Philz Coffee CEO Jacob Jaber hopes to conquer all of America with his slow serve, pour-over coffee, a favorite of the Silicon Valley tech set. But despite a recent infusion of cash, his projected takeover will be deliberate and methodical.
In an interview last week, Jaber said that his company had raised $45 million in a round led by private equity firm TPG. He declined to give a valuation for the San Francisco-based chain of java houses, but said that the money will be used as part of an on-going effort to push his family's business outside of the Bay Area. By 2017, Philz will have stores in Boston, according to Jaber, its second East Coast market after its expansion into Washington, D.C. earlier this year.
"To grow and reach new milestones, you have to have capital and have great people behind you," he said. "We have productive paranoia. We’re always thinking ahead."
In Silicon Valley, it's become the norm for any fast-growing company to take on investment from venture capital and private equity firms and coffee shops have been no different. Oakland-based Blue Bottle has raised more than $120 million, which included a $75 million round in early 2015, while other smaller companies inlcuding Sightglass Coffee, count heavyweights such as Jack Dorsey among their investors.
With the latest round, Philz, which began out of a Mission district corner market in 2002, has raised a total of $75 million and built out 34 locations in the last 15 years. By the end of 2017, Jaber and his father Phil, who founded the company, aim to have more about 50 locations across four major metropolitan markets.
Like most tech CEOs looking to project confidence, Jaber said that the company "didn't need to go out and raise new money," but took the opportunity to "accelerate growth" after meeting with TPG in May. The firm, whose partners often frequented a Philz truck outside their office, had followed the brand for years, and was introduced to the Jabers through Philz board member and former Apple executive Ron Johnson. TPG's Sanjay Banker, who is now on the board with fellow partner Jim Coulter, would go on to spend more than 100 hours over the summer with Jacob, learning of Philz' business and eventually investing.
Jaber said that the firm's with experience with retail and consumer companies, such as J. Crew and Burger King, will help in sussing out future business opportunities, but stressed that Philz was far from selling out. He and his father still maintain voting control over the company, and he will not permit practices that he feels are antithetical to Philz' focus on product quality, including franchising and licensing goods to other retail locations.
While that may prevent it from becoming a close competitor to Starbucks in the near term, the calculated approach to expansion may translate to longevity for a business that is doing more than $50 million in sales a year by FORBES estimates. Instead of opening any store anywhere, the Jabers have focused on affluent, metro areas, preferring to establish multiple Philz locations in a given region, before focusing on the next city. In Los Angeles, the company will soon open its fifth and sixth shops in the span of two years, while the two current D.C. stores will soon have neighboring locations in Maryland and Virginia.
Boston is Philz' next target, said Jaber, who cited the city's young, college-aged demographic as its main attraction. While the town is the home of Dunkin' Donuts, Philz CEO noted that there's opportunity for a higher-end coffee chain to coexist with other established players.
"We know and we respect local brands but what we’re trying to do is something different," he said. "It's a different environment and a different culture. We don’t spend time focusing on them."


Jose Canseco still can crush a baseball.
It’s sometimes hard to take Canseco seriously, especially on Twitter or when he’s lobbying for a major league return. But the 51-year-old remains passionate about baseball. And on Saturday, he stopped by Dr Pepper Ballpark — home of the Double-A Frisco RoughRiders — to take a few cuts.
Canseco, who last played in the majors in 2001, was expected to challenge local sluggers in an attempt to break his own world record for the longest softball home run of 622 feet, according to a story published last week on the RoughRiders’ website. It’s unclear whether he followed through with that plan or came close to matching the record, but the six-time All-Star and two-time American League home run leader proved capable of clearing the fence.
He even pulled a Babe Ruth and called his shot in one instance, though it probably would have been even more entertaining if the RoughRiders asked Canseco to shag fly balls instead.
23 years ago today I bounced a homer off my head .


An $800 million computer hack had everything going for it but a proofreader. Reuters is reporting that a simple spelling error was the only thing that stopped thieves from snatching the better part of a billion dollars out of the Bangladesh Bank’s computer systems. Even at that, they did get away with more than $80 million, making this one of the largest bank robberies in history.
The crooks had first stolen the bank’s credentials for making payment transfers, then began sending requests to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to send money to a variety of destinations in the Philippines and Sri Lanka, including an apparently fictional NGO called the Shalika Foundation. The red flag went up when one of those requests directed money to the Shalika “Fandation,” and Deutsche Bank (through which the request was routed) checked in with the Bangladesh Bank for clarification. At the same time, the Fed had been getting suspicious over the number of transfers to private entities, as opposed to other banks, and stopped the rest of the transactions. One official said that, had the scheme not been caught, the loss could have reached $870 million.


She had jabbed pencils into her eyes to try to kill herself.
When the woman was brought to a Los Angeles County emergency room in 2012 alive and in pain, a hospital employee snapped a photograph, breaking a federal patient privacy law.
Two years later, when that photograph appeared on a website that features gory images, the patient’s medical information had been shared publicly, violating a state regulation.
The woman’s story is extreme, but her experience is an example of how her privacy was violated and her medical data breached. Both crimes, which are on the rise, can lead to identity theft or to misuse of information by health insurance companies, said Pam Dixon, executive director of the San Diego-based World Privacy Forum.
California state law requires hospitals to report breaches of patient medical data. The number of incidents investigated by the California Department of Public Health rose to 4,213 last year, or an 81 percent increase from 2009 when there were 2,333 cases.
On a federal level, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 or HIPAA is supposed to ensure privacy and confidentiality of identifiable health information among other protections.
But complaints filed with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services have risen steadily. In 2013, there were 12,915 complaints filed across the nation, nearly double the number filed in 2004. Dixon said that under the Affordable Care Act all hospitals, clinics and physicians were pushed to digitize medical records to boost efficiency. But not enough has been done to ensure privacy, which in turn places consumers at risk.
The vast majority of breaches investigated by the California Department of Public Health involve unintentional disclosures of medical information that would include documents that are delivered, mailed or faxed to an unintended recipient, state officials said.
Health department officials said they could not comment on what individuals do with medical information that is accessed without authorization because there are too many different scenarios.
“However, many unintentional breaches that we have investigated involve an unauthorized access of medical information that does not result in any further use or disclosure of this information,” according to a California Department of Public Health statement.
Notable and extreme cases involving celebrities have put a spotlight on the problem and led to the establishment of a hefty penalty system. In 2011, UCLA agreed to pay a penalty of $865,500 as part of a settlement with federal regulators after Farrah Fawcett and another celebrity patient alleged that hospital employees reviewed their medical records without authorization. Later in 2011, UCLA was sued for violating a California law after burglars took a laptop from a physician’s home that contained the medical records and other personal information belonging to 16,000 patients.
In another case that year involving social media, officials with Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills dismissed an employee hired from a staffing agency for posting a patient’s medical information on his Facebook page, apparently to make fun of the woman’s name and her medical condition.
And this fall, two nurses were fired from the Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha after they allegedly looked at the medical file of an American aid worker infected with Ebola, according to published reports. Officials at the hospital told reporters that an audit of the hospital’s electronic medical records led to the discovery that two employees had inappropriately accessed Dr. Rick Sacra’s file and that their actions violated federal patient privacy regulations.
Bayer said hospitals have expensive software in place that allows staff only at specific levels to access certain records. And there are other controls in place, such as staff watching over staff.
“Some programs are robust and some are very expensive, but that’s what hospitals are trying to do, especially with high-profile patients, such as those with Ebola or celebrities,” Bayer said.
But there are challenges. Physicians are able to access medical records outside the hospital. There are concerns about laptops that are stolen, which also has happened.
The woman who tried to kill herself by plunging pencils in her eyes has since received psychiatric help, has learned Braille and is taking college classes. But when she learned that her image had become public, she became distressed, her attorney said in a recent complaint filed against Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center. The woman is suing the hospital and those involved for inflicting emotional distress and for breaching her personal medical records. The complaint outlines how a nurse took a photograph of the woman, dubbed Jane Doe. The photo was passed on to another woman whose son then obtained the image and posted it twice on the Internet.
Dixon, of the World Privacy Forum,said such inappropriate behavior among medical staff is rare, and most hospitals work hard to comply with the law. But once a medical file is breached or a patient’s information is leaked, it can be too late.


US president says use of drones is "kept on very tight leash" in rare acknowledgement of controversial missile strikes.
US President Barack Obama has confirmed that unmanned drones have regularly struck Pakistan’s tribal areas in his government’s efforts to dismantle what it alleges are al-Qaeda sanctuaries in the region.
Obama's rare public acknowledgement of the US drone programme in Pakistan came on Monday during an hour-long online video chat with users of the Google social network.
Obama said the strikes were a “targeted focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists”.
The president said “a lot” of the strikes had targeted "al-Qaeda suspects who are up in very tough terrain” in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), along the border with Afghanistan, long believed to be a hub of activity for armed groups.
The controversial drone programme run by the CIA has often been met with protests in Pakistan amid concerns of civilian casualties. The Pakistani government publicly protests the operations, but is believed to support them.
A spokesperson for Pakistan's foreign ministry reiterated the government's public protest in response to Obama's comments.
"Notwithstanding tactical advantages of drone strikes, we are of the firm view that these are unlawful, counterproductive and hence unacceptable," Abdul Basit said.
The New America Foundation, a think tank in Washington, says drone strikes in Pakistan have killed between 1,715 and 2,680 people in the past eight years.
According to the AFP news agency, the number of missiles that struck the tribal region went down from 101 in 2010 to 64 in 2011.
Amnesty International, the UK-based rights group, called for the US to pay closer attention to the Pakistani civilians being killed by drones.
"The US authorities must give a detailed explanation of how these strikes are lawful and what is being done to monitor civilian casualties and ensure proper accountability," Sam Zarifi Amnesty International's Asia-Pacific director, said.
"What are the rules of engagement? What proper legal justification exists for these attacks? While the President's confirmation of the use of drones in Pakistan is a welcome first step towards transparency, these and other questions need to be answered."
Obama, however, played down the use of drones in Iraq, saying the programme was very limited and focused mainly on protecting the US embassy in Baghdad.
"The truth is we're not engaging in a bunch of drone attacks inside Iraq. There's some surveillance to make sure that our embassy compound is protected."
Earlier, the New York Times newspaper had reported that the increasing use of drones in Iraq had outraged Iraqi officials.
The paper, citing a senior US official, said the US government was in talks with the Iraqi authorities, seeking authorisation for the drone operations. But it quoted three Iraqi officials saying they were unaware of such efforts.
"I think that there's this perception that we're just sending in a whole bunch of strikes willy nilly," Obama added. "It is important for everybody to understand that this is kept on a very tight leash."


Tibetan farmers demand their freedom in writer-director Tian Tsering’s first feature.
Not just another immigrant story, Tian Tsering’s sober vision of Tibetan peasants living under Chinese rule, Barley Fields on the Other Side of the Mountain, draws its power from its direct and straightforward storytelling. The heroine is a headstrong 16-year-old girl who labors away in her family’s barley fields, until the day her father is arrested. Her wrenching search for him and quest for her own freedom point at a one-way, no-return trek to India that implies never seeing part of her family again.
Tucked away in the Mumbai Film Festival’s world cinema section, this first feature describes the quiet rebellion of the farmers with a startling frankness that should grab festival attention and play meaningfully to special-interest groups. Tsering, a talented Chinese expat director, wrote the screenplay in film school with Beru Tessema. Though unable to shoot in Tibet itself, he tracked down authentic refugees in Dharamsala, India, where the Dalai Lama lives in exile surrounded by tens of thousands of Tibetans who have fled their homeland. The film brings out the personal costs, suffering and risks they took.
With her red cheeks, flying braids and long dress, barley harvester Pema (played with spunky naturalness by non-pro Tsering Choekyi) seems to have stepped out of the pages of a National Geographic spread. Her remote village atop a big gray mountain appears idyllic and impregnable, but this doesn’t protect her family from the Chinese soldiers who come to arrest Pema's beloved father. He has been glimpsed leading clandestine free-Tibet meetings, and when he is roughly taken away, Pema’s world is shattered.
Her tough-minded mother is busy with her younger siblings and unresponsive to Pema’s anxiety, but the girl finds some consolation at a local Buddhist convent. One of the shaven-headed, red-robed nuns, Choeden (Jamyang Choezom), comforts her with the thought that even the nuns are sometimes taken in for questioning and re-education, but they do come back.
But her father, who is honored in the village as a great man fighting to free Tibet, does not return. Whether out of despair, hero worship or budding ideological conviction, Pema makes up her mind to leave home and join Choeden and others on a long walk to freedom. They plan to cross the mountains on foot to reach Nepal in a month, then push on to India in the shadow of the huge peaks, braving the cold and starvation. She doesn't realize that the main danger of the journey is being caught by the Chinese border guards, who are fully armed.
The story moves briskly and little time is spent probing the heroine’s psychology or exploring her father’s political ideas and goals, which can sometimes make the film seem a bit flimsy. On one hand, much of its realism comes from Tsering’s choice to use a quasi-documentary style of shooting in which the camera, usually fixed to one spot, is a neutral observer. A repeated shot of the family having dinner around a heater mixes silence with bursts of natural conversation. But this apparent neutrality leaves a lot of interpretation up to the viewer; for example, the tense relationship between Pema and her mother, who is never seen without a baby in her arms.
A more communicative character is Choeden the nun, whose spiritual side takes a backseat to her political fervor. While Pema’s rebellious behavior has made her something of an outcast in the village, Choeden is drawn to her, in part because she views her father as a great freedom fighter and wants Pema to emulate him. Considering that even a picture of the Dalai Lama used during prayers in the house has to be hidden away, and that the risky freedom treks to Nepal and India originate at the convent, one can see the thread linking the Buddhists to passive rebellion.
A great sense of silence and majesty emerge from Jigment Wangchuk’s cinematography on location in the Spiti Valley high in India’s Himalayas, the towering rock faces enveloped in a gentle ivory light. The musical commentary is drawn from a variety of contrasting sources that add depth, whether it is cello and strings or the sad twang of traditional Chinese songs.


Speaker of the National Assembly, Dr. Barton Scotland yesterday refused to reverse his recognition of the December 21 no-confidence motion which triggered the fall of the government and said he had envisaged discussions between APNU+AFC and the opposition on “the most propitious manner in which effect can be given to the provisions of the Constitution”.
The provisions in question require the resignation of Cabinet inclusive of the President and the holding of general elections in 90 days.
Immediately after the Speaker’s ruling yesterday, Attorney General Basil Williams SC signalled government’s intention to approach the courts as early as today to challenge the validity of former MP Charrandas Persaud’s vote and to seek an order staying the holding of general elections within the legally stipulated 90 days.
The assembly without PPP/C members.
Just before allowing the business of the National Assembly to go on in keeping with the Order Paper, Scotland pronounced on the consequences of the vote. While contending that he did have the authority to reverse the ruling, he expressed the view that it is a matter that should be dealt with by the courts.
“…the Speaker on this occasion and without more, declines the invitation to act in reversal. Full, final and complete settlement of these issues by a Court of competent jurisdiction will place beyond doubt any question which may exist and serve to give guidance to the Speaker and to the National Assembly for the future,” he said in a statement which was read to the House.
As was expected, the Opposition PPP/C’s benches were empty yesterday.
Scotland after reminding the House about the events which led him to rule that the motion which was brought by the PPP/C was carried, said that the provisions of the Constitution envisage discussions between the Government and the Opposition to find the most propitious manner in which effect can be given to the provisions of the Constitution. He cited Article 106(7) which speaks to the holding of elections after the passage of a no confidence vote.
Noting that he had hoped to speak to the members about the discussion between the two sides, Scotland reminded that following his ruling the leaders of both sides of the House spoke of respect for one another and of the opportunity which the result of the vote offers both sides.
Since December 21, the government has made no attempt to engage the PPP/C on the consequences of the vote, preferring instead to challenge its legitimacy. Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo had requested a meeting with President David Granger on this matter. A meeting is scheduled for January 9th – 18 days following the passage of the motion and expected resignation of cabinet.
Scotland informed that during the last week, he had received from diverse sources, information, both solicited and unsolicited, supported by Case law and Practice emanating from other jurisdictions which has raised doubts as to whether the No-confidence Motion was carried, and properly so, by the margin of the vote.
According to Scotland the information which he had received raises two issues. The first of these issues included a claim supported by several cases that the requirement for the successful passing of a No-confidence Motion is a majority of the elected members of the National Assembly.
That majority, it is contended, was to be formed by a mathematical half of the elected membership of the National Assembly which is 65 plus the vote of one other member, he said adding that such a formula would require a majority of 34 votes instead of 33 by which the No-confidence motion was declared carried.
He went on to state that in furthering this argument it was contended that Article 168 of the Constitution which provides that “…all questions proposed for decision in the National Assembly shall be determined by a majority of the votes of the members present and voting” is different from and does not include provisions relevant to a No-confidence motion since that is separately provided for in Article 106(6) of the Constitution.
The second issue and one of equal importance for the National Assembly and its procedures, he said is Persaud’s conduct.
Persaud who has since been ejected from the Alliance for Change, a main party in the coalition government ,defected and voted `yes’ to the motion. As such Scotland ruled it was carried 33 votes to 32.
Scotland told the House yesterday that it is being contended that Persaud was not a qualified elected member of the National Assembly and so is not entitled to vote, in that he is a citizen of a foreign country and has taken active steps to so exercise that status. It is further contended that he being an elected member of the National Assembly through a list could not abandon that list and support another and still retain the status of an elected member, he said before adding that these matters require urgent attention since the motion was passed by a vote of 33 to 32 and the now former member of Parliament took part in the vote for the majority.
According to Scotland, that certain and finite answers to these questions are necessary, goes without saying and it should be a concern of all members that such answers are obtained.
Scotland stated that he is empowered with the authority to reverse the ruling on the motion. This has been disputed by others.
“It is perhaps useful Honourable Members to let you know that the authority with which the Speaker is clothed enables him to revisit any Ruling which he has rendered and if in doing so he forms the opinion that the Ruling should not stand, he may reverse his Ruling. The only limitation on the action of the Speaker in this regard is the requirement that the Speaker must at all times act in full obedience to the Constitution which is the Supreme Law of Guyana. It is the Constitutionality of action which must at all times guide and direct the Speaker,” he said.
This statement would seem to suggest that he didn’t think the government had sufficient grounds and this may also be a hurdle in the courts.
Further, Scotland pointed out that it has been his preference and practice to endeavour to find resolution of any issue which may affect the procedures and practice of Parliament without third party intervention. “I must tell you Honourable Members that the issues which we now face cause us to look outside of Parliament to find answers,” he stressed.
As Scotland spoke a smiling Williams could be seen nodding his head in agreement. The other government MPs did not react as he did but rather sat listening attentively.
Scotland pointed out that the issues over which many have expressed concern require “final determination” which will place the interpretation and import of the particular provisions of the Constitution beyond doubt.
Williams later expressed satisfaction with the Speaker’s position and said that government is prepared to go all the way to the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ).
He explained that government’s case will be two-fold and will include a stay of execution to stop the holding of elections in 90 days as stated in the Constitution. “I don’t see how we could go to court and not preserve the status quo so we have to preserve the status quo until the court finishes with the matter,” he said.
According to Williams the first action which will deal with the disqualification of Persaud from the voting process given his dual citizenship, will be filed by Senior Counsel Rex McKay sometime today. Stabroek News has since learnt that the documents have already been prepared and that they will be filed at the High Court first thing this morning.
He said that the other matter will deal with the majority argument.
The Attorney General could not predict the duration of time that the matter would be engaging the attention of the various courts but stressed that government has a good case. “…Rest assured, it’s just like the two terms case. Why fuss?” he stressed before adding that there is enough time for the case to be determined by the various courts.
Williams stressed on the need for political cooperation and said that it was always a concept he supported. Asked about the ingredients that are needed to cultivate an environment for this to take place, Williams said that he did not want to preempt anything. “The president is meeting with the Leader of the Opposition so I don’t wish to say anything about that,” while adding that the meeting is set to take place soon.
Williams declined to comment on whether the two could agree to call off the court action. He reiterated that he did not wish to preempt anything and maintained this position when pressed further.


In theory, statistics should help settle arguments. They ought to provide stable reference points that everyone – no matter what their politics – can agree on. Yet in recent years, divergent levels of trust in statistics has become one of the key schisms that have opened up in western liberal democracies. Shortly before the November presidential election, a study in the US discovered that 68% of Trump supporters distrusted the economic data published by the federal government. In the UK, a research project by Cambridge University and YouGov looking at conspiracy theories discovered that 55% of the population believes that the government “is hiding the truth about the number of immigrants living here”.
Rather than diffusing controversy and polarisation, it seems as if statistics are actually stoking them. Antipathy to statistics has become one of the hallmarks of the populist right, with statisticians and economists chief among the various “experts” that were ostensibly rejected by voters in 2016. Not only are statistics viewed by many as untrustworthy, there appears to be something almost insulting or arrogant about them. Reducing social and economic issues to numerical aggregates and averages seems to violate some people’s sense of political decency.
Nowhere is this more vividly manifest than with immigration. The thinktank British Future has studied how best to win arguments in favour of immigration and multiculturalism. One of its main findings is that people often respond warmly to qualitative evidence, such as the stories of individual migrants and photographs of diverse communities. But statistics – especially regarding alleged benefits of migration to Britain’s economy – elicit quite the opposite reaction. People assume that the numbers are manipulated and dislike the elitism of resorting to quantitative evidence. Presented with official estimates of how many immigrants are in the country illegally, a common response is to scoff. Far from increasing support for immigration, British Future found, pointing to its positive effect on GDP can actually make people more hostile to it. GDP itself has come to seem like a Trojan horse for an elitist liberal agenda. Sensing this, politicians have now largely abandoned discussing immigration in economic terms.
All of this presents a serious challenge for liberal democracy. Put bluntly, the British government – its officials, experts, advisers and many of its politicians – does believe that immigration is on balance good for the economy. The British government did believe that Brexit was the wrong choice. The problem is that the government is now engaged in self-censorship, for fear of provoking people further.
This is an unwelcome dilemma. Either the state continues to make claims that it believes to be valid and is accused by sceptics of propaganda, or else, politicians and officials are confined to saying what feels plausible and intuitively true, but may ultimately be inaccurate. Either way, politics becomes mired in accusations of lies and cover-ups.
The declining authority of statistics – and the experts who analyse them – is at the heart of the crisis that has become known as “post-truth” politics. And in this uncertain new world, attitudes towards quantitative expertise have become increasingly divided. From one perspective, grounding politics in statistics is elitist, undemocratic and oblivious to people’s emotional investments in their community and nation. It is just one more way that privileged people in London, Washington DC or Brussels seek to impose their worldview on everybody else. From the opposite perspective, statistics are quite the opposite of elitist. They enable journalists, citizens and politicians to discuss society as a whole, not on the basis of anecdote, sentiment or prejudice, but in ways that can be validated. The alternative to quantitative expertise is less likely to be democracy than an unleashing of tabloid editors and demagogues to provide their own “truth” of what is going on across society.
Is there a way out of this polarisation? Must we simply choose between a politics of facts and one of emotions, or is there another way of looking at this situation? One way is to view statistics through the lens of their history. We need to try and see them for what they are: neither unquestionable truths nor elite conspiracies, but rather as tools designed to simplify the job of government, for better or worse. Viewed historically, we can see what a crucial role statistics have played in our understanding of nation states and their progress. This raises the alarming question of how – if at all – we will continue to have common ideas of society and collective progress, should statistics fall by the wayside.
In the second half of the 17th century, in the aftermath of prolonged and bloody conflicts, European rulers adopted an entirely new perspective on the task of government, focused upon demographic trends – an approach made possible by the birth of modern statistics. Since ancient times, censuses had been used to track population size, but these were costly and laborious to carry out and focused on citizens who were considered politically important (property-owning men), rather than society as a whole. Statistics offered something quite different, transforming the nature of politics in the process.
Statistics were designed to give an understanding of a population in its entirety, rather than simply to pinpoint strategically valuable sources of power and wealth. In the early days, this didn’t always involve producing numbers. In Germany, for example (from where we get the term Statistik) the challenge was to map disparate customs, institutions and laws across an empire of hundreds of micro-states. What characterised this knowledge as statistical was its holistic nature: it aimed to produce a picture of the nation as a whole. Statistics would do for populations what cartography did for territory.
Equally significant was the inspiration of the natural sciences. Thanks to standardised measures and mathematical techniques, statistical knowledge could be presented as objective, in much the same way as astronomy. Pioneering English demographers such as William Petty and John Graunt adapted mathematical techniques to estimate population changes, for which they were hired by Oliver Cromwell and Charles II.
The emergence in the late 17th century of government advisers claiming scientific authority, rather than political or military acumen, represents the origins of the “expert” culture now so reviled by populists. These path-breaking individuals were neither pure scholars nor government officials, but hovered somewhere between the two. They were enthusiastic amateurs who offered a new way of thinking about populations that privileged aggregates and objective facts. Thanks to their mathematical prowess, they believed they could calculate what would otherwise require a vast census to discover.
There was initially only one client for this type of expertise, and the clue is in the word “statistics”. Only centralised nation states had the capacity to collect data across large populations in a standardised fashion and only states had any need for such data in the first place. Over the second half of the 18th century, European states began to collect more statistics of the sort that would appear familiar to us today. Casting an eye over national populations, states became focused upon a range of quantities: births, deaths, baptisms, marriages, harvests, imports, exports, price fluctuations. Things that would previously have been registered locally and variously at parish level became aggregated at a national level.
New techniques were developed to represent these indicators, which exploited both the vertical and horizontal dimensions of the page, laying out data in matrices and tables, just as merchants had done with the development of standardised book-keeping techniques in the late 15th century. Organising numbers into rows and columns offered a powerful new way of displaying the attributes of a given society. Large, complex issues could now be surveyed simply by scanning the data laid out geometrically across a single page.
These innovations carried extraordinary potential for governments. By simplifying diverse populations down to specific indicators, and displaying them in suitable tables, governments could circumvent the need to acquire broader detailed local and historical insight. Of course, viewed from a different perspective, this blindness to local cultural variability is precisely what makes statistics vulgar and potentially offensive. Regardless of whether a given nation had any common cultural identity, statisticians would assume some standard uniformity or, some might argue, impose that uniformity upon it.
Despite these criticisms, the aspiration to depict a society in its entirety, and to do so in an objective fashion, has meant that various progressive ideals have been attached to statistics. The image of statistics as a dispassionate science of society is only one part of the story. The other part is about how powerful political ideals became invested in these techniques: ideals of “evidence-based policy”, rationality, progress and nationhood grounded in facts, rather than in romanticised stories.
Since the high-point of the Enlightenment in the late 18th century, liberals and republicans have invested great hope that national measurement frameworks could produce a more rational politics, organised around demonstrable improvements in social and economic life. The great theorist of nationalism, Benedict Anderson, famously described nations as “imagined communities”, but statistics offer the promise of anchoring this imagination in something tangible. Equally, they promise to reveal what historical path the nation is on: what kind of progress is occurring? How rapidly? For Enlightenment liberals, who saw nations as moving in a single historical direction, this question was crucial.
The potential of statistics to reveal the state of the nation was seized in post-revolutionary France. The Jacobin state set about imposing a whole new framework of national measurement and national data collection. The world’s first official bureau of statistics was opened in Paris in 1800. Uniformity of data collection, overseen by a centralised cadre of highly educated experts, was an integral part of the ideal of a centrally governed republic, which sought to establish a unified, egalitarian society.
From the Enlightenment onwards, statistics played an increasingly important role in the public sphere, informing debate in the media, providing social movements with evidence they could use. Over time, the production and analysis of such data became less dominated by the state. Academic social scientists began to analyse data for their own purposes, often entirely unconnected to government policy goals. By the late 19th century, reformers such as Charles Booth in London and WEB Du Bois in Philadelphia were conducting their own surveys to understand urban poverty.
To recognise how statistics have been entangled in notions of national progress, consider the case of GDP. GDP is an estimate of the sum total of a nation’s consumer spending, government spending, investments and trade balance (exports minus imports), which is represented in a single number. This is fiendishly difficult to get right, and efforts to calculate this figure began, like so many mathematical techniques, as a matter of marginal, somewhat nerdish interest during the 1930s. It was only elevated to a matter of national political urgency by the second world war, when governments needed to know whether the national population was producing enough to keep up the war effort. In the decades that followed, this single indicator, though never without its critics, took on a hallowed political status, as the ultimate barometer of a government’s competence. Whether GDP is rising or falling is now virtually a proxy for whether society is moving forwards or backwards.
Or take the example of opinion polling, an early instance of statistical innovation occurring in the private sector. During the 1920s, statisticians developed methods for identifying a representative sample of survey respondents, so as to glean the attitudes of the public as a whole. This breakthrough, which was first seized upon by market researchers, soon led to the birth of the opinion polling. This new industry immediately became the object of public and political fascination, as the media reported on what this new science told us about what “women” or “Americans” or “manual labourers” thought about the world.
Nowadays, the flaws of polling are endlessly picked apart. But this is partly due to the tremendous hopes that have been invested in polling since its origins. It is only to the extent that we believe in mass democracy that we are so fascinated or concerned by what the public thinks. But for the most part it is thanks to statistics, and not to democratic institutions as such, that we can know what the public thinks about specific issues. We underestimate how much of our sense of “the public interest” is rooted in expert calculation, as opposed to democratic institutions.
As indicators of health, prosperity, equality, opinion and quality of life have come to tell us who we are collectively and whether things are getting better or worse, politicians have leaned heavily on statistics to buttress their authority. Often, they lean too heavily, stretching evidence too far, interpreting data too loosely, to serve their cause. But that is an inevitable hazard of the prevalence of numbers in public life, and need not necessarily trigger the type of wholehearted rejections of expertise that we have witnessed recently.
In many ways, the contemporary populist attack on “experts” is born out of the same resentment as the attack on elected representatives. In talking of society as a whole, in seeking to govern the economy as a whole, both politicians and technocrats are believed to have “lost touch” with how it feels to be a single citizen in particular. Both statisticians and politicians have fallen into the trap of “seeing like a state”, to use a phrase from the anarchist political thinker James C Scott. Speaking scientifically about the nation – for instance in terms of macroeconomics – is an insult to those who would prefer to rely on memory and narrative for their sense of nationhood, and are sick of being told that their “imagined community” does not exist.
On the other hand, statistics (together with elected representatives) performed an adequate job of supporting a credible public discourse for decades if not centuries. What changed?
The crisis of statistics is not quite as sudden as it might seem. For roughly 450 years, the great achievement of statisticians has been to reduce the complexity and fluidity of national populations into manageable, comprehensible facts and figures. Yet in recent decades, the world has changed dramatically, thanks to the cultural politics that emerged in the 1960s and the reshaping of the global economy that began soon after. It is not clear that the statisticians have always kept pace with these changes. Traditional forms of statistical classification and definition are coming under strain from more fluid identities, attitudes and economic pathways. Efforts to represent demographic, social and economic changes in terms of simple, well-recognised indicators are losing legitimacy.
Consider the changing political and economic geography of nation states over the past 40 years. The statistics that dominate political debate are largely national in character: poverty levels, unemployment, GDP, net migration. But the geography of capitalism has been pulling in somewhat different directions. Plainly globalisation has not rendered geography irrelevant. In many cases it has made the location of economic activity far more important, exacerbating the inequality between successful locations (such as London or San Francisco) and less successful locations (such as north-east England or the US rust belt). The key geographic units involved are no longer nation states. Rather, it is cities, regions or individual urban neighbourhoods that are rising and falling.
The Enlightenment ideal of the nation as a single community, bound together by a common measurement framework, is harder and harder to sustain. If you live in one of the towns in the Welsh valleys that was once dependent on steel manufacturing or mining for jobs, politicians talking of how “the economy” is “doing well” are likely to breed additional resentment. From that standpoint, the term “GDP” fails to capture anything meaningful or credible.
When macroeconomics is used to make a political argument, this implies that the losses in one part of the country are offset by gains somewhere else. Headline-grabbing national indicators, such as GDP and inflation, conceal all sorts of localised gains and losses that are less commonly discussed by national politicians. Immigration may be good for the economy overall, but this does not mean that there are no local costs at all. So when politicians use national indicators to make their case, they implicitly assume some spirit of patriotic mutual sacrifice on the part of voters: you might be the loser on this occasion, but next time you might be the beneficiary. But what if the tables are never turned? What if the same city or region wins over and over again, while others always lose? On what principle of give and take is that justified?
In Europe, the currency union has exacerbated this problem. The indicators that matter to the European Central Bank (ECB), for example, are those representing half a billion people. The ECB is concerned with the inflation or unemployment rate across the eurozone as if it were a single homogeneous territory, at the same time as the economic fate of European citizens is splintering in different directions, depending on which region, city or neighbourhood they happen to live in. Official knowledge becomes ever more abstracted from lived experience, until that knowledge simply ceases to be relevant or credible.
The privileging of the nation as the natural scale of analysis is one of the inbuilt biases of statistics that years of economic change has eaten away at. Another inbuilt bias that is coming under increasing strain is classification. Part of the job of statisticians is to classify people by putting them into a range of boxes that the statistician has created: employed or unemployed, married or unmarried, pro-Europe or anti-Europe. So long as people can be placed into categories in this way, it becomes possible to discern how far a given classification extends across the population.
This can involve somewhat reductive choices. To count as unemployed, for example, a person has to report to a survey that they are involuntarily out of work, even if it may be more complicated than that in reality. Many people move in and out of work all the time, for reasons that might have as much to do with health and family needs as labour market conditions. But thanks to this simplification, it becomes possible to identify the rate of unemployment across the population as a whole.
Here’s a problem, though. What if many of the defining questions of our age are not answerable in terms of the extent of people encompassed, but the intensity with which people are affected? Unemployment is one example. The fact that Britain got through the Great Recession of 2008-13 without unemployment rising substantially is generally viewed as a positive achievement. But the focus on “unemployment” masked the rise of underemployment, that is, people not getting a sufficient amount of work or being employed at a level below that which they are qualified for. This currently accounts for around 6% of the “employed” labour force. Then there is the rise of the self-employed workforce, where the divide between “employed” and “involuntarily unemployed” makes little sense.
This is not a criticism of bodies such as the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which does now produce data on underemployment. But so long as politicians continue to deflect criticism by pointing to the unemployment rate, the experiences of those struggling to get enough work or to live on their wages go unrepresented in public debate. It wouldn’t be all that surprising if these same people became suspicious of policy experts and the use of statistics in political debate, given the mismatch between what politicians say about the labour market and the lived reality.
The rise of identity politics since the 1960s has put additional strain on such systems of classification. Statistical data is only credible if people will accept the limited range of demographic categories that are on offer, which are selected by the expert not the respondent. But where identity becomes a political issue, people demand to define themselves on their own terms, where gender, sexuality, race or class is concerned.
Opinion polling may be suffering for similar reasons. Polls have traditionally captured people’s attitudes and preferences, on the reasonable assumption that people will behave accordingly. But in an age of declining political participation, it is not enough simply to know which box someone would prefer to put an “X” in. One also needs to know whether they feel strongly enough about doing so to bother. And when it comes to capturing such fluctuations in emotional intensity, polling is a clumsy tool.
Statistics have faced criticism regularly over their long history. The challenges that identity politics and globalisation present to them are not new either. Why then do the events of the past year feel quite so damaging to the ideal of quantitative expertise and its role in political debate?
In recent years, a new way of quantifying and visualising populations has emerged that potentially pushes statistics to the margins, ushering in a different era altogether. Statistics, collected and compiled by technical experts, are giving way to data that accumulates by default, as a consequence of sweeping digitisation. Traditionally, statisticians have known which questions they wanted to ask regarding which population, then set out to answer them. By contrast, data is automatically produced whenever we swipe a loyalty card, comment on Facebook or search for something on Google. As our cities, cars, homes and household objects become digitally connected, the amount of data we leave in our trail will grow even greater. In this new world, data is captured first and research questions come later.
In the long term, the implications of this will probably be as profound as the invention of statistics was in the late 17th century. The rise of “big data” provides far greater opportunities for quantitative analysis than any amount of polling or statistical modelling. But it is not just the quantity of data that is different. It represents an entirely different type of knowledge, accompanied by a new mode of expertise.
First, there is no fixed scale of analysis (such as the nation) nor any settled categories (such as “unemployed”). These vast new data sets can be mined in search of patterns, trends, correlations and emergent moods. It becomes a way of tracking the identities that people bestow upon themselves (such as “#ImwithCorbyn” or “entrepreneur”) rather than imposing classifications upon them. This is a form of aggregation suitable to a more fluid political age, in which not everything can be reliably referred back to some Enlightenment ideal of the nation state as guardian of the public interest.
Second, the majority of us are entirely oblivious to what all this data says about us, either individually or collectively. There is no equivalent of an Office for National Statistics for commercially collected big data. We live in an age in which our feelings, identities and affiliations can be tracked and analysed with unprecedented speed and sensitivity – but there is nothing that anchors this new capacity in the public interest or public debate. There are data analysts who work for Google and Facebook, but they are not “experts” of the sort who generate statistics and who are now so widely condemned. The anonymity and secrecy of the new analysts potentially makes them far more politically powerful than any social scientist.
A company such as Facebook has the capacity to carry quantitative social science on hundreds of millions of people, at very low cost. But it has very little incentive to reveal the results. In 2014, when Facebook researchers published results of a study of “emotional contagion” that they had carried out on their users – in which they altered news feeds to see how it affected the content that users then shared in response – there was an outcry that people were being unwittingly experimented on. So, from Facebook’s point of view, why go to all the hassle of publishing? Why not just do the study and keep quiet?
What is most politically significant about this shift from a logic of statistics to one of data is how comfortably it sits with the rise of populism. Populist leaders can heap scorn upon traditional experts, such as economists and pollsters, while trusting in a different form of numerical analysis altogether. Such politicians rely on a new, less visible elite, who seek out patterns from vast data banks, but rarely make any public pronouncements, let alone publish any evidence. These data analysts are often physicists or mathematicians, whose skills are not developed for the study of society at all. This, for example, is the worldview propagated by Dominic Cummings, former adviser to Michael Gove and campaign director of Vote Leave. “Physics, mathematics and computer science are domains in which there are real experts, unlike macro-economic forecasting,” Cummings has argued.
Figures close to Donald Trump, such as his chief strategist Steve Bannon and the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, are closely acquainted with cutting-edge data analytics techniques, via companies such as Cambridge Analytica, on whose board Bannon sits. During the presidential election campaign, Cambridge Analytica drew on various data sources to develop psychological profiles of millions of Americans, which it then used to help Trump target voters with tailored messaging.
This ability to develop and refine psychological insights across large populations is one of the most innovative and controversial features of the new data analysis. As techniques of “sentiment analysis”, which detect the mood of large numbers of people by tracking indicators such as word usage on social media, become incorporated into political campaigns, the emotional allure of figures such as Trump will become amenable to scientific scrutiny. In a world where the political feelings of the general public are becoming this traceable, who needs pollsters?
Few social findings arising from this kind of data analytics ever end up in the public domain. This means that it does very little to help anchor political narrative in any shared reality. With the authority of statistics waning, and nothing stepping into the public sphere to replace it, people can live in whatever imagined community they feel most aligned to and willing to believe in. Where statistics can be used to correct faulty claims about the economy or society or population, in an age of data analytics there are few mechanisms to prevent people from giving way to their instinctive reactions or emotional prejudices. On the contrary, companies such as Cambridge Analytica treat those feelings as things to be tracked.
But even if there were an Office for Data Analytics, acting on behalf of the public and government as the ONS does, it is not clear that it would offer the kind of neutral perspective that liberals today are struggling to defend. The new apparatus of number-crunching is well suited to detecting trends, sensing the mood and spotting things as they bubble up. It serves campaign managers and marketers very well. It is less well suited to making the kinds of unambiguous, objective, potentially consensus-forming claims about society that statisticians and economists are paid for.
In this new technical and political climate, it will fall to the new digital elite to identify the facts, projections and truth amid the rushing stream of data that results. Whether indicators such as GDP and unemployment continue to carry political clout remains to be seen, but if they don’t, it won’t necessarily herald the end of experts, less still the end of truth. The question to be taken more seriously, now that numbers are being constantly generated behind our backs and beyond our knowledge, is where the crisis of statistics leaves representative democracy.
On the one hand, it is worth recognising the capacity of long-standing political institutions to fight back. Just as “sharing economy” platforms such as Uber and Airbnb have recently been thwarted by legal rulings (Uber being compelled to recognise drivers as employees, Airbnb being banned altogether by some municipal authorities), privacy and human rights law represents a potential obstacle to the extension of data analytics. What is less clear is how the benefits of digital analytics might ever be offered to the public, in the way that many statistical data sets are. Bodies such as the Open Data Institute, co-founded by Tim Berners-Lee, campaign to make data publicly available, but have little leverage over the corporations where so much of our data now accumulates. Statistics began life as a tool through which the state could view society, but gradually developed into something that academics, civic reformers and businesses had a stake in. But for many data analytics firms, secrecy surrounding methods and sources of data is a competitive advantage that they will not give up voluntarily.
A post-statistical society is a potentially frightening proposition, not because it would lack any forms of truth or expertise altogether, but because it would drastically privatise them. Statistics are one of many pillars of liberalism, indeed of Enlightenment. The experts who produce and use them have become painted as arrogant and oblivious to the emotional and local dimensions of politics. No doubt there are ways in which data collection could be adapted to reflect lived experiences better. But the battle that will need to be waged in the long term is not between an elite-led politics of facts versus a populist politics of feeling. It is between those still committed to public knowledge and public argument and those who profit from the ongoing disintegration of those things.


Hydrogen sulfide (H2S) smells are still sometimes detected around the island, but it’s another gas emitted by Kīlauea that has become more important lately—carbon dioxide (CO2).
Deformation signals are consistent with refilling of Kīlauea Volcano’s deep East Rift Zone (ERZ).
Deformation signals are consistent with refilling of Kīlauea Volcano’s deep East Rift Zone. Sulfur dioxide emission rates in the lower ERZ have been below detection limits since early September 2018.
Volcano Watch: Geology of the past, how long will the eruption last?
How did scientists evaluate how long the Kilauea Eruption would last in 2018?
Kīlauea is not erupting. Rates of seismicity, deformation, and gas release have not changed significantly over the past week. Deformation signals are consistent with refilling of the middle ERZ.
The field day begins with a summit weather check at first light. It is a reflective moment at 6:15 a.m. atop Kīlauea Volcano, and the….
Thermal camera imagery of Route 130 show steam. Low rates of seismicity, deformation, and gas release have not changed significantly over the past week. Earthquakes continue to occur primarily at Kīlauea’s summit area and south flank.
January 2019 marks the 10th annual “Volcano Awareness Month” on the Island of Hawaiʻi.


独栋别墅 出售 with 2 卧室 and 2 卫生间 and an indoor area of 146 square meters. The 独栋别墅 is part of the gated estate community Manora Village II in 考陶, 华欣, 考陶 , it 已建成 in 2013 11月. It is available for sale for a price of ฿10,300,000 and you can but the 独栋别墅 长期租赁产权.For long term rentals, this 独栋别墅 is available for ฿57,500 per month.
HH-1056 is a 90 square meter 独栋别墅 with 1 卧室 and 1 卫生间 that is available 出售., It belongs to the Manora Village II development in 华欣, 考陶 and 已建成 in 2013 11月. The 独栋别墅 can be bought with a 长期租赁产权 ownership title for a sales price of ฿7,000,000 (฿77,778/Sq.M). It is also available for long term rentals starting from ฿45,000 per month.
HH-1054 is a 146 square meter 独栋别墅 with 2 卧室 and 2 卫生间 that is available 出售., It belongs to the Manora Village I development in 华欣, 考陶 and 已建成 in 2009 8月. The 独栋别墅 can be bought with a 长期租赁产权 ownership title for a sales price of ฿9,900,000 (฿67,808/Sq.M). It is also available for long term rentals starting from ฿55,000 per month.
独栋别墅 出售 with 2 卧室 and 2 卫生间 and an indoor area of 240 square meters. The 独栋别墅 is part of the gated estate community Turtle Village in 考陶, 华欣, 考陶 , it 已建成 in 2002-01-20. It is available for sale for a price of ฿16,000,000 and you can but the 独栋别墅 永久产权.For long term rentals, this 独栋别墅 is available for ฿65,000 per month.


A man suspected of fatally stabbing his girlfriend in their Montebello home last month surrendered to authorities Monday at the Mexico-U.S. border.
Feb. 20 in the 600 block of North 20th Street in Montebello by a family member who went to check on her, according to sheriff’s homicide Lt. Holly Francisco.
Deputies said detectives received information Martinez had fled to Mexico.
Martinez will be arraigned today at East L.A. Superior Court.
Coroner’s officials on Tuesday named the driver who was killed after her car plunged 275 feet below Angeles Crest Highway.
Ed Winter, spokesman for the Los Angeles County Department of Coroner, identified the woman as Maral Racquel Joulakian, 43, of Montrose.
According to sheriff’s officials, Joulakian was a missing person but they didn’t say how long she’s been missing and where she was last seen.
The crash at mile marker 32.5. was discovered Monday afternoon by Caltrans workers, who contacted the California Highway Patrol, Los Angeles County Fire and the sheriff’s department.
Sheriff’s Lt. Brian Fitch said the driver had been ejected from the car and her body was found about 100 feet away from the vehicle.
A man was arrested Tuesday for allegedly trying to break into a home and for taking a pair of shoes from an unlocked car.
The incident took place shortly before 3 a.m. in the 500 block of N. Marguerita Avenue.
Window screens had been removed from a house but the culprit didn’t enter the residence, according to Alhambra police Lt. Sean Heckers.
A pair of shoes were then taken from an unlocked vehicle, he added.
Police closed off the neighborhood and searched but didn’t find their quarry. Officers remained in the area after the containment was lifted, Heckers said.
They found the suspect on Atlantic Boulevard and Woodward Avenue around 5:24 a.m.
Heckers said Shan Hai, 18, of Alhambra was arrested on suspicion of burglary.
The arraignment for a gang member suspected of killing his girlfriend, two rival gang members and a North Whittier man has been continued to March 18.
Jose Luis Saenz was arrested in Guadalajara, Mexico, on Nov. 22 and was extradited to California.


AppNexus has stepped up its fundraising, bringing in $50 million for its real-time display advertising platform from existing investors as well as Microsoft (s MSFT). The company has now raised $65.5 million over the last three years from investors including Venrock, Kodiak Venture Partners, First Round Capital, Khosla Ventures, Mark Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and Ron Conway.
The company’s real-time bidding business counts customers like Microsoft and eBay (s EBAY), as well as eight of the top 15 ad networks. It auctions more than 4 billion ads on a daily basis and is growing fast. While real-time bidding is still a small part of the market, AppNexus said it expects the sector to grow to 20 percent of the display market by 2012.
New York City-based AppNexus, which pitches itself as a scalable cloud service, runs out of three data centers including one co-located at a Equinix facility in Amsterdam to serve Europe and the Middle East.
AppNexus CEO Brian O’Kelley was formerly CTO at Right Media (acquired by Yahoo (s YHOO)), and CTO Mike Nolet was director of analytics there. President Michael Rubenstein was general manager of DoubleClick’s ad exchange, then directed the product for Google (s GOOG). Google also recently bought the demand-side platform Invite Media. AppNexus has been discussed as an acquisition target for AOL (s AOL) and Microsoft.
It weighs 3.26 kg with its 6-cell battery, measuring 378 Ã— 252×35-44 mm and is guaranteed for 1 year.
The Compaq Presario CQ70-205th is for people looking for a laptop with a screen diagonal comfortable. The setup is basic but shows suitable for desktop use.
The Presario CQ70 has a configuration similar to its competitors.
This model is also sold in some stores, under reference CQ70-205ef.
Compaq also offers the same price, the Presario CQ70-103ef that differs only by its smaller capacity hard drive.
A direct competitor to rubicon project then?


Aspirin is best known as an over-the-counter painkiller. But acetylsalicylic acid, as it’s called chemically, has many other health benefits, as well as side effects, in the body that have only become clear in recent years.
Aspirin’s second-best known effect is its ability to protect the heart. In people with heart disease who have already had a heart attack, it has been shown to lower the risk of having another. Studies consistently show that people who have had heart attacks or strokes and who take a low-dose aspirin (also known as baby aspirin, which at 81 mg is about a quarter of the dose of regular-strength aspirin) a day can significantly reduce their risk of having another event.
Its protective benefits come from aspirin’s ability to lower inflammation, a condition that can attract clot-building factors within blood vessel walls. These can rupture, plugging up tiny vessels in the heart and blocking blood flow.
Doctors now believe that taking a daily low-dose aspirin is also a cheap and easy way for people who do not yet have heart disease — but who have certain risk factors for it, including high cholesterol and obesity — to avoid first heart attacks. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), a government-appointed group of independent experts, recommends the regimen for people ages 50 to 59 who fall into this category. For them, the group concludes, the benefits of aspirin outweigh the potential risks of the drug, which include gastrointestinal bleeding.
In older people, however, that risk-benefit balance tips the other way. In a recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, scientists found that in a group of more than 19,000 people ages 65 years and older, taking daily aspirin for nearly five years did not significantly lower their risk of having heart problems, but did increase their chances of having bleeding issues by 38% compared to people who did not take a low-dose aspirin daily. For this group, the over-the-counter pill seems to come with more risks and little benefit when it comes to the heart.
For years, doctors have been enthused about aspirin’s potential to lower the risk of certain cancers. Researchers noticed that people in heart studies who took daily aspirin not only had a lower risk of heart problems, but also had fewer cases of colon cancer compared to people who didn’t take aspirin.
In 2016, after reviewing the available evidence, the USPSTF also recommended that most people ages 50 to 59 years take low-dose aspirin daily to lower their risk of developing colon cancer. As with heart disease, aspirin seems to produce this benefit by lowering inflammation, which can contribute to tumors in the colon.
This year, two separate studies, both published in JAMA Oncology, found that people who popped aspirin regularly tended to have lower rates of ovarian and liver cancers. It’s not yet clear what dose is best or how frequently people should be taking the drug to expect a cancer-lowering effect, but these results expand the list of potential cancers that aspirin may affect.
They have some ideas. Like cancer in the colon, liver cancer is driven in large part by inflammation, which can be triggered by changes in the DNA. Aspirin controls inflammatory reactions by tamping down the activity of certain enzymes, called COX1 and COX2. In Simon’s study, which involved more than 170,000 people in the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, people who said they took the equivalent of two or more regular-strength aspirin (325 mg) a week for five years lowered their risk of developing liver cancer by 59% compared to people who did not take aspirin. The effect waned if people stopped taking the drug after about eight years. But other painkillers, such as acetaminophen and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen, which work in slightly different ways than aspirin does, did not impact the risk of liver cancer.
In the ovarian cancer study, Shelley Tworoger, associate director of population science at Moffitt Cancer Center, and her colleagues also analyzed data from the Nurses’ Health Study. Among more than 205,000 women who were followed from the 1980s to the 2010s, they found that women who took low-dose aspirin lowered their risk of developing ovarian cancer by 23%, compared to women who did not use the drugs. But standard-dose aspirin did not have an effect on ovarian cancer risk, and neither did longer term use of low-dose aspirin.
It’s not entirely clear why the two doses have differing effects on the two cancers. But in the case of ovarian cancer, the difference can likely be explained by how the two doses work, says Tworoger. Higher dose aspirin tends to suppress the effects of both COX-1 and COX-2 enzymes that contribute to inflammation, while low-dose aspirin tends to inhibit mainly COX-1. It’s also possible that people taking low-dose aspirin, who usually do so to prevent heart problems, take the drug more regularly than those who take the occasional full dose pills or tablets. “It may be that consistent reduction of inflammation is most important,” she says.
In the case of liver cancer, the data suggest that the consistent anti-inflammatory effect may also be contributing to a lower risk of cancer; most of the people in the study, says Simon, took low-dose aspirin daily, which equals about two full dose tablets a week. “It does seem like just taking 81 mg a day would be sufficient to give people a risk reduction,” she says.
Other data suggest that aspirin may be working in many different ways to lower liver cancer risk. In addition to suppressing inflammation, it could also be reducing the amount of fibrosis that can contribute to out-of-control growth, says Simon. And aspirin might also be affecting the formation of micro-clots that can affect liver disease as well.
But with liver cancer in particular, there is a fine line between enough aspirin for its anti-inflammatory benefit, and the side effect of stomach and gastrointestinal bleeding. People with liver disease are already at high risk of bleeding, and taking too much aspirin could elevate that risk. “We tried to find the lowest acceptable dose that would potentially offer meaningful benefit,” Simon says.
For that reason, it’s too early to advise people who might be at risk of developing liver cancer, or people with cirrhosis, who are at higher risk of the cancer, to start popping baby aspirin. But the results raise hope that with more research, aspirin could become a part of a liver cancer prevention program, says Simon.
If her results are confirmed, researchers could start exploring ways that aspirin may be used early in the disease to slow or even prevent liver tumors from forming.
People with type-1 and type-2 diabetes are two to three times more likely to have a vascular event like stroke or heart problems than those without the disease. Because of the close relationship between heart disease and diabetes, doctors have studied whether people with diabetes should consider taking aspirin to lower their risk of heart events.
The American Diabetes Association recommends that among people with type-1 or type-2 diabetes, only those who also have other risk factors that make them more vulnerable to developing heart problems — such as people who are 50 and older and who have high blood pressure, high cholesterol or are smokers — should consider taking a low-dose aspirin every day to lower their risk of heart problems. Younger people with diabetes, or those who don’t have additional risk factors for heart events, may not benefit from aspirin, since the risk of bleeding may outweigh benefits.
That finding was supported by a recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which analyzed more than 15,000 people over nearly eight years and found that those taking 100 mg of aspirin a day lowered their risk of having a vascular event by 12% — but increased their risk of gastrointestinal bleeding by 29% — compared to people taking the placebo.
Inflammation drives many chronic diseases — especially those associated with aging, such as arthritis, heart disease and even degenerative brain conditions like dementia and Alzheimer’s. Researchers have been investigating whether aspirin’s anti-inflammatory effects can slow down cognitive decline as well.
The results have been mixed. In one study, women with type-2 diabetes and dementia who took low-dose aspirin every day for nearly 10 years lowered their risk of dementia by 60% compared to those who didn’t take aspirin, but men did not have the same benefit. And in a review of existing studies of aspirin and cognitive decline, scientists in Italy found no evidence that the over-the-counter drug provides any benefit.
But a promising, preliminary study involving mice with a form of Alzheimer’s found that low-dose aspirin increased production of a protein that helps remove amyloid plaques, which build up in Alzheimer’s disease. Too much plaque, researchers believe, starts to starve the brain’s nerve cells and eventually destroys connections that are critical for memory and higher thinking functions. More research — especially in people — is needed.
Because inflammation contributes to so many aging-related diseases, and because aspirin can lower inflammation, scientists have also been studying whether people who take aspirin tend to live longer overall. They might be spared some of the chronic diseases that claim so many lives, the thinking goes.
But according to two studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine, that may not be the case. Using a large data set of people in Australia and the U.S. of people aged 65 years or older, the researchers found that people taking 100 mg of aspirin every day did not have lower rates of disability than people who were taking placebo. But they did have higher rates of gastrointestinal bleeding; in fact, the aspirin group was more likely to die during the study’s nearly five years than people who did not take aspirin. Another study analyzing the same data set found that people assigned to take 100 mg of aspirin a day for nearly four years were more likely to die of a variety of causes during the trial than those taking a placebo.


Steve Jobs is not a big fan of a Flash Player for the iPhone according to an eFluxMedia article earlier this month. That’s not stopping Adobe from moving forward with plans to offer a Flash Player for the iPhone anyway. CNet is reporting that Adobe’s CEO, Shantau Narayen, stated that the company is committed to working with Apple to ensure Flash applications can run on the iPhone.
Adobe has even gone as far as beginning to develop the new Flash player themselves using the software development kit (SDK) which Apple provided to third-party developers to create applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Of course, it still isn’t clear whether or not Apple will make a Flash player available to download via their iPhone App store if developed. There may be some renewed pressure for Apple to do so, though.
Earlier this week, we reported that Microsoft had licensed Adobe Flash Lite for the Windows Mobile operating system. That will give Window Mobile devices the ability to access Flash applications. If Apple doesn’t follow suit with a Flash player for the iPhone, then Windows Mobile may be considered as having a competitive advantage against the iPhone.
Read more from the CNet article.
I think it would not be a good strategic move for Apple to not allow a Flash player to be offered for the iPhone. Flash is just used too much on the Internet for the iPhone not too have it. Also, it’s too easy to correct the competitive advantage Windows Mobile will have by offering a Flash player.
If for some reason Apple blocks the offering of a Flash player for the iPhone Adobe may have a lawsuit against the company. After all, I think Adobe can clearly make the case that their product is well regarded on the Internet. It is also a product they know people want on the iPhone. Not allowing the Flash player would quite frankly be anti-competitive. If someone from Microsoft had made a statement as decisive as Steve Jobs about a Flash player not being appropriate for the iPhone then you know that people would be screaming about an anti-trust case.
If I was a betting man I think we will no doubt see a Flash player for the iPhone. I just don’t see how Apple blocks it while still looking their customers in the eye let alone a judge if Adobe sues. It honestly would have been better for Apple to warningly adopt a Flash player for the iPhone before Microsoft licensed it. Now if it is adopted it will simply look like Apple is merely doing so in response to Microsoft’s adoption.


With 114 colleges in Massachusetts, the issue of sexual violence and assault on campuses is on the minds of many students.
That's why Northeastern University senior Jace Ritchey attended a summit at Harvard University on Saturday, where about 100 activists, politicians and survivors of sexual violence gathered to discuss how to tackle the issue.
Ritchey said the first step to staving off sexual violence on college campuses is to require schools provide an anonymous sexual misconduct climate survey to see what that institution's specific needs are.
"If we don't know what's happening and we don't know how students feel and what students are aware of in terms of what resources they have in the first place, we won't really be able to move forward with the right staff members that can really respond in a cohesive manner to a situation like sexual violence on campus," Ritchey said.
U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley, a survivor of sexual assault herself, delivered opening remarks at the event, vowing to push for a "survivor justice agenda," while representing the Massachusetts' 7th Congressional District in D.C.
The agenda she spoke of includes guarding and fortifying "protections for survivors, relative to access to trauma and behavioral health services, to reporting guidelines to investigations," she said. "It means justice."
For Ivy Lee -- co-founder of the advocacy group The Every Voice Coalition, which organized the summit with the Harvard Law School Harassment Assault Law-Student Team — advocacy on the behalf of survivors is particularly important.
"I'm a survivor of sexual assault," she said. "It directly impacted me, but it also impacts the people who love me — all the people I know now and will know in the future will be impacted by this."
The Every Voice Coalition's goal is to end sexual violence on college campuses in Massachusetts. It previously pushed for a bill in the state Legislature that would require all institutions of higher learning to provide an anonymous climate survey. It never passed, though.
Massachusetts House Speaker Robert DeLeo, who attended the summit, said the bill's failure to pass was a matter of legislative mismatching and lack of time. Last year, both the state House and Senate drafted their own versions of the climate survey bill, but the legislative session ended before the two chambers could reconcile the proposed laws.
This year, though, DeLeo said, it'll be different.
"I'm [at the summit] early in the [legislative] session to make sure that everyone knows that this is a priority," he said. "We can take a look at it much earlier in the session, try to work with our colleagues in the Senate and get in on the governor's desk. That's the way I want to see it get done this year."
DeLeo said it's his hope to get that legislation passed this year.


A man has been arrested in relation to the incident and enquiries are continuing.
The discover came about when PCSO Leahy and PCSO Montgomery were on high visibility foot patrols in the region.
They stopped three 14-year-old females in regards to tobacco related offences and intelligence from this resulted in a visit to a local shop and shopkeeper being spoken to.
This in turn led to the extraordinary haul of cigarettes and tobacco being uncovered.


Mohair is the natural luxury fiber that comes from the fleece of the Angora goat, and 50 percent of the world’s production of mohair comes from South Africa.
The 46th edition of the Mohair Trophy, an annual competition established in 1970 to select and award the finest quality mohair fiber, took place in Johannesburg during an intimate gala dinner at The Saxon, a stylish boutique hotel in the posh suburb of Sandhurst.
The awards are cosponsored by the Ermenegildo Zegna Group and Mohair SA, a nonprofit organization representing the mohair industry. Paolo Zegna, chairman of the Zegna Group, hosted the dinner, which saw FE Colborne & Sons win the Mohair Trophy for the 10th time since the awards were established. Second place went to P.H. Viljoen and third place went to Neil Colborne.


The stock has fallen more than 20% since its earnings report, but investors are overlooking the long-term picture.
It's been a rough week for Under Armour (NYSE:UAA).
The high-flying sports apparel stock is now sitting at a two-year low after it cut its revenue forecast in its earnings report last week. The stock is now down more than 40% from its 2015 peak. Shares dropped 13% the day of the report, and have since given up another 7%.
On the earnings call, management said that revenue growth would slow to 20% in the fourth quarter, but it expected to reach the 2018 goal of $7.5 billion in revenue it outlined at its Investor Day conference in 2015. However, the market was dismayed by the company's decision to pull back from a 2018 operating income forecast of $800 million as the company said that it was making investments to "get big fast," which would mean that profits would grow more slowly than revenue. While the company expects revenue growth in the low 20% range over the next two years, it only sees operating income growth in the mid-teens, meaning that operating income may only be in the $600-million range by the end of 2018.
Considering that sizable cut in guidance, the market's reaction may not be surprising. Under Armour already cut its guidance once this year when Sports Authority, a key wholesale customer, declared bankruptcy, and the stock's lofty P/E ratio, still near 70 after the recent slide, means investors have high expectations. Still, this is a company that has grown revenue by 20% or more for 26 straight quarters. Ignoring the long-term prospects and impact of the upcoming investment seems foolish.
While Under Armour is still much smaller than its two main rivals, Nike (NYSE:NKE) and Adidas (NASDAQOTH:ADDYY), the company has shown after several years of strong growth that it can compete with anyone. Its roster of sponsors includes the reigning MVPs in the NFL and NBA, Cam Newton and Stephen Curry, as well as baseball's reigning National League MVP, Bryce Harper. Additionally, it counts big names like 2015 Masters champion Jordan Spieth and 2016 Wimbledon champ Andy Murray wearing its gear.
But comparing Under Armour's financials to Nike's, the global leader in sports apparel, two notable differences stand out. While the majority of Nike's revenues come from footwear and from outside of North America, Under Armour is the opposite, deriving most of its sales from North America and apparel.
Not surprisingly, the company sees footwear and international as its two biggest growth opportunities. Thus far, this year international sales have jumped 67%, and were up 74% last quarter, while footwear jumped 54% through the first nine months of the year and 42% in the last quarter.
Stephen Curry's success represents a particularly strong opportunity as basketball is one of the biggest categories in sneakers and a popular NBA player can move a lot of shoes, as the success of Nike's Jordan brand has shown. In fact, the launch of the Curry One and Two has been a key driver in Under Armour's footwear sales lately, which have accelerated over the last two years. On the earnings call, CEO Kevin Plank said a recent brand tour with Curry in China helped build excitement for the brand, and that sales growth in China, arguably the company's biggest opportunity, is starting to take off, with sales expected to double from $80 million a year ago.
It's understandable that investors would be disappointed with the lower operating income guidance, but management is making the right decisions for the long-term health of the company. Footwear is currently a lower-margin business for Under Armour, so a shifting sales mix toward footwear will cut into profit growth as it builds out that business. Similarly, investments in international and connected fitness will also cost the company on short-term earnings.
But those investments should pay off over time. As Nike's success shows, the opportunity in footwear and international markets is huge. Despite the slower short-term profit growth, Under Armour still has a long growth path ahead of it.


27 acres of land with tremendous potential for the future. Down the road from the I-8 bypass @ Bianco to the south & Hwy 84 to the North. This great piece of property could possibly be used for commercial or residential in the growing community of Casa Grande.


A Louisiana man says a sheriff's office withdrew a job offer after finding out he has HIV, according to a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday.
The lawsuit said the virus doesn't create significant risk for Pierce or anyone he encounters as a police officer and the Americans with Disabilities Act protects him from discrimination. Lambda Legal, a national group that focuses on the civil rights of LGBT and HIV-positive people, filed the suit against Sheriff Louis Ackal and Capts. Ryan Turner and Rickey J. Boudreaux in federal court in Lafayette.


BBC chiefs are reportedly looking at Stephen Fry to replace suspended "Top Gear" presenter Jeremy Clarkson, the Daily Star reports.
The news has not been confirmed by the BBC, and the Daily Star is known for having reported news in the past that turned out to be wrong.
Still, the idea of Fry, one of Britain's most famous comedian, replacing Clarkson is fascinating.
Clarkson was suspended after he was accused of punching BBC producer Oisin Tymon at the Simonstone Hall Hotel in Yorkshire, after the "Top Gear" crew were served a cold platter of cheese and meats instead of hot steak at the end of a shooting session.
An internal investigation, chaired by BBC Scotland chief Ken McQuarrie, is under way, but according to the Daily Mail Clarkson may decide not to come back to "Top Gear" even if he is cleared.
Fry, who presents the BBC comedy quiz show "QI", has already appeared on "Top Gear" twice in the past and is known to be a fan of classic cars.
The two presenters have sided with Clarkson, and have refused to film an episode of "Top Gear" without him, The Independent reports.
There were rumours of filming the last three episodes of the current series using previously recorded footage and May and Hammond in the studio, but the two presenters rejected the offer, The Telegraph reports.
The BBC is facing huge pressure over Clarkson. "Top Gear" is watched on average by 350 million people worldwide every week. According to CityAM, the British audience is about 5 million viewers per week. A documentary broadcasted last Sunday to replace the suspended "Top Gear" was only watched by 1.3 million viewers.


Shanghai remained the most expensive city on the Chinese mainland for expatriates, according to the latest Worldwide Cost of Living Survey released on Tuesday.
Shanghai, China's business center, is now ranked 16th overall, down from 11th last year and on par with the cost of living in the New Zealand cities of Auckland and Wellington.
The survey, conducted by the Economist's Intelligent Unit, found Shenzhen and Dalian were the next most expensive Chinese cities to live.
Beijing and Suzhou, which saw the biggest drop among the eight Chinese cities examined, both fell 16 places to 47th and 69th respectively.
Suzhou, Guangzhou and Tianjin, tied for 69th place, making them the cheapest cities on the Chinese mainland, according to the report.
Overall, Singapore retains its title as the world's most expensive city for a fourth consecutive year, followed by Hong Kong and Zurich.
The survey, which compares the price of over 150 items in 133 cities around the world, found that Singapore was 20 percent more expensive than New York and 5 percent pricier than China's Hong Kong.
Jon Copestake, editor of the survey, said that Singapore reflected a regional trend, with Asian hubs becoming many of the world's most expensive cities.
In addition to Hong Kong, Singapore was joined in the top 10 by the Japanese cities of Tokyo and Osaka in 4th and 5th place respectively, and the South Korean capital Seoul in 6th place.


Goalkeeper Lou Kousouris finished with a career-high 21 saves and a career best for fewest goals allowed as Army upset 10th-ranked Hofstra, 6-2, yesterday in West Point, N.Y.
Kousouris held Hofstra scoreless for the first half and stopped all six of the Flying Dutchmen's extra-man opportunities. Army led 1-0 at halftime on a goal by Ross Yastrzemsky.
Hofstra (6-3) tied the game at 1 on Paul Judge's goal 1: 22 into the third period, but the Cadets (7-4) answered with goals by Chad Hadlock, Yastrzemsky and Tom Miller to forge ahead for good, 4-1. Brian Langtry's goal midway through the fourth quarter pulled the Flying Dutchmen within 4-2, but Army sealed it with two goals in the final minute.
Hofstra was held to two goals for the first time since 1986, and Army's six goals were the fewest it has scored in a victory since defeating Lehigh, 6-5, in April 1996.
No. 1 Princeton 19, Cornell 8: Jesse Hubbard had five goals and three assists to lead visiting Princeton its 21st straight win. Chris Massey had two goals for the Tigers (8-0), tying a school record of 28 games with at least one goal.
Hubbard got Princeton's offense going with three first-quarter goals, then added a goal in the second period and assisted on two others as the Tigers led 12-2 at intermission. The Big Red (2-10) was held scoreless in the third period, while Princeton's lead grew to 16-2 after four goals by four players.
The Tigers, whose final games are against Rutgers and Dartmouth, won 24 of 30 faceoffs and outshot Cornell 39-22.
No. 5 Georgetown 14, Hobart 9: Senior All-American Dan Martin had two goals and four assists as the visiting Hoyas won their fifth straight game. Georgetown's Greg McCavera added three goals.
Georgetown (9-2) led 6-2 at halftime, and a pair of goals by Andy Flick pushed the lead to 8-2 before Hobart scored three straight times to get within 8-5.
The Statesmen's rally was stalled when Georgetown scored five of the next seven goals.
No. 6 Syracuse 19, Penn 10: Casey Powell had five goals and Doug Jackson four for the host Orangemen (8-2). Ryan Powell added three goals and two assists and Rob Kavovit four assists for Syracuse, which outshot Penn 72-45.
Penn was within 9-5 at halftime, but the Orangemen pulled away by scoring on six of 24 shots in the third period. Casey Powell had two of those goals and assisted on another to extend Syracuse's lead to 15-7.
Syracuse had 36 shots to Penn's 22 over the final two quarters, and Peter McGill's goal with four minutes gone in the fourth period ended a 14-minute scoring drought by the Quakers.


Should Oregon trim state government spending by around $300 million, particularly by controlling public employee health insurance costs (Senate Bill 1067, 2017)? Called the bill "faux cost control" and voted "no." "It seems like the solution to our big problems is ... more government control, be it rent control, be it gun control or now price fixing of the health care sector," said Buehler, an orthopedic surgeon who objected to a requirement in the bill that public employee health plans to pay no more than double the Medicare reimbursement for services at certain hospitals.
Buehler says Oregon should switch to a strategy often touted by Republicans called "zero-based budgeting," building state government budgets from zero and requiring agencies to justify every expenditure.
The Bend Republican wants to control spending, in part, by limiting state employees' compensation increases, meaning salary and benefits, to 3.4 percent annually.


Imagine doodling about in your Moleskin, throwing some batteries and LEDs onto the page and having your sketches illuminated like a Christmas light arrangement. Swapping the metallic ink of gel pens for real silver can make that a reality.
University of Illinois engineers have pioneered circuit pens, rendering wires unnecessary. The silver drawn by the pens naturally conducts electricity, so the only materials needed for makeshift circuits are a power source (batteries) and outputs (LEDs). If the idea of paper-and-ink as a circuit sounds rather undependable, the UI researchers bent the drawn-on paper 6,000 times before the ink began to crack. Thus, the pens are not only easier and cheaper to use, they seem to be a sturdier option for circuit-building, too.
Ravers rejoice—the possibilities are endless.


Above: The Cryengine in action.
Developers are always looking to better understand their tools, and now Crytek has made a big leap toward that goal.
The full source code for the game-making Cryengine software is now available on the programming repository GitHub. Crytek senior systems engineer David Kaye explained in a blog post that this will enable people to quickly see the differences between various versions of the toolkit going forward. While companies and other groups typically upload their source codes to GitHub with an open-source license that gives everyone the right to redistribute and modify, that is not the case for Cryengine. The German company will require you to purchase a commercial license to access certain parts of its code, and the legal restrictions of that license will still apply.
Another benefit of Cryengine on GitHub is that it makes it easier than ever for its users to stay updated.
This is the latest big move for a Crytek company that has had a number of major transitions. In March, Crytek made Cryengine V — its latest revision of the software — pay-what-you-want. This means developers could download the entire tool for any price, even a penny. The company also introduced a marketplace where creators can sell content and tools to one another. Also, in February, Amazon revealed that it was offering a free game-making tool called Lumberyard that it based on Cryengine.


With just 10 days until Christmas, Santa's delivery elves are working overtime.
That means it's extra busy for shippers as well. Monday is the peak shipping day of the season for FedEx (FDX) and the U.S. Postal Service.
The post office, which is the nation's largest shipper, expects to process 640 million pieces of mail on Monday, up 33 million from last year. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve, it expects to deliver 12.7 billion cards, letters and packages. An additional 3 billion will be shipped between Christmas and New Year's Eve.
FedEx expects to handle 22.6 million shipments on Monday. It is one of three days this month -- all Mondays -- when FedEx expects to handle more than 20 million packages. This season, FedEx projects making 290 million deliveries, up nearly 9% over last year.
Mondays tend to be busier because of volume built up over the weekend, when people spend more time shopping or writing Christmas cards. To handle all those packages and make the spikes more manageable, the Postal Service, FedEx and UPS deliver on all seven days of the week this season, and they hire thousands of extra hands.
UPS (UPS) said it expects next Monday to be its busiest day, handling 34 million packages. It is planning for 585 million packages this month.
Experts are projecting a big increase in online shopping this season, another test of the already-stressed shipping system. Last year, Amazon (AMZN) and UPS tested the limits of on-time delivery for Christmas, and the companies were forced to offer gift cards after many orders did not make it in time.
This year, Amazon isn't taking any chances. The online shopping giant says there are just four days left to place an order for free delivery by Christmas.


Tahmena Bokhari, Mrs. Pakistan World 2010 has made history. On Saturday November 13th in Negril, Jamaica, Bokhari was crowned Mrs. United Nations 2010. She competed with married women around the world with strong representation from Columbia, Nigeria, West Africa, and South Africa, among many others. In the history of the pageant industry, this is the first time Pakistan has won an international pageant title.
Upon winning Bokhari stated, "I would like to thank all of those who have supported me and have worked with me to improve the image of Pakistan in the world. Being the first international title holder for Pakistan is not my victory alone and nor am I solely responsible for this win. It is because of you out there, all of my family, friends, fans, and all those who have dared to dream this new vision of Pakistan along with me. This is a victory for all Pakistanis everywhere."
Bokhari opened the evening with a bang after coming in the top 5 winner’s circle for talent earlier in the week. Her sensational dance routine represented the emotions of a woman to a compilation of music from around the world. Bokhari was the first delegate to come out in her national costume made from local Pakistani fabric in green and white for the Pakistani flag. Delegates were judged on poise, grace, intellect, diplomacy, passion and commitment to community service along with several other areas.
Along with the organizers of Mrs. Pakistan World, Bokhari landed in Jamaica on the 8th and spent a week with the dozens of delegates from other countries. During their week, the delegates visited local schools, charities and mingled with fans. Due to her grace, charm, personality and style of dress, Bokhari was said to be an instant favorite. Other winners of the night included Miss Canada as Miss United Nations and Miss Teen Jamaica as Miss Teen United Nations.
This is one of the most amazing woman I have ever met. She was graceful and gorgeous. Congrats to Tahmena and all Pakistanis on this win.
She was truly the best without question, the way she spoke and carried herself. True intellect and true queen was crowned. Contratulations to PAKISTAN!
Congratulations to Tahmena Bokhari. I cannot believe it is Pakistan’s first win ever. All of Pakistan and even all of Canada should be proud.
Only you Tahmena could carry this. You have made history for Pakistan and you are showing the world your dream for Pakistan. I think not only married women, but all men, women and children can learn from this. I truly admire you.
This lady is just beautiful person. I had chance to meet her and I can say she is so humble, down to earth and very charming in person. It amazes me how much she has done and how much she knows, she is like a walking encyclopedia and at such a young age. I would never even think she is Pakistani but that is what she is trying to prove that Pakistanis can be like this. If I could only achieve half as much….