sound like a friend, casually discussing the topic of your paper over coffee? Are you writing as a professional who is very direct? Or are you the academic, sharing your expert opinion?
After you know what your audience is expecting, you can decide the best way to present yourself to this audience. This will determine how formal your language is, whether or not you use slang or terminology, and whether you will be more direct and concise or more exploratory and detailed.
The final thing you should do before you start to write, is look for examples of other people who have written this genre. The internet is full of great examples of just about any type of writing you may encounter. Try to find a few examples that seem similar to what you have to do.
First, look at these examples to see what the purpose, audience, and tone was for their paper. When they have a similar purpose, audience, or tone, you should find elements of their writing that you will want to mimic. When they have a different purpose, audience, or tone, you will find certain elements that you will want to avoid in your own writing. Both can tell you a lot about what to do in your own paper.
Next, look at the format they use. Are there standard sections, headings, or organization of main ideas? As readers we expect certain elements for certain genres, so make sure you include these standards in your paper.
As you take all of this information and start writing, remember that writing doesn’t have to be a solitary endeavor. You can discuss your ideas, organization, word choice, grammar, or anything else you are stuck on with someone at any point in your writing process. Find a parent, friend, or perhaps a friendly writing tutor to talk through your paper with you. Since you are writing to someone other than yourself, it is always good to get feedback from another person to make sure that what you think you are saying is coming across as you intended.
The most important thing to remember is that while writing a new genre can take time and effort, there are strategies you can use to effectively communicate your message no matter what genre you are writing.
No matter what you are writing, you can always stop by UMHB’s Writing Center for feedback from trained, peer tutors! The Writing Center is located on the second floor of the Mabee Student Success Center and is a free service provided for all UMHB students. You can stop by for a walk-in appointment, or sign-up ahead of time online. | https://blog.umhb.edu/how-to-write-anything/ |
Chapter 1 introduces the purpose of first year composition courses in your academic, career, and lifelong learning contexts. In this chapter, we introduce key rhetorical concepts and terms we will use throughout this text while engaging you with an exploration of the multiple identities and personal elements you bring to your academic literacies.
By engaging in and reflecting upon the content, processes, and assignments in this textbook, you will begin to develop an identity as an academic “insider” and a competent college writer, reader, and researcher. We hope you will experience a growing sense of empowerment as a person who can harness their literacies and rhetorical knowledge most effectively to inform, persuade, and even entertain others. We also hope you will see the value of these skills and knowledge as tools for meeting your personal purposes and as a foundation for lifelong learning. Through the readings, exercises, and assignments presented in this textbook content, you will explore the relationships among your multiple personal and academic literacies and your sense of empowerment to use these literacies to achieve your desired outcomes in any given situation.
1.0.1 Your unique voice and life experiences are relevant and welcome
Throughout this introductory chapter, we ask you to connect with the idea that you are a rhetorical being, that is, a person who communicates with others for multiple purposes by making intentional choices to deliver a message, request, or thought most effectively to the intended audience. If you have ever tried to inform another person how to make the best cheeseburger or to persuade your friends to go to the restaurant where you would prefer to eat or to amuse your classmates with a story about the time you tripped and flipped over a platter of sizzling calamari on customers dressed in formal evening wear you were serving, you have engaged in rhetoric.
Through the content, activities, exercises, and writing assignments in this chapter, we will ask you to recognize the wealth of knowledge and experiences you bring to the study and practice of writing, reading, and researching rhetorically. Even in academic writing and speaking, your unique voice and life experiences are relevant.
1.0.2 Why First Year Composition Matters to You Now—and Later
The purpose of this first-year composition course and textbook is to provide instruction and writing experiences that require various forms of writing, critical thinking, reading, and academic research. Through the course readings, instruction, assignments, and engagement with peers, you will expand your academic and personal writing, rhetoric, and research skills while investigating key issues in our culture and the local, national, and global issues that affect us most directly today. These experiences and skills will provide a foundation for your academic success, career advancement, and lifelong literacy growth.
As a student who has already completed one semester of college composition, you probably understand the purpose of learning to write well to meet college level expectations, but you may not be sure how these skills translate to the work world. A recent Association of American Colleges and University (AACU) report, How College Contributes to Workforce Success: What Matters Most to Employers presents employer survey findings indicating how important the very skills taught in this course and text are to employers. According to the report, only six in ten employers “say that recent graduates possess the knowledge and skills needed for success in entry-level positions at their companies or organizations” (Finley iv). These five survey findings are particularly relevant to the curriculum reflected in most second semester college composition courses and to the learning outcomes and objectives in this text:
- 90% of employers surveyed felt it was very or somewhat important that students enter the workforce with the ability to communicate through writing.
- 91% of employers surveyed felt it was very or somewhat important that students enter the workforce with digital literacy skills.
- 93% of employers surveyed felt it was very or somewhat important that students enter the workforce with the ability to locate, evaluate, and use information in decision making.
- 93% of employers surveyed felt it was very or somewhat important that students enter the workforce with the ability to integrate ideas/information across settings and contexts.
- 95% of employers surveyed felt it was very or somewhat important that students enter the workforce with critical thinking skills. (Finley 6)
The critical thinking, writing, reading, research, and digital literacy skills emphasized through the writing and research practice presented in this text will be essential to your academic and career success and provide a mindset for lifelong learning. However, a Forbes magazine article suggests that most students who graduate from college do possess these skills and did practice them frequently in college, but they are not aware that these academic skills are so important to employers and, therefore, fail to highlight them in their resumes and interviews. The author suggested the gap is not in the skills college graduates possess, but rather is an “awareness gap,” which author Ryan Craig explains is “the inability for college graduates to make employers aware of the skills they actually have.”
Can you explain and discuss your critical thinking, writing, digital literacy, information, and research integration skills in speech and in writing? Metacognition plays an important role in articulating, practicing, and reflecting upon these skills. Throughout this text, you will have many opportunities to develop awareness of your critical literacy skills and use this knowledge to empower your sense of agency as a rhetor (communicator) who can effect change with language through a combination of literacies and rhetorical knowledge.
Learning Objectives and Aligned Course Level Competencies
In this chapter, you will learn:
- to develop an authentic purpose for engaging with the course content and assignments.
- to reflect on the strengths and values you bring to your study of writing, rhetoric, and research.
- to research, identify, and document literacy and genre norms and expectation in your field of interest, academic discipline, or career area.
- to identify key rhetorical concepts and terms.
- to define and identify types of ethos and reasons for developing your ethos as a college writer.
- to compose a personal essay presenting a rhetorical analysis and reflection upon the way you present and participate in your discourse communities.
- to demonstrate understanding of personal essay genre norms (i.e. personal essay, tone, organization, content, conventions).
- to engage in self-reflection to understand how you can use your rhetorical awareness and knowledge to effectively engage in your discourse communities.
Aligned English 102 Course Competencies:
- Write for specific rhetorical contexts, including circumstance, purpose, topic, audience and writer, as well as the writing`s ethical, political, and cultural implications. (MCCD #1)
- Organize writing to support a central idea through unity, coherence and logical development appropriate to a specific writing context. (MCCC#2).
- Use appropriate conventions in writing, including consistent voice, tone, diction, grammar, and mechanics. (MCCCD#3)
- Use feedback obtained through peer review, instructor comments, and/or other sources to revise writing. (MCCCD #7)
- Assess one`s own writing strengths and identify strategies for improvement through instructor conference, portfolio review, written evaluation, and/or other methods. (MCCD #8)
- Generate, format, and edit writing using appropriate technologies. (MCCCD #9)
1.1 Literacy: Are you a metaliterate Learner?
Oftentimes, when we use the term literacy, we are referring to competence in the acts of reading and writing. The 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy defines literacy in terms of skills as thus: “Literacy is the ability to use printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential.” In 2003, the NAAL measures were designed around “everyday” adult literacy expectations and were assessed through three literacy tasks: prose, document, and quantitative tasks.
In today’s world, the literacy demands on all of us demand far wider range of literacies across all aspects of our lives. You may have heard terms such as digital literacy, financial literacy, information literacy, health literacy, emotional literacy, media literacy, and scientific literacy, just to name a few. In fact, a new literacy term, metaliteracy, is emerging from the information literacy field. Just like metacognition involves critically thinking about your thinking, metaliteracy involves critically thinking about your literacies and how you can most effectively use them to meet a desired goal as a consumer and/or producer of information.
Exercise: Developing Your Identity as a Metaliterate Learner
Purpose: The purpose of this exercise is to help you understand the role of literacy in your learning
Open “Metaliteracy and Your Role as a Metaliterate Learner” in your browser and respond to the practice quiz questions below as you read. The article explains the Metaliteracy Framework and your role as a metaliterate person, a person with the knowledge, skill, and agency to make decisions about which literacies and what roles in social learning are best selected for a given purpose , in any given situation (context). In a follow up activity, you will reflect on this reading and your identify as a “metaliterate learner.”
After obtaining a brief understanding of what metaliteracy is and testing yourself above, read the brief companion page “2018 Metaliteracy Goals and Learning Objectives” to learn what the learning domains and the four overarching goals for the metaliterate learner are.
1.1.1 Reading Reflection
After you have read the articles and responded to the knowledge-based content questions above, it is time to do some further thinking about your thinking on metaliteracy. The purpose of responding to and noting your responses is to help you develop a greater sense of your own identity as a metaliterate learner and to further deepen your response to the written reflection assignment below. Understanding and growing your metaliteracy knowledge and skills will empower you as a college student and, later, in your career and day-to-day lives.
Exercise: Connecting Your New Knowledge about Metaliteracy to Your Experience
Purpose: Completing responses to these prompts will help you connect the reading to your past, current, and future roles as a metaliterate learner
Directions: Paste the prompts below into a document and respond to them in text or jot down responses in a notebook.
- Why do the authors think we need a new and expanded metaliteracy framework? Why wasn’t the term “information literacy” sufficient?
- What are the domains of the metaliteracy model? How might they apply to you in a practical situation when you are learning something new?
- Do you generally think of yourself as a consumer (passive) of information or a producer (more active participant)? Think of some specific examples.
- Under what conditions does your best learning take place? Give an example.
- Of the roles described in the outer ring of the model, which do you see yourself as being most likely to take on? Do you think you take on different roles in academic versus non-academic situations? In what way?
- Then discusses new responsibilities that come with a new information environment. What are these? How do you generally take them on in your role as a social media user? In your role as a college researcher? In your role in your future career?
- Of the goals and objectives listed toward the end of the document which of them most resonate with you? What is one way you might immediately go about incorporating more of these skills into practice?
- In the end, what’s your biggest takeaway from these metaliteracy readings?
Small Group Discussion or Discussion Board: The questions are best further explored and discussed in a small group, if possible. Learning how others interpret the reading and connect their experience to it could inform or expand your understanding of yourself as a flexible and metaliterate learner as well.
- Discuss your responses with other students in small groups or in a discussion board assignment.
- Compare your “takeaways” from the reading with your peers, noting similarities and differences.
- Consider how your peers’ responses influenced or impacted your own thinking.
- Discuss the group’s takeaways and report out key discussion points.
1.2 Learning About Literacies in Your Future Career/s
As you learned above, the forms of literacy keep evolving as has the importance of literacy in career advancement and lifelong learning. Also, each of us is unique in the way we absorb and interact in the culture around us. Because our personal literacies are developed from within the contexts of our personal culture and the larger social and historical settings in which we live as well as through our formal education, personal interests and talents, and interactions with others, each of us possesses a unique identity as a literate person.
Consider the literacies you possess currently as your literacy strengths. Each of us brings our unique literacies with us to every context in which we find ourselves. For example, if your financial knowledge and insights are strengths for you, your friends may come to you with advice about handling their finances. You could claim that financial literacy is a strength for you. Or maybe musical knowledge and experience are strengths for you. What special literacies do you posses as a musician? Can you read music? Write music? Investigate the historical influences on music? If you grew up steeped in your native culture, what cultural stories do you bring with you into every setting? What cultural and historical understandings have you developed as a result of your cultural knowledge and experience?
Now, consider your major, general field or interest, or certificate program. Do you know what literacies are associated with your career path? What literacies do your college professors and future employers expect you to possess? What are the expectations, that is, the kind of documents, research, writing style, and critical literacies necessary to be academically successful in your major, field, program, or career path? The following research-based exercise will help you identify the skills, knowledge, and critical literacies required in a given field or career area.
Exercise: Learning about Literacy Expectations in Your Potential Career
Purpose: The purpose of the following reading exercise and writing assignment is to help you identify the literacy and genre expectations in your chosen field. Even if you are not sure about your field, go ahead and select a career of interest to you or use the sites in the exercise to help you identify a few, then narrow to one career area after you have skimmed a few options.
Sources for This Exercise: Before beginning, review a few examples before you dig into your own career or field. Before you watch the related video, open both these pages in your browser and skim these pages.
- Occupational Outlook Handbook Example: Dancer and Choreography
- O’Net Example: Anthropology and Archaeology
Reading and Notetaking Directions
First: Go to the Occupational Outlook Handbook, published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor. Select your career and read the summary. Then, select the gray tabs “What They Do” and “Work Environment” and read the content closely. Jot down a list of literacies you think are needed to perform this job as you read.
Second: Search the same job or career on O’Net Online, a platform from the U.S. Department of Labor Training Division that will help you dig a little deeper. Read and take a few notes from the Summary, then click on the gray tab “Details.” You will discover a much deeper level of literacy-oriented skills applied in this field.
Third: Look over your notes and reflect on your literacy strengths and needed improvements. Which of the literacies you listed are potential strengths for you? Which do you need to improve? What literacies in this career field surprised you, if any? Reflect on the genres employees in this field must understand and be able to produce whether you have strengths in this area or need more development. What kinds of written documentation and other types of communications is someone in this field expected to produce? Overall, what actions would you take now that will help you later in terms of preparing for that job’s literacy and genre demands?
(This exercise is another good one to discuss with your peers in a small group.)
Reflection ESSAY Prompt
Compose a three to five paragraph reflection essay in response to this exercise and specifically address these three reflection topics that were presented in the third phase of the exercise above:
- your current literacies as related to the demands of your possible career,
- the genre expectations of this career, and
- the actions you see yourself taking to prepare to meet the literacy and genre expectations in this employment area.
1.3 Writing Basics: Process, Purpose, Genre, and Audience
As a college composition course textbook, our central disciplinary focus is a study and application of rhetorical knowledge in traditional academic writing and research genres using a composing process and supported with metaliteracies. However, we will also engage in digital forms of writing and communicating through other modalities. Whether composing a paper, a speech, a lab report, a visual presentation, or a podcast, all these genres share one goal: to effectively communicate a message crafted for an intended audience using the best available and relevant to the rhetorical situation.
How do you achieve this? By following a , intentional composing process, investigating your intended audience’s values and background knowledge, smoothly integrating your well-chosen supporting detail and evidence, and skillfully using rhetorical language and strategies, you empower your message in any context. As a review of the writing process and the essential decisions a writer must make, this section presents background knowledge on approaches to writing in the college context.
Writing, reading, and researching are all process-based, recursive activities. You should expect to engage in these processes several times right up to the point the task at hand is completed. In this section, we will focus on the writing process to review first semester academic writing basics and to prepare you for the first major writing assignment coming up at the end of this chapter. The most import understanding is that this process is not static and the steps are not completed like a check list. You can find yourself circling back through the stages of the process several times.
Writing is a process-based series of actions that typically begin with an external or internal impulse. You may be given a prompt (“compose an argument essay on a human rights topicNo matter the context, when you respond to a writing or speaking task, begin by identifying your purpose and audience, then select the appropriate genre. of your choice”), a genre prompt (“write a letter to the editor to express your views on student loan debt ”), or an idea (“I want to jot down some notes for a novel plot I am thinking about”). No matter the context, when you are given a writing or speaking assignment, you should begin by identifying your purpose and audience. When writers do not identify their purpose and specify their intended audience for a writing task, they can end up making rhetorical decisions that derail their effectiveness or even turn off their audience.
1.3.1 Purpose
Generally, most of us write with a purpose in mind. We write to inform, persuade, entertain, learn, create, and/or reflect—or with a combination of these. If your task is defined or bounded by a writing prompt, as most writing assignments in college are, determine an appropriate purpose and select a writing form for communicating your response that you know the audience will expect. Knowing your purpose will help you write a focused paper and achieve your purpose when your audience is clear on what you want it to learn, know, say, or do as a result of reading your paper.
― William Knowlton Zinsser, from Writing to Learn: How to Write–And Think–Clearly about Any Subject at All as posted on Goodreads.
1.3.2 Audience
In the academic environment, your professors are often your audience for your work. However, in some instances, such as discussion boards, speeches, social media posts, multimedia presentations, and peer reviewing your audience may include your fellow students. In all of these rhetorical situations, the tone and genre expectations will vary. Also, when you are writing a formal argument, you generally have an intended audience in mind, people and entities who have the power to act on the issue at hand. Therefore, your intended audience might include college administrators, Congress, social justice organizations, and corporate executives.
In order to respond to college writing prompts, be prepared to imagine your intended audience. When you enter the workforce, though, the audience becomes a very real factor when you find yourself writing client proposals, marketing plans, memos, and other common workforce genres. In an employment situation, identifying your audience and assessing their needs and values accurately can help you meet with success in workforce writing and communication efforts. Take the time to understand your employer’s, your client’s, and your colleagues wants, needs, and values.
Keeping your audience in mind will help you connect effectively with your intended audience and avoid serious communication problems that can arise when you have not assessed your audience accurately and thoroughly. An audience who feels marginalized or “unseen” will probably reject your proposal or presentation and maybe even reject you. This is why we ask you to learn more about your rhetorical self, the ways you connect to and communicate with others, and how to use disciplinary and workplace genre expectations to meet with success in delivering your message to your intended audience.
1.3.3 Genre
One way to assess what the expected genre is when you are given a prompt is to consider the key verbs in the prompt. These verbs signal the complexity of the composing task and are often associated with specific writing forms. These same verbs can guide your approach to reading a text for a specific purpose.
|EXAMPLE PROMPT||VERBS||GENRE|
|Explain how the chemical reactions in the experiment lead to the results in your lab summary. Detail each stage of the reaction.||explain how
|
detail each stage (process)
|Lab report, process analysis with description|
|After reading Sherman Alexie’s essay “The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman, and Me,” reflect on on your own experiences as a student growing up. Compare your experience to Alexie’s How were your experiences similar or different to Alexie’s? Explain your response and provide examples to illustrate similarities and differences.||reflect
|
compare
explain
|Personal essay written in the first person using the following patterns of development: comparison/contrast, explanation, and illustration with personal examples and personal narratives.|
|Research a current controversial issue in American society and take a stance or position on the issue. Support your argumentative thesis with clear discussion points and relevant, credible research.||take (a stance or position; argue)
|
research
support (your argument)
|Researched Argument Paper or Essay|
1.3.4 The Writing Process, a Guideline
As this text is written as a textbook for the second semester of first year composition, we assume you have experience with various writing processes and strategies. While there is no one way when it comes to writing, following a process and creating a rough plan can help you save time, compose a well-organized response to a writing task, and provide enough time for revising and editing instead of rushing through these important phases of the process. Once you have identified your purpose, audience, and genre expectations, you are ready to start generating content, creating an organizational plan, and drafting your composition. Expect to circle back to invention, research, and planning as you draft and refine your writing. Most writers find themselves returning to earlier phases in the process such as gathering additional research, focus free-writing on a discussion point that is not coming together, revising a thesis statement, or reorganizing the order of your body paragraphs.
― Philosopher Walter Benjamin, One Way Street And Other Writings from Goodreads.com.
- Pre-research: If your composition is a personal essay, you might want to read what others have written on similar personal topics to get a feel for the genre. Magazine articles, memoirs, creative nonfiction journals, and personal blogs are common sources for personal and expressive writing. In most your college courses, however, you will be writing arguments, analyses, and reports based on readings and research. If you are given an assigned topic, do some pre-searching to see what the current “conversation” is in the public discourse and to gain some background knowledge. Keep an open mind as pre-searching should be conducted in a spirit of inquiry, rather than trying to support your existing sense of the topic or an opinion.
- Invention: The first phase of the writing process is known as invention. You might know this activity as “brainstorming.” Methods of invention include webbing or mapping, listing, free writing, focused free writing, reading through pre-research, verbal brainstorming, and discussion. Sometimes talking your ideas over with your classmates and/or instructor can provide invaluable feedback.
- Research: Once you have determined your ideas, you may need to do further research or consult the core readings for the writing task. If your writing assignment requires researched evidence, it is time to engage in robust research process. At this point, head to Chapter 3, “Rhetorical Research.”
- Planning: Whether you create a flow chart, a traditional outline, a “bubble map,” or a bullet point outline, creating an organizational plan up front will save you time and help you keep control of your ideas. Add your researched evidence and the citation that goes with it into your outline or plan. This is another time saver. Creating an organizational plan will help you see the gaps in your supports or a lack of logic in the sequencing of your points. Twenty minutes creating a rough outline could save you two hours in front of a blank screen!
- Drafting: I recommend setting aside about two hours to focus on writing your first draft based on your plan. As mentioned above, if you added your citations into your outline, you will not waste time creating citations.
- When you stop your writing flow to do research or create citations, you will slow down the process and may lose your focus. If you become stuck or “hit a wall” on one discussion point, go onto the next one.
- Another strategy I recommend is to make notes to yourself in the text of your draft noting what you need to revise or add content. Highlight the notes and use them to help you create a check list for your next writing session. I have shared this tip with many students, and for some, it has been a game-changer because they were so accustomed to writing from beginning to end, from point A to point B, it had not occurred to them they could jump ahead if they become stuck.
- Similar advice I give to students is to write the introduction after you have written the paper. It is much easier to write an introduction that sets your reader up with an interesting hook, narrowed topic, background information, and a smooth transition to the thesis once you actually know where you are taking your reader. Think about it: How can you set your reader up for the journey without knowing for sure the final road they will travel with you. Write as much as you can, then jot down a list of the specific actions you need to take next before you work on the next round, and come back to the draft the next day.
- Once you have a solid first or second draft, review your draft with peers, a Writing Center tutor, and/or your instructor. Feedback is essential at this point.
- Revising: After you receive feedback and discuss your draft with others, you will know how well your essay meets the prompt, how clear your thesis statement and topic sentences are, what sections of your paper require more credible evidence or a different kind of evidence, and where your paper needs more revision and editing to meet the rubric criteria.
- Research: Once you have begun writing your paper, you will discover some gaps in your evidence or a need for a specific type of evidence. So, once again, you are circling back to research. Like the composing process itself, research is a recursive process, and you may be conducting additional research right up to the point you are making the final edits.
- Editing: You are probably aware of the conventions or “mechanics” issues you should be concerned about in your paper because of previous writing feedback. If you know sentence structure, comma placement, and clarity are key issues for you, set up a tutoring session at the Writing Center and focus just on those issues.
― Walter Benjamin, One Way Street And Other Writings from Goodreads.com
1.3.5 Purpose and Genres for Writing in Our Everyday Lives
All of us write in a variety of situations throughout our day, but often we overlook this fact. Writing is so essential to communicating with others and so embedded in our activities, we often do not realize how many times a day we are crafting a message for a specific purpose and a specific audience. To achieve our purposes in writing, we often reach for a specific genre as described in the last section.
Now, consider all the writing you normally do over the span of a week or two. In the table below, you will see several areas of our lives in which we commonly write. This writing can take the form of filling out a car service ticket at work, writing a poem for a friend, or writing a lab report. For each context, take a few minutes to brainstorm a list of your typical writing activities and list them in your notebook or a make a copy this Google doc. Or, if you want to work with a small group, share one Google doc link per group or make a copy of this Jamboard and use the post-its to add to each column.
|Work-related||Academic||Social||Personal||Creative|
|
|
Exercise: Reflection & Discussion Prompts
Purpose:
Directions: In your notebook or document, respond informally to these questions.
- After completing this exercise, what would you say about the ways you use writing to inform, persuade, entertain, learn, create, and reflect in your everyday life? Did you gain any insights to your writing activity?
- Compare your lists with another student or group of students. Discuss similarities and differences in the lists. What factors influenced the genres and amount of writing you and other students do in your everyday lives?
- Do you feel the same level of engagement and competence in each area? Why? Why not?
- Reflect on a previous writing experience you found memorable—positive or negative. Beyond writing to earn a grade, what was your purpose in writing? What genre did you choose for this writing? A science lab report, a customer form, a memo, a spreadsheet? Were you successful in achieving your purpose? Was it well received by your audience? Why or why not? How did this experience make you feel about your writing?
- How do you see your writing activity in each context above changing over the course of the next five years?
1.4 Rhetoric and the Rhetorical Situation
Do you want others to seriously consider your thoughts and opinions? Do you want to communicate your ideas as effectively as possible in a given situation, whether that situation is a personal exchange among your group of friends or a researched argument essay written for an academic professor? Do you hope that others view you as a credible source, someone with integrity and honesty who considers their audiences’ needs and values? Do you arrive at your opinions through close examination of credible evidence and a full understanding of the issue? Most of us want to be taken seriously as individuals with worthy thoughts and ideas. This is why the study and practice of rhetoric can be a significant and life-changing experience. However, there are limitations to the use of rhetoric. Consider the purposeful misuse of rhetoric to promote the perpetuation of misinformation or to mislead your audience. That is an idea this chapter will circle back to later.
To establish your own sense of as a person who has valuable ideas to contribute on a given topic given conversation you must merge several key disciplinary terms into your rhetorical vocabulary. When you study keywords in any discipline, we recommend exploring the meanings and word histories or of those terms. This practice will grow your capacity to learn new academic and disciplinary vocabulary more quickly as you begin to associate word roots with meaning and see similar patterns in other words. Every time you enroll in a new course with new terms to learn, study a new hobby or interest, or develop new workplace knowledge and skills, you are engaging with new terminology in that field or discipline. Knowledgably applying disciplinary vocabulary in your course work, specific workplace terms in your job, and even your social discourse communities signals you are an “insider.”
When you learn new terms, your additional word exploration and repetition will begin to cement the new words and their meanings into your memory and create a for knowledge around that term. Voilà! After studying the terms intentionally, you will now know and can begin using those terms knowledgeably. In any subject, intentionally noting and using the subject’s specific terminology, rather than expressing knowledge or thought in unspecific or vague terms, will increase your comprehension and learning of new concepts.
Yes, this intentional practice takes a little extra time up front, but it becomes a time saver as you more easily comprehend and retain your reading and/or listening content. This is a simple “work smarter” approach to learning new vocabulary that also signals to your readers and listeners that you are an “insider” in terms of the literacy expectations of the situation and group.
1.4.1 Rhetorical Keywords
The first key rhetorical term to learn in this chapter is rhetoric. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, rhetoric is:
The art of using language effectively so as to persuade or influence others, esp. the exploitation of figures of speech and other compositional techniques to this end; the study of principles and rules to be followed by a speaker or writer striving for eloquence, esp. as formulated by ancient Greek and Roman writers.
The Oxford English Dictionary further provides the etymology of key terms. The word came to Anglo-Norman English from the Middle French rethorique, the “art of speaking and writing well and persuasively or with eloquence.” The Middle and Old French forms are based in the Latin rhētoricē or rhētorica and the ancient Greek term for the “art of public speaking, oratory.” A common, simplified general definition of rhetoric is “the use of all available means to inform, entertain, or persuade.”
The second key term to learn is . To understand the term, consider the roots and current meanings of both words. Situation means “(t)he exact position of a person or thing in relation to another or to surroundings; the arrangement or position of people or things in relation to each other or to surroundings.” This is not the first meaning of the word, but it is the meaning as used in this textbook. It is a good practice to read all definitions of a term you are learning as words are used differently in different contexts. The word situation has not changed much over time, and we often find this to be the case with words with a Latin etymology that came to English through the French after the Normans (the French) invaded Britain in 1066 as we saw with the roots of rhetoric. In the French, word is the same (situation), and the historical form in Latin is situation and situatio.
If rhetoric is the use of all “available means of language to inform, entertain, or persuade,” and as we use it in this textbook, situation means “(t)he exact position of a person or thing in relation to another or to surroundings; the arrangement or position of people or things in relation to each other or to surroundings,” what do you have when you put the two words together? The rhetorical situation describes the environment in which a rhetor communicates to a specific audience. The Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue University is an excellent source to help you more fully understand what the rhetorical situation and other rhetorical concepts are.
Video, Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue University. Click “CC” on the lower right side of the video to view closed captioning. This 14-minunte video was created by graduate students in the MA in Professional Communication program at Clemson University, and you are free to copy, distribute, and transmit the video with the understanding: 1) that you will attribute the work to its authors; 2) that you will not use the work for commercial purposes; and 3) that you may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.
Also, review OWL’s slide presentation, “Understanding Writing: The Rhetorical Situation” by the OWL Staff at Purdue University.
1.4.2 Rhetorical Situations in Our Everyday Lives
Now that we have introduced the key rhetorical terms used in this text, we can move on to exploring how rhetoric and a grasp of rhetorical situations operate in your daily life. You have a sense of what rhetoric is because you already make rhetorical decisions to inform, persuade, and entertain others by selecting rhetorical appeals that will best support your interactions with others. Some might claim we even use rhetorical strategies on ourselves when we engage in self-talk to problem solve and rationalize our behaviors!
In a given day, you might pack a romantic note in your partner’s lunch, convince your boss to give you a raise, tell an amusing anecdote to your friends at happy hour, post a holiday picture of your family on Instagram, and write a thank you note to your grandmother. You write the note to remind your partner (your audience and purpose) that you love them and are looking forward to your weekend escape (the message, an emotional appeal). You collect evidence (relevant supporting detail, or logos) to support your argument that you deserve a raise (the message and purpose to inform and persuade) and then convincingly present it to your boss (the audience).
Maybe you are a storyteller. You know your friends (the audience) find your zany stories amusing (your purpose is to entertain), so you regale them with your latest mishap (the message or story) at the gym when you pressed the speed button up instead of down, flew off the treadmill, tripped the guy next to you as he was trying to get on his treadmill, and although you were unhurt, he ended up with a scraped nose. You then realized the man was the handsome news anchor on your local news station. You did feel bad about that obvious bump on his nose when you watched him on the news last night.
Sometimes you have several motives for your rhetorical choices, so you make rhetorical decisions that serve several purposes and engage multiple audiences. You post that family image of your kids in their Halloween costumes because their grandparents live 1500 miles away, and you want to keep them connected to their grandchildren. However, your less altruistic motive for posting the pic is to show your friends the original and creative costumes you made for your children in hopes of receiving lots of hearts and thumbs up icon clicks and comments to validate your effort. Even the note you wrote your grandmother and sent in snail mail was written for more than an audience of one. You know she loves showing the ladies in her retirement community the clever and heartfelt cards and letters you send her, so you make sure the original poem you include with touch the hearts of them all.
During this chapter thus far, I have presented rhetoric as a means of empowerment and effective communication for the purpose of informing, persuading, or entertaining others. Earlier, I briefly mentioned that rhetoric could be used dishonestly to advance or manipulate an audience. Rhetoric has supported and perpetuated the shared values of a nation, and rhetoric has shattered the founding ideals of nations. When we possess rhetorical skill, we can use that gift to benefit the greater society (like TED Talk speakers do, for example) or we can use it to get our way and mislead people. Can you think of situations in your life or in American society that illustrated this dark side of rhetoric?
In the TED Talk below, the speaker Douglas Tappin makes this point. Please watch the video below and jot down notes in response to the following questions:
- What is the relationship between rhetoric and truth? Between rhetoric and the rhetor’s ethos?
- How does Tappin use rhetoric to encourage his audience to consider the limits as well as the benefits of rhetoric?
- Your thoughts: Does everyone have equal access to the power of rhetoric. Why? Why not?
Tappin, Douglas. “Rethinking Rhetoric.” Youtube, TedX29. Oct. 2018, youtu.be/vo4aic2zYtk. Douglas Tappin is a writer and composer born and educated in the United Kingdom. A former Commercial Attorney, he practiced as a Barrister (lawyer) in England for eleven years. In his talk delivered at TEDxToledo #WhatNow, Douglas brings awareness to the effectiveness of rhetoric and how its used in all human communication.
1.4.3 Ethos and the Academic Writer
A rhetor is a person who intentionally crafts communications to inform, persuade, and/or entertain their audience and achieves their purpose by appealing to their audience’s values, needs, and even genre expectations. Most of us want others to take their ideas, whether written or spoken, seriously. How can you, as a college student, convey to your readers or listeners that you are trustworthy and a credible source of information? As a college student writing for a variety of audiences about a variety of subjects, how can you build your own credibility as a rhetor?
As a rhetor, you can take specific approaches to creating your audience’s trust and belief that you are trustworthy in the ways you support your views and signal your ethical values. When a rhetor establishes this sense, we say the writer or speaker has .
Learning rhetorical language and strategies alongside critical thinking skills really helped me shape myself into the person I am today. – Seth
Along with logos, pathos, and Kairos, one of Aristotle’s key appeals is ethos, an appeal to values and ethics. Communicators use the ethical appeal effectively when they integrate credible support for their message from credible external sources, experts, and moral leaders. This is known as external ethos.
When rhetors establish their credibility and trustworthiness with their audiences, the rhetor is said to possess internal ethos. If you want your readers and listeners to take you seriously, to trust you, to believe you are credible, you want to convey your character and credibility through your rhetorical identity and external ethos you choose bring to your message. So, what strategies can you use to create trust, a sense of your ethos, and even a shared bond with your audience?
Key Takeaway: How to Establish Your Internal Ethos
- Acknowledge your audience’s values and needs and connect with those you share that are relevant to the message.
- Establish your rhetorical identity. In other words, how do you want your audience to see you? Compassionate? Informed? Reflective? Curious? As an advocate for social justice?
- Cite your sources and give credit where credit is due.
- Support your claims with credible sources and experts to establish the external ethos of the sources.
- Represent your source information ethically; that is integrate the support with the meaning associated with it in its original context.
- Cite a variety of credible, trustworthy sources rather than supporting your perspective with one source that matches your own.
- Use language that reflects careful thought and specificity, but words and phrasing that will not make your audience feel as if they are an outsider to the message you are communicating. Treat your audience with respect using language to set a tone appropriate to the subject, intention of the communication, and reflects the quality of your character.
- Demonstrate you have examined or research alternate views and discuss them respectfully, even when you are countering them.
- Be generous in conceding points in argument.
If your audience trusts you and your character and you make the effort to connect to your audience’s values, experiences, goals, beliefs, wants, and or needs if good faith, your audience will take your essay, speech, or project seriously. Establishing a rhetorical sense of yourself as a rhetor with internal ethos will build your agency as a communicator. Your audience will know who you are and what you stand for. You will have claimed your voice, and your message will be heard.
1.5 Your Discourse Communities
As explained by Dan Meltzer is his Writing Spaces chapter, “Understanding Discourse Communities,” “(w)riting teachers and scholars have come up with the concept of ‘discourse community’ to describe a community of people who share the same goals, the same methods of communicating, the same genres, and the same lexis (specialized language)” (111). What are your discourse communities? These discourse communities can be informal skateboarding groups, fan fiction groups, biology class study groups, musical bands, family groups, online gaming groups, work groups, chess clubs, interest or hobby groups consisting of people who use a common vocabulary, share common goals, and apply the literacy and genre expectations the group expects. These discourse communities often shift with our interests and responsibilities throughout our lives, but there is no doubt their influence upon us is significant.
Exercise: Your Discourse Communities
Purpose: to identify, explain, and reflect upon your participation in one or more discourse communities.
After reading “Understanding Discourse Communities,” reflect on you own participation in several discourse communities. Your discourse community/ies can be formal or informal groups in which common goals and norms define the nature of the group. Keep John Swales’ discourse community criteria below in mind as you select two groups to present and describe in a discussion post or small group.
- A broadly agreed upon set of common public goals
- Mechanisms of intercommunication among members
- Use of these communication mechanisms to provide information and feedback
- One or more genres that help further the goals of the discourse community
- A specific lexis (specialized language)
- A threshold level of expert members (Swales, as paraphrased by Melzer 102)
Reflection
Think over your participation in two of your discourse communities and jot down a few notes. To facilitate your reflection, feel free to make a copy of this discourse community analysis and reflection chart document to help you develop and capture your discourse communities, their features, benefits, and limitations, and the way you engage with them. What do/did you enjoy about your participation in this group? What did you contribute to the community? How does one become an expert in the group? What did you/have learned through your participation in the group? What are the norms for providing feedback to members of the group? How has the community changed you, affected you, or helped you grow in some way? How does someone become an expert in the group? Were there experts in the group who mentored you? How so?
Share
Select a discourse community from your notes above and prepare to give a description of the community and the community norms, especially those associated with language and communication. Also, prepare to discuss how engaging with this group expanded your knowledge, skills, or abilities in some way.
1.6 ESSAY ASSIGNMENT: Uncovering Your Rhetorical Self Essay
Before you review and begin working on this essay assignment, consider and take a few notes on these aspects of your day-to-day self-representation. What do these rhetorical choices communicate to others about your identity, values, interests, and literacies?
- What you wear, how you look, clothes, jewelry (How do others “read” you based on appearance?)
- Your language and mannerisms in different contexts (work, hanging out with friends, in class)
- Your social media activity (your digital footprint, online bio, photos, post topics, responding and sharing activity, icons and commenting activity, etc.)
- Brands you like
- Music you choose to listen to and music you choose to share
ESSAY INTRODUCTION
This essay prompt asks you to consider the way you self-represent to others in your various discourse communities. This assignment requires reflective self-analysis to examine influences on your rhetorical selves through your general everyday rhetorical choices as well as in your participation in specific social, digital, workplace, and academic discourse communities.
In a discourse community, typical means of self-representation include shared words or phrases (the “literacy stream” you swim in with them), mannerisms, clothing, music, value signaling, cultural identification, digital interaction norms, written genres, etc. What shared values and interests do you mirror to others in the discourse community? How do you represent them? Were you an insider to these groups or an outsider when you joined? Are you an insider now or did you leave the group as an insider? Who helped you become an insider in the group? How does your language, behavior, literacy choices, and other behaviors adjust to meet the norms of your key discourse communities? What feedback do you receive from discourse community members and how do you use that information to self-represent in the discourse community? (See discourse community questions listed at the end of this assignment or use this brainstorming chart.)
ESSAY PROMPT
Write a well-organized, multi-paragraph essay in which you identify, analyze, and reflect upon the ways you communicate elements of your rhetorical self in daily contexts as well as in two specific discourse communities in which you participate.
The essay should contain 800-1000 words, be presented in MLA 8 format, and written in the first-person point of view in a mature, reflective, and authentic voice and serious tone. Use this assignment description, invention prompts, and rubric to guide your development, revision, and editing of this paper. Your careful editing prior to submission is essential for meeting the expectations of this assignment. (Remember, our Writing Center tutors are “there” for you!).
ESSAY RUBRIC
This essay rubric provides detailed assessment criteria.
ESSAY ASSIGNMENT PURPOSE
- To become more effective and aware of yourself as a rhetor who makes intentional rhetorical decisions to achieve their purposes as they engage with various audiences.
- To engage in reflection and metacognition to define and describe your rhetorical selves to your audience.
- To identify and describe your self-representation as a rhetorical act connecting you with the characteristics, language, literacies, and behaviors of the discourse communities in which you participate.
- To identify how your self-representation in digital context leaves a “digital footprint.”
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
- To compose a personal essay presenting a rhetorical analysis and reflection upon the way you present and participate in your discourse communities.
- To demonstrate understanding of personal essay genre norms (i.e. personal essay, tone, organization, content, conventions).
- To engage in self-reflection to understand how you can use your rhetorical awareness and knowledge to effectively engage in your discourse communities.
MCCCD ENGLISH 102 COMPETENCIES
- Write for specific rhetorical contexts, including circumstance, purpose, topic, audience and writer, as well as the writing`s ethical, political, and cultural implications.
- Organize writing to support a central idea through unity, coherence and logical development appropriate to a specific writing context.
- Use appropriate conventions in writing, including consistent voice, tone, diction, grammar, and mechanics.
INVENTION Heuristic for the Assignment:
- What values and interests do you communicate to others in the discourse community and how do you represent them?
- How do you want others in your discourse communities to see you?
- What do you think others in your discourse communities know about who you are through the identity/ies you choose to present in your interactions with them? By using the invention prompts below, develop (“invent”) content to help you explore possible key points and provide specific evidence for your rhetorical self-analysis.
- Start by freewriting about the various ways you represent your identity to your family, friends, teams, work groups, fellow students, and people in your other discourse communities, physical or virtual. How do you hope to be seen by people in these various social groups? How do you speak and act in your various discourse communities?
- Consider quickly writing a short focused free write or jot down a list with details and events that illustrate how you self-represent to each significant group. When you stop writing, look over what you wrote and note what is constant in your self-representation across these groups and, more importantly, what is different. Then follow up by narrowing to the two or three discourse communities that resonated most with you and write a longer focused free write to help you generate more detailed content for each.
QUESTIONS to kickstart your freewrites:
- Is there some aspect of your rhetorical self that you make known to everyone who interacts with you?
- How do you want others in your discourse communities to view you, your values, your actions, and your words?
- Do you/how do you change some aspect of your identity, appearance, words, or actions to fit into a discourse community? Is the identity you represent to your musician friends the same as the one you represent to your supervisor at work or your college professors? Are you the same person in your online communities/social media accounts as you are with your close group of friends or parents?
- What is something “fixed” (that is a quality, value, belief you do not change depending on the social context) in your identity you think people in every group would say about you?
- How do you make sure others understand your values and what is important to you? That is, how do others know what you stand for?
- What values or qualities about yourself do you want others to know and “see” about you through your words, actions, and appearance?
Organizational Plan
Review your invention exercise content. Do you see any patterns across the free writes on each group? Some similarities and differences in how you self-represent across these groups? Possibly, you might want to reach for a comparison/contrast pattern of development for your paper’s structure. Or, maybe you want to select two to three discourse communities as a lens to explore the ways you alter your rhetorical self within these groups and write an essay with an explanatory structure. Another strategy is to select two or three ways you alter your identity when you are engaging with others in your discourse communities and explore those separate actions as key points for your body paragraphs. Whether you prefer a traditional linear outline, a mind map, or bullet points, DO plan your essay before you start writing. Afterall, would a film maker begin a film without a storyboard? Think of your rough outline, map, or list as your storyboard, your game plan, or your Google map to a finished paper.
FORMAT of the Essay
Please read and follow the rubric criteria carefully. Format the essay in standard MLA format, with heading, pagination, title, double spacing, Times New Roman 12-pt. font, and indented paragraphs. The word count range is 800-1000 words with four to six paragraphs. Any images you bring in from an outside source must contain a credit or credits (the source). The essay should contain the following components:
An introduction giving an introduction of your rhetorical self. It should explain how you define yourself and how you hope to be seen by the various public groups with which you are affiliated. Your introduction should lead your reader to your thesis statement which should be written as one complete and clear organizing statement forecasting your discussion points.
A description and analysis of your self-presentation modes in at least two discourse communities and how these contribute to your rhetorical identity.
Evidence in the form of specific, concrete examples of language, expected literacies (i.e. online bios, posting norms), common behaviors, visual cues including clothing and other aspects of personal appearance, aural preferences such as music, the values shared, etc. Personal narratives can serve as evidence in this paper. Also, feel free to provide screenshots and images as support. Be sure to cite or attribute any external sources you reference in text and add the source to your Works Cited page.
A conclusion exploring the rhetorical effects and even future possibilities of the choices and actions associated with your rhetorical self-presentation. How can knowing your rhetorical selves be an advantage to you?
A Works Cited page, IF you referenced external sources. If you need tips on how to format a Works Cited page, OWL at Purdue is a good place to start. If your MLA skills need a refresher, I recommend attending a tutoring appointment to receive coaching for MLA in-text citation and source attribution strategies and Works Cited formatting. A half hour with a tutor can save you hours of frustration!
Assignment Rubric
Please link to the assignment rubric pdf or Word doc and use it to guide your planning and as a checklist before submitting your final paper.
DISCIPLINARY LEARNING OUTCOMES
- To develop and apply your understanding of the following key threshold concepts in writing studies:
- Concept 1: Writing is a Social and Rhetorical Activity
- Concept 2: Writing Speaks to Situations through Recognizable Forms
- Concept 3: Writing Enacts and Creates Identities and Ideologies (Naming What We Know)
- Concept 4: All Writers have More to Learn
- Concept 5: Writing is (also always) a Cognitive Activity (Adler-Kassner and Wardle, Naming What We Know, Classroom Edition, Utah State University Press, 2016)
- To apply and develop your understanding of the following Writing Program Administrators (WPA) First Year Composition outcomes:
- Learn and use key rhetorical concepts through analyzing and composing a variety of texts.
- Gain experience reading and composing in several genres to understand how genre conventions shape and are shaped by readers’ and writers’ practices and purposes.
- Develop facility in responding to a variety of situations and contexts calling for purposeful shifts in voice, tone, level of formality, design, medium, and/or structure. (WPA Outcomes for Rhetorical Knowledge)
Textbook Authors’ Note: This assignment is loosely adapted from and inspired by a similar assignment created by Jodi Nicotra in her textbook Becoming Rhetorical (Nicotra 22-24). In addition, an assumption of this assignment is that students have read and responded to class discussions and reflections on Dan Melzer’s “Understanding Discourse Communities” from Writing Spaces, 2020. (See pages 102 and 111).
- What are the goals of the discourse community?
- What are the most important genres community members use to achieve these goals?
- Who are the most experienced communicators in the discourse community?
- Where can I find models of the kinds of genres used by the discourse community?
- Who are the different audiences the discourse community communicates with, and how can I adjust my writing for these different audiences?
- What conventions of format, organization, and style does the discourse community value?
- What specialized vocabulary (lexis) do I need to know to communicate effectively with discourse community insiders?
- How does the discourse community make arguments, and what types of evidence are valued?
- Do the conventions of the discourse community silence any members or force any members to conform to the community in ways that make them uncomfortable?
- What can I add to the discourse community? (Meltzer 111)
1.6 CHAPTER WRAP UP
Conceptual Key Takeaways
- As a college writer, you bring your education, life experiences, culture, and interests to all literacy tasks.
- Every discipline and field is associated with expected critical reading, writing, and research skills and genre expectations.
- Communication in any form exists in and is determined by the cultural, historical, and social contexts at a given point in time as well as the communicator’s experience, education level, and other personal factors.
- Writing expectations in academic contexts require careful consideration of the multiple contexts and expectations you and the institution bring to establishing the purpose, audience, and genre of an academic writing assignment.
- Understanding how rhetoric informs and can enrich your daily communications across every situation empowers you to be heard and understood in those contexts.
- Your discourse communities, just like your academic majors, certificate programs, and career fields, engage in various means of connection and communication reflecting the group’s literacy norms and common genres.
- The academic literacy skill, genre knowledge, and rhetorical awareness you develop as a college writer, reader, and researcher empower your skill in communicating to meet a purpose while helping you develop your internal ethos.
Works Cited
Adler-Kassner, Linda and Elizabeth Wardle, Eds. Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies [Classroom Edition], Utah State University Press, 2016.
Jacobson, Trudi, Mackey, Thomas, O’Brien, Kelsey, et al. “2018 Metaliteracy Goals and Learning Objectives.” Metaliteracy, 2018, metaliteracy.org/learning-objectives/2018-metaliteracy-goals-and-learning-objectives/
Mackey, Thomas, and Trudi E. Jacobsen. Metaliteracy: Reinventing Information Literacy to Empower Learners. Chicago, Neal-Schuman, 2014.
Nicotra, Jodi. Becoming Rhetorical. Cengage, 2019, pp. 22-24.
White, Sheida, and Michael McCloskey. Framework for the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NCES 2005-531). U.S. Department of Education. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics, 2003, nces.ed.gov/naal/fr_tasks.asp.
Further Resources
Adler-Kassner, Linda and Elizabeth Wardle, Eds. Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies, Utah State University Press, 2015.
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(noun) A category of artistic composition, as in music or literature, marked by a distinctive style, form, or content (AH). In the academic context, a genre might be a lab report, historical analysis, or a solution argument.
(adjective) Of or relating to a repeating process whose output at each stage is applied as input in the succeeding (next) stage.
(noun) A saying that sets forth a general truth and that has gained credit through long use (AH)
(noun) 1. Choice and use of words in speech or writing.
2. Degree of clarity and distinctness of pronunciation in speech or singing; enunciation.(AH)
(noun) personal empowerment to act or, in this case, express your views with sense you can effect change.
(noun) the study of word history and origin
1. A plan, outline, or model: a schema for prioritizing vaccinations; a writer's schema for a novel.
2. Psychology A pattern imposed on complex reality or experience to assist in explaining it, mediate perception, or guide response. (AH)
Rhetoric is the use of any available means to inform, persuade, or entertain an audience (or some combination).
A context in which communication occurs. OWL at Purdue definition: "any set of circumstances that involves at least one person using some sort of communication to modify the perspective of at least one other person."
(noun) an Aristotelian rhetorical appeal tied to one's values, morality, expertise, and credibility. The literal definition: "The disposition, character, or fundamental values peculiar to a specific person, people, culture, or movement." | https://open.maricopa.edu/firstyearcomposition/chapter/chapter-1-college-writing-rhetoric-and-you/ |
At NCTE’s Connected Community, Joseph Robertshaw posed the question: What do college composition instructors want from incoming high school graduates?
The essence of this question has been at the center of my work as a teacher for over three decades—18 years as a high school English teacher in rural upstate South Carolina, two years as lead instructor for the summer institute of the Spartanburg Writing Project, and my current position that in part includes teaching writing-intensive first year seminars and a small administrative position as Faculty Director, First Year Seminars.
Let me start with a caveat about teaching with the next phase of formal education in mind.
Justifying classroom practices in the context of future educational expectations can be very dangerous because I have witnessed too many teachers implementing bad pedagogy because they justify those practices as “what students will need next year.” For example, when the SAT added the writing section in 2005, the one-draft and prompted sample essay as well as the return of isolated multiple-choice testing of writing changed classroom practices, as Thomas Newkirk warned in “The New Writing Assessments: Where Are They Leading Us?”:
[The 2005 addition of writing on the SAT] and the other state-mandated writing assessments are also intended as a message to high schools about the importance of writing instruction. It is worth asking, then, what kind of message these assessments will send. What kind of writing will they promote? (English Journal, November 2005, p. 21)
However, having an awareness and critical insight into future expectations for students does provide both teachers and their students grounding for better preparing students to be self-actualized and autonomous learners. Recognizing expectations for students as writers (even when those expectations are misguided) helps foster student empowerment so that they control their learning instead of education happening to them.
To address well what college professors expect from recent high school graduates in terms of those students as writers, we need to consider both learning experiences provided for students and the quality of student writing artifacts.
Now to the opening question.
College-bound high school students need to understand that writing is central to all disciplines—not something students do in English courses only. Many colleges have expectations that writing will be assigned and directly taught across the disciplines (for example, interdisciplinary first year seminars replacing traditional English 101/ composition courses). Thus, students need experiences with and understanding of both universal characteristics of effective writing and disciplinary conventions of effective writing (see Writing for Specific Fields).
When I was teaching high school, students often complained because I stressed the use of present tense verbs when analyzing literature and the U.S. history teacher required past tense verbs for writing about history. Those students wanted one rule.
But, students viewing writing as bound by rules is the results of classroom practices that foster that perspective. Instead, students need to understand the conventionality of writing and that those conventions are discipline- and purpose-based.
An excellent avenue to helping students move away from seeing their writing within the “one rule” context is to foster genre awareness instead of genre acquisition:
GENRE ACQUISITION [is] a goal that focuses upon the students’ ability to reproduce a text type, often from a template, that is organized, or ‘staged’ in a predictable way….Using well-established pedagogies, practitioners follow a teaching/learning cycle as students are encouraged to acquire and reproduce a limited number of text types (‘genres’) that are thought to be basic to the culture (Macken-Horarik 2002).
A quite different goal is GENRE AWARENESS, which is realized in a course designed to assist students in developing the rhetorical flexibility necessary for adapting their socio-cognitive genre knowledge to ever-evolving contexts….After my many years of teaching novice tertiary students who follow familiar text templates, usually the Five Paragraph Essay, and who then fail when they confronted different types of reading and writing challenges in their college and university classrooms, I have concluded that raising genre awareness and encouraging the abilities to research and negotiate texts in academic classrooms should be the principal goals for a novice literacy curriculum (Johns 1997). (pp. 238-239)
At its core, promoting genre awareness is an alternative to setting students up for what Scheele labels “the good student trap”—students who have received high grades and praise as good students based on their ability to comply with highly structured assignments (such as answering an essay prompt, conforming to a rubric, or tapping out a five-paragraph essay).
To offer a negative to the opening question, just as art professors at the college level do not want students who have done only paint-by-number, college professors who ask students to write do not want students who can write only canned essays and students who believe “never use ‘I’” or “don’t start sentences with ‘and.’”
And here, I note, is the key quality college professors want from students in all aspects of academics (and life), including writing: Students who are purposeful, thoughtful, and autonomous. Too often the best students approach professors with “What do you want?” instead of having the background and confidence to make their own informed decisions.
As writers, then, students need ample experiences in high school with choice—choosing what texts they read and then choosing what types of writing they produce. Those choices need to be monitored and supported by the expertise of their teachers guiding them to greater and greater genre awareness grounded in the varied expectations of the disciplines: What is an Op-Ed in a newspaper and how does that differ from a Supreme Court Justice’s dissent on a ruling? What makes a poem, a poem, and how is that distinguishable from a short story? And why are there so many different citation styles?
This approach to teaching writing and increasing student agency is particularly challenging if English teachers are the primary or even sole writing teachers in a high school (teaching writing across the curriculum should be a hallmark of secondary education). But the goals noted above grounded in choice and attaining genre awareness across the disciplines do suggest English teachers must consider balancing the types of writing students produce (less literary analysis, more genre and mode/form variety) as well as moving away from teaching MLA (the citation model preferred in the humanities) only and toward raising students’ awareness of the conventionality of citing across disciplines (Why are there no citations in journalism and only hyperlinks in Web-based writing, but students have to cite for academic settings?)
Within the groundings above, then, here are some experiences that high school students need before entering college as young writers:
- A balance of prompted reading and writing with choice reading and writing.
- Numerous and extended experiences with writing workshop and multiple-draft essays that receive both teacher and peer feedback. Students need to expect feedback, to embrace drafting, and to know how to respond to feedback in the revision process.
- Experiences with a wide range of research-based writing that incorporates a variety of citation styles (including hyperlinks as a form of citation).
- Experiences with writing beyond traditional text-only communication (images, embedded video, etc., with academic purpose).
- Awareness of the larger concepts of effective writing (coherence, for example), of a sophisticated understanding of the “essay” form (beyond the five-paragraph essay and the narrow thesis sentence), and of the conventionality of grammar, mechanics, and usage (beyond seeing surface features as “rules”). I recommend Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace (Williams and Bizup) as an effective resource for these broader and more complex approaches to writing and language.
Purposefulness, richness, and variety are the key concepts that guide me as I seek ways to prepare students for successful college writing. So for one of the initial sessions of my writing-intensive first year seminar, I ask students to brainstorm “rules” they learned in high school that they cannot do in essays, and then we unpack that list (for example, no fragments or never use “I”) to discover that many writers in fact do those taboo things. I help them begin to see that, for example, when a student’s writing is marked for a fragment, the problem is often that the student was unaware of the fragment, had not used the fragment with purpose or intent.
But we also need to confront the negatives—both what students should not do and what expectations college professors have for students that we likely would prefer they did not have.
When students have experienced mostly or almost exclusively writing for A.P. literature exams or literary analysis, they fall into bad habits, such as seeing all texts as a source of identifying literary technique. When they have had their writing mostly corrected and graded (and have not received feedback designed to prompt revision), they see writing as an act of trying to avoid making mistakes.
These, for example, are bad habits that inhibit student success in college as well as presenting to professors qualities often rewarded in high school but discouraged in college.
Another foundational exercise I do with first year students in my writing seminar is identify behaviors that students do that are unlike how people behave outside of school, and then I narrow that discussion to how do students as writers act in ways unlike how professional writers act (and concurrently, we compare “the student essay” with an “authentic essay”).
I then explain to them that my first year seminar is about learning not to act like a student anymore, but to become a writer, and specifically, to become a scholar who writes.
I believe students can begin to learn this lesson before college, as well, and I also think students must be armed with an understanding of the expectations they’ll face in college that are, to be blunt, misguided.
What do college professors want from incoming high school graduates? Too often, professors want students to already know and be able to do those things that many of us would argue are still the job of professors to teach—and in the context of writing, college professors often want students to be grammatically finished before they enter college.
There remains in higher education a narrow and misguided attitude toward surface features and “correctness.” Of course, high school teachers need to address surface features (grounded in the students’ writing), but students as writers will continue to grow in that awareness throughout college and their lives. To be direct, grammatical awareness is simply not something a human can “finish.”
Students need to develop a healthy understanding of language, but also have an awareness that many people continue to judge others based on grammar, mechanics, and usage (see Weaver’s table on status marking, pp. 112-114). Ultimately, and as a college professor myself, I would argue that college professors want students who appreciate and love learning and language, students who have had rich and varied experiences as readers and writers. Students who have confidence in their own voices and ideas along with a balancing humility that they have much left to learn are a joy to teach and are likely to thrive in college.
But I end by noting that high school teachers must not feel burdened to do everything and high school students cannot be expected to be “finished” as prerequisites for entering college. What work left to be done, I think, is a better coordination between high schools and colleges in terms of what it means to be a writer in academic settings, which, I think, is the goal both levels share.
For me, I would prefer dropping the need to ask students to set aside lessons learned about writing in high school as part of continuing in college their journey as scholars and young people who write. And above are some of they ways in which we can all make that happen.
See also Genre Study. | https://radicalscholarship.com/2014/04/25/what-do-college-professors-want-from-incoming-high-school-graduates/ |
Anorexia nervosa is an emotional disorder characterized by severe and potentially life-threatening weight loss through self-induced reduction in total food intake. More than 90% of reported cases occur in women in industrialized countries where cultural expectations encourage women to maintain an extremely thin body, and fashion designers create clothes that look best on thin women.
Signs and Symptoms of Anorexia Nervosa include:
- Refusal to maintain minimum body weight for age and height
- Unrealistic fear of weight gain
- Distorted perception of personal body shape and/or size
- Denial of seriousness of low body weight
- Amenorrhea
- Ritualised eating behaviours
- Monotonous food choices
- Significant pre-occupation with food
- Vegetarianism
Potential events and risk factors that increase the risks of Anorexia Nervosa Include:
- Severe trauma or emotional stress (such as the death of a loved one or sexual abuse) during puberty or pre puberty. (PTSD)
- Abnormalities in brain chemistry: Changes in serotonin levels, a brain chemical that regulates appetite, may contribute to other symptoms of anorexia nervosa such as depression, impulsiveness, obsessive behaviours, or other mood disorders. In addition, the process of purging may deplete tryptophan, an amino acid necessary for the production of serotonin, leading to further imbalances.
- Overbearing, controlling, and critical parents who do not show emotional warmth.
- A tendency toward perfectionism, fear of being ridiculed or humiliated, a desire to always be perceived as being “good.”
- Family history of anorexia: About one-fifth of those with anorexia have a relative with an eating disorder.
- Age and gender—anorexia is most common in teens and young adult women
- Early onset of puberty
- Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) or other anxiety disorders—OCD is present in up to two-thirds of people with anorexia.
Several social and personal beliefs and practices perpetuate the persistence of the disease, including friends who envy the thinness of the patient with an eating disorder; dance instructors, athletic coaches, and others in professions where thinness is desirable who encourage very low body fat; denial on the part of parents or other family members; and the patient’s belief that his/her emaciation is not only normal but attractive, and/or that purging is the only way to avoid becoming obese.
So what can natural therapies do for people with Anorexia Nervosa? As a naturopathour aim is to always treat the person and not the disease, therefore unlike medical management of the condition a naturopath will try to find the underlying pathology or triggering event and treat that instead. This may mean counselling for those where the onset can be linked to a traumatic event, helping in the management of stress and anxiety, treating underlying nutritional deficiencies that may be impacting on symptoms and behaviours, looking for biochemical changes in brain chemistry like serotonin deficiencies, cortisol excess, and changes in dopamine and balancing any imbalances, as well as educating on what a healthy diet is. As a naturopath we try to take the focus off food management as much as possible and shift the awareness to feeling good on the inside which often leads to clients improving their nutritional and dietary habits of their own accord. | https://www.melbournewellness.com.au/blog/what-is-anorexia-nervosa/ |
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“Someone with an eating disorder is going to wake up feeling badly about themselves. They are going to start obsessing about food and feeling mad for either binging or eating the night before. As they approach their first meal it is almost their first test of the day. They wonder if they will eat at all. So they go against the hunger through distracting themselves. At school they will stress about lunch. They feel like everyone will judge if they are or aren’t eating. They are conscious about if anyone is noticing. Towards the middle of the day they are feeling the physical effects of being hungry. They will be fatigued, tired, and irritable. Because of these moods they want to have control in feeling better. They will go home and begin to stress about dinner, especially if they have to eat with their family. They are likely going to find an excuse to not eat with the family, avoiding food at dinner. By the end of the evening they are going to assess how well they did. They might exercise more in the evening to make up for the food they ate during the day. They go to bed feeling depressed, down about themselves, not good enough, and hungry. With hope that they will do better tomorrow”, states Skagit Valley eating disorder specialist Denise Castro. This is a day in the life of someone with an eating disorder.
Denise Castro explains how society is constantly morphing the way we view our bodies. The very own flesh that covers are skin and rolls that keep our body warms are always changing in perspective. Sometimes we imagine our bodies to be perfectly thin. Seeing only skin and bone is the ideal body shape that some individuals who suffer from eating disorders wish to have.
In some social aspects being paper thin is practically required. Careers such as modeling and acting promote being thin and sports such as gymnastics, ballet, rowing, diving, wrestling, and long distance running can encourage weight fluctuations. However, eating disorders are developed in many ways. Some leading causes of eating disorders are divided into psychological, biological, and environmental factors.
Psychological factors are pushed onto the individual by society. Negative body image and poor self esteem created by society can typically lead to the development of an eating disorder. Biological factors are not controlled by the subject. Having irregular hormone functions, nutritional deficiencies, or unusual genetics have large impacts on the development of eating disorders. Finally, environmental factors that are caused by how other people interact with each other and the subject. Careers and sports would fall under as environmental factors, as long as having a dysfunctional family dynamic, childhood traumas, cultural peer pressures, or stressful transitions.
All of these factors can lead to someone choosing to go against the natural instinct of eating and develop an eating disorder. Castro stated; “I think the main factors are cause when a patient struggles with valuing their self worth. Struggling with self worth and looking at their own body image and not thinking it is good enough. Wanting a different body type and having high external standards on what is the ideal.”
Castro claims that along with having low self worth another main reason that eating disorders are developed is because of the need for control. “Many humans are aware that life is out of control. For teenagers, especially women, one thing we can control is how we eat and when we eat. A sense of control can give a sense of empowerment. We need food to live, but we use food to control the way we feel about ourselves.”
However, not all eating disorders have the same symptoms or health effects. This is because there are three types of different eating disorders; Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia Nervosa, and Binge Eating Disorder. All of theses are very different from each other and can be caused by a multitude of reasons.
Anorexia Nervosa is when an individual limits the amount of calories they intake and infrequently eat meals. This form of eating disorder is associated with a fear of gaining weight or having high expectations of their own body image, valuing being thin. There are many health problems that go along with Anorexia Nervosa, such as bone loss, organ failure, brain damage, and infertility.
The next kind of eating disorder is Binge Eating. A patient with a binge eating disorder is very different that an individual with anorexia nervosa. With binge eating disorder an individual eats large quantities of food all at once. Since the symptoms of binge eating involve unnatural overeating the health effects can be obesity and cardiovascular disease.
Bulimia is correlated with binge eating in the way that food is being overeaten, but following the large food intake there is commonly either purging, over excessive exercise, or laxative abuse. This can be very dangerous and lead to gastrointestinal problems, severe dehydration, and electrolyte imbalances.
Sometimes it is hard to tell if a friend of yours is suffering from an eating disorder. Casro stated that “some symptoms of having an Anorexia Nervosa are skipping meals, making excuses for not eating, becoming a vegetarian or shifting what types of food they eat, not eating with the family or general groups of people, and openly not feeling good about their bodies”.
Castro goes on to state that “for binge or bulimic type of eating disorder you might notice someone eats more sweets or high fat foods and going to the bathroom afterwards to purge. A bulimic might use excessive exercise in addition of taking about having body image issues”, stated Castro.
Having a friend with an eating disorder could stem from many factors. The most important thing to do is let them know that you support them. To address the problem properly Castro states “Don’t just do nothing. If you notice something with a friend who is eating a lot less or eating a lot more. Say that you have noticed a change in the way they eat, that you love them and care about them. State your feeling of concern. The key is to name the problem and address it in a very sensitive and caring way. Their eating disorder is not really about the food, but it is about the reason that they are either using or not using food”.
Once the problem has been addressed there is a multitude of ways that an individual with an eating disorder can reach out for help. They could do this by reaching out to a friend, looking for a counselor, or talking to a doctor. When getting help from a counselor the goal is to create a more positive relationship with food.
“Teenagers (and adults) will use eating or not eating/food as a way to cope with their stress and intense emotions. Part of treatment is to help teens develop healthy coping skills so they don’t need to use food to manage the difficult emotions. Healthier coping skills can include going for a walk, meditation, listening to music, reaching out to a friend, reading a book, doing a hobby, journaling, writing poetry etc… Coping is a response to stressors. There are healthy and unhealthy coping skills, such as not eating/restricted eating, overeating, using drugs, drinking or cutting. So, part of treatment of eating disorders includes helping teens develop better and healthier ways to cope with their problems”, stated Castro.
Eating disorders can affect many students within Mount Vernon High School. These disorders represent a need for control and a low self worth regarding body image. By changing society’s view of body shape we can together change how body standards should be. Eating disorders can be easily developed, but through encouragement and friendship they can be overcome. If you too are in need for assistance in an eating disorder know that there is help out there. Some counseling offices in Skagit Valley that help with eating disorders are Skagit Behavioral Health INC (360) 424-0400 and Compass Health (360) 419-3500. | https://bulldognewspaper.com/961/features/the-development-of-eating-disorders/ |
According to the DSM-5, the category of other specified feeding or eating disorder (OSFED) is applicable to individuals who are experiencing significant distress due to symptoms that are similar to disorders such as anorexia, bulimia, and binge-eating disorder, but who do not meet the full criteria for a diagnosis of …
What is the DSM-5 criteria for anorexia?
To be diagnosed with anorexia nervosa according to the DSM-5, the following criteria must be met: Restriction of energy intake relative to requirements leading to a significantly low body weight in the context of age, sex, developmental trajectory, and physical health.
What are the 5 symptoms of anorexia?
- Extreme weight loss or not making expected developmental weight gains.
- Thin appearance.
- Abnormal blood counts.
- Fatigue.
- Insomnia.
- Dizziness or fainting.
- Bluish discoloration of the fingers.
- Hair that thins, breaks or falls out.
What are the symptoms required to attain a diagnosis of anorexia?
Emotional and mental signs of anorexia Having an intense fear of gaining weight. Being unable to realistically assess your body weight and shape (having a distorted self-image). Having an obsessive interest in food, calories and dieting. Feeling overweight or “fat,” even if you’re underweight.
What are 4 characteristics of anorexia nervosa?
Anorexia nervosa is characterized by emaciation, a relentless pursuit of thinness and unwillingness to maintain a normal or healthy weight, a distortion of body image and intense fear of gaining weight, a lack of menstruation among girls and women, and extremely disturbed eating behavior.
What is the main difference between anorexia and anorexia nervosa?
“Anorexia” describes a simple inability or aversion to eating, whether caused by a medical problem or a mental health issue. “Anorexia nervosa,” however, is the name for the clinical eating disorder, the main symptom of which is self-starvation.
What is the most common eating disorder in the DSM-5?
Discussion: The most common DSM-5 eating disorder diagnoses in adolescents in the community are anorexia nervosa and binge eating disorder. Severity ratings for eating disorders seem valid in terms of both the distribution in the community and the correlation with detection and treatment by health care services.
What are red flags for anorexia?
If you are concerned that you or someone you know has anorexia, watch for these red flags that may indicate the need for anorexia treatment: Frequent comments about feeling fat or overweight, despite weight loss. Consistent excuses to avoid mealtimes or situations involving food. Lying about how much food has been …
What are some warning signs a person with anorexia might display?
- Extreme weight loss.
- Emaciated appearance.
- Yellowing skin.
- Brittle nails.
- Irregular heartbeat.
- Frequent abdominal pain.
- Dizziness.
- Fatigue.
What are symptoms of not eating enough?
- Fatigue. Share on Pinterest Undereating can lead to a person becoming fatigued.
- Getting ill more often. Undereating can also lead to an imbalanced diet.
- Hair loss.
- Reproductive difficulties.
- Constantly feeling cold.
- Impaired growth in young people.
- Skin problems.
- Depression.
Which is a characteristic of an individual who suffers from anorexia nervosa?
Anorexia Nervosa is characterized by the National Institute of Mental Illness as individuals that have “a significant and persistent reduction in food intake leading to extremely low body weight; a relentless pursuit of thinness; a distortion of body image and intense fear of gaining weight; and extremely disturbed …
What other disorders might occur with anorexia nervosa?
- Depression.
- Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.
- Alcoholism, Addiction, and Substance Abuse.
- Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
- Anxiety.
- The Importance of Integrated Care.
- What Are Level of Care Options for Dual Diagnosis Treatment.
What is classified anorexia?
Anorexia nervosa is an eating disorder that can result in severe weight loss. A person with anorexia is preoccupied with calorie intake and weight. People with anorexia nervosa eat an extremely low calorie diet and have an excessive fear of gaining weight. They often feel better about themselves when they lose weight.
How much do anorexics weigh?
A normal BMI for an adult is 18.5-25. Above that you are overweight and below that you are underweight. Adults with anorexia have a BMI below 17.5. If you are under 18 years of age, normal weight is assessed by using special age-related BMI charts.
What happens to the body in anorexia nervosa?
Untreated, anorexia nervosa can lead to: Damaged organs, especially the heart, brain, and kidneys. Drop in blood pressure, pulse, and breathing rates. Loss of hair.
Which patient type is considered the most likely to suffer from anorexia nervosa?
Teen girls between 13 and 19 and young women in their early 20s are most at risk.
What is secondary anorexia?
Secondary anorexia is one of the main factors responsible for the development of malnutrition, which in turn negatively affects patient morbidity and mortality. Different mechanisms have been proposed to explain the pathogenesis of secondary anorexia.
Why do anorexics always cold?
The body also drops its core temperature which can make patients feel very cold, especially in their hands and toes; this is aggravated by the decrease in body fat and thus insulation that goes along with malnutrition.
What is atypical anorexia nervosa?
Atypical Anorexia Nervosa (A-AN) The reality is that disordered eating and resulting medical complications can occur with previously overweight patients who present with major absolute weight loss over a short time. This is called Atypical Anorexia Nervosa (A-AN), also known as “weight suppression.”
What disorders are often comorbid with eating disorders?
- depression.
- bipolar disorder.
- panic and anxiety disorders.
- post-traumatic stress disorder(PTSD)
- obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD)
- obsessive compulsive personality disorder (which is different from OCD)
- borderline personality disorder.
- sleep disorders.
Which eating disorder has the highest mortality?
Background. Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a common eating disorder with the highest mortality rate of all psychiatric diseases.
What are 4 complications of anorexia?
More Severe Complications of Anorexia Irregular heartbeats. Low blood sugar. Loss of bone mass. Kidney and liver damage.
What happens at the beginning of anorexia?
Irritability, over-sensitivity to criticism, perfectionism, compulsiveness, depression, unprovoked anxiety, and a desire to be alone are just a few of the indicators that often accompany the onset of anorexia or bulimia, and if any of these personality characteristics are manifesting at the same time as a food …
What are four red flags that indicate someone may have an eating disorder?
Increased talk about food, weight, calories, fat, etc. Complaining of being cold (especially fingers and toes) Increased consumption of diet soda or water. Increased perfectionism.
How can you tell if someone has ED?
Eating disorders may also look different in children. Disappearance of food (which may indicate binge eating) Frequent dieting behavior and/or preoccupation with dieting. Frequent weight fluctuations, significant weight loss, or being significantly underweight. | https://eatingdisorderresources.com/is-an-eating-disorder-in-the-dsm/ |
Research papers on anorexia
This integration helps generate a deeper understanding of how cognitive, emotional and bodily processes interact to maintain the illness.
In collaboration with world-class neuroscientists our work investigates brain processes underpinning thinking, feeling and experiencing reward, and how these differ for people with Anorexia Nervosa. With the aid of additional grants and generous charitable donations we continue with DBS study, which has full HRA approval. We have now published the protocol and an important ethics gold standard to guide such studies worldwide.
These findings not only help us to better understand the disorder but enable us to push forward with research that is directly relevant to the development of new treatments. PERL : Professors Catherine Harmer's group has an international reputation for excellence in the field of neuroscience and neuroimaging. For more information on eating disorders and finding help go to the beat website.
Park RJ. Cowdrey FA. Rawal A.
Other sample model essays:
Please contact us if you want to know more about our work, and we will then send you information about current research studies and opportunities to get involved. Email: oxbread psych. We are deeply grateful for the recent donations from the family and friends of the late Emma Bruce. We never met Emma but she had suffered from Anorexia for many years, and not long before she died, she was given hope after hearing about the work of OxBREaD.
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Click here to go to their JustGiving page. We are looking for people that fit into one of three groups: healthy people who have been recovered from anorexia nervosa for over a year, those who think a lot about their eating, weight and shape, and healthy controls, to participate in a psychological study.
You should be a healthy female aged between 18 and 45 years. We are looking for women who do not have any current health or psychiatric problems.
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We will be asking you to do some questionnaires and complete two computer tasks, which measure behaviour thought to be related to compulsivity. We will also non-invasively measure your pupils during one of the tasks. You will be compensated for your time if you decide to take part.
Essay on Psychology. Research Paper on Anorexia And What Causes It
You can email me on alexandra. This study is run in the University of Oxford Department of Psychiatry. We are recruiting female participants aged 16 — 45 years old, with a current diagnosis of an eating disorder to take part in a study of how women perceive bodies. The study, led by Dr Helen Bould, involves one session, 1. The study also involves being weighed and having your height measured — it will be up to you whether you are told your weight and height or not.
Click 'Find out more' for information on how to change your cookie settings. Continue Find out more. Skip to main content. I think perfectionism combined with over-analysing is quite a deadly combination. Now I am better, I feel I am dwelling in my body, perhaps for the first time in my adult experience. Quotes from individuals with Anorexia Nervosa We are proud of the innovative way our research brings together cognitive science, neuroscience and experimental psychology. Our team. Alexandra Pike DPhil Student. Jessica Scaife Post-doctoral Researcher.
Journal article Park RJ. Journal article Scaife JC. Journal article Godier LR.
Thesis statement about anorexia and bulimia
Journal article Cowdrey FA. Journal article Rawal A. Interested in helping eating disorder research?
News We would like to draw your attention to the change in our contact number: please contact with any enquiries. Do check out our new papers in the 'key publications' section of this page! My research paper will describe in detail the actions and behaviors that someone who is suffering from Anorexia Nervosa demonstrates. I will be discussing the social attitudes towards the illness from the past to the present.
Furthermore, I will give information on different ways to treat Anorexia Nervosa and also preventative measure that can be taken. Definition of distress is great pain, anxiety, or sorrow; acute physical or mental suffering; affliction; trouble. Normally, behavior has to cause distress in order to be classified as abnormal. Dysfunction refers to whether or not the behaviors keep them from carrying out daily living.
Danger means if the behavior puts themselves or other in harm. Behaviors and thoughts of Anorexia Nervosa include: A distortion of body image, a relentless hunt for being thin, an inability to maintain a healthy body weight, a consuming fear of gaining weight, and extremely scarce eating.
To lose weight, people with anorexia force themselves to vomit, misuse enemas and laxatives, and diet and exercise excessively.
Anorexia Nervosa
A person with anorexia becomes so obsessed with becoming thin that they weigh themselves repeatedly still viewing themselves as fat. The denial of this condition is tremendous. The continual need for attention and low self esteem guides anorexics to obsessive diet and starvation as a method to control feelings and actions regarding their emotions. Unfortunately, there is no single cause of Anorexia Nervosa making it difficult to target the reason why someone may suffer from them. Distressful feelings associated with Anorexia Nervosa include; low self esteem, depression, loneliness, anger, anxiety, emptiness, inadequacy, perfectionism, feelings of lack of control, and setting rigid standards for oneself.
The outside appearance of someone with anorexia does not dictate the amount of physical and mental turmoil they are enduring. The following illnesses make it almost impossible to function in regular daily life. The numerous medical consequences are quite serious and usually result in fatality. Other repercussions include; diabetes, blood sugar level disruptions, chronic fatigue syndrome, cramps, bloating constipation, diarrhea, incontinence, dehydration, dry skin and hair, brittle nails, hair loss, mood swings and depression, osteoporosis, electrolyte imbalances, acid reflux disorders, hypertension and hypotension, insomnia, infertility, anemia, kidney infections, malnutrition, ulcers, seizures, and tearing of the esophagus.
As you can see there are various effects and some of them have not even been named. Women with Anorexia Nervosa often miss menstrual cycles due to lack of nutrition. Gum disease can occur from consistent stomach acid exposed on the gums. Dental problems such as severe decay, decalcification of teeth, and erosion of enamel are results of countless purges. Callused fingers are also the aftermath for self induced vomiting. Overtime individuals suffering from Anorexia Nervosa can develop edema, defined as swelling of the soft tissues in the stomach area that can be caused by laxative use.
Muscle atrophy is common in sufferers of Anorexia Nervosa; it is where there are no more muscles left in your body due to it feeding off itself. At risk teens are more likely to begin chronic dieting due to the persistent media messages that encourage diets.
In , Wiley Periodicals, Inc. The results were mostly negative. These attitudes may contribute to reluctance to seek treatment among individuals with Anorexia Nervosa. Fortunately, there is hope. Early intervention can enhance recovery. Just like other addictions the first step is admittance and acceptance of the problem. Depending on the severity of their disorder, outpatient and inpatient treatments are available.
Someone who has started to see the medical effects of the illness in their body may need to be hospitalized. Long term residential treatment is also available to those with uncompromising symptoms. | https://inloteenasi.cf/3847.php |
Anorexia Nervosa – Causes, Symptoms, and Treatment
Anorexia nervosa is an eating disorder by eating foods with very limited portions, which leads to hunger and can be fatal. Finally, this condition can be dangerous because the patient is very thin and malnourished, but the patient still considers himself overweight. Often, people with anorexia nervosa must be hospitalized. But they deny that there is something wrong with them.
Anorexia nervosa usually develops during puberty. As many as 9 out of 10 people with anorexia are women and 1 out of every 100 women in the United States experiences anorexia. A person can be considered anorexia when he limits his food intake in such a way that his weight is very low accompanied by intense fear for weight gain and excessive attention to body weight or body shape.
There are two subtypes of anorexia: One type is related to a different type of eating disorder called bulimia, which is characterized by “eating as much as possible and then vomiting”, so someone eats and then deliberately vomited. Other subtypes manifest themselves through strict and excessive restrictions on food and calories.
Someone with anorexia becomes obsessed about food and weight. Sufferers can have strange eating rituals, such as refusing to eat in front of other people or arranging food on a plate in a specific order. Many people with anorexia care a lot about food. They can collect cookbooks and prepare fancy meals for their friends and family but they don’t join to eat, they also maintain strict training and exercise.
Contents
Causes of Anorexia Nervosa
The cause of anorexia nervosa is not fully understood. This is thought to have developed from a mixture of physical, emotional, and social triggers.
- Extreme diets change the way the brain works and metabolizes, and stresses the body too. This change might make sufferers more likely to experience eating disorders.
- Genetics play a large role in anorexia and bulimia. Compared to people who don’t have this disorder, people who have eating disorders are more likely to have a family history of eating disorders, obesity, or mood disorders (such as anxiety or depression).
- The combination of certain personality traits (such as low self-confidence along with perfectionism) and cultural and social pressure can play a part in anorexia.
- For some adolescents, anorexia might be a way to deal with stress and adolescent challenges. Stressful life events, such as moving to a new environment, divorce, or the death of a loved one, can trigger anorexia.
Symptoms of Anorexia Nervosa
Forms associated with anorexia can include:
- significant weight loss as a result of food intake restrictions
- afraid of being fat, even when it was clear he was very thin
- distorted body image
- excessive diet and exercise
- preoccupation with eating abnormal foods, such as counting all calories or obsessively studying cookbooks
- constipation
- yellowish and dry skin
- tooth decay
- grow fine hairs that grow on the face and arms
- menstrual periods that become irregular or stop altogether
- mood swings and anxiety
- suppression of sexual desire
- cold hands and feet at normal room temperature
- trouble sleeping
- Hyperactive
- often have digestive problems, infections, or other diseases.
- physical problems which include anemia, heart palpitations, bone loss, and tooth decay.
These life-threatening problems can include suicide, heart attacks, cardiac arrhythmias, and kidney failure. All people with anorexia need treatment. In most cases, this needs to involve a doctor and need to do counseling. Opnam in the hospital is needed for those who are underweight or who have severe medical problems. The goal of treatment is to restore healthy weight and healthy eating habits.
If you have an eating disorder, try not to refuse treatment. Even though you may be very afraid of gaining weight, try to think of weight as a life-saving measure. With medical and psychological assistance, you can learn to eat well and maintain your weight at a healthy level.
Recovery of Anorexia Nervosa
Ideally, one can get rid of anorexia with the help of a team that includes a mental health professional (such as a licensed psychologist or counselor), a medical health professional (such as a doctor or nurse), and a nutritionist.
If a medical condition is not life-threatening, patient care can include:
- Medical treatment. If malnutrition or hunger have begun to interfere, medical care will be a top priority. The doctor will concentrate on medical conditions caused by anorexia, such as osteoporosis, heart problems, or depression. When the patient starts to show a better condition, the doctor will continue to follow the condition of health and weight.
- Nutrition counseling. A nutritionist will help take control of the patient’s weight management in a healthy way. Patients will learn how to eat healthy and get a good understanding of nutrition.
- Talking to a health professional like a psychologist will help you overcome the emotional reasons behind anorexia. For example, you can discuss life pressures, beliefs about healthy food and weight, or certain personality traits that might cause anorexia.
Important parts of recovery will include:
- Control the habits of controlling unhealthy eating.
- Learn how to control emotions.
- Build trust in others who try to help patients
For adolescents with anorexia, family involvement is an important part of treatment. Family therapy such as parents supporting children, both emotionally and physically will have a positive effect during the recovery process.
Emergency Care Anorexia Nervosa
Being very thin can cause dehydration, hunger, electrolyte imbalance, and anything that can be life threatening. If anorexia causes life-threatening medical problems, you need urgent medical treatment. Hospital stays are required for those who are seriously underweight or who have severe medical problems. A few weeks in hospital followed by outpatient treatment to monitor your progress. Treatment includes:
- Treat hunger. This can include treating medical problems such as dehydration, electrolyte imbalance, or heart problems. If you can’t eat, you are given nutrition in liquid form.
- Nutrition rehabilitation. The medical team helps to achieve a healthy weight carefully and gradually, learn when your body feels hungry and full, and start a healthy diet.
Insurance varies for inpatient treatment for eating disorders. Check what is obtained to the insurance operator for hospitalization for eating disorders.
Things to think about:
- Anorexia can be a lifelong disease. Many people recover, some get worse, and some have problems with anorexia throughout their lives.
- People with anorexia at a young age and starting treatment early in the disease will usually have a good prognosis.
- Anorexia is more difficult to treat when it has been going on for a long time and refuses to be treated.
Many people who do not get treatment for mental health problems. You may not be seeking treatment because you think your symptoms are not bad enough or that you can work normally. However, anorexia is important to treat. If you need help deciding whether you need to go to the doctor, read about some reasons why people don’t get help and how to deal with it independently. | https://zrehab.com/anorexia-nervosa-causes-symptoms-and-treatment/ |
Anorexia nervosa, or simply called anorexia, is an eating disorder which is usually categorized by an extremely low body weight, a very real fear of gaining weight and a distorted perception of one’s own body. It is a type of self-starvation that if not treated, can lead to fatalities.
It often begins during the teenage years or early adulthood, but it can even begin as young as the preteen years.
Eating disorders affect up to 30 million men and women in the US. Both men and women can suffer from anorexia, but women are 10 times more likely to become anorexic. Nearly 1 in every 100 American women will experience anorexia at one time in their lives.
Anorexia nervosa is a psychological condition that involves an eating disorder. It causes the individual to lose more weight that what is healthy for their age and height. If you have anorexia you will purposefully restrict your food intake, generally due to a fear of being fat or becoming fat.
It is also common for those suffering from anorexia to practice excessive exercise, use laxatives, and even vomit to reduce their weight – but to lesser extent than those suffering with bulimia.
Symptoms
Anorexia is a very complex disease, and it isn’t always easy to diagnose in a loved one as those suffering can be quite secretive about their eating habits.
Some of the physical signs and symptoms of anorexia are:
- Severe loss of muscle mass
- Refusal to eat
- Being secretive about what food they are eating
- Exercising excessively
- Using laxatives
- Intense fear over weight gain
- Intense dissatisfaction with physical appearance, weight and body shape
- Personality changing from being outgoing to becoming more withdrawn
- Low body temperature, with cold hands and feet
- Dry skin
- Hair loss
- Loss of menstruation
- Infertility
- Insomnia
- Brittle nails
- Irregular heart rhythms
- Low blood pressure
- Exhaustion and listlessness
- Lightheadedness and dizziness
- Swollen hands and feet
- Low bone density or osteoporosis
- Fine downy hair growing all over the body, including facial hair
Some of the signs of vomiting a lot may be bad breath as well as toothy decay due to the acid in the vomit.
Some of the psychological signs and symptoms are:
- Excessive concern with weight and body image
- Frequent weighing and measuring themselves
- Inspecting their body in the mirror excessively
- Obsession with food and healthy foods
- Lying and being secretive about food intake
- Not eating or refusing to eat
- Lack of emotion or depressed mood;
- Memory loss
- Irritability
- Over-exercising
- Reduced sex drive
- Lack of energy at times
They will often be in denial that they have a problem, and may be difficult to talk to about their eating habits.
If you recognize any of these symptoms in yourself or in a loved one, it is important that you seek help. At The Center • A Place of HOPE we have qualified professionals who can you help you with your anorexia and help you find a way forward.
Dangerous complications of anorexia
If the symptoms of anorexia go on for too long, they can be life threatening and have long-term health complications for the individual. Up to 20% of anorexics die from major organ failure due to the constant starvation.
Some of the physical long-term complications of anorexia are:
- Cardiac problems
- Organ damage
- Brittle bones
- Osteoporosis
- Tooth decay
- High cholesterol
- Liver damage
- Baldness
- Pancreatitis
- Loss of skin color
Anorexia is a very serious and potentially fatal disease if left untreated. It is so important to seek help for this condition.
Causes of Anorexia Nervosa
No single cause has been identified for Anorexia Nervosa. There is still more research that may need to be done to help identify causes. It has been found that anorexia is due to a number of factors such as biological, environmental and psychological.
Some of the potential risk factors are:
- Being susceptible to anxiety or depression
- Having difficulty handling stress
- Being very worried or anxious about the future
- Having perfectionistic tendencies
- Having a negative self-image
- Growing up with very specific ideas about beauty, weight and health
- Having an anxiety disorder during childhood
- Growing up with physical, sexual or emotional abuse
- Family or relationship problems
- Being bullied from a young age
- Living with a pressure to succeed and be successful
- A stressful life event, such as a bereavement or becoming unemployed
Between 33-50% of people suffering with anorexia are also suffering from a mood disorder such as anxiety disorder or obsessive compulsive disorder.
An individual may develop anorexia nervosa as a way of having control in a difficult environment where they feel they have no control.
Genetic factors may be part of it, as between 50-80% of the risk of anorexia is thought to potentially be genetic.
Treatment
Treatment should focus on the whole person, and will most likely include things like psychology, medication, family counselling and nutritional counselling.
It can be very difficult for someone with anorexia to accept that they have a problem. This is often the hardest part to take that first step of acceptance in the journey of recovery.
Treatment is often long-term as it takes time to change these thoughts and behaviors, and there may be relapses. However, with the right health professionals around you and good family or friend support, you can make a way forward and improve your health.
At The Center • A Place of HOPE there are caring and experienced health professionals that are able to help you or a loved one through this journey and help you to recover from this disease. They can help you to take steps forward and begin to change your life for the better.
Anorexia nervosa is a serious illness and you do need to reach out and seek help for yourself or for a loved one. | https://www.aplaceofhope.com/our-programs/eating-disorders/anorexia/ |
About 95 percent of people with this disorder are women. It usually begins in adolescence, sometimes earlier, and less frequently in adulthood. Anorexia nervosa primarily affects middle and upper socio-economic class people. In western society, the number of people with this disorder seems to increase. Anorexia nervosa may be mild and transient or severe and lasting. Lethal rates as high as 10 to 20 percent have been reported. However, as mild cases may not be diagnosed, no one knows exactly how many people have anorexia nervosa or what percentage dies of it.
The age of onset of anorexia is in the first adolescence, around 12 years, although the most affected population is between 14 and 18 years. It is more frequent in the middle and upper-middle social classes. In 95 percent of cases, anorexia affects young women, although in recent years there has been an increase in men, adult women, and children. There are groups more prone to these disorders, such as gymnasts, dancers, or models.
Anorexia
Anorexia is an eating disorder that involves weight loss caused by the patient and leads to starvation. Anorexia is characterized by the fear of gaining weight and by a distorted and delusional perception of the body itself that makes the patient look fat even when his or her weight is below that recommended. Therefore, it starts a progressive decrease in weight through fasting and a reduction in food intake.
It usually begins with the removal of carbohydrates, as there is a false belief that they fatten. It then rejects fats, proteins, and even liquids, leading to cases of extreme dehydration. To these drastic measures can be added other associated behaviors such as the use of diuretics, laxatives, purges, induced vomiting, or excessive physical exercise. Affected people can lose 15 to 50 percent, in the most critical cases, of their body weight. This disease is often associated with serious psychological disturbances that cause changes in behavior, emotional behavior, and stigmatization of the body
Anorexia
Causes The exact causes of anorexia are not known. Many factors are likely to be involved. Genes and hormones can play a role. Social attitudes that promote very thin body types can also contribute. Risk factors for anorexia include: Being more concerned or paying more attention to weight and figure Having an anxiety disorder in childhood Having a negative image of yourself Having eating problems during breastfeeding or early childhood Having certain cultural ideas or social regarding health and beauty Trying to be a perfectionist or overly rule-centered Anorexia often begins during the years before adolescence or adolescence, or early adulthood and is more common in women, although it can also be seen in men.
Causes
Cause it’s unknown, but social factors seem important. Although there are many socio-cultural factors that can trigger anorexia, part of the population is likely to be more physically predisposed to this disorder, regardless of the pressure the environment may exert. For this reason, there are general factors associated with a triggering factor or some biological vulnerability, which precipitates the development of the disease. The illness’s own obesity. Maternal obesity. Death or illness of a loved one. Separation from the parents. Getting away from home. School failures. Accidents. Traumatic events.
Symptoms
This pathology is characterized by a significant weight loss caused by the patient and by an erroneous perception of the body itself. As a result, endocrine problems become apparent in a relatively short space of time. The main symptoms that determine the onset of the disease are the following:
- Refusal to maintain body weight above the minimum appropriate for the patient’s age and size.
- Fear of weight gain or obesity even when the weight is below the recommended.
- Distorted perception of the body, its weight, and proportions.
- Absence of three consecutive menstrual cycles in women (amenorrhea).
- Anorexics may experience a variety of symptoms: constipation, amenorrhea, abdominal pain, vomiting, etc.
- But it is the family that detects the symptoms that raise the alarm:
- Excessive concern about the caloric composition of food and food preparation.
- Constant feeling of cold.
- Progressive reduction of food.
- Obsession with image, scale, studies, and sport.
- Use of traps to avoid food.
- Hyperactivity.
These symptoms are compounded by other typical features such as irritability, depression, and emotional or personality disorders. There is also a change in the sensation of satiety and fullness before meals, nausea, swelling, or even absence of sensations. This pathology also shows numerous cognitive disorders that focus on food, body weight, and physical appearance:
- Selective abstractions.
- Selective use of information.
- Generalizations.
- Superstitions.
- The negative side of any situation is magnified.
- Dichotomous thinking.
- Self-referential ideas.
- Arbitrary inference.
- As for the clinical consequences, the symptoms are as follows:
- Heart rate’s slowing down.
- Arrhythmias occur that can lead to cardiac arrest.
- Get your blood pressure down.
- Menstruation disappears in women (amenorrhea).
- It decreases bone mass and, in very early cases, slows down the rate of growth.
- Decrease in intestinal motility.
- Anemia.
- A thin, long hair called woolly hair appears on the back, forearms, thighs, neck, and cheeks.
- Chronic constipation.
- The decrease in energy consumption produces a constant feeling of cold.
- The skin becomes dehydrated, dried, and cracked.
- Yellowing of the palms of the hands and soles of the feet due to the accumulation of carotids in the sebaceous glands.
- The nails are breaking.
- Hair loss.
- Problems with teeth and peripheral edema. Swelling and abdominal pain.
- Prevention.
As it is a disorder that usually begins in adolescence, observation by the family is crucial to detect in the youngest habits that are a warning sign. Here are some risk factors:
Bad eating habits: Many teens eat alone while watching TV or communicating with their friends via WhatsApp. Lack of fixed schedules and parental supervision of what they eat increase the likelihood of developing an eating disorder.
Poor communication with parents: knowing the children’s concerns, their tastes, and their circle of friends can help prevent this type of disorder or detect it at an early stage.
Treatments
are the correction of bad nutrition and mental disorders of the patient. In the first place, an attempt is made to achieve rapid weight gain and the recovery of eating habits, since they may involve a higher risk of death. But a full recovery of body weight is not synonymous with healing. Anorexia is a psychiatric illness and should be treated as such. Treatment should be based on three aspects:
Early detection of the disease: knowledge of the symptoms by primary care physicians and protocols setting the criteria to be observed by the physician.
Coordination between the health services involved: psychiatry, endocrinology, and pediatrics.
Outpatient follow-up once the patient has been discharged, with regular visits. Hospitalizations are usually prolonged, resulting in a disconnection from the environment that may impair the normal development of the adolescent. Therefore outpatient treatment is advisable whenever possible.
Admission to a medical facility is necessary when:
- Malnutrition is very serious and there are alterations in the vital signs.
- When family relationships are unsustainable, and it is better to isolate the patient.
- When psychic disorders are aggravated.
- Outpatient treatment is effective when:
- It is detected early.
There are no episodes of bulimia or vomiting and there is a family commitment to cooperation.
In this way, treatment is started with feedback, which can sometimes cause digestive discomfort, since the body is not used to eating food. Over time, the biological situation is restored, and menstruation returns. Psychological treatment then begins, which attempts to restructure rational ideas, eliminate the body’s misperception, improve self-esteem, and develop social and communicative skills between the patient and his or her environment. The family must take an active part in the treatment because sometimes the triggering factor of the disease is in the family and, moreover, the recovery is inevitably prolonged at home. | https://writix.co.uk/essay-examples/stigmatization-of-the-body |
Anorexia nervosa, also commonly known as anorexia, is a psychological condition and a potentially life-threatening eating disorder in which the person loses more weight than is healthy for their height and age.
Anorexia is characterized by low weight, irrational fear of gaining weight, food restriction, and a strong desire to be thin. Individuals with the condition often see themselves as overweight, even though they are underweight.
They eat specific foods and only in small amounts, they frequently check themselves for weight gain. Some others compulsively exercise or induce weight loss by using laxatives.
Although the cause of anorexia is unknown, it has been attributed to genetic and environmental factors. Certain cultures have a role in anorexia by placing importance on being thin.
Furthermore, it is a prevalent condition among those involved in activities that value thickness, such as dancing, athletics, and modeling. Anorexia is usually followed by a life-changing event, and significantly low weight is required to confirm the diagnosis.
As of 2015, anorexia was estimated to affect 2.9 million people worldwide. It is ten times more likely to occur in women than in men in developed countries. The rates are, however, unclear in developing countries.
Anorexia often begins during teenage years or early adulthood. It resulted in 600 deaths worldwide in 2013, higher than the estimated number of deaths ( about 400) in 1990.
William Gull, in 1873 first used the term ‘anorexia nervosa’ to describe the condition.
Causes and Risk Factors of Anorexia
There is no identifiable cause of anorexia nervosa. It could occur as a combination of biological, environmental, and psychological factors. These includes:
Genetic factors
Studies have shown that people with an eating disorder may have an impaired ability to have an appetite, feel hungry, or control digestion.
This occurs as a result of an imbalance in the brain chemistry that controls these activities. Also, anorexia nervosa in an inheritable disease. People who have first degree relatives with the disorder are more likely to develop the condition.
Environmental Factors
These include hormonal changes due to puberty, existing cultural norms, and mainstream and social media. Hormonal changes during puberty are often associated with feelings of anxiety, stress, and low self-esteem.
Cases of anorexia over the decades have been associated with the increased visibility of the ideal body image propagated by the media. People working in jobs that come with the pressure to be thin (like dancers and models) are more likely to develop anorexia.
Also, people who have more than average contact with a culture that promotes weight loss can develop the disorder.
Additionally, people who partake in sports that emphasized aesthetics and low body fat have higher chances of developing anorexia nervosa. Pressure from family can also predispose one to be anorexic.
Other environmental factors of anorexia may include:
- The pressure to succeed and fear of failure
- Physical, sexual, emotional abuse
- Bullying
- Strained relationship with family
- Stressful life events like separation from family and bereavement
Anorexia often stems from a person’s need to control their lives. The American Family Physician describes anorexia as using “caloric intake or excessive exercise to control emotional need or pain.”
Risk factors that have been associated with anorexia nervosa include:
- Finding it difficult to handle stress
- Eating problems during early childhood or infancy
- Having a negative body image and low self-esteem
- Being susceptible to anxiety and depression
- Holding rigid ideas regarding beauty and health that are influenced by culture or society
- Being perfectionist and overly concerned about rules
- Having had a childhood anxiety disorder
- Excessive worrying, and fear or doubt about the future
- Having a high level of control over their emotions, behavior, and expression
About 33 to 50 percent of people with anorexia have mood disorders like depression and anxiety disorder like obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). This could be attributed to negative emotions and body image.
When a person starts losing weight, the weight loss and lack of nutrients may change the brain’s chemistry in a way that reinforces obsessive thoughts and behaviors attributed to anorexia.
This change could involve the part of the brain that controls hunger and appetite, or it could increase feelings of guilt and anxiety that become associated with eating.
According to a 2015 study, researches discovered that people living with anorexia might have gut bacteria that are different from those without the condition.
According to another survey, people with anorexia are less likely to be able to differentiate between different types of positive emotions.
Signs and Symptoms of Anorexia nervosa
There are several ways by which anorexic people lose and maintain their low weight. Some engage in compulsive exercising, while others put excessive restrictions on their diet.
Some others employ binging and purging, as seen in cases of bulimia, while others make use of laxatives, diuretics, or vomiting to get rid of food.
Symptoms of anorexia generally include:
- Severe restriction on food intake and extreme dieting
- Fatigue
- Thinning and falling out of hair
- Insomnia
- Dry skin
- Yellow, blotchy skin with soft fine hairs
- Amenorrhea: an abnormal absence of menstruation, or loss of 3 consecutive menstrual cycles
- Constipation
- Low blood pressure
Other behaviors include;
- Irritability
- Withdrawal and isolation from social functions, family and friend
- Infantile playing with food
- Hunger denial
- Depression
- Cold feeling in the extremities
- Continued fixation on food, calorie count and recipes
- Obsession with calories and fat content of food.
Diagnosis
A physician would require a medical history of the patient for diagnosis. The patient would be asked questions about weight loss, how they feel about their weight and body, and for women, how often they menstruate.
It can sometimes be difficult for the patient to speak truthfully about themselves; this is especially true of the person used to be obese.
The physical may carry tests to check for other underlying medical maladies with similar symptoms. These include:
- Addison’s disease
- Hyperthyroidism
- Malabsorption
- Diabetes
- Cancer
- Immunodeficiency
- Chronic infections
- Inflammatory bowel disease (IBS)
According to the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA’s) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5th Edition (DSM-5), the following are the diagnostic criteria for anorexia nervosa:
- A restriction of energy intake relative to requirements leading to significantly low body weight with reference to age, sex, and physical health.
- Intense fear of becoming fat, even when underweight.
- Obessive and disturbing feelings about the way in which one’s body weight or shape is experienced.
- Excessive influence of body weight or shape on self-evaluation, or denial of the seriousness of the current low body weight.
Treating anorexia would require you to realize and admit that you need help. Unfortunately, many people living with anorexia don’t believe they have a problem or are in any danger. This can make treating the condition rather difficult.
The aim of treatment is to restore normal weight and inculcate healthy eating habits. This would usually require the health of a dietician. Family members and friends are also needed to take part in the therapy with you.
The following methods can be used in the treatment of anorexia nervosa:
Therapy and Counseling
This would involve cognitive behavioral therapy, which seeks to change unhealthy thoughts and behavior with the goal of helping the patient learn how to cope with stress and intense emotions and build a healthy self-image.
Nutrition counseling would also be required to help the patient develop healthy eating habits. Family members may be needed to help the patient keep track of their eating habits and create support for family member dealing with anorexia nervosa.
Furthermore, engaging in group therapy enables the patient to interact with others who have the disorder and know that they are not alone.
Medication
This would require the use of antidepressants to deal with mental health issues common with anorexia nervosa like anxiety and depression. These drugs make the patient feel better but do not diminish the desire to be thin.
Hospitalization
In extreme cases, the physician may require the anorexic patient to stay in the hospital for a few days in order to treat the effects of the anorexia nervosa.
The patient may be put on intravenous fluids and a feeding tube if the patient’s weight is dangerously low or if they are dehydrated.
Complications
The complications of anorexia nervosa can affect every body system. They include:
- Cardiovascular problems: Cardiovascular problems due to anorexia include low heart rate, low blood pressure, and damage to the myocardium (heart muscle).
- Gastrointestinal issues: Movement in the intestines is reduced significantly when a person is severely underweight and eating too little. This can, however, be resolved when the diet improves.
- Blood illnesses: Anorexia nervosa increases the risk of developing leukopenia, or low white blood cell count, and anemia, low red blood cell count.
- Hormonal issues: Lower levels of growth hormones may lead to delayed growth during adolescence. Normal growth resumes with a healthy diet.
- Kidney complications: Dehydration caused by anorexia nervosa can lead to highly concentrated urine and more urine production. Normal kidney processes are restored with improved weight levels.
- Bone fractures: Patients whose bones have not fully matured yet have a significantly higher risk of developing osteopenia (reduced bone tissue), and osteoporosis (loss of bone mass). | https://healthtian.com/anorexia-nervosa/ |
Anorexia Nervosa is a psychological and possibly life-threatening eating disorder defined by an extremely low body weight relative to stature (this is called BMI [Body Mass Index] and is a function of an individual’s height and weight), extreme and needless weight loss, illogical fear of weight gain, and distorted perception of self-image and body.
Additionally, women and men who suffer with anorexia nervosa exemplify a fixation with a thin figure and abnormal eating patterns. Anorexia nervosa is interchangeable with the term anorexia, which refers to self-starvation and lack of appetite.
There are two common types of anorexia, which are as follows:
Anorexia is not a simple disorder. It has many symptoms and effects, and its causes are complex as well. Currently, it is thought that anorexia nervosa develops as a result of multiple factors, both biological and environmental.
Examples of environmental factors that would contribute to the occurrence of anorexia nervosa are:
Examples of biological factors include:
An individual suffering from anorexia nervosa may reveal one or several signs and symptoms such as:
Though the restrictive eating patterns that characterize anorexia nervosa are similar to dieting behaviors, there are stark differences between the two. The effects of the extreme behaviors resulting from anorexia nervosa are far more devastating and consequential than dieting.
While someone may diet in an attempt to control weight, anorexia nervosa is often an attempt to gain control over one’s life and emotions, especially in the light of traumatic events or a chaotic environment.
While someone might diet in an attempt to lose weight as the primary goal, in anorexia they may diet because they perceive losing weight as a way to achieve happiness and self mastery. | http://www.drhaircareclinic.com/anorexia.html |
Starvation diets have far-reaching negative effects on the body. Starving to lose weight changes the metabolism, reduces lean muscle, reduces bone density, and decreases strength.
What happens to the body in anorexia nervosa?
If a person with anorexia becomes severely malnourished, every organ in the body can be damaged, including the brain, heart and kidneys. This damage may not be fully reversible, even when the anorexia is under control.
What are 5 physical effects of anorexia?
- Dramatic weight loss.
- Distorted body image.
- Obsession with weight, food, and dieting.
- Withdrawal.
- Denial of hunger.
- Intense fear of weight gain even though they are “underweight”
- Avoidance of situations involving food.
- Loss of menstrual cycle.
How long does it take for anorexia to damage your body?
The first victim of anorexia is often the bones. “You’re supposed to be pouring in bone, and you’re losing it instead.” Such bone loss can set in as soon as six months after anorexic behavior begins, and is one of the most irreversible complications of the disease.
How does anorexia affect the body and mind?
With malnutrition and a reduction of social support, eating disorders greatly increase the risk of the development of depression and anxiety. In many cases, these conditions can also trigger the start of disordered eating behaviors as a way to cope.
How long will an anorexic live?
5-10% of anorexics die within 10 years after contracting the disease and 18-20% of anorexics will be dead after 20 years. Anorexia nervosa has the highest death rate of any psychiatric illness (including major depression).
What are three long term effects of anorexia?
- Bone weakening (osteoporosis).
- Anemia.
- Seizures.
- Thyroid problems.
- Lack of vitamins and minerals.
- Low potassium levels in the blood.
- Decrease in white blood cells.
- Amenorrhea (absence of menstruation in females).
What are the 2 main causes of anorexia?
The exact causes of anorexia nervosa are unknown. However, the condition sometimes runs in families; young women with a parent or sibling with an eating disorder are likelier to develop one themselves. Then there are psychological, environmental, and social factors that may contribute to the development of anorexia.
Can anorexia be fully cured?
Many Patients with Anorexia Nervosa Get Better, But Complete Recovery Elusive to Most. Three in four patients with anorexia nervosa – including many with challenging illness – make a partial recovery. But just 21 percent make a full recovery, a milestone that is most likely to signal permanent remission.
Why do anorexics crave sugar?
To conclude, sugar is an important source of energy for the body. It is important for brain function and meeting requirements helps to prevent protein being used for energy. This is particularly important patients with anorexia nervosa who often need to build up their muscle mass after a period of starvation.
Can anorexia permanently damage your brain?
A patient who suffers from anorexia or bulimia for many years will have accrued more damage to his/her brain than someone who finds treatment and recovery early on in their illness. The type of eating disorder, however, does not influence levels of neuro-disruption or the amount of damage reversal possible.
What are the chances of surviving anorexia?
In a prospective long-term follow-up of 84 patients 21 years after first hospitalisation for anorexia nervosa, we found that 50.6% had achieved a full recovery, 10.4% still met full diagnostic criteria for anorexia nervosa, and 15.6% had died from causes related to anorexia nervosa.
What it feels like to have anorexia?
People with anorexia often have common traits, including: low self-esteem, feeling worthless or like you’re not good enough. Losing weight can start to feel like a sense of achievement or a way to feel a sense of worth. perfectionism.
What feelings does a person with anorexia have?
- Exhausted or tired.
- Dizzy.
- Bloated and constipated.
- Cold.
- Irritable and moody.
- Distracted and unable to concentrate.
What are 6 symptoms of anorexia?
- Purging for Weight Control. Share on Pinterest.
- Obsession With Food, Calories and Dieting.
- Changes in Mood and Emotional State.
- Distorted Body Image.
- Excessive Exercise.
- Denial of Hunger and Refusal to Eat.
- Engaging in Food Rituals.
- Alcohol or Drug Abuse.
At what weight do you get hospitalized for anorexia?
One Place for Treatment Admission criteria require that patients be less than 70 percent of their ideal body weight, or have a body mass index (BMI) below 15. In a woman who is 5 feet 4 inches tall, that’s about 85 pounds.
Which eating disorder is the most serious?
Experts consider anorexia nervosa to be the most deadly of all mental illnesses because it has the highest mortality rate. For this reason, we can consider it to be the most severe of the 12 types of eating disorders.
What is extreme anorexia?
What is Severe Anorexia Nervosa? Anorexia Nervosa (AN) is a highly lethal mental disorder manifested by marked food restrictions, resulting in a very thin body habitus, an abnormal focus on body image and a host of medical complications which progress as the malnutrition worsens.
What is the most serious consequence of anorexia nervosa?
The most serious risk of anorexia is death. In fact, about 10% of people with anorexia will die because of their eating disorder . Like we said, anorexia is one of the deadliest mental illnesses. People with anorexia who have died tend to pass away due to starvation, heart problems, or suicide .
What other diseases can anorexia cause?
Anorexia is associated with bone health issues. This can include osteopenia, fractures, osteoporosis, and more. The longer a person lives with anorexia, the more severe these problems will be. Additionally, some bone loss stemming from anorexia can be irreversible.
What is the most common medical complication of anorexia?
Cardiac. Bradycardia (pulse
What is the goal of anorexia?
The goals of treatment for anorexia include: Stabilizing weight loss. Beginning nutrition rehabilitation to restore weight. Eliminating binge eating and/or purging behaviors and other problematic eating patterns.
Who most commonly has anorexia?
Anorexia is more common among girls and women than boys and men. Anorexia is also more common among girls and younger women than older women. On average, girls develop anorexia at 16 or 17. Teen girls between 13 and 19 and young women in their early 20s are most at risk.
What hormone is responsible for anorexia?
Anorexia nervosa is also associated with dysregulation of oxytocin secretion, which is an anorexigenic hypothalamic hormone84 (FIG. 1).
Can you be hospitalized for not eating?
Hospitalization for eating disorders Hospitalization may be necessary if you have serious physical or mental health problems or if you have anorexia and are unable to eat or gain weight. Severe or life-threatening physical health problems that occur with anorexia can be a medical emergency. | https://eatingdisorderresources.com/what-are-the-after-effects-of-starving-yourself/ |
When it comes to the eating disorder anorexia, there are many stigmas associated with this psychiatric illness that create misunderstandings about this disease and those who are suffering. For example, many people assume that anorexia is automatically related to a very low body weight or drastic weight loss. However, what about individuals who struggle with restrictive eating and abnormal eating behaviors associated with anorexia nervosa who are of normal body weight? Enter atypical anorexia nervosa.
Understanding Atypical Anorexia Nervosa
Contrary to many of the stigmas assumed about anorexia nervosa, a person can present with the restrictive behaviors and features of anorexia without meeting the low weight criteria for a diagnosis of anorexia.
According to the diagnostic criteria for anorexia nervosa from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), individuals struggling with this disorder will have a restriction of energy intake relative to their caloric requirement, which leads to a significantly low body weight in the context of several factors, including gender, physical health, age, developmental trajectory, and more. Other criterion includes an intense fear of gaining weight and/or becoming fat as well as a disturbance in body perception.
A person dealing with atypical anorexia nervosa will exhibit these same criteria without weight loss. In fact, individuals with atypical anorexia nervosa may be within or above a normal weight range for their age, sex, etc., which makes the presentation “atypical”.
Atypical anorexia nervosa falls under the category of Other Specified Feeding or Eating Disorders (OFSED), which is one of the most prevalent eating disorders among adults today .
Presentation of Atypical Anorexia Nervosa
Rather than listing specific criteria for atypical anorexia nervosa, the DSM-5 has outlined this specific OFSED subtype as defined by anorexic features without low weight.
For example, a person struggling with atypical anorexia nervosa may exhibit an extreme fear of being fat or of any weight changes and resort to abnormal eating and feeding behaviors, such as calorie counting, cutting out certain foods/food groups, avoiding social events and functions that involve food, and more.
Dangers of Those Struggling With Atypical Anorexia Nervosa
Many individuals who have atypical anorexia nervosa may not even realize that they are struggling with a severe and deadly eating disorder, simply due to the weight stigma that surrounds this disease. A person may think, “I am not sick enough to have an eating disorder”, because they may be within a normal/above weight range.
This is a deadly trap that can prevent many individuals who are struggling from seeking out the professional and appropriate help needed for recovery. It is important to remember and understand that weight is not a defining criterion for an eating disorder, and the more this message is promoted, the more effectively this stigma can be challenged.
A person can suffer from eating disorder tendencies, particularly related to anorexia, regardless of their size, shape, or weight. If you have found yourself struggling with abnormal eating patterns or unusual thoughts when it comes to your body and food, be sure to talk with someone you trust.
Having a professional assessment can be the first step in understanding what you might be struggling with and in connecting with the necessary treatment to help you address your concerns. Eating disorders, regardless of their formal diagnoses, are deadly psychiatric illnesses that can result in severe consequences if left untreated.
Atypical anorexia nervosa, even if it does not present like the classic anorexia diagnosis, can be debilitating for an individual who is struggling. If you or a loved one may be dealing with an eating disorder, be sure to reach out to someone and talk about your struggles. Speaking out for help is often the first step in overcoming these diseases.
About the Author: Crystal is a Masters-level Registered Dietitian Nutritionist (RDN) with a specialty focus on eating disorders, maternal/child health and wellness, and intuitive eating. Combining clinical experience with a love of social media and writing, Crystal serves as the Special Projects Coordinator for Eating Disorder Hope/Addiction Hope, where her passion to help others find recovery and healing are integrated into each part of her work.
As a Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor, Crystal has dedicated her career to helping others establish a healthy relationship with food and body through her work with EDH/AH and nutrition private practice.
References:
: Thomas JJ, Vartanian LR, Brownell KD (May 2009). “The relationship between eating disorder not otherwise specified (EDNOS) and officially recognized eating disorders: meta-analysis and implications for DSM”. Psychol Bull 135 (3): 407–33. doi:10.1037/a0015326. PMC 2847852. PMID 19379023.
The opinions and views of our guest contributors are shared to provide a broad perspective of eating disorders. These are not necessarily the views of Eating Disorder Hope, but an effort to offer a discussion of various issues by different concerned individuals.
We at Eating Disorder Hope understand that eating disorders result from a combination of environmental and genetic factors. If you or a loved one are suffering from an eating disorder, please know that there is hope for you, and seek immediate professional help. | https://www.eatingdisorderhope.com/blog/atypical-anorexia-nervosa-signs-and-symptoms |
Viewed from an evolutionary perspective, individuals and their families need not shoulder the blame for anorexia nervosa. Rather, understanding the challenging biological changes can help families and clinicians work together to beat it.
Anorexia nervosa is the most homogenous psychiatric disorder, yet its stereotyped symptoms are the opposite of what one expects of a starving person. Although at least 15% below normal weight, people with anorexia feel energetic and reject foods that used to tempt them. This mysterious illness has been attributed to psychological problems in the individual or their families, or to biological dysfunctions.
Blind to their own bodies
As strange as it may seem, when people first develop anorexia nervosa they may not be aware that something is wrong because their bodies send them false signals. For example, underweight anorexics literally cannot see that they are too thin.
This brain-imaging picture shows the pattern of activation of the visual cortex when women look at other’s bodies and when they look at themselves(1). As these pictures dramatically illustrate, when people with anorexia tell us “I just can’t see it,” they are telling the truth. The visual cortex is literally blinded to their own body contours while the brain region responsible for body image is hyperactive, seamlessly filling in the blank with a fattened-up version. This odd blindness happens only for an anorexic’s own body, and only when he or she is underweight(2).
Reproduced with permission of the author from: Mondraty, N. Paper presented at The International Conference on Eating Disorders, Baltimore, MD, June 2007.
What is the anorexic brain up to?
This isn’t the only odd thing the anorexic brain does. Deep in the brain, an ancient region, called the hypothalamus, does something very odd. The hypothalamus monitors nutritional status and manipulates our appetite to get us to eat; normally when people are starving, it turns up hunger signals so they can think of little else, and it keeps satiety (fullness) signals low, so that if food becomes available, they can gorge.
Normally when people are starving, the brain’s rewards for eating are tuned up high to encourage the search for food. For example, the body turns up opiate receptors, making eating feel like an addict’s fix. It enhances cannabinoid receptors, making food taste like you’re stoned. Dopamine, the brain chemical that plays a key role in orgasm and in addictions, surges when a starving person eats. If it sounds like eating when starved releases a veritable pharmacopoeia of street drugs, you are right. Most addictive drugs exploit reward systems that first evolved to insure that animals eat.
While some brain changes increase the rewards for eating, others change what we decide to do. We assume that we are in control of our eating, but dieters know there is more to the story. Like hunger for air or water, hunger for food can irresistibly alter the will of even the strongest dieter, so that eventually a person will decide to eat.
But this system is altered in those with anorexia nervosa, so that starving people can decide not to eat. It accomplishes this by making changes at every level of the body’s powerful energy regulation system(3). The anorexic hypothalamus turns many hunger signals down and increases satiety signals, so that people with anorexia feel repelled by food and get full after small meals. Satiety signals are also turned up all through the gut, so that people with anorexia get full quickly. In the brain’s reward centers, opiates, cannabinoid enhancers, and dopamine receptors are turned down, so that food tastes flat and eating is unrewarding.
In the brain’s emotion circuits, anorexia produces anxiety and guilt about eating, and pride when resisting hunger; anorexia makes a starving person believe that it is vitally important to control his or her appetite. Yet, at the same time, two of the master hunger signals in the hypothalamus are also turned as high as in normal starvation so that people with anorexia find themselves thinking constantly about the food that that they cannot bring themselves to eat.
Anorexic attitudes and feelings have long been seen by doctors and therapists as dieting run amok. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, anorexia nervosa is the result of a “relentless pursuit of thinness” and “refusal to maintain a normal body weight” (italics added). Anorexics are assumed to be vain and neurotic — “starving for attention” or “on a hunger strike” — and their parents are suspected of being controlling and critical.
There is no scientific evidence for those assumptions (4). Careful studies have found no evidence for emotional problems specific to anorexia in the affected families, and the typical anorexic, before the illness, was hard working, high achieving and conscientious.
There are a number of other facts that do not square with the idea that anorexia nervosa is caused by psychological issues. Anorexia nervosa is genetic. Researchers have identified multiple genetic changes linked to anorexic attitudes and to altered appetite and activity regulatory molecules; significantly, these genes are turned on when body weight drops (5). The core symptoms of anorexia–difficulty eating, hyperactivity and body image distortion–do not vary across individuals, historical era, sex, age, and culture (6), which is expected if anorexia symptoms were a symbolic response to personal conflicts. Instead, the core symptoms are consistent with a biological response to starvation.
Finally, what anorexics are able to do–keep their weight 15% or more below normal–is very remarkable biologically. Energy regulation researchers claim that it is normally impossible for individuals to do this for long.
Why do we think that a 14-year-old girl can willfully resist hunger when adults cannot? Neuroscientists (and parents) know that the part of the brain that helps us exert self-control is not fully mature until people are in their mid-twenties.
In fact, anorexic food refusal is not due to will power. When people with anorexia try to recover, they find that body and mind fight them. As Kari Chisholm wrote in Hungry Hell “It took a lot of self-control to lose the weight, but even more to gain it back.”
Adapted to flee famine
Only those who have the genetic ability can develop anorexia nervosa if starving or very underweight. But, why do some people carry such genes?
At one time in human history the symptoms of anorexia nervosa must have been selected as a useful response to the threat of death by starvation.
Normally, starving people are ravenous, tired and demoralized; they conserve energy and focus on finding food. But consider the challenges that faced our hunter-gatherer ancestors in the Pleistocene, only a few tens of thousand years ago. When nomadic foragers had depleted local food, and mountain ranges, oceans or deserts barred farther travel, normal responses to starvation (lethargy that conserved energy, hunger that motivated single-minded search for food, and awareness that they were emaciated) would have interfered with making a difficult and frightening journey.
If some starving foragers were able to ignore their hunger and energetically move, they might have survived at higher rates than those who stayed put (7). For these special members of the group, self-deception about body image, fat stores, and about how depleted their bodies really were would have provided the optimism to travel. Personality traits of conscientiousness and self-control (both associated with anorexia today) could also have helped explorers persist on desperate journeys with little hope of success. I called this evolutionary explanation of anorexia nervosa the adapted-to-flee-famine hypothesis.
The March of the Penguins
The adapted-to-flee famine hypothesis may sound impossible to prove, but many kinds of evidence support it. Nature gives many species the ability to develop anorexia (lack of hunger) when it would compete with other life tasks. If you saw the movie March of the Penguins, you know that Emperor penguins must become anorexic to breed; males may lose half their body weight while incubating! Other species also reduce eating to migrate or to defend a breeding territory.
Like humans, rats and pigs evolved as omnivorous foragers, and they also become anorexic and energetic when starving. Animal researchers attribute this behavior to the animals’ instinctive attempts to leave food-depleted areas (8). Pigs bred for leanness are vulnerable to developing anorexia if they lose additional weight from the stress of maternal separation or bullying from other pigs. In the lab, if given exercise wheels, starving rats ignore their food to run. Although rats normally run less than a mile a day, these frantic animals clock up to 12 miles a day as though they were trying desperately to get somewhere. If allowed, these caged rats eventually die of self-starvation.
Is there any evidence that prehistoric people really did travel long distances? In the last 50,000 years humans traveled to every habitable part of the earth. Before historic times humans were already more widely distributed than any other mammal. Furthermore, these early humans were such effective hunters that they repeatedly overhunted native prey populations. This led to local famine and the need to migrate in search of new food (9). Only those people and groups that migrated colonized new worlds. The ancestors of today’s anorexia patient may have been the ones who scouted ahead for better lands for the tribe.
Most prehistoric hunter-gatherers did not make it to the next continent. As few as 500 of the people who left Africa gave rise to the modern populations of the rest of the world. According to molecular genetics research, the founding population of American Indians may have only been 70 individuals (10). And, bands with anorexic members were apparently among the founders. Anorexia nervosa is extremely rare in Africans; it is more common in Europeans and Asians, and appears to be most common in Native Americans who have traveled the farthest from Africa (11).
Extreme Sport
Anorexics report feeling they are not supposed to eat. They feel ashamed of giving in to hunger. It feels right to them when they restrict food and exercise, and it is remarkably difficult to reason with them about their beliefs. Although these behaviors seem to be chosen by the patient, patients talk of being “taken over” by the anorexia. It is striking that people as different as reservation Indians, middle school girls, underweight boys, and elderly women express the same bizarre thoughts and feelings when they develop anorexia.
These anorexia attitudes seem illogical to non-anorexics, but we accept, and even laud, athletes who express similar dogged commitment to practicing their sports. This may be a similar situation to anorexia. It is no longer necessary to hunt food and physically defend one’s family, but most people still feel compelled to practice athletic skills, encourage their children to practice, and deeply enjoy watching athletic contests. Our attitudes toward sports are probably an evolutionary holdover from a time when one person’s prowess in throwing or running could save an entire tribe from starvation or in battle (7). We even call certain athletes heroes. I suspect that both athletes’ attitudes toward enduring hardship and anorexics’ attitudes toward resisting hunger were selected because they helped our Pleistocene ancestors survive.
But why would anorexic attitudes get triggered today, when there is plenty of food? We might as well ask why people become obese when there is no need to store extra fat. If your ancestors survived frequent famine by storing fat in the good times and if this ability is inherited, the hypothalamus can make your body store extra fat despite your conscious awareness of plenty.
The hypothalamus, which attends to energy and water balance and other basics of survival, doesn’t get information from the thinking part of the brain, but rather by monitoring the blood. Then, according to rules dictated by evolution, it initiates changes in energy metabolism, appetites, attitudes and behaviors to get the body what it needs.
This powerful energy regulation system is the reason dieters eventually regain their lost weight. We can try to tell our body that there is no reason to store this extra fat, but the hypothalamus can’t hear us. Similarly, if your ancestors survived famine by migrating, the hypothalamus reads very low body fat as the signal to pull up stakes and move. It then deceives you about your fat stores, compels you to control your appetite, and drives you to move. You can develop anorexia nervosa if you lose enough weight for any reason. The hypothalamus does not care whether the weight loss is from illness, over- activity or dieting.
Why do anorexic females outnumber males?
It is commonly assumed that girls and women are more susceptible to anorexia because they are trying to look like anorexic-level thin models. Female anorexics have always outnumbered males — even when thin was not in. Although our culture’s idealization of unhealthy levels of thinness certainly leads to dieting, and it starts some on the path to anorexia and other eating disorders, it turns out that thin standards are not the primary reason for the sex difference. In fact, until the 1930s, historical accounts did not even describe a “pursuit of thinness” as the motivator for anorexia nervosa. Historically, fasting was associated with religious piety, not appearance. Diaries and other firsthand accounts show that many people considered holy in history (then also mostly women) displayed typical anorexia symptoms of food restriction, over-activity, and denial of starvation, although they did not express modern anorexics’ fear of fat (12).
Before puberty as many boys as girls develop anorexia. After puberty nine females develop anorexia for every male. Researchers have found a genetic mutation on an estrogen receptor that turns on the capacity to develop anorexia at puberty in girls (13). The frequency of this genetic variant indicates that, when this gene was selected, it was more adaptive for reproductive females than for prepubescent girls, boys or men to develop anorexia.
Again, the life of nomadic hunter-gatherers may explain why. If a man and woman encountered another band while looking for food, the woman was more likely to survive. Even if captured she would likely reproduce. Thus it was generally safer for reproductive females to travel. Molecular genetic research has discovered that females have indeed migrated farther than males in our evolutionary past. Female rats also develop anorexia sooner than males, perhaps for the same evolutionary reasons.
But is it really likely that hunter gather bands would allow young women to scout for food? Weren’t those cultures even more sexist and rigid about females’ roles and activities than out own? Actually, according to anthropologists, girls and women have always helped to provide food for their families. Hunter-gatherer societies were actually more egalitarian and open to women’s full participation than agricultural and state societies.
But, I think the most compelling evidence that young women could have led their starving bands is the story of Joan of Arc. She was an illiterate peasant girl in medieval France, a feudal, patriarchal culture. Yet, princes and generals followed her. Joan had all the classic anorexia symptoms: she was very thin, famously ate abstemiously, had incredible energy and did not menstruate.
JOAN OF ARC: SHE GAVE EVERYTHING
Joan was athletic, tough and courageous. “She came from nowhere and gave everything,” biographer Mary Gordon observed. Because “she knew herself right and fully able and the chosen of the Lord,” she was able to convince the French Dauphin to give her command of a troop of soldiers. According to another biographer, Marina Warner, her “glorious recklessness” inspired men to follow her. She ignored hunger and fatigue, and she drove herself to punishing physical activity. To lift the siege of Orleans, Joan and her soldiers traveled 350 miles in eleven days, crossing six rivers while eluding their enemies. During the first battle, when she was shot above the breast by an arrow, the French commander assumed the battle was over. But, Joan refused to retreat. She prayed briefly, remounted her horse, and took up her standard. The English fell back in awe; the French soldiers rallied to take the town.
Joan of Arc’s extraordinary courage, even when wounded and outnumbered, inspired her followers to a string of improbable victories. Gordon tells us, “The effect that Joan had on the weak and vacillating Charles is a kind of metaphor for her effect on the whole kingdom of France. Like its leader, the realm was demoralized, depressed, and divided against itself. … Suddenly, a young, brash creature appeared from the countryside.” In those desperate times France needed a fearless leader whose zealous belief could inspire hope.
Joan of Arc’s physical energy probably came from her anorexia, but she understood her extraordinary abilities in the context of what she saw as God’s will for France. Pleistocene foragers would have understood their anorexic abilities in the context of scouting for food. Today’s anorexics understand them in terms of pursuit of thinness, a “hunger strike,” or need for control.
Burned Alive
People with anorexia nervosa often run for miles on very little food. Can anorexics somehow defy the first law of thermodynamics, pulling energy from nowhere?
No. Although anorexics feel strong and fat, this is an illusion. If anorexia nervosa becomes chronic, modern sufferers, like St. Joan, are eventually burned alive by their own bodies. The starving body cannibalizes its own muscles, heart and organs. Anorexics suffer kidney failure, heart failure or seizures, all the while explaining that they cannot bear to eat. Over time people with active anorexia become shrunken and wasted. The bones, drained of calcium, are so fragile that one woman I worked with broke her hip throwing a bowling ball; another’s ankle snapped when she stepped off a curb. Even in the short run anorexia nervosa compromises health. If the disorder persists for over four months it diminishes a growing child’s height.
If anorexia nervosa goes on too long, most people eventually begin bingeing and purging. Researchers used to think that different personality types led to bulimia or to anorexia, but it now appears that bulimia often accompanies or follows anorexia, probably because normal adaptations to starvation — ravenous hunger and ability to gorge — break through from time to time and people find themselves binge eating. If the anorexic then vomits, fasts, or exercises to undo the eating binge, these remedies perpetuate the neuroendocrine signals that cause uncontrollable hunger and establish a vicious cycle of bingeing and purging.
When anorexia nervosa becomes chronic, people exhaust their medical insurance benefits, their friends, families, and themselves. Active anorexia ultimately leads to such a miserable life that the risk of suicide is 50 times normal. In 1991 a Dutch court dismissed charges against a physician who had assisted in the suicide of 25-year-old woman with a 16-year history of anorexia because they concluded “the woman had been suffering unbearably with no prospect of improvement.”
Anorexia demands that everything be sacrificed; friends, spouse and children take second place to the need to exercise, avoid eating, or to purge food already eaten. Loved ones take relapses personally, while explanations invoking anorexic’s “need for control” make families back away from the patient. The assumption that victims refuse to maintain a normal weight leads many to blame victims for their plight. In today’s society, anorexia nervosa makes its victims secretive, lonely, and frail.
Trapped by ANA
A typical first-time anorexic is a 14-year-old girl who has always been lean and active. Why are 14-year-old girls more vulnerable? At puberty girls have attained their adult height but have not filled out. They are typically leaner than at any other time in their lives. Now, like the lean-bred pigs described above, these “beanpoles” are at risk of developing anorexia nervosa if they lose any weight for any reason, whether from illness, athletics, or dieting. Some of my young patients are adamant that they do not have anorexia nervosa because they were never trying to lose weight. But, sadly, they have all the other psychological and neuroendocrine symptoms, including inability to see how thin they are, difficulty eating, and drive to exercise. Anorexia traps some for years.
However, anorexia is not confined to youth. If you have the genetic ability to develop anorexia, it can be triggered whenever body fat drops too low. Dangerous times occur around life transitions that disrupt eating or that inspire dieting: the first years of college, pregnancy and childbirth, school reunions, divorce or death of a spouse, and loneliness or illness in old age.
Because anorexia imbues an ordinary mortal with seemingly supernatural powers, it can also reassert itself when one’s sense of self is threatened. If a person feels out of control in his or her job, marriage, or parenting, dieting to an anorexic weight can make the person feel in charge again. Anorexic thoughts and attitudes get fit into whatever psychological issue the person has; this is probably the reason that eating disorders specialists remain convinced that psychological issues cause the disorder.
“Parents are the worst attendants”
In 1874 Frances Gull, the physician who gave anorexia nervosa, its name, noted that when patients returned home they often lost the weight they had gained in the hospital. He concluded that “parents are the worst attendants” for their anorexic children. This pattern of blaming parents for relapses and for the disorder itself has continued. The most important twentieth century theorist, Hilde Bruch wrote that anorexics were “engaged in a desperate fight against feeling enslaved and exploited” by their mothers. Clinicians advised “parent-ectomies.” Parents were to stop putting pressure on the child to eat and let the professionals do the work. Even today, most clinicians still assume that food “refusal” represents a struggle for independence. Clinicians may suspect that an absent father drives his daughter to “starve for attention,” or that a mother is so controlling that food is the only thing her daughter can take charge of.
Blaming parents turned out to have cruel and sometimes deadly effects. Some families were seriously damaged, and some children, alienated from loved ones, failed to recover. In Slim to None: A Journey through the Wasteland of Anorexia Treatment Gordon Hendricks used his daughter Jennifer’s journals to chronicle the treatment that ended with her death. The father’s love was labeled incestuous, the mother’s as competitive, and the parents were counseled to keep their distance. The therapist was so convinced that Jennifer’s symptoms were symbolic that she undermined the work of a dietician. After ten years battling the illness, Jennifer died alone.
Today parents have clearly been exonerated. Multiple population studies failed to find the hypothesized relation between family pathology and developing anorexia. Parents of anorexics run the gamut of parenting abilities and attitudes, but as a group they are no more controlling, critical, or absent than other groups of parents. Recently genetics researchers studying identical and fraternal twins concluded that family environment has a “negligible” effect on whether a child will develop anorexia (14). We now know that parents can no more make their children anorexic than they can make them autistic or schizophrenic; these are all biological illnesses.
But why were parents supposedly bad at taking care of their children with anorexia? One reason may be the fact that the parents are doing what a good parents does: listening. Learning to read your baby’s cues about being hungry or full is one of the first skills good parents develop. Forcing more food on a sated infant is normally bad parenting. An illness that tricks a child into believing that she is full puts the parent in the unnatural position of not listening. I think that parents can be “bad attendants” exactly because they are so sensitive to their child’s anguish, and for the person with anorexia, eating can be excruciating.
Anyone who has tried to beg, coax, and cajole an anorexic to eat knows anorexia’s certainty, misery, and intellectualization first-hand. Loved ones get the full brunt of anorexia’s desperation. We are dealing, after all, with the kin of Joan of Arc, descendants of people who — with self-control and single-mindedness — ignored their hunger and survived. Who could stand against Joan of Arc? Not her mother or father. Her brothers joined her cause.
Still, if your child were terrified of shots but needed of them, you would soothe and support her while she got the needed medicine. Recovered anorexics say that “eating through the fear” was the hardest thing they have ever done. When loved ones have anorexia, our job is to help them tolerate the acute distress of defying the anorexic body’s demands. We acknowledge their anxiety and applaud the courage it takes to eat despite it.
It takes a village
Humans are deeply social, and when anorexia evolved, people lived in groups bound together by ties of blood and responsibility. Anorexia nervosa was probably more easily “switched off” in that group context. Hunter-gatherer societies share food. When more food becomes available after famine, thanksgiving and ritual feeding of one another accompany breaking the fast. Because anorexia evolved in the context of interdependent groups, the help of friends and family may be vital to recovery — part of the process of dealing with anorexia that our modern world has forgotten.
It is likely that anorexics were a minority in most groups; this is based on its current prevalence. This could have worked to everyone’s advantage. When resources were depleted and the tribe despaired, an anorexic’s energy, optimism, and grandiosity could mobilize the other members to heroic marches. When a starving tribe reached a new hunting/gathering ground, support by the majority non-anorexic members would in turn have helped the anorexic member(s) to begin eating again. Today most people who have recovered attribute their recovery to loved ones’ support.
My body is trying to migrate
For 800 years sufferers of anorexia nervosa have been seemed to be seeking control in their lives. For the anorexic saints it was control of bodily appetites. For Victorian anorexics it was supposedly control of sexuality. In the last half of the twentieth century it is assumed to be control of body size or personal autonomy.
But for you, struggling with this illness in your family today, focus on control becomes a trap. You can replace the mantra “It’s the only thing I can control” with “My body is trying to migrate,” and with this new insight learn to heal and remain well throughout a full and productive life. Patients and their families are not helpless against the power of anorexia; in fact, with knowledge of the illness, they have the tools to beat it.
The word “anorexia” comes from the Latin a = not and orexia = hunger. The term is used as a shorthand for the human eating disorder, anorexia nervosa, and is also used to refer to lack of hunger in animals.
References
- N. Mondraty, in International Conference on Eating Disorders (Academy for Eating Disorders). (Baltimore, MD, 2007).
- A. Wagner, M. Ruf, D. F. Braus, M. H. Schmidt, Neuroreport 14, 2193 (Dec 2, 2003).
- A. Inui, Mol Psychiatry 6, 620 (Nov, 2001).
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- R. A. Adan, T. Vink, Eur Neuropsychopharmacol 11, 483 (Dec, 2001).
- P. K. Keel, K. L. Klump, Psychol Bull 129, 747 (Sep, 2003).
- S. Guisinger, Psychol Rev 110, 745 (Oct, 2003).
- W. F. Epling, W. B. Pierce, International Journal of Eating Disorders 5, 475 (1988).
- J. Diamond, Science 287, 2170 (Mar 24, 2000).
- J. Hey, PLoS Biol 3, e193 (Jun, 2005).
- M. Crago, C. M. Shisslak, L. S. Estes, Int J Eat Disord 19, 239 (Apr, 1996).
- R. Bell, Holy Anorexia (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1985), pp.
- K. L. Klump, K. L. Gobrogge, International Journal of Eating Disorders 37 Suppl, S43 (2005).
- C. M. Bulik, L. Reba, A. M. Siega-Riz, T. Reichborn-Kjennerud, Int J Eat Disord 37 Suppl, S2 (2005). | https://www.adaptedtofamine.com/2013/11/a-guide-for-patients-and-their-families/ |
Anorexia males, but what people don’t know is
Anorexia Nervosa In Men Cristy Honeycutt Stanly Community College Abstract This paper is about the research of men with anorexia. Is it the same as female anorexia or is it something different? Also researchers are trying to see if it requires a different type of treatment verses the types of treatment they use for females. It also talks about what types of males are more prone and known to get this disorder. This study is explored by Catherine Soban in detail. The study is also trying to see what maybe can bring on this disorder in males.
Anorexia Nervosa In MenThe purpose of this study was to determine the validity of male anorexia nervosa and to see how it is different from female anorexia nervosa. Also it was to see how they might could treat the disorder. This study was undertaken to look into male anorexia, because it is ignored by so many people. Most people think that it is just a female problem. People tend to notice it more in females than in males, but what people don’t know is that it occurs in males quite often too. In this study researchers want to look at how common anorexia nervosa is in males and what might trigger it and how to possibly treat it.
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Soban, 2006) Background Review of the Journal Anorexia Research Studied Anorexia for males is like a whole different disorder for males, than for females. This disorder in males has to be looked at in an appropriate may for males, because the brain chemistry between males and females are different. Therefore, each gender is going to analyze things differently and act on things differently which leads to say that when it comes to anorexia nervosa, they are going to be different with the disorder. (Soban, 2006)Most men with this problem do not come out and admit it, because most people associate anorexia nervosa with females not males. “They fear they will get made fun of and will not be taken seriously. ” (Soban, 2006) Psychologist are trying to find a way to treat males different from females to help males with anorexia nervosa, and to show that it is just as serious as female anorexia nervosa. (Soban, 2006) Male and female anorexia nervosa victims suffer from the same clinical disorder, but there are some different characteristics based on their gender and interpretation of it.
(Soban, 2006)Influences on Male Anorexia Nervosa It is believed that the models on the TV. advertisements for clothing companies with these perfect bodies has had a negative influence on males and making them anorexic. That is the ideal image of what males want to look like and other peers are drooling over the nice looking body.
Some males will go to extremes to look like that and this has been a major reason for males becoming anorexic. According to Soban “there is no gender focused psychotherapy approach” to focus on the pressures that affect a males development of his self image in relation to anorexia nervosa. Soban,2006) Because male anorexia is focused on females or girliness, the explanations for women has a small effect on the similarities to male anorexia nervosa, meaning that male and female anorexia are their own disorders. (Soban, 2006) Types Of Males That Have Anorexia Nervosa It has been shown through studies that there are two different most common groups of males with anorexia nervosa. The two groups are, homosexual men and athletes. (Soban, 2006) Homosexuals are people who have sexual feelings toward a person of the same sex. (Merriam Webster’s dictionary.
om) Homosexuals are the most ranked to be seen with anorexia nervosa. This is because most homosexuals have more feminine traits in them than most other males, which is what links this back to anorexia nervosa being stereotyped as a female only disorder. (Soban, 2006) Then you have athletes as the second most common type of males to have anorexia nervosa. Athletes usually have nice looking toned bodies which would be considered the perfect body for most. The athletes that are a part of endurance type sports specifically affected. Endurance sports are one that require some intensity in them. (mimi.
y) These types of sports have weight requirements that put pressure on them to meet certain standards to be accepted on a team. This has made males be more prone to become anorexic because of acceptance. (Soban, 2006) Proven facts of Male Anorexia It has been proven that male anorexia nervosa has a higher premorbid rate than female anorexia, which shows that doctors need to be more concerned about the males than what they currently are. (Soban, 2006) In the study, the ages for homosexuality was on the age range of 18 to 50 years old. It was a “large diverse community based” research sample.Homosexuals seemed to be more unsatisfied with their bodily images and cared more about what people thought.
This made them most likely to have other issues go on with anorexia nervosa. This includes depression, low self esteem, and sexuality issues. (Soban, 2006) Homosexuals having to come forth about their homosexuality cam bring on eating disorders. They can in turn not want to accept that they have a problem. (Soban, 2006) there are some obvious signs that someone is anorexic.
Such as wearing layered clothing while they are working out, this makes them sweat more and in turn it burns extra calories.Excessive exercising can also be a sign, these people really get obsessed with it. They do extra exercising so that they can still eat. Also they get very irritable if any of this is interrupted. Doing these things can cause damage to your body such as stressed fractures because not getting your nutrients can cause bones to be fragile. They can also loose muscle tone, and also get bodily infections easier because their immune systems are weakened. Women see other women battling anorexia and tend to follow those same steps to get that perfect body.
Men that have a more feminine side tend to follow the trend too.Therefore, is said that male anorexia nervosa is branched off of female anorexia nervosa. It just has some differences amongst the two genders that triggers anorexia nervosa in males and females. (Soban, 2006) How Anorexia Nervosa Is Treated You cannot treat them as the same disorder. You have to treat them in different ways. It is not easy to see the relevancy in mal anorexia because people relate it to females so much. Because of this gender related idea of anorexia nervosa, it leaves us with no specific ways to treat the psychosocial issues with this disorder.
Soban, 2006) (Mirriam Webster’s dictionary. com) Another aspect of this disorder is how children are raised. If they are raised up having to always compete at being the best, or always doing things to please someone else which can lead to anorexia nervosa later on in life. Males tend to make anorexia nervosa a competitive issue, which can worsen the disorder. (Soban, 2006) References “Homosexual – Definition and More from the Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary. ” Merriam-Webster Online. Web.
15 Oct. 2010. ;http://www.
merriam-webster. om/dictionary/homosexual;. Soban, catherine “What about the Boys? : Addressing Issues of Masculinity within Male Anorexia Nervosa in a Feminist Therapeutic Environment.
– Free Online Library. ” Free News, Magazines, Newspapers, Journals, Reference Articles and Classic Books – Free Online Library. Web.
15 Oct. 2010. ;http://www.
thefreelibrary. com/What about the boys? : addressing issues of masculinity within male…
-a0159027489;. Conclusion The problem with male anorexia nervosa needs to be fixed before it worsens and gets out of control.Because males are supposed to be masculine, “they show shame of acting in any way that doesn’t conform to their standards” and because of this anorexia nervosa is seen as a female problem therefore men who have the disorder are often treated insufficiently. Something must be be done to help these thinning, hungry men. (Soban, 2006) I think that more studies need to be done, because this seems to be a serious problem. I can’t say how I would try to handle the problem and try to solve it, because it seems very challenging and it needs a very educated person in this field to take on the challenge. | https://campuscrosswalk.org/psychology-paper-critique/ |
- Anorexia Nervosa: is an eating disorder characterized by unrealistic fear of weight gain, self-starvation, and conspicuous distortion of body image.
- Athletes with Anorexia Nervosa refuse to maintain a healthy body weight. Their body weight is 85% lower than that of expected weight or fail to make expected weight gains. They experience an intense fear of gaining weight.
- When an athlete becomes anorexic, their performance is affected by the weakness caused by the disorder. The athlete will say they are fat when they are clearly thin to everyone else. These athletes have difficulty admitting they have a problem.
- An example of this is a gymnast who will strive to make herself thin by not eating or eating a diet of celery to maintain the thin stature expected in the sport. When a sport medical team observes an athlete that appears to be too thin, anorexia should be suspected. When dealing with anorexia, the sports medical team should focus on the distress the athlete currently has rather than focusing on the weight issue. Suggesting going to see if there is a problem is better perceived by the athlete than telling them to go to therapy.
- A widely used diagnostic tool, the body mass index measures the body fat based on the weight and the height of an individual. Developed by a Belgian scientist Adolphe Quetelet, it helps to calculate how healthy a person is, based on his weight and identify whether the person is underweight, overweight or obese. The relation of BMI to fatness differs for people of different age and gender. For example, the BMI of women is likely to be higher than that of men.
- To calculate your BMI, just take your weight in kilograms and divide it with your height in meters. The result has to be again divided by the height in meters. For example if your weight is 60 kg and height is 1.50 m, then the BMI would be 26.67 (60/1.50 = 40 and 40/1.50 = 26.67). Thereafter you can compare your BMI to the weight ranges set out by the World Health Organization (WHO). This applies to both adult men and women but varies for children and older people.
- Calucating BMI,is the same for both. men and women. below is a chart for you to better understand the use of the BMI
- Interpreting Your BMI
- If your BMI is 19 to 24.9 you have a healthy weight.
- If your BMI is 25 to 29.9 you are considered to be overweight and may incur moderate health risks.
- If your BMI is 30+ you are considered to be obese. Obesity is linked to increased risk of cancer, heart disease and other health problems.
- It is vital that while working out the BMI, the body frame and build also be taken into consideration. Therefore the BMI by itself may not be accurate for a weight trainer, a pregnant woman or an athlete. People who are over 60 years of age cannot calculate their BMI by this tool, as their bones start to weigh less due to old age. An athlete can use this test to figure out wheter they fall into the healthy or anorexic zone.
- Interpreting Your BMI
- Bulimia Nervosa: is an eating disorder characterized by recurrent binge eating, followed by compensatory behaviors. Bulimia Nervosa is often seen in athletes who are of normal weight or can be slightly overweight.
- Then these individuals will engage in compensatory behaviors such as laxative, self-induced vomiting, or excessive exercise to get rid of or makeup for what they ate. The food they eat is typically high in sweet and calories.
- They frequently make wide fluxuations in weight.
- One example of an athlete with bulimia is a jockey. Jockeys have to make a certain weight in order to be able to mount a horse and to work. It is a common practice of Jockeys to self-induce vomit to make weight.
- Bulimia does not typically affect an athlete’s performance. The athlete may be affected from the stress of guilt, depression, and family conflicts caused by the disorder.
- Binge-Eating: also known as compulsive overeating, is characterized by periodls of uncontrooled, impulsive or continuous eating beyond the poine of feeling comfortably fully. Althought there is no purging, there many be periods where the individual fasts, have repetitive diets. They often tend to have a feeling of shame or self hatred after a binge.
- According to some studies, not all athletes are engaging in disorders. The video that is located at the in “related video” section will explain what sports are more susceptible to eating disorders (Kakaiya).
- Muscle Dysmorphia: also called as bigorexia and is also known as reverse anorexia, because intead of trying to lose weight an athlete is trying to gain more weight.
- Athletes, such as body builders are mostly affected with this disorder along with men who are involved in boxing and wrestling (Page,2010)
- Signs and symptoms may include:
- The feeling that he or she is small and underdeveloped.
- Constantly check themselves in the mirror.
- Getting anxious if they do not work out every day.
- Doing resistance training, and exercise.
- Side effects include:
- Damaged muscles, joints, cartilage, tendons and/or ligaments.
- This preoccupation can interfere with normal social and occupational lives. The sport medical team should ask the athlete if they are taking over the counter medications or creatine. Some of these supplements, especially those containing stimulants, can cause manic episodes in those prone to bipolar disorder.
- Some athletes will not take the substance or stop if the sports medical team strongly points out that the governing body of the sport could disqualify them from competition for taking the substance.
- Muscle Dysmorphis is common mainly amoug men, however, it is soon in both sexes.
- Body Dysmorphic Disorder(BDD):this is a condition in which the athlete will have obsessions and distressing thoughts that repeatedly intrude into the persons awareness. Individuals with BDD experience problems with percieved apperance flaws that cause stress.
- Just as people with eating disorders obsess about their weight, people with BDD become obsessed over an aspect of their appearance.
- People with BDD may worry their hair is thin, their face is scarred, their eyes aren’t exactly the same size, their nose is too big, or their lips are too thin.
- Although the inperfections are small that people with BDD obsess over, they firmly believe that everyone notices that aspect and think everyone is looking at it. But for a person with BDD, the concerns feel very real, because the obsessive thoughts distort and magnify any tiny imperfection.
- These extreme thoughts can cause the individual to not go out in piblic and think they are just too ugly to be seen in public.
- Individuals with BDD will likely use compulsions to counteract the obsession over their physical appearance. An example would be, if a person with BDD thought their nose was ugly they would constantly check it in the mirroe, apply make up, or frequently ask people if their nose looks ugly. Compulsions are a way to temporarily release some amount of stress.
- Treatment includes one of two things
- Medications such as Serotoin reuptake inhibitors or antidepressants that decrease the obsessive and compulsive behaviors.
- Cognitive behavioral therapy, which is a three step process. | https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Courses/Achieving_the_Dream/Book%3A_Abnormal_Psychology_(Pelz)/08%3A_Case_Studies_of_Fictional_Characters/08.37%3A_Eating_and_Body_Dysmorphic_Disorders |
Normal ideal body weight (IBW) for patients can be calculated by the formulas21: Healthy males: 106 lb for initial 5 feet, plus 6 lb for every inch over 5 feet, plus 10% if over 50 years old. Healthy females: 100 lb for initial 5 feet, plus 5 lb for every inch over 5 feet, plus 10% if older than 50 years.
How much do you have to weigh to be anorexia?
That being said, a BMI below 17.5 in adults is one of the common physical characteristics used to diagnose anorexia. There are also different tiers of anorexia based on BMI ranging from mild (
What is considered significant weight loss in anorexia?
Extreme weight loss is a significant sign of anorexia, such as when body weight drops below 15% of the expected weight for a person of that age and height, or their BMI is less than 17.5.
At what weight do you get hospitalized for anorexia?
One Place for Treatment Admission criteria require that patients be less than 70 percent of their ideal body weight, or have a body mass index (BMI) below 15. In a woman who is 5 feet 4 inches tall, that’s about 85 pounds.
What weight percentile is anorexia?
Results: The weight criterion used for the diagnosis of anorexia nervosa corresponds to BMI values between the 5th and 10th centiles in both populations. In epidemiological terms the lowest BMI values in individuals aged 10 years and older occur during adolescence.
At what BMI does your period stop?
The greater your BMI (typically in the obesity range over 35), the more likely you are to miss your period. It is even possible to stop bleeding altogether, a condition known as secondary amenorrhea.
Is a BMI of 17.5 too low?
The Skinny on Underweight The American Dietetic Association (ADA) defines the ideal body mass index (BMI) as between 20 and 25. Thus, anyone below that range would be considered underweight and those with a BMI from 18.5 to 17.5 extremely underweight.
What is considered rapid weight loss?
Rapid weight loss diet is a type of diet in which you lose more than 2 pounds (1 kilogram, kg) a week over several weeks.
How do you know you are becoming anorexic?
- You don’t eat enough, so you’re underweight.
- Your self-esteem is based on the way your body looks.
- You are obsessed with and terrified of gaining weight.
- It’s hard for you to sleep through the night.
- Dizziness or fainting.
- Your hair is falling out.
- You no longer get your period.
- Constipation.
What is the diagnostic criteria for anorexia?
To be diagnosed with anorexia nervosa according to the DSM-5, the following criteria must be met: Restriction of energy intake relative to requirements leading to a significantly low body weight in the context of age, sex, developmental trajectory, and physical health.
When does anorexia become serious?
The disorder is diagnosed when a person weighs at least 15% less than their normal/ideal body weight. Extreme weight loss in people with anorexia nervosa can lead to dangerous health problems and even death.
At what BMI do you get Hospitalised?
for hospitalization: BMI
When do you get hospitalized for not eating?
Any time a person is experiencing medical complications due to their eating disorder including but not limited to an unstable heart rate or blood pressure, fainting, or bleeding from vomiting, they should be screened for hospitalization.
What BMI is considered starving?
A BMI nearing 15 is usually used as an indicator for starvation and the health risks involved, with a BMI
Is a BMI under 18.5 anorexic?
How is BMI Measured? According to the DSM-5, a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa (AN) or “anorexia BMI” requires that someone have a BMI of less than 18.5.
Can you be anorexic and still have a period?
Some people with anorexia, however, continue to menstruate throughout their illness. Others stop menstruating even before they start losing weight due to their illness. Binge eating has also been found to cause menstrual disturbances.
Do you lose weight when you sleep?
Summary. People do lose weight during sleep. However, this is mostly due to water loss through breathing and sweating. While individuals do not burn much fat during sleep, sleep is a fundamental component of well-being, and a lack of it can make maintaining a moderate weight more difficult.
How much should I weigh to get my period?
Most girls get their first period between the age of 9 and 16, and puberty normally begins around the age of 8 to 14. Most girls will not start menstruation until they weigh at least 100 pounds. Puberty hormones lead to girls developing breast, hips, pubic hair, and growing in height.
What is severely underweight?
Severely underweight – BMI less than 16.5kg/m^2. Underweight – BMI under 18.5 kg/m^2. Normal weight – BMI greater than or equal to 18.5 to 24.9 kg/m^2.
Is losing 7 pounds in a week good?
According to many experts, losing 1–2 pounds (0.45–0.9 kg) per week is a healthy and safe rate (1, 2, 3 ). Losing more than that is considered too fast and could put you at risk of many health problems, including muscle loss, gallstones, nutritional deficiencies and a drop in metabolism ( 4 , 6 , 7 , 8 ).
How much weight loss is a concern?
The point at which unexplained weight loss becomes a medical concern is not exact. But many health care providers agree that a medical evaluation is called for if you lose more than 5% of your weight in 6 to 12 months, especially if you’re an older adult.
What is significant weight loss?
Clinically important weight loss is generally defined as loss of more than 5 percent of usual body weight over 6 to 12 months [1,2]. Clinically significant weight loss and nutritional issues in older adult patients is discussed elsewhere.
What are the 5 symptoms of anorexia?
- Extreme weight loss or not making expected developmental weight gains.
- Thin appearance.
- Abnormal blood counts.
- Fatigue.
- Insomnia.
- Dizziness or fainting.
- Bluish discoloration of the fingers.
- Hair that thins, breaks or falls out.
What are symptoms of not eating enough?
- Low Energy Levels. Calories are units of energy your body uses to function.
- Hair Loss. Losing hair can be very distressing.
- Constant Hunger.
- Inability to Get Pregnant.
- Sleep Issues.
- Irritability.
- Feeling Cold All the Time.
- Constipation.
What is the main difference between anorexia and anorexia nervosa?
But there are differences between the two. Anorexia nervosa doesn’t cause loss of appetite. People with anorexia nervosa purposely avoid food to prevent weight gain. People who suffer from anorexia (loss of appetite) unintentionally lose interest in food. | https://eatingdisorderresources.com/what-is-expected-body-weight/ |
The inevitable death of Kate Chilver of UK at the ripe age of 31 is what her doctors describe as one of the most scarring cases of anorexia. Anorexia is an eating disorder wherein a person resorts to extreme heights of under-eating.
Kate, who weighed less than 30 kg, succumbed to death while fighting a 16-year long battle with this eating disorder.
Her doctors revealed that her BMI was way below the normal range. Usually, people have a BMI ranging between 20 to 25. Kate’s was at a dangerous 9.
The onset of anorexia in this particular patient happened when she was 12, a common age when people generally develop eating disorders. At 15, she was hospitalized.
While her doctors tried everything to restore normal health in her, all efforts went in vain.
How does anorexia end up taking someone’s life?
For starters, by severely restricting food anorexics limit the amount of energy and nutrients their bodies receive. This triggers a chain of bodily reactions which can have fatal outcomes.
Your brain, the epicenter of all bodily functions suffers a massive blow due to malnutrition. As a result, it starts shrinking, causing physiological and psychological damage.
With no fats in the body, the blood vessels start collapsing. Subsequently, the tissues in the abdominal region begin to die due to poor circulation.
At this critical juncture, the patient could die due to a cardiac arrest or insufficient oxygen.
What are Eating Disorders?
Thanks to the unrealistic body image projections kindled by mainstream media, a whopping 78% of people (mostly women) feel pressured to attain a “flawless” body.
Many of them go on crash diets and resort to extreme mechanisms for losing weight.
But when this skewed sense of body image forces an individual to develop extremely unhealthy eating patterns, it takes the shape of a psychological disorder, commonly termed as an eating disorder.
Additionally, a pattern of excessive eating, which is fuelled by deep psychological issues is also categorized under this group.
Basically, when eating irregularities, be it under-eating or over-eating, begin to interfere with an individual’s well-being, that tendency is an eating disorder.
Anorexia nervosa, Bulimia nervosa, and Binge-eating disorder –these are the main kinds of eating disorders plaguing the young generation today.
How bad can an Eating Disorder be?
Eating Disorder statistics
- 1 out of every 5 women is suffering from an eating disorder or unhealthy eating pattern.
- Globally, 70 million people remain affected by different types of eating disorders. Yet, only a meager 10% are currently receiving treatment for it.
- 9 out of 10 patients with eating disorders are teenagers or young adults (12-25 years age).
- The diet-related industry is a booming enterprise, earning $50 billion dollars per year.
- 51% of pre-teens girls feel better when they are on a diet.
- Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate when compared to any other mental condition. For women in the age group of 12-24, the mortality rate of anorexia is 12 times more than any other leading cause of death.
- Men and women adopt unhealthy means to cut down weight which mostly include smoking, skipping food, inherent fasting, taking a large number of laxatives, and vomiting any ingested food.
- 10%-15% of all eating disorder patients are men. But, due to the social stigma and gender-stereotyping associated with these conditions, a majority of them don’t seek treatment.
- All eating disorders have one thing in common- unhealthy weight fluctuations. They either tend to gain or lose considerable body weight within a short span of time.
- Excessive stomach cramps, menstrual irregularities (in females), dizziness, abnormal sleeping patterns – all these go hand-in-hand with eating disorders.
Why are eating disorders classified as mental illness?
The main reason why bulimia, anorexia, and binge-eating are dealt mainly from a psychological point of view is that people tend to develop extreme emotions and behavior around food.
These strong emotions, related to body-image or any other psychological need, are nothing but unhealthy coping mechanisms.
Many of these are passed on from parents to their offspring, just many other psychiatric conditions.
Just like these psychiatric conditions, eating disorders can also make people “dependent” or neurally “hardwired” for this particular practice of unhealthy eating.
Moreover, a clear cognitive, emotional, and physical health decline is observed in eating disorders; the kind which is identified in many psychiatric disorders.
Understanding Eating Disorders
Anorexia nervosa
The term Anorexia nervosa comes from ‘an’ – without and ‘orexia”- desire or appetite. Nervosa is the Latin for a psychological need or affliction for a particular behavior or habit.
When put together, it refers to the eating disorder marked by an unhealthy obsession for starving oneself, mostly for attaining unrealistic bodily features.
Anorexia, called as “rich girl’s syndrome”, makes people feel excessively conscious of their diet and image and they resort to extreme measures in restricting what they consume.
They make heavy use of laxatives, diet tablets, diuretics, enemas, and fierce exercising routines.
- Anorexia is a major psychological condition since people start equating slimness with self-worth.
- Anorexics tend to develop bluish tinge over their fingers, intolerance to cold and infections, irregular heartbeat, severe dehydration, low blood pressure, and anemia.
- Anyone with a BMI less than 17.5 is considered to be falling under the unhealthy radar of anorexia. Normal BMI is 20-25.
- Anorexics face a pathological fear of food and gaining weight (however small it might be), lack of emotions, social-withdrawal, pronounced irritability, depressive mood, and even onset of suicidal tendencies. 20% of all anorexia deaths is because of suicide.
- Experts believe that anorexia may have a genetic component. Additionally, people, especially women who have an obsessive predisposition are more likely to turn anorexics.
- Many cultures, such as the western, hail excessive thinness and beauty and virtue. Such factors may become peer pressure factors and compel young people and wrongly motivate them through unhealthy body images.
- Anorexia is largely a fatal disease. It directly impacts your cardiovascular health, making you prone to cardiac arrests. Due to calcium deficiency, people face more risk of bone fractures. Infertility, severe gastrointestinal disorders, and renal failures – all of these are a part of anorexia.
Bulimia Nervosa
People who suffer from Bulimia exhibit a peculiar tendency.
They tend to heavily binge on food, and then later expel every bit of food ingested by forcefully vomiting or excessive use of laxatives or diuretics(Bulimia = “Buos” or ox-like + “limous” or hunger).
Bulimics tend to believe that a rapid expulsion of food from the body will prevent them from absorbing fats and sugar present in the food.
Their eating habits lie in extremes – they feel compelled to consume a large number of junk foods and then they forceful expel it out of their bodies in hopes of remaining slim.
- Just like in case of anorexia, bulimia patients also have the tendency to relate happiness and satisfaction with an acutely thin body.
- There are two types of bulimic – one who tend to purge out the contents of their stomachs and the other which will resort to extreme fasting and exercise.
- Bulimia has genetic, environmental, and cultural roots. Additionally, a history of trauma or abuse, development of low-esteem, and negative body image are also responsible.
- Bulimia causes severe bodily malfunction. It includes heart problems, damaged blood vessels in the eyes, inflammation of GI tract, chronic dehydration, lacerations in the mouth, stomach ulcers, and infertility.
- Not to mention, bulimia and mood-disorders are very much entwined. More than 50% of bulimics also have anxiety disorders. 10% of all bulimia patients are caught-up in substance abuse.
Binge-Eating Disorder (BED)
While many of us are guilty of making nocturnal visits to the kitchen to quench midnight hunger pangs, people with BED tend to take this behavior a notch higher.
BED patients have round-the-clock, uncontrollable urge to eat large portions of food.
It is the polar opposite of what bulimia and anorexia are. Such individuals tend to grow morbidly obese.
An unhealthy coping mechanism towards dealing with depression and anxiety might be one of the key reasons why people develop this disorder.
Generally, BED patients are in general unhappy with life which pushes them to find solace in food. This makes them dependant on food for every emotional need. So every time one feels emotional, he/she resorts to eating.
This forms a vicious cycle of unfulfilled emotional needs and continuous eating.
Additionally, certain hormonal irregularities, genetic conditions, distorted body-image, and low self-esteem are the main factors at play here.
Sometimes, societal pressure to be thin can cause a person to subconsciously rebel and adhere to BED.
Likewise,emotional eating is commonly observed among people who lack the emotional stamina to deal with mental pain and agony.
This means that history of harassment, abuse, and trauma could also kindle binge-eating.
The major complications caused due to eating disorders are obesity, type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, cardiac problems.
Additionally, hypertension, muscular pain, gallbladder issues, and digestive problems are also a part of BED.
All in all, eating disorders are nothing but mental disorders in disguise.
Moreover,almost all of them are triggered by some sort of depression, loneliness, or pent-up anger. People who are continually ridiculed for their looks and/or are involved in professions (ballet dancing or modeling) tend to develop these tendencies more.
Addressing such issues involves pinpointing the real cause of the eating disorder – this is how one can begin the treatment.
TL;DR?
- https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/eating-disorders/index.shtml
- https://www.eatingdisorderhope.com/information/eating-disorder
- https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/learn/general-information/warning-signs-and-symptoms
- http://www.anad.org/get-information/about-eating-disorders/eating-disorders-statistics/
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12573387
- https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/eating-disorders/signs-of-eating-disorders#1
- https://www.nami.org/Learn-More/Mental-Health-Conditions/Eating-Disorders
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One of the grand challenges facing humankind in the 21st century is understanding and sustaining the natural world--its biological diversity, natural capital and life itself. This challenge is critical to science and society: for managing natural resources, for sustaining human health, for ensuring economic stability, and for improving the quality of human life. This challenge is also complex--it encompasses the composition, functions and patterns of biodiversity and the ecological and evolutionary processes that generate them. Components and processes in these disciplines interact to yield profoundly complex results that are difficult to analyze and understand.
Answering this challenge will require the mining and integration of massive quantities of diverse data and information from scientific and sociological disciplines across earth and human systems. Specifically, it requires seamless access to these data from many locales that are highly heterogeneous in content and format and span enormous scales of space and time. The need for such an informatics solution is increasingly urgent as researchers continue to amass critical data and information about the natural world that lack the broadest degree of availability, interoperability and archiving.
Therefore, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS); the Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center, University of Kansas (KU-BRC); the Network Office of the Long Term Ecological Research Program (LTER); and the University of California's San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Cal-(IT)2, a joint venture of UCSD and UC Irvine) have formed a Partnership for Biodiversity Informatics (PBI) to help meet this challenge. The goal of PBI is to enable scientists and other users to deploy the vast amount of ecological, biodiversity and environmental information in research, education and public service in order to help society achieve the means to safeguard our future and a sustainable planet.
We are
on the threshold of a technological revolution in ecological, biodiversity
and environmental, which entails the management of information along
the entire data stream--from data acquisition through distributed access
and knowledge discovery to maintenance of persistent archives. Knowledge
discovery of the natural world will increasingly be linked to a new
generation of technologies that deliver data and information to a host
of potential users including researchers, educators, policy makers,
and natural resource managers. | http://pbi.ecoinformatics.org/challenge.html |
Learn more....
|CESM Community Earth System Model||The CESM program is a component of the overall U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP). It is a large project involving a large community of scientists and stakeholders in design, construction, evaluation, and use of the ultimate product, the CESM. The program is a highpriority activity within the Climate and Global Dynamics (CGD) Division of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). It provides the infrastructure and support mechanisms necessary for university scientists and other collaborators to contribute to the building of a common climate modeling system, as well as to use the modeling system to address scientific questions about Earth's climate, past, present, and future. Program priorities and decisions are based on scientific peer review and scientific consensus, and the results of the program are open to all. It provides the opportunity to support diversity in the approach to both an outstanding intellectual challenge and a major societal issue. The program also has a mission to foster the creative involvement of university researchers and students in the subject area and thus contribute to the development of highly trained people. The program is a complement to the other major modeling programs in the CCSP that are specifically oriented toward a government mission to provide decision-support information.|
Learn more....
|Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics||On behalf of its Member Institutions, CIG works under a Cooperative Agreement with the National Science Foundation to develop, support, and disseminate open-source software for the greater geodynamics community.|
We are currently working with software in several sub-disciplines, including mantle convection, short and long time-scale tectonics, computational seismology, and the geodynamo. Plans call for expanding into magma migration during the coming year. We invite you to take advantage of CIG for your research by using currently available software or participating in a workshop or training session. You can help set CIG's agenda and priorities by working with your colleagues on the Science Steering Committee.
Learn more....
|Critical Zone Exploration Network||The surface of the Earth is rapidly changing, largely in response to anthropogenic perturbation. How will such change unfold, and how will it affect humankind? The Critical Zone is defined as the external terrestrial layer extending from the outer limits of vegetation down to and including the zone of groundwater. This zone sustains most terrestrial life on the planet. Despite its importance for life, scientific approaches and funding paradigns have not promoted and emphasized integrated research agendas to investigate the coupling between physical, biological, geological, and chemical processes in the Critical Zone.|
Learn more....
|Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science||Mission: CUAHSI fosters advancements in the hydrologic sciences, in the broadest sense of that term, by:|
Developing, prioritizing and disseminating a broad-based research and education agenda for the hydrologic sciences derived from a continuous process that engages both research and applications professionals;
Identifying the resources needed to advance this agenda and facilitating the acquisition of these resources for use by the hydrologic sciences community; and
Enhancing the visibility, appreciation, understanding, and utility of hydrologic science through programs of education, outreach, and technology transfer.
CUAHSI has chosen three community science goals around which to organize our activities:
|Geosciences Network||The Geosciences Network (GEON) project is a collaboration among a dozen PI institutions and a number of other partner projects, institutions, and agencies to develop cyberinfrastructure in support of an environment for integrative geoscience research. GEON is funded by the NSF Information Technology Research (ITR) program.|
The key integrative science theme in GEON is a more quantitative understanding of the 4-D evolution of the North American lithosphere. The cyberinfrastructure in GEON is required to support an inherently distributed system�since the scientists, who are users as well as providers of resources (e.g., data, tools, and computing and visualization capabilities), are themselves distributed. Furthermore, GEON is required to tackle the extreme heterogeneity among data and tools, across a wide range of earth science sub-disciplines and disciplines.
A number of integrative science themes provide the initial guiding applications for realizing this cyberinfrastructure. These include (1) gravity modeling of 3D geological features such as plutons, using semantic integration of (igneous) rock and gravity databases, and other geological and geophysical data, (2) study of active tectonics via integration of LiDAR data sets, data on distribution of faults and earthquakes, and geodynamics models, and (3) study of lithospheric structure and properties across diverse tectonic environments via the integration of geophysical, petrologic, geochronologic, and structural data and models.
Learn more....
|GeoPRISMS||GeoPRISMS (Geodynamic Processes at Rifting and Subducting Margins) is a new NSF funding initiative following upon the highly successful MARGINS Program, which provided a community focal point for science that aims to understand the origin and evolution of the continents through the investigation of their active margins. The GeoPRISMS Science Program includes two broadly integrated initiatives, linked by five overarching scientific topics and themes, where transformative advances are likely to occur in the next decade, and where a concentrated scientific program could be most effective:
|
|Land-Ocean Interaction in the Coastal Zone||The LOICZ Project is one of six programme elements of the IGBP and one of five of the IHDP, and focuses on the interface of the Earth system where land, ocean and atmosphere meet and interact. The overall goal of this project is to determine at regional and global scales:
|
LOICZ has developed scientific knowledge and tools that address global change in the coastal zone, focusing on material flux and human dimensions at regional and global scales. For LOICZ purposes, the coastal zone incorporates the domain extending from river catchments through the land-sea interface and coastal shelf, to the shelf margins. Globally LOICZ has established regional coastal projects addressing natural and socio-economic knowledge and tools development for material flux from river catchments to the coastal shelf.
|National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics||NCED's purpose is to catalyze development of an integrated, predictive science of the processes shaping the surface of the Earth, in order to transform management of ecosystems, resources, and land use.|
NCED is a partnership of research and educational institutions, government agencies, and industry that pursues its goal of predictive Earth-surface science by integrating physical, biological, and social sciences. NCED achieves research synthesis by focusing on a fundamental component of the Earth-surface system - channel networks and their surroundings - that recurs in varying but fundamentally related forms across a wide range of environments and scales. NCED collaborates with applied partners to identify knowledge gaps and develop tools to forecast landscape evolution and guide landscape management, restore river systems, find and develop subsurface resources, and promote environmental awareness. NCED shares the excitement of landscape science with a diverse community, exchanging perspectives through partnering, nurturing, and interacting in formal and informal education settings.
Learn more....
|National Ecological Observatory network (NEON)||The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) will collect data across the United States on the impacts of climate change, land use change and invasive species on natural resources and biodiversity. NEON is a project of the U.S. National Science Foundation, with many other U.S. agencies and NGOs cooperating.|
NEON will be the first observatory network of its kind designed to detect and enable forecasting of ecological change at continental scales over multiple decades. The data NEON collects will be freely and openly available to all users.
|Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research||SCOR is the leading non-governmental organization for the promotion and coordination of international oceanographic activities. SCOR does not have the resources to fund research directly; therefore, SCOR science activities focus on promoting international cooperation in planning and conducting oceanographic research, and solving methodological and conceptual problems that hinder research. Scientists from the thirty-five nations participate in SCOR working groups and scientific steering committees for the large-scale ocean research projects.|
Learn more.... | https://csdms.colorado.edu/wiki/Links |
One of the most important books of Marxist theory published in recent years is Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, in which John Bellamy Foster rediscovered and expanded on Marx’s understanding of the alienation of human beings from the natural world, crystallized in the concept of metabolic rift.
As a direct result of that book and Foster’s subsequent work, Marxist ecological theory has been adopted by a growing number of researchers as a framework for understanding the Earth System crisis, and has formed the basis for a resurgence of ecosocialist theory in the 21st century.
But not everyone endorses the adoption of ecological Marxism and metabolic rift theory. Perhaps the most vehement critic of Foster’s views is Jason W. Moore, who promotes an alternative view he calls “world ecology.” In many essays and talks, and in his book Capitalism in the Web of Life, Moore has repeatedly accused Foster of “Cartesian dualism,” and of “emphasizing disruption and separation, rather than reconfiguration and unity.”
In a recent conversation, Climate & Capitalism editor Ian Angus asked Foster about Moore’s criticisms of ecological Marxism.
See also: Fred Murphy and Ian Angus discuss this interview
========================================
ANGUS: To begin, can you briefly summarize what is meant by “metabolic rift”?
FOSTER: This is a tall order. Let me see if I can get at the main theoretical and historical points as succinctly as possible. The concept of metabolic rift is rooted in Marx’s theory of alienation: the estrangement of human beings from themselves as producing beings, from the process of production, from their species being, and from other human beings. The metabolic rift is a concrete expression of the human estrangement from the material conditions of life, from nature.
In the mid-1800s, scientists developed the concept of metabolism to describe the exchanges of matter and energy within and between organisms, and between organisms and their environments, that are essential to all life. Marx incorporated that concept into historical materialism, using the terms “social metabolism” for the labor and production process, and the “universal metabolism of nature,” for natural processes more generally. As living, objective beings, humans could only exist in a metabolic relation to the rest of nature.
In the late 1850s and 1860s serious concerns arose in Europe and North America about the loss of soil fertility. The new industrialized capitalist agriculture was rapidly depleting the soil of nutrients. Marx described this as an “irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.”
Restoring that metabolism could only be accomplished in a socialist society capable of a rational, sustainable approach to production and hence of the human metabolism with nature. Marx insisted that sustainability — maintaining the earth for the sake of future generations — would be a defining characteristic of socialism, a society in which associated producers would rationally regulate the metabolism between themselves and nature while developing their human potential.
ANGUS: How does metabolic rift theory contribute to understanding today’s environmental crises?
FOSTER: Our whole understanding of the Earth System crisis, of the rifts in planetary boundaries, and of the economic contradictions, are greatly enhanced through an understanding of Marx’s ideas. A growing number of ecologists have analyzed metabolic rifts in a wide variety of spheres, from the soil to the climate to ocean systems, connecting these environmental crises to capitalism’s alienated social metabolism.
Marx provided the only dialectical systems view that understands the ecological problem as simultaneously economic and ecological, rooted in the capitalist mode of production. No other approach has the capacity to integrate a natural-scientific and social-scientific critique that can inform our practice in the Anthropocene.
Marx broke out of the circle of capitalist logic. For him, the importance of environmental degradation wasn’t just that it drove up capitalists’ costs and contributed to economic crises. He addressed the degradation of the ecology as a critical issue in its own right. Marx’s theory of metabolic rift enables us to understand how capitalism grows by externalizing waste and degradation on the environment, a problem that can only be surmounted by socialism, based on a rational, sustainable, relation to nature.
ANGUS: Among Jason Moore’s many criticisms of your work, the charge of “Cartesian dualism” stands out as the most frequent and, in my view, the least comprehensible. He applies that label not just to you and other ecosocialists and radical environmentalists, but also to leading Earth System scientists. Anthropocene science, he says, “is captive to the very thought-structures that created the present crisis. At the core of these thought-structures is Cartesian dualism.”
I find myself agreeing with the British environmental sociologist Graham Sharp, who, in the current issue of Capitalism Nature Socialism, says of Moore’s work, that “Anything he doesn’t agree with is dualist, all the way through the book.” What’s behind the charge of dualism, and is there any validity in it?
FOSTER: It does seem odd that Moore directs the charge of dualism at so many thinkers, even those who are explicitly dialectical, and those who utilize sophisticated systems theories.
Graham Sharp has a point, but we need to add that what Moore “doesn’t agree with” — and what he accuses of dualism — are all those ideas, associated with the radical ecological movement, ecological Marxism, and ecological science to boot, that he sees as challenging his own conceptions. So there is a method to his madness, as the saying goes.
His criticism of Cartesian dualism is aimed at all attempts to distinguish between nature and society, even by way of abstraction. In this respect he has been influenced by radical thinkers in geography like the late Neil Smith and Noel Castree, and by constructionists like Bruno Latour, now a Senior Fellow at the Breakthrough Institute, a leading center for capitalist “ecomodernism.”
Nature, Moore says, is subsumed within society – we can only understand it as what he calls the “double internality” of “nature-in-humanity” and “humanity-in-nature.” This view, which he calls “monist and relational,” follows the pattern of a position in philosophy known as “neutral monism,” which argues that entities like mind and matter cannot be separated, even by abstraction, and in some currently fashionable versions must be “bundled” together. This position was advanced, a century ago, as a counter to materialism and idealism, and to Marxian dialectics. Moore refers constantly to “bundling.” What he calls “the web of life” or “world ecology” is characterized as a bundle of bundles. Social agency is just a bunch of “dialectical bundles.”
To avoid supposedly dualist language he employs a kind of terminological bundling, tying words together with hyphens, like “capitalism-in-nature” and “nature-in-capitalism.”
The constant references to Cartesian dualism, or what Moore calls the Cartesian binary, are extremely misleading. In his seventeenth-century rationalist philosophy, Descartes distinguished between mind/spirit on one hand, and matter/mechanism on the other. Human beings were generally associated with mind, and animals with machines. This was quite different from the distinction between society and nature that Moore calls a “Cartesian binary.”
Moore contends that the concept of metabolic rift (which he incorrectly attributes to me rather than Marx) is dualistic simply because it considers humanity/society and nature as logically distinct entities. He does not seem to understand that dialectics is all about the mediation of totality, the process that both separates and unites individuals and society, humanity and nature, parts and wholes. The social metabolism in Marx’s theory stands for the human role as a self-mediating being of nature through production. We focus on the separation of humanity and nature, on the degradation of natural processes and life, because that is the concrete reality of society, life and nature under the current alienated system of production, capitalism.
This is the whole point of the Marxian ecological critique. Dialectics is always about appearance and essence, identity in difference, the interpenetration of opposites, and the negation of the negation. It is never a choice, as Moore seems to think, between crude dualism and crude monism. There is no contradiction in seeing society as both separate from and irreducible to the Earth system as a whole, and simultaneously as a fundamental part of it. To call that approach “dualist” is comparable to denying that your heart is both an integral part of your body and a distinct organ with unique features and functions.
“Bundling” is a simplistic way of avoiding what dialectics understands, that the world is a complex, heterogeneous and changing totality, mediated in innumerable ways – an open-ended context in which human beings participate as historical beings. Our understanding of the social metabolism of humanity and nature has to be based on this broader understanding.
ANGUS: So Moore’s monism, which he also calls “singular metabolism,” stands opposed to a dialectical understanding of the relationship between society, humanity and nature. Does it go beyond that?
FOSTER: Moore attacks McKenzie Wark’s use of Marx’s metabolic rift theory, Samir Amin’s use of the ecological footprint concept, and your account of the Anthropocene. He essentially rejects all Green thought, including ecological Marxism or ecosocialism, for talking about “what capitalism does to nature” instead of “how nature works for capitalism.” For him, the central ecological problem is not the disruption of the Earth System, but the fact that natural resources have become more expensive, creating problems for the capitalist economy.
He says that this view is “more hopeful” than the “usual narratives of impending catastrophe and collapse” – apparently because it offers hope that capitalism can escape from the crises it has caused.
A while ago, the British writer Larry Lohmann criticized Naomi Klein, on one hand, and Brett Clark, Richard York, and me, on the other, for the subtitles of our books — Capitalism vs. the Climate (Klein) and Capitalism’s War on the Earth (Foster, Clark, and York). Lohmann charged that we were simply resorting to “Cartesian slogans,” and said that there was no such thing as a climate or an Earth System separate from capitalism, so our subtitles, and thus our political views, were dualist and apocalyptic! Moore promptly declared his agreement with that bizarre criticism, and incorporated it into his criticism of ecological Marxism in Capitalism in the Web of Life.
ANGUS: In The Ecological Rift, you, Brett Clark and Richard York argue that ecological crises lead to what you call “rifts and shifts,” where capitalism seeks to move problems around, displacing them, but always ends up by creating cumulatively larger contradictions.
Moore adopts your phrase, although I don’t think he acknowledges the source, but then he changes it to say that “the problem is not a metabolic rift, but metabolic shift.” What is the significance of that change?
FOSTER: In Moore’s view, capitalism’s environmental problems all relate to difficulties in obtaining what he calls the “Four Cheaps” — labor, food, natural resources, and energy. There are, therefore, no ecological crises as such, only economic crises caused by ecological scarcity that can be solved by “shifts” — by obtaining resources or labor elsewhere or in other ways.
Moore goes so far as to claim that those who argue that the planet is being dangerously degraded and disrupted, using such concepts as the metabolic rift, ecological footprint, and the Anthropocene, are “vulnerable to a powerful critique” associated with the capacity of capitalism to make nature work on its behalf. He cites, as an example of such a “counterargument,” work by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute, the leading think tank for capitalist ecomodernism. This is related to similar points made recently by Castree and other left-Latourian constructionists. Latour meanwhile has emerged as a major ideologue of the Breakthrough Institute in his time as a Senior Fellow, arguing that ecological problems do not require the overthrow of capitalism. Moore’s own outlook is wrapped up (we could say bundled) in this kind of thinking.
Moore has identified much of the logic of capitalism; but his error, from a Marxian perspective, is to remain within that logic. His “world ecology” and “web of life” simply describe the capitalist world according to its own conception. His notion of the Four Cheaps of labor, food, natural resources, and energy, each of which threatens to become more expensive, is ecology seen from a capitalist perspective. Labor is put on the same level as food and natural resources as simply one of the Four Cheaps and ecological problems are reduced to the tap (or resource problem) for capitalism, downplaying or ignoring the larger problem of the sink, that is, how capitalism degrades and disrupts the entire Earth System, and imposes its wastes on it.
ANGUS: In Capitalism in the Web of Life, Moore insists that we have to stop asking “How did humanity become separate from nature?” and instead ask “How is humanity unified with the rest of nature and the web of life?” He makes the same point repeatedly: “It is not humanity’s separation from Nature that matters. It is humanity’s place within the web of life.”
This seems to me to directly contradict Marx’s insistence that “It is not the unity of living and active humanity with the natural, inorganic conditions of their metabolic exchange with nature, and hence their appropriation of nature, which requires explanation or is the result of a historic process, but rather the separation between these inorganic conditions of human existence and this active existence, a separation which is completely posited only in the relation of wage labor and capital.” (Grundrisse p. 489.)
What does that reversal indicate about Moore’s Marxism?
FOSTER: My reaction to Moore’s statement was exactly the same as yours. He is turning Marx on his head. Moore says that it is not the alienation of nature by capitalism that we should be concerned with; rather we should focus on how capitalism unifies nature by getting nature to work for it. This is the old human exemptionalist or human exceptionalist view of capitalism that environmental sociologists have long criticized, which has been resurrected as what’s called ecomodernism.
So I would not refer at all to “Moore’s Marxism,” except ironically. The framework he has developed is anti-ecosocialist and anti-ecological. It attacks the Green movement and ecological Marxists wholesale as apocalyptic dualists for being concerned about the growing rifts in the planetary boundaries of the Earth System.
ANGUS: Moore says that your approach to Marxist ecology drives “a wedge between Marx’s historical materialism and Marx’s theory of value.” He claims that his approach is closer to Paul Burkett’s in its stress on the economic impact of environmental change. Is this correct?
FOSTER: Paul and I both rubbed our eyes in disbelief over that. The idea that we differ on value theory is absurd on the face of it, since we frequently write together on the subject, most recently in our joint book Marx and the Earth. In Marx’s Ecology I emphasized that the value analysis in Burkett’s Marx and Nature was crucial to my own analysis. In my foreword to the Haymarket edition of Burkett’s Marx and Nature I stressed that his account of Marx’s ecological value-form theory represents a crucial breakthrough in our understanding of Marx’s ecology.
Moore himself is no defender of Marxian value theory. His manipulation of the value concept in his book resembles the word games of postmodernist literary discourse, rather than the rigorous materialist method of radical political economy. He runs roughshod over crucial distinctions, such as those between value and wealth, exchange value and use value. The end result is pure idealism, as in his glorification of “the centrality of [capitalist commodity] value as a logic re/producing the flow of life.” One could expect such a statement from a Proudhon or a Dühring, never from Marx or Engels!
So what does Moore mean then by saying that I “drive a wedge between historical materialism and Marx’s theory of value”? This has to do with his claim that there can be no ecological crisis unless it is a crisis of value and therefore an economic crisis for capital. What he objects to is the view, which he associates with me (but is just as much held by Burkett, and ultimately stems from Marx) that there is more than one form of ecological crisis – and that economic crises and ecological crises do not necessarily determine each other.
There are the ecological crises that Moore himself recognizes, those related to increasing resource costs that translate into higher costs for the economy. But there are also other ecological crises — though he rejects this — caused by the fact that nature is for the most part outside capital’s value calculus, that the disruption to natural processes and even the Earth System does not enter into the system’s normal accounting. These are crises such as the destruction of species and of whole ecosystems like coral reefs, or even the anthropogenic rifts in the entire Earth System that define the Anthropocene today.
The brilliance of Marx’s analysis was that he did not confine ecological crises to ecological crises for capitalism, that is, in capitalist value terms. Indeed, he saw ecological crises such as desertification as characteristic of class societies in general, and only intensified under capitalism. The question of sustainability rather than capitalist valorization defines such ecological crises. For Moore, whose argument mirrors the viewpoint of capital, these crises are not part of value, so do not truly exist.
In Marx’s analysis such processes are elemental and need to be taken into consideration, particularly as the accumulation process under capitalism tends to degrade natural processes—this is the whole question of the metabolic rift.
To say, as Moore does, that considering natural processes on one hand and capitalist valorization processes on the other is a dangerous dualism, is to deny the fundamental nature of capitalism’s ecological contradictions. Indeed, it eliminates the very possibility of an ecological critique of capitalism.
I should also mention that Moore simply ignores Marx’s theory of rent, making his analysis of “cheap nature” completely vacuous. The whole theory of rent is an outgrowth of the tensions between value and use value, between value and the necessary material conditions of production. Paul Burkett discusses this at length in Marx and Nature.
ANGUS: You’ve written that the rediscovery of Marx’s ecological thought — particularly as developed by you in Marx’s Ecology and by Paul Burkett in Marx and Nature — led to the emergence of what you call second-stage ecosocialism. How does that differ from first-stage ecosocialism, and how does Moore’s work relate to that shift?
FOSTER: First-stage ecosocialism, as Paul Burkett and I have referred to it, involved various attempts to create a hybrid theory in which Green theory was overlaid on certain Marxian conceptions, or, more rarely, Marxism was overlaid on Green theory. It usually involved claims that Marx’s work was ecologically flawed and that Marx and Engels went overboard in their criticisms of Malthus. In first-stage ecosocialism, therefore, the broader Green view dominated.
Second-stage ecosocialism, in contrast, went back to the foundations of classical Marxism, attempting a major reconstruction (and, as it turns out, rediscovery) of historical materialism as a unique method of understanding the complex relationships and interactions between humanity, society, and nature. Second-stage ecosocialism has restored Marx’s ecological value-form analysis and the theory of the metabolic rift, and has given new meaning to the concept of the dialectics of nature.
In Marx and the Earth, Burkett and I labeled Moore’s early work as second-stage ecosocialism, and his later work as a reversion to first-stage ecosocialism. I now think we were mistaken. In his recent works, Moore has adopted positions that are opposed to ecosocialism and to the radical ecological movement in general.
To his credit, he still criticizes inequality and oppression. But what are we to think of a self-proclaimed “world ecologist” who sees ecological crises as simply a matter of nature becoming more expensive for capital, or who argues that “history is replete with instances of capitalism overcoming seemingly insuperable ‘natural limits’.” If that is so, why worry about the crisis of the Anthropocene?
What are we to say of a purported radical who counterposes the Breakthrough Institute’s Shellenberger and Nordhaus to Samir Amin of the World Forum for Alternatives, insisting that the concepts of ecological footprint and the metabolic rift address simply what capitalism “does to nature,” and not “how nature works for capitalism,” and can continue to be made to do so?
What are we to make of an outlook on the environment that essentially rejects modern science? As McKenzie Wark rightly observes, in Moore’s “world ecology,” the scientific conception of an objective world of nature, the Earth System itself, simply vanishes behind “the ‘socially constructed’ interiors of culture.”
How are we to judge an analysis that excludes the ecological movement and its perspectives, abandons Marx’s value analysis, has nothing at all to say about class struggle, and leaves humanity’s fate to the evolution of capitalism as a singular, bundled actor? I can only conclude that he has joined the long line of scholars who have set out to update or deepen Marxism in various ways, but have ended up by abandoning Marxism’s revolutionary essence and adapting to capitalist ideologies.
No doubt Moore’s work has attracted and will attract some notable scholars. But in terms of ecological Marxism it is necessary to draw a line. Moore, I am sorry to say, has moved to the other side, and now stands opposed to the ecosocialist movement and socialism (even radicalism) as a whole.
Ecosocialists, in contrast, stand with Karl Marx, who, when confronted with dire ecological problems in Ireland, declared that there could only be one answer: “Ruin or revolution!”
Notes
In all quotations, emphasis follows the original source.
Foster’s major works on Marxism and ecology include: Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (Monthly Review Press, 2000); The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth, with Brett Clark and Richard York (Monthly Review Press, 2011); and Marx and the Earth: An Anti-Critique, with Paul Burkett (Brill, 2016). He has also written many articles and essays on the subject, in particular for the journal he edits, Monthly Review.
All direct quotations from Moore in this article come from Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (Verso, 2015), and from his essays “The Rise of Cheap Nature” in the anthology Anthropocene or Capitalocene: Nature, History and the Crisis of Capitalism (PM Press, 2016) and “Singular Metabolism” in Daniel Ibañez and Nikos Katskikis, eds., Grounding Metabolism (Harvard University Press, 2014). Other essays by him are posted on his website, http://www.jasonwmoore.com/
Angus and Foster have edited their discussion for length and clarity. | https://climateandcapitalism.com/2016/06/06/in-defense-of-ecological-marxism-john-bellamy-foster-responds-to-a-critic/ |
Also by John Clark:
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Essay
A Social Ecology
by John Clark
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The Ecological Self
A social ecology applies its holistic and dialectical approach of the question of the nature of the self. While it emphasizes wholeness, it does not accept the illusory and indeed repressive ideal of a completely harmonious, fully-integrated selfhood. Rather it sees the self as a developing whole, a relative unity-in-diversity, a whole in constant process of self-transformation and self-transcendence. The very multiplicity of the self, "the chaos within one," is highly valued, since it attests to the expansiveness of selfhood and to our continuity with the larger context of being, of life, of consciousness, of mind. Such a view of selfhood shows a respect for the uniqueness of each person, and for the striving of each toward a highly particularized (in some ways incomparable) good that flows from his or her own nature. But it also recognizes that personal self-realization is incomprehensible apart from one's dialectical interaction with other persons, with the community, and with the larger natural world. The development of authentic selfhood means the simultaneous unfolding of both individuality and social being. The replacement of the voracious yet fragile and underdeveloped ego of consumer society with such a richly-developed selfhood is one of the preeminent goals of social ecology.
Within this general orientation, there remain many areas for development of the social-ecological conception of the self. As Kovel points out, the realm of signification creates an imaginary sphere in which there is a necessary degree of separation from nature, and even from oneself as nature. He explains that
Because of this "basic negativity" in the human standpoint toward the world,
Moreover, the "thinglike" aspects of the self--the realm of the preconceptual and of the most primordial layers of desire--can never be fully transcended in either thought or experience. Part of the social ecological project of comprehending "unity-in-diversity" is to theorize adequately this duality and the necessary experiential and ontological moments of alienation, separation, and distance within a general non-dualistic, holistic framework (rather than merely to explain these moments away).
In doing so, social ecology will delve more deeply into those inseparable dimensions of body and mind that dualism has so fatefully divided. As we explore such realities as thought, idea, image, sign, symbol, signifier, language, on the one hand, and feeling, emotion, disposition, instinct, passion, and desire on the other, the interconnection between the two "realms" will become increasingly apparent. The abstract "naturalism" of Bookchin's social ecology will be transformed into a richer, more dialectical, and many-sided naturalization. As Abram notes,
Such a holistic concept of human-nature interaction is a necessary complement to the conception of humanity as "nature becoming self-conscious" or "nature knowing itself," which might otherwise be taken in a one-sidedly intellectual, objectifying, and ultimately idealist sense.
A Social Ecology of Value
For a social ecology, our ecological responsibility as members of the earth community arises from both our relationship to the interrelated web of life on earth and also from our place as a unique form of nature's and the earth's self-expression. As we accept the responsibilities implied by our role in "nature becoming self-conscious," we can begin to reverse our presently anti-evolutionary and ecocidal direction, and begin to contribute to the continuation of planetary natural and social evolution. We can also cooperate with natural evolution through our own self-development. The overriding ethical challenge to humanity is to determine how we can follow our own path of self-realization as a human community while at the same time allowing the entire earth community to continue its processes of self-manifestation and evolutionary unfolding. A crucial link between these two goals is the understanding of how the flourishing of life on earth is constitutive of the human good, as we dialectically develop in relation to the planetary whole. As Thomas Berry has noted, a central aspect of the human good is to enjoy and indeed celebrate the goodness of the universe, a goodness that is most meaningfully manifested for us in the beauty, richness, diversity and complexity of life on earth (the social and ecological unity-in-diversity).
A dialectical and holistic theory of value attempts to transcend atomistic theories, without dissolving particular beings (including human beings) into the whole, whether the whole of nature or of the biosphere. Holmes Rolston's holistic analysis, and especially his critique of the conventional division of value into intrinsic and instrumental varieties, can contribute much to the development of a social ecology of value. When value is generated in a system (or, as a social ecology would state it, within a whole that is not reducible to a mere sum of parts), we find that it is not generated in an "instrumental" form, for there is no specific entity or entities for the good of which the value is generated as a means. Nor do we find "intrinsic" value in the sense that it there is a single coherent, definable good or telos for the system. Therefore, we must posit something like what Rolston calls "systemic value." According to this conception, the value that exists within the system "is not just the sum of the part-values. No part values increase of kinds, but the system promotes such increase. Systemic value is the productive process; its products are intrinsic values woven into instrumental relationships."
Such a holistic analysis helps us to reach an authentically ecological understanding of value within ecosystems or eco-communities. For Rolston, the "species-environment complex ought to be preserved because it is the generative context of value." The ecosystem--that is, the eco-community which has shaped the species, is internally related to it, and is embodied in its very mode of being--is a value-generating whole. Ultimately, the earth must be comprehended as, for us, the most morally-significant value-generating whole. We must fully grasp the conception of a planetary good realizing itself through the greatest mutual attainment of good by all the beings that constitute that whole--in terms of both their own goods and their contribution to shared systemic goods of the various wholes in which they participate.
An Ecology of the Imagination
If a social ecology is to contribute to radical ecological social transformation, it must address theoretically all the significant institutional dimensions of society. It must take into account the fact that every social institution contains organizational, ideological, and imaginary aspects (moments that can only be separated from one another for purposes of theoretical analysis). An economic institution, for example, includes a mode of organizing persons and groups, their activities and practices, and of utilizing material means for economic ends. It also includes a mode of discourse, and a system of ideas by which it understands itself and seeks to legitimate its ends and activities. Finally, it includes a mode of self-representation and self-expression by which it symbolizes itself and imagines itself. The social imaginary is part of this third sphere, and consists of the system of socially-shared images by which the society represents itself to itself.
One essential task of a social ecology is to contribute to the creation of an ecological imaginary, an endeavor that presupposes an awareness of our own standpoint within the dialectical movement of the social world. A social ecology of the imagination therefore undertakes the most concrete and experiential investigation of the existing imaginary. To the extent that this has been done, it has been found that we live in an epoch that is defined above all by the dominant economistic institutions. This dominance is exercised through all the major institutional spheres : economistic forms of social organization, economistic ideology, and an economistic imaginary. But the dominant economism is far from simple and monolithic. Most significantly, it is divided into two essential moments which interact in complex and socially efficacious ways.
These two essential moments, productionism and consumptionism, are inseparable and mutually interdependent. As Marx pointed out long ago in the classical dialectical inquiry on this subject, "production, distribution, exchange and consumption . . . all form the members of a totality, distinctions within a unity." While Marx's analysis was profoundly shaped by the productionist era in which he lived, all subsequent inquiry is a continuation of the dialectical project that he suggests in this passage. A social ecology ignores none of the moments Marx identifies, but rather looks at distribution and exchange as mediating terms between production and consumption.
But it will focus on the contemporary world as the scene of a strange dialectic between abstract, systemic rationality and social and ecological irrationality. The economistic society drives relentlessly toward absolute rationality in the exploitation of natural and human resources, in the pursuit of efficiency of production, in the development of technics, in the control of markets through research, and in the manipulation of behavior through marketing. At the same time, it rushes toward complete irrationality in the generation of infinite desire, in the colonization of the psyche with commodified images, in the transformation of the human and natural world into a system of objects of consumption, and most ultimately and materially, in undermining the ecological basis for its own existence. Whatever the shortcomings of Marx as economist and political theorist, he is unsurpassed as a prophet insofar as he revealed that the fundamental irrationality of economistic society is in its spirituality--the fetishism of commodities.
An Ecological Imaginary
One result of the careful study of the social imaginary is the realization that a decisive moment in social transformation is the development of a counter-imaginary. Success in the quest for an ecological society will depend in part on the generation of a powerful ecological imaginary to challenge the dominant economistic one. While this process is perhaps in an embryonic stage, we have in fact already developed certain important elements of an emerging ecological imaginary.
The image of the region poses a powerful challenge to the economistic, statist and technological imaginaries. Regions are a powerful presence, yet have no clearly definable boundaries. This is the case whether these regions be ecoregions, georegions, bioregions, ethnoregions, mythoregions, psychoregions, or any other kind. Regionalism evokes a dialectical imagination that grasps the mutual determination between diverse realms of being, between culture and nature, unity and multiplicity, between form and formlessness, between being and nothingness. The concept of regionality implies an interplay between the overlapping, evolving boundaries of natural spaces and the flowing, redefining boundaries of imaginary spaces.
The region is intimately connected to another powerful ecological image--that of the wild. The wild is present in the spontaneous aspects of culture and nature. We find it in forms of wild culture, wild nature, and wild mind : in the poetic, in the carnavalesque, in dreams, in the unconscious, in wilderness. We find it in the living earth, and in the processes of growth and unfolding on the personal, communal, planetary and cosmic levels. The point is not to find the wild in any "pristine" state; it is always intermixed with civilization, domestication, and even domination. The discovery of the wild within a being or any realm of being means the uncovering of its self-manifestation, its creative aspects, its relative autonomy. It is the basis for respect for beings, but even more, for wonder, awe, and a sense of the sacred in all things. The revolts and individualisms of the dominant culture appear quite tame when civilization is subjected to the critique of the wild.
The image of the earth as "Home," or planetary household, and humans as members of the earth community has great imaginary power. As we develop greater knowledge of ecological complexity, and as we rediscover the marvelous richness of place, the earth image begins to incorporate within itself a rich regional and local specificity, and become a holistic representation of planetary unity-in-diversity. As the horror of economistic-technocratic globalism becomes increasingly apparent, and as the world is remade in the image of the factory, the prison and the shopping mall, the rich, dialectical counter-image of the earth will necessarily gain increasing imaginary force.
The ecological imaginary can be expanded further to cosmic or universal dimensions. All cultures have felt the need to imagine the macrocosm and orient themselves in relation to the whole. Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry contend that the universe story, taken from contemporary cosmology and transformed into a culturally-orienting narrative "is the only way of providing, in our times, what the mythic stories of the universe provided for tribal peoples and for the earlier classical civilizations in their times." Through the universe and earth story, people see themselves as part of larger processes of development and "unfolding of the cosmos." They thus achieve "a sense of relatedness to the various living and nonliving components of the earth community." These powerful, indeed sublime narratives relativize cultural absolutes and shake the dominant imaginary, just as they give new imaginary meaning to human existence, consciousness and creativity.
Freedom and Domination
The larger processes of self-realization and unfolding of potentialities have often (since Hegel) been described as the emegence of freedom in the history of humanity, the earth, and the universe. A social ecology carries on this tradition and seeks to give an ecological meaning to such a conception of freedom. It rejects both the "negative freedom" of mere non-coercion or "being left alone" of the liberal individualist tradition, and also the "positive freedom" of the "recognition of necessity" found in many strongly organicist forms of holism. A social ecological conception of freedom focuses on the realization of a being's potentialities for identity, individuality, awareness, complexity, self-determination, relatedness, and wholeness. In this sense, freedom is found to some degree at all levels of being : from the self-organizing and self-stabilizing tendencies of the atom to the level of the entire universe evolving to higher levels of complexity and generating new levels of being. In our own planetary history, embryonic freedom can be found in the directiveness of all life, and takes on increasingly complex forms, including, ultimately, the possibility of humans as complex social beings attaining their good through a highly-developed and respectful relationship to other humans and the natural world. The realization of such freedom requires that humanity attain consciousness of its place in the history of the earth and of the universe, that it develop the ethical responsibility to assume its role in larger processes of self-realization, and that human social institutions be reshaped to embody the conditions that would make this knowledge and ethical commitment into practical historical forces. Bookchin's conception of "free nature" focuses on the way in which human self-realization, culminating in creation of an ecological society, establishes a growing planetary realm of freedom. This occurs as humanity "add[s] the dimension of freedom, reason, and ethics to first [i.e., non-human] nature and raise[s] evolution to a level of self-reflexivity . . . ." The activity of humanity and human self-realization are thus seen as central to the achievement of freedom in nature.
But there is another, larger ecological dimension to freedom. The realization of planetary freedom requires not only the human self-realization that is emphasized in Bookchin's "free nature," but also the human recognition of limits and the human forbearance that is expressed in Arne Naess's usage of that same term. In this sense, "free nature" is the spontaneous, creative nature that has given rise to the entire rich, diverse system of self-realizing life on this planet. It has also given rise to humanity itself, and dialectically shaped humanity through our interaction with the all the other expressions of this free activity, and made us the complex beings that we are. As necessary as it is for humanity to rectify its disastrous disruptions of natural processes, and although a restorative ecological practice is undoubtedly required, a social ecology must also help humanity regain its capacity for creative non-action, for the Taoist wu wei, for "letting-be." The social ecological conception of freedom as spontaneous creative order points to the need for a larger sphere of wild nature so that biodiversity can be maintained and evolutionary processes can continue their self-expression, not only in human culture and humanized nature, but in the natural world substantially free of human influence and control. A social ecology therefore implies the necessity not only for wilderness preservation but for an extensive expansion of wilderness (and relative wilderness) areas where they have been largely destroyed.
A social ecology's vision human freedom and "free nature" is closely related to its fundamental project of critique of the forms of domination that have stood in the way of human and planetary self-realization. However, there have been some widespread misconceptions about the social ecological analysis of domination. These result in part from Bookchin's definition of social ecology as the view that "ecological problems arise from deep-seated social problems," and his claims that the "quest to dominate nature" results from actual domination within human society. In a sense, contemporary ecophilosophies in general assert that ecological problems stem from social ones. For example, deep ecology holds that ecological problems result from the social problem of anthropocentrism, and ecofeminism holds that ecological problems result from the social problem of patriarchal ideologies and social structures. But there remains a fundamental dispute between those who, like Bookchin, give causal priority in the creation of ecological crisis to social institutions (like capitalism or the state) and others who stress the causal priority of social ideologies (like dualism, anthropocentrism, or patriarchal values).
But both sides in this dispute have often seemed less than dialectical in their approach. The roots of ecological crisis are at once institutional and ideological, psychological and cultural. A critical approach to the issue will avoid both one-sided materialist explanations (identifying economic exploitation or other "material conditions" as "the problem") and one-sided idealism (identifying a system of ideas like anthropocentrism as "the problem.") It is indeed tempting to see the emergence of certain hierarchical institutions as the precondition for human destructiveness toward the natural world. Yet these very institutions could only emerge because of the potential for domination, hierarchical values, objectification, and power-seeking that have roots in the human psyche and which are actualized under certain historical conditions. Furthermore, as a system of domination develops it does so through its dialectically interacting institutional, ideological and imaginary spheres, all of which are related to a "transhistorical" human nature developed over a long history of species evolution. Any account of the origins of hierarchy and domination and of their possible "dissolution" must therefore address at once the material, institutional, psychological and even ontological moments of both the development of these phenomena and the process of reversing it.
Eco-Communitarian Politics
A social ecology seeks to restore certain elements of an ancient conception of the political, and to expand the limits of the concept. According to a classic account, if ethics is the pursuit of the good life or self-realization, then politics is the pursuit of the good life in common and self-realization for the whole community. A social ecology affirms the political in this sense, but reinterprets it in ecological terms. It seeks recover our long-obscured nature as zoon politikon and to explore new dimensions of that nature. By this term is meant not simply the "political animal" who participates in civic decision-making processes, but the social and communal being whose selfhood is developed and expressed through active engagement in many dimensions of the life of the community.
A social ecology investigates the ways in which we can encourage the emergence of humane, mutualistic, ecologically-responsible institutions in all areas of social life. It sees not only "politics," but all areas of social interaction, including production and consumption, personal relationships, family life, child-care, education, the arts, modes of communication, spiritual life, ritual and celebration, recreation and play, and informal modes of cooperation to be political realms in the most profound sense. Each is an essential sphere in which we can develop our social being and communal individuality, and in which a larger communitarian reality can find much of its basis. Such a conception of the political requires that practices and institutions be humane in spirit and scale, life-affirming, creative, decentralized, non-hierarchical, rooted in the particularity of people and place, and based on grassroots, participatory democracy to the greatest degree practically possible.
The social ecological tradition has long emphasized the importance of local democracy. Reclus and Kropotkin both wrote extensively about its history, and Mumford argues that
This conception of regional democracy based in local democracy is a corollary of the general social ecological conception (expressed by Geddes) of regional and larger communities growing out of household, neighborhood, and local communities.
Bookchin has carried on this tradition in arguing for the liberatory potential of the town or neighborhood assembly, and has given his libertarian predecessors' ideas of social and political decentralization a more specific and concrete expression. He and other social ecologists point out the ways in which such an assembly offers the community an arena in which its needs and aspirations can be formulated publicly in an active and creative manner, and in which a strong and vital citizenship can be developed and exercised in practice. The community assembly offers a means through which a highly-valued multiplicity and diversity can be unified and coordinated, as the citizens engage practically in the pursuit of the good of the whole community. It is also on a scale at which the community's many-sided relationship to its specific ecological and bioregional milieu can be vividly grasped and achieve political expression.
What is debated vigorously among social ecologists is the validity of a "libertarian municipalism" that would make a program of creating local assembly government and federations of libertarian municipalities into a privileged politics of social ecology. In this ideology, the citizens (as Bookchin defines them) and the municipalist movement assume much of the historical role of the working class and the party in classical Marxist theory, and are endowed with a similar mystique. Yet, it seems clear that the municipalist program and Bookchin's new "revolutionary subject" cannot be uniquely deduced from the general premises of social ecological analysis, nor can they be shown to be the only plausible basis for an ecological politics. It is therefore not surprising that most activists influenced by social ecology do not direct most of their efforts into municipalism, but rather work in many political, economic and cultural realms.
A social ecology recognizes that political forms, as important as they may be, are given meaning and realize whatever liberatory and communitarian potential they may have within a larger political culture. The political culture is thus both historically and theoretically more fundamental. Consequently, when contemplating a promising political form, a social ecology will consider the ways in which the political culture may limit or liberate the potentials in that form. The institution of the assembly, for example, possesses not only the potential to foster freedom, authentic democracy, solidarity and civic virtue, but also a considerable potential for the generation of elitism, egotism, domineering personality traits, and power-seeking behavior. Such dangers are avoided not only through procedures within assemblies themselves, but above all by the creation of a communitarian, democratic culture that will express itself in decision-making bodies and in all other institutions. For assemblies and other organs of direct democracy to contribute effectively to an ecological community, they must be purged of the competitive, agonistic, masculinist aspects that have often corrupted them. They can only fulfill their democratic promise if they are an integral expression of a cooperative community that embodies in its institutions the love of humanity and nature.
Barber makes exactly this point when he states that "strong" democracy "attempts to balance adversary politics by nourishing the mutualistic art of listening," and going beyond mere toleration, seeks "common rhetoric evocative of a common democratic discourse" that should "encompass the affective as well as the cognitive mode." Such concerns echo recent contributions in feminist ethics, which have pointed out that the dominant moral and political discourse have exhibited a one-sided emphasis on ideas and principles, and neglected the realm of feeling and sensibility. In this spirit, a social ecology will explore the ways in which the transition from formal to substantive democracy depends not only on the establishment of more radically democratic forms, but on the establishment of cultural practices that foster a democratic sensibility.
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By Alexandra Knight and Catherine Allan
As a society, how do we encourage early and ethical action when building our knowledge and confronting serious challenges?
In this blog post we explore the conceptual framework of intentional ecology and apply it to a case study to illustrate how it deals with the question raised above.
Intentional ecology – foundations and actions
Intentional ecology, illustrated in the figure below, is a new conceptual framework that enables early, applied and relevant integrated action, as well as reflexive and dynamic approaches to implementation of conservation and sustainability measures. It’s a better way of doing science.
Intentional ecology recognises the deep interrelationships between humans and the more-than-human world, and enables an ethic of care and love. Intentional ecology draws on foundations in feminist science and ecofeminist theory; in addition, conservation biology and systems theory, particularly intervention science, are also essential to the framework.
Recognising the principles and approaches from these disciplines encourages and enables ecological research/management teams to exercise:
- care
- reflexivity
- methodological pluralism
- action and advocacy.
Combined, these actions constitute intentional ecology.
Why “intentional” ecology?
Intention takes us into the realms of choice and action. “Intentional” suggests that it is not by chance or mere habit that something is done. Intention is intrinsically related with active understanding, with aims and purposes, meanings and importance. Because intent is value-laden it leads to ethical considerations.
Intent informs decision-making and comes to the fore when linking research with advocacy and action, and supports the transdisciplinarity essential for addressing complex issues.
Being an intentional ecologist – the Sloane’s froglet case
Here we show how we use the intentional ecology framework in our research, action and advocacy for Sloane’s froglet, Crinia sloanei, a small, rather undistinguished frog, now listed as endangered in south-eastern Australia; see also the figure below. Our transdisciplinary research commenced in 2009, and both research and action continue in 2022.
Early in the research we acknowledged our values:
- the intrinsic worth of the non-human world;
- the right of Sloane’s froglet to continue to live in-situ;
- that we (humans, non-humans, ecological processes and interactions) are all interconnected and dependent upon one another for our well-being; and,
- that research which could be applied to management actions should be applied in the work.
We also believe that a rigorous and honest scientist can be an advocate for the diversity of life with no incongruity.
In applying the intentional ecology framework for Sloane’s froglet we transcend single-species ecological research and acknowledge and incorporate the complex social ecological situation. Taking this approach involves moving beyond the traditional sphere of an applied ecologist – a challenging and rewarding move. Our work gains its credibility through its reliance on theoretical perspectives beyond the accepted space.
We use multiple approaches. Initially, we used well-established ecological methods to research the distribution and habitat of Sloane’s froglet to obtain fundamental wetland and micro habitat information that would be directly and immediately applicable to management. We are now moving to understand landscape-scale connectivity for Sloane’s froglet – moving from individual wetlands to the space between them.
We iteratively examine the boundaries to our research, for instance, we intentionally choose to research habitat rather than, say chytridiomycosis (a fungal disease).
During and following the initial scientific data collection and analysis we started to advocate action in support of Sloane’s froglet via presentations to several local community groups and forums, Landcare groups, individual stakeholders and landholders, non-government conservation organisations and government officials. This engagement continues in new forms including with local, state and national government and in environmental court cases.
Sloane’s froglets are intriguing and drive our scientific curiosity. And we care for Sloane’s froglet and its environments and openly express that care while undertaking rigorous research. We are not alone here – many ecological researchers care about the organism or process that they are studying, and many feel a heavy burden of responsibility. Care can be considered a strength and a motivating force for knowledge-based action.
In advocating for the protection of Sloane’s froglet we express our delight in its beauty, its tiny nature, its seeming courage as it chirps and breeds in the middle of cold wet winters – a sound and inspirational expression of what environmental philosophers have described as the ecological impulse. Curiosity and care inspire us to continue working in arduous conditions and in a sometimes conflicted socio-political context.
As a result of our research and advocacy:
- Site-based action to protect Sloane’s froglet started very soon after research commenced.
- Knowledge has been mobilised and many people now undertake activities to protect Sloane’s froglet independently of our work.
- The wider community is knowledgeable about Sloane’s froglet; Sloane’s froglet is protected at many individual sites; it is protected by national legislation; and new wetlands are built for it. (Such institutional and legislative changes have been slower, but are now accelerating.)
- School children sing songs about Sloane’s froglet, and Landcare groups have wetland planting days for it.
- The presence of Sloane’s froglet is actively monitored by citizen scientists.
- Scientists, practitioners, and locals all come together to exchange knowledge and work for Sloane’s froglet wellbeing.
All of these are expressions of care and intention to make a difference through better understanding.
Conclusions and questions
The Intentional ecology approach is powerful as it motivates scientists and practitioners to not only undertake rigorous ecological research, but also to act and advocate. In requiring reflection and reflexivity, intentional ecology can help build spaces to draw expertise together. Intentional ecology provides a platform and imperative for choice and ethical action.
Do you have a framework for incorporating advocacy into your research and practice? Is it explicit? Do you have examples of how care contributes to better research practices and practical outcomes? Can you see applications for the intentional ecology framework to problems that are not necessarily ecological?
To find out more:
Knight, A. R. and Allan, C. (2021). Intentional Ecology: Integrating environmental expertise through a focus on values, care and advocacy. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 8, 290. (Online) (DOI): https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00960-1
Biography: Alexandra Knight PhD is a Lecturer in Environmental Management at Charles Sturt University’s Port Macquarie campus, Australia. She is committed to working for the benefit of the Australian environment. She works closely with Landcare and other community groups to build and share knowledge of the natural world and how best to manage it. She has a particular interest in amphibians, knowledge exchange and co-design.
Biography: Catherine Allan PhD is a Professor in Environmental Sociology and Planning at Charles Sturt University’s campus in Albury-Wodonga, Australia. She has a strong personal and professional connection to rural landscapes. She has engaged with natural resource management in south eastern Australia for over 30 years, and is particularly interested in adaptive management, social learning and participatory and collaborative research. | https://i2insights.org/2022/04/19/intentional-ecology/ |
Environmental Scientist / Ecologist
We are looking for an exceptional person who is passionate about the industry and what EcoFutures is looking to achieve.
The role is focused on using ecological knowledge to inform the management of our natural environment. We work for Governments, regional agencies and private companies. As part of the Alluvium Group, our people often are involved in multidisciplinary projects with our economists, engineers and catchment scientists.
We are looking for an ecologist or environmental scientist to join our growing team. You will need a passion for applying your knowledge in complex situations. We are not content with just understanding what used to be there – we want to apply our knowledge to help manage the transition of ecological systems under a climate-change future.
The role is based in our Brisbane office. We pride ourselves on the flexibility of our working arrangements so are open to part-time or other arrangements.
The successful candidate will have:
- Significant knowledge about ecological issues, the environment and challenges in Queensland and nationally.
- A willingness to contribute to, and drive, a collaborative and values-driven work culture. We are not a hierarchical organisation – we want all of our staff to have a say in the future of the company and the wider group.
- Ability and desire to work across disciplines and geographies.
- Maturity to take responsibility for agreed outputs, completion and quality of products.
Skills and Experience expected in the role:
- 2-5 years experience including fieldwork and report writing in environmental consulting, research or Federal, State or Local Government.
- Tertiary qualifications in ecology/botany/science, environmental science, environmental management or related discipline.
- Preferably experience with flora and fauna surveys (including native species, weeds and pests), protected plant surveys, Bio condition Assessments, Regional Ecosystem delineation and natural environment strategies.
- Preferably experience with GIS, including the generation of maps for analysis and reporting.
- Understanding of publicly available datasets for desktop surveys, such as Queensland Globe, WildNet, Bureau of Meteorology etc.
- Understanding of ecological functions and processes that influence resilience and adaptation under different climate futures.
- Strong understanding of environmental legislation, including environmental permit and approval processes for Queensland.
- Solid understanding of how to apply ecological rehabilitation/restoration concepts into practice at a range of temporal and spatial scales.
- Exceptional project management and leadership skills with an established record of generating work.
- Great written and verbal communication skills and the ability to describe complex ecological processes in clear plain language.
- Ability to develop a good rapport with clients, stakeholders, staff and partners, together with listening skills, empathy and awareness.
- Experience or a willingness to positively contribute to multidisciplinary projects with economists, engineers, social scientists, designers and researchers.
The role is based in our Brisbane office but other locations will be considered. The successful candidate will be required to spend time in the field (although how this is structured is negotiable)
Remuneration is commensurate with skills and experience and is subject to negotiation. You are requested to provide an indication of your salary expectations for your application. We have a generous profit share policy which applies to all staff. Note that applications are only open to applicants with Australian citizenship or permanent residency.
An important part of our business is the ownership structure. The Alluvium Group is a staff-owned business and over 48% of our staff have ownership. We are committed to continued broadening of the ownership to staff who support and are actively engaged in the attainment of our strategic goals. The opportunity is available for staff to build an ownership stake in the business over time.
Next Steps:
See below to download the Position Description
To further discuss this role please forward your CV and a cover letter to Paul Maxwell ([email protected], 0432 981 028) or Camille Oliver ([email protected], 0418 823 382), or contact us directly for a confidential discussion.
Closing date: Wednesday, 8th December 2021. | https://environmentaljobs.com.au/jobs/environmental-scientist-ecologist-1 |
Ducks Unlimited (DU) is the world's largest and most effective private waterfowl and wetlands conservation organization. DU is able to multilaterally deliver its work through a series of partnerships with private individuals, landowners, agencies, scientific communities and other entities. Realizing that climate change has the potential to dramatically and adversely affect North America's wetlands and waterfowl populations, Ducks Unlimited has been at the forefront in educating its membership and Congress.
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Earth Networks
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Ecological Society of America (ESA)
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Environmental Law Institute (ELI)
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Organization
Federal Transit Administration (FTA)
The Federal Transit Administration (FTA) is one of 11 operating administrations within the U. S. Department of Transportation with over 500 employees located in Washington, DC and 10 regional offices across the nation. The FTA works with public transportation providers and other key stakeholders to implement strategies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector. In addition to FTA’s grant programs, FTA’s technical assistance is another key part of the agency’s efforts to respond to climate change.
Organization
Florida Energy and Climate Commission
In 2008, the Florida Legislature passed HB 7135, the 2008 Energy and Economic Development Legislative, creating the Florida Energy & Climate Commission within the Executive Office of the Governor to centralize state energy and climate change programs and policy development. The Commission held a variety of responsibilities, including administering financial incentive programs, of which grants to local governments are contingent on the consideration of climate change impacts. The Commission was also was responsible for overseeing implementation of both mitigation and adaptation recommendations from the state’s Climate Action Plan.
Organization
Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL)
The Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) develops and uses mathematical models and computer simulations to improve understanding and prediction of the behavior of the atmosphere, the oceans, and climate. Since 1955 the GFDL has influenced the world's research on the modeling of global climate change and has played a significant role in the World Meteorological Organization, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessments, and the U. S. Climate Change Science Program. GFDL scientists focus on model-building relevant for society, such as hurricane research, prediction, and seasonal forecasting, and understanding global and regional climate change.
Organization
George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication - 4C
The Center for Climate Change Communication ("4C") at George Mason University was created to conduct unbiased social science research that will facilitate public engagement in the decision making around climate change. The research center uses social science research methods - experiments, surveys, in-depth interviews and other methods - to find ways of effectively engaging the public and policy makers in the communication around climate change, and in considering and enacting solutions. The Center's mission is "to help government agencies, non-profit organizations, and companies apply the results of this research - so that collectively, we can stabilize our planet's life sustaining climate.
Organization
Global Climate Adaptation Partnership (GCAP)
The Global Climate Adaptation Partnership (GCAP) is a climate change and adaptation consultancy that provides climate-related services to government and commercial clients. The GCAP partnership model focuses on providing three separate but integrated services: Knowledge Management Service, Adaptation Training, and Consultancy on Climate Projects.
Organization
Global Cool Cities Alliance
The Global Cool Cities Alliance (GCCA) is a non-profit organization developed by a consortium of scientists and environmental leaders to promote the adoption of white roofs and white pavements globally. The Alliance is dedicated to advancing policies and actions that increase the solar reflectance of buildings and pavements as a low- or no-cost way to promote cool buildings, cool cities, and, most importantly, to mitigate the effects of climate change through global cooling. | https://www.adaptationclearinghouse.org/search/?s=163&page=8&sort_by=ints_promoted%20DESC,%20score&direction=desc |
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