May 28, 2020 07:00 ET | Source: Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA)

multilang-release

OTTAWA, May 28, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) released its 2020 Canadians Deserve a Better Internet Report, which provides an overview of Canadians views on key digital and internet policy issues. The report will help inform policy discussions ahead of the Canadian Internet Governance Forum, which has been rescheduled to November 24th and 25th due to COVID-19.

Overall, the report shows Canadians growing anxiety about cybersecurity-related issues, including a significant drop in their willingness to disclose personal information for better content and services online. In 2019, 72 per cent of Canadians said they were willing to disclose some or a little personal information in exchange for valuable content or service. Only one year later, with the exception of online banking services, the vast majority of Canadians say they are unwilling to share their personal data in exchange for better online services.

Key Findings from Canadian Internet Users:

Executive QuoteIts clear from our report that Canadians are feeling the need to restore trust online. Right now, many Canadians worry that the dangers online outweigh the benefits especially when it comes to privacy. COVID-19 has shown us that going off the grid is no longer an option; digital forces are knocking on the front doors of our homes through new smart, internet-enabled technologies and digital surveillance tools. But Im optimistic that the entire sector can work together and strike the right balance that provides the assurances Canadians need to ensure the internet remains a trusted part of their everyday lives.

--Byron Holland, CIRA president and CEO.

Join us at the Canadian Internet Governance ForumThe Canadian IGF is Canadas leading multi-stakeholder forum on internet policy issues. This years event has been rescheduled from March to November 24th and 25th, and will be held online as an all virtual event in response to COVID-19. The inaugural Canadian IGF last year in Toronto brought together over 200 representatives from government, civil society, and the private sector to tackle public policy issues facing the internet.

The postponed event will feature a similar program as the original, including keynote speeches and panel discussions on issues including encryption, AI, cybersecurity and more. CIRA is one of the many organizing partners and this years presenting sponsor for the event. The forum is also sponsored by CANARIE, Cybera and ICANN.

About the Canadian Internet Registration AuthorityThe Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) manages the .CA top-level domain on behalf of all Canadians. CIRA also develops technologies and servicessuch as D-Zone DNS Firewallthat help support its goal of building a better online Canada. The CIRA team operates one of the fastest-growing country code top-level domains (ccTLD), a high-performance global DNS network, and one of the worlds most advanced back-end registry solutions. You can learn more at https://cira.ca.

Josh Tabish Corporate Communications Manager

Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA)

Tel: 613-875-3741 | Email: josh.tabish@cira.ca

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Report finds massive drop in Canadians' willingness to disclose personal information for free online services - GlobeNewswire

Among many executive positions in an organisation, the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) is sometimes considered to be one of the most strategic, and rightly so. When the firm in question is an operator in the financial services sector, then the office becomes even more critical to be thrown to just anyone.

Besides being responsible for fiscal operating results, the CFO is the senior executive directly responsible for managing the financial strategy, decision and actions of a company. He tracks cash flow, analyses the companys financial strengths and weaknesses, and fill in for the lapses, reducing operations costs and increasing income.

In other words, we can say that the job of the CFO is to ensure that the company is highly profitable so that no matter how high its share price might be, if listed on the floor of the Nigerian Stock Exchange, it would still be termed undervalued.

This article looks at the CFOs in Nigerias tier one banks, their profiles, their last 3 years records and projections for 2020.

READ ALSO: Billionaire investors in the Nigerian Insurance space (2)

UgoNwaghodoh, Group CFO, United Bank for Africa Plc (UBA)

Ugo is a seasoned financial analyst and accountant with experience spanning assurance, advisory, financial control, financial modelling & programming, strategy and business transformation, investor relations, corporate restructuring, risk management, mergers & acquisition, business integration and project management.

He has been the Group CFO at United Bank for Africa Plc since 2011, managing the performance, financial control, portfolio investment and investor relations among others. Before then he was the Divisional Head, Financial Control and Investor Relations between 2008 and 2011.

He also had a brief stint as Group Chief Compliance Officer, and as Head of Special Project (Corporate Mergers). He was Head, Performance Management, Strategy and Business Transformation for about 3 years, where he drove the cost optimization initiatives of the bank, and engaged in policy formulation.

Before UBA, he had worked as Manager, Assurance and Business Advisory Services with PriceWaterhouseCoopers Nigeria for 8 years, and 2 years in Kenya on secondment.

He has a degree in Accounting and Finance, and MSc in Finance & Management from the Cranfield School of Management, Cranfield University.

He is a fellow, Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria (FCA).

His last 3 years performance

UBA, under Nwaghodohs watch, had a fairly unfavourable 2018 as cost to income ratio increased from 57.8% in 2017 to 64% in 2018, and profit after tax almost remained the same increasing only slightly from N78.59 billion in 2017 to N78.60 billion in 2018.

The bank, however, staged a comeback in 2019 with cost to income ratio reduced to 62.7% while profit after tax increased by over N10 billion to N89.08 billion.

Share price however declined from N10.3 in 2017 to N7.7 in 2018 and N7.15 in 2019, probably not Nwaghodohs fault though, since this happened across most financial services institutions. In addition, the bank also paid N30 million as fine to the CBN in 2018, a situation which led shareholders to cry out to Apex bank for what was termed unfair penalties.

Nwaghodoh, however, has a beautifully designed investor relations page to his credit, with answers to Investors FAQs, analysts reports and credit ratings for the bank, shareholders information and news among others.

Oluseyi Kumapayi, CFO Access Bank Plc

Kumapayi joined Access Bank in 2002. Before then, he was with the First City Monument Bank (FCMB) where he served as Financial officer.

Kumapayi got his MBA from the Kellogg school of management, Northwestern University, and has been severally endorsed in Corporate finance, risk management and business strategy, financial analysis, mergers and acquisitions, financial modelling and investment banking.

He also attended the INSEAD course on Risk Management, London Business School (LBS) High Performance People Skills program, Euromoney, Assets and Liability Management, Strategy Master Class and Mergers and Acquisition. He is a Certified Chartered Accountant.

Now lets look at the banks three years performance under Kumapayi.

For the cost to income ratio, Access bank has remained profitable over the last three years, but now the question would be how profitable?

Cost to income ratio reduced from 72.40% in 2017 to 65.30% in 2018 showing that the banks strategies succeeded in reducing the ratio of cost to income and making more profits. However, 2019 recorded a negative progression to 68.7%.

This is in spite of the fact that profit after tax grew significantly to N97.5 billion in 2019, from N94.98 billion in 2018 and N53.6billion in 2017.

Overall, we can say the indices point to greater progress made in 2018, compared to 2019.

Note also that the merger between Access Bank and Diamond bank started in 2018, running through 2019 before it was eventually sealed with the launching of the new Access logo, and the slogan access more. The role of a CFO in a merger of this magnitude is ourightly priceless, given that not all merger talks result in a successful merger of assets, shareholders, and even management team.

There is also the acquistion of controlling equity interest in Transnational Bank Kenya Plc, which Access Bank undertook in October 2019.

Share price at last day of the year progressed from N10.45 to N6.8 to N10, showing that share price dropped most in 2018, which interestingly happened to be the most profitable year so far. In the same 2018, Access bank paid N20 million in fines to the Central Bank of Nigeria.

Kumapayi has kept the investor relations page of the banks website duly updated with annual financial reports, investor news, credit ratings, upcoming events, shareholders information and news.

Oyewale Ariyibi, CFO, First bank of Nigeria Plc

Before becoming Chief Financial Officer at FBN Holdings Plc, Oyewale Ariyibi had worked with Transnational Corporation of Nigeria Plc (Transcorp) as Chief Finance Officer, and at Standard Chartered Bank, Nigeria as Country Financial Controller.

He has a cumulative 23 years experience in banking and financial services, business assurance, tax management, business process review and consulting across several institutions.

He has been certified in areas such as capital raising, tax planning and cost management, operational risk management, strategic and corporate planning, compliance and business assurance amongst others, and is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria (FCA), Associate of the Chartered Institute of Taxation (ACIT) and Certified Pension Institute of Nigeria (ACIP).

So what has he done with First Bank in the last three years?

Profit after tax has been on an increase, from N47.78 billion in 2017 to N59.74 billion in 2018 and N62.09 billion in 2019. This is laudable given that 2016/17 was not the best times for the Nigerian economy.

Share price has however dropped from N8.8 in 2017 to N7.95 in 2018 and N6.15 in 2019.

This may be no fault of his given that he has managed to keep the cost to income ratio stable at 80.17% in 2017, 80.15% in 2018, but it increased slightly in 2019 to 81.31%.

Note that the FBN Holdings also paid a fine of N32.65 million to the CBN in 2018.

This trend can be considered worrisome not only because FBN holdings has the highest cost to income ratio among the tier one banks, but because it is the only of the five banks where cost to income ratio did not reduce over the last 3 years.

This probably explains why shareholders earned 0.25 dividends per share in 2017, 0.26 in 2018 and 0.38 in 2019, the least dividends declared by any of the top banks.

The investors relations page of the banks site is a bit unclear and it is not easy to access needed information, but once a site visitor gets past the initial confusion, one can see shareholders information, corporate governance reports, financial highlights, unclaimed dividends, press releases and news.

Ariyibi might need to ask some pointers from his colleagues in other tier one banks.

Recently, Ariyibi led engagements with regulators towards FBNs intention to divest its 65% holdings in FBN insurance Limited.

Mukhtar Adam, CFO Zenith Bank Plc.

Mukhtar Adam was appointed Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Zenith Bank in 2018, and is currently the Group Head, Financial Control and Strategic Planning Group of the bank.

Before this, he was the banks Deputy CFO, and sometime before 2014, he headed the Financial Reporting, Tax Management and Strategic Planning Groups, overseeing the entire Zenith Groups financial reporting.

Adams worked in Financial Services Group of the Nigerian and Ghanaian practices of PricewaterhouseCoopers (now PwC), as a Senior Consultant, before joining Zenith Bank in 2007.

Adam holds a PhD in Finance from the Leeds Beckett University (UK); M.Sc. (Finance Financial Sector Management) from University of Londons School of Oriental and African Studies, (UK); MBA (Finance) from the University of Leicester (UK) and B.Ed. Social Sciences (Economics and Management) from the University of Cape Coast (Ghana).

Many feathers for one mans cap, we must agree!

He also holds a Diploma in International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) from the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW).

He is a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria (ICAN), Chartered Institute of Taxation of Nigeria (CITN), and Institute of Chartered Accountants of Ghana (ICAG).

So, what has Mukhtar Adam achieved for Zenith bank since he took over from Stanley Amuchie in 2018?

Its been three progressive years for this tier one bank as cost to income ratio has continued to decline from 52.70 in 2017, to 49.30 in 2018 and further down to 48.8% in 2019. Commendably, this progression is not just a result of cutting down operation costs, but increasing income.

Profit after tax for 2017 stood at N173.79 billion and increased to N193.42 billion in 2018 and spiked further to N208.84 billion in 2019.

Whatever magic wand Adams holds over the bank, it must be working well because among the five tier one banks, Zenith bank has consistently had the highest profit after tax for the past three years.

Share price of the bank also moved from N25.6 in 2017 to N23.05 in 2018 and further down to N18.6 as at last day of 2019.

However, this cannot be counted against him as share price is subject to a whole range of extraneous factors. In the 2018, the bank paid N10 million fine to the CBN.

With his input, the bank also maintains a detailed investors relations page with press releases, credit ratings, corporate governance reports and financial updates. In addition to the BOT which pops up to help guide a visitor through the page and answer inquiries, Adams also appears to be one CFO who spells out his key financial strategies on all aspects of the banks operations, on the investors relations page.

Adebanji Adeniyi, CFO, GT Bank

Adeniyi became CFO of GT bank in 2013.

Adeniyi has been certified competent in risk management, portfolio management, risks and investments, Operational dynamics and Associated Risks among others, and has over two decades of professional experience.

He gained his early experience from notable companies including PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Arthur Andersen (now KPMG).

His banking experience comes from his stint with Lead Bank Plc, and his years at GT Bank. He is a Fellow of Institute of Chartered Accountants (FCA), and also holds a MBA.

So, what has he been up to in the last 3 years.

For Guaranty Trust Bank Plc, cost to income ratio reduced from 38.2% in 2017, to 37.2% in 2018, and to 36.1% in 2019

In addition to its gradual improvement, GT bank has maintained the best cost to income ratio among the top banks.

The bank has also maintained a high profit after tax after Zenith bank. GT Bank recorded N170.47 billion profits after tax in 2017 and this increased to N184.64 billion in 2018 and N196.86 billion in 2019.

Like other banks, however, share price has dropped over the years from N40.75 in 2017 to N34.45 in 2018 and N29.7 in 2019. In addition to this, GT Bank also received a heavy penalty of N24 million in 2018 from the CBN.

In terms of profitability, both for the bank and for investors, Adeniyi is getting it right.

The bank also has a well laid out investors relations page detailing corporate and financial information, outlooks and insights, upcoming events and investors news, shareholders information and annual reports.

Kudos!

Read more from the original source:
CFOs of FUGAZ and their 3-year performance record - Nairametrics

Just 34 teachers were dismissed for poor performance by the NSW Department of Education last year, sparking calls for better oversight of the state's educators to improve outcomes for students.

New data from the department showed the number of teachers dismissed actually increased to hit a 10-year high in 2019, out of an available workforce of 90,000.

Fewer than 600 teachers have been dismissed from the department over the past 11 years, with 179 leaving because they failed an improvement program. The same number were convicted of serious charges, and 171 were sacked for sexual misconduct.

Principals and the union said the data did not reflect the true numbers of teachers leaving because of performance issues, as many quit before the formal process finished.

But the figures come after an auditor-general's report found flaws in the department's monitoring of teacher quality across the state's 2200 public schools, and said it was not doing enough to help teachers improve.

In 2015, just six teachers were dismissed due to "inefficiency", or failing an improvement program, and the following year there were eight. But that increased to more than 30 in each of the past two years, after the length of the program was halved to 10 weeks and the department provided extra support to principals.

Last year, the department also sacked twice as many school leaders for performance issues than it had in the previous decade, dismissing two head teachers, an assistant principal, a deputy principal and a principal.

Other reasons for teacher and principal dismissal included alcohol dependency, breaching boundaries and unlawfully accessing a student's personal information.

Craig Petersen, head of the Secondary Principals Association, said the figures did not reflect the true number of teachers leaving the system because of pressure due to their professional performance, as many quit before formal processes were finalised.

Craig Petersen, head of the Secondary Principals Association.Credit:Janie Barrett

"There's a lot of things that principals and head teachers do at school before we get to a formal improvement program," he said.

"Some teachers pull the pin voluntarily, and the [department's] data is not capturing that. There's also few principals who would take on more than one [improvement] program at a time.

"They are exhausting, emotionally as well as physically, and it really distracts you from a lot of other things that need a priority."

Mr Petersen said empowering principals to select some staff on merit had reduced problems with professional performance.

Angelo Gavrielatos, the president of the NSW Teachers Federation, said there were performance issues in every profession, and the department's procedures which ensured a fair process had been negotiated with the union.

"The figures may not necessarily tell the full story because many people may separate from the service either through retirement or resignation," he said.

David Hope, the president of the Northern Sydney District Council of P&C Associations, said teacher performance was a difficult but important issue to address.

"Historically, the Department of Education has run a system which makes it almost impossible to dismiss any teacher on the grounds of performance an approach which has demonstrably failed to put the student first," he said.

"In recent years, the department has put a lot more effort into leadership training and professional development, and in redesigning the workplace with, for example, modern versions of team teaching."

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The department's data said it employed around 49,000 permanent teachers, and another 45,000 were registered to work on a casual basis.

In 2019, 53 NSW teachers were involved in performance improvement programs, which represented 0.06 per cent of the workforce. The auditor-general's report cited a UK report that assessed the quality of teaching as inadequate at 3 per cent of its schools.

Rachel Wilson, an education academic at the University of Sydney, said the data showed the need for a better understanding of the teacher workforce.

Jordan Baker is Education Editor of The Sydney Morning Herald

Nigel Gladstone is an investigative journalist at The Sydney Morning Herald.

Continue reading here:
Calls to ramp up scrutiny of teacher performance - Sydney Morning Herald

If you're new to Valorant and just got access to the Valorant closed beta, you'll see that it offers both a ranked Competitive mode and an Unrated mode. The regular Unrated mode is available from the start, while the Competitive ranked mode must first be unlocked by completing enough Unrated matches. Once Competitive mode is unlocked, players can start playing for a competitive rank, which is a reflection of their current skill level and will affect how Valorant's matchmaking system pairs them with other players in future ranked play. But not everything about Valorant's ranked system is clear from the start and you might be wondering how it works. How many Unrated matches do you need to play before ranked mode unlocks and how do you earn your first rank? And what are the Valorant ranks anyway? In this guide we'll break down all your questions about Valorant's ranked system, as explained in Riot's official blog, so you know what to expect when diving into Competitive ranked mode for the first time. A new Valorant launch date trailer just dropped, so with the game launching out of beta soon, now is the perfect time to learn how ranking works--but take note, your rank and all your stats will reset when the beta ends on May 28.

To unlock Valorant's ranked mode, which is officially called Competitive mode, you have to complete 20 Unrated matches. It doesn't matter if you win or lose, you just have to play 20 regular games through to completion. Winning or losing Unrated matches will have no effect on your rank once you do unlock Competitive mode. You are only graded on performance in a Competitive ranked match.

To get your first rank, you have to complete a total of five placement matches in Competitive mode. Your performance during these matches will determine your first Valorant rank. Find the list of possible ranks and skill badges, and a deeper explanation of how Valorant's ranked system works--including ranked tiers--below.

There are a total of eight ranks in Valorant. Each has three ranked tiers except for Valorant, the top rank possible. That makes for a total of 22 possible ranked tiers, each represented by its own skill badge. Riot has provided a handy graphic showing off its ranked system, which you can see below. The competitive ranks and their corresponding ranked tiers are as follows.

According to Riot, "winning games is the most important factor in gaining rank," but your personal performance plays a big part in that too. Performing "exceptionally well" can help you rank up faster, while performing worse than you have in previous matches can hurt your competitive rank. It gets a little more complicated, though. As Riot explains, the way Valorant determines your early rank puts much more scrutiny on your personal performance, but eventually, winning matches becomes the more important determining factor. Once you receive your Valorant competitive rank, you will be matched only with players within two ranks of yourself.

Much of the way ranked mode works, according to Riot, is built to combat smurfing, rank boosting, and ensure balanced matches for all competitive players. But be aware--ranked mode only just went live in late April, when the Valorant beta hadn't even been live for a full month, so the more nuanced ins-and-outs of this system may change as Riot gathers data and feedback.

No. Your rank doesn't reset in Valorant if you haven't played in a while, but if you're inactive for 14 days, it will be temporarily "hidden" until the next time you play a match. That doesn't mean it's disappeared or decayed, just that it won't be displayed for other players until you become an active player again yourself.

"We want to be confident that when others see your rank, it's an accurate reflection of your skill," Riot explains.

No. After the Valorant beta is over on May 28, all competitive ranks will reset, so all players will start fresh on Valorant's June 2 release date. You will have to follow Riot's instructions for achieving a new competitive rank based on the rules at that time. We don't know how the competitive ranked system might change before launch, so we can't say much more than that.

Valorant's new Competitive mode was introduced shortly after patch 0.49 was pushed, and it is currently only available in the EU and NA regions. Gameplay-wise, it is no different than Unrated mode. It is still 5v5 team-based matches, set in the same maps, with the same objectives and win conditions. You can still solo queue or queue up with a full five-person party. The only difference is that Competitive mode has a ranked system, which means after playing a few rounds unranked, you will receive your first ranked badge, and then only be matched with other players of similar ranks. Winning matches can increase your rank, and losing them can decrease your rank. That also means if you queue up with a party, you'll all have to be within two ranks of each other.

Valorant is still in closed beta until May 28, and the balance of its ranked system is likely to change even post-launch. We'll keep you up-to-date on Riot's Valorant updates, including future patches and other adjustments to its ranked system. For now, read up on how to get your Valorant beta key if you haven't already and--if you're ready to dive in--learn some top Valorant tips and tricks.

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I am 35 years old with two children aged four and one. I started investing in the following funds at the start of this year for my childrens education: Axis Bluechip, Axis Midcap, Axis Small Cap and Mirae Asset Focused. I have a systematic investment plan (SIP) of 3,000 per month and aim to increase this over years to an amount of around 10,000 in the next five-seven years. Would this suffice considering the current inflation and increasing education expenses? When I searched for good funds, most of the funds were from Axis Mutual Fund. Is it a bad idea to put a lot of my investment in the same fund house? Is there a better allocation?

Name withheld on request

Different types of financial goals have different characteristics. A goal for a retirement corpus can have a specific target amount, but it is possible to be flexible with the time frame (as in work a few more years or less). An education goal is rigid in terms of time frameas in when the money will be requiredbut it can be flexible in terms of the amount required (government or private college; in India or abroad).

The amount you are investing now is insufficient for fully catering to the need of higher education. With two children, you would need to save and invest about 20,000 per month over a period of 15 years to get to a corpus of around 1 crore, which would be required for four-year professional degrees for both of them at that time. So, consider increasing your SIP amount to the maximum of your ability as soon as you can.

Investing in funds that belong to predominantly a single fund house is not a good idea. The reason is that funds from a single fund house tend to perform well or poorly in unison due to similarities in fund management styles or investment philosophies. You can always find funds from other asset management companies (AMCs) that are similar in nature and equal in performance capability. For example, you can consider funds such as Kotak Standard Multicap and DSP Midcap. Also, please review your portfolio every year to keep it up to date.

Srikanth Meenakshi is co-founder, PrimeInvestor.in. Queries and views at mintmoney@livemint.com

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Avoid investing in different funds of a single AMC as they perform in unison - Livemint

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This card does not chargeforeign transaction fees.

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Best Chase Business Credit Cards of 2020 Forbes Advisor - Forbes

As we march past the grim marker of 100,000 dead, there is no escaping the conclusion that America has lost its balance, that the days when the world relied on the United States to lead the way are gone, at least for now.

We are 5 percent of the worlds population. We have 29 percent of the deaths. We had more warning than most countries, we lead the world in medical research, and we have seen that Americans are willing to make dramatic personal changes to help in the fight. And still, our government has been unable to put the pieces together and marshal a competent response.

Americans are still dying at the pace of about 1,000 a day. And even now, as we begin to reopen, we dont have a system in place to detect new outbreaks and quarantine those who are infected. This virus is not done with us, and experts warn of a second surge coming this fall. As we mark 100,000 dead, the question is whether we can avoid marking 200,000 before its over.

In Paterson, Mayor Andre Sayegh is showing what effective local leadership looks like, but its still not enough to protect the city against the predicted second surge. When a Paterson resident falls ill, a contact tracer reaches out to every person who came in contact with the patient within the last two weeks. They are asked to quarantine themselves, but many people in Paterson are packed into small apartments and cant do that.

We dont have the resources for that, Sayegh says. We had a case in a family of 12, and all of them got infected because of that.

No ones talking much about the unsexy stuff that would save lives, and allow us to open up sooner, like contact tracing and quarantine shelters. That stuff is not sexy and does nothing to rile the partisan passions.

No, the hot debate focuses on the pace of reopening, as the economic catastrophe deepens. A gym owner opened, defying the law. Republicans and churches have filed lawsuits. Sen. Declan OScanlon, R-Monmouth, has advocated civil disobedience against restrictions imposed by Murphy.

Im getting calls from mayors who say, Were being ordered to use our police against our businesses and people who are simply trying to survive, and its killing me. Im being asked to turn on the people I promised to serve and crush their businesses, OScanlon says.

But if Murphy yields to political pressure, and opens too fast, the risk of a second surge increases. That would force a second shutdown, delaying the day when the economy can return to health.

Its depressing to see the partisan divide deepen. Republicans are more likely to think the restrictions are too tight, and much more likely to approve of President Trumps performance. On Lake Hopatcong last weekend, where Trump flags were in abundance, several boats were tied together to party, virus or not. Trump himself, of course, signals defiance every day by refusing to wear a mask.

In Washington, leading Republican are dead-set against extending the $600 weekly bonus for the millions who have lost jobs. Over my dead body, says Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, suddenly concerned about the deficit. Republicans are opposing more direct help to state governments like ours as well, dismissing as a that lifeline as a blue-state bailout in the words of Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the GOP leader.

Here in New Jersey, Doug Steinhardt, the Republican state chairman, went nuclear last week by calling for the appointment of a special prosecutor over the catastrophe at New Jerseys nursing homes, as if Murphy has committed a crime. Whether its a 9-11 type of review, or a potential criminal review, we need to get to the bottom of it, he said.

I asked what crime he was suggesting Murphy might have committed. I meant to suggest what I said, he responded. Hmmm. A little taste of the dialogue in Washington.

If this becomes a badge of your partisan affiliation, were in trouble, says Farmer. To me, thats the most regrettable part of this whole thing. Its emblematic of where we are.

America is an exceptional country. With an exceptionally ineffective federal government. At least for now.

More: Tom Moran columns

Tom Moran may be reached at tmoran@starledger.com. Follow him on Twitter @tomamoran. Find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.

Continued here:
The scores are in: America failed the virus test | Moran - NJ.com

Far from being some free-floating cloud around our heads, sensory consciousness is profoundly embedded in biology, anatomy, physiology, and above all, in adaptive functions that serve us in every waking second of life. This is not some philosophical speculation. It is now supported by numerous findings published in peer-reviewed journals that are easily found in web archives.

One of my favorite thinkers and researchers on this topic is Bernard Baars.Baarsfundamentally changed the scientific study of consciousness over 30 years ago and he has done it again in a stimulating update on consciousnesscalled On Consciousness: Science & Subjectivity Updated Works on Global Workspace Theory. In his new bookhe proposesnovel predictions and drawson the latest research in cognitive science. This magun opus is really incredible andshould be on the bookshelf for anyone seriously interested in wrestling with the paradoxes and mysteries of human consciousness. In this interview with Baars, we discuss his new book and his latest thoughts on the scientific study of consciousness.

Q. How did you get interested in the scientific study of consciousness?

I couldnt avoid it. I was interested in philosophy, where every major voice had something to say about consciousness. Then I read A.J. Ayer, a famous logical positivist, who made the case that English and American philosophy since Bertrand Russell was essentially a non-empirical enterprise. I was a newbie, so maybe I got that totally wrong, but I became a psychology major and lucked out. My brilliant introductory professor had us read George A. Millers beautiful little history book, Psychology: The science of mental life.

That did it for me, because under the professional strictures of behaviorism you were not supposed to talk about mental life, and Miller made the case (in a very polite way) that the radical behaviorists were wrong. I had no idea at that time that the Harvard Psychology Department had actually split in two in the 1950s over that debate. The half called psychology was known for B.F. Skinners radical behaviorism, and the new Social Relations department had the most famous sensory psychologist of the time, S.S. (Smitty) Stevens. A very famous article by C.P. Snow, a British scientist-novelist, had publicized what was called the split culture pitting the sciences against the traditional humanities. Historians still view that as a disaster.

So I had fabulous professors who were sincere and eager to communicate, and who privately wondered about the same things. Almost everything Ive written since then had its beginnings in the research programs of my undergrad and grad professors. Even B.F. Skinner changed his mind about radical behaviorism in his two-volume autobiography in 1976, called Particulars of my Life. Thats a Shakespeare quote, and it came from his four-year undergraduate quest to become a stream of consciousness novelist.

Im interested in all aspects of human nature. When I started in 1980 as a cognitive scientist, behaviorism was still powerful and nobody wanted to study consciousness directly. It was considered to be career suicide. Cognitive science in the 80s was a much more broad-minded approach to psychology than the others at the time where we incorporated artificial intelligence, linguistics, anthropology, neural networks, and language science I enjoyed it immensely.

When you ask how I wandered into the lone forest of consciousness and the brain, which is now a coherent field of science, I have to blame the whole history of Western ideas going back to classical Greece. But that even looks arbitrary these days. Now that we have another thousand years of ancient history its obvious that the Indus Valley Civilization had a flourishing trade with Sumer, which was part of the Fertile Crescent, where people carried on constant trade and had early cuneiform alphabets, enormous archives of them. On top of that, the Greco-Buddhist Empire of Ashoka imported Greek sculptors, and the Indo-European languages were already spoken across most of the Eurasian landmass. So the whole idea of East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet is an intentional joke, because Rudyard Kipling knew all about the Greco-Buddhist Empire.

In every wisdom tradition I know, subjectivity (aka consciousness) is a central topic, perhaps because it combines the individual with the social group in such an obvious way. Our individuality is a function of the cortex, which is now proven by brain studies to be the organ of consciousness. Wilder Penfield discovered that in 1934 via open-brain surgeries in fully awake patients, who were able to talk with him and gesture. Over three decades he studied about 1,200 patients at the Montreal Neurological Institute. That surgery is still being done, and the biomedical archives are full of direct evidence. Just do a search on conscious AND brain and it pops up.

Anyway, as you know, consciousness had been neglected for about 100 years since William James. This was an enormous opportunity and challenge, of course, and I could see ways of scientifically addressing it.

Scientific work may look humdrum to outsiders, but many scientists experience it as a kind of creative struggle, filled with practical and conceptual challenges that have never before been solved. We only need to look at the growth in genomics today for endless examples. But what can the creative aspect of science tell us about our mindbrain? This term mindbrain science comes from neuroscientist Jakk Panksepps wonderful books on emotion, and I think he wanted to emphasize that mind and brain are not separate, they are profoundly linked.

So, in 1982, I was able to combine the idea of a global workspace architecture with the stream of consciousness. In a way, it combined the novel idea of swarm computing with the evidence we had about the limited capacity of the conscious stream. The empirical theory was called Global Workspace Theory, or GWT.

GWT continues to grow with more and more evidence. The idea has since entered mainstream science.

Consciousness is a fundamental concept, like mass and energy, entropy and life. Scientists can't avoid it, so we use any number of pseudonyms. People call it "perception" or "attention" or even "knowledge." Those terms capture part of the truth, but they are by no means the whole network of empirically anchored concepts.

The empirical anchors of conscious events are emerging even today, with some real progress on cortical markers for conscious events that are comparable to experimentally matched unconscious ones. This is an emerging field, but it is being developed in a very reliable way by excellent researchers.

Q. What is Global Workspace Theory?

Global Workspace Theory is an effort to understand the biggest empirical paradox that I know of in the very broad field of psychobiology (stretching from consciousness all the way to deep biology). I call this well-known puzzle a paradox, because I dont know the answer. But GWT is an effort to make some sense out of it.

Global Workspace Theory came out of the realization by people like Alan Newell, Herbert A. Simon, Donald Norman, and Daniel Kahneman that the narrowness of the stream of consciousness seemed to conflict with the enormous capacity of unconscious memories, or automatisms, or whatever people called them. You have this fabulous memory domain that no one has any quantitative estimate of, and its all run by this tiny rivulet, as William James called it. He couldnt figure it out either, but he knew the evidence.

Alan Newells group at Carnegie-Mellon University had the insight that none of the available algorithms could solve the ARPA challenge of identifying 1,000 spoken words. So they found a kind of swarm-computational answer: If you put a hundred crummy algorithms together and let them share hypotheses and vote on the most popular one, it turns out that very inadequate algorithms could jointly solve problems that no single one could solve.

People had been thinking about parallel computers, and parallel-interactive problem solving, and a small group of neural network pioneers somehow arrived at a very similar view, perhaps from considering the many layered arrays in the brain.

That turned into Global Workspace Theory as a way to organize a lot of evidence about closely similar conscious and unconscious brain processing. We studied dichotic listening, where the subject wore headphones with two input channels, left and right, and had to say the heard syllables as fast as possible. It was called shadowing the input. People can do that extremely well, the only cost being the fact that the Unattended ear is totally unconscious. But I read a beautiful experiment by Donald G. MacKay, who discovered that an ambiguous word in the conscious (attended) channel could be changed by an unconscious word at the same moment in the unconscious channel. The phenomenon of unconscious brain events shaping conscious ones is now routinely studied, although it is still described in behavioristic terms.

Now we have fabulous brain instruments and we can actually observe signal processing in vision and hearing, not with ground truth precision, but good enough to test hypotheses. I had the good fortune to work with Gerald Edelman on these questions, and by now its very clear that the cortex is the perfect brain structure for a dynamic global workspace.

My current research extends the Global Workspace (GW) theory of conscious experience to brain evidence, particularly the role of the cortex and thalamus. While cortex and thalamus look separate to the naked eye, they act as an integrated system (Llinas and Pare, 1991; Edelman and Tononi, 2000; Steriade, 2006; Freeman, 2007).

Conscious state studies typically compare waking to slow-wave sleep, coma, general anesthesia, and the epilepsies. Studies of conscious contents compare conscious vs. unconscious cognition during the waking state, using binocular rivalry, the attentional blink, backward masking, and attentional manipulations. Both conscious and unconscious stimuli trigger sensory volleys that can be traced well into the cortex (Gaillard et al., 2009; Panagiotaropoulos et al., 2012).

Brain imaging experiments have supported the best-known GW prediction of widespread integration and broadcasting (Dehaene and Naccache, 2001). That is, conscious stimuli typically evoke cortical activity that is more widespread, intense, and correlated than matched unconscious stimuli.

Part IV of my latest book On Consciousness: Science & Subjectivity develops GW dynamics, suggesting that conscious experiences reflect a flexible binding and broadcasting function in the brain, which is able to mobilize a large, distributed collection of specialized cortical networks and processes that are not conscious by themselves. Note that the broadcast phase proposed by the theory should evoke widespread adaptation, for the same reason that a fire alarm should evoke widespread responding, because the specific needs for task-relevant responders cannot be completely known ahead of time. General alarms are interpreted according to local conditions.

A brain-based GW interacts with an audience of highly distributed, specialized knowledge sources, which interpret the global signal in terms of local knowledge (Baars, 1988). The global signal triggers reentrant signaling, resonance is the typical activity of the cortex.

Q. What is the proposed biological function of consciousness?

A great body of evidence suggests that conscious sensation and cognition provides the leading edge of moment-to-moment adaptation to the sensory, social, and conceptual world. Darwinian evolution occurs over generations, and by epigenetic expression it also regulates life development. But animals encounter very fast changes in the world, which are novel and ambiguous. To adapt to fast and ill-defined dangers and opportunities we need the brain.

Cortical sensory consciousness is believed to operate around 10 Hz, which is the theta and alpha range of brain oscillations. If youre a rabbit confronted with a potential snake, you first have to run to safety, and then try to evaluate what you saw. The 100 ms domain (10 Hz) is a very useful dwell time for sensory input, and its also the sniffing rate of small, ancestral mammals. Biologically the 100 ms domain makes a great deal of sense, and consciousness is clearly biological. It has to have plausible bio-functions.

New evidence now also implicated the slower delta range. It is possible that these slow oscillations are modulated by beta and gamma oscillations that carry content, along with spatial arrays that are linked point-to-point by labeled line connections. This is a very exciting frontier.

Q. What does Global Workspace Theory predict about conscious cognition?

Like any other theory, it has numerous implications. I address just this question in my newest book, On Consciousness: Science & Subjectivity - Updated Works on Global Workspace Theory (The Nautilus Press, 2019), laying out a framework for the role of conscious and unconscious experiences in the living brain.

The most novel prediction of GWT is the idea of a global broadcast linked to conscious but not unconscious events in the brain. It has received substantial corroboration from several laboratories.

Q. How does modern science go about studying consciousness?

Consciousness is a part of nature, and we now have clear evidence about the organ of the conscious mind, the cerebral cortex, which fills 80 percent of the cranial volume. Broadly, sensory perception is conscious, while stored memory traces are not. Endogenous senses like inner speech and visual imagery are also conscious, perhaps more vividly in children.

The most revealing studies compare matched conscious and unconscious conditions, aka contrastive analysis, and that has allowed us to pinpoint the location and processes that give rise to visual consciousness, for instance.

Q. Has there been scientific progress?

Yes, an enormous amount. When I first proposed GWT in 1982 all we had was psychological evidence and a new understanding of parallel-interactive processing. Both were vital. But now we can look directly at the living brain at high spatio-temporal resolution, we can trace the fiber system, and we can see how cortex is wired to allow global integration and broadcasting.

We also understand why the cortex is so enormously flexible, and we have new experimental tools.

Cortex can be traced via the fossil record to come even before the mammals. The current weight of evidence suggests that all cortical animals are at least sensorily conscious. Humans have the added advantage of spoken language and more precise use of meanings, which depend on the association areas of cortex. There are alternative proposals for the biological basis of consciousness, but they dont have the enormous bandwidth of cortex.

As you know, there are some simple and informative ways to study the stream of consciousness (SoC). The subjective world is not inaccessible. People can tell us an enormous amount about their conscious inner lives. You can study spontaneous fantasy, creativity, and post-traumatic intrusions. The cortex is essentially never at rest as long as it is awake, so the term resting state is misleading. The conscious component of cortex is always active, even in dreams, and it is simply part of the causal network of nature. Its not something that lives in some other metaphysical space.

Now that we have amazingly good brain instruments, we can also study sensory processes at the level of neurons. What is new, I believe, is what Ive called contrastive analysis, which is the precise experimental comparison between closely matched conscious and unconscious events. It allows us to treat consciousness as an empirical variable. And then we test hypotheses that are falsifiable, in a Karl Popper fashion.

This has been worked out very beautifully in two ways: sensory competition (like binocular rivalry), and what is called the Attentional Blink (AB). Both methods allow close experimental comparisons between nearly-identical conscious and unconscious threads in the brain. The conscious ones we know, because we can describe them; and the matched unconscious conditions are not reportable, but they can be studied via direct cortical recording. Now we can ask, What makes conscious brain activities different from all the others? And there we get a growing family of global workspace (GW) theories.

In science the trick is to pinpoint the empirically answerable questions. Around 1900 physics realized that the cosmic ether was not testable, so they dropped it. In biology they dropped the life force of Henri Bergson, because it was not testable. Even Einstein gave up on trying to understand quantum phenomena in classical terms. Empirical testability allows us to sweep away speculations, and this simplifies things immensely.

Im particularly fond of work done at the CNRS in Paris by Stanislas Dehaene and Jean-Pierre Changeux, first-rate scientists, and by the Max Planck research group in Tuebingen, Germany, led by Nikos Logothetis and Fanis Panagiotaropoulos et al. (2012) building on almost two decades of findings from intracranial recordings in the macaque. They used an experimental technique called flash suppression, involving a long-lasting type of binocular rivalry between the conscious (perceived) and matched unconscious (unperceived) sensory input. This method allows for contrastive analysis of conscious vs. unconscious contents with identical stimulus presentation to the two eyes.

Im glad that this work broadly confirms a prediction I made in 1982, the global workspace hypothesis, which is kind of an integration and broadcasting function in the visual brain, exactly where you would expect it: in areas IT/MTL where visual input is integrated into coherent Gestalts.

IT/MTL is where we organize visual information into people, buildings, and scenes. So it is an area of high-level integration and broadcasting of visual information. The broadcast or ignition appears to be propagated to other parts of cortex.

The area called MTL is the hippocampus, which now appears to be the first experiential holding buffer for memories that will later be spread to cortex and other regions. It takes the traces of moment-to-moment experiences and turns them into vast numbers of synaptic connections.The conscious cortex is the leading edge of moment-to-moment adaptation to new and significant events in the world. It is not some floating halo around the head.

Q. What about the Hard Problem of mind versus the physical world?

With apologies to my friend David Chalmers, the Hard Problem has no supportive evidence. Neither does the new proposal of panpsychism, which is not falsifiable as it is described. Science can only use empirically testable hypotheses.

The mind-body question, in various guises, is ancient, but it is posed as an all-or-none dichotomy, as if mind must be the basis of brain, or vice versa. This is like asking which came first, the chicken or the egg? You divide the world into two halves and expect a sensible answer. It doesnt work. What you need is to study the genome and its phenotypical expressions; this is very complex and the answer is never one causes the other. Its always a set of interactions. The Hard Problem tries to shoehorn all that into simple categories and its not testable.

I make a rule of ignoring any ideas that are untestable empirically, and of focusing on the testable ones. A very old practice in the history of science, which allows us to filter out empty scholasticism following Karl Poppers rule that empirical hypotheses have to be falsifiable, or they are useless. This was crucial to physics and biology in the 20th century.

It seems to be very difficult for people to think of consciousness as a natural phenomenon. But now we have decades of evidence and some theory that points to that idea.

Q. How are you pursuing these ideas today?

Theres a huge task of communicating the new science. My editor Natalie Geld and I are constantly working together to reach out to educated audiences, via our latest book, On Consciousness: Science & Subjectivity, talks, virtual seminars, and our new Podcast On Consciousness with my co-host, neuroscientist David Edelman. Im exploring other cortical hypotheses and answering some new questions with mathematicians.

Read the original here:
On Consciousness: Science and Subjectivity: A Q&A with Bernard Baars - Scientific American

What do scientists spend more time thinking about sex, or the theory of intelligent design? Scientific research famously gives a range of answers to the question of how many times per day men think about sex (from 19 times to 7,200 times). If one European researcher is correct, scientists in the United States (who are mostly male) spend one-fifth of their waking time thinking about how to combat intelligent design. Despite incessant declarations that there is no controversy about evolution, ID is evidently on the mind of many biologists, to the point of obsession!

Evolution News recently commented on an article in an Italian philosophy journal that took intelligent design (ID) arguments with refreshing seriousness. Now another European journal has published its own noteworthy commentary. The author is Giuseppe Longo, who studies mathematical computer science and epistemology as research director (emeritus) at Le Centre national de la recherche scientifique (National Center for Scientific Research) in Paris. His article, Scientific thought and absolutes for an image of the sciences, between computing and biology, appears in the humanities journal Angelaki.

He writes:

During a recent colloquium on biology in Paris, I have heard with dread all American colleagues, but fortunately only them (for the moment), lost 20 percent of their time and brain power combat [sic] intelligent design theory, so much the stakes have become drastically central, even for the financing of research, in this country.

Multiple thoughts come to mind.

First, if the critics are right to say ID is dead, why devote so much time to it? Evolution News reported in 2014 that an article in the journal Nature admitted that scientists self-censor criticisms of neo-Darwinism to avoid lending credence to ID. As Laland et al. (2014) conceded: Perhaps haunted by the spectre of intelligent design, evolutionary biologists wish to show a united front to those hostile to science. In 2017 we observed how Laland followed his own advice, refusing to admit in a report published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution that the 2016 Royal Society meeting included strong critiques of the neo-Darwinian paradigm. Clearly, ID arguments are potent, and evolutionary biologists are aware of this which is why they admit they dont like to acknowledge problems in the evolutionary consensus.

Second, intelligent designs supposed negative impact is hyped beyond reason. The notion that financing of research in the U.S. is being hurt by ID is laughable. Pure ID research gets exactly zero dollars from the Federal Government. From other sources, the amount of money available to fund ID research, though not trivial, is minuscule compared to the amount of money available for evolutionary science. No evolutionary scientist has any right to complain.

Third, its a shame that 20 percent of their time and brain power is going to ID because the trend in thought is now running toward government-backed censorship.

Fourth, it does happen from time to time that ID critics reply to ID arguments. More often what they are doing is attacking straw man mischaracterizations, as in the recent BioEssays that demanded censorship of Evolution News and other ID publications. In his article, Giuseppe Longo himself goes after ID straw men:

Creationist theories require divine intervention case by case: there is no universality of either method or criteria, but only faith in an omnipotent God, who created species and biological functions one by one, each with their own characteristics. Generality is in God, not in the method of knowledge.

We can say the same of the modern version of creationist absolutism: intelligent design theory, which is having great success with the American public. Tapping the molecular alphabet on the genetic keyboard, God would program DNA mutations for his own supreme ends. But then, paleontological evidence tells us that approximately 99 percent of species that were formed on earth have disappeared, and that, especially in the five greatest known extinctions, massacres and death have ravaged our planet. That all of this has taken place to conserve us, as well as the 1 percent of species that have survived, does not seem to be very productive, or particularly intelligent. Hence, we invoke the impenetrability of divine design, of the Absolute Programmer, as the face of the tens of millions of deaths caused by the mutation of the flu virus (the Spanish flu of 1918 for example). Whenever we see fit, this intelligent design becomes impenetrable (unintelligible), the criteria change, and we invoke faith.

What a mess. Its hard to know where to begin. What mainstream ID proponent actually argues like that? Who says that ID requires faith in an omnipotent God? Not Stephen Meyer:

The theory of intelligent design does not claim to detect a supernatural intelligence possessing unlimited powers. Though the designing agent responsible for life may well have been an omnipotent deity, the theory of intelligent design does not claim to be able to determine that. Because the inference to design depends upon our uniform experience of cause and effect in this world, the theory cannot determine whether or not the designing intelligence putatively responsible for life has powers beyond those on display in our experience. Nor can the theory of intelligent design determine whether the intelligent agent responsible for information life acted from the natural or the supernatural realm. Instead, the theory of intelligent design merely claims to detect the action of some intelligent cause (with power, at least, equivalent to those we know from experience) and affirms this because we know from experience that only conscious, intelligent agents produce large amounts of specified information. The theory of intelligent design does not claim to be able to determine the identity or any other attributes of that intelligence, even if philosophical deliberation or additional evidence from other disciplines may provide reasons to consider, for example, a specifically theistic design hypothesis.

Or who says that the theory of intelligent design requires divine design where God created species and biological functions one by one, each with their own characteristics? Here is Michael Behe:

So, based on developmental biology and our new knowledge of lifes molecules, can we draw a reasonable, tentative line between Darwin and design in animal evolution? . Combining the reasoning from the past several sections, then, we can conclude that animal design probably extends into life at least as far as vertebrate classes, maybe deeper, and that random mutation likely explains differences at least up to the species level, perhaps somewhat beyond. Somewhere between the level of vertebrate species and class lies the organismal edge of Darwinian evolution.

Behe again:

[ID] is not an argument for the existence of a benevolent God, as Paleys was. I hasten to add that I myself do believe in a benevolent God, and I recognize that philosophy and theology may be able to extend the argument. But a scientific argument for design in biology does not reach that far. Thus while I argue for design, the question of the identity of the designer is left open. Possible candidates for the role of designer include: the God of Christianity; an angelfallen or not; Platos demi-urge; some mystical new age force; space aliens from Alpha Centauri; time travelers; or some utterly unknown intelligent being. Of course, some of these possibilities may seem more plausible than others based on information from fields other than science. Nonetheless, as regards the identity of the designer, modern ID theory happily echoes Isaac Newtons phrase hypothesis non fingo.

ID grants that organisms might undergo various degrees of Darwinian evolution. Within vertebrates Behe allows that this may extend even up to the level of the class hardly requiring that God specially creates each type of organism in its current form. This is what Behe calls the edge of evolution.

William Dembski agrees that ID does not require special creation:

Intelligent design does not require organisms to emerge suddenly or to be specially created from scratch by the intervention of a designing intelligence. To be sure, intelligent design is compatible with the creationist idea of organisms being suddenly created from scratch. But it is also perfectly compatible with the evolutionist idea of new organisms arising from old by gradual accrual of change. What separates intelligent design from naturalistic evolution is not whether organisms evolved or the extent to which they evolved, but what was responsible for their evolution.

And who says that there is no universality of either method or criteria by which we detect design, but only faith in an omnipotent God? Not Dembski. He laid out an objective criteria by which we can detect design, requiring no religious premises. The method is based on recognizing information in nature, indicating the past action of intelligence:

[I]ntelligent design can be formulated as a scientific theory having empirical consequences and devoid of religious commitments. Intelligent design can be unpacked as a theory of information. Within such a theory, information becomes a reliable indicator of design as well as a proper object for scientific investigation.

The type of information that indicates the prior action of intelligence is complex and specified information (CSI). We can rigorously measure CSI:

To see why CSI is a reliable indicator of design, we need to examine the nature of intelligent causation. The principal characteristic of intelligent causation is directed contingency, or what we call choice. Whenever an intelligent cause acts, it chooses from a range of competing possibilities. Intelligent causation always entails discrimination, choosing certain things, ruling out others. Given this characterization of intelligent causes, the crucial question is how to recognize their operation. Intelligent causes act by making a choice. How then do we recognize that an intelligent cause has made a choice? The actualization of one among several competing possibilities, the exclusion of the rest, and the specification of the possibility actualized encapsulate how we recognize intelligent causes, or equivalently, how we detect design. We can summarize this argument for showing that CSI is a reliable indicator of design as follows: CSI is a reliable indicator of design because its recognition coincides with how we recognize intelligent causation generally. To recognize intelligent causation, we must establish that one possibility from a range of competing possibilities was actualized, determine which possibilities were excluded, and then specify the actualized possibility.

When Longo says that ID is based on faith and absolutism, this bears no resemblance to the actual theory of ID.

What about Longos claim that if organisms go extinct then this shows the design does not seem to be very productive, or particularly intelligent? He argues that unless we admit that extinction refutes design, this shows the impenetrability of divine design. By that he means ID proponents change the goalposts arbitrarily, and Whenever we see fit the criteria change, and we invoke faith.

If ID proponents had ever argued that design requires that all species must live eternally, he might have a point. But no mainstream ID proponent has ever said that, and ID readily allows that mass extinction occurs. Evolution News dealt with the perfect design objection in response to BioEssays as well. Imperfect design is still design. Anyone who ever got stuck trying to upgrade a computers operating system is well aware of this fact. From the textbook Discovering Intelligent Design:

[W]hen ID proponents use the term intelligent, they simply seek to indicate that a structure has features requiring a mind capable of forethought to design the blueprint. But does intelligent design require perfect design?

For that matter, what constitutes biological perfection? Take humans for example. Should our bodies all last 100 years? 200 years? Forever? Should we be impervious to injury and never get sick? These are philosophical or theological questions, having little or nothing to do with science.

Holding biological systems to a vaguely defined standard of perfect design is the wrong way to test ID. The examples at the beginning of this chapter broken machinery, computer failures, and decaying buildings all show that a structure might be designed by intelligence even if it breaks or has flaws. Intelligent design does not mean perfect design. It doesnt even require optimal design. It means exactly what it says: design by an intelligent agent.

In attacking such outlandish straw men, ID critics parade their own ignorance.

So as weve seen, evolutionary biologists think about intelligent design quite a bit (whether its 20 percent of the time, who knows?), and sometimes they get very frustrated about it. They dont like that there are potent challenges to their materialistic origins paradigm. Sometimes it seems they wish ID would just go away. As recent responses indicate, they typically deal with ID in three different ways:

(1) They may pretend that ID challenges dont exist, as Laland et al. (2014) suggested, and Laland (2017) later practiced.

(2) They may put out a fake response, attacking straw men versions of ID, as Giuseppe Longo does.

(3) Writing in BioEssays, Dave Speijer followed approach (2), but added an extra touch of malice by calling for Internet censorship. Thats always an option for dealing with ideas you dislike.

Of course, theres a fourth option. Its a tougher assignment: respond substantively to IDs arguments. If the critics could do that, they probably would.

Photo credit:ThisisEngineering RAEngviaUnsplash.

See the rest here:
Scientist Admits Biologists Are Obsessed with Intelligent Design - Discovery Institute

Mrs. Maryam Rajavi the President-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI)

Mrs. MaryamRajavi, the president-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, sent a videomessageto all Iranianson the eve of the Eid al-Fitr, elaboratingonthetrue meaningof this Eid, which is returning to the humanitysessence, liberty. She alsocommemoratedthememory ofthefounders of the Peoples Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) who were executedon May 25, 1972 and based this organization on sacrifice, selflessness, and honesty.She also condemned the regimes inaction and cover-up intheface of the COVID-19 crisis, which has resulted in nearly 45,000 deaths across Iran, andsheprayed for the speedy recovery ofpatients.

Happy Eid al-Fitrto everyone who fasted during the month of Ramadan and to all my beloved compatriots across Iran and throughout the world.

The historic endowment of the Peoples Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) was the sacrifice of the organizations founders and historical leaders on May 25, 1972.

They were harbingers of freedom and justice and they opened a new chapter in our nations history. They were the great MohammadHanifnejad, Saeed Mohsen, Ali AsgharBadizadegan, and their colleagues MahmoudAsgarizadehandRasoulMeshkinfam.

For members of the PMOI/MEK, Eid al-Fitrrepresents a universal celebration of freedom, and a reunion with the true essence of humanity in confrontation with the rule of the Shah (monarchical dictatorship) and the Sheikh (theocracy).

Although today, our cities and villages are afflicted with tremendous pain and suffering because of the coronavirus outbreak, and although the mullahs religious fascism, repression and poverty are tormenting society, the symphony of liberation can be heard evenin the midst ofthis agony.

Eid al-Fitrbears the promise of victory and is the indispensable destination of our society, whose anger erupted like a volcano during the November 2019 protests.

For our people whose discontent and defiance have been accumulating against the mullahs, day by day under the pressure of the coronavirus crisis, and for the rebellious youth and Resistance Units who are counting down the days to overthrow the mullahs criminal regime, Eid al-Fitris the promise of certain triumph.

Ultimate freedom will come out of the Iranian peoples battle against the regime

In our prayers during Eid al-Fitr, we asked God to save our people out from every misery and misfortune and endow them with goodness and beauty.

The greatest virtue of our time is the full-fledged struggle for the destruction of the evil mullahs regime, who have usurped the Iranian peoples right to sovereignty as well as their freedom.

Eid al-Fitrcelebrates humanity breaking free from chains of coercion and servitude. It is a celebration of the power of humanitys willpower and its capabilities.

Eid al-Fitrshows that a human beings fundamental qualities,consciousnessand the ability to choose, can shape his or her behavior. Human beings are not doomed to arrive at a certain destiny. They are not hapless. They are not doomed to be blind followers. They are not doomed to be seized by their instincts. Human beings have an endless power to build a new world and new relations based on emancipation and equality. They are fully capable of fighting exploitative ideologies and those that run counter to the tide of evolution.

Imam Ali said that the purpose of fasting is not self-mortification or deprivation. It is, rather, akin to waging a type of struggle or battle.

Everyone who fasts and all Muslims must answer this question: fasting is a fight against which forces? The answer is: against forces that deprive human beings of their essential human nature and core identity; forces that take away humanitys combative willpower in the realms of individuality and society, combating against systems and ideologies that enslave human beings. In contemporary times, these forces are personified in the regimes of the Shah and the Sheikh (mullahs).

It is out of this struggle and battle that theFitror true freedom emerges.

So, like otherEids, the message of Eid al-Fitrfocuses on the essence of humanity and the glorious destiny of human beings. The same humanity that during the Eid of Sacrifice (Eid al-Adha) praises its endless ability to make sacrifices.

The same humanity that during the month of Ramadan shows the definitive power of its consciousness and willpower, pledges to write its own fate during the Night ofDestiny, andcelebrates its victory in the Eid al-Fitr.

According to the PMOI/MEK teachings, every Eid represents a return to the soul and coordinating and aligning withit;an evolutionary and conscious return to the origin and fountainhead of liberation and salvation. It is not aboutretreatingor aimless repetition and it is not a vicious circle. Rather, it is all about a tortuous and blood-drenched struggle and an enduring path to shake off all the semblances of alienation and overcome the obstacles of achieving unity and harmony.

This is howhuman kindovercomes divisions and separations, including forms of discriminations based on gender, ethnicity or social classes. In the end, by reining in his cruel instincts, which are common with animals, humanity overcomes the compulsions and paves the way towards a world commanded by consciousness and free choice.Thushumanity unravels the unmatched secret and mystery that defines its divine being.

At the conclusion of the month of Ramadan, everyone, whether they have fasted or not, mustmake a donation.

The donation must be the equivalent of three meals to feed a hungry person. This donation symbolizes a collective pledge to end hunger within society. One can speak of a reunion with humanitys essence only when hunger, poverty and destitution have been eliminated universally.

Khamenei seeks to take advantage of the pandemic to preserve his regime

Sisters and brothers,

Fellow compatriots,

In the great uprising of November 2019, the mullahs clearly saw that their regime is trapped in a vortex of destruction and they have no options to save it from inevitable overthrow.

Therefore, several weeks after the COVID-19 pandemic rapidly spread throughout the country due to the mullahs own inhuman policies, they attempted to conceal the ambers of discontent under the ashes with a thick cover of the coronavirus crisis. They sought to extinguish the blazing flames of the November uprising, with all its 1,500 proud martyrs. They wanted to instill the impression that the social rebellion, which rapidly spread to hundreds of areas across the country, never even happened.

With the outbreak of the pandemic, the mullahs found themselves in an extremely critical position. As the state-run press noted, they clearly saw that the slightest miscalculation in managing the disease would spell an existential catastrophe and they would -- and will -- be the biggest losers of the crisis.

Yes, the mullahs supreme leader sees the eruption of peoples fury and uprising on the horizon.

Therefore, instead of fighting the coronavirus, the first and foremost priority for Khamenei and (his president Hassan) Rouhani became the regimes security.

They refused to allocate the minimum budget for treating patientsin order toavoid the slightest reduction in the financial pot that has been allocated to suppression inside Iran and to warmongering and commission of other crimes in the region.

They refused to use the resources and equipment of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Army for the treatment of patients so that they could have all the resources at hand to preserve the regimes security.

They avoided using even a penny from the wealth accumulated in KhameneisSetad(or Headquarters conglomerate) or other plundering foundations to fight against the pandemic.

Instead, they increased the prices of commodities and food, such as bread. And, they paved the way for the spike in the value of foreign currenciesin order toreplenish the coffers of a bankrupt government.

Indeed, when it came down to a choice between using foreign exchange reserves and other financial sources to avert an economic collapse on the one hand, and sending off underprivileged and hardworking people to production centers on the other hand, the regimes leaders chose the latter option and thus caused a further spread of the disease.

And, as if that is not bad enough, they shamelessly blamed the people themselves for the coronavirus tragedy and scolded the population.

Today, Khuzestan Province has turned into a killing field for the coronavirus. In mid-May, more than 1,000 COVID-19 patients lost their lives in this province, demonstrating just one outcome of the regimes inhuman policy. The clerical regimes officials openly admit that the soaring number of infections began on April 11, when the regime ordered a re-opening.

In reality, Khameneiwants to use the coronavirus crisis as a beneficial parameter to prolong the regimes survival.

For this reason, the mullahs tried to cover up the reality of the enormous and expanding protest movement; they tried to conceal the growing impact of PMOI/MEK Resistance Units and Resistance Councils inside Iran, and they tried to deny that the regime is moving down the irreversible path to being overthrown.

The regimes endless fear of the PMOI and the Iranian Resistance

To achieve these goals, the mullahs carried out a chain of activities and offensives in various arenas. For example:

-- They launched missile attacks against U.S. forces and facilities inIraq;

-- And they launched a satellite into space; and

-- They launched attacks and made widespread arrests of rebellious youths and families and supporters of PMOI/MEK and severely tortured them.

-- They sent their mercenaries to Albania, with a list of 8,000 signatures of so-called families of the PMOI/MEK, whoin the midst ofthe pandemic and social distancing measures, claim that they have missed their parents at Ashraf 3.

The motto of the backward supporters of this circus in foreign countries is Long live the Shah, the same slogan chanted during the 1953 coup (against Dr. MohammadMossadeq), which is an affront to Iranian peoples history and revolution. It is an affront to millions of people who toppled the monarchic dictatorship with the chants of death to the Shah and freed the political prisoners.

The mullahs reactionary and ignorant ideology dates back to 1,400 years ago, but the people of Iran have a longer history of thousands of years, to the days when Kaveh the Blacksmith rose up againstZahhak, the tyrant that had snakes on his shoulders.

The same rings true today. The reality of popular uprisings and resistance cannot be denied, just as the final phase of the regimes life is a formidable reality.

Khameneis remarks on May 22, and earlier on May 17, reflect this truth and the regimes endless fear of the PMOI/MEK and the Iranian Resistance.

On May 17, Khamenei admitted that the regime has not been able to exploit the outbreak for its own benefit, and as an opportunity to prolong its survival. Therefore, he attacked the PMOI/MEK while calling for a youngHezbollahigovernment following in the footsteps of a henchman like Qassem Soleimani.

Khamenei says any form of retreat would be too costly for the regime. This is because he has the experience of the Shahs downfall.

Khamenei pointed to the large number of youth who joined the ranks of the PMOI/MEK after the 1979 revolution. He wanted to focus the attention of his mercenaries on the great threat gripping the regime in the current situation, namely the youths draw and attraction to the PMOI/MEK and Resistance Units.

He urged the regimes forces to draw a solid red line between themselves and supporters of the PMOI/MEK, and to forge a front against them. He said: Do everything you can to expand (the regimes) ranks and recruit, adding: Of course, I do not mean recruiting hypocrites (PMOI/MEK). Yes, the most dangerous name is still the PMOI/MEK and the only red line continues to be drawn against the PMOI/MEK.

Khamenei then warned the regimes forces that they must be careful about the inevitable orientation of protests and uprisings toward the overthrow of the regime, adding: Dont allow demands and protests to be interpreted as a protest against the Islamic system. This is important. Seriously prevent this from happening.

What the regimes tyrant has said represents a political watershed moment. Initially, he wanted to exploit the situation arising from the coronavirus spread as a means of averting the regimes overthrow. Now, he has exposed the discord and divisions at the helm of the regime and is urging the young generation not to support the PMOI/MEK.

Of course, Khamenei himself explicitly said after the November 2019 uprising that the protests had taken on a greater security import due to the presence of the PMOI/MEK and the establishment of Ashraf 3 (in Albania). He claimed that several days before the protests against the spike in gasoline prices broke out in November 2019, the PMOI/MEK met with an American official in this small but sinister, and truly evil, European country and they planned the protests. According to Khamenei, that plan was rolled out several days later during the gasoline price protests. He added that what I mean by saying several days is that the plan was updated in several days, otherwise they had carried out activities before and they had prepared individuals on the ground.

$30B from the Iranian peoples wealth spent on propping up the dictator of Syria

On Friday, May 22, the last Friday during the month of Ramadan, when the regime was forced to scrap its plans to set up the unpopular theatrics of QodsDay, Khamenei maneuvered toward the Palestinian issue and proceeded to unleash a wave of slander and criticism against the late historic leader of Palestine, Yasser Arafat, which is actually a badge of honor and a further testament to Arafats integrity and pride. The criminal supreme leader of the regime praised Hezbollah and Hamas in opposition to Arafat, and openly said that he has drawn up plans to deliver weapons to Hezbollah and Hamas.

This is while the people of Iran chant: Not for Gaza, nor for Lebanon, I sacrifice my life for Iran.

Just recently, the former chairman of the regimes parliamentary Security and Foreign Policy Committee confessed that so far $30B from the Iranian peoples wealth has been spent on propping up the murderous dictator of Syria, and that the regime pockets about 200 billiontomans(roughly $11.5 million) every day as a result of increasing gasoline prices. That is the blood-stained money that was taken by the regime while killing Iranian protesters (in November 2019).

When the number of deaths as a result of coronavirus had just reached 2,000, in his statement on March 7, 2020, the Iranian Resistances LeaderMassoudRajavi declared: Khamenei has to allocate the $100B of wealth in the Setad-eEjraeeFarman-e Imam and the vast funds accumulated in the cooperativesbelonging to the IRGC,Bassij, and State Security Forces (SSF), and in theMostazafanFoundation, as well as the funds that are being spent in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Gaza, and Lebanon, toward providing healthcare to the Iranian people and for the treatment of patients.

He emphasized: The budgets allocated to the regimes nuclear and missile programs and the capital and resources at the hands of the Red Crescent, which has set up numerous locations in the Middle East and Africa in order to advance the regimes reactionary ideology and terrorism objectives, must instead be spent on treating coronavirus patients.

The assets of theAstan-eQodsRazaviin Khorasan province, which has amassed huge wealth and capital by exploiting the name of Imam Reza and obtaining astronomical religious endowments, and which is controlled by Khamenei, can currently pay for the delayed wages and salaries of workers, teachers, and office employees on the eve of the (Persian) New Year, and it can also pay for their treatment.

He added: Prisoners, particularly political prisoners, must immediately be released. This is the only way to prevent a coronavirus catastrophe in the regimes prisons.

The Resistance Units, capable of overthrowing the regime, have exhausted the enemy

Today, after 2.5 monthsand in comparisonwith statistics in early March, the number of coronavirus deaths is 22 times higher. It is immeasurably unfortunate that the number has surpassed 44,000. Observers believe the real figures are much higher.

This is where one can see the regimes final fate and road ahead.

Today,all ofthe causes and factors that triggered the vast November 2019 uprising are not only still in place, but they have been considerably aggravated due to the coronavirus catastrophe and the mullahs inhuman policy response.

The economy is contracting by 9%, the inflation rate ranges from 50% to 60%, the government budget has a 50% deficit, and the devaluation trend of the national currency continues, with the regime slashing four zeros from it. All this indicates that the regimes economy is on the verge of collapse.

Today, the erosion of the regime has not only been reversed, but under the pressure of social protests and political and economic failures, the entirety of the regime has been rendered weak and powerless. Half of Rouhanis government is essentially not operational. The regimes spokesmen and officials cannot do anything other than to lie. Regime institutions are engaged in infighting and quarrels, and Khamenei is setting the stage to take down Rouhanis government.

Today, not only the force capable of overthrowing the regime has not been stopped even after being subjected to numerous suppressive measures and arrests, but it has rather multiplied among the younger generations, and its fighting spirit shown in Resistance Units has exhausted the enemy.

Yes, the mullahs have failed to exploit the coronavirus situation and the peoples poverty and destitution to hide the fact that they are on the verge of being overthrown.

TheFitrof the Iranian peoples liberation

Sisters and brothers,today is May 24.

It is the 48th anniversary of the year that (PMOI founders)Hanifnejadand his friends became eternal. While this day is drenched in blood, it contains the cornerstone for theFitrof liberation for the Iranian people.

The bullets that were fired at the most loving spirits of our time in that blood-stained dawn sparked a vast fury that ultimately brought down the Shahs dictatorship.

We renew our endless praise for MohammadHanifnejad, Saeed Mohsen, Ali AsgharBadizadegan, MahmoudAsgarizadehandAbdol-RasoulMeshkinfam, who were all executed by a firing squad of the Shahs regime in 1972.

The Shah could never imagine of the social whirlwind that would result from these executions in Iran. Similarly, even though the mullahs have put in practice all the lessons learned from the experience of the Shah in order to prevent their own downfall, but after the execution and massacre of the PMOI/MEK and murdering of rebellious youth, they have eliminated all other options for their miserable rule and have instead opened the path toward their ultimate overthrow.

It was in that tumultuous and blood-drenched spring in 1972 that Massoud assured Hanifnejadthat his generation will persevere.

And, since then,Massoudhas endured the great suffering associated with the perseverance and salvation of this generation and this Resistance, thereby guaranteeing its victory,freedomand bright future.

Yes, today, it is this rebellious and enthusiastic generation and Resistance Units who have forged their iron resolveeven more, andhaverisen upto overthrow the religious fascism.

Now, it is time for us to spread the flames of resistance and hope everywhere, ensuring that these flames burn ever brighter.

That is how theFitrof the Iranian peoples liberation will arrive, and that is how freedom will dawn on Iran.

Hail to freedom

Hail to the Iranian people

Read this article:
Maryam Rajavi's Message on Eid Al-Fitr: Iran Will Be Free From the Yoke of the Mullahs' Tyranny - NCRI - National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI)