Misquoted Scientists Respond

Creation Evolution Journal
Misquoted Scientists Respond
John R. Cole

I never cease to be amazed at the skill with which Dr. Morris employs the writings of the top evolutionists themselves to develop an air-tight case against evolution.

Thomas G. Barnes

Creationists have developed a skill unique to their trade: that of misquotation and quotation out of context from the works of leading evolutionists. This tactic not only frustrates scientists but it misleads school board members, legislators, and the public. Whether such actions by creationists of selectively seeking out quotations or references in order to prove a preconceived case are willful distortion or the product of wishful thinking is irrelevant. Such acts misuse science and scientists in bogus appeals to authority. Creationists seem to be saying, "Don't just take our word for itlook at what Professor X has written to prove our case."

To respond to such arguments is difficult for anyone who is not working full time at checking every quotation or tracking down for comment each quoted person. Teachers, parents, policy makers, journalists, and other interested persons are therefore at a disadvantage, and it is for them that this anthology of responses from the scientific community has been compiled. Leading evolutionists in various fields were asked to comment briefly on misinterpretations of their areas of expertise and of their work. Most scientists who were approached replied, although a few cited other commitments that prevented their participation and a couple noted that they could not explain their position in just a few paragraphs.

Half of the following comments were especially written for this article, and the other half are from previously published material, excerpted with the authors' permission. Many topicsand scientistsare not included, but, as an introductory survey of scientists' responses to misquotation and misrepresentation by "scientific" creationists, it is hoped that this anthology will be useful as a representative sampling.

Dr. Richard Lewontin

Author of The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change, biologist at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Agassiz Museum, Harvard University.

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Modern expressions of creationism and especially so-called "scientific" creationism are making extensive use of the tactic of selective quotation in order to make it appear that numerous biologists doubt the reality of evolution. The creationists take advantage of the fact that evolutionary biology is a living science containing disagreements about certain details of the evolutionary process by taking quotations about such details out of context in an attempt to support the creationists' antievolutionary stand. Sometimes they simply take biologists' descriptions of creationism and then ascribe these views to the biologists themselves! These patently dishonest practices of misquotation give us a right to question even the sincerity of creationists.

Several examples of falsification can be found in a recent issue of Acts & Facts, published by the Institute for Creation Research, in an article written by Gary E. Parker, a member of the Institute and a teacher at Christian Heritage College in El Cajon, California. On page two we read that "As Harvard's Richard Lewontin recently summarized it, organisms '. . . appear to have been carefully and artfully designed.' He calls the 'perfection of organisms' both a challenge to Darwinism and, on a more positive note, 'the chief evidence of a Supreme Designer.' "

But the point of my article, "Adaptation" in Scientific American, from which these snippets were lifted, was precisely that the "perfection of organisms" is often illusory and that any attempt to describe organisms as perfectly adapted is destined for serious contradictions. Moreover, the appearance of careful and artful design was taken in the nineteenth century before Darwin as "the chief evidence of a Supreme Designer." The past tense of my article ("It was the marvelous fit of organisms to the environment . . . that was the chief evidence of 'Supreme Designer' ") has been conveniently dropped by creationist Parker in his attempt to pass off this ancient doctrine as modern science.

Later, on the same page, Parker says that "selection works fineif a species has great genetic variability 'built right into it' by plan, purpose, and special creation." He then tries to support this point of view by quoting a statement of mine which said that selection can change organisms "only if their gene pool contains genetic variation" for the character in question. But it is precisely the random nature of the mutation process, the fact that species depend upon chance events in their history to acquire the genetic variation for evolution, that makes a successful response to the pressure of natural selection an uncertain process. Moreover, because populations and families are finite and sometimes quite small in size, mutations that could be selected may be lost to the population before selection has acted to incorporate them. To ascribe the failure of adaptation to deliberate design as creationists do is sheer perversity and illustrates why creationism is not science but blind prejudice.

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On page four of Parker's paper is another quotation from my article on adaptation, stating that ". . . natural selection over the long run does not seem to improve a species' chance of survival but simply enables it to 'track,' or keep up with, the constantly changing environment." This is then alleged to support a conservative rather than a creative role for natural selectiona favorite theme of creationists, who admit minor evolution within species but no major changes. But the theory of environmental tracking (which I think is not a particularly good description of the evolutionary process) does not say that the form and function of species is kept constant. What is conserved is the life of the species, but this conservation is made possible by continual change, sometimes quite radical, in the form and function of the organisms as they track an environment that is itself changing in sometimes quite radical ways. Here the creationist has simply played with the meaning of words.

Because of errors and misquotations of this nature, scientists and educators must clear away a great deal of confusion in the public mind about the true nature of evolutionary science. Confusion that wouldn't be there if it hadn't been created by creationists.

Dr. Niles Eldredge

Curator, Department of Invertebrates, American Museum of Natural History, and coauthor with Stephen Jay Gould of the papers on the theory of punctuated equilibria that initiated the past decade's revolution in paleontology and evolutionary theory.

It is particularly galling to one who labors in the vineyards of evolutionary biology to hear a candidate for the presidency of the United States declare, when asked about evolution, "Well, it is a theory, it is a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science and is not yet believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was believed." Nonsense. No active geneticist, embryologist, systematist, anatomist, or paleontologist doubts that life has evolved. What such biologists do argue about is how life has evolved.

All science involves the search for better explanations. We are currently entering a period of renewed intensity in our search to understand the mechanisms of the evolutionary process. For the past forty years or so, evolutionary thinking has been dominated by a single, simple, and rather elegant notion: that natural selection, tracking environmental change, modifies organisms' adaptations. The "synthetic theory of evolution" claims that this process accounts for all of evolutionary history. Still the dominant view held today, this synthesis marks an unusual period of virtual agreement within the entire field of biology. Many biologists in different disciplines are now openly skeptical that adaptation via natural selection alone can really account for all aspects of the evolution of life's diversity. Scientists see this as a healthy sign; debates over the relative merits of conflicting ideas are the heart and soul of science. Creationists, taking the synthetic theory as a synonym of "evolution," conclude from the debates that biologists are no longer wholeheartedly sure that life has evolved. Hence Ronald Reagan's remark.

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As an example, the notion of "punctuated equilibria," which Stephen Jay Gould and I began discussing in the early 1970s, is commonly cited in creationist literature as evidence that evolution has not occurred. Among other things, the notion of punctuated equilibria accounts for the lack of change seen in most fossil species as they persist through, in some cases, several millions of years. We questioned the long-held belief that evolutionary change must be slow, steady, gradual, and inevitablea view that goes back to Darwin himself. We claimed, instead, that evolution proceeds by fits and starts, mostly in conjunction with events surrounding the origin of new species. Creationists argue that, inasmuch as fossil species do not change much once they appear, the very notion of evolution is itself falsified. But Gould and I were only doing what scientists always do: testing predictions against real evidence. We found that the evidence failed to support the notion that evolutionary change in general is slow and gradual. We then offered an alternative explanation that, for the moment, seems to us to fit the evidence better. We never concluded that life did not evolve, but merely that it did not evolve exactly the way that Darwin said it did. Our data agree perfectly with the general notion that life has evolved.

There are today but two explanations of the pattern similarity interconnecting all forms of life: all organisms share RNA and all vertebrates share backbones and other structures. All mammals have three inner ear bones and mammary glands. How do you explain this pattern of nested similarities? The creationists see this pattern and explain it as the manifestation of a supernatural creator's blueprint. Biologists see the pattern and note that "descent with modification" would also yield the same patterns. How do we choose between these two explanations of the same evidence?

Biologists say that, if evolution has occurred, there should follow some predictions about living creatures. I'll give two of the several general consequences of the notion of evolution. First, we would predict that there must be one (not several or many) single, coherent pattern of similarity linking all forms of life together. This prediction is tested daily by systematists seeking to classify the ten million or so fossil and living species. They predict that distributions of anatomical and behavioral features should yield one single pattern. And this is what they find: one single pattern.

Here is another general prediction from the basic notion of evolution: if evolution has occurred, there should be a regular change in the appearance of life as one goes further back in the fossil record. Progressively earlier forms within a group (for example, the horse family) should look more and more like the early representatives of other closely related groups.

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They do. The Eocene "dawn horse" looks far more like an Eocene rhinoceros than it resembles a modern race horse. And so on. Predictions about laboratory changes in gene frequencies and patterns of differentiation leading to new species is testable and has survived all serious attempts to refute it.

Creationists, on the other hand, make no predictions about patterns of nature that must be there if all of life was fashioned separately by a creator. They cannot. It is their position that whatever patterns we see, that's what the creator made. Thus, there is no way they or anyone else can test creationist notions by consulting nature. One must take creationism on faith alone. "Scientific" creationists purport to test (and always refute!) hypotheses from geology and biologynever hypotheses drawn directly from creationism as a part of science. Yet these same creationists later say that neither creation nor evolution belongs in the realm of science. Both positions are wrong. Evolutionary biology is as much a part of science as nuclear physics; creationism is not a part of science at all.

Thus, the choice boils down to a preference for human understanding of the universe through that unique interplay of thought and experience we call science versus an acceptance of authoritarian revealed truth. Evolution and creationism both explain life's diversity, but only evolution belongs in a science curriculum.

Dr. Stephen Jay Gould

Professor of geology, Harvard University; author of The Panda's Thumb; and probably the single most misquoted and misused scientist among the creationists' unwilling allies. This excerpt is from "Evolution as Fact and Theory, " Discover, May 1981.

It is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationistswhether through design or stupidity, I do not knowas admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level but are abundant between larger groups. The evolution from reptiles to
mammals . . . is well documented. Yet a pamphlet entitled "Harvard Scientists Agree Evolution Is a Hoax" states: "The facts of punctuated equilibrium, which Gould and Eldredge . . . are forcing Darwinists to swallow fit the picture that [William Jennings] Bryan insisted on and which God has revealed to us in the Bible."

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Dr. David M. Raup

Dean of Science, Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago; "punctuationalist" whose writings, along with those of Gould and Eldredge, are among the most influential contributions to that theory and among those cited by creationists in an attempt to bolster their case.

One of the most unfortunate aspects of the current creation-evolution debate is that many of the creationists equate Darwinian theory with evolution. They are saying, in effect, that if Darwin's theory falls, then so does evolution. Nothing could be further from the truth. To me, there are two basic questions: Has evolution occurred (in the sense of change in the biological composition of the earth over millions of years)? By what mechanisms has evolution occurred? Darwin's contribution was to the second question. He proposed a biological mechanism: natural selection. Whether Darwin was right or wrong has no bearing on the question of whether evolution did or did not occur.

On the question of whether or not evolution has occurred, I would say that there are few things in the natural sciences about which we can be more confident. The geologic time scale has been checked and rechecked by many independent methods. Although individual dates may be subject to error, the overall chronology stands firm. It is used every day in petroleum and mineral exploration, and, if there were basic problems with it, I am sure that industrial geologists would have blown the whistle. The fossil record is intimately tied in with this chronology and shows a record of change in organisms through time. What we are not sure about is just how the biological changes took place. Natural selection surely played a part, but there may be other biological processes that have operated. One of the challenges of biology and paleontology is to find out what other processes were involved.

Dr. Laurie Godfrey

Assistant professor of anthropology, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and editor of two forthcoming books, A Century After Darwin and Scientists Confront Creationism. As a specialist in human and primate evolution, she is particularly concerned with creationist misrepresentations of the literature on human evolution.

On April 10, 1981, creationist Dr. Allen Beeber presented a slide show and lecture on scientific creationism at the University of Massachusetts. Although it was ill-received (largely because of its inadequate science), it is worth notice because it illustrates so well the techniques of creationists.

Beeber's doctorate in polymer science seemed impressive at first, but it turned out that there was no polymer science in his presentation. Indeed, Beeber had neither assembled the slide show nor written much of the text. The source of his slide show was John Baungardner of Canoga Park, California.

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It was a "canned" presentation and, judging from the misuse of data in anthropology, geology, biology, physics, and mathematics, it was clear that the author or authors lacked familiarity with much of the material cited. This was certainly true of Beeber, who admitted not having read sources quoted in his arguments.

Distorting information in my own field, Beeber led the audience to believe that Australopithecus was probably, according to anthropologist Charles Oxnard, some kind of orangutan (or, at least, like an orangutan), that anthropologist Clifford Jolly had demonstrated that fragmentary Ramapithecus was probably some kind of baboon, and that Richard Leakey had shown that ER 1470 was essentially a modern human.

These are standard creationist arguments, mirrored, for example, by Dr. Gish in his book, Evolution: The Fossils Say NO! Gish argues on page 103 that Clifford Jolly uncovered "devastating evidence against the assumption of a hominid status for Ramapithecus" and that Ramapithecus was at best a monkeylike ape or, perhaps, a "monkey with diet and habitat similar to that of galada [sic] baboons." He quotes Charles Oxnard as saying that Australopithecus was a unique form but, "to the extent that resemblances exist with living forms, they tend to be with the orangutan." Gish adds, "Oxnard's conclusions are that Australopithecus is not related to anything living todayman or apebut was uniquely different" (p. 12). Gish asserts that modern Homo was around all along, stating that Richard Leakey has found a skull of an individual contemporaneous with Australopithecus (ER 1470), which is "almost indistinguishable from those of many individuals living today" (p. 136).

This represents a gross distortion of what Jolly, Oxnard, and Leakey actually said. Jolly cited dental parallelism between the baboon Theropithecus gelada (which feeds on small hard objects such as grass corms and seeds) and early hominids in an attempt to reconstruct the diet of the extinct forms. But neither Jolly nor any anatomist would ever confuse the mouth of a baboon with that of a hominid such as Ramapithecus (nor any other fossil genus with small front teeth and large cheek teeth, such as the lemur Hadropithecus or hominid Australopithecus). Nowhere did Jolly even remotely imply that Ramapithecus, Australopithecus, Hadropithecus, or Homo are baboons.

Oxnard similarly never implied that Australopithecus is unrelated to any animal living today. Instead, Oxnard argued that late Pliocene and early Pleistocene Australopithecus was not directly ancestral to Homo erectus but shared a more remote common ancestor with an earlier variant of the genus Homo. He further argued that Australopithecus, while facultatively bipedal, probably engaged in climbing activities as well. His research question was functional: Was Australopithecus a habitual bipedal? His analysis was based entirely on some postcranial fragments. Oxnard readily acknowledged the shared dental and cranial features of Australopithecus and Homo (signs of their common ancestry). He explicitly argued that the postcranial resemblances of Australopithecus to orangutans imply functional similarities, not a closer relationship of Australopithecus to Pongo (the orang) than to Homo.

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In conclusion, Gish's allegations concerning ER 1470 are a bit mysterious, since ER 1470 has a face similar to that of robust australopithecines and a cranial capacity little more than half that of the average modern human. The creationist slide showed it in front view, not profile, probably because in profile this "strikingly modern" skull looks far more like other specimens of early Homo and Australopithecus. Leakey describes ER 1470 as a member of the lineage (Homo habilis) ancestral to Homo erectus, in turn ancestral to Homo sapiens (modern man). Some of the hooplah surrounding the discovery of ER 1470 was based on the unexpected presence of a 2.5 million-year-old hominid with a cranial capacity of 800 cc. Leakey publicized the great antiquity of his relatively large-brained discovery with great showmanship. The redating of ER 1470 at less than two million years makes this find far less remarkable than originally hailed. In any case, Leakey never considered it a member of the modern human race.

In spite of these facts, Beeber used this skimpy creationist "review" of the hominid fossil record, plus the well-known Piltdown hoax and the pig tooth once briefly mistaken for that of a hominid ("Nebraska man"), in an attempt to destroy the credibility of the human fossil record. Such arguments have worked well on audiences unfamiliar with the data, but they did not succeed at the University of Massachusetts.

Dr. Isaac Asimov

Author of 232 books and professor of biochemistry at Boston University School of Medicine. His popular writings which explain the workings of the second law of thermodynamics have been widely quoted from by creationists. This response is excerpted from "The Threat of Creationism, " which appeared in the June 14, 1981, issue of New York Times Magazine, and reprinted with permission.

Creationists, in recent years, have stressed the "scientific" background of their beliefs. They point out that there are scientists who base their creationist beliefs on a careful study of geology, paleontology, and biology and produce "textbooks" that embody those beliefs.

They have learned enough scientific terminology to use it in their attempts to disprove evolution. They do this in numerous ways, but the most common example, at least in the mail I receive, is the repeated assertion that the second law of thermodynamics demonstrates the evolutionary process to be impossible.

In kindergarten terms, the second law of thermodynamics says that all spontaneous change is in the direction of increasing disorderthat is, in a "downhill" direction. There can be no spontaneous buildup in the complex from the simple, because that would be moving "uphill." According to the creationist argument, since, by the evolutionary process, complex forms of life evolve from simple forms, that process defies the second law, so creationism must be true.

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To lift the argument a notch above the kindergarten level, the second law of thermodynamics applies to a "closed system"that is, to a system that does not gain energy from without, or lose energy to the outside. The only truly closed system we know of is the universe as a whole.

Within a closed system, there are subsystems that can gain complexity spontaneously, provided there is a greater loss of complexity in another interlocking subsystem. The overall change then is a complexity loss in line with the dictates of the second law.

Evolution can proceed and build up the complex from the simple, thus moving uphill, without violating the second law, as long as another interlocking part of the systemthe sun, which delivers energy to the earth continuallymoves downhill (as it , does) at a much faster rate than evolution moves uphill.

Unfortunately, the second law is a subtle concept that most people are not accustomed to dealing with, and it is not easy to see the fallacy in the creationist distortion.

Dr. Ashley Montagu

Physical anthropologist at Princeton University and renowned author. He summarizes below the attitude of the scientific community toward the general theory of evolution.

Regarding the recent action brought by the creationists in California and the judge's order that the state distribute more copies of a statement of long-standing policy that evolution should not be taught as dogmatic, irrefutable fact but rather as a scientific theory, the truth is that evolution is an unrefuted fact. There are theories concerning the exact mechanisms of evolution, but concerning evolution there no longer can be any doubt as to its reality.

The method of science is falsification, the attempts to disprove by every possible means the theory which appears to explain the fact. If the attempt fails, the scientist knows that he has something and proceeds to set up experiments to further test the theory. When the results support the theory, they are published so that other scientists can check them. When the findings are verified, we have "irrefutable" proof of the accuracy of the theory. In that sense, truth for a scientist means the highest degree of probability attached to a particular judgment.

In that same sense, because we have innumerable evidences of the reality of evolution, both of a premeditated and unpremeditated (natural) experimental kind, evolution is no longer a theory but one of the best authenticated facts within the whole realm of science. The fact of evolution is beyond dispute.

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Theories as to the exact mechanisms of evolution are (happily) alive and being debatedsuch debate constitutes the lifeblood of science, not evidence of disagreement as to the fact of evolution. The scientist believes in proof without certainty; some other people believe in certainty without proof.

Not all things can be proven; evolution can. Creation myths are just that: myths. As such, they are the legitimate study of anthropologists and folklorists. If some people choose to believe them to be truths, they are free to do so.

The foregoing statements should lay to rest some of the claims that leading "authorities" in science are lending support to antievolutionary arguments or that evolution is no longer accepted by the scientific community. There is no "club secret" that evolution is "bankrupt" or that the theory is "crumbling," as many creationists have charged.

It is easy to see how, with effort and a single-minded search through scientific literature, one can locate sentences and passages in anyone's work that can be interpreted out of context to mean whatever one desires. By this same method, some people read into the Bible proof that "ancient astronauts" visited earth.

Instead of searching for quotations, creationists should test their ideas against empirical evidence. The results of such tests, if carefully performed, can then be submitted to the peer review of the scientific journals. Scientists reading the results can duplicate the experiments or recheck the data. If they disagree, their positions will also appear in the journals. Scientists normally disagree with and test each other's ideas. This is the nature of science. But when the Moral Majority's Jerry Falwell promises that students at his Liberty Baptist College will never find differences of opinion among faculty members and that "anytime they start teaching something we don't like, we cut the money off" (Fitzgerald), he promises the opposite of science.

Still, it is easy to see how anyone wedded to such a dogmatic view would find the dynamics of scientific argument and counter argument a kind of proof that scientists now dispute evolution. Absolutist searchers for chinks in the evolutionists' armor miss the point of science and project their either-or values onto it. They therefore see certain scientists as "authorities" who can be used to champion their views.

Arguments from authority are logically weak. A position does not stand or fall depending upon who endorses it. It is the evidence and its logical interpretation that tell the tale. Even if creationists quote an individual more or less correctly, this does not support their position.

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One example, in particular, of near-correct quotation involves philosopher Sir Karl Popper. In 1976 Popper said, "Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory but a metaphysical research program." But Popper is not an expert in the biological sciences or their history. Furthermore, he is not the only philosopher of science in the world with anything to say on the subject of evolution. Philosophers often disagree with each other more than scientists do. And, to top if off, Popper has recently changed his mind on his earlier pronouncement against evolution. In 1978 he wrote, "I have changed my mind about the testability and logical status of the theory of natural selection, and I am glad to have the opportunity to make a recantation." Popper, much earlier than 1976, had had even stronger criticisms of evolution. But as early as 1972 he wrote:

I blush when I have to make this confession; for when I was younger, I used to say very contemptuous things about evolutionary philosophies. When twenty-two years ago Canon Charles E. Raven, in his Science, Religion, and the Future, described the Darwinian controversy as "a storm in a Victorian teacup," I agreed, but criticized him for paying too much attention "to the vapors still emerging from the cup," by which I meant the hot air of the evolutionary philosophies (especially those which told us that there were inexorable laws of evolution). But now I have to confess that this cup of tea has become, after all, my cup of tea: and with it I have to eat humble pie.

Popper then proceeded to restate Darwin's theory in a manner that was logically consistent, feeling that Darwin and other evolutionists had not done the best job nor used the right words to express the theory.

We can see, then, that not only is disagreement between scientists a natural part of the scientific enterprise but scientists and philosophers are capable of changing their minds. Creationism, on the other hand, tries to be the same "yesterday, today, and forever." It is therefore not a science, and citations, quotations, and details lifted out of context do not magically make it so.

Barnes, Thomas G. 1975. Foreward in The Troubled Waters of Evolution by Henry Morris. San Diego: Creation-Life Publishers.

Fitzgerald, Frances. May 18, 1991. "A Disciplined Changing Army." New Yorker, pp. 53-141.

Gish. Duane T. 1973. Evolution: The Fossils Say No! San Diego: Creation-Life Publishers.

Lewontin, Richard. 1978. "Adaptation." Scientific American. 239:33:212-230.

Parker, Gary E. October 1980. "Creation, Selection, and Variation." Acts & Facts. Impact No. 88.

Popper, Karl R. 1972. Objective Knowledge, An Evolutionary Approach. Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 241.
. 1963. Conjectures and Refutations. New York: Basic Books. p. 257.
. 1978. "Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind." Dialectica. 32:399 ff.

About the Author(s):
Dr. Cole is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls.

Copyright 1981 by John R. Cole
This version might differ slightly from the print publication.


Swamp Soccer : The beautiful game served in a new spicy flavour

William Shakespeare once said,” What’s in a name?”, and as Swamp Soccer so hardly learned –everything.  Swamp Soccer, as the title so clearly implies, is the sport of playing football on the marshy ground, sometimes in knee deep mud.

Swamp Soccer as a sport is said to be a brain child of the country of Finland with  Jyrki Väänänen being the proud father. The first championship was held in 1998 and had a sweet sobriquet –“the swamp baron” to go along with it.

The rules of the game are nonetheless designed to intrigue and perplex the random onlooker with questions. Swamp Football is generally played over two halves consisting of 12 minutes each with six legal players on the field at a time.  The much controversial and much-fabled rule of offside which persists in the normal but otherwise mundane version of football has also been bootlegged off.  There is no fixed number of players in the squad, which means that one can have a squad strength to one’s liking.

The substitution format is also different from normal football, with the matches being played on “rolling” substitutions, i.e. a player can be subbed in and as and when his team requires him to come on multiple times if necessary. Corner kicks, penalties, and throw-ins are taken by dropping the ball onto the preferred foot of the player who is to take it. The World Cup is held in Scotland every year, frequently on the last weekend in June and the World Championship is hosted by Finland, a week before the World Cup.

Generally, football is a game which requires skills, nimbleness, and swiftness of feet. However, the muddier version of the game requires you to be physically strong too; the former qualities though are optional. Many of the players take to the field completely sloshed and high, which makes the game even more difficult to follow to comprehend for the likes of us. Moving in knee deep sludge restraints teams from scoring too frequently and more often than not the games are always low scoring. One needs a great deal of stamina because even three full steps in the muck are enough to leave you gasping for air.

Football is considered to be a beautiful game by its lovers and with the advent of Swamp Soccer, a more grotesque and weirder version of the game is quite difficult to conjure up. It all came into existence when the town officials of Hyrynsalmi got down to business and devised an ingenious plan to use the vast reserves of swamp land around for sport.  The sport received such fanatical popularity among the locals that news of it reached the neighboring country of Russia, thereby doubling the number of participating teams. Nowadays there is a tournament for women too.

Usually, other fun events like wrestling, swimming, fairs, music, and dancing accompany the Swamp Soccer event, which is more or less like a carnival for the Finnish. The most common among them is, however, the wife carrying races  –where you run with your wife on your back and the winner gets beer equivalent to the wife’s weight.

However, the fun part is that one doesn’t need to be a professional player to participate in these tournaments because skill plays a very minimal role to one winning or losing out on a trophy. According to participants, no one remembers who wins or who loses- they just participate for the fun involved in it. From electricians and rugby players to even retired football players, everyone comes to Finland to be a part of this cultural ecstasy and wild frenzy. The Finnish sure know how to celebrate and be it through a series of insane and wacky sporting events or some way they have brought out their own distinct uniqueness. As a country, Finland is prone to severe winter months with little or no sunlight. So it should not come as a shock that they choose to indulge in such fun filled festivities during the short-lived summer.


Watch: How is the Modi Government Really Doing on the Skill Development Front?

In conversation with Jayant Krishna, COO of the National Skill Development Corporation, on the effects of Narendra Modi’s Skill India mission.

Anuj Srivas: Hi, and welcome to The Wire‘s discussion on economic growth and skilling India, which a pet project of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. India’s demographic dividend has long been cited as an advantage for our country but lately a number of commentators and economic experts are also referring to it as a demographic ‘time bomb’, when at any given time of year we have 12 million people who are trying to enter the workforce but are only creating four or five million jobs depending on which estimate you go by. The manufacturing centre is not creating the jobs that we expected, the organised service sector –

M.K. Venu: In recent years much less than four million, actually.

AS: That’s true, 2009-2010 was probably the peak for jobs created and you know, India’s service sector, the organised service sector at least, has also seen layoffs in the last one year as growth sort of slows down. So today we have with us Jayant Krishna who is the chief operating officer of the National Skills Development Corporation, an organisation under the ministry that’s trying to ‘skill’ India’s youth and hopefully guide them towards a better future with greater opportunities. Could you start us off by talking to us, Jayant, about this, is it a time bomb and is the Skill India project working?

Jayant Krishna: The demographics of our country very clearly are like a double-edged sword: If you skill people well, if you create livelihood options, very clearly you can leverage a demographic dividend. If you don’t, it could become a demographic disaster, that’s a fact. Skills as an area has been ignored by the country for a very long time and the seriousness started in the 2007-2008 timeframe, when the new policy of development came into being, and then subsequently by the current government when it set up a new Ministry for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship. So we started pretty late; if you look at the countries in the Western world, they’ve had a three or four decade journey before they could stabilise their skill story, we started late, wasted almost six decades after independence, and now we’ve started and we don’t have the luxury of waiting for another three or four decades because the window of opportunity that the demographic dividend presents for the country is not unlimited.

If we don’t pull our act together and start delivering results then I think the country will pay a very heavy price. But the good story is that a lot of positive things have started happening and the initial results are pretty encouraging, but you know this is a huge space as I always say, the largest human resources exercise ever attempted by any country in the history of mankind, so the more you do the more seems to remain to be done.

MKV: How would you, Jayant, characterise the performance of the prime minister’s flagship programme called Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana which was last year allocated Rs 1,500 crore for skilling people entering the job market, for youth entering the job market? There is a report commissioned by the government, which says that its performance has been much below par, it says about 8.5% of the people skilled have actually got jobs. Now how would you respond to that?

JK: See, the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana is the country’s answer to the issue, of who pays for skilling for people who are from the bottom of the pyramid. Many of them don’t know where their next meal will come from, how would they pay a fee if it is based on a cost-plus-recovery basis or based on market forces? The country’s answer to that is that skilling is for free. In the year 2015-16, we enrolled close to 20 lakh people there. Last year, I would not like to quote the figure –

MKV: You’re saying you enrolled 20 lakh people for skilling?

JK: For skilling under the scheme.

MKV: Under the scheme?

JK: Yes, and almost 14-15 lakh people got certified.

MKV: So you’re doing two million, about one and a half to two million a year, enrolling?

JK: See, under Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana, in this financial year – see, last year was a year when we took stock, took a lot of corrective steps, a lot of improvements were brought about, so last year’s numbers under the PMKVY were down vis-à-vis the year before last. But this year, again, everything is hunky-dory, new systems have been put in place and things will improve. I’ll just tell you, you talked about the figure: the employment and self-employment figures for Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana so far has been about close to 20%. But the actual data is more, because in the earlier scheme there was no incentive for training providers to even record this data. So this year, among other changes we have made, the last 20% of payment for training partners would come from the government, from the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship through NSDC only when there was documentary evidence of employment, wage or self-employment having happened, this was one change we have made. Yes, there were some glitches, some inadequacies in the earlier scheme. I’ll tell you, earlier the scheme could have been done out of practically any training centre kind of thing in the country, this year –

MKV: So there was no quality monitoring?

JK: Monitoring was there, but not adequate.

MKV: Not adequate? Okay.

JK: So, for example, the year before last we did these 20 lakh people we talked about, they were enrolled in about 12,500 centres. This year we have reduced the number, this year there are almost 4,000 centres that we have and they go through a huge filtration level, in the sense that our sector skill councils, they prescribe that, for the job rolls that the training providers have an interest in, what kind of equipment is required, what kind of classrooms are required, the entire lab requirement, everything is there and every applicant and training partner has to apply for a centre-level affiliation, and all details of the centre are self-populated on a portal that we have, then some desk research happens, analysis happens and then a field visit happens by the NSDC through an outsource arrangement through the quality council of India. Then only when the centre is found to meet the requirements, then we give them different grades like three-star, four-star, five-starand so far, we have been giving targets only under the PMKVY to the centres which have four-star or five-star ratings. So a lot of quality improvement has happened, placement –

MKV: So you’re saying that through all these processes, you’re hoping that the number of people skilled, getting jobs will be more, going forward?

JK: The quality of skill delivery will improve, the job connect, the market connect will improve, for example, we have centre-skill councils, we said that let them also do the job of demand aggregation. Where do the demands come from? So far, just as a beginning, in the last few months itself they have been able to aggregate almost eight lakh jobs.

MKV: Actual jobs?

JK: Actual jobs, which is at the company level, location level, skill level, what role and level of ability –

MKV: You’re saying that this is real?

JK: This is real.

MKV: Eight lakhs will be delivered?

JK: Eight lakh job aggregation has happened, now the next challenge is how do we connect these jobs with the training partners, so that, you know, what they offer –

MKV: And these jobs are in which sectors generally? Construction?

JK: They are into all (sectors) – construction, IT, retail, hospitality, healthcare, agriculture, a whole lot of areas put together. You know, we have 40 sector-skill councils, not everybody has done but anywhere between 12-15 sector councils have aggregated these eight lakh jobs and this is just the beginning of the process. So I think that is happening, plus, earlier, most of the training in PMKVY used to be there at the NSQF level one and two, just the entry level. We have pegged that up to level three and four this time. Earlier, we used to stop at giving them the qualification packs and the national occupation standards. Then we started making the model curriculum, and not only that, we gave a book, a complete book, for each job role. That kind of hand-holding is being done, training of trainers has been made compulsory, you can’t start a centre unless people are trained by a sector-skill council centrally in a ten-day long programme.

MKV: These processes have been put in place in the last…?

JK: In the last few months, I would say in the last seven or eight months, these processes have been put in place, and –

MKV: But the big data, which you yourself told me earlier, in our earlier interaction, of the total employed or employable pool in India, which is about 480-500 million, right?

JK: The labour force size is almost estimated to be anywhere between 48 crore to 51 crore.

MKV: Yes, well, take it as 480 million. Of that, you told me that just about 5% of that has formal skills.

JK: Yes, I mean, again we don’t have data but in fact less than 5%, about 4% of people are formally skilled.

MKV: So you’re saying that 95% are not formally skilled?

JK: They are not formally skilled, so for them we have rolled out another programme called recognition of prior learning. If somebody, for example a silk weaver in Varanasi or a chikankari worker in Lucknow, or a phulkari artisan in Punjab, these are people who have the skills but they don’t have any formal certification, so what do we do, we do a quick assessment and a snap survey to find out what the gaps are. They have some skills, but what are the gaps? For example, a silk weaver of Varanasi: they may know the core weaving very well, but what they may not be very good at is design skills, they may not be very good at yarn-dyeing skills.

MKV: So you connect them with those skills?

JK: So we give them an incremental training of that, and then give them a certification for the entire job roll. But you know it’s a huge task, it’s a gigantic task. If I claim that everything is hunky-dory, everything is in place, perhaps not. But we’re all gearing up to make things happen.

AS: Just to interject here. Earlier we spoke about the difference between fee-based skilling, where if the person wants to get the pass-course certification he has to pay for it, or you know we have a number of government programmes, the most recent of course is the PMKVY, where the government subsidises and gives the NSDC a certain amount of money, and then we’ve seen that this sort of subsidised skilling has not worked in the past too. The Modi government’s PMKVY is just now, in 2013, but we’ve had the star programme, we had SITS way back in 2007, and there’s a lot of data to show that that hasn’t worked out as well. Why does fee-based skilling, where the person has to pay for it, why does that automatically encourage and result in higher placements, why does it result in higher quality skilling and education in the first place when it’s still being compensated, no one’s doing it for free, it just depends whether the person pays for it or the government subsidises it?

JK: Yeah, I think in the fee-based training, the coefficient of seriousness increases manifold from the training partners, from the trainers and from the students themselves. If something is given to you for free, you don’t value it as much as if you’ve saved or your parents have saved and paid for it. Therefore, in our fee-based training the placement percentage has been off, and in the one year’s data since the inception of NSDC, our experience has been almost 50% of the fee-based people have got wage-employment or are self-employed.

So definitely, to my mind, it’s my personal view, it may not necessarily be that of the ministry, but I think we have to take the fee-based training more seriously and have prior corporate connects before the batches start. Even our current training partners, if not all of them, at least a few of them, have very good industry connects, and they enrol students, they mobilise students for a course only based on definite placement assurances from corporates, which are documented, and then people also when they come there know that they’re going to get a job, and unless the person is useless, most of the people who pass out, they get a job with that corporate for which the batch is being run.

I think the seriousness goes up manifold, the quality of delivery improves and so on and so forth. One more thing, let’s look at states like Maharashtra and Gujarat, the states which are associated with a higher amount of investments, more manufacturing and industrial activity. They are the states where PMKVY does not do very well but the fee-based business happens, especially in Maharashtra, it happens very well. I think wherever the existing base of industry is good, the formal and organised play of industry is more, I think things work very well for fee-based training.

MKV: The other question which Anuj has discovered from the committee report – we’re coming back to the committee report because its a report set up by the government and it’s very critical of the manner in which things have gone on so far. One broader question – of course they make many accusations which you may not agree with – but one question that arises which Anuj said, correct me if I’m wrong, he said there is a suspicion of the private sector as a partner, right? That’s a constant, since this is a public-private partnership

JK: NSDC is, yes.

MKV: So there is the government committee report’s finding, that the private sector is not fulfilling its part of the obligation. Now I don’t understand what all this is about. Can you just throw some light on that?

JK: One can always argue that is the private sector or industry doing enough, or not doing enough, but let’s look at the entire genesis of the job rolls. Each of these sector-skill councils, the governing council does not comprise of industry people. They may have one or two – sorry, of government people. It largely has industry people. For example, healthcare is headed by Dr Naresh Trehan. Vandana Luthra heads our beauty and wellness. Mr Vikram Oberoi used until recently to head our –

MKV: Hospitality.

JK: Hospitality sector-skill council. Similarly, everywhere I think there are very very iconic people. The NASCOM chairman heads the IT and ITS council, Mr Ajit Gulabchand heads the construction, so very iconic – and they’re not just the chairman. The other people in the governing council are also who’s who of the industry, and what they essentially do, they brainstorm and then they decide which are the job rolls in their vertical which will constitute a critical mass in terms of wage or self-employment opportunities. They do the occupation mapping and then they develop detailed national occupation standards based on which the training happens.

MKV: And qualifications.

JK: And qualifications, though qualification packs are nothing but another name for job rolls, actually. And each qualification pack for a job roll will have multiple occupation standards and these occupation standards essentially come from the industry, and they go through the industry validation not by just one or two players, but by multiple players, not just the large industry, but the MSME sector also, the small sector also, before they become the national standards. So I think industry is chipping in, but are they doing enough? This is a debatable question, but very clearly, skills is an area where for six decades we had bare minimum industry involvement in skills, so I think this journey has started fairly –

MKV: So what exactly does the report say about the private sector?

AS: Two or three different points it makes. One, as Mr Krishna’s pointed out, clearly our industry captains spend a lot of time with these sector-skill councils, but one thing it brings up is the NSDC, while majority shareholding is held by industry associations, 100%, near 99% of funding comes from the government, so industry associations, companies are not putting their money where their interests really lie here. So they’re not – their funds are not coming out, and funding the SSCs, and so on, so do you think this should change in the years ahead? Should NSDC depend on purely, 100% government funding?

JK: No, NSDC could always raise funds –

MKV: Of course, private sector contributes more in terms of funding?

JK: Could, could contribute, but let’s also look at, see, NSDC’s not the only route through which corporates invest in skilling. Many corporates have set up their own iconic skill development centres, they do skilling for their own employees. Look at the IT industry itself.

AS: The finishing schools.

JK: Absolutely, so I think –

MKV: Like Infosys has its own finishing school.

JK: Absolutely, every major IT company, Infosys, TCS, Wipro, everybody has not just finishing, even technical schools and finishing schools, both. So I think this happens, and if you captured the data the entire private sector play in the skill development space, of the money that they contribute, which is not captured unfortunately in our country. It’ll not be second to the government at all, they spend a lot of money. So through multiple routes private sector chips in. They may not do it necessarily through NSDC. If NSDC could raise money from sources other than the government, yes, it could, it can and it should, but very clearly I think it’s not just a question of money being –

MKV: Do you think NSDC could go to the market and raise money? Kind of corporatise?

JK: It’s a not-for-profit organisation.

MKV: Why? Why can’t it be for profit?

JK: I think by design it was thought that, let’s also look at NSDC –

MKV: If you’re not-for-profit then you necessarily depend on donations from the industry, which –

JK: Yeah, so the training business that we promote, that is for-profit, in the sense all our training partners whom we fund, even they may be non-funded, they encourage skilling for profit, that kind of thing. But our founding fathers thought that the best form for NSDC is a not-for-profit organisation. And let’s also understand why, why was it set up as a PPP kind of thing. Couldn’t government have chipped in the rest of the equity also? Could it not have done it? It could have done it very easily, to keep it 100%. But it was thought perhaps, that you need the work culture of the private sector, you need the flexibility and operational freedom of the private sector, you’ll need a lot of velocity of decision making, it has to be faster, and you know, I think these were, and above all, to get the best of breed people from the industry and elsewhere to get into these roles, so these benefits are far more in creating an organisation which has a high degree of very, very good professional ethos, a good work culture, a very, very different responsive sensitivity, than what generally people in the country associate with government. So I think those objectives have been realised to a large extent and very clearly it was known that government funds would be leveraged and delivery will be through NSGC which was always thought to be a private sector company because of the benefits that we’re talking about.

AS: Correct, that’s true, and also I mean, another aspect, in terms of quality of skilling, so the sector skill councils, for our viewers who might not know, so they create as you said NOSs and QPs. The government panel that was constituted, one thing it points out is that a lot of the national occupation standards that have been created are too broad. For instance, they give a very nice example of if you want to skill a driver, for example, there are four different sector skill councils which each have their own NOSs about what a driver, a chauffeur, a truck driver and so on and so forth, and all of these are sort of overlapping and yet they are still not comprehensive when you compare it to a country like Korea or Germany and so on and so forth. I know that you’ve said this report has not been accepted by the government as of yet so there might be a lot of back and forth in the way it pans out in the end, but they explicitly state that this reason why our NOSs are not comprehensive enough is because there was a lot of private consultants who were brought in who perhaps didn’t do the job they were supposed to because this was based off monetary incentives and so on and so forth.

JK: We have 1,900 job rolls, and the same job roll being in multiple sector-skill councils or being made by multiple sector-skill councils, they’re very, very rare, very few and far between, such examples. But there was a situation that one SSC has made a job roll, but that job roll is demanded by other SSCs, so now we’ve started loaning

of job rolls, so any SSC could have made it, but any other SSC, as long as there is a business case, which is approved by NSDC, we allow them usage of job rolls, loaning of job rolls, to other SSCs and the entire compensation, assessment, number accumulation is allowed to the SSC which has loaned that job roll. So all these things are getting done, but, when you talk about the driver, let’s take for example, a light commercial driver, it’s not there in multiple SSCs, it is one, but the requirements of a driver in a light commercial vehicle versus a earth-moving equipment, these requirements are very different. Even, for that matter, light commercial vehicle and a lorry driver, they’re very different requirements. So now it’s very clear that any SSC can make it, and any other SSC, as long as there’s justification, can adopt it and start using it.

MKV: You know one bigger question, Jayant, you just said that you’re slowly moving to skilling say two million new people a year.

JK: Under Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana could be a little more than that, then there’ll be fee-based also.

MKV: Then overall, if you add fee-based everything, aggregate about three million?

JK: No, everything put together, for NSDC itself, it will be about four million, in the coming financial year.

MKV: You’ll be skilling four million people?

JK: Indirectly, and then there’ll be other government of India programmes, there’ll be other corporate programmes, there’ll be state government programmes.

MKV: OK, so what is an adequate number according to you? If you look at the labour force, or the employable labour force, at 480 million, and if you yourself said that currently, formal skilling is received by less than 5%, right, which makes it less than 24 million, so how will you scale this up to at least, say 100-150 million? You’ll have to do that, right?

JK: It’s a challenge, it’s a challenge, if you really ask us, you know the country in the last policy in 2015 had embarked upon a target to skill 400 million people by the year 2022 –

MKV: So isn’t that, this 400 million people by –

JK: It’s a daunting task.

MKV: Yeah, it seems almost impossible, right? At the current pace of skilling that’s going on by you and others all combined?

JK: Yeah, so it’s a huge task, if you ask us whether we’ll be able to achieve that, nobody can answer that today. A lot more galloping of efforts is required, we’ll need to have more and more people come to us, take loans, set up, create investments in skilling, lot of corporates have to come. A lot of corporate skilling which already happens, that data needs to be dragged and captured, which is not happening today. So I think it’s a big task.

MKV: So currently you’re saying that we’re not even properly mapping as to how many people are getting skilled through multitude, through multiple efforts by a government, corporate sector, everything?

JK: Government, there is a mapping available. Government of India, which is the skills ministry, as well as other government of India ministries, as well as state governments, that data is consolidated, but corporate data is still not available, except in bits and pieces here and there.

AS: Jayant, the quality of skilling that happens in other ministries, has that come up to common standards? I know there was some concern over that over the last two years. Every ministry, 19 other ministries, I think, do some sort of vocational education but they don’t necessarily follow the NOS –

MKV: Ministries like what? Textiles and –

AS: Textiles, MHRD does a lot of things, but a lot of the common criticism from many in civil society in the past has been that these vocational education training efforts are not standardised, they’ve not resulted in good quality, so does NSDC want to reach out to the other ministries in this regard and sort of come up with something?

JK: I think it’s happening already, big time, for example, if you look at the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, they run a scheme called HUPA, sorry, NULM, HUPA is the name of the ministry and similarly, the rural development ministry runs a Deendayal Upadhyay Yojana, that kind of thing. So many of these courses are already aligned to the national skills qualification framework, and the job rolls map to the job rolls which are there in the overall skills ecosystem. So I think they didn’t start from there, but I think that mapping, and that, you know, that alignment is happening. We also have common norms, even norms for compensating training partners who do programmes for various government of India schemes and all that, or other government schemes, those are getting aligned to the same standards and largely it has been done. We didn’t start with that, but I think a lot of work has happened in the last year, year and a half, to bring forward this kind of aggregation and alignment of various government skilling schemes based on common norms.

AS: What’s also added to Mr Krishna’s burden, the difference between the 2009 skilling policy and the 2015 skilling policy is that the 2015 policy also adds the extra criteria that you have to place them at a certain wage, a tenable wage. Has that standard been met across different sectors and industries? You skill them, they go get placed, but the wages that they receive are –

MKV: You have to ensure a certain minimum wage, is it?

JK: See, let’s understand, every state government has a minimum wage, right?

MKV: Delhi has Rs 13,000, right, per month?

JK: Some levels, it will be less than that also, I think the unskilled levels it will be less than that. It is a state subject. Every state comes out with three or four categories of skilled, semi-skilled, unskilled workers –

MKV: Minimum wages.

JK: Minimum wages, kind of thing. But let’s understand, 91% of our jobs are in unorganised sector and in informal sector. I’m not saying nobody in this sector adheres to the minimum wages, but there are many who do not adhere to minimum wages.

MKV: And for that 91% I think our research is abysmally poor. I don’t think we have mapped that 91% properly.

JK: We have not mapped properly, there is some connect with that world, but not adequate, that’s a big challenge. There’s no other country in the world which has such a heavy composition of jobs in the informal and unorganised sector. Perhaps our rules, our labour laws, and a lot of other things which the industry found require a lot of relaxation, because of which workarounds were found, and even some of the big corporates resorted to contract manufacturing and outsourced manufacturing and so on and so forth. I think that’s very important because most of these jobs in informal and unorganised sector are not aspirational. Students don’t really look forward to them. I think it’s a challenge we, as a country, we need to fight, and minimum wages, the law can mandate, the law can do as much. End of the day market forces prevail. You can walk the talk when you engage with the industry, that please give premium to skilled people over unskilled people, but at the end of the day the demand and supply and the market forces take over. So regulation you can take this far and not beyond.

MKV: And the big challenge in the informal sector, Jayant, correct me if I’m wrong, is that most of them are also self-employed. Fifty-sixty percent are self employed.

JK: There is a fair percentage of them that are self-employed.

MKV: And this government also has focused on the self-employed, you know, the Mudra Bank –

JK: The Mudra Bank.

MKV: Gives loans to the self-employed, this whole Stand-Up India slogan that the prime minister has coined is about –

JK: Is about start-ups.

MKV: About the self-employed, right?

JK: Yeah.

AS: In fact, I think I just saw a news report a couple of days ago, I think NITI Aayog is now embarking on trying to get better data –

JK: For getting job data and all that, yeah, it was there in today’s newspaper.

AS: Today’s newspaper, correct, that’s what I meant. Great, so thank you for joining us and we look forward to your work.

JK: And my only request to all of you is please evangelise the skills, it needs a lot of evangelisation. Every media channel, everybody, every corporate house, every media leader has to walk the talk, then only his skills will become aspirational in the country. There are problems in the sector, we’re all working hard to resolve these problems, but as I said it’s a huge and daunting task and every stakeholder in the nation needs to work together.

MKV: But the best evangelisation is people getting jobs, and they’ll talk about it.

JK: Absolutely.

MKV: And of course, when they do that, when they do get jobs, we’ll talk about it, definitely. Thank you.

  • Devanjali Basu

    Very very helpful for understanding Skill India comprehensively . Thank you


Is the Ebola epidemic really coming to an end?

The initial announcement of the latest outbreak of Ebola was on 25 March, in Guinea – part of West Africa, where the virus has never been known in the population, meaning that they would have been totally unprepared for such an epidemic to occur. As of 14 April, a total of 202 clinical cases of Ebola virus disease (EVD) – which includes confirmed and suspected cases – have been reported in Guinea, Liberia, Mali and Sierra Leone, including 128 deaths. Researchers have also determined that it is genetically similar to Ebola Zaire, but it is a brand new strain. This is significant because it shows that this Ebola epidemic has arisen separately from the previous epidemics in Central Africa. The Ministry of Health of Guinea has announced that with the decrease in the number of new cases, this latest epidemic of EBV is coming to an end; however, the fact that the latest wave of cases involved people in Conakry, Guinea’s capital with an airport, is slightly worrying.

Ebola is a fairly lethal virus, which is actually part of the reason why it hasn’t turned into a pandemic yet; it kills its hosts too quickly – up to 90% of the infected will be dead in a couple of weeks after manifesting symptoms – for them to pass on the virus very far. The other reason is because it is spread via contact with an infected victim’s fluids, unlike the flu, which can spread via air. And that is the next fear – that the virus will mutate such that it can be transmitted through the air, which was suspected to have happened with another species of Ebolavirus known as Reston virus, of the book The Hot Zone fame. On the bright side, it seems that the more people the Ebola virus infects, and the more it adapts to humans, the less lethal it gets.

This is why I bring sanitizing wipes on cruise ships

News broke recently where more than 600 people on a cruise ship fell ill with gastrointestinal symptoms such as vomiting and diarrhea. Unfortunately, the only unusual thing about this is that such a large percentage of the passengers became sick – from 2008 to 2013, there were 83 cruise ships that the CDC reported as having gastrointestinal illness outbreaks. Cruise ships from other countries also reported similar outbreaks.

Going by the symptoms presented, the pathogen in question is most likely to be norovirus (Norwalk virus). This virus is able to spread from person-to-person, and by contact with surfaces contaminated by the virus, such as door handles, elevator buttons, and cutlery. Norovirus spreads even faster in where large groups of people are kept close together in enclosed spaces such as cruise ships and schools. The best way to counteract the spread of norovirus is to sanitize high contact surfaces and minimize item exchange between people as much as possible with chlorine and chlorine-based cleaners; alcohol-based cleaners have less of an effect on noroviruses because they do not have a lipid envelope which could be disrupted by alcohol. People should avoid touching their faces, particularly around the mouth, nose or eyes, and wash their hands prior to eating.

Most sanitizing wipes, unfortunately, are not chlorine-based; nevertheless, they act as a reminder to myself to wash my hands; I also use them to wipe my cutlery and door handles, and throw them away once used. Call me a germaphobe, but I do like to stay healthy as much as I can, and I really don’t fancy spending my days on a cruise ship vomiting or running to the toilet to vacate my bowels every hour.

(Although there were about 20,000 U.S. cruises from 2008 to 2013, not all of the outbreaks occurring may have been reported; only cruises of 3-21 days length, with more than 100 passengers and more than 3% of the passengers ill, coming from an international port to a U.S. port, are required to be reported by the CDC. As the average number of passengers on a cruise ship tends to hover around 100, this means that about half of the 20,000 cruises are not reported upon; if we take into account the other conditions mentioned, it is likely that the number of cruises within the purview of the outbreak updates by the CDC falls even further.)

U.S. Department of Transportation Maritime Administration, North American Cruise Statistical Snapshot, 2011

Coronas are not (just) beers.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), as its name suggests, is a respiratory illness Coronaviridaewhich largely targets the upper respiratory tract, with its defining symptom being a fever with a temperature of 38°C (100.4°F) or higher. Other symptoms include flu-like symptoms such as chills, muscle aches, headaches, fatigue and sore throat. As the illness progresses, patients may then develop a dry cough and/or shortness of breath, followed by pneumonia, respiratory failure, and acute respiratory distress, potentially leading to death. The incubation period of the virus is about 2-13 days, with a mean of 5 days.

SARS is caused by the virus SARS-coronavirus (SARS-CoV). This virus was responsible for the SARS epidemic of November 2002 to July 2003. At the end of epidemic, there were a total of 8273 cases, and 775 deaths. The case fatality rate – that is, the number of deaths as a ratio of the number of cases – has been stated as being somewhere between 9.6%-11%, depending on the definition of case fatality rate used. Although the case fatality rate was somewhat high (the case fatality rate for the recent 2009 influenza pandemic was about 0.03%), the number of deaths was likely mitigated by the fact that many of the people infected by SARS-CoV had access to very good supportive/palliative healthcare, helping their immune systems to fight off the virus.

An electron micrograph of a SARS-CoV virion. Image by CDC/ C. D. Humphrey and T. G. Ksiazek.

An electron micrograph of a SARS-CoV virion. Note the distinctive “corona”, which gives the family Coronaviridae its name. Image by CDC/ C. D. Humphrey and T. G. Ksiazek.

SARS-CoV is a coronavirus, so named for the protein spikes that surround this spherical virus, which looks like a corona. Although SARS-CoV was initially suspected to have originated in masked palm civets – which were commonly sold in markets in China, where some of the first cases of SARS was reported – it was finally traced back via phylogenetics to the Chinese horseshoe bat. Both the human and civet cat SARS-CoV were found to have descended from bat coronaviruses.

Although there are no cures or vaccines currently available for SARS-CoV, there is a vaccine in development by MassBiologics, cooperating with researchers at NIH and the CDC. The 2002-2003 epidemic was successfully controlled by quarantining those infected, and suspected to be infected by the virus, and is a viable alternative solution in countries where such measures can be effectively implemented. The determination of the incubation period of the virus was a vital part of this counter-measure, as it enabled health officials to determine how long had to elapse before people who had come into contact with SARS patients could be declared free from SARS.

A similar coronavirus surfaced in Saudi Arabia in April 2012. Known as Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), there have been 94 confirmed cases, 16 probable cases and 47 dead, with a case fatality rate of approximately 50%, as of August 2013. Like SARS, this is a viral respiratory illness; its symptoms include fever, cough and shortness of breath, which may be followed by kidney failure and respiratory distress, potentially leading to death. People who have weaker immune systems are more likely to die from Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). Thus far, all cases have been linked to the Middle Eastern area.

A negatively-stained electron micrograph of MERS-CoV,  revealing its ultrastructural morphology. Image by CDC/ Cynthia Goldsmith; Azaibi Tamin, Ph.D.

MERS-CoV can be transmitted from person to person if there has been close contact without protective equipment e.g. gloves and masks, but in general, it appears that there has not been a sustained spread of MERS in people. There are three main epidemiological patterns to the transmission of MERS-CoV – 1) sporadic cases, probably after coming into contact with an animal carrying MERS-CoV. 2) Family clusters and 3) healthcare workers are similar, as they are both sets of people who would have come into close contact with an infected person while the person is contagious. The incubation period of MERS-CoV seems to be from 2-14 days; thus, isolation protocols similar to those as carried out in the SARS 2002-2003 epidemic can be applied to people who are suspected to be infected with MERS-CoV. There is also no known cure or vaccine for MERS-CoV. The only treatment available is supportive/palliative care, ensuring that the patient manages to live while their immune system fights off the virus.

Not much is known about MERS-CoV; it seems to be a genetic match to a coronavirus found in Egyptian tomb bats, but recently there has been a report that camels may be the actual animal reservoir for this strain of coronavirus. It also appears that a large amount of virus is actually needed to cause an infection, as only about 20% of our respiratory epithelial cells – that is to say, about 20% of our lungs and airways – are carrying the protein receptor DPP4, which allows MERS-CoV to enter, and hence infect, them.

On an slightly more unsettling note, it seems that there has been at least one case of asymptomatic MERS – that is to say, a person was infected, and then produced anti-MERS-CoV antibodies, without ever showing signs of MERS. If asymptomatic MERS can be confirmed, and people with asymptomatic MERS can transmit the virus to other people, this could potentially explain the sporadic cases of MERS that seem to pop up out of nowhere. Of course, this would also lower the case fatality rate of MERS-CoV. There are also further concerns about the potential for a serious epidemic as there will be an increase in the number of people going to Mecca in Saudi Arabia for the Muslim Haj. While a vaccine could potentially be developed, it might be that the MERS epidemic would burn itself out the same way the SARS epidemic did, thus rendering the development of the vaccine unnecessary and unprofitable.

Tracking SARS back to its source

S. K. P. Lau, P. C. Y. Woo, K. S. M. Li, Y. Huang, H-W. Tsoi, B. H. L Wong, S. S. Y. Wong, S-Y. Leung, K-H. Chan and K-Y. Yuen. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-like virus in Chinese horseshoe bats PNAS Vol. 102 No. 39 14040–14045, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0506735102

Special Online Edition: The SARS Epidemic

A. Rambaut MERS-Coronavirus Molecular Epidemiology and Genetic Analysis – Origin and Evolution

C. BEM Reusken, B. L. Haagmans, M. A. Müller, C. Gutierrez, G-J. Godeke, B. Meyer, D. Muth, V. S. Raj, L. Smits-De Vries, V. M. Corman, J-F. Drexler, S. L. Smits, Y. E. El Tahir, R. De Sousa, J. van Beek, N. Nowotny, K. van Maanen, E. Hidalgo-Hermoso, B-J. Bosch, P. Rottier, A. Osterhaus, C. Gortázar-Schmidt, C. Drosten, M. PG Koopmans Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus neutralising serum antibodies in dromedary camels: a comparative serological study The Lancet Infectious Diseases, Volume 13, Issue 10, 859 – 866 doi:10.1016/S1473-3099(13)70164-6

R. Roos Saudis, WHO Report 8 Silent MERS Cases

D. Butler Receptor for new coronavirus found

Virology 100x: Round and round we go; where we stop, nobody knows

Viruses are so varied because each virus has evolved to specifically infect one particular host. There are so many different types of viruses that it’s difficult to describe them with a generality; what they have in common is merely as I wrote in an earlier post – that they’re obligate intracellular parasites comprising of nucleoprotein complexes with a protective protein coat (and possibly a lipid envelope). However, with classification, we are able to make generalisations within a particular subset of viruses – particularly with respect to how they infect and replicate, then bust out of our cells. If we are able to figure out how viruses replicate and infect our cells, we are then in a better position to prevent them from replicating in, or even better, from entering and infecting our cells in the first place.

Viruses are primarily classified according to their genetic material; that is to say, whether they have DNA or RNA. After splitting into these two groups, there are further subsets, such as whether the genetic material is single- or double-stranded; if the viral genome is whole or segmented – amongst others.

Baltimore classification

See text for explanation on Baltimore classification

This method of classification is called the Baltimore classification, after its developer David Baltimore. The genetic nature of a virus is important because it determines where and how the replication of the DNA or RNA takes place (either the nucleus or the cytoplasm), which in turn partially determines what steps the virus must take to get its genome there. Thus, it is possible for us to predict certain features of a virus’s replication cycle based purely on its genetic nature.

The stages in viral replication are so closely linked that it is difficult to separate them sometimes, and the number of stages range from seven to eight, or even nine, depending on who you are talking to. Nevertheless, they can be grouped into three main areas dealing with Entry into, Replication in, and Exit from host cells. Adsorption & Attachment, Entry, and Uncoating are stages in how the viruses enter cells; Transcription, Expression/Synthesis, and Replication are stages in viral replication; Assembly, Maturation, and Release are stages in how viruses exit cells.

As viruses don’t have any means of moving around, they depend on collisions with other things moving around in our bodies to push them along, causing random movement (also known as Brownian motion). Viruses are adsorbed onto the surface of the cells they are trying to infect, where they attach to the host cell by inserting their protein key into the host protein/sugar-chain lock, and thus gain entry into the cell.

The virus then enters the host cell via one of three methods. First, the translocation of the entire virus particle across the cell membrane; not much is known about this process, unfortunately. The second and third methods both involve endocytosis, which is the process by which our cells engulf particles such as nutrients (and in this case, viruses) from outside the cell. Endocytosis causes the formation of little pockets called vesicles, which go on to merge with larger pockets (containing fairly hostile environments) called lysosomes, which break down the particles that are brought into the cell for use throughout the cell. Triggered by the change in environment in lysosomes, viruses undergo uncoating, where the viral genome is exposed to the cellular environment. In the second method of entry, no further direct virus-host interactions are required, whereas in the third method, often employed by enveloped viruses, the viral lipid envelope and the cell membrane fuse to allow entry of the viral genome into the cell.

Upon entry, the virus then takes over the cell machinery and uses the cells’ enzymes to start transcribing and replicating its genome, and synthesizing the protein components of more viral particles. The precise order and manner of these stages is dependent on the nature of the viral genetic material¹.

Finally, the assembly of the newly-synthesized viral proteins and newly-replicated genetic material forms new viral particles, which is followed by protein cleavage where necessary for the maturation of the new viral progeny, and the release of the new viruses into the world again, usually by budding from the cell, or causing the cell to burst.

By deciphering how the various steps of any particular virus’s replication cycle happens, we are better able to prevent and/or treat a viral infection; for instance, the various drugs available in HIV therapy are based around the steps HIV takes to replicate itself. HIV is a class VI virus, meaning that it requires reverse transcriptase to replicate; one of the first HIV treatments was zidovudine (commonly known as AZT), which was aimed at inhibiting reverse transcriptase. Many other HIV drugs have continued to be developed in the same vein, and research has gone into finding drugs that can inhibit virus entry, maturation and exit as well.

1. Viruses are classed using the Baltimore Classification scheme according to how they replicate.

Class I and Class II have DNA for their genetic material. Class I viruses are able to express their genes upon entry as the genes are made of double-stranded DNA; replication of the genome and expression/synthesis of proteins are then carried on concurrently. Replication is almost exclusively nuclear in Class I viruses, with the exception of poxviruses, which are able to replicate their DNA in the cytoplasm. Class II viruses, with single-stranded DNA, typically have to undergo genome replication in the cell nucleus first before protein expression can be carried out.

Class III, IV and V have RNA for their genetic material. Class III viruses have segmented double-stranded RNA genomes, which are transcribed separately to produce mRNA and synthesize proteins in the cell cytoplasm. Class IV viruses’ (+)sense RNA are able to synthesize viral proteins immediately after infection in the cell cytoplasm, as they use their genomes like mRNAs; Class V viruses, on the other hand, have to make a (+)sense RNA from their (-)sense RNA genome first.

Class VI and VII viruses both use reverse transcription in their replication, although the point in the viral replication cycle at which reverse transcription is carried out is different for both classes. Class VI has diploid single-stranded (+)sense RNA, but this genetic material does not serve as mRNA immediately after infection. Instead, they use viral reverse transcriptase to create a DNA intermediate for replication and protein synthesis after infection. Class VII has double-stranded DNA, much like our own cells, which can be transcribed into mRNA, and the resulting mRNA read to make viral proteins. Reverse transcriptase comes in near the end of the replication cycle, to re-create the virus DNA from its mRNA.

Virology 100x: Let’s start from the very beginning

Tobacco Mosaic Virus

The tobacco mosaic virus; the first virus discovered and studied.

Let me get one thing straight first – viruses are NOT the same thing as bacteria. They’re just not. Okay? Great.

What are viruses, then? Well, I could tell you that they’re nucleoprotein complexes that make use of cells to replicate; I could tell you that they are obligate intracellular parasites – that is to say, they’re obliged to be parasites inside our cells; I could even tell you that they do not undergo cell division. But I won’t.

Oh. I already did.

Never mind then.

The point is, viruses are all that and more. One of the most interesting things in the world, we still can’t decide if viruses are living organisms or not. They carry genetic material, and are able to replicate themselves (but only after they’ve infected a host cell). However, outside of cells, they become metabolically inert – they can’t make their own proteins or copy their own DNA (or in the cases of some cells, their own RNA). Yet they can ‘die’ – if they’re outside of their host cell for long enough, or are otherwise exposed to adverse conditions, they can no longer successfully infect cells. This straddling of the line between life and non-life is very likely to be a clue to how life originated; most viral genes are so unlike the genes of the rest of the planet that they may well have come from a common ancestor before cell-based life existed.

The core of any virus is its genetic material – either DNA or RNA; this may be wrapped up with viral proteins to form a nucleoprotein complex (from combining “nucle”ic acid + “protein”). Viral proteins are also incorporated into the protective coat surrounding the nucleoprotein complex to give rise to the basic viral particle (or the virion). Some viruses, particularly those that infect mammals, may also have an additional lipid envelope over its protective coat.

You may think that all viruses are harmful to us, but this is not true. Because of the proteins embedded in their protein coat (or lipid envelope), viruses are very specific about which species they will infect, much like how only one specific key can open one specific lock. In fact, there are viruses, known as bacteriophages, which are beneficial to us because they are able to infect, and thus cause the death of bacteria that are harmful to us. It has been suspected that some “healing waters” may have been effective due to the presence of viruses that infect pathogenic bacteria. Viruses also infect amoeba, fungi, plants, and of course, other animals. In fact, every species on Earth has a whole host of viruses that is specifically only able to infect that species.

lock and key

In this case, the pink object refers to a viral surface protein, while the orange object refers to a host cell surface protein/glycoprotein. Only when viral protein keys are able to fit into host protein/glycoprotein locks can the infection of a cell start to happen, so viruses are VERY specific about who they are able to infect.

The gold standard for determining a new virus is by cultivating and isolating the virus, and viewing it under an electron microscope. Unfortunately, this species specificity means that it is very difficult to cultivate human viruses in order to study them, because they won’t infect non-human cells. The best way to go about studying human viruses would of course be by infecting humans, but this is ethically problematic, to say the least. One partial solution would be to culture human cells in a dish, and throw some human viruses on top to infect the human cells. This helps with studying how viruses infect cells in the first place, and what effects they have on cells in isolation. However, viruses are very finicky, and it first takes a lot of trial and error, and later, precision and time, to properly grow them. This still doesn’t answer how viruses act in the whole body, though – especially in the presence of our immune system, which has been implicated in a large amount of the cellular damage it causes as it tries to rip the virus from our bodies. Scientists thus have to use genetically near-identical species such as monkeys, or modify mice and other model organisms such that they carry human proteins, and are then able to be infected by our human viruses.

Because viruses are basically protein coats around genetic material, they are therefore also ideal as a mechanism for transferring genes to our own genomes. These engineered viruses are known as viral vectors, and have been modified such that they no longer cause disease. Viral vectors have a wide range of applications, including gene therapy, cancer treatmentvaccine development, and even in basic neuroscience research. Virus-like particles, which are viruses emptied of their genetic material, are also being investigated for use in nanotechnology applications like drug delivery and diagnosis.

Ebola: From monkeys to us

Ebola is caused by a virus that causes viral hemorrhagic fever – that is to say, it results in fever and bleeding disorders, shock, and eventually, death. Other symptoms include edema, migraine, fatigue, vomiting, and diarrhea. Occurring most often in the African continent, ebolavirus outbreaks happen when the virus jumps from its animal reservoir to a human, thus spreading through the human population; however, it is still unknown which animal harbours ebolavirus, although a strong suspect is bats. Ebola

The first ebolavirus (EBOV) was isolated in 1976, in what was then known as Zaire (now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo), when it caused an outbreak in the local population, and was thus named the Zaire ebolavirus, or the Zaire virus. Almost simultaneously, a second species of ebola virus was isolated in Sudan, and thus was called Sudan ebolavirus (SUDV); at first it was thought to be of the same species as EBOV, but later studies proved it to be of a different species. Later, animal laboratory workers in Reston, Virginia, got a scare, when ebolavirus was identified in the sick primates that they had been handling. Luckily for them, this turned out to be an Asian species of ebolavirus that did not cause disease in humans. All in all, five genetically and immunologically distinct species of ebolavirus have been isolated, with each species having several different strains. The most virulent species is EBOV, or Zaire virus, with an average case fatality rate of approximately 83%, and there have been more outbreaks of EBOV than any other ebolavirus.

EBOV and its kin are RNA viruses that are unusually genetically stable, allowing researchers to determine that most outbreaks were caused by different strains of different species of ebolavirus, indicating that these outbreaks were probably from different viral reservoirs. Ebolaviruses are unusual in that they are one of the only species of filamentous animal viruses in the world; filamentous viruses are more usually found in plants, so it has been posited that ebolaviruses may have evolved from plant viruses. Ebolaviruses have an outer lipid envelope, which technically means that the virus can be disrupted via alcohol-based agents; however, very low levels of virions are needed for infection to occur in humans (in the range of 1-10 virions). As transmission from humans to humans is via contact with an infected person’s blood or other body fluids, practicing the barrier nursing (or these days, the standard precautions) method, involving the use of protective equipment such as gloves, masks, gowns and so on, is more effective and useful in preventing transmission.

An electron micrograph of an Ebola virus

An electron micrograph of an Ebola virus

It has been problematic to elucidate the mechanism of ebolavirus infection because of a lack of samples and the difficulty of culturing the virus in the laboratory. However, researchers finally figured out the structure of the EBOV glycoprotein (GP) as derived from a human survivor of an outbreak. EBOV GP is the only virally expressed protein on the surface of the virion; it is important in the replication cycle of EBOV because it is responsible for the attachment of the EBOV virion to host cells, as well as virion-cell membrane fusion. Hence, it is a vital target of vaccines against EBOV. Various types of vaccines, including live attenuated and DNA subunit vaccines, have been developed against EBOV, and thus far they have had some promising success in animal models such as mice, guinea pigs, and macaques.

EBOV and its kin primarily attack endothelial cells, white blood cells and red blood cells, and overwhelms the protein synthesis mechanism in these cells. It is also able to interfere with our adaptive immune system by inhibiting the activation of neutrophils, a type of white blood cell. After entering these cells, these viruses replicate in the cytoplasm, then cause the host cell to burst, spreading their virions even further throughout the body. When enough cells burst, this causes the patient’s organs to break down, and their blood to stop clotting, leading to death, if the virus is not expelled from the body by the immune system in time.

Unfortunately, there is no curative treatment available for ebolaviruses; there is only supportive treatment that helps to mitigate the symptoms. Although there is a promising drug target called Niemann–Pick C1(NPC) present in the cell membrane, which is important in helping EBOV bind to our cells, a drug that can successfully target NPC is still under development. Thus the best way to avoid being infected would be to avoid contact with bats or non-human primates, and to wear protective equipment when taking care of people who have been infected with ebolaviruses. Frighteningly, it seems that EBOV can be transmitted between species through the air via large droplets, although the range of such transmission is limited.

Ebola Virus

The Ebola Virus poster (Science Infographics 2011 Honorable Mention)

CDC | Ebola

J E Lee and E O Saphire Ebolavirus glycoprotein structure and mechanism of entry Future Virol. 2009; 4(6): 621–635. doi: 10.2217/fvl.09.56

Structure of the Ebola Virus Glycoprotein Bound to an Antibody from a Human Survivor

N Sullivan, Z-Y Yang, and G J Nabel Ebola Virus Pathogenesis: Implications for Vaccines and Therapies J. Virol Sept 2003 vol. 77 no. 18 9733-9737 doi: 10.1128/JVI.77.18.9733-9737.2003

J. B. McCormick, S. P. Bauer, L. H. Elliott, P. A. Webb and K. M. Johnson Biologic Differences Between Strains of Ebola Virus from Zaire and Sudan J Infect Dis. 1983 vol 147 no. 2 264-267 doi: 10.1093/infdis/147.2.264
M McGrath Growing concerns over ‘in the air’ transmission of Ebola

Influenza A virus schematic

Note a: An 18th hemagglutinin antigen was found recently in bats


Honors Senior Theses/Projects

Date of Award

Faculty Advisor

Elisa Maroney

Human communication is an immensely complex system that varies widely across geographic regions, age groups, and cultural identities. Tactile signed language systems, which have been widely adopted by many members of the DeafBlind community, have been a relatively new introduction to the linguistic study of signed languages. This research examines the current literature on the unique features of ProTactile American Sign Language (PTASL) in terms of its linguistic structure, turn-taking elements, and methods of back channeling in contrast with the same features of Visual American Sign Language (VASL). These linguistic differences have historically led to the description of PTASL as a dialect of VASL (Collins, 2004). However, since the inception of ProTactile in the early 2000s, progressively more unique structures have been adopted in tactile discourse, which have led to the consideration of PTASL as a language distinct from VASL (Edwards, 2014a). In accordance with these claims, I have examined research conducted on casual use of PTASL among native users in a search for connecting patterns and commonalities. In this paper, I explore the unique characteristics of PTASL in relation to progressive language change with a direct focus on the implications thereof for interpreters working within the DeafBlind community.


The Social Cartographer Series: Diagnosing

How important is it to have a map when traveling to a destination? We use maps and our phone’s GPS to get to different destinations. Using maps is a very reliable means of navigation. We also use mental maps to navigate our lives. So for the next few shows, I want to talk about something we are all familiar with…MAPS.

MK 020

Podcast Details:

Podcast Title:  The Social Cartographer Series:  Diagnosing

Podcast Series: The Maven’s Keys to Financial Contentment

Link to Show Episode

As we discussed a couple of weeks ago in “Decoding Our Money Messages“, there are belief systems that essentially act as the software program in our brains that have us carry out certain behaviors or decisions that produce a set of desired or undesired results.  For example, you may be that money is something that only the rich have because they take it from others, and therefore you find it hard to ask for money from someone or accept it when given because deep down you feel you are doing something wrong because you don’t see yourself as rich.  There are many instances of these mental “maps” we create that guide how we feel and act about certain things.  This week, I’ll talk about how my role as a financial planner involves uncovering these “maps”.
So sort of a misnomer is calling this series “CARTOGRAPHY” when I don’t really make the map, my clients do.  But my job I feel when they come to me is definitely to help them achieve better results than they are currently getting.  So let’s talk about what happens in DIAGNOSIS.
This happens in essentially 2 steps….

So just like with a physical map or location, you start with where you want to go from where you are.  You decide among the quickest route from several alternatives and pick the one most suitable to you.  Unfortunately, financial decisions can often be harder to decide than how to get from point A to B.  Especially without a list of PRIORITIES that are important to you.  My job is to help you articulate the things that are important to you so that we not find the quickest route, but the most effective for you.

As with just about all travel you have to adapt to roadblocks, traffic, construction, etc.  Well, your financial map will be no different.  It is important though that we don’t give up because of a delay or a setback. There are countless reasons as to why we may have a setback (e.g. family/life event, job change, etc.), but here is why the plan is in place in the first place.  A good plan will build enough margin for adjustments.

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Author: The Maven of Financial Literacy


This is similar to our FAB2110 Input Transformer Module… but instead of using a CAN type transformer, we’re using a Carnhill/UK Input Transformer, typically used in Neve preamps.

To mount the Carnhill transformer horizontally on this FAB board, a separate Carnhill PCB Adapter is also required.  Both boards will be provided when you purchase this FAB board.