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REPORT: New Title IX regulations bolstered due process at colleges, but Lhamon nomination threatens progress
Policies governing Title IX misconduct guarantee significantly more due process protections than policies outside these regulations.
Presumption of innocence is guaranteed at 90% of top universities in Title IX misconduct proceedings, but only at 62% of institutions for proceedings not governed by the regulations.
Lhamon's confirmation would torpedo improvements for student due process rights.
Tuesday's Title IX guidance from the Department of Education is latest evidence that the Biden administration will not hesitate to undermine student due process.
PHILADELPHIA, July 21, 2021 — The due process rights of America's college students are up for a vote this month as senators consider whether to return Catherine Lhamon to her post as the Department of Education's assistant secretary for civil rights. A new report from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education examines the gains realized since Title IX regulations went into effect last year — improvements that could vanish if Lhamon is confirmed.
"We were finally seeing student rights moving in the right direction, but Catherine Lhamon's nomination just shows how threatened the progress we've made is," said FIRE Executive Director Robert Shibley. "If confirmed, Lhamon's history and rhetoric indicate that she will put her thumb on the scale of justice — ripping away fundamental rights and encouraging a patently unfair shadow justice system that deprives students of their right to due process."
"Spotlight on Due Process 2020-2021" examines policies at 53 top national colleges to see how many of 10 fundamental procedural safeguards those institutions guarantee to students accused of violating college policy. FIRE's research grades institutions on providing basic protections such as the presumption of innocence, the right to impartial fact-finders, and the right to meaningfully cross-examine one's accuser.
Last May, the Department of Education released new regulations for how colleges must respond to alleged violations of Title IX, the 1972 law that prohibits sex discrimination in federally funded educational programs. The Title IX regulations, which apply to nearly every college and university in the country, public or private, carefully balance the rights of complainants and accused students alike. At 85% of schools included in the report, Title IX sexual misconduct policies scored noticeably higher than other policies, demonstrating the positive effect of the regulations on due process in Title IX cases.
Not every accused student benefits from the regulations, however. Procedures governing non-Title IX misconduct, such as fighting, destruction of property, or sexual misconduct not covered under Title IX, still lack basic due process protections. Many institutions went from the already confusing and unfair status quo of having two disciplinary systems with different rules — one for sexual misconduct and one for all other misconduct — to having three such systems, simply adding another set of rules for sexual misconduct governed under the new Title IX regulations.
"Institutions are taking every opportunity to avoid providing due process across the board — even going so far as to create three separate disciplinary systems per campus to afford students as few protections as legally permissible," said FIRE Program Officer Ryan Ansloan. "America's top universities are offering rock-bottom due process protections. That's why lawmakers and the courts must require a single, clear, and fair process for adjudicating campus misconduct once and for all."
FIRE's findings were troubling: Despite improvements, 44 of the 53 universities studied received a D or F grade for maintaining at least one system of policies that guaranteed no more than 4 of those 10 safeguards. This is a slight decrease from 49 institutions in FIRE's previous report.
Other notable findings from the report include:
Nearly two-thirds (62.2%) of America's top 53 universities do not explicitly guarantee students that they will be presumed innocent until proven guilty. By contrast, more than 90% of rated universities' Title IX policies include a presumption of innocence, which, contrary to Lhamon's assertion during her recent Senate confirmation hearing, is explicitly required under the new regulations.
Three out of every four schools (75.4%) do not provide timely and adequate notice of the allegations to students accused of wrongdoing before expecting them to answer questions about the allegations. By contrast, less than one-fifth of schools (18.9%) have a Title IX policy that fails to provide such notice.
Fewer than one out of every six schools (15%) guarantee a meaningful hearing, where each party may see and hear the evidence being presented to fact-finders by the opposing party, before a finding of responsibility. On the other hand, almost two-thirds of schools (64%) have a Title IX policy that guarantees a meaningful hearing.
On Tuesday, the Department of Education issued new guidance to outline how the department will enforce Title IX in the coming months. The guidance is further evidence that the administration is focused not on protecting student rights, but on advising institutions how to provide as few due process protections for students as possible.
"This report is proof that institutions will go to absurd lengths to abridge their students' rights," said Ansloan, lead author of the report. "These ratings represent the fates of real students who face suspension or expulsion without a fair process. No student should have to face a confusing, unwieldy campus judicial system with the deck already stacked against a fair process."
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to defending and sustaining the individual rights of students and faculty members at America's colleges and universities. These rights include freedom of speech, freedom of association, due process, legal equality, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience — the essential qualities of liberty.
Katie Kortepeter, Media Relations Associate, FIRE: 215-717-3473; media@thefire.org
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FIRE's award-winning Newsdesk covers the free speech news you need to stay informed.
FIRE investigates allegations MIT canceled Mike Pompeo speech about China
Keeping censorship track record alive, Fordham bans RAs from speaking with media
Fordham's claimed commitment to free speech gives student employees the right to speak to the media in a personal capacity. Seems Fordham cares more about good PR at any cost.
Censorship in India exposes the gap between 'free speech' and the law
Modi's government has suppressed the release of a BBC documentary chronicling his role in the country's 2002 religious riots that resulted in over a thousand deaths.
University of Arizona faculty demand fair grievance committee elections after admin caught removing 'problematic' professors from ballot
FIRE expressed concern about potential administrative interference when selecting who could appear on the ballot. We were right.
Callin' Baton Rouge: New Louisiana laws protect student free speech and due process rights
Kentucky governor signs historic, bipartisan campus due process bill into law
Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania bills threaten academic freedom over race and sex instruction
North Dakota enacts law ensuring colleges and universities fulfill their First Amendment obligations
Montana enacts two laws to protect free speech rights on college campuses
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School's almost out for the summer, which means a big jump in activity at the library from some of our youngest members. From picture books and graphic novels to easy readers and classic chapter books, they'll be flying off the shelves as families swing into summer.
Summer can be a great time to branch out with some new titles and authors or to kick back and enjoy a classic favorite. There's nothing more relaxing to me than a nice warm day and a great book, even one you've read before. In fact, every summer I take a break from new books, and pick up some of my favorite titles.
Every hero has a story and these heroes are no different. Enjoy the stories and continue the tales far beyond the pages with some of these unique (and entirely non-alcoholic) beverages inspired by the titles below.
Get your wolf costume ready, and prepare to conquer the wild things. As this title is a classic adventure, only an adventuresome, classic drink will do. Try your hand at a Homemade Fruit Slurpee and let the wild rumpus begin. A tried-and-true cherry version would be fantastic, or truly embrace this wild journey through the jungle by including a mix of tropical fruits.
"If you give a mouse a cookie, he's going to ask for a glass of milk." An ice cold glass of milk, be it cow, soy, almond, or mouse—okay, probably not mouse—is definitely needed to properly enjoy this fun story. Since our mouse friend always wants something more, make sure you've got some extras on hand. You might even try making your own flavored milk, including this yummy Cookies and Cream version.
This classic picture book is one of my favorite books for storytime. From chocolate cake to salami, this caterpillar eats his way through everything in his path; however, for some reason, whenever I read this story I always crave strawberries. This Strawberry Apple Smoothie is every bit as vibrant in color and taste as the illustrations in this Eric Carle book. It's the perfect nourishment for a heroic transformation from caterpillar to butterfly.
Decadence and imagination are the only words for Willy Wonka's outrageous chocolate factory in this Roald Dahl title. To truly indulge in Charlie's experience, you'll need something tremendously chocolatey and over-the-top. And with a glass elevator at your disposal, even the sky's no limit for your creativity. My recommendation is a giant chocolate milkshake embellished any number of ways. This Toasted Marshmallow Chocolate Milkshake, full of toasted marshmallows and rich chocolate ice cream, is definitely one to try.
It's not all Butterbeer and Firewhiskey in the wizarding world—the everyday choice of wizards everywhere is a nice, cold glass of Pumpkin Juice. Sweet, tart, and just a little bit spicy, this is the perfect drink to wake you up in the morning or sip at while working on your summer transfiguration homework. Just keep an eagle eye out for Professor Snape—you never know when he might slip a little veritaserum in there.
In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, up is down, right is left, and the main inhabitants are playing cards instead of people. For the Hatter's tea party, you have to go with a wildly delicious Nutella Iced Coffee (with a crazy straw of course). I know that seems off, it's a tea party after all, but I think you need something a little nutty for this event. Besides, the Hatter's never seemed the traditional type to me, and it's been tea time for ages, so he could probably use something different by now. Not to mention that poor, snoozing dormouse could really use a little caffeine. For those not quite into coffee, try the recipe without it for a fantastic twist on chocolate milk.
Between a grieving, bullied main character and the storybook world fighting for their home against "The Nothing", this books desperately needs something comforting. With its warming, classic flavors, full of spice and sweetness, a Hot Caramel Apple Cider is just what I crave when I read The Neverending Story. When those occasional, stormy summer days hit, all I want to do is bury myself in a nest of warm blankets, grab a mug (or thermos in Bastian's case) of comforting apple cider, and dive into this amazing tale.
Every hero starts their journey somewhere; Frodo's journey starts with a birthday party. So in keeping with the party theme, I think a Birthday Cake Shake is something of "special magnificence" to truly celebrate with his Uncle Bilbo. Plus with the cake, milk, and sprinkles, it's like an extra meal—maybe you can squeeze it between second breakfast and elevenses.


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Upon completion of required prequalification, the student will be placed in the next available specialized course and notified accordingly. Future dates will be available upon completion of required pre-qualification course.
Instructors who have received a recommendation from a certified school director and will be instructing physical fitness in Basic Law Enforcement Training (BLET) and Detention Officer Certification Course (DOCC). Individuals must have successfully completed the general Instructor Training course prior to entering the Specialized Physical Fitness Instructor Training course or qualify for a special exception from the Criminal Justice Standards Division.
To provide the knowledge and skills necessary to instruct physical fitness training in Basic Law Enforcement Training (BLET) and Detention Officer Certification Course (DOCC).
► Administer fitness tests and assess cardiovascular abilities, body composition, muscular strength, muscular endurance and flexibility.
► Prepare exercise programs for BLET, DOCC, and in-service personnel.
► Advise students of a nutritional awareness program.
► Design and administer a physical fitness program that minimizes injury, maximizes performance and reduces training liability problems.
This course employs lecture, discussion, practical exercises and workout sessions.
Attendance is required at all class sessions. Students must be able to complete a daily rigorous exercise schedule, demonstrate the ability to conduct fitness assessments and profiles, and design exercise programs to complete the course. Upon course completion, students must attain a minimum of 75% on a Commission-administered written examination prior to being certified as a Specialized Law Enforcement Physical Fitness Instructor.
Students must bring a calculator, athletic clothes, good running shoes, extra towels, and their duty issued ballistic vest.
NOTE: Effective February 2013: Student's applying for our Specialized Instructor Training courses no longer have to submit a CPR card in order to enroll or attend. Students will have to submit the CPR card to the Criminal Justice Education and Training Standards Division once they complete our Specialized course and apply for certification.


Previous Post Not Your Average Friday!
Girls + diet industry = problems! Big problems!
I am leaving this reply to support your stance and concern. I feel perhaps that it is something you may use to show the schools that partipate the reaction of a mother who nursed a child through an eating disorder.
My daughter fell ill and it was no bodies fault.
But once we started to fight the illness, I found I needed a lot of support and understanding, the school my daughter attended was a lifeline. They were amazing and without their fantastic attitude and care we would have found it a lot harder to recover.
This school has also had a teacher fall prey to this insidious illness, and wrote a book again acknowledging the incredible support she recieved during her recovery.
This school achieves a very high degree of success from it's students because a a girls school it acknowledges the right of all young ladies to be who they are. This school encourage all girls to be the best they can be to the best of their ability, and acknowledges that not all will reach the highest benchmark. They still celebrate each and every girl from the 99.9 enter score to the young apprentice starting a TAFE course.
The reason I highlight this is because this school would never allow an industry that causes their wonderful girls to doubt themselves. In fact I challenge the Alliance of Schools to do their homework, and watch a brilliant show that explains just what advertising and industry do.
They create a demand for their services by pointing out a perceived flaw, oh you know you have a little muffin top there, tsk, tsk, not so healthy!
Here I have the solution to that, buy all my prepackaged food and you will be so much better off.
The diet industry is there to make money, no other reason. Just as you would frown at the successful CEO of McDonalds at such a conference I fail to see how the leader of another industry should be allowed to peddle their wares at such an event also.
Eating disorders are serious life threatening diseases, they are triggered by body dissatisfaction and dieting. Again you would never dream of a tobacco company at the conference , I personally put the diet industry in a similar category, and before you scoff, remember cigarettes were once promoted as a " health benefit".
Please do not confuse success with money making ability, there are many successful people out there who don't run large companies with large turnover.
Stand firm and tall on this issue. When a corporate monolith can grab an opportunity by the throat that will deliver them GENERATIONAL leverage in their market, it takes somebody with similar sized conviction and decency to wrest it from them. Let's make it clear what's at stake here.
First, Jenny Craig has INFLUENCE like few other corporates. Cashed up. Big. Respected by and large. When they wield the cash, people listen. And what are they saying? That they know what's right for people who DO NOT LIKE THEIR BODY IMAGE. And as a result of the Alliances invitation, they can now authoritatively proclaim that IT'S OK NOT TO LIKE YOUR BODY IMAGE AND WE HAVE THE PRODUCTS TO HELP YOU. And they have the perfect forum to convince the most vulnerable demographic in this regard. Girls. What an opportunity it must be for Jenny Craig when they can have permission to embed this message, via the pulpit of the Organisation deemed responsible for leading educational institutions for girls, into the consciousness of young girls. I cannot, for the life of me, understand WHO of proper moral construct and values, would allow this! Strategic alliances are normally built between like-minded individuals holding authoritative influence in their professional networks. I can only shudder to think the relationship and how it has evolved between the Alliance leadership and the leadership of Jenny Craig. Abhorrent.
Yeah, it's really enlightened to try and ban someone because you don't like the company they work for.
Is that what you preach to the people you claim to be helping – if you don't like their views shut them down.
You should rename your outfit as the Unelightened Thought Police.
Thanks for commenting Christopher. You raise a really important point – the issue of freedom of speech.
I will state that I have never aimed at banning Amy Smith or Jenny Craig. I understand that Jenny Craig is a legitimate business and have made it clear I appreciate Ms Smith is a highly accomplished woman. My letter, above, expresses my concern over the selection of the leader of a diet company being selected as a speaker at a conference for leaders of girls' education.
As an educator, author, media commentator, and advocate for girls I felt I had a professional responsibility to voice my concerns ( which may I add was not easy to do given the Alliance is made up of women I deeply respect) . As a friend to many young women struggling with eating disorders, and a mother to two young girls, I also felt compelled to speak my truth. Under freedom of speech, I also have the right to do this. As a sponsor of this event, I also have the right to withdraw my funding if I do not wish to see my funds spent spent legitimizing the diet industry in this way.
A colleague, Nina Funnell, offered me feedback which I think also raises a valid point: "If a respected expert in the field such as yourself can't offer feedback and raise concerns without risking attack how on earth can girls- who often feel disenfranchised and powerless- be expected (let alone encouraged) to stand up for the things they believe in. The teenage girl in me is cheering you on." Teen girls have incredibly radars for inauthenticity. I would feel quite the hypocrite talking to them about standing up for what they believe in if I didn't model that I have the courage of my convictions.
encourage girls to be discerning consumers and critical thinkers and to find their own voice and power in a complex world." Education is the key. In fact, in much of my writing on young women I warn of policing and patronizing.
In all honestly, based on the Alliance's response to the expressions of concern they have received to date, I do not think they will reconsider their choice of speaker. However, my goal in making my concerns public was to illicit vital conversations on girls and dieting and body image. This issue has absolutely achieved this.
This morning a teacher at a girls' school posed a query of what girls in schools learning about freedom of speech might make of the protests. I encouraged him to get his students to read widely from both perspectives and debate the issue. Debates like this, that will now begin happening in our classrooms, also are an absolute win.
At least you have confirmed that your aim is to "illicit" discussion on dieting and body image.
On the one hand you claim that you encourage girls to reach their own conclusions and on the other you're withdrawing your support in order to silence a speaker.
Who do you want to ban next? The chiefs of tobacco companies, Crown, KFC, McDonald's, the TAB. I note this website rejects any comment that uses the word that describes what people do when they go to Crown!
Your modus operandi is to side with competitors of Jenny Craig and to shut down the company's managing director.
The conference kerfuffle is a beat-up and a stunt by Bodymatters and Unenlightened Education.
I'm sorry Christopher I genuinely do not understand the points you are making so I can't reply, but note I have not censored your right to continue to attack me in this ill-informed and bewildering manner.
Chris, you are suggesting Danni and Enlighten Education have ulterior motives. Only a person who has NO knowledge of who they are, what they have done to inspire, and help so many girls cut through the BS and see who they really are, and realise their potential would suggest that they are just in it to try to 'police' what people say and think. The diet/meal replacement industry have NO place at a girls education conference. If this person was an educator on healthy eating and exercise in the name of health and wellness, then YES! That would be acceptable, but this is Jenny Craig, an international multinational corporation who prey on womens self loathing to sell their product, that does not even work in the long term (and there are statistics to prove this claim). This is a fight worth fighting and when a bloke actually takes the time to visit your blog to say otherwise, he proves it by his actions.
You really should acquaint yourself with what is under discussion here.
It is a staff conference not a "girls education conference", and it is patronising in the extreme to suggest that teachers shouldn't be allowed to hear a speaker, even if her crime is to head up Jenny Craig.
Are you seriously suggesting she's going there to try and flog dietary products to a group of teachers?
Anyway, you've given the game away with your description of Jenny Craig as an "international multinational corporation" – clearly that disqualifies her right away.
She used to work for Telstra…would you have let her speak then? Probably not, it's a wicked capitalist outfit.
She used to work in advertising…would you have let her speak then? Probably not, she's hand in glove with the wicked multinationals.
I'm the mother of a 27 year old female educator. She is a PE and English secondary teacher. . She was a joyous, beautiful and healthy young woman. At 163cms tall and 60kgs she eputomised a muscular toned PE teacher.
After a couple of years along comes the man she fell in love with who despises "fat" and is a fitness fanatic.
My daughter was in no way fat or unfit.
A good attitude for an educator? A good attitude for a male?
Keep up the good work Danni. A lot of our educators are of the same age and thinking as my daughter and with that way of viewing themselves they don't need to be further influenced by Jenny Craig's presence at this event.
Ok Chris, but you are missing my point completely. I'm just pointing out that they are HUGE in their field, giants in the competitive diet industry. That's the only reason I described them that way.
I have an iPhone, I drink coca cola so I am not anti corporation! To put that one single sentence under the microscope, I suspect is an attempt to draw attention away from my other points. Why bother?
I am fully aware that she is not addressing the students themselves. That does not make it an acceptable choice for the Alliance of Girls schools. If they had complete conviction in their speaker selection choices, they would have not taken the decision to remove all wording from their promotional material for this gathering which connects her to JC or the diet industry. But they did.
And no, I don't for a second suggest that she will promote the JC product to the attendees, but by inviting her to participate the Alliance of Girls Schools is endorsing the company as one they approve of. And in my opinion, that is not okay.
Not everyone has an obsessional hatred of the Jenny Craig organisation, Simone Patterson.
If someone wants to pay the company to help them lose weight, then so be it.
I'm all for people making up their own minds, and not being railroaded by Jenny Craig's competitors and/or opponents, who are trying to silence the managing director at this conference.
Having her as a speaker on a panel is not endorsing the company she works for, anymore than having Gail Kelly on a panel is endorsing Westpac.
If this particular representative appears, I sincerely hope she will be discussing the possibility for a women to aspire to and become CEO of an international corporation, or whatever other role she aspires to, and some of the basic knowledge and steps and attitudes required.
Here is an article in todays the Age newspaper which states why the diet industry is an unethical and deceitful one. It's not just this one brand, and it's not just about this industry. The Alliance should not be allowing representatives of ANY industries with poor ethical standards to speak at their gatherings, full stop.
Standing up to the Thought Police.
Bravo to these letter writers in The Age!
The Butterfly Effect » Blog Archive » The weight-loss industry has no place in our schools.


text:
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Hungary Pulls Out of Eurovision Song Contest Due to Alleged Homophobia
Eurovision logo
Hungary is reportedly pulling out the Eurovision 2020 contest for reasons that some may see as homophobic.
According to reports, the reason the country is withdrawing from the contest has to do with the contest's perceived gay-friendly policies. The withdrawal is the first known instance a nation boycotting the contest due to social issues. Though Russia in the past has criticized it for what it considered promoting homosexuality.
Not only is Hungary one the more conservative countries in Europe, especially in regards to social issues, but it is currently under the conservative leadership Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has drawn comparisons with U.S. President Donald Trump because his strong views on hot-topic issues such as gay rights.
Officially, the Hungarian government has not provided a reason as to why the country will not participate in the event. Though sources inside Hungarian public service broadcaster MTVA have told The Guardian that the government has been discouraging it from promoting events relating to gay rights, apart from the country's annual pride parade, which takes place in the capital city Budapest.
index.hu, which is a Hungarian news website, has further reported that — according to sources inside the government — authorities consider Eurovision "too gay" and therefore demanded that the country pull out the contest.
However, Orbán's fice has denied that this is true. In a statement that will only further draw comparisons between Orbán and Trump, his fice called the report "fake news." Though it failed to provide what it believed was the actual reason for withdrawing from the contest.
One Orbán's domestic policy initiatives has been something called "family first," which seeks to provide incentives for traditional families. The prime minister has also ten reiterated his opposition to gay marriage.
Orbán is not the only person in the Hungarian government to oppose gay rights. László Kövér, who is the speaker the Hungarian parliament, recently compared same-sex adoption to pedophilia.
Published December 1, 2019 By Leal LouiseTagged art, Donald Trump, More, music, News, No, red, tv
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
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The Speakers Assembly of Southwest Florida is hosting a lecture series at the Bonita Springs Performing Arts Center. Dr. Zigang Dong will share information on cancer research and prevention on Thursday, Feb. 7.
Dr. Dong attended Columbia University and has received post-Doctoral training at the National Cancer Institute. He continuously conducts research on the identification of molecular and cellular targets in carcinogenics and chemo-prevention. Currently, he resides as the Executive Director of Cellular & Molecular Biology at The Hormel Institute.
To attend this event, tickets are on sale for $30 for members of The Speakers Assembly of Southwest Florida, or $45 for guests. The doors open for this event at 3:15 p.m. with the lecture beginning at 4 p.m. The lecture will conclude at 5 p.m.
Contact Arden McCurdy, Executive Director of The Speakers Assembly of Southwest Florida, for more information on the scheduled events and speakers.


We award scholarships to students and professionals from a number of countries to study in Flanders as well as travel grants to Flemish/European students to do fieldwork/internships in one of the 31 scholarship countries in Africa, Asia or Latin America.
International master programmes (ICPs) are accredited (advanced or initial) master programmes (EQF 7) consisting of 2 or 4 semesters (60 or 120 ECTS respectively) on a subject that is relevant to or specific for development. We support a selection of 15 ICPs and provide 12 scholarships per ICP programme.
We only provide scholarships for the full duration of the master programme. It is not possible to apply for a partial scholarship.
Scholarship amounts can change at any time in line with decisions of the funding government.
Nationality and country of residence: A candidate should be a national and resident of one of the 31 eligible countries (not necessarily the same country) at the time of the application.
Age: The maximum age for a master programme candidate is 35 for an initial master and 40 for an advanced master. The candidate cannot exceed this age on the first of January of the intake year.
Professional background and experience: Priority is given to candidates who are employed in academic institutions, research institutes, governments, the social economy or NGOs, or who aim at a career in one of these sectors. However, master candidates employed in the profit sector or newly graduated candidates without any work experience can be eligible for the scholarship as well, depending on their motivation and profile.
Fungibility with other VLIR-UOS funding: Candidates working in a university where we already fund IUC, TEAM or SI projects, can receive an ITP-ICP scholarship if they clearly motivate the reason of their application and clarify why the participation at the ICP programme cannot be funded as part of the existing IUC, Team or SI programme or project funds.
VLIR-UOS scholarship applications and previously awarded scholarships: A candidate can only submit one scholarship application to us per year - irrespective of the scholarship type - and can therefore only be selected for one of our scholarships per year.
The Master programme candidate has never received a scholarship from the Belgian government to attend a master programme or equivalent or was never enrolled in a Flemish higher education institution to attend a master programme or equivalent before the first of January of the intake year.
In case you have any questions regarding your application or selection process, please contact the university directly!
Check the eligibility criteria for a scholarship.
If you meet all the criteria, have a look at the selected master programmes (15).
You can find the links to the all the master programmes' website here.
If a specific programme catches your interest, visit the website of the organising university and follow its instructions.
Via the university's website, you will have to apply for both admission to the programme as well as for the scholarship itself. When you apply for the programme, be sure to mention whether you wish to apply for a scholarship.
Do not apply for more than one master programme per year.
The dates of application are determined by the programme.
We receive the selection results of the programme organisers.
We will contact the selected candidates as well as the waiting list candidates by e-mail as soon as possible after selection, by mid-June at the latest.
The trainings target participants from 31 scholarship countries with relevant professional experience in the ITP's subject and who will be able to transfer the obtained knowledge and skills to a wider audience in their home countries.
We provide 12 scholarships per ITP programme. If any applications are open, you can find them here.
We only provide scholarships for the full duration of the training programme. It is not possible to apply for a partial scholarship.
The detailed current amounts and more information on the different allowances can be found in the document 'Allowances and guidelines for VLIR-UOS scholarships'.
International Plant Biotechnology Outreach (IPBO) at UGent, in cooperation with the International Potato Center (CIP), organizes a short term course for students, scientists and professionals from the public and industrial sector, who are involved in local crop (potato) improvement or genetic manipulation regulatory programs.
The course proposes fundamental background sessions on potato breeding, the use of molecular techniques in plant breeding, plant biotechnology, genetic transformation and new breeding techniques for potato. Experts from Europe and Africa will further give an overview of important biotic and abiotic stresses affecting the growth of potato and possible solutions to overcome these threats. In these sessions, special emphasis will be given on the effects of pests, diseases, fungal contamination, drought and climate change on the growth and yield of potato.
The course will continue with both theory and exercises for the understanding of the basic principles and methodologies of crop safety, risk assessment and science communication. The sessions will be interactive, including group work, presentations and discussions. The program also includes visits to a potato field trial and the processing industry.
A number of scholarships with support from VLIR-UOS for registration, accomodation and travel expenses are available for applicants from the VLIR country list. Preference will be given to participants from the public sector in Africa who are professionally involved in the topic.
Africa: Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, DR Congo, Ethiopia, Guinea, Kenya, Madagascar, Mali, Morocco, Mozambique, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zimbabwe.
2) VLIR-UOS targets applicants from research institutes, higher education institutes, the government sector (nation-al/subnational), the sector of social economy, an international organization or an NGO, with expertise in matters relevant to development. Applicants from the commercial profit-sector without expertise in matters relevant to the development of a country are not eligible.
A candidate who was awarded a VLIR-UOS-scholarship before to participate in a ICP, ITP or STI can only be awarded a scholarship to participate in the STI if the STI has a thematical connection with the previously followed program.


3 cottages, all complete with tourism rental licenses, communal swimming pool and plot containing grapevines used to make regional award-winning red wine. Located close to all amenities near the village of Espiche, as well as the coastline only 1.5km away.
These properties are located a few kilometres outside of Lagos, a short distance from local shops, golf courses and the coastline along with its beaches.
Each cottage has 3 bedrooms, a bathroom, kitchen and living area as well as carport and storage space. There is also outside space, terracing and a communal swimming pool so that the area can be enjoyed in the holiday season too.
Surrounding the properties are over 14,000m2 of land used to cultivate grapes to make regional award-winning wine. This estate can be easily accessed from the main road, and with parking spaces onsite, this would make a perfect commercial rental opportunity.


Below are the 5 nearest locations to Loughborough.
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19 May 2021 14 min read
Scaling products beyond regular constraints
Sebastian Ungureanu
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One of the most difficult problems in business is scaling your product and business beyond regular constraints. Typically, people assume products don't scale because of time, money, and people constraints - I disagree.
In this article, I'll explain why products don't actually scale, and walk you through three steps to overcome these hurdles; doing things that don't scale, working your brain muscles every day, and being bold.
My name's Sebastian and I'm a Product Marketing Lead for a cybersecurity company called Bitdefender. In this article, I will try to be your source of education, enlightenment, and entertainment.
A very serious problem, one of the most difficult problems in business is scaling your product and business beyond what can be considered a regular constraint.
Over the past couple of years, I've taken a couple of products from zero to one, in the words of Peter Thiel, or from zero to over $1 million annual recurring revenue after having previously worked on some more mature products.
Scaling is not a conventional problem
Let me tell you it's much harder to scale something that doesn't really exist than it is to take something that is well established and maybe grow 15 to 20% a year. The reason for this is because scaling is not a conventional problem in the sense that we can do X and get results Y.
We are pretty good at predicting impossible outcomes but quite bad at predicting success.
To give you an example of why that is, a question, who wants their product to be the most successful?
This is why we are biased towards predicting our own success, but also pretty good at seeing what else doesn't work for other people. We know what can possibly scale because we recognize the problems and usually not our own problems, but we don't know what will actually scale.
An example of that comes from 1903, the most horribly wrong person in history told Henry Ford's lawyer the horse was there to stay, but the automobile was just a novelty, a fad.
Obviously, he was a banker, investing against putting money into Henry Ford's business.
Hindsight is a beautiful thing
The result is called hindsight and everybody who wants to look smart today can say, "Oh, look, Amazon did all the right things in the 90s. Of course, they're very successful today". But can you say the same thing about your own product?
Can you say I am doing the right things now, and I will be successful 100% guaranteed in a couple of years?
Why people think products don't scale
Why do you think products do not scale? Usually, there are three things that come to mind.
One of them is time, but you can always prioritize. There's a way to decide on what to focus on. It's called the Eisenhower Decision Matrix, the American president with the same name used it.
Using it, you can map things across two scales, one of them is urgency and the other importance.
If things are not urgent and not important, you probably can safely ignore them.
If they are not urgent but they are important you can set a schedule for them.
If they're not important but they're urgent, you can always find someone to delegate to.
We as product marketers should focus on the things that are both urgent and important.
Another thing is money. But we can always raise money. For example, The Boring Company, it's not that they're dull, it's that they bore tunnels. It's an Elon Musk company, which was quite strapped for cash, if you can believe that, in the beginning.
They sold off 50,000 baseball caps at $20 apiece. Initially, they raised $1 million, and then they ran out of money. What they did was launched a flame thrower which made them $10 million, which they used for their main product, which is digging tunnels and connecting infrastructure underground.
Another reason is people. One of my favorite books on this issue is The Mythical Man Month by a guy called Fred Brooks. You might have heard of Brooks law which says any people addition to a project that's already late will make it only later.
Yes, you can hire, train, outsource people but if you don't do it at the right time, you're probably going to set yourself up for failure.
It's easy to remember, there's a magazine for each of these excuses.
What do we say to these people? We say, no, no, and possibly maybe.
Why products don't actually scale
Let's see why products don't actually scale.
Lack of focus - To our shame, one of them is we lack focus, we're in a lot of meetings all the time, we're looking at data, we're looking at the wrong data, we're interpreting it wrong, and we're not really looking at the market.
Bland ideas - A lot of what happens in the office is not as important as you think, for those of you who have done the pragmatic framework you may remember 'nothing important happens in the office'. It's true.
What does originate in the office is usually bland ideas, boring ideas, dull meets inoffensive, everybody's doing the same thing. There are ideas floating in the air and everybody's picking the same ones from the same exact pool of ideas.
Average execution - The other one is, obviously, average execution, because you can't really drive your positioning and your messaging if your starting point is a boring idea.
Let's see what constitutes a lack of focus. To do this, I want to play a little game in the form of a round of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire PMM edition. I want you to take a couple of moments and look at this image.
It's a real problem from 1942. The US Army looked at the planes that were returning to American bases and decided they needed to upgrade their product, their airplanes, so as to make them more resilient to enemy fire.
They looked at every plane that was coming to the base, mapped out where they had holes in the fuselage and what do you think their conclusion was? Which part of the planes needed more reinforcement?
The answer was the cockpit, the engines, and the tail needed the most reinforcement. The first reaction was 'we're going to look at where the most black spots are on this chart, and we're going to reinforce those'.
But luckily, they had a mathematician named Abraham Wald, who told them that their data is biassed, they were not collecting the right information, they are not looking at it from the right angle. The map actually showed them that planes who had suffered shots to the engines were not actually coming back to the base so you could drive a conclusion from it.
How much are you relying on data?
We're not as lucky as those people usually, we might or might not have BI teams who deliver the right insights to us. I'm willing to bet many of us are relying either too much or too little on data.
If you're relying too much, you probably are waiting to make decisions based only on data.
If you're using it too little, you're probably just using your gut instinct.
Do these look familiar?
This is controversial but if any of these look familiar to you, if you're doing these, these are not factors of growth. These are the things that allow us to hold on to our seats internally in our own companies.
Bland ideas
Another big issue is everybody has kind of the same ideas. This is the Ford Edsel.
It's a car that was first introduced in 1957, by Ford, with the following tagline, "It acts the way it looks but it doesn't cost that much".
Who would want a car that acted the way that thing looked? It was a resounding failure for Ford and it's a way for us to understand that inside-out ideas are actually detrimental to product success.
Bland ideas are sneaky and take lots of forms
They can take a lot of forms.
It could be for example Google Trends saying this is a good opportunity for us, which, if it does, means you're already late to the party.
You could say that everybody else is doing it, this is peer pressure, this is looking at the marketing saying "Oh my God, this is a feature our product needs, we cannot sell more because we don't have this feature" - it might be true, might not be true.
Ford Edsel syndrome
Then nobody else is doing it which I call Edsel syndrome, because there's a reason maybe why nobody else is doing that thing.
Finally, this is how it was always done, which is traditional peer pressure from dead people. Do yourself a favor if you're working for a company that doesn't allow innovation, says you cannot do this because we have a way of doing things, find a different company.
I know it's controversial, but this is what successful products look like...
Let's look at what constitutes a bold initiative. This is us on planet Earth, this is where SpaceX and Elon Musk have their headquarters, and this is Mars where Elon Musk is trying to get.
What he did is started a company called SpaceX, you might have heard of it. This is actually just a way for him to transport all of his products onto a new planet. He has Starlink, which is a way to connect everything interplanetary, it's a communication method.
Then he has the Boring Company which can dig infrastructure, he has Tesla, those ugly cars, which have actually been conceived for something like this on a different planet, and power everything with Solar City and Power Wall.
Average execution
To the opposing end of the spectrum, we have average execution from a lot of companies. You will know if you look around the industry, everybody else is doing the same thing.
If you're getting the same results, if you're benchmarking yourself and are happy you're right there in the middle then it's probably an average job.
I've got some more examples from the fashion industry. I've taken out the brand names, can you actually recognize which brands are shown in the pictures?
Everybody is doing the same thing. The clothes look almost identical. The style is a little different. But without the brand name label on the images, you could not recognize what they were doing.
A practical example of great
From the same industry, there is an example of a great marketing campaign. I bet you know who this is. In 1985 Tommy Hilfiger was an unknown with a low budget but was trying to make a name for himself. He collaborated with George Loise a legend of the American advertising industry.
With a $100,000 budget, they put up an ad in Times Square which said, the four great American designers for men are Ralph Lauren, Perry Ellis, Calvin Klein, and Tommy Hilfiger.
It was so outrageous that he would go after the biggest names in the industry, he who was a young unknown that people actually looked him up, and came into the Tommy Hilfiger store. Thus, he became the legend that he is today.
If that doesn't work, what does?
If doing the same thing as other people doesn't work, if being average doesn't work, if looking at data all the time doesn't work, then what does? I'd like to recommend you:
Do things that don't scale.
Work your brain muscle every day and,
Be bold, don't look back on what you've already done.
Let's take them one by one.
Do things that don't scale
Doing the things that don't scale is a bit counterintuitive, but it's what, for example, Y Combinator recommends to new entrants.
Recruit your first users one by one
You can actually recruit your first users one by one, it might be surprising, but you don't need fully scaled marketing campaigns when you're introducing the new product. You can go out and do it yourself.
Make them happy
For example, Stripe the payments processor that is now the number one in the industry, its founders were doing something different than everybody else. When you launch a trial, you usually go "Would you like to try our new product? I will send you a link and you can install it".
What they did was they'd ask, "Would you like to try our product?" And when people said, "Yeah, sure, why not?" They immediately told them, "Okay, give me your laptop, I'll install it right now". They had conversations with their users and tried to understand and make them happy, even if this means having a 30-minute call every day with your largest clients.
This is something you cannot possibly do at scale but if you do it with a sufficiently large number of people, then you will be able to eventually automate it.
Roll up your sleeves and solve the problems your product doesn't
Just roll up your sleeves and maybe try to solve the problem your product doesn't yet - do not scale before the demand is real. This is one of the pitfalls a lot of people fall into, wanting their products to grow and be successful.
Do things that don't scale: The Bitdefender Box
For example, I'm going to tell you a story about how Bitdefender turned a small plastic box into a scalable service. Back in 2015, we introduced the Bitdefender Box, which was a small network appliance that would protect IoT devices from consumers' smart homes.
It was a minorly successful product, it was the first of its kind and then a couple of years after we launched the Bitdefender Box 2. About this time we realized this wouldn't scale in this particular format, it required us to build the hardware, do the marketing ourselves, and generally put in a lot of extra effort just to make it scale the way we wanted to.
What we did was remove the physical constraints. We turned it into a software platform that would be able to integrate with basically any existing router. It's called the Bitdefender IoT Security Platform, and it's taken our manufacturing problems away from us and allowed us to really focus on integrating our service into as many products as possible.
We have achieved 20 times better market penetration with our collaboration with Netgear in the last year than we did in the previous four years with both versions of the Bitdefender Box.
What's scarier?
Back to my previous points, I want to ask you, what's scarier? Is it:
Solving problems in a way that isn't yet automatic, or
Solving a problem that doesn't exist with something automatic?
If there is an opportunity for you to grow, but the possibilities aren't there yet, just do the manual work yourself and then automate yourself out of the loop. Eventually, you will find the momentum you need to achieve success.
Work your brain muscle every day
Get 1% better every day
If you get one percent better every day, then you will eventually find yourself in a much better position than if you would maybe put in a lot of effort at one particular time and hope that your big launch will achieve you the success that you want.
Things a PMM should be good at
These are the things PMMs should be good at.
If you think you cannot get 1% better every day, then here's this list. Decide on a particular topic you want to work on, give yourself 30 minutes a day and you will eventually see better results with your products as well.
Have the audacity to put a yellow image in an article that didn't contain yellow. Don't be afraid to try new things because people are not going to remember everything that you did.
YouTube, a dating service?
For example, YouTube. Do you remember the early days of YouTube? Did you know they put up a Craigslist ad for attracting people who were into dating?
YouTube founders wanted their platform to get some initial traction so they tried a lot of things in those early years, putting even a Craigslist ad for I believe women between 18 and 35.
Slack, the video game?
Slack started out as a video game actually and once they realized the unit economics weren't there, and the product would actually cost them money out of their own pocket, they scratched the entire game, kept the chat component, and pivoted towards what is now arguably the most successful communication platform for businesses.
There are a lot of big names who started out as something different or did something different along the way.
Samsung started out as a general convenience store including dried fish and flour exports to China.
Nokia started out as a wood pulp mill then they did some rubber boots. There's actually a company called Nokian, which does car tires and rubber boots, and was a spinoff from the original Nokia.
Nintendo started out as a hanafuda playing card company, it's a type of popular card game in Japan. Then they tried a lot of things along the way, including being a taxi company, ramen noodle company, they even had some love hotels at one point which is exactly what you think it is.
Western Union was initially a telecom service until the telephone almost put them out of business and they had to pivot toward being a money sending service. My bet is they will need to do something like this again with the rise of revolute and instant payments.
Playdoh, the popular children's putty was initially a wall cleaner for coal residue. We are no longer using coal-fueled heating in our homes but this was a big issue at the beginning of the 20th century - the walls were blackened with a cold residue, and somebody invented a substance that was able to clean the dirt.
But once people start using alternative methods of heating, they had to find an alternative use to this substance, which is now known as Playdoh.
Twitter started as a podcasting service but quickly realized they can do so much more with their platform than that.
Remember, people are only going to remember you for one thing
I want you to remember you're freer than you think to do things that you wouldn't normally dare to because people are only going to remember you for one thing.
I want you to decide which one it's going to be.
Like what you see? Then check out tonnes more.
From exclusive content by industry experts and on-demand resources to 100s of hours' worth of presentations and mentors, our membership plans are designed to be your toolkit to propel growth.
Product Marketing Manager at Bitdefender


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Indian Culture & History: Whose Narrative Should It Be- 2
This article will look at the narratives on India that emerged as a result of the foreign gaze.
In Part 1, I discussed the Indigenous and Ambedkar's views of our culture and history. The Indigenous view covered how the sages viewed our Shastras. According to this view, spirituality is at the core of our cultural heritage. Ambedkar's view is nuanced with a deep historical perspective. An outstanding scholar, Ambedkar has many political claimants: Dalits, Leftists and Hindutva. However, the political spectrum is claiming him via selective reading only.
Indian Cultural History is unique, in that it has many perspectives that have not been reconciled and thus, are given to fierce debate. In this Part 2, we cover all narratives transpiring from the foreign gaze: The Colonialist, Orientalist and the Marxist.
1. Colonialist Narrative
After the Islamic period, came the British rule, which viewed the Indian culture from a heavily tinted Christian lens. The reason I have changed the chronology here is because the history of the Islamic period was by and large written by Colonialists and Marxists. Therefore it is important to understand the Colonialist perspective before we go into their reading of the Islamic period.
Let us start with William Jones (1746-94). He had impeccable credentials, with Harrow and Oxford education, a scholar of languages and culture. Even before arriving in India in 1783, he was well published and highly regarded. He was a judge at the Calcutta Supreme Court when Warren Hastings was the governor. His view on Hinduism will provide you with an idea of what the colonial lens was.
Jones looked at India from the lens of romantic primitivism. His thesis was that while Europe had moved forward towards reason, Hindus were still stuck in a primitive state.
Primitive religions, he reasoned, converted natural forces into gods, being not yet capable of rational and abstract thinking. For Jones, Hinduism was more to do with imagination than with reason and therefore was an erroneous religion.
He formulated the Hindu laws and Muslim laws. To formulate the Hindu laws he pulled out the Manu Smriti.
Now let us look at another colonial 'Indologist', Reverend William Ward (1769-1821). He had studied the Vedas, Puranas and other ancient texts in great detail. Here is what he concluded:
About Yogis – "The absurdity on which yogic practices are founded need not be exposed. The doctrine, which destroys all accountability to the creator, and removes all that is criminal…must be condemned by every good man. The absurdity of rejecting the rational enjoyments which prove the beneficence of the creator and contribute to the refinement of our nature is so flagrant that the slightest notice of it may surely be considered as more than necessary to the discharge of our duty to the interest of Christian morals."
About the philosophy of Brahman – "The Hindoo is perverted by the idea that God in man is the author of every volition that is evil and good. He does not perceive the evil of ascribing every villainous action to God."
About Idolatry – "Heathen deities owe their origin to the common darkness and depravity of men, who consider God too great to worship directly, choose such images as their darkness and passions suggested."
On Tantra – "it is not devotion that leads Hindoos to the temple but licentious appetite."
This is how it went. The church was the B-team of the colonial administrators and they combined to first trash the venerable ancient wisdom of the natives. Then they used Macaulayan education to instill a sense of inferiority. The clear intent of the Church was to convert the heathens to Christianity. However they were not fully supported by the East India Company who did not want the resultant upheaval to interfere with their business.
The narrative revolved around the contrast between true and false religions. False religions are those that are invented by men to satisfy their own desires in the name of God. True religion on the other hand is a revelation of God.
In this narrative Hindu priests imposed rites and restrictions to control and manipulate the masses. Caste system was a proof of this. Note how the Marxist historians have kept up this thinking.
Max Muller
Now let's look at Max Muller. Macaulay used his influence to fund Max Muller. There can be no doubt about Muller's commitment to conversion of Hindus to Christianity. Here are some quotes from Muller:
"History seems to teach that the whole human race required a gradual education before, in the fullness of time, it could be admitted to the truths of Christianity. All the fallacies of human reason had to be exhausted, before the light of a higher truth could meet with ready acceptance. The ancient religions of the world were but the milk of nature, which was in due time to be succeeded by the bread of life…"
"Large number of Vedic hymns are childish in the extreme: tedious, low, commonplace…they contain…childish thoughts."
"…Vedas is the root of their religion and to show them what the root really is, I feel, is the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last three thousand years."
"The ancient religion of India is doomed and if Christianity does not step in, whose fault will it be?"
Max Muller was the father of the Aryan Invasion theory. It helped the British in two ways. Firstly it introduced race differences in India – Aryans, Dravidians and Tribals. Second, using this fabricated story, they could claim that India was ruled by foreign invaders – first by Indo-Europeans, then by Muslims, and now by the British. In this narrative the British were really a return of the Indo-Europeans. Christian missionaries took advantage of this to call the Bible Yesurveda – Veda of Jesus.
Herbert Risley
Herbert Risley was a race scientist. Race science was a discipline that concluded that all races are not equal. They did this by distorting Darwin's theory. They had methods like size of the skull and length of the nose to determine which races were superior and which were inferior. It is no surprise that the Caucasian race topped the chart while the African race was at the bottom.
We have already seen that the varna system was not hierarchical and individual varna was based on worth. Much later it was corrupted and made hereditary. Jaati was based on guilds. It was quite flexible. Jaati could be changed if one changed one's profession and new jaatis could be formed. Over time however the jaati system got more rigid. Risley used race science to create castes (from Portuguese Casta). He organised them in descending order. Despite objections from people, they had to comply for administrative reasons. This cemented the caste system.
Boden Chair for Sanskrit
Lieutenant Colonel Boden willed his estate to the University of Oxford to establish a chair for Sanskrit with the special objective to promote the translation of the Bible into Sanskrit so as to enable the conversion of natives of India to Christianity.
The date of the Will was 15th August, 1811. In terms of the Will of Lieutenant Colonel Boden, who died on 21 November, 2011, his estate passed on to the University of Oxford after his daughter Elizabeth died in August 1827. The extract of his Will is as follows:
"I do hereby give and bequeath all and singular my said residuary estate and effects, with the accumulations thereof, if any, and the stocks, funds, and securities whereon the same shall have been laid out and invested, unto the University of Oxford, to be by that body appropriated in and towards the erection and endowment of a Professorship in the Shanskreet language, at or in any or either of the Colleges in the said University, being of opinion that a more general and critical knowledge of that language will be a means of enabling my countrymen to proceed in the conversion of the natives of India to the Christian Religion, by disseminating a knowledge of the Sacred Scriptures amongst them, more effectually than all other means whatsoever."
Before ending this section let us go back to William Ward, who said in the 18th century:
"The Hindoo is perverted by the idea that God in man is the author of every volition that is evil and good. He does not perceive the evil of ascribing every villainous action to God."
This question continues to be asked even today. If we think we are God then whatever we do or think must be good, for God can do no evil. This is extremely dangerous, they say, and will lead us down the path of evil.
Here is what Swami Vivekananda had to say to this:
"Can it be proved that on the other side (Man is not divine), the same danger does not exist? They have been worshiping God in heaven separate from them and a God they fear. Has the world been made better. Those who worshipped a personal God and those who worshipped an impersonal God, on which side have been great gigantic workers and moral powers. Certainly the impersonal. How can morality develop through fear, its basis is freedom.
"So it is not right to say that the impersonal idea will lead to evil as if the other doctrine never lends itself to works of evil, as if it did not lead to sectarianism…that is the outcome of dualism all over the world"
2. Orientalist Narrative
Based on a Western sense of superiority, the Colonialist view got codified as Orientalism in English and European universities. After the World War II, however, the academic centre of gravity moved to the US universities and we find the American Orientalists viewing the narrative from a Marxist lens.
Let us look at the theoretical basis of orientalism. The Orientalists have viewed Hinduism from the lens of Western philosophy. Rajiv Malhotra lists three main influences:
Giambattista Vico, the 17th century Italian philosopher, analysed the transcendental and worldly realms. In this view, the secular is separated from the transcendent. The ancient thinking is termed pre rational, mythically oriented and emotional. This has been used to conclude that the Vedas are not a true reflection of transcendence.
Walter Benjamin was a 19th century German philosopher and a Marxist. He theorised that languages spread because of the use of aesthetics by the elite. Elites would present the language in aesthetic ways to popularise it. But the real motive was to control and manipulate the masses. His theory is called Aesthetisation of Power. This has been used to create the theory of Sanskrit as a weapon of political control.
Antonio Gramsci was an early 20th century Marxist and a key thinker in the development of Western Marxism. He opined that in a capitalist society there is a division between political society and civil society. A capitalist state works because the political society exercises hegemony over civil society with their consent. He was a proponent of historicism where ideas have meaning only in a socio-historical context. He has become an important figure in the current academic discussions in cultural studies and political science.
Yvette Rosser, the American scholar of Hinduism, succinctly points out the difference between how the west views history and how Indians view history. She says:
"There is at the core a basic difference in the orientation towards historiography. In the West, we see our ancient past as something alien, to be studied as "isolated projects". Enlightenment and Post-Enlightenment scholars saw the past as primitive and irrational, "as something from which to escape, in Collingwood's words, [as] 'sheer terror [and] devoid of all positive value whatever.' When gauged against the standards of the present, it failed to measure up." In the West, "when the past is presented in chronological order, it is prioritized [and] only the post-Renaissance past appears relevant to the present; the earlier past is presented…as an object of curiosity."
The Indian perception of history is diametrically different. "The ancient and medieval periods are presented in a manner which ensures that they carry the same aura of relevance to the present as the modern period does… The message of an underlying continuity is explicit…and imparts to the nation-state a civilizational heritage which is historically continuous."
Let us look at the current Orientalist Narrative. We analyse one of their key proponents here.
Sheldon Pollock
Sheldon Pollock is an academician at Colombia University. He is a Sanskrit scholar and is well acquainted with our ancient texts. Rohan Murthy, son of Infosys founder Narayan Murthy, has appointed him as head of the ambitious Murthy Library, which plans to translate about 500 of our texts into English for large-scale dissemination.
On Sanskrit
Sheldon Pollock wrote a paper called 'Death of Sanskrit.' Before I summarize the main arguments he makes, a word on the indigenous view on Sanskrit will be in order.
Sanskrit is multifaceted.
It has a spoken language component.
It is the language of mantras and tantras, used both in yajnas and meditation.
There is a vibrational aspect to the language. The Vedas go into excruciating details of how shlokas are enunciated.
It is now used in computational linguistics.
Pollock argues that Sanskrit was not a spoken language and only used by the Brahmins to recite Vedic shlokas and perform yajnas. He believes Yajnas are nothing but black magic used by Brahmins to hypnotize and control the masses. He holds that the mantras are hymnology-chants without meaning. Pollock does not accept the transcendental aspect of the Vedas. He sees Sanskrit as a language of oppression of Shudras, women and Muslims.
Arguing against historical evidence, he says Sanskrit died before Muslim rule. The Hindu kings, according to him, could not defend Sanskrit because its essence is abusive. Any criticism of Mughals or the British for playing a role in destroying Sanskrit is totally false. Muslim kings, and later the British, tried to revive Sanskrit but were not supported by Hindu kings and Indians in general.
He goes on to theorize that the Buddhists created the Brahmi script, which was patronized by Kushan rulers. Till then, according to him, Sanskrit existed only as an oral language. The first kavya (literature) was thus the Buddhist Jataka Tales. The Brahmins, not to be left behind, wrote their own kavya – Ramayana in 1st century CE. The purpose of Ramayana was to legitimize the oppression in the Vedas as a popular tale. He sees a nuanced text like Ramayana in binary terms – divine king verses demonic other. The kings, because of their divinity, could do pretty much what they wanted. There is no reference, in his narrative, to Dharma Shastra and Artha Shastra, the Dharmic principles that guided rulers.
On Ramayana
Ramayana was not important till the 12th century CE. No big temples or public buildings were built before 12th century (this too is factually incorrect). In the 12th century there were invasions by Turks, and the Hindu kings used Ramayana to assert their own divinity and present the Muslims as demonic.
He writes "In the age of Hindutva inaugurated in the 90s by BJP and VHP…religious nationalism…is distorting India's past. Few things are as central to the religionism as Sanskrit. Hindutva propagandists have sought to show that Sanskrit is an indigenous language."
He goes on to say that BJP, VHP are being chauvinistic about Sanskrit and from the very beginning it has been used to vilify Muslims.
On Kavya (Literature)
His theory of Kavya is that that the 11th century CE King Bhoja came out with the first Kavya Shastra. He ignores Natya Shastra and other such texts which are much older. His choice of Bhoja's Kavya is political. It is a Kavya that praises the king and is devoid of rasa – the emotional surrender and absorption that leads to the divine. Since he does not acknowledge the transcendental aspect, he does not acknowledge rasa.
In essence, he first removes the sacredness and transcendental aspects from the Vedas, but adds oppressiveness and political domination. His objective for the revival of Sanskrit is from the point of view of political philology.
Let us see how Orientalists defended the charge that they were racial. Edward Said, a Palestinian by birth and professor of Literature at Colombia University, charged the Orientalists of being racist in his 1978 book "Orientalism". Their response was the most curious. They said that they learnt racism from Sanskrit since the language contained racial biases.
According to Pollock's "Deep Orientalism?" (1993), "European Indologists and the British colonialists merely propagated the pre-existing oppressive structures inherent in Sanskrit such as varna."
Pollock postulates that the Nazis benefited from Sanskrit as an instrument of hegemony and domination, to formulate anti-Semitism, which led to the holocaust.Sheldon Pollock was awarded the Padma Shree in 2010, by the then UPA government.
3. The Indian Marxist Narrative
The Marxists viewed our ancient texts from the lens of Brahminical oppression. To analyze this, we will look at the views of D D Kosambi on the Bhagavad Gita. Marxists had a major role to play in interpreting the long history of India. We will look at their historiography and later provide the counter view of the Revivalists.
D D Kosambi on Gita
In an essay titled "Social and Economic Aspects of the Bhagavad-Gita", published in "Myth and Reality: Studies in the Formation of Indian Culture" (1962), Kosambi argues that the Gita is a text of "slippery opportunism" whose utility "derives from its peculiar fundamental defect, namely, dexterity in seeming to reconcile the irreconcilable." He adds that the Gita was composed between 150 and 350 CE (many date the Gita to 3000-1500 BCE).
He argues that the Gita is flexible and can be variously interpreted. He says Sankara, Ramanuja, Jnaneshwara, and later Gandhi and Tilak, were all influenced differently by the same text. This, he interprets as a proof that the ideas in the Gita had no singularity and hence it is not a serious text. He goes on to say that the Gita did not influence the laity at all. He gives examples of Kabir and Tukaram to prove that their inspiration lay outside the Gita. He concludes that the 'leisure' class read the Gita.
His main thesis is that the Brahmins and rulers used the Gita as scriptural justification, to appropriate insufficient surplus without having to resort to violence.
According to him, major portions of Chapter 2 could not have been possible without the influence of Buddhism. This section of the Gita covers Samkhya Yoga and more specifically Sthithaprajna – qualities of a jivanmukta (an enlightened being firmly established in the supreme).
There are 5 Shlokas he has specifically chosen to prove that Gita is against lower castes. In brief these are:
The four-fold varna has been created by me according to the differentiation of gunas (4.13).
Sages look with equal eye on the learned Brahmana, cow, elephant, dog and outcast (5.18).
For taking refuge in me they also who may be of sinful birth, women, Vaishyas, Shudras, even they attain the supreme (9.32).
Agriculture, cattle rearing and trade is for Vaishyas and service is the duty of Shudras (18.44).
His main point of criticism is that the Gita says that God created caste. Gita was thus written to justify caste exploitation. He has taken the meaning of the quoted shlokas quite literally as in Shudras being clubbed with assorted animals. The disdaining tone towards women, traders and low castes also disturbs him.
It is important to explain the Indigenous view of the shlokas quoted by him:
The reference is to varna and not caste. One of the themes in the Gita is Gunas and how to move from Tamas to Rajas to Sattva, and finally to transcend the Gunas. Varna is based upon the individual Guna composition. The Marxists and Colonialists have, in my opinion, focused disproportionately on varna as scriptural justification for caste conflict. Further they have collapsed varna and jaati, which are two different ideas. Ambedkar, who they quote extensively, understood this distinction.
Gita talks about the duties of each varna for the smooth functioning of society. No varna is higher than the other. Brahmins have ascendency in rituals, Kshatras in administration and warfare, Vaisyas in commerce and Shudras in craftsmanship. It is in this context that the Shudra's role to serve the traders and rulers is placed.
What Kosambi interprets as Shudras being clubbed with dogs and elephants, is intended to convey that the sage's level of awareness is such that he sees the divine in everything without distinction.
"Even women, Vaishyas and Shudras will attain the supreme if they come to me".
Here the deeper meaning is: Striyah symbolizes binding attachments; Vaishya symbolizes the tendency to calculate profit even from psychological investment while Shudra symbolizes the attitude of slumber and slothfulness. All these qualities are impediments on the path of self-realization. Yet Krishna says if they approach the divine sincerely, they too will attain The Supreme.
Post-colonial Marxist History
Marxists have dominated the historical discourse in the post-colonial era. Nehru, and later, his daughter Indira Gandhi, entrusted the writing and teaching of history to Marxists. Romila Thapar, Bipan Chandra, Irfan Habib, Barun De, Amalendu Guha, Nurul Hasan and D D Kosambi, to name a few.
Historians more steeped in the indigenous tradition like the Gandhian R C Majumdar, Jadunath Sarkar, G S Ghurye, Sitaram Goel, did not find favour.
Some of the key contours of the historiography of the Marxists are captured here.
There was no Hindu identity till Turkic rule
The Marxist view is that there was no sense of cultural unity in the geography called India till after 5th century CE.
In "Communalism and Ancient Indian History", Romila Thapar writes "The recognizable Hindu begins to emerge in the post-Gupta period post 5th century CE…There is ample evidence…to suggest that religious sects and groups in pre Islamic India did not identify themselves as Hindu and as a unified religion."
They support the theory of Aryan Invasion/ Migration
Despite irrefutable evidence to the contrary, they go along with the Colonialist narrative that the homeland lay west of India and the invading/ migrating Aryans took control, became the higher castes, wrote the Vedas and oppressed the Dravidians and tribal people. Since the Colonialist did not go further back from 4004 BCE (that's when the world was created according to the Bible), Indus Valley civilization is dated 4000 BCE while the Aryan Invasion/ migration is dated 1500 BCE. Further there is no continuity between Indus Valley civilization and the Aryan Vedic civilization. They also claim, contrary to archaeological evidence, that only the North West of India was populated till the invading/ migrating Aryans pushed Dravidians and tribal people to the Gangetic plains and further south.
Pre Islamic India was the age of strife
Before the Islamic invasions, India presented a story of fragmentation, internal strife and Brahmin hegemony. The sacredness of our tradition is not given importance. The lens from which it is seen is one of caste struggle.
Islamic era is seen as age of synthesis
The narrative attempts to juxtapose Islamic invaders with Indian kings to put forth a thesis that they were no different from Indian rulers. They are not seen as alien invaders. Their atrocities have been attributed to economic motives and not religious zealotry.
Mahmud Ghaznavi (971-1030) is portrayed as an incidental Mohammeden. Jawaharlal Nehru said: "As a matter of fact, Mahmud was hardly a religious man. He was a Mohammedan, of course, but that was just by the way."
Romila Thapar proposed that the motive behind the sacking of Somnath was for its wealth and not religious bigotry. Her theme is that Islamic invaders were no different from Indian rulers, they were not religious zealots and their excesses were due to financial motives or the need to assert their power by token destruction.
Nehru saw the invasion of the Mughals as a positive event. He wrote: "A foreign conquest, with all its evils, has one advantage: it widens the mental horizon of the people and compels them to look out of their shells. They realize that the world is a much bigger and more variegated place than they had imagined… The Mughals, who were far more cultured and advanced in ways of living than the Afghans, brought changes to India… Babar is an attractive person, a typical Renaissance prince, bold and adventurous, fond of art and literature and good living."
Marxists have portrayed Mughals as an integral and defining part of Indian history. They are shown as enamoured by India. The Muslim invaders have been juxtaposed with Indian rulers and integrated into the culture. The era is shown as the age of synthesis as opposed to the pre-Islamic era which was the age of conflict. Mughals are lauded for their contribution to architecture, paintings, literature and music.
The extremely violent aspects of the Islamic era have been whitewashed. In a recent book, Romila Thapar has stated that the raid by Ghaznavi on Somnath in 1025 was not considered as being of any consequence by Hindus. She discounts religious frenzy as the cause of the raid.
The main takeaways are:
Conflict ridden history with caste oppression, dowry and sati – a human rights nightmare.
All knowledge came with invaders. Starting with Aryans, then Greeks, down to Arabs and British.
Mughals vitalised the culture.
British brought education and railways.
India was not a nation or cultural entity. The British cobbled together a nation.
In Part 3 of this series we will discuss the Revivalist challenge to the Orientalists and the Marxists.
Sharadha Sugirtharaja, Imagining Hinduism A Post Colonial Perspective. Routledge, 2003
William Ward, Account of the Writings, Religion, and Manners of the Hindoos,' Serampúr, 1811
The Purpose of Boden Chair of Sanskrit in Oxford University, Sulekha
Swami Vivekananda, The Complete Works Books 1,2,3
Rajiv Malhotra, On Sheldon Pollock 'Battle for Sanskrit', YouTube
Rajiv Malhotra, Hinduphobia in Academia, YouTube
D D Kosambi, Social and Economic Aspects of Bhagavad Gita, Myth and Reality: Studies in the Formation of Indian Culture (1962)
Makarand Paranjpi, Analysing Myth and Reality
Hari Ravi Kumar, Deconstructing D D Kosambi, Indiafacts.org, 23.12.15
N. S. Rajaram, Distortions In Indian History, Indiafacts.org, 19.3.2015
Yvetta Rosser, Imagining Jambudvipa: Rescuing Indology and Indian History, Indiafacts.org, 15.9.2014
Atul Sinha
Atul Sinha founded and runs a leading Strategic Brand Design Company. His interest in Indic culture and history led him to pursue a PhD program at SVYASA, Bangalore. He writes on Vedanta and Indic Culture.
Marathas and Bundelkhand – IV: Jhansi ki Rani
The Idea of Bharatiya Exceptionalism-I


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Paper. No matter how much we hear about going paperless, it's still a fact of life that paper in every form whether it be junk mail, supermarket coupons, business cards, magazine clippings, bills or receipts will continue to be part of our lives for the foreseeable future.
• Stop printing website pages from the Internet. Of if you must, only print those that are associated with a task or action you plan to take.
• Don't take what you don't need. Just because they hand it to you doesn't mean you keep it. If your local supermarket hands you a coupon at the register, unless it's an item you know you will buy don't keep it and ask the cashier to dispose of it.
• Stop clipping magazine and newspaper articles. Seriously, when was the last time you actually looked in that file and did something with that article? When you clip an article you are actually contracting for your own time. What is your time worth? With everything else you have to do, are you really going to make this recipe? Are you really going to going to invest in a marble countertop? It's great to keep a single file or box of images that inspire you, but rather than keep every picture related to the hobby you think you plan to do "some day" – use the time instead to focus on ways you can actually do that hobby today!
For all other pieces of paper, you should ask yourself, "Is there a necessary action I need to take with this?" If so, then take the action and dispose of it or file it if you've been advised to when you're done.
1. You have been advised to by a financial professional. Examples would be your tax return or record of business expenses.
2. It would be difficult to replace such as a passport, birth certificate or deed.
3. It's a record of where your money comes from and goes to such as an unpaid bill or a recent investment statement.
4. You know you will reference it again and probably more than once such as frequently called numbers, vendor information or mailing labels.
5. It has strong emotional value such as a cherished photograph or sentiment from a loved one AND would be dearly missed if lost.
Whatever is left over, according to to the National Association of Professional Organizers, there is an 80 percent chance you will probably never refer to it again except when you decide it's time to purge your files.
This is the very definition of paper clutter. You keep it but it serves no purpose for you. If this is the case for you then ask yourself, "If this piece of paper were to disappear, what would it cost me in terms of lost time, money or information?" If the answer is nothing or probably nothing, then it's time for the shred or recycle bin.
For more practical tips on organizing your life at home or at work, subscribe to Back On Track, the e-guide to organizing living from LET'S MAKE ROOM.


Is Edge of Destiny now non-canon?
As much as I loved the episode, especially the final fight, and I did love this episode and that fight, everything honestly, while playing through the episode, there were a lot of inconsistencies and retcons to Edge of Destiny, particularly about Glint and Kralkatorrik. One of the most notable and story-relevant ones being the original Dragonsblood Spear's complete ineffectiveness against Branded, and Caithe collecting Kralkatorrik's blood at the end of the novel. There are other things too, and some inconsistencies between Edge of Destiny and Path of Fire, like Kralkatorrik's appearance and size.
I get that "what happens in the game takes precedence over lore outside of it", but it's gotten to a point where basically only the generalities of Edge of Destiny seem to remain canon.
So I feel I must ask, do the devs effectively treat Edge of Destiny as non-canon or, baring that extreme, as merely a very rough guideline for names and places?
Just want to reiterate how much I loved the episode, and honestly the only fault I feel there is, besides not enough cameos in the already jam-packed cameo department, would be what brings up this question.
I honestly think they just forgot all about those intricacies and will say that the novels are just going to be rough guidelines from now on. Because why have structure when you can just change the rules to suit your needs whenever you need to for the sake of epick storytellingzzzz?
There are other things too, and some inconsistencies between Edge of Destiny and Path of Fire, like Kralkatorrik's appearance and size.
Whats inconsistent about kralk's size and appearance?
His appearance in the book is described with far more fleshiness to it compared to his in-game model(s). His eye is also described as green, like an emerald, and that coloration was even used in the Sorrow's Furnace story cinematic that told players of Destiny's Edge's fall. For size: he was mistaken for a mountain/mountain range while still mostly buried, yet fits within a mountain here (well, his head/neck); he was also described as "1,000 feet tall" which seems a bit shy here.
But the inconsistency I'm really curious about is the fact that we're told we have no Kralkatorrik blood to make a new spear, yet Caithe collected a bunch at the end of the Edge of Destiny novel.
My question here isn't criticism or the like. Honestly, given the quality of the novel and that unlike the other two it was fully written third party, I'd do the same and consider it just a rough guideline. I'm just hoping for an official statement. Especially since the only official statement akin to this ("when out-of-game and game contradict, game is more canon") is about non-officially released stuff like forum comments, and not about the books, etc.
Changes in Kralkatorrik could be waived away as changes wrought by him gorging on magic. Remember, in Edge of Destiny, he had just barely woken up and hadn't had time to feed at all yet.
I think Edge of Destiny was a bit off in the description of his size, because we saw Kralkatorrik in Guild Wars 1. GW1 Kralk and the Kralk we just saw in this episode line up in size (unlike GW1 Primordus and Flashpoint Primordus). That said, given the size we do observe, Kralkatorrik easily has a thousand-foot wingspan.
Changes in Kralkatorrik could be waived away as changes wrought by him gorging on magic.
If that theory has precedence. A theory created as a means for fans to waive the difference between GW1 Kralk and Primordus and their GW2 models.
That said, given the size we do observe, Kralkatorrik easily has a thousand-foot wingspan.
1,000 feet height. Wingspan was as "stretched to unseeable distance" and blocking out the sun. Page 346.
But like I said, I don't want to focus on that bit of inconsistency.
It does have a precedent. We see how much Aurene changed after Balthazar's death and her feeding on his magic.
I reiterate, though, that Edge of Destiny was likely the one that was off.
Sorry, meant to say "if that theory is correct". And I wouldn't really use Aurene as strong support, after all she doesn't physically change appearance (from flesh to rock like Kralkatorrik and Primordus did between the games), she just grows up from infant to teenager.
Both kralk and primordus dont look fleshy in the first game tho. Primordus is looking very much rocky in game and kralk's back in eotn looks abit metalic tbch.
I think it's that the writers aren't 100% aware of the things that happened back then, since they switched around a lot. Then on the table it was kinda forgotten because it's not been a topic for so long. Can't really blame them, though it is a shame.


text:
Q: ExFat formatted USB 3.1 flash drive extremely slow with sporadic bursts of speed I recently purchased this 512gb USB 3.0 flash drive with advertised read speeds of up to 200mb/s and write speeds of up to 100mb/s. To use with my Mac with USB 3.0 ports. When I first used it, I transferred a large file (90gb) in about the advertised time: ~8 minutes. I tried this with the drive formatted in ExFat and HFS+ and got around the same speeds. I stuck with the ExFat formatting
But then I copied over a whole directory structure with many different folders and subfolders and, at some point, it started reading and writing extremely slowly. So now transferring the entirety of the files from the drive is being reported by MacOS as taking upwards of 17 hours, much more than what I would expect given that my 90gb file transferred so quickly. Occasionally, I'll get these random bursts of what seems like several gb in a period of seconds, but that happens rarely.
In addition, any kind of I/O operation seems to take an extremely long amount of time. Even merely loading 3 or 4 file icons in a directory can take upwards of 20 seconds. I've never encountered this before.
What's going on here? Could it be that the big directory structure and size of the drive mean that the filesystem has a lot of overhead involved with transferring the files? This seems normal, but in my case even trivial operations like loading a few file or directory icons from the drive take an extremely long time, longer than any other drive I've ever owned

A: It appears to have been Spotlight indexing that was slowing down the reading of and writing to the drive. I ran the command outlined here to disable indexing for my external drive. And added it to the list of drives excluded from Spotlight outlined here. Files and folders are loading faster in Finder, streaming media and movies appear to no longer be hanging, and file transfers are happening at their advertised speeds.

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