Last month, Collins Dictionary unveiled its word of the year: lockdown, defined as the imposition of stringent restrictions on travel, social interaction and access to public spaces. As Collins explained: We have chosen lockdown as our word of the year because it encapsulates the shared experience of billions of people who have had to restrict their daily lives in order to contain the virus. Meanwhile, Merriam-Webster went with pandemic, with runners-up quarantine and asymptomatic. And the Oxford English Dictionary, instead of choosing a single word, issued a 38-page report analyzing the use of dozens of words, including coronavirus, doomscrolling, social distancing and systemic racism. Given the phenomenal breadth of language change and development during 2020, the report explains, Oxford Languages concluded that this is a year which cannot be neatly accommodated in one single word.

I disagree. There is a single word that sums up 2020 and does encapsulate, in a deeper sense, the shared experience of billions of people this year. That word is resilience. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness. The ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity. Its that quality that allows us to overcome challenges, obstacles, hardship and adversity, instead of being defeated by them.

The reason resilience is my word of the year is because, unlike quarantine and coronavirus and social distancing, resilience is the only one thats going to be just as relevant when the pandemic is over. Resilience is the quality that was summoned in us by all the challenges of 2020. And its also the quality thats going to carry us forward into 2021.

Resilience is often spoken about including in the Oxford dictionary definition in terms of navigating or simply getting through challenges. But the key part of resilience isnt about bouncing back, its about bouncing forward. Its about using adversity as a catalyst to get better and become stronger.

Of course, weve always needed resilience. But what weve learned in 2020, at both the individual and collective levels, is that at a time of so many losses and such deep uncertainty and anxiety, we simply cant do without it. Right now were all waiting for a vaccine to bring the pandemic to an end. But our challenges wont end when the pandemic does. And resilience is the vaccine we already have its our immune system for the inevitable ups and downs of life. Just as with our bodys immune system, the hostile agents are always there and always coming at us. Resilience allows us to tap into deeper resources in ourselves we didnt even know we had, not just to overcome the obstacles but to be transformed by them.

Certainly its not hard to see the urgent need this year for resilience. According to a recent C.D.C. report, 41% of Americans have struggled with mental health issues, like anxiety, depression or substance abuse related to the pandemic. The American Psychological Associations Stress in America report found that nearly 8 in 10 adults say the pandemic is a major source of stress, and 60% are overwhelmed by the issues currently facing America. And suspected overdoses went up 18% in March, 29% in April and 42% in May.

These are depressing numbers, but an important thing to remember is that though our need for resilience is endless, so is our capacity for it. Its not a finite resource, or a quality we are born with that we cannot develop later in life. But as Norman Garmezy, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota and a pioneer in studying resilience, found there are protective factors that make some people better able to handle adversity than others. Indeed, Emmy Werner, a researcher at the University of California, Davis, followed high-risk children for 32 years and found that the resilient children, even as toddlers, tended to meet the world on their own terms. However, as Maria Konnikova wrote in The New Yorker, some people who werent resilient when they were little somehow learned the skills of resilience. They were able to overcome adversity later in life and went on to flourish as much as those whod been resilient the whole way through.

So the power to build resilience is within us; just as we can learn other skills through practice, we can teach ourselves to be more resilient. We can make ourselves more or less vulnerable by how we think about things, George Bonanno, a clinical psychology professor at Columbia Teachers College, said. Events are not traumatic until we experience them as traumatic.

You can let your loss and pain be the catalyst that divests you of whatever is not needed and takes you to the core of who you are.

Though the science unpacking the psychological and neural mechanisms of resilience may be recent, in many ways, its confirming a concept thats been at the heart of spiritual and philosophical traditions for millennia. In the Bible, were told that God gave us a spirit not of fear, but of power and love. Lao Tzu, the 6th century B.C. founder of Taoism, taught us that if you correct your mind the rest of your life will fall into place, and that knowing others is knowledge, knowing yourself is wisdom, while in the Bhagavad Gita, were reminded that happiness arises from the serenity of ones own mind.

Stoic philosophers understood this well. As they have taught us, while we cant control what happens in the external world, we do have control over our inner world and how we respond. For Epictetus, this meant that men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things. In other words, do we see crises solely in terms of the havoc they have wrought, or also as opportunities to get stronger and grow?

Science has confirmed everyday ways to nurture our resilience through sleep, taking time to unplug and recharge, gratitude, social connection and the belief in something larger than ourselves. In an interview about her work on resilience, Emmy Werner talked about the role spirituality plays in cultivating greater resilience. Its not about any one organized religion, but what faith provides for you as an emotional support, as a way indeed of making sense of your life and your suffering, and also as a way to help you become a chain that you yourself give back something to others who have given to you. Thats a very, very important part of the community of faith that should be more appreciated by people that either want to foster resilience or study it. In other words, we draw strength and support the community, and also from giving back, which studies have shown creates a helpers high that has a powerful impact on our resilience and well-being. There is a lot of evidence that one of the best anti-anxiety medications available is generosity, Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at Wharton, said. The great thing about showing up for other people is that it doesnt have to cost a whole lot or anything at all, and it ends up being beneficial to the giver.

If youll forgive a proud mother moment, my daughter Isabella has written about the connection between pain, resilience and spirituality in her first book, Map to the Unknown, which was released as an Audible Original last week. It chronicles the story of what happened after she was hit by a bike in the streets of New York. What began as a concussion became three years of debilitating pain, but also a transformative emotional and spiritual journey of learning to trust the universe and her inner voice. When something senseless happens that our minds cant explain or justify or control, its a fork in the road, a moment of choice, she writes. One fork is to go into despair and cynicism and raging at the universe (which is the route I first chose), or if you never believed in anything as amorphous as God or the universe, you can double-down on how meaningless life is. Or you can choose the other fork: starting the journey to finding deeper meaning in even the most senseless events in your life. You can let your loss and pain be the catalyst that divests you of whatever is not needed and takes you to the core of who you are.

This has been a tragic year for so many a year of so many losses and so much grief. And yet, what the science and wisdom of resilience show us is that, as horrible as this year has been, the long-term impact on both our individual and our collective lives as a society is not predetermined or fixed. Its no coincidence that the group of people whose lives were shaped by the Great Depression and World War II were branded The Greatest Generation. This has been a year in which weve learned what we need and what we dont need, what adds value to our lives and makes us stronger, and what depletes us. By tapping into those parts of our lives that many of us were ignoring or not tending to before this year, we can nurture our resilience and create a new normal for 2021 one thats not simply going back to the pre-pandemic status quo, but one thats a better normal. Its our resilience that offers us a chance at true transformation, allowing us to go deeper, connect with what we truly value, grow and expand.

Its a common refrain on social media to want to say goodbye to 2020. But our goal should be more than to just get through 2020, which will pass no matter what we do. The new year will inevitably come, but what kind of year will it be? What lessons will we carry with us to shape it into a year of hope and possibility? How will we have been transformed based on what we have experienced? That is up to us. And the more we summon and strengthen our resilience, the more we can bounce forward into a new and better year.

Subscribe here for Ariannas On My Mind Newsletter, where youll find inspiration and actionable advice on how to build healthy habits, resilience and connections in our unprecedented times.

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Arianna Huffington: Why Resilience Is My Word of the Year for 2020 - Thrive Global

Earlier this week, a video of a Shiv Sena leader promising to organise an Azaan recitation competition for Muslim children went viral on the internet. The proclamation drew severe flak from netizens on social media websites and invited criticism from the opposition parties like the BJP.

Several social media users criticised Shiv Sena for its brazen pandering to the minorities. The BJP, on the other hand, accused Shiv Sena of bartering Hindutva for minority votes. One of the BJP leaders slammed Shiv Sena for its decision to organise an azaan recitation competition and alleged that the only thing left for Shiv Sena now is to carry a green flag on its shoulders.

Unnerved by the criticism his announcement garnered, Shiv Sena leader Pandurang Sakpal, who had claimed that Shiv Sena would organise an azaan recitation competition on the lines of Bhagavad Gita recitation and even reward the winners, made an about-turn, stating he has no plans on conducting such an event.

However, it appears that the party is bent on tying itself in knots as it tries to defend the indefensible. Earlier today, an editorial was published in party mouthpiece Saamana, lambasting the critics for Senas contentious announcement of organising an azaan recitation competition.

In its bid to criticise the detractors accusing the party of courting minorities, Shiv Sena leader and Rajya Sabha MP, Sanjay Raut, who is also the editor of Saamana, proffered a bizarre and ambiguous analogy in the editorial that lends itself to multiple interpretation.

Dragging Shiv Sena through the mud on the issue of azaan recitation competition is akin to calling protesting farmers in Delhi Pakistani terrorists, the editorial published in Saamana said. This ambivalent parallel drawn by Sanjay Raut in the Shiv Sena mouthpiece can mean a host of things. Here are the four things that Raut could have meant with this absurd comparison.

The most basic interpretation of the aforementioned analogy in Saamana could mean that Shiv Sena agrees that the protests carried out in Delhi are done by Pakistani terrorists. This assertion may not be far-fetched as the protests convulsing the national capital region and the Punjab-Haryana border has seen participation from pro-Khalistani elements.

At the very least, it would seem like political parties, Khalistani elements etc have come together to mislead farmers, spread misinformation, and ensure that the country burns.

Deep Sidhu, a Punjabi actor, became the face of the protests after his video threatening a security official manning a barricade went viral on the internet. Subsequently, Sidhu was offered a platform by Barkha Dutt and Shekhar Gupta to come clean on the allegations of him being a Khalistani supporter. However, Sidhu dug his heels in, hailing Khalistani terrorist Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale as a revolutionary fighter who fought for a strong federal structure and refusing to condemn him as a terrorist.

It is an established fact that Khalistanis, in their heydays during the 1980s, were morally and financially supported by Pakistan. The ulterior motive of Pakistanis then was to dismember India as a retributory action for the secession of Bangladesh back in 1971 by aiding the Khalistanis. In this context, Pakistan had waged a proxy war on India with the help of Khalistanis. The Khalistan supporters and sympathisers can therefore be effectively compared to Pakistani terrorists, who are trying to revive militancy and stoke unrest in India.

If Sanjay Raut did not mean that the protesters thronging the national capital are terrorists, then the corollary that naturally follows it would imply that for Shiv Sena and Sanjay Raut, Khalistanis are not terrorists, since the protests were decidedly hijacked by Khalistani proponents.

The protests and blockades carried out by the so-called protesters saw posters of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale being raised at various places. On other instances, protesters could not hide their Khalistani impulses. The demonstrators gloated on former PM Indira Gandhis assassination and threatened PM Modi with a similar fate. Pro-Khalistan slogans were also raised by the protesters who were apparently demonstrating against the three new agriculture laws.

Since Shiv Sena has a history of trading their ideology for petty political gains, it remains to be seen what is Sanjay Rauts stand on Khalistanis who had taken over the farmers protests. Would Shiv Sena condemn the protests or will it, like its alliance partnersNCP and Congresscontinue to turn a blind to the Khalistani presence in the ongoing protests?

Another interpretation that the ambivalent analogy lends itself to is that Shiv Sena is being humanitarian in respecting azaan and minority sentiments. However, admitting to this would effectively mean that Shiv Sainiks in the past were cruel ruffians who allegedly targeted and harassed the states Muslim populace.

Ironically, Sanjay Raut which claims Sena of being a secular party, had in the past asked for disenfranchisement of Muslims. In an editorial published in Saamana in 2015, Raut had called for barring of Muslims from voting, stating that the masks of the secularists will come off if Muslims are disenfranchised. For a long time now, Shiv Sena had preened itself on being a party whose members played an instrumental role in levelling the controversial Babri structure in Ayodhya. Shiv Sena leaders have also been convicted of orchestrating the riots in 1992 in which several Muslims were killed.

The partys past antecedents do not jibe with this interpretation of Shiv Sena being an inclusive and pluralistic party in organising the azaan recitation competition. Nonetheless, if Shiv Sena still persists with this outlook, it would mean denouncing its past and therefore implicitly admitting that it was a party of radical fundamentalists earlier.

The last interpretation that emerges from Rauts absurd comparison is that whoever does not agree with Shiv Sena is a terrorist and must be treated as one. This appears to be the most likely case when Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut said that criticising Shiv Sena for keeping Azaan recitation competition is tantamount to calling protesters in Delhi terrorists.

This stance was evident in its full glory when the Uddhav Thackeray government relentlessly pursued Republic TV, just because it asked uncomfortable questions of the Uddhav Thackeray government.

Ever since Arnab Goswami criticised the state government on its handling of Palghar lynching of Hindu sadhus, the Maharashtra government, of which Shiv Sena is a part, carried out a relentless witch hunt against the journalist and his channel Republic TV. Multiple FIRs were lodged against him. Republic TV employees were routinely harassed. A Republic TV crew was unlawfully jailed when they were pursuing an investigative story in Navi Mumbai.

Mumbai Police commissioner called out a press conference to allege that Republic TV had indulged in manipulating TRPS. Later, it was found that the complaint had mentioned India Today and not Republic TV. The culmination of this witch hunt resulted in the arrest of Arnab Goswami, who was arrested by a phalanx of armed police officials and lodged in the Taloja jail. Mr Goswami had claimed that he was treated like a terrorist and not allowed to meet his lawyers.

Similarly, actor Kangana Ranaut was also attacked by Shiv Sena after she likened Mumbai to Pakistan occupied Kashmir after Azaadi graffiti had defiled the streets of the city. In response to her remarks, BMC demolished her office. The Bombay High Court recently slammed that BMC, stating that the demolition was carried out with malafide intent and directed the corporation to compensate the actor for her loss.

We really have no idea what Sanjay Raut really meant, but that is ok. We are used to it. Arent you yet?

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Raut gives bizarre analogy trying to defend party after Azan row: Here are 4 things that he could have meant - OpIndia

More News 08 Dec 2020 | 10:54 PM

Ranchi, Dec 8 (UNI) The Coronavirus tally in the state on Tuesday reached to 1,10,639 as 182 cases were detected across 20 districts of Jharkhand.

Shillong, Dec 8 (UNI) Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad Sangma is scheduled to meet Governor Satya Pal Malik on Wednesday to discuss the Inner Line Permit and Meghalaya Resident Safety and Security (Amendment) Bill, 2020 (MRSSA).

Agartala, Dec 8 (UNI) A day after his own party men raised slogans demanding his removal in front of BJP national secretary and central observer for Tripura Vinod Kumar Sonkar, Chief Minister of Tripura Biplab Kumar Deb on Tuesday invited people of the state to assemble next Sunday at Stable Ground here to decide whether he should continue in the office.

Ranchi, Dec 8 (UNI) The Bharat bandh, called on Tuesday by the farmers unions, hit the normal life in many districts across the state.

Patna, Dec 08 (UNI) The nationwide shutdown call of the farmers on Tuesday against the Centre's new farm laws evoked mixed response in Bihar where road and train services, which were disrupted by the protestors, gradually resumed in the afternoon.

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Dhankhar remembers freedom fighter Khudiram Bose on his birth anniversary - United News of India

Voices of Dissent: An Essay. Romila Thapar. Seagull Books. 2020. Pages 164. Rs 374.

Writer Romila Thapar would have made a great environmental activist. She believes in recycling.

Unfortunately, she is a historian and she recycles the same old propaganda lines in style and, more importantly, with authority, which stems more from her ideological network than genuine scholarship.

In her latest book, Voices of Dissent: An Essay, she promises to take her readers on a journey into the history of dissent in India from Vedic times to Mahatma Gandhis satyagraha and "places in context the recent peaceful protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens.

The book has a narrative that has been told right from the day when the first Protestant missionary started exhibiting its despise for Hindu Dharma "the Brahminical priestcraft" oppressing the people.

Since then, this evangelist theme has resurfaced many times and in different jargons such as Indological, Marxist, Post-Modern and so on. Here, Thapar provides the same old opiate of the colonised academics, though packed in a new wrapper.

In the first section of the long essay, the villains of the narrative are outlined. Her word jugglery could be admired but for the boring repetition of the same old yarn she weaves.

For instance, she acknowledges that it is incorrect to speak of an Aryan race that is the escape window but discusses about the Other of the Arya which she identifies as those who could not speak the Vedic language.

So, throughout the first section of the essay, she presents the typical Aryan-Dasyu/Dasa binary with Vedic religion practising uniconic ritualism and the Dasas/Dasyus, phallic worship as they could not speak the Vedic language properly etc.

She even distorts the elevating episodes of Kavashaka and Satyakama. A reading of Kavashaka and Satyakama stories show that while the Vedic society was as hierarchical as any contemporary society with social exclusions, the Vedic values were against both social stratification and exclusion.

If one is to find a continuity for satyagraha and dissent then one can find that right in the soulful protests of Kavashaka, which in turn resulted in the Brahmins asking for his forgiveness.

In Satyakama being admitted to the school of sacred learning there is social emancipation. Even Thapar is forced to acknowledge that, when she says, "here the Varna identity gave way to an ethical qualification.

But then she asks her readers not to accept this as positive aspect of the Vedic culture but to see a hint of a subtle and new socio-religious interface of a more complex kind. Worse, she tells her readers how to read the Vedic texts with a prejudiced framework: "The dasas is the culture of the Other.

Then come the Shramanas whom she considers as possessing social good at their heart, but persecuted by adherents of Brahminism. Though today, this theory itself has been questioned heavily, she happily repeats the same lines.

Later, when it comes to the Islamist times the Other becomes more nuanced. Those rebelling against the sultanate and Mughal empire, including the collaboration between the forest-dwelling and urban-rural warrior communities, acquire a new label and even a motive. The covet reference is obviously to the Bhil-Rajput cooperation and resistance to Mughal onslaught.

So she speaks of "the few cases where the adivasi clans had assisted adventurers to acquire political power" and then of "some concessions of status" by the rulers like applying tilak by the "adivasi chief" at the time of coronation of Rajput kings.

But, here, one should note the language. The vanvasi-Rajput cooperation amounts to assisting adventurers, and liberation from the empire is portrayed as "acquiring political power". More importantly, freedom fighters, true rebels like Rana Pratap Singh, become "adventurers". Rituals that came into existence in recognition of the sacrifices of vanvasi communities are relegated to "concessions".

While Thapar wants to present an alluring narrative that flows seamlessly from Shramanas to satyagraha, she meets a problem in Gandhis satyagraha being rooted in his reading of Bhagavad Gita. She tries her best to somehow disconnect Gandhi from traditional Gita but fails pathetically.

However, for the faithful and the establishment, this may appear like an academic miracle whereas any true Gandhian scholar would see only a clumsy sleight of hand.

The whole exercise by Thapar is to fabricate a historical continuity to the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) agitations. The true implications of the continuity is the slow but sure destruction of Hindu communities in India right from the day of the first Islamist marauders slaughter of Hindus because they were Hindus to the 1971 East Pakistan genocide, where the countrys army was given written orders to account for the number of Hindus they killed.

The real democratic dissent has its roots in Vedic literature where a Kavashaka, taunted for being born to a dasi woman, would summon the river Saraswati. In a remarkable continuity of this assertion of spiritual oneness of all traditions and divine equality, Ravidas would summon river Ganga. Later, Sreedara Iyyavaal in southern Tamil Nadu, when ostracised by the Brahmin community for giving the ritual food to a socially excluded person, would make Ganga flow out of his well.

In all these traditional narratives beyond or bereft of the supernatural elements, there is dissent against social stagnation and a push towards social emancipation. That force for that push comes from the values which continue as invisible strands right from the Vedas.

Mahatma Gandhi himself defined swarajya as a Vedic concept no less and considered his satyagraha as being derived from his Vaishnavism. And coming to civil disobedience, the most visible democratic form of dissent in modern times, the most comprehensive and detailed study of its traditional roots in Indian context has been done decades before Romila Thapars present book by Dharampal a really dissenting historian dissenting to the established power structures of academia and media.

The book Civil Disobedience in Indian Tradition was first published in 1971 by Varanasi-based Sarva Seva Sangh Prakashan, now it forms the second volume of the collected works of Dharampal.

The foreword was written by Jayaprakash Narayan, another dissent in the truest and most honest sense of the term. The book explores the protest movements by Indian people in the beginning of the nineteenth century decades before the 1857 uprising.

In both the books, (Dharampal (1971) and Thapar (2020) one can find superficially strikingly similar passages but there are crucial, basic differences.

Thapar follows the Marxist model (which is also subtly Eurocentric) where the dissent is traced to a particular group or ideology and set against the other. In this case, it is Brahminical versus the non-Brahminical.

The pre-modern society is depicted as having marginalised or subjugated dissent but it was always present. Then whatever ideological movement with which Thapar aligns herself with in this case anti-CAA movement, is shown to be a continued but conscious evolved form of that historical dissent.

Dharampal bases his book on empirical data. He does not have binaries. Then from the data, he points out the alternative ways of looking at history different from the establishment history. Unaffected by colonisation of the brain, he points out how the colonial raj with its inherent infallibility of the state created a disruption in the traditional way in which people and the rulers were related.

This can be illustrated by two quotes from each of the books. The first is from Thapar:

Read the original here:

Romila Thapars Latest Is Recycled Work Of An Evangelist Theme Brahminical Oppression - Swarajya

A heritage corridor will soon be developed in Haryana chief minister Manohar Lal Khattars constituency Karnal under the Karnal Smart City Limited (KSCL).

Officials monitoring the project said the corridor will be developed on the two kilometre stretch from main entrance of Karnal at Srimad Bhagavad Gita Gate to Karna Gate.

The corridor will include heritage buildings including 200-year-old Christian Cemetery, the old court building, record room, Kos Minar and the ancient Victoria Memorial Hall.

Deputy commissioner Nishant Kumar Kumar Yadav, who is also the chief executive officer (CEO) of Karnal Smart City Limited said, As of now, we have identified four old buildings under this project and later the Karnal Club and old building of civil hospital will also be included.

He said the project will attract tourists to showcase the historic importance of these buildings built in the 19th century. The buildings will have CCTV cameras and other facilities including artifacts.

In this regard, the authority has prepared a proposal to get the NOC from the archaeological department. The tender process will be started after getting approval from the boards of directors and NOC from the Archaeological Survey of India. The work will be completed by March-end, Yadav said.

The Christian Cemetery was a cantonment of British forces about 200 years ago and the mortal remains of soldiers were buried at this site. Likewise, the 114-year-old Victoria Memorial Hall is the perfect example of Indian, Islamic and European architecture.

Read the rest here:

Heritage corridor to be developed in Karnal - Hindustan Times

By Shade Vaughn3 minute Read

For some, digital transformation may seem like a traditional business project that has a distinct beginning and end. However, the savviest organizations know that it has no defined starting point, and there is no true finish line. Digital transformation will continue to evolve and scale with the business, and it will require building consensus across numerous functional silos.

It also isnt something that naturally happenscompanies need to make the conscious decision to proactively define and manage their own digital transformation objectives, especially as spending on digital transformation increases each year. In fact, according to IDC, global spending on digital transformation technologies and services will grow 10.4 percent in 2020 to $1.3 trillion.

The investment is paying off. Those that had already begun executing against a digital transformation strategy were able to navigate the dramatic changes that resulted from the current pandemic.

While it might feel natural to look to the IT department to shepherd a digital transformation effort, marketers have specific skill sets that make them well-equipped to take on a leadership role. Marketers can help their companies use transformative technology to strengthen engagement between brands and customers, improve business performance and operations, and increase employee engagement.

According to Gartner consulting, 87% of senior business leaders say digitalization is a company priority, however only 40% of organizations have brought digital initiatives to scale. To address this gap, marketers can tap into one of their many areas of expertise and showcase their value to the project:

Marketers can use their communications skills to help energize and educate employees about the benefits of undergoing a digital transformation effort. More than six out of 10 respondents consider culture as the number one hurdle to digital transformation, according to Capgeminis Digital Transformation Review 12th Edition, and marketers can help push the needle with effective communication strategies. When the pandemic disrupted the restaurant industry, Friendlys Restaurants rapidly transformed their technology strategy to include contactless options. Friendlys CIO recognized the strength of its culture as a key factor in the companys successthey embraced the new processes and rose to the occasion.

Marketers have the insight and perspective to shape digital transformation efforts to maximize the value to the customer. After all, they are well-versed in the customer journey and how to establish strong connections across all touchpoints. To build a relevant roadmap, organizations need to take a long view of what they want a digital transformation strategy to accomplishacross people, performance, operations, and customers.

By nature of the role, marketers have acquired a vast amount of knowledge about their organizationits strengths, its weaknesses, and how it operates day-to-day. They are able to have a birds-eye view of the business and build an ecosystem of trusted partners who are willing to put skin in the game and ensure value. This type of foresight will go a long way when executing against a digital transformation strategy as it requires strong talent in development and technology-related areas.

Advances in marketing technology have changed drastically over the past 10 yearsand so has the role of the marketer. The days of simply generating impressions and clicks are mostly gone; now, more effective dollars are being spent on buyer intent and propensity-to-buy tools, data and analytics, search marketing, digital campaigns, and social selling. Many marketers have embraced this digital-forward world and welcomed the many opportunities it presents to connect with customers in new and exciting ways. They are usually on the forefront of innovation and strive to inspire others in their quest for marketing excellence and fueling business growth.

While marketing can confidently take charge, it still needs to be in lockstep with the IT department. After all, there is no digital transformation without a technology evolution, and that requires a heavy lift from IT. The two teams should work together to solve business problems, implement systems that support the larger goal, and find new ways to create value for customers.

For example, IT and marketing teamed up to create an improved fan experience for the San Francisco 49ers. Innovative technology was implemented to ensure football fans stay connected throughout the season, and the new site (IGYB) incorporates different aspects of digital and social media marketing to provide the latest updates and resources.

Marketers are creative and nimble, constantly on the lookout for new ways to innovate. By putting them in prominent leadership positions within a digital transformation overhaul, there will be an immediate shift in communication effort, diligence, and culture.

Shade Vaughn is Chief Marketing Officer for Capgemini North America.

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4 reasons why marketing should drive your company's digital evolution - Fast Company

Read Part One

People often talk about consciousness as a mystery. But there isnt anything mysterious about consciousness itself; nothing is better known to us than our own experiences.

Philosopher Philip Goff, writing in his essay, Bertrand Russell and the Problem of Consciousness

I mentioned, yesterday, that a group of scientists and philosophers have been pushing a radical idea lately.

Pan-psychism Pan meaning, Everywhere, and Psych meaning, Consciousness. Panpsychism, then, is the belief that consciousness is everywhere.

Given the failure of modern science to define and explain the one thing that is common to every human being consciousness the panpsychists have proposed a general concept that consciousness is just as much an essential building block of reality as are space, time, matter and energy. The theory postulates that consciousness is present in everything, from the largest galaxies to the smallest subatomic particles.

That everything everything has some level of awareness of its surroundings and perhaps even some level of intentionality.

This is not a new idea. Cultures all around the world, down through history, have apparently held similar beliefs that everything in nature is blessed with consciousness, although some have taught that consciousness is found only in living beings (people, animals, plants).

Ancient Hindu scriptures, dating back to perhaps 1500 BC, are interpreted differently by different teachers, (and always have been), but one popular teaching holds that the universe, as we know it and experience it, is a single, unified consciousness and that all conscious beings are, in essence, sharing one and the same consciousness. Such a world view can easily accommodate the idea that a nocturnal dream might allow access to special areas of the universal consciousness inaccessible to us when were awake. That special access might allow us to look into the future, or develop unique insights into the situations were facing during the daytime.

This Hindu understanding of the world as a unified consciousness, poses a strong challenge to the materialist view that science has been promoting, ever more aggressively, for the past 400 years, especially in Europe and North America. In general, the materialist view has long maintained that consciousness, far from being universal, exists only in human beings if it even exists at all? (See Part One of this essay, for a brief overview of the idea, as promoted by philosopher and scientist Daniel Dennett, that consciousness is merely an illusion created by the mechanical firing of synapses in the brain.)

The materialist often views the world as lifeless matter that, in certain accidental combinations caused by an non-conscious process called evolution, gives the appearance of being something more than lifeless matter. To the materialist, a nocturnal dream something that presents no physical evidence of its occurrence other than some electrical activity in a recessed corner of the brain and some random eye movement and perhaps some twitching in the hands and feet can have little significance.

Something that has little physical significance gets ignored, if you believe the world is exclusively physical.

This materialist view would appear, on its face, to deny not only Hindu beliefs in a universal consciousness, but also Judeo-Christian beliefs in humankind as created in Gods image and as having inherited from the Creator a range of intellectual and moral characteristics.

The panpsychists are now challenging the materialist world view. How far they will get, no one knows. But I want to touch for a moment on another idea weve briefly considered in this essay.

Confirmation bias.

Ill repeat a quote I shared earlier, attributed to billionaire Warren Buffett: What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.

If Warren Buffett is correct, confirmation bias the tendency of people to favor information that confirms their existing beliefs, and to undervalue evidence that could disprove those beliefs is not only a common human trait, but its what we do best.

I enjoy hearing alternative view on current events from our Daily Post readers and contributors. Different views on the Biden-Trump election, for example. Different views on the COVID pandemic. Different view on local politics. Sometimes, I end up in lengthy email exchanges with these friends, and I am often amazed at how often highly intelligent people will look at only one side of an issue, and totally discount and ignore the evidence on the other side of the coin. (I have no doubt that Im suffering from the same malady, at least on occasion, and rarely notice it.)

And it seems that, the less certain a person is about the certain question, the more desperately they cling to their biased opinions.

Right now, many scientists are clinging to a materialist view of the universe, and feel justified in their biases because science has made great progress in understanding certain physical processes.

But what happens when a process is not physical? What then?

Bill Hudson

Bill Hudson founded the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 based on the belief that community leaders often tell only one side of the story while the public deserves to hear all sides.

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ESSAY: Dreams and Perception, Part Seven - Pagosa Daily Post

Most people know Wish as a site that sells throwaway doodads from China, but in anticipation of its impending IPO, the 10-year-old San Francisco-based company has begun portraying itself as a kind of Amazon for the rest of us.

Judging by what weve read and heard from sources in recent months, Wish wants to paint itself as a patriotic alternative to the trillion-dollar juggernaut and is positioning itself as the better option for the estimated 60% of families in the U.S. without enough liquid savings to get through three months of expenses. Such cost-conscious customers cant afford Amazon Prime and are at least in Wishs telling willing to wait an extra week or three for a product if it means paying considerably less for it.

Well know soon enough if public market investors buy the pitch. Wish registered plans this morning to sell 46 million shares at between $22 an $24 per share in an IPO thats expected to take place next week. The current range would value Wish at up to $14 billion, up from the $11.2 billion valuation it was last assigned by its private investors.

Wish has a lot of reasons to feel optimistic about its story heading into the offering. For one thing, people are clearly still discovering its business. According to Sensor Tower, Wishs mobile shopping app was downloaded 9 million times last month, compared with the 6 million downloads that Amazons shopping app saw and the 2 million downloads seen by Walmart. In 2019, across all types of apps, Wish was the 16th most downloaded app.

Theres a lot to discover once potential customers do check out Wish. According to the companys prospectus, its more than 100 million monthly active users across more than 100 countries are now shopping from 500,000 merchants that are selling approximately 150 million items on the platform.

While many of these are the nonessential tchotchkes that Wish has long been identified with, from tattoo kits to pet nail trimmers, a growing percentage of the mix also includes essential goods like paper towels and disinfectants the kinds of items that keep customers coming back in reliable fashion.

Its a bit of an evolution for the company, whose early focus was almost exclusively on cheap items that didnt weigh much. From the start, Wish has worked with unbranded merchants, mostly in China, who dont have marketing costs built into their products and like the platform because it enables them to reach new customers for free without cannibalizing their existing market.

Until recently, Wish which takes 15% of each transaction had also relied heavily on a partnership with the USPS and China called ePacket that enabled it to send items overseas to the U.S. for $1 to $2 as long as the items werent unusually large or heavy. That changed on July 1, with a new USPS pricing structure that now requires companies like Wish to pay more to ship their goods or else move to more costly commercial networks.

It could have been a deadly blow, but Wish had back-up plans. One of these has involved packing together multiple orders in China based on customers locations, then sending them in bulk to the U.S. to a designated location where they can be picked up.

Relatedly, dating back to early 2019, Wish began partnering with what are now tens of thousands of small businesses in the U.S. and Europe that stock its products, trading their storage space for access to Wishs customers along with a small financial bonus for every in-store pickup. (Wish will pay store owners even more if they can deliver orders directly to customers homes.) According to Forbes, these partnerships provided Wish with an inexpensive distribution network practically overnight.

It happens to fit neatly into a larger anti-Amazon narrative wherein the Goliath (Amazon), unable to disrupt convenience stores, is now trying to supplant them with its own branded convenience shops, while Wish may be helping them prosper. Wish also boasts a very asset-lite model compared with Amazon. Wish doesnt hold inventory; it also doesnt have to buy or maintain a fleet of cargo planes or trucks or warehouses.

None of these developments completely counter the challenges that unprofitable Wish is still facing, beginning with its scale, which remains tiny compared with the towering giants it faces.

While the company is showing moderate revenue growth, its filings also show steady losses owing in part to its marketing spend. (In 2019, Wish reported revenue of $1.9 billion, up 10% year over year, but it saw a net loss of $136 million.)

The company has been making inroads into new geographies around the world, but it is still heavily dependent on China-based merchants. To address this, it has reportedly begun partnering increasingly with more U.S. and Europe-based retailers, including those with overstocked or returned items to offload, along with those looking to sell refurbished electronics. Wed love to diversify, co-founder and CEO Peter Szulczewski told Forbes this summer.

Wish has always been plagued by quality control issues, too, which it has yet to resolve. In fact, there are YouTube channels some very funny focused entirely around what Wish products look like in reality versus how they are presented to shoppers online (see below).

Partly, its a cultural issue. For example, at a 2016 event hosted by this editor, co-founder and CEO Peter Szulczewski talked about having to educate Chinese merchants about American customers expectations. Its true that consumer expectations in China are very different, Szulczewski explained at the time. Like, if you order a red sweater and you get a blue one, [shoppers are] like, Eh, next time. So we have a lot of merchants that have only sold to Chinese consumers and we have to educate them that its not okay to ship a blue sweater because you dont have any red sweaters in stock.

Wish has been working to close the gap, as well as to tackle outright fraud on the platform. Just one of many moves has involved hiring a former community manager at Facebook as its own director of community engagement, a task that reportedly involves organizing Wish users to weed out bad apples. But Wish has surely lost customers burned by shopping experiences along the way.

In the meantime, plenty of public market investors will be watching and waiting to see what happens next week. So will the venture firms that have provided the company with $2.1 billion in funding over the years, including Formation 8, Third Point Ventures, GGV Capital, Raptor Group, Legend Capital, IDG Capital, DST Global, 8VC, 137 Ventures and Vika Ventures.

For her part, Anna Palmer of Boston-based Flybridge Capital Partners who does not have a stake in Wish but who is focused very much on so-called commerce 3.0 thinks that Wish serves a different use case and a different customer need than the Amazon shopper.

If you look at the strong retail performance of the off-price and discount market think of retailers like Dollar General and Dollar Tree it bodes well for the continued growth of Wish, especially since the discount market has been a tough one to bring online because of the additional logistics costs involved.

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Wish wants to be the Amazon for the rest of us; will retail investors buy it? - TechCrunch

What has pandemic life been like for you? Im curious to know how the experience varies for different people & began researching about that this past weekend.

And somewhere down that internet rabbit hole I began looking into past pandemics and what pandemic life was like for the humans back then.

Back in 1918 during the Spanish Flu, not only were there no effective vaccines or antivirals, drugs that could treat the flu like today but the ability to converse with friends and family all over the world was far far off from possible.

In fact with the lack of communication tools, people were reliant on local community updates through physical printing methods to be kept in the loop about pandemic progress. And if you got the virus there was no way to let anyone know, let alone ask for help.

In fact if you were smart at the time, you would use something like a white scarf, and wrap it around your door handle to let people know that you werent feeling well & they shouldnt enter your room.

But with no way to connect & communicate that made the 24 months more dreadful from isolation and fear of the unknown.

Whereas today, during the coronavirus, the advancement of technology has made the transition & change more comfortable for many people.

With an estimate of over 5 billion people having access to a cell phone/computer which gives us the ability

Were far better off in terms of connection than those during the Spanish Flu.

Our devices have become an external limb we carry them everywhere, are holding them throughout the day, and if we leave the house with nothing else, our phone will at the least be in our pocket.

If we think about this progression it started with computer interfaces. A huge innovation for computers were the mouse and keyboard additions which made using them more intuitive.

We then got rid of the keyboards & began controlling these devices like we do the rest of the objects around us with our hands.

Simple touches that replaced the need for keyboards and mouses, leading us to the touchscreen phase. Its so easy and natural that a child can control these devices with no instructions using just their fingers.

But what now? ..

It seems like a very obvious progression for these hardware devices to now disappear and for us to have the information that can be accessed using them available to us in thin air.

Currently virtual, mixed, augmented reality have been leveraged to try to make this a reality with initiatives like Project Aria by Facebook, however using XR in isolation, doesnt seem like a promising bet for making this ubiquitous.

Lets compare this access to all information from a device in thin air instead to smartphones, becoming ubiquitous.

According to the founder of Neurable there were 3 main stages to the iPhone becoming ubiquitous.

Category 1: Niche/Enterprise specialized category

The Palm Pilot phone falls under this, which was specifically for business people to organize their data.

Category 2: Consumer Specialized Category

The Palm Live Drive falls under this, which was a phone with WiFi and touchscreen & all these novel features that the industry hasnt seen yet.

Category 3: Ubiquitous

The iPhone falls under the ubiquitous category. The interesting thing is that the Palm Live Drive which came out years earlier than the iPhone had more features.

Secret: The difference between a consumer specialized product and a ubiquitous product is the interaction being undeniably natural aka the iPhone.

Current AR/VR methods are an unnatural alternative to the iPhone because they lack

*Enter: Brain computer interface magic*

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are systems that allow communication between the brain and various machines and seemingly the next stage in this interface evolution.

An event-related potential (ERP) is the measured brain response that is the direct result of a specific sensory, cognitive, or motor event. It has been used to allow differently-abled individuals to type using their thoughts, hands-free.

The way that this works is that

6. If the patient blinked, the key would move to the right.

7. If the patient didnt blink for three seconds then that key would be clicked on and typed.

8. There were also shortcut keys which let you go back to a specific row, or shuffle between them without having to click through each box individually.

As this progresses & is made to work faster and more intuitively it could allow all of us to type using just our thoughts.

Leveraging such ERP for a variety of conscious want detection & then using advancing ML tech to produce real-time, responsive actions in XR environment have been created like thinking of wanting an orange on a table from the other side of the room and then the orange travelling to you.

This intersection of XR and BCIs could allow us to create an alternative to smartphones which becomes ubiquitous

Three main steps:

The first step is measuring brain signals which can be done with three different approaches.

So, imagine you are living in a different city and want to join your family for their dinner table conversation.

This invasive approach would be like asking all you family members to wear lavalier microphones on their collars while on call with you and you listen to the conversation using air pods so you are able to get clear and crisp information (/audio) of what they are saying.

2. Semi-invasive method: electrodes are placed on the exposed surface of the brain and electrocorticography (or ECoG) data is collected by recording electrical activity from the cerebral cortex of the brain.

This would be like having a smartphone on the table to listen to your familys conversation via WhatsApp audio, you can hear what they are saying but it could be crisper.

3. Non-invasive method: sensors are placed on the scalp to measure the electrical potentials produced by the brain also known as electroencephalogram (or EEG) data.

This is like having your phone in the kitchen and listening to the call while you clean up the living room its harder to make sense of what they are saying, but you could listen carefully to understand it better.

Drawing the parallel between the types of brain signal collection methods & the listening to a call methods shows the accuracy & detail of data that can be collected by each.

The measured brain signals are then run through a software which identifies the different brain signals based on the activity performed.

For example if a theta wave is detected which is when the brainwave has a frequency between 4 to 7 hertz that indicates the individual is sleeping.

Then machine learning is used to activate an output where a machine takes a certain action. The external device is controlled/responds according to how it was programmed to based on the brain signal detected.

Currently the most practical applications of brain computer interfaces have been in the medical field

According to the World Bank, 1 billion, or 15% of the worlds population are differently-abled and must rely on others to help them perform basic tasks like eating, walking, drinking water & bathing.

They lack the privilege of controlling their day to day actions and interacting with other people & technology the way fully-abled individuals can.

The previous example of typing using your thoughts is currently being used by LIS or Locked In Syndrome patients who cannot move any muscles in their body except for blinking their eyes.

Using BCIs researchers from Case Western Reserve University & Harvard Medical School have also been able to restore functional reach-to-grasp ability for a patient who had a severe spinal cord injury and was paralyzed from the shoulders down.

There was another study that allowed paralyzed monkeys to walk.

A company thats currently working on creating a world without limitations where you can be someone whos different abled or fully-abled but can interact or control anything using just your mind is Neurable.

The algorithm systems goal is to understand user intent. So far theyve created a virtual reality device and cap which records electrical signals from brain activity and interprets what you actually want to do from them.

Theyve created a software that allows you to control devices using just your mind in both the real world and the digital world essentially telekinetics.

The way that it works is that when new information is presented to you, your frontal lobe which is in charge of executive function communicates with your parietal lobe which helps with visual spatial processing.

They leverage those two areas of the brain to understand user intent and move external objects accordingly which takes us to the world of brain-machine interfaces where interfaces meet robotics and smart objects

As BCIs progress exponentially & they are being used for purposes other than helping those differently abled, neurological data from more and more people will become available, & we will be confronted with critical ethical questions.

This future isnt as far away as it seems with Ray Kurzweil, used to the Head of Engineering at Google, who thinks that by 2030s were all likely to have brain chips.

For example, the US Military is in clinical trials for a mood altering brain implant which would allow them to control how you feel. The intent is to help soldiers with depression or PTSD feel better. But if you think about it: thats still a third party controlling how you feel

Researchers have also been able to detect if you are laughing, smiling, running or jumping in a dream. And so if we could program these dreams which feel like real experiences to create virtual realities of ones mind that you or other people could step into, then ones desires, secrets, and thoughts could be exposed and taken advantage of.

Today itself we are worried about the data thats being collected on us based on external actions. Skin outward which pictures we like, who we meet, what we eat etc.

But with brain chips predicted to become a norm, third party organizations could have access to whats going on inside us technically knowing us better than we know ourselves.

That relationship is far more dangerous, & if manipulated by economically or politically incentivized organizations with malicious intent dangerous outcome.

A solution proposed by Bryan Johnson, the founder of Kernel is that if we say that human data privacy is a right and

As BCIs continue to rapidly develop future realities brain to brain interfaces could transform our day to day interactions.

There was a study conducted where there was

This is known as brain-to-brain communication & would allow us humans to communicate with each other not by speaking, not by texting, but instead by simply thinking

This could allow us to share our knowledge, experiences, and opinions with each other non-verbally leading us to explore what it means to download knowledge and skill sets.

We spend over 20 years about 1/5th of the human lifetime in educational institutions acquiring knowledge. We learn what already exists, is already available, what others already know.

There was a Harvard study that showed that more students are likely to know where on the internet to find out information on something than the information itself.

What if we could save years by downloading the knowledge and skills we need at the moment & spend more of our time working on questioning it, and applying it opposed to just acquiring it.

There are researchers looking into how our consciousness are all somehow connected shared consciousness. Where we could potentially experience someone elses life by experiencing other peoples experiences in a dreamlike state.

This could potentially allow us to eliminate isolation and allow for true empathy at the same time redefining what it means to be human.

Before we make telepathy, telekinetics, and getting rid of smartphones a reality. I have a quick question for you:

What does it actually mean to be human

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Smartphones But in Thin Air? | Future of Interface Evolution - Medium

Published December 8, 2020 by Jodie Hare Writer

Many have highlighted the potential benefits of reading translated literature, and with novels like Olga Tokarczuks Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the...

Many have highlighted the potential benefits of reading translated literature, and with novels like Olga Tokarczuks Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, it seems that translated works are performing better than ever. Despite this, however, reports show that as of 2018, only 5.63% of published work in the UK is translated fiction. So, what are we as a nation missing out on through this omission? If Henry James-Garretts newly published book, This Book Will Make You Kinder, is anything to go by, I believe we are missing out on the opportunity to learn how to be kinder.

James-Garrett, who spent time as a PhD candidate researching empathy and metaethics, writes that "we are kind (to the extent we are) because we possess the capacity for empathy [] Its thanks to empathy that you care about experiences that are not your own. And that is why you are kind."Therefore, he believes that many examples of malice are caused by what he terms "empathy-limiting mistakes",and that this "tendency for our empathy to be sabotaged by our lack of knowledge about other peoples lives and our impact on them, accounts for the larger part of human cruelty."

This ignorance around the lives of others is where I believe translated literature can offer a solution. He acknowledges that in todays world, the current power structure maintains its position through the control of stories it decides whose stories are worth telling, whose will be believed and whose can be manipulated for structural gains. James-Garrett asks, "How does one become less prone to ignorance-induced cruelty? The answer is simple: We just have to listen" -and by listening, he means "any conscious effort we make to learn about and internalize someone elses experience".

Whileyou may be questioning why reading British literature is not sufficient for this task, we must remember that there are ample reports that demonstrate that the lack of diversity in our publishing sector is still a huge problem, and that if James-Garretts theory is to be believed, reading stories from further afield can offer us the chance to cultivate more empathy for those who live beyond our tiny island.

James-Garrett explains how evolution might have used kin selection as a method to foster our altruistic behaviours, and that this can leave empathy gaps between ourselves and those outside of our particular social groups. I believe, however, that this gap can be tightened when we are able to locate shared experiences in others stories those such as our ability to love, to hate, to feel fear and to wonder. It is difficult to maintain a lack of empathy when we are trailing similar emotional landscapes and when we are forced to reconcile with the fact that there are experiences that we do share, even when a world apart.

Although we mustnt think that there is nothing to learn from the differences in our stories either. A fact acknowledged by Rnn Hession, author of Leonard and Hungry Paul, who emphasises that "Literature and culture are ways for us to exchange lived experiences, and this exchange is fundamentally an act of respect. The most culturally porous part of us is our imaginations, so its through these international stories that we stand the best chance of transcending what separates us".This exchange of stories lies at the heart of translation work and ensures that reading more translated literature can allow us to interact with the stories of marginalised groups. In a world where the use of English is so dominant, it is easy to go unheard or be dismissed when using another language. This leads to the underrepresentation of members of our own community and beyond and there have been calls for the decolonisation of the publishing industry and the need to decentre whiteness in the writing that is published as a result.

So, how can the publishing industry focus on the inclusion of translated literature?

It may help to start by taking a look at the publishers who are already doing great work in this area, such as And Other Storiesor Charco Press, or perhaps beginning to seek out collaboration with the many academic communities where translation work is practiced regularly and valued highly, such as Out of the Wings. It will involve reaching out to publishers from every inch of the globe and being willing to promote stories that are different from our own. Perhaps we should even consider the use of James-Garretts book in promotional campaigns as an example of the advantages of reading in translation. The possibilities are endless - and important to grasp hold of now.

Jodie Hare is a freelance writer and has just finished an MA in Modern Languages, Literature and Culture at King's College London.

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Found in translation - The Bookseller