The Internet Needs Privacy-Protecting Public Spaces—the Zcash Foundation is Now a Public Charity Dedicated to Building Them

The Zcash Foundation is now officially a 501(c)(3) Public Charity. You may not be particularly interested in non-profit tax law, but if you are passionate about the Internet, privacy, and the future of public infrastructure, then this is important news. So far as I know, the Zcash Foundation is now the first public charity dedicated to building internet payments and privacy infrastructure for the public good.

Committing to Public Infrastructure & Scientific Research

Our application was not run-of-the-mill. There are several types of charitable activities recognized by the IRS: among them public education, scientific research, and the creation and maintenance of public infrastructure. Any good non-profit tax attorney will tell you that the easiest approach to approval is to focus on public education rather than making more complicated arguments about public infrastructure or scientific research. We had a very good tax attorney, but we didn’t take the easy approach.

When we were working with our lawyers it was important to me and several of the other board members that we accurately describe our goals—especially with regard to scientific research and public infrastructure. These may be more difficult to explain, and the IRS may be initially less comfortable with those arguments for public goods, but we were more interested in the principle of the thing: online public infrastructure and the science that makes it safe and private are just as much public goods as roads, reservoirs, and clean air or water.

The foundation will—still—engage in public education about cryptocurrencies, online privacy technology, and the computing networks that power these new tools. But the foundation will also support open, peer-reviewed scientific research into zero-knowledge proofs and associated cryptographic technologies, and, perhaps most importantly, it will help to build the Zcash decentralized network as open, public infrastructure.

Public Infrastructure Beyond Physical Spaces

The IRS has long recognized certain maintainers of public infrastructure as charities. In most cases, however, that infrastructure has been physical: roads, waterworks, parks, and recreational facilities. What makes these things public? They can be used by anyone, a public park accepts all visitors and provides important goods for free to patrons: places for relaxation, contemplation, inspiration, community, and play. In general, we want public charities to help provide these goods because (A) a world of only gated and private parks would be deeply fragmented and non-egalitarian, and (B) government alone can’t always sufficiently provide the quantity and quality of public parks that we might want as a society.

But what if public infrastructure is something that exists in the virtual world rather than the physical? Can a public charity be created to build and maintain these online public spaces?

The Internet is a public space, but it is—especially of late—becoming a balkanized federation of private fiefdoms. Where are you as you wander the Internet? Most likely, you spend the majority of your time on private properties: Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, Uber, Airbnb, Ebay, Reddit, or the New York Times.

As you navigate between these digital landowners you are using public infrastructure: the TCP/IP protocol, the DNS system, and web browsers that are mostly powered with open source software libraries. Additionally, the servers that power private websites like Google and Amazon are—more often than not—running on open source software (e.g. Apache).

Just as the public sewers and subways of New York undergird the very valuable and privately owned buildings above, the public protocols and software stacks of the Internet sustain the very valuable websites we frequent. There’s a fascinating and complicated mix of public and private, open source and proprietary infrastructure online, and there are already some public charities promoting the creation of public components of that infrastructure: think of the Free Software Foundation, or the Mozilla Foundation, and digital civil liberties groups like the EFF.

Blockchains as Public Payment Infrastructure

Until the emergence of the Bitcoin network, however, there was no public payment infrastructure on the Internet. If you wanted to pay someone else you’d have to use wholly-owned proprietary tubes and channels (the credit card networks, the banks, the Paypals, Wechats, and Venmos of the world).

Bitcoin proved that an open network of independent and unincorporated participants can come together and create public payments infrastructure. The Bitcoin network protocol and associated free software provides that infrastructure gratis to the public. Anyone can—without fee or barrier—create a payment address and receive payments from other persons on the network. Sending rather than receiving payments may require a fee, but fees ultimately go to the network as a whole (to each unaffiliated participant pro rata based on their efforts to do work to secure the blockchain) rather than going to a single network-owning provider.

Privacy is Necessary for Internet Money

Bitcoin is awesome, but in its current incarnation it is not sufficiently private to be a realistic public payments infrastructure. The public deserve privacy as well as ungated, free, and censorship-resistant Internet money. That’s why Zcash and related projects are so important. As we wrote in out charitable status application:

The [Zcash Foundation] may also support, design, and otherwise encourage the development of software made available to the general public, gratis and under open source licenses. This software, when run voluntarily on the internet-connected computers of members of the general public, forms a peer-to-peer network that enables participants to send and receive payments securely and privately over the internet. This peer-to-peer network is a public payments and communications infrastructure developed and deployed as a benefit for the general public. The unique qualities of the software and the network it creates should decrease the risk that sensitive and personally identifiable information associated with electronic payments will be obtained by unauthorized third-parties. The Organization wishes to aid the development and maintenance of this public infrastructure, in part, because financial privacy is a fundamental human right necessary to guaranteeing the dignity of individuals and the diversity of society. Ensuring that personal information related to financial transactions is not available to unauthorized third parties can prevent discriminatory pricing, predatory lending, extortion, and other practices that degrade vulnerable or targeted persons and facilitate discrimination and prejudice.

To convince the IRS that this was a truly public purpose we had to make analogies to several of their past rulings on the subject. We had to lay out the case for there being public spaces on the Internet. Internet nerds as well as tax attorneys might find those details of our application exciting. Aside from being a document that was necessary to achieve tax exempt status, it’s also an excellent articulation of the Foundation’s commitment with respect to Zcash and privacy in general:

The Service has previously ruled that the creation of a public park, the preservation and improvement of a lake used for public recreation, solid waste recycling, and the development and maintenance of community parking lots all qualify as charitable purposes. While the Zcash network may be a virtual public space rather than one existing in the physical world, it still allows the public, unencumbered, to enjoy a benefit. Much as a public park provides vistas to a neighborhood, a public network for secure payments provides a valuable service to persons across the nation via their internet-connected devices. In this case, the benefit is secure payments and financial privacy. Privacy is a fundamental human right recognized by the United Nations and other governments and international organizations. Technologies that protect individual privacy can discourage or prevent discriminatory pricing, predatory lending, and other attempts to target individuals for unfavorable treatment based on intimate knowledge of their financial standing or vulnerable economic position within society. Encouraging the creation of secure electronic payments networks is understood as a governmental responsibility. The Zcash network, therefore, provides citizens with utility ordinarily provided by the state. For example, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (the Board) fosters the safety, efficiency, and accessibility of the Fedwire Funds Service, an electronic payments system. The Zcash network provides similar functionality to the Fedwire service, and the role of the Organization in maintaining the Zcash network is similar to the Board: fostering the payment network’s safety, efficiency, and accessibility for the use of the public at large.

Approval of our tax exempt status is an awesome way for us to commit to this mission. I trust my fellow board members, our new and excellent staff, and I trust the community to do the right thing and work towards building privacy protecting tools and infrastructure for the general public regardless of any legal status achieved by the Foundation, but it’s pretty neat that we now have beneficial status that demands we stay true to that goal. Let’s build a public but also privacy-protecting Internet together!


by Charles Eisenstein.

Cultivation and Culture

Separation from Nature, and the technological program to control the world, did not originate with agriculture, despite the eloquent arguments of Daniel Quinn and others who associate the expulsion from the Garden of Eden into the world of toil with the transition from a hunter-gatherer to an agricultural mode of existence. Agriculture, rather, marked an epochal acceleration of a pre-established trend, an inevitable expression of a long-gathering latency.

With agriculture, the separate human realm expanded into radically new territory to include the various animals, plants, and other parts of nature that we made ours. No longer was domesticity limited to the campfire circle. With agriculture, we began to domesticate the whole world.

Because it was agriculture that launched the ascent of humanity into its present phase, the question of how and why agriculture began is critical. Many of the theories in the literature are unconvincing. The fallacy of the “nasty, brutish, and short” assumption of anxiety theory casts doubt on theories depending on population pressure and food shortage (food production can sustain far more people per square mile than food gathering). Hunter-gatherers had the means to regulate their population levels and in many places did so successfully for thousands of years; population grew dramatically as a result of agriculture more than as a cause. Another theory is that climate change or increased CO2 levels at the end of the Ice Age rendered old lifestyles untenable and made new plants available.[69] However, this ignores the rapid adaptability of hunter-gatherers, who inhabited a wide variety of ecosystems even before the end of the Ice Age, and in any event, the transition from one to another environment would seem much less difficult than the transition from foraging to farming. Most ridiculous are explanations that imply we only figured out the idea of planting seeds quite recently: foraging cultures have a highly sophisticated understanding of plant reproduction and the conditions for their growth.

The fact that agriculture arose independently in several locations around the globe points to a natural progression from earlier technology and mindsets, and not an accident (whether mistake or glorious invention) that could just as well not have happened. Agriculture arose independently in Mesopotamia, in China (possibly in two locations), in South America, in Central America, in the Eastern United States, and perhaps in New Guinea and sub-Saharan Africa.[70] Indeed, most of the places where agriculture failed to develop were where there was a dearth of easily domesticable plants and animals. With few exceptions, wherever we could develop agriculture, we eventually did. Somehow, an agricultural future was built in to who we were in the late Upper Paleolithic.

Inevitable or not, agriculture was not a sudden invention but the cumulative consequence of a series of incremental developments that marked a gradual shift in human attitudes toward nature. Although in our customary dualistic mindset we may be tempted to see agriculture as an invention, a distinct epochal transition, Jared Diamond plausibly describes the origin of agriculture as a gradual step-by-step transition from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. At first, perhaps, nomadic hunter-gatherers merely followed the herds of the ancestors of modern cattle, sheep, and so on. Over many generations, these nascent herders began to provide food and protection at key moments, upon which the animals came increasingly to depend. Crop planting may have started as a wider scattering of seed or removal of competing plants to give favorite foods a head start, followed perhaps by months of nomadic foraging for wild foods. Eventually, these plants came also to depend on the assistance of the planters, whether through deliberate breeding or unconscious coevolution. In any event, the domestic corn plant cannot reproduce without human assistance; nor does a domestic chicken stand much chance of survival in the wild.

Once domestication began, the much larger population density it permitted meant there was no going back. Agriculture, the archetype of human control over nature, induces dependency and the need for ever-increasing control—over land, people, plants and animals—as the population continues to grow.

Along with the gradual shift to agriculture came a transformation in human attitudes toward nature. Hunting accords with a view of other animals as equals. After all, nature works that way—some eat and some are eaten—and the human hunter is doing nothing different from animal hunters. Domestication imposes a hierarchy onto the interspecies relationship, as man becomes lord and master of the animals. Understandably, this relationship is then projected onto the whole of nature, which becomes in its entirety the object of domestication and control. Yet we must also consider that the innovation of animal domestication could perhaps not have happened in the first place unless nature were first objectified conceptually. The solution to this chicken-and-egg problem lies in the embryonic self-other separation embodied in all life forms, going back to prehuman times. Domestication merely represents its crystallization into a new phase: a slow-motion gestalt which also included all the other elements of separation detailed in the foregoing sections.

The farmer’s new relationship with nature engendered a new conception of the divine. As agriculture and other technology removed humans from nature, so also did the gods become supernatural rather than natural beings. The process was a gradual one, starting with ancient pantheons closely identified with natural forces. Gradually, identity evolved into rulership as the gods were abstracted out of nature, eventually resulting in the Newtonian watchmaker God completely separate from the earthly (the natural) realm. At the same time, as we lost touch with nature’s harmonies and cycles, the gods took on the capricious character exemplified by the Greek pantheon and the Old Testament. Accordingly, the gods must be propitiated, kept happy through the offering of sacrifices, a practice found in most ancient farming and herding cultures but not among hunters.

The angry God that arose in early civilizations is also linked to the concept of good and evil and the concept of sin. The corn is good, the weeds are bad. The bees are good, the locusts bad. The sheep are good, the wolves bad. Technology overcomes nature by promoting the good and controlling the bad. As for nature, so also for human nature. The self is divided into two parts, a good part and a bad part, the latter of which we overcome with the controlling technologies of culture.

Whereas hunter-gatherers could easily adapt to all the vicissitudes of the local climate, farmers were at the mercy of drought, hail, locusts, and other threats to a successful harvest. While the resources of hunter-gatherers were virtually unlimited and their population fairly stable, agricultural civilizations experienced famines, epidemics, and wars that decimated whole populations and defied any attempt at prevention. Here was a source of constant, inescapable anxiety woven into the fabric of life itself—no matter how successful this year’s harvest, what of next year?—as well as a motivation for the increased understanding and control represented, respectively, in science and technology. Scarcity and the threat of scarcity is implicit in the attempted mastery of nature. Jockeying for position in the face of scarcity, we endure an endlessly intensifying competitiveness that is built into our system of money, our understanding of biology, and our assumptions about human nature.

Paradoxically, while agriculture raised nature’s productivity of food (for humans), it also introduced the contemporary concept of labor. Food was at once more abundant but also harder to get. With agriculture we had to work today to obtain food tomorrow—a primary example of the paradox of technology, which has brought us to the brink of catastrophe despite its motivating goals of ease, comfort, and security.

Agriculture, because it involves keeping nature from its rest state, necessarily involves effort. I don’t need to do any work to grow thistles, burdock, and crack grass in my garden, because that is what those thousand square feet of land naturally tend to. But to grow cabbages, kale, and garlic I have to do all kinds of work—pulling up the plants that crowd them out, erecting fences to keep out the rabbits and woodchucks, etc. The truism that we reap only what we sow only goes back as far as agriculture. Before then, we could reap without sowing: nature was fundamentally provident. For the hunter-gatherer, the providence of nature requires little labor or planning, but only an understanding of nature’s patterns. Primitive survival is a matter of intimacy and not control.

The advent of agriculture accelerated the demise of the gift mentality that characterizes hunter-gatherer societies. Whereas hunter-gatherers see game and food plants as gifts of the earth, a farmer tends to see them as items of exchange for labor, and it is always his goal to tilt that exchange constantly to his benefit. No longer is sustenance something that the world freely provides. Whereas the hunter-gatherer is part of the gift network that we call an ecology, the farmer separates himself from that network and seeks to extract what he needs from it. Thus Daniel Quinn names the hunter-gatherers “leavers” and the agricultural societies “takers”,[71] though perhaps “givers” would be a better word for the former. Eventually, the new relationship of taking and exchanging manifested among humans as well, setting the stage for the rise of money and property.

When we need to apply effort to coax a livelihood from the land, humanity’s relationship with nature tends to become adversarial. The land naturally drifts towards weeds, pests, and in general a less productive default state. With the technologies of agriculture we seek to prevent this from happening. The battle lines are drawn. Today we seek to live more sustainably, yet the oppositional view of nature that environmentalists lament as the most destructive force on our planet is built into the very origin of civilization—agriculture. What else can we expect from a technology founded on arresting or reversing the processes of nature? Consequently, the end of humanity’s war against nature must involve a wholly different approach to technology, and not merely better planning, fewer accidents, more foresight, and tighter control.

Agriculture inaugurated our conception of the earth as a resource or asset, defined primarily by its productivity. The land gradually lost its intrinsic value—its sacredness—and assumed an extrinsic, conditional value based on what it could produce. For the first time there was good land and bad land. The transition was a slow one, advancing each time new technology separated us a step further from original natural cycles. The primitive farmer is still very close to the land, even if less completely embosomed by it than the hunter-gatherer. Each new technological advance freed us from one or another natural limitation, culminating in modern industrial monoculture in which given the right inputs, almost anything can be made to grow on any land. Even a desert can be made to bloom.

It is becoming increasingly apparent, though, that natural cycles can be ignored only temporarily. Their disruption bears consequences that can be postponed by a series of technical fixes, but never permanently denied. Deserts can be made to bloom, yes, but only at an increasing cost and not forever. Someday they will return to their natural state. Moreover, the consequences of the disruption of natural cycles intensify the longer it is sustained. The present accelerating desertification of the world’s agricultural areas testifies to the impossibility of forestalling natural processes forever, and to the severity of the consequences of trying. It is as if the desert cannot be denied.

The valuing of land according to its productive function and not its innate sacredness projects onto human society in the division of labor. With agriculture, human beings began to be distinguished by function—farmer, soldier, metalsmith, builder, priest, king—in a way they never had before. True, there are chiefs and shamans in pre-agricultural societies, but with rare exceptions they were not exempt from hunting and gathering food. They did not specialize by trading food for their services. In agricultural societies people came to be defined more and more according to generic functional classifications, a trend that drew as well from the anonymizing effect of the vast increases in population density that agriculture permitted.

With agriculture, a new category of being came into existence: the stranger. Before then, humans lived in tribes of at most 500 people, comprising bands of about 15-20 people each. It is not difficult to know 500 people by name and face, especially after a lifetime of frequent association, but beyond that the identifying structures of kith and kin become tenuous and some people necessarily fall into the category of “other”.

In a hunter-gatherer band or tribe, and even in a Neolithic village, we were intimately known by virtually everyone we ever interacted with. Our acquaintances collectively embodied a tightly integrated web of relationships from which we derived our identity, our sense of self. We answered the question, “Who am I” through relationships with people who knew us very well, as unique individuals. But as the scale of society expanded, these personal relationships gave way to generic ones governed by commerce, law, and religion. Accordingly, the sense of self came to depend on these structures as well, which are by their nature anonymous and impersonal.

Relationships in primitive societies are guided by kin structures that provide each person a place relative to each other person. When society expands in scale to the point where two people are strangers, unable to place each other in their respective constellations of self, then there is a serious potential for conflict. Some kind of impersonal governance is required in the absence of structures of known relationship. After all, when someone is not “self” then he is a potential competitor whose interests might be at odds with ours. Practically speaking, if someone is a stranger there is no rational reason not to cheat them. Since he is not linked to your own social network, the consequences need never come back to haunt you. Hence the need for some kind of regulatory structure imposed from above.

When hunter-gatherers from different bands run into each other in the bush, they immediately begin an urgent and often very long conversation about who they know in each other’s band, seeking to identify their relationship. Eventually, they establish that one is the cousin of the sister-in-law of the nephew of the other one’s brother-in-law, effectively bringing each other into the same constellation of self. Vestiges of this behavior are apparent today when two strangers talk: “You were in Taiwan? Hey, I had a classmate from Taiwan—do you know so-and-so?”

When encounters between strangers are common, then some kind of governance is necessary based not on their unique relationship as individuals, but on generic principles: “All are equal under the law.” Laws in the form of explicit codes are never found in pre-civilized peoples, nor are they necessary. It is no accident that as modern society grows increasingly anonymous, and as we pay strangers to perform more and more life functions, that the reach of the law extends further and further into every corner of life. Disputes that were settled informally a generation ago are today routinely administered according to written rules. Indeed, without some kind of formal standard we would feel insecure, for we would literally be at the mercy of strangers. This trend is a necessary consequence of the alienation and depersonalization that began with agriculture.

The division of labor introduced a new kind of anxiety into human life rooted in the idea that “You have to work in order to survive,” a concept apparent today in the locution “to make a living.” Foraging peoples engaged in various arts and crafts beyond what was necessary for survival—the fashioning of musical instruments, for example—and there was surely some differentiation of skills and talents among them. However, food was always there for the taking, readily available regardless of prior planning or its lack. We typically applaud the agricultural surpluses that “freed the non-farmer to specialize in other skills,” not realizing that the non-farmer, lacking the means to obtain food on his own, was thereby enslaved to his specialization. Freedom is slavery. Art became profession and its product became commodity. Work is nothing other than art diminished, degraded, and debased. Driven by economic necessity (a code phrase for survival), no longer could we work in “fits and starts, and in these occasional efforts . . . develop considerable energy for a certain time.”[72] Even worse, art created in the interests of economics is no longer art, for good enough is good enough. Why make it any better when it is to be exchanged anonymously for food or money, when it is to be given over unto the Other?

In the early days such exchanges were not completely anonymous. Money only partially replaced other forms of reciprocity, and most human interaction was not with strangers. Moreover, the life of the subsistence farmer is still intimately involved in the cycles of nature, wedded to the soil, and sustained only through a knowledge and respect for natural laws rivaling a hunter-gatherer’s. Indeed, for us moderns gardening takes us much closer to nature, not away from it. However, once it started the ascent of agriculture built upon itself: technology advanced, the population grew, the regime of control intensified, and the conceptual dichotomy of human and nature widened. Finally, the institution of the Machine that culminated in the Industrial Revolution completed the degradation of work from its original identity with art to its present condition of slavery.

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[69] See for example Sage, R.F., 1995, “Was low atmospheric CO2 During the Pleistocene a Limiting Factor for the Origin of Agriculture?” Global Change Biology, 1, 93-106

[70] Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, p. 99. The inevitability of agriculture (that it developed every place where there were domesticable species) is a main theme in Diamond’s book.

[71] Quinn, Daniel. Ishmael. Bantam Books, 1995.

[72] Gusinde, Martin. The Yamana, Human Relations Area Files, 1961. p. 27, cited by Sahlins, p. 28

Creative Commons Non-Commercial Copyright2008 Charles Eisenstein


Post 5: Final Thoughts

Post 4: Possible Solutions

Post 3: Pathways of Resistance

In my mind, one of the greatest achievements of research is not only producing something that can be understood by the academic community, but by those who don’t have a PhD or Masters or even a Bachelors degree in the sciences. In this post I hope to break down the more complicated explanations I’ve found in the articles I’ve read to a clearer, simpler version of how antibiotic use in agriculture influences antibiotic resistance. I must admit, even this attempt at a “less complicated” version of the pathways of resistance will still be quite complicated. This is because there are multiple pathways that are all two-way streets so to speak. In total, there are four general pathways that the animal can interact with and resistant bacteria can move through. The first is the physical environment: soil, air, water, manure, et cetera. The second is the interactions that occur between animals: feeding, drinking, birthing, and general herd or flock behaviors. The third is the processing of the animal: shipment, slaughter, packaging, and storage. Finally, the fourth pathway is how humans handle the meat once it is purchased. Antibiotic resistant bacteria can be spread at any point along the route, making it difficult to separate what resistance antibiotics being fed to livestock caused, and what was caused by other sources. This is what I feel makes my research topic so difficult. Antibiotic resistance is dynamic in nature. What amount of resistance would occur naturally? What percentage of antibiotic resistant infections is caused directly by livestock rather than other sources? In other words, what is the true impact of agricultural antibiotic use? Without knowing this answer, we cannot begin to make decisions in policy or seek solutions to the growing problem of antibiotic resistance. Nevertheless, I hope to present some possible options in future posts to lead us closer to that answer.

Post 2: From the Public Health Official’s Perspective


Download E-books Simon: The Genius in My Basement PDF

By Alexander Masters

Alexander Masters tripped over his first publication topic on a Cambridge sidewalk, and the outcome was once the multi-award-winning bestseller Stuart: A existence Backwards. His moment, he’s discovered lower than his floorboards.
one of many maximum mathematical prodigies of the 20th century, Simon Norton stomps round Alexander’s basement in semidarkness, dodging among stalagmites of bus timetables and engorged plastic luggage, consuming tinned kippers stirred into packets of Bombay combine. Simon is exploring a theoretical puzzle so advanced and important to our figuring out of the universe that it's referred to as the Monster. It appears like a sudoku table—except a sudoku desk has 9 columns of numbers.
The Monster has 808017424794512875886459904961710757005754368000000000 columns.
yet that’s now not the complete tale. What’s contained in the decaying activities bag he by no means we could out of his clutches? Why does he hurtle out of the home in the midst of the evening? And—good God!—what is that noxious odor that creeps up the stairwell?
Grumpy, poignant, comical—more intimate than both the writer or his quarry intended—Simon: The Genius in My Basement is the tale of a friendship and a pursuit.  half biography, half memoir, and half renowned technological know-how, it's a learn of the frailty of brilliance, the measures of happiness, and Britain’s such a lot uncooperative egghead eccentric.

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Joe Rosen, Symmetry stumbled on: ideas and functions in Nature and technological know-how (1975) Mathematicians are sophisticated with language, yet they've got made a large number of the note “symmetry. ” What traditional humans suggest by means of “symmetry” is kindergarten shapes (such as sq., Triangle, and so forth. ) and snowflakes. on the middle of what mathematicians suggest by way of the notice “symmetry” is the notice “always. ” A sq. constantly seems an identical if you happen to rotate it via a quarter-turn, or part a flip, or three-quarters of a flip, or flip it bottom up; or do any mix of 2, 5, ten, or 743 of these items. it really is symmetrical with appreciate to those operations. Triangle constantly appears to be like an identical for those who manhandle it via a 3rd of a flip, two-thirds of a flip, turn it bloomer-side and rotate it as again and again as you're keen on, or continue your self churchlike and Sunday-mannered and go it by means of altogether. it's symmetrical with appreciate to all of it. if you happen to can word an idea—any thought, on any subject—to comprise the notice “always,” then you’re inside of whistling distance of what mathematicians name “symmetry. ” Simon consistently fills his tub too complete. I continuously get pass and kick close the Excavation door while Simon chefs packet rice with Chinaman in it. E consistently equals mc2. The Monster continually appears a similar (although not anyone but is familiar with what that glance is like) for those who practice on it one of many 808,017,424,794,512,875,886,459,904,961, 710,757,005,754,368,000,000,000 symmetry operations in its team desk. while inebriated, Jim, our next-door neighbor, regularly leaps on his bike at 2 a. m. and begins revving the engine. every one of those circumstances makes an entice symmetry. Symmetry is the invariability of a few item, situation or dating to a distinctive set of alterations. positioned Simon within the tub in our condo or on a planet in Alpha Centauri; in the midst of a nuclear warfare; while he used to be 5, seventy-five or upside down—it makes no distinction. so far as the water within the tub is worried, it’ll regularly dribble over the sting, seep below the skirting, ooze alongside the basement wall and reason bogs and stair treads to break down. It’s a knack Simon has. within the starched language of squares and triangles, “rotate” Simon-in-a-bath between any of those diverse events, and the outcome constantly seems to be a similar: even if repeatedly, in no matter what order, we practice those operations, it is going to nonetheless be splish-splash Norton within the bathtub: The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss famous that particular types of marriage between Australian tribes are constantly thought of incestuous and for this reason forbidden. yet he couldn’t determine the underlying constitution in the back of those taboos, so he went round manhattan (where he was once residing on the time) banging at the doorways of mathematicians. the 1st was once dismissive: “Mathematics has 4 operations, and marriage isn't considered one of them. ” however the moment used to be the younger and superb André Weil, brother of the thinker Simone. “When in doubt,” cried Mr. Weil, “look for the crowd! ” and he bustled Lévi-Strauss off the road into his research.

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Charlie Boy, Anti-Buhari Protesters Violently Attacked In Abuja Market

Charlie Boy, Anti-Buhari Protesters Violently Attacked In Abuja Market

An anti- Buhari protest became violent on Tuesday  after supporters of president Buhari attacked popular musician, Charles Oputa, popularly called Charly Boy, who has been leading a campaign for the return or resignation of the president.

“Charley Boy came to this market with some cameramen doing his protest here, I was standing in front of my shop when I saw him running for his dear life, being chased by those youth,” a trader at the market said.

According to Deji Adeyanju, one of the leaders of the group, “We just went to Wuse market for mobilisation against 100 days event tomorrow & a regular face at Unity Fountain brought thugs to attack us,” Deji wrote on Twitter.

The musician was rescued by security operatives who fired gunshots and tear-gas to disperse the crowd.
The security operatives later returned to remove Charly Boy’s vehicles from the market, using tear-gas to disperse the protesters who tried to stop them.

“Charley Boy caused it, how can he come here to be talking against Buhari.


Friday, March 10, 2017

Fluoride may be damaging your brain

Drinking pure water is very important for your health, especially if you have poisons in your water like we do. For example; sodium fluoride, arsenic, chlorine, lead, Mercury,  aluminum, magnesium  and so on. The list goes on.

All filtered water is not the same. Most filters are only sediment filters that filter out solids but cannot filter out the "TDS" total dissolved solids which is completely different from solids.

On average tap water has a total dissolved solids averaging from 300 to 400 parts per million. The average filter in the common household brings down the total dissolved solids between 295 to 395. This is not acceptable.

The EPA also known as the Environmental Protection Agency states that water with the total dissolved solids greater than 10 is considered contaminated. They state that water with the total dissolved solids less than 10 is considered pure water.

The only water filtration system that works best is the reverse osmosis filtration system. Reverse osmosis can bring down the total dissolved solids on average about 10 to 20 parts per million. This water can be pumped into a distillation machine which will bring down the total dissolved solids to 000.

The cleanest water to drink would be distilled water which has a total dissolved solids of 000. Distilled water can be modified by changing its pH balance buy pumpkin it through a Kangen machine. This water is fit for a king and queen.

Lot of people ask, what about the minerals? Our body's do need minerals, right? The answer is "yes". But there's a big difference between the minerals in your water supply and the minerals your body needs.

The minerals in tap water are leached in from the Earth form rocks, stones and such. These are called non organic minerals that plants use to thrive and grow. The plants turn the "non-organic minerals" into "organic minerals" that we need as humans to live and thrive. Always remember this, organic minerals come from living things like plants fruits and vegetables including Meats.

My father always told me don't eat red meat. Vegetarian diet is the best. Use coconut oil that contains "MCT" medium chain triglycerides. Don't use toothpaste that contains fluoride. Don't drink tap water. Brush your teeth with baking soda but I chose to use Tom's toothpaste that has no fluoride. My dad still has all his teeth and he's 90 years old. My dad was a Medic during the World War II. He has Doctored me with his intellect and wisdom.

Below is the article written By Dr. Mercola

The fluoride debate is changing, and fast, as more Americans are becoming aware of the known health risks of water fluoridation. City councils across the country are beginning to give their residents a choice when it comes to fluoridated drinking water, with many adding fluoridation measures to upcoming ballots.

Fortunately, Americans are using their votes to keep this highly toxic fertilizer-industry byproduct out of their drinking water (the fluoride added to municipal water supplies is a toxic byproduct from the fertilizer industry—a rarely discussed fact!).

Dallas is among the latest US cities considering whether or not to renew a three-year, $1.8-million contract that provides their drinking water with fluoride. Set to expire January 1, 2015, if Dallas ends fluoridation, it will become the largest city in the US to stop fluoridating its water.

Dallas Is on the Verge of Ending Water Fluoridation

Earlier this year, in May, there was a shift in attitudes in the Dallas city council meeting regarding water fluoridation. Despite the fact that anti-fluoridation activist Regina Imburgia had spoken to the Dallas city council several times before with no response, at the May meeting three of the 15 council members finally agreed with Imburgia's message that water fluoridation in the city deserves a closer look.

The media picked up the story with the Dallas Observer covering the issue at length, in both column and blog formats, not only citing a recent concerning study about fluoride health risks (see below) but also calling out Dallas Morning News columnist Jacquielynn Floyd for engaging in unprofessional behavior (like name-calling) against anti-fluoride activists.

Then, on June 11, retired chemistry professor Paul Connett, director of the Fluoride Action Network (FAN) testified before the Dallas council. His 3-minute (plus questions) expert testimony can be seen in the video above (and it’s time well spent if you’re new to the issue of water fluoridation). Dr. Connett said:

“I was impressed by the willingness of the councilors to listen to me and to ask important questions. This augers well because we have to beat this nonsense one open mind at a time.

I was also very impressed by the local organizers. In addition to my testimony, with only a few days notice, they were able to pull together a public meeting, which over 40 people attended including 3 local dentists.

Like many other cities right now the decision to end fluoridation in Dallas may well hinge on events happening elsewhere, like the potential for a legal challenge to fluoridation in Canada as outlined by a leading lawyer in Canada before the peel regional Council in Ontario on June 26 and the ending of mandatory fluoridation in Israel.”

During his testimony, Dr. Connett made a strong case for why dentistry should be done in the dental office… not via your water supply, and as he stated, water fluoridation is "the height of arrogance".

"Organized dentistry, which includes the American Dental Association, the Oral Health Division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state dental directors, is the only health profession that seeks to deliver its services via the public's water supply.

The practice of artificial water fluoridation is the height of arrogance when one considers the following undisputed facts and scientifically supported arguments."

12 Reasons Why Water Fluoridation Must Be Challenged

Dr. Connett, who co-authored the book "the case against fluoride", is recognized worldwide as a leading movement to eliminate fluoride from municipal water supplies, and I'm pleased to be working with him to achieve this goal. He recently compiled a comprehensive and eye-opening list of reasons why water fluoridation must be challenged. Here are some of the highlights:

Fluoride is not a nutrient; no biochemical process in the human body needs fluoride

The level of fluoride in a mother's milk is exceedingly low. Formula-fed infants receive up to 175-250 more fluoride than a breast-fed infant

Once fluoride is added to the water supply, there is no way of controlling the dose; it goes to everyone regardless of age, weight, health, need, or nutritional status

Fluoride accumulates in bone and other calcified tissues over a lifetime; early symptoms of fluoride poisoning of the bones are identical to arthritis, and fluoride accumulation may make bones brittle and prone to fracture

The addition of fluoride to the public water supply violates the individual's right to informed consent to medical or human treatment

Fluoride is known to have toxic properties at low doses

Children in fluoridated countries are being over-exposed to fluoride as demonstrated by the very high prevalence of dental fluorosis; according to the CDC, 41 percent of American children aged 12-15 have some form of dental fluorosis

The effectiveness of swallowing fluoride to reduce tooth decay has never been demonstrated by a randomized control trial

The evidence that fluoridation or swallowing fluoride reduces tooth decay is very weak

Fluoridation is designed to treat a disease (dental caries) but has never been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA); the FDA classifies fluoride as an "unapproved drug"

The vast majority of countries neither fluoridate their water nor their salt, but according to the World Health Organization, tooth decay in 12-year-olds is coming down as fast, if not faster, in non-fluoridated countries as it is in fluoridated countries

Fluoride Added to List of Chemicals That Cause 'Brain Drain' (Along with Mercury and Lead)

In 2006, researchers from Harvard School of Public Health and Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai did a systematic review and identified five industrial chemicals as developmental neurotoxicants. This included unquestionable poisons like lead, methylmercury, polychlorinated biphenyls, arsenic, and toluene. Since then, they've documented six additional developmental neurotoxicants and have added them to the list of what are now 11 known industrial chemicals that harm brain development in human fetuses and infants. One of the recently added neurotoxicants is fluoride, and one of the study's authors has previously said:

The debate over the dangers of fluoride has been ongoing for more than six decades, despite the fact that study after study has confirmed that fluoride is a dangerous, toxic poison that bio-accumulates in your body while being ineffective at preventing dental decay. So what exactly does fluoride do to your brain?

There are 37 human studies linking fairly modest fluoride exposures with reduced intelligence (nine of these studies found lowered IQ at less than 3 ppm in the water) and 12 human studies linking fluoride with neurobehavioral deficits. There are also three human studies linking fluoride exposure with impaired fetal brain development, and approximately 100 animal studies linking it to brain damage. This includes such effects as:

Reduction in nicotinic acetylcholine receptors

Damage to the hippocampus

Reduction in lipid content

Damage to the Purkinje cells

Exacerbation of lesions induced by iodine deficiency

Impaired antioxidant defense systems

Increased uptake of aluminum

Accumulation of fluoride in the pineal gland

Check Out the Truth: Drinking Fluoride Doesn't Prevent Cavities

Even if you were willing to overlook the proven fact that fluoride is a poison to the human body, would you still want to drink fluoride if it wouldn't protect your teeth? The truth is, it won't. Fluoride advocates often claim that the reduction in tooth decay that's occurred since the 1950s is a benefit of fluoridated water, but the facts just don't add up. For example, in 1999 the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) claimed that dental caries declined precipitously during the second half of the 20th Century.

Fluoride Has Nothing to Do with the Underlying Causes of Tooth Decay

Mineral deficiencies, like magnesium, which can weaken bones and teeth

More than 600 medications promote tooth decay by inhibiting saliva

It's often said that fluoride helps to re-mineralize your teeth and make them stronger, but even this must be questioned. A groundbreaking study published in the journal Langmuir uncovered that the fluorapatite layer formed on your teeth from fluoride is a mere six nanometers thick. You'd need 10,000 of these layers to get the width of a strand of your hair! Scientists now question whether this ultra-thin layer can actually protect your enamel and provide any discernible benefit, considering the fact that it is quickly eliminated by simple chewing. They wrote: "…it has to be asked whether such narrow… layers really can act as protective layers for the enamel."

More Than 100 US Communities Have Ditched Water Fluoridation

Since 2009, about 130 communities have stopped water fluoridation. Canada has dropped from about 60 percent of the population drinking fluoridated water down to about 32-33 percent. Victories have also been logged in Australia, Israel, New Zealand, and across the US. The latest fluoride-free victories include:

Wellington, Florida: After hours of debate and testimony from medical experts and residents, council members voted to end 14 years of fluoridation. A number of pro-fluoride dentists are unfortunately working to overturn the council's vote, but it's still a victory for now.

Amherst County, Virginia: The Service Authority Board voted to discontinue fluoridation because of conflicting opinions on what constitutes "optimal" levels of fluoride. According FAN, "Several board supervisors felt that the additive was unnecessary and a waste of resources."

Wood Village, Oregon: The Woodsville City Council was considering adding fluoride to the city's drinking water, but after polling residents found that 100% of respondents were against it. They have since ended their fluoridation discussions.

Sebastopol, California: City Councilors voted unanimously against fluoridation in Sonoma County because of concerns the fluoride could leach into their groundwater from surrounding communities, putting residents at risk.

Bantry, Ireland: Town Councilors voted unanimously in favor of a resolution calling for an immediate end to fluoridation throughout Ireland. Two other towns--Skibbereen and Clonakitty--also passed similar resolutions in 2013. Support for this historic vote was provided by the local group West Cork Fluoride Free.

Boyne City, Michigan: In early May 2014, city commissioners voted 3-2 to end more than 40 years of fluoridation for the town's approximately 4,000 residents. Commissioner Gene Towne summed up the council's decision, saying: "It comes down to choice. I don't see how you can control the dosage (of fluoride that people ingest) if it's in everything. If there's a chance that it could cause any health problems… this should all come down to your choice."

Buffalo and Union, Missouri: In May 2014, Alderman voted to end a decade of fluoridation, saying the additive damaged equipment, city trucks, and was not economical. Also in May, councilors in Union, Missouri voted 7-1 to end fluoridation after the city's public service committee recommended the city not repair fluoride injection equipment destroyed by the corrosive additive. According to the city engineer, "It's an acid and it eats the pipes. Employees are handling it and they don't want to be."


Attorney-Client Privilege

No matter where your community is located, how big your community is, or what type of community you live in (condominium, townhome, single family, etc.), legal issues, and the need for legal advice, arise.  Consequently, the board of directors should be aware of the attorney-client privilege and the protection it provides to associations regarding nondisclosure of certain communications.  However, like with most things in life, there are certain exceptions to the attorney-client privilege rule.  This article will explain the basis of the attorney-client privilege, which communications are covered under the privilege, who is covered under the privilege, and how the privilege is waived.

What is the attorney-client privilege?

The attorney-client privilege is an important part of an attorney-client relationship and encourages full and frank communications between an attorney and his or her clients.  The attorney-client privilege covers communication (oral or written) between privileged persons (an attorney and his or her client) made in confidence (the communicating person reasonably believes that the communication will not be shared with nonprivileged persons) for the purpose of obtaining or providing legal advice or assistance regarding the client’s rights and obligations.

In the context of associations, an attorney-client communication is a confidential communication between the association’s legal counsel and the board or, sometimes, the board’s representatives.  It should be noted that an association’s attorney represents only the corporate entity—not the individual board members, not the board as a whole, not the community manager, not the association’s management company, and not the individual homeowners.  Thus, communications between an association’s attorney and an owner who is not also a board member would not constitute attorney-client privileged communication.

What communications are covered under the attorney-client privilege?

Not all communications are covered by the attorney-client privilege.  Communications with an attorney involving general business advice or utilizing the attorney’s services in any nonlegal role generally do not qualify as attorney-client communications.  The attorney-client privilege extends only to confidential communications between the client and attorney in the course of gaining counsel, advice, or direction concerning the client’s rights or obligations.  Essentially, the client must be seeking advice on a specific issue in the community or general legal advice concerning the community.

Who is covered by the attorney-client privilege?

As stated above, the corporate entity (the Association) is the entity that establishes the attorney-client relationship.  Because the corporate entity is not a living, breathing human, it cannot individually communicate with an attorney.  Thus, under Colorado law, the corporate entity communicates through its board of directors.  Any communication between an attorney and a member of a board of directors—assuming it is for the purpose of gaining counsel, advice, or direction concerning the association’s rights or obligations—may be considered a privileged attorney-client communication.

However, most associations govern with the assistance of community managers.  While it is clear that direct communications between the board of directors and the association’s counsel are privileged communications, the law is not entirely clear on where communications with community managers fall.

Based on the above, it is good practice to adopt an attorney-liaison policy that clarifies the association’s position that the manager and management company are acting on behalf of the association and the same privilege of confidentiality applies to communications between the association’s attorney and the association’s manager and management company.

How is the attorney-client privilege waived?

While the attorney- client privilege is beneficial to an attorney-client relationship in that it allows for open and frank discussion, it is not iron-clad and may be waived.  A waiver of the attorney-client privilege occurs when (1) a third party (such as a homeowner who is not a board member) is present during discussion or copied on an email; (2) the association voluntarily abandons the privilege by disclosing attorney-client information to a third party; or (3) the association impliedly abandons the privilege through its actions.

Finally, the attorney-client privilege belongs to the association and may only be waived by the board.  An association’s attorney may not waive the attorney-client privilege, barring a few specific circumstances.

Overall, the attorney-client privilege is a valuable tool that facilitates candid discussions between attorneys and their clients and encourages the free flow of advice.  However, the attorney-client privilege analysis is a difficult and complicated one, and the board should consult with the associations’ legal counsels prior to taking any action that could waive the privilege.


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Medicine LibreTexts

Iron plays an important role in biology, forming complexes with molecular oxygen in hemoglobin and myoglobin; these two compounds are common oxygen transport proteins in vertebrates. Iron is also the metal at the active site of many important redox enzymes dealing with cellular respiration and oxidation and reduction in plants and animals. A human male of average height has about 4 grams of iron in his body, a female about 3.5 grams. This iron is distributed throughout the body in hemoglobin, tissues, muscles, bone marrow, blood proteins, enzymes, ferritinhemosiderin, and transport in plasma.[4]

Biological and pathological role

Main article: Human iron metabolism

Iron is involved in numerous biological processes.[136][137] It is the most important transition metal in all living organisms.[138] Iron-proteins are found in all living organisms: archaeansbacteria and eukaryotes, including humans. For example, the color of blood is due to hemoglobin, an iron-containing protein. As illustrated by hemoglobin, iron is often bound to cofactors, such as hemes, which are non-protein compounds, often involving metal ions, that are required for a protein's biological activity to happen. The iron-sulfur clusters are pervasive and include nitrogenase, the enzymes responsible for biological nitrogen fixation. The main roles of iron-containing proteins are the transport and storage of oxygen, as well as the transfer of electrons.[138]

Structure of Heme b; in the protein additional ligand(s) would be attached to Fe.

Iron is a necessary trace element found in nearly all living organisms. Iron-containing enzymes and proteins, often containing heme prosthetic groups, participate in many biological oxidations and in transport. Examples of proteins found in higher organisms include hemoglobin, cytochrome (see high-valent iron), and catalase.[139] The average adult human contains about 0.005% body weight of iron, or about four grams, of which three quarters is in hemoglobin – a level that remains constant despite only about one milligram of iron being absorbed each day,[138] because the human body recycles its hemoglobin for the iron content.[140]

Iron acquisition poses a problem for aerobic organisms because ferric iron is poorly soluble near neutral pH. Thus, these organisms have developed means to absorb iron as complexes, sometimes taking up ferrous iron before oxidising it back to ferric iron. In particular, bacteria have evolved very high-affinity sequestering agents called siderophores.[141][142][143]

After uptake in human cells, iron storage is carefully regulated; iron ions are never "free". This is because free iron ions have a high potential for biological toxicity.[144] A major component of this regulation is the protein transferrin, which binds iron ions absorbed from the duodenum and carries it in the blood to cells.[145] Transferrin contains Fe3+ in the middle of a distorted octahedron, bonded to one nitrogen, three oxygens and a chelating carbonate anion that traps the Fe3+ ion: it has such a high stability constant that it is very effective at taking up Fe3+ ions even from the most stable complexes. At the bone marrow, transferrin is reduced from Fe3+ and Fe2+and stored as ferritin to be incorporated into hemoglobin.[138]

The most commonly known and studied bioinorganic iron compounds (biological iron molecules) are the heme proteins: examples are hemoglobinmyoglobin, and cytochrome P450. These compounds participate in transporting gases, building enzymes, and transferring electrons.[138] Metalloproteins are a group of proteins with metal ion cofactors. Some examples of iron metalloproteins are ferritin and rubredoxin.[138] Many enzymes vital to life contain iron, such as catalase,[146] lipoxygenases,[147] and IRE-BP.[148]

Hemoglobin is an oxygen carrier that occurs in red blood cells and contributes their color, transporting oxygen in the arteries from the lungs to the muscles where it is transferred to myoglobin, which stores it until it is needed for the metabolic oxidation of glucose, which generates energy. Here the hemoglobin binds to carbon dioxide, produced when glucose is oxidized, which is transported through the veins by hemoglobin (predominantly as bicarbonate anions) back to the lungs where it is exhaled.[138] In hemoglobin, the iron is in one of four heme groups and has six possible coordination sites; four are occupied by nitrogen atoms in a porphyrin ring, the fifth by an imidazole nitrogen in a histidine residue of one of the protein chains attached to the heme group, and the sixth is reserved for the oxygen molecule it can reversibly bind to.[138] When hemoglobin is not attached to oxygen (and is then called deoxyhemoglobin), the Fe2+ ion at the center of the heme group (in the hydrophobic protein interior) is in a high-spin configuration. It is thus too large to fit inside the porphyrin ring, which bends instead into a dome with the Fe2+ ion about 55 picometers above it. In this configuration, the sixth coordination site reserved for the oxygen is blocked by another histidine residue.[138] When deoxyhemoglobin picks up an oxygen molecule, this histidine residue moves away and returns once the oxygen is securely attached to form a hydrogen bond with it. This results in the Fe2+ ion switching to a low-spin configuration, resulting in a 20% decrease in ionic radius so that now it can fit into the porphyrin ring, which becomes planar.[138] (Additionally, this hydrogen bonding results in the tilting of the oxygen molecule, resulting in a Fe–O–O bond angle of around 120° that avoids the formation of Fe–O–Fe or Fe–O2–Fe bridges that would lead to electron transfer, the oxidation of Fe2+ to Fe3+, and the destruction of hemoglobin.) This results in a movement of all the protein chains that leads to the other subunits of hemoglobin changing shape to a form with larger oxygen affinity. Thus, when deoxyhemoglobin takes up oxygen, its affinity for more oxygen increases, and vice versa.[138] Myoglobin, on the other hand, contains only one heme group and hence this cooperative effect cannot occur. Thus, while hemoglobin is almost saturated with oxygen in the high partial pressures of oxygen found in the lungs, its affinity for oxygen is much lower than myoglobin in the low partial pressures of oxygen found in muscle tissue, resulting in oxygen transfer.[138] This is further enhanced by the concomitant Bohr effect (named after Christian Bohr, the father of Niels Bohr), in which lowered pH (as occurs when carbon dioxide is released in the muscles) further lowers the oxygen affinity of hemoglobin.[138]

Carbon monoxide and phosphorus trifluoride are poisonous to humans because they bind to hemoglobin similarly to oxygen, but with much more strength, so that oxygen can no longer be transported throughout the body. This effect also plays a minor role in the toxicity of cyanide, but there the major effect is by far its interference with the proper functioning of the electron transport protein cytochrome a.[138] The cytochrome proteins also involve heme groups and are involved in the metabolic oxidation of glucose by oxygen. The sixth coordination site is then occupied by either another imidazole nitrogen or a methionine sulfur, so that these proteins are largely inert to oxygen – with the exception of cytochrome a, which bonds directly to oxygen and thus is very easily poisoned by cyanide.[138] Here, the electron transfer takes place as the iron remains in low spin but changes between the +2 and +3 oxidation states. Since the reduction potential of each step is slightly greater than the previous one, the energy is released step-by-step and can thus be stored in adenosine triphosphate. Cytochrome a is slightly distinct, as it occurs at the mitochondrial membrane, binds directly to oxygen, and transports protons as well as electrons, as follows:[138]

4 Cytc2+ + O2 + 8H+
inside → 4 Cytc3+ + 2 H2O + 4H+

Although the heme proteins are the most important class of iron-containing proteins, the iron-sulfur proteins are also very important, being involved in electron transfer, which is possible since iron can exist stably in either the +2 or +3 oxidation states. These have one, two, four, or eight iron atoms that are each approximately tetrahedrally coordinated to four sulfur atoms; because of this tetrahedral coordination, they always have high-spin iron. The simplest of such compounds is rubredoxin, which has only one iron atom coordinated to four sulfur atoms from cysteine residues in the surrounding peptide chains. Another important class of iron-sulfur proteins is the ferredoxins, which have multiple iron atoms. Transferrin does not belong to either of these classes.[138]

Health and diet

Iron is pervasive, but particularly rich sources of dietary iron include red meatlentilsbeanspoultryfishleaf vegetableswatercresstofuchickpeasblack-eyed peas, and blackstrap molassesBread and breakfast cereals are sometimes specifically fortified with iron. Iron in low amounts is found in molassesteff, and farina.[149][150]

Iron provided by dietary supplements is often found as iron(II) fumarate, although iron(II) sulfate is cheaper and is absorbed equally well.[134] Elemental iron, or reduced iron, despite being absorbed at only one-third to two-thirds the efficiency (relative to iron sulfate),[151] is often added to foods such as breakfast cereals or enriched wheat flour. Iron is most available to the body when chelated to amino acids[152] and is also available for use as a common iron supplementGlycine, the cheapest and most common amino acid is most often used to produce iron glycinate supplements.[153] The Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) for iron varies considerably depending on age, sex, and source of dietary iron: for example, heme-based iron has higher bioavailability.[154]

Dietary reference intake

The Food and Nutrition Board of the U.S. Institute of Medicine updated Estimated Average Requirements (EARs) and Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDAs) for iron in 2001. The current EAR for iron for women ages 14-18 is 7.9 mg/day, 8.1 for ages 19-50 and 5.0 thereafter (post menopause). For men the EAR is 6.0 mg/day for ages 19 and up. The RDA is 15.0 mg/day for women ages 15-18, 18.0 for 19-50 and 8.0 thereafter. For men, 8.0 mg/day for ages 19 and up. RDAs are higher than EARs so as to identify amounts that will cover people with higher than average requirements. RDA for pregnancy equals 27 mg/day. RDA for lactation equals 9 mg/day. For children ages 1–3 years 7 mg/day, 10 for ages 4-8 and 8 for ages 9-13. As for safety, the Food and Nutrition Board also sets Tolerable Upper Intake Levels (known as ULs) for vitamins and minerals when evidence is sufficient. In the case of iron the UL is set at 45 mg/day. Collectively the EARs, RDAs and ULs are referred to as Dietary Reference Intakes.[155] The European Food Safety Authority reviewed the same safety question did not establish a UL.[156]

For U.S. food and dietary supplement labeling purposes the amount in a serving is expressed as a percent of Daily Value (%DV). For iron labeling purposes 100% of the Daily Value was 18.0 mg, and as of May 2016 remained unchanged at 18.0 mg. Food and supplement companies have until July 28, 2018 to comply with the change. A table of the pre-change adult Daily Values is provided at Reference Daily Intake.

Main article: Iron overload

Iron uptake is tightly regulated by the human body, which has no regulated physiological means of excreting iron. Only small amounts of iron are lost daily due to mucosal and skin epithelial cell sloughing, so control of iron levels is primarily accomplished by regulating uptake.[157] Regulation of iron uptake is impaired in some people as a result of a genetic defect that maps to the HLA-H gene region on chromosome 6 and leads to abnormally low levels of hepcidin, a key regulator of the entry of iron into the circulatory system in mammals.[158] In these people, excessive iron intake can result in iron overload disorders, known medically as hemochromatosis. Many people have an undiagnosed genetic susceptibility to iron overload, and are not aware of a family history of the problem. For this reason, people should not take iron supplements unless they suffer from iron deficiency and have consulted a doctor. Hemochromatosis is estimated to be the a cause of 0.3 to 0.8% of all metabolic diseases of Caucasians.[159]

Overdoses of ingested iron can cause excessive levels of free iron in the blood. High blood levels of free ferrous iron react with peroxides to produce highly reactive free radicals that can damage DNAproteinslipids, and other cellular components. Iron toxicity occurs when the cell contains free iron, which generally occurs when iron levels exceed the availability of transferrin to bind the iron. Damage to the cells of the gastrointestinal tract can also prevent them from regulating iron absorption, leading to further increases in blood levels. Iron typically damages cells in the heartliver and elsewhere, causing adverse effects that include comametabolic acidosisshockliver failurecoagulopathyadult respiratory distress syndrome, long-term organ damage, and even death.[160] Humans experience iron toxicity when the iron exceeds 20 milligrams for every kilogram of body mass; 60 milligrams per kilogram is considered a lethal dose.[161] Overconsumption of iron, often the result of children eating large quantities of ferrous sulfate tablets intended for adult consumption, is one of the most common toxicological causes of death in children under six.[161] The Dietary Reference Intake (DRI) sets the Tolerable Upper Intake Level (UL) for adults at 45 mg/day. For children under fourteen years old the UL is 40 mg/day.[162]

The medical management of iron toxicity is complicated, and can include use of a specific chelating agent called deferoxamine to bind and expel excess iron from the body.[160][163][164]

Main article: Iron deficiency

Iron deficiency is the most common nutritional deficiency in the world.[165][166][167] When loss of iron is not adequately compensated by adequate dietary iron intake, a state of latent iron deficiency occurs, which over time leads to iron-deficiency anemia if left untreated, which is characterised by an insufficient number of red blood cells and an insufficient amount of hemoglobin.[168] Children, pre-menopausal women (women of child-bearing age), and people with poor diet are most susceptible to the disease. Most cases of iron-deficiency anemia are mild, but if not treated can cause problems like fast or irregular heartbeat, complications during pregnancy, and delayed growth in infants and children.[169]


Why Shouldn’t We Talk About Mathematics In The Deli Line?

The End 2016 Mathematics A To Z Roundup

As is my tradition for the end of these roundups (see Summer 2015 and then Leap Day 2016) I want to just put up a page listing the whole set of articles. It’s a chance for people who missed a piece to easily see what they missed. And it lets me recover that little bit extra from the experience. Run over the past two months were:

A Leap Day 2016 Mathematics A To Z: Conjecture

For today’s entry in the Leap Day 2016 Mathematics A To Z I have an actual request from from Elke Stangl. I’d had another ‘c’ request, for ‘continued fractions’. I’ve decided to address that by putting ‘Fractions, continued’ on the roster. If you have other requests, for letters not already committed, please let me know. I’ve got some letters I can use yet.

An old joke says a mathematician’s job is to turn coffee into theorems. I prefer tea, which may be why I’m not employed as a mathematician. A theorem is a logical argument that starts from something known to be true. Or we might start from something assumed to be true, if we think the setup interesting and plausible. And it uses laws of logical inference to draw a conclusion that’s also true and, hopefully, interesting. If it isn’t interesting, maybe it’s useful. If it isn’t either, maybe at least the argument is clever.

How does a mathematician know what theorems to try proving? We could assemble any combination of premises as the setup to a possible theorem. And we could imagine all sorts of possible conclusions. Most of them will be syntactically gibberish, the equivalent of our friends the monkeys banging away on keyboards. Of those that aren’t, most will be untrue, or at least impossible to argue. Of the rest, potential theorems that could be argued, many will be too long or too unfocused to follow. Only a tiny few potential combinations of premises and conclusions could form theorems of any value. How does a mathematician get a good idea where to spend her time?

She gets it from experience. In learning what theorems, what arguments, have been true in the past she develops a feeling for things that would plausibly be true. In playing with mathematical constructs she notices patterns that seem to be true. As she gains expertise she gets a sense for things that feel right. And she gets a feel for what would be a reasonable set of premises to bundle together. And what kinds of conclusions probably follow from an argument that people can follow.

This potential theorem, this thing that feels like it should be true, a conjecture.

Properly, we don’t know whether a conjecture is true or false. The most we can say is that we don’t have evidence that it’s false. New information might show that we’re wrong and we would have to give up the conjecture. Finding new examples that it’s true might reinforce our idea that it’s true, but that doesn’t prove it’s true.

For example, we have the Goldbach Conjecture. According to it every even number greater than two can be written as the sum of exactly two prime numbers. The evidence for it is very good: every even number we’ve tied has worked out, up through at least 4,000,000,000,000,000,000. But it isn’t proven. It’s possible that it’s impossible from the standard rules of arithmetic.

That’s a famous conjecture. It’s frustrated mathematicians for centuries. It’s easy to understand and nobody’s found a proof. Famous conjectures, the ones that get names, tend to do that. They looked nice and simple and had hidden depths.

Most conjectures aren’t so storied. They instead appear as notes at the end of a section in a journal article or a book chapter. Or they’re put on slides meant to refresh the audience’s interest where it’s needed. They are needed at the fifteen-minute park of a presentation, just after four slides full of dense equations. They are also needed at the 35-minute mark, in the middle of a field of plots with too many symbols and not enough labels. And one’s needed just before the summary of the talk, so that the audience can try to remember what the presentation was about and why they thought they could understand it. If the deadline were not so tight, if the conference were a month or so later, perhaps the mathematician would find a proof for these conjectures.

Perhaps. As above, some conjectures turn out to be hard. Fermat’s Last Theorem stood for four centuries as a conjecture. Its first proof turned out to be nothing like anything Fermat could have had in mind. Mathematics popularizers lost an easy hook when that was proven. We used to be able to start an essay on Fermat’s Last Theorem by huffing about how it was properly a conjecture but the wrong term stuck to it because English is a perverse language. Now we have to start by saying how it used to be a conjecture instead.

But few are like that. Most conjectures are ideas that feel like they ought to be true. They appear because a curious mind will look for new ideas that resemble old ones, or will notice patterns that seem to resemble old patterns.

And sometimes conjectures turn out to be false. Something can look like it ought to be true, or maybe would be true, and yet be false. Often we can prove something isn’t true by finding an example, just as you might expect. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Here’s a false conjecture, one that was put forth by Goldbach. All odd numbers are either prime, or can be written as the sum of a prime and twice a square number. (He considered 1 to be a prime number.) It’s not true, but it took over a century to show that. If you want to find a counterexample go ahead and have fun trying.

Still, if a mathematician turns coffee into theorems, it is through the step of finding conjectures, promising little paths in the forest of what is not yet known.

A bit more about Thomas Hobbes

Reading The Comics, March 17, 2014: After The Ides Edition

Rather than wait to read today’s comics I’m just going to put in a fresh entry going over mathematical points raised in the funny pages. This one turned out to include a massive diversion into the wonders of the ancient Roman calendar, which is a mathematical topic, really, although there’s no calculations involved in it just here.

Bill Hinds’s Cleats (March 7, rerun) calls on one of the common cultural references to percentages, the idea of athletes giving 100 percent efforts. (Edith is feeling more like an 80 percent effort, or less than that.) The idea of giving 100 percent in a sport is one that invites the question, 100 percent of what; granting that there is some standard expectable effort made, then, even the sports reporting cliche of giving 110 percent is meaningful.
Cleats continued on the theme the next day, as Edith was thinking more of giving about 79 percent of 80 percent, and it’s not actually that hard to work out in your head what percent that is, if you know anything about doing arithmetic in your head.

Jef Mallet’s Frazz (March 14) was not actually the only comic strip among the roster I normally read to make a Pi Day reference, but I think it suffices as the example for the whole breed. I admit that I feel a bit curmudgeonly that I don’t actually care about Pi Day. I suppose that as a chance for people to promote the idea of learning mathematics, and maybe attach it to some of the many interesting things to be said about mathematics using Pi as the introductory note the idea is fine, but just naming a thing isn’t by itself a joke. I’m told that Facebook (I’m not on it) was thick with people posting photographs of pies, which is probably more fun when you think of it than when you notice everybody else thought of it too. Anyway, organized Pi Day events are still pretty new as Internet Pop Holidays go. Perhaps next year’s comics will be sharper.

Jenny Campbell’s Flo and Friends (March 15) comes back to useful mental arithmetic work, in this case in working out a reasonable tip. A twenty-percent tip is, mercifully, pretty easy to remember just as what’s-her-name specifies. (I can’t think of the kid’s name and there’s no meet-our-cast page on the web site. None of the commenters mention her name either, although they do make room to insult health care reform and letting students use calculators to do arithmetic, so, I’m sorry I read that far down too.) But as ever you need to make sure the process is explained clearly and understood, and Tina needed to run a sanity check on the result. Sanity checks, as suggested, won’t show that your answer is right, but they will rule out some of the wrong ones. (A fifteen percent tip is a bit annoying to calculate exactly, but dividing the original amount by six will give you a sixteen-and-two-thirds percent tip, which is surely close enough, especially if you round off to a quarter-dollar.)

Steve Breen and Mike Thompson’s Grand Avenue (March 15) has the kids wonder what are the ides of March; besides that they’re the 15th of the month and they’re used for some memorable writing about Julius Caesar it’s a fair thing not to know. They derive from calendar-keeping, one of the oldest useful applications of mathematics and astronomy. The ancient Roman scheme set three special dates in the month: the kalends, which seem to have started as the day of the new moon as observed in Rome; the nones, when the moon was at its first quarter; and the ides, when the moon was full.

But by the time of Numa Pompilius, the second (traditional) King of Rome, who reformed the calendar around 713 BC, the lunar link was snapped, partly so that the calendar year could more nearly fit the length of the time it takes to go from one spring to another. (Among other things the pre-Numa calendar had only ten months, with the days between December and March not belonging to any month; since Romans were rather agricultural at the time and there wasn’t much happening in winter, this wasn’t really absurd, even if I find it hard to imagine living by this sort of standard. After Numa there were only about eleven days of the year unaccounted for, with the time made up, when it needed to be, by inserting an extra month, Mercedonius, in the middle of February.) Months then had, February excepted, either 29 or 31 days, with the ides being on the fifteenth day of the 31-day months (March, May, July, and October) and the thirteenth day of the 29-day months.

For reasons that surely made sense if you were an ancient Roman the day was specified as the number of days until the next kalend, none, or ide; so, for example, while the 13th of March would be the 2nd day before the ides of March, II Id Mar, the 19th of March would be recorded as the the the 14th day before the kalend of April, or, XIV Kal Apr. I admit I could probably warm up to counting down to the next month event, but the idea of having half the month of March written down on the calendar as a date with “April” in it leaves me deeply unsettled. And that’s before we even get into how an extra month might get slipped into the middle of February (between the 23rd and the 24th of the month, the trace of which can still be observed in the dominical letters of February in leap years, on Roman Catholic and Anglican calendars, and in the obscure term “bissextile year” for leap year). But now that you see that, you know why (a) the ancient Romans had so much trouble getting their database software to do dates correctly and (b) you get to be all smugly superior to anyone who tries making a crack about the United States Federal Income Tax deadline being on the Ides of April, since they never are.

(Warning: absolutely no one ever will be impressed by your knowledge of the Ides of April and their inapplicability to discussions of the United States Federal Income Tax. However, you might use this as a way to appear like you’re making friendly small talk while actually encouraging people to leave you alone.)

Tom Horacek’s Foolish Mortals (March 17), an erratically-published panel strip, calls on the legend of how mathematicians “usually” peak in their twenties. It’s certainly said of mathematicians that they do their most important work while young — note that the Fields Medal is explicitly given to mathematicians for work done when they were under forty years old — although I’m not aware of anyone who’s actually studied this, and the number of great mathematicians who insist on doing brilliant work into their old age is pretty impressive.

Certainly, for example, Newton began work on calculus (and optics and gravitation) when he was about 23, but he didn’t publish until he was about fifty. (Leibniz, meanwhile, started publishing calculus his way at about age 38.) It’s probably impossible to say what Leonhard Euler’s most important work was, but (for example) his equations describing inviscid fluids — which would be the masterpiece for anybody not Euler — he published when he was fifty. Carl Friedrich Gauss didn’t start serious work in electromagnetism until he was about 55 years old, too. The law of electric flux which Gauss worked out for that — which, again, would have been the career achievement if Gauss weren’t overflowing with them — he published when he was 58.

I guess that I’m saying is that great minds, at least, don’t necessarily peak in their twenties, or at least they have some impressive peaks afterwards too.


Lifestyle: Fashion Latest Trends and Health & Beauty Tips

Do you work harder or you work smarter?

When you work smart you will be better off than when you work hard. Working smart would mean that you spend less energy and you get enough time to enjoy life. Here are 5 unusual ways to start working smarter.

1. Take more breaks:
Our brains are only able to focus for 90 minutes followed by at least a 20 minutes rest. Taking a break can help refresh your mind and reset your attention span. Even cutting a tree requires you to take a break to sharpen your axe. If you continue cutting using a blunt axe, you will take longer.

But if you are too busy, you can work in small bursts. Just set your timer for 25 minutes, and when it goes off, take a break. Grab a drink, take a small walk or just relax. And if you are so much pressed of time, try to switch between different activities; a change is as good as a rest.

2. Take naps:
Taking a nap is one of the most efficient ways of boosting your brain function. Naps lead to improvement of memory performance, cognitive function and creative thinking. In particular, it helps in the learning process helping you to retain information better.

Napping also helps in remembering new information and avoiding burnout. Our bodies need a short nap during the day in addition to the long period of sleep during the night.

3. Spend time observing nature:
Spending time in nature helps you to reset your attention span and relax your mind. Taking a walk in a quiet park refreshes more than walking down a street. Studies have shown that the level of attention needed to navigate busy streets does not allow the brain to relax as required.

Sitting quietly and observing nature will let your mind fully relax and unwind. This will help you to focus for longer when you return to work.

4. Work in blocks and move around:
You can set up various work places to do different chunks of work. You can come up with a clear to-do list at each station so you jump to it once you get to the station without wasting time.
Some people have also found working at different coffee shops rather than in offices to be quite refreshing.

If moving around is not possible, you can break your work into chunks and set milestones as stopping points for you to take a short break/ This can be a good way to work lots of breaks in a day.

5. Check your email first thing in the morning:
This might sound weird but there are reasons for doing this. Checking your e-mail in the morning will help you plan your day. What mails you need to respond to, meetings you are supposed to attend, and any other thing that you might be required to attend to might be lying in your e-mail inbox.

It can be a great embarrassment if you check your e-mail in the course of the day only to realize that there was an important issue that needed your attention in the morning.
So you need to work smart and not hard.

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Sunday, March 20, 2016

This Factory Robot Learns a New Job Overnight : Cloud Robotics

The world's largest robot maker, Fanuc, is developing robots that use reinforcement learning to figure out how to do things.
One of the big potential benefits of the learning approach, Hido says, is that it can be accelerated if several robots wok in parallel
and then share what they have learned. So eight robots working for one hour can perform the same learning as a machine going for eight hours. "Our project is oriented to distributed learning." Hido says. "You can imagine hundreds of factory robots sharing information."
This form of distributed learning, sometimes called "cloud robotics,|" is shaping to be a big trend both in research
and industry.
"Fanuc is well place to think about this," says Ken Goldberg, a professor of robotics at the University of California Berkeley, because it installs so many machine in factories around the world. He adds that cloud robotics will most likely reshape the way that robots are used in the coming years.
Goldberg and colleagues (include several resuarchers in Google) are in fact taking this a step further by teaching robots how certain movements may be used to grasp not only specific objects
but also certain shapes. A paper on this work will appear at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation this May.
However, Goldberg notes, applying machine learning to robotics is challenging because controlling behavior is more complex than, say, recognizing objects in images. "Deep Learning has made enormous progress i pattern recognition ," Goldberg syas. "The challenge in robotics is that you are doing something beyond that. You need to be able to generate appropriate action for a huge range of inputs."
Fanuc may not be the only company developing robots that use machine learning. In 2014, a Swiss robot manufacturer ABB invested in another AI startup called Vicarious. The fruits of the investment has yet to appear, however.
Cloud Robotics and Automation
What if robots and automation systems were not limited by onboard computation, memory, or software?
Rather than viewing robots and automated machines as isolated systems with limited computation and memory, "Cloud Robotics and Automation" considers a new paradigm where robots and automation systems exchange data and perform computation via networks. Extending earlier work that links robots to the Internet,
Cloud Robotics and Automation builds on emerging research in cloud computing, machine learning, big data, open-source software, and major industry initiatives in the "Internet of Things", "Smarter Planet", "Industrial Internet", and "Industry 4.0."
Consider Google's autonomous car. It uses the network to index maps, images, and data on prior driving trajectories, weather, and traffic to determine spatial localization and make decisions. Data from each car is shared via the network for statistical optimization and machine learning performed by grid computing in the Cloud.
Another example is Kiva Systems approach to warehouse automation and logistics using large numbers of mobile platforms to move pallets using a local network to coordinate platforms and share updates on floor conditions.
Google's James Kuffner coined the term "Cloud Robotics" in 2010. Cloud Robot and Automation systems can be broadly defined as any robot or automation system that relies on data or code from a network to support its operation, i.e., where not all sensing, computation, and memory is integrated into a single standalone system.
There are at least four potential advantages to using the Cloud: 1) Big Data: access to updated libraries of images, maps, and object/product data, 2) Cloud Computing: access to parallel grid computing on demand for statistical analysis, learning, and motion planning, 3) Collective Learning: robots and systems sharing trajectories, control policies, and outcomes, and 4) Human Computation: use of crowdsourcing to tap human skills for analyzing images and video, classification, learning, and error recovery. The Cloud can also provide access to a) datasets, publications, models, benchmarks, and simulation tools, b) open competitions for designs and systems, and c) open-source software. It is important to recognize that Cloud Robotics and Automation raises critical new questions related to network latency, quality of service, privacy, and security.
The term "Singularity" is sometimes used to describe a punctuation point in the future where Artificial Intelligence (AI) surpasses human intelligence. The term was popularized by science fiction author Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil. Superintelligence, a 2014 book by Nick Bostrom, explored similar themes that provoked Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates to issue warnings about the dangers of AI and robotics. My sense is that the Singularity is distracting attention from a far more realistic and important development that we might call "Multiplicity". Multiplicity characterizes an emerging category of systems where diverse groups of humans work together with diverse groups of machines to solve difficult problems. Multiplicity combines the wisdom of crowds with the power of cloud computing and is exemplified by many Cloud Robotics and Automation systems.