How to cite in powerpoint

HowToInTech

2022.10.23 18:00 How_To_In_Tech HowToInTech

A community that seeks to inform tech lovers and curious minds about everything technology.
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2012.02.28 11:59 CriticallyChallenged A guide to gaming in India

/IndianGaming — For discussions related to the Indian gaming scenario, from video games in general, how we procure them to how we play them. Pretty much anything in and around videogames and its intersection with India or Indian-ness.
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2013.01.30 07:21 IIHURRlCANEII For .gifs that provide knowledge!

Gifs are great at getting quick to digest info, and /educationalgifs strives to give you educational info in this quick to digest format. From chemical processes, to how plants work, to how machines work, /educationalgifs will explain many processes in the quick to see format of gifs.
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2024.05.09 21:15 Klin_Ikal_Sci_25 UCSD Analytical Chemistry, Biochemistry, Medical Microbiology

Hello, I had a hard time finding reviews for these UCSD extended studies courses (Analytical Chemistry, Biochemistry, Medical Microbiology), so i figured I'd post here in case anyone is also looking for feedback.

Analytical Chemistry (CHEM-40004) Jacob Strain

Medical Microbiology (BIOL - 40367) Wilson, Jesse

Biochemistry (BIOL-40357) Dr. Anila Venable Madiraju

For background: I had already completed my B.S in Biology and was missing 5 prerequisites prior to applying for a CLS program. I took 1 class at a time as I work full-time, am in a relationship, and wanted to have a life outside of work and school. As of today, I have not applied to a program and am planning on taking Clinical Hematology & Immunology at UCSD, if you have any professor recommendations/information please feel free to share.
submitted by Klin_Ikal_Sci_25 to CLSstudents [link] [comments]

2024.04.08 08:50 Alball512 WRONG .22–Paul Johnson didn’t seem to care.

WRONG .22–Paul Johnson didn’t seem to care.
CREDIT: AAS 5.13.2000 by Leah Quinn “Gun link in yogurt shop case questioned: Tests show pistol taken from suspect probably was not murder weapon” —- DET. PAUL JOHNSON (lead of “AG Task Force”):
It’s not the murder weapon. They had that gun for nearly 9 yrs but Paul Johnson didn’t order tests until September of ‘99, the same month they went to work interrogating MS/RS.
Prosecution had no physical evidence (aside from bullets they couldn’t attribute to MP’s .22 and DNA that ruled out the defendants) so they tested MP’s .22 over and over. PJ didn’t like the results; he thought prosecutors “could wave any .22” around the courtroom and secure convictions. He was almost right. I find it difficult to believe PJ truly thought he had found the perps when he approached Earle in October seeking warrants from Lynch to arrest the 4. The fact that he held back ballistics reports, continually made statements about the 4 [knowing] things only the killer’s could about the crime scene—consistently citing that they knew “what the girls were bound with”. We now know that Scott got that answer right during what sounded like a game of “20 questions” with interrogators: MS’ first guess: “napkins?”

The fact that none of the 4 had done any time (aside from a night or 2 in county depending on day of week they were arrested) and therefore had records void of felonious activity should have raised serious doubt as well.

This crime was committed by HC criminals who were familiar with how to conduct themselves with detectives (don’t talk…and def not for 20+ hrs in 4 day shifts).

Personally (I’m no detective), but if perps young, pull sheet of every YA offender with felony arrests and/or convictions (violence/SA/arson) who lived within a few miles and work your way out.

I believe PJ thought he had enough with 2 confessions to put this case to rest, and thought “we might have found them” at best 10.5.99. After DNA results came back, prosecutors sat on them for weeks until ordered by Lynch to deliver. I wonder what PJ thought when he read the results (shocked?). All to say, I doubt he was certain.
I don’t know Johnson personally, and I harbor no ill will toward anyone who worked this case—even Polanco. Johnson is smart, just like the rest of homicide during this period (as far as I can tell). He was critical, stern, diligent, and incredibly hard working. He continued to go to CCU of his own accord every Wednesday when Lara was OIC long after the convictions were overturned. — *Immense pressure to solve + tunnel vision in “The Pursuit of Maurice Pierce” (title of PJ’s PowerPoint presentation briefing in ‘97):
Detectives were just so desperate for this to be over as a new century approached. The case was handled *poorly btw ‘97 and ‘99, particularly when PJ made the decision (based on a hunch in ‘97) that it was MP and co. who committed YSM.
When first assigned lead, PJ immediately found fault with Detective Jones’ handling of YSM. He thought the files were a mess, and that many suspects had been cleared prematurely. There may have been some bad blood btw the initial 6 detectives and the AG Task Force which was ostensibly assigned to do what the first team couldn’t. Then Johnson ends up landing on one of the first suspects Jones looked into and presumed was full of sh*t (but contrary to many pubs had not “cleared” in ‘91), Maurice Pierce.
Who knows how this would have turned out if the original detectives had stayed on as many wanted to. —- See post from last year about police dragging Lake Austin/search for evidence. Article was also written by Leah Quinn precisely one week prior to this one (5.6.2000) 👇
https://www.facebook.com/groups/711640839489983/permalink/1264061040914624/?mibextid=W9rl1R
submitted by Alball512 to YogurtShopMurdersYSM [link] [comments]

2024.04.06 20:00 EzVox03 Repost: More Skepticism

Repost: More Skepticism
Celebrity persons of influence, including Bill Nye The (Non) Science Guy are so transparently unqualified to espouse political rhetoric under the guise of "science"; yet, to the chagrin of rational and independent thinkers everywhere, pop-culture icons continue to hold unjustifiable sway over the minds of large swaths of dimwits seemingly unaware of their intellectual deficiencies and vulnerabilities to groupthink.
For over 15 years now the media, politicians, and embarrassingly unqualified entertainers presenting as "Scientific Experts" have been actively campaigning and shouting down skeptical inquiry in defense of Climate Theorists. The Climate Science community's refusal and_or inability to provide satisfactory answers to questions born from logic or any among the scientifically contradictory research out there; instead, seemingly in collusion with the media and global politicians, any dissent or questions running afoul of the narrative have been systematically suppressed and_or ignored, no matter how damning to the "settled" science they so vehemently protect.
One must wonder why, if man-made climate change theory has been declared "accepted, settled science", have many in the climate science community along with global politicians, mainstream media, and self-proclaimed "experts" such as Bill Nye, gone to such great lengths to silence, suppress, or bully anyone from heralded scientific experts and former UN IPCC climate experts, to a cartoonist having poked a little deserved fun at climate science methodology in order to protect a narrative so supposedly concrete. A federal judge recently gave the go-ahead for a climate scientist to sue a dissenting internet blogger. Yep, it seems to be a slippery slope indeed if even regular citizens are threatened for practicing their fundamental rights of free speech simply by voicing their concern with the many dubious questions surrounding climate theory.
In An Inconvenient Truth — Gore stated with absolute confidence that unless we took “drastic measures” to reduce greenhouse gasses, the world would reach a “point of no return” in a mere ten years. We’re still here, and the climate activists have postponed the apocalypse, again. And, they've changed "Global Warming" to Climate Change, so now any fluctuation in climate or natural event Mother Nature bestows upon us can be and often is blamed squarely on man-made climate change.
None of the doomsday predictions made by alarmists, ever, have been proven correct... ever. This might indicate that it's Mother Nature who's calling the show, while the hubris of man makes room for those with agendas to pretend man is so mighty, our planet's fate will be determined on our own by using our air conditioners or by enabling industrialism's damage by buying things.
The fact politicians have conjured numerous ways to fight climate change which all happen to involve revenue, ostensibly in order to combat the "apocalyptic" predictions courtesy of UN IPCC warnings of imminent disaster and doom, in itself should provoke critical thought and questions for the global citizenry; however, the media, the UN, the Nobel Prize Committee (by awarding perhaps the most shameful Nobel Prize in world history to Al Gore for having been recorded giving a now disproven, ridiculous PowerPoint presentation consisting of one disproven or heavily exaggerated assertion after another) - the list goes on and on - have done all they can do to control this one singular version of the climate narrative.
Federal and state legislators actually bring in revenue by laughable decree - for corporations and the citizenry alike to compensate for their "carbon footprints". Is that not among the most amazing examples of lunacy in government overreach? Charging people and corporations to offset something as abstract as a "carbon footprint" is among the most ridiculous repercussions dealt upon common man in the name of a far from settled, highly suspect science.
A science with an ever-growing list of competent, unbiased scientific experts voicing dissent with the passing of each year. A science the global population has been intentionally and erroneously informed has reached a "97% consensus" among the scientific community. That go-to liberal talking point (as it requires absolutely zero independent thought; solely the unsubstantiated parroting for which liberals are known) that, at this point, sounds quite similar to nails on a chalkboard, has been incontrovertibly debunked by a superfluity of scientific researchers.
The most important fact about climate science, often overlooked, is that scientists disagree about the environmental impacts of the combustion of fossil fuels on the global climate.
The articles and surveys most commonly cited as showing support for a “scientific consensus” in favor of the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis are without exception methodologically flawed and often deliberately misleading.
There is no survey or study showing “consensus” on the most important scientific issues in the climate change debate.
Extensive survey data show deep disagreement among scientists on scientific issues that must be resolved before the man-made global warming hypothesis can be validated. Many prominent experts and probably most working scientists disagree with the claims made by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
NIPCC (Non-Governmental Panel on Climate Change) Report on the so-called "scientific consensus" ~ Follow this link for the full study
The source most cited by hyperventilating climate alarmists was bequeathed upon the peasantry in a 2004 essay produced by Harvard historian, Naomi Oreskes (You read that right - not a scientist). Unsurprisingly, Ms. Oreskes essay was not peer-reviewed, was made into a profitable book, cleverly titled "Merchants of Doubt" (which in 2015 was made into a movie), and built her entire career making the false claim that "deniers", make up a minute minority among the scientific community…
Her aim was presumably to provide a simple, democrat/liberal approved talking point even even the most dense among the peasantry can easily understand, parrot, and aggressively/violently insist as the New Gospel… Which of course is necessary for U.S. Politicians to help garner the much needed electoral support they (reluctantly) rely upon before imposing massive economic and industrial reforms with insane cost projections far surpassing trillions of dollars in global government revenue raised from "carbon" taxes, carbon footprint offsets (it's difficult to even write the words "carbon footprint" with a straight face), CAFE standards imposed upon the Auto-Industry, penalties and fines, etc.
According to an in-depth study on the supposed climate "consensus" conducted by the The Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change, numerous problems and ethical questions have surfaced with regards to the methodology used by the Harvard historian.
It's now widely-known Orsekes failed to scrutinize and properly categorize the scientific studies included in her research.
Oreskes' definition of "consensus" is notably remiss of whether man-made climate change is either dangerous or benign.
Her review "inexplicably" overlooked or simply ignored hundreds of articles by prominent global warming skeptics - John Christy, Sherwood Idso, Richard Lindzen, Patrick Michaels, among many others. 1,350 of these ignored articles can now be found in an online bibliography (PopularTechnology.Net)
Her methodology was inherently flawed; and, while she's not a scientist per se, her conclusions have been instrumental in promoting and enabling global political, economical, and industrial ramifications that will negatively affect common Americans for years to come. The very fact Oreskes was not and is not a scientist undermines any findings and conclusions she made through her unqualified analysis of scientific research available to her.
It has been discovered that her original assertion based on the 928 scientific papers was also flawed; as to query a result of that number, the words "Climate Change" must be used; yet, a query using search terms "Global Climate Change" yields over 10,000 results of climate studies, research, and abstracts.
Oreskes recorded running her queries using the search term "Global Climate Change"; however, it has become abundantly clear she either employed manipulation tactics to substantiate the preconceived conclusions as intended, or lacked professionalism and competency by conveniently omitting the precise keywords used to conduct the study.
In short, Ms. Oreskes' conclusions, which provided the left with the "97% consensus" talking point, are entirely unscientific and performed by an unqualified non-scientist now known to have utilized flawed methodology and mishandled data, undermining Ms. Oreskes integrity and the conclusions so many on the left have been smugly and condescendingly been citing as "fact" for a decade. Take a moment to laugh at the gullibility (or) deception committed by all who have parroted the "consensus" B.S.
I'm sure everyone must have forgotten by now the comically erroneous doomsday prophesies asserted on the first Earth Day in 1970. Some of my favorites are: the end of civilization within 15-20 years; 100-200 million deaths to starvation annually for 10 years; urban dwellers having to wear gas masks to survive; and one of the best... a new Ice Age by 2000.
As reported in 'The New American', Global Warming alarmists, the U.N. IPCC, and the Climate Science community at large continues to "double down" on claims they've made which have proven falsified, to the dismay of scientific experts around the globe:
"Global warming — temperature predictions: Perhaps nowhere has the stunning failure of climate predictions been better illustrated than in the “climate models” used by the UN. The UN climate bureaucracy, known as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), produces periodic reports on “climate science” — often dubbed the “Bible” of climatology. In its latest iteration, the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), the UN featured 73 computer models and their predictions. All of them “predicted” varying degrees of increased warming as atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) increased.
The problem is that every single model was wrong — by a lot. Not only did temperatures not rise by as much as the models predicted, they have failed to rise at all since around 1996, according to data collected by five official temperature data­sets. Based just on the laws of probability, a monkey rolling the dice would have done far better at predicting future temperatures than the UN’s models. That suggests deliberate fraud is likely at work.
"Dr. John Christy, professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama Huntsville (UAH), analyzed all 73 UN computer models. “I compared the models with observations in the key area — the tropics — where the climate models showed a real impact of greenhouse gases,” Christy told CNSNews. “I wanted to compare the real world temperatures with the models in a place where the impact would be very clear.
"Using datasets of temperatures from NASA, the U.K. Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research at the University of East Anglia, NOAA, satellites measuring atmospheric and deep oceanic temperatures, and a remote sensor system in California, he found, “All show a lack of warming over the past 17 years.” In other words, global warming has been on “pause” for almost two decades — a fact that has been acknowledged even by many of the most zealous UN climate alarmists. “All 73 models’ predictions were on average three to four times what occurred in the real world.
"No explanation for what happened to the warming — such as “the oceans ate my global warming” — has withstood scrutiny.
"Almost laughably, in its latest report, the UN IPCC increased its alleged “confidence” in its theory, an action experts such as Christy could not rationalize. “I am baffled that the confidence increases when the performance of your models is conclusively failing,” he said. “I cannot understand that methodology.... It’s a very embarrassing result for the climate models used in the IPCC report.” “When 73 out of 73 [climate models] miss the point and predict temperatures that are significantly above the real world, they cannot be used as scientific tools, and definitely not for public policy decision-making,” he added.
"Other warming predictions have also fallen flat. For instance, for almost two decades now, climate alarmists have been claiming that snow would soon become a thing of the past."
So if you think this hysteria hasn't been happening since 50 years ago and beyond, you're mistaken. The scary part about "climate change" is the global politicians and elite, media, and pop culture are so fully committed to its unproven, logically fallible theory that to hold out for the truth, and some reliable science (or a collective concession) is far from likely in our lifetimes.
I've read one scientist who dissents from man-made theory put it something like this: Science has always been vulnerable to erroneously believed "settled" theories. He mentions that the only recourse we may count on is that science always corrects itself eventually, but it usually requires the generation hyping the erroneous conclusions they've arrived at, and embraced by their world, to die off and the births of new generations of scientists to disprove and correct previous scientific "gospel".
https://preview.redd.it/n9c2ftkr6xtc1.png?width=948&format=png&auto=webp&s=a8d6f7461e3e7ee82ff1364fd601a621fac93382
Compare this scientific conclusion with something as complex and multi-factored as global climate change and scientific theories postulated by Albert Einstein or Sir Isaac Newton; the elementary simplicity of this "settled science" is comical and indicative of the times in which we live.
Michael Mann's "scientific", two axis graph (which reached scientific consensus in historically record time) showing solely carbon dioxide and temperature correlation is so beneath the complexities of what one might expect of true science; particularly, a field of science applied to determining the driving variables of the earth's climate.
"Whatts Up With That" is one of the more prominent sites available, and not only calls into question the "Settled" Science that is Climate Theory, credible scientific experts around the globe contribute research, hypotheses, and debate ideas in an effort to practice proper scientific methodology where the prominent Climate Theorists and media have failed. Here's one of vast multitudes of examples unavailable through mainstream media:
For the past 20 years, there hasn’t been a global warming trend, despite 30% of all manmade CO2 emissions since 1750 being made over just the last 20 years….
We’ll get about another 0.3C of beneficial CO2 warming recovery between now and 2100 per CO2 doubling, LESS the cooling effects of the coming Grand Solar Minimum expected to start around 2035 and last 50~100 years…
There is a good chance global temps may well be cooler by 2100 than they are now….
The disconfirmed CAGW hypothesis predicted 3C~6C of CO2 induced warming by 2100, which is impossible, and explains why the disparity between CAGW projections are so devoid of reality:
Some scientists go so far as to pretend that we people of earth can either accept their findings and support every political policy made to usurp Mother Nature; such a belief system and/or assertion is so irrational and absurd, this writer can only defer to the definition of man's hubris. The flip side to full, unquestionable worship of their gospel is to be labeled as one who couldn't care less if our descendants will have to develop gills in order to survive the damage our questions do to this settled science.
Science by definition is to seek truth. These same guys are the first to label one in search of that truth "anti-science" or in denial. Their hubris and hypocrisy is mind boggling.
submitted by EzVox03 to climateskeptics [link] [comments]

2024.04.05 07:45 EzVox03 Repost: More Skepticism

Repost: More Skepticism
Celebrity persons of influence, including Bill Nye The (Non) Science Guy are so transparently unqualified to espouse political rhetoric under the guise of "science"; yet, to the chagrin of rational and independent thinkers everywhere, pop-culture icons continue to hold unjustifiable sway over the minds of large swaths of dimwits seemingly unaware of their intellectual deficiencies and vulnerabilities to groupthink.
For over 15 years now the media, politicians, and embarrassingly unqualified entertainers presenting as "Scientific Experts" have been actively campaigning and shouting down skeptical inquiry in defense of Climate Theorists. The Climate Science community's refusal and_or inability to provide satisfactory answers to questions born from logic or any among the scientifically contradictory research out there; instead, seemingly in collusion with the media and global politicians, any dissent or questions running afoul of the narrative have been systematically suppressed and_or ignored, no matter how damning to the "settled" science they so vehemently protect.
One must wonder why, if man-made climate change theory has been declared "accepted, settled science", have many in the climate science community along with global politicians, mainstream media, and self-proclaimed "experts" such as Bill Nye, gone to such great lengths to silence, suppress, or bully anyone from heralded scientific experts and former UN IPCC climate experts, to a cartoonist having poked a little deserved fun at climate science methodology in order to protect a narrative so supposedly concrete. A federal judge recently gave the go-ahead for a climate scientist to sue a dissenting internet blogger. Yep, it seems to be a slippery slope indeed if even regular citizens are threatened for practicing their fundamental rights of free speech simply by voicing their concern with the many dubious questions surrounding climate theory.
In An Inconvenient Truth — Gore stated with absolute confidence that unless we took “drastic measures” to reduce greenhouse gasses, the world would reach a “point of no return” in a mere ten years. We’re still here, and the climate activists have postponed the apocalypse, again. And, they've changed "Global Warming" to Climate Change, so now any fluctuation in climate or natural event Mother Nature bestows upon us can be and often is blamed squarely on man-made climate change.
None of the doomsday predictions made by alarmists, ever, have been proven correct... ever. This might indicate that it's Mother Nature who's calling the show, while the hubris of man makes room for those with agendas to pretend man is so mighty, our planet's fate will be determined on our own by using our air conditioners or by enabling industrialism's damage by buying things.
The fact politicians have conjured numerous ways to fight climate change which all happen to involve revenue, ostensibly in order to combat the "apocalyptic" predictions courtesy of UN IPCC warnings of imminent disaster and doom, in itself should provoke critical thought and questions for the global citizenry; however, the media, the UN, the Nobel Prize Committee (by awarding perhaps the most shameful Nobel Prize in world history to Al Gore for having been recorded giving a now disproven, ridiculous PowerPoint presentation consisting of one disproven or heavily exaggerated assertion after another) - the list goes on and on - have done all they can do to control this one singular version of the climate narrative.
Federal and state legislators actually bring in revenue by laughable decree - for corporations and the citizenry alike to compensate for their "carbon footprints". Is that not among the most amazing examples of lunacy in government overreach? Charging people and corporations to offset something as abstract as a "carbon footprint" is among the most ridiculous repercussions dealt upon common man in the name of a far from settled, highly suspect science.
A science with an ever-growing list of competent, unbiased scientific experts voicing dissent with the passing of each year. A science the global population has been intentionally and erroneously informed has reached a "97% consensus" among the scientific community. That go-to liberal talking point (as it requires absolutely zero independent thought; solely the unsubstantiated parroting for which liberals are known) that, at this point, sounds quite similar to nails on a chalkboard, has been incontrovertibly debunked by a superfluity of scientific researchers.
The most important fact about climate science, often overlooked, is that scientists disagree about the environmental impacts of the combustion of fossil fuels on the global climate.
The articles and surveys most commonly cited as showing support for a “scientific consensus” in favor of the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis are without exception methodologically flawed and often deliberately misleading.
There is no survey or study showing “consensus” on the most important scientific issues in the climate change debate.
Extensive survey data show deep disagreement among scientists on scientific issues that must be resolved before the man-made global warming hypothesis can be validated. Many prominent experts and probably most working scientists disagree with the claims made by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
NIPCC (Non-Governmental Panel on Climate Change) Report on the so-called "scientific consensus" ~ Follow this link for the full study
The source most cited by hyperventilating climate alarmists was bequeathed upon the peasantry in a 2004 essay produced by Harvard historian, Naomi Oreskes (You read that right - not a scientist). Unsurprisingly, Ms. Oreskes essay was not peer-reviewed, was made into a profitable book, cleverly titled "Merchants of Doubt" (which in 2015 was made into a movie), and built her entire career making the false claim that "deniers", make up a minute minority among the scientific community…
Her aim was presumably to provide a simple, democrat/liberal approved talking point even even the most dense among the peasantry can easily understand, parrot, and aggressively/violently insist as the New Gospel… Which of course is necessary for U.S. Politicians to help garner the much needed electoral support they (reluctantly) rely upon before imposing massive economic and industrial reforms with insane cost projections far surpassing trillions of dollars in global government revenue raised from "carbon" taxes, carbon footprint offsets (it's difficult to even write the words "carbon footprint" with a straight face), CAFE standards imposed upon the Auto-Industry, penalties and fines, etc.
According to an in-depth study on the supposed climate "consensus" conducted by the The Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change, numerous problems and ethical questions have surfaced with regards to the methodology used by the Harvard historian.
It's now widely-known Orsekes failed to scrutinize and properly categorize the scientific studies included in her research.
Oreskes' definition of "consensus" is notably remiss of whether man-made climate change is either dangerous or benign.
Her review "inexplicably" overlooked or simply ignored hundreds of articles by prominent global warming skeptics - John Christy, Sherwood Idso, Richard Lindzen, Patrick Michaels, among many others. 1,350 of these ignored articles can now be found in an online bibliography (PopularTechnology.Net)
Her methodology was inherently flawed; and, while she's not a scientist per se, her conclusions have been instrumental in promoting and enabling global political, economical, and industrial ramifications that will negatively affect common Americans for years to come. The very fact Oreskes was not and is not a scientist undermines any findings and conclusions she made through her unqualified analysis of scientific research available to her.
It has been discovered that her original assertion based on the 928 scientific papers was also flawed; as to query a result of that number, the words "Climate Change" must be used; yet, a query using search terms "Global Climate Change" yields over 10,000 results of climate studies, research, and abstracts.
Oreskes recorded running her queries using the search term "Global Climate Change"; however, it has become abundantly clear she either employed manipulation tactics to substantiate the preconceived conclusions as intended, or lacked professionalism and competency by conveniently omitting the precise keywords used to conduct the study.
In short, Ms. Oreskes' conclusions, which provided the left with the "97% consensus" talking point, are entirely unscientific and performed by an unqualified non-scientist now known to have utilized flawed methodology and mishandled data, undermining Ms. Oreskes integrity and the conclusions so many on the left have been smugly and condescendingly been citing as "fact" for a decade. Take a moment to laugh at the gullibility (or) deception committed by all who have parroted the "consensus" B.S.
I'm sure everyone must have forgotten by now the comically erroneous doomsday prophesies asserted on the first Earth Day in 1970. Some of my favorites are: the end of civilization within 15-20 years; 100-200 million deaths to starvation annually for 10 years; urban dwellers having to wear gas masks to survive; and one of the best... a new Ice Age by 2000.
As reported in 'The New American', Global Warming alarmists, the U.N. IPCC, and the Climate Science community at large continues to "double down" on claims they've made which have proven falsified, to the dismay of scientific experts around the globe:
"Global warming — temperature predictions: Perhaps nowhere has the stunning failure of climate predictions been better illustrated than in the “climate models” used by the UN. The UN climate bureaucracy, known as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), produces periodic reports on “climate science” — often dubbed the “Bible” of climatology. In its latest iteration, the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), the UN featured 73 computer models and their predictions. All of them “predicted” varying degrees of increased warming as atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) increased.
The problem is that every single model was wrong — by a lot. Not only did temperatures not rise by as much as the models predicted, they have failed to rise at all since around 1996, according to data collected by five official temperature data­sets. Based just on the laws of probability, a monkey rolling the dice would have done far better at predicting future temperatures than the UN’s models. That suggests deliberate fraud is likely at work.
"Dr. John Christy, professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama Huntsville (UAH), analyzed all 73 UN computer models. “I compared the models with observations in the key area — the tropics — where the climate models showed a real impact of greenhouse gases,” Christy told CNSNews. “I wanted to compare the real world temperatures with the models in a place where the impact would be very clear.
"Using datasets of temperatures from NASA, the U.K. Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research at the University of East Anglia, NOAA, satellites measuring atmospheric and deep oceanic temperatures, and a remote sensor system in California, he found, “All show a lack of warming over the past 17 years.” In other words, global warming has been on “pause” for almost two decades — a fact that has been acknowledged even by many of the most zealous UN climate alarmists. “All 73 models’ predictions were on average three to four times what occurred in the real world.
"No explanation for what happened to the warming — such as “the oceans ate my global warming” — has withstood scrutiny.
"Almost laughably, in its latest report, the UN IPCC increased its alleged “confidence” in its theory, an action experts such as Christy could not rationalize. “I am baffled that the confidence increases when the performance of your models is conclusively failing,” he said. “I cannot understand that methodology.... It’s a very embarrassing result for the climate models used in the IPCC report.” “When 73 out of 73 [climate models] miss the point and predict temperatures that are significantly above the real world, they cannot be used as scientific tools, and definitely not for public policy decision-making,” he added.
"Other warming predictions have also fallen flat. For instance, for almost two decades now, climate alarmists have been claiming that snow would soon become a thing of the past."
So if you think this hysteria hasn't been happening since 50 years ago and beyond, you're mistaken. The scary part about "climate change" is the global politicians and elite, media, and pop culture are so fully committed to its unproven, logically fallible theory that to hold out for the truth, and some reliable science (or a collective concession) is far from likely in our lifetimes.
I've read one scientist who dissents from man-made theory put it something like this: Science has always been vulnerable to erroneously believed "settled" theories. He mentions that the only recourse we may count on is that science always corrects itself eventually, but it usually requires the generation hyping the erroneous conclusions they've arrived at, and embraced by their world, to die off and the births of new generations of scientists to disprove and correct previous scientific "gospel".
https://preview.redd.it/j9026z1qnlsc1.png?width=948&format=png&auto=webp&s=255f1ca07b66f9089e27b55b42c686fc7292b9e1
Compare this scientific conclusion with regards to something as complex and multi-factored as global climate change and scientific theories postulated by Albert Einstein or Sir Isaac Newton; the elementary simplicity of this "settled science" is comical and indicative of the times in which we live.
Michael Mann's "scientific", two axis graph (which reached scientific consensus in historically record time) showing solely carbon dioxide and temperature correlation is so beneath the complexities of what one might expect of true science; particularly, a field of science applied to determining the driving variables of the earth's climate.
"Whatts Up With That" is one of the more prominent sites available, and not only calls into question the "Settled" Science that is Climate Theory, credible scientific experts around the globe contribute research, hypotheses, and debate ideas in an effort to practice proper scientific methodology where the prominent Climate Theorists and media have failed. Here's one of vast multitudes of examples unavailable through mainstream media:
For the past 20 years, there hasn’t been a global warming trend, despite 30% of all manmade CO2 emissions since 1750 being made over just the last 20 years….
We’ll get about another 0.3C of beneficial CO2 warming recovery between now and 2100 per CO2 doubling, LESS the cooling effects of the coming Grand Solar Minimum expected to start around 2035 and last 50~100 years…
There is a good chance global temps may well be cooler by 2100 than they are now….
The disconfirmed CAGW hypothesis predicted 3C~6C of CO2 induced warming by 2100, which is impossible, and explains why the disparity between CAGW projections are so devoid of reality:
Some scientists go so far as to pretend that we people of earth can either accept their findings and support every political policy made to usurp Mother Nature; such a belief system and/or assertion is so irrational and absurd, this writer can only defer to the definition of man's hubris. The flip side to full, unquestionable worship of their gospel is to be labeled as one who couldn't care less if our descendants will have to develop gills in order to survive the damage our questions do to this settled science.
Science by definition is to seek truth. These same guys are the first to label one in search of that truth "anti-science" or in denial. Their hubris and hypocrisy is mind boggling.
submitted by EzVox03 to u/EzVox03 [link] [comments]

2024.04.01 07:55 ele0s Professor warned me, for citing Philosophy StackExchange ???

I double major in math + philosophy, at an American university. In a PowerPoint presentation for class, I cited https://philosophy.StackExchange.com. I know never to source StackExchange on anything formal, such as essays or exams. After class, my prof. emailed me
You are not to cite inappropriate websites, such as StackExchange, in my class. If this happens again, I shall treat this as an academic offence.
I’m flabbergasted! In math classes, many other students and even professors cite, all the time,
How the deuce is SE "inappropriate" for an INFORMAL presentation ??? Thanks.
submitted by ele0s to askphilosophy [link] [comments]

2024.03.27 16:16 IFeelFantastic1980 Avoid Boston University's Genealogy Courses

I'm reposting my comments that I made when replying to another thread and including updated information. People looking to advance their genealogy skills need to know the issues with Boston University's fraudulent genealogy program.
I took Principles in Fall 2021 and Genealogy Research in Spring 2022. Based on my experience with the latter, I would recommend neither. BU doesn't deserve to make a cent off of these fraudulent programs.
And before you read more, please understand that my experience was not an isolated incident, and these are not baseless accusations. There are dozens of us now who have connected and shared our experiences, and they are all remarkably similar. We've all taken screenshots of interactions with the "teachers" and saved all of our graded assignments. After every single class is over, new people find us and share their experiences. Despite contacting the Director of Continuing Education, the Dean, and the Associate Dean of Enrollment and Student Affairs, this is still an ongoing problem.
I don't want any more prospective genealogists to join our ranks. Take this post as your warning - Do NOT sign up for BU's courses. Go to the National Genealogy Society and take their courses instead. I haven't personally taken any, but I've heard nothing but good things from fellow BU genealogy program survivors.
In a nutshell, the BU genealogy courses are poorly organized and poorly run. The assignments have little to do with the reading, and the assignment questions and/or expectations are often unclear. The grading is incredibly harsh and often incorrect. In almost every assignment I was told I didn't include something that I HAD very clearly included. When I questioned these instances, I usually received no reply from either the grader or the instructor. If they did reply, they only copy/pasted the assignment without further comment (they said that would be cheating.) I was marked down for things that weren't included in the assignment expectations or rubric, and when I pointed this out, their only response was that I should drop because I wasn't qualified to be in the course.
To be clear: the VERY FIRST time I asked for clarification, I was advised to drop the course. This was way past the date when I could get any refund. But the immediate suggestion of dropping was shocking. I've never, EVER had a teacher respond to a question with, "you're clearly not qualified. I recommend dropping the course."
I have a Master's degree, and l've taken many continued education courses. I've earned several certificates, and even helped retool a program for a nationally-recognized organization. l've also taught classes at the college level myself. I don't say this as a brag, but to highlight that I am extremely experienced in higher education. I am not the problem.
To earn the certificate, you must get a C in each of the five modules and a B- overall. Now I had received one D in my ENTIRE life up until this class, during which I seemed to only pull Cs, Ds, and As (the As were from the multiple-choice tests.) The As kept my head above water, but in the fourth module I was 2 percentage points off from a C, and so I failed the course. I didn't even try after that because there was no point - I wasn't going to get the certificate. And again, I was ONLY pulling these grades because they didn't include everything we needed to do for the assignment AND graded my work incorrectly.
You're not allowed to talk with other students apart from the highly-controlled message board. I had posts deleted because I asked for clarification on an assignment. I was told this was considered cheating. If you talk outside of class, they will remove you from the class. This was a highly isolating experience, and one I've never seen ever before in my life. Thank god I broke that rule and reached out to a fellow classmate to express my frustration, because I was starting to think I was crazy. That was when I discovered I wasn't alone, and they were experiencing the exact same issues across the board - incorrect grading, lack of clarity, refusal to explain why things were marked down, being told to drop, etc. In fact, we exchanged graded assignments and discovered we weren't even being graded the same way. In several cases we had the same answer, but it was marked incorrect on my paper and not on theirs, and vice versa.
International students are welcome, but I found out from one of these students that there were several sites needed for assignments that people outside the US cannot access. This was brought this to the teacher's attention, and the student was still marked down, even though they literally could not access the site to complete the assignment.
I seemed to struggle with citations, even though I followed their examples exactly. I finally just copied and pasted their citation examples depending on what I needed to cite and replaced the information, and I was told they'd never seen anyone EVER write citations like this.
The head of the program told us during one of the few live sessions (where they just read a PowerPoint presentation) that we're lucky if they respond to our emails, because they're not paid to do that. That they're doing much of this work on their own time. No wonder they encourage people to drop - it means less work for them. Also, how INCREDIBLY unprofessional to say that to a class!
Our section started out with more than 30 students (I'm not sure of the exact number, somewhere between 30 and 35.) We finished with 15 people still participating. I assume the rest dropped. Of those 15, at least 2 of us didn't earn a certificate. THIS IS A TREND EVERY SINGLE SURVIVOR HAS NOTED.
After the course, I reached out to the head of the department, Thomas Adams Martin, and he told me I wasn't qualified to have taken the course to begin with. Based on the course description, I am qualified ten times over. I provided documentation showing how I was continually misgraded, and he simply didn't care. (They have since updated their course requirements rather than actually fix the program.)
I - along with several other students - have reached out to multiple people at BU - Dr. Zlateva, Dr. Sessa, Ms. Murphy, and Mr. Adams. We have provided detailed examples and included assignments, pointing out the errors in grading. We've also included screenshots of interactions with teachers and graders. They claimed to be investigating the program, but the only result has been changing a few of the assignments (students have reported that the new assignments have the same issues with lack of clarity and poor grading) and the course requirements.
The BU website now states: "It is highly recommended that students have the recommended prerequisites for the course before enrolling. The Certificate Course is an advanced course that requires prior intermediate to advanced-level genealogical education. Advanced education in other fields is typically not sufficient to succeed in the course; it is highly recommended that prior intermediate to advanced level genealogical coursework is successfully completed prior to enrolling ... All students wishing to enroll in the Certificate course must take the placement assessment to assess readiness for the course."
They are only doing this to cover their butts. LET ME BE CLEAR: The blame falls SQUARELY on Boston University. They treat this course as if you already are a professional. They have no interest in actually teaching. If you're already a pro, you'll do great, but then what's the point? Save your money and go apply for your certification with the Board for Certified Genealogists.
One other point to clear up: if you do manage to pass this class, you receive a certificate from BU. It does NOT mean you're a certified genealogist. If you Google this program (as of today, March 27, 2024,) their headline reads, "Become a Certified Genealogist." The description does say that you can use their program to work towards applying to BCG. But it's initially false advertising. It should also be noted that the MAJORITY of the instructors are NOT certified genealogists, so I question if this program even helps prepare you for certification.
BU has no business offering this course as it currently stands. It seems they've tweaked things here and there, but all they've done is shuffle things around superficially and update their prereqs. It's not a solution to the core issues.
The sad thing is, this program has SO much potential. They need capable teachers and graders, and especially someone who knows how to structure a course to retool. Clearly they don't have anyone with those capabilities, because after hearing from so many of us and after seeing our receipts, they still haven't made any significant changes.
submitted by IFeelFantastic1980 to Genealogy [link] [comments]

2024.03.21 17:04 yeet54651 Legitimate fear that I wouldn’t pass my defense

This is a long read, but I wanted to share my experience about the months leading up to my defense, which was yesterday.
Keep in mind that I have a full-time job throughout this whole story; spouse is in the military, and has a super volatile schedule. In the last few months, we’ve also had pipes burst in our home, a dog in her angsty teenage phase (destroying things & just being a general asshole), I broke my toe, been having thyroid issues, and doing the jobs of two people at work.
In early January, I finally started doing a deep dive into my data, and had to re-orient myself to this software, as it had been years since I used it last. Since there were missing values, I tried imputation to get consistent counts for my study sample. Long story short, I spent a MONTH on this, and I was stuck on the data cleaning before even getting near ready to analyze the research questions. I finally reached out to a few people (including my methods advisor, who absolutely did not want to make anything easy for me), and they said to just drop the imputation and cite as a limitation. Little did I also know that the statistical software (as of this date) doesn’t have the necessary commands I would have needed to complete my analysis.
So I spent a month spinning my wheels, but met with my committee member #3 to see if they thought I was ready to defend, and they said “yes, absolutely set a date.” So, I did.
Since my data was restricted, I couldn’t get any other eyes on this other than committee member #3’s. The agency I was using to access this restricted data state they can take up to 5 business days to review anything I wanted to export, and I knew this. I set my date on February 12th for mid-March, and even I knew that was soon because I hadn’t done a deep dive on my main analysis yet.
In addition to being a dumbass and having to figure out exactly what I needed to do for my analysis (regressions, t-tests, chi-square, VIF, etc.), I was already on a tight deadline for mid-March. I basically had to re-write all of the code I had three times. This happened from Feb 18 – Feb 24. Once I was getting close to finishing up my analysis, I found out there was ANOTHER agency that needed to clear my work before anyone else could see it, and they wanted the ENTIRE dissertation. In order to meet the deadlines before my defense, that means I had to write the analysis chapter AND the discussion chapter in A WEEK. I somehow wrote 50+ pages in that week.
Once I got that done and sent out to the agency, I had to work on my PowerPoint for the actual defense itself. Once I was done there I asked the agency if they needed to see that as well (they were already trying to do an expedited request), and they asked me to send it along with any edits to the actual dissertation itself. There were A TON of edits, but I tracked them and even kept notes on the figures that I managed to add. Of course they found edits for me to make (I completely neglected to read their requirements, so that was on me), so I made those edits in every single table, had to figure out the broken figure numbering stuff going on, etc.
I got the final approval this past Monday, immediately sent everything to my committee, but man, Tuesday night, was out of my damn mind… I had done so much work in little time for something I’d never done before, and SURELY there were some catastrophic errors that I was too dumb to notice. Everyone around me knew what kind of toll this was taking and knew when I was defending. So, if I didn’t pass, everyone would know. I recently knew of a classmate that wasn’t ready for their defense and they got pushed back to summer. I wanted to be done with this degree and have the title so I’d get a much needed raise at work, and so my poor spouse would stop seeing me at the absolute lowest points of my life. I didn’t eat, I didn’t really sleep, I was super irritable all the time, I didn’t pull my full weight around the house, I didn’t cook… I did what I could with stopping at the store for some food/cleaning up around the house.
The thing that worried me the most was that my committee was all encouraging me along the way, but given that my data was restricted, none of them could see my work. Except committee member #3, and they weren’t going to go through all of my coding files. I kept reading this sub with people saying like “they wouldn’t push you to defend if they knew you weren’t ready” and I’m just like “they don’t know the full story! They got my dissertation a DAY AND A HALF before I defended, and that’s like a 200-page document with over 400 sources.
I defended Wednesday and I passed with minor revisions. I still cannot believe this is real. I attend a tier-1 research university.
I’m very much neurotic, so I just let my fate rest in the hands of my chair and followed him at his word (whom I’ve written a conference paper with). It was the hardest thing I’d ever done. The only other thing worth mentioning is that my chair and I didn’t discuss how long the defense should be, and so when they said “you have the floor for 30 minutes” and I had been doing practice runs lasting about an hour, the defense wasn’t as strong as I had wanted it to be and had to make a lot of adjustments on the fly. Still passed with revisions. Guess it depends on how much you’ve proved yourself throughout your program that gives your advisors faith that you’ve done your due diligence.
Just thought I’d share in case someone like me is browsing this sub looking for reassurance/advice 💙
submitted by yeet54651 to PhD [link] [comments]

2024.02.26 17:38 EddieLeeWilkins45 (PA) Was this age discrimination

{I'm aware this is long but please bear with me} Lately I've been going thru a lot. And have some regret, as I think I passed on something big. (I was late 40s in 2020 fyi)
I was working for a small non-profit, doing video work for continuing education (think Law/Medical/CPA/Realtor etc). I was viewed as 'just a camera guy' during my first 2 years there. I was capable of more but whatever. Anyway worked part time, showed up at hotel conference rooms, classes etc, setup a camera, and streamed the speaker to online training platforms, kinda like Zoom webinars. This is back in 2018 &19. Attendees were both in the class, and online.
Then, 2020 hits. At first I thought I'd just be let go, but my manager there (IT), knew I did web design & might come in handy, so they kept me on a few days a week while deciding things for the pandemic. So the online platform we used, came with a Wordpress style website builder, that could really enhance the overall experience of the webcast. Adding pages, and agenda, embedding marketing videos etc. It was very technical, and tedious, but I handled it and then some.
Long story short, 3 of us were incredibly busy the second half of 2020. Crazy busy. 50, 60, 70 hours a week at times to pull off large scale conferences. What sucked was, as with anything, the 'complainers' always try to set the narrative. They sat on the sidelines and watched, constantly complaining about this or that, thinking they could do it better. Whatever, I was soo laser focused I just kept pushing the 3 of us to keep going & generating revenue. (These generated very good income, we didn't skip a beat compared to being in person). Again, throughout the year there was a meeting about why don't we do this or that (polls, quizes etc). It wasn't only a matter of we didn't have time, it was also a matter of trying to get any poll or quiz questions from speakers, as it was often a challenge just to get the powerpoint slides in time.
So the year ends, and I'm knowing we were great. Totally excited I found my career, finally, again late 40s. Well, one day in January, an email goes out. And one of my coworkers, who was great, was leaving. Uggh, I was devastated. I wanted to email HR and be like 'We gotta keep her', but I wasn't sure what kindof pay she was getting, and maybe they couldn't/wouldn't match it. So it sucked but I left it be. She & I were fine and sad she had to leave.
Anyway, she would do the recordings of speakers, onboard them, explain the slide advancing, attendee chat and Q&A feature etc. I built the website, uploaded all the videos, edited any mistakes out that she wrote down, etc. As well as had a 'second' daily job that took up a lot of my time, but it too generated revenue. So we had 1 conference to run without her, before we could train any new people, and I ran it mostly myself, in tandem with the remaining coworker who did the planning and scheduling, and was very effective at it. We crushed it, and got a 90% feedback score from viewers.
I'll try to keep this quick. So the CEO & new VP (they reorganized), assign to me a 25 year old staffer. The chick was a complete idiot. My first meeting with her, she thinks she runs the website, and asks me about redoing the graphics for her. I told her I run the website, but if she wants to submit graphics to me I'll upload them. The girl didn't even know what Photoshop was, but said the VP (her friend) put her in charge of creative. I didn't spend 5 seconds on the issue and said the VP is wrong. I won that battle, a battle that should have never began. So the VP gets mad, and wants me to run a stupid 'fake conference', to show how good her friend is at running things?? It wasn't explained this way, but it was subliminal. It turned into this idiot just telling me what to do, what features she wants on the website, dumb things that were either pretty irrelevant (a Twitter icon) or things that would require an entire additional web designer for time constraints (again, I was upwards of 50-60 hours a week, and now planning to cut it at 40 if this ish continued). There were constant battles, of her claiming I didn't know what I was doing, and wasn't a 'real' web designer. (The website had to be built over & over again, not re-using one, for backend tech & crediting purposes, so I built 20 websites in 7 months time).
Her & the VP were constantly complaining, calling me lazy, saying I don't work hard etc. (We were remote, so when I build a website I do it alone. And no I'm not going to constantly meet with an idiot for updates. It was my project, not hers). So she said I sit around all day watching TV etc.
Lastly, we run this VP's 'fake conference', only I changed the narrative. Instead of making it 'Whooa look at what our new staffer is doing. Changing things up already', I took the time to create a dynamite presentation, based on how hard we worked, how successful we were, explaining how we learned as we went, and ran multiple 2 day conferences (which were very hard), and how well attended they were. Adding in the fact after our teammate left, the other & I ran a near flawless event. Then, oh yeah, and now 2 new people are joining the team. Welcome, prepare to work.
Well, I know the VP hated it (was pretty much my intent). She also didn't want her friend to do that kind of work, insisting she is essentially 'Creative Director' and that I would need to build the website, and for her to review. With me making any final adjustments. There was also an issue where we needed to redo a video we would play at the beginning, explaining the platform to the viewers. We needed this done because I brought to the VP's attention the former employee was in it, and it would be bad form to continue (also could be an issue if she never signed a waiver, although she said to me via text she didn't care). The VP tells me not to make it, that her friend is 'in charge of it'. I wrote back 'Great, let me know when its done and I'll upload it'. About a month later, the girl asks me about when I'll have time to work on it??? I said its not my project, its hers, and that I was launching a new theme for the website and didn't do work for her.
The whole place became upside down. I spoke once with the quote unquote ceo (it wasa small company of about 50 people), and she definitely did not take my side. Saying this is their direction to take to improve things etc. The staffer had no graphics skill sets, no video editing skill sets, and no web design skill sets, but was put in charge? I was never told a reason, but I was let go after our faux conference, it was also the last day of the fiscal year so I'm thinking they viewed me as a 'problem employee'. I will admit, during all this turmoil, and favoritism, I'd reached my boiling point in a meeting, where an irrelevant manager who did nothing in 2020, told me I would also need to do the former staffers work also, and I was like "What??! Ohhh, what the f#@k?!" Also, when I was told by the VP her friend was in charge of the video project, I forwarded her email to the ceo asking 'Is this how you treat us for all our hard work and success?? New people just walking in and getting to take over projects over me". Again, the ceo did not take my side. There were some other things, not cursing but just sales talk & motivational about how the coworker & I had big goals of taking these bigger by scale, and all the VP and manager are fixated on is getting their friend in charge of a video, that they need bigger goals in business. The ceo did not like those comments.
Anyway, to clarify, the company became a pure disaster after my dismissal. The 25 year old 'friend' (who also had a babysitting job that prevented her from working before 9am, (yeah) quit within 2 months. She also forgot on multiple instances to ask mistake on air be edited out, whereas we were perfect thru all of 2020. Another girl they brought in to share the work also quit, citing too much blatant favoritism. They hired her replacement, who only lasted 2 weeks and eventually had to use someone on Upwork. Two of the first 5 conference absolutely bombed (refunds given), and the VP was demoted/quiet fired after about 4 months, promoting my former manager to VP. Numerous people have since left, including other VP's who had been there close to 20 years, and other tangibly media related folks.
I'm having a tough time with this, and regret. Some reasons I didn't sue were I did like working there, and felt alot of the people were my friends. Honestly I thought she'd call me back or hire me as a consultant/outsourced style role. Also though, there was whole f bomb & (in your face) email I wrote the ceo. Lastly its an 'at will' state. I don't think its right to annoint someone as creative director, but I'm not sure where that would stand legally. Also, I had a friend who was somewhat closely associated to the organization, and I wasn't sure if they knew, but I thought it could get awkward and kindof affect his career. He's been very successful, and I was scared his friend from childhood might come back to hinder it, I kinda didn't wanna do that to him at this point in his life.
submitted by EddieLeeWilkins45 to AskLegal [link] [comments]

2024.02.12 15:40 IntellectualAINC We create AI software and provide AI automation for companies. Here is a list of the best AI tools for research IMO

Here are some AI tools that are useful for research. So you can save some money by just using them and not hiring a professional. I tried to include some of the best and underrated AI tools. Most of them are free so check them out if you want.
I did not include ChatGPT as it can basically be used for anything with the right prompts. So these tools will be more research-oriented.
Here is the list of all the AI tools that can be used for research of all kinds:
A quick disclaimer – I work for the company Idealink where we create custom ChatGPT for businesses and other AI products.
Now a bit more about them individually (They are not in any particular order but Gemini is my favorite at the moment):

#1 Gemini:

Bard is an AI chatbot from Google AI that can be used for a variety of research tasks, including finding information, summarizing texts, and generating creative text formats. It can be used for both primary and secondary research and it is great for creating content.

Key features:

Scite.AI

Scite AI is an innovative platform that helps discover and evaluate scientific articles. Its Smart Citations feature provides context and classification of citations in scientific literature, indicating whether they support or contrast the cited claims.

Key features:

4. GPT4All

GPT4All is an open-source ecosystem for training and deploying large language models that can be run locally on consumer-grade hardware. GPT4All is designed to be powerful, customizable and great for conducting research. Overall, it is an offline and secure AI-powered search engine.

Key information:

5. AsReview

AsReview is a software package designed to make systematic reviews more efficient using active learning techniques. It helps to review large amounts of text quickly and addresses the challenge of time constraints when reading large amounts of literature.

Key features:

6. DeepL

DeepL translates texts & full document files instantly. Millions translate with DeepL everyday. It is commonly used for translating web pages, documents, and emails. It can also translate speech.
DeepL also has a great feature called DeepL Write. DeepL Write is a powerful tool that can help you to improve your writing in a variety of ways. It is a valuable resource for anyone who wants to write clear, concise, and effective prose.

Key features:

  1. Tailored Translations: Adjust translations to fit specific needs and context, with alternatives for words or phrases.
  2. Whole Document Translation: One-click translation of entire documents including PDF, Word, and PowerPoint files while maintaining original formatting.
  3. Tone Adjustment: Option to select between formal and informal tone of voice for translations in selected languages.
  4. Built-in Dictionary: Instant access to dictionary for insight into specific words in translations, including context, examples, and synonyms.

7. Humata

Humata is an AI tool designed to assist with processing and understanding PDF documents. It offers features like summarizing, comparing documents, and answering questions based on the content of the uploaded files.

Key information:

8. Cockatoo

Cockatoo AI is an AI-powered transcription service that automatically generates text from recorded speech. It is a convenient and easy-to-use tool that can be used to transcribe a variety of audio and video files. It is one of the AI-powered tools that not everyone will find a use for but it is a great tool nonetheless.

Key features:

9. Avidnote

Avidnote is an AI-powered research writing platform that helps researchers write and organize their research notes easily. It combines all of the different parts of the academic writing process, from finding articles to managing references and annotating research notes.

Key Features:

10. Research Rabbit

Research Rabbit is an online tool that helps you find references quickly and easily. It is a citation-based literature mapping tool that can be used to plan your essay, minor project, or literature review.

Key features:

I’ll keep updating this little guide, so add your comments and I’ll try to add more tools. This is all just a personal opinion, so it’s completely cool if you disagree with it. Btw here is the link to the full blog post about all the AI tools in a bit more depth.
submitted by IntellectualAINC to passive_income [link] [comments]

2024.02.12 15:39 IntellectualAINC Review: 10 AI tools that can be used to improve research

Here are some AI tools that are useful for research. So you can save some money by just using them and not hiring a professional. I tried to include some of the best and underrated AI tools. Most of them are free so check them out if you want.
I did not include ChatGPT as it can basically be used for anything with the right prompts. So these tools will be more research-oriented.
Here is the list of all the AI tools that can be used for research of all kinds:
A quick disclaimer – I work for the company Idealink where we create custom ChatGPT for businesses and other AI products.
Now a bit more about them individually (They are not in any particular order but Gemini is my favorite at the moment):

#1 Gemini:

Bard is an AI chatbot from Google AI that can be used for a variety of research tasks, including finding information, summarizing texts, and generating creative text formats. It can be used for both primary and secondary research and it is great for creating content.

Key features:

Scite.AI

Scite AI is an innovative platform that helps discover and evaluate scientific articles. Its Smart Citations feature provides context and classification of citations in scientific literature, indicating whether they support or contrast the cited claims.

Key features:

4. GPT4All

GPT4All is an open-source ecosystem for training and deploying large language models that can be run locally on consumer-grade hardware. GPT4All is designed to be powerful, customizable and great for conducting research. Overall, it is an offline and secure AI-powered search engine.

Key information:

5. AsReview

AsReview is a software package designed to make systematic reviews more efficient using active learning techniques. It helps to review large amounts of text quickly and addresses the challenge of time constraints when reading large amounts of literature.

Key features:

6. DeepL

DeepL translates texts & full document files instantly. Millions translate with DeepL everyday. It is commonly used for translating web pages, documents, and emails. It can also translate speech.
DeepL also has a great feature called DeepL Write. DeepL Write is a powerful tool that can help you to improve your writing in a variety of ways. It is a valuable resource for anyone who wants to write clear, concise, and effective prose.

Key features:

  1. Tailored Translations: Adjust translations to fit specific needs and context, with alternatives for words or phrases.
  2. Whole Document Translation: One-click translation of entire documents including PDF, Word, and PowerPoint files while maintaining original formatting.
  3. Tone Adjustment: Option to select between formal and informal tone of voice for translations in selected languages.
  4. Built-in Dictionary: Instant access to dictionary for insight into specific words in translations, including context, examples, and synonyms.

7. Humata

Humata is an AI tool designed to assist with processing and understanding PDF documents. It offers features like summarizing, comparing documents, and answering questions based on the content of the uploaded files.

Key information:

8. Cockatoo

Cockatoo AI is an AI-powered transcription service that automatically generates text from recorded speech. It is a convenient and easy-to-use tool that can be used to transcribe a variety of audio and video files. It is one of the AI-powered tools that not everyone will find a use for but it is a great tool nonetheless.

Key features:

9. Avidnote

Avidnote is an AI-powered research writing platform that helps researchers write and organize their research notes easily. It combines all of the different parts of the academic writing process, from finding articles to managing references and annotating research notes.

Key Features:

10. Research Rabbit

Research Rabbit is an online tool that helps you find references quickly and easily. It is a citation-based literature mapping tool that can be used to plan your essay, minor project, or literature review.

Key features:

I’ll keep updating this little guide, so add your comments and I’ll try to add more tools. This is all just a personal opinion, so it’s completely cool if you disagree with it. Btw here is the link to the full blog post about all the AI tools in a bit more depth.
submitted by IntellectualAINC to ArtificialInteligence [link] [comments]

2024.02.12 15:37 IntellectualAINC We create AI software and provide AI automation for companies. Here is a list of the best AI tools for research IMO

Here are some AI tools that are useful for research. So you can save some money by just using them and not hiring a professional. I tried to include some of the best and underrated AI tools. Most of them are free so check them out if you want.
I did not include ChatGPT as it can basically be used for anything with the right prompts. So these tools will be more research-oriented.
Here is the list of all the AI tools that can be used for research of all kinds:
A quick disclaimer – I work for the company Idealink where we create custom ChatGPT for businesses and other AI products.
Now a bit more about them individually (They are not in any particular order but Gemini is my favorite at the moment):

#1 Gemini:

Bard is an AI chatbot from Google AI that can be used for a variety of research tasks, including finding information, summarizing texts, and generating creative text formats. It can be used for both primary and secondary research and it is great for creating content.

Key features:

Scite.AI

Scite AI is an innovative platform that helps discover and evaluate scientific articles. Its Smart Citations feature provides context and classification of citations in scientific literature, indicating whether they support or contrast the cited claims.

Key features:

4. GPT4All

GPT4All is an open-source ecosystem for training and deploying large language models that can be run locally on consumer-grade hardware. GPT4All is designed to be powerful, customizable and great for conducting research. Overall, it is an offline and secure AI-powered search engine.

Key information:

5. AsReview

AsReview is a software package designed to make systematic reviews more efficient using active learning techniques. It helps to review large amounts of text quickly and addresses the challenge of time constraints when reading large amounts of literature.

Key features:

6. DeepL

DeepL translates texts & full document files instantly. Millions translate with DeepL everyday. It is commonly used for translating web pages, documents, and emails. It can also translate speech.
DeepL also has a great feature called DeepL Write. DeepL Write is a powerful tool that can help you to improve your writing in a variety of ways. It is a valuable resource for anyone who wants to write clear, concise, and effective prose.

Key features:

  1. Tailored Translations: Adjust translations to fit specific needs and context, with alternatives for words or phrases.
  2. Whole Document Translation: One-click translation of entire documents including PDF, Word, and PowerPoint files while maintaining original formatting.
  3. Tone Adjustment: Option to select between formal and informal tone of voice for translations in selected languages.
  4. Built-in Dictionary: Instant access to dictionary for insight into specific words in translations, including context, examples, and synonyms.

7. Humata

Humata is an AI tool designed to assist with processing and understanding PDF documents. It offers features like summarizing, comparing documents, and answering questions based on the content of the uploaded files.

Key information:

8. Cockatoo

Cockatoo AI is an AI-powered transcription service that automatically generates text from recorded speech. It is a convenient and easy-to-use tool that can be used to transcribe a variety of audio and video files. It is one of the AI-powered tools that not everyone will find a use for but it is a great tool nonetheless.

Key features:

9. Avidnote

Avidnote is an AI-powered research writing platform that helps researchers write and organize their research notes easily. It combines all of the different parts of the academic writing process, from finding articles to managing references and annotating research notes.

Key Features:

10. Research Rabbit

Research Rabbit is an online tool that helps you find references quickly and easily. It is a citation-based literature mapping tool that can be used to plan your essay, minor project, or literature review.

Key features:

I’ll keep updating this little guide, so add your comments and I’ll try to add more tools. This is all just a personal opinion, so it’s completely cool if you disagree with it. Btw here is the link to the full blog post about all the AI tools in a bit more depth.
submitted by IntellectualAINC to EntrepreneurRideAlong [link] [comments]

2024.02.12 15:36 IntellectualAINC We create AI software and provide AI automation for companies. Here is a list of the best AI tools for research IMO

Here are some AI tools that are useful for research. So you can save some money by just using them and not hiring a professional. I tried to include some of the best and underrated AI tools. Most of them are free so check them out if you want.
I did not include ChatGPT as it can basically be used for anything with the right prompts. So these tools will be more research-oriented.
Here is the list of all the AI tools that can be used for research of all kinds:
A quick disclaimer – I work for the company Idealink where we create custom ChatGPT for businesses and other AI products.
Now a bit more about them individually (They are not in any particular order but Gemini is my favorite at the moment):

#1 Gemini:

Bard is an AI chatbot from Google AI that can be used for a variety of research tasks, including finding information, summarizing texts, and generating creative text formats. It can be used for both primary and secondary research and it is great for creating content.

Key features:

Scite.AI

Scite AI is an innovative platform that helps discover and evaluate scientific articles. Its Smart Citations feature provides context and classification of citations in scientific literature, indicating whether they support or contrast the cited claims.

Key features:

4. GPT4All

GPT4All is an open-source ecosystem for training and deploying large language models that can be run locally on consumer-grade hardware. GPT4All is designed to be powerful, customizable and great for conducting research. Overall, it is an offline and secure AI-powered search engine.

Key information:

5. AsReview

AsReview is a software package designed to make systematic reviews more efficient using active learning techniques. It helps to review large amounts of text quickly and addresses the challenge of time constraints when reading large amounts of literature.

Key features:

6. DeepL

DeepL translates texts & full document files instantly. Millions translate with DeepL everyday. It is commonly used for translating web pages, documents, and emails. It can also translate speech.
DeepL also has a great feature called DeepL Write. DeepL Write is a powerful tool that can help you to improve your writing in a variety of ways. It is a valuable resource for anyone who wants to write clear, concise, and effective prose.

Key features:

  1. Tailored Translations: Adjust translations to fit specific needs and context, with alternatives for words or phrases.
  2. Whole Document Translation: One-click translation of entire documents including PDF, Word, and PowerPoint files while maintaining original formatting.
  3. Tone Adjustment: Option to select between formal and informal tone of voice for translations in selected languages.
  4. Built-in Dictionary: Instant access to dictionary for insight into specific words in translations, including context, examples, and synonyms.

7. Humata

Humata is an AI tool designed to assist with processing and understanding PDF documents. It offers features like summarizing, comparing documents, and answering questions based on the content of the uploaded files.

Key information:

8. Cockatoo

Cockatoo AI is an AI-powered transcription service that automatically generates text from recorded speech. It is a convenient and easy-to-use tool that can be used to transcribe a variety of audio and video files. It is one of the AI-powered tools that not everyone will find a use for but it is a great tool nonetheless.

Key features:

9. Avidnote

Avidnote is an AI-powered research writing platform that helps researchers write and organize their research notes easily. It combines all of the different parts of the academic writing process, from finding articles to managing references and annotating research notes.

Key Features:

10. Research Rabbit

Research Rabbit is an online tool that helps you find references quickly and easily. It is a citation-based literature mapping tool that can be used to plan your essay, minor project, or literature review.

Key features:

I’ll keep updating this little guide, so add your comments and I’ll try to add more tools. This is all just a personal opinion, so it’s completely cool if you disagree with it. Btw here is the link to the full blog post about all the AI tools in a bit more depth.
submitted by IntellectualAINC to Automate [link] [comments]

2024.02.12 12:35 IntellectualAINC We create AI software and provide AI automation for companies. Here is a list of the best AI tools for research IMO

Here are some AI tools that are useful for research. So you can save some money by just using them and not hiring a professional. I tried to include some of the best and underrated AI tools. Most of them are free so check them out if you want.
I did not include ChatGPT as it can basically be used for anything with the right prompts. So these tools will be more research-oriented.
Here is the list of all the AI tools that can be used for research of all kinds:
A quick disclaimer – I work for the company Idealink where we create custom ChatGPT for businesses and other AI products.
Now a bit more about them individually (They are not in any particular order but Gemini is my favorite at the moment):

#1 Gemini:

Bard is an AI chatbot from Google AI that can be used for a variety of research tasks, including finding information, summarizing texts, and generating creative text formats. It can be used for both primary and secondary research and it is great for creating content.

Key features:

Scite.AI

Scite AI is an innovative platform that helps discover and evaluate scientific articles. Its Smart Citations feature provides context and classification of citations in scientific literature, indicating whether they support or contrast the cited claims.

Key features:

4. GPT4All

GPT4All is an open-source ecosystem for training and deploying large language models that can be run locally on consumer-grade hardware. GPT4All is designed to be powerful, customizable and great for conducting research. Overall, it is an offline and secure AI-powered search engine.

Key information:

5. AsReview

AsReview is a software package designed to make systematic reviews more efficient using active learning techniques. It helps to review large amounts of text quickly and addresses the challenge of time constraints when reading large amounts of literature.

Key features:

6. DeepL

DeepL translates texts & full document files instantly. Millions translate with DeepL everyday. It is commonly used for translating web pages, documents, and emails. It can also translate speech.
DeepL also has a great feature called DeepL Write. DeepL Write is a powerful tool that can help you to improve your writing in a variety of ways. It is a valuable resource for anyone who wants to write clear, concise, and effective prose.

Key features:

  1. Tailored Translations: Adjust translations to fit specific needs and context, with alternatives for words or phrases.
  2. Whole Document Translation: One-click translation of entire documents including PDF, Word, and PowerPoint files while maintaining original formatting.
  3. Tone Adjustment: Option to select between formal and informal tone of voice for translations in selected languages.
  4. Built-in Dictionary: Instant access to dictionary for insight into specific words in translations, including context, examples, and synonyms.

7. Humata

Humata is an AI tool designed to assist with processing and understanding PDF documents. It offers features like summarizing, comparing documents, and answering questions based on the content of the uploaded files.

Key information:

8. Cockatoo

Cockatoo AI is an AI-powered transcription service that automatically generates text from recorded speech. It is a convenient and easy-to-use tool that can be used to transcribe a variety of audio and video files. It is one of the AI-powered tools that not everyone will find a use for but it is a great tool nonetheless.

Key features:

9. Avidnote

Avidnote is an AI-powered research writing platform that helps researchers write and organize their research notes easily. It combines all of the different parts of the academic writing process, from finding articles to managing references and annotating research notes.

Key Features:

10. Research Rabbit

Research Rabbit is an online tool that helps you find references quickly and easily. It is a citation-based literature mapping tool that can be used to plan your essay, minor project, or literature review.

Key features:

I’ll keep updating this little guide, so add your comments and I’ll try to add more tools. This is all just a personal opinion, so it’s completely cool if you disagree with it. Btw here is the link to the full blog post about all the AI tools in a bit more depth.
submitted by IntellectualAINC to Entrepreneur [link] [comments]

2024.02.12 10:40 IntellectualAINC We create AI software and provide AI automation for companies. Here is a list of the best AI tools for research IMO

Here are some AI tools that are useful for research. So you can save some money by just using them and not hiring a professional. I tried to include some of the best and underrated AI tools. Most of them are free so check them out if you want.
I did not include ChatGPT as it can basically be used for anything with the right prompts. So these tools will be more research-oriented.
Here is the list of all the AI tools that can be used for research of all kinds:
A quick disclaimer – I work for the company Idealink where we create custom ChatGPT for businesses and other AI products.
Now a bit more about them individually (They are not in any particular order but Gemini is my favorite at the moment):

#1 Gemini:

Bard is an AI chatbot from Google AI that can be used for a variety of research tasks, including finding information, summarizing texts, and generating creative text formats. It can be used for both primary and secondary research and it is great for creating content.

Key features:

Scite.AI

Scite AI is an innovative platform that helps discover and evaluate scientific articles. Its Smart Citations feature provides context and classification of citations in scientific literature, indicating whether they support or contrast the cited claims.

Key features:

4. GPT4All

GPT4All is an open-source ecosystem for training and deploying large language models that can be run locally on consumer-grade hardware. GPT4All is designed to be powerful, customizable and great for conducting research. Overall, it is an offline and secure AI-powered search engine.

Key information:

5. AsReview

AsReview is a software package designed to make systematic reviews more efficient using active learning techniques. It helps to review large amounts of text quickly and addresses the challenge of time constraints when reading large amounts of literature.

Key features:

6. DeepL

DeepL translates texts & full document files instantly. Millions translate with DeepL everyday. It is commonly used for translating web pages, documents, and emails. It can also translate speech.
DeepL also has a great feature called DeepL Write. DeepL Write is a powerful tool that can help you to improve your writing in a variety of ways. It is a valuable resource for anyone who wants to write clear, concise, and effective prose.

Key features:

  1. Tailored Translations: Adjust translations to fit specific needs and context, with alternatives for words or phrases.
  2. Whole Document Translation: One-click translation of entire documents including PDF, Word, and PowerPoint files while maintaining original formatting.
  3. Tone Adjustment: Option to select between formal and informal tone of voice for translations in selected languages.
  4. Built-in Dictionary: Instant access to dictionary for insight into specific words in translations, including context, examples, and synonyms.

7. Humata

Humata is an AI tool designed to assist with processing and understanding PDF documents. It offers features like summarizing, comparing documents, and answering questions based on the content of the uploaded files.

Key information:

8. Cockatoo

Cockatoo AI is an AI-powered transcription service that automatically generates text from recorded speech. It is a convenient and easy-to-use tool that can be used to transcribe a variety of audio and video files. It is one of the AI-powered tools that not everyone will find a use for but it is a great tool nonetheless.

Key features:

9. Avidnote

Avidnote is an AI-powered research writing platform that helps researchers write and organize their research notes easily. It combines all of the different parts of the academic writing process, from finding articles to managing references and annotating research notes.

Key Features:

10. Research Rabbit

Research Rabbit is an online tool that helps you find references quickly and easily. It is a citation-based literature mapping tool that can be used to plan your essay, minor project, or literature review.

Key features:

I’ll keep updating this little guide, so add your comments and I’ll try to add more tools. This is all just a personal opinion, so it’s completely cool if you disagree with it. Btw here is the link to the full blog post about all the AI tools in a bit more depth.
submitted by IntellectualAINC to ChatGPT [link] [comments]

2024.01.19 22:19 JessLittleX Seeking Advice on Citing Child Abuse and Sexual Harassment Lawsuit in Personal Statement

I would greatly appreciate any feedback/advice. I focused on 3 life events in my personal statement where I personally experienced how systemic issues can aid in oppression/abuse. These three events also most heavily influenced my decision to apply to law school and the fields of law I want to practice. They are experiences that will make me a great advocate for victims, but I am learning could lead to me being judged and rejected by admissions committees.
  1. Experience growing up in the rural deep south and how inefficient child protective services, family ties at a corrupt police dept, and my stepmother’s and father’s leadership roles at the local Baptist church (Southern Baptist Convention) exacerbated and prolonged child abuse. Not giving any details of abuse. But was thinking I need to give at least one example of how systems made it worse so stating that after 2 CPS investigations resulted in zero consequences, abuse escalated. Harsher conditions and mistrust of CPS led to me running away to a stranger’s house on my bicycle one night. Police picked me up, a 10-year-old run away dressed in a mickey mouse nightgown, and took me into the station where a senior officer covered it up as a family favor. It’s common knowledge Louisiana police and the Southern Baptist Convention are riddled with corruption. The DOJ is currently investigating both, so I feel like this should be 100% applicable. However, I have a bad feeling it will lead to being stigmatized and dismissed.
  2. Experience as an inner city educator showed me how systemic issues in our education system lead to impoverished minorities being robbed of an education and how violent schools become pipelines to prison. Inspired interest in education reform via strategic litigation.
  3. Spent 7 1/2 years in medical device sales supporting cases in OR (filters, stents, etc). When a wonderful work environment turned sour, my eyes were opened to how noncompete agreements aid in the exploitation of Americas workforce by legally binding employees to toxic workplaces. (Noncompetes are also of current interest to DOJ in addition to FTC) Slander, libel, sexual harassment and retaliation became commonplace, and any evidence pointing to wrongdoers was deleted from HR for years. Labor laws and FDA laws were being broken. In an effort to stand up for my colleagues, myself and the patients we served, I started my own investigation calling everyone I knew who had an HR report that had been deleted, and if they permitted me to share it with the EEOC, I typed it out until I had a 7-page witness list, 16-page timeline, and 23-page PowerPoint that I gave to the EEOC and filed a charge of discrimination resulting in a global leader being fired and multiple global leaders resigning. After heavier allegations of drug induced sexual assault surfaced, and a lawsuit from 2006 proved a pattern of retaliation ensued for women alleging the same, I filed my own lawsuit and started studying for the LSAT. I cited the case # of my lawsuit and the suit from 2006 in the footnotes of my PS. I feel like this should be accepted as applicable. I also feel like it's going to leave me stigmatized and dismissed.
Thoughts please. I value brutal honesty.
submitted by JessLittleX to lawschools [link] [comments]

2024.01.19 11:10 JessLittleX Seeking Advice on Citing Child Abuse and Sexual Harassment Lawsuit in Personal Statement

I would greatly appreciate any feedback/advice. I focused on 3 life events in my personal statement where I personally experienced how systemic issues can aid in oppression/abuse. These three events also most heavily influenced my decision to apply to law school and the fields of law I want to practice. They are experiences that will make me a great advocate for victims, but I am learning could lead to me being judged and rejected by admissions committees.
1) Experience growing up in the rural deep south and how inefficient child protective services, family ties at a corrupt police dept, and my stepmother’s and father’s leadership roles at the local Baptist church (Southern Baptist Convention) exacerbated and prolonged child abuse. Not giving any details of abuse. But was thinking I need to give at least one example of how systems made it worse so stating that after 2 CPS investigations resulted in zero consequences, abuse escalated. Harsher conditions and mistrust of CPS led to me running away to a stranger’s house on my bicycle one night. Police picked me up, a 10-year-old run away dressed in a mickey mouse nightgown, and took me into the station where a senior officer covered it up as a family favor. It’s common knowledge Louisiana police and the Southern Baptist Convention are riddled with corruption. The DOJ is currently investigating both, so I feel like this should be 100% applicable. However, I have a bad feeling it will lead to being stigmatized and dismissed.
2) Experience as an inner city educator showed me how systemic issues in our education system lead to impoverished minorities being robbed of an education and how violent schools become pipelines to prison. Inspired interest in education reform via strategic litigation.
3) Spent 7 1/2 years in medical device sales supporting cases in OR (filters, stents, etc). When a wonderful work environment turned sour, my eyes were opened to how noncompete agreements aid in the exploitation of Americas workforce by legally binding employees to toxic workplaces. (Noncompetes are also of current interest to DOJ in addition to FTC) Slander, libel, sexual harassment and retaliation became commonplace, and any evidence pointing to wrongdoers was deleted from HR for years. Labor laws and FDA laws were being broken. In an effort to stand up for my colleagues, myself and the patients we served, I started my own investigation calling everyone I knew who had an HR report that had been deleted, and if they permitted me to share it with the EEOC, I typed it out until I had a 7-page witness list, 16-page timeline, and 23-page PowerPoint that I gave to the EEOC and filed a charge of discrimination resulting in a global leader being fired and multiple global leaders resigning. After heavier allegations of drug induced sexual assault surfaced, and a lawsuit from 2006 proved a pattern of retaliation ensued for women alleging the same, I filed my own lawsuit and started studying for the LSAT. I cited the case # of my lawsuit and the suit from 2006 in the footnotes of my PS. I feel like this should be accepted as applicable. I also feel like it's going to leave me stigmatized and dismissed.
Thoughts please. I value brutal honesty.
submitted by JessLittleX to lawschooladmissions [link] [comments]

2023.12.28 00:13 NoLeafClover777 Do we really have a "skills shortage", or do we have an over-abundance of sh*tty businesses?

We all know that one of the biggest reasons used to justify our record rates of immigration is the often-cited "skills shortage" parroted by business groups such as the Australian Retailers Association and the Business Council of Australia.
These are two influential groups (consisting of business owners/bosses/executives) who put extreme amounts of pressure on governments to keep immigration levels as high as possible, with the implicit goal being that they can put a cap on wages.
When you look at the breakdown of our "skilled" migrant intake list, an extremely high percentage of workers are granted visas for two sectors in particular: hospitality, and tech.
For the hospitality industry - roles like cafe manager, cook, chef, restaurant manager etc - have been near the top of the skiled visa lists for years and years now.
The "shortage" here never stops by definition, because people continually open more and more cafes and restaurants no matter how weak their business case might look, and claim they can't survive without paying their staff the absolute minimum wage.
Cooks here in particular are known to be ridiculously underpaid given how hard most of them work. In what other space do we justify saying it's "OK" to open a business, when you already know it won't be able to survive without exploiting a foreign labour pool?
Hospitality businesses also have one of the lowest impacts on society out of any kind of business towards making productivity-increasing contributions; they don't really develop or innovate anything that makes the economy healthier or more advanced/efficient as a whole.
Sure, it might be nice to have one extra cafe to choose from, but is it worth it from a societal perspective? Are you really willing to sacrifice housing affordability so your lukewarm Eggs Benedict can arrive 5 minutes earlier? Those who already own their house outright might be, for everyone else it's a pretty raw deal.
The other sector that is currently hugely over-represented is tech, specifically software developers/programmers (there's a bunch of different visa job titles that all basically represent the same thing).
As someone who owns a tech business, and who deals with plenty of other start-ups and wannabe business owners in this sector in particular, I can give some specific insight as to what "skills shortage" actually usually means within IT.
Most of the "businesses" I encounter in this space are obviously terrible business models that will NEVER be profitable or make decent money, started by the sons (almost always men) of wealthy parents who have never been told that their shit stinks.
They use their combination of too much hair gel and flashy PowerPoint presentations to convince some investors (usually a group of their dad's cashed-up boomer mates who don't understand technology) that they're going to be the next Atlassian, and start a shitty software company with a tryhard "cool tech" name like LifeProBroTech.
They then list a bunch of below-industry-average salary job ads, trying to push "perks" like 'fun culture!', 'regular team lunches!', and any other bullshit except actually paying a fair wage.
The job ad then sits on Seek/LinkedIn for a month, and they start to grumble and cry about how they "can't get anyone" and we have a "skills shortage", so they cry to their connections to continue to push for more immigration.
Eventually they hire a bunch of developers (usually Indian) who are new to the country and accept the low salary they're offering, and bully them into producing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP, basically a barely-functional version of the software they talked up in their investor pitch deck) as quickly as possible.
As most of the best Indian developers tend to go to the USA, the ones here (often, not always of course) are typically not very good at their jobs, and may have even fabricated their resume.
As a result, these products are often built on absolute spaghetti code, cobbled together by the developers copy-pasting from Googled code snippets, and the business owner (sorry, "entrepreneur") then tries to flog the terrible product off ASAP to one of their dad's other connections in VC or similar.
They'll either get a payout as someone buys the software, and then spend the rest of their days sharing "life advice from a successful entrepreneur such as themself" on LinkedIn, or no one will buy it, leading to the business disbanding; either way, a handful of new not-very-good developers (who still require housing) are now in the unemployment line looking for work.
All of this is to say, that much of what we're being told we're sacrificing quality of life for is things like THIS - wanker business owners believing they have a god-given right to operate some shitty cafe, or money-sink tech company, or crappy clothing store, and should be able to pay mediocre wages in order to do it.
It's these, and CEOs of big business who can't come up with any other ways to make their profits continue to go up, other than paying lower wages, or relying on population growth to have more customers; again, zero innovation involved.
This is in return for massive demand for housing, infrastructure stress, more doctors and medical staff and childcare workers all continually needed. All of those roles add tons of housing demand, as none of them contribute to home building.
If our skilled visa list was proptionally adjusted a lot more to provide a greater emphasis on healthcare, construction, childcare etc, things would likely be in a much healthier place from an infrastructure and social services perspective.
But at the moment, it's just pouring more fuel on the fire, for what seems to be increasingly less economic benefit, and certainly not for the lifestyles of actual workers.
submitted by NoLeafClover777 to australian [link] [comments]

2023.12.07 16:44 StillChillTrill THIS IS NOT OVER. They either go back to the drawing board and add BOTH amendments in their entirety before December 21st. Or we demand that the NDAA be vetoed by the President.

PURPOSE OF THIS POST
I know there has been a lot of news regarding the "finalized" UAPDA over night. There's been summaries and such typed up. I'm going to tell you why it isn't over and you all need to get louder.
It isn't done until the president signs the NDAA in approval.
FIRST LET ME EXPLAIN A BIT OF A TIMELINE
David Grusch began investigating SAP financial waste at the direction of leadership in his dept. As he's mentioned multiple times, it was a group effort. Grusch filed his DoD IG complaint in July of 2021. He was stonewalled. Because of the reprisals and help in authoring stronger PPD-19 provisions for whistleblowers (with the help of Chuck McCullough), he was able to file a PPD-19 urgent concern filing with the ICIG in May of 2022, allowing the investigations to be brought to congress.
Grusch handed over four years of investigation and testimony from 40 witnesses to the current ICIG, who verified Grusch's claims through independent corroboration. So, according to the timeline, he began investigating in 2017 and turned over findings mid 2021.
This legislation and the hearings you are seeing is the result of the gatekeepers getting sloppy with the money. We need STRONG LEGISLATION so that financials can be subpoenaed, and their financial waste can be highlighted for the world to see.
WHY AM I CONFIDENT WE CAN DO THIS
Taking the legislation we have today, how strong it is, and overlaying it with the Grusch timeline. I think the UAPTF caught the gatekeepers in a massive financial misappropriations scandal. This is a conclusion that many others have reached I believe. It appears to be clear who some of the players are. I wrote about Radiance back in July/August, they were easy to find.
I think the vast majority of the MIC wants disclosure. Meaning the money is on your side. There have been a few bad players that have benefitted heavily, compartmentalized everything, and hidden it from the rest of the A&D industry. They didn't cut enough people into their misappropriation scheme. They didn't pay enough people off.
Let me offer you a thought: We already know Lockheed Martin was asking the government to take their UAP materials in the past, and that's what Harry Reid was working on. But gatekeepers wouldn't let it happen. I'd be willing to bet they already made their deals, and they don't mind being named. I'd be willing to bet that they were the first domino to take the opportunity to come clean.
THERE IS NO MIDDLE GROUND
The White House has raised no issue with the UAPDA. Make them prove it. Hold up the NDAA until we get the legislation we need. We want UAPDA and Burchett amendment provisions, IN THEIR ENTIRETY. There is no reason 5 republicans and greedy companies can really stand in the way of this. Get louder.
In regards to the UAPDA language: It is not over. You do not have to cave. We need to demand that this get fixed NOW.
Option 1 - They must take this back to the drawing board and approve BOTH amendments, in their entirety, in time for NDAA Deadline of December 21st.
Option 2 - Biden must VETO the NDAA, and demand that it be taken back to the drawing board to add BOTH amendments, in their entirety.
IF YOUR INCOME/FUNDING RELIES ON THE NDAA
I understand holding the NDAA up for this will affect people who want to feed their families. This is an incredibly tough situation for all. Well, mostly everyone except a few.. We must come together and right this by getting strong legislation in place. It makes me really sad that active duty, veterans, civilian contractors, the entire A&D industry will have to accept that they've been lied to and cheated against as well. And there a select few like Mike Turner and Roger Wicker have benefitted heavily.
The gatekeepers are killing our planet and stealing from us all. If you are involved, you will be considered complicit in this if you don't start getting off of your sinking ship. You need to begin getting on the right side of this immediately or you will be a target for the entire world. Please I implore all potential whistleblowers to RUN through the direct channels RIGHT NOW.
These fools no longer have the power in this fight. They didn't pay enough people off.
There are powerful allies that will demand answers until they are given. Period.
I'M WELCOMING ALL EXPLANATIONS
I have a big list as to why we should demand that the Amendments pass in their entirety. We demand proper congressional oversight over our tax dollars. There is no good faith argument to oppose this legislation when considering the following.
Radiance Tech has been awarded $2,210,000,000 ($2.2 Billion) in Federal contracts since 1999. Let's talk about that $2,210,000,000 ($2.2 Billion). What agencies awarded it, what it's potentially been spent on, and what it could have been spent on instead of Warpigs profiteering in the MIC.
Every penny counts. It doesn't matter if it's 1 trillion dollars or its 1 penny. EVERYTHING MUST REQUIRE CONGRESSIONAL OVERSIGHT FOR APPROPRIATIONS. THE PURSE MUST BE CONTROLLED BY ELECTED OFFICIALS, NO ONE ELSE.
THE PENTAGON'S INABILITY TO REGULATE THEMSELVES
Let's focus on the Pentagon's recent history with financial waste.
2023 - Pentagon fails 6th straight audit of trillions (americanmilitarynews.com)
2022 - Pentagon fails audit, keeping unbroken 5-year failure streak (americanmilitarynews.com)
2021 - The Pentagon Has Never Passed An Audit. Some Senators Want To Change That : NPR
2020 - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-pentagon-auditor-idUSKBN27X03P/
2019 - Pentagon gets failing grade in its second audit Reuters
2018 - The Pentagon Doesn’t Know Where Its Money Goes - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
2017 - Report: Pentagon Wants to Redirect $416M in Funds Toward Missile Defense Programs (executivegov.com).
2016 - Pentagon’s Sloppy Bookkeeping Means $6.5 Trillion Can’t Pass an Audit The Fiscal Times
2015 - The Pentagon Doesn't Deserve More Money From Debt Ceiling Deal (usnews.com)
2014 - https://www.usnews.com/opinion/economic-intelligence/2014/11/12/congress-should-look-closely-at-pentagon-overseas-funding-requests
2013 - Accounting Fraud And Waste Is Standard Procedure at the Pentagon - The Atlantic. fy2013pentagonrequest.pdf (nationalpriorities.org)
2012 - The Fiscal Cliff, Pentagon Waste, and Afghanistan (usnews.com)
2011 - Audit of Pentagon Spending Finds $70 Billion in Waste - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
2010 - War, Weapons Force Pentagon Budget Ever Upward The Fiscal Times. Microsoft Word - RevFund_presbud.rtf (defense.gov)
2009 - https://www.wired.com/2009/05/pentagons-black-budget-grows-to-more-than-50-billion/
2008 - Secret Pentagon Funding Near All-Time High WIRED
2007 - Pentagon Cites Poor Controls for Iraq Fund - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
2006 - Pentagon to Request Billions More in War Money (NY Times)
2005 - Pentagon asks for $402 billion in 2005, up 7% - MarketWatch
2004 - Pentagon Gets $416 Billion From Congress Arms Control Association
2003 - https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/09/pent-s26.pdf. Pentagon Investigates Movement of Funds - The Washington Post. Microsoft PowerPoint - Report Cover.ppt (defense.gov)
2002 - Pentagon Cannot Account For — $2.3 Trillion CBS News 2002 (isgp-studies.com). Federal government fails fifth straight audit - Government Executive (govexec.com). Pentagon was warned in 2002 of contractors (nbcnews.com)
2001 - On 9/10/2001 Donald Rumsfeld announced the Pentagon had $2.3 TRILLION unaccounted for.
2000 - Pentagon's Finances Just Don't Add Up - Los Angeles Times (latimes.com)
THIS IS BIPARTISAN, IT'S ABOUT THE MONEY, NOT THE POLITICS
They stripped Burchett's amendment also. His amendment did NOT replace the UAPDA. They gutted his too. This speaks toward just how Bipartisan this has been.
The Bipartisan Press Conference was telling. I believe that there is alot of political capital invested in combining the two amendments to get disclosure moving. Both sides of the aisle are focused on getting to the bottom of where the hell is the money going? UAP Caucus has been spearheading pro-Disclosure efforts in the House of Representatives. The Senate UAPDA push was extremely bipartisan as well. The hearings where David Grusch, David Fravor, and Ryan Graves gave testimony impacted many users as well.
There has been a TON of credible people talking about this stuff.
WHY I SEE THE UAPDA AND BURCHETT AMENDMENT COMBINING WITH NO CHANGES
- Congressman Jared Moskowitz: "The Pushback We Got Is What Interested Me"
- Congressman Eric Burlison: “It’s time for Tim’s amendment to be passed and as well as the Schumer amendment….It’s my belief that both of them will put us in a better place.”
- Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna: “We need the UAP Disclosure Act….Representative’s Burchett’s language should be added.”
- Congressman Tim Burchett: paraphrasing from Steve Bassett: Cong. Burchett's Amendment was not intended to replace the UAP Disclosure Act. Rather, it was to provide some more direct language to augment extremely complexity Senate bill.
- Congressman Matt Gaetz: "We had an NDAA Conference meeting yesterday, where members of the house and senate both raised this issue in debate. The strongest resistance to transparency and disclosure and the Burchett language, has come from the House Intelligence Committee"
Explicitly saying: no pushback from Schumer or Senate/House Democrat on Burchett Language. I believe we can advocate for both, In their entirety. And we should NOT WAIVER on ANYTHING. Call and email your reps to implement both amendments in the final NDAA and get this show on the road.
I saved my favorite for last, her video that I linked below is incredible.
- Congresswoman Nancy Mace: "What you see on TV is one thing.. What you see behind the scenes is another. After the UAP Hearing ALOT of members were very interested and intrigued, and wanted more information. They want to get in a SCIF, they want to find out, they want to go read classified briefings. But what you get and see publicly, is a mockery, making a mockery of people who have seen UAPs or UFOs or whatever you want to call them. So basically we're going to mock our men and women in uniform? No we're not. We shouldn't do that, we shouldn't be afraid to broach a subject. Whether its real or not real, your money your tax dollars are being spent on it. We ought to know what's going on."
And these are just a few of the most recent examples!
Bonus: jab from Burchett at Kirkpatrick
Bonus: clip of AOC
DISCLOSURE PROCESS SERIES
  1. The Hearings
  2. The Whistleblower Investigations
  3. The Pilots
  4. The UAP Disclosure Act/NDAA and The Potential Authors
  5. The Tic Tac
  6. The Political Representatives
  7. The US Government Can't Solve These Six UAP Cases
  8. The Sol Symposium - Overview
  9. The Forgotten Legislation and AARO Director's Importance
  10. The Infringement of States' Rights
  11. The Architects of The Legacy Crash Retrieval Program
  12. The Reason that AARO Must be Funded
  13. The Beginning of the Dismantling of 80 Years of Secrecy
  14. The Next AARO Director Appointment is Key
  15. The Other Credible People Talking About NHI/UAP
  16. The Company That is Bribing... Hiring People
  17. The Burchett Amendment and The Schumer Amendment (UAPDA)
  18. The UAP Caucus Faces Opposition to Their Bipartisan Efforts
  19. The Senator That Wants to Block Disclosure for Some Reason
  20. The First Full Week of December: Contact NDAA Conferees
GET ACTIVE, LEGALLY AND RESPECTFULLY
  1. Write your Governors
  2. Write your Reps (Create an effective template, resist.bot)
  3. Declassify UAP
  4. UAP Caucus
  5. Disclosure Diaries
  6. The Disclosure Party
PLEASE USE THE REPORT BUTTON WHEN NECESSARY. I'M TOLD THAT IT HELPS THE MODS
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submitted by StillChillTrill to UFOs [link] [comments]

2023.11.25 08:36 SofTee01 Tips/Advice for New Health and Human Services Students

Tips/Advice for New Health and Human Services Students
I tried replying to someone who asked for tips but I couldn't, I thought I'd make a post for anyone who is starting out.
I have submitted my capstone and field exp to grade a couple of days ago (hopefully I pass lol)
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I started in Sept, needed 78 credits, I transfered in basically all my core classes since I have an Associates of Arts and Sciences. I'm officially done with everything, 78 credits between September and November, and my semester is suppose to end in January 31st. (I technically began in August, but I started with Software Engineering and switched to HHS in Sept.)
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BUCKLE UP BECAUSE ITS A LOT OF INFO
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The way I studied was like this: OAs I aimed for 5 days, 3 reading, 1 taking pre-assessment and studying any material I was lacking on, and 5th day test. So for this method, it is extreme, but I was determined to finish this degree in one go, but I am a stay at home mom though, but most of my work was done at night when my son was asleep, I would take about 3 hours to read an entire section, and if you're not like me and don't have attention issues you may be up for a better start.
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4 courses that were a particular handful for me were Medical Coding, Pathophysiology, Medical Terminology, and Pharmacology. But that's because I had no experience, at all in those topics, yet I still took on average 5 days to complete each one of them, so if you have some knowledge on these topics then it'll go a long way.
I used my made up mnemonics for medical terminology and played the quizlet match game a lot, and pharmacology, I also used a YouTube video of picmonics for pharmacology that helped a lot. There are also very helpful quizlets that you could use, I usually play games instead of flashcards.
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Medical Terminology
https://youtu.be/uVm91-NH5Ek
https://youtu.be/cQIU0yJ8RBg
https://quizlet.com/5214683/medical-terminology-root-words-a-z-flash-cards/?x=1jqU&i=1wae42
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Pharmacology
https://youtu.be/Z37UviMBXfk
https://youtu.be/saxaFkiMjY8
These are the notes I wrote, idk if they'll help you, but they helped me
https://knowt.com/flashcards/14883f00-490d-4d85-8449-250c51ca7a47
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Pathophysiology is a lot of reading
https://quizlet.com/494710231/c805-pathophysiology-study-guide-flash-cards/?x=1jqU&i=1wae42
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Lastly Medical Coding is going to change so idk what your experience will be like, but I used some YouTube videos before the reading to gain a better understanding, and at the time it didn't make sense but after the readings from WGU it all clicked. But essentially I think this information will be useful and still applied.
What I learned essentially is how ICD-10-CM, ICD-10-PCS, CPT, and HCPCS are different, their purposes, who is responsible for each, and how to use them, you dont have to memorize the codes (itd be crazy its like 1000s of them).
For example, ICD-10-CM are used for diagnosis, and they are used by all hospital, and when coding you only code what the physicial noted, not the symptoms, focus solely on the diagnosis, e.g. a patient comes in complaining of excessive thirst, increased urination, fatigue, after the tests etc etc we have concluded that the patient presents with Diabetes Mellitus, therefore the code could look something like E10.9 Type 1
Diabetes Mellitus with or without complications. But you could in some instances code symptoms only if the diagnosis hasn't been found.
ICD-10-PCS is for Procedures done Inpatient ONLY, such as a coronary artery bypass, e.g. 0210083 Bypass coronary artery, one artery from coronary arte....
CPT, is for outpatient procedures only, like a chest ultrasound done in real time and documenting the images, e.g. 76604 ultrasound, chest real time w/ image documentation
HCPCS II, what was used for the procedure, like transporting a patient in a wheelchair, e.g. E1087 high strength lightweight wheelchair
If you noticed these codes have a different format which is also something you might want to learn, such as the ICD-10-CM and PCS are 3 and up to 7 characters, but CM starts with an alpha followed by two characters, and then a decimal, PCS doesn't have decimals but sometimes it does have alphas but not in the beginning, HCPCS I (is essentially CPT) and HCPCS II are usually 5 characters
Lastly, know about the fraud, abuse, and waste, such as if someone is overcoding to get extra reimbursements, what would that be, fraud, abuse, or waste?
The test wasn't as bad as I read it to be. I was extremely nervous to take this test because I read a post where a person failed like 3 times and finally passed on their 4th attempt, so I hesitated. My advice, is don't, don't let others dictate your experience or your capacity to do what you set yourself out to do. Believe in yourself and trust yourself.
https://youtu.be/iBkLbXhFOJE
https://youtu.be/6WGtu48yIb8
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Every other test wasn't bad at all, totally doable as long as you read the book and links.
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The PAs, I usually skimmed through the material and tried to gain the important viewpoint, answered the questions of the task, elaborate, and paraphrased with articles that could back up my answers, and I also used the book's References pages to find the exact information they used to back up my answers.
D397 is a PowerPoint presentation, my mentor advised me to make my speaker notes presentable and essentially all you're doing is reading your speaker notes. So your PowerPoint will look like bulletpoints, and in the speaker notes you get to elaborate them. My advice is when you present it, to open the presentation view on PPT, through panopto (make sure you use the web and not the app because there's a lot of issues with the app), and don't forget to cite your speaker notes and add a reference slot. Don't worry too much on your video though, but make sure your background is presentable (as in no questionable objects at view), your notes are more important.
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I would take a day or two on PAs.
I would use APA citation websites like Citation Machine or SciSpace (my favorite), you may need to double check them for errors though.
Definitely download Grammarly, it's one of the first things my mentor advised me to do, and it helped a lot!
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The Field Experience is composed of three simulations, they last about 25 minutes each, about 15 mins pretending to give care to avatars voiced by actors, and the rest of the time talking to an avatar voiced by an actor about your experience and how it went and what you'd change. Each simulation is a task, and the tasks are basically divided in half, so let's say one task is about care coordination, you would first write the plan you have, how you would go about it, and then the other half of the paper would be about your experience and if it went your way or not. They are recorded, but only for your purposes, you don't have to submit them, the only thing you have to submit is the paper.
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The Capstone is basically a focus on your career development skills, it's 2 tasks, one is an interview video (their part is pre recorded, so you won't be actually talking to someone) and the other is about developing your professional portfolio, like a resume
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Personal tip to overcome the daunting anxiety, before every test, like 10 minutes before a test I would use this video, due to having the worst test anxiety attacks, and it helped me extremely with my nerves. Before using this method, I would get shaky, and sweaty yet super cold, I would have brain fogs overall, but after implementing this meditation I would start the test calm, relaxed, and ready to tackle it, it was like a boost of confidence lol
https://youtu.be/ISQ-MKCa684
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Lastly, to take accountability I created a note on my phone, my term is suppose to end in January 31st, so I would google "days until January 31st." I would write all the courses I needed and the timeline I expected myself to complete it in, so that I could take accountability and have a visual representation of what I wanted to happen, and know if I could allow myself some days extra on a class, or a break to enjoy and live in the present, or a sick day, etc.
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For example, I started in September, therefore my broken down goal was:
4 OA and PA combo (6 days/ea.) : 24 days total
9 PAs (3 days/ea.) : 27 days total
10 OAs (5 days/ea.) : 50 days total
2 Major Classes, Field Exp. & Capstone (10 days/ea.) : 20 days total
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Total days of work: 121 days
Days left of school: 213
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That means I have 92 days left to spare, I can readjust these days to take longer to study (if you don't yet, opt for the mentality to prefer to study 1 or 2 days extra if needed, rather than having to spend 1 week completing a study plan), or I could take a break for the day.
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Celebrate your accomplishments, every milestone, say every 5% to 10%, reward yourself with something tangible, and keep the momentum going. I would get tacos lol or have a family night with zero school work for the day.
I have bipolar depression as well, and I was scared I would have my lows and have a set back, but I made school a priority, the way I saw it was, I can either sacrifice my time for a couple of months and carry on, or years and make it a dread and procrastinate.
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When I started, my mentor told me my goal was unrealistic and that I should set a better goal, that bummed me out, and I slacked my first month, I only took 2 classes, and I could've taken less on them but I really let her comments get to me, and my self esteem was low and I had low expectations, but I did some self reflection, and thought f*ck that, I'm gonna show her I can, I took it personal, and in a way I'm glad she discouraged me, otherwise I wouldn't have been so stubborn
https://preview.redd.it/cdvn8w858g2c1.jpg?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ad0f5d50a99cd4343770db52f8798acb75a77e54
submitted by SofTee01 to WGU [link] [comments]

2023.11.21 18:08 CDTwitler How do I cite a contract for a college assignment? (MLA Format)

I have an assignment in a “College & Career Success” course to make a powerpoint on the career we’re interested in pursuing and present it as our final. I wanted to include parts of the contracts/agreements that were created when the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes ended for my presentation, but I’m stuck and don’t know how to cite them. The professor wants it to be in MLA format.
submitted by CDTwitler to howto [link] [comments]

2023.09.09 20:58 geopolicraticus Civilization and Ethics

The View from Oregon – 253
Re: Civilization and Ethics
Friday 08 September 2023
Dear Friends,
Recently I have been thinking a lot about the relationship between civilization and ethics, and I realize now that this is an insufficiently explored area for philosophy; there is, here, both a lot of low-hanging fruit as well as more profound insights that await those who delve deeply. I started thinking about this in a roundabout way.
It occurred to me recently that human language developed long before the domestication of dogs, which means that our distant ancestors would have been sitting around their campfire talking about the wolves they would see at the edge of the firelight, and the differences between the wolves, with some of them seemingly a little friendly, while others were clearly threatening and predatory. The most recent research suggests that dogs were domesticated only once in human history (I suspect that this view will be challenged eventually), and if this is true then there was one conversation around the fire pit—or perhaps a running conversation over days and weeks and months—that eventually resulted in bringing a wolf into the circle around the fire pit, who then settled in to stay and became the origin of all domesticated dogs.
I have heard people ridicule fire pits in the back yards of suburban houses, and probably there are many people who just don’t “get” it, but, clearly, when we sit talking around a fire pit we are participating in a ritual that goes back hundreds of thousands of years—something older than our species, and therefore a selective force that has shaped us over evolutionary time. It is quite literally in our genes to talk around a fire pit, and dogs have been with us around the fire pit for at least 15,000 years.
In any case, human language has also been around a lot longer than civilization. We talked amongst ourselves as hunter-gathers, talking about hunter-gatherer things, and we still talk amongst ourselves as city dwellers in civilization, now talking about urban things. While we have been talking all this time, our records of written languages only go back around 5,000 years. Linguists have attempted to reconstruct proto-Indo-European, which takes us back a few more thousand years, but that still leaves tens of thousands of years of conversations unaccounted for. Perhaps the spoken language of the past is a paradigm case of the unrecoverable past: we know it existed, but it seems unlikely that we will ever find a way to study it. However, in the recent past it seemed unlikely that we would ever have enough scientific knowledge to reconstruct the pattern of human migrations before historical records, but we have now found a record in our DNA that makes it possible to determine, to a surprising degree of precision, who was where, and when. At present I can’t imagine any comparable way of reconstructing past languages, but I will not claim that it will never be possible.
Languages, like other human technologies, are refined and improved over time. We get a sense of this when we reflect on the refinement of mathematics over historical time. A lot of languages have words only for “one” and “two,” and anything beyond that is “many.” The concept of zero was introduced in historical times, and does not seem to have been inherited from some pristine predecessor language. From this we understand that the mathematical concepts of early languages were impoverished compared to the relatively sophisticated linguistic tools we possess today to express mathematical ideas.
Extrapolating what we know about the introduction of mathematical concepts into language, I assume that earlier languages were conceptually impoverished in many ways, though one would also expect that there would have been both a sophisticated vocabulary and conceptual framework for those aspects of human life that predominated. We also have a glimpse of this in the Paleolithic cave art that has survived from the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), which is beautifully observed and always striking, whether the depiction tends toward realism or toward stylization and symbolism. Our ancestors who hunted to keep themselves alive during the long winters of the LGM were probably much better observers of wildlife than we are. They would have, then, possessed a vocabulary and a conceptual framework proportionate to these needs. One might call this the “Eskimo principle” from the oft-repeated claim that the native peoples of the far north have a large vocabulary of words for snow.
Where do moral concepts fit into this cognitive and linguistic development? Should we assume that moral concepts in early thought and language were rough and essentially inchoate, later to be refined and extended, or should we assume that moral considerations were central to the lives of early human beings, and that they therefore developed this aspect of cognition and language early, and in some ways that may have gone beyond our own conceptions of the moral life? The argument can be made either way. Darwin’s claim that morality would evolve in any animals with a sufficient cognitive endowment and which lived in circumstances in which it was forced to interact with others of the same species, is, I think, largely correct, but not necessarily the whole story. The Darwinian account suggests that moral thought evolved early. However, there is considerable evidence that our moral ideas have evolved significantly since the advent of civilization.
The most familiar such claim is Jaspers’ formulation of the Axial Age, a time when human communities in many geographically distinct regions reached a level of complexity that new moral ideas emerged, almost as spontaneous and unified of a development as when civilization itself emerged several thousands of years previously, again, in geographically distinct regions. There will always be those who will argue for a single origin and diffusionism, though I am much more inclined to favor the appearance of civilization and ethics in many different regions and peoples without any demographically significant diffusionism—which, I think, is a partial explanation of the differences in civilization and ethics as we find it in different parts of the world. Both the commonalities and the differences merit our attention, and may have more than one explanation. In other words, while either pristine origins or diffusionism may predominate in any one given geographical region, the predominating influence need not be the whole story.
The earliest ethical ideas, of course, are bound up in mythology, mysticism, altered states of consciousness, and all of the materials out of which institutionalized religions eventually formed. Whether we hold that philosophical ethics extracted moral ideas from such cultural contexts, and gave them an independent and autonomous exposition, or whether philosophical ethics simply drew on the same human resources as did religions, is another chicken-and-egg question. It is probably impossible in the chaotic mix of cultural influences to which every individual within a civilization is subject to tease out the one from the other.
For Western civilization, our philosophical tradition of ethics traces to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and all of these men were very much men of their time, immersed in the social milieu of the Greek polis, accepting much of what their fellows accepted, and, some would argue, simply giving rationalizations of the society of which they were a part. Ethics in ancient Greek philosophy rapidly brought philosophical ethics to a high degree of sophistication. It seems extremely unlikely to me that anything like this existing previously, anywhere in the world. If it did, there is no record of it. And as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle drew on the resources of a civilization which had been developing for more than two thousand years (counting as its antecedents the ancient Aegean Bronze Age civilization of Crete), and that their work would have been inconceivable without this long cognitive preparation provided by civilization, there is no reason to believe that a comparably sophisticated moral tradition could have appeared earlier in history.
That is a rough summary of why I don’t think that the moral traditions of cavemen were as sophisticated as the moral traditions of Athens in its Golden Age, but that doesn’t mean that there were no moral traditions at all. On the contrary, the moral tradition that would have developed among hunter-gatherer bands of the LGM would have been highly specific to their society, involving the moral codes of small groups of related individuals seeking to survive under harsh conditions, sewing clothes and making arrows by firelight, organizing hunting parties, and gathering berries without being killed by wild predators.
With the origins of the pristine civilizations, being a city-dweller was the exception for the simple reason that most human beings were still hunter-gatherer nomads. One can imagine conversations around the fire of hunter-gatherers who happened upon agriculturalists, or even upon an early city. Perhaps they debated amongst themselves whether they would be allowed to join (like the wolf nosing closer to the fire, eventually to be domesticated), or why they wanted to get the hell away from this way of life and put as much distance as they could between themselves and city dwellers. Perhaps some groups discussed whether they could replicate this way of life elsewhere, subsequently to themselves become vectors of diffusionism.
Usually our focus falls on the economic, technological, and social organizational differences between nomadic and settled, civilized peoples, but I think that the difference would be equally marked in regard to the moral life. Even in our own time, rural and urban populations view themselves as distinct, and the moral distinctiveness of their different ways of life is not the least source of this perceived differentness. All the more dramatic would have been the moral differences between early city dwellers and the still largely nomadic bulk of the human population.
Rural and urban differences continued as a theme throughout history, becoming better defined as civilization itself is better defined. For the medieval peasant who is a tenant on his lord’s estate, being a city-dweller was unusual for several reasons: there were few cities; they were distant from the countryside and therefore difficult to get to; the medieval peasant had no way to prepare for city life; if he were to run to escape to a city—where, in many European traditions, if he could live for a year and a day, he could be a citizen of the city and no longer merely a runaway peasant—he would face difficulties unimaginable to the rural agricultural laborer. Clearly, this is a context that favors the most resourceful and adaptable, which means it would favor higher intelligence. Cities, then, would attract those sufficiently adventurous to be interested in leaving their former way of life, and sufficiently intelligent to make a success of urban life despite having no preparation for the task. These qualities of temperament and intelligence would, in turn, be expressed in the moral lives of urban and rural populations.
Robert Redfield, whose work I often cite, distinguished between the “great tradition” in cities, where there is literacy and usually also a class of persons who do not need to toil for a living, and a “little tradition” in small towns and agricultural villages, where traditions are often transmitted orally and through ritual, literacy is low, books are rare, and everyone must work. The great tradition is intertwined with the mythology, mysticism, and rituals mentioned earlier that are in turn intertwined with the development of the moral life, and with our conceptual framework that bears upon the moral life. The great tradition and the little tradition overlap, but they do not coincide, and this is true also for the moral life embodied in the great tradition and the moral life embodied in the little tradition.
Civilization pushes the development of ethics in a direction that is amenable to civilization. If civilization had never appeared on Earth, the moral tradition of civilization would never have developed. Whether hunter-gatherer nomads would, given sufficient time, develop further complexities independently of civilization, including a complex moral tradition, is a question that I have often considered. It is one of those great counterfactuals, and as inaccessible to us as human speech in the remote past.
And another, final counterfactual for this newsletter: above I mentioned the Darwinian account of the origins of moral conceptions. (Today there are a great many evolutionary theories of ethics; Darwin was the ultimate origins of all of these, so I invoke him symbolically as a proxy for this tradition.) One of my favorite thought experiments in which I indulge is the idea of an intelligence-rich biosphere, i.e., a biosphere in which multiple intelligence species evolve. The Darwinian account usually implies that a species would need to be both intelligent and social for a moral code to develop, implying that intelligent but solitary species would not develop morally in the way that a social species would develop. But suppose that an intelligent species (whether social or solitary) evolved in an intelligence-rich biosphere, so that its social context was not (exclusively) members of its own species. In such a context, an inter-species or pan-species ethics might develop, shared by all those species in the biosphere to the extent of their intellectual capacity. In some of my posts on intelligence-rich biospheres I have speculated that a civilization would not appear, but rather alternative forms of complexity would arise. Similarly, an intelligence-rich biosphere would not have the moral traditions of a civilized society, but it could potentially develop a refined and sophisticated conceptual framework of the moral life independently of the stimulus given to moral thought by civilized life.
Best wishes,
Nick
PS—I have been corresponding with Krzysztof Brzechczyn, a philosopher of history in Poland (I learned about his work from Academia.edu; I am particularly interested in his The Historical Distinctiveness of Central Europe: A Study in the Philosophy of History), and he has extended an invitation for me to speak in Poznań, so, if this works out, after the ISCSC conference in Warsaw, I will deliver a talk in Poznań. This will be related to my Warsaw talk, but will be more in the vein of philosophy of history than what I will present in Warsaw. Last night I figured out how to round out my Warsaw presentation, so that is substantially finished, with only some details left to put in place. My original intention was to use mostly the same PowerPoint deck for Poznań, but now I think my presentation will be sufficiently distinct to require its own PowerPoint (or none at all—I will be prepared to speak with no slides if that is what the occasion requires). The argument for what I will present in Poznan came to me during a sleepless night, which I related in a Tumblr post, The Good Kind of Sleepless Night. I depart for Poland on Sunday.
PPS—I watched a couple of recent films this past week, both of which could be characterized as surrealist science fiction: Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) and Dual (2021). The former film has won a lot of awards and is well known. I will admit that I got a lot of laughs out of it, but overall I would say that the film has the virtues of its defects and the defects of its virtues. The comparatively obscure Dual I actually enjoyed more, though I laughed less. The film is almost stilted in its delivery, which arguably adds to the tension and feeling of heightened unreality. Dual is as pared-down as Everything Everywhere All at Once is overwrought. Both films play on the loneliness and isolation of a female protagonist, but I don’t think that either film does justice to this theme. (The definitive femcel film has yet to be made, though it seems obvious that the life of Emily Dickinson could supply the materials for such a film. Imagine, if you will, a film like The Moon and Sixpence—1942, based on the Somerset Maugham novel of 1919—where the narrator is not the subject of the film, but nevertheless plays a central role; in this way the actual subject of the film can remain mysterious and distant: that might be the narrative device that would make it possible to do justice to this theme.)
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submitted by geopolicraticus to The_View_from_Oregon [link] [comments]

2023.09.03 22:53 NinjaFenrir7 Winning the Lottery

by BlakeClass
Congratulations! You just won millions of dollars in the lottery! That's great.
Now you're fucked.
No really.
You are.
You're fucked.
If you just want to skip the biographical tales of woe of some of the math-tax protagonists, skip on down to the next comment. To see what to do in the event you win the lottery.
You see, it's something of an open secret that winners of obnoxiously large jackpots tend to end up badly with alarming regularity. Not the $1 million dollar winners. But anyone in the nine-figure range is at high risk. Eight-figures? Pretty likely to be screwed. Seven-figures? Yep. Painful. Perhaps this is a consequence of the sample. The demographics of lottery players might be exactly the wrong people to win large sums of money. Or perhaps money is the root of all evil. Either way, you are going to have to be careful. Don't believe me? Consider this:
Large jackpot winners face double digit multiples of probability versus the general population to be the victim of:
  1. Homicide (something like 20x more likely)
  2. Drug overdose
  3. Bankruptcy (how's that for irony?)
  4. Kidnapping
And triple digit multiples of probability versus the general population rate to be:
  1. Convicted of drunk driving
  2. The victim of Homicide (at the hands of a family member) 120x more likely in this case, ain't love grand?
  3. A defendant in a civil lawsuit
  4. A defendant in felony criminal proceedings
Believe it or not, your biggest enemy if you suddenly become possessed of large sums of money is... you. At least you will have the consolation of meeting your fate by your own hand. But if you can't manage it on your own, don't worry. There are any number of willing participants ready to help you start your vicious downward spiral for you. Mind you, many of these will be "friends," "friendly neighbors," or "family." Often, they won't even have evil intentions. But, as I'm sure you know, that makes little difference in the end. Most aren't evil. Most aren't malicious. Some are. None are good for you.
Jack Whittaker, a Johnny Cash attired, West Virginia native, is the poster boy for the dangers of a lump sum award. In 2002 Mr. Whittaker (55 years old at the time) won what was, also at the time, the largest single award jackpot in U.S. history. $315 million. At the time, he planned to live as if nothing had changed, or so he said. He was remarkably modest and decent before the jackpot, and his ship sure came in, right? Wrong.
Mr. Whittaker became the subject of a number of personal challenges, escalating into personal tragedies, complicated by a number of legal troubles.
Whittaker wasn't a typical lottery winner either. His net worth at the time of his winnings was in excess of $15 million, owing to his ownership of a successful contracting firm in West Virginia. His claim to want to live "as if nothing had changed" actually seemed plausible. He should have been well equipped for wealth. He was already quite wealthy, after all. By all accounts he was somewhat modest, low profile, generous and good natured. He should have coasted off into the sunset. Yeah. Not exactly.
Whittaker took the all-cash option, $170 million, instead of the annuity option, and took possession of $114 million in cash after $56 million in taxes. After that, things went south.
Whittaker quickly became the subject of a number of financial stalkers, who would lurk at his regular breakfast hideout and accost him with suggestions for how to spend his money. They were unemployed. No, an interview tomorrow morning wasn't good enough. They needed cash NOW. Perhaps they had a sure-fire business plan. Their daughter had cancer. A niece needed dialysis. Needless to say, Whittaker stopped going to his breakfast haunt. Eventually, they began ringing his doorbell. Sometimes in the early morning. Before long he was paying off-duty deputies to protect his family. He was accused of being heartless. Cold. Stingy.
Letters poured in. Children with cancer. Diabetes. MS. You name it. He hired three people to sort the mail. A detective to filter out the false claims and the con men (and women) was retained.
Brenda, the clerk who had sold Whittaker the ticket, was a victim of collateral damage. Whittaker had written her a check for $44,000 and bought her house, but she was by no means a millionaire. Rumors that the state routinely paid the clerk who had sold the ticket 10% of the jackpot winnings hounded her. She was followed home from work. Threatened. Assaulted.
Whittaker's car was twice broken into, by trusted acquaintances who watched him leave large amounts of cash in it. $500,000 and $200,000 were stolen in two separate instances. The thieves spiked Whittaker's drink with prescription drugs in the first instance. The second incident was the handiwork of his granddaughter's friends, who had been probing the girl for details on Whittaker's cash for weeks.
Even Whittaker's good-faith generosity was questioned. When he offered $10,000 to improve the city's water park so that it was more handicap accessible, locals complained that he spent more money at the strip club. (Amusingly this was true).
Whittaker invested quite a bit in his own businesses, tripled the number of people his businesses employed (making him one of the larger employers in the area) and eventually had given away $14 million to charity through a foundation he set up for the purpose. This is, of course, what you are "supposed" to do. Set up a foundation. Be careful about your charity giving. It made no difference in the end.
To top it all off, Whittaker had been accused of ruining a number of marriages. His money made other men look inferior, they said, wherever he went in the small West Virginia town he called home. Resentment grew quickly. And festered. Whittaker paid four settlements related to this sort of claim. Yes, you read that right. Four.
His family and their immediate circle were quickly the victims of odds-defying numbers of overdoses, emergency room visits and even fatalities. His granddaughter, the eighteen year old "Brandi" (who Whittaker had been giving a $2100.00 per week allowance) was found dead after having been missing for several weeks. Her death was, apparently, from a drug overdose, but Whittaker suspected foul play. Her body had been wrapped in a tarp and hidden behind a rusted-out van. Her seventeen year old boyfriend had expired three months earlier in Whittaker's vacation house, also from an overdose. Some of his friends had robbed the house after his overdose, stepping over his body to make their escape and then returning for more before stepping over his body again to leave. His parents sued for wrongful death claiming that Whittaker's loose purse strings contributed to their son's death. Amazingly, juries are prone to award damages in cases such as these. Whittaker settled. Again.
Even before the deaths, the local and state police had taken a special interest in Whittaker after his new-found fame. He was arrested for minor and less minor offenses many times after his winnings, despite having had a nearly spotless record before the award. Whittaker's high profile couldn't have helped him much in this regard.
In 18 months Whittaker had been cited for over 250 violations ranging from broken tail lights on every one of his five new cars, to improper display of renewal stickers. A lawsuit charging various police organizations with harassment went nowhere and Whittaker was hit with court costs instead.
Whittaker's wife filed for divorce, and in the process froze a number of his assets and the accounts of his operating companies. Caesars in Atlantic City sued him for $1.5 million to cover bounced checks, caused by the asset freeze.
Today Whittaker is badly in debt, and bankruptcy looms large in his future.
But, hey, that's just one example, right?
Wrong.
Nearly one third of multi-million dollar jackpot winners eventually declare bankruptcy. Some end up worse. To give you just a taste of the possibilities, consider the fates of:
So, what the hell DO you do if you are unlucky enough to win the lottery?
This is the absolutely most important thing you can do right away: NOTHING.
Yes. Nothing.
DO NOT DECLARE YOURSELF THE WINNER yet.
Do NOT tell anyone. The urge is going to be nearly irresistible. Resist it. Trust me.
/ 1. IMMEDIATELY retain an attorney.
Get a partner from a larger, NATIONAL firm. Don't let them pawn off junior partners or associates on you. They might try, all law firms might, but insist instead that your lead be a partner who has been with the firm for awhile. Do NOT use your local attorney. Yes, I mean your long-standing family attorney who did your mother's will. Do not use the guy who fought your dry-cleaner bill. Do not use the guy you have trusted your entire life because of his long and faithful service to your family. In fact, do not use any firm that has any connection to family or friends or community. TRUST me. This is bad. You want someone who has never heard of you, any of your friends, or any member of your family. Go the the closest big city and walk into one of the national firms asking for one of the "Trust and Estates" partners you have previously looked up on http://www.martindale.com from one of the largest 50 firms in the United States which has an office near you. You can look up attornies by practice area and firm on Martindale.
/ 2. Decide to take the lump sum.
Most lotteries pay a really pathetic rate for the annuity. It usually hovers around 4.5% annual return or less, depending. It doesn't take much to do better than this, and if you have the money already in cash, rather than leaving it in the hands of the state, you can pull from the capital whenever you like. If you take the annuity you won't have access to that cash. That could be good. It could be bad. It's probably bad unless you have a very addictive personality. If you need an allowance managed by the state, it is because you didn't listen to point #1 above.
Why not let the state just handle it for you and give you your allowance?
Many state lotteries pay you your "allowence" (the annuity option) by buying U.S. treasury instruments and running the interest payments through their bureaucracy before sending it to you along with a hunk of the principal every month. You will not be beating inflation by much, if at all. There is no reason you couldn't do this yourself, if a low single-digit return is acceptable to you.
You aren't going to get even remotely the amount of the actual jackpot. Take our old friend Mr. Whittaker. Using Whittaker is a good model both because of the reminder of his ignominious decline, and the fact that his winning ticket was one of the larger ones on record. If his situation looks less than stellar to you, you might have a better perspective on how "large" your winnings aren't. Whittaker's "jackpot" was $315 million. He selected the lump-sum cash up-front option, which knocked off $145 million (or 46% of the total) leaving him with $170 million. That was then subject to withholding for taxes of $56 million (33%) leaving him with $114 million.
In general, you should expect to get about half of the original jackpot if you elect a lump sum (maybe better, it depends). After that, you should expect to lose around 33% of your already pruned figure to state and federal taxes. (Your mileage may vary, particularly if you live in a state with aggressive taxation schemes).
/ 3. Decide right now, how much you plan to give to family and friends.
This really shouldn't be more than 20% or so. Figure it out right now. Pick your number. Tell your lawyer. That's it. Don't change it. 20% of $114 million is $22.8 million. That leaves you with $91.2 million. DO NOT CONSULT WITH FAMILY when deciding how much to give to family. You are going to get advice that is badly tainted by conflict of interest, and if other family members find out that Aunt Flo was consulted and they weren't you will never hear the end of it. Neither will Aunt Flo. This might later form the basis for an allegation that Aunt Flo unduly influenced you and a lawsuit might magically appear on this basis. No, I'm not kidding. I know of one circumstance (related to a business windfall, not a lottery) where the plaintiffs WON this case.
Do NOT give anyone cash. Ever. Period. Just don't. Do not buy them houses. Do not buy them cars. Tell your attorney that you want to provide for your family, and that you want to set up a series of trusts for them that will total 20% of your after tax winnings. Tell him you want the trust empowered to fund higher education, some help (not a total) purchase of their first home, some provision for weddings and the like, whatever. Do NOT put yourself in the position of handing out cash. Once you do, if you stop, you will be accused of being a heartless bastard (or bitch). Trust me. It won't go well.
It will be easy to lose perspective. It is now the duty of your friends, family, relatives, hangers-on and their inner circle to skew your perspective, and they take this job quite seriously. Setting up a trust, a managed fund for your family that is in the double digit millions is AMAZINGLY generous. You need never have trouble sleeping because you didn't lend Uncle Jerry $20,000 in small denomination unmarked bills to start his chain of deep-fried peanut butter pancake restaurants. ("Deep'n 'nutter Restaurants") Your attorney will have a number of good ideas how to parse this wealth out without turning your siblings/spouse/children/grandchildren/cousins/waitresses into the latest Paris Hilton.
/ 4. You will be encouraged to hire an investment manager. Considerable pressure will be applied. Don't.
Investment managers charge fees, usually a percentage of assets. Consider this: If they charge 1% (which is low, I doubt you could find this deal, actually) they have to beat the market by 1% every year just to break even with a general market index fund. It is not worth it, and you don't need the extra return or the extra risk. Go for the index fund instead if you must invest in stocks. This is a hard rule to follow. They will come recommended by friends. They will come recommended by family. They will be your second cousin on your mother's side. Investment managers will sound smart. They will have lots of cool acronyms. They will have nice PowerPoint presentations. They might (MIGHT) pay for your shrimp cocktail lunch at TGI Friday's while reminding you how poor their side of the family is. They live for this stuff.
You should smile, thank them for their time, and then tell them you will get back to them next week. Don't sign ANYTHING. Don't write it on a cocktail napkin (lottery lawsuit cases have been won and lost over drunkenly scrawled cocktail napkin addition and subtraction figures with lots of zeros on them). Never call them back. Trust me. You will thank me later. This tactic, smiling, thanking people for their time, and promising to get back to people, is going to have to become familiar. You will have to learn to say no gently, without saying the word "no." It sounds underhanded. Sneaky. It is. And its part of your new survival strategy. I mean the word "survival" quite literally.
Get all this figured out BEFORE you claim your winnings. They aren't going anywhere. Just relax.
/ 5. If you elect to be more global about your paranoia, use between 20.00% and 33.00% of what you have not decided to commit to a family fund IMMEDIATELY to purchase a combination of longer term U.S. treasuries (5 or 10 year are a good idea) and perhaps even another G7 treasury instrument. This is your safety net. You will be protected... from yourself.
You are going to be really tempted to starting being a big investor. You are going to be convinced that you can double your money in Vegas with your awesome Roulette system/by funding your friend's amazing idea to sell Lemming dung/buying land for oil drilling/by shorting the North Pole Ice market (global warming, you know). This all sounds tempting because "Even if I lose it all I still have $XX million left! Anyone could live on that comfortably for the rest of their life." Yeah, except for 33% of everyone who won the lottery.
You're not going to double your money, so cool it. Let me say that again. You're not going to double your money, so cool it. Right now, you'll get around 3.5% on the 10 year U.S. treasury. With $18.2 million (20% of $91.2 mil after your absurdly generous family gift) invested in those you will pull down $638,400 per year. If everything else blows up, you still have that, and you will be in the top 1% of income in the United States. So how about you not fuck with it. Eh? And that's income that is damn safe. If we get to the point where the United States defaults on those instruments, we are in far worse shape than worrying about money.
If you are really paranoid, you might consider picking another G7 or otherwise mainstream country other than the U.S. according to where you want to live if the United States dissolves into anarchy or Britney Spears is elected to the United States Senate. Put some fraction in something like Swiss Government Bonds at 3%. If the Swiss stop paying on their government debt, well, then you know money really means nothing anywhere on the globe anymore. I'd study small field sustainable agriculture if you think this is a possibility. You might have to start feedng yourself.
/ 6. That leaves, say, 80% of $91.2 million or $72.9 million.
Here is where things start to get less clear. Personally, I think you should dump half of this, or $36.4 million, into a boring S&P 500 index fund. Find something with low fees. You are going to be constantly tempted to retain "sophisticated" advisers who charge "nominal fees." Don't. Period. Even if you lose every other dime, you have $638,400 per year you didn't have before that will keep coming in until the United States falls into chaos. Fuck advisers and their fees. Instead, drop your $36.4 million in the market in a low fee vehicle. Unless we have an unprecedented downturn the likes of which the United States has never seen, should return around 7.00% or so over the next 10 years. You should expect to touch not even a dime of this money for 10 or 15 or even 20 years. In 20 years $36.4 million could easily become $115 million.
/ 7. So you have put a safety net in place.
You have provided for your family beyond your wildest dreams. And you still have $36.4 million in "cash." You know you will be getting $638,400 per year unless the capital building is burning, you don't ever need to give anyone you care about cash, since they are provided for generously and responsibly (and can't blow it in Vegas) and you have a HUGE nest egg that is growing at market rates. (Given the recent dip, you'll be buying in at great prices for the market). What now? Whatever you want. Go ahead and burn through $36.4 million in hookers and blow if you want. You've got more security than 99% of the country. A lot of it is in trusts so even if you are sued your family will live well, and progress across generations. If your lawyer is worth his salt (I bet he is) then you will be insulated from most lawsuits anyhow. Buy a nice house or two, make sure they aren't stupid investments though. Go ahead and be an angel investor and fund some startups, but REFUSE to do it for anyone you know. (Friends and money, oil and water - Michael Corleone) Play. Have fun. You earned it by putting together the shoe sizes of your whole family on one ticket and winning the jackpot.
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