Examines intrapersonal and interpersonal principles of high performing teams, meaningful relationships, and being an effective leader and member of groups. Real-life projects will be designed, implemented and evaluated.
Examines controversial contemporary educational issues, the forces that perpetuate them and the socio-cultural contexts in which they exist. Teachers' work and ethical tenets shaping practice are also examined.
School personnel collaborate with persons from higher education, the community, and scholars who have created model multicultural/urban education programs to learn new ways of teaching and learning among diverse populations.
Critical examination of the socio-cultural foundations of schooling in the United States, including purposes of schooling in a multicultural society and the resulting nature of teacher work.
Examines how race, class, gender, ethnicity and disability intersect with power, culture, knowledge and ideology in American schools to influence the lives of students and teachers in a multicultural society.
In-depth history of racial and ethnic minorities in the U.S. and the ongoing tension between deculturalization and democratic pluralism in P-12 and higher education including current theories and practical applications.
Exploring the nature of philosophic inquiry in education and examining competing traditions in the West, particularly in the United States. A distinction between education and schooling will be drawn.
TSOC 5400 History Of Schooling & Teaching In The U.s.
Evolving role of schooling and teaching in the US, using history to reflect on the relationship of schooling to other social institutions, groups of people and the process of social change.
Examination of cross-cultural, comparative and other studies directed toward understanding processes of cultural transmission and transformation, and implications of anthropological research for contemporary issues in education.
The purpose of this course is to introduce the basic concepts, theories, and approaches to peace education. The course explores the theories of peace education, including pedagogical appproaches to peace-learning. The course also introduces the substantive areas of peace education.
This course surveys works of prominent feminist scholars in order to address the impact of dominant ideology upon the lives of women and girls in American schools.
Complex interrelationships between global issues and education systems will be examined. Emphasis will be on how education can be used to build a more global society. Some sections of the course will include an international field trip.
An examination of the historical, legal, sociological interaction between state and schooling in US, emphasizing both religious/non-religious issues. These concerns are compared and analyzed with respect to other countries.
The collaborative study of a specific topic in educational theory and social foundations by a group of advanced students under the direction of one or more professors.
2Application of theoretical assumptions presented in TSOC 5210/7210 to US schools and classrooms, with particular attention given to program and curriculum issues, teachers and teaching policies, practices and procedures.
Development and dynamics of schooling in urban centers across the United States, including historical and critical analyses of current problems, issues and reform initiatives.
An examination of selected educational philosophers who have addressed themselves to the problem of the ends and means of education from Classical Hellenic Times to the present.
Examination of the interdependence among education, democracy and ethics in the context of civic life. Applications made to the practice of schooling as cultural production in a democratic society.
The purpose of this seminar is to explore the ethics of war and peace and its implications for the moral and civic education of democratic citizens.
The purpose of this seminar is to explore the nature of human rights and human rights education. The origin, definition, content, scope, foundation, and correlative duties of human rights, as well as, the theory of human rights education will be explored.
The purpose of this seminar is to explore the nature of environmental ethics and its implications for educational theory, in particular moral and civic education.
The purpose of this class is to explore prominent theories of distributive justice in a liberal democratic republic and to analyze key educational policy issues from the perspective of those theories.
A formal, independent study culminating in a written discourse that advances our understanding of educational theory or social foundations.
A formal, independent project applying principles of educational theory or social foundations to analyze a particular problem and culminating in a written discourse.
Directed study of a current topic in educational theory and social foundations. The student meets with the instructor at arranged intervals without formal classes.
Examines how race, class, gender, ethnicity, and disability intersect with power, culture, knowledge and ideology in American schools to influence the lives of students and teachers in a multicultural society.
TSOC 7400 History Of Schooling & Teaching In The U.s.
Examination of cross-cultural, comparative, and other studies directed toward understanding processes of cultural transmission and transformation, and implications of anthropological research for contemporary issues in education.
The purpose of this course is to introduce the basic concepts, theories, and approaches to peace education. The course explores the theories of peace education including pedagogical approaches to peace-learning. The course also introduces areas of peace education.
This course aims to develop a broader understanding of the role of culture in psychological processes and the implications of such psychological understanding for a culturally diverse society.
The proseminar will enable doctoral students to improve their understanding of the research process. Students will learn to ask research questions, choose alternative methodologies and interpret the validity of conclusions.
The purpose of this course is to explore methods of and approaches to normative theory construction. The central goal of the course is to equip doctoral students in the field of educational theory and social foundations, among other students whose fields engage in normative theory, the understanding and skill necessary to engage in normative theory construction. Normative theory refers to systematic moral, political, social, and educational conceptions that rationally account for adjust what ought to be (rather than empirical theory that accounts for what is). In the discipline of normative theorizing a number of methods of and approaches to theory construction have been developed as a means to the development and analysis of normative theory. There are two main approaches to theory construction in this field: deontological and teleological approaches.
The purpose of this research methods course is to explore prominent methods and approaches Central Analysis and Textual Interpretation. These methods and approaches constitute the research tools in the field of educational theory and social foundations, among other fields of inquiry. The central goal of the course is to equip doctoral students in field of educational theory and social foundations, among other students whose fields engage in theoretical research, the understanding and skill necessary to engage in theoretical research.
A formal, independent study culminating in a written discourse central to the advancement of knowledge in educational theory or social foundations.


Teachers' narratives of classroom talk: what are the challenges?
Coultas, Valerie (2015) Teachers' narratives of classroom talk: what are the challenges? (PhD thesis), UCL Institute of Education, uk.bl.ethos.646153.
This study seeks to explore English teachers' understandings of the challenges of classroom talk. A key assumption is that while many teachers and researchers view talk for learning as valuable, there is still a problem when it comes to actually using talk and small group learning widely. There are many different challenges that emerge when teachers try to promote this type of learning. Rather than study classroom discourse therefore, I wanted to focus on teachers' understandings of how talk works in the classroom. This was the problem I wanted to research in more depth. I start the study with my own talk autobiography. I reflect on my own life in education and my life as a teacher in urban schools and highlight the role of talk, language and learning in my intellectual development. Having done this I identify the questions I wanted to ask teachers. I wanted to hear their stories of talk as pupils and as teachers. I chose to talk to six teachers at different stages of their careers in different phases of education. Later, I return to the teachers and ask them to video a lesson and identify what I am calling 'a critical moment for talk'. We then evaluate such moments collaboratively. The study is sociocultural in approach. Further, the life narrative case studies draw on traditions of practitioner and feminist research with the aim of making teachers' expertise more visible in wider debates about classroom talk. The analysis of the case studies suggests that a teacher's own experiences in education and their values influence pedagogy and specifically their approach to talk. They reveal the challenges of dealing with conflicting power relationships within group work and during whole class dialogue and consider some solutions. The era and context are shown as particularly powerful factors in influencing pedagogy. Today what I refer to as the 'talk for learning model' is under attack and the focus has returned to the promotion of standard English. The aim of the study is make teachers' intuitions and insights available about the place of talk and what they have found challenging about organising talk for learning.


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Hey everyone! Happy New Year! What are you plans for 2015? I am definitely determined to make 2015, the best year yet. I have recently enrolled on a blogging course called Blogging 101, and although I am not a new to blogging, I believe that there is always room for improvement and it helps to look back, reevaluate your efforts and to set new goals.
When I started this blog my goal was to write about hotels, restaurants and some of my travel experiences, in general everything related to hospitality and travel. A few years down the line, this is something that I still do but I haven't been as consistent as I would like to be and what I should be. This is why I see this course as an opportunity to get my act together, to challenge myself and to take this blog to another level. This blog deserves some real love and that's what I am planning to do in 2015.
Blogging is a full time job, there is no doubt about that. The truth is that I have been quite busy with a number of projects. First was the development of my travel website Passion for Greece, which was launched in October 2014, and this project required my full attention, dedication and persistence. I was working on establishing it for nearly a year and it still requires a lot of work on a daily basis. Another exciting project that I have been working on is the launch of a Travel Bloggers Greece network together with a partner and fellow travel blogger Marissa Tejada, who runs this cool blog My Greece, My Travels. So as you can see I have been pretty busy.
In 2015 there are a lot of plans for many exciting adventures, travels and experiences which I plan to share with you guys. I will do my best to deliver the most exciting content whenever possible from different locations. Thank you for reading and I look forward to sharing my journey with you in 2015.


MOVIE SYNOPSIS: A single mother and the man who has not been able to forget her since she was 23 years old. A woman who yearns to be a mother and a single father in her fifties who only thinks about her. A discouraged man who starts dating a driver who gives love advice on the radio. And a mature woman who comes from Miami looking for new experiences. A crazy and funny musical comedy where the characters will discover that it is never too late to be crazy again of love.


Wednesday 27th February, 8pm (delivered via Zoom Online). Spaces are limited, save your place here.
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Rumors swirled last year that Google would acquire troubled smartphone maker HTC as the release of the Pixel 2 approached. However, the deal eventually announced was much more limited in scope. Google agreed to acquire most of HTC's design team for $1.1 billion. Today, Google says it has completed the deal.
Google says it's getting about 2,000 engineers, designers, and support staff from the deal. The employees won't have to relocate as Google already has extensive operations in HTC's native Taiwan. Sources close to the deal claim HTC is giving up a substantial majority of its R&D team in the deal. This division was responsible not only for working on HTC's branded phones, but also contract jobs like the Google Pixel phones. HTC says it still has a "best-in-class engineering team."
This move marks a substantial expansion of Google's hardware efforts. The first-generation Pixel phones were designed by HTC under Google's direction. The same is true of the second-gen Pixels, but HTC shared that responsibility with LG. Having its own army of hardware designers could let Google take on most of the preliminary work itself, then pass off the manufacturing to a company like HTC.
Going forward, this instantly makes Google a major player in the smartphone industry. The Pixel phones have sold in relatively small numbers, but HTC's former R&D team with Google resources might be able to accomplish some amazing things. It also gets a license to HTC's patents as part of the deal. Google's hardware chief Rick Osterloh has stated he hopes Google will be moving a significant number of phones within five years. Having its own in-house designers is a big step in that direction.
On HTC's side, the $1.1 billion cash infusion keeps the lights one, but the once major smartphone player is still on a downward trajectory. It hasn't had a profitable quarter in years, and Sprint is the only US carrier selling its phones anymore. Selling off its design team to Google doesn't help it turn that trend around. In fact, it might accelerate things.


Lazio fans have been begging Senad Lulic to change his squad number ahead of the forth coming season.
According to Corriere dello Sport, PSV forward and Slovenian international Tim Matavz has told his club that he wishes to leave and Lazio is his preferred destination.
The Felipe Anderson saga seems to be at a close as both Santos and Doyen agree to his sale.
Brazilian football club Santos FC have denied that there was ever an agreement between the club and S.S. Lazio for Felipe Anderson.
Lazio marketing manager Marco Canigiani discusses the new shirt.
Proving there is life after Felipe Anderson, Lazio's Director of Sport is now searching for wing-backs according to Corriere dello Sport with three names on the shortlist.
CdS report that Lazio defender Andre Dias has made a u-turn and is happy in Rome.
According to la Repubblica, the UK company have accepted Lazio's proposal.
The difference between Felipe Anderson and Lazio seems to be 500 thousand Euros.
The next part in the Zarate saga will take place next week.


Researchers are only beginning to understand the roles of the hundreds of proteins involved in reading, writing, and erasing the epigenome. One of the epigenetic regulators, SP140, which is mutated in a number autoimmune disorders, including Crohn's disease and multiple sclerosis, is also essential to macrophage function and intestinal homeostasis in both humans and mice, scientists reported today (March 3) in Science Immunology.
"Many immune-mediated disorders are driven by a combination of genetic susceptibility as well as environmental influences [so] epigenetics is a suitable critical juncture between those two aspects of the disease," said coauthor Kate Jeffrey, a researcher investigating the epigenetic control of innate immunity at Massachusetts General Hospital.


text:
Protesters in police shooting injure officers, shut highway
Middletown native, 25, remembered for dynamism, strength
TOM FOREMAN Jr. Associated Press
1of3Police fire tear gas into the crowd of protesters on Old Concord Road late Tuesday night, Sept. 20, 2016, in Charlotte, N.C. A black police officer shot an armed black man at an apartment complex Tuesday, authorities said, prompting angry street protests late into the night. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department tweeted that demonstrators were destroying marked police vehicles and that approximately 12 officers had been injured, including one who was hit in the face with a rock. (Ely Portillo/The Charlotte Observer via AP)APShow MoreShow Less
2of3In this frame from video provided by WBTV, a police vehicle is damaged after protests broke out Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016, in Charlotte, N.C., following a fatal shooting of a black man by police. (WBTV via AP)APShow MoreShow Less
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — Authorities used tear gas to disperse protesters in an overnight demonstration that left about a dozen officers injured in North Carolina's largest city and shut down a highway after the fatal shooting of a black man by Charlotte police who said he was armed and posed a threat.
The protests broke out Tuesday after 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott was fatally shot by a black officer at an apartment complex on the city's northeast side. They continued into early Wednesday morning, when TV footage showed dozens of protesters on Interstate 85 apparently looting semi-trucks and setting their contents on fire on the highway.
Neither the North Carolina Highway Patrol nor Charlotte police could immediately be reached for comment about the Wednesday morning protests. The North Carolina Department of Transportation website showed a portion of I-85 near the University of North Carolina Charlotte campus was closed in both directions early Wednesday. The website said the closure was due to police activity.
Tuesday night, a larger group of demonstrators gathered near the scene of the shooting. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department tweeted that demonstrators were destroying marked police vehicles and that approximately 12 officers had been injured, including one who was hit in the face with a rock. Photos and TV video showed police firing tear gas to break up the crowd. Some officers were in riot gear.
By 5 a.m. Wednesday, the streets were quiet with no protesters in sight and I-85 was moving again. Broken glass and rocks littered the ground where a police car had been vandalized. Less than 5 miles away, wooden pallets barricaded the entrance of a Wal-Mart that had apparently been looted.
The unrest in Charlotte came just hours after another demonstration in Tulsa, Oklahoma, over the shooting there of an unarmed black man by police.
Charlotte police officers went to the complex about 4 p.m. looking for a suspect with an outstanding warrant when they saw Scott — who was not the suspect they were looking for — inside a car, department spokesman Keith Trietley said in a statement.
Officers say they saw Scott get out of the car with a gun and then get back in, Trietley said. When officers approached, the man exited the car with the gun again. At that point, officers deemed the man a threat and at least one fired a weapon, he said.
Scott was taken to Carolinas Medical Center and pronounced dead.
Officer Brentley Vinson, who shot Scott, has been placed on administrative leave, which is standard procedure in such cases. Vinson has been with the department for two years.
Detectives recovered a gun at the scene and were interviewing witnesses, Trietley said.
Police blocked access to the area, which is about a mile from the campus of the UNC at Charlotte, as protesters gathered after the shooting.
Video from WCCB-TV in Charlotte showed police in riot gear stretched across a two-lane road confronting protesters at the apartment complex later in the night. Some of the officers flanked the main line on one side of the road.
Some protesters were heard yelling "Black lives matter," and "Hands up, don't shoot!" One person held up a sign saying "Stop Killing Us."
Other footage showed protesters lingering around a police vehicle after shattering its windows.
One television news crew retreated from the scene after demonstrators began rocking their remote van, which was parked near the apartment complex where the shooting occurred.
Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts appealed for calm and tweeted that "the community deserves answers."
In Tulsa, hundreds of people rallied outside police headquarters calling for the firing of police officer Betty Shelby, who shot 40-year-old Terence Crutcher on Friday during a confrontation in the middle of a road that was captured on police dashcam and helicopter video.
Shelby's attorney has said Crutcher was not following the officers' commands and that Shelby was concerned because he kept reaching for his pocket as if he were carrying a weapon. An attorney representing Crutcher's family says Crutcher committed no crime and gave officers no reason to shoot him.
Local and federal investigations into that shooting are ongoing.
[--][--][--]
Associated Press writer Steve Reed contributed to this report.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


It's less than 2 weeks away, people!! Zoey is getting REALLY excited (look at that smile!!) about the walk and all the fundraising that's been going on!! She's asking if you would PLEASE follow in her mama's footsteps and give a donation to Humane Indiana (Paws In The Park event) through team Pet Parlor??
Zoey is one of the sweetest dogs on the planet … even though she is a bit of a wet-grass diva. Hates it! If she could speak I think she would be saying, "Are you serious? You want me to put my paws on that? It's wet!" Seriously, we love going to Munster and spending some time with this girl!
If you'd like to donate and help Zoey raise money (just imagine her tail wagging!) here is the link to donate or join our team.


text:
Children's Texts and Childhoods in Kerala
ArticleChildren's Magazines and Different Childhoods in Kerala
ArticleIdyll and Ideology: An Overview of Soviet Literature for Children in Malayalam
Article'Alternate' Childhoods and 'Different' Tales
ArticleMoulding a Modern Child: Eureka and the Propagation of Science in Kerala
InterviewIn Conversation with Saraswathy Rajagopalan: On the Politics and Policies of Publishing Children's Literature
InterviewIn Conversation with Veerankutty: On Children's Literary Writing in Kerala
InterviewIn Conversation with Five Child Readers from Kerala
OverviewChildren's Literature in Kerala: Traces and Trajectories
In Conversation with C.S. Venkiteswaran: Children's Films in Kerala
Visual and Material ArtsInstitutions
Published on: 24 July 2019
Kerala children's media children's studies visual culture Films Children's films Satyajit Ray
Sudha K.F. in conversation with C.S. Venkiteswaran, Thiruvananthapuram, July 2018
Dr C.S. Venkiteswaran is an Indian film critic, professor, documentary filmmaker and writer from Kerala, who writes in English and Malayalam. He won the National Film Award for Best Film Critic in 2009 and is known for his insightful analysis on social aspects of cinema. His writings and reviews on film and media have been published in journals and periodicals such as Deep Focus, Film International, Cinema in India, Bhashaposhini, Pachakuthira, Indian Express, The Hindu, Mathrubhumi and Madhyamam. His column 'Rumblestrip' (1999–2008) in the Indian Express talked about film and the media scene in Kerala. He also won the National Award for Best Arts/Cultural Film in 1995 along with M.R. Rajan for directing Pakarnnattam Ammannur, The Actor, a lyrical cinematic documentation of the life of Ammannur Madhava Chakyar, an exponent of the ancient classical Sanskrit theatrical artform Kutiyattam.
Sudha K.F. is an Indian filmmaker. Her dissertation short film Eye Test, made for her Masters in Film from the University of Reading, was selected to be screened at major international film festivals and has won several awards. She is a recipient of the Felix scholarship for 2016–17.
Following is an edited (transcribed and translated by Ambili Anna Markose and Bivitha Easo) transcript of the interview.
Sudha K.F. (SFK): There have always been child-centred films in Malayalam. What could be the reason behind using such a narrative trope?
C.S. Venkiteswaran (CSV): I think, in Kerala, especially in the narrative context of Malayalam cinema, the child is a significant element. The child was a focal point in Malayalam cinema in the formative years; be it Vigathakumaran (1928) or Balan. But, by the 1950s, an imagination of a post-independent society started to be represented through the movies. For example, with the production of movies like Neelakkuyil, Newspaper Boy, etc., we can see an imagination which is suggestive of a nation-to-be, or a future-to-be. In many ways, those films presented a longing for a better future through the child. This child/nation, who is encumbered by the social, economic, and casteist issues, looks at the outer world. Often, the shift portrayed in the cinema could be in terms of a transition from agricultural society to an industrial one, or from a village to a city, etc., that is to say, in a sense, the child is on the cusp of this transition.
Take for example, the movie Rarichan Enna Pauran (1956). The film begins with a scene where we see a boy winding the chakku (traditional oil press). Though he is revolving around the machine, the song he sings is about Kerala and the lyrics capture the entire geography of Kerala. It brings in the regional products, agriculture patterns, etc. Therefore, my point is—there is an imagination of 'Kerala' in all the films produced at that juncture. I think it is an imagination of a nation-to-be. It talks about an underclass—something that calls for a social realist mode—which imagines itself as free citizens in a future world. These films, seemingly, talk about the possibilities of the imminent future. That is, on a closer look, either Rarichan Enna Pauran or Newspaper Boy, are not really children, they are citizens in many respects. They are characters who can represent all the conflicts of the society they live in. So, they are not necessarily 'children's films'. Moreover, this phenomenon may not be typical to Kerala; rather, it has to be viewed as a Pan-Indian phenomenon. Pather Panchali must have played an important role in this.
SFK: What was the influence of neo-realism on Malayalam cinema?
CSV: I think the manner of narration and especially the mise-en-scène has a lot of influence from neo-realism, specifically in terms of characterization. Visibly, there is also an interface of different pasts in the narrative. Furthermore, one of the major issues of regional films like those from Kerala is the difficulty in showing people from different classes in a particular scene. There is always confusion in setting the space where they come together, so that they can be shown together in a scene: for instance, a scene where there is a dialogue between a feudal landlord and a tenant or that of between a Namboodiri (a Brahmin caste in Kerala that belongs to the 'upper castes' in the Varnavyavastha—system of caste that classifies people as four-fold based on their occupation) and a Pulaya (a 'lower caste', which is presently categorised as Scheduled Caste). You just cannot show it. Because they simply do not have a common space! That is the reason why in most of the films we see the courtyard (muttam) as the background for their conversation. One would stand on the veranda and the other would stand down in the yard. In yet other instances, this common space would become the road. They meet on the street. This is what happens, when the characters represent the dominant and the subordinated positions in terms of their social status in the hierarchical social structure. If they share more social, interactive spaces, the locations changes into a teashop or barbershop depending on the scope of shared social spaces. And, the dramatic and narrative dynamics and visual compositions in these contexts definitely bring in the neo-realist narrative modes.
SFK: Later on, the 1980s produced a number of films where children appeared as an important part of the narrative. How do you look at this phase? Why is it so?
CSV: I think we can call it a moment that necessitated the making of such films. If we look at what happened in the 1950s, we can say that it was a national moment, and in the 1980s it was a nuclear family moment. This moment was important because it was post land reforms and Gulf migration. Both these historical events had accelerated the disintegration of joint families to a large extent and the birth of nuclear family systems. In particular, here we see the emergence of the middle/upper caste, middle class nuclear family. Thus, the major concern of the films produced in this period was the middle-class nuclear family unit. And at the centre of the nuclear family was again the child. That means, though the films have children at the centre of the narrative, they are not 'children's films' per se.
I think, there has never been any children's film made in Malayalam cinema. There are only films where we can take children. Family has always been our audience unit. Thinking of the time when I was a child, the films we got to see were of three categories: 1) mythologicals, 2) films which had animals and things that attracted children. Directors like P. Subramaniam had experimented with this genre. Subramaniam's Aana Valarthiya Vanambadi (1959) is an example of this. 3) And the last category includes those films that offered spectacular visual experience like Ben-Hur (1959) which again come under the Western mythological genre.
SFK: We often find parents carrying their kids to the theatre—taking toddlers to theatres is commonplace here. Clearly there is no differentiation between children's or adult movie in terms of content. What about the Western context? Is this 'normality' unique to Kerala/India?
CSV: I think these are issues pertaining to the industry's idea of the market. It is related to what constitutes an audience unit here. For example, the family has been the audience unit of the larger south Indian film industry, until recently. We do not have the segmentation of audience unlike Western film industries. The consumers are not segmented into youth, children, elderly, etc. What we have are 'A' (adult) certified films and those that are not. Family remains the key unit. The dismantling of this concept happened only after the 1990s. Until then, until the television came into the picture, it remained the same. Television brought in a fissure in this structure. Eventually, families withdrew into television viewing and the theatre turned into a completely male, macho space. The idea of family as the audience unit remained intact until the 1990s. And the existence of the family unit permitted the presence of children in cinema halls. I think, even adult films have not banned kids.
SFK: Coming to the film society movements—have they ever thought of the child spectator at any point of time in the history of film society movements in Kerala?
CSV: There were hardly any such attempts. For the film society movements in Kerala, viewership is purely and exclusively a male domain. Even women were not visible, let alone kids. May be there were children's films from classics. But they were all part of the movie fair. They had Chaplin films as part of regional film festivals. Children would have been brought in there to watch those films. But, other than that, I do not remember anything like a children's film society or a special screening or things like that.
SFK: Were there any such interventions on behalf of 'independent cinema'? Were there any deliberations on the need for children's film?
CSV: If we look at the issue from that vantage point; see, our serious filmmakers in Malayalam in the 1970s and the 1980s or may be till the 1970s like Ramu Kariat, P. Bhaskaran, Sethu Madhavan, Vincent Mash, etc. and then people like Padmarajan, Bharathan, Aravindan etc. did make a few children's movies. For instance, Padmarajan, Aravindan, and Ramu Kariat have made children's movies. Kariat's Ammuvinte Aattinkutty (1978) can well be considered as a children's film. It could be the only film widely screened as a children's film all over Kerala. Even Kummaatti (1979) did not have the tag of a children's film. I do not think Kummaatti was ever seen, or talked about as a children's film. Children also saw it, of course. But it was not conceived as a children's movie.
Though Satyajit Ray was a huge influence and idol for many Malayali filmmakers or artists, we hardly have any serious filmmakers who focused on children's films or who thought about their life and world the way Ray did. He was a prolific writer of children's literature and a maker of children's films. He had done designing and illustrations, and he had many drawings for children to his credit. But here, serious filmmakers did not take children's cinema seriously.
SFK: Would Aravindan have envisioned a child spectator or viewership when he was making Kummaatti?
CSV: He must have thought of it. But look at the body of his work. In each film, he was trying to do something else, something different. One needed musicals, the other had a circus in there; some other had something else, and so on and so forth. This means, it may not have been intended as a children's film, but it was part of his larger narrative or oeuvre, if I may say so.
SFK: My Dear Kuttichathan (1984) was a milestone as the first 3D film from India. What do you think of that film?
CSV: It was the first 3D movie ever made in India. But, like I said earlier, it was not a film conceived and conceptualized entirely as a movie for children. It was a runaway hit. Everybody watched that film and there were many reasons for its huge success. One thing could be that, it was about children and people must have found it interesting. Or, may be the whole idea of 3D cinema itself made everybody a child. That might have appeared a good rationale to watch a film that presented a child's perspective. I think everybody was curious to know what it really was. May be, the idea of watching a 3D film for the first time in their life, for the first time in Malayalam, made everybody a child.
SFK: When we talk about Japanese cinema, they have different genres like animations, fantasy, etc. Do we have similar branching out or different explorations in Malayalam?
CSV: In my opinion, a major drawback or limitation of Malayalam cinema or the larger south Indian cinema per se, is the dearth of generic variety. Most of the films made would be confined to the audience unit or concept of family in one sense or the other. Look at the current scenario in Malayalam cinema. What is the generic variety that it offers? Vadakkanpaattu movies are of course a genre with identifiable and distinct identity. You do not even have gangster films or thriller films. Yakshi movies stand out as a different category. There is nothing more to add; no science fiction, no other categories and varieties.
I think it is also because the needs and demands of the film viewers are met by other cinemas. For instance, James Bond movies are part of our viewing preference; similarly, mythologicals from Tamil cinema or colossal science fiction films from Hollywood and larger-than-life NRI romantic films from Hindi. And this has shaped our viewing habits. It is not necessary to have each and every genre made in Malayalam itself.
SFK: Currently Kerala has an international children's film festival organized in Trivandrum (ICFFK). Could you elaborate on the venture and its history?
CSV: It is actually an offshoot of IFFK (International Film Festival of Kerala). IFFK has a very long history in Kerala. It is a hugely popular fair which enjoys an international appeal and crowd. The number of applicants exceeds 20,000 and very often, there is a huge rush. But, there is a kind of feeling that it is only for adults. So, what about the children? Should children be watching movies seriously? Basically, the idea was promoted by the Child Welfare Board, and the Chalachitra Academy provided the content. It was a huge success in terms of participation. A lot of children came forward, and they watched and thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing. The mix of the films was also oriented towards entertainment, and filmmakers as well as actors participated in the festival. So, it could be considered as yet another younger, smaller, and a child's version of IFFK.
SFK: Children's Film Society, India (CFSI) is a major funding source of children's films in India. Could you explain more about the kind of films supported or funded/produced by CFSI?
CSV: The Malayalam industry has not utilized the opportunity or they have not taken it seriously, I think. Except a few of them—like Shivan perhaps—not many have made use of CFSI funding. I think, in Malayalam, CFSI has not been used much as a source of funding. Even if used… those films, though it may have won awards, it is because every year they have a category called Best Children's Film Award. So most of the years you have a film. It is there most of the times. They get awards as well. But, in a sense, we do not have a slot for such children's films in the theatre network. And they do not actually show it. Secondly, there are no arrangements or film-show networking across schools in Kerala. So, it never gets shown. Thirdly, the only space where we can actually show this is on television. And, television never shows children's films. There is neither a slot nor do they care. In that sense, if I can say so, there is hardly any exhibition space for children's films made in Malayalam. Hence, that itself makes it very difficult to make films. But, if you look at art cinema, we have made some serious children's films. I think art cinema have made many more children's films than commercial cinema. Earlier we talked about Ramu Kariat, Aravindan etc. Similarly, I think there are two very interesting films: one is our Sunil's Kaliyorukkam (2007). It is a very interesting children's film. A film made by children. It is a movie in which children participated at all stages. And it really deals with children's issues and also about their public spaces and all that.
Another film is our Murali Nair's Unni (2007). Unni is also a very interesting film. A very, very different kind of a movie! But, if you talk about these films, these films got awards; they participated in festivals; but never actually entered a children's viewing circuit. There may be such attempts. Children's Film Society of India is a kind of organization which is…which does not have an exhibition network or a programme to reach out to children. For instance, there are some cinemas that they make; there are festivals that they conduct every year. What about taking a package of those films to all the colleges or schools? There are no such initiatives. Children will become part of a viewing culture only if there are such outreach programmes.
SFK: It is heard that cinema is now part of our curriculum. How does it look at cinema? Where does that effort come from?
CSV: I think there are two factors here. I have felt that the mandate or the objective of children's film festivals is…children, today, are not like us or the previous generation. They are living in a… in other words they are breathing itself in a highly visually saturated atmosphere; through television, internet, WhatsApp, mobile phones, and so on. So, they are surrounded by images, narratives; they are living with this visual flood. In reality, these film festivals have not self-reflectively asked the question: what should be the nature of a film festival that addresses students growing up in such contexts? We have to create a kind of film festival that will educate them about problems, to look at the usual visual content they are consuming every day in a critical way; in a discerning manner. Festivals should be packaged in such a manner. Like a counter to this present context; or else we can perhaps think of a film appreciation programme as the festival. Film festivals should be packaged with the objective of imparting film education, visual education, visual culture exposure, etc.
Similarly, it is now part of the curriculum. If you look at it, in a way, visual media, television, cinema, etc. are part of school, college and university curriculum in Kerala unlike any other states in India. But, actually there are two issues here. First, what are being taught here are techniques like script writing, not the study of visual cinema or to generate visual education among students. Second, there is hardly any reference to the basics of visual education like visual culture, painting or other kinds of visual arts in these textbooks. They are totally alien. There is no real subject like this (visual arts). We study history; we study literature. Why not visual arts? We should at least begin a primary education in this. It is possible to become a postgraduate even without getting acquainted with Raja Ravi Varma or KCS Panikker. So what I am saying is that unless you start from the beginning, from an earlier stage, there is a problem in introducing visual education suddenly in high school or the tenth class. They do not know even the basics of visual communication or visual arts or visual culture. Nobody has seen a painting; nobody has seen a sculptor. We start directly from/with cinema. Then there is a disconnect. The curriculum has not addressed this. We just teach some technical lessons, and that is all! We introduce some scripts, some cinemas. That method is very fragmented, according to me.
SFK: Today when digital technologies are more accessible even here, it has become easier for anyone to become a filmmaker while, filmmaking was a remote possibility in the past. How has this affected the sensibilities of this generation of makers as well as viewers?
CSV: Anybody can be an image maker or filmmaker now. If anybody could be a poet in the past, anybody can be a filmmaker in the present. In our generation everyone was a poet! Today, everybody is an image maker. That is the shift. But if I am asked about these excesses… Carlos Sobera was the chief guest at IFFK two years ago. This was a question raised in a conversation with him: what about digital technology? It has made everything easy. Anybody can be a filmmaker. What do you think about this? He said that digital imaging or digital technology was like a whale. It gives birth to millions of eggs; but only one or two survive. So that is about digital and image making. It is flooding! Everybody is an image maker. You are making images; you are sharing images; you are manipulating images every day; not every day, every minute in fact! But as a producer and as a consumer, we can ask two questions here: am I a thinking producer or a thinking consumer? I doubt it. We do not have such education. This visual flow or visual flood does not allow a distance to look at it. Because you are in it; you are breathing it. You just cannot keep away from it and look at it. As a result, what happens is that… especially in the case of children… I notice it when taking classes in schools and colleges… there is a pace underlying their visual understanding or visual experience, which is set by the television. There is a hyperlinked situation here. You tend to move from one to the other. And it is natural to you.
We do not have the patience to consistently look at or follow a particular visual. Because you are always impatient to go somewhere else. Because that is the format of this web page. You go from one to the other and it continues. This is the pace of the television. In that sense, television, as a frame, and as a continuous one, is highly fragmented temporally and spatially. This is what has set the visual pace of these children. This is their pace. Hence, they are not actually able to relate to everything. They get impatient. Then, they do not relate to the image. They do not let the image sink in.
We only had this (limited visual material) in our generation. So our pace was set accordingly. We did not have television to set our pace. Hence, we were not used to any other kind of faster medium. We had not experienced any editing pace.
Also, in a sense, we could feel the difference, as well. Now, even that is not felt. There is no difference or an alternative felt either visually, aesthetically or emotionally. Thus, there is this issue here. I doubt whether that is the way to approach images. Then the question is what would be the visual culture of such a generation?
V.D. Selvaraj in Conversation with Dr M.S.…
Knowledge TraditionsPeople


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Phishing Is the Internet's Most Successful Con
Tricking people out of sensitive information online is far too easy.
By Quinn Norton
In The Sting, Robert Redford plays a con artist who built a fake reality to get his mark. On the internet, phishing attacks are a similar kind of trickery. (Getty)
In the classic 1973 heist movie The Sting, two con men—played by Robert Redford and Paul Newman—build a fictitious world in a Depression-era Chicago basement to defraud a corrupt banker. They make an offtrack-betting room, hire actors to ensure the scene is convincing, and even enlist pretend law enforcement to fake-bust their mark. The film is memorable because it is one of the finest movies in the genre, well written and funny, but also because the duo's work is so meticulously detailed.
The con has changed since then, both short and long. In this age, the online equivalent of The Sting is a phishing site: a fake reality that lives online, set up to capture precious information such as logins and passwords, bank-account numbers, and the other functional secrets of modern life. You don't get to see these spaces being built, but—like The Sting's betting room—they can be perfect in every detail. Or they can be thrown together at the last minute like a clapboard set.
This might be the best way to think about phishing: a set built for you, to trick information out of you; built either by con men or, in the case of the recent spear-phishing attack caught and shut down by Microsoft, by spies and agents working for (or with) interfering governments, which seems a bit more sinister than Paul Newman with a jaunty smile and a straw hat.
But perhaps it should not seem so sinister, because phishing is profoundly easy to do. So easy, and comparatively cheap, that any country that isn't using it as part of its espionage strategy should probably fire its intelligence agency.
Computer security often focuses on malware: software that attacks faults in your computer to take control of it and give that control to someone else. Malware is often sophisticated software that can quietly take over a computer without being detected—from there, it can do anything, from copying every keystroke you type, to watching every page you open, to turning your camera and microphone on and recording you, to encrypting your hard drive and ransoming your computer's contents back to you. But novel malware is difficult to write, and can take many paid hours for some of the most talented programmers, in addition to finding or buying a security flaw that allows you to get your malware onto someone's computer undetected. It's painfully expensive, and often ends up leaving a trail back to the authors.
Phishing doesn't attack computers. It attacks the people using computers.
Setting up a phishing website is something a summer intern can do in a couple of weeks, and it works. If you were to try to create a phishing version of this article, you could start by saving the complete webpage from your browser—that would get you the picture, text, and code that makes the page you're reading now. If this article contained an account login, you could put it on a server you control, and maybe register another domain, something like http://tehatlantic.com. If you enticed someone to try to use their TheAtlantic.com username and password on tehatlantic.com, you would then have that information.
This kind of phishing started out mainly as a money-stealing scheme, delivered en masse. "Phishing has changed a lot. A decade or so ago it was a mass phenomenon of people looking for passwords to bank accounts, PayPal, eBay … anything they thought would be easily monetizable," says Cormac Herley, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research. "I think that threat has largely been beaten back: Spam filters have become better at detecting it, browsers have warning mechanisms built in, banks have become good at detecting fraud."
But that's the untargeted stuff. Enticing someone to click on a phishing link, in an email or elsewhere, is where a targeted attack, also known as spear-phishing, comes in: learning about someone's life and habits to know just what email would get them unthinkingly to click. A reality built for one person, or one cohort of people. The con is on, the set is built, and the actors are hired to make the sting, all from a web browser.
In early 2016 a phishing email requesting an urgent payment as part of what's known as a "fake president" scam landed on the Austrian aviation-parts maker FACC's email servers. The "fake president" is generally an urgent message from an authority figure that needs Accounts Payable to send money to a foreign account at once. In the case of FACC, a dubious wire transfer followed the email, and the company lost more than 40 million euros and fired its CEO.
Email hackers are winning.
John Podesta, the chairman of the Hillary Clinton campaign, was famously spear-phished in 2016 by an email saying someone in Ukraine was attempting to log into his Gmail account. When he clicked the link and entered his username and password (instead of using the Google domain passed along by his own help-desk person), his account was actually captured. His emails, along with Democratic National Committee emails harvested the same way, were later leaked online, creating chaos in the run-up to the 2016 election. Most recently, Microsoft found and shut down six domains it believed were created by a group known as the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian army, or GRU, targeting conservative think tanks (the International Republican Institute and the Hudson Institute) and the U.S. Senate. It's not clear what exactly these phishing sites looked like, or how they worked. As far as Microsoft knows, no one was compromised by these sites, but they also don't know how many more are out there, waiting for just the right spear-phishing email or bogus phone call to get someone to click the link.
"The phishing that persists as a real problem today is the spear-phishing for … credentials," Herley says. He has studied the economics of phishing as well as the efficacy of security advice. "This is still a very successful vector in getting a toehold on enterprise networks. It's low volume, so it's much harder to detect." In the case of political and industrial espionage, each potential victim is worth researching and getting to know—building just the right room for their own personal sting.
Phishing and malware aren't exclusive options. Blending phishing with malware can be the most potent approach, usually in the form of a well-crafted email with an important, often urgent, document attached. But it's not a document, or not just a document. It's malware, and when you click on that attachment you're telling your computer that you want to install the software, which you don't know is software. The computer obeys you, and in doing so, invisibly hands itself over to the person who sent you the software. This approach uses you to get to your computer. It's been used against journalists and activists all over the world, and probably a lot of other people, but it's the journalists and activists we hear about.
More frightening is the fact that, most of the time, a decent fake website gets an attacker whatever they need without expensive and detectable malware. You just followed a link, put in your username and password, and maybe the page showed an error with a link that goes to the real site. Just one of those hiccups on the net that we see and forget moments later. This can be overwhelming to think about. Someone, you might reasonably say, should fix this, and by someone you mean tech companies.
The most Microsoft, Google, or any of the tech companies can do with their technology is try to detect malware and phishing sites, and stop them from talking to the internet—blocking up the door to the offtrack-betting basement. This is called "blackholing." But because spinning up a hundred basements on the internet isn't much harder than spinning up one, leaving it to tech companies won't work. The victims are the weakest link in phishing, and the tech companies can't put out reliable updates to change or prevent user behavior.
"We do invest a lot in technical fixes like better threat detection, better protection of networks, efforts like AccountGuard and Defending Democracy, and encouraging two-factor authentication for high-value accounts," Herley says. "But there's also an education component; we'd love protection to have zero asks of the user, but that's not always possible."
AccountGuard and Defending Democracy are offerings from Microsoft aimed at its most vulnerable (and political) clients, but even then, most of the offerings consist of recommendations, best practices, webinars, and notifications: attempts to patch the human.
Many security-professional and media recommendations exhort eternal vigilance, paying attention to every detail. This is terrible advice. I'm a professional with years of experience in this space and I don't bother to inspect my emails or carefully read all my URLs: I have things to do. As a strategy for the constant level of attacks in modern email, this approach has failed, even in dealing with the amateurish mass-phishing attacks we've seen over the past 10 years.
Spear-phishing, especially political spear-phishing, is even harder to catch with vigilance. The inconsistency of security advice has contributed to the disaster with ideas that are hard to implement, don't make sense, and don't work, but that security and IT departments yell at people with all the fury of revivalist preachers. It's exhausting.
Developing a few good habits based on how this computer you're using works is relatively easy and more effective than paranoia. Turn on two-factor authentication where you can, where it's available on sites you use. This includes things such as RSA tokens, Yubikeys, Google Authenticator, and SMS verification codes, which create something needed to log in beyond a password and a username so that if your username and password are stolen or leaked, attackers still can't take over your accounts. Apply software updates. Or, better yet, Herley suggests letting your computer do it for you. "I'd say use automatic updates … We invest heavily in [fixes] as soon as we figure out things are wrong. You want all that goodness working for you."
Set up regular backups that require minimal effort from you. "You don't have to worry as much about ransomware [or theft, or disk crashes] … if you know you can always get your stuff back," Herley says. Use long, complex, and unique passwords, but make it easy on yourself. "Write them down or use a password manager," Herley says.
How long until the next big ransomware attack?
I'd strongly recommend the password manager, but not directly for security purposes. Password managers are easy and will autofill your password on sites you've used before—even less effort. There's most likely one built into the browser or operating system you're using now, but if you want to get fancy, you can use an online password-management system that syncs between devices. Don't reuse passwords, and go ahead and change your password on the sites where you know you've reused passwords. This is an hour or two of pain, but only one time. You are not likely to leak your password onto the internet, but a site you use almost certainly will at some point. You can also sign up at Have I Been Pwned to find out which of your passwords have already leaked onto the internet.
Don't follow links you get sent to sites on which you have an account—you have your own bookmarks and browser history, which already go to the right site for sure. If you get an email from your bank or, say, think-tank employer, log in on your web browser. You're going to have to do that anyway, so you might as well follow your own link. One habit that would take some work to change but does the most to secure you from malware is not opening email attachments on your own computer. Have people put files in a file-locker site, something like Dropbox, and open documents in a remote service like Google Docs. Make it someone else's IT department's problem.
Don't try to be perfect. Just try to be expensive for the con artist. Make them work hard enough, and you're not worth the bother. Right now, most computer users, whether they are political consultants, CEOs, scientists, or researchers, aren't very hard to con.
Understanding all of this, the news of phishing campaigns takes on a different tone. Rather than asking why there are groups linked to Russia phishing our politics, the question is: Why aren't more governments phishing U.S. companies and agencies? Perhaps they are, and we just don't notice. Whatever the reason, people need to talk about phishing, as much as they need to update their software. Because striving to understand complex phenomena is how humans are updated over time, and it's how we make it as expensive and difficult to hack humans as it is to hack computers.


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The most prominent architect of the GND is New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Under her proposal, cows might suffer, but humans will thrive thanks to all the wonderful new jobs and free health care her utopian scheme would provide.
This entry was posted on February 18, 2019 at 10:35 am	and is filed under Uncategorized. Tagged: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Amazon, Clarence Darrow, GREEN NEW DEAL, New Dealers, NRA, the Depression. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.


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bilaterals.org » Negotiations » US-China
Trump's agricultural trade policy with China: trade-offs or trade disputes?
posted 15-June-2017
IATP | 7 June 2017
By Dr. Steve Suppan
With the U.S. confirmation of the Secretary of Agriculture and the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) having taken place little more than a month ago, it may seem premature to write about the Trump administration's agricultural trade policy. However, it appears that at least parts of this trade policy are occurring in trade-offs with China, outside traditional USTR and USDA channels. Can trade-offs agreed outside a trade negotiations structure be implemented successfully at the same time as the U.S. pursues a World Trade Organization dispute over China's agricultural subsidies?
In search of the deal
On May 11, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross announced that a one-year trade policy plan will be discussed as "concrete progress is made in implementing the actions under the 100-day plan" agreed by President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping in April. Indeed, Ross touted the plan as a "Herculean accomplishment." The managing director of an economic research firm in Beijing was less impressed by the deal: "China has made a few modest concessions that cost it very little, in areas strategically picked to maximize the political benefit to Trump."
Among the ten actions to be implemented is a trade-off to allow U.S. beef exports to China in exchange for allowing Chinese cooked poultry exports to the United States. Chinese poultry exporters must ensure that their poultry is sourced from U.S. "approved sources" and that the poultry processing meets U.S. standards.
Food and Water Watch criticized the poultry leg of the trade-off as exposing U.S. consumers to imports from a country with a weak food safety system. Consumers will have no way of knowing where their poultry comes from since in December 2015 Congress repealed 2008 Farm Bill requirements for Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) of poultry and meat products. Cargill announced that its processing plant in China was ready to export the cooked poultry products. Ross said "the Department of Agriculture feels that this will not cause major injury to the U.S. poultry industry."
The beef leg of the trade-off was first announced by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in September 2016. The beef export opening will require segregation of cattle 30 months or younger prior to slaughter to reduce the likelihood of Mad Cow contamination of the meat. China has banned U.S. beef since the detection of Mad Cow in U.S. herds in 2003. "It's pretty clear we're going to have a special China beef program that runs through our industry," said Joel Haggard vice president for the Asian Pacific Region of the U.S. Meat Export Federation. The beef industry maintained that segregation and tracing the origin of cattle under a U.S. COOL program would be unduly burden the industry and provide no informational value to U.S. consumers. Chinese consumers of U.S. beef won't see a COOL label, but they will be ensured that U.S. beef will be from cattle segregated by age prior to slaughter to meet Chinese import requirements.
According to a 2016 Rabobank report cited in a Financial Times article, about half of U.S. beef destined for Hong Kong is transshipped to a quasi-legal "grey market" in China, i.e. beef import smuggling. Rabobank estimated the value of the grey market U.S. beef exports to China at about $340 million a year. USDA estimated total Chinese beef imports for 2015 at $2.3 billion, following dramatic import increases since 2012. Tyson and Cargill are expected to be the major beneficiaries of the beef poultry trade-off deal.
What does China want?
Benefits for China in the trade-off for agricultural biotechnology are not evident within the terms of the May 11 announcement. Among China's "modest concessions" to the United States is to expedite the process for approving eight U.S. biotechnology product trait applications to enable Chinese import of grains and oilseeds with those traits. Any requests by China's National Biosafety Committee for information to assess the safety of these and future genetically engineered products must be judged to be relevant to the safety evaluation by U.S. authorities. What does China get out in exchange for complying with U.S. demands?
The Chinese government views the ChemChina (China National Chemical Corporation) acquisition of Syngenta, the Swiss-headquartered pesticide and genetically modified seed manufacturer, together with expediting U.S. GM crop trait approvals, as part of a national food security strategy. The European Commission and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission approved the $43 billion merger in April. GM crops are planted illegally in China, as they were in Brazil, Argentina and elsewhere, and then have been subsequently legalized, with U.S. government support, in the face of public protest. In June, China will begin a media campaign to encourage consumer support for GMOs. Assuming the media campaign persuades Chinese consumers to eat whatever is put on their plate, biotech companies will join Cargill and Tyson as the main beneficiaries of U.S.-China agricultural trade policy.
A deal by deal basis for U.S. trade policy was not dominant when the Obama administration launched a World Trade Organization trade dispute with China in September 2016, and requested the formation of a dispute panel in January to judge the case. China has responded to the launch of the dispute by calling for a renegotiation of the WTO rules on agricultural subsidies, which the USTR has characterized as a "distraction" from the dispute. The dispute request accuses the Chinese of violating their limits in crop-specific Aggregate Measures of Support (AMS) to farmers by more than $100 billion, according to a 2016 econometric study commissioned by the U.S. Wheat Associates. The excessive AMS payments are "deemed" to "distort trade" by enabling Chinese consumers to buy AMS supported domestic crops at prices above the "global price."
(U.S. crop support in the 2014 Farm Bill is designed, according to a Congressional Research Service report, to comply with WTO AMS limits and with the rules of the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures (SCM). Brazil won a WTO dispute over U.S. cotton price, income and export guarantee measures as violating the SCM.)
Unrealistic expectations: the U.S. wheat case
At stake, however, are not only the facts of the case and their interpretation under the WTO Dispute Settlement Agreement, but the WTO authorized retaliation and the consequences of that retaliation for Chinese farmers. U.S. Wheat Association Chairman Jason Scott indicated the scale of that retaliation in a May 11 statement congratulating Robert Lighthizer on his Senate confirmation as U.S. Trade Representative. China's domestic support "restrains wheat trade and costs farmers in exporting countries billions of dollars every year," presumably in export revenues that would be captured if China removed its AMS payments to wheat farmers. China produces far more wheat than any other country, with nearly all of it consumed domestically or stored as part of national food security strategy.
The Wheat Associates commissioned study forecasts, "Removal of domestic support for wheat in China has significant impacts. The fall in production, resulting from the decrease in domestic price and higher production costs, leads to an increase in imports to 9.6 million metric tons, the [WTO] in-quota level. As a result, world wheat price increases by 2.8%. The U.S. responds to the higher price by increasing production and consequently, net exports, which increase by 6%, or 1.5 million metric tons, between the base case and the scenario." In this stylized scenario, China agrees to remove its domestic support for wheat, and the resulting fall in Chinese wheat production is supplanted by U.S. wheat exports. These exports fill the entire amount of allowable, but not required, U.S. portion of the wheat import quota that China agreed to as one condition of its accession to the WTO in December 2001.
There is reason to believe that this idealized scenario will not play out as projected, particularly if the Trump administration decides to continue the WTO dispute against China's agricultural subsidies. The dispute is launched against all Chinese AMS, potentially affecting the economic viability of the crops and livestock of China's nearly 300 million farmers. If China were to remove its domestic support for wheat, the resulting unemployment of most wheat farmers and their subsequent migration to China's cities would present difficult and costly relocation and re-employment challenges.
Due to the high financial, storage, and environmental costs of domestic support for corn, a livestock feed grain, China ended its corn price support and stockpiling program in 2016. Instead, Iowa State University economists reported, "China adopted a direct payment corn subsidy policy tied to planting acres in spring 2016—a policy familiar to US farmers." Rather than deplete China's already low aquifers by trying to be self-sufficient in water hungry corn production, China may prefer to increase its corn imports.
However, China might find its price support for wheat to be a price worth paying, rather than depend on U.S. wheat exports for a critical margin of Chinese food security. China's political and scientific elite may be counting on the biotechnology leg of the May 11 announced plan to provide food security in the near future through a combination of Chinese GM crops and U.S. GM imports.
Fueling unsustainable agriculture
The 2017 USTR agenda states that it will rely less on the WTO dispute settlement system and more on unilateral U.S. action to enforce an "America First" trade and foreign policy. Whether the Trump administration avoids the WTO to settle agricultural disputes, the reorganization of the U.S. Department of Agriculture to add an Undersecretary for Trade and Foreign Agricultural Affairs indicates that the Trump administration will prioritize exporting U.S. agriculture overproduction. The reorganization eliminates two undersecretary positions and creates an Under Secretary for Farm Production and Conservation.
There are concerns, both in Congress and in USDA, that placing the offices to conserve agricultural natural resources and the offices to administer the 29 domestic support payment programs (Table 1) authorized by the 2014 Farm Bill to support agricultural production under the control of one Undersecretary will result in a budgetary competition that the Natural Resources Conservation Service is very likely to lose. The likely result of this reorganization is an environmentally destructive and unsustainable agricultural trade policy.
In a 2011 speech to European agricultural economists, then WTO Director General Pascal Lamy said, "Neither food nor agricultural trade policy operates in a vacuum. In other words, no matter how sophisticated our trade policies are, if domestic policies do not themselves incentivize agriculture, and internalize negative social and environmental externalities, we will not be satisfied with our agricultural systems." Thus far, the Trump administration's policy indicates the social and environmental costs of maximizing agricultural production for trade, to China and elsewhere, will stay off the trade accounting balance sheet or, in the euphemism of economists, will be "externalized."
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agriculture | farmers | food
source: IATP


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use OpenCloud\Rackspace;
use OpenCloud\Common\Constants\Datetime;

$client = new Rackspace('{authUrl}', array(
    'username' => '{username}',
    'apiKey'   => '{apiKey}',
));

$service = $client->queuesService(null, '{region}');

// You MUST set a client ID before executing any operation. This ID must be a
// valid UUID. The SDK can set a random UUID for you if you don't want to
// define your own, just leave the argument empty.
$service->setClientId();

// Get your queue
$queue = $service->getQueue('{queueName}');

// Post a new message. The body attribute specifies an arbitrary document that
// constitutes the body of the message being sent. The size of this body is
// limited to 256 KB, excluding whitespace. The ttl attribute specifies how
// long the server waits before marking the message as expired and removing it
// from the queue. The value of ttl must be between 60 and 1209600 seconds
$queue->createMessage(array(
    'body' => (object) array( // This can be anything you want
      'event' => 'foo'        // and not necessarily an object
    ),
    'ttl' => 2 * Datetime::DAY,
));

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Keegan's mom, Cynthia, and I became friends on our CCAI DTC group from last year. Although we didn't travel together, we did meet up at the CCAI reunion last year. Chris and I had already brought Isabelle home, but they hadn't travelled for Keegan yet. So this was the first time I had seen this little angel in person.
And *wow* is she cute!
They came over and spent the morning at our house since they were in town visiting relatives. My girls had a great time playing with Keegan, and were entertained just by the fact that someone new was here!
Cynthia and I got to talking and realized that the kids had all gone back to the boys' room where Dalton had made himself honorary DJ and was spinning some Disney tunes on the CD player. The girls were going wild, dancing, spinning and basically cracking up.
Thanks for coming over, Keegan!


Chronicles of the Cask - this event offers a sensory journey from cask to glass…………….
A rare opportunity to learn the story of Roseisle Distillery's innovative process and add a rare commemorative bottle of whisky to your collection.
This is a unique experience to visit Duncan Taylor and taste whiskies before and after "Octave Invigoration".
Meet Peter MacKay from Carn Mor at the Whisky Castle for an open tasting of whisky throughout the day.
A distillery tour like no other!
Do you want to be a whisky blender?
Renowned whiskies from five historic Speyside distilleries.
Join our Global Brand Ambassador for a unique tasting!
A very exclusive guided tour of Tamdhu Distillery which is normally closed to the public.
Explore whisky country in a new way on a small group trail run followed by a tasting at Glen Grant, and finish up with tea/coffee and home baking.
Explore whisky country in a new way on a small group trail run followed by a tasting beside the River Spey, curated by Dave Craig.
Join Dave Broom, chief engineer at scotchwhisky.com and Lyndsey Gray, Quaich bar manager for the ultimate fight to decide who is Speyside's champion.
A guide through the mystery of maturation and how wood makes our whisky.
Long lost bottlings from the Gordon & MacPhail Whiskies archive.
A special festival tasting of Dramfool's new releases and some rare sold out previous bottlings.
Come along to try 6 different spirits and see if you can identify them. Prizes to be won!
The Johnnie Walker Whisky Team invite you to immerse yourself in the history and heritage of Johnnie Walker, the world's No.1 whisky.
Our Global Brand Ambassador invites you to an exclusive tasting of a range of Johnnie Walker Whiskies.
Join Windswept Brewery for an open tasting of their range of beer, paired with a selection of whiskies.
Meet Alastair Milligan from Gordon & MacPhail at the Whisky Castle for an open tasting of whisky throughout the day.
This whisky tasting features a selection of whiskies from Berry Bros & Rudd, independent bottler, with Jonny McMillan.
Help choose the 2004 Family Cask vintage with the 6th generation of the Grant family, George Grant.
Join Gordon Haughton and his team for this walking tour around the "7 Stills of Dufftown"
Come along and try some of the whiskies from The Whisky Shop Dufftown's tastings you may have missed and plenty of other whiskies too!