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Brand Protection on NFT Marketplaces
Why you should care & what you need to be doing now
Oct 26, 2022 1:30 PM - 2:30 PM EDT
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Key Discussion Takeaways:
Businesses have been hesitant to fully adopt NFTs and blockchain technology as a whole. So much is unknown or arcane to the average person, but the potential rewards are worth the dive. It helps to have experts in the crypto space to illuminate the confusing elements and show companies how to leverage the technology properly.
Adam Sherman is one such expert, a partner at a firm that works extensively in NFTs. His personal and professional experience has allowed him to help brands enter the space with confidence. He has much to say about protecting your brand in the NFT marketplace.
In this virtual event, Aaron Conant is joined by Adam Sherman, a partner at Vorys eControl, to talk about NFTs and how to use them to your brand's advantage. Adam introduces the key topics of the crypto industry and then expands on use cases for businesses. He also touches on the future of Web3, protecting your brand early on, and the best commercial uses for blockchain technology.
Here's a glimpse of what you'll learn:
Why companies should care about brand protection for NFTs
The reason that powerful brands are utilizing NFTs
Use cases for blockchain technology in businesses
What is Web3, and where is it heading in the future?
Why it's crucial to protect the physical and digital versions of your product
Other advantages of using NFTs in the commercial space
Vorys eControl is a top 150 law firm that has an expertise in implementing legal strategies to stop unauthorized re-sellers, control MAP pricing, eliminate channel conflict which all ultimately lead to online marketplace sales growth.
Connect with Vorys eControl
Aaron Conant LinkedIn
Co-Founder & Managing Director at BWG Connect
Aaron Conant is Co-Founder and Chief Digital Strategist at BWG Connect, a networking and knowledge sharing group of thousands of brands who collectively grow their digital knowledge base and collaborate on partner selection. Speaking 1x1 with over 1200 brands a year and hosting over 250 in-person and virtual events, he has a real time pulse on the newest trends, strategies and partners shaping growth in the digital space.
Adam Sherman LinkedIn
Partner at Vorys eControl
Adam Sherman is a partner and a brand protection attorney in the Vorys Cincinnati and Orange County offices and a member of the Vorys eControl group. Adam has worked with Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease LLP for over 17 years, first as an associate and now as a partner. His practice focuses on online brand protection, infringement issues, and seller enforcement, helping companies address their problems with unauthorized sales, product diversion, and product pricing.
Adam helps his clients identify and solve their online distribution issues, including issues with pricing, product diversion, counterfeiting, unfair competition, and false advertising. Adam designs and implements efficient enforcement strategies to identify and remove online sellers that are causing the most problems for his clients. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Law at Northern Kentucky University, where he teaches intellectual property law. Before Vorys, he was an associate at Faruki Ireland & Cox and Dorsey & Whitney LLP.
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Aaron Conant
BWG Connect provides executive strategy & networking sessions that help brands from any industry with their overall business planning and execution.
Co-Founder & Managing Director Aaron Conant runs the group & connects with dozens of brand executives every week, always for free.
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Discussion Transcription
Aaron Conant 0:18
Happy Wednesday, everybody. My name is Aaron Conant. I'm the co-founder Managing Director here at BWG Connect. We're a networking knowledge sharing group with 1000s of brands. And we do exactly that we network and knowledge share together to stay on top of news trends, strategies, pain points, whatever it might be that shaping digital. I spend the majority of my time talking to brands and trying to figure out hey, what do you what are you most interested in? A lot of times, it's pain points things are trying to solve for and other times like this. It's like, what's next? What do we need to be concerned about for what's around the corner? So we got some great friends, partners, supporters, the network over at Vorys eControl. We've done a ton with them over the past five years, a lot on the unauthorized reseller space and brand protection as a whole, usually in the physical goods space. But then more recently, a lot of questions around, you know, NFTs, the Metaverse, and so Adam's here and I'll kind of kick it over to you, if you want to do a brief intro on yourself and Vorys eControl, that'd be awesome. And then we can kind of jump into the deck a little bit sound good?
Adam Sherman 1:18
Yeah. Thanks, Aaron. I appreciate it. as Aaron mentioned, my name is Adam Sherman. I'm a partner at Vorys eControl. I've been with the group since the beginning. We primarily help clients, you know, navigate the eCommerce space, protect against unauthorized sellers and all sorts of brand protection infringement issues online.
Yeah. So just a reminder, if you have questions, or were, you know, drop them in, you know, comments, drop them in the chat or the q&a, and we'll, we'll get them answered as we go. Like to tackle those real time. Awesome. So I'm gonna kick it to you. And if you want to roll through, and we'll just pop up questions as we go.
Absolutely. Sounds good. Yeah. If you have any questions, feel free to drop them in, and I'll do my best to answer them. Yeah, today we're talking about brand protection. In a decentralized world. We'll talk a little bit about Web3, the Metaverse and NFTs. The purpose of this, in my mind is not to try to cram a bunch of technical knowledge about these sorts of things. There's a lot of material out there where you can do that. It's changing all the time. It can be very complicated. But what I want to do is kind of just focus on why brands should care about this, why they should care about it now and things that you can be doing now, to make sure that your brand is ready to delve in once the once the once it's the right time for your brand. And I want to start off by kind of acknowledging why you know why some brands feel like they don't want to do anything within this space right now. Because there's a lot of craziness going on. There's a lot of silliness. There's a lot of things that seem like scams. And I think we have to acknowledge that to kind of understand where we're at now. We're going to talk about how things are going to change and how there could be very useful applications of this technology going forward. So if you look in the news, you see all sorts of things about these images of apes being sold for hundreds of 1000s of dollars. If it's not the apes, it may be the crypto punks, which are these blocky kind of, you know, images. You read about people being scammed out of ownership of these NFT's, you know, having to pay exorbitant amounts of money to get them back. A lot of it doesn't really make sense. It's it seems highly suspicious. Even Bill Murray, got scammed in the process and supposedly $180,000 worth of cryptocurrency in relation to an NFT auction. When you look at the market trends overall, you know, the markets are pretty volatile and have you know, crashed recently, several months ago, you had a large volume of sales happening at these NFT marketplaces. That has crashed a bit following the disruption of the cryptocurrency market. You know, again, several months ago, the most popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin was trading at about $40,000 per Bitcoin. It's been cut in half it's still $20,000 per Bitcoin that's still pretty good. But that's, that's a pretty volatile market, and certainly, you can understand why people would want to stay out of it. Again, just to focus on some of the insane amounts of money that supposedly gets exchanged with respect to these, these small not great pieces of art. And you know, you may think I wonder why that is exactly and I can't fully explain it. But it's it's not, I can tell you at least this a lot of these NFT sets that you read a lot about, they're really not about ownership of the image themselves. They're kind of exclusive clubs, that a lot of early entrants into the Web3 in NFT space are a part of, it's almost like a badge of honor to show that you're a part of this exclusive group. And in supposedly, that's what contributes a lot to the value, but it's a great
I think there was a huge question that comes up is why $512,000 is it's not it's not to use or the resale a lot of it, it is, you know, you're paying money to be part of exclusive. You're saying exclusive club.
Yeah, I think that's a huge part of it. Now, do I necessarily think all of these transactions are bonafide transactions between disinterested third parties? Maybe not. But there is money being exchanged? And right, it is it is all about kind of exclusivity and being part of that club. But despite target,
no what stuck what stop somebody from creating another crypto punks that looks just like that and selling it?
Well, that's a, you could absolutely do that you could you could create one that looks very similar. It's not, you know, the the way that the blockchain works, it's pretty tied down to be able to distinguish the imitation from the actual version and where it comes from. So you could have ones that look similar, but kind of built into the technology that's that exists on a particular blockchain, there are processes in place that prevent perfect duplicates, or at least ones that are, you know, signed the same way and in with that sort of badge of authenticity. But yeah, so you know, despite all of these kind of scammy sorts of uses, I think it's really important to think about all of the big companies that are investing heavily in blockchain technology. And it's not just the startups centered around blockchain or Web3, or NFT's. These are pretty well known companies, in a lot of different industries. You've got finance, industries, technology, consumer products, insurance, you know, automobiles and entertainment, all investing a lot of money in this technology. And I think that shows a, you know, on their part and understanding that the this sort of technology is going to be a big part of the future of the internet. And it's not just little investments here. And there, you've got millions of dollars being funneled into development projects, by very mainstream companies. I really emphasize this point, which is why I've done a number of slides on it. This is it's so widespread, it's almost Yeah, to start thinking about, well, what are these companies understand that my company doesn't? Or why are they investing in it? And I think that that really shows their commitment and understanding that this is, this is part of the future. And even during that crash that I talked about, the fundraising hasn't really gone down, it's been pretty stable. You know, even as of last month, we're still have, you know, millions of dollars being invested. So this is not something that people are pulling weight away from, despite the volatility. So, again, why should brands care? You know, all of this, I think the big point that we got to look at is that we are in the very early stage of what's going on with NFT's in the Metaverse. I mean, the current uses, there's a lot of prospecting out there. There's a lot of you know, scams out there. But this technology is going to evolve in the use cases for it are going to evolve. I've already talked about how all these major companies are investing a lot of money into it. And there's got to be reasons for that, particularly when you look at some of the kings of the Internet right now. We're all very familiar with Facebook, you know, are now Meta, one of the top social media companies investing as heavily as anyone in web 3.0 in the Metaverse, they're, they're at the forefront they are because they understand that if they don't evolve, if they don't start to get into this, that someone else will and they could be left behind. One of the helpful ways I think of looking at it is we when we think about the origins of the internet, or at least when it started to get adopted by mainstream consumers. There were a lot of technological barriers in place. When we're thinking about the 90s. In order to get into the internet, you had to use a dial up modem through your landline. You connected at a very slow speed through a couple have, you know, big providers like America Online. And when we when people started to get onto the Internet, you the the use cases for it became really intriguing like having all this information at your fingertips that you could access any time. But the technology really had to catch up, we needed high speed internet access, that would be able to connect people to it, because the the modem thing wasn't going to work for all of the use cases that we were thinking about. We didn't have smartphones yet, that still needed to be invented, that took time, there's a lot of technologies that need to develop, to get to the point where we're at now and have been for a little while forever, where most people have access to high speed internet, you know, in the palm of their hands. And the difference there is I think we all, you know, at an instinctual level understood the usefulness of the internet, but we just couldn't access it quick enough or in a convenient manner. With, you know, with Blockchain with Web3, with all that technology. It's it the technology is already pretty highly developed, it's almost ahead of the use cases. So as we start to kind of develop those use cases for it, which we'll talk about more in a bit. A lot of the technology is already there. And we could be in a situation where before you know it, it accelerates gets mainstream adoption. And then a brand's are going to be behind the eight ball because they weren't prepared for all of this. And I think it's very clear that blockchain technology, which is kind of the the main technology behind web 3.0, and NFT's is going to have a profound effect on eCommerce. And I'm just going to try to touch on a couple of ways where I think that will be the case, there's going to be enhanced security. The one of the main benefits of blockchain is is how the information on it is verified. It's it's almost hack proof from a from a Situ from the standpoint where if someone wanted to kind of change information on the blockchain, you'd have to have a majority of computers that were accessing the blockchain simultaneously change the data, or it will be rejected. So it there's there's some inherent security in there. It can provide protection against data breaches, and fraudulent transactions. For that reason, we might think of sort of self executing escrow transactions, if I'm paying a lot of money for something, and I don't have that product in my hand. That could be problematic, particularly if you don't have a lot of confidence in the buyer. But the way blockchain works, so you could have currency, you know, being held in escrow. And then once you receive the product that automatically gets released without any further intervention by a third party. There's less potential for fraud with payments. I know a lot of brands a lot of companies deal with credit card fraud all the time. Because if someone uses a stolen credit card, you may get an order, you may ship out a product only to get a chargeback weeks later. And by then you're out of that you don't have the product anymore, the money gets pulled back by you know, MasterCard, or Visa and your your there's nothing you can do about it. But the way cryptocurrency works, that you know that money gets transferred, and there's not going to be a way to claw it back those those transactions happen very quickly and instantly, and protect you know, the person that received the money from those sorts of clawbacks that are very common with with more conventional payment systems. There's a lot of talk about better Supply Chain Management, its base, Blockchain is a publicly accessible digital ledger that can be shared securely among everyone in your supply chain. And it can be the one place where all that information is stored. So it the coordination that you can do the transparency across the supply chain, a lot of a lot of people think that's going to revolutionize how the supply chain works. There's also related to that, you know, potential ability to digitally track products and shipment in a very secure way. They're the way blockchain works. So you're going to have an expanded access to consumers. You don't need to have a credit card, you don't need to have a formal banking relationship. When you're operating in cryptocurrency, you could securely pay for things without having any relationship with a bank. So there's a potential to open up commerce transactions to consumers that maybe don't have conventional banking. Again, I think that the the concept of no chargebacks could be huge for companies because the money is transferred, you have it. There's not a central authority that can take that back from you. And I really think this is probably the most important thing to consider about there's just a huge potential for increased brand and consumer interaction, particularly through the use of NFT's. You know, brands can have NFT's that their customers own, that you can be used to validate that a customer is really enthusiastic about your brand that has purchased a lot of products. And that can be used to give all sorts of benefits. And I'll talk a little bit more about that going forward. But I think the main point is, is that this technology, perhaps in these ways, perhaps in others, is really going to affect eCommerce beyond kind of the the more the way that a lot of people think it will where we're going to be looking at wearing virtual goggles and in a shopping mall, that that may happen as well. But I want to stress that this technology goes far beyond that sort of virtual shopping situation. It's really what we're talking about is evolution of the Internet, the next stage of the internet, how we interact with computers, how we interact online. You know, when we talk about Web3, that's kind of a general term for that next step in the internet, it's a collection of technologies that's going to make, you know, that makes NFT's possible that makes the Metaverse possible. So when we talk about Web3, that's really what we're talking about. And I want to, you know, make this point just because I feel like it when I'm talking with brands, it could really help them understand where, where all this technology is headed. So when we talk about Web1, the first generation of the web, that is the very early internet, when you would you would get on you would go to a web page, and you would see information. And that was useful. It was a resource you didn't have there wasn't interactivity, audit, you know you didn't users in postings themselves was more about static websites. When we talk about Web2, that's kind of where we're we are now maybe we're a little bit in the Web3, but mostly, it's Web2, where the Internet became interactive. It was very centralized around major providers, like social media companies, Facebook, Twitter, those are the central platforms that people access. But there's also you know, Google, and a lot of those those other platforms that aren't necessarily social media that you access, we were able to share information on the internet, we were able to interact with others on there. And that's to a large degree where we are now when we talk about Web3, the future of the internet, you know, the main things that are going to be different is that it's going to be a lot less centralized, decentralized, you know, not as platform dependent. Right now, you may have accounts on various social media platforms, very various shopping sites. The idea behind Web3 is that a user will get to control their digital persona. Sometimes it's called like a digital wallet. And they'll be able to, you know, use that account use that means of access, use that information to access all the different platforms. And the user gets to control that digital wallet, that digital persona. And it gets accessed by the various platforms. You know, the big part of Web3 is, you know, the blockchain, which is the technology that empowers. You know, when we talk about the Metaverse and NFTs, and cryptocurrency, you know, we have what we talked about a little bit earlier, various privacy and security built into the infrastructure of Web 3.0. It's just part of how it's going to work. Then we also have the other things that we that we see a lot when people talk about the Metaverse, it's 3d graphics and environments. But what I come back to, it's all going to be about connectivity, putting power in back into the users hands, to interact with everything that's online. So to talk a little bit about NFT's I don't want to get very technical about it. But what I want to just kind of talk about it in general concepts that I think are important to brands in a very general level. An NFT is a means of establishing ownership over digital assets. That's one of the kind of the blessings and the curses of digital assets right now. They're very easy to copy. They're very easy to duplicate. There's really no way to prove that you own it within the technology. Obviously we have things in the law, like copyright and trademark that can help establish ownership. But when something is online, whether it's you know, a piece of art, a picture music, you know, a bunch of texts, it can be copied so easily and quickly. And it's very hard on the technol technological level to establish ownership over those sorts of digital goods. And the other thing is that NFT's introduced the concept of scarcity, to virtual goods. And, again, this is a blessing and a curse. One of the great things about digital goods is that, in theory, they can be spread around, there's no extra cost for duplicating them. But when you think about what makes something valuable, so much of it is tied to scarcity, you know, gold is valuable, because there's not an unlimited supply of it, in the same concept applies to practically anything. So there's a lot of things that can come out of the fact that we can make digital products scarce in some ways. So to talk a little bit about what that means, like, what are some of the use cases that we'll have for NFTs, I don't know for sure what they're gonna be. But I've talked to a lot of people in this space. And there's a lot of really interesting concepts out there. Obviously, you know, digital tickets would be one way, you know, used to go to a concert, you would have your ticket, you would maybe keep the stuff as a souvenir, but you know, you have a digital ticket now. And you know, once that ticket gets scanned, if there's some artwork or something attached to it, that is now your souvenir from that concert, and that can be stored in your digital wallet, and your parents are not going to clean out your room, after you move out and throw it away, it's always going to be there, you're going to have it. And I think that's the benefit. You can use NFT's to provide access to exclusive content and deals for your best consumers, the NFT being in their digital wallet that can validate them to you and know that, oh, this is a person that buys a lot of our products, we're going to introduce a new product line. And let's give everyone that that everyone all of our good customers early access to that. And this is a means of validating who they are, it really has the potential to do some amazing things with brand customer interactions. And also, one of the one of the intriguing uses that I've heard is that, you know, tagging an NFT to a physical good, like let's say, you go and you buy a new car, in that car comes with an NFT that goes in your digital wallet, whenever you take your car in for maintenance, or, you know, any sort of any sort of work being done on the car, all that can be recorded and tied to that NFT. So instead of having to keep paper records of all the maintenance you've done, it's there in the NFT. If there's a recall on the product, and you get that taken care of that can all be included on the NFT we go to trade in the car, the dealer verifies that all that's been done via the NFT. There's no paperwork, it's all digitally trapped in electronic. And that could apply to all sorts of goods, high end luxury goods or anything just to be able to validate what the product is you might have bought a refrigerator. And you know, it's a particular brand, but all of a sudden, you need to replace the water filter, and you go online and you see oh, there's 30 different water filtered water filters that it could be, but it could, you could validate which one you have with that NFT. And you would know exactly what parts that particular item needed. So there's just all sorts of really interesting ways that we could use NFT's are just very much scratching the surface there. So turning to brand protection a bit, I'll kind of want to come, you know, start with these three main takeaways, and I'll go over them at the end. But we talked a lot about how the internet is evolving. And that current uses of the Metaverse and NFT's may seem silly or not mainstream, but they're going to be a big part of the Internet's future as the use cases evolve. I think it's important that brands start preparing today, to make sure their IP rights are secured. In this new space, you know, one of the things that, you know, in particular is just because you have a trademark that protects the physical version of your product that may not apply to virtual versions of it. And there are ways that you can do that, you know, the trademark offices all over the world are accepted are starting to process registrations for virtual goods. And if you're a brand that thinks you're going to participate in this space, virtually, it may be important to secure those trademarks. And there's no better time than today before it becomes an issue to start doing that. That in general is going to be like and-
Aaron Conant 24:29
I see we're almost at a time here. But you know, I'm thinking of that, you know, the brand of the trademark where you know, somebody launches your brand internationally, this is, you know, in the past, right, and then you have to either go buy it, you know, in China was a perfect example, right that my previous brands, they'd already taken the brand name and gotten a trademark there. Were using it for me to use an app to go buy back. You're saying this could potentially happen in the Metaverse.
Adam Sherman 24:59
Yeah You've you've got to, you've got to approach a
major brand, you have to do it or somebody will just grab it and run with it.
Right? It's important, you want to start doing that now before that happens, and then I'll go through quickly for the rest of this. I know we're running up on time. And you should start thinking about protecting yourself now on some of these, you know, Web3 NFT marketplaces, because there's already a lot of infringements happening. There's a lot of brand protection challenges. You know, anonymity and pseudonymity is a big problem online. Now, it's even bigger in this space. The, you know, Web3 is designed to help users stay anonymous. So that gives you that causes all sorts of issues when you're trying to, you know, protect your brand. NFT's can't be destroyed either, they can be quarantined off, what you call burned, but you can't just remove NFT's from a blockchain, once they're created. There's we talked about how it's decentralized, there's no central authority that can fix things for you. So you got to do a bunch of things to work within the system to protect your brand, it's not the same as being able to report to, you know, Amazon, to remove this listing, or Facebook to remove this content. I talked already about making sure that your trademark classes, your trademarks are registered to include virtual goods. Right now, we're, we're dealing with a lot of secondary marketplaces, there's a bunch of them that are out there, they're, you know, these are some of the big ones. They're all over the world. And you can see the various traffic numbers. And again, I'm happy to share the slides with anyone I'm gonna go over pretty quick because we're running up on time. But, you know, if you go and you search for your brand, I did some searches for Rolex, there's all sorts of content on there. Now, that's probably not authorized. That's using Rolex as trademarks. And people may think that this is associated with them. You've got people that are registering what we call blockchain domains, like that Ferrari dot eath. And that can be used to impersonate the brand, how a brand operates. And web 3.0 is largely going to be determined by you know, their identity is going to be associated with these blockchain domains. And if this is, if Ferrari doesn't own this line, and someone else does, there's all sorts of things that can be done, there that aren't great. Our approach to enforcing in protecting is kind of the same as what authorities does for a lot of online brand protection, we want to make sure you have that foundation in place, we want to make sure that we're monitoring the various channels and prioritizing the biggest infringers, we want to use investigation where we can to figure out who's behind them that we want in a regular enforcement strategy to make sure that we're getting those removed. Thankfully, a lot of these online marketplaces are pretty good about responding to intellectual property complaints. So we, we work with them a lot, and we can get those removed. But it's important to have kind of a systematic way of handling it, because there's a lot of these marketplaces out there, they vary a lot and in how much traffic they get, they vary a lot per brand about who you know, where the biggest problems are for your brand, and maybe on one of the smaller parts, you know, marketplaces that has a lot of infringement going on. And we want to make sure that it's tailored to protect your brand. And then we can regularly monitor those, figure out the types of infringement that we're seeing, and then put a plan in place to use your IP to get those infringements removed. So it's similar to how we approach a lot of brand protection, we want to make sure it's tailored to your brand. And what we're seeing. So again, returning to these takeaways, the best time to get get your house in order is right now, you know, make sure you have those registrations in place. And then you know, start, don't ignore the space, don't let it get out of hand before you try to fix it. Because it's much easier to keep it clean and get it clean. But again, I'm happy to talk about this with anyone I know we're up on time, but happy to answer any questions that have come up.
Yeah, I just said, one. We can connect you with them where and how do we register? And so I think that's, I mean, I just see that we're over. I want to be respectful of time, but more than happy Adam to connect to you.
Yeah, it again, this is this is a big area. This is a short presentation. There's there's a lot to say here. And I'm happy to have conversations with anyone who wants to follow up with specific questions. There's my contact information, you should all feel free to reach out to me.
Yeah, we can connect you afterwards. And I think that's it. I think it's, you know, almost like to have an audit done of what's going on currently. And then a Does anything need to be fixed. And then hopefully, there's nothing out there yet. And you're just in a proactive mode. But again, I mean, we saw this happen with Amazon. We saw this happen internationally across multiple marketplaces, brand protection over and over again, the the number one thing that you know, that you had up there, one of the top things was like all marketplaces they're global. And so yeah, so it'll end up being a global issue. Today we're gonna wrap this one up. Adam, thanks so much. You guys are awesome. Really appreciate you and all the education you provide for the network as a whole. Thanks to everybody who dialed in, we'll follow everybody with the connection over to Adam. And with that, we're gonna wrap it up. Hope everybody has a fantastic Wednesday everybody take care stay safe. We look forward to having you at a future event. Alrighty,
Thanks a lot, everyone. Bye


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On this Memorial Day 2014, we honor all those in the military who have given their lives in the defense of the USA. So many heroic men who have made the ultimate sacrifice to keep America free. God Bless them all.
Let us never forget the sacrifices made!
Even though it rips my heart out every time I listen to it, I love "Mansions of the Lord." If you didn't know it, its lyricist is Randall Wallace, who wrote it for the movie "We Were Soldiers" when he realized there was no memorial Army hymn in the vein of "Eternal Father, Strong to Save" for the Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard.
I have the same feelings as you do Cathy when I listen to it. Thanks, Cathy.
Thank you for this beautiful tribute. And thanks to Cathy for the information.
:-))) Well, tell Dad I appreciate him too!


text:
HealthStream, in Partnership with Association of periOperative Registered Nurses, Advances Resuscitation Education with First-in-the-Industry, Role-Based Simulation Program
HealthStream receives Notice of Allowance for new patent for its proprietary methodology for building role-defined, specialty resuscitation education and certification
NASHVILLE, Tenn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--HealthStream (Nasdaq: HSTM), a leading provider for workforce and provider solutions for the healthcare industry, today announced the launch of its Resuscitation Specialty Sims™, which are simulation-based scenarios for healthcare professionals that build off of their foundational resuscitation knowledge and allow individuals to practice cardiac arrest response within their respective specialty environment. The first specialty area, Operating Rooms (OR), is launched today in partnership with the Association of periOperative Registered Nurses (AORN). Additional Resuscitation Specialty Sims will be introduced in 2021.
When hospitalized patients experience cardiac arrest and resuscitation efforts are initiated, fundamental resuscitation knowledge and skills of the clinical team members are always critical as the starting point. Importantly, those urgent, tense resuscitation events are team efforts where each healthcare professional has a distinct, important role to play. The outcome of the resuscitation effort depends on the collaboration of each clinical team member fulfilling their role competently and in coordination with each other. HealthStream's new Resuscitation Specialty Sims focus on developing the role-based competency of each clinical team member—working within the group dynamic that occurs in resuscitation events.
"It is critical that perioperative nurses receive education specific to their environments," said Linda K. Groah, Chief Executive Officer, AORN. "We are excited to be in partnership with HealthStream for this type of industry-first resuscitation education."
The first specialty area, Operating Rooms, provides two common scenarios: respiratory arrest and pulmonary embolism. Each scenario provides a learning option for five different roles typically enacted in resuscitation events as a part of the team. Those roles include: Team Leader, Compressor, Airway Manager, Medication Administrator, and Defibrillator Operator. There are 10 separate Operating Room simulations, which can be quickly completed in 10-15 minutes from any mobile device.
"When hospital staff are alerted with a code blue, a rapid response by a well-coordinated, competently trained team where each person works in concert with the other can make the difference between life and death," said Robert A. Frist, Jr., Chief Executive Officer, HealthStream. "The Resuscitation Specialty Sims will add to healthcare professionals' overall resuscitation competency and confidence by expanding their individual, role-based competencies. Our methodology for building role-based education is unique, powerful, and innovative—and it has been approved for a patent."
HealthStream has received a Notice of Allowance from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for patent application No.16/721,700: "Systems and Methods for Health Education, Certification, and Recordation." The approved patent covers HealthStream's proprietary methodology and system for using data to build a role-defined, specialty pathway of resuscitation education and certification for healthcare professionals.
In partnership with AORN, HealthStream is offering a preview of the Resuscitation Specialty Sims today at 1:00 p.m. CT in a free webinar. To register for the webinar, click HERE.
About HealthStream
HealthStream (Nasdaq: HSTM) is dedicated to improving patient outcomes through the development of healthcare organizations' greatest asset: their people. Our unified suite of solutions is contracted by healthcare organizations across the U.S. for workforce development, training & learning management, talent management, credentialing, privileging, provider enrollment, performance assessment, and managing simulation-based education programs. Based in Nashville, Tennessee, HealthStream has additional offices in Jericho, New York; Boulder; Colorado; Denver, Colorado; San Diego, California; Chicago, Illinois; Portland, Oregon; and Raleigh, North Carolina. For more information, visit http://www.healthstream.com or call 800-521-0574.
This press release includes certain forward-looking statements (statements other than solely with respect to historical fact) that involve risks and uncertainties regarding HealthStream. These statements are based upon management's beliefs, as well as assumptions made by and data currently available to management. This information has been, or in the future may be, included in reliance on the "safe harbor" provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The Company cautions that forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause the actual results, performance, or achievements to be materially different from future results, performance, or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements, including that the anticipated financial and strategic benefits of the acquisition may not be realized, as well as the result of risks referenced in the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2019, filed on February 26, 2020, the Company's Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the three months ended June 30, 2020, filed on July 30, 2020, and in the Company's other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission from time to time. The Company undertakes no obligation to update or revise any such forward-looking statements.
Mollie Condra, Ph.D.
HealthStream
mollie.condra@healthstream.com

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


COMMODOR, we base our human politics on listening, understanding and 15 years of experience.
We make the difference by being present on the field and selecting high profile personals which are able to deliver a tailor made service solutions to our clients. Pragmatism and ability to react quickly are our core values.
Because every customer is above all a partner, we accompany him throughout the overall approach as we are convinced that collaboration begins with the good interpersonal communication and understanding of each other.
Copyright © 2009 Commodor. All rights reserved.


Beth has enjoyed working with children and families at Blacknall since 2006. She and her husband Eric have lived in Durham since 1993, and have three adult children. In her free time, Beth enjoys knitting, reading, gardening, and preparing/eating good meals with her family and friends.


Even in this day-and-age of readily available APIs and RSS/Atom feeds, many sites offer none of them. How do you get at the data in those cases? Through the ancient internet art of screen scraping.
The problem then becomes: how do you get at the data you need in a pile of HTML soup? You could use regular expressions or any of the various string functions in PHP. All of these are easily subject to error, though, and often require some convoluted code to get at the data of interest.
Alternately, you could treat the HTML as XML, and use the DOM extension, which is typically built-in to PHP. Doing so, however, requires more than a passing familiarity with XPath, which is something of a black art.
What if you could do that with PHP?
While it does not implement the full spectrum of CSS selectors, it does provide enough to generally allow you to get at the information you need within a page.
The above queries for ul.bs-sidenav li a — in other words, all links within list items of the sidenav unordered list.
When you execute() a query, you are returned a Zend\Dom\NodeList instance, which decorates a DOMNodeList in order to provide features such as Countable, and access to the original query and document. In the example above, we count() the results, and then loop over them.
Each item in the list is a DOMNode, giving you access to any attributes, the text content, and any child elements. In our case, we access the href attribute (the link target), and report the text content (the link text).
Another use case is for testing. When you have classes that return HTML, or if you want to execute requests and test the generated output, you often don't want to test exact contents, but rather look for specific data or fragments within the document.
We provide these capabilities for zend-mvc applications via the zend-test component, which provides a number of CSS selector assertions for use in querying the content returned in your MVC responses. Having these capabilities allows testing for dynamic content as well as static content, providing a number of vectors for ensuring application quality.
While this post was rather brief, we hope you can appreciate the powerful capabilities of this component! We have used this functionality in a variety of ways, from testing applications to creating feeds based on content differences in web pages, to finding and retrieving image URIs from pages.
Get more information from the zend-dom documentation.
This article originally appeared on the Zend Framework blog at https://framework.zend.com/blog/2017-02-28-zend-dom.html.


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[Statement] Indigenous Women Speak out: Anti-Terrorism Act is a direct threat to us as rights defenders -LILAK
Human Rights Online Philippines / August 9, 2020
Indigenous Women Speak out: Anti-Terrorism Act is a direct threat to us as rights defenders
Indigenous women speak out and stood up against the Anti-Terror Act. They filed a petition before the Supreme Court questioning the constitutionality of Republic Act 11479.
Surmounting the challenges and difficulties of fulfilling technical legal requirements, Teresa dela Cruz, an Aeta Abelen from Zambales, and Nora Sukal, a B'laan woman from Tampakan, South Cotabato, are two of the petitioners of the IP-MORO petition led by the Atty. Tony La Vina and Atty. Efrenita Taqueban as co-counsels. Other petitioners are leaders, mostly women, of indigenous communities from Cordillera and Mindanao, as well as from the Moro communities of BARMM. LILAK (Purple Action for Indigenous Women's Rights), a collective of feminists and women activists advocating for the rights and empowerment of indigenous women, is also one of the petitioners. This comes two days before the celebration of the International Day of Indigenous Peoples (Aug. 9).
In a time of pandemic, the Duterte government railroaded a bill that would neither combat COVID-19 nor better the situations of many Filipinos suffering from the pandemic. The year 2020 has seen worsening poverty, unemployment, and hunger while Duterte strengthens the military and police to battle against what it considers terrorism – the growing anger, disgruntlement and resistance to its violent, corrupt, anti-people governance.
The vague definitions of terrorist and terrorist act in ATA endanger indigenous peoples who, for years, have been threatened, harassed, terrorized and red-tagged as they assert their rights to their ancestral lands. Even before the introduction of the Anti-Terrorism Bill, the Duterte government has accused indigenous leaders – who are defenders of the environment and natural resources – of being enemies of the state.
According to the UN Human Rights Office, 248 activists were killed from 2015 to 2019, Global Witness tagged the Philippines the most dangerous country for environment and lands rights defenders. They counted 133 killings during Duterte's presidency; 46% of the cases are believed to have been perpetrated by the Armed Forces of the Philippines; 44% occurred in Mindanao; and 22% of the victims were indigenous people. A large percentage of the killings were related to land-grabbing of agribusinesses, plantations, and mining companies and state-sponsored development projects such as mega dams and power plants. These are from killings which were reported. There are more acts of violence and killings within their ancestral domains which are not officially documented and reported.
Teresa and Nora are indigenous women who are in the frontlines of their communities' struggle against large scale mining within their ancestral domains, and land grabbing. They themselves are victims of different forms of harassment and threats; and they fear that they are the targets of the law. According to Teresa, "Kami na mga naninirahan sa bundok, at doon nagtatanggol ng aming karapatan para mabuhay, ay nangangamba na kami ay matuturing na terorista. Dahil sa ilalim ng pamahalaang ito, ang sino man ang di payag o di sang-ayon sa kanilang gawain ay tinuturing na kaaway (We who live in the mountains, where we fight for our rights to live, are afraid that we will be considered terrorists. Because under this administration, whoever is against of their actions are considered enemies)".
The ATA is an obvious weaponization of the law aimed to silence dissent. It is a violation of human rights and a mockery of the Philippines' legal systems. The Anti-Terrorism Council (ATC) that has the power to permit arrests, surpassing the power of the judiciary, will consist of presidential appointees, Duterte's loyal "yes men".
LILAK will continue to support indigenous women and their struggles, as we join hands, and link arms in our collective defense and assertion of our rights against Duterte's fascism, impunity, and misogyny.
For more information please contact,
judy pasimio – 09175268341 | judy104@lilak.net
Shar Balagtas – 09771966122 | sharbalagtas.lilak@gmail.com
Include your full name, e-mail address, and contact number.
Human Rights Online Philippines does not hold copyright over these materials. Author/s and original source/s of information are retained including the URL contained within the tagline and byline of the articles, news information, photos, etc
August 9, 2020 in Statement. Tags: HumanRights, Indigenous peoples, Terror Law, Women
[Press Release] Groups mark IP month with stories of women against mining -ATM
[Press Release] Anti-torture advocates, women and child rights groups among new petitioners vs. Anti-Terror law filed at SC -UATC
[Press Release] On the 48th Anniversary of Martial Law: Women's Groups Submit 33rd Petition vs. ATL
← [Statement] Epekto ng MECQ sa pagbubukas ng klase sa Agosto 24 -TDC
[From the web] Anti-Terrorism Act cannot win against terrorism! Fight for A Democratic, Ecological and Peoples'-Centred Philippines! -MindanaOne →


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Sarmad Kashani, or simply Sarmad (ca. 1590–1661) was a Persian-speaking Armenian mystic and poet who travelled to and made the Indian subcontinent his permanent home during the 17th century. Originally Jewish, he may have renounced his religion to adopt Islam. However "his conversion was probably only nominal and superficial, since he himself later warned the Jews not to convert themselves". Sarmad, in his poetry, states that he is neither Jewish, nor Muslim, nor Hindu.

Early life
Sarmad was born in Armenia around 1590, to a family of Jewish Persian-speaking Armenian merchants. Sarmad had an excellent command of Persian, essential for his work as a merchant, and composed most of his works in this language. He produced a translation of the Torah in Persian. He studied under Mulla Sadra and Mir Findiriski before migrating to the Mughal Empire as a merchant.

Travels in the Mughal Empire
Hearing that precious items and works of art were being purchased in India at high prices, Sarmad gathered together his wares and traveled to the Mughal Empire where he intended to sell them. In Thatta, in present day Sindh, Pakistan, one of his close disciples was a Hindu called Abhay Chand. Although there is debate on the nature of their relationship very little is known about the life of Abhay Chand and no historical records to confirm the details of their encounter, except Sarmad's own poetry. Some scholars have argued that, while Sarmad employed Abhay Chand to translate the Torah as well as Old Testament and New Testament,  it is possible that Abhay Chand converted to Islam or Judaism. It is important to note that, in later years, Sarmad grew critical of all religions and took a more spiritual position.

At some stage, he abandoned his wealth, let his hair grow, stopped clipping his nails and began to wander the city streets. Although it is widely speculated that Sarmad and Abhay Chand moved to Lahore, then to Hyderabad, settling finally in Delhi, however there are no credible sources to confirm the events.

Life in Delhi
The reputation as a poet and mystic he had acquired during the time the two travelled together, caused the Mughal crown prince Dara Shikoh to invite Sarmad at his father's court. On this occasion, Sarmad so deeply impressed the royal heir that he vowed to become his disciple.

Sarmad has been witnessed by the French physician and traveler, François Bernier, who reported Sarmad as a naked faqir.

Sexuality
Abhay Chand was a Hindu disciple of Sarmad Kashani. The nature of their relationship is debated by historians. There are no historical records to confirm the details of their encounter, except Sarmad's own poetry. The biography of Sarmad Kashani published by caretakers of his shrine states that he had fallen for a Hindu boy named Abhai Chand whose father eventually relented and allowed them to be together.

Death
After the War of Succession with his brother Dara Shikoh, Aurangzeb (1658-1707) emerged victorious, killed his former adversary and ascended the imperial throne. He had Sarmad arrested and tried for heresy. Sarmad was put to death by beheading in 1661. His grave is located near the Jama Masjid in Delhi, India.

Sarmad was accused and convicted of atheism and unorthodox religious practice.

Aurangzeb ordered his Ulema to ask Sarmad why he repeated only "There is no God", and ordered him to recite the second part,"but Allah". To that he replied that "I am still absorbed with the negative part. Why should I tell a lie?" Thus he sealed his death sentence. Ali Khan-Razi, Aurangzeb's court chronicler, was present at the execution. He relates some of the mystic's verses uttered at the execution stand: "The Mullahs say Ahmed went to heaven, Sarmad says that heaven came down to Ahmed." ... "There was an uproar and we opened our eyes from the eternal sleep. Saw that the night of wickedness endured, so we slept again."

Abul Kalam Azad on Sarmad
Abul Kalam Azad, one of the leading political personalities involved in the Indian independence movement, compared himself to Sarmad, for his freedom of thought and expression.

See also
 Dabestan-e Mazaheb

References

Bibliography

Rubā'iyyāt-i Sarmad, ed. Fazl Mahmud Asiri, with a preface by S. Qazvini, Prabhat Kumar Mukherjee Shantiniketan (Visva Bharati Series 11), Shantiniketan 1950.
Abul Kalam Azad, Sarmad Shahid IN:  S. S. Hameed, The Rubayat of Sarmad, New Delhi 1991, p.18-41.
Cook, D. (2007) Martyrdom in Islam (Cambridge) .

Ezekial, I.A. (1966) Sarmad: Jewish Saint of India (Beas) ASIN B0006EXYM6.
Gupta, M.G. (2000) Sarmad the Saint: Life and Works (Agra) .
Katz, N. (2000) The Identity of a Mystic: The Case of Sa'id Sarmad, a Jewish-Yogi-Sufi Courtier of the Mughals in: Numen 47: 142-160.
Rai, L. (1978) Sarmad. His Life and Rubais, Hanumanprasad Poddar Smarak Samita, Gorakhpur.
Schimmel, A. And Muhammad Is His Messenger: The Veneration Of the Prophet In Islamic Piety (Chapel Hill & London).
Sarmad di Kashan. Dio ama la bellezza del mio peccato. Le quartine di un poeta mistico della tradizione indo-persiana, ed. Carlo Saccone, Centro Essad Bey-Amazon IP, Seattle 2022

External resources

Sarmad, Mohammed Sa'id
Majid Sheikh, Sarmad the Armenian and Dara Shikoh
Sarmad, a mystic poet beheaded in 1661

Sarmad
Sarmad
Sarmad
Sarmad
1661 deaths
Year of birth unknown
17th-century Indian poets
Sufi mystics
Converts to Islam from Judaism
History of Delhi
Mughal Empire Sufis
People executed by the Mughal Empire
Executed Indian people
Converts to Hinduism from Islam
Iranian Hindus


Royal Wootton Bassett Town recorded a 2-1 victory away against relegation battling Longlevens in their penultimate Hellenic League Premier Division fixture of the season.
Royal Wootton Bassett Town set up the chance to finish their Hellenic League Premier Division campaign with a hat-trick of victories after they saw off Longlevens 2-1 in their penultimate game of the season.
Goals either side of half time from Gio Wrona and Elias Youssef did the damage as Sam Collier's side recorded a deserved triumph against a team they will meet again in three days' time in a quirk of fixture scheduling.
It was a fine result too as, despite their lowly league position, Longlevens have been in good form recently, finding this at seemingly the right time as they seek to battle against the drop.
But Bassett ensured they were second best on this occasion, a dubious second half penalty from Shaun O'Connor not being enough for them to take anything from the game.
The visitors got off to a fast start and had a string of early chances.
After just six minutes Longlevens 'keeper Kane Winman was forced to claw over the bar after a Wrona free kick took a deflection on its route towards goal. Mark James then nearly scored from the resulting corner but his powerful header was cleared off the line by Jonty Welch.
A dipping Wrona volley flew narrowly over on sixteen minutes before he teed up Brad Pagliaroli, who went close. Pagliaroli, scorer of two in the win over Holmer Green on Saturday, followed that up by shaving the bar with a powerful strike.
Finally, on 22 minutes, Bassett got the goal that their early pressure deserved. And it came through the lively Wrona. Linking up well with Pagliaroli, his shot from the edge of the area caught a deflection and found its way past Winman.
Longlevens' best opportunity of the opening period came on the half hour mark when Welch saw a snatched effort almost squirm past Gary Aulsberry. But aside from that the hosts appeared largely toothless.
Their task then got harder two minutes after the restart when Youssef took advantage of a poor clearance from Winman and made no mistake.
With Bassett seemingly in control though, Longlevens got a lifeline ten minutes later when awarded a soft penalty. O'Connor was in no mood to pass that opportunity up either, and he confidently drove the spot kick down the middle.
That set up an exciting finish, with Longlevens forced to throw men forward to try and salvage at least a point.
At the other end, Bassett almost grabbed a third as Ollie Long nearly diverted a Gio Wrona corner into his own net, while Carl Evans headed straight at Winman from the ensuing set piece delivery.
There was still time for some late drama. But unfortunately for Longlevens it resulted in them being reduced to ten men as Luke Kavanagh was dismissed for dissent after his colourful response to receiving a yellow card. Manager Craig Martin joined him in taking an early bath as he was ordered from his dugout.
The teams now go again on Saturday.
For Bassett, it's a chance to make it three wins on the bounce and move past the fifty point mark that they last recorded in 2014-15. And victory will match the record number of points - 52 in 2000-01 - they have recorded in a Hellenic Premier Division campaign.
Meanwhile, for Longlevens it's the first of a crucial final five games as they aim to escape the potential relegation zone.
Plenty to play for then. It therefore should not be a dull end-of-season encounter.
Royal Wootton Bassett Town FC is a Charter Standard Community Club.
Website designed and developed by Scott Smedley for Royal Wootton Bassett Town Football Club (v9.0.0 - 2015).
©2015-2019 Royal Wootton Bassett Town Football Club. All rights reserved. Copying and printing is permitted for personal use only.


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text:
Tag Archives: Yayoi Kusama
Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama
Last summer, I had the good fortune of catching Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors at the Seattle Art Museum. I'd had a taste of her work at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, which owns a Mirror Room in its permanent collection, so I was ready to soak up more polka dots and tubers. One thing I learned at the SAM was Kusama's obsession with pumpkins. (See Infinity Mirrored Room–All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins, 2016.) Pumpkins are a fairy tale-ish interest of mine (an essay for another time), and when I saw her autobiography Infinity Net (trans. Ralph McCarthy) in the museum shop, I needed to have it.
Well, I was disappointed that Kusama has little to say about that purported obsession, beyond this: "I was enchanted by their charming and winsome form. What appealed to me most was the pumpkin's generous unpretentiousness. That and its solid spiritual balance." Painting that gourd, and onions, was a form of practice. I'll just have to think on what she means by "solid spiritual balance."
Pumpkin-disappointment aside, Infinity Net is a fascinating portrait of an artist's ambition and drive. Escaping her hometown of Matsumoto City, where it was respectable to be a patron of the arts but not be an artist, she landed in New York City after a brief sojourn in Seattle. She received early encouragement from Georgia O'Keefe, who worried she'd starve in New York City and invited her to New Mexico. But Kusama declined; NYC was where stars were made. So she would suffer, working despite conditions such as this: "New York is almost as far north as Sakhalin island, and I froze to the bone and developed a pain in my abdomen."
Between her singular focus on repetition (to counter hallucinations, to obliterate herself, to lose herself in infinity), an incredible work ethic, and caring friends like O'Keefe and Donald Judd, she soon gained notice. She also developed a relationship with the reclusive Joseph Cornell; he was the only woman he'd had a relationship with, and would keep her on the phone for hours. His neediness eventually led to some shocking meanness. While recovering from prostrate surgery, he asked if she'd come visit. She said, "When Dali wants to see me…he sends his Rolls Royce for me. Shouldn't you show more respect for the love of your life?" Yowzah. So he sent a woman in a Mercedes, and she describes their last encounter in graphic, unflattering terms. Still, she calls him her greatest artist friend, and I'm not sure if it is to make up for her admitted cruelty or because she genuinely feels that way, and/or whether she feels that way because he wrote her many poems and worshiped her, and she seems pretty set on lasting fame and stardom.
Kusama returned to Japan in the 1970s and has been voluntarily living in a mental institution there since 1977. The final chapter, on her drive to make lasting art as she comes nearer to death is particularly moving: "And no matter how I may suffer for my art, I will have no regrets. This is the way I have lived my life, and it is the way I shall go on living."
Tags: Infinity Net, mirror room, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, pumpkins, Ralph McCarthy, Seattle Art Museum, tubers, Women in Translation, Yayoi Kusama
Categories arty tidbit, books, food
DAUGHTERS OF THE AIR Reviewed in The Seattle Times and Included in Seattle Review of Books' "Seattle Novels That Made My Year"
The term "dumpster fire" has been used in reference to 2017 at least several million times. At one point in October, I considered taking some classes on how to cope with anxiety and insomnia that were organized specifically in response to our collective ongoing sense of doom. I didn't though—because I was overwhelmed! Ha.
From my New Year's Day reading, ALICE IN WONDERLAND, illustrated by Yayoi Kusama.
Despite everything, I need to celebrate 2017 on a personal level. Daughters of the Air, which I'd toiled over for years, finally came out, and people are reading it and telling me they are enjoying it! Michael and I celebrated the holiday season with candles and latkes and lights and dim sum and snow (!) and The Shape of Water (a beautiful love story!) and chocolate peanut butter pie and New Year's Eve back at the Hotel Sorrento's Fireside Lounge for reading (me, Teffi's Subtly Worded, him Hanna Krall's Chasing the King of Hearts, which I'm happily adding to my Women in Translation Month queue), writing, live jazz, people watching, and bubbles. What more could I ask for?
Dark chocolate with candied roses, a holiday treat. Resolution: eat more flowers.
The day after Shelf Awareness called Daughters "a striking debut from a writer to watch," The Seattle Review of Books included it among five Seattle novels that made Paul Constant's year:
Anca Szilágyi's Daughters of the Air is a fantastic debut — a magical realist fairy tale set in gritty New York City. It's the kind of book that leaves you utterly confounded at the end, as you try to remember all the twists and turns that you took along the way. It feels like an impossible book, somehow — a product of alchemy, a creation of unearthly talents.
Wow! The book hasn't been panned yet, but when it does, I'll hang on to these two reviews for dear life. I was also super happy to see Tara Atkinson's novella Boyfriends included in the end-of-year list; I gobbled it one sitting and highly recommend it.
Yesterday afternoon, I was thrilled to see The Seattle Times reviewed Daughters too—my first review in a major American newspaper!
Anca L. Szilágyi's intense debut novel, "Daughters of the Air," locates a deeply personal story against the surreal backdrop of [Argentina's Dirty War].
DAUGHTERS OF THE AIR in fine company at Elliott Bay Book Company.
DAUGHTERS OF THE AIR at Phinney Books
I'll be moseying up to a newsstand later today so I can rustle up the paper and feel the newsprint on my fingers.
Every year, I strive to collect 100 rejections. (Why? See this wonderful Lit Hub article by Kim Liao.) In 2016, I made it to 106, plus eight acceptances. In 2017, I garnered 93 rejections and 16 acceptances. This is actually bad in terms of my other annual goal, which is to be rejected 90% of the time. I need to aim higher.
There are just four spots left in my online Fiction II class at Hugo House, which begins on January 14. You can sign up here.
Thank you for reading all the way to the end of this longer-than-usual blog post! As a gift, here is a Goodreads giveaway for you. Already read Daughters? Leaving a review on Goodreads, Amazon, or Powell's would help spread the word! You can do this regardless of how you obtained the book (other bookstores, my publisher, the library, and all that fun stuff).
Tags: Alice in Wonderland, Amazon, Argentina, Argentina's Dirty War, book reviews, books, candied roses, Chasing the King of Hearts, chocolate peanut butter pie, dark chocolate, Daughters of the Air, dim sum, eating flowers, Elliott Bay Book Company, fiction class, giveaway, Goodreads, Hanna Krall, Hotel Sorrento, Hugo House, Kim Liao, Lit Hub, novel, novella, online classes, Paul Constant, Phinney Books, Powell's, rejection, Seattle Review of Books, Shelf Awareness, Subtly Worded, Tara Atkinson, Teffi, The Seattle Times, The Shape of Water, WITMonth, Women in Translation, Women In Translation Month, Yayoi Kusama
Categories announcements, arty tidbit, books, botany, Dirty, fairy tales, fiction, film, food, journal-y, publishing, reading, resources, writing


Lee Mi Young crossed the Tumen River from North Korea into China a month ago. Now she is hiding in a safe house in China, getting help from a Chinese-Korean missionary, and hoping to start a new life. She is terrified to be talking to the first foreigner she has ever seen, more so because she is painting a negative picture of her country. She could be executed in North Korea for this conversation (Lee Mi Young is a pseudonym).
In her mid-30s, with pretty, bright brown eyes and carefully stenciled eyebrows, Lee says she left North Korea because she was tired of never having quite enough to eat. Things are better than they were during the famine of the mid-'90s, but they have begun to deteriorate since July when North Korea announced a series of economic reforms that many observers said signaled the start of a serious effort to fix the country's collapsed command economy. The government raised the salaries of workers such as miners and teachers, increased the cost of state rations such as rice and allowed the North Korean won to fall to about 150 to the dollar, much closer to its real black-market value than the 2.5 won to the dollar at which it had previously been pegged.
Lee says that in her hometown north of Pyongyang (she prefers we don't name it) the price of grain in the black market has risen, but people can't afford to buy it: Although salaries have been raised, the government has only actually paid them once since July. People need to supplement meager government rations with rice bought at exorbitant prices on the black market. "This was a reform for the rich," says Lee. "Things are worse than before."
Kim Jung Il is still fully in control of the country, analysts say. There are periodic reports of small signs of dissent — anti-government leaflets and graffiti, for example. Some defectors say family members will complain among themselves and possibly with friends. But North Korean defectors say that everyone is aware that anybody caught protesting publicly will be sent to a harsh prison camp, where they will be joined by members of their family. Lee, the young woman who fled last month, says she saw an old lady standing in line waiting for rations in August who suddenly said: "It is so difficult to live here. I can't stand this." Almost immediately, a man came up, tapped her on the shoulder and led her away. Other members of her family later disappeared without explanation.
What has changed in the past few years is the amount of knowledge about the outside world flowing into the country. Hundreds of aid workers have been in and out of the country in recent years, bringing with them new ideas and information. Thousands of North Koreans have crossed across the Tumen River into China attempting to flee or simply looking for food. Many come back not only with food, but also bearing tales of the wonders of China's booming cities and stores brimming with goods. According to one defector, Chinese-Koreans are bringing cell phones into North Korea, using them along the border and even leaving them behind for relatives to use — in a country where ordinary people don't have landline phones in their homes.
For impoverished North Koreans, China's flashy modern cities seem like paradise and many dream of going there. There is much more knowledge about South Korea as well. North Korean propaganda for years portrayed the South as a land of beggars oppressed by a rich elite. Many average North Koreans now know that isn't true, according to defectors. One reason: North Korean sailors, traders and workers who have been to places like Cuba and Libya come back with video tapes of American action movies. These are secretly circulated, with eager audiences gathering at the house of the very rare family rich enough to have a VCR player, sometimes with an English-speaker on hand to translate the dialogue. A record 600 North Korea defectors arrived in Seoul last year — this year's figure could top 1,000.
Some analysts argue the clash in the West Sea on June 29 (in which North Korea patrol boats fired on South Korea naval vessels, killing five sailors) was the work of disgruntled military leaders trying to warn Kim Jong Il to keep a lid on change. The conventional wisdom has always been that North Korea is afraid to open the door a crack because the system could unravel so quickly. Some defectors and aid workers report that there is a sense of instability and uncertainty in the country right now. Rather than the start of reform, we may be seeing a country starting to unravel already.
When I visited Pyongyang in August, it looked better than it had even six months earlier. There were open-air restaurants offering grilled meat — just like in Seoul — and people looked healthy and even vibrant. But the capital has always been an oasis reserved for party members and North Koreans loyal to the regime. Aid workers and diplomats say smaller cities lack regular electricity and people still can't get enough to eat. They probably aren't starving but malnutrition remains widespread.
North Koreans who live in the countryside may be marginally better-off than their urban cousins, because they are able forage for wild plants in the mountains and are allowed to grow vegetables on small private plots. Life is harsh for city dwellers dependent on the industrial economy. On the road from Pyongyang to the northeast corner of the country, you pass mile after mile of rusting factories — probably less than one third of the country's factories are actually running.
A Korea-American businessman who visited the city of Kaesong recently was shocked to learn it had had no electricity for 10 days. The only electric lights shining at night in Kaesong those illuminating monuments to the late "Great Leader" Kim Il Sung. Many city have electricity at certain times of the day. Foreign reporters who visited Shinuiju last month, for the unveiling of a plan to turn it into a free economic zone designed to lure investors, were struck by the contrast with the neighboring Chinese city of Dandong. Dandong at night is a blaze of lights; across the river, Shinuiju is in near-total darkness. Apartment blocks in Pyongyang are lit at night these days, but there are few lights outdoors — except, of course, those illuminating the gigantic statue of the "Great Leader."
To make a go of "special economic zones" such as Shinuiju, North Korea needs to massive foreign investment to rebuild its electrical grid and other key infrastructure. The country has never been self-sufficient in food and needs an industrial economy to make fertilizer to boost agricultural yield and to finance food imports to make up the shortfall. But the disappearance of foreign subsidies following the collapse of the Soviet Union saw a rapid de-industrialization — until the late 1960s, it had been ahead of South Korea economically. North Korea is now dependent on international food aid and donations of fertilizer, and desperately needs to get on the right side of the U.S. in order to get the loans it desperately needs from the World Bank — loans that the U.S. is now blocking. That has many South Korean analysts suggesting that the reason Pyongyang sudden nuclear confession is precisely that it hopes to put its nuclear weapons program on the table and trade it away for economic gains and security guarantees from Washington.


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Just one night of sleep loss can alter clock genes in your tissues
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Swedish researchers at Uppsala University and the Karolinska Institute have found that genes that control the biological clocks in cells throughout the body are altered after losing a single night of sleep, in a study that is to be published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.
"Previous research has shown that our metabolism is negatively affected by sleep loss, and sleep loss has been linked to an increased risk of obesity and type 2 diabetes. Since ablation of clock genes in animals can cause these disease states, our current results indicate that changes of our clock genes may be linked to such negative effects caused by sleep loss", says Jonathan Cedernaes, lead author on the study and a researcher at Uppsala University.
For the study the researchers studied 15 healthy normal-weight men who on two separate occasions came to the lab for almost 2-night long stays. During the second night the participants slept as usual (over 8 hours) in one of the two sessions, while they were kept awake in the other of these sessions, but in random order. To minimize the influence of various environmental factors, light conditions, food intake and activity levels in the lab were strictly controlled and the participants were bed-restricted when they were kept awake.
Following the second night on both occasions that the men were studied, small tissue samples were taken from the superficial fat on the stomach, and from the muscle on the thigh – two kinds of tissues that are important for regulating metabolism and controlling blood sugar levels. Blood samples were also taken before and after the participants had consumed a sugar solution to test their insulin sensitivity, a practice commonly done to exclude the presence of diabetes or a metabolic state called impaired insulin sensitivity, which can precede type-2 diabetes.
Molecular analyses of the collected tissue samples showed that the regulation and activity of clock genes was altered after one night of sleep loss. The activity of genes is regulated by a mechanism called epigenetics. This involves chemical alterations to the DNA molecule such as methyl groups – a process called methylation – which regulates how the genes are switched on or off. The researchers found that clock genes had increased numbers of such DNA marks after sleep loss. They also found that the expression of the genes, which is indicative of how much of the genes' product is made, was altered.
"As far as we know, we are the first to directly show that epigenetic changes can occur after sleep loss in humans, but also in these important tissues", says Dr. Cedernaes. "It was interesting that the methylation of these genes could be altered so quickly, and that it could occur for these metabolically important clock genes", he continues.
The changes that the researchers observed were however different in the adipose tissue and the skeletal muscle. "This could suggest that these important molecular clocks are no longer synchronized between these two tissues", Dr. Cedernaes says. "As such, 'clock desynchrony' between tissues has been linked to metabolic pathologies, this could suggest that these tissue-specific changes were linked to the impaired glucose tolerance that our participants demonstrated after the night that they had been kept awake"
The researchers do not at this stage know how persistent these changes are. "It could be that these changes are reset after one or several nights of good sleep. On the other hand, epigenetic marks are suggested to be able to function a sort of metabolic memory, and have been found to be altered in e.g. shift workers and people suffering from type 2 diabetes", Dr. Cedernaes points out. "This could mean that at least some types of sleep loss or extended wakefulness, as in shift work, could lead to changes in the genome of your tissues that can affect your metabolism for longer periods", Dr. Cedernaes concludes.
Uppsala University Original reporting by: Jesper Lodin
Benedict C et al. Acute sleep loss induces tissue-specific epigenetic and transcriptional alterations to circadian clock genes in men. The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, Published Online July 13 2015. doi: 10.1210/JC.2015-2284


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Hell Ship – The Journey of The Ticonderoga
A sea voyage | A tragedy | A love story
In 1852 the Ticonderoga was a handsome clipper ship with a nightmare hidden in its holds. She limped into Port Phillip after a nightmare voyage from England during which 100 of her passengers had died of Typhus.
A story almost lost, this is a true moment of Australian maritime folklore. Journey through hopes of a new world, then almost smell the rotting stench of them slipping away. All the time travel the themes of family, of grit and of courage – and love.
A young surgeon is thrust into the role of saving those remaining – and he did with a dedicated assistant at his side. This man was James William Henry Veitch. Michael Veitch's great great Grandfather and his assistant, Annie Morrison his great great Grandmother. For Michael, this is a very personal story.
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"Master story-teller Michael Veitch carries us back to early Melbourne with a personal history woven into our shared colonial past. He brings back from the dead the benighted souls who perished on the hellish journey of the Ticonderoga and the few wretches that survived. It's a poignant tale with a vividly regenerated cast of characters. Michael Veitch does it all, brilliantly and single-handedly." . . . Max Gillies AM


"I felt like I failed because I didn't know how common miscarriages were because we don't talk about them".
"it's important to talk to young mothers about the fact that miscarriages happen".
Mrs Obama told ABC's Robin Roberts on Good Morning America.


According to some analysts only one percent of all terrorist attacks occur in the West. But the November, 2015 attacks in Paris have galvanised the world. Paris is known as The City of Light, as the most beautiful city in the world, the epitome of all that the Western civlisation has been able to produce. Author Edward Rutherfurd, the grand master of the historical novel, has produced a dazzling epic about this magnificent city. Described as "grand and engrossing", Paris: The Novel moves back and forth in time, the story unfolding through intimate tales of self-discovery, divided loyalty, and long-kept secrets. As various characters come of age, seek their fortunes, and fall in and out of love, the novel follows nobles who claim descent from the hero of the celebrated poem The Song of Roland; a humble family that embodies the ideals of the French Revolution; a pair of brothers from the slums behind Montmartre, one of whom works on the Eiffel Tower as the other joins the underworld near the Moulin Rouge; and merchants who lose everything during the reign of Louis XV, rise again in the age of Napoleon, and help establish Paris as the great center of art and culture that it is today. The sights, scents, and tastes of the City of Light are brought to brilliant life.
Paris : City of love. City of revolution. This romantic story opens in La Belle Époque, the golden, hedonistic age of peace and joie de vivre. Moving back and forth in time across centuries, the story unfolds through intimate and vivid tales of self-discovery, divided loyalty, passion, and long-kept secrets both fictional and true, set against the backdrop of the city – from the summit of Montmartre to the gothic towers of Notre Dame to the grand boulevards of Saint-Germain, from the medieval world of saints and scholars to the modern French ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité.
The story of Paris is rich indeed: From the days of Notre Dame and the mighty Knights Templar to the expulsion of the Jews; from the age of heroic Joan of Arc, to cunning Cardinal Richelieu and the bloody conflict between Catholics and Huguenots; from the glittering court of Versailles to the Terror of the French Revolution; from the heyday of the Impressionists to the shame of the Dreyfus Affair, and the tragic mutiny of the First World War; from the 1920s when the writers of the Lost Generation could be found drinking at Les Deux Magots, to the Nazi occupation, and the heroism of the French Resistance.


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Q: How to access arrays from multiple different forms? Currently creating a project which requires me to declare a public array in the program class and then access and add to this array in one of my forms. When I declare the array in the program class, it says that it does not exist when I try to reference it in a different form.
How can I make the array accessible from all of my forms?

A: Declare it as a static variable in the Program class, something like:
public static string[] MyArr = {"my", "array"};

Then whenever you want to access it, use Program.MyArr.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


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Do you need Xbox Live to play Fortnite? see the explanation here !!!
Do you need xbox live to play fortnite - Fortnite is free to play, right? Not necessarily on all platforms. It's officially free to play on PC from the Epic Games store, but that's not the case for all platforms. Xbox and PlayStation 4 players require subscriptions to access any online game, including Fortnite.
Xbox blocks its online multiplayer content behind Xbox Live Gold. There are two levels for Xbox Live: Free and Gold. If you are looking to play online, you will have to pay for that gold membership. There are a few other updates available, including Game Pass and Ultimate, but if you just want to go online to play with friends, Xbox Live Gold is the cheapest option. Also Read : How to Unlock Raz Glyph Master
Sony does the same with its PlayStation 4 console. PlayStation Plus is Sony's version of Xbox Live without the additional tiers. The price of the program is approximately the same and you have the option of being billed monthly, every three months and annually. If you want to play online, you must pay at least a monthly fee to do so.
Nintendo Switch is the only console that doesn't charge its players a fee to play with their friends in Fortnite. Nintendo has a subscription service, Nintendo Switch Online, but Fortnite is still free to play on Switch.
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So do you need an Xbox Live subscription for Fortnite? Yes. And you need a PlayStation Plus subscription on PS4. If you want to avoid the subscription fee, your options are Nintendo Switch or PC.